The Pittsburgh Press (May 10, 1945)
BODY OF GOEBBELS FOUND
Corpse held by Reds may be Hitler’s
Fuehrer’s last stand made in raid shelter beneath Chancellery
By Joseph W. Grigg Jr., United Press staff writer
BERLIN, Germany – At least four bodies, any one of which may be that of Hitler, have been found by the Russians in Berlin. But none has been identified as being definitely that of the Nazi Fuehrer.
The bodies of Propaganda Minister Paul Joseph Goebbels and his family; of Martin Bormann, successor to Rudolf Hess as Hitler’s deputy, and a number of other top Nazis have been found and identified with fair certainty.
For a week the Russians have searched through the ruins of the underground fortress where Hitler and his gang of last-ditch Nazi fanatics held out until the destruction of Berlin was complete.
Four bodies, blackened and charred, that seem to answer to Hitler’s general appearance, have been dragged out of the ruins. They have been measured and photographed for examination by experts. But the Russians are beginning to believe that no body that can be identified without any shadow of doubt as that of Adolf Hitler will ever be found now.
Underneath Chancellery
The underground fortress which Hitler made his headquarters in the final mighty battle of Berlin was the huge, supposedly bombproof air-raid shelter underneath the Chancellery.
It had been linked by deep underground passages with shelters under the nearby Wilhelmsplatz, the great Air Ministry building 500 yards away in the Leipzigerstrasse, and the Hugh Command building in the Bendlerstrasse and on the Luetzow Ufer, about a mile distant. There were other big underground shelters under the Tiergarten Park. The whole was linked by communicating passages to form a great subterranean fortress.
Flamethrowers used
It was not until the underground fortress had been burned out yard-by-yard by Soviet flamethrowers that Berlin fell.
Somewhere amid this underground labyrinth of ruins, his body charred beyond real recognition by flamethrowers, Hitler probably met his death. The Russians believe he might have been killed beforehand by the people around him. But the flames that finally swept through the subterranean passages probably destroyed forever any definite evidence of how the Nazi leader was wiped out.