Did Hitler really shoot himself in the Fura bunker? Or did he slip past advancing Soviet troops and escape to South America?

There have been so many conspiracy theories behind Hitler's death. But in this episode of the World Wars

podcast, a podcast dedicated to that turbulent period in history between 1914 and

1945, we're going to try and find out the truth.

Now this was first recorded for Dan Snow's history here, and Dan talks with Luke Daily

Groves from the University of Leeds. Luke has made it his mission to take on the

conspiracy theorists and smash their argument using historical methods and new research

with the help of recently declassified MI5 files, previously unpublished sketches of Hitler's bunker and eyewitness accounts from the intelligence officers.

This makes for a fascinating discussion, one that gets us that step closer to the truth. Enjoy. Thanks for having me on.

This is a big deal. Did Hitler die in the bunker in May 1945? Yep, 100% absolutely dead. Why are we even talking about this?

Since the sort of radio announcement that Hitler had killed himself, there has been all sorts of speculation

about whether he actually did kill himself, and a large part of it is because Stalin himself decided

for political reasons to convey this rumor that Adolf Hitler had escaped to Spain or Argentina.

So obviously you have one of the major allies of the Second World War announcing that Hitler hasn't actually killed himself and this results in a whole swave of rumors which haven't really stopped despite the fact that there's an overwhelming amount of evidence for Hitler's suicide. So it begins with the Soviets and then of course

people on the ground pick it up so you have neo Nazis and in Germany that use it for their own reasons and then

you have this sort of modern sort of swarm of conspiracy theories which have came about since the 2009 DNA results on a piece of skull in archives in Moscow which historians and even the archivist in Moscow said was Hitler's skull.

And then it turned out through DNA results that it was actually a woman that couldn't

behave a brown, and then this resulted in a whole new wave, if you like, of conspiracy theories theories and it's my book which has been

written primarily as a response to these new theories since 2009 insofar as they are new.

So why did it come out of the conspiracy here as well?

Historians can only speculate on what Stalin's motives might have been for saying

this, that there are all sorts of reasons which I outline in the book.

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