Will this be the end of the Adolf Hitler conspiracy theories?

The group’s findings were published this week revealing the teeth held no fragments of meat products. Hitler was a vegetarian. Tick. There was a bluish taint in the teeth revealing Hitler had taken cyanide prior to his death and the skull fragment revealed a bullet hole. Tick, tick.

At last now we can set aside the bizarre conspiracy theories that there is a 130-year-old monster shuffling around Paraguay.

As a child I grew up hearing so many of these theories. Hitler was still alive, it was said. He had fled to South America and was living comfortably there. Another crazy theory had Hitler escaping Germany by U-boat after which he set up camp in the North Pole.

That the greatest criminal and mass murderer of the 20th Century (not counting Stalin or Mao), perhaps the greatest bogeyman of all time was alive and kicking somewhere on the planet speaks more of conspiracy theories, how they start and how they gather momentum. It also raises the question of why so many people would prefer to believe bizarre and unlikely tales than examine hard facts and draw logical conclusions.

Charlier’s examinations confirm everything we knew to be true about Hitler’s death. He committed suicide in the bunker of the Reich chancellery and his body and the woman he had married less than 40 hours earlier, Eva Braun, were taken to ground level and incinerated in the early hours of April 30, 1945.

The charred remains of Hitler and Braun and two dogs, almost certainly Hitler’s beloved Alsatian, Blondi and her pup, Wulf, were discovered in a bomb crater outside the Reich Chancellery by the Soviet Third Shock Army under the command of Major General Maksim Purkayev on May 1.

Soviet intelligence, known by the delightful cold war acronym of SMERSH, took charge of the remains, performing autopsies on the two corpses before burying them in Berlin in an undisclosed location. The bodies were exhumed and reburied several times, the last in a location in Magdeburg in Saxony where Hitler’s and Braun’s corpses were joined in interment with those of Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, his wife and their six children. Again the location was kept secret.

A year later, SMERSH agents recovered two skull fragments from the burial site in Magdeburg and these were dispatched to Moscow where they gathered dust in Russian State Archives and sat forgotten until their discovery during the Soviet Perestroika period some two years after Mikhail Gorbachev’s period as General Secretary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union came to an end.

The conspiracy theories that would abound decades later were inspired initially by Stalin. US President Harry S. Truman asked Stalin point blank at the Potsdam conference in July 1945 if Hitler was dead. Stalin said no despite the fact SMERSH had obtained definitive dental evidence to the contrary.

Even at the Nuremberg trials, the US was still uncertain as to Hitler’s fate. Stalin’s game was largely to confuse and confound US authorities but by the end of 1946, the verdict was in and known by all Allied authorities. Hitler was dead and died by his own hand on April 30, 1945.

Less known about Hitler in the decades following his death was the miserable drug addict he had become. His drug regime, prescribed by the unrestrained quack and charlatan, Theodor Morell, had left Hitler perilously close to a premature death. Hitler’s daily intake of methamphetamine, cocaine, and heroin may not have been enough to kill him but would take years off his life, to the point where he was a walking corpse by 1945.

Similarly, the July 20 1944 plot to assassinate him by bomb at the Wolf’s Lair had left him seriously injured and these injuries would necessarily reduce his life expectancy considerably.

Alas, these hard facts were often poorly understood or roughly ignored. It was far more exciting to believe in the fantasy that Hitler had fled Germany and was alive and kicking.

Even as recently as 2009, forensic testing of skull fragments led to further confusion and a brief revisitation of conspiracy theories when an American archaeologist and bone specialist, Nick Bellantoni, found the pieces of skull he was given were that of a woman aged less than 40.

Back then, the Guardian reported breathlessly that the “histories (sic) of Hitler’s death may need to be rewritten — and left open-ended.” What nonsense.

I don’t doubt Bellantoni’s analysis or his qualifications. It seems more likely that he was given pieces of Braun’s skull rather than Hitler’s.

Hitler is dead and he died in 1945. We know this now and really, any sensible person should have accepted the facts as they were known seven decades ago. But will this final piece of the puzzle delivered by one of the world’s leading forensic pathologists kill off the conspiracy theories once and for all? I doubt it.

This column was first published in The Australian on 25 May 2018.