How Red Army tried to identify Hitler's body in his bunker by checking his SOCKS: Author reveals how Soviets bungled discovery of Fuhrers' corpse and sparked wild theories he escaped Berlin

For 79 years, the details surrounding Adolf Hitler's death have been the subject of intense speculation. Not least among the dazzling array of anomalies and curiosities in the investigation conducted by Soviet forensic experts, which Laurier analyses in his new book Le Cadavre d’Hitler, is the revelation that one of the 13 bodies discovered in the bunker was ruled out as Hitler's because of a sock. The Soviets concluded that, since the sock was darned, and the Nazi dictator would never wear such a shoddy item of clothing, the body could not be Hitler's. Adolf Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun, whom he finally married after 14 years in his bunker beneath Berlin - the day before they both died The final moments of Hitler and Braun, seen here dining together, have long been the subject of intense speculation among researchers and scholars Hitler, right, is seen during an exchange with his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels during a dinner at the Führerbunker Such obfuscation lived on long after Stalin's death in 1953, Laurier believes, with a 1968 Soviet autopsy report that claimed Hitler died from cyanide poisoning shaped by a desire to portray his demise as a craven affair. 'The remains of those who died in the bunker were numbered from 1 to 13 and those of Hitler and Eva Braun were those numbered 12 and 13,' said Laurier, the title of whose book translates as Hitler’s Corpse.