Hitler's Final Days in the Bunker

Hitler Survives the Battle of Berlin

The obverse of history in Hitler’s particular case is not at all hard to imagine credibly. Reacting to precisely the same circumstances, acting upon the very same stew of perception and delusion, Hitler could have just as easily decided not to kill himself after all. Change nothing else but this and one changes everything. One might impose a measure of control over any alternative scenario by asking no more of inventiveness than one might ask of a prediction.

If one imagines a living Hitler, one who survived the battle of Berlin, a good deal of the canvas has already been painted for us:

At 12:50 in the afternoon of 2 May, General Helmuth Weidling’s chief of staff and several other official representatives flew a white flag at the Potsdam Bridge, and were escorted promptly to General Chuikov’s headquarters, and an armistice was arranged forthwith. At about the same time Russian troops took the Reichskanzlerei and, after some confusion, finally discovered the Führerbunker itself. One can easily envision a resigned, even an indifferent Hitler, still alive, having ordered General Weidling to seek a ceasefire. 

Perhaps Hitler might still have harbored a fantasy of a negotiated peace, but of course he had nothing left with which to strike any sort of bargain. The Russians would not have been in a mood especially conducive to negotiation, having lost nearly 100,000 casualties in the Berlin campaign alone. Hitler would have been hustled off to see one of the Russian commanders. Immediately, a signal confirming his capture would have gone out to Stalin, and then, to the rest of the world. In all likelihood, the prisoner Hitler would have been on his way to Moscow before the day was out.

It is known what would have happened to Hitler from old NKVD archives. The story about parading him in a cage is a myth which originated with Marshal Georgy Zhukov, there is nothing in the archives about this.

From "Napoleon and Hitler: A Comparative Biography", by Desmond Seward:

"During the Emperor's flight from Russia in 1812 he speculated as to what the Allies would do if they caught him. 'Can you picture to yourself, Caulaincourt, the figure you would cut in an iron cage, in the main square of London?' He then had a fit of hysteria.

Hitler had no illusions. He knew that he would be put on show and then executed...in the one chivalrous gesture of his entire life, he married Eva Braun. Next day both retired to their bedroom to die".

From "Khrushchev Remembers", by Nikita Khrushchev:

"I remember one day in Kiev getting a call from Zhukov. He was jubilant. 'Soon I'll have that slimy beast Hitler locked up in a cage,' he said. 'And when I send him to Moscow, I'll ship him by way of Kiev so you can have a look at him'.

I wished Zhukov every success. I knew that with him commanding the front, our offensive was in good hands.

Then, after Germany capitulated, Zhukov called me again and said, 'I won't be able to keep my promise after all. That snake Hitler is dead. He shot himself, and they burned his corpse. We found his charred carcass'.

A special NKVD unit attached to the 8th Guards Army was send to the government area [known to the Germans as the Citadel - Die Zitadelle]. This unit was accompanied by three doctors who were fluent in German and had done their medical studies in Germany.

Ironically, by 2 May 1945 it was known to the Soviets that there was an emergency hospital underneath the Reichskanzlei, and the 8th Guards Army had send in medical troops. The first to enter Hitler’s Bunker were female doctors and nurses who, after a chat with Chief Mechanic Johannes Hentschel [the only one left in the Bunker], plundered the wardrobes of Magda Göbbels and Eva Hitler. The NKVD troops arrived a bit later.

Had Hitler been found alive, he would have been transported to one of the various houses the NKVD had prepared in the Eastern suburbs of Berlin. Here he would have been undressed, undergone a full medical examination [including a search for poison capsules] and gotten new clothes. Afterwards he would have been transported by aircraft to Moscow where he would have been treated as a VIP POW in the Lubyanka.

Stalin wanted to make the most out of his capture, PR wise. Hitler would have been photographed and filmed at various points to prove to the world they had captured him and that he was being treated humanely. During the war a lot of Soviet Propaganda had resulted in negative publicity in the West and Stalin hoped by treating Hitler well that the Soviet Union would be seen as a magnanimous victor.

Afterwards Hitler would have been turned over to the International Military Tribunal for a [seemingly] fair trial. No doubt he would have been sentenced to death, the Allies had already agreed upon that before the end of the war.

There would not have been any torture as this would have been pointless. Taking into account Hitler’s age, his bad health, and his stubbornness, he would most likely not have cracked easily and might have died. Besides, there was not anything the Soviets did not already know, there was no real point in questioning him.

These are the outer limits of a reasonably safe scenario. A less plausible alternative is, how likely is it that Hitler chose escape over suicide—precisely what many suspected at the time?

There is testimony of just what was required to make good such an escape at this point in time. Escape was possible, but only just. In the chaotic final hours of the war, several small groups took their chances outside, in a wrecked city engulfed by artillery and small arms fire. The chances of success were minuscule.

An ill-assorted bunch of soldiers, secretaries, and party officials, including Martin Bormann, tried to get out through the New Chancellery exits and into the city with the aim of working their way northwest of the city. Most were killed or captured.

The fortunes of battle favored some. Major Willi Johannmeier  was chosen to carry a copy of Hitler’s final testament to Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner, the newly appointed commander in chief of the Wehrmacht.

Wilhelm Zander and Heinz Lorenz, drew similar missions, as well as Corporal Heinz Hummerich, assigned to Johannmeier, an experienced and resourceful soldier, detailed to lead the group to the safety of German lines. His skills were about to be tested.

The Russians had established three battle lines in a ring around the city center, at the Victory column, at the Zoo station, and at Pichelsdorf, the sector  where Johannmeier and his party had to go. At noon on 29 April, the four men left the Chancellery through the garage exits on Hermann Göring Strasse and struck westward, through the Tiergarten toward Pichelsdorf, at the northernmost reach of the large city lake, the Havel.

By four or five in the afternoon, having spent the last several hours evading Russians, the party arrived in this sector, which was in German hands for the moment, defended by a battalion of Hitler Youth awaiting reinforcements.

Johannmeier and company rested until dark and then took small boats out onto the lake making southward for another pocket of defense on the western shore, at Wannsee. There, Johannmeier managed to get a radio signal off to Admiral Dönitz, asking for evacuation by seaplane.

After resting in a Bunker for most of the day, the small group set off for a small island, the Pfaueninsel, where they would await their rescue by Dönitz’ seaplane, a Blohm & Voss BV 138 Seedrache [Sea Dragon]. In the meantime, another group of Bunker refugees arrived.

On the morning of 29 April, just as Johannmeier and his party were preparing to leave, Major Bernd Freytag von Löringhoven, Rittmeister Gerhardt Boldt, and a lieutenant colonel named Rudolf Weiss had asked and received permission to attempt an escape and join General Walther Wenck’s imaginary army of relief. The next day, 30 April, they would follow the same but even more dangerous route west as Johannmeier’s group. The Russians were as close as a few blocks now, already at the Air Ministry. And they had nearly closed the ring on the Pichelsdorf sector at the Havel. Freytag and his group had set out already when they were joined by Colonel Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, who had received a postscript to his will from Hitler, in which he bade farewell to the German army. Below seems to have been the last one to leave the Bunker before Hitler killed himself.

All of these fugitives collected for a time on the lake, awaiting the salvation of the seaplane. A seaplane did materialize eventually, but owing to the heavy enemy fire, its pilot chose between discretion and valor and flew away before taking on his passengers. Now all were left to their own devices. By ones and twos most of the escapees managed to get away, if only to be taken prisoner later. Johannmeier and his group worked their way down past Potsdam and Brandenburg and crossed the Elbe near Magdeburg.

Posing as foreign workers, they passed through enemy lines a few days later. Johannmeier simply continued his journey all the way back to his family home in Westphalia. There in the garden he buried Hitler’s last testament in a glass jar.

Zander made his escape good all the way to Bavaria, as did Artur Axmann, the chief of the Hitler Youth. Nicolaus von Below enrolled in law school at Bonn University. His studies were to be interrupted by the Allied authorities.

All of these men were considerably younger, healthier, and more physically resourceful than Hitler. The vision of Hitler negotiating all these difficulties is an alternative that is defeated by Hitler’s psychological and physical states, neither of which, singly or in combination, conduced to the demands of such a choice. By this time, Hitler simply did not have the physical or mental vigor necessary even to attempt an escape, much less actually succeed in one.

But, as the eminent British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper has reason to know, "Myths are not like truths; they are the triumph of credulity over evidence".

Immediately upon the conclusion of the war, Trevor-Roper was given access to Allied Intelligence and prisoner interrogation reports for the purpose of disentangling the confusions of Hitler’s last days, and, by implication, his ultimate fate. Behind Trevor-Roper’s assignment were the rumors that swept Europe in the summer of 1945: Hitler had escaped after all, the rumors said. He had gone to ground in Bavaria. Or he was in the Middle East. Or perhaps he had made for the Baltic coast, there to be rescued by submarine and deposited among sympathizers somewhere in South America. These rumors did not merely enthuse the gullible. Stalin startled the American secretary of state at the Potsdam Conference in July by arguing that Hitler was, in fact, alive and in hiding.

 

Adolf Hitler is Alive

Those of you who are ever in any bookstore in the UK,  ask if the owner has an issue of "World War Investigator".  The magazine will not disappoint. Obviously, given its subject, somewhat elitist, the publication has not gone down in history. But it was a very produced and well written magazine, worth savoring even today if you are fond of military history.

Material from one of the issues of the magazine, in 1988, is used here. The authors of the study published by WWI had access to the dossier prepared by the CIC, or Counter Intelligence Corps of the US Army on the search after May 1945, of Adolf Hitler allegedly still living. In 1988, CIC files on the matter had not been published, but maybe by now have  undergone a transparency law. In any case, records show that US Intelligence took seriously the possibility that Hitler was alive, so it ended up devoting time and taxpayer money to investigate leads that were authentic possibilities.

The origin of the myth of Hitler miraculously surviving the siege of his Berlin Bunker has two supporting elements. The first is that some key figures of the Nazi entourage, like Dr. Mengele escaped; so, why not Hitler? The second factor, much more important is the attitude of the USSR.

General Dwight Eisenhower made a fundamental error at the end of the Second World War, an error that was criticized by a disillusioned Winston Churchill.  Both Ike and US Intelligence believed the stories, in part, spread by the Nazis themselves in their increasingly scarce speeches; stories that spoke of majestic underground barracks, or within a Bavarian mountain. These barracks, called "Alpenfestung", would be so powerful that they could provide Hitler almost eternal strength, which is why it was said, the German Chancellor was not in Berlin, but somewhere in Bavaria, Over the years, this myth has been peppered with Nazi  possession of the atomic bomb.

Stalin never believed this hoax and therefore focused his efforts on reaching Berlin, It was very clear that Hitler was there and he was doubly clear that possession of Berlin would give him an advantage in the predictable partition of Germany,

In the final days of the war in Europe, everyone among the winners wanted Germany to never again regain its territorial integrity, so the main concern was as well as the main interest was to gain more conquered land rights. Stalin wanted Berlin for himself. The other Allies, however, had other priorities; Eisenhower when he realized that he was wrong, that Hitler was in the capital, tried to reach Berlin before the Russians, but failed.

Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Bunker in the company of Eva Braun, shortly after poisoning his German shepherd Blondi, sacrificed hours prior to test the potential effectiveness of the poison if need be. The body was partially burned by the Germans, and found and unearthed by the Soviets. However, Stalin always refused to provide the rest of his Allies accurate forensic information remains of Hitler.  This silence caused by the Cold War, also caused a whole cohort of mistakes and the huge sales of endless books asserting that Hitler was alive.

Because of the shortsightedness of Eisenhower, almost all the witnesses of the last days of Hitler that survived were captured by the Russians, which plunged these into the dark on Stalin's side of the curtain, so testimonies were not available to the West until little-by-little by the mid-fifties, at which time the myth of Hitler being alive had lost strength.

However, not a few people had versions of the end of Hitler that were different, if not contradictory; which did not help much when it comes to close the issue in for the public. Two years after Hitler's death and the end of the war in Europe, half of adult Americans believed he was alive. Of course today there are still many that says that Elvis is alive. Public opinion is not a precise constitutional court.

The CIC was responsible in the US camp to check all these things. The CIC, with different names and forms, was active from the First World War, until both its body and its operating arm, the Army Intelligence Command, were engulfed by the Defense Investigative Service. Equipped with many responsibilities, the most important was the hunting of Nazis. In January 1983, the ICC would be made notorious when it was discovered that it had protected the Butcher of Lyon, Klaus Barbie.

Having all this potential power, the US attempted to fight the Hitler Myth. And that started soon.

On 1 May 1945, just hours after the death of the German Chancellor, the radio speech by Admiral Karl Dönitz, who, so as not to upset the Germans, had invented a cartoon Hitler who had died  fighting heroically.

That same day,  General Clayton Bissell, Deputy Chief of Staff G-2 of US Military Intelligence, sent a memorandum in which he explained that his boss, General Marshall had ordered a "contra-programning" speech to the one by Dönitz to literally "destroy the myth of Hitler a martyr". They took it so seriously that even military Ike Eisenhower proposed to send a message to President Truman proposing to making a public statement to this effect..

What If Hitler Had Not Killed Himself?
By Mark Grimsley
30 July 2010

In 1943, Brig. Gen. William J. "Wild Bill" Donovan, director of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services [OSS], asks Walter C. Langer, a prominent psychoanalyst, to produce a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler.

Langer scrutinizes a mountain of documentary evidence about Hitler and interviews a score of German refugees who have known Hitler personally.

The resulting report covers Hitler’s troubled childhood, his megalomania, even his sexual pathologies, and concludes with an assessment of his likely future behavior.

One course that Hitler could choose strikes Langer as both “a real possibility” and, from an Allied perspective, the most dangerous.

"When he is convinced that he cannot win," Langer writes, "he may lead his troops into battle and expose himself as the fearless and fanatical leader".

Langer presumes that Hitler would fight at the head of Wehrmacht or Waffen SS units and would die in combat—an end that would inspire his followers to fight on with "fanatical, death-defying determination to the bitter end" and "would do more to bind the German people to the Hitler Legend and insure his immortality than any other course he could pursue".

But what happens in the spring of 1945, as Allied armies invade Germany from east and west, is even worse. Hitler indeed leads his troops into battle, but not in a way that Langer could ever have anticipated. Moreover, his "troops" belong to no conventional military force. Rather, they are shadows that seem everywhere and nowhere: the "Werewolves".

Werewolves can be anyone at all: SS members and army veterans; officers who remain devoted to their oath of loyalty to Hitler; and, above all, civilian men, women, and even children who pick up any of the millions of rifles, grenades, and antitank weapons that litter the ruins of the Third Reich. The Werewolves have no organization. They have no officers in the normal sense. Their leader is a voice on the clandestine but ubiquitous "Werewolf Radio": the voice of Adolf Hitler, the voice of their unconquered and unconquerable Führer.

"All means are right to harm the enemy," the voice declaims. "Our towns in the west, destroyed by cruel air terror, the hungry men and women along the Rhine, have taught us to hate the enemy. Our raped women and murdered children in the occupied east territories scream for revenge. Werewolves must ambush the enemy’s soldiers and sabotage his supply lines, and kill without mercy all collaborators".

"Hate is our prayer," the voice concludes, "revenge our battle cry!"

In the months that follow, Werewolves slay hundreds of Allied soldiers. They murder thousands of “traitors.” They sabotage supply dumps and derail trains. An orderly occupation of the country is impossible, for Nazi Germany, though entirely overrun, has not surrendered—cannot surrender—in any legitimate sense. Instead American, British, French, and Soviet soldiers must conduct an intensive search for the Werewolves—and for Hitler. In time Werewolf Radio falls silent, and it is whispered that Hitler has died. But no one can prove it. Fueled by the Hitler mystique, the Werewolf insurgency continues for years.

The above scenario is historically accurate in several details.

Psychoanalyst Walter C. Langer did indeed produce an extensive report for the OSS, speculating that Hitler might choose to fight on. As evidence of such a possibility, he pointed to apocalyptic statements by Hitler such as one declaring that "we shall not capitulate…no, never. We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag a world with us…a world in flames".

And the Werewolves did indeed exist. Initially conceived by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler as highly trained guerrillas supporting the conventional war effort, but then  became an umbrella group including any German involved in partisan resistance against the Allies. The change occurred primarily through the efforts of propaganda minister Josef Göbbels, who believed that the same underground resistance the Wehrmacht had encountered in occupied countries—especially the Soviet Union and France—could arise in Germany and, fueled by Nazi fanaticism, increase exponentially.

It was Göbbels who founded Werewolf Radio. Ostensibly a chain of clandestine mobile radio stations in the occupied territories, it was really a single transmitter that, historically, was overrun by the Red Army on 23 April 1945. It was Göbbels, not Hitler, who made the incendiary broadcast that ended "Hate is our prayer, revenge our battle cry!" And, to a limited extent, the Werewolf popular resistance did operate in postwar Germany.

Their symbol was an ancient rune sign resembling a lightning bolt.

The leading historian of the movement, Perry Biddiscombe, estimates that “hundreds of people—perhaps over a thousand—died as a direct result of Werewolf attacks," and that Werewolves continued to operate as late as 1947.

The Werewolf movement never became a serious impediment to the Allies, however, in large measure because Hitler refused to concede the possibility of a German military downfall.

For that reason any centralized attempt to organize a post-occupation resistance movement was squelched because it seemed inherently defeatist.

Had Hitler chosen to embrace the idea of a massive partisan uprising to continue the struggle even after Germany had been overrun and conventional military defense ended, however, he could have made it a reality. True, the Allies had at least four million troops in Germany—nearly one for every 20 Germans. Even so, the ratio for a successful occupation in the face of continued guerrilla resistance is one for every 10.

Could such an insurgency have defeated the Allied occupiers? The answer is almost certainly no. But it would have been an obstacle to a substantial drawdown of Allied forces in the country, delayed the reunion of millions of displaced persons with surviving relatives, and vastly complicated efforts to restore normal government.

Fortunately for the Allies, Langer proved correct in his prediction of the “most plausible” course Hitler would take. Hitler, he believed, would commit suicide.

One of the Nazi principles was that Death was better than Dishonor, which may have prompted Hitler to chose suicide.

He may also have believed that a captain does not abandon a sinking ship, which would make trying to flee a dishonorable act. Hitler may have decided to stay in Berlin right till the end to prove that he stood by his Ideals and was there for his people.

American generals were right: it would create a myth; but the myth, contrary to what they expected, was not that Hitler died as a hero on the last barricade of a free Germany [perhaps not considering that, in fact, the German people were no longer willing to believe Dönitz]; but the myth of a Hitler who had managed to outwit four armies and, therefore, lived a life hidden somewhere, waiting for his chance to return. The proven facts also remained very low: In 1945 the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper began investigating the topic [the result of these investigations is the well-known book,  "The Last Days of Hitler", designed in fact to settle this issue] without actually getting some data.

On 2 November 1945, British General John Sydney Lethbridge released to the press the results of a study on the possibility of Hitler being alive. This study, as the US military said, was intended to convince journalists that speculation about Hitler still bring alive was a nonsense. [This was a vain attempt to convince a reporter that reality can spoil a good headline]. The presentation of the study to the Quadripartite Intelligence Committee was proposed [Quadripartite, means USA, the USSR, Britain and France, who apparently also had won the war].

At this meeting, Lethbridge intended to raise the questions, if the four Allies had in their possession an eyewitness and if they could facilitate interrogation,  and, in the case of the USSR, you would order them to confirm whether, indeed, they had found a body buried in the vicinity of the Bunker and Hitler could be identified by dental records.

In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, it appears that the Soviets did not answer. 

In this environment, in July 1945, a letter was send to the foreign affairs correspondent for the "Chicago Daily Times". This letter, sent from Washington D.C., referred to a certain Norman N. Stineman. He informed them that newspaper reported that Hitler was alive and hiding "in a Hacienda owned by Germans located 675 miles west of Florianopolis and 450 miles northwest of Buenos Aires". He added that the place had a secret entrance consisting of a stone wall that was triggered by photoelectric cells and signals. In other words, roughly the house of Inspector Gadget. To throw out even more, Stineman, perhaps after having hit heavy Bourbon, stated Hitler had been there with two doubles [why, if it was hidden?] and participated in the work of Argentine Nazis to manufacture a new secret weapon and a Bomb-Robot.  The military attaché of the US Embassy in Buenos Aires was commissioned to do a thorough research on the subject. To this day there has been nothing about a Bomb-Robot in Argentine news.
 

 

Considering that the leak had occurred in the United States and by a citizen, the issue ended up on the desk no less than J. Edgar Hoover, FBI director. The feds made their inquiries and, in this way, Mr. Hoover could write to the Department of Defense informing them that Stineman was a kind of seer of 97 years named Dr. Brown Lawdone. He is a man who has left an indelible mark on humanity, but apparently Google does not know who he is.

Brown Landone [1847-1945] was a leading member of the 'New Thought'  movement and author of over 100 books on leadership, civilization, peace, religion and esotericism.

In his Telois system, he referred to 3 basic numbers and deduced deep connections such as the alleged construction of the Cheops pyramid after his number system.

 He also published the secret Jesus name Ja-Sha Mish-Chah.

Hoover's report concluded by stating that, there was no serious indication that Hitler had gone "Gaucho". 

A month later, in August 1945, FBI director himself received a letter sent from Huntingsburg, Indiana. The letter was signed by a man or woman who stated that he was a lawyer, but he preferred to keep his name anonymous. He said in his letter, that after 22 years of practice,  "I do not want to be held to laughing stock or subject to ridicule".

Excerpted from "Is Hitler Really Dead? A Historian Examines the Evidence" by H. R. Trevor-Roper:

A certain Dr. Karl Heinz Späth of Stuttgart, deposed on oath during his holiday at Illertissen in Bavaria that he had personally attended Hitler when he was wounded in the lung by Russian shellfire at the Zoo Bunker on the afternoon of 1 May, and had pronounced him dead.

In search of Dr. Karl Heinz Späth I went to the address which he had given in Stuttgart. I found that it was not a private house but the Technical High School. His name was unknown there, nor did it occur in any Stuttgart directory. It was clear that he had given a false name and address; and since his affidavit was mendacious on this subject, there was no reason to credit it in other matters where ignorance would have been more excusable.

The source of Späth's story is clear. It is an amplification, with circumstantial detail and a personal part assigned to the narrator, of the broadcast statement by Dönitz. Dönitz had said that Hitler had been killed fighting at the head of his troops on the afternoon of 1 May: Dr. Späth had accepted and embellished this minimum of apparent fact, had added local color and detail, and had introduced himself as a central figure. His motive was probably not rational but psychological: a delusion of vanity such as leads raconteurs to introduce themselves into the anecdotes they repeat.

The evidence of Hitler’s fate based on the statement of Admiral Karl Dönitz, raises the question - what opportunity had Dönitz of knowing the facts? It is known that Dönitz had left Berlin on 21 April, and had never seen Hitler since. His broadcast speech had been made from Plön, 150 miles from the incident which it claimed to describe. How then did he know? The answer to this question was easily discovered. When the so-called "Flensburg government" was arrested, all its papers were also seized, and among these papers was a series of telegrams which had passed between Dönitz and Hitler’s headquarters. The last in this series was a telegram from Göbbels to Dönitz on 1 May. This telegram informed Dönitz that Hitler had died "yesterday" — i. e. on 30 April 30—"at 15:30 o’clock".

Dönitz had no other evidence, for none of those who had been with Hitler at the end had been able to join him: The last eyewitnesses who had reached him from the Bunker were Ritter von Greim and Hanna Reitsch, who had left before the end. His statement that Hitler had died fighting at the head of his troops was pure invention, and his statement that Hitler had died on 1 May was unsupported by the only evidence at his disposal, which clearly stated that he had died on 30 April. Thus Dönitz like Späth is a worthless and rejected authority. The only evidence of Hitler’s death was a telegram signed by Göbbels, who could not be cross-examined because he was dead, and his body, unlike Hitler’s, had been found by the Russians.

On 25 September, US Intelligence would find a new version, the fate of Hitler was in Spain. According to information collected by a US military attache in Buenos Aires, the secretary general of the local Nazis went around telling a story that the informant himself considered "highly unlikely". This version said that Hitler lived in a German submarine that was part of a kind of clandestine flotilla located somewhere on the Spanish coast. With the complicity of General Franco? 

That same 25 September, however, the Andalusian history option  for Hitler had a competitor. On that date, former director of the Museum of Mauser Armas, Friedrich von Leon, told to section 430 of the CIC in Austria [more specifically, the team Steyr] that "a friend had told him" that Hitler was the guest of an Argentines of German descent named Eichhorn who lived in a very exotic house in a place called La Falda.

Hitler, and this is the story that is most successful over the years, moved to the South American country on a submarine.
 

15 May 1937 was a big day at the Eden Hotel, a luxury vacation resort in the western sierras of Argentina’s Córdoba province. In the main dining room, bowtie clad-waiters rushed to and fro nervously, clanking silverware, champagne flutes and preparing table settings for hundreds of guests, all in preparation for a wedding anniversary dinner. The resort’s house orchestra warmed up in the adjacent room, readying for a long live show. Everything had to be just so, for this was not just any other reception; tonight, honored guests arrived to celebrate the 25th "silver" anniversary -or Bodas de Plata- of the Eden Hotel’s owners, Walter and Ida Eichhorn.

Wealthy Germans who now called Argentina home, the Eichhorns were excited all day as over-the-top flower arrangements and congratulatory telegrams from all corners of the globe flooded into the hotel in La Falda, the small town that grew up around the resort. It was the guest of honor, German Ambassador to Argentina Edmund von Thermann, who possessed the gift that most delighted the couple. After a decadent meal and free flowing wine, in front of all of their friends, Walter and Ida would beam with pride as von Thermann hand delivered the silver framed portrait, inscribed by the photo’s subject himself, who had scrawled in German:

"Mr. and Mrs. Eichhorn, To my comrades in battle during difficult times for your Silver Anniversary. Warm Wishes, Adolf Hitler".

Built during Argentina’s "Golden Age" in 1898 by a German immigrant, the Eden Hotel was purchased by the Eichhorn brothers in 1912. They appreciated the agreeable climate and beautiful scenery of the Punilla Valley and the nearby mountains that surrounded the 100-room hotel. The Eichhorns invested heavily in improving the property in the 1920’s, where the elite of Argentina and the world would come to visit for days, weeks or sometimes even months on end.Before the journey from Córdoba was arduous - the Eichhorns paved the roads and bought a fleet of Ford Model-Ts to transfer guests in comfort, at least those not rich enough to arrive by plane to the resort’s private landing strip.

There were large terraces for relaxing on warm days, and indoor greenhouse gardens for taking sun during the winter. Game rooms and swimming pools occupied women and children, while men could spend the day hunting foxes aboard the trained horses from the nearby stables.

Famous guests over the years included not just four Argentine presidents but also Albert Einstein, the Prince of Wales, the Duke of Savoy, famous Nicaraguan poet Rubén Dario, and acclaimed Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini. From the  presidential suite where some of these guests slept, the balcony provides a view of the entire front of the property and the fountains and gardens.

From this same vantage point there were the large German eagle emblem that was the centerpiece to the hotel’s façade, and a radio antenna, big and tall enough to send and receive transmissions from the other side of the world. This antenna carried Hitler’s live speeches to the Nazi sympathizers in Córdoba, and sent messages back from the secret meetings of the Eichhorns and their collaborators.

Only some months after Hitler’s suicide in his Berlin Bunker, the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigations, or FBI, released a secret memo, dated 17 September 1945, from the American embassy in London, that was declassified in the 1990’s.

Penned by J. Edgar Hoover, the document connects the Eichhorns to the founding of the Nazi party, Hitler’s rise, and their close friendship.  On 13 November 1945 a FBI report was sent to the American embassy in Buenos Aires, recapping the September FBI report detailing the Eichhorn's relationship with Hitler. Most ominously, it suggests that if Hitler somehow did survive, he would surely find refuge in a place far-flung from Europe and his allied enemies. In all the world, the memo singled out one place: The Hotel Eden in La Falda, Argentina.

In the ensuing years since the collapse of the decadence of the Eden Hotel, Conspiracy theories of several different varieties have developed surrounding the resort’s strange history. Many books and exposés have been written by historians and journalists, several documentaries filmed and even a fictional Argentine TV drama called "Eden" was set in the era. At times it has been difficult to separate fact from fiction, historic record from rumor. But there is no shortage of intrigue. The ancestors of Eichhorns supposedly still live in the area, but add to the Controversy by refusing to talk to the media. Citizens have come forward to confess that their parents had revealed a hidden past as Nazis who fled Germany for new lives and identities in Córdoba.

In May 1945, Ida Eichorn told her closest circle that her "cousin" Adolf Hitler was "traveling". The Eichhorns, shutting themselves away in their chalet a short distance from the hotel, created a network of distribution centers that sent thousands of clothing and food parcels to a devastated Germany. They also helped the network for Nazis who fled to Argentina, and Adolf Eichmann would often visit La Falda with his family. One of his sons, Horst Eichmann, who led Argentina's "Frente Nacional Socialista Argentino" [FNSA] Nazi party in the 1960s, married Elvira Pummer, the daughter of one of the Hotel Eden's gardeners.

When a German ship, the 'Graf Spee' limped into a South American port in 1939, many of the crew abandoned the ship and integrated into Argentine society, many becoming waiters at the Eden Hotel.

The Eichhorns maintained close contact with the Gran Hotel Viena on the shores of Mar Chiquita; they owned a property just 150 yards from the hotel. They would have met Hitler and Eva there while he was convalescing in 1946. [Whatever the Nazi's long-term plans were for the Gran Hotel Viena, they never came to much. After the Hitler's second visit in early 1948, the property was virtually abandoned].

Catalina Gamero, was fifteen years old when she went to live with the Eichhorns in 1945. She suffered from asthma and came from a poor family who believed she would have a better life at the Hotel Eden than they could offer her. Although a servant, Catalina was treated by the Eichhorns almost as a daughter. She said that Hitler arrived at their house in La Falda one night in 1949 and stayed for three days; she recognized him right away. A driver must have brought him. He was put up on the third floor.

"We were told to take his breakfast upstairs and knock at the door and leave the tray on the floor. He ate very well, the trays were always empty. Most of the meals were German. He had shaved his moustache off. There were usually people in the house all day, but for those three days, the third floor was private. Mrs. Ida told me, 'Whatever you saw, pretend you didn't'. One of the drivers and I used to joke, 'I saw nothing and you saw nothing'. It was as if it had never happened. It was kept very, very secret".

Hitler left his clothes, including green canvas trousers and a black collared shirt, outside the room, and Catalina would clean and iron them. She took him three breakfasts, three lunches, and three complete teas. On the fourth day she was told he had left. Eight days after the 'important visitor' left La Falda, Mrs. Eichhorn told Catalina to pack a picnic lunch. With the chauffeur driving the Mercedes-Benz and Walter Eichhorn seated next to him, the four drove to the Eichhorn's house on Pan de Azucar Mountain. This brick-and-timber construction had a large radio antenna and was part of the network of Nazi safe houses across the country. Hitler stayed for fifteen days at what the family called "El Castillo", but after that Catalina never saw him again. However, she remembered taking telephone calls from him at the Eichhorn home through operators in La Rioja and Mendoza; she recognized his voice. The calls continued until 1962.

John Walsh, an FBI agent stationed in Buenos Aires at this time, admitted the difficulties he and his operatives encountered in doing any undercover work in Argentina. Of the Hotel Eden and the Eichhorns, Walsh said, "We personally did not do surveillance work there. We would have sources that were outside the embassy that would do that. You just can't walk in and say, you know, that you are looking for something".

Walsh said that he and his colleagues came under surveillance by the local police. A number of times when he was out with other agents they would see people who were obviously following and watching them.

The Intelligence chief in Austria handed the report to the team leader G-2 USFET [United States Forces European Theatre], who gave the passed the papers to the French Surete of Innsbruck. 

In February 1946, the Intelligence Organisation of the Allied Commission for Austria, IOACA returned to address this issue and reported that the farm is now a sanatorium, and Eichhorn had lost his status in Argentina to become, directly, German or Austrian. The writer of this report indicated that the veracity of this story "is difficult to determine".

In March 1945, only three weeks before the official armistice, under intense pressure from the United States, Argentina finally declared war on the Axis powers, the last of the Latin American nations to do so. After this declaration, local authorities seized the Eden Hotel as “enemy property".  It  was surrounded by barbed wire and guards to keep people in rather than out. It was used for eleven months to intern the Japanese Embassy staff and their families. Shortly after the Japanese were repatriated, anti-Nazi Argentines in La Falda, some from the same group that Ernesto "Che" Guevara’s father participated with, raided the property and tore down the giant German eagle, seeing it as a symbol of Nazism. Legend has it that the eagle was later restored by the municipality, but destroyed again when struck by lightning during a thunderstorm.

The anti-Fascist locals had reason to be concerned: It is estimated that Walter and Ida Eichhorn helped contribute more than 30,000 Deutschmarks [roughly equivalent to US $1 million today] to Hitler and the Nazi party, collecting the money in Argentina from local sympathizers and German expatriates and funneling it to the Nazi Ministry of Propaganda in the name of Josef Göbbels. During frequent visits to Germany in the 1920’s, Walter Eichhorn became a supporter of Hitler early in his political career, helping the Führer finance an aircraft and Mercedes-Benz to help him campaign. For this early loyalty Walter was later rewarded with gifts and private audiences with Hitler and his highest generals, including the infamous and flamboyant Hermann Göring.

After the hotel was abandoned in 1947, off and on for 50 more years the horses of local farmers used the looted dining room to eat, sleep and "do their business".

In December 1945, Hitler was dead again. An informant of the third region of the CIC, in Bad Nauheim, told of the soldiers who had seen the Chancellor and Eva Braun dead and packaged in individual coffins.

In January 1946, the French, who, also apparently won the war, felt left out without its own version of Hitler's survival, and entered with force into the market. An agent of the second region of the CIC in Mannheim left a letter in which related that French Intelligence had "considered reliable informants" that had warned the high command that Hitler was hiding in Heidelberg. According to other versions Hitler was disguised as s bearded old hunchback.

French Intelligence was informed that in Heddesheim a man named Friedrich Menz, knew everything about the whereabouts of Hitler.  The CIC took it seriously, and mounted a special operation in the place of the alleged hiding of Hitler.  At half past nine p.m. of 7 January 1946, five special agents of the CIC, accompanied by 25 members of the military police of the town [military cavalry] used the typical movie scene, that of "Open to the police". The result is recorded in the archives of CIC with some sarcasm: "...failed to produce any evidence that sustantiates any of the information contained in the French report". Hitler was not in the house, and what is more, the citizen Friedrich Menz, who according to the French was the general co-ordinator of the whole operation, turned out to be  an anti-Nazi Nazi  that he had been arrested twice in 1936 for openly criticizing their bosses and that obviously had never belonged to any Nazi organization. 

In October 1946, the first part of the CIC [Stuttgart] is investigating a certain Klaus, actually called Nikolaus Weingärtner, who was not a gnome but a former SS Obersturmführer. Nikolaus, always according to research, had been helped by an actress [quite beautiful, by the way] called Camilla Horn. According to his information, Hitler would be living in Munich, but very ill and waiting for death. The Stuttgart CIC  sought help from the fourth region [Munich]; but in the report submitted stated that they were convinced that the whole story was invented by Klaus. Even so, the Munich CIC requested the eighth region [Berlin] to question the actress, which was done on 17 March. Camilla, of course, denied everything.

Camilla Horn [25 April 1903 - 14 August 1996] was a German dancer and film star of the silent and sound era. 

She was educated as a dressmaker and worked in Erfurt, but she also took dance lessons and in the early twenties she joined Rudolf Nelson's Kabarett at the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin as a stage dancer.

In 1926 F.W. Murnau gave her the part of Gretchen in his UFA production "Faust", which made her famous at once. She was signed by United Artists and Joseph M. Schenck himself took care of her career and even wanted to marry her.  In later years Camilla claimed that they were friends but not lovers.

She made several successful Hollywood movies, mostly playing vamps.

In "Tempest" [1928] and in "Eternal Love" [1929] she starred with John Barrymore.

But she got homesick and claimed that her English was not good enough for movies with spoken words. This was not true, but she did not want to offend the Americans.

She was to appear in 70 more movies in Germany, England and France.

In the thirties she refused to follow the official line of the Nazis and  was prosecuted for a monetary offense. But Göbbels pardoned her and she was able to act again, starting with the anti-Bolshevist movie "Weiße Sklaven" [also known as "Panzerkreuzer Sebastopol"]. In her autobiography she describes how Hitler had forbidden the movie and Göbbels wanted to negotiate with her about the alterations that should be made. He tried to seduce her, but claiming that a man like him did not need this, she escaped. After the war the British tribunal at Delmenhorst convicted her for minor offenses [among them travelling without permission] and she was imprisoned for three months at the women's prison in Vechta.

As late as 1987 she had a part in "Die letzten Tage von Schloß Königswald" by Peter Schamonis for which she received the Bavarian Film Award. She spent her old age at Herrsching [near the Ammersee below Munich] and died at Gilching near Starnberg, where she had lived during the last year of her life.

Finally, in January 1947, US veteran, Ralph W. Sams, who lived in Bradley Beach, New Jersey, informed the Department of Defense in New York that just before returning to the US he had been stationed in Bensheim. At that time he had decided to hire a maid. Therefore, he had become acquainted with a local woman, who began to work for him, the report says, "but without enthusiasm".

Following the maid's hire, Sams became acquainted with three other people who lived with her. They were called  Adolphus Blicker, Mary Kinscherf Blicker and Gretl. The American soldier realized that under these three identities Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun and Gretl Fegelein were hiding. Sams complained that already in Bensheim he had told the matter to his superiors but they had not done anything.

Fully convinced that the US Army was morally and legally obliged to engage in the fact that he was a dumb-ass, when he arrived home, he insisted, that when he reached the US he saw more photos of Braun and her sister. In fact, he adorned his story saying that the control attitude control of Adolphus Blicker was evident in a town where all the other inhabitants tended to be timid and obedient. A curious way of hiding.

Sams told the German intelligence he had witnessed the alleged Hitler and Eva Braun show an intense emotion to the picture of a dog that looked a lot like the Chancellor's. When he went to the US, the Germans who Sams was now denouncing, gave him a charcoal sketchs as a memento, signed by all three, which he gave the military. Apparently, he had not stopped to think that someone who is persecuted in the world is not going to sign pictures.

The US Army, despite acknowledging that Sams believed in what he said, classified his history as D-4, which means: garbage.  However, they wrote a letter to the USFET describing the height and weight of the alleged Hitler. The letter added that the man showed a great interest in American politics and weapons, and had once burst angrily into an argument in which he spoke of the V1. Three weeks after sending the letter, the  CIC Earl Browning, head of the headquarters of the ICC and who was involved when Klaus Barbie was arrested, sent a petition to the CEC of the third region, sub-region Darmstadt , to investigate the case. A week later, agent Henry Noyer of the said sub-region reported that, in his opinion, "Blicker is not like Adolf Hitler,"  adding the little detail that Blicker had been registered in Bensheim since May 1942.

Three months after the end of the Blicker search, Hitler reappeared, though only partly because he lacked an arm. General Lucius Clay, military governor of Germany, received a letter whose sender also told him it was submitted to President Truman. In the letter of 17 pages, someone claiming to be a former SS Standartenführer claimed to be Hitler's amanuensis, who could not write the text himself for having lost his right arm at the Battle of the Bunker. In the letter, Hitler himself, as he explained that after having escaped to a friendly country and there recovered his health had made a trip to Germany to return to exile, where he was trying to make as little noise as possible "to avoid the social alarm bloodshed". 

The letter was basically devoted to describing a dozen proposals for collaboration, allegedly proposed by Hitler. While acknowledging that the idea was not new: During the war the Nazis, and especially Heinrich Himmler, had thought they would always be able to come to an understanding with Washington. 

Among the proposals was the derailment of the Nuremberg trials and all trials of Nazis, followed by an amnesty for all members of the SS who had entered the organization before the coming to power of the NSDAP. The former SS Standartenführer finally took the floor, offering to give personally a few necessary explanations. He suggested to be contacted by a notice in the "Neue Zeitung" that said: "The SS man Werner Eckerlich is summoned to appear immediately in Munich; personal integrity is guaranteed". 

The Americans closed the case in June 1947. The main argument was that someone who has lost an arm cannot write a 17-page letter, but at least he can sign it. 

In November of 1947, the CIC in Linz, Austria, the hometown of Hitler, was informed by one Ludwig Traksch that a person had formed a company escort that had accompanied Hitler fleeing to Switzerland. In April 1945, according to this bizarre story that the CIC qualified directly as frivolous, Hitler had fled to Denmark by air. Two days later, Eva Braun, who had unsuccessfully asked to accompany him, was poisoned. According to this version, the other body next to Eva Braun was the Sturmbahnführer SS Herbert Schmidt, who had been killed by a bomb. [a Herbert Schmidt was actually one of Hitler's valets] The Germans would have burned both bodies to protect the flight of their Chancellor.

Traksch also reported relatively punctiliousness, that Martin Bormann and other prominent Nazis had  in August 1945 visited Austria, Gmunden specifically, to prepare the way for Hitler to Switzerland. Finally, when the Chancellor traveled to there, it was in the company of Bormann and Traksch who owned a motorboat. The ship was sunk on Lake Constance. Hitler went to Zürich, where he lived with a woman named Hilda Reichl. According to the information, he is seen without problems in public places in the area. He is holding a Swiss passport in the name of Kurt Reichl and one with the Danish name of Uwe Jensen. With this documentation, the  former Chancellor of Germany had, according Traksch, traveled at least six times to Germany and Austria in 1946 [but if traveling without problems, why did he enter Switzerland in a clandestine little boat?].

The informant also reported changes in the appearance of Hitler. He appeared as an old man, almost completely white hair, leaning forward and walking with short steps, besides constantly coughing. Dressed modestly, always preferring jackets and dark coats and hats.  This seemingly precise data, but actually quite generic invention, made the Intelligence of the United States investigate it. In February 1948, the Americans asked the chief of police of Bern to find this man. On 25 March, the Swiss police answer the request reporting that have not discovered anything, but politely comprising, clarify, regardless,  they must investigate.

In November 1948,  Adolf Hitler was in Amsterdam. An anonymous Dutch informant wrote a letter to "His Excellency General Dwight Eisenhower Quarterback" in which he reported that the owner of a cafe in the Dutch capital was Hitler. The alleged Chancellor was called Ludwig Kirchner. The two main evidence for the theory of the anonymous informant were: physical resemblance between Hitler and Kirchner, the informant "proved" with a drawing, and the fact that the cafe had apparently ashtrays made ​​from remnants of shells. The informant continued explaining that Kirschner had scarring on his head that matched those that had been on Hitler after the assassination attempt, without any explanation of why the informant had such accurate data on Hitler's wounds.

As incredible as it may seem, the military who read the letter accepted it, and it was sent to the Director of Intelligence. On 25 January 1949 the Dutch, competent in research, reported in writing to the US military attaché based in The Hague that the poor Ludwig Kirchner, far from being Adolf Hitler was a German citizen of Jewish origin! That, because of this, had left Germany in 1933. He had opened the cafe in 1934. The researchers found that at that establishment regulars almost all spoke German [logical, as the owner was]; and that Kirchner himself was elusive when the conversation dealt with his life or his business; which is logical given that he spent years juggling his Jewish origins. The investigator concluded that there was a resemblance between Kirchner and Hitler, but not very relevant.

Last, but not least, in September 1949 a British citizen named Leslie Graham Fraser, said he saw in the cafe Cologne Pontypridd, where he lived, a man like Hitler. He described him as a man "with a fierce expression in general, though with occasional smiles". The oddest thing about this version is that she says Hitler, after a whole life hating tobacco, had come to fall, because the man in the pub was smoking a cigar. 

The story that has best survived time has been that Hitler fled to Argentina.
 

Did Adolf Hitler escape to Argentina after WW2?

On 1 May 1945, Admiral Karl Dönitz took to a German radio station to announce that the Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler was dead.

Although Dönitz told the German people Hitler had died heroicly defending the Reich, he and his wife Eva Braun actually committed suicide on 30 April whilst holed up in his Berlin bunker.

Hitler had killed himself with a gunshot and Braun used cyanide. The bodies of the pair were then taken outside to the Reich Chancellery garden, doused in petrol and burnt.

The story was quickly reported around the world, Hitler was dead and Germany was on the brink. Barely a week later, the war in Europe was over.

This official account of how Hitler died — promoted by the Americans, Russians, and British, became the truth of the matter for public consumption.

However, privately the Allies doubted the story. Several senior figures in Allied intelligence believed Hitler may have escaped. Russian leader Josef Stalin was certain Hitler had actually fled, and told this to the Americans.

During a visit to the Hague shortly after the war, the commander of the allied forces Dwight D. Eisenhower told reporters that there was “reason to believe he[Hitler] was still alive.”

The Russian’s account of what happened after they had seized Hitler’s Bunker were confused and contradictory. And most tellingly, there was no body. Could Hitler have escaped?

Rumours began to circulate that Hitler and Braun had been smuggled out of Germany at the last minute and sightings of them came in from all over the world. The FBI and OSS, the forerunner to the CIA, investigated many of these rumours.

Some authors have suggested Hitler was flown out of Germany just days before the end of the war, under the code name ‘Grey Wolf’, and then smuggled out of Europe in a German U-Boat to Nazi sympathizing Argentina.

There, the theory goes, he lived out his life under an assumed name with his wife Eva Braun and their children until his death in the early 60s.

Did Hitler really escape to Argentina after WW2?

Evidence for

1. The bodies

Nobody at the Führerbunker saw Hitler shoot himself, and there are no photographs of his corpse.

When advancing Russian troops seized the Reich Chancellory they found several bodies but, after initially mistaking a double of Hitler for the Führer, were unable identify any of them as Hitler.

The Russians later claimed to have found Hitler’s charred body in this garden.

Marshal Zhukov, the head of the Russian army told a press conference:

"We did not identify the body of Hitler, I can say nothing definite about his fate. He could have flown away from Germany at the last moment".

But in 1968, the Russians changed their story. They had in fact recovered Hitlers charred remains and reburied them on several occasions. They had a skull, some teeth and a jawbone fragment to prove it.

For many years, the Russians refused any access to these artifacts. They were the only hard, physical evidence in existence for Hitler’s death but without access they could not be subject to forensic testing.

It wasn’t until 2009 that experts were finally allowed to examine the bone fragments. A team of American investigators, led by archaeologist Nick Bellantoni, took samples from the skull and jawbone for DNA testing. The results were shocking.

The bone fragments held by the Russians were not from Hitler.

None of the samples belonged to Hitler. The skull and jawbone belonged to a young woman, not Hitler. It was also unlikely to be that of Eva Braun as there were no reports she had shot herself.

Where had the skull come from, who did it belong to and why were the Russians trying to pass it off as Hitler's? Whatever the answers, the DNA results seriously undermined the official story.

2. Allied intelligence

The allied forces secretly doubted Hitler had committed suicide. Even before the war ended American intelligence were preparing for Hitler’s escape.

The OSS, then America’s foreign intelligence agency, prepared a series of mocked-up images of Hitler in various disguises, anticipating how he may try to escape at the end of the war.

Army intelligence interrogating a young SS officer at Nuremberg discovered he had actually observed Hitler’s flight from Germany just before the end of the war.

This appeared to confirm newspaper reports at the time that SS pilot Peter Baumgart had flown Hitler out of Germany to Denmark in a Junker 52 transport aircraft on 28 April.

Beginning shortly after the war, the FBI conducted a decade-long investigation into the alleged escape of Hitler. Compiling a 700-page dossier, the FBI gathered reports of his survival from around the world.

Claims emerged that Hitler was flown out of Germany to Denmark.

Many of the reports were hoaxes and nonsense — including sightings of Hitler disguised as a croupier at a casino and walking around in New York City. But there were also a cluster of more credible reports that centered on Argentina.

Accounts of Hitler’s arrival by submarine and his life in the country were numerous. One informant gave the FBI detailed descriptions of Hitler and his precise whereabouts in Argentina, but these were never followed up.

Argentina, under the fascist rule of Juan Peron, had a large German community and one of the biggest Nazi parties in the world outside of Germany. Like many other South American countries, it was sympathetic to the crumbling Nazi regime and prepared to hide fleeing Nazi war criminals.

Recently, Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams in their book "Grey Wolf", followed up some of the Argentina rumours. The developed evidence that Hitler hid out at a remote pro-Nazi enclave near Nahuel Huapi Lake in Patagonia.

The authors found several eyewitnesses who remember Hitler’s presence there, and interviewed one now elderly man who claims to have served Hitler on 2 occasions in 1953 and 56 in a private hotel suite.

3. Nazi Ratlines

Some evidence from other fugitive Nazis supports the idea that Hitler may have escaped to Argentina.

Lots of other high ranking Nazis escaped after WW2 with the help of ratlines set up by secret SS groups like Odessa, the Catholic Church and even American Intelligence.

Both Josef Mengele and Adolf Eichman, two of the most notorious Nazi war criminals, escaped to South America after the war, where they were protected by pro-Nazi fascist dictatorships in countries like Chile and Argentina.

Argentina especially was a hotspot for escaping Nazis. Millions of dollars of Reich assets were smuggled out of Germany at the end of the war and funneled through the Peron regime into Argentina to help set up an underground regime to protect ex-Nazis.

If Hitler had escaped Germany, the odds are he would have ended up in Argentina where he could have been sure of a safe haven from the international authorities.

To confirm the hypothesis of an escape of Hitler to Argentina there is the long investigation by the journalist Abel Basti

After years of investigations, culminated in the publication of the book "Tras los pasos di Hitler", Abel Basti has reached the conclusion that Hitler was not dead on 30 April 1945 in Berlin.

Basti argues that Hitler escaped to Argentina and lived there for many years, until February 1971, dying like a normal person, undisturbed. Currently, according to this reconstruction, Hitler would be buried in Paraguay, in a crypt located in an ancient Nazi Bunker, today replaced by a luxurious hotel.

Basti argues that every year this hotel closes to ordinary clients, to allow a small group of Nazis, to visit the grave of Hitler on the anniversary of his death.

Basti said that in the beginning he was skeptical of a hypothesis of this kind, but all the meeting with many eyewitnesses made him change his mind. So, did Hitler really live in Argentina where he escaped to after the siege of Berlin?

What has been historically verified is that in Argentina, in July 1945, two German submersibles [the U-977 and the U-530], arrived.

The arrival of a good number of U-Boats in Argentina has been spotted, at the end of the conflict, by fishermen, soldiers and inhabitants of coastal villages. They were reported in the Gulf of St. Matías and particularly in the Caleta de los Loros.

Was Hitler on board of one of these other mysterious submarines?

Evidence against

1. Eyewitnesses in the Bunker

There are eyewitness accounts from inside Hitler’s Bunker that attest to his suicide there.

SS Officer Rochus Misch, a Hitler aide, claims the Führer had already made it clear he would end his life, apparently terrified that his body may be paraded by the approaching Russian army.

According to Misch, Hitler ordered them to destroy his body after his suicide. On 30 April, the deed was done. Misch and other staff in the Führerbunker entered Hitler’s private room and discovered his and Braun’s bodies.

Misch recounts how they took the bodies of the pair up to the Chancellery garden to burn them. Hitler’s valet Otto Günsche was in charge of the cremation but had struggled to round up enough Petrol.

Finally, Günsche and the other remaining Nazis set fire to the bodies and, before giving one last salute, retreated back into the Bunker.

Whilst there are several such accounts amongst the witnesses to Hitler’s death, some historians have questioned their reliability due to the many inconstancies between them.

Several of the witnesses changed their stories over the years or made questionable claims that tend to undermine their veracity. Some witnesses said they heard the gunshot that killed Hitler, but Günsche heard no shot despite having stood at the door to Hitler’s room.

2. Hitler’s teeth

Although not reported for many years, the Russians now confirm they performed an autopsy on Hitler’s remains in 1945 and confirmed them to be Hitler.

Partial remains of some of Hitler’s teeth were positively identified by his dentist as matching distinctive dental work he had performed on the Führer the year before.

This identification appeared to be confirmed in 1999 when forensic dentist Prof Michel Perrier used newsreel footage, photographs and X-rays to match the teeth to Hitler.

However, some critics have questioned the identification. Hugo Blaschke, the dentist who made the original match in 1945, did so entirely based on memory.

Hitler’s dentals records were lost and instead Blaschke had to draw a picture of Hitler’s teeth as he remembered them.

3. Cold war paranoia

Many historians account for the inconsistencies in the accounts of Hitler’s death and the recovery of his body to cold war secrecy and paranoia.

Almost as soon as WW2 ended, the cold war between Russia and the West began and a great many lies and propaganda can be attributed to this period.

Most of the early evidence we have about Hitler’s demise comes from Russian counter-intelligence sources, working on Stalin’s orders.

Stalin, historians say, was not only paranoid that news about Hitler’s death could be used against him, but decided to deliberately obscure the prosaic reality of his suicide to try and suggest the Western powers were hiding him.

Obsessive secrecy, disinformation and propaganda became the norm, and it wasn’t until many years after Stalin died that the Russians finally began to open up their archives and reveal the truth about what happened in 1945.

4. Hitler’s health

Those who saw Hitler in the months up until his alleged death were shocked at his physical and mental deterioration.

SS Physician Ernst-Günther Schenck tended to Hitler in the final few days. According to Schenck, the 56-year-old Führer was "a living corpse, a dead soul".

"His spine was hunched, his shoulder blades protruded from his bent back, and he collapsed his shoulders like a turtle…I was looking into the eyes of death", Schenck recounted in a 1985 interview.

Schenck, like other observers, noted how Hitler looked 20 years older that his true age — a physical and mental wreck whose left arm shook so uncontrollably he could hardly shave or feed himself.

Hitler, it seems, was suffering the mental and physical effects of degenerative disease Parkinson. Aside from his physical ailments he had begun to ramble and veer wildly from euphoria to deep depression.
 

Ernst-Günther Schenck, who worked at an emergency casualty station in the Reich Chancellery during April of 1945, claimed Hitler might have had Parkinson's disease. However, Schenck only saw Hitler briefly on two occasions and, by his own admission, was extremely exhausted and dazed during these meetings [at the time, he had been in surgery for numerous days without much sleep]. Also, some of Schenck's opinions were based on hearsay from Dr. Haase.

Schenk, a physician in charge of nutrition for the German Army who was present at Hitler's last medical consultation in April 1945 and later wrote a book ["Patient A"] about Hitler's relationship with his personal physician, was quoted in "American Medical News" to the effect that Hitler was neither clinically insane nor chemically dependent on drugs. Schenk says that  Hitler's regular injections consisted of vitamins mixed with glucose and caffeine. Hitler was not a regular user of any stronger drug, but was given them on occasion: codeine and cocaine for colds, strong painkillers and barbiturates for cramps and colitis [an intermittent condition in most people that suffer it]. By the end of his life, Hitler showed obvious symptoms of Parkinson's disease, and also had a heart problem that was treated with nitroglycerin and digitalis. Schenk says that medically there was nothing unusual about Hitler [AP, 10 October 1985]  and there is no reason to believe that drugs adversely affected Hitler's judgment.

In 2010 the book "War Hitler Krank?" by Henrik Eberle and Hans-Joachim Neumann [published in English in 2012 as Was Hitler Ill?] offered generally the same assessment as Schenk. They write that "at no time did Hitler suffer from pathological delusions," [Eine Besessenheit im Sinne eines krankheitsbedingten Wahns gab es bei Hitler zu keinem Zeitpunkt] and they find no indication that Dr. Theodor Morell was anything other than a competent and ethical physician.

The idea a man gripped by paranoia, mental illness and severe physical decline could mastermind a daring escape from the grasps of the advancing Allies and go on to live for many years in South America seems absurd.

Perhaps stories of Hitler's condition were more wartime Propaganda or stories spread to aid his escape. But if Hitler’s condition really was as bad as many witnessed in 1945, it would seem to rule out the idea he lived on for many years.

According to what is told and known in History is that Hitler had died before the end of WWII.  However, evidence has surfaced refuting the claims.

In 1955, Germany Justice pronounced Hitler's disappearance. 

Hitler's alleged inside the Bunker in Berlin described by Trevor- Roper's book "The Last Days of Hitler" has been refuted by many historians.  We now know that the official history is not true.  The history Trevor-Roper told was invented by British Intellegence Services to free themselves from the accusations by Stalin which stated that they helped Hitler escape.

That's assuming of course that the official accounts based on eyewitness testimonies gathered by the incredible historian/journalist extraordinaire Hugh Trevor-Roper, the one and only expert on the last days of Hitler's life, is accurate.

For whatever reason, we have no reason at all to believe that these eyewitnesses who were deeply loyal to Hitler could have lied, just as we have no reason at all to believe that Trevor-Roper could be incredible [incredible = the opposite of credible].

Except that we do have reason to doubt Trevor-Roper: the "Hitler Diaries" fiasco. [Basically, a crude forgery fooled our expert].

What's fascinating is that there is no dispute here that Trevor-Roper was indeed fooled, which means the same people who know that Trevor-Roper blundered also vouch for his expertise in gathering evidence on Hitler's death.

We are now left with jaws that are alleged to belong to Hitler. In 2003, "a German forensic scientist named Dr Mark Benecke confirmed that they belonged to Hitler".

How does this confirmation process work?

He trusted experts/authorities who had provided him with the jaws and the X-Rrays. That's like reading a book, and then using a magnifying glass to verify that you are reading every letter correctly, and then declare whatever the book said to be true because you have read each letter correctly.

Historically, it appears not only did Stalin and the Russians doubt Hitler was dead, but so did US General Dwight D. Eisenhower. And in 2009, DNA testing proved the skull the Russians had been claiming was Hitler's since the end of the war was actually that of a forty year-old woman.

 

Adolf Hitler: A WWII Survivor?
Nick Redfern
May 27, 2015

Is it possible that, going completely against what the history books assure us, Adolf Hitler did not commit suicide in 1945, as the Second World War spiraled down to its end? Was his death actually, and ingeniously, staged to allow him to escape from Nazi Germany and start a new life on the other side of the world? To many, it must sound like the stuff of a big bucks Hollywood movie or of a page-turning thriller. Others are not quite so sure that’s all it is.

It’s a little known fact that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in the post-Second World War era, began to quietly compile what ultimately turned out to be a large dossier of material on claims that none other than Adolf Hitler survived the Second World War and secretly fled to South America. It’s a dossier that has now been declassified and which can be accessed at the FBI’s website, The Vault – which is an absolutely excellent source of countless numbers of official files, all now released under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act.

As one might expect to be the case, many of the claims received by the FBI on the “Hitler survived the war” controversy are scant in data, second- and third-hand in nature. That said, however, one section of the file is particularly intriguing and noteworthy.

Incredibly, it suggests that none other than Allen Dulles – who, in the Second World War, made his mark in the Office of Strategic Services, and served as Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961 – was complicit in a top secret program to have Hitler secretly shipped out to South America, when the Nazis were defeated.

The files in question refer to stories coming out of Los Angeles, California, and which reached the eyes and ears of the L.A. office of the FBI. According to what the FBI was told, in 1945, two Nazi-controlled submarines made their stealthy way to the Argentinean coastline, where they covertly deposited high-ranking Nazis that had escaped the wrath of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.

One of the most astounding rumors concerning this story –of definitive secret history proportions– was that it was not just high-ranking Nazis who were making new lives for themselves on the other side of the world. It was the most high-ranking Nazi, too: Adolf Hitler, who, allegedly, was by now hunkered down, somewhere, in the heart of the Andes.

The big question is: who was the FBI’s informant? Well, that’s the problem. Unfortunately, we don’t know, since his name is excised from the relevant, released documents. Nevertheless, the Bureau’s informant had a great deal of data to impart, something which definitely made the FBI sit up and take careful notice.

It must be noted that the Bureau’s source, who was a former Nazi, offered the information –with a promise of more to come– in return for safe haven in the United States. In other words, it may very well all have been nothing but a complete lie, one created by the Nazi in question, to try and ensure a new life for himself. In fact, that could well have been the crux of the entire affair.

As to how the person claimed to know that Hitler had survived the war, it was, if true, sensational. The man said he had been personally present when the submarines in question reached the coastline of Argentina. Aboard one of them were Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun– neither displaying any evidence of bullet wounds or of the effects of cyanide. Quite the opposite: they were vibrant, healthy, and very much alive.

If the story was simply that –a tall tale told by a Nazi trying to secure asylum in the United States – the man had certainly crafted an elaborate story. The FBI’s source provided details of the specific villages that Hitler, and the rest of the straggling, pathetic remnants of the laughingly named “Master Race,” passed through on their way to safe haven, somewhere in Argentina.

Adding further credence to this, additional files –also declassified under Freedom of Information legislation– revealed that amongst staff of the U.S. Naval Attaché in Buenos Aires rumors were circulating that Hitler did not die in Berlin, but was now hiding out in Argentina. Needless to say, however, the story ultimately remained a rumor and nothing else.

Truth? Fiction? Somewhere in between? Those were the questions the FBI pondered on decades ago. Some are still doing likewise today.