A week later, the Stavka in Moscow sent a high-level general to inspect the bodies and interrogate the witnesses again; his name remains unknown.27 Exhumed for the general’s viewing were the bodies of Hitler, Eva Braun, members of the Goebbels family, and General Hans Krebs, who also committed suicide in the bunker on May 1, after he unsuccessfully contacted General Vasilii Chuikov with Goebbels’s offer of surrender. The Stavka general was perhaps in contact with Abakumov because on May 22, Abakumov complained to Beria about Ivan Serov’s (NKVD Plenipotentiary at the 1st Belorussian Front) attempts to control the SMERSH investigation.28 At the same time, in Moscow’s Lubyanka Prison, Möhnke and Rattenhuber wrote detailed accounts of Hitler’s last days.
On May 23, Beria received a report from Serov. Attached was the report of Aleksandr Vadis, head of the UKR SMERSH of the 1st Belorussian Front, in which Vadis described the interrogations of additional witnesses who positively identified Hitler’s body.29
At the end of May 1945, the 79th Rifle Corps along with the whole 3rd Shock Army was relocated to the town of Rathenau, west of Berlin. Klimenko and his OKR SMERSH took the bodies along with them, ultimately moving them several times.
On June 16, 1945, Beria forwarded all materials on the SMERSH investigation, collected by Serov, to Stalin and Molotov. Therefore, Stalin knew since the end of June 1945 that Hitler was dead. Mysteriously, he kept this information a secret from the Western Allies. In 1968, Colonel Gorbushin, former head of the SMERSH operational group, recalled that in early June 1945, Abakumov ordered him to Moscow. Instead of listening to Gorbushin’s report on developing investigations in Berlin, Abakumov revealed the following order from Stalin: ‘Let’s be silent. Hitler’s double might suddenly appear, and he could announce himself a Nazi leader. At that moment we will unmask him.’30 In fact, on May 4, 1945, Soviet troops had already found and filmed the body of Hitler’s double, Gustav Weler, in the bunker.
Strangely, in 1968 Marshal Zhukov claimed that in 1945 he had no knowledge of the results of SMERSH’s investigation. When Rzhevskaya told Zhukov that Stalin knew about Hitler’s death in June 1945, Zhukov was shocked and could hardly believe that Stalin had concealed Hitler’s suicide from him.31
Colonel Klimenko expressed skepticism about Zhukov’s statement: ‘Although the fact that Hitler’s corpse had been found was not widely announced, it was not a secret, and many people in the [79th] Corps knew about it, including [its commander] Lieutenant General S. N. Perevertkin, and Colonel I. S. Krylov, head of the Political Department. After May 13, 1945, when the autopsy report was written, the circle of persons who knew became quite wide… I personally reported on Hitler’s dishonorable death to Lieutenant General Vadis… and Lieutenant General Serov… when they visited the Chancellery. They could not conceal this information from Zhukov.’32 Klimenko may have been right because at the time Serov was very close to Zhukov.
In July 1945, when Stalin arrived in Berlin to attend the Potsdam Conference (July 17 to August 2), he refused to see Hitler’s body. The writer Konstantin Simonov, who visited Berlin in 1945, recalled: ‘Somebody, Beria or Serov, reported to Stalin [about Hitler], and suggested bringing the corpse for [Stalin] to see or taking Stalin to look at it. Stalin said: “OK, tomorrow morning I’ll go to look at it.” Then in the morning, when it was time to go, he waved his hand and said: “No, I won’t go. Let Molotov and Beria go and look. I won’t go.”’33 However, while talking to American Secretary of State James Byrnes in Potsdam, Stalin denied that Hitler’s body had been found.34
In February 1946, the 3rd Army moved to the city of Magdeburg, and all fourteen bodies were reburied there. But this was not the end of the story, because the NKVD/MVD conducted its own investigation, directed by Amayak Kobulov, head of the Directorate for POWs and Interned Persons. During the Battle of Berlin, NKVD operatives arrested another group of witnesses that included Hans Baur, Hitler’s personal pilot; SS-Sturmbannführer Otto Günsche, Hitler’s adjutant; and Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet. They were held in NKVD/MVD prisons in Moscow, separately from SMERSH prisoners, and brutally interrogated.
In May 1946, while searching the bunker area in Berlin, a team of MVD investigators found two cranium fragments, one with a clearly visible bullet hole.35 The investigators decided that the fragments were from Hitler’s skull. Noted medical expert Pyotr Semenovsky studied the fragments and concluded that the shot was upward to the mouth or temple. In other words, it looked as if Hitler shot himself. The MVD team also found bloodstains on the sofa where Hitler was sitting during the suicide. Since 1946, the skull fragments and small pieces of bloodstained fabric and wood have been kept in secret archives along with the file on the NKVD/MVD investigation.
However, the results of a DNA study conducted in 2009 did not support the MVD’s conclusion about the fragment with a bullet hole.36 Most probably, this fragment belonged to the skull of a woman and, therefore, could not have been a fragment of Hitler’s cranium. However, male DNA was identified in bloodstains on the sofa. Although this DNA study needs confirmation, it leaves open the question of whether Hitler only took poison or shot himself as well (or was shot by Linge).
Finally, from August 1948 to September 1949, Otto Günsche and Heinz Linge were held at the secret MVD Special Object no. 5, an MVD safe house in Moscow.37 Colonel Fyodor Parparov, an intelligence officer, was in charge of overseeing them. In 1944, Parparov was awarded the Order of Patriotic War of the 1st Class for his propaganda work with captured Field Marshal Friedrich von Paulus.38 Now, with the assistance of a group of MVD officers, Parparov translated into Russian what Günsche and Linge had written about Hitler and his death. Finally, Parparov heavily edited and altered the text in conformance with Soviet propaganda style. In December 1949, the manuscript was published as a single-copy book called Unknown Hitler, and was sent to Stalin as a gift for his seventieth birthday.
The manuscript was discussed again later, in 1959, at the Central Committee, but it was not until 2005 that two German historians published a German translation of it under the title Das Buch Hitler.39 Writing the manuscript did not help Günsche and Linge, who, in 1950, were sentenced like the other witnesses to twenty-five years in labor camps, and released and returned to Germany only in 1955.
The story of Hitler’s body ended only in March–April 1970, when on the order of KGB Chairman Yurii Andropov, the remains of Hitler, Braun, and members of the Goebbels family were exhumed again.40 The Central Committee approved this operation under the code name Arkhiv (Archive), and Lieutenant General Vitalii Fedorchuk, head of the 3rd KGB Directorate, a successor of SMERSH, was in charge. According to the documents, the remains were burned to ashes and thrown into the river Ehle near Biederitz in Sachsen-Anhalt.
In 2005, Major General Vladimir Shirokov, one of the few participants in the Archive operation, briefly described it in an interview. Shirokov’s superior, Nikolai Kovalenko, head of the 3rd Section of the KGB Special Department of the 3rd Shock Army (located in Magdeburg), was in command of the operation. Shirokov recalled:
There were remains of ten individuals (four adults and six children). By the way, the information that [Hitler’s] jaws are kept in an archive, is not true because they were taken only for a while for an expert evaluation… We put the bones in a new box… In the morning, we brought it to a particular place near Magdeburg, poured napalm on it, burned it and dispersed the ashes. Nikolai Grigorievich [Kovalenko] told us: ‘Lads, we need to mention the place where we’ve dispersed the ashes. But who knows what can happen, let’s write down another place.’41