Professor appears on ‘Hunting Hitler’
John Cencich is shown during production of the new History series, “Hunting Hitler.”
California U. professor John Cencich is a moderator of History’s new TV series, “Hunting Hitler.”
History deserves a footnote in terms of the accepted belief that German dictator Adolph Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, killed themselves in his bunker as Russian forces circled him while his country collapsed during World War II, a local professor says.
John Cencich, a professor of criminal justice at California University of Pennsylvania, said newly released federal documents and other research only broaden the mystery as to whether the couple killed themselves or fled under cover to South America.
“There is evidence that suggests he died,” said Cencich, who will appear as a moderator on History’s new TV series, “Hunting Hitler,” which begins tonight.
“There’s evidence that he had a plan to get to Argentina,” said Cencich, who led the war crimes investigation into Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic before joining the Cal U. faculty in 2002.
Before the series was filmed, Cencich and his cohost on the show, former CIA intelligence expert Bob Baer, pored over nearly 400 pages of recently declassified documents involving the investigation into Hitler’s April 30, 1945, suicide.
The first thing that amazed him about the documents was the amount of time the federal government spent looking for Hitler after Germany fell to Allied forces, using investigators from the FBI, Office of Strategic Services, U.S. War Department and U.S. State Department.
“For me, the entire notion that he lived was nonsense,” Cencich said.
However, he said history always needs to be re-examined through a modern lens, and that he agreed to do the TV show only after History assured him he wouldn’t be reading from a script or be required to compromise his objectivity.
“John is not one of those wild-eyed conspiracy theorists,” Cal U. spokeswoman Christine Kindl said. “He has a great deal of experience, and he approached this project from a very serious scientific and historical point of view.”
Cencich said there is puzzling evidence from the Russian autopsy on the bodies that indicates the skull with a bullet hole in it belonged to a woman between the age of 30 and 40, contradicting reports that Hitler shot just himself in the head after the two took cyanide in his bunker. He said the bodies also appeared to be 5 inches shorter than were Hitler and Braun.
“We do know from evidence both of them had doubles. If someone was going to stage a crime scene, this was the perfect way to do it,” Cencich said. “The accepted truth that he committed suicide is ambiguous.”
The series includes eight one-hour episodes, the first of which airs at 10 p.m. today.