FSB opened archives about Hitler's suicide and the last days of the Third Reich

The Office of the Federal Security Service of Russia in the Ivanovo region on Wednesday, April 30, declassified archival documents regarding the suicide of Adolf Hitler, the study of his and Eva Braun's bodies and the last days of the Third Reich. The agency's statement is available to Izvestia.

In particular, it follows from the documents that operatives of the Smersh task force detained several people from Hitler's inner circle. Among them: Commander of the Berlin defense, General of Artillery Helmut Weidling; Hitler's personal pilot and commander of a government squadron, SS Gruppenfuhrer and police Lieutenant General Hans Baur; head of the Reich Security Service, SS Gruppenfuhrer and Police Lieutenant General Hans Rattenhuber, and others.

On May 5, 1945, in the garden of the Imperial Chancellery, Smersh employees found the badly burned corpses of a man and a woman in an aerial bomb crater. The corpses were located 3 m from the entrance to the bomb shelter and covered with a layer of earth.

"On May 8, 1945, the conclusion of a forensic medical examination of a man's corpse, presumably belonging to Hitler, was ready. In particular, the experts carefully examined "the jaws with a large number of artificial bridges, crowns and fillings," the documents say.

After the testimony of the assistant to Hitler's personal dentist, Kete Goizerman, and dental technician Fritz Echtmann, it was confirmed that the discovered body belonged to Hitler.

"Each of them was individually presented with jaws removed from the male skull for identification. Goizerman and Ehtman unhesitatingly admitted that the jaws belonged to Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler," the conclusion says.

As a result of their work, the military counterintelligence officers were able to reconstruct the events that took place in the Fuhrerbunker from April 20 to April 30, 1945, and establish the circumstances of Hitler's suicide.

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Earlier, on April 7, the Yeltsin Library declassified Hitler's plans for cooperation with the United States. The declassified archive is posted under the heading "Memo from the People's Commissar of State Security of the USSR V.N. Merkulov to I.V. Stalin on the attempts of German representatives to establish contact with representatives of Great Britain and the United States in Ireland."