Hitler's
Skull Fragment Displayed By Anna Dolgov
Associated Press
Writer MOSCOW --
What officials
claim is a fragment of Adolf
Hitler's skull went on display
Wednesday, along with documents revealing
what happened to the dictator's remains
after they were seized by Soviet troops in
1945.  The
four-inch fragment -- with a hole where a
bullet reportedly exited through the left
temple -- was displayed under thick glass
at Russia's Federal Archives Service. The
exhibition, called "The Agony of the Third
Reich: The Retribution," was timed to mark
the 55th anniversary next month of the
defeat of Nazi Germany.
The piece of skull and the jaw are the
only surviving remains of Hitler's body,
according to officials at the archive
service and at the Federal Security
Service, or FSB, the main successor of the
KGB. Photographs of the jaw went on display
Wednesday. But the jaw itself, with the
dental work tßhat originally allowed
the Soviets to identify Hitler's body, is
still in secret archives. "The jaw is the main piece of evidence"
in the decades-old Soviet investigation
into Hitler's death," said Yakov
Pogony, head of the FSB archive
department. "And the main piece of
evidence must be preserved." After Hitler shot himself in his Berlin
bunker on April 30, 1945, his body was
taken outside by his staff, doused with
gasoline and set ablaze along with the
remains of his longtime companion, Eva
Braun. Soviet troops seized the remains when
they captured the bunker. But what
happened later has been shrouded in
mystery and speculation. Secret
communications between Soviet
counterintelligence units in Germany
and the government in Moscow tell of
repeated burials and exhumations of the
remains, and of their final destruction
by fire in 1970. According to the documents, which also
went on display Wednesday, the remains had
been kept by the counterintelligence unit
of the Soviet 3rd Army, part of an
intelligence organization called
SMERSH -- a Russian
acronym for "Death to Spies." The soldiers
buried and dug up the remains at least
three times in 1945-46 as the army moved
around Germany. They were finally interred on
SMERSH-controlled
grounds in Magdeburg, a town about 70
miles west of Berlin -- until the Soviet
government in 1970 ordered the remains be
dug up and burned, the documents say. The Magdeburg base was about to be
transferred to East German authorities,
and the Soviets feared "possible
construction or excavation work on this
territory that might lead to the discovery
of the remains," according to a report by
KGB boss Yuri Andropov. Hitler's jaw, however, had been removed
and brought to Moscow in 1945, to be
included as evidence in an investigation
into Hitler's death, said Sergei
Mironenko, head of Russia's State
Archive. The skull fragment was found separately
in 1946, when the Soviet secret police
opened a second investigation, prompted by
rumors that Hitler had survived. They
again dug up the hole outside Hitler's
bunker, Mironenko said. The fragment they
found was sent to Moscow. Russia announced it had the skull
fragment in 1993, and some Western experts
argued it was not Hitler's. But Mironenko
insisted his service had "no doubts that
it is authentic." "It is not just some bone we found in
the street, but a fragment of a skull that
was found in a hole where Hitler's body
had been buried," Mironenko said in an
interview. Still, the archives service has asked
Russia's Forensic Medicine Institute -- a
top agency for genetic testing -- to help
in positively identifying the skull
fragment, Mironenko conceded. So far, there seems to be no conclusive
evidence. "I have not seen any documents
providing evidence that this is the skull
of Hitler," said Alexander
Kalganov, an official at the FSB's
archives department. ©
Copyright 2000 The Associated
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