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Did Hitler Escape?
The skull kept in a museum that was supposed Adolf Hitler’s remains turns out to be that a female. Oops.
The official story is that Adolf Hitler committed suicide by gunshot on 30 April 1945 in his Führerbunker in Berlin. His wife Eva (née Braun), committed suicide with him by ingesting cyanide.
That afternoon, in accordance with Hitler’s prior instructions, their remains were carried up the stairs through the bunker’s emergency exit, doused in petrol and set alight in the Reich Chancellery garden outside the bunker. The Soviet archives record that their burnt remains were recovered and interred in successive locations until 1970 when they were again exhumed, cremated and the ashes scattered.
A program on the History Channel, called MysteryQuest, dispatches teams of experts around the world to try to solve “some of mankind’s strangest and most persistent mysteries.”
The premiere episode Sept. 16, 2009 – “Hitler’s Escape” – featured three UConn faculty: Nicholas Bellantoni, Linda Strausbaugh, and Dawn Pettinelli. Together they investigated what became of Adolf Hitler’s remains in the days, months, and years after the end of World War II.
Pettinelli conducted tests on the soil samples and Strausbaugh and her team conducted DNA testing on swabs of blood and skull fragments. The results of these tests showed definitively that the skull fragments did not belong to Hitler but belonged a young female according to skull morphology and DNA tests.
Strausbaugh’s lab was tasked with extracting DNA from burn-damaged dime-sized fragments of what was believed to be Adolf Hitler’s skull. Much of the research was conducted by two of Strausbaugh’s former students, Craig O’Conner, Ph.D. ’08, and Heather Nelson, MS ’04, both now on staff at the Chief Medical Examiner’s Office in New York City. After successfully extracting DNA, the researchers determined that the skull fragments belonged to a female and were not Hitler’s. The story was featured in The History Channel series MysteryQuest.
Photos and video here http://tiny.cc/jj0hmw
