THE game was up. The war was lost. Their leader had killed himself.

So why would Adolf Hitler's aides have gone to such lengths and risked their lives to take his body and that of Eva Braun out of his bunker, under fire from Soviet artillery, and try to burn them beyond recognition?

Now a fragment of skull, believed for 64 years to have been from the remains of the Fuhrer, has been shown to be that of a woman aged between 20 and 40.

It is a sinister thought but conspiracy theorists all over the world will be asking once more: Did Hitler really die in his bunker?

Historians have generally agreed since the end of the Second World War that, staring defeat in the face, an increasingly feeble and paranoid Hitler had married Eva Braun in the bowels of his Berlin bunker after midnight on April 29, 1945, and later dictated his will.

His physician Werner Haase, in response to Hitler's questions, had recommended a dose of cyanide and a gunshot to the head as the most reliable form of suicide.

‘  I saw Hitler slumped by the table. I did not see any blood on his head ’

BODYGUARD ROCHUS MISCH

Hitler, convinced of the treason of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, doubted the reliability of the SS-supplied cyanide tablets and had one tested on his dog Blondi, after which the dog died.

Following lunch on April 30, with Soviet forces less than 500 metres from the bunker, Hitler and Eva said goodbye to staff and fellow occupants, including the Goebbels family, private secretary Martin Bormann and military officers.

They went into Hitler's personal study at 2.30pm and at around 3.30pm some witnesses reported hearing a loud gunshot.

Those, including valet Heinz Linge, who went into the study reported the smell of almonds, consistent with cyanide gas.

They said they saw Hitler slumped on his desk with a bullet wound to his head, a pistol on the floor and blood pooling on the arm of the sofa on which Eva lay beside him with no visible sign of injury.

Shelling

Several witnesses said the bodies were then carried up to the emergency exit and into a small bombed-out garden behind the Chancellery where they were doused with petrol and set alight, then buried in a small crater when the Soviet shelling made it unsafe for the cremation to continue.

Seven and a half hours later, Red Army troops began storming the Chancellery and the remains of Hitler, his wife and two of his dogs were said to have been discovered in a shell crater by a Soviet soldier.

But were they? The Soviet story changed regularly in the aftermath of the fall of Berlin and in the following years. Conspiracy theorists point to suggestions that: 

Joseph Stalin told Western leaders at the Potsdam conference in 1945 he believed Hitler may have escaped to Spain or South America.

Stalin's top army officer, Marshal Georgy Zhukov, said: "We found no corpse that could be Hitler's."

The acting chief of the US trial counsel at Nuremberg, Thomas J Dodd, said: "No one can say he is dead." The most convincing evidence of Hitler's suicide came from the testimonies of those who were in the bunker - but they did not all agree on the details.

Hitler's bodygyuard Rochus Misch, the only survivor of the bunker still alive, told this year how he heard someone shout to Hitler's valet, "Linge, Linge, I think it's happened."

He told The Sun: "They'd heard a gunshot, but I hadn't. I saw Hitler slumped by the table. I did not see any blood on his head."

After the bodies were carried upstairs, Misch said: "Someone shouted to me, 'Hurry upstairs, they're burning the boss!' "

But Misch decided not to go, in case the "last witnesses" were shot.

He was later captured after fleeing the bunker and spent eight years in Soviet prison camps.

Details of a Soviet autopsy on the remains they found, released years later, apparently showed gunshot wounds and cyanide poisoning.

The remains were repeatedly buried and exhumed by Russian agents during their relocation from Berlin to a new facility at Magdeburg. There, they were put in an unmarked grave with the bodies of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, his wife and their six children. 

When the facility was due to be handed over to the East German government in 1970, the KGB, it is said, exhumed all ten bodies, burned them and threw the ashes in the river Elbe to prevent the area becoming a Nazi shrine.

They kept Hitler's jaw and part of his skull - the fragment now thrown into doubt by US archaeologist Nick Bellantoni, who was given permission to examine the artefacts in the Russian state archive.

Other discrepancies which have muddied the waters include a photo released by Soviets at the time of the fall of Berlin which purported to be the body of Hitler, shot in the forehead. It is now thought to be one of Hitler's body doubles.

Others who believe he escaped subscribe to a variety of conspiracy theories. The most popular include one or more of these elements: