The erstwhile USSR's intelligence agency, the KGB, destroyed all traces of German dictator Adolf Hitler's corpse and threw the ashes in a river, the Federal Security Service has claimed.

According to Lieutenant-General Vasily Khristoforov, chief archivist of FSB, Hilter's remains had been incinerated in 1970 and the ashes thrown into a river in East Germany out of concern that his grave could become a Nazi shrine.