Skullduggery

Adolph Hitler is dead, alright---but maybe not how we thought.

Some recent DNA testing has indicated that what was thought to be the skull of the Nazi dictator is, in fact, not.

Not Hitler's, but that of a woman, no less, probably no older than 40.

Hitler was presumed to have taken his life in 1945, along with mistress Eva Braun, when he was 56 years old.

University of Connecticut archaeologist and bone specialist Nick Bellantoni knew from the outset that something was amiss. "The bone seemed very thin; male bone tends to be more robust," he said. "And the sutures where the skull plates come together seemed to correspond to someone under 40." Hitler had turned 56 in 1945.

It's been universally accepted that Hitler took cyanide and then blew his brains out with a gun in his Berlin bunker as Allied forces closed in on him, with Braun replicating his actions on herself.

But scientists at UConn conducted tests on the bullet-pierced skull---which had been secretly preserved for decades by Soviet intelligence---and discovered that it belonged to an unidentified woman under 40.

That wouldn't seem to match Adolph's description.

So if that's the case---if the skull fragment long thought to be Hitler's actually isn't---then what really happened to him?

It could be that the story of his death is still accurate, and that the skull fragment is simply someone else's.

"It could be anyone," Bellantoni says of the piece of skull long thought to belong to Hitler. "Many people were killed around the bunker area," he added.

Cue the conspiracy wackos.





Hitler escaped!! He lived for decades longer, perhaps plotting more atrocities.

A: Doubtful; B: So what?

Before you pepper me with venomous e-mails, does it really matter when Hitler croaked? After all, not a peep was heard from him after his alleged death occurred. Do you actually think that someone of his ego would simply go away, never to be heard from again?

All that matters is that the world didn't have to worry about Adolph Hitler anymore after his 1945 "death."

The presumed bodies of Hitler and Braun were wrapped in blankets, doused with gasoline, and then set on fire.

Bellantoni also doesn't believe that the skull fragment thought to be Hitler's is actually Braun's, despite the gender matching and the age being close. Braun was 33 when she presumably died in April 1945.

Hitler, sadly, has been in the news quite a bit lately. Before this rather startling revelation about his skull, this country has been inundated with Hitler references, by those lesser intelligent of us who have compared President Obama and his health care reform to Nazism.

So be prepared to hear delusions of grandeur about Hitler and his slipping through the Allies' fingers and dashing off to parts unknown, to live a quiet and simple life, with nary a peep.

He'll join Elvis that way, I guess. There are folks among us---maybe the same ones who believe the moon landing to be faked---who still refuse to believe that Mr. Presley died.

Sometimes we go the opposite way; remember when rumors began---propagated by Detroit's own DJ, Russ Gibb---that Beatle Paul McCartney had, in fact, died? And the group supposedly left clues of his demise in their songs?

Isn't it funny how we, at the same time, are reluctant to believe that folks who died are dead and those that are living are still alive?

Nothing kills a good story like the truth, eh?