What Really Happened During Hitler's Final Hours In The Führerbunker

Luke, thanks for coming on the show. Thanks very much for having me on. This is a big deal. Did Hitler die in the bunker in May 1945? Yep, 100% absolutely dead. Why are we even talking about this? Since the sort of radio announcement that Hitler had killed himself, there has been all sorts of speculation about whether he actually did kill himself, and a large part of it is because Stalin himself decided for political reasons to convey this rumour that Adolf Hitler had escaped to Spain or Argentina. So obviously you have one of the major allies of the Second World War announcing that Hitler hasn't actually killed himself, and this results in a whole swathe of rumours which haven't really stopped, despite the fact that there's an overwhelming amount of evidence for Hitler's suicide. So it begins with the Soviets, and then of course people on the ground pick it up, so you have neo-Nazis in Germany that use it for their own reasons, and then you have this sort of modern swarm of conspiracy theories which have come about since the 2009 DNA results on a piece of skull in archives in Moscow, which historians and even the archivist in Moscow said was Hitler's skull, and then it turned out through DNA results that it was actually a woman that couldn't be Ava Brown, and then this resulted in a whole new sort of wave, if you like, of conspiracy theories. And it's my book which has been written primarily as a response to these new theories since 2009, insofar as they are new. So why did Stalin come out of the conspiracy theory as well? Historians can only sort of speculate on what Stalin's motives might have been for saying this, but there are all sorts of reasons which I outline in the book. One of them was that it was advantageous for him to sort of direct Allied attention towards his fascist enemies in Spain and Argentina. Another one was that there was sort of territorial disputes going on between whether Soviets were actually allowed to occupy, and he thought it might strengthen his hand if he said the threat of Hitler remained. And then, of course, I give another reason in the book, and that is that I think Stalin might have been embarrassed about the Soviet investigations and how they were actually conducted, so he didn't want to share evidence with the Allies, and that's an interpretation which I put forth in the book. Okay, well let's talk about what did actually happen. Soviet forces are closing in on the capital of the Third Reich, Berlin. Hitler is trapped underground. What does he do? He sort of oscillates between anxiety and hope and despair and back and forth. He directs ghost armies from his map room, armies which only exist on paper. He gets furious with people for not following out his orders, even though at this stage a lot of his orders are suicidal, because the Wehrmacht is outnumbered by millions of Soviet troops. They scrape together whatever they can from young boys in the Hitler Youth and old men in the Volkssturm. They even bring in Kriegsmarine troops to get on the ground, and there's a lot of foreign SS divisions there. There's a French division that obviously they have nothing to lose, because once Nazism's gone then nobody's going to want them. And so Hitler, his health at this stage has deteriorated greatly. There's some accounts say that he shuffles around the bunker, his arm is shaking. This is really well depicted in the movie Downfall. I know it has been critiqued by historians, but I find it to be quite accurate, having read pretty much most of the eyewitness accounts from the bunker. There's a particular event on the 22nd of April, where he throws his pencil across the map table, and he admits for the first time that the war is lost. He says, but if you gentlemen think I'm going to leave Berlin, then I'd rather blow my brains out. And it's this sort of shocking, sort of defining moment in the bunker really. It's a great period to study, because sort of the worst elements of the Nazi regime really come to the fore in the bunker. And all these events have really come to symbolise what Hitler really stood for in the end. So you have his sort of rants and raves against people who were betraying him. Of course, some of them weren't actually betraying them. Some of them actually did, but then you can't blame them, they're betraying Hitler. Although it's for their own sort of Nazi reasons. And you have this horrible moment. So Hitler begins, he eventually comes to accept that the war is lost. And then he begins to make plans for his suicide. He actually writes explicitly in his last will and testament that he has chosen to die. He's just married Eva Brown in a bizarre wedding ceremony. And that, again, it's stated in the will, and we have the marriage certificate. And these eyewitness testimonies give these really morbid accounts of how Hitler's discussing the best way to commit suicide. He has his beloved German shepherd dog Blondie poisoned with a cyanide capsule to test it, to make sure that Eva Brown is okay to use it, because he suspects that somebody might have tampered with the capsules because he thinks everybody's betraying him. And then, of course, he goes into the room. He lines up all his staff and he says his final goodbyes, and there's numerous eyewitnesses for that as well. And then he retires to his private quarters. And now historians don't know exactly what happened behind that door because the only two people in there were Hitler and Eva Brown. But what we do know is what happened afterwards, which is that the eyewitnesses who opened the door and looked in the room, that they all agree on this point that Hitler's corpse had blood on it, but Eva Brown's didn't. So that's why we conclude that Hitler shot himself, whereas Eva Brown took poison. And Eva's corpse, as well, smelt of bitter almonds, which is apparently indicative of cyanide poisoning. So he's carried into the Reich Chancellery garden out of the emergency bunker exit. They light a rag on fire and throw it onto the corpses, but they have to retreat because there's so much shellfire coming from the Red Army. And so it's this really sort of morbid scene which really encapsulates what the Nazi regime really deserved to happen to it, really. It's quite a fitting end for Hitler. It's the end that he wanted, but it's not the end which historians... It's not been interpreted in the way that he wanted historians to interpret it. He wanted it to be seen as heroic and a principled example that when you lose a battle, you are to shoot yourself. And this is something that he expected of his own commanders. But thankfully, the reality of the situation is that he had young boys out there fighting this battle for him. And he even allowed... He was aware that the consequence of his suicide would be that he's leaving everybody in the bunker in this dangerous situation. And Magda Goebbels responds to this. And this is primarily what I mean when I say it encapsulates everything about the Nazi regime. She responds to this by... This is Joseph Goebbels' wife? Joseph Goebbels' wife, yes. She responds by killing six of her little children in their rooms as they were sleeping. And there's even indications from the autopsy on the eldest daughter that she might have struggled at the point that they were trying to kill her. And there's horrific photographs of the corpses of these children as well. And a key point to make about that is one which conspiracy theorists don't like to address as well is that Magda Goebbels would never have done this if this wasn't Adolf Hitler that had committed suicide, if this was a double or if Hitler had escaped. Magda Goebbels felt that she had to kill her children because they couldn't live in a world without Hitler. Yeah, it's unbelievably shocking stuff. But your point is also that actually it's very well documented, right? There's lots of highly literate, reliable government employees knocking about in this bunker and no privacy. So you presumably have multiple sources for what you're describing. There's so many sources. And the thing which makes Hugh Trevor Roper's investigation so reliable all these years later, he was the British intelligence officer who was recruited to head the British intelligence investigations into Hitler's death. He was the key officer in charge. The things which make his conclusion so reliable is that it's not just the big fry Nazis, if you like. It's not just the fact that Arthur Axman, the head of the Hitler Youth, he sees Hitler slumped over on his sofa. He draws a diagram for his interrogators, which is reproduced in the book. And the bloodstains on Hitler's sofa, on the photographs we see of Hitler's sofa, match the position where Axman saw them. It's not just big fries like that. It's the fact that people outside the bunker saw things that they weren't supposed to see. So there was guards that were ordered away from the bunker, and then they came back a bit too early, and they saw Hitler's body on the ground on fire. And there's people that overheard the conversation about bringing petrol to the Fuhrer bunker. And it all adds up. And there's so many different eyewitnesses that it would have been completely impossible to concoct a sort of false story. That, and there's also a complete absence of evidence of him having escaped, right? Yeah, and there are rumours of Hitler's survival. British and American intelligence were sort of plagued by these rumours. As soon as the Soviets announced that Hitler couldn't escape, the newspapers had a field day. So you have all these headlines that, you know, Hitler isn't dead, says the Red Army. And then later, there's even one which says, you know, Hitler lives, say Nazis, and things like this. And a lot of the newspaper articles are reproduced in the book. But British and American intelligence, they start to investigate these rumours, not because they're doubting that Hitler's dead, more because they want to know why people are spreading these rumours. And they want to know, you know, what motivates people to say that Adolf Hitler's still alive? Can this indicate routes by which other Nazis might have escaped? Are there sort of political motivations behind this? Of course, in Germany at the time when these rumours are being spread, the Allies are undertaking programmes of democratisation and denazification. And this idea that Hitler lives is obviously a hindrance to these because it is actually inspiring neo-Nazi movements. But the thing which conspiracy theorists do is they take these rumours of, you know, Hitler's survival rumours, Hitler was here, Hitler was there, and they take them out of their appropriate context. So rather than looking at the conclusions which intelligence officers came to about many of these rumours, they just say that the rumours are fact and they completely ignore what the people who investigated them and came to a conclusion about them actually said. So Hitler's on fire in the courtyard of the Reich Chancellery. Do we know what happens to their bodies after that? Are they completely destroyed? It is sort of a lingering mystery or a partial mystery, if you like, of what happened to Hitler's body. Historians haven't really reached the consensus. We know that they were buried in a bomb crater and there's diagrams in the book, one of them which has never been published before, which I've produced, which shows where they were buried. We know that what was left of them was exhumed by the Red Army. We know for certain that Hitler's jaw and his teeth are in the archives in Moscow because they've been, recently in 2018, they've been subjected to modern forensic analysis and Hitler had really unique dental work. So there's no doubt that these teeth are Hitler's and conspiracy theorists might say, ah, but it's just the dental work, it's not the teeth, but they're attached to a jawbone and there is real teeth left and those real teeth showed signs of vegetarianism as well. So unless the Russians managed to find, a lifelong vegetarian matching Hitler's age with his unique dental work attached to a jaw, then it's fairly certain that it is Hitler's. Whatever was left of Hitler was found by the Red Army. Where the mystery comes into it is that the Soviet autopsy has a lot of discrepancies in it, which are strange to say the least. So they end up dissecting the internal organs of the Goebbels family, but they don't do this for the corpses of Hitler and Eva and it leads me to question, why did they not do this? They take photographs, a lot of photographs of the Goebbels corpses, even at the autopsy, but there is only one photograph, as far as I'm aware of the full remains of Hitler and Eva and it just looks like a pile of mush in the ammo boxes. So I conclude that all that was left of them really was a garbled mess, but within that mess, of course, there was the teeth and the jawbones and that was all that was really needed for a definitive identification. How organised was the Red Army's assault on the Führerbunker? I mean, was it after the end of hostilities or was it taken in battle? It was early May 1945 and the first people to enter the Führerbunker were a group of Red Army women and they actually proceeded to steal Eva Brown's lingerie and I say that this sort of sets the tone for the Soviet investigations because rather than sort of concealing what was a sort of crime area, if you like, they allowed plunder and looting of the bunker. There was a sort of farcical start to the investigation in that they discovered at least one body who they said was Hitler, which it turned out wasn't actually Hitler and as a result, a corpse which they had exhumed, which was actually Hitler, ended up being reburied and then re-exhumed. I go into this in some detail in the book, it is actually a quite amusing story, but then, and this is why I say that Stalin may be embarrassed by the initial Soviet investigation, so when the Allies are allowed to occupy Berlin in the summer of 1945, because there is a delay between the British and Americans being actually allowed into Berlin, when they get to the bunker, what they see is that they see the evidence of this looting, they see rooms piled with Hitler's personal belongings and a really unorganised effort of finding out what happened to Hitler. And there's a particular incident which I note in the book in which a British officer actually manages to break into the Führerbunker, which shows how sort of unguarded it was and he manages to steal Heinz Linger, which is Hitler's valet, his engagement diary out of the bunker and the fact that this is left there months after Hitler's death, a crucial piece of evidence and this is then used to verify various dates and times in Hugh Trevor-Roper's investigation. So yeah, it wasn't a very good investigation on the Soviet part and this in turn has obviously fed into the conspiracy side of things. You've mentioned Hugh Trevor-Roper a couple of times, people have heard of the famous historian. Talk to me about how he ended up being put on the case of working out what happened to Hitler. Hugh Trevor-Roper was the first person who came to mind when the British decided that they wanted to solve once and for all what actually happened to Hitler and the reason they decide this is because the Soviets actually accuse or they allege that Hitler is hiding in the British zone of Germany, which has terrible implications for British intelligence. So they say that's enough now, we need to solve this and the first person who Dick White, who is a senior MI5 officer, at the time he heads the counterintelligence bureau in Germany, the first person he thinks of is Hugh Trevor-Roper because Trevor-Roper has been working on Nazi intelligence throughout the war and he is in Dick White's mind, he is the foremost expert on the German intelligence services. So if anybody is going to sort of help Hitler escape then it's going to be the German intelligence services. So Dick White says that, look Trevor-Roper is a first-rate chap, we need him on this case. He was already familiar with a lot of the personalities who were to be interrogated from the bunker and we actually have the letters which resulted in Trevor-Roper's appointment and I sort of print them in quite a lot of detail in the book as well. But conspiracy theorists they like to say Trevor-Roper was unsuitable to lead the investigations which is complete nonsense because as I say he was the best man for the job and again even in the 1950s when Werner Naumann is arrested, he was Goebbels Minister of State and he tries to sort of revive Nazism in 1950s Germany and British intelligence can't think of anybody who's good to sort of interrogate people on this case and the first person they say is Hugh Trevor-Roper because he's so sort of efficient as an intelligence officer. So what's it like being on the front line of this new very 21st century battle whack-a-mole against conspiracy theorists? I mean we all are sort of wringing our hands about what to do with this big problem of people believing all sorts of crazy shit and you're the answer. Historians coming in, working it out, producing big proper books and just smacking it all down. Yeah I mean that's one of the things I sort of stress in the book is that a lot of academic historians have tended to sort of shy away from this topic because they didn't think it was worthy of an in-depth investigation and some of the attitudes to conspiracy theorists has been well they're so silly that they don't deserve a serious sort of reputation and I argue that conspiracy theorists, they claim to have new evidence which supports their theories and as historians we operate based on, we draw conclusions based on evidence. So for us to say to conspiracy theorists you're just silly even though they say they have new evidence that is undermining what we claim to be our own practice. So I decided with this book that there needs to be a proper academic response to these theories so I looked at their evidence and I found it really misleading the way that they've used it and I hope that it sort of it does begin to put a stop to it and this is why I engage with the conspiracy theorists on Twitter as well because this is where the idea is spread so the conspiracy theorists are on social media they get their knowledge from TV shows and films and things like this they mightn't have the time to sort of read a giant academic book which is why I'm quite happy with how concise my book turned out to be as well but the problem with the conspiracy theories is that they seem to be a lot of sort of harmless fun but at the time they were encouraging neo-nazism and even now I've seen evidence on Twitter that they are encouraging these sort of extreme ideologies because the implication that allied intelligence did a deal with Adolf Hitler and Martin Bormann to allow them to escape that sort of gives hope to these far-right extremists because look they've done a deal with us before they can do a deal with us again that sort of thing and it encourages dangerous worldviews not just from the far right but a general sort of conspiratorial view of the world in which democracy itself is to be mistrusted because of this alleged deal between allied intelligence and Hitler so there are these broader issues as well so I'm really happy with the sort of response that the book is getting because I've actually managed to change a few people's minds on Twitter that's a first yeah so yeah I do do my best well I'm very happy to say on this case that your best has been good enough what is next? what are the shibboleths you're going to slay next? well I'm working on my PhD at the moment which is an in-depth exploration of exploration of British and American intelligence divisions in occupied Germany so these are really large intelligence organizations and the histories of them haven't yet been written so I'm hoping to to sort of write an almost it won't be definitive because nothing on this sort of area of history can be definitive but I'm hoping to write a large history of that and in terms of the Nazi side of things I'm exploring a lot of the post-war intelligence operations anti-Nazi operations because a lot of people think that Nazism died with Hitler perhaps it did as a mass popular movement but there was a lot of underground movements which tried to revive Nazism in post-war Germany so this is something which I'm looking to explore in more detail and to write about more I've just published an article in the Journal of Intelligence and National Security which looks at the reasons as to why British and American intelligence officers employed Nazi war criminals in post-war Germany and that ties in really nicely with Hitler's death and the conspiracy theorists because a lot of conspiracy theorists like to use Operation Paperclip as evidence of this deal between the Allies and Hitler and Bormann after the war as if just citing Operation Paperclip is evidence that the Allies would do a deal with Adolf Hitler and Martin Bormann and what I explore in the article is the reasons behind the employment of war criminals including those that were employed under Operation Paperclip and what I argue is that the two sort of key determinants which decided whether war criminals would be employed were whether they were a security risk and whether they could be controlled Adolf Hitler and Martin Bormann cannot be controlled and they were huge security risks and Allied intelligence knew this so it's another argument it's another nail in the coffin of the conspiracy theorists How can people watch you jousting with conspiracy theorists on Twitter? That sounds fun What's your account? You just follow me at LukeDailyGroves just my name is the at and yeah have fun seeing me attack conspiracy theorists on their evidence Brilliant Well your book is Hitler's Death Good luck with it Thank you Thanks very much Check out the History Hit YouTube where you can get great exclusive videos and a sneak peek at what's available on the world's best history channel History Hit TV It's growing really fast we're thrilled to have you all aboard