LizzieMaine
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Stalin used his SMERSH agency to keep the specifics of what happened to Hitler's body under cover for a very deliberate reason -- although Zhukov would no doubt have preferred to drive down the Unter den Linden with Adolf's peeled skull for a hood ornament, Stalin wanted to keep the Western powers off balance as the Cold War was taking hold. If they could be encouraged to believe that Hitler was alive, or even just that he *might* be alive, Stalin believed he could use that belief to his advantage in negotiations with the west. A lot of deliberate misinformation was spread thru SMERSH during the late forties toward that end.
FBI documents shouldn't necessarily be taken at face value. The agency under Hoover kept a record of every single bit of odd information its agents gathered, every single rumor no matter how absurd. It's natural that would be hundreds of pages of documents like this about Hitler, because every barbershop magazine and streetcorner loafer in 1946 had an opinion about what really happened to him. Much of the FBI file is merely a collation of this type of fantastic speculation, some of which was given a "just in case" investigation. Hoover may well have believed some of it himself, given his own conspiracy-minded paranoia.
Hitler's entire FBI file, including the postwar rumors about his death, can be downloaded by anyone from the FBI website.
A complete English translation of the SMERSH autopsy report on the male body recovered from the Chancellery garden shell hole, as published by Soviet historian Lev Bezymenski in 1968 is available here. While the usual Cold War caveats apply, it's signficiant, I think, that this document was kept top secret by the Soviet authorites for more than twenty years after Hitler's death. And I can't help but also point out that, according to the autopsy report, that satirical British song about monorchidism was right.
FBI documents shouldn't necessarily be taken at face value. The agency under Hoover kept a record of every single bit of odd information its agents gathered, every single rumor no matter how absurd. It's natural that would be hundreds of pages of documents like this about Hitler, because every barbershop magazine and streetcorner loafer in 1946 had an opinion about what really happened to him. Much of the FBI file is merely a collation of this type of fantastic speculation, some of which was given a "just in case" investigation. Hoover may well have believed some of it himself, given his own conspiracy-minded paranoia.
Hitler's entire FBI file, including the postwar rumors about his death, can be downloaded by anyone from the FBI website.
A complete English translation of the SMERSH autopsy report on the male body recovered from the Chancellery garden shell hole, as published by Soviet historian Lev Bezymenski in 1968 is available here. While the usual Cold War caveats apply, it's signficiant, I think, that this document was kept top secret by the Soviet authorites for more than twenty years after Hitler's death. And I can't help but also point out that, according to the autopsy report, that satirical British song about monorchidism was right.