Jean-Christophe Brisard - The Death of Hitler - The Final Word

More than seventy years after this episode, we may be about to find out if Trevor-Roper was right. And if Kempka wasn’t lying. Had Hitler fired a bullet into his mouth?

“Antimony?” Charlier asks.

“No,” Raphaël Weil replies.

“Lead?”

Raphaël says: “No, and no barium.”

This exchange of short phrases goes on for many minutes. Until the result of the last analysis.

“And?”

Charlier turns towards me. He had almost forgotten that I was there. My question surprises me. His “nothing” sounds like everything.

“Nothing!”

On the other hand, he is able to announce with certainty the end of the Hitler mystery.

Winter is about to fall like a languorous veil over Paris. Nearly two years of investigation are coming to an end.

Lana has stayed in Moscow. She is waiting.

I go to the Paris suburbs. Towards the west, just past Versailles, to Philippe Charlier’s medical anthropology and forensic laboratory at the university of Versailles-Saint-Quentin.

A grimacing face and bulging eyes that leave no doubt about his mood; the welcome is far from warm. All around us, other equally malevolent expressions, some of them sticking out their tongues as if summoning us to a sacrificial rite.

“So, this one comes from Oceania. The other one is from West Africa…” Philippe Charlier no longer knows where to put his masks and other totemic figures. His office looks more like the store-room of an imaginary museum of primitive art than the office of a forensic research scientist. Is it to help us remember that he is also an anthropologist?

A certain tension fills the office. Is it the doctor’s white coat or the worrying assemblage of indigenous tutelary figures around us? Unless it’s simply the exhaustion of those months of battles over a historical and political inquiry.

Philippe Charlier is sitting down, using the serious voice of those who are aware of the importance of the moment.

He begins: “Quite often the death of a historical figure is surrounded by mystery: people always imagine that the person isn’t dead, that they have escaped. People don’t like a classic death; it’s too simple, too ordinary. Forensic work seeks to separate the true from the false, and supply definitive conclusions in line with scientific developments. I apply the same seriousness and the same objectivity to a case pleaded in a courtroom and an archaeological case.”

A giant portrait of Henry IV rests on the floor, against the wall. It is a reconstruction made in 3D by Philippe Charlier’s team. The old French king seems to be listening impatiently.

“And?” I ask, just to bring his circumlocutions to an end. “The human remains stored in Moscow: are they Hitler’s or not?”

Not a sound. Then: “The skull, I don’t know.”

The visual examination carried out by Philippe Charlier, limited by the uncooperative attitude of the GARF teams, did not allow him to reach a conclusion: it was impossible to determine the age of that fragment of skull. Contrary to the declarations of Nicholas Bellantoni, the retired American archaeologist at the University of Connecticut, the extent of the sutures is not an indication of whether that piece of skull belonged to a young person. Philippe Charlier is categorical. The x-rays of Hitler’s face made in the autumn of 1944 allowed him to contest the analysis of his American colleague. “In those x-rays, you can see the sutures at the top of Hitler’s skull,” he explains. “These sutures are quite wide apart. That is the proof that you can’t claim that because sutures are open they belong to a young individual. It’s an argument that doesn’t hold water.” As you may remember, Nick Bellantoni explained in 2009 that: “The bone seemed to be very thin,” the American archaeologist says. “Male bone tends to be more robust, and the sutures where the skull plates come together seem to correspond to someone under forty.” [70] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqrrjzfnsVY

Philippe Charlier insists: “The skull belongs to an adult. Full stop. On the other hand. I do know about the teeth. They’re Hitler’s!”

I go on: “Are you a hundred per cent certain?”

“In forensic science, we don’t like to give figures for our results, but we are certain that this isn’t a historical forgery. And we are certain that there is an anatomical match between the x-rays, the descriptions of the autopsies, the accounts of the witnesses, mainly those who made and manufactured those dental prostheses, and the reality that we have held in our hands. All of these analyses taken together confirm to us that the remains examined are those of Adolf Hitler, who died in Berlin in 1945. And all of this destroys the theories of his possible survival.”

And the bullet in the mouth? And the cyanide?

Did the bits of dental tartar allow him to answer those two questions? Was the British theory in 1945 about Hitler’s death erroneous? Was Trevor-Roper mistaken?”

“The chemical analysis of the surface of dental tartar has enabled us to look for traces of metals that are found when a shot has been fired into the mouth. Normally there are combustion gases, gunpowder, incandescence deposited in the oral cavity, the tongue, the mucous membrane… and therefore in the tartar. But we have found nothing.”

So Hitler didn’t fire a bullet into his mouth!

Kempka lied when he said that Günsche, the aide-de-camp, had mimed the gesture of a pistol being fired into his mouth. Even Günsche stated in 1956, when questioned by the German court, that Kempka had made everything up. Here is his deposition:

I rule out the possibility that Hitler fired a bullet into his mouth. I would also like to insist that I have never spoken to anyone in the bunker about the way that Hitler fired a bullet into his head and under what circumstances. I only told certain people present that Hitler had shot himself and that his body had been burned. [71] Munich State Archives (Staatsarchiv München), op. cit.

We had to wait for over half a century to prove Günsche right, and confirm that Hitler did not shoot himself in the mouth. And right beyond any possible doubt. Science triumphs over all the witness statements taken together, over emotion, over attempts at manipulation. And it confirms the version repeated several times by the man who first discovered the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun: Heinz Linge, the dictator’s loyal valet. During the interrogations carried out by the Soviets, in the interviews given to the newspapers, to the radio stations and television channels, in his memoirs published after his death in 1980, it’s always the same scenario: “When I came in, on my left, I saw Hitler. He was in the right-hand corner of the sofa… Hitler’s head was tilted slightly forward. On his right temple there was a hole the size of a ten-cent coin.” [72] Ibid.

And the cyanide?

And the blue traces on the teeth?

Philippe Charlier has to admit his helplessness. Those blue traces are surprising, startling, and most importantly, disconcerting.

But the scientist can’t go any further without taking a sample of the teeth kept in Moscow. Alexander Orlov claims it’s impossible. For his part, Dmitri confirmed to Lana that she had to move on to something else.

Switch to a new inquiry.

“They told me that no analysis will be carried out.” Lana herself told me that we could hope for nothing else for now. “They just wanted proof that the teeth belonged to Hitler. Now that it’s done they’re closing everything up again.”

But what if we had concluded that they weren’t his?

My question, rhetorical though it was, made Lana freeze: “That would have been a big problem for Russia.”