Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (4 page)

There are other much better descriptions of the final days; the account by James O’Donnell in his 1978 book
The Bunker
is a thorough investigative report, with interviews from all the surviving people. But O’Donnell, like Trevor-Roper, was fooled by one thing. The corpses that were said in the accepted “history” to be taken up to the garden and burned were not those of the two main actors in the appalling final death throes of the Third Reich, but their doppelgängers. Hitler’s double was likely an unfortunate stand-in named Gustav Weber, but the name of Eva’s look-alike may never be known. They will go down in history as the world’s unluckiest body doubles.

Stalin never believed Hitler was dead, insisting at the Potsdam Conference on July 17, 1945, that he had escaped—probably to “Spain or Argentina.” Stalin’s top general, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, said on August 6, 1945: “
We found no corpse that could be Hitler’s
.”

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower stated publicly on October 12, 1945,
“There is every
assumption
that Hitler is dead
, but
not a bit of conclusive proof
that he is dead.” He told the Associated Press that “Russian friends” had informed him that they had been “unable to unearth any tangible evidence of his death.” One U.S. senator went as far as offering one million U.S. dollars for proof of Hitler’s death. It has never been claimed.

Uncovering Hitler’s escape has not been simple. Our New York agent, Bill Corsa, gave us what seemed to be the best analogy for this work. He described it as similar to the tracking of an animal; you never get to see all the traces left and sometimes there are gaps where the trail seems to go cold, but if you persevere you will pick it up again until you find the final lair.

For the authors, the trail began in Buenos Aires in Argentina in 2006 and led us later to the windswept beaches of Patagonia and the city of San Carlos de Bariloche in the foothills of the Andes, where, to our amazement, no one we talked to seemed surprised at all that Hitler had lived there after the Nazi defeat in 1945. Prior to this research, two Argentine investigators whom we met, Capt. Manuel Monasterio and Abel Basti, had followed and uncovered trails of many “sightings” of Hitler in Argentina. Capt. Monasterio published his book,
Hitler murío en la Argentina (Hitler Died in Argentina)
, in 1987, and although he admits he made part of it up—to avoid trouble with the Argentine authorities at the time—he insists that the most salient points are true.

Much of Basti’s work is more difficult to accept. Basti’s website and books carry a picture of a man alleged to be Hitler in old age. It was sent to him by an unidentified source who had found it on the Internet. Basti presents this photo as proof of Hitler’s survival. The same expert who spotted the March 20, 1945, fake has checked the photo scientifically for us. Although superficially an aged look-alike, the facial features do not stand up to scrutiny; it is not Hitler. The same is true about a passport alleged by Basti to be that of Martin Bormann. Of Uruguayan origin and issued in Genoa, Italy, it was in the name of Ricardo Bauer—a known alias of Bormann in the postwar era. It carried a thumbprint and a picture of a man who looked superficially like Bormann. We had the print checked against Bormann’s known fingerprints from the Interpol files by a police expert, and we had the picture tested. Neither belonged to Hitler’s faithful right-hand man.

However, video interviews with eyewitnesses filmed in the 1990s while Basti was working for
Ambito Financiero
, one of Argentina’s most respected daily newspapers, are compelling. It is the words of these witnesses, on a tape given to us by the paper’s editorial director Ricardo D’Aloia, that have contributed to the findings published in this book.

In over twenty research trips to Argentina, a beautiful country full of wonderful people, one thing has always surprised us: everyone we spoke to about the possibility of Hitler living there after the war believes it was eminently possible and in many cases definitely true.

It is often dropped into conversation quite innocently. On one investigative trip, we were in the city of Córdoba planning a foray to the dilapidated Hotel Viena on the shores of Mar Chiquita, a large inland salt lake. We asked the young receptionist at our hotel for the best route from Argentina’s second city to Mar Chiquita. Without knowing why we were going to Mar Chiquita, she took our map and politely showed our interpreter the best route to get there. After we had finished with the map, she said to us, “Oh, you must try the fish—it’s sea fish in the middle of Argentina! And then if you’re bored you can visit the Hotel Viena where Hitler and his wife used to stay after the war.”

Similar stories greeted us throughout our trips. On April 20, 2007, we were in San Carlos de Bariloche smoking cigarettes outside the town’s casino. A man in his seventies approached us and asked for a light and then, somewhat incongruously, inquired if we were South African. Explaining that Gerrard was Welsh and Simon English, we asked him where he was from. “Chile,” he replied, explaining that he ran a fish-farming business there. We offered him a cigarette and commented that Bariloche felt very German—there were a lot of German speakers everywhere, much of the food, architecture, and culture was Germanic, and many of the street names were in German. He replied that the place was full of Nazis, particularly tonight, the anniversary of the Führer’s birthday. He should know, he said; his father was the gauleiter (Nazi Party regional leader) of Hamburg, Germany, and when Hitler visited Hamburg he would always stay at their home. With a cheerful auf Wiedersehen, he then walked off into the night. We had scores of similar encounters in the deepest reaches of Patagonia, but that is a story in itself.

There is no proof that Adolf Hitler and his “wife” Eva Braun killed themselves in the bunker, and yet the wider world has always believed this. Not everyone seems to have taken it as fact: the Federal Bureau of Investigation under Director J. Edgar Hoover kept files of reports on every sighting of Hitler into the 1960s; the relevant Argentine ones are to be seen in this book. However, many of the FBI’s files on Hitler and Eva Braun after the war have not been released, and the same is true of those of the British security services. It should be remembered that Bormann’s ruse fooled almost everyone and that Hitler subsequently lived among fellow Nazis and collaborators, many of them also on the run for war crimes. The government of Juan Domingo Perón—and the Peróns themselves—benefited massively from the influx of looted money as well as German experts and scientists. Argentina is a huge country—about the size of the entire United States east of the Mississippi River—and in 1945 there were fewer than 20 million people. Today there are still only 42 million—slightly more than the state of California—approximately 3 million of whom are of German origin. It was easy for Nazis to lose themselves in places where being German was completely normal.

Why did none of the world’s intelligence organizations or the Israeli government continue searching for Hitler? The simplest answer is, “Why bother? He was dead.” To their lasting shame, the
Allied Powers employed numerous Nazi war criminals
for their supposed knowledge of the Red Army and Soviet capabilities in the emerging Cold War of the late 1940s. Men such as Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, were hired by Western intelligence agencies for years after the war: an inconvenient fact that was suppressed for decades. Most proved to be of little value in the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union. Equally troubling, many Nazis were allowed to find new lives in North and South America as well as Australia under government-sponsored emigration schemes in return for their services.

In the case of Israel, the young Jewish state was surrounded by enemies, and its overriding priority was simply survival as a nation. As an indication, the most comprehensive history of Israel’s formidable intelligence services runs to 634 pages, yet only three pages are concerned with
Nazi hunting
in South America. Mossad’s eventual capture of Adolf Eichmann came only after repeated requests from concentration camp survivor
Lothar Hermann
in Argentina, whose daughter had dated one of Eichmann’s sons. Hermann had been trying to get both the German and Israeli governments to investigate for a number of years.
It has now been proved
—after a lengthy court battle in Germany—that the West German intelligence service knew that Eichmann was in Argentina—indeed, knew his address and his pseudonym of Ricardo Klement—as early as 1952, eight years before he was seized and taken to Israel, where he was tried and hanged.

West Germany under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had good reason to remain quiet on the matter. Adenauer’s chief of staff, Hans Globke, had not only helped to draft the 1935 anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws but had also worked with Eichmann in the Department for Jewish Affairs. Any revelations by Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem would have been extremely embarrassing to West Germany, since many other government posts, both federal and local, were held by former Nazis who had been cleared of complicity in the Third Reich after a perfunctory “denazification” program in the late 1940s. Many of the most odious Nazi war criminals had found employment in the CIA-funded and SS-dominated “
Gehlen Organization
,” led by former Nazi general Reinhard Gehlen. Indeed, to the British intelligence services the Gehlen Organization was known as the “Gestapo Boys.” Such an organization had little vested interest in revealing the whereabouts of other high-ranking Nazis around the world. On the front line of the Cold War, what the West Germans knew, so did the United States and Britain. What other details lurk in the still-secret files of the Gehlen Organization, the forerunner of the West German foreign intelligence agency, the BND? We may never know.

If Eichmann could have been a considerable embarrassment, what would the fact of Hitler’s, Bormann’s, and Müller’s survival do to the West? The world was a dangerous place in the days of two diametrically opposed nuclear-armed superpowers, and Argentina was not high on the intelligence-gathering list of the Soviet Union or the United States, let alone Israel. On the other side of the world, away from important “spheres of influence,” Hitler was able to live out his life helped, hidden, and harbored by Perón’s fascist friends and thousands of die-hard Nazis who fled to South America after the war.

But probably the most telling comment in our hunt for Hitler and the U-boats that brought him and his stolen loot to Argentina came from the-then Argentine minister of justice and human rights, Señor Hannibal Fernández. As we left his Buenos Aires ministerial office in 2007 after a lengthy interview, he politely shook our hands and said, “In 1945, in Argentina, anything was possible.” He was right.

I
NTRODUCTION

“Who controls the past controls the future.”

—GEORGE ORWELL,
1984,
1949

There is an old saying in police work that applies to most crimes—“Follow the money.”

When Adolf Hitler returned from the Western Front
to Munich ten days after the Armistice of November 11, 1918, his bank account contained the sum total of 15 marks and 30 pfennigs (pennies)—the equivalent of less than two U.S. dollars. Despite a public persona of austerity and selfless service to Germany, Hitler was the wealthiest man in Europe by 1945. His fortune was based on plunder and extortion. From the earliest days, Hitler attracted monetary contributions from German nationalists and industrialists anxious to counter the threat of communism in the weak and decadent Weimar Republic in the aftermath of World War I. Once Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Germany embarked on a massive rearmament program to reconstruct the German armed forces, denied by the humiliating Treaty of Versailles of 1919 at the conclusion of World War I. Germany soon became an attractive prospect for capitalists in America and Britain keen to make profits and to create a strong Germany as a bulwark in Central Europe against the threat posed by the communist Soviet Union.

For many years, Hitler’s closest and most loyal acolyte was Head of the Party Chancellery and Reichsleiter (Reich leader) Martin Bormann. Since Hitler was totally disinterested in administrative matters, Bormann soon ran the Führer’s day-to-day diary and his personal affairs. As an astute businessman and bureaucrat, Bormann quickly devised numerous schemes to enhance revenues both for the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler himself. Long before today’s soccer and basketball players realized the value of their image rights, Bormann raised a levy on every use of the Führer’s likeness, from posters to postage stamps—Hitler personally obtained several pfennigs for every stamp issued throughout the Third Reich. Similarly, Hitler received a bounty on every ton of steel and barrel of oil produced by the grateful industrialists making fortunes from German rearmament. Both Wall Street and the City of London (London’s financial district) were eager to invest in the resurgent German economy despite the excesses of the Nazi regime, and this collusion continued even after war was declared in September 1939.

The Nazi war machine bulldozed all before it in the victorious days of the blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939–41 that reached from the Atlantic Ocean to the gates of Moscow. Most of the nations of Europe were crushed beneath the Nazi jackboot and the tracks of the all-powerful panzers. Once occupied, these countries were unmercifully plundered of their wealth and cultural heritage to feed the coffers of Nazi Germany and satisfy the greed of its corrupt leadership. Between them, Adolf Hitler and Field Marshal Hermann Göring acquired the most extensive and valuable art collections of any individuals ever in history. Similarly, the national treasuries of the occupied countries were looted of their gold bullion and coinage to pay for the raw materials necessary to sustain Germany’s war effort. First and foremost, the Nazi Party was a criminal organization and its hierarchy acquired much of this wealth for its own dubious ends, let alone the gold and money extracted from the victims of the Holocaust before they were butchered in the gas chambers of the death camps. Large quantities of gold and precious gems were processed through the neutral countries of Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain, with considerable individual fortunes secreted in the numbered accounts of Swiss banks. There is an old German saying that “
Money does not bring happiness
unless you have it in a Swiss bank.”