[5] German historian Joachim Fest credited Joachimsthaler for correcting various inaccuracies of the last days of Nazi Germany that have been stated and restated in past books, and were due mainly to contradictory statements of the people involved.
[11] Joachimsthaler cites a 1925 study which supports such exit failures when not fired transversely at contact range (as later eyewitness accounts said Hitler did)[11][12][13] and mentions that West Germany conducted ballistics tests.
[30] In his review of the forensic evidence and eyewitness statements, de Boer also supported Joachimsthaler's conclusions regarding the limited remains as well as the fabricated nature of the alleged autopsy report.
[34] However, Daly-Groves praises Joachimsthaler's methodology of returning to primary sources to "regain perspectives on official conclusions", but suggests that review of closed files of MI6 intelligence regarding its choice to investigate rumours of Hitler's escape could be useful in disproving such claims.
[36] Daly-Groves argues that while the evidence implied a suicide by gunshot, it should not be considered the "definitive answer", citing Fest's 2002 argument that eyewitness discrepancies had rendered Hitler's death "impossible to reconstruct".
[37] Forensics expert Philippe Charlier, who analyzed the dental remains,[a] concluded that the bodies were not completely burnt due to their water content, as forensicist Mark Benecke opined in 2003.
[38][18] In 2023, English historian Mark Felton surmised that (after botching the couple's cremations) the Germans must have expertly concealed the bodies and planted the dental remains on similar corpses, with the Soviets later propagandizing their findings.