For the past fifty years the Iron Curtain and the Cold War have
prevented the truth from being told about one of the most enduring
mysteries of the twentieth century: how, exactly, Adolf Hitler died on
April 30, 1945, and what happened to his remains. In this groundbreaking
book, which reads like a riveting detective story, Ada Petrova and Peter
Watson provide the answers to these two questions. Given access to the
Russians' hitherto unseen Hitler Archive - File I-G-23, the so-called
Operation Myth File - they reveal not only the truth of what went on in
Berlin in May 1945 after the Russians captured the bunker in which
Hitler, Eva Braun, and their entourage spent their last days, but also
why the Soviet regime felt the details of the Fuhrer's death had to be
kept secret for so long. Further, they explain how and why his body and
those of Braun, Josef and Magda Goebbels, and the Goebbels' six children
were secretly buried in Magdeburg, East Germany, and finally disinterred
and cremated in 1970 by order of the then KGB chief Yuri Andropov.
Besides the Myth File, Petrova and Watson have also been given access to
much more: unpublished interrogations that the Russians conducted of
those close to Hitler - including his pilot, his valet, and the
commander of the bunker; new forensic evidence from the secret autopsies
carried out on the bodies of Hitler, Braun, and the Goebbels;
photographs from Hitler's private album; and some thirty-six unpublished
watercolors that Hitler painted in his youth and that he kept with him
right up to the end in the bunker. Most sensationally, however, they
have been shown, and allowed to examine, fragments of Hitler's skull
that the Russians have had in theirpossession since 1945. The location
of the bullet hole in one of the fragments and the results of an
independent forensic examination settle once and for all the manner of
Hitler's death.
