Recently, the film by Nick Belantoni "Hitler's Escape" appeared on the screens of the USA. According to the author of the film, the Fuhrer of the Third Reich managed to secretly escape from Berlin from the Soviet Army at the end of April 1945, hide in an unknown direction and escape punishment for serious crimesniya.
The film rests on one "discovery" made by Belantoni. He claimed that he was allowed to study the skull, which is stored in the FSB archive in Moscow and allegedly belonging to Hitler. He allegedly even managed to get the pieces of the skull, conduct their genetic study and find that the skull did not belong to a man, but to a woman. So a new sensation was born in addition to many of the old ones. Either Hitler escaped in a submarine to Latin America, then this boat was sunk, and a sealed bottle with a note was found in the sea, where it was said that the Fuhrer had drowned along with this boat, then his double was taken for Hitler, and the real Fuhrer allegedly disappeared. All these versions rested on shaky ground.
In Alexei Pushkov’s program “Post factum” on October 31, one of the responsible employees of the FSB archive denied the author of the film named that he was given the opportunity to conduct a genetic study of Hitler's skull and even take away fragments of it with him. It is also striking that the film completely ignored scientific research and numerous German memories of the events associated with the end of the Nazi Third Empire and its Fuhrer. The main thing for its creators, obviously, was to hit a big jackpot for a sensation. Such are the grimaces of the film market.
What really happened to Hitler at the end of April 1945? Did he manage to escape from his bunker in Berlin? On this score, I can share very interesting testimonies with the readers. In the 1960s, I worked as the scientific editor of the Voenno-Istoricheskiy Zhurnal and dealt mainly with topics of foreign military history. The editors, no doubt, were interested in the history of the end of the Third Empire. In the June issue of the magazine for 1960 my article "The Last Week of Fascist Germany" was published, and in June 1961 another article was published - "On the Wreckage of the Third Empire."
But many reliable facts about the end of Hitler's headquarters were lacking. And so in 1963, the idea arose to interview the former chairman of the State Security Committee, and later the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, General of the Army Serov. Decisive for the editorial board was that at the end of the war he was the NKVD commissioner for the 1st Belorussian Front and, of course, was initiated into all the mysteries of the death of the imperial chancellery of Nazi Germany, where Hitler's bunker was located.
The editors knew that Serov was removed in 1963 from the post of chief of the GRU in connection with the case of Colonel Penkovsky, bought by American and British intelligence services and causing great damage to the national interests of the Soviet Union. Only later did it become known that Penkovsky was Serov's favorite and even kept in touch with his family. As a result of this case, Serov was not only removed from the post of chief of the GRU, but also demoted to major general and appointed deputy commander of the Volga Military District for educational institutions.
It didn't matter to the editors of the magazine what happened to Serov. It was important to get from him a true picture of what happened during the fall of Berlin and the capture of Hitler's headquarters. Serov agreed to be interviewed, and I went to meet him in Kuibyshev. This is what he told me.
At the end of the war, he received personally from Stalin the assignment to create a special detachment to capture, alive or dead, the fascist leaders in Berlin. To carry out this operation, Serov created a detachment of 200 people. On April 31, 1945, the soldiers of the detachment came close to the imperial chancellery, where Hitler's headquarters was located, and on the night of May 2, when the Berlin garrison surrendered, they were the first to penetrate it.
In the courtyard of the headquarters, in a crater from an exploding bomb or shell, they found two charred corpses - a man and a woman. They were Hitler and Eva Braun. The fact that they were indeed them was confirmed by the captured personal aide-de-camp of Hitler, SS Sturmbannführer Otto Günsche and personal valet of the Fuhrer Heinz Linge. Gunsche, along with Hitler's chauffeur Erich Kempke, burned both corpses, pouring gasoline from car cans over them.
The burnt corpses of Goebbels and his wife Magda were also found nearby. The corpses of their six children, poisoned with incredible cruelty by their mother with potassium cyanide, lay in the bunker. They also found a dead Hitler double with a bullet in the head. A photograph of his corpse, lying in the courtyard of the imperial chancellery, was later widely circulated in print. The identification of Hitler's corpse was also confirmed on the basis of his medical record, seized in the bunker.
As Serov said, Hitler's corpse was soon secretly buried at the direction of Moscow for some time in the courtyard of the headquarters of the Soviet army, stationed in Frankfurt an der Oder. A table was dug into his grave, and Soviet soldiers played chess and dominoes on it, not knowing who was lying under their feet. During the Potsdam conference, Serov asked Stalin and Molotov if they would like to look at Hitler's corpse. But Stalin, he said, refused.
These are, in brief, information about the miserable end of the Fuehrer, which I gleaned from a conversation with General Serov. There is no reason not to trust them. Serov was responsible for their reliability with his head before Stalin.
Unfortunately, this interview was not published. A ban was imposed on its publication due to the fact that General Serov was in deep disgrace. In 1965, after Khrushchev was removed from power, he was even expelled from the party. There were a lot of things that connected him with the events of the Stalin era. There is evidence that he wrote memoirs. But it is still unknown where they are stored.
The captive Gunsche, as Serov said, was ordered to prepare something like a report or memoirs about life at Hitler's headquarters. He worked on these memories for many months, being in the Lubyanka in the building of the Ministry of State Security, and as a result created a work of about a thousand pages. It also recreated the picture of Hitler's death. Serov said that only members of the Politburo were allowed to read these memoirs, and they read them very willingly. An abridged version of the translation was specially prepared for them.
By some unknown means, this version, arbitrarily abbreviated by the translator, was published in the Federal Republic of Germany several years ago. Someone probably made a lot of money from this. The publication in Russian of the full version of these memoirs is still waiting in the wings. Gunsche himself was released home, and he lived until his death near Bonn. By the way, Hitler's personal chauffeur Kempke published in Germany back in 1960 his book I Burned Hitler.
Thus, there is no reason to believe the hypothesis that Hitler managed to escape from Berlin from retaliation. His "march to the East" ended in a pitiful end in his own lair. It is symbolic that his charred corpse ended up in the hands of Soviet troops. As for the American film "Hitler's Escape", it turned out to be another sensational "cheap movie".
