After months of negotiations and six hours sitting in a rundown Moscow waiting room, a plastic box that once stored computer floppy disks was put on a table in front of authors Lana Parshina and Jean-Christophe Brisard.
In the box was a cracked, brownish piece of curved bone with a circular hole on one edge, a trophy identified by Russians as the remains of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
The origins of the 15cm bone section were challenged when it was first displayed to the Western world at an exhibition in Moscow in 2000.
Stalin told US President Harry Truman that Hitler might be living in Spain or Argentina
Also included in Russia’s Agony Of The Third Reich — Retribution exhibition were bloodstained sofa legs and photographs of grey teeth and a dental prosthesis, also claimed as Hitler’s and long hidden in Moscow archives.
Neither the bone nor teeth were subjected to physical analysis, and Parshina insists authorities at KGB successor, the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB), are unlikely to ever permit DNA analysis. “We could take a DNA sample from the teeth, but FSB archive people have concerns about it,” she says.
“They are afraid that history may repeat itself and predict the worst-case scenario, if the DNA of Hitler were to end up in wrong hands. Modern technology allows cloning and there is a chance some people may want to clone Hitler.”
But in their book The Death Of Hitler, Parshina and Brisard explain how physical analysis by French forensic pathologist and physical anthropologist Philippe Charlier has confirmed the teeth were Hitler’s.
They were taken by Soviet medical examiners on May 4, 1945, from a burned corpse found in the enclosed courtyard of Berlin’s Reich chancellery, and suspected to belong to Hitler.
The corpse was so damaged it could not be identified, so examiners extracted the teeth and extensive bridgework from the mouth and placed them in a box carried by interpreter Elena Rzhevskaya.
At FSB offices in Moscow, Brisard and Parshina found Hitler’s teeth were stored “in the very same cigar box that Elena Rzhevskaya carried through Berlin”.
Archival material, which includes diagrams of Hitler’s bunker 10m below ground and statements from his staff captured by Soviet troops in 1945, are wheeled through FSB corridors in a rattling supermarket shopping trolley.
“We were quite surprised by this and it is quite the same with the other archives too,” Parshina says. “Time stopped in these archives and people who work in them obviously do it for passion.”
Russians collected suspected evidence of Hitler’s death within days of his suicide on April 30, 1945, but at the Potsdam conference in July 1945 Soviet leader Joseph Stalin told US President Harry Truman that Hitler might be living in Spain or Argentina.
On Hamburg radio at 10.20pm on May 1, German Grand-Admiral Karl Donitz announced Hitler had fallen “this afternoon”, fighting “at the head of his troops”.
Widely believed at the time, it was later revealed Hitler committed suicide in his bunker under the Reich Chancellery, where he had lived since January 1945.
Nazi loyalists refused to believe Hitler had killed himself and western European Allies could not find witnesses to confirm his death.
The Soviets, who interrogated several former Hitler staff, including his pilot Hans Baur and Kathe Heusermann, who worked as an assistant to Hitler’s dentist Hugo Blaschke, refused to release details of their discovery.
Blaschke, who along with many Hitler acolytes had fled to Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps, had tended Hitler’s notoriously bad teeth since 1932 and fitted a U-shaped link on his prosthesis that allowed him to keep one of his few remaining teeth.
Heusermann confirmed the teeth were Hitler’s, further verified in Charlier’s study of a section of jawbone and teeth. Charlier also reported that the teeth appeared to match X-rays taken of Hitler in 1944.
“There was a perfect anatomical and technological correspondence,” Charlier told a French documentary directed by Brisard.
“The teeth are authentic; there is no possible doubt,” Charlier says. “Our study proves that Hitler died in 1945. We can stop all the conspiracy theories about Hitler. He did not flee to Argentina in a submarine, he is not in a hidden base in Antarctica.”
It had taken Parshina and Brisard two years to arrange access to Russian archives, granted in March and July 2017. State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF) director Larisa Rogovaya also promised them access to study the skull fragment.
Parshina and Brisard had removed the fragment from a floppy-disc box to examine during their visit to the GARF building in 2016.
GARF staff were keen then to “put an end to this disastrous controversy”, referring to US archaeology professor Nick Bellantoni’s claim in 2009 that he had acquired a sample from the bone for analysis.
In a TV documentary Bellantoni said: “The bone segment seemed to be very thin. Male bone tends to be more robust and the sutures … seem to correspond to someone under 40.”
Although unable to take samples, Charlier found the gunshot wound was consistent with descriptions of how Hitler’s body was found on the sofa. He contradicted Bellantoni, arguing anthropological examination of the skull fragment could not establish the dead person’s gender. “That absolutely doesn’t hold,” Charlier says.
The Death Of Hitler documentary; SBS, September 16; 5.30pm
The Death Of Hitler, The Final Word On The Greatest Cold Case In History: The Search For Hitler’s Body. Hachette Australia; $35