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Russia declassifies documents about Hitler’s last hours

The Federal Security Service (FSB) has released a top secret document in which Hitler’s private pilot tells about the hours before the Nazi leader committed suicide with his wife.

Russia’s RT television station said that the FSB (formerly KGB) on April 29 declassified documents from the archives related to Lieutenant General Hans Baur. Mr. Baur worked for Hitler for over a decade and was captured by Soviet troops on May 2, 1945.

In the declassified document, Mr. Baur describes his last conversation with Hitler that took place on April 30, 1945, shortly before the leadership. Nazi Germany and his wife Eva Braun took their own lives. According to Mr. Baur, in his final days, Hitler almost never left his residence, his appearance visibly aged. Mr. Baur said Hitler’s hands looked shaky, but his intentions were clear.

Russia declassifies documents about Hitler's last hours - photo 1

Hitler (3rd from left) and Hans Baur (centre, next to Hitler) in this September 1932 photo.

fsb

“Hitler met me in the hall and led me to his room. He held out his hand to me and said, ‘Baur, I want to say goodbye to you, I want to thank you for all the years of service’. “, the pilot recalled.

Then, according to Mr. Baur’s testimony, Hitler wanted to give him his favorite painting – a portrait of the Prussian king Frederick the Great painted by the artist Rembrandt – as a gift. Mr Baur tried to convince Hitler not to kill himself, saying that if he did, “everything would fall apart”.

“My soldiers can’t and don’t want to hold out any longer. I can’t stand it anymore,” replied Hitler.

Hitler revealed to Mr Baur that he had ordered his and his wife’s bodies to be burned “immediately” after death. Hitler explained that he wanted to do this out of fear that their bodies would suffer the same fate as the Italian dictator. Benito Mussolini and his mistress. After the execution in April 1945, the bodies of Mussolini and his lover were displayed in Milan.

After the conversation, Mr. Baur spent several hours incinerating the documents and preparing to leave Berlin. Having finished, Mr. Baur went back to Hitler’s residence to retrieve the Rembrandt painting and discovered that “everything is over”. The bodies of Hitler and Braun were burned.

Mr. Baur said some guards had told him that the bodies of the Hitlers had been wrapped in blankets, doused in gasoline and burned. “Then I learned that Hitler shot himself… Someone said ‘We need to clean up the puddles of blood’…”, he recounted.

Hans Baur was sentenced to 25 years in prison in the Soviet Union in 1950 but was released five years later. He was imprisoned by the French for about two years until 1957. Later that year, he returned to West Germany, where he died in 1993 at the age of 95.

For many years, the story of Hitler’s suicide was the subject of controversy. In 2009, American researchers confirmed that the skull fragment displayed in an exhibition in Moscow was not Hitler’s. The head of the FSB’s archives, Vasily Hristoforov, then denied the claim, saying that a Soviet forensic investigation had confirmed the ashes were those of Hitler.

Hitler’s ashes were buried in Magdeburg, Germany, in 1946, but the Soviet government was concerned that the site might become a sanctuary for Hitler’s followers, so they secretly excavated the tomb in 1970 and destroy what’s inside. Moscow decided to keep fragments of skulls and jaws that had been used to identify the Nazi leader.

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