Eva Braun Hitler's Odontological IdentificationŁA Forensic Enigma?

Through generous cooperation by custodians of several museums, libraries, and government archive centers, the author has had occasion to explore various historical dental relics and reports covering the evolution of dental art and science over a period ranging from the time of George Washington to that of Adolf Hitler [1,2]. When the Berlin dentist, Dr. Hugo Johannes Blaschke, who cared for Germany's wartime leaders, was captured and interrogated by American army officers in 1945, he prepared descriptions and diagrams of the dental condition of Adolf Hitler, as well as of Martin Bormann and of Eva Braun, Hitler 's longtime female companion whom he married just before the end of the war. By comparing American and Soviet reports it has been shown elsewhere that data attributed to a 1945 Russian autopsy report cited in 1968 by Bezymenski [3-5] are in harmony with Hitler 's 1944 head and jaw X-rays which, after much search and research, were located through the cooperation of the Captured Record Branch of the U.S. National Archives and Records Service [2]. This discovery was followed by a detailed comparison with other dental data, as reported at the 6th International Conference on Forensic Sciences in Edinburgh in 1972 and subsequently published in early 1973 by Sognnaes and Str6m [6]. Similarly, the dental data elicited regarding Martin Bormann's dental condition, based on dental diagrams prepared by Dr. Blaschke, have recently been analyzed in detail by Sognnaes [7]. Responding to widely publicized reports on the subsequently unearthed Berlin skull alleged to be that of Bormann [8,9], it was suggested by Sognnaes [10] that "there are several confusing missing links in need of further research." With regard to Eva Braun, Trevor-Roper [11] has concluded that there is much circumstantial evidence of her death and burning next to Hitler at the Berlin bunker in 1945. The purpose of the following analysis is to reappraise data from (1) American documents and (2) Soviet documents, and (3) to compare the USA and USSR archives pertinent to the identification of Eva Braun Hitler.