The Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, has published new archival materials about the suicide of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in late April, 1945, which were seen by Sputnik.
The materials pertain to records of interrogations of Hitler’s personal pilot, General Hans Baur, - documents that are currently stored in the FSB’s Novgorod region department.
During the interrogations, Baur in particular revealed that he had seen Hitler shortly before his suicide on 30 April 1945.
According to the general, in the afternoon of that day, Hitler invited him along with the Fuhrer’s aid-de-camp, Colonel Betz, to visit the Reich Chancellery in order to say goodbye to them and thank the two for their faithful service.
“He looked very old and haggard. His hands were trembling, and it was clear to me that he had made the final decision to commit suicide,” Baur claimed, referring to Hitler.
The pilot argued that after he tried to dissuade the defeated tyrant from committing suicide, the Fuhrer said, “My soldiers cannot and do not want to hold on anymore. I can tolerate it no longer.”
Baur also testified that during the 30 April meeting, Hitler presented him with Rembrandt’s masterpiece - a portrait of the Prussian King Frederick the Great – before telling the pilot that he ordered the corpses of him and his wife Eva Braun to be burned in order to avoid repeating the fate of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, who had been publicly executed by Italian partisans on 28 April 1945.
According to Baur, his meeting with Hitler wrapped up with the Fuhrer saying, “sometime afterwards, one will have to write on my tombstone: ‘He fell victim to his generals’'.”
“Me and Betz I silently shook hands with Hitler and went out,” Baur claimed, adding that he returned to the Reich Chancellery a couple of hours later to take the promised Rembrandt masterpiece.
“The corridors of the private rooms were very smoky. Several SS guards ran up and down excitedly. I asked, 'Is it all over?' [and they said,] 'Yes’,” the general testified.
When asked where the corpses are, the SS guards answered that “they were wrapped in blankets, doused with gasoline, and are already burning upstairs in the garden of the Imperial Chancellery”, according to Baur.
Holed up in a bunker under his headquarters in Berlin on 30 April 1945, Hitler committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule and shooting himself in the head. This was followed by Nazi Germany announcing its unconditional surrender on 2 May 1945, which ended the Fuhrer’s dreams of a “1,000-year” Reich.