How Hitler actually died, new information revealed 80 years later
April 30, 1945. Soviet Red Army troops have surrounded Berlin, Germany. They are gradually approaching Hitler’s bunker. At that time, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his last refuge, the bunker next to the newly built Chancellor’s building. Although the events of that day are historically documented, many myths and conspiracy theories have surrounded his death over the years. Some claimed that Hitler survived the war and fled to South America. Others talked about his secret base in Antarctica.
80 years after Hitler’s death, Professor Dr. Klaus Puschel, former director of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the Hamburg Eppendorf University Medical Center, has provided new information about Hitler’s death. He wrote many unknown facts about Hitler’s death in his newly published book, ‘The Toad Gets Uber Leischen’ or ‘The Body Lies on the Road to Death’, published on March 20.
Puschel wrote, ‘The probable cause of Adolf Hitler’s death was a joint suicide by biting and breaking a cyanide capsule in his mouth and shooting himself in the head shortly after. Hitler committed suicide in his bunker on April 30, 1945. Shortly after that, Soviet forces arrived at Hitler’s bunker in Berlin.
Klaus Puschel, former head of the Hamburg Institute of Forensic Medicine, was able to inspect the skull and the results of the Russian autopsy of Adolf Hitler’s body kept in a military archive in Moscow in 1990. In his newly published book, he analyzes the mystery of Adolf Hitler’s death based on scientific evidence. Eighty years after Adolf Hitler’s death, a Hamburg forensic expert has debunked myths surrounding his death. He writes, “For decades, there have been many myths surrounding Hitler’s death that have no basis in fact.”
According to Dr. Puschel, the results of Hitler’s dental examination clearly identify the body as Adolf Hitler.
“I think that, despite the wartime conditions in completely destroyed Berlin, the examination of the bodies recovered from Hitler’s bunker was carried out very carefully and intelligibly and documented,” Puschel said.
However, one of the new things that Puschel’s intriguing examination revealed is that Hitler did not have one testicle. He offers two explanations for this discovery. One is that Hitler lost his testicles, or cryptorchidism, due to an injury during World War I in 1916. Later, when he was detained in Landsberg Prison, a prison medical officer diagnosed Hitler’s absence of a left testicle.
It is worth noting that Hitler was imprisoned in Landsberg Prison after a failed coup attempt in 1923. At that time, Russian military doctors did not describe Hitler’s internal organs. They only gave detailed descriptions of the surface of the body. Regarding the cause of Hitler’s skull and the smell of a certain smell on his body, Klaus Puschel said that this was an indication of poisoning by potassium cyanide.
In addition, glass fragments were found in Hitler’s oral cavity. This makes it clear that he had bitten an ampoule of potassium cyanide. It is still unclear whether this potassium cyanide was fatal or whether Hitler shot himself in the head very quickly. Based on the skull injury, Dr. Püschel speculates that Hitler shot himself in the right side of the head with a 7.65 mm caliber Walther pistol. He had two minutes to chew the cyanide capsule open in his mouth, during which time he shot himself in the head.
According to Püschel, Hitler used two lethal methods simultaneously to ensure his death.
Hitler ordered his most loyal followers to cremate his body in the garden of the Reich Chancellery. But the Soviet Red Army arrived before the cremation could be completed.
Soviet intelligence preserved Hitler’s remains for decades after World War II. They were buried and exhumed several times. On April 5, 1970, KGB chief Yuri Andropov and Soviet Communist Party leader Leonid Brezhnev ordered the body to be buried in a garden at the Soviet secret service headquarters in the former East German city of Magdeburg.
When the process of reunification of East and West Germany began in 1991, the Soviet secret service headquarters in Magdeburg ordered the buried remains to be cremated before being closed. However, only Hitler’s skull was taken to Moscow. The ashes of the cremated remains were floated in the Elbe River, which runs through the city. In this way, Adolf Hitler’s body was finally destroyed.
The book was jointly published by Klaus Püschel and journalist Bettina Mittelach.