It was also on May 2 that Soviet soldiers, acting on advice from captured German officers, discovered two corpses in the Chancellery garden that were tentatively identified as Joseph Goebbels and his wife, Magda. This was an important find, but the Soviets’ primary quarry was Hitler, dead or alive. Two days later, a Russian private, rooting around in the same garden, noticed a pair of legs protruding from a crater. A little digging revealed the charred bodies of a man and a woman. The colonel in charge, having been told by the Germans that Hitler’s body was somewhere in the Chancellery building, did not believe that these were the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun, so he had them reburied. On May 5, still unable to find the Nazi leader’s remains, the Russians returned to the garden and dug up the bodies that they had reburied the previous day.
These bodies, along with the putative Goebbels corpses and the suspected remains of General Krebs, who had also killed himself in the bunker, were taken to the headquarters of Soviet Counter Intelligence at Buch, a Berlin suburb. On May 8 autopsies were performed on all the bodies, which indicated that they were indeed those of Joseph and Magda Goebbels, Hans Krebs, Hitler, and Eva Braun. As far as Hitler was concerned, the telling evidence was some bridgework that was identified as his by a dental nurse who had once worked on his teeth.
At first the Soviets kept their discovery and identification of Hitler’s body a secret, apparently holding this information in reserve in case somebody claiming to be the Führer showed up and tried to seize power. On June 6, however, they suddenly announced that they had identified Hitler’s corpse, adding that he had died exclusively from poisoning (which was more “cowardly” than shooting). Three days later they retracted this story and suggested instead that he might have escaped from Berlin and gone into hiding.
Why the reversal? It seems that a “live” Hitler was of more use to Moscow than a dead one, for the threat of a Nazi rebirth would allow the Soviets to push for larger reparations from Germany and a stronger role for Russia in Eastern Europe and Berlin. Moscow’s duplicity indeed fueled all kinds of rumors regarding Hitler’s fate. Many people preferred to believe that the Führer had gotten out of Berlin alive, and Hitler-sightings began cropping up all over the globe. He was seen on an island in the Baltic, a monastery in Spain, a temple in Tibet, a sheep ranch in Patagonia, a Volkswagen repair shop in Buenos Aires, a bandit hideout in Albania, even at an explorer’s camp in Antarctica. The sightings continued for decades and with a frequency that rivaled those of the Virgin Mary and Elvis Presley. In November 1989 the
In the early hours of May 7, the day before Hitler was autopsied and conclusively identified as the former Führer of the Third Reich, representatives of the rump Nazi regime signed a surrender document at General Eisenhower’s headquarters at Reims. The Germans had delayed taking this step for several days in order to allow as many German soldiers as possible to withdraw westward and evade capture by the Russians. The Soviets saw the surrender at Reims as a tactic to deny them their rightful share in the victory. They insisted on a second, and far more elaborate, surrender ceremony in Berlin on May 8. Thus it was that representatives from the Western powers flew to Tempelhof airport and participated along with the Russians in the final surrender of the German forces at the Soviet headquarters in Karlshorst, in the northeastern part of the city. It was appropriate that this momentous event should take place in the demolished Nazi capital, but the recrimination surrounding the German surrender presaged rifts within the Allied camp that would soon result in the division of Germany and Berlin.
7
COMING INTO THE COLD
—Nikita Khrushchev, 1959
