Hitler was, “sunken over, with blood dripping out of his right temple. He had shot himself with his own pistol, a Walther PPK 7.65.”
— SS Sturmbannführer Otto Günsche, Hitler’s adjutant, 1945.
In the summer of 1983, while stationed in West Germany, this author traveled to Berlin on military business, and crossed into communist East Berlin at the famous Checkpoint Charlie. Turning left after several blocks, onto the broad, Unter den Linden boulevard, I made my way to the majestic, Brandenburg Gate, turned left again, and three blocks farther south, after passing a busload of Czech tourists, I was standing atop the site of Adolf Hitler’s wartime, Reich Chancellery bunker, where he committed suicide with a Walther pistol as the Soviet Red Army swarmed the shattered streets of the city. It was uncomfortably close to the 12-foot-tall, concrete Berlin Wall, built in 1961.
The steel-reinforced, concrete bunker remains buried underground to this day, with no access possible, and it was directly beneath a sandy children’s playground during my visit. The same site, since 2006, is now a paved parking lot for a nearby apartment building.
Hitler retreated to his spartan, subterranean bunker on the Reich Chancellery grounds on January 16, 1945, as the war effort for Nazi Germany became increasingly desperate, and never left it afterward, for the last 105 days of his life. By the evening of April 21st, 1945, the Red Army was at the outskirts of the city, and the end was drawing near.
The infamous dictator asked his SS physician, Obersturmbannführer (Lt. Col.) Werner Haase, about the most reliable method of suicide, and Haase recommended the “pistol-and-poison method,” combining a dose of hydrogen cyanide (prussic acid) with a gunshot to the head. The cyanide will kill a human within one to three minutes by halting cellular respiration.
Hitler owned at least three Walther pistols at that time. He had a Walther PPK in 6.35mm (.25 ACP), probably the lightweight, alloy-framed version, for concealed carry in a small holster sewn into his trousers. Then, there was a full-sized, Walther PP in 7.65mm (.32 ACP), which he carried as a military service pistol on his belt.
Finally, there was an ornately-engraved, 24-karat, gold-plated Walther PP (“Police Pistol”) in 7.65mm, with ivory grips, which was strictly a presentation piece from the Walther factory to commemorate his 50th birthday in 1939. However, a fourth pistol, a richly-engraved, silver-plated, Walther Model 9 in 6.35mm still in existence bears the golden initials “A.H.,” and has additionally been attributed to him.
The gaudy, gold-plated Walther PP, also initialed “A.H.,” was later recovered from a desk drawer in Hitler’s apartment in Munich on April 29, 1945, just before his death, by Ira “Teen” Palm of North Carolina and two more American soldiers from the 179th Infantry Regiment of the 45th Division. This very special pistol later passed from owner to owner, until it sold at auction in 1987 for a lofty $114,000, to an owner who preferred to remain anonymous. Today, it’s believed to be someone along the West Coast of the U.S.
So, realistically, Hitler only had two Walther pistols inside the bunker: the small PPK in .25 ACP, and the larger PP in 7.65mm, both of which were everyday carry models, and probably not fancy or engraved at all, but since there’s no physical description of either weapon, we’ll never know for certain.
Shortly after midnight on the early morning of April 29, 1945, with Soviet troops closing in rapidly, Hitler married his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, in a small, civil ceremony inside a map room in the bunker. They had approximately 40 hours to live.
Late on the morning of April 30th, the Red Army troops were only 500 meters away from the Führerbunker. At about 2:30 PM, Adolf Hitler and his wife went into his personal study and sitting room, on the south side of the bunker, and his adjutant, SS Sturmbannführer Otto Günsche, dutifully stood guard outside the door, respecting their final privacy.
At approximately 3:25 PM, a gunshot rang out from inside the study, but no one entered the room until 3:30 PM, when Günsche and Heinz Linger, Hitler’s valet, walked in and saw Hitler and Eva sitting upright on the sofa, with Hitler to his wife’s right side, both dead. She had taken cyanide, and he had bitten a glass ampule of cyanide, and then shot himself in the right temple with a pistol.
Günsche subsequently stated that Hitler, “sat… sunken over, with blood dripping out of his right temple. He had shot himself with his own pistol, a Walther PPK 7.65,” and the gun lay at his feet, with a large bloodstain on the sofa arm to his right. A single, 7.65mm brass shell casing was found on the floor.
It’s quite likely that Günsche’s “PPK” description was a translational error in his later testimony, because the suicide gun was clearly a 7.65mm weapon, and the only such firearm in Hitler’s possession was his own Walther PP belt pistol.
The two bodies were burned outside the bunker from four PM to 6:30 PM that evening, soaked in some 55 gallons of gasoline, inside an artillery shell crater. In early May 1945, the Soviets recovered the charred bodies of Hitler and his wife, and positively confirmed their identities through dental records, and the sworn testimony of dental assistant Käthe Heusermann and dental technician Fritz Echtmann, both of whom had worked for Hitler’s dentist, Hugo Blaschke.
The Walther PP and PPK that Hitler had in his possession at the time of his death have subsequently been lost. They could have been taken by occupying, Soviet troops or hidden away by a member of his inner circle, present at the end. Without a detailed description or serial numbers, we may never know the real answers.
The Walther PP and PPK were certainly among the very best handguns of that era, highly sought after by the Nazi Party elite. Even the small-caliber, .22 Long Rifle version was quite popular, because it held nine (PPK) or 10 rounds (PPK/S) of ammunition, compared to just seven rounds of 7.65mm ammunition in the standard PPK.
Finally, during a February 13, 2023, interview with a Russian TV station, Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov (and prime minister of the Chechen Republic, part of Russia) claimed to possess Hitler’s actual, suicide pistol, saying that is was “a trophy pistol with which Hitler shot himself…brought to him (Kadyrov) by his commanders.” Kadyrov referred to traces of blood on the breechblock, which allegedly matched Hitler’s blood type. The biggest problem with the Chechen leader’s story is that the pistol in his hands is very clearly a Mauser Model 1934, not a Walther, and Hitler did not possess any Mausers.
What if Hitler’s infamous suicide pistol was just an ordinary service weapon, his standard belt-sidearm for venturing out into the field to inspect the troops? After all, carrying an expensive, custom-engraved, gold-plated handgun from day to day in an enclosed holster, where no one ever sees it, and the leather may be likely to wear away some of the gold finish, makes very little sense, so Hitler’s everyday, military sidearm was likely quite ordinary.
According to the head of Hitler’s bodyguards, SS Obergruppenführer Hans Rattenhuber, Reichsleiter Artur Axmann, the Reich Youth (“Hitler Youth”) leader of the Nazi Party, took the Walther PP pistol that Hitler used to commit suicide, and said that he would “hide it for better times.”
During his daring escape from the Führerbunker on May 1, 1945, Axmann later stated that he hastily buried the pistol next to the Sandkrug Bridge over the Berlin-Spandau Shipping Canal downtown, only one mile north of the bunker. He survived the war, was later exonerated of any war crimes, and died peacefully in Berlin in 1996, at the age of 83.
Axmann certainly had no reason to lie, so his account is the most credible of all. His own adjutant, Gerhard Welzin, reportedly escaped from the bunker with the PPK in .25 ACP, which soon disappeared without a trace. He was captured by the Red Army.
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was said to have possessed a blued, Walther PPK that he was told was Hitler’s suicide weapon, but that story does not correspond with any of the known facts regarding Hitler’s actual weapons. Then again, as Julius Caesar once observed, “People believe what they want to believe,” whether it’s actually true or not.
The bottom line is that no one currently knows for certain what Hitler’s last Walther looked like, or the exact model, engraved or standard, except that it was apparently a 7.65mm weapon, and most likely a Walther PP model. Like so many other aspects of the dark and menacing Third Reich, it remains an enduring mystery for the ages.