The Disturbing Details Of Hitler's Death Scene

A bloody couch, tattered documents, and  bone fragments — Adolf Hitler left little behind when he ended his life after losing  World War II. Here's what history remembers. World War II was a conflict that saw millions  slaughtered and displaced across Europe and beyond. Nations such as France and Poland  were devastated by aggression from Germany, which had been ruled since 1933 by the fascist  and expansionist Nazi Party. However, 1944 saw a decisive shift in the fortunes in the conflict,  with

the allied forces of the United States, United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and  France beginning to make inroads into Germany itself. Historians have highlighted  the Battle of Stalingrad as a turning point: the moment when the Nazis saw their  plan of maintaining two battlefronts in the East and West fall to pieces. In  January 1945, with greater and greater swaths of the country falling under enemy  occupation, the senior Nazis recognized that a sustained ground assault on Berlin,  the center

of the Nazi world, was imminent. As 1945 commenced and battles began to rage  throughout a crumbling Berlin, the Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, found that his fascist empire had  shrunk to nothing. Since becoming Chancellor of Germany, Hitler had taken as his primary residence  the Reich Chancellery, a sumptuous palace in the center of Berlin. But as artillery fire became  more frequent, Hitler and his inner circle were restricted increasingly to the Führerbunker,  a 3,000-square-foot network of roo

ms 50 feet below the surface. Here, too, Hitler would die  by suicide alongside his wife of a single day, Eva Braun, though much of the evidence was  cleared before the arrival of Allied forces. Adolf Hitler spent 105 days living almost  completely below ground during the collapse of Nazi Germany. Despite being built primarily  as an artillery defense and characterized by the slate grey concrete in which it was encased,  the Führerbunker was surprisingly luxurious, including dining rooms, a sump

tuous study for  the Nazi leader, and a conference room. It was here that Hitler married his lover Eva  Braun shortly after midnight on April 29, as Berlin was pounded by artillery  strikes by the advancing Allied forces. Senior Nazis Joseph Goebbels and Martin  Bormann were witnesses at the ceremony. They were part of a dwindling circle of  loyalists who were willing to remain in Berlin as the city became encircled. Most  of Hitler's former allies had left Berlin, but the wedding party, it seem

s, was  preparing to go down with the ship. "The war is over. Six years of  suffering, sacrifice and death." The following day, Hitler and Braun entered  the Nazi leader's study and failed to emerge. They were found slumped together on a couch,  which was stained with blood from a gunshot wound at Hitler's temple. Braun's body  was said to smell strongly of almonds, a sign that she had taken a cyanide pill, one of  which had hours earlier been tested on Hitler's dog, Blondi. Other dogs in the bu

nker were  also killed. Goebbels and his wife died by suicide in the bunker, arranging the murders  of their six children, also in the bunker, before they ended their own lives. Bormann  died on the surface attempting to flee Berlin. The suicidal end of Nazi Germany came immediately  after news broke that the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini, a key ally of the Nazis,  had been shot to death. He died at the hands of partisans who posthumously strung him  from a lamppost and desecrated his

body. Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels' suicides were  carried out to avoid a similarly brutal fate. But Hitler was also keen to avoid having his  dead body fall into Allied possession. As such, he ordered that his and Eva Braun's corpses  be burned in the Reich Chancellery garden following their double suicide, an order  which his loyalists carried out. When Soviet soldiers arrived at the Chancellery, they  searched the connected bunkers extensively in the hope of finding Hitler's corpse,  but

didn't find it. All that is believed to remain of him is a fragment of cranium  with a bullet hole and a piece of jawbone, the latter of which was confirmed as Hitler's  using dental records. Soldiers also discovered a pile of gasoline cans which were believed  to have been used to torch the bodies. "If Hitler wasn't going to survive the war, he needed to sort of martyr  himself for the Nazi cause." After the conclusion of the war, the Allies  went on to conduct extensive inquiries into the work

ings of Nazi Germany. They took little  evidence from the bunker itself: Hitler's personal safe had been emptied of documents,  which were then burned. So were documents belonging to Goebbels and other loyalists,  preventing them from falling into enemy hands. Little knowledge of the exact circumstances of  Adolf Hitler's death made it into the press until well after the end of World War II. The absence  of his corpse fueled numerous conspiracy theories, and some suggest he actually escaped the 

bunker along with several other senior Nazis. But photos later emerged from the interior of  the bunker that shed light on Hitler's final days. Sofa cushions and upturned furniture lay  haphazardly among the dust and debris. Troops examined the death scene by candlelight, examining  a couch on which Hitler's blood was still visible. Some items from inside the bunker, like fabric  from the bloodied couch, tattered documents, and telephones later found their way into  museum collections. Hitler's

suicide pistol has never been found and is assumed to have  been taken by a soldier as a souvenir. The Reich Chancellery and the bunker were destroyed  with dynamite in the years that followed.