Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (45 page)

“Schmidt’s” childhood memory was of three small neighborhoods widely spread out in a big, beautiful valley. In a solemn voice, his father told them that the place they had arrived at was called “Adolf Hitler’s Valley” and that the neighborhoods were called respectively Deutschland (Germany), Heimat (loosely, Homeland), and Vaterland (Fatherland). Schmidt recalled his father telling him that German submarines had come to Argentina carrying the immense treasures of the Third Reich and that other treasures captured by the SS during the conquests of Europe had come by various different means. The family moved into a big, attractive house with a garden in the Heimat community. After the hunger of postwar Germany, they led an “almost luxurious life”—the family even had a servant, an old SS subordinate of his father’s who took care of all the work in the garden and the house.

Heinrich Bethe also lived in the Center and
described his more modest dwelling
as “a small typical local cabin, it had one big room which served as a bedroom and living room, a small hearth, and all that was apparently needed to live comfortably in that area. On the left side was a bathroom and on the right a small room designed for keeping personal belongings.” Bethe was allocated one of several offices off a corridor in one of the larger houses. The “quartermaster general” had his center of operations in the Center’s main building, where sixteen people worked looking after the facilities and the grounds; nine Germans, three Chileans, and four Argentines.

“Schmidt” was
sent to the German school
in San Carlos de Bariloche. On the classroom walls there were portraits of Hitler, swastikas, and other decorations; it reminded the boy of his old school in Munich during the time of the Third Reich. All the students, regardless of age, had to join a youth organization. Although it was not called the Hitler Youth, it seemed very much like that paramilitary group to the young Schmidt. He recalled that he enjoyed the meetings, the marches, the drums, the military instruction, the war games, and the training with different firearms, all of which were pursued with an almost religious fervor. The discipline was severe, and youngsters were beaten for breaking the rules, poor grades, or a lazy attitude. There were lessons about the Third Reich and Hitler’s activities, and everything was illustrated with films, slides, and photographs. The school had a “splendid” library that contained many copies of
Mein Kampf
, Hitler’s and Goebbels’s speeches, Rosenberg’s books, annuals, old copies of the weekly Nazi propaganda newspaper
Das Reich
, and other Nazi books published during Hitler’s time or secretly in West Germany after the war. The children were told that the Center was a small piece of the Third Reich, a haven where one day the struggle for a new and great Germany would begin, where the survivors would begin to seek vengeance for the lost war. “We were educated as the avengers who would continue the work of our fathers.” His schoolmates secretly told him that their fathers had also been in the SS or Gestapo or had held other important positions in the Third Reich, but they were not allowed to reveal their true surnames or ask others about theirs.

Nobody lived outside the valley; the members of the community grew most of their own food, and anything else they needed was brought in from the outside, from the nearby towns of San Carlos de Bariloche and San Martín de los Andes. Philip Hamburger told a similar tale in the
New Yorker
:

Once a month the gates of the estancia swing open and
a large black truck
races down the driveway, careens onto the main road and heads for the main hamlet many miles distant, where a dozen stalwart blond men hop down and wander through the streets for ten or fifteen minutes, purchasing a bite to eat here and a trinket there. Then they hop into the truck and race back to the estancia.

IN 1946
,
“ADOLF HITLER’S VALLEY”
was controlled by a mass murderer and wanted war criminal, SS and Police Gen. Ludolf von Alvensleben, known to his friends as “Bubi” (Little Boy). Born in 1901, Alvensleben came from the Prussian officer class and fought as a hussar at the end of World War I. After he became a Nazi Party member of the Reichstag in 1933, his rise was rapid: he commanded the 46th SS Regiment in Dresden the following year and became senior adjutant to Reichsführer-SS Himmler. During the war, he commanded SS and police units in the Crimea, and as commander of the Selbstschutz paramilitary forces in occupied western Poland he presided over mass executions and other atrocities. Married with four children, Alvensleben also fathered at least one illegitimate child as part of Himmler’s “Lebensborn” program to breed a master race—Himmler was the “godfather” to Alvensleben’s illegitimate son. Captured by the British in April 1945, Alvensleben walked out of his prison later that year while the guards at Neuengamme internment camp in Hamburg were celebrating Christmas.
He fled with his family
down the Vatican-organized ratlines through Italy (see
Chapter 21
), arriving in Argentina early in 1946. President Perón and his “Blessed Evita” would welcome many such mass murderers to the Nazi home away from home among the lakes and mountains of Patagonia.

THE HITLERS MOVED INTO
INALCO, THEIR NEW MANSION
, after returning from holiday at Casino in Brazil in June 1947. Inalco Mansion is located in what had been plot number eight of the Nahuel Huapí agricultural colony, planned at the beginning of the twentieth century. The area was almost inaccessible until the 1960s, when the road that crosses the Andes into Chile was built. The area between San Carlos de Bariloche and Villa La Angostura in Río Negro province looks and feels distinctly European—specifically, Bavarian. It is an area of outstanding natural beauty, with snow-capped mountains and several lakes set amid mile after mile of untouched forest.

A short distance from the international border with Chile, at the very furthest end of Lake Nahuel Huapí, Inalco is almost hidden from view from the lake by two small islands. The offshoot of the lake where the house was built is called Última Esperanza or “Last Hope,” since it was believed by early explorers to be the last hope of finding a water-borne route through to Chile. In the 1940s and ’50s, Inalco was easily accessible only by boat or seaplane. One regular visitor, who was said to take Hitler on regular trips to meetings in the area, was a pilot coincidentally named Frederico Fuhrer, whose Grumman Goose seaplane was often tied up at the concrete jetty to the left of the main house’s lawn. In the
boathouse next to the jetty
was Hitler’s personal motorboat.

A ten-bedroom mansion, Inalco is a typical example of the style of famed Argentine architect Alejandro Bustillo, who openly acknowledged the influence of Albert Speer’s work. Known colloquially as “Perón’s favorite architect,” Bustillo had designed the Llao Llao Hotel complex in San Carlos de Bariloche in 1939, and in mid- or late 1943 he was commissioned, almost certainly by Ludwig Freude, to work on a future home for Hitler. The mansion looks out on Lake Nahuel Huapí and the Andes—a stunning panorama of water, forest, and snow-capped mountains that rivals Obersalzberg. It is difficult to imagine a more beautiful alpine setting nor one that was so far beyond the reach of any but the most determined intruder. At the time, the house was accessible by motor vehicle only after an arduous journey
along unmade roads and tracks
from the nearest township, Villa La Angostura (as described by both “Schmidt” and Bethe). Lookout points were dotted around the neighboring forested hills, guarding the air and water approaches to the property. One puzzling aspect—considering how expensive the mansion must have been to build in the 1940s, and what a major task it must have been to bring the building materials to such an isolated location—was that its position, surrounded by hills and native towering trees, left it in constant shadow, never in direct sunlight.

Behind the house was a huge underground fuel tank that powered the electrical generators for the valley, and to one side a mound,
now covered with trees
, shows evidence of underground chambers and ventilation shafts. Heinrich Bethe’s account of the Center described
underground steel-lined chambers
beneath the offices, where the “most important and sinister documents of that century” were kept. In 2008, the
caretaker on the property
warned that the mound was dangerous and kept collapsing in on itself. He said that when he first took over the job at Estancia Inalco he had to attend an interview at a local house where the property manager lived, and he remembered two massive bronze plaques decorated with swastikas on the wall of the main hall.

As well as the main house,
Bustillo also designed
and built a pastiche of a medieval-style watchtower at Peninsula San Pedro called the “Saracen tower” by locals; invisible from the main road, it can be seen only from the waters of Lake Nahuel Huapí or from the air. From the top of the tower a watchful observer could see virtually the whole lake and any aircraft or boats approaching Inalco from the Argentine side. Omar Contreras, a former journalist who is now the minister of tourism for Río Negro province, remembered visiting this tower as a young boy with his father at the end of the 1960s; Contreras senior worked for SS Col. Friedrich “Fritz” Lantschner’s construction company. Contreras remembered being surprised when he saw the tower; he thought it was a castle, and beyond it he could see Lake Nahuel Huapí. A tall, fair-haired German chatted with his father and took them into the tower; Contreras thought he was
Friedrich Lantschner
. The hall had a double wooden door leading to a big room. Being a curious boy, Contreras walked through, and he remembered being surprised at seeing a number of Nazi flags inside—he recognized them from war comics. Back in the main room, he saw a group of about ten people talking in what he thought was German. In the car on the way home, he asked his father about the flags, but his father replied, “We do not talk about that.”

INALCO WAS
HITLER’S MAIN RESIDENCE
from June 1947 until October 1955, and it was here that the former Kriegsmarine petty officer, Heinrich Bethe, was to become his closest servant. For Eva and her young daughters, living at Inalco was at first idyllic; during the summers they swam in the ice-cold waters of the lake, and in the winter enjoyed the skiing at the nearby mountain resort Cerro Catedral. In the early years, President Perón would visit too, skiing and climbing in the mountains with his Nazi friends from the
Club Andino Bariloche
, a mountaineering association set up in 1931 by Otto Meiling.

Hitler was in congenial company at the Center and on his regular trips to San Carlos de Bariloche; the town was home to hundreds of Nazis after World War II. A small yellow-brick building in the town center housed a delicatessen once owned by SS Capt. Erich Priebke, who was also chairman of the board of governors of the city’s most prestigious German private school, Primo Capraro. (In 1996, after intense international pressure, Argentina finally extradited him. At the time of this writing in 2010, Priebke was serving a life sentence in Italy for his role in the massacre of 335 Italians at the Ardeatine caves in Rome on March 24, 1944.) Across the road from Priebke’s delicatessen was the Club Andino Bariloche. Its membership from the late 1940s included the famous Stuka pilot Col. Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the Luftwaffe’s most highly decorated ace and a close confidant of Hitler, as well as Friedrich Lantschner and his brother Gustav.

The town was also home for many years to an Austrian SS sergeant named
Josef Schwammberger
, a noted sadist who was eventually convicted of killing thirty-four victims personally and being directly responsible for the deaths of 274 others in the Polish ghetto and camp at Przemysl. (Argentina finally agreed to his extradition in 1987; found guilty of murder by a West German court in 1992, he died in prison in 2004.) At the town hall, the “Angel of Death” Dr. Josef Mengele, the SS captain notorious for his medical experiments at Auschwitz, had to take his driving test twice in the 1940s. Others who lived in or visited the area at various dates included SS Lt. Col. Adolf Eichmann, the functionary who made Reinhard Heydrich’s “Final Solution” a reality; SS Capt. Eduard Roschmann, christened “the Butcher of Riga”; SS Capt. Aribert Heim, Mauthausen concentration camp’s own “Dr. Death”; and Martin Bormann himself. None of them except Eichmann were ever caught, and he only when he returned to live in the Argentine capital and became more accessible to his hunters.

President Juan Perón explained
: “When the war was over, some useful Germans helped us build our factories and make the best use of what we had, and in time they were able to help themselves too.”

IN 1947
,
WITH HITLER AND HIS FAMILY SECURE
under the watchful eyes of senior SS officers and with Perón newly sworn in as president, Martin Bormann began to conclude his clandestine work in Europe. He was ready for his own final move to the south. One last meeting in Europe would seal his pact with the Peróns.

Chapter 21