|
|
Hitler Story Goes Around the World
Uki's exclusive story in London's Observer on the first-ever Hitler DNA test was reproduced by major media all over the world. Even David Letterman joked about it. The DNA finding calls into question the accepted account of the Führer’s death.
HITLER
|
|
David Letterman runs sketch on the Hitler DNA finding.
HITLER
|
by Uki Goñi - 17 October 2009 As author of The Real Odessa, a book on the escape of Nazi criminals from Europe, I am frequently approached by documentary makers working on Nazi themes. At the start of this year, I was contacted by Joanna Chejade-Bloom, a filmmaker for KPI-TV in New York, who was working on two such projects for History Channel. I collaborated on her second project, Fourth Reich, filming with her in Europe during the month of July. Joanna had just come from filming in Moscow for her other project, Hitler's Escape. Her crew had made an astounding discovery. Having managed to obtain samples from the fragment of skull held in a Moscow archive that the Russians claim belonged to Hitler, they returned to the US and subjected these samples to a DNA test. The skull was not Hitler. It was a woman. I quickly realized the importance of the discovery but suspected it might pass unnnoticed if the TV airing wasn't backed by a strong print media report. I was right. Hitler's Escape aired on September 16 but it wasn't until I published a piece in The Observer in London two Sundays later that the story took off. The next day my article was picked up by major media worldwide and even David Letterman joked about it on his TV show in New York. Not everyone was pleased, certainly not the Russian archivists who dismissed the DNA test altogether. Academics also seemed resentful of a TV crew meddling on their turf, fuming against the Escape word in the documentary's title while missing the significance of the find. Television journalists (who, yes, can often be factually careless) had bravely exposed a major myth sustained precisely by those who portray themselves as defenders of fact. In this case, and pending an independent examination of Hitler's alleged remains in Moscow, television proved itself right.
HITLER
|
|
AUDIO - 28 September 2009: Uki talks to Sean Moncrieff of Newstalk Ireland about the DNA tests performed on the alleged remains of Hitler held in a Moscow archive.
HITLER
|
'DNA Samples Uncontaminated'
UkiNet - 29 Sep 2009
In the wake of the media sensation caused by the revelation that the skull fragment found outside the Führerbunker after the war was not Hitler but actually belonged to a female under 40 years of age, some critics have called into question the validity of the DNA test, saying the samples could have been contminated by post-mortem handlers of the bone material. But the University of Connecticut scientist who conducted the test feels fully confident the female DNA found is not the result of contamination from handlers during the last decades. "First of all, the bone we powdered came from the interior of the samples so it could not have come in contact with handlers, secondly, they were very small fragments that had chipped away and were too small to have been normally handled, and thirdly, the DNA signal we were able to extract was very weak, which is consistent with the DNA that usually results from historical samples such as these that were stored in poor conditions," says geneticist Linda Strausbaugh, who has a long experience in extracting DNA from historical samples in archaeological projects . "If the DNA was the result of contamination from a handler we would have found a much louder signal."
HITLER
|
|
Archaeologist Nick Bellantoni and geneticist Linda Strausbaugh of the University of Connecticut on how they proved the Hitler skull in Moscow is not Hitler.
HITLER
|
Hitler DNA in Bloodstain?
UkiNet - 27 Sep 2009
A DNA test conducted on blood samples from the sofa on which Adolf Hitler is believed to have committed suicide on April 30, 1945, has shown that the they correspond to a male person, in all likeliehood Hitler himself. When a secret Soviet team reentered the Führerbunker in 1946, they not only took the skull fragment they found in the garden outside, they also took wood and fabric from Hitler's bloodstained sofa. Connecticut University archaeologist Nick Bellantoni collected samples from these stains at the Russian State Archive in Moscow. "I had the reference photos the Soviets took of the sofa back then and I was seeing the exact same stains in front of me," says Bellantoni. As is shown in the History Channel documentary Hitler's Escape, screened on American television earlier this month, the DNA from the skull fragment belonged to a woman. But the DNA extracted from the stains appears positive. "The signature on that swab was from a male," says Linda Strausbaugh, the geneticist who conducted the test. Does that mean the Connecticut lab now holds a DNA sample with the genetic profile of the Führer, or that could even, God forbid, allow the creation of a Hitler clone? "No, you could not clone it," says the geneticist reassuringly. "We managed to get some DNA but not the full range." At best, the lab could seek to match this DNA with one of the Hitler family members known to live in the United States and Europe. But Strausbaugh is cautious about the sofa stains: "I wouldn't dare affirm it is Hitler's blood, it could be somebody else."
HITLER
|
|
Russian State Archive Director Sergei Mironenko in 1993 revealed to the world that his institution had in safekeeping an authentic fragment of Hitler's skull. But in 2009 American scientists collaborating with the History Channel documentary "Hitler's Escape" proved that the Moscow skull is actually from a woman. This video excerpt is from the 1995 British documentary "Hitler's Death: The Final Report".
HITLER
|
© ukinet 2011