Mental_Floss has posted an interesting list detailing nine historic figures whose bodies may be missing.

3. Genghis Khan.

Speaking of tyrants, here’s another one who has gone missing. Unlike Vlad, though, Genghis has disappeared at his own request. He asked to be buried in an unmarked grave and his wishes were granted. Legend has it that slaves buried the body somewhere in Mongolia – possibly Khentii Aimag, Khan’s birthplace. After the body was buried, the slaves were killed. And then the soldiers who killed the slaves were killed. Another tale has an entire river being diverted to cover the spot to make Khan virtually impossible to find. Whatever trick was employed to hide the body was obviously quite effective – nearly 800 years later, we still don’t know where he is.

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The grave of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg has been found in some woods in Germany.

Stauffenberg and other co-conspirators were summarily executed after a bomb the army officer planted at Hitler’s east Prussian HQ failed to kill him on July 20 1944.

The plot to kill him and overthrow the Nazi state called Operation Valkyrie, which was made into a film starring Tom Cruise as the doomed nobleman, was hatched by disillusioned army officers who knew Germany had no chance of winning the war and who were disgusted by atrocities they witnessed on the eastern front.

Stauffenberg and several others were shot dead in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock, the army HQ in the centre of Berlin, in the hours following the coup attempt. Their last resting place was never found until now.

A former cemetery inspector at the Gueterfelde graveyard in the Wilmersdorf district of Berlin left behind a will stating that he had been told of a “mysterious action” in the night of July 20 and 21, 1944 by his predecessor who died in the 50s.

This man told him how he was woken from his sleep by a detachment of “excited” SS men who asked to be “guided to an area where they could dig a grave big enough to take 10 bodies.” After the cemetery inspector showed them where to dig he was dispatched back to his quarters and warned to “say nothing” of the night’s proceedings. He was convinced, following news of the failed plot in the following days, that Stauffenberg and his fellow conspirators had been buried there.

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An auction house in Germany is putting up on the block a collection of 500 documents from the prison which held Adolf Hitler in 1924. [Thanks Frank!]

The papers were discovered by a Nuremberg man among the possessions of his late father.
Hitler spent nine months in prison after an abortive coup attempt known as the Munich beer hall putsch.
Among the documents is a letter from Hitler to a Mercedes dealer asking for a discount on a 40-horsepower 11/40 model.

The future Nazi leader, who brought Germany to defeat and ruin in World War II, explains that his book, Mein Kampf, is not yet finished and he is unsure how much money it will make.
“I am forced to obtain an advance or loan from somewhere. So a few thousand marks makes a big difference,” he writes.

The auction house, Werner Behringer, says the bulk of the documents are official prison cards listing visitors, including more than 30 people who celebrated his birthday on 20 April.

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Life magazine has posted a series of never-before-published photographs from inside Adolf Hitler’s bunker.

In April, 1945, as Russian and German troops fought — savagely, street-by-street — for control of the German capital, it became increasingly clear that the Allies would win the war in Europe. Not long after the two-week battle ended, 33-year-old LIFE photographer William Vandivert was on the scene, photographing Berlin’s devasted landscape. Hundreds of thousands perished in the Battle of Berlin — including untold numbers of civilian men, women, and children — while countless more were left homeless in the ruins. But it was two particular deaths — that of Hitler and his longtime companion and (briefly) wife, Eva Braun — in a sordid underground bunker on April 30, 1945, that truly signaled the end of the Third Reich. Here, LIFE.com presents never-before-published images from both the bunker itself, and the decimated city beyond its concrete walls.

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During WWII, a group of Benedictine monks hid the Turin Shroud due to fears that Adolf Hitler would steal it.

The shroud was transferred for its safety to the Benedictine sanctuary of Montevergine in Avellino, in the southern Campania region of Italy in 1939 and was only transferred to Turin in 1946.

The current director of the library at the abbey, Father Andrea Cardin, said the reason behind the move was because Hitler was “obsessed” with the sacred relic.

Both the Vatican and the Italian royal family, the Savoys, who were the guardians and owners of the shroud, feared that the German leader, who had an interest in the esoteric, might try to steal the linen cloth.

In an interview with an Italian magazine, Diva e Donna, Father Cardin said: “The Holy Shroud was moved in secret to the sanctuary in the Campania region on the precise orders of the House of Savoy and the Vatican.

“Officially this was to protect it from possible bombing (in Turin). In reality, it was moved to hide it from Hitler who was apparently obsessed by it. When he visited Italy in 1938, top-ranking Nazi aides asked unusual and insistent questions about the Shroud.”

Father Cardin, a Benedictine monk, said that after Italy entered the war in alliance with Hitler, and German forces were sent to Italy, the shroud was very nearly discovered in its secret hiding place.

“In 1943 when German troops searched the Montevergine church, the monks there pretended to be in deep prayer before the altar, inside which the relic was hidden. This was the only reason it wasn’t discovered.”

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