Historical Note: How Hitler Died

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It was April 30, 1945, and Berlin, the capital of Adolf Hitler's tottering Third Reich, was a shattered, flaming inferno. Tanks and troops of Soviet General Vasily Chuikov's Eighth Guards army had fought to within a few blocks of the Reich Chancellery. The end was clearly at hand. Some time after lunch that day, Hitler and his wife of one day, Eva Braun, retired to their suite in the Führer's underground bunker to take their lives. They left instructions that their bodies be burned.

The war was over seven days later. Yet for two decades, mystery shrouded the exact circumstances of the dictator's death. In the West it was surmised, from testimony by Germans who were in the bunker at the time, that Hitler had shot himself. The Soviets said nothing. In a book published last week, Lev Bezymenski, a former Red army intelligence officer, reveals that the Russians not only found Hitler's body after taking the bunker but that they also performed an exhaustive autopsy. It showed that Hitler had died by cyanide poisoning, not by a bullet.*

In The Death of Adolf Hitler (Harcourt, Brace & World; $3.95), Author Bezymenski, now a Soviet journalist, says that on May 4, 1945, a Soviet private came across two partially burned, badly disfigured bodies in a shell crater outside the Führerbunker. The Russians, having mistaken another corpse for Hitler's, at first buried the two bodies, but unearthed them again when a Soviet counterintelligence officer had second thoughts. On May 8, a team of Russian forensic experts performed autopsies in a Berlin hospital mortuary. Their full reports are reproduced verbatim in grisly detail that even notes the discovery that Hitler had only one testicle. Glass splinters, apparently from poison ampoules, were found in the mouths of both bodies. There were no visible gunshot wounds—although part of Hitler's cranium was missing—and "the marked smell of bitter almonds and the presence of cyanide compounds in internal organs" led the Soviet doctors to conclude that the deaths of both Hitler and Eva were caused by cyanide. A meticulous comparison of Hitler's dental records and the teeth found on the corpse convinced the Soviets that they had found the body of the Führer. Eva was similarly identified. Stalin showed "considerable interest in the fate of Hitler," Bezymenski observes with seemingly unconscious irony. Yet the Soviets kept their findings secret. The Kremlin wanted to hold the autopsy reports back, the author claims, "in case someone might try to slip into the role of 'the Führer saved by a miracle,' " and to continue the investigation in order to rule out all possibility of error. Clearly, neither reason matters any longer—as proved by the fact that Bezymenski was allowed to publish his book.