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  HITLER'S PRESENCE was always disproportionate to the destruction he caused, and now it’s no bigger than a tea saucer. The road taken by the Führer's remains has been far rockier than the one he thought he deserved. When Hitler shot himself in the head on April 30, 1945, deep inside his Berlin bunker, and was burned in a shell-hole in the courtyard by his loyal followers, who delivered the stiff-armed Nazi salute one last time -- well, that was the way a German general should go out. But history hasn’t been so kind. This Wednesday, after countless indignities, the Federal State Archives Service in Moscow put the last serviceable fragment of the physical Hitler on display. It commands a strange fascination, as the Führer’s body always has, dead and alive: mesmerizing on the platform, hidden by the Soviets, rumored to have only a single testicle, and the epicenter of the worst cataclysm of the last century.

Visitors to the exhibit see a piece of skull, pierced with a bullet-hole at the temple, purporting to show the section between the forehead and the ears. Accompanying documents testify to the progress of the corpse after the Red Army captured it. Agents of the secret Soviet intelligence service SMERSH, attached to the 3rd Army, took possession of the body, which seems to have been charred, but intact, and which quickly became the subject of a turf war with SMERSH agents of the 5th Army. The intelligence men drove Hitler away on the back of a truck, buried him, dug him up, buried him again. Doctors exhumed him for autopsy. They planted the pieces near a barracks in East Germany. There, in 1970, Hitler’s mortal remains, minus a skull, were retrieved, on Brezhnev’s orders, by three KGB men, taken with them on a "fishing trip," and burned with gasoline. The ashes were stuffed in a sack and dumped unceremoniously in the Ehle River.

Thanks in part to the Soviet cloak-and-dagger, survival fantasies persisted, and death couldn’t dispel the myth that followers had preserved Hitler’s brain. A nation of children saw that brain in Cold War comic books, the familiar silvery wires trailing away from the tissue, lines of oxygen bubbles rising in its tank. In Sleeper, Woody Allen cast himself as a hero who discovers a dictator’s nose in a vat and uses a bulldozer to destroy it once and for all. (Viewers knew which dragon the bespectacled Jew was really slaying.) Respectable opinion, meanwhile, had its eye on the dictator’s gonads, which OSS operatives and professional psychiatrists had been discussing since the crossing of the Rhine. A Soviet autopsy report released in 1968 confirmed that the leader only had one testicle. But did Freudians really believe that genocide could stem from this sexual void? Or was it fear that led them to dismember the Führer’s genitalia? For if Hitler's manhood was wounded in some accounts, it was potent and lethal in others. As the Angry Samoans warned, circa 1982, in "They Saved Hitler’s Cock":

       If Hitler’s cock could start to talk
       It would say to kill today

Murderousness is the real issue, with Hitler's missing body a zero at the center of the post-Holocaust equation. And given the Nazi fascination for dismantling the dead and processing corpses for industrial applications, the humiliations exacted from Hitler's corpse must be history's best-deserved case of bad karma. Twenty years after the war, theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel cited the prewar German litany of the uses of mankind -- the human body contains a sufficient amount of fat to make seven cakes of soap, enough iron to make a medium-sized nail, a sufficient amount of phosphorous to equip two thousand match-heads -- and wondered if the body would ever recover the loss of dignity it suffered in the camps.

Which is why the sheer bumbling degradation of Hitler's postmortem journey is both horrible, and horribly satisfying. And it needn't stop, so long as there's a scrap of bone left to mistreat. Unless it wants to do Hitler a favor, the Moscow archive should not think of its square of skull as a relic to lay on velvet, or burnish with spotlights, behind glass -- better that it have an elastic band through the bullet-hole, and some archivist's car keys on the other end.

Mark Greif is a Writing Fellow at The American Prospect.

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