The death of Adolf Hitler

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1:03So do like I did, and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for a three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. Default terms at mintmobile.com. At about 3.30, on the afternoon of the 30th of April 1945, as Soviet soldiers advanced through Berlin,

1:37Hitler died in his study in his bunker. But how did he die? And how did the news of his death spread? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Caroline Sharples delves into the investigations, discoveries and reporting that followed the Fuhrer's death. Speaking to Charlotte Vosper about her new book, The Long Death of Adolf Hitler, Caroline reveals the truth behind what really happened in the bunker. Your book explores the long afterlife of Adolf Hitler, his continued presence in cultural consciousness after his death.

2:09But before we can explore that legacy, I think we need to backtrack a little bit because Hitler's death was imagined and actually talked about before he died in 1945. So how had Hitler's death been envisaged and constructed before it even happened? That's a really good question. And I call the book The Long Death of Adolf Hitler for precisely that reason, that people are imagining it and chatting about it long before 1945. If we look during the war years, for instance, almost as soon as the conflict starts, you have got people imagining his fate as this, essentially like a goal for the end of the war, awaiting the Allies.

2:46You know, this promise that the person responsible for the devastation that's going to occur and all the temporary deprivation you're going to have through things like rationing, he is going to get his comeuppance. So there's some amazingly bloodthirsty visual imaginings of his fate in wartime propaganda. You see Hitler sort of bruised and battered and crushed underneath the combined weight of the Allied military effort. Or we see him being brought down by the effects of the civilians doing their bit for the war effort. There's a British propaganda poster, for instance, encouraging women to join in the munitions factories.

3:20And the character on the poster is clocking in for her shift, but essentially she's slapping Hitler around the face as she's doing it. So it's encouraging people to almost imagine getting their own hands on him. Now, everything you do is going to be contributing to his downfall. So we have the propaganda rhetoric, but we also see it taken up in all sorts of cultural elements. There are songs and jokes circulating around the idea of Hitler's grave or Hitler meeting his demise in various manners. There's even fundraising efforts for the military in the Allied nations, which are often predicated on the idea of a Hitler demise.

3:57In Vancouver, for instance, in 1940, they have a campaign called Smash the Nazis, and it's a collection to raise money for the Canadian Air Force. And they're not just going to stand around with collecting tins. They're much more imaginative than that. We have a mock coffin and it's paraded through the streets and sort of laid to rest, as it were, in the city centre. And then people, as they make contributions, it's marked by the literal hammering of a nail into this box. And so this idea that you're donating, you're putting a nail in Hitler's coffin, you're going to bring about his downfall, becomes quite a recurring motif.

4:31And we see the same sort of activity picked up elsewhere in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and so on. So there's all sorts of ways in which people are chatting about it and anticipating it before he finally takes that last breath in the bunker in April 1945. And just to kind of extend that question, actually, how had Hitler's death been, or I suppose maybe just more widely Nazi death, been spoken about and imagined in kind of Nazi ideological circles? We know that the Third Reich has been building a veritable death cult around its fallen heroes.

5:06This all starts back in 1923 at the Munich Putsch when 16 Nazis have killed them. And they become an annual focal point, one of the holiest days in the Nazi calendar, as it were, these annual commemorations. So they've been perfecting ways of talking about the dead throughout their rule. And state funerals become incredibly massive. I always think the closest approximation to what Hitler's death might have looked like if he died, if you like, under normal circumstances, would be that of Reinhard Heydrich,

5:37who was assassinated by Czech resistance fighters in 1942. And he gets a very elaborate send-off. Obviously, period of mourning, there's torchlight parade, his coffin is bedecked with a swastika flag, and it's paraded on a gun carriage through the streets of Berlin. So you can imagine that if Hitler hadn't died amid imminent regime change and total defeat, he might have had something like that. So then if we jump to the 30th of April, 1945, the Soviet soldiers are advancing through Berlin,

6:07and at about 3.30pm, Hitler died in his study in the Fuhrerbunker at his own hand. And I say at his own hand because that's something we're going to come back to. But once he was dead, what happened next? How did the news of Hitler's death spread? It actually takes another 31 hours before his death is formally announced, and that is performed by his named successor, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who is stationed up in Flensburg in Schleswig-Holstein. And he takes to the airways of North German radio in the evening,

6:38and normal programming has been interrupted around 9pm. Tell audiences to stand by for an important announcement that's coming from the German government. There's a lot of sombre music being played in the run-up to this. And then we have some dramatic drum rolls before the announcer comes on and says that Adolf Hitler is dead. And what Dönitz does in this broadcast is that he tries to sow the seeds, I think, of a potentially heroic death legend. He says that Hitler has fallen whilst fighting to his last breath against the Bolshevik hordes.

7:12So the idea of this leader fighting to the bitter end, doing his bit for Germany, as he'd always promised. And that's the announcement. And then the next day, the news obviously filters through across the international press. We have lots of very dramatic headlines which say things like Hitler dead in a very uncomplicated fashion. It seems very unambiguous at this point. We get a sort of German radio says he died fighting, but the actual idea that he's dead at this particular moment doesn't necessarily seem to be disputed.

7:44There's very emphatic headlines and there's some very interesting visual representations. A Time magazine in the United States have Hitler's face on the cover and they use the large red cross struck through his face to indicate that he is no more. Hitler is gone. Nazism is vanquished. The Second World War in Europe is pretty much over. So given the prior imaginings and Nazi framework that had been built around Hitler's death that we spoke about, how did people react to hearing that the Fuhrer had in fact died?

8:16We have some initial moments of jubilation that are reported in the press. So in Australia, for instance, there's a group of coal miners who immediately down tools and head home for the day as they hear the news that Hitler is gone. But at the same time, there's a sense of bewilderment, I think, that this thing that people have been anticipating for so long has finally happened. He just seems to have gone out of a bit of a whimper and it's not quite the ending that people had expected. So there's also a real sense of numbness, disorientation,

8:47and this starts to then feed into a sense of dismay, disappointment, that he seems to have just gotten away with it. He's evaded justice, that they haven't been able to see him die. And then this starts to also then feed into a kind of, well, actually, I don't think I believe this. There were some opinion poll surveys where people say, I think I would have felt it more if it was true. This moment just doesn't seem to have delivered. And people are starting to question, and obviously they're questioning what German radio is saying. The idea that he's fallen in battle seems obviously very convenient.

9:18But because you're not seeing him die, like Mussolini has been very visibly executed, his body hanged in the public square, and people have seen that. But Hitler, we don't have that kind of visual end to him. And I think that does sow the seeds for people thinking, hmm, I'm not quite sure what to believe here. Following that sense of distrust and inkling of disbelief, there were some later sightings of Hitler after April 1945, weren't there?

9:48Do you want to talk about those a little bit? Yes, because I think it is really important, if we think about modern day ideas around the conspiracy theories and potential survival legends, I think you really do have to go back to the spring of 1945, and you see the seeds for some of this being sown. There's a struggle to comprehend the reality that he is finally gone. And in Germany, you start to have rumours. People say, well, can I trust the radio? Other people have said, well, we think he's hiding. He's fled Berlin. He's retreated to the Bavarian mountains.

10:20He's actually really just waiting to regroup. He's going to come back. He's going to have this last push against the Allies. There are other people who say, no, he's fled to Hamburg. He's escaped on a yacht. He's sailing around the coast. There's other rumours that he's hiding in the woods outside Heidelberg. There's all sorts of ideas circulating. And then over the summer of 1945, these tales get a little bit more complex, and you start to hear, oh, actually, he's left Germany. Now he might be off the French coast,

10:51or he might be made his way to Spain. And then it gets a bit more elaborate still that he's gone beyond Europe and obviously evolves into the notorious legends that he's actually taken a submarine and gone to Argentina. I think those sightings testified to the idea that there was a real need for Hitler's death to be verified with physical proof. Why do you think that people crave tangible evidence, though? And how did the search for Hitler's body begin? So the search for the physical evidence, first of all,

11:22falls to the Soviets because of the nature of the Allied advance on Germany. The Soviets reach Berlin first. They're the ones that capture the Reich of Chancellorry, so they're on the spot. And they have the first look around the Fuhrerbunker. So we're relying on them to tell us what's going on. And at that point in May 1945, there's certainly an expectation that not only will they share information as they find it, but that they will actually find something. And you can trace this across the Western media. There's sort of almost daily updates.

11:53Excitable media coverage following them is they're making their way through this rubbled city. What are they going to come across? There's a lot of anticipation there. And in terms of why do we crave this evidence before spring 1945, we've had rumours before that he might have died. So I think there's definitely this idea that we want to check and make sure he's definitely gone this time. But there's also obviously a real political imperative around this. The Allies are really wary about the potential for myth-making.

12:24They want to totally denazify Germany. They want to make sure that national socialism is rendered dead as well. And so the idea of a potentially still-living Hitler is dangerous because it could encourage people to flock to that idea, to keep Nazism alive. So they want to be able to hold him up and say, no, he's gone. You know, this is a definite break with the Nazi past. So as the Soviets are coming into Berlin, they're beginning the search, and the Western media is receiving these updates about the extent of the search.

12:55What do the Soviets come across? What are the first findings? So the first findings are actually some witnesses who are still on the spot. And so they can ask them about what they know. And they might be able to testify to, for instance, the suicidal gloom that has hit the Fuhrer bunker. They recover the remains of Josef and Magda Goebbels pretty quickly. And they also discover the charred remains of another man and woman in the Reich Chancellery Gardens. And from their documentation,

13:25we know that they take these remains to their field headquarters. They do an autopsy. And very quickly in these documents, they're referring to these corpses as being that of Hitler and Eva Braun. So there is a sense that for those on the spot, they have completed their mission. They have found him. And they are pretty confident in the identity of the remains because they have looked at the dental remains and been able to have those confirmed by Hitler's former dental nurse and dental technician because they've arrested pretty quickly.

13:57So the Russians have these bodies. They've done the autopsy. But the Russians didn't share that discovery, did they? Why was that? They don't share the discovery officially. There are rumours in the spring of 1945, May 45, that they might have found something. You keep hearing these little whispers, particularly around the idea that they've got his dental remains, they've identified him. But the official line from Moscow is, no, we have not. And so there's a press conference in June, early June,

14:27where Marshal Zhukov is the Soviet bigwig on the spot in Berlin and he's flanked by someone from Moscow and he has to very publicly say, no, no, we haven't found anything. And we definitely know that he's getting this steer from Stalin, from the Kremlin. But what Stalin is up to is maybe up for some debate. You know, some people attribute it to his naturally suspicious, paranoid nature, that he's a bit frustrated, that he hasn't been able to hold up a presentable body as clear-cut evidence. But there are also certain geopolitical advantages

14:57for him to kind of keep sowing the seeds of confusion at this point. The idea that a still-living Hitler might be out there could be used as a way to try and extract harsher terms against Germany in the post-war peace settlement. It could be used to reinforce the Soviet argument that they need to maintain their sphere of influence in this part of Europe. And also there's certain sort of internal political rivalries. Now, Zhukov has emerged from the war as being quite a heroic-looking popular figure.

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17:33This should be tons of fun. Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again now streaming only on Disney+. So in that culture of emerging Cold War tensions from May 1945 onwards, what are the other key investigations that happen into Hitler's death? I think the easiest way to do this is to give you a very rough timeline of some of these key moments. So in June 1945, we get the first Western witnesses who are able to testify to the fact that Hitler's body was burned

18:05in the Reich Chancellery Gardens. We have a guard who's on duty outside the bunker who accidentally observes the cremation and he says, I saw Hitler's body. And we also have Hitler's former chauffeur, Erich Kempke, who was the person who supplied all the fuel to douse over the bodies and set them alight. And these two men are captured separately by the British and the Americans. They're interrogated separately. And then in late June, they are both paraded before the press. They tell their stories. And this is the first real testimonial evidence

18:37that we have from people who are able to say, yes, he's dead. Yes, we saw his body destroyed. But that in itself is not quite enough to quell speculation. There's still allegations that perhaps they've concocted this story, that all the staff have been briefed to cover up the fact that Hitler has fled the scene and was actually hiding somewhere. So as we move through the year, in autumn 1945, we have a formal inquiry launched by British military intelligence. It's led by the historian Hugh Treferroper,

19:08and he sets out to try and interview as many bunker witnesses as he can possibly find and establish what did they know? What was Hitler's mood? What were his final movements? And just two months later, on the 1st of November 1945, he gives his press conference in Berlin, and he says that he's accumulated all this evidence, which proves that Hitler took his own life, that he shot himself in the head. This establishes the enduring thesis of suicide by gunshot. But this isn't necessarily

19:40the whole truth by any means. This is what has been unfolding publicly. What I've been trying to do in my book is actually tease out what's been going on behind the scenes, because now, all these years later, with the privilege of some hindsight and newly released records, we can start to integrate other material and complicate this timeline. And it emerges, for instance, that in May 1945, Schmers, who were one of the Soviet intelligence agencies, do recover the charred remains

20:11of a man and woman outside the Fuhrer bunker. They take them to their field headquarters. They perform an autopsy. They have dental remains extracted. And they're like, yes, straight away, those are Hitler's teeth. So the Soviets have this evidence, but the public line is always, no, no, no, no, we haven't found anything. They're not sharing evidence like that at the meetings that they're having with the Western allies. One year later, in May 1946,

20:42another arm of the Soviet intelligence, the NKVD, also returned to the former bunker site. They're doing their own round of checks, I suppose. They've been re-interrogating some of the witnesses that were already in Soviet captivity. But they also revisit the scene. And at that point, in the Reich of Chancellery Gardens, in pretty much the same spot where Schmerz had supposedly recovered the corpses a year earlier, the NKVD recover fragments of bone, skull. One of them seems to have this intriguing bullet hole in it.

21:13And so they're convinced this is going to be Hitler's skull. And they take that back to Moscow. Again, this evidence is not shared. So we don't publicly know about this yet. But in the intervening time, we move into the 1950s. By 1955, the last remaining German prisoners of war who've been held in Moscow are being released, returned to the West. And some of these are the most intimate members of Hitler's inner circle. They have been his valet or his close advisors.

21:44They have been the people who were instructed to carry out that cremation of his corpse. So they have handled his body, let alone just see it. And all of a sudden, these people are able to testify. And what we have in West Germany at this point is a hearing in Berchtesgaden to establish whether there's enough grounds to declare Hitler legally dead. Obviously, in all the kerfuffle at the end of the war, nobody had ever thought to actually issue a death certificate for him. But now in the mid-50s, there are various practical reasons why that needs to be done.

22:15And the Berchtesgaden hearings then are able to not just re-interview witnesses that we'd heard in 1945, but also take advantage of these returning former prisoners of war. And thus, we start to hear about the idea that the dental technician Fritz Echmann has been made to identify teeth. And that sort of starts a reaction of, huh, maybe the Soviets did find something. We go, it's not until a few years later, we get into the 1960s, that a Soviet autopsy report

22:45is finally published and it comes out in 1968. It's published in English and German. And it is an interesting book, shall we say. It is very propagandistic in its tone. Much of the pages is a celebratory account of the Soviet war effort. And then Hitler's autopsy report is in this collection and this book promises to expose all the secrets that have been held up until now. And in this report,

23:15it clearly acknowledges the fact that they recovered a body, that they did an autopsy. Now they talk about this body having died from cyanide poisoning. They talk about glass splinters in the mouth. They talk about burns to internal organs, all indicative of having ingested cyanide. In Soviet narratives, then, it's not enough for Hitler to die. He couldn't have shot himself like a man. He had to take poison. In their eyes, that's seen as, well, I suppose, stereotypically a woman's weapon. It's seen as weaker.

23:45And the response from the West at that point is, nah, this can't be right. This is just puerile propaganda. They don't like the fact that, obviously, it disputes their idea that he shot himself. And they suggest that this is just, again, some sort of Soviet myth-making. And the more urgent question at this point as well is, OK, even if this is true, why have you sat on this for all of these years? Why have you never shared it? That in itself, they think, is highly suspicious. So nobody really kind of takes it seriously in the West. It's not until we get into

24:15the 1990s, the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the opening up of Moscow archives, that a renewed interest starts to emerge. We have more documents being released, translated, but also news stories about the Soviet archivists suddenly now rediscovering Hitler's dental remains in a box of pens or whatever. It's always in some sort of mundane container, which is kind of interesting, isn't it? You know, how he's being stored. And so there's a lot of media interest in the early 90s

24:45about his teeth, and then the skull starts to enter the discussion as well. And this continues into the turn of the millennium as we start to get some documentaries and some Western investigators wanting to go and have a look at these items for themselves. One of those investigations that you mentioned there, the release of the Soviet autopsy, where they had examined Hitler's dental fragments, his jawbone, and found glass fragments in his teeth. This, as you just explained, could suggest

25:16that he ingested a glass capsule of cyanide, causing him to die. But there's certainly been some doubt cast over that. What really happened in the bunker, do you think? When the Russians published their autopsy report in 1968, the Soviets are very keen to put forward the idea that if Hitler is dead, he has to die in a really cowardly, weak way to again puncture any potential heroic myth-making before it can take hold. This is part of the reason why the West is a bit sceptical of this autopsy report because it doesn't align

25:48with their narrative that they've already established that he shot himself. And most of the witness testimony that we have already gathered up to this point is all talking towards a gunshot. Some witnesses talk about hearing a gunshot. Witnesses who happen to enter the study after his suicide, talk about seeing the pistol on the floor. People have described in very consistent terms the size of the blood splatter in the room. And there are also descriptions from witnesses who saw his corpse in the immediate aftermath

26:19and they talk about the blood to his head. So collectively, all of those things add up to this idea that he shot himself. The case is perhaps made more intriguing by the fact that the Russians also have these tiny fragments of skull bone in their archives. And it's a separate archive from where the teeth are held, I should say. And this is because these skull bones are not discovered at the same time as the rest of the corpse.

26:49And indeed, they're discovered a whole year later by a different intelligence body. Yes, on the surface you think, ah, brilliant, this will prove the idea that he did shoot himself. But the provenance of these bones is challenging. You know, is it just coincidence that they were found in that same spot? We don't have anything to definitively link it to the original corpse, which in the meantime after autopsy had been destroyed further and buried and then reburied. So we can't match the two.

27:20The conditions in which those skull fragments have been kept in have not been ideal, shall we say, over the years. And in the early 2000s, there was an American documentary which claimed to have looked at these items and suggested that actually they belonged to a woman, a younger woman. Now, we can't verify that either. That work hasn't been peer-reviewed, published or anything. But it is enough to kind of set the whole question of how did Hitler die running again in the media.

27:50The skull is interesting, though, because it has been held up in exhibitions and it's labelled as Hitler's skull. We're not quite sure. Let's just say that. It's not so convincing. Whereas the teeth, there's a clearer sort of chain of evidence between that and the rest of the remains and the whole discovery process in 1945. So I think with that in mind, we probably come down more on the side that Hitler died by gunshot. There's just so much more kind of circumstantial evidence

28:20around that. Which would perhaps lead us to continue with that particular thesis. Do you think then it's fair to say that as much as the gunshot theory seems more valid, it is still a theory. We can't objectively and definitively say that that's how Hitler died. Yes, absolutely. And to some extent, and I think as commentators remarked in some of the newspaper editorials back in the 1960s, it may not matter so much how he died, just as long as he did die. And all of the evidence

28:51that we have definitely points to him being dead and that he took his own life. So whether he shot himself, whether he took poison, whether he somehow managed to bite down on a cyanide pill and shoot himself in the head simultaneously, it doesn't necessarily matter in the end. The result is the same. He ended his life in that Berlin bunker. Bringing this story up to today, this biomedical interest and investigation in Hitler's death hasn't actually died down. Just at the end of 2025,

29:22we heard about the testing of Hitler's DNA, which had come from a scrap of sofa fabric found in the bunker. The study debunked the idea that Hitler had Jewish ancestry and found that Hitler could have experienced abnormalities in the development of his sexual organs. And for our listeners, if you'd like to find out more about this recent study of Hitler's DNA, we've actually got a brilliant article about it, which you can access via the History Extra website and app. The article is called We Analyzed Hitler's DNA and What We Discovered Made Us Gasp.

29:52I'll pop a link to it in the description of this episode. So definitely go and check that out if you are interested. In light of this recent study then, why do you think our fascination with Hitler and his death continues? Will it ever end? I don't think our fascination with Hitler is going to end. Every sort of generation seems to have its own sort of cultural moment of engagement with it as new evidence comes to light or new ways of interpreting or understanding existing pieces of evidence come to the fore. I think these days we're so confident in modern forensic techniques

30:24and science to give us objective, definite results. You know, we tend to value that, I think, over the perhaps more emotive, subjective, testimonial evidence that we have, say, from the 1940s witnesses. So I think there's always this perennial hope that we'll just get stronger and stronger proof as to what happens. And obviously that then keeps the fascination going. But I think it also goes back to some of the things that we spoke about earlier is the fact that Hitler didn't die in the way people had hoped for in 1945.

30:56And it becomes an interesting story in itself, I think, which I try to capture in my book. It's just how do we know what we think we know about Hitler's death? How did all this fall into place? So that journey of discovery, I think, becomes a line of historical inquiry and public fascination on its own. And, of course, you know, he is one of the most notorious criminal figures in modern history. So the idea that he just fades away with a bit of a whimper doesn't quite fit our preferred narrative

31:26of events. So I think we're just always looking for maybe a stronger sense of closure to this story. Yeah, absolutely. And finally, zooming out, what do you think is the significance of our continued interest in Hitler's death? Do we risk mythologising him? Or are we, in a way, by continuing to return to the subject and delve further, are we actually defying Hitler's last wish that his corpse wouldn't fall into enemy hands and be humiliatingly presented for all to see?

31:57I think there's a bit of both there. And I like the idea that we are defying his last wish. And what is interesting is in 2000 in Moscow, when they put that alleged skull fragment on public display, they did so not just by putting it in a glass case, but they had footage from the Nuremberg trials playing on the wall of the exhibition space. You can see his former comrades getting their comeuppance. And they also had a document next to the skull fragments, which essentially copied Hitler's lines

32:28from his testament, where he says, I don't want my remains to fall into enemy hands. So there's a real sort of sense of triumphalism. Ha ha, look, we've defied him his very last wish because here he is, or at least bits of him on display. So I think, I like the idea that we kind of keep prodding this metaphorical corpse, aren't we? And I think if we handle this story critically, if we approach it in a way where we're not looking to go down little rabbit holes or conspiracy theories or engage in all this outlandish

32:59survival legend, if we look at the evidence before us, if we handle that correctly, I think actually we are doing the opposite of mythologising him in a way because we are sort of becoming more attuned to the really pathetic circumstances in which he died, you know, underground, pretty much on his own, really sort of cramped conditions. It's not the Hitler of his heyday with all that pomp and circumstance. He's this aged, frail, pretty much abandoned figure taking these measures.

33:30I think similar to that, some of the way in which the evidence has been handled in previous years has been done in such a way to like chip away at any notion that he did die heroically. So when his will was discovered in late 45, early 46, there's a copy that gets put on display in public exhibitions later on and there's a lot of media coverage which deliberately invites readers to go and take a look at it, look at the scratchy, tiny, cramped handwriting

34:01in his signature and basically mocking him in that way as well. So it's not a glorious death, it's a really pathetic death and when people are looking at that, then we're undermining his legacy as it were. That was Caroline Sharples speaking to Charlotte Vosper. Caroline is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Roehampton. Her latest book, The Long Death of Adolf Hitler, reveals more about Hitler's continued presence in our cultural consciousness long after his death. Meet the new iSIMS,

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