80 years after Hitler's death: the stormy fate of the woman who identified the Nazi leader's remains

At the end of April 1945, as Soviet troops entered Berlin with blood and fire, Adolf Hitler knew with certainty that World War II was over for Germany. The dream of conquering the world with his Third Reich was finally gone. Then, the Nazi leader locked himself in a room in the bunker in the German capital where he had taken refuge and took his own life.

A few days later, on May 5 , Russian forces that had reached the German Chancellery building under which the dictator's refuge was located found, in the garden of the place, the charred remains of a man who could be Hitler.

The Russians were desperate to know if they really had before them the remains of their worst enemy, but the body they had found was unrecognizable due to the fire. Then, when they noticed that the body's teeth were almost intact, they began searching for someone who could identify them.

Thus they came to Käthe Heusermann , the Nazi dictator's dentist assistant, who, upon observing the teeth and prostheses on the charred body, did not hesitate for a second and said: "These are Adolf Hitler's teeth."

What the woman didn't know then was that the recognition she had just received, far from granting her an important place in contemporary history, would bring her a destiny of suffering that would haunt her for the rest of her days.

Käthe Heusermann , born in 1909 in Liegnitz —then a German town, now a Polish town—grew up in a middle-class family. She had no idea what a role history had in store for her when, in the early 1930s , she began working as an assistant to a Jewish dentist in her town named Fedor Bruck.

With the rise of the Nazi Party to power, Bruck was forced to leave Liegnitz and fled to Berlin. Käthe also went there, although her employment with her employer was terminated. While her former boss worked for other dentists and later had to go into hiding to avoid being deported by the Nazis to an extermination camp, the young woman found employment with another professional, Hugo Blaschke , who would soon become Hitler's dentist .

From 1937 until the final days of the monstrous dictator, Blaschke and Heusermann took care of his oral health and that of his partner, Eva Braun . Hitler's teeth , constantly damaged (suffering from cavities and gum problems) and lacking numerous false teeth, required such intensive care that the dentist had his own office in the underground bunker where the Nazi leader had been living since January 1945.

Over the years, the dental assistant became familiar with every dental detail of the Nazi leader , who, meanwhile, was striving to conquer the world and perpetrating the most atrocious human extermination of the 20th century. Until the final day arrived.

On April 30, 1945, when the Red Army troops were just 500 meters from the Chancellery building, Hitler decided to end his life . As reported by the German broadcaster DW, just after noon, the dictator locked himself in a room with Eva Braun (whom he had married two days earlier), they both ingested a cyanide pill, and then Hitler shot himself.

Fearing that his body would suffer the same fate as that of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini , who had been assassinated days earlier and then hung upside down by the population in a square in Milan, Hitler had left instructions that their remains be, in his own way, protected from that fate. So the bodies of both were removed from that room, taken outside the bunker, doused with gasoline, and set alight .

On May 2 , the Russians finally reached the Chancellery and gained access to Hitler's bunker . The entire space was sealed almost immediately, and a group of Soviet counterintelligence men, a unit known as Smersh , dedicated themselves exclusively to finding any remains or any trace that would lead them to Hitler's whereabouts.

Thus, on May 5 , these Russian agents discovered the remains of two people, half-buried in a bomb crater in the Chancellery garden. They suspected, with good reason, that the charred bodies could be those of Hitler and his wife. Since what remained of the corpse of the chief Nazi genocidaire was unrecognizable, the Soviets proceeded to extract his teeth, which had remained intact despite the flames.

At this point, a character enters the story who would later be crucial in recounting the events that led to the dictator's recognition. This is Elena Rzhevskaya , a Russian soldier who worked as a German interpreter for her comrades in the Soviet army.

The woman, then 25 years old, had helped the Smersh men search for the Nazi dictator's body by interrogating German survivors from the bunker , and would later also help find Käthe Heusermann . But before that, young Elena had been given an unexpected mission: to be the bearer and custodian of the Führer's dentures .

Elena received the dictator's dental remains in a satin-lined box, similar to one that might be used to hold perfume or an inexpensive piece of jewelry. “ She carried the box under her arm . It smelled faintly of perfume. Suddenly, she saw her own reflection in a large mirror and thought, 'My God, I'm standing here holding in my hands the only thing left of Hitler! '” Rzhevskaya 's granddaughter, Liubov Summ, told The Times of Israel in a 2017 interview.

The Russian interpreter's granddaughter added that her grandmother's superiors had entrusted her with such precious material because they feared that the Soviet military would all end up drunk—and forgetful of their duties—during the mass celebrations for the victory over the Germans, who officially surrendered on May 7 (although the final ceasefire took place on the 8th).

Elena Rzhevskaya , who died in 2017 at the age of 97, would become a writer after the Second World War, recording all these episodes in the book Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter, published in Russian in 1965 and in English only in 2018.

“ It was overwhelming and oppressive to carry that with me . Now the crucial task was, at all costs, to find Hitler's dentist ,” the translator wrote in her book. When they began searching for someone who could analyze the teeth supposedly belonging to the Nazi leader, the Russians learned that his dentist, Dr. Blaschke , had fled the bunker with other Nazis.

Paradoxically, it was Käthe's first employer, Fedor Bruck , who told the Russians where they could find his former assistant. "She's in her apartment, right next to our house," the dentist told them.

The translator also learned at that time that Bruck had remained hidden from the Nazis for months in various houses of friends in Berlin . And that one of the people who had hidden him, even at risk to her own life, had been Käthe Heusermann herself. The woman, who was 35 years old in 1945, shared with her former employer the generous rations she was given for being part of Hitler 's entourage.

“ Heusermann was anything but a Nazi,” she would later write in her book Rzhevskaya . The Russian interpreter came to deeply empathize with the woman she had to translate.

When the Soviets finally located the dental assistant, she was happy to help. She led the Russians to the dentist's office in the bunker , which was preserved almost intact, as were the Führer's dental X-rays. She then made an impeccable sketch on paper of the dictator's teeth, complete with false teeth.

And when Elena Rzhevskaya finally opened her satin-covered box before her eyes, Käthe Heusermann recognized her patient's pieces. They matched the ones she had just drawn in every way .

Years later, Dr. Blaschke's assistant recalled the moment in the German magazine Die Welt : “I took the dental bridge in my hand and looked for an unmistakable sign. I found it immediately. I took a deep breath and blurted out: 'These are Adolf Hitler's teeth.' I was showered with expressions of gratitude .”

Heusermann 's firm assertion about the authenticity of Hitler's teeth would be confirmed several times later by other scientists . One of these confirmations came in 2018, when a group of forensic pathologists from the University of Paris gained access to the pieces still stored in Moscow.

The results of these analyses were published in the European Journal of Internal Medicine , and the scientists left no doubt that these were the dental remains of the Nazi dictator. "The teeth are authentic, there's no doubt about it. Our study shows that Hitler died in 1945," lead pathologist Philippe Charlier told the AFP news agency.

The aforementioned report details the pieces found: “ A fragment of the upper jaw , characterized by a nine-unit maxilla, a yellow metal (gold?) bridge that culminates in the second right premolar and three fragments of the lower jaw , characterized by other prostheses, bone resorption and dental erosion in the incisor region.”

But Heusermann's work on Hitler 's dental examination, which should have been considered a colossal contribution to contemporary history , became a condemnation of her. For a reason as simple as it is difficult to understand: Soviet leader Joseph Stalin didn't want anyone to hear the news that Hitler was dead.

Historians are still debating why Stalin took this stance. “If Hitler was alive , Nazism had not yet been defeated, and the world was still in danger. For him (Stalin), this concept was tactically important for the discussions that were to follow in the post-war world,” Rzhevskaya wrote in her book, adding: “Stalin stood on the truth.”

British historian Anthony Beevor , author of Berlin: The Fall, for his part, crystallized his hypothesis in an interview with the BBC: “ Stalin’s strategy, evidently, was to associate the West with Nazism and make it seem that the British or Americans must be hiding it.”

The truth is that, under Stalin 's ever-present influence, Soviet intelligence agents launched what was known as "Operation Myth," a disinformation campaign about Hitler 's fate that suggested the German dictator had managed to escape in a Japanese submarine and had ended up taking refuge somewhere in Argentina . A belief that has not lost its validity even today.

But when it comes to spreading a lie, those who carry the truth often take risks . Thus began a path of confinement and suffering for Heusermann that she clearly did not deserve. Hitler's dentist's assistant was arrested and taken to Russia. Pending conviction or acquittal, she spent six months in Lubyanka Prison in Moscow , and then six years in solitary confinement in Lefortovo Prison, also located in the Russian capital.

It was not until November 1951, by resolution of the Special Council of the Ministry of the Interior , that the woman was sentenced “as a witness to Hitler's death” (something that was supposed to remain secret) to spend 10 years in a gulag in southeastern Siberia .

Furthermore, at the sentencing, she was told that by helping to repair the German dictator's teeth, she had contributed to the continuation of the war. She should have hit him over the head with a bottle , was the argument, according to the testimony given by the translator's granddaughter in the aforementioned interview with The Times of Israel .

A month after receiving her sentence, the woman who had identified the teeth of the Nazi's chief genocide perpetrator was sent by cattle car to Taishet, Siberia, 4,500 kilometers from Moscow. Although her punishment was a forced labor camp, the six years of confinement had weakened Heusermann so much that she could barely move.

And because she didn't do any chores, the woman sentenced to the gulag was given little food. She was able to save her fragile existence thanks to the generosity of a Jewish prisoner from the Carpathians who shared her food rations with her, according to the American Jewish community magazine, Tablet .

After Stalin's death, Germany negotiated with Russia in 1955 for the return of German prisoners held in the USSR . Thus, that year, an emaciated 45-year-old Käthe Heusermann was able to return to her homeland, and to Berlin. She then discovered that her relatives had assumed she was dead and that her fiancé had married a few years before her return and had started a new family.

The little that is known about Heusermann 's life after that indicates that she moved to Düsseldorf , in western Germany, and continued working in dentistry. In the mid-1960s, she testified before the German courts that she had identified Hitler's teeth.

In 1995, at the age of 85, Kathe Heusermann died in Düsseldorf, where she lived her final years. Elena Rzhevskaya , who devoted several pages of her book to reconstructing the story of Dr. Blaschke ’s assistant, wrote of her: “ If we hadn’t found Käthe , Hitler , as Stalin had intended, would have remained a myth and a mystery. But what suffering we had unwittingly condemned Käthe Heusermann to! ”