Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (65 page)

228    
“seeking a secret U-boat”:
Declassified FBI report, Buenos Aires, August 1943.

228    
“Argentine navy carried out antisubmarine operations”:
Salinas and De Napoli,
Ultramar Sur
.

228    
“in a rubber boat”:
Joseph Newman, “Two Mystery Figures Landed by U-boat,”
New York Herald-Tribune
, Buenos Aires, July 14, 1945.

229    
Stanley Ross report:
Overseas News Agency, “U-Boats Base Spy Surge in Latin America,”
Christian Science Monitor
, January 24, 1945.

229    
“Koehn was already back”:
The Associated Press, Montevideo, Uruguay, August 18, 1945.

229    
Colonel Bustos’s recollections:
Ernesto G. Castrillon and Luis Casabal, “Historia Viva Busquedas and Yo Fui Testigo,”
La Nación
, Buenos Aires, March 23, 2008.

230–31 
U-234:
Wolfgang Hirschfield,
The Secret Diary of a U-Boat
, trans. Geoffrey Brooks (London: Cassell, 2000).

231    
“Call off all coastal patrols”:
Salinas and De Napoli,
Ultramar Sur
.

231    
“Along the coast of Patagonia”:
Drew Pearson, Bell Syndicate, July 24, 1945.

232    
Raúl Damonte Taborda:
United Press, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October 20, 1945.

232    
“Not long after the German army was defeated”:
Ernesto Guevara Lynch,
Young Che: Memories of Che Guevara by His Father
, trans. Lucía Álvarez de Toledo (London: Vintage/Random House, 2008.

Chapter 19: T
O
P
ATAGONIA

234    
Descriptions:
Authors’ travels to San Carlos de Bariloche, 2007–8.

234    
Prince Stephan zu Schaumburg-Lippe:
McGaha, “Politics of Espionage.” Prince Stephan is not to be confused with his brother, Prince Friederich Christian, also a committed Nazi, who was an aide to Joseph Goebbels and held rank in the SA.

235    
“Abwehr agents in Turkey”:
Gerald Reitlinger,
The SS: Alibi of a Nation
(London: William Heinemann, 1956).

235    
“Adm. Canaris was hanged”:
Geoff Sullivan and Frode Weierud, “Breaking German Army Ciphers,”
Cryptologia
29, July 2005. The article mentions a four-part message called No. 69, sent at 4:33 p.m. on April 9, 1945, from Walter Huppenkothen. The message was marked
Geheim
(Secret) and was addressed to SS-Gruppenführer Glücks. The article notes: “Glücks [was] kindly requested to immediately inform the chief of Gestapo, SS-Gruppenführer Müller, by telephone, telex or through messenger that his mission has been completed as ordered. The mission he had accomplished was the summary execution of the last prominent members of the German resistance movement connected with the assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944.” SS-Standartenführer Walter Huppenkothen was chief of
Gruppe E–Spionageabwehr
(Group E–counterespionage) in the RSHA department IV, Gestapo. Otto Thorbeck was a legal officer.

236    
“thorough investigation as to Hitler’s whereabouts”:
Drew Pearson, Bell Syndicate, July 24, 1945.

236    
Carmen Torrentuigi:
Television news magazine
La Cornisa
, Channel 7 Argentina, reporter Martin Jáuregui, 2005. In the television piece the crew members are filming a building on the estancia when Angela Soriani, Carmen’s niece, arrives and asks them what they are doing. When they reply that they are filming the house where Hitler was said to have lived, Angela shakes her head and then points to another spot on the estate and says, “He lived there.” The house where the Hitlers had lived was pulled down in the 1980s.

236    
“liver dumplings and squab”:
Ryan Berry,
Hitler: Neither Vegetarian Nor Animal Lover
(New York: Pythagorean, 2004).

237    
“Hitler and Eva Braun stayed in the main house”:
Carmen Torrentuigi via her niece, who said that the staff at the Estancia San Ramón were told that the Hitlers had died in a car crash in March 1946.

237    
“dark-haired, buxom Eva Braun”:
Time
magazine, “Italy: Spring in the Axis,” May 15, 1939,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,761275,00.html
.

237    
“born in San Remo”:
Reuters, Bad Godesburg, Rhineland, January 19, 1946; published in
Baltimore Sun
, January 20, 1946. A German journalist, Bernard Lescrinier, quoted this date and place to a press conference for the launch of his book
Behind the Scenes in the Third Reich
(apparently never actually published). “Fatty” Lescrinier was a notoriously shady character, who fed material mainly to the London
Daily Telegraph
and United Press; according to Michael Tracy, biographer of Sir Hugh Carleton-Greene, Fatty’s value lay in his close contacts with Göring’s circle and the Reich Chancellery. When his story is followed backward, it does not stand up in detail. However, a young man who had followed Eva in the job of studio assistant to Hitler’s “court photographer” Heinrich Hoffman did say that she had a child. This claim was allegedly backed up by Eva Braun’s father, who was quoted as saying, “The important thing is that Hitler will not die now without a successor.”

237    
“three-day trip to Bavaria”:
United Press, Stockholm, June 11, 1945. A former member of the Swedish Legation in Berlin, Erik Wesslen—who said he had been in close contact with Hitler’s headquarters during the siege of the city—believed that the reported marriage of Hitler and Eva in the bunker was to legitimize both a boy and a girl born to Eva during their long relationship. Wesslen said that prominent Germans believed the children to be living in Bavaria with distant relatives of Eva Braun’s mother and that the Hitlers left for a three-day trip to Bavaria on April 8 or 9. Hitler and Eva moved into the Führerbunker on April 12 or 15 (historians differ). There is no historical record to prove or disprove that they were in Berlin between April 8 and 12.

237    
“many happy hours”:
In late fall of 1945, The Associated Press reported that U.S. intelligence officers had found Eva Braun’s “treasure chest,” including “beneath its hoard of jewelry and money, dozens of photographs showing family pictures of her and Adolf Hitler and a mysterious baby girl called Uschi [the diminutive of Ursula],” which were displayed “as normally as they would be in any family album.” See “Americans Find Treasure Chest of Eva Braun,” Frankfurt, published in
St. Petersburg Times
on November 16, 1945,
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=gBIwAAAAIBAJ&sjid=pE4DAAAAIBAJ&pg=4925,2133570&dq=eva+braun%27s+treasure-chest&hl=en
.

On many of the snapshots, which show the little girl from infancy to about three years of age (the last was dated 1944), Eva had handwritten the words, “and here is Uschi again.” Eva’s personal home-movie library was found in 1945. The library is archived at NARA, Record Group 242.2, Motion Pictures Branch, Archives II, and was eventually released commercially on DVD to the public in 2004. The movies feature Uschi on dozens of occasions, with many scenes showing the great affection in which Hitler and Eva held her. After the war there were many theories about who Uschi was, the prevailing view being that she was the daughter of Eva’s best friend Herta Ostermeyer, née Schneider. However, in the newspaper archives there is no mention of the child after this time, and the story seems to have been closed off. Intriguingly, this little girl who features so prominently in Eva’s personal life, photographs, and home movies is not even mentioned by Eva’s biographer Angela Lambert.

238    
“Eva Braun was again pregnant”:
London
Sunday Chronicle
, June 17, 1945.

238    
“a stillborn child in 1943”:
Interview with Eva Braun’s mother, North American Newspaper Alliance, February 18, 1946.

238    
“car crash close to the property”:
La Cornisa
, Channel 7 Argentina, reporter Martin Jáuregui, 2005.

239    
“none of them were submariners”:
Contemporary newspaper reports describe the extra prisoners aboard the
Highland Monarch
as former Nazi diplomats, spies, and other “undesirables” being thrown out of the country under the instructions of Foreign Minister Juan Cooke. Details of the “passengers” on the
Highland Monarch
are contained in Admiralty files ADM 116/ 5474 and 116/ 5475 at The National Archives, Kew, London.

239    
“neuralgic pain”:
North American Newspaper Alliance, New York, March 3, 1947.

239    
“Hitler needed surgery”:
Dr. Otto Lehmann, Hitler’s personal physician, quoted in Jeff Kristenssen (Manuel Monasterio),
Hitler murió en la Argentina.
See note “Petty Officer Heinrich Bethe and Capt. Manuel Monasterio” on page 316.

239    
Gran Hotel Viena:
Authors’ visit to hotel, 2007. While visiting Córdoba and staying at one of the city’s hotels, the author’s interpreter asked for directions to Mar Chiquita. The young receptionist behind the front desk obliged, recommending the saltwater fish available from the inland sea. She then blithely suggested that if we had nothing better to do we should visit the Gran Hotel, where “Hitler and his wife used to stay after the war.”

239    
Max Pahlke:
James Stewart Martin,
All Honorable Men
(Boston: Little and Brown, 1950). Pahlke’s ostensible reason for building the complex at a cost of US$25 million was personal: the eldest of his two children, Máximo Junior, was said to suffer severely from psoriasis, and Pahlke’s wife Melita suffered from asthma. The “cure” was apparently found in the saline waters and therapeutic mud of the Mar Chiquita. The story that the motive for building the facility was a relieved father’s gratitude was contradicted after the war by a family member, who said that young Max had never had the disfiguring skin disease.

240    
“he then left”:
Fernando Jorge Soto Roland, “Hotel Viena,” research paper, January 2010,
http://letras-uruguay.espaciolatino.com/aaa/soto_fernando/gran_hotel_viena_y_el_hotel_baln.htm
. Roland is a professor of history at the University of Mar del Plata. It has been suggested that the hotel was a money-laundering operation for part of the huge amount of Nazi loot that had arrived in Argentina, but this seems illogical. “Laundering” is a process by which “dirty” money becomes “clean” and available again for use. It would make little sense to pour millions into a huge hotel complex in the middle of nowhere and then just leave it to stagnate.