page_title: Death of Adolf Hitler
section_title: Aftermath
hierarchical_section_title: Death of Adolf Hitler / Aftermath
caption_attribution_description: English: The picture depicts two versions of a photograph of Adolf Hitler that was retouched by an artist of the United States Secret Service in 1944 in order to show how Hitler may disguise himself to escape capture after Germany's defeat. Since Hitler's death was not a certainty in 1945 the pictures were posted up all over Germany in 1945 to ease finding the (potentially) "fugitive" dictator.
context_page_description: Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-German politician who was the leader of the Nazi Party, Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and Führer of Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945. He killed himself by gunshot on 30 April 1945 in his Führerbunker in Berlin. Eva Braun, his wife of one day, committed suicide with Hitler by taking cyanide. In accordance with his prior written and verbal instructions, that afternoon their remains were carried up the stairs through the bunker's emergency exit, doused in petrol, and set alight in the Reich Chancellery garden outside the bunker. Records in the Soviet archives show that their burned remains were recovered and interred in successive locations until 1946. They were exhumed again and cremated in 1970, and the ashes were scattered.
  Accounts differ as to Hitler's cause of death; one version states that he died by poison only and another view claims that he died by a self-inflicted gunshot while biting down on a cyanide capsule. Contemporary historians have rejected these accounts as being either Soviet propaganda or an attempted compromise in order to reconcile the different conclusions.
context_section_description: The first inkling to the outside world that Hitler was dead came from the Germans themselves. On 1 May, the Reichssender Hamburg radio station interrupted their normal program to announce that Hitler had died that afternoon, and introduced his successor, President Karl Dönitz. Dönitz called upon the German people to mourn their Führer, who he stated had died a hero defending the capital of the Reich. Hoping to save the army and the nation by negotiating a partial surrender to the British and Americans, Dönitz authorised a fighting withdrawal to the west. His tactic was somewhat successful: it enabled about 1.8 million German soldiers to avoid capture by the Soviets, but it came at a high cost in bloodshed, as troops continued to fight until 8 May.
  General Hans Krebs met Soviet General Vasily Chuikov just prior to 04:00 on 1 May, giving him the news of Hitler's death, while attempting to negotiate a ceasefire and open "peace negotiations". Joseph Stalin was informed of Hitler's suicide around 04:05 Berlin time, thirteen hours after the event. He demanded unconditional surrender, which Krebs lacked authorisation to give. Stalin wanted confirmation that Hitler was dead and ordered the Red Army's SMERSH unit to find the corpse. In the early morning hours of 2 May, the Soviets captured the Reich Chancellery. Inside the Führerbunker, General Krebs and General Wilhelm Burgdorf committed suicide by gunshot to the head.
  On 4 May, the thoroughly burned remains of Hitler, Braun, and two dogs (thought to be Blondi and her offspring, Wulf) were discovered in a shell crater by SMERSH commander Ivan Klimenko. They were exhumed the next day and secretly delivered to the SMERSH Counter-Espionage Section of the 3rd Assault Army in Buch. Stalin was wary of believing Hitler was dead, and restricted the release of information to the public. By 11 May, part of a lower jaw with dental work was identified as Hitler's; his dentist's assistant Käthe Heusermann and dental technician Fritz Echtmann both confirmed dental remains of Hitler and Braun. Details of the Soviet autopsy were made public in 1968 and used by odontologists at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to confirm the remains as Hitler's in 1972.
  In early June 1945, the bodies of Hitler, Braun, Joseph and Magda Goebbels, the six Goebbels children, Krebs, Blondi and another dog were moved from Buch to Finow, where the SS guard who buried Hitler reidentified his remains. The bodies were reburied in a forest in Brandenburg on 3 June, and finally exhumed and moved to the SMERSH unit's new facility in Magdeburg, where they were buried in five wooden boxes on 21 February 1946. By 1970, the facility was under the control of the KGB and scheduled to be relinquished to East Germany. Concerned that a known Hitler burial site might become a neo-Nazi shrine, KGB director Yuri Andropov authorised an operation to destroy the remains that were buried there in 1946. A KGB team was given detailed burial charts and on 4 April 1970 secretly exhumed the remains of ten or eleven bodies "in an advanced state of decay". The remains were thoroughly burned and crushed, and the ashes thrown into the Biederitz river, a tributary of the nearby Elbe.
  For politically motivated reasons, the Soviet Union presented various versions of Hitler's fate. When asked in July 1945 how Hitler had died, Stalin said he was living "in Spain or Argentina". In November 1945, Dick White, the head of counter-intelligence in the British sector of Berlin, had their agent Hugh Trevor-Roper investigate the matter to counter the Soviet claims. His report was published in 1947 as The Last Days of Hitler. In the years immediately after the war, the Soviets maintained that Hitler was not dead, but had escaped and was being shielded by the former Western Allies.
  On 30 May 1946, MVD agents recovered two fragments of a skull from the crater where Hitler was buried. The left parietal bone had gunshot damage. This piece remained uncatalogued until 1975, and was rediscovered in the Russian State Archives in 1993. In 2009, DNA and fore
caption: Hitler depicted by the U.S. Secret Service in 1944 to show how he might disguise himself to evade capture
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