CNN has picked up on the story about a top Russian security chief’s story on what happened to Hitler’s remains:
The remains of Adolf Hitler were burned in 1970 by Soviet KGB agents and thrown into a river in Germany on direct orders from the spy agency’s chief, a top Russian security official said this week.
The head archivist of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) — the successor to the former Soviet Union’s KGB — confirmed for the first time the chain of events that led to the disposal of Hitler’s body, and who ordered the operation, in an exclusive interview with Russia’s Interfax news agency.
Gen. Vasily Khristoforov told Interfax in an interview published Monday that previously secret documents show that KGB chief Yuri Andropov, with prior consent from the Soviet Communist Party leadership, ordered a top secret operation to destroy the remains of Hitler, his wife Eva Braun, Nazi Germany’s propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels; and Goebbels’ entire family.
Meanwhile, The Associated Press has the story about a U.S. soldier who stole what turned out to be a book of photographs belonging to Hitler:
After fighting his way across Europe during World War II, John Pistone was among the U.S. soldiers who entered Adolf Hitler’s home nestled in the Bavarian Alps as the war came to a close.
Making his way through the Berghof, Hitler’s home near Berchtesgaden, Germany, Pistone noticed a table with shelves underneath. Exhilarated by the certainty of victory over the Nazis, Pistone took an album filled with photographs of paintings as a souvenir.
"It was really a great feeling to be there and we knew, by that time, he was on his last leg," Pistone told The Associated Press.
Sixty-four years after Pistone brought the album home to Ohio, the 87-year-old has learned its full significance: It’s part of a series compiled for Hitler featuring art he wanted for his "Fuhrermuseum," a planned museum in Linz, Austria, Hitler’s hometown.
Pistone’s album is expected to be formally returned to Germany in a ceremony at the U.S. State Department in January. Germany has 19 other albums discovered at the Berchtesgaden complex that are part of a 31-album collection of works either destined for or being considered for the Linz museum.
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