The Hunt For Hitler & Hitler's Skull

Introduction

National Geographic has been around since 1888 with their stated aim to "increase and diffuse geographic knowledge". Over 375 million people are exposed to National Geographic worldwide every month though their range of output that includes magazines, TV channel and DVD releases.

This release is a double feature of two episodes from different National Geographic series: The Hunt For Hitler (2006) and Hitler's Skull (2003).

The Hunt For Hitler

The history books have long told of Hitler's demise on 30th April 1945, where the dictator and his bride of 36 hours were laid and burnt in a ditch outside the Fuhrer Bunker after killing themselves. But other sources at the time claimed that he faked his suicide and escaped, maybe to Argentina, in order to prepare for a comeback and a Fourth Reich.

The FBI spent a number of years tracking down leads and false sightings, but what of those who overran the capital at the time? Russian soldiers who claimed to have found his body say they incinerated it before dumping the remains down a Berlin sewer. And Stalin, who sent the elite SMERSH unit to capture Hitler, always denied finding the body and stoked the rumours of his escape. So just where is the body and what happened to the World's most reviled man?

Hitler's Skull

With an investigation that starts at Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, forensic scientist Mark Benecke travels to Lausanne, Switzerland, then Zurich before ending up in Moscow. There he is given access to material held in secret in Russian archives that have been kept secret for over half a century. Benecke is presented with a set of teeth and also a portion of skull, both said to have originated from the body of Adolf Hitler.

Benecke uses his scientific knowledge and that of both dental and anthropological experts to try to determine not only if these artefacts belonged to Hitler, but to also answer the age old question of just how he died.

Picture/Sound

The picture is pretty good for a TV programme, the source material is 16:9 but also is very good shape.  Soundtrack is 2.0 Stereo but has rather excellent subtitles to go with it.

Overall

It's not just the preserve of the History Channel, Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich with its insidious reach simply grips the imagination of many. More than 60 years after the end of World War II, the interest in this period of history is still greater than just about any other period.  I suspect the sheer arrogance, ignorance and outright brutality of the regime is what draws most people, pondering how a developed nation could fall under the influence of a man such as Hitler and willingly follow him on the road to destruction.

Both of these documentaries are very good, not especially for what they tell us about the demise of Hitler, but about events that happened around him or because of him.  The first documentary actually references the second, and there are some fascinating stories about the various rumours surrounding Hitler's death, but ultimately this goes over ground covered many times previously. The fascinating portion of this documentary is the revelation that Hitler's remains were loaded into an ammo box by Russian soldiers and buried within the Unit's barracks and then excavated and taken with them to each succeeding base, being reburied several times.

The second documentary, Hitler's Skull, on the other hand sheds new light on the work that others have done either to keep secret or uncover what has happened to Hitler since his death. So we get to see some real artefacts and it is the teeth that are the most interesting, as the small portion of skull could actually be
anyone's. Benecke meets a German dentist who uses X-rays plus footage from propaganda films to identify what Hitler's teeth would have looked like.  Oddly enough, Hitler seems to share my contempt of visiting the dentist but went much further to ensure he didn't need to go. It appears that most of his teeth were replaced with gold bridgework that is very distinctive and also quite painful.

These documentaries, with an obvious overlap, pair up quite well together and are interesting for anyone with an interest in this era. Neither really gives you answers you might be looking for, but each provides you with some real gems of info that you didn't know before.