A Female Soviet Translator Tracked Down Identifying Dental Work

In the annals of 20th-century history, Adolf Hitler’s death is on one level a very well known suicide that took place on April 30, 1945, in an elaborate air-raid shelter near the Reich Chancellery famously known as the Bunker, or the Führerbunker.

But alternative theories have flourished as well. TV series, books, and documentaries suggest that Hitler managed to trick the world and made his escape, although the possibility of the dictator who sought to conquer all of Europe opting for a small farm in South America seemed remote to serious historians.

One of the reasons for the persistent belief that Hitler didn’t really die in Berlin in April 1945 is a certain murkiness about the identification of his remains.

The corpses of Hitler, his wife Eva Braun, and two of their dogs–burned in the Reich Chancellery garden in compliance with Hitler’s wishes as overseen by his private secretary Martin Bormann–were discovered by a special unit of the Red Army on May 2nd, most historians agree.

Joseph Stalin was informed of this discovery, but the news of Hitler’s death was not confirmed by the Soviets. All news on it was tightly controlled. It’s even been suggested that Stalin wanted the world to think that Hitler survived, hidden away by intelligence operatives from England or the United States, to throw suspicion on his onetime allies as the Cold War dawned.

But recent scientific research confirms that the burned corpse, found in 1945 buried hastily in the Chancellery garden, was definitely that of Hitler. The study was published by five French researchers in the scientific magazine European Journal of Internal Medicine. The Soviets allowed the French team to study the teeth and bridgework of the corpse, more than 70 years after the end of World War II.

“The lead author of the research, Professor Philippe Charlier, told a French documentary that it had been possible to compare the jawbone held by the Russians to Hitler’s dental records, thus allowing the Führer to be identified by his false teeth,” reported the Independent.

Charlier, a distinguished coroner, forensic pathologist, and paleopathologist, told the AFP, “The teeth are authentic, there is no possible doubt. Our study proves that Hitler died in 1945. We can stop all the conspiracy theories about Hitler. He did not flee to Argentina in a submarine, he is not in a hidden base in Antarctica or on the dark side of the moon.”

Without the preserved dental work, this identification would not have been possible.

In 1945, at the age of 56, Hitler had only five of his original teeth left. Analysis of them showed no trace of meat. This confirmed reports that Hitler was a vegetarian. Blue deposits on the dental work also support the theory that Hitler took cyanide before shooting himself in the head. This confirms the timeline that historians believe took place: Hitler took poison and shot himself.

Motivation for suicide was abundant. According to statements from those who accompanied Hitler in the Bunker in the final weeks of the Third Reich, by late April it had become obvious that none of the tattered German armed forces could come to the rescue of Berlin. Ammunition was running out, and the Soviet Army was bearing down. The Soviets were believed to have suffered casualties of 20 million people in the war launched by Adolf Hitler. They were absolutely determined to make it to Berlin.

The outside of the Bunker

On April 28 and 29, with the Soviets closing in, Hitler gave permission for people to leave the Bunker and break out of Berlin, although many remained. As for the Führer, he married Braun, his longtime mistress, and prepared for death. His priority was that their bodies would not be mutilated and shown to the public, as were those of Benito Mussolini and his companion.

Hitler said goodbye to Bormann, Joseph Goebbels, their families, and other members of his staff, and, with Braun, retreated to his study. A shot was heard after one or two hours. Bormann, Hitler’s valet, and others reportedly entered the study and found the bodies. Braun had been given cyanide by Hitler.

The corpses were wrapped in a Nazi flag, taken to the garden of the Reich Chancellery, and burned with petrol. What was left of the German government released the news of Hitler’s death and a radio station announced he had died as a hero, while the music of Wagner played. But this manner of news announcement was not believed by the Western Allies.

The Soviets found the Bunker and the graves. They were able to identify Hitler by his teeth within days of discovering the charred remains. But the identity of the person who made this possible is of interest.

A 25-year-old woman with the Red Army working as a translator, Elena Rzhevskaya, was given the teeth that soldiers found and asked to use them to identify Hitler. Traveling around the rubble of Berlin with the teeth in a box, using her German language skills, Rzhevskaya was able to find a dental assistant in Berlin who’d visited Hitler in the Bunker. That person confirmed that they were the teeth of the Führer, and so the corpse was positively identified.

Born Elena Kagan, she was from a Jewish family in the town of Gomel in Belarus. When war broke out between the Soviet Union and Germany, she was studying philosophy at the Moscow State University. At first she moved into nursing to be of use during the war, but her knowledge of German led her to enroll in a school for war interpreters. In February 1942, she joined the Army and moved with the command unit through Belarus and Poland, heading west, ultimately to Germany and Berlin.

Rzhevskaya wrote a memoir, Berlin May 1945, that was published in the Soviet Union in the 1960s. She died at the age of 97 in 2017. Her granddaughter said in a recent interview that a translator was entrusted with Hitler’s teeth because “She was an officer and a woman and everyone knew that [all the men] would get drunk on Victory Day.”

In the same interview, published in The Times of Israel, the granddaughter said, “She carried the box under her arm. It smelled lightly of perfume. She saw her own reflection in a big mirror and thought, ‘My God, am I standing here holding in my hands the only thing that is left of Hitler?’”

Elena Rzhevskaya

The teeth were later sent to the Soviet Union, but kept secret for decades. While the other Allies said Hitler died in the Bunker, the Soviet authorities put out the information that Hitler was probably alive and in South America or being protected in Spain by Franco.

In the 21st century, a new push was made to identify the remains of Hitler.

The Guardian reported, “In March and July 2017, Russia’s secret service the FSB and the Russian state archives authorised a team of [French] researchers to examine the bones of the dictator, for the first time since 1946.”

And so the puzzle of Hitler’s death was finally solved. But it might not have been possible without Elena Rzhevskaya.