Myths & Legends of the Second World War

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Myths & Legends of the Second World War Page 16

by James Hayward


  The publication of The Death of Adolf Hitler should stand as the last word on the circumstances surrounding the Führer’s demise. Before it reached print, however, the controversial Hess historian Dr Hugh Thomas advanced another of the imaginative ‘double’ theories on which his reputation is based. In Doppelgänger: The Truth About the Bodies in the Berlin Bunker, Thomas asserted that the bodies burned and buried in the Chancellery garden were not those of Hitler and Braun, but instead substitutes which formed part of a complicated forensic fraud. The main evidence on which Thomas relied was a supposed poor match between dental records and the (few) teeth left in the corpses found, and inconsistencies arising from blood stains and types. By this hypothesis, Hitler was strangled by an aide rather than shot or poisoned, and a female corpse substituted to allow Braun to escape from Berlin. As Thomas is forced to admit, however, his alternative scenario is nothing more than ‘relatively uninformed speculation’, which calls to mind the question of why the author chose to commit it to print.

  In 2001 Hugh Thomas turned his attention to the ‘untimely’ death of the Reichsführer-SS in his book SS-1, in which the indefatigable doctor yet again postulated the existence of a double in relation to a leading Nazi. According to Thomas, the circumstances of the capture of Himmler at Bremervoerde by Intelligence Corps personnel on 22 May 1945 were suspicious, in that his unwieldy party of a dozen or so men were too conspicuous, their forged papers too poor, and that Himmler’s answers under interrogation were inaccurate. Thomas also cited supposed medical anomalies, including an absent duelling scar on the left cheek, oddly muscular legs and a nasal deformity which the real Himmler never had. None of the evidence is particularly compelling, and Thomas himself was only able to offer that the man who swallowed cyanide at Luneburg was ‘perhaps’ not Heinrich Himmler, but a double intended to assist in the escape of the real Reichsführer. As with the Hess theory, it is hard to believe that any such double could have been found, let alone persuaded to commit suicide. And if the British authorities were really so unsure about the identity of the corpse that photographs were taken from deliberately obscure angles, as Thomas suggests, why allow a death mask to be cast, and preserved as an exhibit at the Royal Army Dental Corps Museum in Aldershot?

  Besides Hitler, the other leading undead Nazi was Martin Bormann. Although Hitler Youth Leader Artur Axmann claimed to have seen Bormann’s corpse near the Weidendammer Bridge on the night of 1/2 May, a widespread belief persisted that Hitler’s deputy escaped to South America. In 1945 Stalin informed Harry Hopkins that Bormann had escaped from Hamburg in a submarine, and in October 1946 the former Reichsleiter was sentenced in absentia at Nuremberg. In 1965 the Soviet journalist Lev Bezymenski claimed Bormann had escaped to South America to serve ‘US imperialism’ during the Cold War, while the South American connection was restated three years later in a Bormann biography by James McGovern. In 1967 a hapless peasant was arrested in Guatemala, followed several years later by a 72-year-old German expatriate living in Colombia. In his book Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich, the American writer Ladislas Farago claimed to have run Bormann to ground in the hospital of a Redemptorist convent in Bolivia. By way of contrast, the former German intelligence chief Reinhardt Gehlen asserted that Bormann had acted as a Soviet spy, and in May 1945 sought and found refuge in Moscow.

  A year after this unverifiable revelation, in December 1972, two sets of human remains were unearthed on waste ground near the Invalidenstrasse in West Berlin and identified as those of Bormann and Hitler’s doctor, Ludwig Stumpfegger. Despite the fact that their identities were confirmed by the renowned American forensic odontologist Dr Reidar Sognnaes, and a DNA match established, the myth that Bormann had survived persisted. In 1981 the case for South America was pressed again in Nazi in Exile by Paul Manning, which suggested that Bormann was responsible for Germany’s economic rebirth in the years following the war, while the Moscow connection was repeated by Hugo Beer in 1983, and by J.O.E.O. Mahrke in 1992. Two recent variations are more ridiculous still. In 1995 the News of the World claimed that Bormann had been living as Peter Broderick-Hartley in Reigate, Surrey, having undergone plastic surgery. The following year saw the publication of Op JB by Christopher Creighton, which offered a fantastical tale in which Bormann was smuggled out of Berlin by a team of British commandos, selected by Churchill, with the object of accessing Nazi currency reserves secreted in Swiss bank accounts. Creighton’s incredible tale, which involved a double and Bormann later running a riding school in the English countryside, has since been demolished by the intelligence historian Nigel West in his study Counterfeit Spies.

  Another Bormann falsehood revolves around the celebrated photograph of the skulls discovered in 1972, as Dr Sognnaes explained some time later:

  The ‘Bormann skull’, which a few years ago was so prominently displayed in the world press, was none other than Bormann’s post-mortem companion, Stumpfegger. The photographic mix-up of the two skulls may have been purely accidental. Perhaps the Stumpfegger skull was simply chosen as the better looking one by the competing photographers, whereas what later turned out to be the Bormann skull at first appeared like a toothless blob of dirt.

  Despite this clarification, the image of the more photogenic Stumpfegger skull is still routinely captioned as that of Bormann, even in minutely researched accounts such as Berlin Then and Now by Tony Le Tissier (1992) and The Death of Adolf Hitler by Pedrova and Watson (1995).

  Probably the most enduring Hitler myth is the canard that the Führer possessed only one testicle. While there can be little doubt that the tale was both current and popular in Britain during the Second World War, contemporary mores on taste and decency prevented it being recorded in print. Nevertheless this infamous lyric proved cheering when sung to the tune of Alford’s deathless Colonel Bogey March:

  Hitler has only got one ball

  Göring has two, but very small

  Himmler has something similar

  But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.

  Spy Mysteries Unveiled, an espionage potboiler written by Vernon Hinchley in 1963, further explored the theme:

  Hitler’s abnormal sex life was due to his freakishly under-developed genitals, and he never recovered from the sneers of fellow soldiers during the First World War. Thereafter he would never allow himself to be seen in a bathing costume. This meant that he could never bathe in the sea.

  Hinchley went on to connect this phobia with Hitler’s failure to cross the Channel in 1940. The testicle legend might well have been forgotten had it not been for the findings of the Buch autopsy, conducted in May 1945 but not made public in the West until 1968. The autopsy was carried out by a commission comprising five Soviet military doctors, the principal examiners being two Lieutenant-Colonels named Shkaravski and Krayevski. Their report stated:

  The genital member is scorched. In the scrotum, which is singed but preserved, only the right testicle was found. The left testicle could not be found either in the scrotum or on the spermatic cord inside the inguinal canal, nor in the small pelvis.

  We now know that the Buch autopsy was substantially flawed, and there is every reason to suspect that it was also incorrect in respect of the missing testicle. Indeed it is not unreasonable to suggest that data was deliberately falsified by the Soviets, who wished to present Hitler as a coward with a sexual defect. Certainly several Germans who were intimates of Hitler dismissed the allegation that he was a monorchid, including his valet Heinz Linge, who protested that he had seen his employer’s intact testicles when once they had both urinated against a tree. Two Nazi doctors also stated they had observed no ‘anomalies of the genitals’ when examining Hitler, although some doubt has been cast on their testimony, particularly given that one of them, Dr Erwin Giesing, was an ear specialist. Conversely, in 1971 Hitler’s company commander from the First World War wrote to Die Zeit to claim that he had indeed had only one testicle, a fact on which he was positive since the army had periodically conducted genit
al inspections for venereal disease. The legend that Hitler was impotent is probably a variation of the original testicular allegation, and at this remove is equally impossible to confirm or deny.

  The allegation that Hitler was a homosexual, or at least displayed homosexual tendencies, was also widespread during the early war years. In 1934 one Ernst Hanfstaengl issued a libel writ after the Daily Express described him as ‘Hitler’s Putzy’ and an ‘intimate friend’, although Beaverbrook indicated he would defend the charge and the case fizzled out. The diaries of Sir Harold Nicolson record a conversation with a Swiss aristocrat in October 1939, who revealed that Hitler was ‘the most profoundly feminine man’ he had ever met, and that there were ‘moments when he becomes almost effeminate’. In February 1940 an article in The Listener concurred, making much of Hitler’s supposed intellectual inferiority complex and ‘effeminate mysticism’. The American journalist William Shirer watched Hitler closely one day in September 1938 as he left a hotel in Bad Godesberg, having met with Neville Chamberlain, and noted his ‘very ladylike’ walk and ‘dainty little steps’. In 1940 a refugee German industrialist told Henry ‘Chips’ Channon that Hitler ‘was certainly a homosexual’ and that his failure to ascend to a rank higher than corporal in the First World War ‘was due to his very pronounced perversion. In later years he reformed.’ While it is famously hard to prove a negative, it is difficult to believe that such stories were anything more than crude propaganda, and certainly no serious biographer of Adolf Hitler has turned up anything that substantiates the claim. The Hidden Hitler, published by Lothar Machtan in 2001, remains the subject of fierce controversy.

  Although there is little to choose between Hitler and Stalin as icons of evil, Hitler became the subject of a far greater number of unlikely (and unpleasant) rumours. Following the publication of Mein Kampf, in which Hitler referred to prostitution in Vienna and to venereal disease, some claimed he had contracted syphilis in a brothel on his seventeenth birthday, and that the condition continued to afflict him for the rest of his life. As well as the stock myths that Hitler was mad, it was variously said that he was an epileptic, a drug addict and a sexual pervert. A book published in New York in 1941 said to have been written by ‘Hitler’s psychiatrist, Kurt Kruger’ repeated the allegation of homosexuality, and offered the distasteful falsehood that Hitler became anti-Semitic at the age of ten after watching the village grocer, a Jew, rape his mother. When his beloved cousin, Geli Raubal, committed suicide in September 1931, it was said that Hitler had her killed because she was pregnant by a Jewish lover. It was also whispered that Hitler had pulled the trigger himself. Later Hitler was widely rumoured to have sired a secret child with Eva Braun, said by some to have been born in Dresden in 1942. The Führer myth list is almost endless.

  Several books written by or about Hitler’s inner circle are completely fictional. In 1947 one Josef Greiner published a memoir in which he claimed to have been a close associate of the young Hitler in Vienna between 1907 and 1908, and again in Munich in 1913. According to Greiner, in Vienna Hitler was so filthy and impoverished that he was obliged to discard his underclothes because they were tattered and lice-ridden, and he faked antique oil paintings by roasting them in an oven. Greiner went on to attribute all manner of hetero- and homosexual exploits to Hitler, and rounded off his account with a predictable claim that his erstwhile friend was still alive, having flown out of Tempelhof on 30 April 1945 in a prototype Messerschmitt turbo-jet. The entire book was a tissue of lies, as were the supposed ‘intimate notes and diaries of Eva Braun’ published as The Private Life of Adolf Hitler in 1949. As well as peddling several hoary old tales about syphilis and astrology, the fraudulent Braun diaries also hinted at incest, group sex and other ‘sexual riddles’ which ‘cannot be reproduced because of their obscenity’. According to the publisher’s preface, Braun had entrusted the diary to her friend Luis Trenker, described as ‘a well-known Austrian writer, film director and film star’, following a meeting at the ski resort of Kitzbuhel in the winter of 1944–5. In fact they were fiction.

  Another unreliable memoir, never actually published, led subsequent historians to perpetuate the myth that between November 1912 and April 1913 Hitler lived with relatives in Liverpool. The source of the story is an undated typescript written in about 1940 by Brigid Dowling-Hitler, titled My Brother-in-Law Adolf. The author was the Irish wife of Hitler’s half-brother, Alois Hitler Jnr, an itinerant waiter and razor blade salesman. After a somewhat mundane account of the future Führer’s sojourn in Toxteth, Dowling went on to describe her subsequent adventures inside the Third Reich while trying to rescue her son William Patrick from the clutches of the Gestapo, including lengthy meetings with Hess, Himmler and other Nazi leaders. In The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, published in 1973, writer Robert Payne relied on the spurious Dowling memoir to support the notion that Hitler learned to respect the English people and the Royal Navy while in Britain, which informed his decision to spare the BEF at Dunkirk and seek a negotiated peace. However, contemporary police records reveal that Hitler was living in Vienna throughout this period, while Immigration Service files show no record of Hitler having visited Britain at this or any other time. The reason that Hitler never once mentioned his pre-war trip to England, either in print or in conversation, is because it never took place.

  Popular in its day, The Flying Visit by Peter Fleming offered a satirical fantasy in which Hitler parachuted into England in a vain effort to broker peace, and which prefigured the arrival of Rudolf Hess in May 1941 by a full year. Stranger even than this fiction was the belief of some within the British intelligence community that Hitler might be kidnapped and flown to RAF Lympne in Kent – this on the hearsay that his private pilot, Hans Bauer, was dissatisfied with his employer’s conduct of the war. This unlikely tip had been passed on by the British air attaché in Bulgaria, but apparently convinced Sir Arthur Harris (who had worked at the Air Ministry before taking over Bomber Command) to arrange a reception. Two platoons of troops were posted to Lympe to act as guards, and a possible arrival date pencilled in: 25 March 1941. It was anticipated that Hitler’s personal aircraft, a four-engined Focke-Wulf Fw200, would approach the airfield with its wheels down, and even when the Kondor failed to arrive on the appointed day, the troops were kept in place until May. Details of this bizarre plan are preserved in an Air Ministry file deposited at the Public Record Office.

  Although few today believe Adolf Hitler survived the holocaust of Berlin in May 1945, a steady flow of books and theories have sought to exaggerate his supposed interest in the occult. The subject of astrology seems first to have been raised in the minutes of a meeting of the Services Consultative Committee on 6 March 1940, when it was recorded:

  A large number of Germans are superstitious and it is believed that a good deal of interest is taken in astrology. There was a rumour that Hitler himself believes in astrology, and had employed the services of an astrologer. We suggest obtaining from a well-known astrologer a horoscope of Hitler predicting disaster for him and his country and putting it into Germany by secret channels.

  However, the idea was overtaken by the Fall of France, and the subsequent invasion threat and attendant rumour-mongering discussed in Chapter Six. Nevertheless, as late as October 1940 the Joint Intelligence Committee were prepared to take some account of astrology in attempting to predict the date of a cross-Channel assault. For the period beginning 19 October their minutes record:

  The moon and tides were suitable, the incidence of fog likely, and Hitler’s horoscope, a sign to which he was reported to pay considerable attention, was favourable during this period.

  Anti-German astrological propaganda first emerged in the wake of the Hess affair in 1941, when it was hinted that the Deputy Führer had been misled by bogus astrological predictions, and when deception agencies began to circulate false horoscopes, as well as bogus quatrains by the sixteenth-century French seer Nostradamus. Although much of this British activity took the form of unavowable ‘
black’ propaganda, and was therefore unknown to the public at large, a tour of America undertaken by a Hungarian astrologer known as Louis de Wohl did much to promote the myth that Hitler was reliant on the science of the stars. A great deal of nonsense has been written about de Wohl’s American tour, and his contribution to the Allied war effort generally, including the false claim that de Wohl had once been Hitler’s personal astrologer. In fact de Wohl had arrived in London as a refugee in 1935, and quickly developed a clientele as a professional astrologer. In his memoir The Stars of War and Peace (1952), de Wohl claimed that Hitler had been convinced of the value of astrology by Hess while the pair were imprisoned in Landsberg prison in 1923–24, and that in 1935 de Wohl himself had been invited to place his own expertise at the service of Germany and the Führer. Neither seems very likely.

  After war broke out de Wohl offered his services to British intelligence, but was rebuffed until September 1940, when he was allowed to set up his own ‘Psychological Research Bureau’ in an unfurnished suite at the Grosvenor House hotel. It seems that few took seriously his claims to be able to ‘predict the predictions’ of Hitler’s own tame astrologers, said to include Karl Ernst Krafft. However in May 1941 it was decided to send de Wohl on a tour of the United States, in part because a number of American astrological journals had begun to carry articles and letters predicting a German victory. Initially the ‘astro-philosopher’ de Wohl made little headway, although a lecture to a convention of the American Federation of Scientific Astrologers in Ohio in August was apparently a success, and his comparisons between the horoscopes of Hitler and Napoleon enthusiastically received. In addition, arrangements were made for certain of de Wohl’s predictions to be circulated around various English-language newspapers in Africa. Typical of those is an item credited to Sheikh Youssef Afifi, which appeared in a Cairo paper and promised:

 

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