It was a ‘horrible, grim place which smelt terribly’, said the first British soldier to enter Adolf Hitler’s Berlin bunker.
The grimness and the stench was no surprise, given the horror of what had unfolded there just weeks earlier.
For on April 30, 1945, 80 years ago today, 56-year-old Hitler and his partner turned wife of one day, Eva Braun, 33, took the coward’s way out by taking their own lives.
As Russian troops fought for control of the city just yards away above ground, Hitler shot himself and Braun bit down on a cyanide capsule.
The bodies of the fallen Nazi dictator and his long-time other half were then carried outside and burned before being hastily buried.
It was the Russian troops who found their remains, a fact of history which sparked decades of conspiracy theories that still refuse to die.
The first British soldier that the Soviets allowed into Hitler’s lair, in July 1945, was Hugh Lunghi, who was in Berlin as an interpreter for first Winston Churchill and then his successor as PM Clement Attlee as they attended the Potsdam Conference.
Speaking decades later, Lunghi told how he saw a ‘heap of ashes and a pile of stuff’ that he was told was ‘Hitler and his mistress’.
The last known photograph of Adolf Hitler alive shows him just days before his death looking at the ruins of the Reich Chancellery with his adjutant Julius Schaub
A soldier examining the bed of Adolf Hitler inside the ruins of his bunker
Lunghi was allowed to walk around the bunker and was even given permission to take a memento. He claimed that he chose a volume of Hitler’s Brockhaus encyclopaedia.
Hitler had moved into the bunker – which was built in 1944 – in January 1945, when defeat in the Second World War loomed.
It was from there that he plotted the ailing German military campaign, and railed against the reality of impending doom.
By the start of April 1945, around 2.5million Russian soldiers had reached the capital.
They reached the city centre two weeks later, with fighting taking place just a few hundred yards away from the entrance to Hitler’s bunker.
Hitler dictated his will in the early hours of April 28-29 and then married Braun.
Their union was celebrated with a party in the bunker, with Hitler’s closest aides present.
In the day on the 29th, Hitler’s SS bodyguards set about destroying his personal papers.
Hugh Lunghi, Winston Churchill’s interpreter at the Potsdam Conference and the first British soldier to enter Adolf Hitler’s bunker, pictured above in 1945 and in later life with a file he was allowed to take from Hitler’s office in the Reich Chancellery
Private First Class Richard Blust of Michigan surveys the ruins of Adolf Hitler’s bunker
What are believed to have been the teeth of Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun got married just one day before they took their own lives
Russian soldiers, pictured on July 7, 1945, examine the trench in the Reich Chancellery Gardens, Berlin, where the bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were burnt following their suicides
Hitler’s Alsatian dog, Blondi, was poisoned along with Braun’s spaniel.
On the morning of April 30, the sounds of Russian forces fighting nearby was audible in the bunker.
Witnesses told how Hitler and Braun emerged from their suite to shake hands with their personal staff.
Secretary Gertrud Junge recalled that she and her colleague Gerda Christian were given poison capsules by Hitler.
Braun’s last recorded words after embracing Junge were: ‘Take my fur coat as a memory. I always like well-dressed women’.
Hitler and Braun then retreated into their rooms and took their own lives. It is not known for certain if Hitler both shot himself and bit down on a cyanide capsule.
Witnesses described his corpse being covered in blood, while Braun smelled of bitter almonds – the distinctive odour of cyanide.
But examination of Hitler’s teeth did find blue deposits, indicating the residue of a cyanide capsule.
The bomb-ravaged remains of the Chancellory building, beneath which was Hitler’s bunker
Sergeant Ernest Pappas holds coat hangers and a loop of keys he found in Hitler’s Bunker, October 1945
Speaking in 2005 in an interview with the Observer, Lunghi said of his visit: ‘It was damp and nasty and there was a lot of dirty clothing – a horrible, grim place which smelt terribly.
‘However, it was fascinating, and that was a moment when I thought: “My God, this is history.”
‘Outside there was a heap of ashes and a pile of stuff and I said, what was that?
‘One of the soldiers, a major, said: “Oh, that’s Hitler and his mistress.” I don’t think he realised he wasn’t supposed to be telling me this.’
He added: ‘There were several rooms down there, including a medical room with a herb rack full of glass phials, which I suppose had both medicines and poisons in.
Another room was like a studio and sitting-room with books in, including a set of Hitler’s Brockhaus [the equivalent of Encyclopaedia Britannica ].
‘I took one volume and when I went up the steps again asked, can I take this? They said: “Oh yes, take it, by all means.”
Lunghi, who died aged 93 in 2014, also toured the Reich Chancellery building, from which he said he took chunks of Hitler’s marble desk.
A Russian soldier holds Eva Braun’s phone to their ear inside Hitler’s bunker beneath Berlin
He also took a file detailing the arrangements for Hitler’s attendance at a 1937 trade fair.
After their deaths, the corpses of Hitler and Braun were dragged into the garden of the Reich Chancellery, doused in petrol and then set on fire.
But their bodies were only partly destroyed by the flames.
Soviet troops found the remains and carried out an autopsy that would remain hidden for decades.
Churchill himself went to the ruins of Hitler’s bunker when he was in Berlin for the Potsdam Conference, at which the plan for the post-war peace was discussed.
He was pictured sitting in a chair that had been in the bunker, yards away from where Hitler’s body had been.
But claims that Hitler had survived Germany’s defeat were fuelled by Stalin himself, who cynically claimed that the Nazi was alive.
Versions of the conspiracy theory – in particular the notion that he fled to Argentina and lived there in secret for years – have been detailed over the decades by dozens of books and TV shows.
Hugh Lunghi seen standing fourth from left at the Moscow Military Academy in 1947, with Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery (second left)
But reputable scholars have definitively challenged the notion that Hitler lived beyond 1945.
British historian Luke Daly-Groves assessed the existing evidence in his 2019 book Hitler’s Death: the Case Against Conspiracy.
Examination of the charred remains of the corpses found in the gardens of the Reich Chancellery by Russian officials showed that one body was of a male aged between 50 and 60, and the other of a woman aged between 30 and 40.
The Russians also tracked down Hitler’s dental records and x-rays, which matched the fragments of teeth and jaw found in Berlin.
Dr Daly-Groves also laid out the previously secret files detailing reported sightings of Hitler. When followed up, sightings were shown to be false trails.
Also examined in his book was the British inquiry led by British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in 1945.
Then working as an intelligence officer, Trevor-Roper interviewed several people who were present in Hitler’s bunker in his final days.
They all testified that Hitler and Braun killed themselves.
Hitler poisoned himself and then shot himself in the head as the murderous Third Reich collapsed in flames around him
Among them was guard Hermann Karnau, who said he saw the bodies of Hitler and Braun on fire very close to the exit of the bunker.
A new book published by German expert Professor Klaus Püschel also concludes that Hitler and Braun died in 1945.
Professor Püschel said: ‘There’s no doubt anymore. Hitler bit down on a cyanide capsule and seconds later shot himself in the temple with a Walther PPK.’
His German-language book, Der Tod geht über Leichen’ (‘Death Walks Over Corpses’), also outlines how Hitler’s dental records matched the burned skull.
It also outlines how the KGB kept Hitler’s remains hidden for decades. They were buried in East Germany and then dug up again.
On April 5, 1970, the last of Hitler’s bones were burned in secret and his ashes were then dumped in a stream in the city of Magdeburg in East Germany.
Before his service in Berlin, Lunghi had been the interpreter for Churchill at the Tehran and Yalta conferences in late 1943 and February 1945.
Churchill was replaced as PM by Labour’s Attlee after losing the July 1945 election.
Until 1949, Lunghi interpreted for meetings between Stalin and British generals and diplomats, including ones with Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and Lord Mountbatten.
