Hitler's ashes and the man who scattered them

[Jumbo]

Hitler's Ashes And The Man

Who Scattered Them

5-3-1

MOSCOW (AFP) - The man who burnt Adolf Hitler's remains and dispersed his ashes to the wind is refusing to say where he carried out his gruesome task and has pledged to take the secret with him to the grave.

Vladimir Gumenyuk, a 64-year-old former Red Army officer, told Russian media Tuesday how he followed an order from Moscow to disinter the Fuehrer's remains, take them out to the countryside, burn them and scatter them.

Now deputy manager of a hotel in the Urals city of Ulyanovsk, Gumenyuk is the sole survivor of the three-man squad charged by the Kremlin with resolving once and for all the problem of what to do with the corpse of the man who had set the world aflame.

Speaking out after 30 years, Gumenyuk provided a graphic account of how he accomplished his mission, deliberately leaving out one essential detail: the name of the spot where the ashes were dispersed.

This, he said, he would never reveal.

"There are still too many neo-Nazis around," he told NTV television, "There would be pilgrimages. They'd even put up a monument."

In March 1970, Gumenyuk said he learned later, KGB chief Yury Andropov wrote to Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev advising him that probable construction work near the place where Hitler was buried meant that it would be "advisable to destroy the remains by incineration."

Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945 in a bunker under the Berlin Chancellery, along with his mistress Eva Braun whom he had married the day before, as the capital of the Third Reich collapsed around him, leaving orders that his body was to be burnt.

From the beginning, what to do with the badly charred remains, along with the bodies of Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and his wife found nearby, had posed a problem for the Kremlin, which feared that Nazi sympathisers might seek to create a cult around the Fuehrer's last resting place.

Its immediate solution was to create a special section of the Soviet Third Army permanently charged with guarding them.

The crates in which the remains were contained travelled with the section as it moved from one garrison to another in what was then East Germany, until on the night of April 4, 1970, Gumenyuk and his companions serving in Magdeburg were given instructions to go to a certain location, taking shovels with them.

There, Gumenyuk said, under cover of a large tent, they dug to a depth of 1.7 metres (five feet) and found the crates which they loaded onto a jeep.

They then drove out into the countryside at dawn with their fishing rods prominently displayed as if they were going for a day's relaxation.

They came to a halt by a river at a location they had decided on in advance and, behind a screen of trees, poured petrol over the crates and set them alight, Gumenyuk recalled.

He then gathered the ashes into a canvas rucksack -- which he kept, and displayed on televison Tuesday -- and scattered earth over the last traces of the fire. The three men then walked to a nearby hillside.

"I then proceeded to the final dispersion of the ashes," Gumenyuk said. "It was over in no time at all. I opened up the rucksack, the wind caught the ashes up in a little brown cloud, and in a second they were gone."

[Mlapanzer]

Back up the moving van!

[Soddball]

I didn't know that - but had wondered. Thanks for the interesting info.

[Panzer Leader]

Interesting story, perhaps true, but I believe that it will forever remain a mystery as to what happened to Hitler in the final hours.

There is simply no proof, and at this late date, I fear there will never BE any proof, one way or the other. That is at least the 10th different story I've heard, ranging from commiting suicide all the way up to living to a ripe old age in Buenos Ares.

Its too bad that this will remain one of History's great mysteries. But in a way, I am glad that he just vanished off the face of the earth: no reminders, no shrines, just an ignoble end.

[boy_Recon]

the remains of Hitler are dispersed on the breeze, and the bones of the Romanovs see the light of day for the first time in 80 years........