Name: What Happened to Hitler's Body
Uploaded: 2022-07-29T03:00:42.000Z
Duration: 19 min 52 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

Most gravestones are a site of solemn remembrance,  where mourners bring flowers and share memories.  

転換語

However, there are some people whose  graves would be more likely to become  

public graffiti targets - no one  more than Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

But no one's defacing Hitler's  grave - because he doesn't have  

one. Which raises one big question  - what happened to Hitler's body?

It was 1945, and the walls were closing in on the  Nazi regime. The Soviet Red Army was marching from  

the east, having liberated Poland. The attempt  by the Nazis to bomb Britain into submission had  

long since failed, and now the united forces of  Britain, the United States, and the rest of their  

allies were marching on Germany from the west.  Hitler was surrounded and increasingly paranoid,  

and had retreated to his bunker, an air raid  shelter in Berlin. As the Soviets approached  

the city, Hitler discovered that even his own  generals were starting to reject his orders.

As Hitler planned to end his life rather  than being taken alive, multiple Nazi  

leaders jockeyed for position. Hermann Goring  attempted to take control in the aftermath,  

and was rewarded by being stripped of  his offices by Hitler and arrested.  

As communications around the city were cut off,  Hitler heard bits and pieces of news about his  

top allies surrendering - with Heinrich Himmler  even claiming he had the right to negotiate a  

surrender for the regime. Hitler also heard  word that his closest ally, Benito Mussolini,  

had been deposed and killed by Italian rebels.

Within his bunker, Hitler and his longtime  mistress Eva Braun were married, and then  

Hitler dictated his last will and testament to  his secretary. Knowing the end was near, he was  

determined he wouldn't allow his enemies to get  ahold of him and execute him or put him on trial.  

He had already obtained capsules of poison from  Himmler before Himmler's attempted surrender, but  

now doubted if they would be effective or if they  were just another betrayal. So he gave them to his  

beloved dog Blondi - and the dog died immediately,  adding one final casualty to Hitler's long list  

of kills. He soon said his goodbyes, retreated to  his room with Eva Braun, and prepared for the end.

What happened next has been  debated for almost eighty years.

The leader of the Soviet Union,  Joseph Stalin, was a ruthless man  

and he wanted his revenge on Hitler for the  Nazi's betrayal. He had offered a medal to  

the person who found Hitler alive as they surged  into Berlin, and Stalin hoped to capture him alive  

and make an example of him. But it wasn't to be.  According to witnesses in the bunker, Hitler's  

valet entered the chamber and immediately smelled  gunpowder and a strange burnt almond smell. Both  

Hitler and Braun were dead - Braun apparently  from poisoning, as she had no visible wounds,  

while Hitler was bleeding from a fresh wound  to his temple and had a gun at his feet.  

The Nazi leader and his new wife were  apparently serious about not being taken alive.

And there was a plan as soon as the news broke.

The Nazi leaders knew Hitler's body  would be of great interest to the Allies,  

and they didn't want them to get ahold of it.  Led by the acting Nazi leader, Joseph Goebbels,  

the Nazis on site rolled the bodies up in a rug,  gathered papers covered in petrol, and lit the  

entire thing on fire. This took place amid heavy  Allied shelling of the area, which shows just how  

loyal Hitler's die-hards were - they were willing  to carry out these bizarre funeral rites even as  

their own lives were endangered. While Hitler's  body wasn't totally destroyed by the burning,  

it was now unrecognizable and was buried in a bomb  crater along with the rug soaked with his blood.

And that was the end of the story  - or at least, it should have been.

Soon, the Soviets took control of Berlin, and the  news that Hitler was already dead did not make  

Stalin happy. As word spread of Hitler's death,  millions of German troops left the battlefield  

to avoid the Soviet forces. It would be several  days before the Soviets arrived at the compound,  

and they dug up what is believed to  be Hitler and Braun's dental remains.  

A cursory analysis identified Hitler's  body, which seemed to put things to rest.

It just seemed too easy, didn't it? Hitler had  terrorized the continent and beyond for twelve  

years, and now he's dead with no way to hold  him accountable for his crimes? That sounds  

like exactly what he'd want them to think!  Many Soviet operations in the area continued  

to dig up the bodies of the Nazi leadership,  but it's not clear if they found any more of  

Hitler's body beyond what was believed to be his  teeth. And without more proof, Stalin refused to  

believe his nemesis was truly gone. And as  Stalin spoke, millions of people listened.

And so began the great Hitler conspiracy battle.

Early polls showed that over two-thirds  of Americans thought Hitler might still be  

alive in June 1945, but the leadership didn't  seem to share those doubts. The same couldn't  

be said for the Soviet Union, where Joseph  Stalin actively spread the conspiracies!  

In fact, only a month after the  discovery of the dental remains,  

Stalin ordered his Field Marshall Georgy  Zhukov to present details on how Hitler  

could have survived. And a month after that,  Stalin stated at the Potsdam Conference that  

Hitler had probably escaped to Spain or  Argentina like so many other Nazi leaders.

And this had some unintended consequences.

Conspiracy theories don't stay  where they're supposed to.  

Stalin's motivation for insisting Hitler was alive  

may have been because he wasn't willing to  give up on bringing the Nazi leader to justice,  

but there were also still a lot of loyalists to  Hitler. Soon enough, the former Nazi ambassador  

to Vichy France, Otto Abetz, was claiming  that Hitler was still alive, just in hiding.  

Soon, the Allied forces were dealing with a more  active Nazi resistance not willing to give up the  

war - because after all, if their leader was still  alive, then they hadn't actually lost the war.

It got intense enough that  governments had to get involved.

With the Soviets consistently boosting the  conspiracy theory that Hitler was still alive,  

the British counter-intelligence division in  Berlin launched an investigation. They found  

no conclusive evidence that Hitler was still  alive - but that didn't stop the conspiracies.  

The official report stated that “the desire to  invent legends and fairy tales is greater than  

the love of truth” - which is probably proven  right every time someone watches an infomercial  

for a miracle product and picks up the phone  immediately. Even after this investigation,  

almost half of the US population  still believed the conspiracy.

It was only a year after the war when letters  started going out around the country from  

someone calling himself “Furrier No. 1”. The  mysterious madman not only claimed to be Hitler,  

but insisted he was living in Kentucky under  an assumed name with Eva Braun - and he had not  

given up the war effort. The “Furrier” claimed  to be building tunnels under Washington DC,  

and to be armed with sleeper cells and nuclear  bombs - and even invisible spaceships to take the  

Nazi regime to space. Needless to say, the writer  wasn't Hitler, he was a miner and Baptist preacher  

who used his scam to defraud his supporters of  $15,000 before being arrested for mail fraud.

But the next conspiracy would  have more meat on the bones.

Arthur F. Mackensen wasn't a bigwig in  the German military during World War II,  

just a Lieutenant - but he claimed that fate  put him in the most important role of all.  

In 1948, he spoke to major newspapers and  claimed that on May 5th, 1945 - five days  

after Hitler's supposed death - he had fled Berlin  in tanks alongside Nazi official Martin Bormann,  

Hitler and Eva Braun, who had faked their deaths.  They flew to Denmark, and Hitler and Braun then  

boarded a submarine to Argentina. The only problem  with this? Not only was there no record of this  

crazy escape mission, but there was no record  of Arthur F. Mackensen, who may have been named  

after First World War field marshal August von  Mackensen. So the entire affair may have been  

a creative work of fiction by some newspaper  writers - who definitely sold papers off it.

The question for these conspiracists is,  

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