Artur Axmann (18 February 1913 – 24 October 1996) was the German Nazi national leader (Reichsjugendführer) of the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend) from 1940 to 1945, when the war ended.

[2] In September 1931, Axmann joined the Nazi Party and the next year he was called to the NSDAP Reichsjugendführung[1] to carry out a reorganisation of Hitler Youth factory and vocational school cells.

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

[6] On 1 May, Axmann left the Führerbunker as part of a breakout group, which included Martin Bormann, Werner Naumann and SS doctor Ludwig Stumpfegger.

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.

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

[14] Axmann stood by this interpretation in his 1955 testimony, but court experts pointed out that the relevant caliber, 7.65 mm, travels under the velocity able to produce such a hydrodynamic expulsion.

[16][17][18][19][20][21] 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.

[22] Joachimsthaler cites a 1925 German study concluding that, based upon 47 cases of 7.65-mm gunshots to living bodies, it is not uncommon for a bullet to become lodged or shatter within; he does not mention that the two 7.65-mm shots fired through the temples at contact range both resulted in an exit.

[14] Similarly, SS-Rottenführer Harry Mengershausen claimed that Hitler's jawbones would have been broken due to the gunshot's effect on air pressure.

[25] 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.