Robert Harris: Selling Hitler

The Third Reich had dissolved into chaos. In Berlin, in Munich, in Berchtesgaden, Allied soldiers as well as German picked through the detritus of Hitler’s Germany and carried off whatever seemed of value. A gang of Russian women soldiers ransacked Eva Braun’s apartment in the Berlin bunker and emerged, according to one witness, ‘whooping like Indian squaws’, waving Frau Hitler’s underclothes above their heads, carrying off lamps, vases, bottles, carpets, crystal glass, Hitler’s monogrammed silver, an accordian, a tablecloth, ‘even a table telephone’. At the Berghof, French and American troops wrenched off light-fittings and doorknobs and pulled out the springs from the Führer’s bed. Eventually, every inch of plaster was stripped from the walls; stairs and handrails were torn up; the members of one enterprising unit even took a sledgehammer to Hitler’s marble fireplace and sold off the pieces as ashtrays. At the Führerbau, the monumental stone building on the Konigsplatz in Munich where Hitler had met Chamberlain and Daladier, dozens of GIs plundered the storerooms, using a wooden crate as a stepping stone as they explored the waterlogged basement. When one anonymous soldier from the US 14th Division staved in the lid of the crate he found yet another hoard of Hitler’s private property: two gold-plated pistols, a swastika ring, a miniature portrait of the dictator’s mother painted on ivory, a framed photograph of Hitler’s favourite dog, Blondi, a gold watch bearing the initials ‘A.H.’ and valuable monogrammed crystal glasses, carefully wrapped in newspaper. ‘The next thing I picked up was a diary,’ recalled the soldier, many years later. ‘It was a red diary with gold lettering and Hitler’s insignia on it, his initials on it. But I flashed right through it and it was all in German. I just threw it right aside and it dropped into the water on the floor.’ He returned to retrieve it some time later but the ‘diary’, or whatever it was, had gone. There are many such stories. As recently as 1984, a family in British Columbia found a crateful of personal papers belonging to Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s court photographer, lying discarded in their attic: it had been brought back by their father at the end of the war and forgotten. Years later it is impossible to guess how much of historical value may have been carted away from the wreckage of Nazi Germany and may still come to light.

Reviewing such documentary evidence as exists, it is conceivable that of five sets of Hitler documents supposedly destroyed in the spring of 1945, four of them – the private files held at the Berghof, the letters to Eva Braun, the correspondence with Himmler and even possibly part of the cargo entrusted to Arndt – may actually have survived. Only the contents of the safe in Berlin, whose incineration was personally supervised by the Führer, can definitely be regarded as lost.

This tantalizing state of affairs was to provide the perfect scenario for forgery.

OUTSIDE THE ENTRANCE to the Führerbunker in Berlin, a shell crater was strewn with sheets of charred paper. Rummaging beneath the blackened litter, a Russian soldier discovered a pair of scorched and crumbling bones. He called his commanding officer over. ‘Comrade Lieutenant Colonel!’ he shouted, ‘there are legs here!’

Thus, on 2 May 1945, if the Soviet writer Lev Bezymenski is to be believed, Private Ivan Churakov of the ist Byelorussian Front stumbled on the most sought-after Hitler relic of them all. ‘So!’ exclaimed Stalin when he first heard of the Führer’s death, ‘that’s the end of the bastard. Too bad that we did not manage to take him alive.’

Disinterred from the crater, the remains of Hitler and Eva Braun were placed in a pair of rough wooden boxes and taken to the Soviet Army headquarters in the northern Berlin suburb of Buch. Hitler’s corpse had been so badly damaged by fire that parts of it disintegrated on the mortuary table. According to the official autopsy report, the left foot was missing; so was the skin: ‘only remnants of charred muscles are preserved.’ The mouldering cadaver was displayed in a clearing in a wood outside Berlin at the end of May to one of the Führer’s bodyguards. By August it was in Moscow, where, quite probably, it remains to this day. (‘Hitler’s body’, boasted one Russian official in 1949, ‘is in better keeping with us than under the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.’) Hitler’s teeth – a bridge of nine dentures in yellow metal and a singed lower jaw consisting of fifteen teeth – were handed over to the Soviet counter-intelligence agency, SMERSH. These, together with the dictator’s Iron Cross, his party insignia and the teeth of Eva Braun, were last seen in Berlin in May 1945 in a cigar box, being offered around by a SMERSH officer to fashionable German dentists for identification.

But, abetted by the Russians, even in this reduced form, Hitler was still capable of making mischief. The autopsy report and the various proofs of Hitler’s death were suppressed by the Soviet Union for more than twenty years: officially, to have them ‘in reserve’ in case an imposter appeared claiming to be ‘the Führer saved by a miracle’; in reality, to embarrass the British and Americans. At least twice in the Kremlin and once at the Potsdam Conference, Stalin lied to the Allies, telling them that Hitler had escaped and was in hiding. As part of his campaign against fascist Spain, he even suggested that Hitler was being sheltered by General Franco. Senior Soviet officers in Berlin, who had at first admitted to the discovery of the body, hastily changed their stories and followed Stalin’s line. The Soviet newspaper Izvestia went so far as to allege that Hitler and Eva Braun were living in a moated castle in Westphalia in the British Occupation Zone of Germany.

The post-war appetite for stories about Hitler and the Nazis, which was to culminate in the diaries fiasco, found its first sustenance in this confusion. Throughout the summer of 1945, newspapers trampled over one another to bring their readers the ‘true story’ of the Führer’s fate. First Hitler was said to be working as a croupier in a casino in the French resort of Evian. A few days later he resurfaced as a head waiter in Grenoble. Then, in bewildering succession, he was reliably reported to be a shepherd in the Swiss Alps, a monk in St Gallen, and an Italian hermit living in a cave beside Lake Garda. Some newspapers maintained that Hitler was posing as a fisherman in the Baltic, others that he was working on a boat off the west of Ireland. He had escaped by airplane. He had escaped by submarine. He was in Albania. He was in Spain. He was in Argentina.

Hitler’s progress across the world’s front pages was followed with increasing embarrassment in Whitehall. When the Russians hinted that the British might be shielding him in Westphalia, the Government decided to act. In September 1945, Brigadier Dick White, a senior official in the British security service, later to be chief of both MI5 and MI6, was asked to prepare a report on what had happened to Hitler. He was given six weeks to complete the task. White delegated this urgent mission, code-named Operation Nursery, to a particularly bright young intelligence officer named Hugh Trevor-Roper.

At the outbreak of war Trevor-Roper had been at Oxford completing a biography of Archbishop Laud. Recruited into British signals intelligence, the twenty-six-year-old research student was obliged to switch his mind from the study of seventeenth-century clerical politics to the analysis of intercepted German radio traffic. He became one of the foremost experts on the German intelligence service, the Abwehr. He had a penetrating intellect, a sharp tongue, and a natural combativeness which caused one of his superiors in the Secret Intelligence Service to threaten him with court martial.