09 December,2009 02:13 PM IST | | PTI
The erstwhile USSR's intelligence agency, the KGB, destroyed all traces of German dictator Adolf Hitler's corpse and threw the ashes in a river, the Federal Security Service has claimed.
According to Lieutenant-General Vasily Khristoforov, chief archivist of FSB, Hilter's remains had been incinerated in 1970 and the ashes thrown into a river in East Germany out of concern that his grave could become a Nazi shrine.
"It was not worth leaving any grounds for the rise of a cult of worship... there are people who profess the fascist ideology, regrettably even in Russia," British newspaper The Times quoted him as saying.
He said that agents under orders from the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, had dug up a grave containing Hitler, his wife Eva Braun and the family of his henchman Joseph Goebbels. The officers had removed the remains from a burial ground in a Soviet base at Magdeburg, Andropov having written to Soviet party chiefs recommending the bodies be destroyed after it was decided to pass the base to East Germany.
In April 1970, Andropov compiled a report declaring "the remains were burnt on a vacant area outside Sch nebeck, 11 km from Magdeburg, ground into ashes, gathered and thrown into the Biederitz river" - either the Ehle river near Biederitz suburb.
Hitler's remains arrived in Magdeburg in early 1946 after a peripatetic eight months. The bodies of Hitler and Braun had been crudely cremated on April 30, 1945, at the site of his bunker in Berlin. He had bitten a cyanide pellet then shot himself. When Red Army reached the bunker they found the two charred corpses alongside the bodies of Goebbels and his wife.
