21 Facts About Artur Axmann

Artur Axmann was the German Nazi national leader of the Hitler Youth from 1940 to 1945, when the war ended.

Artur Axmann was the last living Nazi with a rank equivalent to Reichsleiter.

The young Artur Axmann was a good student and received a scholarship to attend secondary school.

Artur Axmann joined the Hitler Youth in November 1928 after he had heard Nazi Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels speak.

Artur Axmann became leader of the local cell in the Wedding district.

In September 1931, Artur Axmann joined the Nazi Party and the next year he was called to the NSDAP Reichsjugendfuhrung to carry out a reorganisation of Hitler Youth factory and vocational school cells.

Artur Axmann directed the Hitler Youth in state vocational training and succeeded in raising the status of Hitler Youth agricultural work.

Artur Axmann was a member of Hans Frank's Academy for German Law and the chairman of its Committee on Youth Law.

In October 1941, Artur Axmann became a member of the Reichstag from electoral constituency 1, East Prussia.

In early 1943, Artur Axmann proposed the formation of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend to Heinrich Himmler, with servicemen drawn from the Hitler Youth.

Artur Axmann's units consisted mostly of children and adolescents and fought in the Battle of Seelow Heights and the Battle in Berlin.

Meanwhile, it was announced in the German press that Artur Axmann had been awarded the German Order, the highest decoration that the Nazi Party could bestow on an individual for his services to the Reich.

Artur Axmann decided to go in the opposite direction of his two companions.

Artur Axmann did not have time to check the bodies thoroughly and so he did not know how they died.

Artur Axmann's statements were confirmed by the discovery of Bormann's and Stumpfegger's remains in 1972.

Artur Axmann avoided capture by Soviet troops and lived under the alias of "Erich Siewert" for several months.

In December 1945, Artur Axmann was arrested in Lubeck when a Nazi underground movement, which he had been organising, was uncovered by a United States Army counterintelligence operation.

Artur Axmann was one of three eyewitnesses who implied that the dental remains would only be found sundered, arguing that the gunshot would have caused this.

In 1947, Artur Axmann asserted that Hitler's corpse was not identified because the gunshot destroyed his dental work.

In 1995, German historian Anton Joachimsthaler theorized that after Hitler shot himself, the bullet passed through one temple and became lodged inside the other, rupturing in a hematoma that looked like the exit wound described by "several witnesses", although Artur Axmann's version is evidently singular.

Artur Axmann returned to Berlin in 1976, where he died on 24 October 1996, aged 83.