What Really Happened

After 150 years, many unsolved mysteries and enduring urban legends still surround the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by the popular stage actor John Wilkes Booth. In a new look at the case, award-winning author Robert Hutchinson (The Dawn of Christianity) explores what we know, and don't know, about what really happened at Ford's Theatre on the night of April 14, 1865. In addition, he argues that the deep-seated political hatreds that roiled Washington, DC, in the final weeks of the Civil War are particularly relevant to our own polarized age. Among the tantalizing questions Hutchinson explores are: **why Abraham Lincoln's final day on earth one of the happiest of his life **whether desperate Confederate political leaders, fearing for their lives, had a hand in the assassination plot **how a talented family of actors, poets, and physicians opposed to slavery somehow produced a presidential assassin **the mystery of Lincoln's police bodyguard-why he disappeared at Ford's Theatre when Lincoln had already been the subject of an assassination attempt the previous year **what led Booth to give up on his original plan to kidnap Lincoln and decide on assassination instead **whether Lucy Hale, Booth's secret fiancée and the daughter of a US senator, who once caught the eye of Lincoln's son Robert, knew about Booth's plans to kill Lincoln **how Booth evaded the largest manhunt in US history for nearly two weeks despite being unable to walk **why the government insisted on the death penalty for Mary Surratt, who ran a boarding house where Booth used to visit, but allowed most of the Confederate sympathizers who aided his escape to get off scot-free **who gave the order to shoot Booth in the Garrett barn-and what happened to his body **what became of the Booth and Lincoln families after the assassination **and much more.

After World War II, 50 percent of Americans polled said they didn't believe Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had committed suicide in their bunker in 1945, as captured Nazi officials claimed. Instead, they believed the dictator faked his death and escaped, perhaps to Argentina. This wasn't a crazy opinion: Joseph Stalin told Allied leaders that Soviet forces never discovered Hitler's body and that he personally believed the Nazi leader had escaped justice. At least two German submarines crossed the Atlantic and landed on the coast of Argentina in July 1945. Plus, there were numerous reports of top Nazi officials successfully fleeing to South America, where there was a large German colony. So what really happened? Popular history writer Robert J. Hutchinson, author of What Really Happened: The Lincoln Assassination, takes a fresh look at the evidence and discovers, once and for all, the truth about Hitler's last week in Berlin. Among the questions the book explores are:What did surviving Nazi eyewitnesses really say about the Führer's final days in the bunker-and could they have been lying to aid Hitler's escape? If Hitler didn't escape, why did the Allies not find his body? What about Hitler's proven use of body doubles? Could Hitler have used a body double in the bunker while he and Eva Braun flew to safety in a long-range aircraft that took off from a runway in Berlin's Tiergarten? Why did the FBI continue to investigate reports of Hitler's survival for more than a decade after World War II-reports that were only declassified in 2014? What about sensational claims in books such as The Grey Wolf that Hitler and Eva Braun lived in an isolated chalet in the Andes-and that Hitler died in 1962? Why were forensic tests on crucial physical evidence only conducted in 2016, more than seventy years after World War II ended? And much more.