Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (36 page)

A VIEW OF the front of the Berghof, Adolf Hitler’s estate in Obersalzberg, Berchtesgaden, Upper Bavaria, Germany, c. 1938. Note the similarity in design to Inalco.

Hitler’s main residence in Patagonia between 1947 and 1955. Built in 1943, parts of Inalco are modeled on the Berghof.

BUILT BY THE same architect as Inalco, the Saracen Tower on Lake Nahuel Huapí guarded the air and water routes to Hitler’s home. While the Saracen Tower overlooked the lake itself, there was a series of
refugio
[literally “refuges”] situated in the mountain passes from Chile and in the hills above San Carlos de Bariloche. These mountain chalets controlled every avenue of approach to “Adolf Hitler’s Valley.” One
refugio
above Bariloche was named the Berghof after Hitler’s home in the Bavarian Alps, and it was there that Juan Domingo Perón often came to ski with the Nazi members of the Club Andino Bariloche.

THE “ARCHITECT OF the Holocaust,” Adolf Eichmann, escaped from American custody early in 1946 and, with the help of Bishop Alois Hudal, sailed for Argentina on a Red Cross passport on July 14, 1950. For the next ten years, he lived openly as Ricardo Klement (see identity card, above) and ultimately worked as a foreman at the Mercedes Benz factory in Buenos Aires. On May 11, 1960, Israeli secret agents kidnapped him in a suburb of Buenos Aires and took him to Jerusalem, where he was tried in 1961. On May 31, 1962, Eichmann was hanged and cremated, and his ashes discarded outside Israeli territorial waters.

KNOWN AS “The Angel of Death” for his vile medical experiments on prisoners, particularly on twins and dwarves, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Josef Mengele was one of thousands of Nazis who escaped justice after the war and settled in South America. There he acted as an illegal abortionist, living in San Carlos de Bariloche in Patagonia (where he failed his driving test twice) and Buenos Aires, before fleeing to Paraguay after Eichmann’s kidnapping. Using various names from José Mengele to Wolfgang Gehard, he subsequently lived in Brazil where he died on February 7, 1979, while swimming in the sea. He is shown here during the 1970s in Brazil eating with an unidentified woman (on left), sitting across from an unidentified man and his maid Elza Gulpian de Oliveira. De Oliveira, who worked for Mengele for several years, testified that she knew him as “Mister Pedro.”

PRESIDENT JUAN PERóN and his wife Eva are seen here with Rodolfo Freude, Perón’s private secretary and intelligence coordinator, in October 1946, several months after Perón took office. Freude’s father, Ludwig, was the de facto Nazi ambassador in Argentina and in control of the massive fortune sent by Bormann, much of which was acquired by the Peróns for their own use. The Peróns also made large amounts of money from the indiscriminate sale of immigration visas that allowed many wanted Nazi war criminals to escape justice in Europe and make a new life in Argentina after the war.

SHOWN HERE IN 1994, Catalina Gomero was the housemaid—and virtual adopted daughter—of the Eichhorn family. She waited on Hitler at their home in La Falda, in Cordoba Province in 1949. She said that his visit was “kept very, very secret.” She also saw Hitler with the Eichhorns at their mountain retreat, El Castillo, that same year.

HERNáN ANCIN, Croatian dictator Ante Paveli?’s carpenter, shown in 1995. He met the Hitlers five times in Mar del Plata between September 1953 and October 1954. He described Hitler as “very polite” and said Eva Hitler seemed to have “suffered a great deal.”

RETIRED POLICEMAN Jorge Colotto, Juan Domingo Perón’s personal bodyguard, in a 2009 photograph. He saw Bormann in 1954 when the Brown Eminence met with Perón. Colotto was entrusted with the task of taking an envelope of cash from Perón every month to the Hotel Plaza in central Buenos Aires, to pay for Bormann’s expenses.

Chapter 17