Eva (51 page)

Rosenfeld turned to Buter. “Just let me get this one thing straight,” he said. “This escape route. The B-B Axis, I believe Lieutenant Ward called it. All the—the stops along the route pinpointed by the lieutenant were raided, were they not?”

“That is correct, Sir,” Buter acknowledged.

“And all were found to be abandoned?”

Buter nodded. “The people manning them had all flown the respective coops,” he conceded. “Apparently alerted immediately after the raid on the Bari embarkation point. Their communication network appears to be excellent.” He looked grimly at the undersecretary. “But I do not for a second believe the Nazi escape operation has been destroyed, Sir. I am certain other routes will be found—if they are not already in operation.”

Rosenfeld nodded. “I dare say you are right, General,” he agreed.

“Only at one stop on the route were the people caught with their pants—eh, caught unaware,” Major Hall interjected. “At an inn in the Italian town of Merano. It seems that the escape route agent who operated the stop, the innkeeper, Bazzano, was laboring under the impression of some sort of false security.”

Woody grinned to himself. Pimple-face Pietro had saved his own hide—and put his uncle’s ass in a sling.

“The main question remaining,” Rosenfeld frowned, “is how to handle the whole sensitive situation with Eva Braun Hitler. We know now why the Nazis wanted the world to think she had died in the Bunker in Berlin, and the Russians undoubtedly are perpetuating the myth because they cannot get themselves to admit that they bungled in the first place. Of course, that’s par for the course.” He looked at Buter. “From what we know now, it seems certain, however, that Hitler himself did indeed die by his own hand. And was subsequently cremated.”

Buter nodded. “I agree.”

Rosenfeld sighed. “I shall prepare my report, General. Make my recommendations. I should appreciate your comments when I have done so. And, of course,” he added soberly, “everything said here and done here must remain top secret.”

“Of course.”

“It seems to me, Sir . . . Woody ventured. “It seems to me that the best thing to do is just to leave well enough alone. Let everyone think Eva died in the Bunker.” He looked from one to the other of the officers in the room. “She and Adolf are just as dead.”

Rosenfeld stared at him. A slow smile of amusement crinkled his face. “Young man,” he said, “I think you have the answer. We just—keep our mouths shut!” He nodded to himself. “That, I think, is exactly what I shall recommend to the President.”

Woody and Hall were walking back toward the CIC office. Hall gave Woody a sidelong glance. “That was one hell of a female bombshell you let loose on the poor bastards at the Bolzano CIC,” he commented.

“I wasn’t even sure she’d go there,” Woody said. But she had, he thought. She had. And he was grateful.

“She moved heaven and earth, and what’s more the whole damned CIC outfit in town to get me on the horn. And she sure hit me with a big enough two-by-four to get my attention. I was in Bolzano practically before the phone connection was broken.”

“She saved my ass,” Woody said.

“By the way,” Hall continued. “She’s a bright cookie. We offered her a job. As one of our civilian CIC employees. She took it.”

Woody stopped dead in his tracks. He stared at Hall. “She— took it!” he exclaimed. “She’s here? At Corps?”

“Sure,” Hall grinned. “As a matter of fact, she’s waiting in my office.”

The last couple of words were delivered into thin air. Woody was already halfway down the corridor.

She was standing at the window when he burst into the office. She turned. He’d never really seen her in a simple, feminine dress. She looked beautiful. In two steps he was at her side. He folded her in his arms.

“Ilse,” he whispered.

For a moment they held on to one another. Then Ilse gently freed herself. She looked up into his face, an enigmatic expression in her eyes.

“I—I did what you asked,” she whispered. “I went to the Americans.”

“I know,” he said. “I know. Oh, God, do I know!”

“I know everything now,” she said soberly. “I know what you were doing. All the time. With me. With everything.”

He studied her face. Suddenly he was in no hurry to get on a damned boat and go back home. There were other matters to settle first.

He tried to read the thoughts behind her solemn eyes. He could not be sure.

What he wanted, what he needed, was her understanding. Her trust. At least—for a starter. Was it there? Was it there in the big luminously liquid eyes regarding him?

He did not know.

But he knew it would come. It would take time, but it would come.

It would come . . .

I
N JULY OF
1981 the world press carried a startling report by Professor Reidar F. Sognnaes, founding dean and professor emeritus of anatomy and oral biology at the UCLA School of Dentistry and one of the scientists who worked on the identification of the burned bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, a report that raised valid and serious doubts about the true identity of the woman whose body was found with Hitler’s.

It was
not
Eva Braun.

The charred body, which was discovered in the Chancellery garden by SMERSH, the Russian counterintelligence, and identified as that of Eva Braun, was most probably that of someone else.

Professor Sognnaes pointed out that one of the pieces of evidence by which Eva supposedly was positively identified was a certain dental bridge with white plastic teeth. But despite the fact that the woman’s cranio-facial bones were burned beyond recognition by the searing fire, this crucial piece of dental evidence used by the Russians to identify the body as that of Eva Braun was claimed by them to have been found with the remains, intact and undamaged.

DOCUMENT NO. 13 of the Forensic-Medical Commission to the Soviet Army, dated 8 May, 1945, Berlin-Buch, Mortuary, Field Hospital for Surgery No. 496, describes how Eva’s cranium was literally consumed by the heat and flames with only a few charred remains of the lower left facial bones and a few teeth found. Yet the autopsy report states that the dental bridge survived: “On the metal plate of the bridge the first and second artificial white molars are attached in front; their appearance is almost undistinguishable from natural teeth.”

But, had this bridge actually been on the body when it was being consumed by the flames, the metal plate would have melted, the plastic facings on the teeth would have exploded, and the bridge would have been destroyed. However, the bridge was
not
on the body; for some undisclosed reason it was added to the remains later. According to the dental assistant who was to have fitted Eva Braun with the bridge, this fitting never took place, and the bridge was still in the files of the Berlin workshop when Eva Braun supposedly died in the flames. It was later seized at this workshop by the Russians and added to the unrecognizable remains of the woman burned with Adolf Hitler.

Professor Sognnaes considers it quite likely that the body found in the Chancellery garden was not Eva Braun but a substitute. If Eva did
not
die in the Bunker, someone else died in her place and was burned in the fire pit.

It would have been relatively easy to make such a substitution. The actual facts surrounding the suicides of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun Hitler will probably never be known. Although several eyewitnesses were questioned exhaustively by many interrogators, their accounts of the same event were all different and contradictory. Principal among these witnesses were SS
Standartenführer
(Colonel) Erick Kempka, Hitler’s personal chauffeur; SS
Standartenführer
Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet; SS
Sturmbannführer
(Major) Otto Günsche, Hitler’s Senior SS Adjutant, and Artur Axmann, the Hitler Youth Leader.

All of them gave conflicting reports of the same events. In fact, thirty years after his original testimony, Kempka admitted that at the time he had simply told his interrogators what he thought they wanted to hear. Originally he had testified that he heard the shot that killed Hitler; in truth he was not even present in the Bunker below, but was still in the garden above!

Each man who entered Hitler’s room and saw the bodies saw something different and at times gave conflicting reports. Günsche at first said he saw the bodies sitting next to each other on the sofa, but later he said Hitler was sitting in a chair and Eva was lying in another chair. Linge saw them both lying on the sofa, and Kempka, when he did arrive, saw Hitler lying and Eva sitting. Kempka saw the entry of the bullet into Hitler as being through the mouth, while Günsche saw the same wound in the right temple, and Linge saw it in the left!—a statement he later changed to the right.

Even the few minutes of the commonly shared experience of waiting for Hitler and Eva to take their own lives were reported in totally different versions.

Kempka and Linge reported that they heard the shot that killed Hitler; Axmann said that no shot was heard at all. And it has been established that no shot could possibly have been heard through the heavy door.

According to Günsche there were at least seven people directly outside the door. They were Goebbels, Bormann, Linge, General Krebs, General Burgdorf, Axmann, Günsche himself, and a couple of SS officers. According to him, he, Linge, Goebbels, and Axmann entered the room behind Bormann. According to Linge, however, he smelled gunpowder in the corridor and then fetched Bormann, and the two of them entered the room. And other reports state that Bormann arrived after everyone else was already inside Hitler’s room! The picture is totally confusing. And when the reports by the various chroniclers of the events—Shirer, Trevor-Roper, Ryan, Fest, Payne, Goldson, Irving, Boldt, O’Donnell,
et al
—are added, the picture becomes even more confused and contradictory.

The only thing on which they all seem to be in agreement is the fact that the bodies were wrapped in blankets as they were carried up to the Chancellery garden to be cremated, making identification difficult if not impossible.

One of the most knowledgeable of the chroniclers of Eva Braun, war correspondent Nerin E. Gun, states: “The fate of Eva Braun’s corpse, or of her ashes if her body was completely cremated, remains a mystery.” He notes that the German General, Hans Krebs, at his urgently requested meeting on May 1, 1945 with the Russian Field Marshal Vassili Chuikov, informed him of Hitler’s suicide and the cremation of his body in detail, without mentioning a word about the death of Eva Braun, a fact, which under the circumstances, seems highly suspicious to Mr. Gun. And he wonders why the Soviets waited more than twenty years to make public the report of their findings regarding the bodies of Adolf and Eva, arguing that there was no real evidence to support the death claim of Eva Braun, and—citing the weight of contradictory statements—he considers what really happened on Monday, April 30, 1945 “one of the great enigmas of contemporary history.”

In the months that followed the defeat of Germany and the collapse of the Third Reich several reports from different European sources claimed that Eva Braun Hitler had been seen in various parts of Europe. The reports ceased after several months.

As for the abortive breakout of Martin Bormann and the various versions of his death, they are matched only by the many versions of his successful escape to South America, and both are far outdistanced by the reports of subsequent Bormann sightings in many places both in Europe and in South America. The facts will undoubtedly never be known.

However, there were in existence several more or less effective organizations that assisted thousands of high-ranking Nazis and war criminals in escaping from Germany, and helped them find concealment and refuge abroad, especially in South America. Of them the three most important and best known were ODESSA,
Die Spinne
(The Spider), and
Die Schleusse
(The Lock-Gate).

All of these escape organizations had their beginnings during the final months of the war and shortly thereafter. Through the years they were aided by many other more or less clandestine organizations and societies which sprang into being throughout Germany and the rest of the world. These organizations included General von Manteuffel’s
Brüderschaft
(Brotherhood);
Der Rudel Klub,
originally founded in Argentina by Hans Ulrich Rudel, a Luftwaffe ace; HIAG—
Hilfe und Interessengemeinschaft der Ehemalige Angehörigen der Waffen SS
(Aid and Mutual Interest Society of Ex-Waffen SS Members);
Stille Hilfe
(Silent Aid);
Evangelische Hilfswerk
(Evangelical Aid Work) in Hamburg; the notorious
Vatikanische Hilfslinie
(The Vatican Aid Line) between Austria and Rome, one of the best-organized and safest escape routes also known as The Monastery Route because the escape route safe houses were run by religious orders and ended in the Collegia Teutonica di Santa Maria dell’ Anima in Rome, in the charge of Monsignor Alois Hudal, a Croatian nationalist, Bishop of Eila;
Der Salzberger Zirkel
(The Salzburg Circle); St. Martin’s Fonds in Belgium; HINAC in Holland; KABSZ (Comradeship of Fighters on the Eastern Front) in Hungary, believed to have been founded by one Karoly Ney under the direction of Otto Skorzeny;
Hjelporganisasjonen for Krigskadede
(Aid Organization for War Wounded) in Norway;
Dansk Frontkämpfer Forbundet
(The League of Danish Frontline Fighters) in Denmark; and
Kameradschaft IV
in Austria, as well as many others.