DNA test could clear doubts about Hitler’s death

WASHINGTON - Shortly after leaders of the French Revolution lopped off the heads of Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, in 1793, they locked the royal couple's 8-year-old son in a dank prison cell. What happened to the Dauphin - the eldest son of a French king - after that has been the subject of much speculation.

A more recent conundrum for some is the fate of Adolf Hitler.

The Nazi leader is widely believed to have committed suicide in the closing days of World War II. His body, reportedly burned by two aides and buried in a shallow grave, was uncovered by Soviet troops a few weeks after his 1945 death and kept in a secret location until it was cremated in 1970. But some people have long questioned whether the remains the Russians unearthed were actually those of Hitler and Eva Braun, the Fuhrer's longtime mistress.

Now the answer to both of these mysteries may be at hand.

Last month, two scientists uncovered evidence that the boy who died in a French prison in 1795 actually was the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. They matched the DNA found in descendants of the royal family with a sample taken from the child's heart - a heart stolen by the doctor who examined the dead boy. The physician kept the child's heart as a memento - a trophy of the autopsy he performed on the young heir to the French throne.

Pretty ghoulish, right?

In a series of events that rival the mishaps in a Fatty Arbuckle Keystone Kops routine, the heart bounced about for a half-century until it was given to one of the boy's distant relatives in the 19th century. But it wasn't until the DNA test that evidence became available to refute speculation the child escaped his captors and lived a long life in obscurity.

In the case of Hitler, there was little to substantiate his death beyond the official Russian account, which was hard to verify since the remains were never made available to American or Western European doctors. The Russians buried the bodies in a secret gravesite on one of their military bases in East Germany. Shortly before the facility was turned over to East Germany in 1970, the Soviet Union's secret police cremated the remains - except for a jagged piece of skull and four fragments of jawbone.

Just why the Russians held on to these body parts isn't clear; DNA testing didn't come into vogue until the 1990s. They seemed to be little more than ghoulish spoils of war until the Russian archive put them on public display last month and indicated a willingness to allow a DNA test.

While the cash-poor Russian government is not willing to pay for such a test, the archivists hope a Western government will come up with the money. While few people doubt Russia's claim that the body its secret police cremated was that of Hitler, a DNA test would put to rest any controversy that the brutal butcher managed to avoid that fate.

The opportunity to close the final chapter of Hitler's life wouldn't have been possible without the shard of skull that, for some unexplained reason, was not cremated along with the rest of his body.

However unseemly, the theft of the heart of Louis XVII and Russia's secret retention of Hitler's skull fragment may help solve two of history's greatest mysteries.

Literally dozens of imposters claimed to be the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in the years following the boy's imprisonment. One was so convincing that he was buried in the Netherlands in 1845 with a tombstone that identified him as the missing Dauphin. After World War II, Hitler sightings were rampant. One rumor had him living in an Italian cave, another working as a croupier in a Swiss casino. Even Dwight Eisenhower expressed doubts about Hitler's death two months after it was reported on German radio.

Strangely, the debate over what actually happened might be put to rest by the ghoulishness of people whose bad taste produced good res