Official: KGB chief ordered Hitler's remains destroyed
By Maxim Tkachenko, CNNDecember 11, 2009 1:25 a.m. EST
 
What happened to Hitler's body?STORY HIGHLIGHTS
KGB agents were ordered to burn Hitler's remains, dispose in river, says Russian official
 
Documents: Decision based on fears Hitler's burial site would be used as worship place
 
All that remains of Hitler's corpse are fragments of jawbone, skull
 
Moscow, Russia (CNN) -- The remains of Adolf Hitler were burned in 1970 by Soviet KGB agents and thrown into a river in Germany on direct orders from the spy agency's chief, a top Russian security official said this week.
 
The head archivist of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) -- the successor to the former Soviet Union's KGB -- confirmed for the first time the chain of events that led to the disposal of Hitler's body, and who ordered the operation, in an exclusive interview with Russia's Interfax news agency.
 
Gen. Vasily Khristoforov told Interfax in an interview published Monday that previously secret documents show that KGB chief Yuri Andropov, with prior consent from the Soviet Communist Party leadership, ordered a top secret operation to destroy the remains of Hitler, his wife Eva Braun, Nazi Germany's propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels; and Goebbels' entire family.
 
Khristoforov said according to the documents, Andropov's decision to destroy the remains of the Nazi leaders and their family members was motivated by the fears of the KGB and Soviet Communist Party leadership that Hitler's burial site could become a place of worship for supporters of fascist ideas.
 
Neither the FSB nor Khristoforov were immediately available to comment on the secret documents, when asked by CNN.
 
The operation, code-named "The Archives," was carried out by a group of special KGB agents in Magdeburg, East Germany, where the bodies had been secretly buried February 21, 1946, on the territory of a Soviet military facility, Khristoforov said.
 
Two protocols were compiled after the operation was carried out on April 4, 1970, the general said. The first documented the opening of a grave that contained the remains of the Nazi leaders and their family members, and the other one detailed their physical destruction.
 
"The remains were burnt on a bonfire outside the town of Shoenebeck, 11 kilometers away from Magdeburg, then ground into ashes, collected and thrown into the Biederitz River," the second document reads, according to Khristoforov.
 
The bodies of Hitler, Braun and the Goebbels family had been discovered by the Soviet Army in May 1945. The bodies of Goebbels and his wife were found May 2 in the garden of Nazi Germany's Reich Chancellery. The bodies of the couple's children were recovered the next day, and the corpses of Hitler and Braun were discovered May 5 in a crater from an artillery shell outside his bunker in Berlin.
 
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