During the first days of May 1945, the world did not quite know what had happened to Adolf Hitler. There was no shortage of rumors: he had been arrested by Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler, he was on a U-boat headed for Japan, he had been killed by an exploding shell. What was known for certain was that Berlin was about to fall, and as TIME reported, "Adolf Hitler had been buried, dead or alive, in the rubble of his collapsing Third Reich." Unsure of what had happened to Hitler but certain that his rule was finished, TIME ran on...