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The Death of Hitler: The Full Story With New Evidence from Secret Russian Archives
For the past 50 years, the truth has been repressed about one of the most enduring mysteries of our time: how exactly Adolf Hitler died on April 30, 1945, and what happened to his remains. Now, the authors have tapped into the Russians' hitherto unseen Hitler Archive to reveal what wen on in Berlin in May 1945 after the Russians captured the bunker in which Hitler and his entourage spend their last days. They explain how and why Hitler's body and those of Eva Braun and the Goebbels family were secretly buried in Magdeburg, East Germany, and finally disinterred and cremated in 1970. Including photographs from Hitler's private album and 36 watercolors painted by Hitler and stored in the bunker, the book explores authentic forensic evidence to revel once and for all the exact manner of Hitler's death. Black-and-white and color photos.
180 pages, Hardcover
First published May 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 9, 2025
I picked up The Death of Hitler in 2011 with that particular mix of morbid curiosity and historical hunger that any book promising “new evidence” about one of the twentieth century’s most infamous endings inevitably provokes.
By then, I’d already encountered dozens of accounts of Hitler’s last days—eyewitness memoirs from the bunker, Soviet intelligence summaries, British documentaries narrated in hushed tones over grainy black-and-white footage.
The broad strokes were familiar: Berlin in flames, the Soviets tightening the noose, the Führer’s descent into a bunker-bound haze of rage and resignation, the pistol shot, the poison, the fire, the rubble. But what Ada Petrova and Peter Watson offered here was something different—a key to the long-locked Soviet vaults, pried open just enough to let us glimpse the macabre evidence they’d guarded since 1945.
The book reads like a detective story, but one where the detectives arrive decades late, the crime scene has been trampled by history, and the witnesses are all either dead or unreliable. Petrova had access to material that, until the collapse of the USSR, had been the stuff of rumour: photographs, medical reports, autopsy notes, and, most tantalising of all, the preserved physical remains—fragments of jawbone and skull—that the Soviets had spirited away from Berlin and hidden in Moscow.
The way she unfolds these revelations is calculated, almost cinematic. We move from the well-worn narrative of April 1945 into a sequence of interrogations, coded cables, and secret storage rooms, each new piece of evidence feeling like a puzzle piece you didn’t know you were missing.
And yet, the story is not simply about confirming that Hitler died in the bunker. It is also about the politics of that confirmation. For decades, the Soviet Union let the Western world stew in uncertainty. Stalin himself encouraged the idea that Hitler might have escaped, a propaganda move designed to sow distrust among the Allies and keep Germany destabilised.
The irony is that they had the proof all along, but the proof itself was locked away so tightly that even many Soviet historians didn’t know it existed. Petrova’s access in the 1990s, granted in the chaotic openness of the post-Cold War years, feels almost accidental in the sweep of history—like a brief window in which the guards were distracted and the archives unlatched.
What struck me, reading this in 2011, was how much the book is as much about the nature of historical truth as it is about Hitler’s death. The forensic evidence—most memorably, the jawbone with its distinctive dental work—is the kind of physical anchor that historians dream of. It cuts through conspiracy theories like a scalpel.
And yet, even with that anchor, the surrounding waters are murky.
Who exactly burnt the bodies?
How complete was the destruction?
Why were certain Soviet autopsy findings so sloppily recorded or inconsistently reported?
Petrova doesn’t tie every thread neatly. In fact, the book’s power lies partly in its refusal to pretend that the last days of the Third Reich can be reconstructed with cinematic precision. The bunker was chaos, the city above it was hell, and memory under such conditions warps like metal in fire.
There’s also a strange intimacy to the material. The dental charts, for instance, were identified by Hitler’s own dentist’s assistant—one of those unlikely, almost absurd details of history. You picture this young woman, dragged from the rubble, confronted by a Soviet officer holding a scorched jawbone, and asked to match it to the Führer’s fillings.
These moments pierce the historical distance, reminding you that the war’s grand narratives were lived and ended in such cramped, grimy, human scenes.
Petrova’s writing, filtered through Watson’s English, is brisk but not without atmosphere. She’s not here to write literature; she’s here to lay out the case. But in her choice of details—the damp smell of the archive, the clatter of files being unlocked—you can feel the weight of years pressing in. And perhaps because the subject is so stark, she doesn’t need to embellish.
The image of Soviet guards handling the relics in white gloves, the macabre banality of storing a dictator’s jawbone in a cardboard box—these stay with you long after the page is turned.
Still, I remember wrestling with the question of how much any “final” account of Hitler’s death can truly be final. In an age saturated with myth-busting documentaries and internet rabbit holes, every “new evidence” claim risks feeding the very conspiracy appetite it’s trying to close.
Petrova’s book is about as definitive as we’re likely to get, but human imagination is stubborn. For some, the very fact that the Soviets held the evidence in secret for so long will be taken as proof that the real story is still hidden. The irony is that the secrecy which once served Soviet political aims has, decades later, kept alive the ghost they were trying to control.
By the time I finished the book, I was left with a sense not of triumph over mystery, but of how tangled history becomes when it is filtered through competing political needs. The Soviets had the body, the West had the narrative, and between them lay a fog that has never quite lifted. Petrova’s work cuts a path through that fog, but even she can’t disperse it entirely.
And maybe that’s the point—history isn’t a clean crime scene. It’s a battlefield, and the debris it leaves is always incomplete.
Reading it in 2011, in the middle of a century already shaping its own shadowy legends and classified files, I couldn’t help but think about which of today’s “sealed” stories will crack open decades from now, and what strange artefacts they’ll reveal.
A lock of hair, a flash drive, a hard drive buried under rubble. History, like the Berlin bunker, always has another locked room.
By then, I’d already encountered dozens of accounts of Hitler’s last days—eyewitness memoirs from the bunker, Soviet intelligence summaries, British documentaries narrated in hushed tones over grainy black-and-white footage.
The broad strokes were familiar: Berlin in flames, the Soviets tightening the noose, the Führer’s descent into a bunker-bound haze of rage and resignation, the pistol shot, the poison, the fire, the rubble. But what Ada Petrova and Peter Watson offered here was something different—a key to the long-locked Soviet vaults, pried open just enough to let us glimpse the macabre evidence they’d guarded since 1945.
The book reads like a detective story, but one where the detectives arrive decades late, the crime scene has been trampled by history, and the witnesses are all either dead or unreliable. Petrova had access to material that, until the collapse of the USSR, had been the stuff of rumour: photographs, medical reports, autopsy notes, and, most tantalising of all, the preserved physical remains—fragments of jawbone and skull—that the Soviets had spirited away from Berlin and hidden in Moscow.
The way she unfolds these revelations is calculated, almost cinematic. We move from the well-worn narrative of April 1945 into a sequence of interrogations, coded cables, and secret storage rooms, each new piece of evidence feeling like a puzzle piece you didn’t know you were missing.
And yet, the story is not simply about confirming that Hitler died in the bunker. It is also about the politics of that confirmation. For decades, the Soviet Union let the Western world stew in uncertainty. Stalin himself encouraged the idea that Hitler might have escaped, a propaganda move designed to sow distrust among the Allies and keep Germany destabilised.
The irony is that they had the proof all along, but the proof itself was locked away so tightly that even many Soviet historians didn’t know it existed. Petrova’s access in the 1990s, granted in the chaotic openness of the post-Cold War years, feels almost accidental in the sweep of history—like a brief window in which the guards were distracted and the archives unlatched.
What struck me, reading this in 2011, was how much the book is as much about the nature of historical truth as it is about Hitler’s death. The forensic evidence—most memorably, the jawbone with its distinctive dental work—is the kind of physical anchor that historians dream of. It cuts through conspiracy theories like a scalpel.
And yet, even with that anchor, the surrounding waters are murky.
Who exactly burnt the bodies?
How complete was the destruction?
Why were certain Soviet autopsy findings so sloppily recorded or inconsistently reported?
Petrova doesn’t tie every thread neatly. In fact, the book’s power lies partly in its refusal to pretend that the last days of the Third Reich can be reconstructed with cinematic precision. The bunker was chaos, the city above it was hell, and memory under such conditions warps like metal in fire.
There’s also a strange intimacy to the material. The dental charts, for instance, were identified by Hitler’s own dentist’s assistant—one of those unlikely, almost absurd details of history. You picture this young woman, dragged from the rubble, confronted by a Soviet officer holding a scorched jawbone, and asked to match it to the Führer’s fillings.
These moments pierce the historical distance, reminding you that the war’s grand narratives were lived and ended in such cramped, grimy, human scenes.
Petrova’s writing, filtered through Watson’s English, is brisk but not without atmosphere. She’s not here to write literature; she’s here to lay out the case. But in her choice of details—the damp smell of the archive, the clatter of files being unlocked—you can feel the weight of years pressing in. And perhaps because the subject is so stark, she doesn’t need to embellish.
The image of Soviet guards handling the relics in white gloves, the macabre banality of storing a dictator’s jawbone in a cardboard box—these stay with you long after the page is turned.
Still, I remember wrestling with the question of how much any “final” account of Hitler’s death can truly be final. In an age saturated with myth-busting documentaries and internet rabbit holes, every “new evidence” claim risks feeding the very conspiracy appetite it’s trying to close.
Petrova’s book is about as definitive as we’re likely to get, but human imagination is stubborn. For some, the very fact that the Soviets held the evidence in secret for so long will be taken as proof that the real story is still hidden. The irony is that the secrecy which once served Soviet political aims has, decades later, kept alive the ghost they were trying to control.
By the time I finished the book, I was left with a sense not of triumph over mystery, but of how tangled history becomes when it is filtered through competing political needs. The Soviets had the body, the West had the narrative, and between them lay a fog that has never quite lifted. Petrova’s work cuts a path through that fog, but even she can’t disperse it entirely.
And maybe that’s the point—history isn’t a clean crime scene. It’s a battlefield, and the debris it leaves is always incomplete.
Reading it in 2011, in the middle of a century already shaping its own shadowy legends and classified files, I couldn’t help but think about which of today’s “sealed” stories will crack open decades from now, and what strange artefacts they’ll reveal.
A lock of hair, a flash drive, a hard drive buried under rubble. History, like the Berlin bunker, always has another locked room.
July 17, 2023
Interesting read of Hitler’s last days in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin as the Russians were closing in. At times it reads as speculation - so many differing eye witness accounts regarding the deaths of Hitler & Eva Braun - will we ever know the complete truth? Was it suicide, a botched suicide/mercy killing, a faked suicide in Braun’s case? Did Hitler shoot himself or one of his loyal men assist in his death? You learn about life in the bunker that last week & how many fled, while others decided to follow their leader in death. It’s hard to read about the Goebbels children - that their parents decided to follow the Fuhrer’s plan of suicide & even murder their own (six) children. So horrifying and heartbreaking. An interesting read, but an event that still seems shrouded in mystery.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 2, 2021
A fascinating read which compares the various reports of Hitler's death at the Bunker in Berlin. I was amazed at the number of differing accounts by those over the years who may (or may not) have actually been present in the Bunker at the time of the event, what went on, who heard what, and what (if anything) was the actual truth. The author examines previous accounts on the subject whilst trying to set apart the fact and the fiction. The author claims to have the "final word" on the issue but no matter how compelling her arguments I doubt that the mystery (if there is one) has had its last hurrah. If this genre is your bag then this book is a definite must read.
April 4, 2020
What a great read! I really enjoy the research which goes into these books. Well done, easy read and it has up to date photo's.
July 10, 2010
Kind a tabloid telling of what happened to Hitler's body. The old -
now using available Russian archives. Interesting but just putting some
papers together for a reasonable guess.
December 4, 2024
An OK read but not riveting. the book sheds light on Hitler's death as the Russians closed in. Worth a read if the topic interests you.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews