Did Hitler Survive WWII?

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Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Decoding and Unknown. This one,

rid of my George read by me, Simon Everett before. It's all about the myth of Hitler's survival.

We did the DNA test, right? Didn't they find like his jaw and like drilled a hole in it,

scooped out some of his bone marrow and we were like, yeah, that's Hitler, all boy.

Anyway, let's get into it for one of the show I've never read this before.

George wrote it, I read it.

Modernity presents us with many annoying,

niggly things that are just a nightmare to be rid of.

Scampoan calls and LinkedIn influences all spring the mind as general examples.

I don't really know any. LinkedIn is a little bit, I'm not, I think I am on LinkedIn,

technically, but it's been a long time since I've been on LinkedIn.

For me, though, as the history nerd that I am, I also happened to have some specific

world war two related bug bears. For example, the notion that the tiger was a good tank,

it wasn't. George has put this in all caps, bold, italic, and underlined.

The idea that it was just those naughty boys in the essence that did the genociding,

while their marks were all honorable and noble like they weren't. Again, strong emphasis.

The belief that the French army were a comedy force that just rolled over and took it up the

chuck in the battle of France. They didn't. Strong emphasis.

All of them are, however, a minor compared to the one that really gets my eye twitching,

the claim that Adolf Hitler somehow survived the war. I know, there's plenty of people who say

that he did hell the history channel is probably running a documentary, there's a very moment

claiming that he did, but I can assure you, he did not. Don't worry, though, because I'm not

just going to ask you to take my word for it, I'm going to prove to you that he didn't write

here right now in the next eleven or so thousand words, okay? Was that going to be an Aaron

Hardish? Something like that? Let's get into it. The real story.

So, let's get things started by clearing up the reality of the matter,

i.e. by looking at how Hitler actually died, while he decorated the Fuhrer bunker with his brains,

Dinti. It's the best thing he ever did, and it really is something that I'm able to speak

in objective and absolute terms about too, because it really isn't a mystery how it all went down.

We know exactly how it happened, exactly where it happened, exactly who was around him,

and the exact events that run up to and immediately followed it.

I stress the word exact, for a very specific reason too, to really dry home the utterly absurd

degree of information that we have here. Seriously, thanks to the work of leading Nazi historians

like Ian Kershaw, who know basically everything safe of what color underpants Hitler was wearing

on that fateful day, and even that detail is probably recorded in an archive somewhere,

if you want to go find it. And I don't just bring up Kershaw to shout him out as an OG

historiographical legend either, title which he's very much owed. No, no, no, I mention him because

he, through his books Hitler, and the end Hitler's Germany 1944 to 1945, is basically going to be

holding our hands through this chapter, because it is from those two texts that I've drawn

basically all of my information. Thank you Kershaw. I have fair reason for having done so too,

because they aren't just good books about Hitler, they are among the best books about Hitler.

Both of them near unmatched for their exhaustive degree of research, depth of exploration,

and frankly accessibility, despite what their four bigger page counts may lead you to initially

believe. It has been a long time since I've read a book with more than a thousand pages.

And with that little sprinkling of historiography out of the way, along with some due transparency

about my sources, let's have at it. The real story of Hitler's death.

Come 1945, there were no two ways about it. Germany was finished or cooked, as the kids would say

these days. On the Eastern Front, the Red Army had spent the previous years smashing its way

through Ukraine and Poland, finally pushing into the Reich itself on the 17th of October 1944.

When elements of the 184th Rifle Division took the town of Shivins, now a Russian patch of grass

upon which only sheep live. In the West, the Allies did it even earlier, on the 11th of September

to be exact when a reconnaissance patrol from the American Fifth Armored Division crossed over

somewhere along the Germany Luxembourg border, which at least allows us to narrow it down to a

small potential area courtesy of Luxembourg being the size of a postage stamp. But even just having

the enemy in the hinterland, dire as it was, was but a single aspect of Germany's truly catastrophically

poor strategic situation, as it was also being absolutely decimated from the air, courtesy of

strategic bombing. The British came by night, the Americans came by day, and the Soviets

were in a token run here and there when they were able to. It was a nonstop conveyor belt that meant

by the end of the war, Germany had 1.28 million tons of bombs drops on it, and if you're wondering

what that looked like on the ground, Dresden went from looking like this, in 1939, looking like this

in 1945, and if you're just listening to this in audio, just imagine a city that is completely

fucking destroyed. Hamburg, similarly, went from this to this. Forse, I'm for a third example,

went from this to this, and again, repeat my previous description of the imagery. As a result,

the Nazi war machine was held together with duct tape, and it had barely any remaining industrial

capacity. It was now starving for fuel, something that it never had enough of, even at the best of

times, and even when it could move troops and supplies, they invariably had to move at a

treacle-weighting pace as everything tried to push through the few remaining pieces of infrastructure

that hadn't yet been graced by something explosive. Then there's the simple fact that Germany was

running out of bodies to actually send to the fight, as their casualties were placing upwards of

ten million towards the end of the war, with surviving German high command figures compiled on

the 31st of January 1945, giving the figures of two million, one thousand, and three hundred and

ninety-nine dead, one million, nine hundred and two thousand, seven hundred and four missing,

or captured, and four million, four hundred and twenty-nine thousand, eight hundred and seventy-five

wounded. Margin it up a bit to account for the last few months of the war, and you arrive at the

ten million figure, which is an extraordinary amount of people. And indeed, this is why old men and

children became an increasing part of Germany's defensive plans in the final few months of the war,

because there just wasn't anybody else left. So yes, I like to say that Germany's strategic

situation was truly terrible, insurmountably so, in fact, contrary to what some like to say,

there was no, oh, if only he did as he could still win, no, hearts of iron four tested strategy that

could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. The end was coming, it was a matter of where not

if. And when faced with this disaster of his own making, Hitler chose not to surrender,

but to flee the Wolfslayer, his East Prussian headquarters, and retreated the absolutely

named Fiora Bunker, beside the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in its stead, a concrete war on some eight

meters undergrounds, with cramped corridors, low ceilings, poor air, and constant damp. And sure

enough, that was exactly where he would remain for the rest of his life too. Only returning to

the surface, for the most occasional and brief outings here and there, such as his final birthday

appearance on the 20th of April, when he slowly climbed the steps into the Reich Chancellery Park

to greet a few delegations, including 20 Hitler youth boys, when he must have a few words,

padded one or two on the cheek and then disappeared back underground. It was from this very appearance

that the earlier photo of the boys came to be, in fact. But really, I should be getting Simon

to do air quotes every time I mention Hitler by name by this point, because by 1945,

he was only the Hitler we all know and hate, in the most abstract sense of the word. A totally

different man's of the one we stereotypically picture. For starters, he was sick. Almost certainly

in the early stages of dying, in fact, his hair was grey and fast, his eyes were bloodshot,

his cardiograms showed a heart on the verge of giving up. He was also plagued by chronic

stomach and intestinal problems, and was displaying symptoms that very strongly point toward Parkinson's

syndrome, walking borderline hunchbacked on steady on his feet and a left arm that shook uncontrollably.

That's all a thing. It was only a scaffolding of 28 pills a day that kept him more or less

upright by this point, which as a side effect didn't exactly do wonders for his mental condition,

which was poor to put him mildly. For example, his lifelong mood swings became extreme. One

moment he'd be angrily denouncing betrayal from every direction. Herman Gering, Heinrich Himmler,

the VM arcs, the German people, and the next he'd be lapsing into a kind of defeated

monotone staring at situation reports, with just a glassy indifference. He also clung to fantasies

of last minute salvation, long after any rational commander would have accepted reality.

And underpinning it all was the same obsessive, conspiratorial thinking that had driven him since

the 1920s only now sharpened by fear, exhaustion, and the knowledge that after a lifetime spent

chasing make-believe enemies, real ones were now quite literally only a few hundred meters away.

And packing some very heavy artillery. Yes, the time has come. The time has come to do the

noble thing Hitler had shoot yourself in the head. Not that he was mentally, although,

Kirscher, and indeed every serious Hitler biographer, are very clear about that. No,

what we're looking at here is something far more banal than terrifying, a man whose core

psychology hadn't changed at all, but whose circumstances had stripped away every buffer

that once made him psychologically functional. And it was this new and somehow

worse version of Hitler that took court in the Fuhrer Bunker as Soviet artillery,

edged ever closer. Some of the courtiers got out while the going was good, your

Abbott spears, your Heinrich Himmler's, ones like them, and others such as Joseph Gurbles

and Martin Bourbon remained. Partly out of loyalty, partly because they had nowhere else to go,

and partly because they were couldn't quite bring themselves to believe that the end was coming.

Not very smart, guys. The end is definitely coming. The end was coming, though.

Georgina on the same page. Fantasies to the contrary be damned with the battle of Berlin,

the final Cuda Grace for the Nazi regime, starting in the early hours of the 16th of April,

when Marshal Georgi Zhukov let a devastating artillery barrage loose and then advanced

with just under a million men across the silo heights to the east, at the same time,

as Marshal Ivan Konev with 550,000 men under his command came from the south.

And despite the German forces putting up a surprisingly competent defence all things

considered, all they were doing was ever so stemming the tide, not damning it, and so Soviet

tanks were in the suburbs, come Hitler's birthday. And what a birthday was room.

Traditionally, his personal staff lined up at Midnight's shop to be the first to offer their

greetings, but that year he told his valet Hein's Ling that he didn't want to see them.

There was, he said flatly, nothing to celebrate. Ling was also ordered to pass that message on.

Naturally, the order was quietly ignored and shortly before Midnight, a line of

agitants and hangers on, formed up outside of Hitler's room.

Wilhelm Bergdoth, Hermann Fergeline, Julius Schalbe, Herbert Arbrecht, Otto Gunscher, and a few

others. Eva Braun, who had returned to Berlin weeks earlier, and was quite insistent that she

would stay with her love to the very ends, then put in a word for them, and soon enough the birthday

boy relented. What they got, when he appeared, was not a rousing appearance by the old fire and

brimstone demagogue, but a tired, shuffling, hollowed out man. He trudged down the line,

offering limp handshakes and a blank expression. The atmosphere was not that of a celebration,

but a funeral. Yes, and rightly so, because that was about to happen.

I've never never actually, straight enough, considering all the videos that I've made,

all the bits of history that I've touched on. I don't think I've ever really been through

Hitler's final moments in the bunker. I don't know the story, which is odd. It feels like

something I should know. Over the next week, the Red Army should read that Ken Shaw book.

Kenshaw, Kenshaw, Kenshaw, Kershaw. Kershaw, shout out. Over the next week, the Red Army

tightened the noose. Berlin's outer defense lines were smashed, and the German army was driven

back towards the south of the city, and the remaining German forces were pushed steadily into a shrinking,

improvised citadel of sorts, around the government quarter. His courtiers pleaded with him to get

out of Berlin while he still could. Bro, there's one and a half million men bearing down on you,

the city is surrounded by artillery. It's over my dudes. And attempt to lead what was left of the

Reich down in the south. Hitler was having none of it. Hannah Reich, a test pilot, who would be a

feminist icon, wearing not for the whole, being a massive Nazi thing, even flew into Berlin on

the 26th, putting down her little Faisler 156 on an improvised strip near the Brandenburg Gate

under Soviet fire, and sprinting into the bunker to tell him that escape was still possible,

that she could fly him out the same way she came in. If only he would give the word, but he wouldn't

give it. He flatly refused to abandon the capital he had doomed, insisting that he would stay in

Berlin to share the fate of the German people as he put it. I would say he's a captain going down

with his ship, but that seems too positive. He's just a genocidal maniac who's going to be killed,

the way he deserves to kill himself, as he deserves. At the same time, news from outside the

bunker made it clear that his inner circle was unraveling. Goering, long as designated air,

sent a clumsy telegram from Bavaria, asking whether given Hitler's isolation in Berlin,

he should assume leadership of the Reich. Hitler read this as a coup attempt, and so

Goering was stripped of all titles, and orders were issued for his arrest. For all that was worth

at that point. I don't think Goering's going to be particularly worried about the Nazis coming

to arrest him, I think he's going to be more worried. Goering they kill, right? They'd hang him,

I think. That's Goering. Good. Then came word that Himmler, the architect of the Holocaust himself

of all people, always tried to negotiate a separate piece with the Western Allies via Count Bernadotte

of Sweden, and that was when Hitler gave up. By 28th, Hitler's only thoughts were of settling his

affairs and then ducking out, and first on the to-do list was finally marrying Eva Braun.

Throughout their relationship, Hitler had always refused marriage. He told all those who asked

that Germany was his bride, and further claimed that being seen as a bachelor without domestic

entanglements made him more appealing to women politically. Brut. No one sexually fantasised he had

off Hitler for God's sake. And a risk of making you bring up your dinner, he wasn't wrong,

as Hitler as a sex symbol was a whole thing in Nazi Germany. Yeah, because the propaganda

machine is a thing, dudes. But now there was no public to impress and no future of the Reich to

worry about. Eva had refused several chances to leave Berlin, and it made it very clear that she

intended to die with him. And with everything else gone, giving her the formal stages of a wife,

was a cost-free gesture, one that had given what she had wanted for a long time more than anything

else. And so it was, but shortly after midnight on the 29th of April, in the Fuhrer bunker conference

room, Volta Wagner conducted the ceremony, with girdles and boorman acting as witnesses.

He had also penned a new will half an hour or so before the ceremony.

In the private section, he mentioned his decision to marry Eva Braun,

praised her choice to come to Berlin and die at his side, left his possessions, including

his art collection, which he still fantasised about being displayed in Linsk one day,

to the Nazi party, and appointed Boorman executor. Brut. Why are you bothering? Why are you bothering?

It's not going to happen. And then came the political part of his will.

And with the Soviets at the door and the Reich in ruins, Hitler's obsessions hadn't shifted

an inch. He insisted that neither he nor anyone in Germany had wanted war in 1939,

that it had been undesired, and instigated exclusive by Levi's statesmen of Jewish descent,

or serving Jewish interests, and that centuries will pass away, but out of the rubble Germans

would keep renewing their hatred of international Jewry and its helpers.

Been nearly a century, how's that going? Whom he blamed for everything that would be fallen

both him and Germany? Escape, go, escape, go to the end, oh, Hitler.

In between the ranting, however, he also appointed new leaders for the broken state,

that he was about to leave behind Admiral Cardonets as president and supreme commander

of the armed forces, Gurgles as Reich-Chancellor, and various other posts.

You see, on paper, the Nazi regime was meant to stand wrong without him.

Nothing if not optimistic. 1.5 billion people perished out on the Berlin

deeds. Like, what do you think is happening here? Then, later into the 29th,

SS surgeon Ludwig Stunferger distributed brass-caiced ampules of cyanide to those who wanted them,

with the ever-loud sound of fighting all around them, now making it increasingly apparent that

if they didn't want to be captured by the Soviets, the time was quickly coming,

do that thing, and get this episode demonetised if I was to say it outright, indeed.

Hitler, paranoid at the end, though, distrusted the capsules, and so he used his dog as a test

subject instead. But now, blondie, the Alsatian he doated on and used in countless propaganda photos

had probably been the creature he showed most genuine affection for for years, arguably,

more than any human being in his life. And to be fair, at this point, killing blondie

probably was an act of mercy because it's hard to imagine her having too much fun of a time

in Soviet captivity. I kind of doubt it. I don't think the, like, is a dog. It doesn't matter

if it's Hitler's dog. Dogs are not, like, responsible for any of this. I think the Soviets would be

like, cool. I got Hitler's dog. What's that? Hitler's dog? It's mine now. Yeah. That little bitch.

I got his dog. Someone's like, I got his hat. And so it was that Hitler's dog handler for

it's torn out, forced open blondies' jaws, and crushed one of the cyanide amputals in her mouth.

She collapsed instantly, Hitler entered the room moments later, looked for a few seconds

at his dead dog, said nothing, and walked out, shutting himself in his room. His turn would come

the next day on the 30th. By that point, the Soviet line was close, and in the afternoon,

exhausted runners came bearing the news. The final assault had begun. With a little else to be done,

Hitler said his goodbyes to the bunker staff, shaking hands and mumbling a few words.

No rousing speech, no heroic send-off, just a thin, gray man, stooped and trembling,

shuffling past people who had built their lives and careers, worshipping in, much to their,

and indeed their entire nation's detriment. Yes, and many other nations as well, people's.

Shortly after, he had a final meal. Accounts disagree on the exact menu, but it was something

simple, probably passed or in vegetable dishes in line with his vegetarian preferences.

He was apparently an oddly domestic atmosphere, all things considered,

but then came the last private conversation. Magdegobles, who adored Hitler,

were the kind of fanatical devotion and saw him as the embodiment of Germany's destiny,

knew he was about to die, and so was she, with her also planning to take her six children with her.

Not to spare them from the Soviets' wrath, but to spare them from having to grow up in a world

without national socialism. Oh no! Jesus Christ.

Adidated and desperate, she begged for another audience, one last conversation with her mortal

god before she carried out the monstrous duty she had set for herself. Hitler indulged her,

but only 60 seconds. She pleaded with him to leave Berlin to save himself, to give Germany some

shred of a future. He brushed her off, coldly, then mechanically. Then, true to form, he retreated

back to his study with Eva, and shut the door, leaving Magde alone in the corridor with nothing

that the echo of his refusal and the terrible knowledge of what she was about to do.

From there, silence. No noise at all was heard, safer than the drone of the diesel generator that

was keeping the lights on, and the air fresh. Gobles, the male one, linger, born in, and utter

oxman, stood waiting, and increasingly concerned as the silence bore on. They voiced the obvious

concern to Hitler's agitant Otto Gunsha, who stood guard by the door, but he was having none of it.

His furor had given him an order to make sure his privacy wasn't disturbed, and he never

disobeyed orders. But then, ten minutes of total silence passed, and even he had to temper his

loyalties with a bit of pragmatic reality. It was linger and born, and he eventually opened the

door, though, carefully, and immediately they saw the bodies. Hitler and Eva Braun were sitting

next to each other on a small sofa. Eva was slumped to Hitler's left, a strong spell of bitter

arbons, a classic sign of cyanide rising from our corpse. Hitler's head drooped forward,

blood tripping from a small entry-roons, in his right temple.

On the floor, there's trusty walther PPK pistol. Isn't that the same gun that James Bond uses?

The exact choreography will never be known with total certainty. We can pin the time that the

deed was done to between 3.30 and 3.40 pm, the time of that ominous ten-minute silence.

But the exact series of events, which is not witnessed, to be able to be recorded,

why wasn't there a pfft, a bang from the gun? It's a walther PPK, it's not, it's like a handgun,

it's not particularly tiny. Was the diesel generator really that loud? Quite evidently,

though, at some point during that time, both Hitler and Eva bit down on a cyanide capsule,

and pretty much immediately after that, or even at the exact same moment, given how quickly

cyanide works, Hitler also shot himself in the head. But that's all we know for certainty.

We don't know what their last words were, what their last emotions were, nothing,

blood jam, at all. We do know what happened next, though, and it was a hasty affair,

as by that point, the Soviets were, at maximum, 100 or so meters away from the Fuhrer bunker.

Straight away, the bodies were wrapped in grey army blankets, Lingard fetched. He, assisted by

several SS men, lifted Hitler's corpse, its lower legs sticking out of the blanket,

and carried it through the bunker corridors, and up the roughly 25 feet of steps to the

chanceary garden. Bournemann carried Eva's body, handing it off to Eric Kemka,

Gunsha, tasked by Hitler himself with overseeing the destruction of the corpses when the time came,

carried Eva the rest of the way. Outside, the garden was being rigged constantly by Soviet artillery,

shells landing all around the chanceary ruins. Gunsha quickly laid the body side-by-side on a

patch of sandy ground, about three meters from the bunker entrance. Eva, to Hitler's right.

Kemka had prepared a large supply of petrol around 200 litres,

precisely for this moment, and that supply, every last drop of it,

so a lot of petrol, was poured over and around the bodies. They were not messing around.

The Soviets were to even get the smallest chunk of bone out of the first couple of Nazi Germany,

as a trophy. Under continuous shallower, the Adok Power proved surprisingly difficult to light,

though, Gerbels' matches failed in the wind, and Gunsha was on the verge of using a grenade when

Linzer managed to fashion a paper torch, which Bournemann managed to set a light.

Someone accounts differ on who, then hurled the burning paper onto the petrol-soaked corpses,

and that was that. No one stayed to tend the pyre, and instead the bunker door was slammed

shut as everyone raced back inside to escape the shells landing all around them.

Later, one of the guards, Herman Karnaut, did make a point of popping out to check it was all right,

though. He claims to have found two vaguely human-shaped piles of ash and

that collapsed when given a gentle nudge with his foot. Notably, this differs from the

testimony of another guard, Eric Mansfeld, who, when he himself had, around 6pm, claimed that he

saw two charred, shrunken bodies, recognisable as human-years, but not recognisable as anything

like a specific person. Gunsha, mindful of Hitler's instruction that there should be no trophy left for

the enemy, then ordered the two officers, from the Führer-Exgort squad, Evald Lindloff and Hans Reiser,

to bury what was left. And this gives us a third account of the state as the Hitler's remains,

as according to them, they were burnt and partly torn thanks to having taken an artillery round

or two, but very much not ash, not even that badly messed up all things considered. I mean,

it's possible that the first dude just, you know, they're going to be very badly burned,

whatever you look at it. And one guy maybe he just tapped a bit in the outside,

fell away and he's like, oh, it's all ash. But the inside, not so much, there's a lot of

water in her in a human body. Either way, the Hitler's were indeed buried, no later than 6pm.

And from that point, the last physical traces be they dust or chunks, when I'll just mixed in

with the other corpses and rubble in the bomb craters around the garden. So, that is the official,

i.e., the real story for how World War II ended for Hitler. Big love to you and Kershaw for

providing such a handy-dandy reference text for us once again. But how did he know that?

What are his sources? Are there any gaps in it, which mean that there's at least the possibility

that somehow Hitler survived World War II? And as a much as I'd love to dangle her,

maybe it brought the audience? Because it would make for really good content? No,

no there isn't. To use some very unacademic language, Kershaw is a shit-hot

historian. He's God dear. And you don't get to that level in the trade without doing things

fucking perfectly. Shout out. If he was the sort to fill in gaps to make his life easier,

or the sort to just outright make stuff up, he wouldn't be that level of historian.

Don't just take my word for it either because Kershaw provides receipts for his tea,

or is it called in the trade, primary sources? i.e., those which are contemporary to the time

being discussed, and not those which were retroactively penned. The so-called secondary sources.

And obviously, primary is what you want if you're trying to prove something because

would you believe it? People who actually witness events provide better accounts than those

who didn't. Ask Herodotus. As for what he dited, just from the Hitler killing himself

bit, it includes the Kriegstar Wuchher, der Seek-Rieg-Sleitung. Or the navy war diary, there we go,

which literally logs when the German navy was told Hitler had died, complete with a final

heroic defenders of Berlin, propaganda flourish. The German eye-command war diary published as

die-neederlager 1945, which records the last orders, the collapsing fronts, and the transition

to Donets after Hitler's death. And the hieroslager, daily army situation reports for the whole period,

capturing the exact timeline of Berlin's command structure falling apart. And that is just

the official layer, the proper four-government use documents. Kershaw also uses the accounts

of the ordinary lower-ranked Nazis, who happened to be in the Fuhrerbunk, basically all of whom

that survived wrote it down one way or another. Trowel Jungers, Hitler's last private secretary,

is a particularly standout one. On top of that, Kershaw leans on his four-running document collaters,

people like Anton, Yorchim Slafer and H.R. Trevor Roper, who spent years sifting through

British interrogation receipts and German statements from the actual bunker staff,

Linger Guntze Kemper-Aksman, all the names important enough to come up in the main narrative,

basically, and to actually survive the war, of course. They're the ones who described opening

the door, seeing the bodies on the sofa, carrying Hitler and Eva upstairs, soaking them in a

shitload of petrol, trying to set them alight while the Soviets blew everything around them to

buggery. Lay it on top of that, you've got the stuff the Nazi leadership themselves wrote or

dictated at the time. Gurbels' 1945 diary entries, for example, scribbled in the bunker. He himself

didn't survive, as per his wife's plans. Part of people's all around, but his writing still

gives us his first-hand account of the last meetings, his rationale for killing his own children,

Jesus Christ, and take on Hitler's decision to take the L and duck out of life, things like that.

Then you pull in the big outside voices, Wilhelm Keitel, basically the most senior army officer,

still in the fight who was running all over the place, trying to delay the inevitable.

He wrote in his own memoir, as did Karl Donetsu, also did a few interviews post-war since he escaped

the dingle-dangle rope, and Lutz Scherven von Krossik, the Minister of Finance, whose sworn

statements laying out what the short-lived continuation government in Flesberg thought had

actually happened in Berlin and when. Put all that together. And what you have is a cast iron

picture of what went down, basically every word, basically every emotion, basically everything,

save for the consistency of Hitler's final dump was jotted down by some eyewitness somewhere

at some time. So, okay, that's the boring, real version of events. Now let's dissect a myth,

shall we? It's going to get fun. The Argentina myth

Let's dissect the biggie in fact, the one which claims the Hitler ended up in Argentina.

I'm not just pulling this one being the biggie out of my ass either,

as more so than any other myth pertaining to Hitler's survival. This one seems to have real

penetration in the popular zeitgeist years as one I know Hitler, like gone a submarine or whatever,

and tough to Argentina. Please. For example, the History Channel, famous hawkers of absolute

trust that they are, ran three whole seasons of hunting Hitler, which discussed exactly what

you would assume it would from that title, and invariably it always came back to Argentina.

In fact, wherever you're from, if you were to turn on your tele and flick over to one of

the many Slop History channels that poison our airwaves nowadays, I'd be willing to bet

that within the hour you would see some bollocks show floating this theory, localize just for you.

They are, but all of them, however, mere televised regurgitators. For the lore here,

was not penned by an underpaid TV scriptwriter desperately meeting his word quota,

so he could punch out at five. No, it was typed up by pseudo historians with too much free time,

and bound up in lengthy books. Books like, say, Grey Wolf, the escape of Adolf Hitler by Simon

Dunston and Jared Williams, not the first book to discuss them out of it, but certainly the one

that got the most traction, and naturally, for all your entertainment today, I got my hands

in a copy, secondhand of course, because f**k giving them money. Arrrr, sail the piracy!

And boy, allegedly, I'd never encourage piracy.

And boy does it make for nothing, if not an interesting read, because it doesn't just

argue that Hitler made it out a Berlin, it constructs an entire parallel history.

It's just fiction labeled as fact, so they can sell more books allegedly, as I always say.

Incidentally, that parallel history is also why I went into the depth that I did in the last

chapter, because had I just kept it simple, a boorman, and go, opened up the door in Hitler's

brain to become one with a wallpaper, Yeri was depo-dead, LOL typewriter. We'd have risked

falling into the exact trap, Grey Wolf sads for the inattentive reader. The trap, where the official

version looks thin, and hand-wavy, and the conspiracy, dripping with drama as it is, suddenly feels

fuller, more detailed, and more real. Well, because when you are making something up, you just

get to like, elaborate on it, and make it all complicated and s**t. That's the Loki genius of

this stuff too, although it pains me to admit it. They bury you in anecdotes, character sketches,

mysterious houses, invented orders, and big cinematic flourishes, so that if you haven't done

the groundwork, maybe not to the extent of reading Kershaw's mega-tones, but some kind of

pointed effort to discern the truth. All that embroidery looks like substance, which like George

says is exactly why we did that groundwork, so you don't fall for this bullshit. It's pseudo-rigga,

surface complexity, the kind of thing that if you're not already holding the real timeline in

your hand, can momentarily fool you into thinking, huh, I guess this could be possible. Even though

once you actually check, one of the whole thing is very easily provable as bullshit. But I digress,

the contents of the book now, yes. It opens with the grand claim that in the last days of the war,

Bournemon offered the American Office of Strategic Services, the wartime ancestor of the CIA,

a falsely-impact quote. The fruits of 1,000 years of western art, together with the secrets of

Nazi Germany's advanced military technology, in exchange for the escape of one man, Adolf Hitler.

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According to Greywolf, this is the key to Action Fureland. Either the Americans let it

go or Bourbon blows up Europe's cultural heritage and all the Nazis fancy whiz bank technology

out of spite. And once that premise is accepted and the book demands you accepted,

despite offering not a single chase up a document to support it, everything else is easy.

Hitler's escape route has already been prepared. The safe houses are already built and the submarine

pick-up point has already been arranged. And where is this pick-up point? Well as a man of

house on the Gendia Peninsula of Fuerto Ventura in the Canary Islands, Villa Winter.

According to the authors, quote, the base had deliberately been excluded from utilization during

the Nazi war effort and was intended to serve one purpose only to act as a key link in the escape

route from Berlin. A whole island warehouse then built and maintained in secrecy for years

just to facilitate a potential escape by Hitler. They even gave Villa Winter a back story,

more elaborate than most main characters in actual history books. Gustav Winter, the engineer

who actually built it because yes it is a real place, they call a senior intelligence agent

in the Canary Islands in charge of observation posts to quit with radio and of the supplying of

German submarines. And then comes the piece to resistance of the whole fantasy, the use of

the real submarines that actually existed. Basically the authors declare that three U-boats

opened sealed orders that would divert them southward on a special mission, and that these three

subs, U-518, U-880 and U-1235, sailed to Fuerto Ventura to wafer Hitler. Leaving ever's tidy little

telegraphic exchanges to sell the drama, a message flashed from shore to the subs then

Bourbon's supposed reply, a group of post-transfer overseas. Then one titler is confirmed as

having reached the Canaries, he was supposedly whisked across the Atlantic in one of these

so-called Grey Wolves, hence the name of the book. They remind you, as if it means anything,

that Hitler's personal plane was called Flygende Wolf, his yacht Sea Wolf, his headquarters Wolf

Shanzer, his nickname Wolf, and therefore obviously the submarines that carried him, were lauded by

the propaganda ministry as Grey Wolves. No, it couldn't just be, he thought Wolves were sick,

which would be a rare point of accord between myself and the moustache man. It was all part of

the same into weaving nudge nudge wing, hidden in a plain-side system of nomenclature or something

like that. Yes, well, isn't it? It's just, they equaled them wolves because he thought they're

cool. Wolves are pretty cool, and can scary. From there, straight to Argentina, conveniently

skipping over the small, trivial matter of how they ensure that they dodge the dozen Allied

hunter-killer groups sweeping the Atlantic at that moment, because in reality dodging them

was a matter of luck, as everyone submarine that made it to South America, which wasn't exactly

many, five also were tracked and destroyed with the loss of all hands. Well, I didn't know that,

that's brutal. I mean, deservedly so for those guys, but goddamn. Then they present Hitler's

first documented post-war sighting, as being at the San Ramon estate near Barreloche in June 1945,

and once they have emplaced in Argentina, the narrative becomes positively bucolic. They describe,

in Alcoe, Hitler's estate in Patagonia, a serene lodge overlooking Lake Nahul Huapi,

complete with moody photograph. Then comes the Barreloche airfield, where they claim Peron's

government expanded in 1943, specifically to receive long-range German aircraft as a part

of Action Fureland. It's all a masterpiece of patent-seeking. Every German-owned ranch

becomes a safehouse, every expatriate becomes an artsy agent, every pre-existing structure becomes

a part of a continent spanning exfiltration network. Every co-incidence is treated as a conspiracy.

Basically, they don't so much connect dots, then, as they slam their pre-determined shape down

and see what dots just happen to fall within the pattern. It is pure bought. And indeed,

that's exactly why yes, they do list their sources 50 pages in fact, but not one of them,

outright says, here is Hitler, provably an Argentina, bang, suck on it. It's all circumstantial

evidence. Don't you see a patent if you look at things that don't actually prove anything

and isolate that sort of thing? Circumstantial. And indeed, neither do they deconstruct the accepted

narrative either. There is no dissection of, say, one of Kershaw's books, where they go through

it piece by piece and explain why he is incorrect, debunk his evidence, and present new evidence

that either outright replaces his version of a then-sure adds new layers of context to it.

Yeah, because that's not what they're doing, the Try and Write, a conspiracy theory book that's

gonna sell lots of copies. Money, baby, that's what it's all about. I don't really believe they believe

this shit. It's no evidence. It's just circumstantial evidence for an ultimately unproven claim that

sits in isolate totally cut off from wider historiography, an enclave of twaddle. Kershaw, meanwhile,

does do that for every single one of his claims. There is not one single thing he says in his books,

where he couldn't take you to a primary source, pointed a particular line and say,

there, being claimed as having happened by a contemporary to the events. Go fuck yourself,

which is what I imagine. Well, I imagine him saying, which would be nice, but he's probably just

say, oh my god, these idiots. It's hard being a real historian with all these

dances around. Still though, at least the argument they present is at least consistent in and

of itself and definitely not full of holes. Right? Of course not. Unfortunately for Dunston and

Williams, they have drifted into the scope of a giant World War II nerd called myself a World

War II historian, seeing as how one of my academic papers pertained to it, but where would be the

fun in that? And sweet, merry, mother of Christ, I've seen collenders with less holes in it than

this pile of shit. For example, you know how they said Hitler had a yacht named Seawolf?

Total fiction. His actual yacht or the closest approximation to his anyway, as it was also used

to why the party duties was the Grille, a dispatch ship laid down by Blarman Vos in 1934.

Why'd I heard of Blarman Vos? They still make shit. We also know exactly where she was in the

closing stages of and immediately after the war. She was not occupied Norway, acting as a stationery

HQ ship, was seized by the British in May 1945, stripped of her guns and laid up at Hartpool.

Then in 1946, she was sold to the Lebanese entrepreneur, George Arida, who planned to turn her into a

floating casino. And she met her end years later in 1951, when she was wrecked in the US and scrapped.

No Argentina, there is the guys. No, there is not George. It's the same deal with his personal

aircraft, too. Fleagenda Wolf, as Dunston Williams claimed it was. Well, it never existed.

Instead, Hitler had two go-to aircrafts in the war, Imelmann II and Imelmann III.

The former was a Junkus 52, quite a smaller modest thing. Here's a photo of one for my personal

collection, as pubbed at the absolutely slapped-on crack-out air museum in Poland.

The latter, however, was Hitler's big boy, a much longer-ranged fock of Wolf 200.

I don't have any of my photos of this one sadly, as there's only one left and it lives at the

Berlin Temple Fairport, which I've yet to grace with my presence. As for whether they could have

been used in some escape to Argentina plot, well, Imelmann III would have a job on because it was

destroyed in an allied bombing raid on the 18th of July 1944, and so it didn't exist anymore

by the time the Nazis started, high-tailing it that way. Imelmann II, as I wanted to say,

in no small part due to the fact that they slapped Hitler's personal aircraft number,

D-2600 on any aircraft that he flew on, even if it was just a jaunt down the way,

leading to there being quite a debate on which J.U. 52 even really was Imelmann II.

But it's kind of the point, isn't it? Because in a properly argued Hitler escaped book,

you don't get to hand-wave the basics and hope the redesigns glaze over. You don't get to say his

plane was called Fleejende Wolf when it wasn't, and you don't get to invent a yacht called Seawolf

when the real thing was the grill. These are machines with serial numbers, basing records,

loss reports, fuel ranges, maintenance logs, crew rosters, and paper trails that live in archives

precisely because militaries are obsessive record-keeping freaks. There's also the matter of the

supposed U-boats involved, because I don't think Dunstan Williams even bothered to look them up.

Remember, Gray Wolf doesn't just say some U-boats picked them up somewhere, then it was all

cushy and they made steam for Argentina. No, it names specific hulls, U-518, U-880, and U-1235,

all allegedly part of a special group of Seawolf elements that slipped away from the Atlantic

battlefront and putled down to the Canaries to wait for Hitler, which it claims happened on the

night of the 28th. Their crews presumably killing the time spent by drinking sunbathing and trying

to have it away with anything that moved in the immediate vicinity, as is tradition for some

mariners. And unfortunately for this crap book, there exists people who really like U-boats,

and those people find themselves compelled to troll through every archive and make

whopping great bloody books that explain what every U-bo did throughout its entire career and

what fate had eventually met. Books like U-bo losses during World War II, details of destruction,

written by people like Axel Niestel. And what would you know is, I just have another copy of that

in my library, as part of my, I really hope I can use this for a script so I can plug it as a

business expense collection. And cracking it open, what do we find? They were, all of them,

sunk, come the 28th of April. I feel like these guys got Chatchee PT to write their

You know, it's just like, it just hallucinates. It's just like, yeah, no, that U-bo came

agotive. It's like, oh no, that U-boat was destroyed when you actually look into it.

Chatchee PT, my mistake, you're absolutely right. U-1235 was the first to go,

buying it on the 15th of April in the mid-Atlantic, and after the destroyers,

USS Stanton and Frost gave it the business with some depth charges. Ironically, it was

those exact same two destroyers that bagged U-882 on the following day. And as for U-518,

she was sunk on the 22nd of April, Northwest of the Azores by USS Carter and near Lace God.

So, by the time Grey Wolf has Hitler and Eva supposedly bored one of these last wolves

off Fwerd of Endura on the night of the 28th, every single one of them had been sitting on the

seabed for between 6 and 13 days in the North Atlantic, hundreds and hundreds of miles away.

Happily though, they got a lot more wrong than just really counting details about vehicles.

For example, they confidently assert that the Fuhrer bunker was built by a hot-sheff subsidiary

called Fuhrer bunker Fensterputz, a GMBH, which apparently also built the Berghof,

Hitler's Bavarian Mountain retreat as well as his wolf's lair in Rustinburg. And would you

believe it? That ridiculous name which translates roughly as the Fuhrer bunker window-cleaning company,

genuinely, and I triple-checked, is complete bollocks. There's not a single mention of this company

ever existing, ever, ever, in any of the serious histories that I had to hand. Not the week

should be surprised though, because we're well aware who actually built all these things.

Hotchtäfer, German construction company that's still going strong to this day, although

the Berghof was just an adaptation with the original structure of the built in 1916 through

1917 by a chap called Otto Winter for his own use. And then, then we have the books handling

of Hitler's early life. They write that young Adolf was pursuing art in Vienna despite the

fierce objections of his overbearing father, Alois Schlikluber. Uno problemo with that though,

Hitler first applied to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1907. His dad was dead in 1903.

Oh, he was objecting beyond the grave, was he, boys? Also, Alois Schlikluber? And yes,

that was his birth name. He was born out of wedlock, rather salacious in those days I know.

But he changed the name legally to Heidler in 1877 and then adopted the spelling Hitler.

And the Hitler was born in 1889, way after the name Schlikluber had stopped having any relevance

to the family at all. I thought he had no idea why they did this. It isn't making something up

and neither is it lazy research because if anything, you'd lean on assuming Hitler was a straight

up the line family name. Weird, hell if I know. And as much as I could go on, and would indeed

rather enjoy doing so, I think that's enough to sell you on the idea that this book is just a

mix of poorly researched or just totally fabricated shit. In George's opinion, that's also definitely

mine. If nothing else though, such conclusion at least makes Greywolf an exemplar for all the works

that float this theory because there's a lot of them and they're all double-wank. Consider,

for example, Laddislav Sfarbo writing back in the late 1940s. He's the guy who first came up

with the idea in his book, Hitler Estavivo. I won't bother giving you the English name,

I don't believe the book is ever been translated anyway. It's got to be Hitler's lips is a

live, right? Estavivo? Vivo feels like Latinish for life, right? Viva? Viva? Life? Something like that?

An ester, I don't know. Spanish, right? Sound Spanish. The beats are just familiar though, apparently

anyway, because if I can read Spanish, there we go, at least beyond the ever-essential Uno Biro

Porfavora and Uno Piala Porfavora con HP source. There's an Englishman like me drops when

in Benadon. Oh, and while we're here, Sfarbo also threw in the Nazi base in the Arctic myth as well.

It's apparently ground zero for that one. Oh, there we go. That's where we'll begin, huh?

Or how about Jeff Christianson's Operation Patagonia or Patrick Burnside's The Escape of Hitler?

Pick anyone you want, basically. They're all the same crap. A whole load of nonsense history,

a whole load of sources that don't prove the point, blah, blah, blah, etc, etc.

However, and this is something that I want to make absolutely apparent with giant,

visible from space and neon lights, the fact that it's a big old load of bollocks

Hitler escaped to Argentina does not mean that the whole,

oft-topped media trope of Joseph Gerber's Martin Bournemon or Heinrich Himmler,

turning up in South America, wearing a comedy fake nose and glasses, only to then

disappear and live out their lives in pieces entirely untrue because it's not.

Consider Adolf Eichmann, then TLDR for those of you not in the know who he is,

because he is a smidge niche as far as Nazis go. He was the particularly pleasant

individual who made the wheels of genocide run the head Holocaust Hontro when it came to logistics.

He lives in his house where he lived is very, very close to my house,

like without giving out too many details of where I live. It's really some nice house,

but it'd be weird living there, because he was at Adolf Eichmann's house. He's been a couple of

years after the war, dosing around in Germany and Austria under assumed identities until he then

in 1950, quietly slid down into Italy, acquired a nice, shiny set of international red cross-papers

in the name of Riccardo Clement, courtesy of some ideologically sympathetic clergy consacks,

good guy church, and then stepped onto a ship in Genoa, bound for Buenos Aires,

like he was just another European, hoping to make a fresh start of it overseas,

after his home-consument had blown itself up. Once in Argentina, he built a whole new life

in the suburbs, a factory job, wife and kids brought over, barbecues at the weekends,

all while being one of the key bureaucrats of the Holocaust. And the reason we could say all of

this so confidently is because we've got the receipts, the Red Cross Passport, the passenger lists,

the Argentine immigration file. And then when Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agent,

he finally nabbed him off the pavement in 1960, his own testimony in an Israeli courtroom

before they finally sent him to the Dingo Dangle rope a couple of years later. The only person

Israel has ever sent to the rope incidentally. And a good one too, to send there? Consider also

Joseph Mengele, him being the so-called Angel of Death, who did all of those human experiments

you've heard about in Auschwitz. He did actually fall into Allied custody, but blanked it as a

nobody with some funched paperwork, it would take years for the full extent of his crimes to even

be documented, much less popularly understood, you have to understand. And then in 1949,

he did basically exactly what Eichmann would later do, turning up in Genoa under the alias of

Helmet Gregor, waving some Red Cross documents, and then heading on off to Buenos Aires. He did

flee to Brazil, following Eichmann's capture, reasoning it to be safer for whatever reason,

but otherwise he got to live out his days peacefully, totally getting away with his crimes,

and eventually dying of a stroke in 1979, whilst women were of each near South power.

Fuck man, Joseph Mengele got away with it. Whenever I'm reminded of that, it sucks.

As George would call it, he deserves to go to the dingle dangle, doesn't he?

And again, just like with Eichmann, the reason I can say all of this so confidently is that we are

absolutely swimming in primary evidence to support these claims. Real travel documents issued

under real alias as real ship passengers, real residency and employment traces in Argentina

and beyond. Real police files once people started putting two and two together, real witness

statements from the people around him, and in the end, a real, actual dead body. Dug up,

examined and identified by those with brains bearing many wrinkles, whose entire day job is

figuring out who is this corpse, when he's at home then. I'll bring those two examples up for

a very specific reason besides just demonstrating that there's some truth to the fleeing Nazi

trope, because people who push the Hitler escape chart and China myth will often use the fact

that some serious Nazis escaped as caused a dangle. Oh, you can't rule it out then, can you?

About Hitler. Except actually no such arguments in the people making them can f*** off,

those cases, as we've seen, are backed by primary evidence. And as we have also seen,

there's bugger all back in the notion that Hitler did the same. It all points to him.

In that bunker, doing himself in, in the matter I explained earlier. And with that,

chapter done, f***ing right George. The curious case of Hitler's remains.

I've now intended to move on to other explanations about Hitler's supposedly

survived World War II, but to be honest with you all, I'm currently staring at the drafts of

five such chapters, and they're basically all just derivatives of what we've already seen,

but we know what really happens, and this doesn't prove anything otherwise, blah blah blah,

et cetera, et cetera. So instead, let's bin them off, not retread stagnant water,

and use our remaining time to look at some actually useful stuff instead, things that reinforce

that yes, Hitler really is dead, you know, things like his f***ing corpse. The story begins with

the arrival of the Soviets, the right chance to read the grounds of which the Führer bunker was

buried, Stalin by this point had made one thing very clear. He wanted Hitler's corpse.

It was him, the ultimate war trophy, a point to which I'll have to agree,

I'll certainly pop over for a cork if a museum somewhere had it in a cabinet.

And so the soldiers started digging among them, some officers of smush, the amalgamated Soviet

counterintelligence agencies. They went over every piece of human remains found, of which there

was no shortage, and they did this in forensic detail, and anything that had even a whiff of Hitler

even brought about it, no matter how vague or abstract was pulled away, cleaned up and photographed.

Then, the survivors from the bunker convinced on a pain of being shot in the f***ing face if they

didn't, gave yeses or noes to the whole lot of it. Yet, you got captured by the Soviets,

and you're in the Führer bunker, you'll be like, I was the secretary!

Really, you sure look like that! Why are you wearing a dress?

Yes, cables. And for a while it was nothing but the former, then on the fourth of May,

they started digging in a shell crater near the bunker exit. That shell crater, in it,

were two vaguely humanish-looking mounds of broken flesh, and the remains of a dog.

The bulk of it was, well, indesertible gorg, as I just described, but through absolute flukofate,

a little section of jaw and teeth had survived, and this was huge initentifying the remains,

because Hitler's oral hygiene was bad, downright honking in fact, and so if these scraps

matched his very particular cocktail of fillings, fake teeth and everything else, bingo,

Hitler, with a 99.99% likeness. So, did it match? Well, Kathie Haaseman, his dental assistant

and Fritz Xman, his dental technician, would drag didn't have a look, because who on earth

alive or dead would possibly know better than them, and they said yes. That is Hitler's teeth.

I'm inclined to believe them too, as they did my own analysis of the matter,

we have two pieces of evidence, as to the state of Hitler's gnash as to compare against the

recovered sample. Dental X-rays taken after the July pod, plot and descriptions and little sketches

of Hitler's teeth, given by Haaseman and X-men during their interrogation by the Soviets.

Take those, then hold them up against the jaw fragment, the Soviets pulled out of that crater,

and yeah, you can see it perfectly. The X-ray, for example, shows almost everything in his mouth

is artificial. A great opaque slab on the lower right, where a multi-toothed bridge sits,

only a few skinny lower front incisors showing up as natural teeth, and a forest of crowns and

root jobs everywhere. Haaseman's diagram and notes, done before she ever set eyes on the remains,

it's worth noting, talk about exactly that. An upper nine-toothed bridge, a distinctive long bridge

along the lower right, specific teeth missing here, crowned there, and four front lower incisors

still original. It's his fucking mouth. There's no question. And what do we see when we look at

the jaw fragments, a charred chunk of bone, with a monstrous metal bridge sprouting off the right

hand side, four little natural incisors at the front, and everything else made up of crowns and

bridge work, in exactly the layout they described. Case closed to me, these are Hitler's. They're

going to DNA at right, later on when DNA becomes a thing. But because I'm not exactly a dental

expert, I'm basically just playing match the shapes. So I wanted to go and see what people

are dental experts, thought of all this. And sure enough, in the 1970s, forensic odontologist,

rider, sognaes, and ferdinand strom sat down with the exact same set of evidence, and wrote his

musings up in a paper titled The Odelonge... She's Christ, the Odeetonlogical. Odeetonlogical.

It's a hell of a word. Identification of Adolf Hitler. Documentation by X-rays and

derogations, and autopsy findings. As for their conclusions, we'll quote them here,

from this overall comparison of the Odelongeological... Jesus. Can we just say tooth evidence?

The tooth evidence? We conclude that the accumulated evidence now provides definitive

Odelonge's tooth proof that Hitler did in fact die, and the Russians did indeed recover

and autopsy the right body. End quote. They aren't alone in thinking that either as more recently

a French team led by one Philippe Charlier, who's the most French name ever, got the golden ticket,

supervised access in Moscow to the actual jaw fragment and skull piece.

Their letter, the remains of Adolf Hitler, a biomedical analysis and definitive identification

published in 2018, describes how they x-rayed the jaw, overlaid it with the 1944 films,

peered it all under the microscopes. They came back saying the quote,

the Russian secret services gave us full access to the remains in order to make an

independent scientific analysis. Regarding the jaw's elements, it provides sufficient

pieces of evidence in the definitive identification of the remains of the former

Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. I'm glad that they put former Nazi leader in there because

for a moment I wasn't sure whom Adolf Hitler was. End quote. Sorry, the quote ended before

I made my commentary, but you get the picture. I could give you further examples,

but those two are consistent with what we'd see. That clever sorts, who give those jaw fragments

a once over, are certain that they are Hitler's, but is more to consider than just his teeth.

A supposedly, a chunk of his skull turned up over the years. The story goes that the

Soviets didn't just stop in May 45 when they found the remains by the door. A stall in

prone to paranoia as he was, wanted the whole of the right chance to read its surrounding area

going over again. And so a second swordsman's search was ordered in 1946.

And this time, the excavators turned up small charred fragments of skull in the soil of the

garden, vaguely 10 by 10 centimeters in size according to one photo that I could get a hold of,

and it's beside a ruler with a hole in it that looked much like an exit wound. Well,

I would make sense with it and give any shot himself. Naturally, given the fact that Hitler

gathered himself in the nut, it was scooped up, assumed him as be a chunk of his

norgan and shipped off to Moscow to sit alongside the drawer in the trophy cabinet.

However, the Soviet Union kept this one to themselves with no one outside of a small circle,

even knowing that it existed for decades. They let slip once in 1968 by accident when Soviet

journalist Lev Bezemin's book The Death of Otto Hitler and no documents from Soviet archives

made a passing reference to it. And then, nothing. It's all 1993, when Russian archivist Vladimir

Isaac Chinkov, writing for the Associated Press, does a piece titled Russian say they have

bones from Hitler's skull, confirming the fragment's existence, but no pictures were included.

The first time the wider world actually got to see the thing was in the year 2000 when Russia's

federal archival service put on a VE day exhibition in Moscow called The Agony of the Third Reich,

Retribution. And part of it, plunked the fragments in a glass case while also telling the Guardian

and LA Times that Hitler's drawer is also in the archives, but too fragile to put on show.

From there, with it being confirmed that the fragment was not a piece of fiction,

people obviously wanted to know if it's a real deal.

Fast forward to 2009, and the archive led to an American researcher, Nick Bellatoni,

take a DNA sample from the skull fragments, the result was that it was a woman aged roughly

20 to 40. It's even wrong, right? Gotta be, and so not Hitler's, but given that Eva

Braun was 33 when she topped herself, could it be hers? Well, maybe. If every eyewitness that saw

the condition of the two corpses was wrong, somehow, which let's be real, they aren't gonna be

are they? There's not one person who saw Hitler and Eva Braun's remains who even once said

that she had a gunshot wound to her head. Although there is another angle altogether that we

must consider, the angle that points out that some within the Russian government are absolutely

adamant that the skull section is totally Hitler's to this very day. Boys, I'm sorry, but it's DNA.

It says XX, it's a woman, and a pretty sure Hitler was a dude, and uncomfortably for

this channel's commitment to being factual, I have to nod my head and go, hell yes, I totally agree.

All right, then, George, explain. Well, that would be because I'd like to see

you could make a tank museum in the Central Air Force Museum one day, and the fact I decided not

to hide the fact that I'm a part-time squaddy, like the tit that I am, and basically everything I've

ever written about the Russian government for Simon ever, means that I need to win back some browny

points with Moscow. It's the chance that that visa being approved currently stands somewhere in

the region of 0% George, probably best you don't, to be honest. So yes, I'm sold, it's totally

Hitler's skull as far as I'm concerned, and to really make them like me, I cannot believe the

Red Army one-world war two all on their own without any help from anyone else, and further, I cannot

believe they conducted themselves absolutely flawlessly while doing so and didn't even commit a

single crime against humanity. I'm not going to see that only surviving mouse tank, am I? No,

George, you're not. Miscalaneous evidence. Frankly, for my part, we're getting the episode here,

and I'll be happy. We have a mountain of witness testimony in the confirmed remains of Hitler.

Given the circumstances of his death of one of the chaotic as they were, literally,

what more could we want? Nothing. We'll be my answer. As far as I'm concerned, just off the evidence

we've seen Hitler, 1000% died in their bunker, no ifs, no buts, no woo, but what abouts? Remaining,

but there are other bits of evidence still, and in the spirit of doing a good job today, we should

at least touch upon some of it. It's supplementary evidence at this point, though, the sort of thing

that if you were marking an exam script, you'll scribble in the margin. Further, demonstrates excellent

understanding, so good to know but not vital. First up, the bit of evidence that really ought to

have killed every escape theory stoned at on day one, the German government itself announcing

his death, not whispered, not implied, not coded, they literally got on the radio and told the

entire surviving rags that the Fuhrer had clocked out and will quote them. It has been reported from

the Fuhrer's headquarters that Arthurair Adolf Hitler has died this afternoon in his battle

headquarters at the Reich Chancellery, fighting to his last breath against Volshemism. On the 30th of

April, the Fuhrer appointed Grand Admiral Donets to be his successor. He's fighting to the last

moment, no, he killed himself. Then Donets himself, stepped behind a microphone to confirm it,

Arthurair Adolf Hitler is dead, the German people bow in deepest sorrow and respect,

he died a hero's death in the capital of the German Reich. We didn't, that's a lie,

and sure they could be lying, he died, but not a hero's death. And they could be lying,

but it could be all but a ruse to make the allies think the Hitler was dead, just to give him a

bit of breathing room for scarping. But here's the thing, even in the private records, the ones

that were never intended for public consumption, as we touched upon earlier when discussing how

Kershaw evidence is his claims, they confirm that he had indeed died. Then there's the initial statements

of the Soviets which are face value, you would think would be evidence that Hitler did survive the

war because on the 6th of June, Stalin told a Western envoy that he was sure Hitler was still alive.

And then at the Potsdam Conference the following month he said it again. Then you've got Zhukov

standing at a press conference telling the world that Hitler's body has not been found,

and that he could have flown out of Berlin at the last moment. All right, very interesting,

but here's the thing, they were all chatting bollocks, intentionally. Because behind the scenes

Smirch had already found those remains outside the Führer bunker, as we know, and they were

pretty sure they were the real deal, they just chose not to tell the world. Why? Because a little

mystery kept the West off balance. A little ambiguity prevented Hitler from becoming a martyr,

a little contradictory noise made the Soviet Union the sole holder of the truth,

or whatever that happened to be on the day. And they admitted all of this in private documentation too.

Although if we want to talk about interesting Soviet documents, we need to talk about a

classified memo that Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB and future premier, sent to the current

premier, Leonid Brezhnev, in 1969, saying that they destroyed Hitler's body. Basically,

Hitler didn't actually find his way straight to the Kremlin's trophy cabinets. No, after his

identity had been originally confirmed, he was dumped into an unmarked grave in the yard of a

Soviet barracks in Magdaburg. The dead Führer ventured there for a quarter century. Italy was

decided that the base was to be handed over to the East German Army. Andropov, he knew everything

about everything on account of being the head of the KGB, then to break, because what of a neo-nazi

of some flavor of which there were plenty in East Germany at the time, just generally being

sensible and keeping their mouth shut day to day should happen to discover that diggy mob,

and to whisk the remains off to become a holy relic for enduring national socialism.

That obviously would be bad, but the solution at least was straightforward, destroy the remains.

Brezhnev signed off, and so in April 1970 a KGB team went in all nondescripts and subtle like

exhumed the box of bones and burned them to ash on a bonfire, crushed the leftovers,

and then tipped the lost into the nearby Bietzerritz river. And critically,

the report attached to Adrov's memo says that he kept two things back, a section of skull,

and the jawbone with teeth. Those, it said, were to remain in Moscow as proof of identity.

And again, those are private communications that were never meant to be seen,

and only did come to public attention after the war came down when the Kremlin archives were

briefly opened up to the world. Would they create an intentionally bollocks document 25 years earlier

when it was never meant to be accessible? No, would the independent Kremlin then retroactively

create a bollocks document just to claim that their four runners destroyed Hitler's remains?

I mean, never say never, but it is a bit odd, isn't it? There's also the matter,

I've Hitler's death certificate, which yes he did get. Because here's the thing,

legally speaking, Hitler was a missing person, and if you want to settle his estate, close off

any claims and officially mark him as gone, you have to prove it legally. And so it was that between

1953 and 1956, according to Berk Tskaden, the district of his last registered address in Poveria,

said off to answer, legally, the question is Adrov Hitler dead, and if so, where and how?

They dragged in everyone they could get their hands on.

Bunker survivors had only just come back from the Gulag, Linger, Gunsha, Mangerhausen,

Bar, Rattenhober, old boys who'd been in western custody for years, Kemper, Axmann,

Trollhunga, Hannah Reich, Hitler's dentists. On top of that, they had the Allied interrogation

reports, the Soviet material that had filtered through, the German war diaries, the wills,

the whole paper trail that we've been talking about, and on the 25th of October 1956,

Judge Henrik Stefanus finally issued his ruling. Hitler was dead, he died on the 30th of April 1945,

at around half past three in the afternoon, and had, quote, shot himself in the right temple,

while in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery. The court had explicitly rejected the idea that he

might have survived. It did so after hearing sworn testimony from virtually everyone still alive,

who'd seen him in those last days, and after reviewing every scrap of documentation

then available, East and West. Conclusion

And look, I could go on listing miscellaneous evidence to the cowscombo, but really,

I don't think it's needed at this point, as I imagine we're all on the same page and thoroughly

convinced by now. Could it be, the bits of the picture be fuzzy around the edges, and might

certain minor details here and there change in future history or historiography? Certainly yes,

on both counts, but let's be real. The big picture, that's about as glaring as a freshly

shot pair of pants, but totally locked in at this point, and what does that big picture say?

It says, quite clearly, the Hitler died in the Fuhrer bunker on the 30th of April 1945 by his

own hands, and frankly, I don't think there's much more to say than that, so I'm going to spare

you the fool. Here's what we learned today. Conclusion recap and just call the episode done,

indeed, George. I don't think, I mean, it's just a ridiculous conspiracy theory.

And that's the end of today's episode. Thanks for being here. If you would like to pick up a

signed copy of a decoding the unknown script, I sign them all. They are for sale. They are

ones of one, of course, and they are available at the match store, which is linked below. Thank you

for watching.