Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (66 page)

240    
“the Hitlers’ stay at the medical facility”:
Conversations between authors’ researcher (anonymous) and Mrs. M., Argentina, 2008. Mrs. M. was a visitor to the hotel who said she met the Hitlers numerous times after the war. Mrs. M. agreed to ask friends if they had kept photographs of the Führer from after the war. After making some enquiries, she received a telephone call from an unknown man. He said that “the Gestapo were still active,” threatened her life, and told her that curiosity was dangerous since “she” was still alive—the “she” being Eva Hitler. Mrs. M. has refused to speak to us since. We must presume that during this visit the Hitlers left both Ursula and her infant sister in the care of others at San Carlos de Bariloche.

240    
“lost in thought”:
Ibid.

241    
“wonderful sunsets”:
Researcher’s conversations with Claudio Correa, Argentina, 2008.

241    
“would return to plague him”:
Dr. Otto Lehmann, quoted by Kristenssen (Manuel Monasterio),
Hitler murió en la Argentina.

241    
“huge tracts of land”:
Researcher’s conversations with Mrs. M., Argentina, 2008.

241    
“saw him there in October 1945”:
Meskil,
Hitler’s Heirs.

241    
“saw his old boss in a car”:
The Associated Press, Nuremberg, July 29, 1946.

242    
“Frenchman claimed”:
Letter to Director Hoover, FBI, from Los Angeles bureau, June 5, 1947; see page 293.

242    
“more detail”:
Letter, EX 39, from Director Hoover, FBI, to Legal Attaché, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, dated July 9, 1947.

246    
“even more positive”:
Report marked “Secret—Air Courier from Legal Attaché, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Director Hoover,” dated August 6, 1947. Released FBI files are available from
http://vault.fbi.gov/adolf-hitler
.

Chapter 20: A
DOLF
H
ITLER
’
S
V
ALLEY

247    
“Donitz had declared”:
Bar-Zohar
, The Avengers.

247    
“The following year Dönitz told”:
Tim Swartz,
Evil Agenda of the Secret Government
(New Brunswick, NJ: Global Communications, 1999).

247    
“The region extends”:
Authors’ travels through Chilean and Argentine Patagonia, 2007–8.

247–48 
“barren, wind-swept … other-planetary”:
Philip Hamburger, “Winds across the Pampas,”
New Yorker
, December 1948.

249    
Schmidt’s” account:
Quoted from “Hitler’s Valley in Argentina,” in the Polish weekly news magazine
Przekrój
, March 1995.

249    
“described by Heinrich Bethe”:
Kristenssen (Manuel Monasterio),
Hitler murió en la Argentina.

249    
“Martin Bormann’s hideout in Patagonia”:
Manning
, Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile
.

249    
“Adolf Hitler’s Valley”:
“Hitler’s Valley,”
Przekrój
magazine.

250    
“described his more modest dwelling”:
Kristenssen (Manuel Monasterio),
Hitler murió en la Argentina.

250    
“sent to the German school”:
“Hitler’s Valley,”
Przekrój
magazine.

251    
“a large black truck”:
Hamburger, “Winds across the Pampas.”

251    
“He fled with his family”:
BBC Television documentary “Children of the Master Race,” part of the series
The Last Nazis
, Minnow Films, London, broadcast 2010. Various halfhearted attempts were made by the West German government to extradite Alvensleben on charges of murdering 4,247 people in the autumn of 1939. These approaches were spurned by the Argentine government, and the SS general lived undisturbed in Argentina until his death in 1970.

252    
“Inalco, their new mansion”:
Abel Basti,
Bariloche Nazi: Sitios históricos relacianados al Nationalsocialismo
(San Carlos de Bariloche, Argentina, privately published, 2005); Burnside,
El escape de Hitler
.

252    
“boathouse next to the jetty”:
Authors’ research trips to Inalco, Bariloche, and Villa La Angostura, 2007–8, including Argentine Civil Aviation records.

253    
“along unmade roads and tracks”:
“Hitler’s Valley,”
Przekrój
magazine; Kristenssen (Manuel Monasterio),
Hitler murió en la Argentina
.

253    
“now covered with trees”:
Authors’ multiple visits to Inalco, 2007–8.

253    
“underground steel-lined chambers”:
Authors’ conversations with “Jeff Kristenssen” (Manuel Monasterio), Buenos Aires, 2007–8.

253    
“caretaker on the property”:
“Hitler’s Valley,”
Przekrój
magazine.

253    
“Bustillo also designed”:
for Alejandro Bustillo, see biography in
Revista arquitectura Andina
4,
http://www.arquitecturaandina.com.ar/anterior.php
. The “Saracen tower”: Researcher conversation with Río Negro province minister of tourism Omar Contreras, Buenos Aires, 2008.

253    
Friedrich Lantschner:
Joachim Lilla,
Statisten in Uniform: Die Mitglieder des Reichstages 1933–1945
(Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 2004); Andreas Schulz and Günter Wegmann,
Die Generale der Waffen-SS und der Polizei, Band 1
(Bissendorf: Biblio-Verlag, 2003); Ruth Bettina Birn
, Die Höheren SS- und Polizeiführer: Himmlers Vertreter im Reich und in den besetzten Gebieten
(Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1986). Lantschner, implicated for his involvement in the 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms against the Jews, was a senior Nazi Party official in the Tyrol. In 1945 he fled with his brother Gustav (“Guzzi”—a silver medalist at the 1936 Winter Olympics) along the Vatican ratline run by Cardinal Alois Hudal. Installed in San Carlos de Bariloche, Lantschner set up a thriving building business to which the Perón regime awarded many government contracts.

254    
“Hitler’s main residence”:
Kristenssen (Manuel Monasterior),
Hitler murió en la Argentina.
As part of our research in 2008, Capt. Monasterio asked the widow of an old friend, Oswaldo R., if she had kept any of her husband’s papers. Oswaldo, a key figure in the ratline operation based in Genoa, had once shown Monasterio a postwar letter from Martin Bormann thanking him for his help. Monasterio’s and Oswaldo’s wives had been friends and neighbors for years, living next to each other in a small town in the province of Chubut in Patagonia. Mrs. R. agreed to look for the papers. That night the eighty-three-year-old Monasterio received a telephone call from an unknown man, who threatened to kill him and his family and burn down his home unless he dropped this line of enquiry. When Monasterio tried to contact Mrs. R. the next day, he was told that she had gone overseas, to Germany. Capt. Monasterio’s book exposed him to a number of death threats over the years; he has also been interviewed by the FBI.

254    
Club Andino Bariloche:
Authors’ visits to San Carlos de Bariloche, 2007–8. See Seamus Mirodan, “Nazis’ Argentine Village Hide-Out Pulls in Tourists,” London
Daily Telegraph
, February 14, 2004,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/argentina/1454352/Nazis-Argentine-village-hide-out-pulls-in-tourists.html
.

254–55 
Josef Schwammberger:
The Associated Press, Berlin, December 3, 2004; see also
www.holocaustresearchproject.org/ghettos/przemysl.html
.

255    
“President Juan Perón explained”:
Authors’ visits to San Carlos de Bariloche. See Mirodan, “Nazis’ Argentine Village Hide-Out.”

Chapter 21: G
REEDY
A
LLIES
, L
OYAL
F
RIENDS

256    
“Evita was accompanied by”:
“Wiesenthal Says Evita Likely Stashed Nazi Loot,” Reuters, June 26, 1997, published in
Página 12
newspaper, Buenos Aires;
U.S. News & World Report
, “Cry for Them, Argentina, Nazi Loot from Holocaust Victims Enriched Eva Perón,” November 15, 1999; Chesnoff,
Pack of Thieves
. See also Nicholas Fraser and Marysa Navarro,
Evita: The Real Life of Eva Perón
(London: Andre Deutsch, 2003; New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).

256    
Alberto Dodero:
Time
magazine, “Abdication of a Tycoon,” May 16, 1949,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,853719,00.html
. See also Jane Shuter,
Aftermath of the Holocaust
(Chicago: Heinemann Library, 2003); Holger M. Meding,
Ruta de los Nazis en los Tiempos de Perón
(Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 1999). See also references to Eichmann and Meding’s status in “The Long Road to Eichmann’s Arrest,”
Spiegel Online
, April 1, 2011,
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,754486,00.html
, and Nicolás Cassese, “La rama nazi de Perón,”
La Nación
, Buenos Aires, February 16, 1997,
http://www.lanacion.com.ar/202464
.

257    
“French war criminals”:
Uki Goñi,
The Real Odessa: How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina
(London: Granta Books, 2002).

257    
Benítez in Rome:
Alicia Dujovne Ortiz,
Eva Perón: A Biography
(New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997).