UK: Soviet War Grave – Private V. Duschin [Владимир Душин] (1916-1945) – Soviet Forces – Shaftsbury Borough Cemetery, Dorset (Visited 31.5.2022)

There is an added complication involving the fact that Guys Marsh Military Hospital also treated primarily British, American and Soviet POWs who had been held by the Imperial Japanese and who had suffered terrible psychological and physical abuse! It is believed that prior to the Soviet Union declaring war on Imperial Japan on August 9th, 1945 – the Nazi Germans would ship tens of thousands of Soviet POWs to Japanese-occupied Northeast China – where they were worked to death or used for military and medical experiments. As V. Duschin was ‘liberated’, rescued, brought to England and had died at least six-months prior to the Soviet ‘liberation’ of Northeast China (and the eventual surrender of Imperial Japan on September 3rd, 1945). However, V Duschin is recorded as being rescued by the British Army during its drive across Northwest Europe – which must have been around December 1944 – January 1945, but the question remains ‘where’? There were hundreds of sub-camps of various sizes that the Nazi Germans ‘liquidated’ (that is ‘massacred’) as the Allies approached and it could be that V Duschin had been originally moved into Western Europe to work before his health failed. More research is required.

USSR: SS Gruppenfuehrer – Police Lieutenant General Hans Baur – Recalls Hitler’s Last Moments and Suicide! (29.4.2022)

As he wrote during interrogation, until the very end of April 1945, Hitler’s inner circle, who was next to him in the Reich Chancellery bunker in Berlin, did not know the Fuhrer’s final intentions.

“Only on April 30, in the afternoon, he called me together with my adjutant, Colonel Betz. Hitler met me in the hallway and led me to his room. He shook my hand and said: “Baur, I want to say goodbye to you, I want to thank you for all the years of service,” the ex-pilot recalled.

“He was very old and haggard. His hands were trembling, it was clear to me that they had made the final decision to commit suicide,” the military man recalled.

Hitler told him that he wanted to donate his favourite painting as a keepsake – a portrait of King Frederick the Great by Rembrandt that hung in his room. Baur tried to dissuade Hitler from committing suicide, “because then everything will fall apart in a few hours.”

“My soldiers can’t and don’t want to hold on anymore. I can’t take it anymore,” Hitler replied.

He went on to say that “the Russians are on Potsdamer Platz” and could capture him alive, allegedly using sleeping gas. Hitler added that he ordered to burn his corpse and the corpse of his wife Eva Braun, because he was afraid that they would be hanged for show, as the Italian partisans had previously hanged the corpse of the leader of fascist Italy, Benito Mussolini.

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