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Did Hitler Escape? DNA Test Refueled Controversy
in his Führerbunker in Berlin. His wife Eva (née Braun), committed suicide with
him by ingesting cyanide.
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.
As the war was ending and Russian troops closed in on Berlin, Hitler and other Nazi officials confined themselves to a bunker beneath the city. It is widely believed that Hitler and his wife Eva Braun killed themselves in the bunker, in order to avoid possible capture. Accounts suggest that his remains were burned and buried at the site, and later moved by the Soviets to other sites in Germany in the decades after the war, but this is uncertain.
What became of Hitler’s remains is still an open historical question and it was thought the answer could lie in the Russian archives in Moscow, where among other artifacts, there is a piece of human skull with a bullet wound that the Russians say is that of Adolf Hitler.
The History Channel brought Bellantoni on a fact-finding mission from Germany to Moscow in search of evidence. He conducted an exploratory dig through a patch of earth where Hitler’s remains were said to have been reburied by the Soviets in the decades after World War II, searching for bone fragments. He also gained access to the Russian national archives, where he reviewed documents related to the Soviets’ handling of Hitler’s remains, and examined and gained DNA evidence from blood and bone fragments the Russians have said for decades belonged to the Nazi dictator.
by poison only and another that he died by a self-inflicted gunshot, while biting
down on a cyanide capsule. Contemporary historians have rejected these accounts
as being either Soviet propaganda or an attempted compromise in order to
reconcile the different conclusions. One eye-witness recorded that the body
showed signs of having been shot through the mouth, but this has been proven
unlikely. There is also controversy regarding the authenticity of skull and jaw
fragments which were recovered. As stated above in 2009, DNA tests were performed on a skull
Soviet officials had long believed to be Hitler’s. The tests revealed that the
skull was actually that of a female under 40 years old
The remains of the above-ground portion of the Führerbunker in the garden of the Reich Chancellery. Entrance is to the left and circular structure was for generators and ventilation.
Different versions of Hitler’s fate were presented by the Soviet Union according to its political desires. In the years immediately following 1945, the Soviets maintained Hitler was not dead, but had fled and was being shielded by former western allies. This worked for a time to cause western authorities some doubt. The chief of the U.S. trial counsel at Nuremberg, Thomas J. Dodd, said: “No one can say he is dead.” When President Truman asked Stalin at the Potsdam Conference in August 1945 whether or not Hitler was dead, Stalin replied bluntly, ‘No’. However, by 11 May 1945, the Soviets had already had Hitler’s dentist, Hugo Blaschke, and his dental technician confirm the dental remains found were Hitler’s and Braun’s. In November 1945, Dick White, then head of counter-intelligence in the British sector of Berlin (and later head of MI5 and MI6 in succession), had their agent, Hugh Trevor-Roper, investigate the matter to counter the Soviet claims. His findings as to Hitler’s last days and suicide were written in a report and published in book form in 1947.
Credit: Wikipedia
In 1969, Soviet journalist Lev Bezymensky’s book on the death of Hitler was published in the West. It included the SMERSH autopsy report, but because of the earlier disinformation attempts, western historians thought it untrustworthy.
In 1970, the SMERSH facility, by then controlled by the KGB, was scheduled to be handed over to the East German government. Fearing that a known Hitler burial site might become a Neo-Nazi shrine, KGB director Yuri Andropov authorised an operation to destroy the remains that had been buried in Magdeburg on 21 February 1946. A Soviet KGB team was given detailed burial charts. On 4 April 1970 they secretly exhumed five wooden boxes containing the remains of “10 or 11 bodies … in an advanced state of decay”. The remains were thoroughly burned and crushed, after which the ashes were thrown into the Biederitz river, a tributary of the nearby Elbe.
Bellantoni is a professor of anthropology at UConn as well as the state archaeologist at theConnecticut State Museum of Natural History; Strausbaugh is the director of the Center for Applied Genetics and Technology in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology; and Dawn Pettinelli is manager of the Home and Garden Education Center and Soil Nutrient Analysis Laboratory.
2012-10-20 15:23:56
Source: http://nanopatentsandinnovations.blogspot.com/2012/10/did-hitler-escape-dna-test-refueled.html
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