She was an assistant to Hitler’s dentist
Käthe Heusermann was born in Berlin to a middle-class family. She was interested in studying dentistry and hoped to become a dentist one day. In the early 1930’s she started to work for a Jewish dentist. But the dentist fled Germany when the Nazi party came to power. After that, she started working for Dr. Hugo Blaschke who would soon become Adolf Hitler’s personal dentist. For the next decade, she would tend to Hitler’s teeth with Dr. Blaschke. Along with Hitler they also treated Eva Braun, Hitler’s wife.
When the Soviet Army reached Berlin in 1945, they were desperate to find Hitler as soon as possible. When the Soviets discovered Hitler’s dead body it was burned and unidentifiable. Only Hitler’s teeth were intact, so the Soviets tried to find his dentist, but he had fled Germany.
Instead, they found the dentist’s assistant Käthe Heusermann who had been treating Hitler for the past decade and was very familiar with his teeth. Käthe Heusermann had been offered a chance to fly out of Berlin with Hitler’s inner circle, but she declined and stayed behind.
The Soviets eventually confirmed Hitler’s death through Käthe Heusermann.
Käthe wrote years later about the moment when the Soviets handed her Hitler’s teeth:
“I took the dental bridge in my hand, and looked for an unmistakable sign. I found it immediately, took a deep breath and blurted out, ‘These are the teeth of Adolf Hitler.’ I was showered with expressions of gratitude.”
Käthe thought she identified Hitler now the Soviets would let her go but little did she know that this was the start of her misery.
The Soviet Union didn’t want the world to know of Hitler’s death. Stalin kept the news of Hitler’s death a secret so the Soviet Union could use the information or evidence to their advantage when needed.
Heusermann was secretly transported to Moscow and put in prison, and investigated for years. She would spend the next six years in solitary confinement without a trial. Käthe writes:
“In August 1951, I was finally charged, By my voluntary participation in Hitler’s dental treatment, [they said] I had helped the bourgeois German state to prolong the war.”
She was transported to a Siberian gulag in 1951. The prison was 2800 miles distance from Moscow. Käthe was forced to do labor work in the gulag. She got very weak with time and wasn’t able to complete her quota of work, to punish her the prison guards would give her less food.
In 1955 West Germany negotiated for the release of prisoners, and at last, Käthe was released from the gulag. She returned to Germany to find out that her family had declared her dead. Her fiance back home had married another woman. She continued to live in Germany for the rest of her life. She died in 1993 at the age of 83 in the German city of Düsseldorf.
Elena Kagan, who was one of the Soviet agents that found Heusermann wrote in her book Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter:
“If we had not found Käthe … Hitler, as Stalin wanted, would have remained a myth and a mystery,” she wrote. “But what suffering we had unwittingly doomed Käthe Heusermann to endure.”
Sources:[1]: How the woman who identified Hitler’s dental remains ended up in prison
[2]: Hugo Blaschke — Wikipedia
[3]: The Jew who Identified the Fuehrer’s Remains & Kept the Secret for Decades
