Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (3 page)

F
REUDE
, L
UDWIG:
Banker and construction-industry millionaire, who acted as Nazis’ chief financial representative and agent of influence in Argentina.

F
REUDE
, R
ODOLFO:
Son of
LUDWIG
, who became private secretary and intelligence coordinator to P
RESIDENT
P
ERÓN
.

L
EUTE
, R
ICARDO VON:
General manager of German-founded Lahusen trading conglomerate.

P
AHLKE
, M
AX:
German-born director of Mannesmann company’s Argentine subsidiary, and owner of Gran Hotel Viena clinic and spa, Miramar, Córdoba province.

P
ERÓN
, C
OL
. J
UAN
D
OMINGO:
Member of Grupo de Oficiales Unidos (GOU)—United Officers’ Group military junta, who became vice president, later president, of Argentina.

P
ERÓN
, E
VA
“E
VITA
” D
UARTÉ:
Mistress, later wife, of C
OL
. P
ERÓN
, and agent of influence for Nazi intelligence.

S
ANTANDER
, S
ILVANO:
Deputy for Entre Ríos province (1936–44), active and vocal opponent of Nazi links with Argentine government.

T
ABORDA
, R
AÚL
D
AMONTE:
Chairman of Argentine congressional committee investigating Nazi activities.

O
THER

B
RUGGMANN
, C
HARLES:
Swiss ambassador to the United States (1939–45).

D
ODERO
, A
LBERTO:
Uruguayan-Argentine millionaire shipping magnate and confederate of the Peróns.

M
ASSON
, G
ENERAL
R
OGER:
Director of the Swiss secret service (1939–45).

W
ALLENBERG
, M
ARCUS:
Swedish industrial and banking magnate.

T
REATMENT OF
M
ILITARY
R
ANKS

Since this book is not primarily a work of military history, we have not distinguished between the different grades of generals and flag officers in any of the Axis and Allied armed forces.

We have translated German SS and navy ranks, as below, and have simplified the former. The complexity of the SS structure meant that general officer ranks held by individuals were often qualified by suffixes differentiating rank within the basic organization or Allgemeine-SS, the military branch or Waffen-SS, and parallel rank in the police. Apart from key individuals with dual titles, such as “SS and Police Gen. Kaltenbrunner,” we have felt it unnecessary to make most of these distinctions.

A
BBREVIATIONS

L
IST OF
M
APS
AND
D
IAGRAMS

Allied Advance into Germany: April–May 1945

Reich Chancellery

Führerbunker

Junkers Ju 52

Berlin Underground: April 28, 1945

Flight from Berlin: April 28, 1945

Flight from Germany to Spain: April 29, 1945

Type IX U-Boat

Arrival in Argentina: July–August 1945

Postwar Argentina

P
REFACE

WE NEVER WANTED THIS STORY TO BE TRUE.
It was originally intended to be a quixotic but thought-provoking “conspiracy theory” television documentary. However, extensive research in Argentina, Poland, Germany, Great Britain, and the Canary Island of Fuerteventura produced a compelling dossier of details—backed up by the testimonies of many eyewitnesses—that told a completely different story from the accepted “history” of World War II. In the words of Winston S. Churchill, “History is written by the victors.” Never has this been more true than the untold account of Hitler’s escape from the ruins of the Third Reich in April 1945.

The horrifying reality, we believe, is that at the end of World War II the most evil man in the world, Adolf Hitler, escaped from Germany and lived out his life in Argentina—and that his deputy, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, and Heinrich “Gestapo” Müller, a key figure in the planning of the Final Solution, also escaped justice and joined him there. Equally disturbing is the evidence that America and Britain
facilitated the flight of hundreds of erstwhile Nazis
, such as the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and the sadistic torturer Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon. Both were employed by U.S. government agencies in the postwar years while others were allowed to avoid prosecution and flee to the far corners of the world. Even as this book goes to press in the summer of 2011, a ninety-one-year-old Ukrainian, Ivan
“John” Demjanjuk
, has been convicted as an accessory to the murder of 28,060 Jews in the Sobibor death camp in Poland some sixty-eight years after the event. For years he lived a comfortable life as an autoworker for the Ford Motor Company in Cleveland, Ohio, before being extradited to Germany in 2009 for trial as a war criminal.

There is no concrete forensic evidence that it was Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun who died in the Führerbunker—no eyewitness to the moment of death. The famous “Hitler Skull” fragment held in Moscow for decades has finally been DNA-tested. It is that of a woman under the age of forty and it is not Eva Braun. There is also no absolutely accepted forensic evidence for Martin Bormann’s supposed death; in 1998 German officials claimed that a skeleton buried near the Reichstag matched the DNA of an elderly relative of Bormann’s, who remains nameless; the cremated ashes of the remains were scattered at sea. Bormann’s family refused to accept the findings. Meanwhile, the bones found in Müller’s grave, when exhumed in 1963, were found to be those of three other people.

We show for the first time that the “last official pictures of Hitler,” with Artur Axmann and his Hitler Youth on March 20, 1945, are actually of Hitler’s double. Modern science has proved beyond reasonable doubt that the man in the film and still pictures of the event, although bearing a striking resemblance to Hitler, was in fact not him, but one of several doubles. Alf Linney, professor of medical physics at University College London and a noted facial recognition expert witness, reviewed the picture for us and is convinced that it is not Hitler. Hitler was not alone in his use of plausible stand-ins. Stalin had numerous doubles; Churchill at least one. Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery—“Monty”—used one in a successful ruse to mislead the Germans about his movements prior to D-Day in 1944.

Magicians have known the trick for hundreds of years. People expect to see what they are shown. It’s called sleight of hand. Martin Bormann carried out the most incredible trick in history on April 28, 1945. The Reichsleiter replaced Hitler with the double from the March 20 appearance. An actress from Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels’s cinematic “stable” of film actresses—aided by the best makeup artists the Reich could find—stood in for Eva Braun. The look-alikes took their places in the Führerbunker as Hitler and Eva made their escape. Bormann carried on the charade for two days until he was sure that the real Hitler was safe. He then staged the fake double suicide of Hitler and his new bride and then callously had Hitler’s double and his bogus bride murdered, almost certainly by “Gestapo” Müller.

The escape route into the Berlin subway system is still there. There are similar tunnels in London from the cellars of Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street, the residence of the British prime minister, to the London Tube, which would have been used by the British royal family and senior members of the government and military if London had ever fallen to Nazi invaders.

The Associated Press and Reuters reported the testimony of the pilot Peter Baumgart, who flew the couple out of Berlin along with Eva’s brother in-law, Gen. Hermann Fegelein, extensively from Warsaw in 1947. But researchers have ignored this until today. Having worked for both of these illustrious press agencies as a lifelong journalist, Gerrard Williams knows how difficult it is to get copy onto the wire. It passes through many subeditors in an exacting process before it can end up in a newspaper column. Newspapers around the world carried the story, although curiously no one ever followed up with Peter Baumgart and he simply disappeared from history after his release in 1951 from Warsaw’s Mokotów Prison (also known as Rakowiecka Prison).

Historians have preferred to accept the “masterful” account of British historian, Oxford professor, and former intelligence officer Hugh Trevor-Roper, which insists that Hitler committed suicide in the Führerbunker on April 30, 1945. It was vital to the Allied cause that Hitler should be demonstrably dead, to allow a new Germany to emerge from the ashes of the old. Trevor-Roper’s work, which was published in 1947 as a book called
The Last Days of Hitler
, is intrinsically flawed, from the testimony of Hanna Reitsch—“Hitler’s favorite pilot”—who denied ever meeting Trevor-Roper or saying what he quoted of her, to Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, who later stated that he had lied to the Oxford don and had a good laugh every time he saw his lies repeated.
Hitler’s chauffeur, Erich Kempka
, was interrogated repeatedly but subsequently admitted in 1974, “I told American and British interrogators just about anything or everything I thought they wanted to hear.”

Accepted as fact, Trevor-Roper’s book has never been out of print. The acclaimed historian—who in 1983 identified the pathetic “Hitler Diaries” forgeries as real—had created his own sophisticated “forgery.” He had never been given access to those Germans who had been in the bunker and were captured by the Soviets while trying to escape Berlin; these escapees were subsequently held prisoner, some for many years. Similarly, Trevor-Roper received only written accounts from those held by the Americans. All were anxious to save their own skins and invariably related whatever their captors wished to hear—that Hitler was dead.