The Murder of Adolf Hitler: The Truth about the Bodies in the Berlin Bunker

Rejecting historians' consensus that Hitler and his mistress, Eva Braun, committed suicide in the Nazi underground bunker as Allied forces took Berlin, British surgeon and forensic expert Thomas (The Murder of Rudolf Hess) asserts that the two partially charred corpses found by Soviet troops were actually those of Hitler-and a substitute for Braun, wearing one of her dresses. In his scenario, SS guards murdered Hitler, rather than allow a degenerate, raving Fuhrer to fall into Soviet clutches, and let Braun escape. Hitler, he further speculates, suffered from Parkinson's disease, which made him a partially paralyzed, grossly weakened, uncontrollably shaking insomniac. Thomas bases his detailed analysis, which raises far more questions than it answers, on Russian State Archive material comprising alleged skull fragments of Hitler and Braun, as well as on their dental records and on six folios of documents found with the skulls. Using Paraguayan police files released in 1993, Thomas concludes that Martin Bormann, Hitler's personal secretary, survived the bunker, apparently moving to Paraguay in 1956. Photos. (Apr.)