various versions of Hitler's fate. On 5 June, the Soviets claimed that his body had been examined and that he had died by cyanide poisoning. At a press conference on 9 June, the Soviets said they had not actually identified the body and that Hitler had likely escaped. When asked in July 1945 how Hitler had died, Stalin said he was living "in Spain or Argentina". In November 1945, Dick White, the head of counter-intelligence in the British sector of Berlin, had their agent Hugh Trevor-Roper investigate. His report was expanded and published in 1947 as The Last Days of Hitler. In the years immediately after the war, the Soviets maintained that Hitler was not dead, but had escaped and was either being shielded by the former Western Allies, was in Francoist Spain, or was somewhere in South America. Until the mid-1950s, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency received many leads claiming that Hitler might still be alive, while giving none of them credence. The documents remained classified until the early 2010s, as authorised by the 1998 Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act. The secrecy in which the investigation was shrouded helped fuel conspiracy theories asserting Hitler's survival. Presiding judge at the Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg Michael Musmanno considered all such claims contrary to the evidence. Between 1948 and 1952, amid denazification proceedings in West Germany, legal disputes over Hitler's former property (including The Art of Painting by Johannes Vermeer) were hindered by the lack of an official death declaration. Beginning in 1952, a federal court in Berchtesgaden interviewed 42 witnesses about Hitler's suicidebehind closed doors to avoid testimonies influencing one another. After four years of extensive review, Judge Heinrich Stephanus concluded: "There can no longer be the slightest doubt that on 30 April 1945 Adolf Hitler put an end to his life in the Chancellery by his own hand, by means of a shot into his right temple." A death certificate was issued on 25 February 1956, with an attached report of more than 1,500 pages. An 80-page expert criminological report was prepared in mid-1956, focusing on the "substantial discrepancies" between eyewitness testimonies and serving as a springboard for photographic reconstructions. Ballistic experiments were arranged to determine which interpretation of the fatal gunshot was most likely. The declaration became public and legally binding by the year's end. Hitler's demise was entered as an assumption of death