Hunting Hitler
Page 11
Particularly controversial were the negotiations code-named “Operation Sunrise,” or alternatively, “Operation Crossword,” in which Allen Dulles played a direct role in negotiating the surrender of German forces in northern Italy. In his 2011 book, Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice, historian Gerald Steinacher argues that the decision to exclude the Soviets from the Operation Sunrise negotiations with the Germans marked the beginning of the Cold War. Steinacher notes that suspicions remain that Dulles offered protection to the German Wehrmacht and SS officers in Italy during the Operation Sunrise negotiations. “Dulles had certain interests in common with the German generals and, therefore, reportedly intervened on behalf of his German partners in Sunrise,” Steinacher wrote. “All SS officers who took part in the operation managed to escape serious punishment after the war. Some were later hired by US intelligence services; others were able to flee to South America or start new careers as private businessmen.”142
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98 Carl Reiss, The Nazis Go Underground (Garden City, New York, 1944), p. 15.
99 Ibid., p. 5.
100 Ibid., p. 4.
101 Ibid., p. 15.
102 Ibid., p. 2.
103 Dr. Greg Bradsher, “Allen Dulles and No. 23 Herrengasse, Bern, Switzerland, 194201945,” National Archives website, Nov. 9, 2012, http://blogs.archives.gov/TextMessage/2012/11/09/allen-dulles-and-no-23-herrengasse-bern-switzerland-1942-1945/.
104 Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams, Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler – The Case Presented (New York: Sterling Publishing, 2011), p. 17.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid., p. 42.
107 Ibid., pp. 48-49.
108 Ibid., p. 55.
109 Ibid., pp. 56-58.
110 Paul Manning, Martin Bormann in Exile (Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1981), p. 144. Manning used the Anglicized spelling of “Mueller,” instead of the German spelling, “Müller.”
111 Ibid., p. 139.
112 Ibid., p. 114.
113 Ibid., p. 139.
114 Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams, Grey Wolf, op.cit., p. 59.
115 Ibid., p. 199.
116 Ibid., p. 209.
117 Ibid., p. 211.
118 James DiEugenio, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case (New York: Skyhorse Publishing, Second Edition, 2012), pp. 4-5.
119 Ibid.
120 “John J. McCloy, Assistant Secretary of War, explains to John W. Pehle, Director, War Refugee Board, that the War Department cannot authorize the bombing of Auschwitz, Nov. 18, 1944,” The American Experience, pbs.org, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/holocaust/filmmore/reference/primary/bombjohn.html.
121 Ladislas Farago, Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), pp. 26-32, at p. 27.
122 Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, op.cit., pp. 216-217.
123 Paul Manning, Martin Bormann: Nazi in Exile, op.cit., p. 180.
124 Ibid.
125 Ibid., p. 183.
126 Ladislas Farago, Patton: Ordeal and Triumph (New York: Ivan Obolensky, Inc., 1964).
127 Ladislas Farago, Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich, loc.cit.
128 Ibid., pp. 93-95.
129 Ibid., p. 211.
130 Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams, Grey Wolf, op.cit., p. 264.
131 Imre Karacs, “DNA test closes book on mystery of Martin Bormann,” the Independent, May 4, 1998, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/dna-test-closes-book-on-mystery-of-martin-bormann-1161449.html. See also: “Bormann’s body ‘identified,’” BBC News, May 4, 1998, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/87452.stm.
132 Ion Mihai Pacepa and Ronald J. Rychlak, Disinformation (Washington D.C.: WND Books, Inc., 2013), p. 59.
133 Uki Goñi, The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Perón’s Argentina (London: Granta Books, 2002), p. 93.
134 Ibid., p. 94.
135 Ibid., pp. 98-99.
136 Ibid., p. 124.
137 Ibid., p. 230.
138 Ibid., p. xii.
139 Peter Levenda, Ratline: Soviet Spies and Nazi Priests, and the Disappearance of Adolf Hitler (Lake Worth, Florida: Ibis Press, 2012), p. 69.
140 John Loftus and Mark Aarons, Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and Soviet Intelligence (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. xiii.
141 “CIA Oswald 201 File Online,” Mary Ferrell Foundation, featured archive, 2008, http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Featured_CIA_Oswald_201_File_Online.
142 Gerald Steinacher, Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 169-170.
5
THE ESCAPE TO ARGENTINA
“From information just received from Buenos Aires, I am virtually certain Adolf Hitler and his ‘wife,’ Eva Braun, the latter dressed in masculine clothes, landed in Argentina and are on an immense, German-owned estate in Patagonia. The pair reportedly landed on a lonely shore from a German submarine which supposedly returned to surrender to the Allies.”
—Vincent de Pascal, correspondent, Chicago Times, July 17, 1945143
While in the United States, the idea that Hitler escaped the Führerbunker is considered a conspiracy theory, in Argentina few doubt that Hitler lived out the remainder of his life there in safe refuge after World War II.
In recent years, two well-known and respected journalists living in Argentina have written well-documented books explaining how Hitler arrived in Argentina at the end of World War II and lived out the remainder of his life in South America. Abel Basti, an Argentinian journalist born in the province of Buenos Aires, has written a trilogy presenting his investigations into Hitler’s escape to Argentina. It began with Bariloche Nazi: Historical Sites Related to National Socialism (2004),144 which was followed by Hitler in Argentina (2006).145 The trilogy concluded with Hitler’s Escape: The Proof of Hitler’s Escape to Argentina, published in 2010.146 Italian journalist Patrick Burnside’s 2000 book, The Escape of Hitler: His Invisible Life in Argentina and the Connections with Evita and Perón,147 has led documentary director/producer Noam Shalev and researcher Pablo Weschler to produce a new much-anticipated film dedicated to exploring the evidence in Argentina that Hitler sought refuge there at the end of World War II.148
The problem for most United States readers is that books published in Argentina on Hitler’s escape generally have not been translated into English, and the Spanish editions are hard to get and relatively expensive even when purchased from Internet book-buying powerhouse distributors that carry foreign-language titles. Reading these books in Spanish makes it clear that Basti and Burnside have conducted extensive interviews with those few World War II eyewitnesses to Hitler’s arrival yet alive in Argentina. Moreover, each journalist has spent years conducting primary research in Argentina, involving the seeking-out of contemporary World War II newspaper accounts published in Argentina and examining in the government archives in Buenos Aires the limited documentary evidence that has been made public on a topic that has remained politically sensitive despite the passage of more than six decades since the end of World War II. Perhaps because so many of the primary sources remain in Argentina in Spanish, English-speaking readers in the United States have had little access to the folklore widely accepted as common knowledge in Argentina that Hitler escaped from Germany and arrived by submarine in 1945, landing in Mar del Plata on the Atlantic coast 400 kilometers (249 miles) south of Buenos Aires.
As we saw in Chapter Three, US military intelligence in Germany had information as early as September 1945 that Hitler had escaped to Argentina with the help of Walter and Ida Bonfert Eichhorn, German expatriates who had financially supported him early on, around the time of the Munich Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. We also saw that J. Edgar Hoover wrote to the US Embassy in Buenos Aires in November 1945, warning US diplomats in Argentina that the FBI had information that Mrs. Eichhorn, the proprietor of a spa in La Falda, Argentina, had made repeated offers to create a safe h
aven for Hitler in Argentina. Interestingly, this information which was available to US authorities within months of Hitler’s disappearance turns out to be the current focus of the books published since 2000 by Abel Basti and Patrick Burnside. From Mar del Plata, the trail, as we shall see, connects Mr. and Mrs. Eichhorn and “The Eden,” the elaborate hotel and resort complex built in the 1890s that was acquired by Walter Eichhorn and his brother Bruno in 1912, in the town of La Falda in the province of Córdoba, approximately 800 kilometers (498 miles) northwest of Buenos Aires.149 From there, the trail for Hitler in Argentina traces to San Carlos de Bariloche, a small town in the province of Rio Negro at the southernmost tip of Argentina. In many ways, San Carlos de Bariloche resembles the German Alps, situated as it is in the foothills of the Andes and on the southern shores of Nahuel Hapi Lake. The region is noted for the large number of German expatriates who have settled here since the beginning of the twentieth century.
The flight of the wolf
Even as these Argentinian researchers turned their attention to how exactly Hitler escaped from Berlin, their conclusions remain shrouded in uncertainty. Still, after sorting through the available evidence, two different stories have emerged as the leading contenders for the truth. Hitler, whose private nickname for himself was “The Wolf,” did not decide to commit suicide rather than risk capture. Instead, the Führer decided to flee, heeding the advice of his closest advisors.
The two co-conspirators urging Hitler to escape appear to have been Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary, and Henrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo. “Bormann’s power over Hitler began with the murder of Hitler’s niece, Angelica (‘Geli’) Raubal, who catered to Hitler’s perverted sexual needs,” wrote journalist William Stevenson in his 1973 book, The Bormann Brotherhood.150 Although the incident remains shrouded in secrecy even today, the likelihood is that Hitler shot and killed her in a fit of jealous rage on September 18, 1931 in his apartment, into which Geli had moved at Hitler’s insistence. She was 23 years old at the time. Among the investigators called to the spot was Henrich Müller, then a local police detective. “Müller found the girl lying dead beside what turned out to be Hitler’s revolver,” Stevenson continued. “Her naked body was bruised and her nose was broken.”151 Bormann arrived at an understanding with Müller that involved shipping Geli’s body back to Vienna in a sealed lead coffin. Her death was ruled a suicide and the investigation was quietly closed. Müller rose within Nazi ranks to become the head of the Gestapo. Müller, like Bormann, is one of the top Nazis whose body was never found when Berlin fell to the Soviets on May 2, 1945. In September 1963, Müller’s “grave” at the Lilienthalstrasse Cemetery in West Berlin was exhumed and the grave was found to contain the remains of three different people, none of whom were Müller.152
On the night of April 22, 1945, two days after his birthday, Hitler was walking his favorite dog Blondi when he met Müller in the garden of the Chancellery outside the Führerbunker. Also present in the garden at that time were Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet, and SS General Hans Rattenhuber, the head of Hitler’s personal bodyguard. This, according to several different accounts, is the night Hitler left Berlin. Supposedly, when Hitler left the garden that night, Rattenhuber commented, “The Chief is gone, but now we have a new Chief,” referring to Hitler’s double assuming the role of Hitler in the Führerbunker.
Eyewitnesses in the Führerbunker noted a distinct difference between the Hitler they observed before and after April 22, 1945. Before this date, Hitler was alert, afterwards he was dull and drowsy; before Hitler could climb up the forty-eight steps to the bunker exit, afterwards he could barely climb two steps; before he slept late and preferred late night conferences, afterwards he had breakfast at 8:30 a.m. and only held short afternoon conferences; before he had lunch with Eva Braun, afterwards he avoided all social contact with her.153
In an interview on Feb. 7, 1948, Gertraud Junge, the secretary who claimed to have typed Hitler’s last will and testament as dictated to her by Hitler, commented in passing on a very different Hitler and Eva Braun than was expected. “His eyes were no longer in this world; they did not penetrate one any more,” she noted. “For instance, it has been like that that during those days people smoked in his presence. Even Eva Braun smoked.”154 Interviewing her, Musmanno was surprised. He noted that Eva Braun had never smoked before, and Junge agreed. Hitler, who never smoked, was typically intolerant of anyone who dared smoke around him. That Hitler had a double in the Führerbunker is clear from the lookalike corpse with a bullet hole in its forehead that the Soviets, assuming the body was Hitler’s, displayed in a Soviet propaganda film made after the fall of Berlin. If Hitler’s double was substituted for him the night of April 22, 1945, this would lend weight to the supposition that Hitler’s last will and testament, as well as his marriage to Eva Braun, were events staged most likely by Goebbels with the intent of lending credence to the suicide story by showing that Hitler in his last hours was intent on wrapping up the loose strings of his messy personal life.
Some accounts have Hitler fleeing Berlin on board a Focke-Achgelis Fa-223 twin-rotor helicopter that the Nazis had developed. The helicopter supposedly flew to Hörsching airfield outside Linz, Austria. From there, Hitler flew to Barcelona, Spain, on April 26, 1945, in a Junkers 290 A6 airplane piloted by the highly decorated German Luftwaffe bomber pilot, Werner Baumbach. Barcelona was an ideal location for escape both because of the sympathy Spain’s dictator Francisco Franco had for Hitler (going back to Hitler’s support of Franco during the Spanish Civil War) and because the seaport city made an escape by U-boat possible. In his 2012 book, El Exilio De Hitler, Basti notes that Baumbach mentions in his autobiographical book, Broken Swastika, that he was in Berlin on April 21, 1945, to meet with Albert Speer. Here, Baumbach inserts a strange sentence that Basti considered completely out of context. Baumbach wrote: “We had fixed up long-range aircraft and flying-boats so that we could get anywhere on earth.”155 Basti observes that Baumbach does not explain why he was in Berlin on April 21, 1945, nor does he explain what he was doing from April 21 to April 28, 1945.156
Basti also claims to have in his archives a Nazi document that lists the official passenger manifest from Hörsching airfield to Barcelona at 20:00 hours military time on April 26, 1945. The passenger manifest lists, in addition to Hitler and Eva Braun, that the additional passengers included Bormann and Müller, as well as SS officer Hermann Fegelein, the brother-in-law of Eva Braun.157 The names of Goebbels and his wife and children were originally included on the list, but appear to have been crossed out, indicating that the Goebbels family did not make the flight. This is consistent with the evidence that the Goebbels family committed suicide, with their corpses positively identified in the Führerbunker. After World War II, Basti noted, Baumbach traveled to live in Argentina, where in 1948 he was named “technical consultant” to the Argentinian air force. In 1953, he was killed in an air accident when he was testing the launch from a British Avro Lancaster B-036 bomber of a missile developed in Argentina with the collaboration of the Nazis.158
U-530 surfaces at Mar del Plata
At dawn on July 10, 1945, the 76.8-meter (252-foot) long Type IXC/40 German submarine U-530 surfaced unexpectedly outside the harbor at Mar del Plata. Commanding Officer Oberleutnant (Lieutenant Junior Grade) Otto Wermuth, 25 years old, and Executive Officer Oberleutnant (Lieutenant Junior Grade) Karl Felix Schuller, 21 years old, were the two most senior officers aboard. At 6:30 a.m., Wermuth ordered the navigation lights lit, and the submarine began entering the harbor. In response to signals from shore, he flashed with his blinker the letters “A-L-E-M-A-N-A S-U-B-M-A-R-I-N-O (“German submarine). He proceeded cautiously, flying the Nazi flag.
According to US Navy intelligence reports, the U-530 made a dawn entry into the Mar del Plata harbor, skillfully negotiating a sand band that partially obstructs the channel and making its entrance despite the lights of the town that make lights at the end of the breakwater marking the entrance to
the harbor exceedingly difficult to distinguish. On July 23, 1945, Time magazine described the arrival of the U-530 as follows:
Off the submarine base at swank Mar del Plata, fishermen trolled through the wintry, misty Argentinian dawn. Out of the grey murk loomed the bulk of a big submarine. Its engines silent, it rolled gently with the waves. The fishermen noted the craft’s unfamiliar lines, went right on fishing. Just before daylight, the submarine got under way, slid silently through the naval base’s narrow entrance. The sub swished past a sentry, standing with his back to the sea, and blinked a surrender signal to the control tower. The German submarine, U-530, commanded by Lieut. Otto Wermuth, 25, had arrived.159
Argentinian naval officers ordered the U-530 to secure a buoy in the outer harbor. The officers and crew were taken off and lodged in the Naval Base under guard. Once the crew was on shore, the Argentinian navy began taking an inventory of all gear on board the submarine. Preparations were made to start interrogating the prisoners. Argentinian naval officers Captain José Dellepiane and Commander Patricio J. Conway, both considered by US naval intelligence to be favorable to the US cause, were assigned to lead the interrogations, and the US and British Embassies were invited to send observers, but the request was made that no publicity be given to this offer for “political” reasons.160