Russian television broadcast a picture that it implied was taken of Adolf Hitler's corpse right after the fall of Berlin in 1945.
But the newspaper Kom-som-ol-skaya Pravda, which first published the old photograph in July, said it was of Hitler's double, not the Nazi leader himself.Hitler and his bride, Eva Braun, committed suicide in their bunker in Europe's closing days of World War II. Most accounts say his aides then doused the bodies with gasoline and burned them to prevent them from falling into Russian hands.
Tuesday night's telecast did not say explicitly that the picture was of Hitler. The commentator merely said that Hitler's body was found by Soviet counterintelligence agents in Berlin in May 1945. The photograph of a body that strongly resembled Hitler, with an apparent bullet hole in the forehead, then appeared on the TV screen.
Russian historian Lev Bezymensky said in articles that appeared in July in Kom-som-ol-skaya Pravda and the weekly Novoye Vremya (New Times) that Soviet soldiers found the body of Hitler's double in good condition.
Soviet filmmakers took pictures of it, thinking it was really the dictator himself, Bezymensky said.
He said that later, Soviet counterintelligence officers discovered Hitler's actual remains, which were identified by matching dental records.
The historian said the remains were reburied repeatedly but were preserved until 1970 by a Soviet intelligence unit. The teeth and dental work of the Nazi leader and his wife are still in Russian military archives in Moscow, he said.
What happened to the double is unclear. A man with a natural resemblance to Hitler was used as a decoy for security reasons. The double may have committed suicide, or been murdered, at about the same time Hitler died.