Former Soviet leaders had Adolf Hitler's remains incinerated in 1970 out of fear they would attract neo-Nazis, a magazine reported Sunday.
Since the end of World War II, there have been numerous rumors about Hitler's fate. Historians say he shot and killed himself in his Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945.The Hamburg-based Der Spiegel said Hitler's remains and those of his wife, Eva Braun, were excavated from graves in Magdeburg near Berlin in April 1970 on KGB orders. The remains of Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, his wife, Magda, and their six children also were taken.
Spiegel, citing a secret file, said the bodies had been buried by the Soviets at a site they occupied in Magdeburg in February 1946.
In early 1970, Spiegel said, then-KGB chief Yuri Andropov learned the graves existed. The report said Andropov wrote a letter to Communist Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev on March 13, 1970, suggesting the graves be excavated and the remains cremated.
Brezhnev concurred, and the bones were incinerated and destroyed during the night of April 4-5, 1970, Spiegel said.
Andropov's former chief of staff, Vladimir Kruchkov, himself later head of the KGB and now retired in Moscow, confirmed the file's authenticity, Spiegel said.
"Yuri Andropov wrote the most important phrases with his own hand," Spiegel quotes Kruchkov as saying.
American historian William L. Shirer, in "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich," wrote Hitler shot and killed himself on the afternoon of April 30, 1945. Eva Braun swallowed poison to die with him.