Archive film showing Hitler

BONN (Reuter) - Archive film shown this week in the former Soviet Union and purporting to show the corpse of Adolf Hitler in the Berlin Chancellery was a hoax, a German television news programme said yesterday.

The news programme Spiegel TV said the corpse was that of a German soldier with a Hitler-like moustache killed in the fighting as Soviet troops captured Berlin. It quoted Michail Poselsky, a former Red Army cameraman, as saying he had been ordered to shoot the footage of Hitler's supposed corpse at the scene in May 1945. But Mr Poselsky said he had doubts about the corpse's identity after seeing that it wore darned socks. The programme said Hitler's remains were finally laid to rest in a secret cemetery in Moscow in 1970.