At the beginning of 1945, Germany was about to be defeated, and on the Eastern Front, the Soviet Red Army had advanced into German territory and began to besiege Berlin. On the Western Front, the Allies advanced rapidly after breaking through the Normandy defense line in France and Belgium, and were also approaching the heart of Germany.
Hitler was hopeless on both the Eastern and Western fronts, foreseeing the imminent collapse of the Nazi regime and fearing that the bodies of himself and other high-ranking Nazi officials would be used by the Allies for propaganda or other purposes. Therefore, he ordered the bodies of some key people to be moved to a relatively safe place for burial.
He ordered the lead coffins of Hindenburg and his wife, buried in the Tannenberg memorial, to be exhumed and transferred to a bunker outside Berlin, where they were then transferred to a salt mine near the village of Beltrod in Thuringia, along with the remains of Kaiser Wilhelm I and King Frederick II of Prussia.
The salt mine is 550 meters deep, and the deep depression of the mine is covered with 1.8 meters of masonry. Four coffins were placed here, marked with red crayons to identify the tomb owners.
However, the coffins were discovered by the U.S. Army Ordnance Unit on April 27, 1945, and moved to the basement of the heavily guarded Marlborough Castle in Marburg-sur-Land, Germany.
In August 1946, 20 months after being removed from the Tannenberg Memorial, the coffins of Hindenburg and his wife were finally buried by American troops in St. Elisabeth's Church in Marlborough, the church of his Germanic ancestors, where they still remain today.
About the Tannenberg Memorial, it was erected to commemorate the victory in the Battle of Tannenberg in 1914, a battle that lasted 5 days in which the German army achieved a great victory. Nearly 92,000 Russian soldiers were captured and 50,000 were wounded or killed.
On September 18, 1927, after three years of construction, the monument was inaugurated by Paul von Hindenburg, President of the Weimar Republic.
This Tannenberg memorial is octagonal in shape, with towers at each corner and an average height of 20 meters. The towers have a clear view of the surrounding topography and are connected to the walls around the courtyard. In the middle of it stands a huge cross, surrounded by the graves of twenty unknown soldiers.
When Hindenburg died in 1934, Tannenberg became his mausoleum. Under Hitler's command, Hindenburg was buried here with his wife, who died in 1921. Perhaps it was indeed a suitable location for him, since Hindenburg was born in Prussia and with his victory in Tannenberg, he thus gained the status of liberator of Prussia.
However, in his will, he preferred to have a funeral at the Garnison Church in Potsdam and was buried at the Newbeck estate where he was born.
Unfortunately, Hitler did not follow his wishes. On January 21, 1945, the Germans retreated, facing the reality of defeat, and in the process, the Germans tried to destroy a number of strategic buildings, including the Tannenberg Memorial.
As a result, the retreating Germans planted demolition explosives on the entrance tower of Tannenberg and in the tower where the coffin of Hindenburg was originally kept, causing two towers to be blown down. On 22 January, the Germans used another 30 tons of explosives to blow up more buildings.
When the dust settled, Hitler also ushered in his final moments, killing himself by drinking a bullet in the Führer's bunker. Berlin, the city is also in the darkest hour in the smoke of war.