There is abundant concrete evidence that Hitler killed himself on April 30 1945 at approx. 15:30 hours CET in the FĂĽhrer Bunker together with Eva Braun, whom he had married about 40 hours earlier. Eva bit into a cyanide capsule, Hitler then shot her and himself in the head with his own pistol, a Walther PPK 7.65 - whether, or not he also took cyanide while shooting himself is unclear.
The couch in the FĂĽhrerbunker, where Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves being examined by US War Correspondent in May 1945.
Their bodies were then taken outside, doused with petrol and burnt. Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet and Martin Bormann, head of the chancellery organised the cremation. Several eye witnesses, including Goebbels (who later committed suicide with his whole family) were present. Due to not having enough fuel the bodies were only partly incinerated. They tried to get the bodies completely burnt until 18:00 when SS officers Ewald Lindloff, and Hans Reisser were charged with disposing of the bodies. They put them in a shallow bomb crater and covered them up as best they could.
On May 2 the bodies and those of what is believed to be his dog Blondie and her pup Wulf were found by the Soviet intelligence services SMERSH - charged with the task of locating Hitler, or his remains. What was left of Hitler and Braun, and the bodies of Goebbels with wife and six children were taken to a Red Army camp outside Berlin. An extensive autopsy, of which the records were declassified in the 1990s, was carried out on the Führer and then they were all buried in unmarked graves at the same Red Army encampment. During the autopsy Hitler was conclusively identified using dental records provided to all Allied commands that they had acquired from his dentist’s nurse, who the US forces had captured earlier in the year.
These facts are uncontested and well documented.
US soldiers at the shalow grave where Herr und Frau Hitler, Blondie and Wolf where probably temporarily buried by Lindloff and Reisser. The picture for Time & Life Magazine was taken after the fall of Berlin and several days after the removal of the corpses by Soviet SMERSH agents.
This is when the rumours start - reluctant to publicise Hitelr’s death for reasons of making him a martyr, Stalin now had the Soviet intelligence services spread the fake news that he had escaped. Reports of his death were already out since days though, so the effect of this was only to confuse the public. Albeit completely disproven these rumours persist to this day (clearly).
Over the next year the bodies were uninterred and reburied several times, until 21 February 1946 when they were left in an unmarked grave in a SMERSH facility in Magdeburg. Finally, in 1970 on April 4 what was left of them was once again dug up and cremated and the ashes poured into a nearby creek. The facility was going to be handed over to the GDR military and the KGB had decided to avoid any future risk of a Nazi shrine at the burial site at all cost and wanted the remains destroyed. A piece of a skull and a row of teeth were preserved by the KGB as evidence - they’re still in Moscow at this point - although it remains unclear if the skull piece is his, Eva’s or one of the Goebbels’ the teeth have again been compared to Hitler’s dental records by several independent forensic specialists and they are conclusively his.