Escapees from Hitler’s bunker in the Chancellery fled in three groups after Hitler’s death.12 Yelena Rzhevskaya, a translator of Klimenko’s SMERSH group, recalled: ‘The group that included… Rattenhuber and Hitler’s driver [Erich] Kempke, was getting through under the cover of a tank. But a grenade thrown from a window hit the tank at the left side… “I was wounded,” wrote Rattenhuber [later in his testimony], “and was taken prisoner by the Russians.”’13 Möhnke and Vice-Admiral Voss were captured in another group. SMERSH operatives additionally arrested Major Ernst Keitel, Field Marshal Keitel’s son, and Hans Fritzsche, head of the Radio Department in the Propaganda Ministry and future defendant in Nuremberg.
On the same day, Colonel Klimenko and his men found the burned bodies of Paul Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda in the garden of Hitler’s Chancellery, and the bodies of their six children, poisoned by their mother, inside the bunker.14 More exactly, a small competing SMERSH searching group of the 5th Shock Army commanded by Major Zybin found Goebbels’s body first. As Zybin’s superior, Leonid Ivanov, recalled later, ‘Zybin was a short guy, but he stood up in front of the colonel [Miroshnichenko, Klimenko’s superior] and, with his chest sticking out, pronounced: “This is my trophy, I won’t give it to you!” The colonel swung his arm and struck the major [Zybin]. This is how the 3rd Army got Goebbels’s corpse.’15
Voss, Karl Schneider, a member of Hitler’s military guards, and some others identified the bodies, while Hitler’s personal doctor Werner Haase testified about Hitler’s suicide. Major Boris Bystrov, a member of Klimenko’s SMERSH group, told Rzhevskaya about the identification of the dead Goebbels children by Voss:
Bystrov asked Voss: ‘Did you know these children?’
Voss nodded positively and, exhausted, after asking permission, slipped into a chair.
‘I saw them only yesterday. This is Heidi,’ he pointed to the youngest girl.
Before he moved into this room, he had identified [the bodies of] Goebbels and his wife…
Voss was shaken; he was sitting with stooped shoulders…
Suddenly he… jumped up and ran away. Bystrov rushed after him along a corridor of the dark dungeon… When he overtook Voss, [Bystrov] understood that it was Voss’s gesture of desperation, without any intention or desire to escape.16
Voss even tried to commit suicide by cutting his veins with a small knife, but Klimenko’s men interrupted his attempt.
The next day, Major General Aleksei Sidnev, deputy head of the UKR SMERSH of the 1st Belorussian Front, sent two reports to Abakumov and Beria. The first mentioned the finding and identification of the bodies of the members of the Goebbels family, and the second described testimony by Dr. Haase. Haase stated that, on April 30, he had seen Hitler for the last time, but he knew that after the meeting Hitler had poisoned himself and his body had been burned.
Possibly, both Abakumov and Beria reported the news to Stalin. SMERSH and the NKVD began competing to find out what, in fact, had happened to Hitler. Unfortunately, most of the sources published in English failed to identify two separate investigations by the two Soviet security services.17 Here I will mention only some of SMERSH’s efforts.
SMERSH operational groups began an intensive search for Hitler’s body and for additional witnesses who could identify the corpse. On May 4, the captured SS-guard Harry Mengershausen provided the first detailed information that the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun had been burned in the garden of the Chancellery.18 The next day the badly burned bodies of a man and a woman were found by accident in a bomb crater in the Chancellery’s garden. Nobody could identify them, and Klimenko ordered that they be buried again. Later he realized that the bodies could have belonged to Hitler and Eva Braun. Since now the 5th Army, and not Klimenko’s 3rd Shock Army, controlled the territory of the Chancellery, Klimenko and his men stole the bodies from the site and kept them.
On May 5, Weidling gave a detailed testimony stating that ‘Hitler and his wife committed suicide by taking poison, after which Hitler also shot himself.’19 Three days later Rattenhuber said that Hitler did not shoot himself, but ordered his valet, Heinz Linge, to shoot him.
On May 8, a special medical commission of the 1st Belorussian Front headed by Lieutenant Colonel Faust Shkaravsky, chief medical forensic expert of this front, conducted an autopsy of Hitler and Braun’s presumed bodies. As Rzhevskaya writes, ‘it was really incredible that Doctor Faust [Shkaravsky’s first name] directed an autopsy of Adolf Hitler!’20 The commission concluded that death was caused by cyanide poisoning, and not shooting. However, the commission also noted that part of Hitler’s skull was missing.
Colonel Vasilii Gorbushin, head of a SMERSH operational group, called up Rzhevskaya:
He handed me over a box and said that it contained Hitler’s teeth and that I was responsible for its safety…
It was… a dark-red box with a soft lining inside made of satin…
It was a great obligation for me to have that box in my hands all the time, and I turned cold every time I thought that I might have left it somewhere…
For me… the deaths of the leaders of the [Third Reich] and the surrounding circumstances had become something ordinary.
And not only for me. When I came to the headquarters, my friend Raya, a telegraph operator, tried on Eva Braun’s evening dress. Senior Lieutenant Kurashov, who was in love with her, brought her this dress from the dungeon of the Reich’s Chancellery. It was long, almost down to the floor, with a deep décolleté on the front, but Raya didn’t like it. And she was not interested in it as in a historical souvenir.21
Later the lower jaws of Hitler and Eva Braun, and both jaws of Magda Goebbels, were sent to the 2nd MGB Main Directorate (internal counterintelligence) in Moscow and have been kept in the MGB/KGB/FSB archive since then.22
In the early 2000s, the German forensic scientist Mark Benecke examined Hitler’s and Braun’s jaws in the FSB archive.23 The fragments were still kept in the same perfume or cigar boxes that Rzhevskaya put them in, back in 1945. Benecke wrote: ‘The teeth are stored inside of large overseas travel suitcases, packed together with Hitler’s uniform and the original files of the death investigation. The reports of Hitler’s dentist, [Hugo] Blaschke (who had formerly studied in the U.S.), and other witnesses clearly show that the teeth in that little cigar box must indeed be the Führer’s.’
In the meantime, on May 9, 1945, the Soviet Victory Day, most SMERSH arrestees and high-level generals were flown to Moscow. However, some witnesses of Hitler’s death, and Fritzsche, remained in prison in Berlin and were further interrogated. Later all of them were also transported to Moscow. The witnesses were held in investigation prisons until 1951–52, when they were finally sentenced to long prison terms, and the most important of them were sent to Vladimir Prison.24 Dr. Haase died under investigation in 1946, and Weidling died in Vladimir Prison on November 17, 1955, just before repatriation to Germany. That same year, the survivors were released and returned to Germany.
Also on May 9, Gorbushin’s SMERSH operational group, which included Rzhevskaya, found and arrested Käthe Heusermann, the assistant to Dr. Blaschke, Hitler’s chief dentist.25 Heusermann’s testimony concerning dental work on Hitler and Braun was crucial in identifying the bodies. Also, with her help Hitler’s dental X-rays and a bridge prepared for Hitler were found in the bunker. On May 11, based on Heusermann’s description and on an even more detailed description from another dentist, Fritz Echtmann, Dr. Shkaravsky concluded that the burned corpse was, in fact, Hitler.26