The Pittsburgh Press (May 3, 1945)
REDS HUNT HITLER’S BODY IN BERLIN
Death story still doubted by Russians
Fuehrer killed self, Goebbels’ aide says
LONDON (UP) – Victorious Red Army troops searched the rubble of captured Berlin today for the bodies of Adolf Hitler and his crippled henchman, Paul Joseph Goebbels.
On the success of their hunt hinged the solution to the greatest mystery of the war – whether Hitler and Goebbels actually were dead, and if so, whether they committed suicide, were killed by Soviet shells or died of natural causes.
The Russians also may find among the dead and 70,000 prisoners in Berlin such personages as Reichsmarshal Hermann Goering, Joachim von Ribbentrop, ousted only yesterday as German foreign minister, and other leading Nazis.
Reports suicides
Hans Fritzsche, Goebbels’ deputy propaganda chief, told Red Army troops who captured him that Hitler, Goebbels and Gen. Krebs, newly-appointed chief of the German Army General Staff, had killed themselves in tine final hours of the battle of Berlin.
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and a British Foreign Office spokesman said all evidence at hand indicated that Hitler had died of a brain hemorrhage.
The German radio version of Hitler’s death was that he “fell” a hero while directing the defense of Berlin.
Moscow remained unconvinced that Hitler actually was dead and suggested that he may have gone underground with other key Nazi Party leaders to plot an eventual return to power.
Cremation reported
A high officer of the German Foreign Office captured on the American First Army front said he believed Hitler had died of a brain hemorrhage and his body had been taken to Berlin for propaganda purposes.
The officer said the Nazis probably had cremated Hitler’s body and scattered the ashes to prevent the remains from falling into Allied hands.
Fritzsche’s report that Goebbels also had committed suicide was the first word from a German source on the whereabouts of the propaganda minister in more than a week.
Goebbels had announced at that time that as gauleiter of Berlin he and his family would remain in the city.
Issues order of day
Russian troops centered their search for the bodies of Hitler, Goebbels and other high Nazis in the area around the Reich Chancellery and the Tiergarten, beneath both of which Hitler was rumored to have maintained underground headquarters.
Premier Marshal Stalin announced the capture of Berlin last night in a triumphant order of the day. He called the ruined capital “the center of German imperialism and the nest of German aggression.”
Resistance ended when Gen. Weidling, commander, and the 70,000 haggard survivors of the original garrison of perhaps 500,000 troops surrendered to Marshal Gregory K. Zhukov’s First White Russian and Marshal Ivan S. Konev’s First Ukrainian Armies.
City in ruins
Eight other generals were taken in the final mop-up, which was concluded three years, 10 months and 10 days after German armies attacked the Soviet Union.
The Germans made their final stand in the Tiergarten, around the Alexanderplatz and in the Wilhelmstrasse, the latter the site of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery.
Front dispatches to Soviet newspapers said most of Berlin was in ruins. Large sections previously had been blasted into rubble by Allied bombs, and Russian and German guns and mortars added to the wreckage.
De Valera voices regret personally
DUBLIN (UP) – Prime Minister Eamon de Valera of neutral Eire expressed condolences for the death of Adolf Hitler in a personal call at the German Embassy yesterday.
He was accompanied by Joseph Walsh, secretary of the Department of External Affairs, and was received by German Minister Dr. E. Hemphill.