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Artur Axmann (18 February 1913 – 24 October 1996) was the Germans Nazi national leader ( Reichsjugendführer) of the Hitler Youth ( Hitlerjugend) from 1940 to 1945, when the war ended. He was the last living Nazi with a rank equivalent to Reichsleiter.
Axmann became leader of the local cell in the Wedding district.
Axmann directed the Hitler Youth in state vocational training and succeeded in raising the status of Hitler Youth agricultural work. He was also a member of Hans Frank's Academy for German Law and the chairman of its Committee on Youth Law. In November 1934, he was appointed Hitler Youth leader of Berlin and from 1936, presided at the annual Reichsberufswettkampf competitions. On 30 January 1939 he was awarded the Golden Party Badge. On 1 May 1940, he was appointed deputy to Nazi Reichsjugendführer Baldur von Schirach, whom he succeeded three months later on 8 August 1940. In October 1941, Axmann became a member of the Reichstag from electoral constituency 1, East Prussia.
After World War II began in Europe, Axmann was on active service on the Western Front until May 1940. As a member of the Wehrmacht 23rd Infantry Division, he was severely wounded on the Eastern Front in 1941 and lost his right arm. with sailors of the Horst Wessel, October 1943]] where he inspected heavy artillery, 23 July 1943]] In early 1943, Axmann proposed the formation of the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend to Heinrich Himmler, with servicemen drawn from the Hitler Youth. Hitler approved the plan for the combat division to be made up of Hitler Youth members born in 1926 (members aged between ), and recruitment and training began. In the last weeks of the war in Europe, Axmann commanded units of the Hitler Youth, which had been incorporated into the Home Guard ( Volkssturm). His units consisted mostly of children and adolescents and fought in the Battle of Seelow Heights and the Battle in Berlin.
On 30 April 1945, just a few hours before committing suicide, Hitler signed the order to allow a breakout. According to a report made to his Soviet captors by Gruppenführer Hans Rattenhuber, the head of Hitler's RSD bodyguard, Axmann took the Walther PP pistol that had been removed from Hitler's sitting room in the Führerbunker by Heinz Linge, Hitler's valet, which Hitler had used to commit suicide and said that he would "hide it for better times".
On 1 May, Axmann left the Führerbunker as part of a breakout group, which included Martin Bormann, Werner Naumann and SS doctor Ludwig Stumpfegger. The group managed to cross the River Spree at the Weidendammer Bridge.
Leaving the rest of their group, Bormann, Stumpfegger, and Axmann walked along railway tracks to Lehrter railway station. Bormann and Stumpfegger followed the railway tracks towards Stettiner station. Axmann decided to go in the opposite direction of his two companions. When he encountered a Red Army patrol, Axmann doubled back. He saw two bodies, which he later identified as Bormann and Stumpfegger, on the Invalidenstraße bridge near the railway switching yard (Lehrter Bahnhof), the moonlight clearly illuminating their faces. He did not have time to check the bodies thoroughly and so he did not know how they died. His statements were confirmed by the discovery of Bormann's and Stumpfegger's remains in 1972.
Axmann uniquely saw blood dripping from both of Hitler's temples; he told US officials that he thought this was secondary damage from a gunshot through the mouth–which he thought was "obvious" due to the jawbone hanging askew, appearing "distorted", and contradicting himself about whether the mouth was bloody. He 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, Axmann asserted that Hitler's corpse was not identified because the gunshot destroyed his dental work. Harry Mengershausen similarly claimed that Hitler's jawbones would have been broken due to the gunshot's effect on air pressure.
For the first two decades after the war, Western historians generally regarded Hitler's mandible as being wholly recovered by the Soviets, as opposed to only a fragment with teeth. These dental remains were novelly detailed in a 1968 Soviet book which in turn supported the Western conclusion that only Hitler's dental remains were found intact.
Axmann stood by his oral-gunshot interpretation in his 1955 testimony, but court experts pointed out that the relevant caliber, 7.65 mm, travels under the velocity able to produce the hydrodynamic expulsion responsible for secondary damage. The two other key witnesses to survive the war were Linge and Günsche. Linge recalled only one temple wound–usually as being on Hitler's right side. Günsche reportedly told the Soviets that he did not see the wound himself, but in his 1956 court testimony and later interviews stated that he also saw an entry wound to the right temple.
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 Axmann's version is evidently singular. Joachimsthaler cites a 1925 German study concluding that, based upon 47 cases of gunshots to living bodies, it is not uncommon for a bullet to become lodged or shatter within; he does not mention that in two cases shots were fired transversely to the temple at Contact shot range, both resulting in an exit.
In May 1949, a Nuremberg denazification court sentenced Axmann to a prison sentence of three years and three months as a "major offender". He was not found guilty of war crimes.
On 19 August 1958, a West Berlin court fined the former Hitler Youth leader 35,000 Deutsche Mark (approximately £3,000 or US$8,300, ), about half the value of his property in Berlin. The court found him guilty of indoctrinating German youth with National Socialism until the end of the war in Europe but concluded that he was not guilty of war crimes.
After his release from custody, Axmann worked as a businessman with varying success. From 1971 he left Germany for a number of years and lived on the Spanish island of Gran Canaria. Axmann returned to Berlin in 1976, where he died on 24 October 1996, aged 83. His cause of death and details of his surviving family members were not disclosed.
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