Strangest fact
A skull piece with a bullet hole, shown in Moscow as Hitler's, was tested by UConn scientists in 2009. They said the DNA came from a woman, perhaps 20 to 40 years old.
Why it is odd: An object shown for years as proof of how Hitler died seems to belong to an unknown woman, and no one knows who.
Adolf Hitler died in his bunker in Berlin on April 30, 1945, as Soviet troops closed in. Witnesses from the bunker said he shot himself and that his body and that of Eva Braun, whom he had married the day before, were burned outside. Soviet investigators collected remains and evidence, and the Soviet Union, later Russia, kept them secret for decades. In 2000, a piece of skull with a bullet hole was shown publicly in Moscow as part of Hitler's skull.
In 2009, Nicholas Bellantoni, an archaeologist at the University of Connecticut, was allowed to examine the fragment in the Russian state archives in Moscow for a History Channel program called MysteryQuest. He thought the bone looked too thin for a man in his fifties. He brought tiny samples back to Connecticut, along with samples of blood from the sofa where Hitler was said to have shot himself.
Linda Strausbaugh, who directed the university's Center for Applied Genetics and Technology, led the DNA testing. The university's genetics center says the results showed the skull belonged to an adult female, considerably younger than Hitler. News reports put her age at about 20 to 40. The blood from the sofa was male, so it did not come from the same person as the skull.
Russian officials rejected the finding. An official of the FSB, Russia's security service, told reporters that the American researchers had never contacted them and asked what they could have compared the DNA to. The UConn results were announced on television and in the news. We could not find them published as a peer-reviewed scientific paper, which is the usual way other scientists check a result.
In 2018, a French team led by forensic scientist Philippe Charlier was allowed to examine teeth and jaw pieces kept in Moscow, and to look at the skull fragment, which has a bullet hole on its left side. Writing in the European Journal of Internal Medicine, they said the false teeth and bridges matched Hitler's dental records and that he died in Berlin in 1945. So the skull piece may well be someone else's, but the teeth point the other way on the bigger question: Hitler did not escape.