Declassified Report: Hitler's Traces and Why Smersh Didn't Take Him Alive

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The Russian military-historical society declassified the report of Marshal Zhukov to Stalin, how they were looking for traces of Hitler in the defeated Berlin. And why didn't Smersh take him alive.

It is always pleasant to touch an authentic historical document, especially concerning people and events about which everyone knows something.

The names of Victory Marshal Georgy Zhukov, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, his German "colleague" Adolf Hitler, who was not only the leader of the NSDAP, but also the chancellor, Reich propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels are known to everyone. It is these historical figures that appear in the document dated May 3, 1945, published by the Russian Military Historical Society (RVIO) on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the start of the Berlin strategic offensive operation of the Red Army. This is the report of Marshal Zhukov, who took Berlin the commander of the 1st Belorussian Front, to his Supreme Commander-in-Chief Stalin about the circumstances of the suicides of Hitler and Goebbels.

The details give a special relish to documents of this kind, which quickly appeared in the midst of turbulent events. In what has become public, this is, for example, the spelling of the surname of the main propagandist of the Third Reich and the most loyal associate of the Fuhrer with one "b" - "Goebels". And also encountered grammatical errors, because Soviet generals and marshals did not finish universities, although they knew how to fight well. And how gorgeous the "head" of the document looks: "Cipher telegram number 255. A very secret cipher. Making copies prohibited."

What did Zhukov write to Stalin?

With such precautions, Marshal Zhukov conveyed to the leader the data of the Smersh military counterintelligence agencies of the 79th Rifle Corps of the 3rd Shock Army, who rushed to find out the fate of the leaders of the defeated Reich from their captive entourage, who showed that “Hitler shot himself on April 30, but they do not know the place, but Goebels and his wife committed suicide on May 1 this year."

While descending into the underground of Goebbels, at the entrance to his office, the burnt corpses of a man and a woman were found, in which … Goebbels and his wife were immediately identified. Additionally, they summoned Bartkevich, who worked for the Ministry of Propaganda for four years, Bartkevich, who also identified Gebels and his wife. No documents were found with the corpses, but folders with various documents were found in Goebels' office, which were sealed and taken under protection,

- reported Zhukov.

To confirm the received data, the report goes on to Stalin, it was ordered on the morning of May 3 "to present the bodies to five captured generals, document their testimony, photograph the corpses, study in detail the situation in the shelter and establish the cause of the corpses being burned, after which it will be reported to you additionally."

The Goebbels family committed suicide in the Fuehrerbunker, there is no doubt about that, but Hitler obviously escaped - the Red Army men were photographed there with his dead counterparts. Photo: Mary Evans Picture Library / Globallookpress

In addition, according to the marshal, "at the same time, measures were taken to locate Hitler's place of residence and a detailed study of all information on Hitler's suicide."

Let's pay attention to the end of the text - Zhukov is not at all sure that the Fuhrer really committed suicide. Goebbels is another matter. With this croaker, everything is clear - he took his own life along with his entire large family, everyone is identified, everything is in order.

"Where is Hitler's corpse?"

This report on the alleged fate of Hitler is not the first sent by the Marshal to Moscow. On the morning of May 1, 1945, an extremely important telegram on four pages of typewritten text left the headquarters of the 1st Belorussian Front for the Supreme Command Headquarters. In it, the front commander informed Stalin about a dispatch from the Imperial Chancellery, signed by Bormann and Goebbels, which was handed over to the Soviet command by General Krebs, who spoke well in Russian and knew Zhukov personally before the war (with the identification of the remains of the ex-German military the attaché in Moscow also had no problems).

It was then that Stalin uttered his famous phrase: “Got bad luck, scoundrel. It’s a pity that we didn’t manage to take him alive.” But just a few seconds later, the Generalissimo suspected a catch: "Where is Hitler's body?" He did not believe in the death of the Fuhrer.

Marshal Zhukov until the end of his life did not understand Stalin's attitude to the disappearance of Hitler, but he pretended to understand. Photo: Russian Look / Globallookpress

And already on May 2, TASS officially announced to the whole world about the doubts of the USSR about this:

… by spreading the statement about Hitler's death, the German fascists apparently hope to give Hitler the opportunity to leave the scene and go into an illegal position.

On May 4 - the day after Zhukov's declassified report was written - Stalin declared in his office to Generals Antonov and Shtemenko: one should not believe the reports of Hitler's death.

On May 9, Zhukov himself admitted:

The situation is very mysterious … We did not find the identified body of Hitler. I cannot say anything in the affirmative about the fate of Hitler. At the very last minute, he could fly out of Berlin, since the runways allowed him to do this.

On May 26, at a meeting in Moscow with the special ambassador of the new US President Harry Truman, Harry Hopkins, according to the latter's report, Stalin suggested that "Hitler probably hid with Bormann", having escaped retribution in one of the "3-4 large submarines" that the Nazis had, and he does not believe that the body found in the Berlin bunker belongs to Hitler.

On June 12, the Pravda newspaper wrote that Hitler should be sought in Spain or in South America - right up to Patagonia. So for the first time in the USSR this geographical name was publicly used in relation to Hitler. It was there, as established by Western researchers, that Adolf Hitler was hiding mainly after the war.

On July 17, at a meeting in Potsdam with the new US President Harry Truman and Secretary of State Byrnes, Stalin confirmed: Hitler fled either in Spain or Argentina …

Confession of Leonid Ivashov

What is this, paranoia? It cannot be denied that the Soviet leader had it, but in this case it is not at all about her. It's just that Stalin was very well informed. Therefore, his initial suspicions about staging the suicide of Hitler, who had doubles, quickly turned into confidence, and soon, apparently, specific information was added. Incidentally, he did not believe in the death of the Fuhrer and who replaced Winston Churchill as British Prime Minister - and openly declared this - Clement Attlee, whom no one had ever suspected of paranoia.

Periodically emerging since then, genuine declassified intelligence of the American and British special services confirms that this was not a secret for Western politicians, and, therefore, for Stalin too. Although in Russia it is still officially believed that "there is no doubt about the death of Hitler," and even claim that there are fragments of his jaw and skull in Moscow.

People who know the subject have no confidence in this version. Especially after the recognition of Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, who was at one time the head of the secretariat of the Minister of Defense and the former Stalinist People's Commissar Dmitry Ustinov. The latter refused Ivashov's proposal to expose the skulls of Hitler and Eva Braun by May 9, Victory Day, for public display, confidentially admitting that these were not the skulls …

Constantinople wrote a lot and repeatedly about this superdetective story, part of which is Zhukov's now declassified report to Stalin on May 3. The Internet has it all.

Now I would like to draw attention to only three points: how and where did Hitler fled from Berlin besieged by the Red Army, where Smersh was unsuccessfully looking for him, how the Fuhrer succeeded and why Moscow has been officially silent about this and is still silent about it.

How it was?

At the end of April, Hitler and his wife Eva Braun, accompanied by several persons, secretly left the Fuehrerbunker. Their place was taken by doubles trained by the second man in the Reich, Martin Bormann, who were killed. Through the metro tunnels, the fugitives reached the only runway under German control. There a plane was waiting for them, on which they flew to a small Danish town near the German border, then also reached Travemunde in the not yet occupied north of Germany by air. From there, on another plane, a long-distance flight was made across all of Europe - to the Spanish Air Force base near Barcelona. Then on a Spanish plane - to Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands. After a short rest at the Villa Winter, the Führer and his entourage rode a German submarine to Argentina, whose government was sympathetic to the Nazis, and where a huge and politically influential German community lived.

For several decades, Hitler settled in Northern Patagonia, the nature and climate of which are very similar to the Bavarian-Austrian. He lived on the shore of the lake in an estate near the town of San Carlos de Bariloche, where in 1947, according to the novel "Position" by Julian Semyonov, who knew many secrets from his high-ranking friends in the KGB, Standartenfuehrer Stirlitz appeared, that is, apparently, its prototype. Completely not fictional characters actually lived there, so much inherited in their lives that their names are still heard.

This is SS Hauptsturmführer Erich Priebke. The most decorated ace of the Luftwaffe, "Stuka pilot" Oberst Hans-Ulrich Rudel. SS Hauptsturmführer "Angel of Death" Josef Mengele. SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Adolf Eichmann (he was kidnapped and sentenced to death in Israel when he moved to Buenos Aires). SS Hauptsturmführer Aribert Heim, "Doctor Death" from the Mauthausen concentration camp. Hitler's deputy for the party, Martin Bormann, who allegedly died in Germany in the last days of the war, also often visited there. In general, the Fuehrer had a "pleasant" company.

The Nazis flourished in Argentina until 1955, when President Juan Domingo Perón was in power. With him, as they write in their famous research book “The Gray Wolf. The Flight of Adolf Hitler”historian Simon Dunsten and journalist Gerard Williams, the Fuhrer almost openly traveled around the country, signed books, he was recognized, and met in neighboring countries, in one of which he then disappeared.

Because since the beginning of 1962, traces of it have been lost in Argentina. Most likely, Hitler moved to Paraguay, where the German-born dictator Alfredo Stroessner was in power until 1989, and where the Fuhrer lived in deep isolation until the early 70s. Not everything is clear about the last years of his life.

How did the Fuhrer manage to become a "rentier"?

Hitler's transformation into a Nazi "rentier" became possible because his regime, sending millions of Germans to the front to die, bought off the Western "democracies" with a "weapon of retaliation", which was nevertheless created by the Nazis, but not used. And also the transfer of unique samples of weapons, nuclear fuel, heavy water, breakthrough technologies, patents and thousands of specialists led by the SS Sturmbannfuehrer and the future "father" of the American space program, Wernher von Braun. In addition, by handing over priceless works of art taken "hostage", plundered throughout Europe and something else.

And so that the USSR would keep mum, and its scouts would not drag Hitler in a cage to Moscow from distant places, the Germans shared the same with us. It is this version that best explains why thousands of the best German scientists allegedly went to the USSR, many of whom had SS uniforms, headed by the "favorite physicist of the Fuehrer", Knight's Cross Knight's Cross, Standartenfuehrer Baron von Ardenne. In record time, they helped the USSR to do something that would otherwise have taken years, which the country did not have.

This Standartenfuehrer and "Hitler's favorite physicist" received two Stalin prizes in the USSR after the war. Photo: Scherl / Globallookpress

Reporting on the results of the work of the NKVD commission on the territory of Germany on May 14, 1945, that is, practically at the same time when Smersh was frantically looking for Hitler, the deputy chairman of the USSR State Defense Committee, the curator of the Soviet nuclear project Lavrenty Beria told Stalin that a "world-renowned scientist" Baron von Ardenne, who heads the fully preserved private institute, expressed his desire to "work only with Russian physicists and leave the institute and himself at the disposal of the Soviet government." Gustav Hertz, Nikolaus Riehl, Max Steenbeck, Karl Zimmer, Robert Doppel, Peter Thiessen and many other outstanding German scientists who did not sympathize with the USSR did the same. Nevertheless, the baron and his team worked for ten years in a state security sanatorium near Sukhumi, making a decisive contribution to the appearance of the atomic bomb in the USSR in time, which saved the country and the world, and at the same time earning two Stalin prizes.

This is why Smersh was unable to catch Hitler

The "guarantor" of the loyal cooperation of German scientists with "allies" who quickly became enemies was in many ways the Argentine "rentier", and the guarantee was his security. Behind this was the idea, quite understandable to the Germans, that if there are two nuclear powers in the world, then their war between themselves, which could finally destroy Germany, because it would have been fought, first of all, on its territory, becomes practically impossible. Is it any wonder after this that in Nuremberg the Allies did not judge Hitler even in absentia?

Therefore, Smersh and other Soviet special services were never able to find the Fuhrer, and Stalin, abandoning sweet revenge in the name of higher state interests, did not include Hitler among the defendants at the Nuremberg trials, knowing full well that he was alive, where he was and how he got there. … Remember his words - Spain, submarines, Argentina, Patagonia? Ex-SS Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler, who allegedly committed suicide immediately after the war under extremely suspicious circumstances, was not tried in Nuremberg either. Alas, history is a crime and has nothing to do with morality.