A
FORMER KGB lieutenant general has described how Hitler's bones
were secretly burnt in a night-time operation a quarter of a century
after the Nazi dictator died. The remains were then tipped into
the sewerage system in Magdeburg, a city then in East Germany.
The revelation was made
last week by Sergi Kondrashev, who spent two periods as head of
Soviet counter-intelligence in East Berlin at the height of the
cold war.
His account ends half a
century of speculation and conspiracy theories that Hitler took
advantage of the chaos at the end of the second war war to escape
to Argentina.
Kondrashev is one of the
few former Soviet intelligence officers familiar with the details
of what happened shortly before midnight on April 4, 1970, to
the remains of Hitler, his wife Eva Braun, and Joseph Goebbels,
the Nazi propaganda minister, his wife and six children, who also
died in Hitler's bunker in Berlin.
Operation Archive was ordered
by Yuri Andropov, then chairman of the KGB and later general secretary
of the Soviet Communist party.
"The remains were
all burnt in secret at night," Kondrashev said last week,
breaking his silence after almost three decades. "Then the
ashes were dumped in the city sewerage system through a manhole.
That's where they ended up."
The remains had lain until
then beneath concrete on the grounds of a Soviet military camp
off Klausenerstrasse in Magdeburg, 70 miles west of Berlin, their
exact location known only to a small circle of Soviet leaders.
They had been transported there in 1946, less than a year after
their discovery by a Soviet military advance party in the yard
of Hitler's bunker, buried in a shallow grave in a large bomb
crater.
"The bodies had been
half burnt," recalled Kondrashev, who was a personal friend
of some of the officers who carried out the first tests on the
remains. "They were placed in separate cases and transported
to a secret location in Berlin. A report was sent immediately
to Joseph Stalin,
who gave orders to determine beyond doubt that Hitler's corpse
was among those discovered. After we concluded that the remains
did belong to Hitler, they were taken to Magdeburg and buried."
They lay beneath the city
for 24 years, as speculation about their whereabouts raged in
the west. But in 1970, when the Russians thought they would have
to hand over the military camp to the East Germans, Kondrashev,
who was completing his second posting as KGB head in Berlin, reminded
Andropov of their existence.
In a move personally approved
by Leonid Brezhnev, then the Soviet leader, Andropov gave the
order to dig up the remains and destroy them for fear that they
would one day be discovered and the site turned into a shrine
to Hitler.
The KGB first secured the
area around the Magdeburg camp to guard against curious neighbours.
A small tent was erected over the grave and five officers dug
through the night, first with pickaxes, then with shovels. They
found five cases containing the remains of ten bodies. After counting
the leg bones to ensure that no body was missing, they loaded
the cases onto a lorry and drove them to a nearby training camp,
where they were burnt.
Skull fragments, including
his jawbone, are all that remain of Hitler. They were sent in
secret to Moscow in 1945, together with parts of a blood soaked
leather couch on which the Führer is believed to have died.
Blood from the couch matched Hitler's blood type and the skull
was painstakingly reconstructed except for a missing cheekbone
and other fragments destroyed when his corpse was doused in petrol
and set alight by an aide. After months of research, based mainly
on the dictator's teeth, the Russians concluded the remains were
indeed Hitler's.
"We concluded that
first Hitler took an ampoule of poison and then shot himself,"
said Kondrashev. "He was then burnt and buried, first by
the Nazis and then by the Russians."
The skull is still in the
hands of the FSB, the KGB's successor organization, and is believed
to be held in an archive on the outskirts of Moscow. According
to the latest reports, it is stored in a small cardboard box originally
used for ball-point pen refills.
Mark Franchetti / The Sunday
Times (UK) : 31st October 1999.
