On Wednesday 8 November, 2000, I flew back to London from Madrid where I had been interviewed for the Spanish edition of Stalingrad. Fortunately, my flight was not delayed as I had feared. That evening the Oxford philosopher Tony Quinton was giving a dinner at Brooks’s, a club in St James’s, for the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was by then Lord Dacre of Glanton. Marcelle Quinton deliberately put me next to him. This was simply because Hugh Dacre was keen to find out whether his most famous book, The Last Days of Hitler, had stood the test of time.

Fortunately, I had been researching the death of Hitler and the Nazi Downfall in Berlin in the Moscow archives just before the barriers came down. It was not the recently elected President Vladimir Putin who closed them. The main outcry had come from Communist and Nationalist members of the Duma. They were convinced that Soviet history was being betrayed by allowing access to foreigners. A popular rumour at the time held that an American in the former Marxist-Leninist Institute had come across copies of architectural plans of the US Embassy showing where all the microphones had been planted. To this day I suspect this rather gleeful story was apocryphal.

Hugh Trevor-Roper’s book came about in an unusual way. Attached to counter-intelligence in the British sector of Berlin, he was ordered in September 1945 by Brigadier Dick White to investigate the death of Hitler. Stalin had ordered Soviet propaganda to claim that the Führer had escaped the city and was hiding somewhere in Bavaria, in the American zone. Naturally, with no documents made available by Red Army authorities, Trevor-Roper could only work from interviews with captured German officers who had been in the Führerbunker during the last days. One of his key witnesses, Major Bernd Freytag Freiherr von Loringhoven, was a huge help to me just over 50 years later. Although utterly reliable in his testimony, this military assistant of General Guderian, like the other officers Trevor-Roper managed to interview at the time, had left before Hitler’s death. He had given permission for Freytag and another adjutant to escape from Berlin ‘to rejoin fighting troops’, the day before his own suicide.

In September 1945, as Trevor-Roper acknowledged, wild theories about Hitler’s apparent disappearance were all the rage. ‘Some stated that he had been killed fighting in Berlin, others that he had been murdered by officers in the Tiergarten. He was supposed by some to have escaped, by air or submarine.’ In fact, Stalin knew all the time exactly what had happened.

On 29 April, when Hitler was still alive, a decision was taken in total secrecy by Lavrenti Beria, the head of the NKVD, and Viktor Abakumov, the head of SMERSh, to deceive Marshal Zhukov, the commander-in-chief, and even other counter-intelligence generals. They would send the SMERSh detachment from the 3rd Shock Army to the Reichs Chancellery next day even though it lay in the sector of the 5th Shock Army. Listening in to that army’s radio net, the group moved in within minutes of the first report that the building had been reached. Apart from a bomb-disposal squad, all other Soviet personnel were ordered away instantly, and inner and outer cordons established. Even the army commander, General Berzarin, was not allowed to enter.

We managed to interview both Yelena Rhzevskaya, the SMERSh group interpreter, and Captain Shota Sulkhanishvili, who commanded the sappers clearing the bunker. Everyone thought of booty and souvenirs to take home. Rhzevskaya even told us how she found their young SMERSh woman signaller trying on one of Eva Braun’s dresses, but she did not dare keep it because it was too low-cut to wear in Stalinist Russia. Sulkhanishvili and his men, on the other hand, were sent away as soon as two partially charred corpses were discovered. The male had an orthopaedic boot. That was Joseph Goebbels. The body of the woman with him had been his wife, Magda. She had a half-melted gold cigarette case and Hitler’s own Nazi Party badge which he had also given her. Astonishingly, the bodies of their six children, whom Freytag Loringhoven had described to me descending the steps into the bunker like a school crocodile, were not discovered until 3 May. Concealed under Wehrmacht blankets, they had been poisoned in their bunk beds by their parents.  One of them, Helga, had a damaged jaw and bruised face from trying to resist the capsule of cyanide forced into her mouth.

Lieutenant-General Alexander Vadis, the chief of SMERSh for Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front, arrived to take command. He was well-aware that Stalin’s highest priority was to find Hitler’s body. Pravda had just announced that Hitler’s death was a fascist trick. The real search started, digging up the garden already worked over by artillery shells. Zhukov arrived, but was turned away on the grounds of ‘safety’. He was refused entry again two days later. Interrogation followed interrogation as SMERSh seized anyone connected with the Reich Chancellery. Every protocol had to be signed off with an acknowledgement that it was a capital offence to say a word.

It beggars belief, but Marshal Zhukov did not finally discover until 20 years later that Hitler’s body had been found on 5 May. His corpse and that of Eva Braun were found in the same shell-hole in which his Alsatian Blondi and one of her puppies had been buried after they had been used to test the cyanide capsules.

The bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun were concealed in blankets and smuggled out through the Red Army cordons to a secret clinic at Buch in the north of the city, to be examined by SMERSh pathologists. Further checks were carried out when Hitler’s jaw was removed to be checked by his dentist’s assistant. When it came to 8 May and the night of the official surrender, Rhzevskaya was given the jaw in a red satin box used to store cheap jewellery, and told to guard it with her life. As a woman she was less likely to get drunk and lose it. That night ended what the writer Konstantin Simonov called ‘the bandit glory of the former fascist empire’.

From the very start of his investigation in September 1945, Trevor-Roper sensed that the Russians had something to hide. Why were they themselves not hunting high and low for Hitler, instead of using his absence as a crude stick with which to beat the western Allies? Although it was unclear at the time, Stalin had become obsessed with every detail that could be extracted, largely because he wanted to know the secret of Hitler’s grip on the imagination of so many Germans. ‘The nation was spellbound by him’, said Speer, ‘as a people has rarely been in the whole of history.’ German officers and officials, both high and low, who had been with Hitler in the last weeks of the war were rounded up to be held and interrogated in the nearby German Institute for the Blind. Questioned again and again, most would be held for another ten years in Moscow.

It is not just the last days in Berlin and the Führerdammerung that Trevor-Roper depicts so well. ‘With slogans of victory on their lips’, as he put it, the German people were preparing for defeat. In an elegant echo of Edward Gibbon, he describes the characters of Hitler’s court and their rivalries with sardonic pleasure: a ‘political and intellectual fools’ paradise in which such figures as Goering and Goebbels and Himmler, with their drugs and perfumes, their nihilism and mysticism, their flatterers and astrologers, could determine policy’. When assessing the Führer himself, he clearly agrees with the clear-headed General Franz Halder. Slavish accounts of the Führer’s genius were the dazzled reflections of the man’s own narcissistic belief in himself as a great political philosopher. When it came to the fabulist stories of Hitler escaping to South America by plane or submarine, Trevor-Roper treated the rampant mythopoeia with exquisite contempt. Little more than four months after the event, he was particularly impressive in his assessment of key moments. He correctly pinpointed Hitler’s decision to commit suicide when he received ‘the shattering news of Himmler’s treachery’.

Right from the start, Trevor-Roper also distrusted the Russian attempt to pretend that Hitler had not shot himself, but had instead taken poison, which was considered less soldierly. He reminds his reader that Field Marshal Paulus’ refusal to shoot himself on surrendering at Stalingrad in February 1943 had provoked a furious tantrum. Suicide was an important subject for Hitler; in fact, one suspects that during the worst period of his early life in Vienna the idea of it as an exit in extremis had been a great comfort, rather like for Goethe himself as he acknowledged in Dichtung und Wahrheit. Hitler, as Trevor-Roper rightly sensed, did not lack the courage to pull the trigger. He chose both methods, bullet and poison, to be absolutely certain. His greatest fear was to be captured and taken back to Moscow in an iron cage for Stalin’s victory parade.

Of course, there are some minor errors. Trevor-Roper believed that Hitler’s body had been exhumed on 9 May by a detachment of the NKVD, when in fact it had been smuggled out on 5 May by SMERSh. But Trevor-Roper never had anything like the access to such details as we did half a century later during that brief window in the 1990s when Rudolph Pikhoya, Yeltsin’s minister of the archives, forced the Russian military to open their files. Back in 1945, British intelligence had only the vaguest idea of how SMERSh had emerged under Abakumov out of the Special Detachments of the NKVD as the all-powerful Soviet counter-intelligence arm.

Needless to say, the power struggles under Stalin became byzantine, and eventually the jaw of Hitler held by SMERSh ended up in the Lubyanka archive, while the rest of the skull was deposited by the NKVD in what became GARF – the main State Archive of the Russian Federation. Recent analysis on a fragment of cloth soaked in Hitler’s blood, (from American rather than Russian sources), suggested that he suffered from Kallmann syndrome. This would have affected his sexual development and probably contributed to ‘an unusually small penis (micropenis) and undescended testes (cryptorchidism)’. More to the point, the analysis suggested ‘a high predisposition for conditions such as schizophrenia, autism, bipolar disorder, and ADHD’. If I had known that at the time, I hope I would have asked Hugh Dacre the question that historians will have to face more and more in our changing moral universe of forgiveness. Does evil really exist, or is every mass murderer from the past just a victim of their own DNA or childhood environment? Perhaps they were questions better put to a moral philosopher such as Tony Quinton.

Andrei Sakharov, the great Soviet physicist and dissident, once argued that although Stalin killed more people, Hitler had to be killed first. This was because the Nazis’ Hunger Plan to eliminate at least 30 million people through deliberate starvation would have dwarfed both the Holocaust and Stalin’s Holodomor against the Ukrainian people. The enormity of suffering during that totalitarian period was so great that the younger generation today find it too much to grasp. Yet when Albert Speer was interrogated by American officers of their Counter-Intelligence Corps a few days after Hitler’s death, he complained bitterly that ‘History always emphasises terminal events’. He hated the idea that what he saw as the early triumphs of the Nazi regime, such as full employment and the autobahns, would be obliterated in human memory by the squalid horrors of its end. But Speer was wrong and History was right. Nothing reveals more about the true nature of a leader and their political system than the manner of their downfall. Hugh Trevor-Roper was absolutely right in his conclusions, an astonishing achievement in those few short autumn weeks of 1945. It was indeed a very great pleasure to be able to tell him so at the Quintons’ dinner.