When "Newsweek" magazine published an article named 'Adolf Hitler's Double', in its 13 March 1939 issue, the editors were only repeating an opinion that was already widely acknowledged by the Allies.
TIME Magazine
GERMANY: Double Hitler
Monday, 8 July 1935
"Adolf Hitler last week became the first Dictator frankly to employ a double. Impersonating the Realmleader, a pudgy-fingered, smudge-mustached person officially opened the new motor highway from Holzkirchen to Munich. Suddenly the crowd recognized Dictator Hitler standing unobtrusively a few yards from his double and good-natured German cheers were given first for one, then for the other".
According to a recent Russian story, "Göbbels had engaged six doubles to impersonate Hitler for purposes of security and public appearances. After the capitulation of the Third Reich, Hitler had to die for the sake of vindication. There could be no doubt of his death".
Zarah Leander, a favorite friend and singer of the Führer, told Leni Riefensthal that: "Yes, Hitler had doubles, even Eva Braun had her counterpart, there are no doubts about it".
Despite the Intelligence reports, many Western historians continued to maintain that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin underground Bunker on 30 April 1945.
Ironically, it was not the evidence provided by Russia that convinced them, but the testimony of the obsessively devoted Nazis who were also present in the Chancellery Bunker when Hitler allegedly killed himself. Here is where their futile pretence became a matter of imprudence: For they were primarily the very same historians who insisted that the body shown in the annoying Russian photos was a Doppelgänger killed by those Nazis in the Berlin Bunker who wanted to thwart Allied investigators.
Behind the Soviet troops rolling bloody battles for each Berlin street, SMERSH's special troops advanced. This counter-Intelligence name created in 1943 was short for "spier smiert" or "death to spies". In Berlin, SMERSH was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Klimenko. His task was to find out what happened to Hitler and Eva Braun.
Klimenko arranged his quarters in the Plötzensee Prison, where prisoners captured in the Reichstag and the Reich Chancellery were brought. From them, he learned about Hitler's death.
This was also testified to by Vice-Admiral Hans-Erich Voss: On 30 April, Voss was among the group of officers whom Hitler informed that he had decided to commit suicide rather than attempt to escape from Berlin, which was surrounded by the Red Army.
Johann Rattenhuber, later testified:
"In Hitler's reception room at 10 o'clock in the morning there assembled Generals Burgdorf and Krebs, Admiral Voss, Hitler's personal pilot General Hans Baur, Standartenführer Georg Beetz, ObersturmbannführerPeter Högl, his personal servant Sturmbannführer Heinz Linge, Otto Günsche and myself.
"He came out to us and said: 'I have decided to abandon this life. Thank you for your good and honest service. Try to escape from Berlin with the troops. I am staying here'. Saying goodbye he shook hands with each of us".
Voss also stated, "I left Berlin with Führer's adjutant [Günsche], telling me Hitler committed suicide, and his corpse was buried in the garden of the Reich's Chancellery".
Klimenko drove to the Bunker later: "We went down into the Bunker, inside it was dark".
Voss was acting strangely nervous, muttering something under his breath, and they went out to the surface to the garden near the emergency exit. Voss shouted, "There is Hitler!" pointing to a large empty fire hydrant tank, filled with human corpses, and they came closer. Voss leaned over one corpse. "This is Hitler," he said.
After a moment, Voss hesitated, "I can not say that this is Hitler sure".
Gustav Weler was a political decoy [Doppelgänger or Body-double] of Adolf Hitler. [1] At the end of the Second World War, he was executed by a gunshot to the forehead in an attempt to confuse the Allied troops when Berlin was taken. He was also used "as a decoy for security reasons". [2] When his corpse was discovered in the Reichs Chancellery garden by Soviet troops, it was mistakenly believed to be that of Hitler because of his identical moustache and haircut. The corpse was also photographed and filmed by the Soviets.
One servant from the Bunker declared that the dead man was one of Hitler's cooks. He also believed this man "had been assassinated because of his startling likeness to Hitler, while the latter had escaped from the ruins of Berlin". [3]
It wasn’t until days after that the Russian’s found out that they had been fooled by a ruse. Weler was wearing socks with holes in them and his dental records, obviously, did not match Hitler’s teeth.
According to Klimenko, "We do not know what he was doing in the Bunker, why he was wearing Hitler's jacket and why he was killed".
Weler's body was brought to Moscow for investigations and buried in the yard at Lefortovo prison. [4]
However, British surgeon and author W. Hugh Thomas reported in his 1996 book "Doppelgängers: The Truth About the Bodies in the Berlin Bunker" that Gustav Weler was found alive after the war and was interviewed by an Allied commission to establish Adolf Hitler's fate. So that corpse found by the Russians was a further double.
Reports now circulate in Russia that an actor, Andreas Kronstädt, was the impersonator who had volunteered to die in Hitler’s place.
This was the theme of the 1996 film, "Conversation with the Beast", directed by one of Fassbinder’s followers, Armin Müller-Stahl.
References
1. Petrova, Peter Watson. "The Death of Hitler". W. W. Norton & Company.
2. The Houston Chronicle 17 September 1992
3. The New York Times, 9 May 1945
4. The Times. London [UK]: 20 September 1992.
We were therefore expected to believe that after committing the outright murder of a double for the purpose of obstructing justice, our Nazi Bunker guests were nonetheless quite frank and honest in their eye-witness accounts of what really became of Adolf Hitler.
Hence, one witness reported seeing a gunshot wound in Hitler's mouth, while others claimed it was near the corner of his eye [some even hinted that Hitler's butler strangled him and forced a cyanide capsule into his mouth].
Pick a card, any card.
One witness described finding the body of Hitler perched limp next to a dead Eva Braun on an elongated, upholstered sofa. But another found Hitler's corpse sitting alone near a corner, on a chair by himself.
Mix and match.
Hitler's one-day marriage to Eva Braun was another sentimental enticement, orchestrated to win our naïve confidence. For only a worm could marry a lovely woman, just to poison her a few hours later, and then escape with a Doppelgänger's charred corpse left in his place. The unhappy couple, together at last.
The fact that a maid admitted seeing a Hitler look-alike confined to the butler's pantry area was not considered to be of great consequence. A question mark near the water pipes? And the murder of the Doppelgänger was just another war technicality.
Who did it? No doubt it was one -or all- of our Bunker guests. They would not stop even at murder to perpetrate their Führer's cover-up. But by now, the world was totally convinced of their honest integrity and humble desire to satisfy our secret wish that Hitler should not have escaped justice.
Establishment historians assured us that Adolf Hitler committed suicidein his Berlin Bunker, shortly after exchanging marriage vows with Eva Braun. No bullet was ever found. But that does not matter. The blood stains on the sofa were reportedly of the wrong blood-type. But such details need not concern us. Hitler's entire body apparently vanished into thin air. But at least we found his teeth, in the garden.
Dental assistants apparently identified them from X-Rays made public in 1968. And what was the actual point of murdering the Doppelgänger on the floor?
What was that cover-up about if Hitler had already left a legally written will; a historical document, stating that his body was to be "immediately destroyed" by fire?
We never thought of that.
But since we must believe in something, our Chancellery Bunker guests were ingenious enough to embellish us with such an entwined mass of information and confused additions that we could now produce our own personal interpretations of history; our own special views of faith. Indeed, an entire library of books may be filled with eye-witness accounts and so-called proofs of Hitler's suicide.
Most of the new printed works were merely rehashed Berlin Bunker testimonies, smoothed out to make a bit more sense, and hopefully convince us by their sheer size of whatever we seriously hope is true. But as Col. W. F. Heimlich, former Chief of U.S. Intelligence, commented: "Upon reviewing the actual facts, not a single insurance company would ever pay out a cent to similar claims based on such scant, non-conclusive evidence".
With certainty, the world was lied to about Hitler's death.
What sort of cover-up was the actual purpose behind the murder of Hitler's double?
The most prevalent opinion is that the true motive was for Hitler to escape: According to the "Washington Post", the US Office of Censorship intercepted a letter in July 1945 written from someone in Washington. Addressed to a Chicago newspaper, the letter claimed that Hitler was living in a German-owned Hacienda 450 miles from Buenos Aires. The US government gave this report enough credibility to act on it, sending a classified telegram to the American embassy in Argentina requesting help in following up the inquiry.
In his 1995 book "The Greatest Illusion: The Death [?] of Adolf Hitler," Australian historian Fred C. McKenzie summarizes how Stalin was adamant in his conviction that Adolf Hitler still lived. In August of 1945, Stalin personally accused the British of "concealing the real, living Adolf Hitler in their sector of Berlin".
A similar inquiry currently being published by Oberbaum Verlag in Germany is "Hitler's Double" by Walter Laufenberg,an award winning German author who has written and published several novels.
The noted British surgeon Hugh Thomas is chief spokesman for the growing opinion that not only Adolf Hitler had a Doppelgänger, but also Rudolf Hess and Heinrich Himmler.
Perhaps all of the top Reich leaders kept look-alikes as part of a master contingency plan to escape unnoticed should the need arise. Dr. Thomas' Doppelgänger theory was finally investigated by Scotland Yard and the final report now remains hidden from the public. A hundred-year ban has been imposed on key facts concerning the so-called deaths of certain Reich leaders.
Surprisingly, the tell-tale fingerprint issue was not such a serious problem in the early days of Nazism. Although various anthropologists and novelists had toyed with the idea of fingerprints as a form of identification in the 1800s, it was not until 1924 that an act of congress established the Identification Division of the FBI. But by then, Hitler already led the Nazi party. And later of course, the Reich maintained full control over all fingerprints kept in Germany's files. Hitler's burnt corpse had no surface skin to yield fingerprints.
In the end, only Hitler's false teeth, found with the Chancellery garden corpse fragments, provided some evidence to satisfy the strict terms imposed by most modern insurance companies.
And that was still highly questionable, because a patient's bridgework could easily be reproduced by an experienced dentist and deliberately placed almost anywhere.
Elena Revskaia, who served as a translator for one of the SMERSH units, responsible for finding Hitler, alive or dead, was present at the discovery of the Hitler and Eva Braun corpses, in the Imperial Chancellery court. Only Josef Stalin had been informed. He had been given a detailed report on 16 June 1945, of all the actions of SMERSH, related to the discovery of Hitler alive or dead.
But the Soviet leadership did not issue a communiqué on this issue, leaving its army and secret services to search for Hitler, who had already been rumored to have been seen throughout Latin America.
The main reason why the identification of the body was not recognized was precisely the uncertainty that they discovered the real Hitler. Hitler's golden dental work does did not provide a guarantee, because it is known that when a leader chooses a double, he must suffer all of the "original" surgery.
The key suspects of a possible cover-up in the Berlin Bunker were Heinz Linge, Hitler's valet, Otto Günsche, Hitler's Adjutant, Hans Baur, his personal pilot and Johann Rattenhuber, the Chief of Bodyguards.
They were all vigorously trained to guard Hitler's personal secrets, even under the threat of torture and death. And they would not hesitate to kill a Doppelgänger to complete their Chancellery cover-up. However there was still one entity they could not easily deceive or trick: the polygraph or lie-detector test.
An instrument capable of continuously recording blood pressure, respiration, and pulse rate was devised by John Larson in 1921, followed by the polygraph [1926] of Leonarde Keeler, and the psychogalvanometer [1936] of Walter Summers, which measured electrical changes on the skin. Because instruments were able to record bodily changes resulting from the telling of a lie,
it is likely that certain testimonies, as witnessed by those in the Bunker, were absolutely true.
Perhaps for this reason, no one actually saw Adolf Hitler shoot himself. They could only be called upon to describe what they did to dispose of the dead body. Whose corpse they actually burned in the garden was a matter of recognition, especially if Hitler's double was an exact look-alike. In this way, even a lie-detector test could be beaten.
Certainly, some of the Bunker guests presumably could not establish the difference between Hitler and his Doppelgänger.
During the first weeks of the year 2000, a Russian news broadcast sparked fresh interest in Adolf Hitler's Bunker suicide.
The broadcast, following reports by former Soviet Intelligence agents who claim to have buried the remains of Hitler and his wife Eva Braun in Magdeburg, Germany, said that much evidence was officially ignored at the time, and that the buried remains may not be of the German leader after all.
The Russian autopsy report said that the male body had only one testicl*. Aides reportedly had doused the corpse with gasoline and burned it to prevent the body from falling into Soviet hands. Its disappearance prompted reports that Hitler may have escaped. The Soviet autopsy report, first published in 1968, reads in part:
"[T]he genital member is scorched. In the scrotum, which was singed but not preserved, only the right testicl* was found".
The fact that over half a century hadpassed without an authorized inquiry or official explanation as to why the male body had only one testicl* finally persuaded Russian investigators of a post-war cover-up.
The broadcast suggested that the burnt remains may not be of the Nazi dictator.
