Saturn the alligator, age 84, has died in Russian custody after spending 70 years behind bars in the infamous Lubyanka Prison.
The alligator was in Hitler’s bunker when the Nazi dictator reportedly killed himself in 1945, but somehow escaped and was found in 1946 by British soldiers who then gave him to the Soviet Union.
Once the home of Vladimir Lenin’s secret police force, the Cheka, and then the national headquarters of the Soviet secret police for, the KGB, the Lubyanka building was rumored to be the “the tallest building in Moscow” because prisoners could see Siberia from its basement when they weren’t being tortured.
Snopes has falsely claimed that Saturn died in the Moscow Zoo, but sources inside Russia say the alligator was being interrogated to determine if he had helped Hitler escape from Berlin.
“Snopes has also claimed that Hitler never made it to Argentina alive,” said Felix Dzerzhinsky, who has been a janitor in the Lubyanka, now home to Russia’s Border Guard Service, for 50 years. “But transcripts of the interrogation indicate that anyone coming out of that Berlin bunker with an alligator would have been able to leave the city unmolested.”
Russia also claims Saturn was the oldest alligator in the world and that “animals are not involved in war and politics and it is absurd to blame them for human sins, but if they have anything to tell us then we have ways of making them talk.”
