Adolf Hitler's skull

A researcher says a bone found in Hitler's burned bunker came from a woman. So, did he really commit suicide?

"The histories of Hitler's death may need to be rewritten," said Uki Goni in Britain's The Guardian. Soviet intelligence preserved a bullet-punctured skull fragment dug up in the charred remains of Adolf Hitler's bunker as proof that the Nazi leader killed himself as the Soviet army entered Berlin at the end of World War II. But University of Connecticut bone specialist Nick Bellantoni says he has tested a DNA sample from the skull—and it belonged to a 30-something woman.

Cue the conspiracy theorists, said Tom Chivers in Britain's Telegraph. "Rumors of Hitler’s survival have been widespread for years," and Bellantoni's bombshell should give even the "strangest theories" new life. Among them: Hitler fled Germany on a "ghost convoy" to Argentina, or he fled to Antarctica in a U-boat. Here's where "Hitler conspiracy theories lose touch with reality altogether"—some say he used secret rocket technology to fly to a Nazi base on the moon.

The people rushing to embrace the idea that Adolf Hitler didn't really kill himself in his bunker, said Duncan Riley in The Inquisitr, would delight "the deluded mind of Josef Stalin, who didn’t accept that Hitler had died and dispatched a second mission in 1946 that looked for evidence to back up the suicide story." But it's important to remember that "this latest revelation doesn’t prove the story of Hitler’s suicide is false, all it proves is that the Red Army basically f---ed up" and never collected Hitler's skull fragment in the first place.

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