Mythos Film Production

Operation Myth: The final report!

admin — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 10:35:34 +0000

The Death of Adolf Hitler is one of the most talked about mysteries in history. The Fuhrer was both a beloved and a hated figure and he continues to be so to this day. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that people are curious about the manner of his death and when it occurred. The general consensus is that he killed himself with a cyanide tablet and a bullet to the head on April 30, 1945. However, the Soviets were not so sure of this, so they launched “Operation Myth.” Operation Myth was an investigation into the death of Adolf Hitler and the authenticity of the bodies that were discovered when the Red Army invaded Berlin.

On April 30, 1945, the Soviet Red Army was attacking Berlin. Meanwhile, Hitler and a few trusted associates were hiding underground in the Chancellery Bunker. The bunker was designed specifically to protect the Fuhrer. It was replete with personal apartments for Adolf and his new wife (of which the public had no knowledge), Eva Braun. Hitler and Eva were there when they supposedly committed suicide, an event that Operation Myth would cover extensively.

Shortly after Hitler and Eva’s supposed suicide, Hitler’s men reportedly took their bodies outside and attempted to cremate them, with partial success. They then buried the bodies in the Chancellery garden. When the Red Army arrived, they found a body that looked like Hitler. The Soviets later discovered that it actually belonged to Hitler’s doppelganger, Gustav Weller. They found the two partially cremated bodies as well. At first, they were dismissed because the soldiers believed the Fuhrer’s body had been found. They became more interested in the two bodies when the first turned out to be a trick. Many people believe they belonged to Eva and Adolf, though no forensic evidence remains.

The Soviets claimed they had found Hitler’s body in the weeks after the invasion of Berlin. However, they admitted that they did not have the body a few weeks later. In order to ascertain whether Hitler escaped and where his body was, Operation Myth was launched. The Operation Myth file (1-G-23) was a secret until just recently. Since it has been made public (to an extent), we know that the operation’s focus was to interview (interrogate) people who were close to Hitler and/or who were with him in the spring of 1945. Roughly 800 people were questioned.

Hitler’s successor had made a public announcement that the Fuhrer had died while fighting in Berlin. This account of events was only accepted by Hitler’s followers (some neo-Nazis believe this too). It did not hold water with Operation Myth investigators. Through their questioning, they had ascertained that Hitler and Eva both alluded to their impending suicide that April. They had also received statements from most of the men close to Hitler at the time say he shot himself in his right temple and was disposed of by his men. They eventually came to the conclusion that they had Hitler’s body. Alternatively, that is what they wanted everyone to believe.

The body that was dug up from the Chancellery garden is the most likely candidate for Hitler’s corpse. Unfortunately, it had reportedly been dug up and reburied several times before being destroyed under orders from KGB leader Yuri Andropov in 1970. The Soviets kept some evidence of the body and the suicide. They kept a piece of the bloodstained couch that Hitler was supposedly sitting on when he shot himself and a piece of skull. Forensic analysis of the couch gives us nothing because Hitler’s relatives do not respond to test requests. The skull, on the other hand, was revealed to be that of a woman by an expert working for the History Channel.

Operation Myth doesn’t really answer the question of Hitler’s death fully. However, the Soviets obviously believed that Hitler killed himself and that they eventually wound up with his body. This is believable for many reasons. Firstly, it would have been odd for Hitler to fight on the front lines in Berlin, knowing what the Red Army would do to him if he were caught. Secondly, other Nazis like Joseph Goebbels and his wife, Magda had committed suicide. Joseph and Magda went as far as to kill their six children first. This tells us that it was seen as preferable to being captured. Lastly, there was very little chance for Hitler to escape. He waited until the Red Army was on his doorstep. Neo-Nazis have a tendency to paint Hitler as a brave hero. However, he employed a doppelganger to prevent assassination. Does this sound like the kind of man who would die fighting on the front lines?

Rochus Misch life in pictures

admin — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:31:19 +0000

Misch was an SS man in the Leibstandarte-SS Adolf Hitler, in the end with the rank of a Sergeant. From 1940 to 1945 Misch worked as a body guard at Hitler’s headquarters and as a telephone operator until the very end. Misch is the last living witness of the suicide of Adolf Hitler

„I am not an important man, but I witnessed important things.“ (Rochus Misch in his autobiography)

“The very day he was born, his own father died from the consequences of war injuries. And his mother and brother died when he was a little boy.”
(His wife, Gerda, née Lachmund, on Rochus Misch)

Hitlers Bodyguard

admin — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 10:21:22 +0000

I was in Hitler’s suicide Bunker.

At his living room table, 92-year-old Rochus Misch shows me some of his old photo albums. Private pictures he had taken more than 60 years ago. There are colour images of Mr Misch in an SS uniform at Adolf Hitler’s home in the Alps, snapshots of Hitler staring at rabbits, and photos of Hitler’s mistress and future wife Eva Braun.

For five years, SS Oberscharfuehrer Rochus Misch had been part of Adolf Hitler’s inner circle, as a bodyguard, a courier and telephone operator to the Fuehrer.

“My first meeting with Hitler was rather strange,” Mr Misch recalls. “I’d been in the job 12 days when Hitler’s chief adjutant, a man called Bruckner, started asking me questions about my grandmother, about my childhood.

“Then he got up and walked towards the door. Being an obedient soldier, I flung myself forward to open it, and there was Hitler standing right behind the door. I felt cold. Then I felt hot. I felt every emotion standing there opposite Hitler.

“In the Fuehrer’s entourage, strictly speaking, we were bodyguards,” says Mr Misch. “When Hitler was travelling, between four and six of us would accompany him in a second car. But when we were at Hitler’s apartment in the Chancellery we also had other duties. Two of us would always work as telephone operators. With a boss like Hitler, there were always plenty of phone calls.”

Last survivor

With the Allies advancing and Germany on the brink of defeat, Hitler retreated to his Berlin bunker. Rochus Misch was the telephone operator there.

“I worked in a small room with a telephone and teletype machine with outside lines,” he remembers.

“There was only enough room to shelter one extra person in my room in the event of an air raid. The bunker really wasn’t that big. It contained small rooms of only 10 to 12 square metres.”

Rochus Misch is the last survivor of the Hitler bunker. He is the final witness of the drama that took place there on 30 April 1945. It was the day Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun committed suicide.

“Suddenly I heard somebody shouting to Hitler’s attendant: ‘Linge, Linge, I think it’s happened.’ They’d heard a gunshot, but I hadn’t. At that moment Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, ordered everyone to be silent. Everyone began whispering. I was speaking on the telephone and I made sure I talked louder on purpose because I wanted to hear something. I didn’t want it to feel like we were in a death bunker.

Deaths

“Then Bormann ordered Hitler’s door to be opened. I saw Hitler slumped with his head on the table. Eva Braun was lying on the sofa, with her head towards him. Her knees were drawn tightly up to her chest. She was wearing a dark blue dress with white frills. I will never forget it.

“I watched as they wrapped Hitler up. His legs were sticking out as they carried him past me. Someone shouted to me: ‘Hurry upstairs, they’re burning the boss!’ I decided not to go because I had noticed that Mueller from the Gestapo was there – and he was never usually around. I said to my comrade Hentschel, the mechanic: ‘Maybe we will be killed for being the last witnesses.’”

The next day the drama continued. Down in the bunker, the six children of Germany’s new leader – Joseph Goebbels – were drugged and murdered. It was their own mother Magda who killed them.

“Straight after Hitler’s death, Mrs Goebbels came down to the bunker with her children,” Mr Misch recalls. “She started preparing to kill them. She couldn’t have done that above ground – there were other people there who would have stopped her. That’s why she came downstairs – because no-one else was allowed in the bunker. She came down on purpose to kill them.

“The kids were right next to me and behind me. We all knew what was going to happen. It was clear. I saw Hitler’s doctor, Dr Stumpfegger give the children something to drink. Some kind of sugary drink. Then Stumpfegger went and helped to kill them. All of us knew what was going on. An hour or two later, Mrs Goebbels came out crying. She sat down at a table and began playing patience.”

Crimes

Mr Misch fled Hitler’s bunker just hours before it was seized by the Red Army. But he was quickly captured and spent the next nine years in Soviet labour camps. The captured “Fuehrerbunker” became a symbol of the Allies’ victory in World War II.

Two months after the end of the war, Winston Churchill visited it. He posed for photos outside, sitting on a chair recovered from the shelter. In later years, the bunker was blown up to stop it becoming a Nazi shrine.

At the end of our conversation, I ask Rochus Misch whether he knew of the horrors that Adolf Hitler had unleashed across Europe. Did he know about the Holocaust?

“I knew about Dachau camp and about concentration camps in general,” he tells me. “But I had no idea of the scale. It wasn’t part of our conversations. The Nuremberg Trial dealt with crimes committed by the Germans. But you must remember there was never a war when crimes weren’t committed, and there never will be.”

Britain declared war on Nazi Germany exactly 70 years ago today. What are your memories of the day? What did you or your relatives do in the war? Do you or your family have any inspirational wartime stories? Are you doing anything to mark the anniversary? Tell us your experiences.

By Steven Rosenberg
BBC News, Berlin

Where is Adolf Hitler?

admin — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:32:58 +0000

“He’s hiding on a ranch in Argentina”

We get insight into the greatest crimes of humanity, in the investigation into the mysterious deaths of celebrities, or mass murderers. The “Federal Bureau of Investigation” (FBI) of the United States, now published on the web their investigations on about 2000 events that moved the world. Excerpts from a major daily german newspaper April 2011:

HITLER “He’s hiding on a ranch in Argentina,”
On 29 April 1945 Adolf Hitler († 56) committed suicide in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery. The body was cremated and buried. But the FBI kept on searching for Hitler, as a previously secret file (752 pages) proves.

Many Americans did not believe in Hitler’s death. Many names and passages are blacked out and numerous letters to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover are illegible. The FBI office in Los Angeles for example wrote 21 September 1945: “About ten days after the fall of Berlin, Hitler and 50 of his closest confidants landed in Southern Argentina with two U-boats. Hitler is hiding on a ranch. He has shaved off his beard, suffers from asthma and stomach ulcers”. Other Americans reported:” Hitler has disappeared into thin air to Tibet “or” I have seen him in Denmark “. On 15 October 1945 an informant bet with the FBI, “a dollar against a wax ring that Hitler lives in New York City. There’s no better place for him to hide… ”

Hitlers last man – Making of

admin — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 10:37:29 +0000

‘Misch – naturally you’ll be needed here’

This haunting command got Rochus Misch, Hitlers’s body guard and telefonist at the 22nd of April 1945 in the leader-bunker. Scarcely anybody else spent the war-years in similarly monstrous as also exceptional closeness Hitler’s. Now ‘the last witness’ tells his story with the nightmarish honesty of a man, who realizes, that his action at that time was correct for him.

The Preproduction

Rochus Misch

admin — Tue, 10 May 2011 10:43:51 +0000

After Germany surrendered in 1945 the Soviet intelligence services scoured their prisoner of war camps and collected survivors of Hitler’s last hours in the “Führerbunker”, then used their methods of ‘enhanced interrogation’ to look for answers to Comrade Stalin’s urgent question: was Hitler dead? Or had Stalin’s worst enemy faked a suicide and escaped from the Nazi apocalypse?

This is the true story of two men who were the main players in that deadly and mysterious game: a 28 year old SS squad leader, ROCHUS MISCH, and a 48 year old Soviet interrogator, WOLF STERN. Their story is set in several versions of hell…