Lt Col Harold E. Raugh, Jr., United States Army (Retd) reviews these books exclusively for DJ.

The enduring macabre fascination with Hitler and the mystery surrounding his final days and death continues to intrigue historians and laymen alike. The Death of Hitler, subtitled The Full Story with New Evidence from Secret Russian Archives, claims to be a “groundbreaking book” that reveals “the truth of what went on in Berlin in May 1945.” But while interesting and thought-provoking at times, this study fails to live up to its publisher’s exaggerated claims.
The genesis of this book was the chance discovery by veteran Russian journalist Ada Petrova of “Hitler’s skull,” other memorabilia, and related “secret files” in 1992 in the State Special Trophy Archive in Moscow. At a January 1995 conference on “The Spoils of War,” British journalist Peter Watson was told by Russian friends that they had a colleague in Moscow who had a “world scoop” she wanted to bring out to the West. Thus, the journalist partnership of Petrova-Watson began, and they apparently completed this book quickly to take advantage of the public interest generated by the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi defeat in World War II.
The short initial chapter attempts to explain why the Americans and British forfeited the capture of Berlin, the Third Reich’s seat of government and site of the Fuehrerbunker. As a result of the Soviet seizure of Berlin, the fate of Hitler — or the location of his corpse — remained enshrouded in mystery.
The following three chapters are an historiographical review and assessment of the three major published studies on Hitler’s last days and death. The first significant account was Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler (New York: Macmillan, 1947), the research for which began only months after the termination of hostilities in Europe. Petrova and Watson question the veracity of many of the eyewitness statements collected by Trevor-Roper, who concluded his narrative by positing that Hitler shot himself through the mouth and his new wife, Eva Braun, poisoned herself. After burning and burial, their corpses, however, were never recovered — or at least the West had no direct confirmation or tangible evidence thereof.
It would be naive to think that the Soviets had not investigated Hitler’s fate. In fact, they conducted two official investigations: the first, conducted in 1945 by Smersh (Soviet Counterintelligence), did not include, among other shortcomings, a dissection of the internal organs of the bodies thought to be Hitler’s and Braun’s. Still skeptical about the certainty of Hitler’s death, Stalin ordered a second commission conducted in 1946 by the NKVD, forerunner of the KGB. This second investigation, headed by a medical forensic specialist, “surmised” that Hitler’s death was caused by poisoning. This was the dominant theme of Lev Bezymenski’s The Death of Hitler: Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives (London: Michael Joseph, 1968), which described the work and results of the first official Soviet investigation, but suffered from the author having been denied access to the results of the second inquiry. It seems the Soviets were anxious to show that Hitler had not shot himself and “had not died like a man, like a soldier . . . . [and] had taken the easy way out, the coward’s way and had poisoned himself” (p. 56). This contradicted Trevor-Roper’s conclusion.
After decades of conducting research and numerous interviews with Fuehrerbunker survivors, James O’Donnell wrote The Berlin Bunker (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1979). While adding new details to the last days of Hitler, O’Donnell concluded that Hitler had shot himself in the right temple while simultaneously biting into a cyanide capsule.
According to the authors, however, the decisive factor in solving the conundrum of Hitler’s death was an examination of his allegedly never-before-released skull. Their conclusion was reinforced by their claim of having been the first to have access to the entire six-volume, secret Soviet “Hitler Archive,” purportedly known as the “Operation Myth” file. The authors use this evidence to show that a fourth theory of Hitler’s demise (Hugh Thomas’ Doppelganger: The Truth about the Bodies in the Bunker (London: Fourth Estate, 1995)), which opines that Hitler was strangled and Braun’s body was that of a “double,” was based on speculation and lacked credibility. The “crucial clue,” according to the authors, was an assessment of “the psychology of the last days in the Bunker [italics in original]” (p. 102). They claim that “in those last days in the Berlin Bunker, as elsewhere at other times, people acted as they did for a reason [italics in original]”
(p. 109). Considering the personalities and programmes of the Third Reich, especially in the nerve-wracking days of despair during the Soviet onslaught, such a statement is, at best, ludicrous. Similarly, the few skull shards, examined by a single Russian scientist commissioned specifically by the authors who said he was “eighty percent sure that the skull was Hitler’s” (p. 126), is not incontrovertible evidence.
Considering the controversial nature of the subject and the author’s self-proclaimed coup in being the first to have access to “Hitler’s skull” and “Hitler Archive,” one would imagine sources of information and quotes to be well-referenced and documented. This is not, however, the case. There is not a single footnote, an inadequate four-page “annotated bibliography,” and a listing of “Russian Archives Consulted During Research.” The sensationalistic nature of the book, and the lack of claims to be a serious historical study, are reinforced by the frequent use of phrases such as “reported in this book for the first time” (p. 98) and “as we have reported here for the first time” (p. 99).
The second part of the book, titled “Hitler’s Others Remains,” consists of three chapters on a purported Soviet spy in the Fuehrerbunker, and descriptions of some of Hitler’s watercolours and personal photographs found in the Soviet archives. These chapters add little new, substantive information on the final days of Hitler, and seem to have been written for no other reason than to add more pages to the book.
Petrova and Watson suggest that The Death of Hitler reveals “the whole truth” of this controversial topic. It does not. At one point, in describing conflicting sources of information, the authors state, “It is difficult, therefore, to know what exactly to make of all this” (p. 114). The same can be said for this entire book.