Adolf Hitler’s Teeth Reveal His Cause of Death
By: Jayden Yugie
Tags: Crime, Germany, Politics, History, War

Adolf Hitler’s Teeth Reveal His Cause of Death

Image Source: Wikipedia

It is written in any history book that you study at school that the German dictator Adolf Hitler killed himself on April 30, 1945, in his Berlin bunker, together with his wife Eva Braun, to prevent the Soviet troops who were about to conquer the German capital from capturing him. Since then, there have been various conspiracy theories that questioned his death and the reason why the bodies of Hitler and Braun were not found by the Anglo-American troops on their arrival in Berlin. Many people believe that the dictator fled to South America like other Nazi hierarchs.

On May 2018, in the European Journal of Internal Medicine, an article was published to discredit these conspiracy theories once and for all. It is based on the analysis of some teeth preserved in Moscow, which according to study belonged to Hitler and prove that the dictator really died in 1945.

The Alleged Body Parts of Hitler and His Wife Uncovered

The history of Hitler’s alleged teeth is very long and confusing, and it also concerns a piece of skull of dubious authenticity. We know that when the Soviet troops arrived in Berlin, on May 2, 1945, among other things, they were tasked with finding Hitler’s corpse. Before he died, the dictator gave the order that his remains be burned to prevent them from becoming a war trophy, but parts of his body were not completely destroyed and were buried near the bunker.



On May 4, the Russian soldiers found body parts that were probably the remains of Hitler and Braun, and on May 8 the first autopsy was carried out. The jaw remains of Hitler’s alleged corpse were shipped to Moscow so that an identification could be made with the help of Hitler’s dentist Hugo Blaschke, dentist assistant Käthe Heusermann, and the hygienist Fritz Echtmann. The conclusion was that yes they were indeed the teeth of Hitler. On May 30, 1946, the Soviet Union conducted a secret operation in Berlin to check the surveys made a year earlier and be able to confirm the hypothesis that Hitler had committed suicide by ingesting cyanide.

A Skull Uncovered

It is at this point in the story that a fragment of a skull with a bullet hole, which was found in the same spot as the alleged bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun, is discovered. This discovery questioned the idea that Hitler committed suicide with cyanide: it was speculated that the dictator shot himself or had himself shot because the poison was having no effect, or because its effects were very painful.



When the Anglo-American troops arrived in Berlin in May 1945, the Russians denied having found the body of Hitler. The Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin told the British prime minister Winston Churchill that Hitler could have also fled to Argentina or Japan, Stalin ordered that the remains found by Soviet soldiers be kept hidden. West Germany declared Hitler dead only in 1956, it was a Bavarian court that made the decision based on the testimonies of some people close to Hitler who saw his body after his suicide. The purpose of declaring the death of the dictator was also to be able to assign ownership of the rights to Mein Kampf, Hitler’s famous manifesto to the land of Bavaria. Those witnesses, now all dead, gave a version of the facts that supports the thesis that Hitler shot himself, they said his body was found with a bullet hole on the head.



Meanwhile, the alleged remains of Hitler (teeth and piece of skull excluded) were buried in Magdeburg, East Germany. They remained there until April 1970, when the Soviet secret police, the KGB (Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti), destroyed them in a special operation. The same thing also happened to the alleged remains of Eva Braun, of which only one tooth is preserved in Moscow. Together with the piece of skull found in 1946, is kept in the headquarters of the Russian secret police, now the FSB (Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation). The alleged teeth of Hitler, on the other hand, rest on a piece of cotton wool in a cardboard box in the state archives (in what according to many is a kind of posthumous mockery of the enemy beaten). Only after the end of the Soviet Union, in 1993, did Russia made it known that it had preserved part of the alleged remains of Hitler. Since then, however, there had been no definitive analyzes of the remains, because Russia had always denied permits to do them.

The Study of The Remains

A study permit on Hitler’s skull piece was granted in 2009 to the American archaeologist Nick Bellantoni, which, based on observation of the bones, he believed it belonged to a woman. Bellantoni collected a sample of the skull and had it examined by the University Connecticut geneticist Linda Strausbaugh, who after an analysis of DNA confirmed his theory. The FSB reacted quite badly to Bellantoni’s theory and Strausbaugh (which was never set out in a scientific article, but only explained in a History Channel documentary) and reaffirmed the authenticity of the piece of skull, although they never commissioned further analysis. Later, documentarian Jean-Christophe Brisard took two years to convince the FSB to allow him to re-analyze the alleged remains of Hitler.



Brisard said that one of the reasons he managed to get the FSB to let him analyze Hitler’s alleged teeth is that he collaborated with Philippe Charlier, a doctor, lawyer, and forensic anthropologist specializing in the deaths of important historical figures, and for this reason, well known internationally. Charlier and his associates, however, didn’t have full access to Hitler’s alleged remains, they could only observe the skull without being able to remove it from a clear container.



Observing the skull, Charlier concluded that the bullet hole on its surface is an exit hole and that it may have been the cause of the death of the person to whom the skull belonged, due to the traces it left on bones. Charlier wasn’t sure if the skull was Hitler’s. In an interview, Charlier said he was skeptical of the analyzes done in 2009 by Bellantoni and Strausbaugh.

The Jaw Remains

As for the remains of the lower jaw and upper jaw, Charlier was able to make a few more observations, because he analyzed them under a microscope, having received them for the first time after permission from Russia. He discovered that there were only four actual teeth, all the others had been replaced with prostheses, some metal and some ceramic, held together thanks to a series of bridges. It is the first test to support the theory that it is Hitler’s teeth, given that the alternation of real teeth and prostheses coincides with that of official radiographs of the dictator’s head preserved in the United States, as well as with the testimonies given by the American secret service, Dr. Käthe Heusermann, and the Soviet secret police.



In addition to doing visual analyzes, Charlier removed small fragments of tartar from the teeth which he then analyzed in a solid-state physics laboratory at the Paris-Saclay University. The components of the tartar showed traces of a vegetarian diet, another piece of information that supports the theory that the teeth are those of Hitler, who did not eat meat. The person who the teeth belonged to also had stomach problems, this also helped in the identification of Hitler, who suffered from chronic pain, perhaps caused by an ulcer or gastritis, for which he took various medications.



On the prostheses, Charlier found signs of wear and traces of blue colour, the origin of which was not possible to determine. According to the scientist, it is possible that they are due to a reaction between the cyanide and the metal of the prostheses, or that somehow formed during the cremation of the body. Nobody ever did any toxicology tests on the alleged remains of Hitler and Braun, the suicide hypothesis by cyanide was considered by the Soviets only because pieces of glass ampoules were found near the bodies and were in the first autopsy.

The Findings

Finally, no traces of antimony, barium, and lead were found on the tartar. There is therefore no evidence that the owner of the teeth shot himself in the mouth. According to Charlier, however, the location of the exit hole from the skull — given that skull and teeth belonged to the same person — does not exclude different dynamics of the shot, with the barrel pointed under the chin, or on the right temple.



Charlier is convinced that the teeth are Hitler’s because there is a correspondence with radiographs of his head, and for this, he argues that his study definitely proves that the dictator died in 1945 because of the ruined state of his dental prostheses, the same as that of radiographs, indicates that they could not have been used for a long time. This is the definitive conclusion of the story.