Soviet agents burned Hitler’s remains – report
BONN, April 8 (Reuter) – Soviet KGB agents dug up Adolf
Hitler’s remains from a secret grave in eastern Germany in 1970,
burned and pulverised them and then dumped them into a river, a
German magazine reported on Saturday.
Spiegel, quoting a KGB report titled “file on opening the
grave of the war criminal, top secret,” said the then KGB chief
Yuri Andropov ordered the charred remains of Hitler to be
disinterred from their burial site in Magdeburg where Soviet
military intelligence hid them in 1946.
“Skulls, bones, ribs, vertebrae etc” were dug up on the
night of April 4, 1970, the magazine said.
The operation, code named Archive, aimed to eliminate once
and for all the remains of Hitler, his wife Eva Braun, Nazi
propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and his family.
All of them had committed suicide in Hitler’s Berlin bunker
as Soviet troops closed in on the Nazi leaders in April 1945.
Witnesses said Hitler’s body was doused with petrol near the
bunker and set alight.
Carefully watching neighbouring houses to ensure no Germans
were watching, the KGB agents counted the leg bones to make sure
they had all the bodies, then closed up the grave and returned
it to its previous condition.
“Destruction of the remains was accomplished by burning
them on a pyre. The remains were completely burned, then
stamped…into powdered ashes and thrown in the river,” the KGB
report said.
Spiegel said a special Soviet military intelligence unit had
crammed the bodies from the Berlin bunker into ammunition boxes
and taken them with it as it moved to Rathenow, Stendal and then
Magdeburg. The unit buried the bodies at Magdeburg on February
21, 1946.
Archive/File: people/h/hitler.adolf/press remains.destroyed
