In the previous videos of Hitler’s Escape series, we explored the possibility of Hitler fooling the
entire world and escaping to live a quiet life in perhaps somewhere else in Europe or South America
but was there ever enough evidence to prove Hitler lived. Welcome to Nutty History and
it's time to look at all the evidence and figure out what happened on the climactic day
of April 30th, 1945. Did Adolf Hitler live or did Adolf Hitler die?
In previous videos, we explored the possibility of locations where Hitler would have found
refuge, and South America, specifically Argentina, was the best bet Hitler had.
We also explored the theories that delve into how Hitler may have escaped and reached Argentina.
The theory of Hitler using U-Boats to cross the Atlantic Ocean and reach South America is perhaps
the strongest argument authors of these conspiracy theories offer. But, do they really hold their
ground? Unfortunately, not. Despite the intriguing and interesting nature of this type of narrative,
history with its hard-cold facts always prevails and ends up destroying more entertaining versions.
Two German submarines, named U-530 and U-977 indeed arrived in Argentina after the war. But,
they did so in order not to have to surrender to British forces and weren’t part of any escapade.
Simply, the possibility of any of them carrying Hitler as a passenger is next to none. In fact,
there was no Nazi leader that arrived, none. Some of those who support the theory of Hitler
escaping through a submarine also speak of a fleet of three U-boats that disappeared in April 1945.
But the truth is far less mysterious, the Allied fleet sank them. The U-1235 was hit
on April 15 by torpedoes launched by an American destroyer, and one day later the same happened
to the U-880. On April 22, the U-518 met the same fate as well, better late than never,
right? Another issue with the U-boat theory is its departure from Barcelona. If it did, it would have
had to cross Gibraltar and elude the British radars, a feat that seems impossibly unlikely.
Richard Evans, Professor Emeritus of History at Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy,
led extensive research on all conspiracy theories surrounding Hitler’s death. According to him,
alleged proof of Hitler's survival crumbles into dust as soon as it's subjected to critical
examination. One of the most prominent witnesses used by a popular speculative documentary series
is an elderly Argentinian woman, Catalina Gomera. Her account details her time working in a house
where she had to leave meals for a mysterious German visitor outside his room.Now she wasn't
allowed to see him and she claims it must have been Hitler since they were typical German meals,
sausage, ham, fish but even a 10th-grade History student can see the mistake in this testimony.
Hitler was a pure vegetarian and would have never eaten a meal mostly consisting of Fish
and Sausages. But more importantly, this is a purely speculative claim. She never saw the
mysterious person for whom she served these meals and that makes her testimony entirely uncredible.
Authors and Journalists like Abel Basti and Gerrard Williams base their claims of Hitler’s
escape on the CIA’s investigation and documents regarding the possibility of Hitler being alive
and living in South America in the 1950s and 60s but they conveniently skip the fact in their books
that the CIA itself was highly skeptical of the evidence presented and never took it
serious enough to launch a manhunt for Hitler. Professor Evans stated in his book that the
Argentinean Abel Basti’s texts lack documentary evidence. All of the testimonies mentioned in
Basti’s book are second-hand and the witnesses do not provide any sort of accurate evidence.
Almost all of those accounts are only sayings that are almost impossible to corroborate.
Most of the CIA’s involvement with the possibility of Hitler living in Argentina
is based on a self-proclaimed former German SS trooper named Phillip Citroen’s report
proclaiming Hitler lived in Colombia for a month and then left for Argentina around January 1955.
He also presented a photograph with an elderly person who somewhat appeared to look like Adolf
Hitler. However, superiors of the CIA station who investigated this presented evidence
found it flimsy and considered it a “high-risk low-reward” sort of scenario where the CIA may
end up expending a vast number of resources with minimum possibility of a positive outcome. Even
the independent Nazi Hunters such as Simon Wiesenthal and Klasfeld couple never sought
or investigated Hitler’s survival or tried to hunt down der Fuhrer in their entire career.
And these Nazi Hunters searched relentlessly for most of the Nazi hierarchs who escaped Europe
and end up tracking down several of them. There could be only one reason that none
of the famous Nazi Hunter ever tried to seek Hitler out. He was not alive.
While a lot of amateur historians have proposed various theories about escape plans for Hitler.
Historically, there were never any escape plans found in the Fuhrer Bunker or any other place of
Nazi authority. The only plan of escape that has been revealed in all the years since the Battle
of Berlin involved Hermann Goering, Heinrich Himmler, and other senior figures taking off from
north Germany to continue their struggles from abroad. Captain Ernst Koenig at the age of 93,
confessed about an escape plan in 2003. It would have the Nazis evacuate their surviving
leaders by flying boats to Greenland at the end of the Second World War.
However, Koenig, who was drafted as a navigator in Luftwaffe, also explicitly stated that Hitler
himself was determined not to leave Berlin, where he eventually committed suicide. Interestingly,
this plan was spearheaded by Himmler who was stripped of his offices and authority by Hitler
near the end of the war for attempting to surrender to the Western Allied Forces.
This again insinuates that if the concerned plan would have been carried forward Hitler would
either not have knowledge of it or participated in it. The last-ditch mission described by Koenig
also involved an attempt to pick up a copy of the Fuhrer’s will from Berlin, but this had to be
abandoned because of heavy Russian fire. Koenig said he had just finished preparing two giant
BV-222 seaplanes for the escape flight when the Allies launched an air raid and destroyed them.
This implies that escaping Berlin was nearly impossible as it was heavily sieged in every
manner. Terry Charman, a historian at the Imperial War Museum in London, authenticated Koenig’s story
because of the credibility of events in Koenig’s confession and it was also backed up by incidental
details revealed by other Germans such as Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect. So, if Hitler was
determined to not leave his bunker, does that mean the story of his suicide is irrefutable?
We narrated the official version of events at Fuhrer Bunker on April 30th,
1945 in our first video of this series, which we would highly recommend you to watch,
but here’s a small summary. After getting the news of the Red Army invading Berlin early morning of
April 30th, 1945, Hitler and his new wife Eva Braun locked themselves in the study at 2:30 PM.
Moments later, Hitler shot himself and Eva Braun chewed a cyanide capsule.
The first witnesses Otto Günsche and Heinz Linge corroborated the deaths in their statements. They
said they smelled a strong odor of burnt almonds on Eva Braun’s corpse, an indication of cyanide
poisoning. They also smelled gunpowder on Hitler’s corpse along with the gunshot wound in his skull.
There is a slight controversy on the skull of Hitler as in 2009, a bone-specializing
archaeologist performed DNA and forensic tests on a sample of one of the skull fragments provided by
Russian officials, for an episode of a documentary TV show. The sample was found to be that of a
woman aged under 40. However, when the same set of researchers examined a blood-soaked piece of cloth
from the sofa on which Hitler was sitting while he shot himself, the blood was said to be of a male.
And here’s where things get twisted. Neither Soviet nor Russian officials ever explicitly
claimed the said skull was the main piece of evidence of Hitler’s death. However, conspiracy
theorists and books by amateur historians latched onto it and presented it as the main evidence of
Hitler’s death being a hoax. So, if not the skull fragments, what was the main evidence of Hitler’s
death? Well as they, you can only get the truth from a horse’s mouth, or in this case, Hitler’s
mouth. The main piece of evidence collected from the hastily burned body of Hitler was his jawbone
fragments and two dental bridges. In April 2018, memoirs of a Russian interpreter revealed that
she had been entrusted with the grandest trophy of World War 2, a set of Hitler’s teeth. She was
tasked with the job of cross-checking them against the dictator’s dental records and they matched.
Ever since the Russians were keeping these dental remains safe. After months of negotiations,
Russia’s FSB secret service and the Russian state archives permitted a team of French researchers
to examine a skull fragment and bits of his teeth. The piece of the skull had a hole on
its left side, consistent with a bullet wound from Walther PPK, with black charring around the edges.
Though scientists weren’t allowed to take samples from the skull, they noted in the study, its shape
seems “totally comparable” to radiographies of Hitler’s skull taken a year before his death.
But the final nail in the coffin was the analysis of the teeth fragments. At the moment
of his death, Hitler had only four remaining teeth which were misshapen, brown at the base,
and flecked with white tartar deposits. And as the DNA matched, it’s been proven that Hitler did die
in 1945. Lead study author Philippe Charlier has validated that teeth are authentic and there is no
possible doubt about it. But if there’s still any doubt in minds of anyone watching this,
let’s not forget Hitler himself has once said “I’d kill myself if the war was lost.” Also think
about this, can you imagine somebody like Hitler living peacefully in anonymity and not trying to
achieve his only goal in life ever again? Tell us in the comments which other history-related
conspiracy theory you’d like us to debunk in the future. Thanks for watching Nutty History.