steresurkunde (13. 918)

In the hopes of silencing conspiracy theories that had circulated since 1945 and would so for decades afterwards, on this day in 1956 the district court (Amtsgericht) of Berchtesgaden, with jurisdiction as the Führer’s home of record, declared Hitler officially dead. Following the capture of the Reich Chancellery during the Battle of Berlin, the Red Army secured the remains of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun and directed the NKVD (НКВД, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the secret police and intelligence agency later responsible for carrying out the Great Purge) to carry out a comprehensive post-mortem. Fritz Echtmann, dental assistant, identified dentures and implants as belong to the deceased and collected testimony from other witnesses to the suicide.
At first publishing the details of this fact finding mission and initially sharing it with American counterparts, on orders from Josef Stalin, Soviet commander-in-chief Georgi Zhukov retracted the statements and launched a disinformation campaign, disappearing Echtmann and others present behind the Iron Curtain. In order to disabuse allies from the apparent confusion, MI5 conducted its own investigation, finding Hitler’s last will and testament, marriage certificate and generally corroborating the factual account, though doubts lingered due to the continued detention of important witnesses. The USSR was motivated to maintain these conspiracies in order to justify harsh crackdowns on those within their sphere of influence and suppress democratic reform through the legend of a useful boogeyman. Following their release and repatriation to West Germany, their narratives helped strengthen the case for remit of Hitler’s estate and assets to the state of Bavaria and the municipality of Linz—however, despite all this, the deliberate Soviet obfuscation fuelled alternative narratives well into the 1990s, championed by American tabloids positing notions that the couple were alive and well in Argentina or Colombia or Albania, only dispelled—mostly—with the collapse of the Soviet Union and release of the archives detailing the burial and reinterment of the remains of Hitler and Braun nine times in various locations in Berlin and Magdeburg before cremating them in 1970 with only a few fragments remaining, dentures and some pieces of skull as forensic evidence, with ashes scattered in a tributary of the Elbe.