Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (43 page)

IN 1945, THE GERMANS HAD COMPLETE CONTROL
over access to San Carlos de Bariloche and the Estancia San Ramón. No one got in or out of the area without express permission from the senior Nazis in the area. On July 24, Drew Pearson had written in his syndicated column,

It may take a long time to find out whether Hitler and his bride Eva Braun escaped to Patagonia. The country is a series of vast Nazi-owned ranches where German is spoken almost exclusively and where Hitler could be hidden easily, and successfully for years. The ranches in this southern part of Argentina cover thousands of acres and have been under Nazi [note: there were Germans in the area long before the Nazis dominated] management for generations. It would have been impossible for any non-German to penetrate the area to make a
thorough investigation as to Hitler’s whereabouts
.

The staff at the isolated San Ramón estate had been busy for days since being given advance warning of the impending arrival of important guests. The arrival of a security team of
Admiral Graf Spee
sailors a week before had already added to the staff’s workload, and two new faces had joined the weekly shopping trip into San Carlos de Bariloche to ensure that no gossip betrayed the guests’ presence. The cook at San Ramón,
Carmen Torrentuigi
, would have been thoroughly briefed on her guests’ dietary requirements. Her rightly famed “Cordero Patagónico,” Patagonian lamb
,
was off the menu for the time being, as were many of the other meats from the traditional Argentine “asado” or barbecue. The menu was to be heavy on vegetables, but with classic German dishes like
liver dumplings and squab
(baby pigeon).
She was to find out later that that was “his favorite” of the many meals she would prepare for him and the woman who was soon to be his wife.
The Germans on the estate had taken the official news of Hitler’s “death” with an air of calm disbelief; it was with little surprise that Carmen, dressed in a clean starched apron over her homespun clothes, was introduced to the guests before supper.

Hitler and Eva Braun stayed in the main house
at San Ramón for nine months. Contact with Martin Bormann, who was still on the move in Europe, was infrequent, but his “Organization” in Argentina was finalizing security plans for the couple’s permanent residence. This more private and secure refuge was nearing completion; named Inalco, it was fifty-six miles from San Ramón, on the Chilean border near Villa Angostura.

URSULA, EVA’S DAUGHTER BY HITLER
, arrived at the Estancia San Ramón in September 1945. The six-year-old Ursula, nicknamed “Uschi,” had sailed first-class from Spain; her uncle Hermann Fegelein met her off the ship in Buenos Aires and brought her to join her parents, flying into the airstrip on the hillside above the ranch on the same Curtiss Condor they had used.
Uschi’s existence had been kept strictly secret from the German people, as indeed had her parents’ relationship, although the rest of the world knew about Hitler and Eva as early as May 15, 1939, when
Time
magazine gave details of how “
dark-haired, buxom Eva Braun
, 28, had her apartment rent paid, as usual, by her old friend in Berlin.… To her friends Eva Braun confided that she expected her friend [Adolf Hitler] to marry her within a year.” It was not to be. Hitler believed that his grip on the public mind depended upon his being seen as wholly dedicated to Germany’s destiny. The child was said to have been
born in San Remo
, Italy, on New Year’s Eve 1938. Her parents had not seen her since April 11, 1945, the last day of a secret
three-day trip to Bavaria
to visit Uschi for what they had both thought might be the last time. Hitler’s double Gustav Weber would have covered for the Führer while the couple slipped away. Brought up largely by distant relatives of Eva’s mother, the blonde-haired little girl had spent
many happy hours
at Berchtesgaden playing with Gitta, the daughter of Eva’s childhood friend Herta Schneider, and was photographed and filmed extensively. After the war, she was variously described as Gitta Schneider’s sister or Hermann Fegelein and Gretl Braun Fegelein’s daughter—yet their only child, Eva, was born after the war ended. Uschi was neither. In 1945, she may have already spoken basic Spanish;
in 1943, Bormann would have arranged for both her and her caregivers (her “family”) to be issued with Spanish documents, and on his instructions the “family” had spent much of 1944 learning the language.

When Uschi arrived in Argentina in September 1945,
Eva Braun was again pregnant
—“as a last mission for Hitler”—having conceived in Munich in March 1945. The couple was still unmarried, and rumors of her pregnancy had been rife among the people in the bunker. (It was in fact her third pregnancy; she had had
a stillborn child in 1943
. August Schullten, gynecologist and chief physician of the Krankenhausen Links, a hospital in Munich, attended. He died in a car crash later that same year.) With the family now safe in Argentina, and with Eva’s brother-in-law Hermann Fegelein on hand to give her away, the private Catholic chapel at San Ramón would have made a perfect place for the couple’s real marriage. (The doubles allegedly “married” in the bunker on April 29, 1945—over twenty-four hours after the real couple fled from Berlin. There were no surviving witnesses to the ceremony except for Bormann.)

In March 1946, the San Ramón estate employees were called to a meeting and told that their guests had been tragically killed in a
car crash close to the property
. They were warned never to discuss the matter again. The trail in Patagonia was to go cold; not only were Hitler and Braun “dead” in the Berlin bunker, but now they were “dead” again in Argentina. If anyone managed to follow the Hitlers to Argentina, all they would find were more stories of corpses burned beyond recognition, this time in an automobile accident.

THE BRITISH AND U.S. GOVERNMENTS
had put intense pressure on the Argentine authorities to repatriate to Germany all remaining members of the
Admiral Graf Spee
crew—those who had not escaped or disappeared—whether or not they had married local women. On February 16, 1946, the British troopship RML
Highland Monarch
, escorted by HMS
Ajax
(one of the Royal Navy cruisers that had driven the
Admiral Graf Spee
into Uruguayan waters in December 1939), arrived first in Buenos Aires, and then in Montevideo, to ship the German sailors home. The Argentine authorities turned over about nine hundred identity books (military identification papers) in a couple of mailbags. The boarding was chaotic, the
Highland Monarch
was ordered to sea as soon as possible, and no one had the time to check the papers against the individuals who had embarked. Despite the Allies’ insistence, many officers and men of the “pocket battleship” had simply disappeared into Argentina. It was only on the long voyage to Germany that the documents and men were cross-referenced. Rumor had it that among them were eighty-six U-boat crewmen, whose presence in Argentina the Argentine, U.S., and British authorities were supposedly at a loss to explain, since the crews of the surrendered U-530 and U-977 had already been repatriated via the United States. In fact, documents in the British National Archives prove that the British identified everyone on the
Highland Monarch
, and
none of them were submariners
—so the fate of the men from the other three boats, U-880, U-1235 and U-518, remains undocumented.

THE “STAUFFENBERG BOMB”
of July 20, 1944, had injured Hitler more extensively than the Nazi propaganda machine had made public. The deep cold of the Patagonian winter now contributed to his “rheumatism” and he suffered from inflamed joints and stiffness in his right hand, but more distressing was the fact that the surgeons had been unable to remove all the oak splinters that had sprayed from the table that saved his life. The constant pressure from an oak fragment lodged deep in the nasal bones between his eyes caused him acute
neuralgic pain
during the stay at Estancia San Ramón.
Hitler needed surgery
.

Since it was judged too much of a security risk for him to attend a hospital in Buenos Aires, he and Eva traveled north to the province of Córdoba and the Nazi hospital and health spa at the
Gran Hotel Viena
, at Miramar on the Mar Chiquita lake. The Gran Hotel Viena was built by an Abwehr agent, an early Nazi Party member named
Max Pahlke
, between 1943 and 1945—the same period as the construction of Villa Winter on Fuerteventura and the extension of the airfield at San Carlos de Bariloche. Pahlke, the capable manager of the Argentine branch of the German multinational Mannesmann, had acquired Argentine citizenship in the 1930s, but was well known to the Allies for his espionage work in South America.

The building contained eighty-four rooms, a medical facility staffed by doctors, nurses, and massage therapists, a large swimming pool, a library, and a dining room that seated two hundred. Every room had air conditioning and heating, granite floors, walls lined with imported Carrara marble, and bronze chandeliers. The facilities included a bank, a wine cellar, a food warehouse, a bakery, a slaughterhouse, an electricity generating plant, and garages with their own fuel supply. Of the seventy hotel employees, only twelve were locals from Miramar, all of whom worked outside the facility and had no contact with hotel guests. The remaining fifty-eight employees were either from Buenos Aires or from Germany, and all spoke German. In addition to a modern telephone system that connected guests with the rest of the world, the Gran Hotel Viena also had a tall telecommunications antenna on the seventy-foot-high water tower. This vantage point, and a further tower just down the coast, enabled watchful guards to spot any approach to the hotel by land, water, or air.

The tiny market town of Miramar was a strange location for a huge, state-of-the-art hotel and spa complex, miles away from any major roads or other commercial routes. Pahlke, known for his business sense, had built Mannesmann Argentina into a massively profitable business. Pahlke supervised the opening of the hotel from December 1945 to March 1946;
he then left
. A former German army colonel named Carl Martin Krueger, the Viena’s “chief of security,” was put in charge. An immaculate figure known locally as “The Engineer,” Krueger had arrived in Miramar in 1943. He did everything to make
the Hitlers’ stay at the medical facility
as comfortable as possible; they had an exclusive suite complete with AH-monogrammed blankets, sheets, towels, and dishes.

With many local supporters, Hitler and his wife often took day-trips to Balnearia, a town some three miles from Mar Chiquita, to take tea. He had his photograph taken with other senior Nazis and would sign copies of
Mein Kampf
for well-wishers. One witness to these mundane encounters said that Hitler was often “
lost in thought
” and would say, “Now, I am far from here.” The Hitlers enjoyed their stay at the exclusive, luxurious waterside hotel. One of his bodyguards recalled that the couple would regularly walk along the shore, Hitler commenting on the
wonderful sunsets
. The operation to remove the splinters at first seemed to be successful, but the pain in Hitler’s face
would return to plague him
in later life.

In February 1946, Juan Domingo Péron was finally voted into untrammeled power as president of Argentina, which must have eased any latent fears of pursuit on the part of some of the fugitive Nazis. During the late 1940s, Hitler himself would move fairly freely between strategic points in Argentina, around a triangle based on San Carlos de Bariloche; the home of his friends and early financial backers, the Eichhorns, at La Falda; and Mar Chiquita. He owned
huge tracts of land
in all three areas.

MEANWHILE, MARTIN BORMANN WAS STILL IN EUROPE
, controlling the network in Argentina from afar. He was in regular contact with Ludwig Freude through the portable T43 encryption system. He also made good use of his wide-ranging contacts, most importantly inside the Vatican, to advance his own plans for exile. After his abortive trip to Flensburg in May 1945 (see end of
Chapter 15
), Bormann had hidden in the Bavarian hills for five months before risking a visit to the old Nazi heartland of Munich, the Bavarian capital. J. A. Friedl, a former Nazi Party member and senior sergeant of Munich police who had known Bormann since the early days,
saw him there in October 1945
. Friedl recollected that Bormann had been “with some other men in a car, parked in front of the Spanish Consulate.” When Friedl approached the car and greeted his old comrade, they chatted briefly; Bormann told Friedl that he was trying to arrange a visa to enter Spain.

Bormann stayed in Munich until July 1946, when he was spotted again, this time by a man who held no love for him. Jakob Glas, a disgruntled former chauffeur of Bormann’s—who had been fired in a disagreement over stolen garden vegetables from the Führer’s personal Berchtesgaden plot—also
saw his old boss in a car
, riding in the front seat next to the driver. The car was moving slowly, and Glas got a good look at Bormann; he was dressed in ordinary, rather shabby civilian clothes. According to the associated press, Glas said, “There were some other men with him, but I didn’t get a close look at them. I was too busy staring after Bormann.” Glas’s report prompted the U.S. Army to mount a house-to-house search for Bormann, but without success. He returned to his personal “Alpine Redoubt,” where he was protected by two hundred former members of the Waffen-SS (see
Chapter 21
). Toward the end of the summer of 1947, it was time for Bormann to get on the move again.