HistoryExtra https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war Wed, 21 Oct 2026 14:54:37 GMT en hourly 1 The Nazis fell in love with the Bayeux Tapestry – and there's a dark reason why https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-the-nazis-fell-in-love-with-the-bayeux-tapestry/ Wed, 21 Oct 2026 13:30:05 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/why-the-nazis-fell-in-love-with-the-bayeux-tapestry/ Shirley Ann Brown examines Nazi attempts to establish a Germanic presence in the celebrated chronicle of the Norman conquest On 1 August 1944, two SS officers drove a pair of trucks into the heart of Nazi-occupied Paris, and headed straight for the Louvre. These men were on a top-secret mission – one assigned to them by Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS and one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich.
Himmler had tasked the two men with descending into the bowels of the world-famous art museum, seizing the Bayeux Tapestry and spiriting it away to a “safe place” far from the grasp of the Allies’ rapidly advancing armies.
After 15 years as the head of one of the most feared paramilitary organisations in history, Himmler was used to getting his own way. Yet in this case he was to be disappointed. A few days earlier, a group of local resistance fighters – tipped off by the codebreakers of Bletchley Park – had learned of the SS men’s mission and rushed to the Louvre to protect the iconic embroidery. Warned at the last minute that any attempt to ‘liberate’ the tapestry would be met with a hail of bullets, the SS officers gave up on their mission.
The Nazi proclivity for buying, extorting and confiscating Europe’s greatest artworks is well documented. But there was more to Himmler’s desire to seize the Bayeux Tapestry than an acquisitive lust for one of France’s foremost cultural treasures. In the celebrated images of Norman knights putting Anglo-Saxon foot soldiers to the sword he saw evidence of medieval Germanic supremacy.
The Nazi fascination with the Bayeux Tapestry can, perhaps, be traced back to 1 July 1935 when Himmler – along with fellow Nazi ideologues Richard Walther Darré and Herman Wirth – created Ahnenerbe, the Society for the Study of Germanic Heritage. Ahnenerbe was founded to promote archaeological investigations of sites that could be associated with early Germanic settlement, and to study, in situ, works related to the history of the Aryan race. It wasn’t long before its leading lights had turned their attention to the celebrated 11th-century embroidery depicting the Norman conquest of England in 1066.
The French had claimed the Bayeux Tapestry as a national historical monument since the early 1700s, but the Nazi regime had an alternative theory. In July 1939, a memo written by Franz Altheim, professor of classical philology at Frankfurt University, arrived on the desk of Wolfram Sievers, Ahnenerbe’s general manager. It proposed that a detailed examination of the Bayeux Tapestry would prove that the Normans who conquered England were, in reality, Vikings – and, by extension, Germanic. The idea that they were French, Altheim argued, was based on a 200-year-old lie. At the bottom of his note he wrote: “I emphasise the importance of this study.”
In July 1939, when Altheim penned his memo, the idea of a team of ardent Nazis poring over one of the most iconic artefacts in French history in an attempt to establish its Germanic origins would have been anathema to the people of France. But the fall of their nation to German forces in June 1940 rendered their opinions all but irrelevant.
And so, in the aftermath of the French surrender, Dr Herbert Jankuhn, professor of Viking archaeology at Rostock University – and a loyal Nazi – was appointed to head a team of experts tasked with studying the artefact in the northern French town of Bayeux. Jankuhn offered a clue as to what he hoped to achieve when declaring: “For general Germanic studies, the Tapestry’s visual representations, through the recording of Germanic legends and traditions, provides a very valuable source for this early period.”
Photographic evidence
Jankuhn’s first task as leader of Special Assignment Bayeux was to study the hanging, and gather information so that further studies could be carried out by research scholars after the embroidery had been moved to safe wartime storage. The ultimate aim was to produce a multi-volume publication of their findings, featuring a photographic replica of the tapestry. By examining representations of everything from boats and weapons to costumes, they would provide irrefutable scientific evidence that the tapestry was a testament to Germanic hegemony in early medieval Europe.
Jankuhn couldn’t complete such a weighty undertaking alone. He was accompanied by Dr Karl Schlabow, textile expert and head of the Germanic Costume Museum in Neumünster, whose job it was to scrutinise the fabric and take careful measurements. Rolf Alber, photographer and war reporter, was to shoot new images of the tapestry, in both black-and-white and colour. Herbert Jeschke, an artist from Berlin, was the only member of the Bayeux team who wasn’t a member of the Nazi party or the SS. His task was to create a series of accurate, full-size drawings and watercolours of details from the Bayeux Tapestry, under Jankuhn’s guidance.
First, though, they had to gain access to the embroidery – and that would prove surprisingly problematic. In September 1939, with war clouds gathering, the French authorities had rolled it up on a bobbin, placed it in a padded, zinc-lined wooden case and deposited it in a concrete bunker in the basement of Bayeux’s Hôtel du Doyen.
Since the fall of France, German officers had peppered Bayeux’s authorities with requests to see the tapestry – a process that meant repeatedly manhandling the fragile, 900-year-old artefact. The French were reluctant to allow this to continue and, in a classic delaying tactic, began insisting that all permissions to view the tapestry be signed by the proper authorities in Paris. As a result, following their arrival in Bayeux on 8 June 1941, Jankuhn and his team would have to wait days before beginning their work.
At first, they examined the embroidery in the Hôtel du Doyen’s Bishops’ Gallery – but this entailed unrolling and rolling the tapestry every day. So, on 23 June, it was moved in a truck – accompanied by Rene Falue (the tapestry’s official guardian), three French customs officials and a lone German policeman – to the Monastery of St Martin at Mondaye, five miles south of Bayeux, where a large section could be left unrolled.
Summoned to fight
Working seven days a week, Jankuhn’s team set about studying, drawing and photographing all 70 metres of the embroidery. They hit a stumbling block on 29 June, when Alber returned to military service. A replacement photographer, Ursula Uhland, was summoned but, because women weren’t allowed in the monastery’s cloister, the tapestry had to be transported to its public gallery.
Despite this setback, Jeschke had completed his sketches by the end of July, and the project’s last week was taken up with Uhland’s work and with shooting propaganda films for Wochenschau, a newsreel series released in the cinemas.
On 1 August, the tapestry was returned to its concrete bunker in Bayeux. A few days later it was moved again – to the Château de Sourches, some 100 miles south of Bayeux, where it joined treasures from the Louvre.
The first stage of Special Assignment Bayeux may have come to an end, but the Nazi obsession with the Bayeux Tapestry was showing no signs of abating. Dr Hermann Bunjes, head of the German Art Historical Institute in Paris, now became the project’s guiding spirit, assembling a group of academics to bring the multi-volume book on the artefact to fruition.
They set about comparing Jeschke’s drawings with Germanic and Viking artefacts in museums, and considered the photographs taken by Uhland and Alber. They envisaged a book that would present essays on the past scholarship of the embroidery, its physical details, its historical authority, its significance for the history of culture. The book would also contain a study of the fabric and embroidery, and an analysis of its material and colour.
One study ‘proved’ the early Germanic origin of the wooden houses depicted; another emphasised the similarity of English and Norman boats to Viking ships.
All of this was undertaken with one overriding ambition: to prove that the Normans were still true, untainted Vikings – representatives of the pure Nordic Aryan race.
Herbert Jankuhn had little doubt that Special Assignment Bayeux had achieved just that. “The Bayeux Tapestry is not only a king’s saga of purely Germanic imprint, but also constitutes the documentary justification of William’s claim to England,” he declared in December 1942. “His actions appear to us… as the execution of his given right and the punishment of unforgiveable perjury and unfaithfulness according to the Germanic viewpoint. The tapestry not only exudes genuine Germanic joy in the tradition of heroic deeds, but also the statesmanlike desire to justify the campaign in England as a legal operation and political necessity.” Propaganda magazines agreed wholeheartedly, running articles that eulogised the tapestry’s celebration of “the joy of the Germanic tradition of great acts of war”.
In short, Special Assignment Bayeux was to reclaim the tapestry as a perfect fit with Nazi pan-Germanic ideology, since it bore witness to the early unification of the Germanic cultures of Scandinavia, Normandy and England. It would also serve as a precedent for the Nazis’ desire to recreate Germania, a homeland for all Germanic peoples.
Glorious warfare
This sentiment would certainly have struck a chord with Heinrich Himmler, who was fascinated by the Bayeux Tapestry’s imagery of medieval knights and glorious warfare. Over Christmas 1942, the head of the SS was presented with a bound volume of photos and drawings of the embroidery – a gift that delighted him so much that he sent a thank-you note to Wolfram Sievers in which he noted “the significance that this Bayeux Tapestry has for our glorious and culturally rich German history”.
The Allied invasion of western Europe on 6 June 1944 merely sharpened Himmler’s desire to secure the tapestry for the Third Reich. His fear that it would fall into enemy hands became apparent on 27 June, when the Gestapo moved the embroidery – without notice and despite local French protest – from Sourches to the basement of the Louvre. This would be followed, little more than a month later, by the two SS officers’ attempt to spirit the embroidery away to a “safe place”, only to be thwarted by fast-acting resistance fighters.
What had been Himmler’s intentions when he ordered the tapestry moved from Paris? What would he have considered a “safe place” in June 1944? One possibility is Wewelsburg Castle in central Germany, which had been chosen by Himmler as the location for his training centre, the home of the cult of the SS – a place where officers were taught how to recreate the lost world of the ‘Nordic race’.
Obsessed with the idea that the SS was a revival of the medieval Teutonic knights, Himmler imagined the castle as the home of modern Nazi Knights of the Round Table. The crypt, designed to hold the ashes of SS leaders, was named Valhalla. Himmler installed his own collection of ancient and medieval weapons in the castle, and indicated he wanted tapestries hung on the walls. This would have been an apt location for the Bayeux Tapestry, which he considered a great testament to an earlier Germanic-Nordic-Aryan triumph.
If Wewelsburg Castle was a safe place in June 1944, it certainly didn’t remain so. On 31 March 1945, with US forces closing in, Himmler ordered the castle dynamited, along with its contents.
Fortunately, the Allies had already found the Bayeux Tapestry safe in its temporary home in the basement of the Louvre. On 2 March 1945, after going on display in an exhibition in the art museum, it was returned to Bayeux.
Were the Nazis wrong to attempt to divine a Viking presence in the Bayeux Tapestry? No. It has long been accepted that the Scandinavian influence on both English and Norman societies was significant – seen, for example, in ships, ship-building tools and some decorative elements. This influence can be traced back to the Viking occupation of vast swathes of England (the so-called Danelaw), and the ceding of what became Normandy to the Vikings in 911.
All three groups – English, Normans and Scandinavians – may be considered, to some extent, Germanic. But surely Ahnenerbe would have had finally to admit that, even if the Normans were still Vikings in 1066, they were French-speaking ones.
Shirley Ann Brown is professor emerita of art history at York University, Toronto, a member of the Bayeux Tapestry Advisory Committee, and author of The Bayeux Tapestry: A Sourcebook
This article was first published in the July 2018 edition of BBC History Magazine
]]> The country house at war https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-country-house-at-war/ Wed, 14 Oct 2026 10:53:16 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/the-country-house-at-war/ From the conscription of upper-class women to stories of great loss, Judith S Lewis charts the roles that country houses and their occupants really played in the WW2 war effort It might be assumed that the owners of Britain's country houses weren't hugely affected by the Second World War, and that they continued to live in luxury in their vast estates. However, as Judith S Lewis explains to Lauren Good, that wasn't the case. From the conscription of upper-class women to stories of great loss, she charts the roles that country houses and their occupants really played in the war effort.
]]> The Soviets found proof of Hitler's death. So why did they hide it from the world? https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/soviet-proof-of-hitlers-death-hid-it-from-the-world/ Sun, 11 Oct 2026 13:00:04 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/soviet-proof-of-hitlers-death-hid-it-from-the-world/ Soviet investigators had obtained compelling evidence of Hitler’s death – but Moscow’s public statements told a different story In the ruins of Berlin in May 1945, Soviet investigators recovered dental remains and tracked down two people familiar with Adolf Hitler’s mouth: his dental assistant and the technician who had made his elaborate dental work.
Both quickly recognised what they were shown.
“They are able to not only describe all of the complex dental treatment that Hitler has had over the years, but then, when confronted with the physical remains in front of them, they're said, ‘Yes, straight away, these are Hitler's teeth,’” explains historian Caroline Sharples, author of The Long Death of Adolf Hitler.
But even as Soviet investigators assembled their findings, Moscow publicly encouraged uncertainty about whether Hitler was dead at all. Why would the power that had captured Berlin withhold evidence confirming the Nazi leader’s fate?
The death of Hitler
Hitler died on 30 April 1945 in the Führerbunker, the underground shelter beneath the Reich Chancellery complex in central Berlin, as Soviet troops were closing in. His staff carried his body and that of his wife, Eva Braun, into the garden, doused them with petrol and burned them.
When Soviet forces took the site, its investigation fell partly to SMERSH, the military counterintelligence organisation whose name abbreviated the Russian phrase “Death to spies”.
According to the Soviet account, investigators recovered the charred remains of a man and woman outside the bunker and performed autopsies. The dental identification became the strongest element of that investigation.
“They take them to their field headquarters, they perform an autopsy, they have dental remains extracted, and they immediately hunt down Hitler's former dental nurse and his dental technician,” says Sharples speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.
The witnesses were Käthe Heusermann and Fritz Echtmann. Their knowledge of Hitler’s distinctive bridges and other dental work gave investigators crucial evidence that was much more tangible than a subjective resemblance between a burned corpse and a photograph.
But evidence gathered inside the intelligence organisation did not automatically become information available to allies, or even to other Soviet officials.
As Sharples explains, “the Soviets have this evidence, but the public line is always, ‘No. We haven't found anything.’”
In practice, Soviet statements fluctuated. Reports suggesting that a body had been identified were followed by denials. On 9 June, Marshal Georgy Zhukov publicly said there was no identified corpse and raised the possibility that Hitler had escaped. Soviet suggestions that he might be in Spain prompted an official Spanish denial.
Why ambiguity about Hitler’s death was useful
For the Soviets, this intentional uncertainty was politically useful. Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union had fought a common enemy, but following crucial developments at the Yalta conference, their alliance was already strained over the direction of Europe’s postwar future. Suggestions that Hitler remained at large could cast suspicion on other countries and sustain the argument that the Nazi threat required continued vigilance. Historians have therefore interpreted Stalin’s handling of the evidence partly as an attempt to strengthen his position in the postwar settlement.
For Western investigators, the immediate consequence was that they had to reconstruct Hitler’s death without access to the strongest physical evidence. In June 1945, witnesses in British and American custody began describing the burning of the bodies. They included Hitler’s chauffeur, Erich Kempka, who had supplied the petrol.
“They're interrogated separately, and then in late June they're both paraded before the press,” says Sharples of Kempka and a guard who had observed the burning.
- Read more | Did Hitler really shoot himself? Here's why the Führer's death is more complicated than you think
“They tell their stories, and this is the first real testimonial evidence that we have from people who are able to say, “yes, he's dead. Yes, we saw his body destroyed.””
But without the dental records for corroboration, these eyewitness statements weren’t enough to silence every objection. Had Hitler’s staff agreed on a cover story? Could witnesses distinguish what they had seen from what others had told them?
British Military Intelligence commissioned the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper to investigate. He sought witnesses, compared their accounts and reconstructed events inside the bunker. On 1 November 1945, he presented his conclusion in Berlin: Hitler had killed himself.
“This isn't necessarily the whole truth by any means,” Sharples observes. “This is what has been unfolding publicly.”
Behind the scenes, Soviet inquiries continued. In May 1946, investigators from the internal-security apparatus associated with the NKVD (the Soviet Union’s secret police organisation) returned to the bunker site, after further questioning witnesses in custody. They recovered skull fragments from the Chancellery garden where Hitler’s corpse was burned. One fragment appeared to contain a bullet hole. “Again, this evidence isn’t shared [with other countries],” Sharples says.
The truth emerges
During the 1950s, that secrecy became harder to maintain. Germans returning from Soviet captivity included members of Hitler’s household who had witnessed the aftermath of his death.
“They have been his valet or his close advisers,” says Sharples. “They have been the people who were instructed to carry out that cremation of his corpse. So they have handled his body, let alone just seen it.”
German legal proceedings gathered testimony, including from these people, to establish Hitler’s death formally. The Berchtesgaden court’s investigation culminated in a declaration of death in 1956. Accounts of the dental identification also started to emerge, revealing that Soviet investigators had possessed evidence unavailable to their Western counterparts.
Then, in 1968, Soviet journalist Lev Bezymenski published The Death of Adolf Hitler, including an autopsy report and previously withheld material.
“It is very much a propaganda text in its tone,” Sharples says. “Much of the book is a celebratory account of the Soviet war effort, and then Hitler's autopsy report is in this collection.”
The publication acknowledged the recovery and examination of remains. But its insistence on cyanide poisoning also challenged the Western account centred on a gunshot.
For Sharples, this interpretation carried an ideological purpose. Soviet narratives presented poison as a supposedly weak, feminine means of death, denying Hitler the image of a soldier dying by his pistol. Those were propagandists’ gendered assumptions, not forensic distinctions.
Western scepticism consequently concerned both the findings and their presentation. Evidence released selectively, inside an overtly political account, was difficult to assess separately from the motives of those releasing it.
Caroline Sharples was speaking to Charlotte Vosper on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> This was one of the most brutal battles of WW2 – so why have you never heard of it? https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/battle-of-hill-170-arakan-offensive/ Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:01:57 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/battle-of-hill-170-arakan-offensive/ In January 1945, British commandos and Indian troops fought to cut a vital Japanese route through Burma. The struggle around Hill 170 revealed how much had changed since the Allies’ disastrous retreat three years earlier. When the men of 44 Commando occupied a position called Pinner near Kangaw, in western Burma, they dug in and waited. The knew the opposing Japanese forces were nearby. Why were they not attacking?
“It was almost eerily empty. Tensions were high,” explains historian Lucy Betteridge-Dyson, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast.
The wait didn’t last too long. After darkness fell, artillery opened fire from the surrounding rice paddies, with shells bursting among the trees above the commandos. “There is a very brief barrage, and then it stops. It stops completely.”
But that brief silence was only a prelude to further conflict, and infantry attacks quickly followed, bringing Japanese soldiers into the defenders’ trenches. Pinner was one position in a wider struggle around Kangaw in January 1945, remembered chiefly for its climax on nearby Hill 170. The stakes extended beyond these small patches of high ground: control of them could determine whether Japanese troops retained a crucial route of withdrawal.
That night’s fighting at Pinner was an early phase of the Kangaw operation, distinct from the major assault on Hill 170 a week later.
The Burma campaign
Three years earlier, it had been the British and their allies who were retreating.
Japan invaded Burma, now Myanmar, in January 1942. Burma stood between Japanese forces advancing through south-east Asia and British India. Its loss would expose India’s eastern approaches and disrupt the overland supply route to China, which was also fighting Japan.
The ensuing Allied retreat covered roughly 1,000 miles. British, Indian and Chinese troops withdrew under conditions of exhaustion, disease and collapsing communications. Rangoon, Burma’s principal port, fell in March.
“[The Allied forces] were completely kicked out of Burma, back to the borders with British India,” says Betteridge-Dyson. This retreat was followed by a prolonged process of “getting to grips with this new enemy, the Imperial Japanese Army”.
That required understanding the landscape as well as Japanese tactics. Because Burma, she explains, “isn't just jungle”.
“It's mountains, it's open plains, and you've got to deal with the climate. So you've got to deal with malaria, you've got to deal with the heat, the monsoons.”
By 1944, improved training, supply arrangements and leadership were changing Allied prospects. General William Slim, commanding the Fourteenth Army, and Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, the supreme Allied commander in South East Asia, helped rebuild confidence. The victories at Imphal and Kohima that year defeated Japan’s offensive into India and demonstrated that its armies could be beaten.
Previously, Betteridge-Dyson explains, rumours had presented Japanese soldiers as “these supermen, these terrifying jungle fighters”. Now the men increasingly believed: “We can win this.”
The next challenge was to turn that confidence into an advance.
The Arakan offensive
On Burma’s western coast lay Arakan, separated from the country’s central plains by the Arakan Yoma mountains. The limited routes across this barrier made roads and passes particularly valuable. Capturing coastal airfields would also support operations inland.
Here, Lieutenant General Philip Christison’s XV Indian Corps conducted an offensive involving British commandos, Indian formations and other Allied troops. Waterways offered a means of bypassing difficult ground and threatening Japanese positions from unexpected directions.
“This was done basically in a series of amphibious landings,” explains Betteridge-Dyson.
Kangaw was so significant because of its road. Japanese forces used it for communications, supplies and withdrawal towards a mountain crossing.
“Because there were so few lateral road links, it was a big fight between the Japanese and the British as to who was going to control these,” she says. “They were very, very important.”
On 22 January 1945, 3 Commando Brigade landed south of Kangaw. These specialist assault troops included both army and Royal Marine commandos. Mangrove creeks and rice paddies complicated movement, while Japanese-held high ground stood between the landing area and the road. No 1 Commando secured Hill 170; 44 Commando occupied Pinner the following day.
“The chaps came ashore. This audacious landing caught the Japanese entirely by surprise,” says Betteridge-Dyson.
The following bombardment brought incredible danger from above. Shells exploding in branches produced “tree bursts”, scattering metal fragments and splintered wood over positions that offered better protection against blasts at ground level.
And the pauses between barrages were deliberate.
“They're trying to unnerve the commandos,” Betteridge-Dyson explains. “They're trying to get them to break their position. They're trying to get them to reveal themselves.”
Close-combat warfare
Eventually, the Japanese infantry climbed towards the defenders.
“It gets down to really nitty-gritty hand-to-hand fighting. You've got suicidal attacks from the Japanese. They're coming in with grenades on sticks and throwing themselves into the frontline trenches.”
The commandos organised their positions for defence in every direction. Tin cans provided improvised warning devices; heavily armed men covered the corners of their defensive perimeter. Remaining in position, and resisting the impulse to fire at every sound, was essential.
Firsthand accounts describe Japanese “jitter parties”: men attempting to unsettle defenders and draw fire that would disclose their positions.
“They're calling out to the commandos, ‘We know where you are. Come out.’”
Betteridge-Dyson also describes accounts of attackers wearing captured green berets to provoke the commandos. Such incidents added an emotional strain to the practical difficulty of distinguishing an approaching enemy from movement in the darkness.
“And they did amazingly manage to do so,” she says of the men holding their fire. “They waited.”
The assault on Hill 170
The wider battle continued, and Indian infantry and tanks reinforced the landing, and the struggle to dominate the road intensified. On 31 January, Japanese troops launched a major assault against Hill 170. Losing the hill would threaten the Allied foothold behind the troops operating towards Kangaw.
At its northern end, Lieutenant George Knowland of No 1 Commando commanded a platoon of 24 men. His Victoria Cross citation records repeated attacks, mounting casualties and his efforts to keep the position fighting.
- Read more | How and when did WW2 end?
When a Bren gun crew was wounded, Knowland took over the weapon. Later he used a light mortar, then a rifle and a submachine gun as attackers closed in. He was mortally wounded. His platoon continued resisting; its stand lasted 12 hours before relief. Knowland was 22.
Other commandos and Indian troops helped sustain the defence. “By the evening of 31 January, the assault had been defeated, and the surviving Japanese attackers were withdrawing.” Their attempt to dislodge the commandos had failed.
Hill 170 formed part of a much larger offensive, dependent on infantry, artillery, naval transport, aircraft and supply services working together. But the contrast with the 1942 retreat was substantial. Allied troops were now landing behind Japanese positions, threatening their communications and holding their ground through determined counterattacks.
The fighting around Kangaw showed what years of adaptation to the Asian landscapes of war had achieved, and how much was still demanded of the men in the trenches.
Lucy Betteridge-Dyson was speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> WW2's bloody battle for Arakan https://www.historyextra.com/membership/ww2s-bloody-battle-for-arakan/ Wed, 30 Sep 2026 10:35:26 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/ww2s-bloody-battle-for-arakan/ Military historian Lucy Betteridge-Dyson discusses an Allied offensive that launched daring amphibious assaults deep into Japanese-held territory, turning the tide of the Burma campaign In 1944, the Allies unleashed an offensive in Burma – a brutal campaign spearheaded by 3 Commando Brigade alongside the Indian and West African troops of XV Corps. Against a ruthless enemy and in one of the world’s most unforgiving environments, these men launched daring amphibious assaults deep into Japanese-held territory, turning the tide of the Burma campaign and delivering a devastating blow to the Imperial Japanese Army.
Military historian Lucy Betteridge-Dyson has written a book on the subject, Jungle Commandoes, and Emily Briffett spoke to her to find out more.
]]> Hitler ordered my father’s death – but an SS general spared his life https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/george-lascelles-harewood-gottlob-berger-colditz-ww2/ Sun, 27 Sep 2026 20:00:06 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/george-lascelles-harewood-gottlob-berger-colditz-ww2/ When he was captured by the Nazis in 1944, George Lascelles – the eldest nephew of King George VI – became one of Colditz Castle’s most important prisoners. David Lascelles tells the remarkable story behind his father’s time in captivity, and why, decades later, he decided to track down a pistol belonging to the man who let his father walk free It was April 1945. As the Second World War entered its final stages, my father, First Lieutenant George Lascelles of the Grenadier Guards, was imprisoned in Oflag IV-C, Colditz Castle.
The prisoners there called it a straflager – a punishment camp – much to the irritation of their German captors, who insisted it was just an ordinary PoW camp but with better security. It was where they sent particularly troublesome prisoners, the habitual escapers and those considered to be deutschfeindlich, hostile to German ways.
My father, just 22 years old, didn’t see himself as any of those. He had been a prisoner for less than a year and had never tried to escape. What he was, though, was well connected. His maternal uncle was King George VI, and he was one of a small group of young British officers being held together in Colditz, all of them related to members of the establishment: the son of the Viceroy of India, the nephew of Clementine Churchill, and so on.
The Germans called them the ‘Prominente’. They were hostages, kept together for who knows what purpose when the war ended: perhaps as bargaining chips for captured high-ranking Nazis, or as human shields in Hitler’s rumoured last redoubt in the mountains of southern Germany.
For the other prisoners in Colditz, the sound of the Allied guns was the sound of approaching freedom. For the Prominente, it signalled the moment of maximum danger. Sure enough, just a couple of days before the Americans liberated Colditz, they were roused from their beds in the middle of the night, loaded onto a bus and driven south, destination unknown.
Fear and uncertainty
The Prominente were on the road for more than two weeks. It was a time of fear and uncertainty. They never knew where they were going to be the next day or whether that day might be their last.
After being transported to another medieval castle prison in the town of Tittmoning, they encountered a Dutch officer who had a plan that might buy them a little time – time, they hoped, for the approaching Allied armies to arrive.
- Listen | Ben Macintyre discusses his book Escape from Colditz
A small chamber had been excavated in the thick castle walls, in which five of the men could hide. A sixth, Giles Romilly, would escape with one of the Dutch prisoners in a pre-arranged plan. Hopefully the Germans would think they had all escaped.
It almost worked. It was four days before they were discovered, and Romilly and his Dutch companion made it all the way to Munich, arriving there a matter of days before the Americans liberated the city.
The Prominente were watched even more closely after this, with their guards now Waffen-SS rather than regular soldiers. So when they were moved to a run-down camp just outside the alpine town of Markt Pongau, they thought it was a concentration camp and that this was to be their end.
After a couple of days at the new site, they received an unexpected visitor: Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, the SS general recently appointed as Germany’s head of prisoner-of-war affairs. He showed them a letter from Hitler. It contained a list of their names, ranks and PoW numbers, with a short note attached: “On no account must the listed prisoners be allowed to fall into Allied hands.” It was their death warrant.
Berger had other ideas, however. The order was pointless and certainly illegal, he told them, and he – for the first time in his long military career – was not going to obey it. Instead, he was going to arrange their safe passage to the Allied front line, only a few hours’ drive away.
“I ask for nothing in return,” he added, “except that you remember this moment when the war is over.” And he presented the most senior member of the group, John Elphinstone, with a gift: an ornamental pistol in a red leather case. “This is,” he said, “of my goodwill the proof.”
Years later, Michael Alexander – one of the other Prominente and the cousin of a senior British general – described the moment in vivid detail:
“In the box, resplendent on a couch of red velvet, lay an enormous automatic pistol about the same size as a Colt .45. This splendidly flashy weapon was inlaid with ivory and enamel; its squat barrel was elaborately chased with golden oak-leaves in high relief. On the butt was the enamelled monogram of the SS and a small plate with Berger’s signature.”
Within days, the Prominente were home. Berger, on the other hand, was arrested, interrogated and tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison, and his lawyer asked Elphinstone to write to the appeals court on behalf of the Prominente, explaining what Berger had done for them.
This affidavit was an important factor in Berger’s sentence being heavily reduced. Twenty-five years became 10 and, with further time off for good behaviour, he was released by the end of 1951.
Berger then settled in the small town of Gerstetten in southwest Germany, where his wife, two children and two grandchildren were living. He died there in 1975, still connected to many figures on the far right and still bitter at his treatment by the Allies. He said he regretted ever having trusted his long-time boss, Heinrich Himmler.
But why had he decided to spare the lives of my father and his fellow Prominente? Remorse? A belated onset of compassion? Or simply self-interest?
After Colditz
The Prominente returned to their old lives, or at least a version of them. My father was the youngest of the group, still at school when the war began, and just 22 when he returned to England. The next six years – 1945–51, when Berger was in prison – were perhaps the most tumultuous of his life.
- Read more | The Nuremberg Trials: the real history behind the post-WW2 tribunal
After leaving the army, he served as an aide to the governor general of Canada before graduating from Cambridge and getting a job in the business about which he was most passionate – music, especially opera.
His father died in 1947, and he inherited the family title, becoming the 7th Earl of Harewood. By the end of 1949 he was married, and his first child was born in 1950. That’s me.
The return home was not so straightforward for all the other Prominente. Some of the men almost certainly suffered from what would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), though the condition wasn’t recognised then. “Pull yourself together and get on with it,” they would have been told.
Dawyck Haig, for example, son of Field Marshal Douglas Haig, the commander-in-chief of the British Expeditionary Force during the First World War, wrote in his memoirs that he had “a sort of breakdown”.
Giles Romilly, who had escaped from Tittmoning, was also haunted by his wartime experiences. “My five years of absence were like a deep shaft,” he wrote. “I at the bottom, able to see the free people overhead, not able to make them see or hear me.” He died of an overdose of barbiturates in California in 1967.
Michael Alexander, meanwhile, led a colourful postwar life in London, entertaining fellow members of what became known as the Chelsea Set in his flat in Eaton Square and at his restaurant just off the King’s Road.
The hunt for the pistol
Years later, I met several other descendants of the Prominente. There was one question that I asked each of them: did they know what had become of Berger’s pistol?
I had been intrigued by it from the moment I started working on my new book, Out of Colditz. It seemed like a classic MacGuffin – a plot device in a movie that helps drive the story but is otherwise unimportant to the audience (the Maltese Falcon, for example). The story of Berger and the Prominente would have been much the same without the pistol, but the weapon seemed to embody the theatricality of their brief, strange encounter.
Berger had presented the pistol to John Elphinstone, so I set out to learn more about him. Elphinstone was a countryman, a fisherman and a keen shot. After the war, he returned to manage the family estate in Scotland. I assume he took the pistol home with him, though I could find no evidence of this or of what happened to it next.
- Read more | I’ve just been inside a Nazi monster’s mansion – and what I found there was deeply haunting
Its last known sighting was on the popular TV programme This is Your Life in 1985, when my father was the subject and Michael Alexander – a guest on the show along with a couple of the other Prominente – produced it from his pocket with a theatrical flourish. “Do you remember this, George?” he asked.
Elphinstone had died in 1975, so Alexander seemed to me to be the most likely holder of the gun. However, Alexander had died without leaving a will, and his friends had no idea of the weapon’s whereabouts. It was another dead end.
So if Alexander or his descendants didn’t have the pistol, who did? Elphinstone’s family seemed the most likely. He never married, so the title, the estate and the contents of the family home passed to his nephew, Jamie. Jamie married Willa Chetwode shortly after inheriting, and they had four children together before Jamie died in 1994, aged just 41.
Willa was left rattling around with four young children in a large house that held unhappy memories for her. Within a year she had sold the house, moved out and put its contents into storage. There it all remained, untouched, until a fire at the storage unit destroyed much of it. Did that include the pistol, I wondered?
When I finally tracked down Willa, who had since remarried, I asked her whether she had any idea where the pistol was. “Oh yes,” she replied. “I know exactly where it is. I’ve got it here in my safe.”
A special weapon with a strange history
I drove to meet Willa and her husband Thomas Lloyd at their home in west Wales, getting hopelessly lost in the narrow lanes around their house and arriving late, hot and flustered. “Don’t worry about that,” said Willa. “I expect you want to see the pistol.”
Thomas held up a red leather case. He clicked open the brass catches on the lid. It was, in its own small way, a dramatic moment. The lining of the box was a faded yellow, not the red that Michael Alexander had described. The case was a little battered, the engraved brass barrel quite tarnished and the ivory handle discoloured, but the Nazi eagle, swastika, SS insignia and Berger’s signature were very much as originally stated.
I lifted the pistol carefully out of the case. It was smaller than I had expected, settling easily into my palm, but heavier too. I checked the safety catch and the trigger. Both were jammed solid – hardly surprising, as it hadn’t been handled for a long time and had probably never been fired.
There was something almost comically theatrical about the way it had been presented, but the SS insignia and the swastika gave it a sinister edge. As often happens if you’ve been looking for something for a long time, the moment of discovery can be an anti-climax, but there was a tickle of emotion there, too, as I tried to picture the strange scene when the presentation was made.
“Wow!” I said, rather feebly. “So it really does exist.” Willa smiled ruefully. “Yes. It’s been sitting there all this time, and I’ve never known what to do with it.”
We talked about what might happen next. We agreed that a museum, probably the Imperial War Museum, would be the pistol’s best destination. It would be a permanent home for this “splendidly flashy” weapon, as Michael Alexander described it – a special weapon with a strange history.
As I write, Elphinstone’s family and the Imperial War Museum are currently in discussions. There could be no more suitable home for a weapon that, to me, has come to represent the extraordinary encounter between Berger and the Prominente, and its enduring impact on the lives of all concerned.
David Lascelles, 8th Earl of Harewood, is a BAFTA-winning film and television producer. He is the author of Out of Colditz: My Father the POW and the Nazi Who Controlled His Fate (Profile Books, 2026)
]]> In 1944, Hitler threatened London with a new "wonder weapon". How did resistance fighters race to stop him? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-1944-hitler-threatened-london-with-a-new-wonder-weapon-how-did-resistance-fighters-race-to-stop-him/ Sun, 20 Sep 2026 14:30:46 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/in-1944-hitler-threatened-london-with-a-new-wonder-weapon-how-did-resistance-fighters-race-to-stop-him/ As Allied victory in the Second World War became increasingly inevitable, Hitler’s scientists launched a vicious new ‘revenge weapon’ – the supersonic V-2. Even more audaciously, Polish resistance and British forces combined to locate and secrete one out of occupied Europe. Guy Walters picks up the story There are moments in historical research when the past suddenly ceases to feel distant. You can spend years reading documents in archives, following footnotes, studying maps and aerial photographs. Then one day you find yourself standing in the mud near a lake in eastern Europe, and realise that history happened right here.
During the Second World War, the lake in question was still a meadow, given the codename Motyl (‘Butterfly’). Eight decades later, the track I took to that spot in southern Poland was deeply rutted after recent rain, and I wondered whether my hire car was about to disappear into the mud altogether.
There were earthworks half-hidden by trees and, in the far distance, the Carpathian Mountains loomed under a grey sky. Nothing about the place obviously suggested that it had witnessed one of the most audacious secret missions of the conflict.
Yet it was from this remote spot that, in the summer of 1944, a RAF Dakota aircraft landed in darkness to pick up a cargo so important that Winston Churchill himself had taken a personal interest in the operation.
That cargo was a V-2 rocket.
The tale at the heart of my new book, Stealing Hitler’s Rocket, is one of those extraordinary wartime episodes that sounds almost too cinematic to be true. It features secret laboratories, daring flights into occupied territory, coded messages, hidden airstrips, brilliant scientists, terrified villagers, and one of the greatest intelligence coups of the entire war. Yet despite its importance, it remains astonishingly little known outside Poland.
Most British adults know broadly what the V-2 was: Hitler’s terrifying ‘revenge weapon’, capable of travelling many times faster than the speed of sound before smashing into cities without warning. Unlike the V-1 flying bomb, the spluttering engine of which gave Londoners a few moments of dreadful anticipation, the V-2 struck before anybody heard it. The explosion came first; the sound followed afterwards. It was the world’s first ballistic missile.
The V-2 has always occupied a strange place in the history of the Second World War. It was both technologically astonishing and strategically futile. It represented a leap into the future while emerging from one of the darkest regimes in human history. It killed thousands in London and Antwerp, yet far more perished while building it in the tunnels of Mittelwerk, the underground factory in central Germany where concentration camp prisoners were worked to death under unimaginable conditions.
For years, however, one aspect of the story has fascinated me more than any other: how the Allies learned what the V-2 actually was – because the Germans guarded the secret obsessively.
Explosive revelations
During the early years of the war, British intelligence received fragmentary reports suggesting that something unusual was happening on the Baltic coast at Peenemünde. There were whispers of rockets. Strange test facilities had appeared. A handful of agents mentioned experimental weapons. But the information arriving in London was contradictory and confusing. Some believed that the Germans were developing long-range rockets. Others dismissed the idea as fantasy.
One of the most intriguing figures in this story is the scientist Reginald Victor Jones, a brilliant British intelligence officer who became convinced that Nazi Germany really was attempting to build a giant rocket. Jones was one of those wonderfully eccentric wartime minds: imaginative enough to grasp the possibility, rigorous enough to pursue the evidence. Yet even within the British establishment there was scepticism. Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s scientific adviser, thought the rocket theory absurd. The arguments became fierce and deeply personal.
Meanwhile, the Germans pressed ahead.
The centre of development was indeed at Peenemünde, where aerospace engineer (and, after the war, Nasa pioneer) Wernher von Braun and Major-General Walter Dornberger oversaw the creation of what became the V-2. The scale of the enterprise was immense. Thousands of engineers and workers were involved. The technical challenges alone were staggering. This was to be not merely a bigger artillery shell but a machine capable of reaching the edge of space before descending on its target at supersonic speed.
When the RAF bombed Peenemünde in August 1943, the Germans dispersed parts of the programme east into occupied Poland. That decision would prove crucial. Because there the Germans faced one enemy unlike any other in Europe: the Polish underground state.
Resistance is fertile
The Polish resistance has often been remembered chiefly through the prism of the Warsaw Uprising, but by 1944 the Home Army had constructed an extraordinary clandestine network stretching across the country. It gathered intelligence, sabotaged infrastructure, printed underground newspapers, and infiltrated German operations on a remarkable scale.
In the forests and fields around Blizna in southern Poland, the Germans began testing V-2 rockets. Inevitably, some failed. Many, however, launched successfully; when they crashed into the ground hundreds of kilometres north of the launch point, the Polish underground and German army both raced to collect telltale remnants of this secret and terrifying weapon.
In retrospect, the operation to find, remove and research one of the crashed rockets feels almost impossible, with individuals taking enormous risks at every stage. Farmers, priests, engineers, couriers, scientists, radio operators and partisans all became part of a vast improvised effort to understand Germany’s most advanced weapon.
Eventually, a V-2 that crashed into marshy ground at Sarnaki, near the River Bug about 80 miles east of Warsaw, failed to explode properly. Instead of being obliterated, much of the missile survived because it simply went ‘splat’.
The implications were enormous. For the first time, the Allies had the chance to examine substantial pieces of Germany’s secret weapon. Not vague intelligence reports, not guesses, but actual hardware. What followed was an extraordinary race against time.
The Germans knew that rocket parts were going missing after crashes. They launched investigations, with search teams combing impact sites, and the Gestapo became increasingly suspicious that information was leaking out of occupied Poland. Yet somehow the resistance repeatedly managed to stay one step ahead.
Silent witness
The landscape itself still carries traces of the story.
When I visited Sarnaki, the weather was bleak and cold. The Bug snaked through the countryside, broad and brown beneath the low sky. The landscape still feels remote enough that you can imagine the events unfolding there in secrecy.
I found myself thinking about the moment the rocket came down nearby. The silence today makes it difficult to imagine the violence of the event itself: the shockwave, the panic, the rush to secure the site before the Germans arrived. That silence also somehow preserves the atmosphere of secrecy that surrounded the operation.
The rural location of this story is striking. We tend to think of intelligence history in terms of London offices, codebreakers and diplomatic intrigue. But so much of the V-2 story happened in muddy villages, forests and isolated farmsteads.
Men cycled through darkness carrying messages between local Home Army commanders, scientists in clandestine laboratories in Warsaw, and radio operators transmitting intelligence to London. Farmers hid fragments of rocket components beneath haystacks or inside barns before resistance couriers spirited them away.
In Warsaw, two of Poland’s leading scientists, Professor Janusz Groszkowski, an expert in radio engineering, and the chemist Professor Marceli Struszyński, painstakingly examined the recovered parts. Their aim was not to reconstruct a working V-2, but to discover how it functioned: its guidance system, fuel tanks, engine and construction. They measured, photographed and sketched every component before preparing reports for Britain, giving Allied scientists their clearest picture yet of Germany’s revolutionary weapon. The stakes could hardly have been higher. If caught, those involved faced torture and execution.
Part of the tension in this story comes from the sheer fragility of the enterprise. At numerous points, the operation could have collapsed completely. A single informant, a chance patrol, a delayed message, or a mistimed movement might have destroyed everything. Yet the operation continued.
The tale is especially relevant today because it reveals something important about the nature of wartime alliances and intelligence cooperation. British histories of the Second World War have not always given sufficient credit to Polish contributions. Yet in this case the Polish underground provided intelligence that Britain simply could not have acquired independently. Without the Polish resistance, the Allies would have known far less about the V-2 for far longer.
That matters not only historically but emotionally, too. Travelling through these areas, speaking to locals, visiting museums and sites connected with the operation, I was repeatedly struck by how vividly the story survives in local memory while remaining relatively obscure in Britain.
At Blizna, where the Germans conducted many of the test launches, there is today a small museum containing remnants of rockets and wartime material recovered from the area. Walking around it on a cold November morning, looking at twisted fragments of metal and ceramic components, it was impossible not to think about the tense drama surrounding these objects in 1944. At the time, such scraps represented perhaps the most secret technology in the world.
The atmosphere at Motyl, the scene of the clandestine landing operation by the RAF, affected me even more strongly, perhaps because the place still feels so isolated. The mission itself carried huge dangers. The Dakota crew had to navigate their way across Europe at night, land on a rough, improvised strip, load precious cargo quickly, and escape again before German forces intervened.
Standing there even now, with the cold air rolling in from the east and the mountains faintly visible on the horizon, it became possible to imagine the fear and tension of that night.
International collaboration
There is also something deeply moving about the international nature of the story. British airmen, Polish resistance fighters, local villagers, scientists and intelligence officers all became linked through this desperate attempt to understand and counter one of Hitler’s deadliest weapons.
The rocket was a technological marvel – there is no point pretending otherwise. Its engineering was astonishing. But it emerged from a regime driven by fantasy, brutality and self-destruction. Hitler poured enormous resources into “wonder weapons” partly because he increasingly believed technology could reverse Germany’s collapsing military position.
It could not. By the time the V-2 entered service in significant numbers, Germany was already losing the war irretrievably. The rocket inflicted terror and suffering, but it could not alter the outcome.
Yet the legacy of the V-2 stretches far beyond the Third Reich. Modern ballistic missiles descend directly from that weapon. So does the space age. The engineers who built the V-2 later helped create both Soviet and American rocket programmes. The road to the moon runs, uncomfortably, through Peenemünde and Mittelwerk. That moral complexity is one reason the subject remains so compelling.
Writing the book also forced me to think about the strange relationship between landscapes and memory. So many wartime sites today appear utterly ordinary. The forests grow back. Roads are rebuilt. Lakes form. Villages continue quietly with daily life. Unless you know the story, you would never suspect what happened there.
And secrecy lies at the heart of this story.
Indeed, one challenge in writing the book was resisting the temptation to reveal too much too early. The operation unfolded in stages, each one more hazardous than the last. First came the painstaking gathering of intelligence from launch sites and crash locations, and then the race to recover intact components before German search parties could reach them. After that came the clandestine scientific examination of the rocket in occupied Warsaw, followed by the even greater challenge of convincing London that the priceless cargo could actually be smuggled out of occupied Europe. With every success, the risks multiplied. The closer the resistance came to unlocking the V-2’s secrets, the more perilous the operation became.
Eventually, the Allies faced a conundrum. If the rocket fragments and intelligence could somehow be transported out of occupied Poland, the value to British scientists and military planners would be immense. But accomplishing that would require an operation of extraordinary boldness.
Which brings us back to Motyl and that muddy strip beside the lake in the darkness of a Polish summer night in 1944; back to the waiting Dakota aircraft and the men risking their lives to load its mysterious cargo before hopefully vanishing once again into the sky. The mission itself was a remarkable feat of international cooperation. The RAF crew had flown from Italy under the cover of darkness, while Home Army soldiers secured the landing ground, guided the aircraft in and guarded the precious cargo. Among those waiting to board were key figures from the Polish underground, carrying not only crucial rocket components but also scientific reports compiled in occupied Warsaw.
Other ways of getting the material to Britain had been considered, including courier routes through occupied Europe, but they were judged too slow and too vulnerable to German interception. An airlift was enormously risky, yet it offered the only realistic chance of delivering both the evidence and the men who understood it. What happened next represents one of the most remarkable episodes of the war.
Guy Walters is a historian, journalist and author. His latest book is Stealing Hitler's Rocket: The Incredible Mission to Smuggle a V-2 Rocket Out of Nazi-Occupied Europe to Britain (Apollo, 2026)
]]> Did Hitler really shoot himself? Here's why the Führer's death is more complicated than you think https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/how-did-adolf-hitler-die-gunshot-cyanide/ Fri, 18 Sep 2026 17:15:00 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/how-did-adolf-hitler-die-gunshot-cyanide/ Witnesses described a pistol and a bloodied body. Soviet investigators pointed to poison. The evidence surrounding Hitler’s death reveals how his final moments became another battleground between the powers that defeated him. On 30 April 1945, as Soviet troops fought their way through Berlin, Adolf Hitler’s world had contracted to a bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, the headquarters of his government.
The dictator who had pursued an empire across Europe was now sheltering underground. With him was Eva Braun, his long-standing partner, whom he had married only the previous day. That afternoon, both died by suicide. Their bodies were carried into the garden outside and burned. MI5’s account of the bunker witnesses describes the hurried destruction amid Soviet shellfire.
The broad outline is well established. But precisely how Hitler killed himself has proved harder to settle.
Witnesses pointed towards a gunshot. A Soviet autopsy report attributed his death to cyanide poisoning. Skull fragments apparently offering physical evidence of a bullet wound brought complications of their own.
For historian Caroline Sharples, author of The Long Death of Adolf Hitler, these disagreements reveal the difficulty of reconstructing an event when the evidence was damaged and dispersed, and part of the struggle to determine how the Nazi dictator would be remembered.
What the witnesses saw
The case for a gunshot rests on several kinds of testimony from people inside the bunker.
“Some witnesses talk about hearing a gunshot,” Sharples explains, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “Witnesses who happen to enter the study after his suicide talk about seeing the pistol on the floor.”
Others described the scene and Hitler’s body.
“People have described, in very consistent terms, the size of the blood splatter in the room, and there are also descriptions from witnesses who saw his corpse in the immediate aftermath, and they talk about the blood to his head.”
These were observations of the immediate aftermath, rather than accounts of someone watching Hitler pull the trigger. Nevertheless, their cumulative significance is substantial.
“So collectively, all of those things add up to this idea that he shot himself.”
Gathering this evidence required investigators to trace members of Hitler’s scattered entourage. In autumn 1945, British intelligence officer and historian Hugh Trevor-Roper questioned witnesses and examined accounts gathered by the Allies. His investigation concluded that Hitler had killed himself; his book, The Last Days of Hitler, followed in 1947.
But Western investigators lacked access to crucial physical evidence. Soviet forces had occupied the site where the bodies were burned. The witnesses and the remains were being examined through separate investigations, controlled by powers whose wartime partnership was already deteriorating.
The Soviet case for poison
More than two decades later, a different account reached Western readers.
“When the Russians published their autopsy report in 1968, they talk about finding fragments of glass among the dental remains, which is indicative, of course, of someone potentially biting down on a cyanide capsule,” says Sharples.
An autopsy is an examination of a body to establish the cause of death. Here, however, investigators were dealing with badly burned remains, limiting what could be reconstructed. The reported glass fragments offered evidence of possible poison use, but did not automatically explain away the testimony about a gunshot.
The report also arrived with political baggage.
By 1968, the wartime alliance had given way to the Cold War: a prolonged confrontation between the Soviet Union and Western powers, particularly the United States. Germany itself was divided into rival states. Accounts of the Nazi defeat carried implications for the authority and prestige of its victors.
“The Soviets are very keen to put forward the idea that if Hitler is dead, he has to die in a cowardly, weak way,” Sharples explains, “to, again, puncture any potential heroic myth-making before it can take hold.”
That distinction reflected a political judgement about supposedly honourable and dishonourable deaths. Neither method conferred dignity on Hitler’s actions. But shaping the account of his end offered another opportunity to demolish any positive image cultivated by his regime. In effect, it could be PR.
“This is part of the reason why the West is a bit sceptical of this autopsy report, because it doesn't align with their narrative that they've already established, that he shot himself.”
A skull with an uncertain history
The Soviet archives also contained evidence that seemed to support the gunshot account: fragments of skull, including a piece bearing an apparent bullet hole. But these bones had a different history from the dental remains.
“These skull bones are not discovered at the same time as the rest of the corpse,” Sharples explains. “And indeed, they're discovered a whole year later by a different intelligence body.”
Their recovery in 1946 created a fundamental problem of provenance: the documented history connecting an object to the person it supposedly belonged to.
“On the surface, you think, ‘Ah, brilliant. This will prove the idea that he did shoot himself.’ But the provenance of these bones is challenging.”
The same location did not necessarily mean the same body.
“We don't have anything to definitively link it to the original corpse, which had, in the meantime after autopsy, been destroyed further and buried, and then reburied. So, we can't match the two.”
The skull fragments were also held in a separate archive from the teeth. Their preservation introduced further difficulties.
“The conditions in which those skull fragments have been kept have not been ideal, shall we say, over the years.”
When apparent proof creates more questions
A later American documentary subsequently gave the controversy new momentum, claiming that examination of the skull material indicated it belonged to a younger woman.
For Sharples, that claim requires caution too.
“Now, we can't verify that either. That work hasn't been peer-reviewed or published, but it is enough to set the whole question of ‘how did Hitler die?’ running again in the media.”
“The skull is interesting, though, because it has been held up in exhibitions and it's labelled as Hitler's skull,” Sharples says. “But we are not quite sure. Let's just say that it's not so convincing.”
The teeth offer firmer ground. A 1973 dental study compared distinctive dental features documented in the Soviet findings with wartime X-rays and interrogation records, supporting Hitler’s identification.
As Sharples explains, “there's a clearer chain of evidence between that and the rest of the remains and the whole discovery process in 1945.”
Identifying a dead man and establishing precisely how he died are different tasks. The teeth support identification; witness testimony supplies much of the evidence for a gunshot. Possible poison use does not, by itself, exclude a shooting.
“So I think, with that in mind, we probably come down more on the side that Hitler died by gunshot,” Sharples concludes. Did he bite down on a cyanide pill simultaneously? It’s possible.
Either way, while Hitler’s life ended in Berlin, the contest over how to describe his death continued long afterwards.
Caroline Sharples was speaking to Charlotte Vosper on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
]]> Did Britain really 'keep calm and carry on' in WW2? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-britain-really-keep-calm-and-carry-on-in-ww2/ Fri, 28 Aug 2026 12:31:20 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-britain-really-keep-calm-and-carry-on-in-ww2/ Steven Casey explains the often surprising reality of Britain's wartime morale, so often characterised through the motto 'Keep calm and carry on' Keep calm and carry on' has long been held up as the defining spirit of wartime Britain. But was the nation really as united, stoic and unquestioning as popular memory suggests?
In this episode, Steven Casey takes Isabel King through the often surprising reality of Britain's wartime morale.
]]> Did the Catholic Church support Hitler? https://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-the-catholic-church-support-hitler-podcast/ Wed, 26 Aug 2026 11:07:17 GMT https://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-the-catholic-church-support-hitler-podcast/ Ambrogio Caiani considers how the politically neutral Catholic church come to have dealings with the fascist regimes of Mussolini and Hitler How did the politically neutral Catholic church come to have dealings with the fascist regimes of Mussolini and Hitler? In this episode, Ambrogio Caiani tells Charlotte Vosper why the Curia was enticed by authoritarianism, and what these deals with dictators meant for ordinary Catholics and non-Catholics alike.
]]>