![\"Hitler1a\"](\"https:\/\/hcsblogdotorg.files.wordpress.com\/2016\/02\/hitler1a.jpg?w=620\")
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Quentin Tarantino reimagined the end of World War II as only he could \u2014 with Hitler being machine-gunned to death in a movie theater by Jewish GIs. Inglourious Basterds<\/em>, the director\u2019s 2009 eight-time-Oscar-nominated moneymaker of a flick, made absolutely no effort to tell the truth, and maybe we\u2019re all better off for it. But film is not history, and that may be precisely why it\u2019s much more satisfying than whatever constituted the real story connected to the not-rapid-enough exit of Adolf Hitler<\/a>.<\/p>\n The real story, according to the consensus? Hitler died in his bunker on April 30, 1945, victim of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. But confusion surrounding an initial postmortem \u2014 not to mention plenty of alternative theories \u2014 have fueled speculation since then, leading many researchers to dig deeper into the whos, whats and wherefores of the dictator\u2019s passing. Some of them, dismissing the official story altogether, fervently believe Hitler didn\u2019t die that day, but instead fled to Spain and then Argentina.<\/p>\n As early as the summer of 1945, there were headlines asking \u2018Where is Hitler?\u2019 all over the world.<\/p>\n Pablo Weschler, researcher<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n When U.S. intel officers debriefed former Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller prior to his going to work for American intelligence to aid the anti-communist push, he \u201cdisclosed that Hitler escaped to Spain after the war and that his place in the bunker \u2014 and the grave \u2014 was taken by a double, a distant blood relative of the F\u00fchrer\u2019s,\u201d says American talk-radio host and political researcher Dave Emory.<\/p>\n Joseph Stalin publicly waffled on whether or not Hitler was dead, expressing dissatisfaction until bodies were produced, and suspicion after they were. An initial autopsy \u2014 one that notably failed to mention a bullet \u2014 led Stalin to take a view that has evolved into an oft-repeated question: What really happened to Hitler? The pro-suiciders\u2019 believe in the standard Hitler\u2013Eva Braun double-suicide story that has dominated the airwaves. But since 1945 there have been anti-suiciders \u2014 first derided as wackos, now perhaps less so \u2014 who have made compelling counterclaims, all thoroughly documented in a cottage industry of books, articles and TV shows.<\/p>\n In a 2012 interview with The Jerusalem Post<\/em> about their documentary, Revealed: Hitler in Argentina<\/em>, director-producer Noam Shalev and researcher Pablo Weschler said a treasure trove of evidence for alternative theories about Hitler\u2019s fate existed. \u201cNo one believed the Russians\u2019 story of Hitler\u2019s suicide in the bunker,\u201d Weschler said. \u201cAs early as the summer of 1945, there were headlines asking \u2018Where is Hitler?\u2019 all over the world.<\/p>\n Now even some Russians have doubts, thanks to a 2009 report by Pravda<\/em> detailing how researcher Linda Strausbaugh ran some DNA samples and found that the bone fragments \u2014 collected by the Soviets \u2014 came from a woman, not a man. This culminated in one writer\u2019s call for the samples to be compared to ones from Hitler\u2019s sister, who died in 1960. (That has yet to happen.) In Hitler\u2019s Exile: Proof of the Escape of the F\u00fchrer to Argentina<\/em>, Argentine author Abel Basti doubles down, suggesting that the Nazi<\/a> leader was flown from Berlin to Spain in a Messerschmitt Me-262, and then traveled, with Braun, to Argentina by submarine.<\/p>\n