Finally, I uncovered at the National Archives evidence that US military intelligence officers in Argentina had reported to their superiors in Washington that a Nazi submarine, U-530, had unexpectedly surfaced at Mar del Plata, at dawn on July 10, 1945. The records in the Archives, including pictures of the crew, interrogation records, and investigations with the local residents led US military intelligence to report the U-530 was believed to have dropped Hitler off on the Atlantic coast of Argentina before surfacing at Mar del Plata.
I felt I had assembled enough evidence to start writing Hunting Hitler, knowing that in 2014 I would still face derision some seventy years after the end of World War II for arguing that Hitler had escaped Berlin in April 1945 by submarine to Argentina.
Today, in 2017, the History Channel is in the second season of its very successful multi-episode series by the same name, Hunting Hitler. Also basing their investigation on the FBI documents declassified in 2014 that provided evidence that Hitler may have survived World War II, fleeing to South America following the fall of Nazi Germany, the History Channel series involves a team of experienced investigators led by twenty-one-year veteran Bob Baer and war crimes investigator John Cencich.
As described by the History Channel, a team of investigators organized by Baer and Cencich undertake “a definitive search with the goal of finding out whether the notorious dictator actually survived the war and pulled off one of history’s greatest disappearing acts.” The History Channel’s website for the Hunting Hitler series comments the team “uncovers a mysterious Nazi lair in the Argentinian jungle and searches for evidence of a missing U-boat that may have transported Hitler out of Europe as Germany collapsed.”5 The History Channel’s two-season series has informed a wide audience of the possibility that Hitler escaped, and as the audience watches these investigators professionally track down leads in Germany, Europe, and South America, interviewing dozens of locals that possibly have firsthand information valuable to uncovering the truth.
While the History Channel’s Hunting Hitler has faced the same derision I have faced from professional historians wedded to the official double-suicide version of Hitler’s death, millions of viewers in the United States and around the world are asking questions previous generations never dared to ask. Still, those of us with the courage to defy official explanations of history, knowing after following scandals like Watergate that it frequently takes courage to expose cover-ups—a truth former Defense Department official Daniel Ellsberg learned in the national political controversy following his 1971 decision to make public the top secret Pentagon Papers. While the truth about Hitler’s demise remains uncertain, I invite inquisitive readers for themselves to examine the evidence presented here with an open mind.
In the final analysis, I challenge doubters to explain why so many now publicly available documents make clear the FBI conducted an international hunt for Hitler, decades after World War II ended, if definitive proof had made certain beyond any reasonable doubt that Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves in a double-suicide in the Berlin Bunker on April 30, 1945—as we were all taught as school children in the 1950s and, mostly, still even today.
______________
2 MysteryQuest, “Hitler’s Escape,” produced by the A&E Television Networks studio and shown first on The History Channel, September 2009. Joanna Chejade-Bloom, producer; Bill Hunt and Vincent Kralyevich, executive producers. Stan Bernard, narrator.
3 “Adolf Hitler,” FBI Records: The Vault, Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2014, https://vault.fbi.gov/adolf-hitler.
4 H. R. Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947).
5 “Hunting Hitler,” History Channel, 2017, http://www.history.com/shows/hunting-hitler/about.
1
SCIENTIFIC PROOF HITLER ESCAPED GERMANY
A skull long believed to be that of Adolf Hitler actually belonged to a woman, according to an American scientist who has taken DNA samples from it.
—Sky News, “Where in the World is Hitler’s Skull?” Sept. 28, 2009 6
From July 16 to August 2, 1945, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes accompanied President Harry S. Truman to a meeting with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin in Potsdam, Germany. During a casual moment at the meeting, Byrnes asked Stalin whether he believed Hitler actually died in Berlin at the end of World War II. In his 1947 book, Speaking Frankly, Byrnes recounted the conversation: “I asked the Generalissimo [Stalin] his views of how Hitler died. To my surprise, he said he believed that Hitler was alive and that it was possible he was then either in Spain or Argentina.”7 Some ten days later, Byrnes asked Stalin if he had changed his views, and Stalin said he had not. Stalin retained the same beliefs until the end of his life.
Two months earlier, in May 1945, shortly after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Hopkins, one of FDR’s closest advisors, undertook a special mission to Moscow at the request of President Harry Truman to prepare for the upcoming conference with Churchill and Stalin, scheduled to begin in July 1945 in Potsdam, Germany. In a discussion with Stalin in Moscow, Hopkins commented that he hoped Hitler’s body, which had not yet been recovered, would be found by the Russians. Stalin replied that Soviet doctors thought they had identified the body of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda; and of Erich Kempka, Hitler’s chauffeur; but that he personally doubted that Goebbels was dead. He said the whole matter was strange, and that the various talks of funerals and burials struck him as being very dubious. He further explained that he thought Hitler, Goebbels, and General Hans Krebs, the chief of staff of the German army, along with Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann, had all escaped and were in hiding. Hopkins commented that the Nazis had several large submarines, and he was aware no trace of Hitler had yet been discovered. Stalin responded that the Germans were using those submarines to transport gold and negotiable assets to Japan, with the connivance of Switzerland. He further mentioned that his intelligence service was investigating these Nazi submarines, but Russia had also failed to find any trace of Hitler. In concluding the discussion, Stalin speculated that Hitler and the other top Nazis he mentioned may have fled to Japan.8
Yet as early as May 4, 1945, Russian army troops claimed to have found the bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun buried outside the Führerbunker in the garden of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Why was Stalin yet skeptical that Hitler had died in Berlin, when his troops had discovered what appeared to be incontrovertible proof that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had died in the bunker? Shrouded in uncertainty is exactly how the mystery of Hitler’s last days began.
The Russian army at the Führerbunker, May 1945
The first Russian troops reached the Reich Chancellery on May 2, 1945. A book published in New York in 1968 by Lev Bezymenski, a Russian military intelligence officer who served on the staff of Russian General G. K. Zhukov in the battle of Berlin, entitled The Death of Hitler: Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives, caused a worldwide sensation.9 For the first time, the Soviet Union allowed access to documents from Moscow’s secret archive, including both the records of the autopsy the Russians conducted on corpses they believed were the bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, as well as the extensive files from “Operation Myth.” Not accepting the autopsy results that indicated that the bodies the Russians found at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin were those of Hitler and Eva Braun, Stalin launched “Operation Myth” in December 1945 to conduct a comprehensive investigation of all possible witnesses to Hitler’s last days in the Führerbunker. The Soviet investigation was labeled “Operation Myth” to reflect Stalin’s conviction that Hitler had escaped Berlin.
Bezymenski disclosed that on the afternoon of May 2, 1945, Russian Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Isayevich Klimenko—commander of the Counter Intelligence Section of the 79th Rifle Corps of the Third Shock Army—received orders to inspect the Reich Chancellery that the Fifth Shock Army had stormed the night before. Once he received his orders, Klimenko jumped into a jeep and headed toward the Reich
Chancellery, followed by a Russian army truck containing various German witnesses and soldiers who claimed under interrogation to have heard Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda for Nazi Germany, commit suicide in the Chancellery. Bezymenski quotes Klimenko as follows:
We drove up to the Chancellery, went into the garden, and arrived at the emergency exit of the Führerbunker. As we approached this exit, one of the Germans shouted: “That is Goebbels’ corpse! That is the corpse of his wife!
I decided to take these corpses with us. Since we did not have a stretcher, we placed the corpses on an unhinged door, maneuvered them onto the truck (it was a covered vehicle), and returned to Plötzensee.
The day after, May 3, 1945, the corpses of six Goebbels children and the corpse of General Krebs were found in the bunker. They too were taken to Plötzensee.10
The six Goebbels children were found dead in their beds in the bunker, having been poisoned by their parents. The next day, German Vice-Admiral Hans-Erich Voss, one of the final occupants of the Führerbunker during the Battle of Berlin and a staff member of Hitler’s appointed successor, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, made a positive identification of the Goebbels’ bodies. Lieutenant-General Krebs was the chief of the general staff of the German army. He was identified by a strip of cloth bearing the name “Krebs,” found in the lining of his uniform jacket near the left side pocket.
Having failed to find Hitler’s body on May 2, 1945, Klimenko returned to the Reich Chancellery the next day with Voss. Here is how Klimenko described the decision to visit the Führerbunker a second time:
Naturally we asked Voss where Hitler might be. Voss gave no clear answer and told us only that he had left Berlin together with Hitler’s adjutant, who had told him that Hitler committed suicide and that his corpse had been burned in the Chancellery garden.11
Once at the Chancellery, Klimenko decided to look around.
We arrived with the jeep carrying me, Voss, a Lieutenant Colonel of the [Russian] Army Counter Intelligence Service, and an interpreter. At the Chancellery, we went down into the bunker. It was dark. We illuminated our way with flashlights. Voss behaved somewhat strangely; he was nervous, mumbling unintelligibly. After that we climbed up again and found ourselves in the garden, not far from the emergency exit.
It was close to 9 p.m. We stepped up to a big dried-up water tank for fire-fighting. It was filled with many corpses. Here Voss said, pointing to a corpse: “Oh, this is Hitler’s body!”
This corpse was dressed; the feet were in mended socks. After a moment Voss began to have his doubts: “No, no, I can’t say with certainty that this is Hitler.” Frankly, I also had my doubts because of the mended socks!12
Deciding this was not Hitler’s body, Klimenko and Voss left the corpse in the bunker where it was found. When Klimenko and Voss left, however, the body was rediscovered by a group of Russian soldiers who were convinced they had found Hitler’s corpse. Taking the corpse outside the bunker, the Russian soldiers filmed the corpse, making sure the bullet hole in the middle of the forehead was clearly visible, and bragged to the press that Hitler’s body had been found. The corpse bore a certain resemblance to Hitler but was quickly determined to be a Hitler double, as suggested by the fact that the corpse was wearing no shoes, clearly showing darned socks; also, the uniform on the corpse was food-soiled, which was very uncharacteristic of the Führer, who was known for his fastidious nature and meticulous dress. Particularly damning was a height measurement that showed the doppelgänger to be three inches shorter than Hitler.
Still, the discovery of this Hitler double was misleading to the Russian investigation into the death of Hitler, as can be seen from Klimenko’s continuing narrative:
Then came May 4. From early morning the search among the prisoners for possible witnesses went on. Around 11 a.m. I returned to the garden of the Chancellery together with six witnesses. We ran to the water tank, but the corpse had already vanished!13
Klimenko and his witnesses discovered the vanished corpse laid out in one of the many halls of the Chancellery. One of the six witnesses claimed the corpse might be Hitler, but the other five denied it categorically. It was at that point that Klimenko learned Russian soldiers had dug up two more corpses they believed might be Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun:
Together with me were Platoon Leader Panassov and a few soldiers. One of my soldiers asked: “Where did you find the Goebbels?” We went back to the garden, to the bunker exit.
Private Ivan Churakov climbed into a nearby crater that was strewn with burned paper. I noticed a bazooka in there and called to Churakov: “Climb out quickly, or you may be blown to bits!” Churakov answered: “Comrade Lieutenant Colonel, there are legs here!”
We started to dig them out and pulled two corpses from the crater: the bodies of a man and a woman. Of course at first I didn’t even think that these might be the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun, since I believed that Hitler’s corpse was already in the Chancellery and only needed to be identified. I therefore ordered the corpses to be wrapped in blankets and reburied.14
The next day, Russian intelligence officers of the 79th SMERSH counter-intelligence unit learned from high-ranking prisoners that the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun had been burned before being buried. So, reconsidering that the corpses might be Hitler and Eva Braun, Russian intelligence ordered the badly charred corpses to be dug up again and hauled away in ammunition crates. While one of the corpses was clearly male and the other female, the bodies were too badly burned to permit facial recognition. Still, after additional investigation, including an identification of the corpses by Harry Mengerhausen, one of Hitler’s bodyguards, and what Bezymenski identified as a “forensic autopsy,” the officers determined that these two corpses were Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun.
Playing on the use of “Ivan” as a generic reference to Russian soldiers (as well as the first name of the Russian soldier who supposedly found Hitler’s corpse) Bezymenski bragged, “Ivan came to Berlin and found the corpse of War Criminal Number One.”15
The Russian autopsy evidence
On May 5, 1945, according to secret Soviet documents serving as the source materials for Bezymenski’s 1968 account, the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun were transported from the center of Berlin to the northern suburb of Buch, where various divisions of the staff of the Russian Third Shock Army were stationed. “In place of the soldier Ivan, a new character comes to the fore—Dr. Faust Shkaravski,” Bezymenski wrote. “I have not invented his first name: it is really the name of a man of advanced age, forensic physician by profession, who at the time was Chief Expert of Forensic Medicine with the 1st Byelorussian Front.”16 On May 8, 1945, coincidently “V-E Day,” celebrating “Victory in Europe,” Dr. Shkaravski directed a team of four additional qualified and competent Russian forensic pathologists in conducting an autopsy on the two corpses thought to be Hitler and Eva Braun. The autopsy was conducted in a pathology laboratory that had been converted from a clinic that had once served as a mental institution.
Given the disfiguration of the bodies, the autopsy doctors quickly determined that the teeth offered the best opportunity for a positive identification.
The autopsy reports published in Bezymenski’s book indicated that, from the male corpse, the following dental specimens were handed over to the SMERSH Section of the Third Shock Army on May 8, 1945: a maxillary bridge of yellow metal, consisting of nine teeth from the upper jaw; and a burned lower jaw consisting of fifteen teeth. From the female corpse, the following teeth were recovered for identification purposes: a gold bridge of the lower jaw with four front teeth. On May 9, 1945, Vasili Ivanovich Gorbushin, the deputy chief of counter-intelligence in the Third Shock Army, found and visited Hitler’s dentist, a Dr. Bruck, and his dental assistant, Käthe Heusermann. As suggested by Heusermann, Gorbushin was able to find X-ray photographs of Hitler’s teeth, along with detailed dental records and photographs of Hitler’s teeth, plus a few gold crowns that had been prepared but never installed.
Following Heusermann’s instructions, Gorbushin found a dental technician named Fritz Echtmann, who had worked on Eva Braun.
As quoted by Bezymenski, Gorbushin reported the following:
In answer to my questions, Käthe Heusermann and Fritz Echtmann described Hitler’s teeth from memory in minute detail. Their information about bridges, crowns, and fillings corresponded precisely with the entries in the medical history and with the X-ray pictures that we had found. Next we asked them to identify the jawbones which had been taken from the male corpse. Frau Heusermann and Echtmann recognized them unequivocally as those of Adolf Hitler.
In a similar procedure we next asked the dentists to describe Eva Braun’s teeth. After they had both answered our questions exhaustively, we placed before them the gold bridge which had been taken from the mouth of the female corpse during the autopsy.
Käthe Heusermann and Fritz Echtmann declared without hesitancy that this prosthesis belonged to Eva Braun. Fritz Echtmann added that the special construction of the bridge prepared for Eva Braun was his own invention and that so far no dental prosthetist had used a similar method of attachment.
Next, our medical experts met again. After examination of the medical history, X-ray pictures, and jawbone with the teeth of the charred male corpse which had been found on May 4 in the garden of the Chancellery, the experts came to the definite conclusion that these were Adolf Hitler’s teeth.17
The presence of crushed glass ampules and traces of cyanide compounds found in the oral cavities of both bodies led the autopsy doctors to identify the cause of death for both the male and female corpses as poisoning via cyanide compounds. Curiously, the autopsy of the male corpse did not find evidence of a gunshot wound, although the autopsy doctors did note a piece of the cranium was missing. This finding was at odds with intelligence reports that Hitler had both shot himself and taken a cyanide capsule. Despite the findings that the cause of death for both corpses was cyanide poisoning, the Russian autopsy did not include a dissection of the internal organs of either corpse. Additionally, the autopsy of the female corpse indicated evidence of metal shrapnel fragments in the throat, which had caused bleeding in the throat, chest, and lungs. Yet there was no evidence that Eva Braun had been wounded by an artillery shell. Nor would wounds to a corpse be expected to cause bleeding. The type of hemorrhage observed in the female corpse could only have been sustained if the heart had been beating strongly enough to create pressure in the body’s arteries and veins to force blood out. In other words, the female was alive at the time the shrapnel wounds were suffered. Bleeding would not result had the corpse been hit by shrapnel after committing suicide by ingesting cyanide compounds.
Hunting Hitler Page 2