French forensic experts say the charred corpse unearthed by Soviet troops outside the Berlin bunker where Adolf Hitler committed suicide wasn't the Fuehrer's body after all.
In a report published in the professional review Hospital Weekly, four forensic scientists concluded that the body was in fact that of an unknown German male.Soviet coroners who conducted an autopsy on the body gave a false report to Josef Stalin stating that the body was Hitler's in order to appease the Soviet dictator, the article concluded.
The article, published on March 11 and excerpted in France's national press this week, does not claim that Hitler survived and fled Germany, but rather that his body was given to a German soldier.
The report was prepared by doctors at the Institute of Forensic and Social Medecine in the northern city of Lille.
They spent more than two years analyzing the autopsy reports prepared by Soviet coroners in the days following the Red Army's arrival in Berlin and the surrender of the Third Reich in 1945.
According to the Soviet autopsy, the body found outside the bunker where Hitler committed suicide with his mistress, Eva Braun, had an extra tooth and only one testicle.
The French team pointed out that no German doctor who had examined Hitler before his death ever mentioned either anomaly.