Hunting Hitler

by Jerome R. Corsi

  The extremely corroded condition of the ship’s hull indicated that the U-530 had been at sea for a long time, but US navy intelligence could not determine by inspection the exact duration of its journey. A US navy intelligence report dated July 13, 1945, commented, “There appears to be no reason why the sub could not have returned to a European port before coming here and have brought passengers.” The report also indicated skepticism about Wermuth’s claim that he came to Argentina because he considered it a safe haven, and he did not know that Argentina had declared war on Germany. “Since he stated his radio was in good condition, it can be assumed he did know,” the US navy intelligence report continued, indicating suspicion that the commanding officer was lying. “Since this is at variance with his statement as to the condition of his radio, it is believed that he had other reasons for coming to Argentina.” The report noted that rumors were being investigated about fisherman off the coast of Argentina seeing a strange submarine on July 9, 1945, the day before the U-530 surfaced at Mar del Plata. Other rumors suggested a submarine off the coast was seen a week before the U-530 surrendered. “Had it been the intention to land people, this would be a logical procedure—land the people and then stand off for some time in order to give those people an opportunity to hide themselves before the possibility of their landing from a submarine could be noted.”161

  In his initial discussions with Argentinian navy officials, Wermuth indicated that there were fifty-four sailors on board the U-530: the commanding officer, plus two deck officers, two engineer officers, and forty-nine men. Wermuth explained that the U-530 left Kiel, Germany, north of Hamburg, on February 19, 1945, after overhauling there. The submarine proceeded to Kristiansand, Norway, and left there in March, assigned to patrol the North Sea and North Atlantic. Wermuth explained that the U-530 spent some time off the port of New York. He said that the U-530 departed with full tanks, holding 245 tons of diesel oil, with six tons left on arrival. The vessel was capable of making eighteen knots on the surface and five knots submerged with the snorkel up. Wermuth noted that he had not used the snorkel “for a long time.”162 The oldest member of the crew was a 45-year-old warrant officer, and one of the engineers was 32 years old—but the rest of the crew averaged about 22 years old, with the youngest being 19. The crew was examined by an Argentinian medical officer and found to be in good health, although all were pale, apparently due to having been submerged during daylight hours, which the crew claimed had been the case.163

  Was Hitler on the U-530?

  On July 11, 1945, the day after the U-530 surfaced in Mar del Plata harbor, the Argentinian Ministry of Marine issued a communiqué stating that the interrogation of the crew and inspection of the submarine proved that the U-530 did not carry any Germany politicians or military officials, no persons were landed on the Argentinian coast prior to survival, and all personnel aboard were bona fide crew members. From the Mar del Plata naval station, the officers and crew were taken under guard to Martín García, a small detention island in the Río de la Plata, after the Argentinian Cabinet decided on July 17, 1945, that the submarine and crew would be placed at the disposal of US and British authorities, with the findings of Argentinian naval authorities also turned over. US naval intelligence was suspicious that the Argentinian government authorities, yet sympathetic to Nazi Germany, had forced what amounted to whitewash conclusions.

  In a US naval intelligence report written on July 18, 1945, the Naval Attaché in Buenos Aires noted that Argentinian newspapers had reported the following: “None of the crew has identification papers, the combat-log is missing, all armament was destroyed or rendered useless, the bow gun and two anti-aircraft guns are missing, and the only ammunition left aboard is in such condition as to be useless.” Clearly the crew had something to hide, and the submarine was not ready for combat before it surrendered to Argentinian naval authorities. The US naval intelligence report further commented, “There was plenty of food aboard but very little fuel. The crew was in good condition and very little information of value could be gotten from any of them. The ship’s log and instruments were intact and the submarine was fitted with a particularly powerful radio which was in operating condition. The crew of fifty-four men was sixteen over the normal crew of thirty-eight men for a submarine of that class.”

  The report went on to describe a C-4 naval intelligence report that tracked various unnamed Argentinian newsmen who were following stories that Hitler and Eva Braun had been landed in the south of Argentina. The critical paragraph containing that information is reproduced here in full:

  A submarine was sighted by an Argentinian Navy transport about the middle of June and was subsequently hunted by Argentinian warships. Two men landed near San Julián (Territory of Santa Cruz) about July 1, 1945, coming in a rubber boat and being met by a sailing boat. The submarine refueled from drums hidden under water along the coast at a place marked with three large stones near a tamarisk grove. Another submarine is on the way to Argentina to surrender. The Assistant Chief of the Department of Investigations informed the Federal Police that a submarine was going to surrender some time before the actual surrender took place. Eva BRAUN and Adolf HITLER were landed in the south of Argentina.164

  Interestingly, even though this paragraph was written to report on what Argentinian news reporters were saying, the last sentence regarding Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun was written as if the information conveyed were established fact. The report noted that in police circles, it was being said that U-530 put in at Comodoro Rivadavia before surrendering at Mar del Plata. Further more, a resident of Coronel Dorrego, Province of Buenos Aires, reported that on or about June 22, 1945, some people landed on the coast from a rubber boat.

  In addition, on the evening of July 9, the day before the U-530 surrendered, a celebration was held in the private dining room of what US Navy intelligence characterized as the “Nazi Jousten Hotel” to laud the arrival of some important Nazis in Argentina. The report continued to note that celebrations were also held in other Nazi meeting places for the same reason. “On July 17, the same source reported that HITLER and five other men had landed (time and place unknown) in a restricted military district far in the south of Argentina,” the US Navy intelligence report stressed. “They are said to have come in from the sea in two power boats, flying the Argentinian official flag.”165

  U-530’s clandestine mission

  A careful reading of the US naval intelligence reports on the U-530 investigation makes it clear that the navy believed the officers and crew of the U-530 were lying, with many clues suggesting that the U-530 was on a clandestine mission, most likely involving the ferrying of high-profile Nazis to safety in Argentina.

  A US naval intelligence report filed from Buenos Aires dated July 25, 1945, indicated that the U-530 was found to be short one large rubber life raft. The report noted that life rafts were carried in waterproof containers on deck and were equipped with a sack of yellowish chemical that, when loosened in seawater, dyed it a very bright green. The life rafts were orange colored, and the dye was presumed to make the life rafts more visible from the air. It was noted that the container just forward of the conning tower, which was closed when the U-530 arrived at Mar del Plata, did not contain a life boat, but was filled with a bright green liquid, presumably dyed seawater. “Attention is called to the fact that if one boat were used for some purpose clandestinely, it might be assumed that the dye would be left in the container, and seawater could easily have splashed into the container,” the report commented. To document and reference the specifics of the mission raft, US naval intelligence most likely suspected, but could not prove that the missing life raft had been used to ferry important passengers from the U-530 to friendly forces on shore, anticipating important Nazi guests who had escaped from Germany.166

  The US navy intelligence reports also state suspicions that Wermuth, who was only 25 years old, may not have actually been the commanding officer of the U-530—but that the real commanding officer may have been
landed somewhere else. Another stated suspicion is that the additional fourteen crew members beyond the thirty-eight needed to run the ship may have been picked up from another U-Boat that was scuttled along the Argentinian shore after dropping off the Nazi officials transported from Germany. Was the U-530 stripped of armaments and torpedoes to allow the submarine to take on the extra weight from a crew of VIP Nazis picked up in Europe and/or a U-boat crew picked up in Argentina upon completion of their transport of VIP Nazis to the Atlantic coast? Argentinian researchers Juan Salinas and Carlos De Nápoli discuss in their 2002 book, Ultramar Sur (Overseas South), available only in a Spanish edition, that at least five German U-boats reached Argentina in the months at the end of World War II, carrying no fewer than fifty high-ranking Third Reich officials on board. The authors believe that their crews scuttled several of these U-boats after the passengers were dropped off along Argentina’s southern Atlantic shore.167

  The officers and crew of the U-530 were noted to be evasive in answering questions, both when interrogated by Argentinian naval officials in Mar del Plata and when questioned by US naval officials both in Argentina and later in Washington. The US intelligence reports on the interrogation found gaps and inconsistencies in the accounts, concluding that there was nothing to preclude the U-530 from having stopped in Europe to pick up passengers before heading across the Atlantic toward Argentina. US interrogators noted that Wermuth “talked very freely in general, but consistently refused to give information about specific routes and areas.” Interrogators noted that Karl Schuller, the second-in-command, was “very non-cooperative,” refusing to answer many questions. In general, all fifty-four sailors stuck to the same cover story, almost as if it had been rehearsed: that the ship had been overhauled in Kiel, Germany, and then sailed in March 1945 from Kristiansand, Norway, to patrol the Atlantic. Wermuth continued to insist that he received a message on May 8 that the war in Europe had stopped. He said that although at the time they knew Argentina had broken diplomatic relations with Germany, he did not know Argentina had declared war on Germany. He insisted that he decided to come to Argentina for the internment because it was far from the fighting zone in Europe and because he thought they would get better treatment there. Since all log books and navigation records were destroyed before the U-530 reached Mar del Plata, there was no way to determine precisely where the ship had been and when.

  Again, various clues suggest Wermuth was lying. Among the inventory of the crew’s personal effects that Argentinian naval authorities had prepared, Wermuth was found to have had on board with him a German-Spanish dictionary, an item several other sailors had listed in their personal inventories as well. There hardly seems any reason for the crew of the U-530 to have gone to sea with German-Spanish dictionaries if their sole purpose was to patrol the Atlantic in combat missions. If Wermuth had the German-Spanish dictionary from the beginning of the voyage, that suggests his mission departing from somewhere in Europe may have been to sail to Argentina, not to engage in combat in the Atlantic. The alternative would be to assume that Wermuth and other sailors found to have Spanish dictionaries picked them up in one of the stops the U-530 may have made along the Argentinian coast dropping off Nazi passengers. Other sailors were found to have Argentinian cigarettes, Argentinian chocolate, and Argentinian pesos amongst their possessions. Again, Argentinian cigarettes hardly seem a normal item issued by the German navy, but picking up Argentinian cigarettes from compatriots on shore receiving their Nazi guests could easily have been part of a welcoming ceremony.

  The U-977 surfaces at Mar del Plata

  Then, on August 17, 1945, a second Nazi U-boat, the U-977, came to the surface outside Mar del Plata harbor and surrendered, five weeks after the U-530 did the same. This U-boat was a 220-foot Type VIIC/41 with a standard crew of fifty-two and was considered to be the workhorse of the German U-boat force. Unlike the U-530, the U-977 arrived in Argentina fully armed with a full complement of torpedoes on board. The commanding officer, Oberleutenant (Lieutenant Junior Grade) Heinz Schäffer was 24 years old at the time the U-977 was surrendered in Argentina. The U-977 left Kristiansand, Norway, on May 2, 1945, the day after Germany announced Hitler’s death. This was the U-977’s first and only war patrol. The objective was to move into the port of Southampton, in Great Britain, to attack British shipping. The U-977 had reached the waters of Scotland when on May 5, 1945, German President Karl Dönitz ordered all German submarines to return to their home ports. According to the engineering officer, U-977 left Kristiansand with only eighty-five metric tons of fuel and arrived at Mar del Plata with approximately five tons. U-977, as a Type VIC/41 U-boat, was capable of doing seventeen knots on the surface and 7.6 knots submerged. On this last patrol, the U-977 spent 107 days at sea, for an elapsed cruise of 7,644 nautical miles.

  On May 8, 1945, when the German surrender became official and after extensive discussions on board, several of the crew wished to disembark and return home. On May 10, 1945, between 0230 and 0330 hours military time, three enlisted men and thirteen petty officers took three of the large rubber boats, one of which was damaged and abandoned, and sixteen of the one-man rubber boats, and put ashore at the island of Holsenöy, near Bergen, Norway. After the departure of these sixteen members of the crew, the U-977 continued with the remaining thirty-two officers and men.168 Those who remained with the submarine hoped to avoid being turned over to the Russians. They planned instead to surrender to the Argentinians, with the hope of being allowed to settle in South America. In a book written by Schäffer in 1952, the cruise of the U-977 to Argentina was distinguished by Schäffer’s claim to have sailed an extraordinary sixty-six days continuously submerged, using the snorkel to recharge the electric batteries.169 This is a claim Schäffer evidently neglected to make to interrogators immediately after his surrender. The US Navy report on U-977 crew interrogations, compiled a month after the submarine’s capture, mentions nothing about a sixty-six-day voyage submerged. Specifically, the US Navy report notes that the U-977 made for an Iceland Passage after dropping off the sixteen crewmates in Norway, diving once on sighting an airplane and once on sighting a ship. That the U-977 was forced to dive implies that the submarine was on the surface at the time.170 The US Navy report also notes that the U-977 anchored for four hours on July 14, 1945, on the southwest side of Branco in Cape Verde to permit the crew to take a swim.

  Schäffer has always insisted that the U-977 played no part in Hitler’s or any other Nazi official’s escape from Europe to Argentina. Yet in his 1952 book, he describes being brought before an Anglo-American Commission composed of high-ranking officers dispatched to Argentina to investigate the U-977. “These gentlemen were very obstinate indeed,” Schäffer wrote. “‘You have stowed Hitler away,’” they told me. “‘Come on, where is he?’” Schäffer wrote that every story written about him focused not on “this first long underwater journey under such conditions,” but upon suspicions that he had been involved in Hitler’s escape. He described that, when he was handed over to the United States and placed in a camp for VIP POWs in Washington, D.C., the questioning continued. “For weeks on end, day after day, the Americans repeated the charge: ‘You stowed Hitler away.’ For weeks on end I tried to make them see how nonsensical the whole thing was—actually I could no more prove that I hadn’t than they could show that I had, which simply brought us to a deadlock.”171 Finally, the Americans put Schäffer in a room together with Otto Wermuth, the commanding officer of the U-530. “They were hoping that in the first flush of our joyful reunion we would so far forget ourselves as to discuss, in front of all their Dictaphones, the whole inside story of the ghost convoy,” Schäffer wrote. “They must have been very annoyed when nothing emerged from our talk save the true facts about the completely independent voyages of both our submarines.”172

  Yet claims persist that U-977 was involved in shielding other U-Boats unloading Nazi VIPs along the Atlantic coast of Argentina. When the U-977 surrendered at Mar del Plata, the submarine was observed
to have suffered unexplained depth charge damage and to have been repainted. The U-977 may well have been the submarine depth-charged by the Argentinian torpedo boat “Mendoza” near San Antonio del Oeste on July 18, 1945. Other suspicions are that the real reason Schäffer disembarked crew in Norway was not that the crew members leaving the submarine were married and wanted to go home at the end of the war, but because the U-977 needed to make room for a previously unscheduled stop to pick up Nazi VIP passengers needing to escape Europe. Perhaps a rendezvous to pick up Nazi elite was the point of the stop on the Cape Verde Islands rather than a need to provide submariners used to underwater duty with a chance to get some fresh air and take a swim. Schäffer also never fully explained why it took from July 23 to August 17, 1945, some forty-five days, to go from the equator to Mar del Plata, a distance of less than 3,300 miles, except to establish the presumption that his record underwater stint slowed the submarine down to a crawl. Experts calculating from Schäffer’s testimony to the US Navy indicate that U-977 was averaging a speed of ten nautical miles per hour, a speed which should have permitted the U-boat to travel some 276 miles per day while cruising the South Atlantic, which would have placed the submarine at the point of surrender on August 5, 1945. Was the extra time used to discharge Nazi passengers, or to guard other U-boats engaged in that activity? Clearly the intensity of the US interrogation as reported by Schäffer suggests his innocent story was not so readily believed.173

  A refuge in Bariloche

  When Hitler arrived in Argentina, he found an enthusiastic German community ready to welcome his presence. In 2010, Argentinians of German descent account for more than three million in a population that approaches forty-two million, with many of these families having emigrated from Germany in the decades preceding World War I. In the 1930s, as Hitler came to power, many German-Argentinians were fierce Nazi sympathizers dedicated to the principles of national socialism. In the spring of 2008, some 20,000 Nazi supporters celebrated a “Day of Unity” rally held at the Luna Park stadium in Buenos Aires to celebrate the Anschluss, the annexation of Austria into the Third Reich, with German Nazi flags flying alongside the Argentinian flag.174