Hunting Hitler
Page 13
As suggested earlier in this chapter, Hitler found an immediate refuge at the Eden Hotel, owned by Walter and Ida Bonfert Eichhorn, in La Falda in the province of Córdoba. Now in disrepair, the Eden Hotel was a focal point for the German community in Argentina in the period leading up to and during World War II. During this period, the Eden Hotel had international prestige, hosting heads of state from Europe and distinguished guests, including physicist Albert Einstein. Every time the Nazis won a major victory on the battlefield, the Eden Hotel was the site of celebrations and parties. Abel Basti, in his book Hitler en Argentina, documents that Hitler and the Eichhorns freely exchanged letters and were on cordial terms. The Eichhorns, visiting Germany once a year before the war, supported Hitler’s political campaigns financially as he rose to power. As an expression of gratitude, Hitler sent Ida Eichhorn a personal gift of the first Mercedes-Benz automobile to arrive in South America.175
In 1943, architect Alejandro Bustillo (at the request of German supporters of Hitler then living in Argentina) designed and constructed an elaborate resort residence for Hitler and Eva Braun—Residencia Inalco, located in a remote area between San Carlos de Bariloce and Villa La Angostura, bordering the Nahuel Haupi Lake outside the city of Bariloche, in the province of Río Negro, Argentina. Hitler’s Inalco estancia, a home of 6,000 square feet built on 1,050 acres of land on the banks of the lake, is protected on all sides by dense forests. In its heyday, the ten-bedroom mansion had a large expanse of private beach and a dock suitable for mooring seaplanes.176 The Hitler mansion was built to look and feel Bavarian, located in “an area of outstanding natural beauty, with snowcapped mountains and several lakes set amid mile after mile of untouched forest.”177 Here in southern Argentina, in the region of the Andes adjoining Chile, the surroundings and residence were selected and designed to echo the distinct feel of Hitler’s Obersalzberg retreat above the town of Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. Hitler moved into the residence in June 1947.
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143 “Hitler Is Reported in Argentine Hideout: Montevideo Dispatch to Chicago Times Says Eva Braun There Too,” newspaper account quotes a dispatch from Vincent de Pascal, the newspaper’s Montevideo correspondent, reported in The Lewiston Daily Sun, July 17, 1945, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1928&dat=19450717&id=LJ0gAAAAIBAJ&sjid=OmgFAAAAIBAJ&pg=5027,982627.
144 Abel Basti, Bariloche Nazi: Sitios Historicos Relacionados Al Nacionalsocialismo (Edicion del Author, 2004).
145 Abel Basti, Hitler en Argentina (Edicion del Author, 2006).
146 Abel Basti, El Exilio De Hitler: Las pruebas de la fuga del Führer a la Argentina (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Sudamericana, 2012).
147 Patrick Burnside, El Escape de Hitler: Su Vida Invisible en la Argentina, las Conexiones Con Evita y Perón (Buenos Aires, Planeta, 2000).
148 Michael Santo, “New ‘Hitler in Argentina’ documentary claims Hitler did not die in 1945,” The Examiner, Dec. 31, 2012, http://www.examiner.com/article/new-hitler-argentina-documentary-claims-hitler-did-not-die-1945.
149 Ronald C. Newton, The “Nazi Menace” in Argentina, 1931-1947 (Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 1992), p. 77.
150 William Stevenson, A New Investigation of the Escape and Survival of Nazi War Criminals (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1973), p. 30.
151 Ibid.
152 Timothy Naftali, Norman J. W. Goda, Richard Breitman, and Robert Wolfe, “Analysis of the Name File of Heinrich Mueller,” National Archives, Interagency Working Group, Record Group 263, Records of the Central Intelligence Agency, Records of the Directorate of Operations, http://www.archives.gov/iwg/declassified-records/rg-263-cia-records/rg-263-mueller.html.
153 H. D. Baumann, Hitler’s Fate: The Final Story (Twickenham, United Kingdom: Athena Press, 2008), p. 58.
154 Interview with Gertraud Junge, Munich, Feb. 7, 1948, in the Michael Musmanno Collection, Gumberg Library Digital Collections, Duquesne University, p. 44, http://digital.library.duq.edu/cdm-musmanno/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/musmanno-interviews&CISOPTR=25&CISOBOX=1&REC=1.
155 Werner Baumbach, Broken Swastika: The Defeat of the Luftwaffe (New York: Dorset Press, 1960), p. 193.
156 Abel Basti, El Exilio De Hitler, op.cit., p. 231.
157 Ibid., pp. 236-239.
158 Ibid., p. 240.
159 Time Magazine, “Argentina: U-530,” Vol. XLVI, No. 4, July 23, 1945.
160 Naval Attaché, Buenos Aires, Argentina, US Navy Intelligence Report, “Subject: German Submarine Surrenders to Argentine Navy,” July 13, 1945. Source: Record Locator 38, OP162, Interrogations and Documents from U-Boats 1945-1945, Box 23, National Archives and Record Administration, NARA, College Park, Maryland. Appears to be a mimeograph copy.
161 Ibid.
162 Ibid.
163 Ibid.
164 Naval Attaché, Buenos Aires, Argentina, US Navy Intelligence Report, “Subject: Argentina Navy, Movements of Enemy Vessels,” July 18, 1945. Source: Record Locator 38, OP162, Interrogations and Documents from U-Boats 1945-1945, Box 23, National Archives and Record Administration, NARA, College Park, Maryland. Appears to be a mimeograph copy.
Capitalization and parenthesis in original.
165 Ibid. Capitals and parenthesis in original.
166 Naval Attaché, Buenos Aires, Argentina, US Naval Intelligence, “Report on the Interrogation of Prisoners from U-530 Surrendered at Mar del Plata, 10 July 1945, dated July 24, 1945. Source: Record Locator 38, OP162, Interrogations and Documents from U-Boats 1945-1945, Box 23, National Archives and Record Administration, NARA, College Park, Maryland. Appears to be a black-ink typed copy.
167 Juan Salinas and Carlos De Nápoli, Ultramar Sur: La última operación secreta del Tercer Reich (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Grupo Editorial Norma, 2002).
168 Office of Naval Intelligence, “Report on the Interrogation of Prisoners from U-977 Surrendered at Mar Del Plata, 17 August 1945,” File Op-16-2, Sept. 19, 1945, http://www.uboatarchive.net/U-977INT.htm.
169 Heinz Schaefer, U-Boat 977 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co. Inc., 1952); republished as Heinz Schaeffer, U-Boat 977: The U-Boat that Escaped to Argentina (Bristol, United Kingdom: Cerberus Publishing Ltd., 2003), Chapter 13, “Sixty-Six Days Under Water,” pp. 131-137.
170 Office of Naval Intelligence, “Report on the Interrogation of Prisoners from U-977 Surrendered at Mar Del Plata, 17 August 1945,” loc.cit.
171 Heinz Schaeffer, U-Boat 977: The U-Boat that Escaped to Argentina, 2003 edition, pp. 154-155.
172 Ibid., p. 155.
173 H. D. Baumann, Hitler’s Escape, op.cit., p. 154.
174 Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams, Grey Wolf, op.cit., p. 197.
175 Abel Basti, El Exilio De Hitler, loc.cit. See also: “Revealed: Hitler in Argentina,” YouTube, posted Dec. 24, 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Gw1hgOlHTD4.
176 “Residencia Inalco: la casa de Hitler en Argentina,” HistoriasLadoB.blogspot.com, March 5, 2012, http://historiasladob.blogspot.com/2012/03/residencia-inalco-la-casa-de-hitler-en.html.
177 Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams, Grey Wolf, op.cit., p. 252.
Conclusion
WHO HELPED HITLER ESCAPE?
Today I know that the great Bormann mystery was never really a mystery at all. His survival was known to the governments of countries in whose territories he lived with impunity since 1948.
—Ladislas Farago, Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich (1974)178
That Hitler escaped Berlin was never a mystery to Juan Perón, as Hitler even today is widely believed by Argentinians to have lived out his life in Argentina. Still, that Hitler escaped Berlin alive and lived out the remainder of his life in a mountain lake retreat in Argentina is an outrage when we consider that countless millions—certainly more than sixty million—died in World War II, with more than six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust.
A key theme of this book is that the cover story of Hitler’s dual suicide with his new bride Eva Braun has b
ecome the official politically correct version of Hitler’s demise because that version was and is more palatable to establishment leaders in the United States and Europe. At the end of the war, Eisenhower knew that Hitler had escaped, and he had the courage to say so, at least up until the time when he was preparing to run for president.
In reality, very few Nazis were ever brought to justice. The Nuremberg Trials, in which twenty-three of the most important Nazi political and economic figures then in captivity were tried, was the most important war crimes tribunal held by the Allies in Europe at the end of World War II. While sixteen Nazis were hanged to death at the conclusion of the Nuremberg Trials, tens of thousands of Nazis escaped Europe, largely heading to Argentina and other nations in South America. Few Americans today remember the Malmedy massacre, for which forty-two former members of the Waffen SS—including Colonel Joachim Peiper, commander of the First SS Panzer Regiment, the core group involved in the slaughter—were sentenced to death by hanging. Even fewer Americans remember that, despite the convictions and death sentences given to these forty-two Nazis for killing more than eighty-four American POWs in cold blood on December 17, 1944, (the second day of fighting in the Battle of the Bulge) the sentences of all the Waffen SS convicted in the Malmedy Trial were commuted to life imprisonment—and all were released one by one, with Colonel Peiper being the last.
Hitler’s escape began in 1943, when Martin Bormann implemented a plan to invest billions of dollars of stolen wealth in corporations with a particular focus on business enterprises in the United States and Argentina. The ties between Wall Street and the Hitler regime forged as Hitler was coming to power before World War II proved to be useful once again when Allen Dulles served the interests of the Roosevelt administration in Berne, Switzerland, for the duration of the war. With Bormann relying heavily upon Swiss banks and financial agents to effect his transactions, Dulles could anticipate a continuation of the pre-war alliances that had been forged between US companies and German companies. While the post-war Marshall Plan rebuilt German infrastructure, Dulles and Bormann quietly created a capital base for a post-war boom in the United States and a Germany destined to emerge as the economic powerhouse behind a united Europe put together through the early free trade compacts masterminded by French internationalist Jean Monnet.
Truthfully, Hitler could not have escaped without the complicity of Allen Dulles in Switzerland and Juan Perón. Having the world believe Hitler committed suicide rather than convicting and sentencing him to death during a war crimes tribunal avoided the creation of a Nazi martyr for future generations. Suicide, however, when seen as the final act of a coward, is hard to admire. In many ways, the dilemma Roosevelt, and then Truman, faced at the end of World War II was similar to the dilemma Abraham Lincoln faced at the end of the Civil War. “If you bring these [Confederate] leaders to trial, it will condemn the North, for by the Constitution, secession is not rebellion,” Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase said in July 1867. “Lincoln wanted [Jefferson] Davis to escape, and he was right. His capture was a mistake. His trial will be a greater one.”179 Perón could quietly provide a safe haven for Hitler, knowing he would have to remain in hiding the rest of his life. The moment he resurfaced as a public figure or allowed the remaining Nazis to reform a national socialist movement with his backing, Hitler would have signed his death warrant. The history of the Nazis in South America is that they attempted to live out their lives in hiding, so as to enjoy freedom in their final years without having to face the consequences of being apprehended and brought to justice.
Today, a convincing argument can be made that the Fourth Reich is arising today in the United States and Europe. “At the beginning of the third millennium after Christ, by most criteria, the once-free constitutional republic of the United States had become a National Socialist nation, an empire of the creators of the Third Reich—a Fourth Reich,” wrote journalist Jim Marrs in his 2008 book The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies that Threaten to Take Over America.180 What Allen Dulles perceived was that the twentieth century was shaping into a conflict not between capitalism and communism, but between national socialism and communism. With the coming of the New Deal, both the established Republican and Democratic Parties bought into the idea that social welfare was the responsibility of an ever-expanding federal government. Since the 1930s, with rare exceptions, so-called “big-government Republicans” have dominated the establishment of the Republican Party.
In a real sense, we have become the modern-day national socialists, in that the United States political consensus assumes that the government’s responsibility is both to provide the regulatory structure and economic stability for government to form a partnership with business, while taxing the people and the corporations to provide abundant social welfare support to sustain those struggling to achieve or maintain some level of middle-class stability. Seeing the fundamental agreement between the Nazi’s National Socialist political philosophy and New Deal thinking, the precursor to today’s progressive thinking, Allen Dulles knew the Nazis working for Hitler in government, business, and intelligence activities were our natural allies.
Dulles not only masterminded co-opting Reinhard Gehlen’s Wehrmacht intelligence agency to craft the CIA, he also masterminded “Operation Paperclip” to bring thousands of German scientists, engineers, and otherwise technically skilled experts to the United States to work in the retooling of US business from their war-production orientation to the competence needed to dominate the post-war economy worldwide. Just as US intelligence operations at the end of World War II were based on the Nazis, JFK relied on Nazi rocket scientist and aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun to build the intercontinental ballistic missiles the United States would need in the atomic era and to create the NASA infrastructure, which would lead to the United States landing on the moon.
It is far from certain that the United States and Western Europe would have had the economic strength to withstand an expanding Soviet Union throughout the Cold War years had Bormann not invested the ill-gotten Nazi capital—including the wealth stolen from the Jews about to be murdered—in the Western economies in order to establish viable escape routes for himself, Hitler, other top Nazis such as Heinrich Müller, and tens of thousands of other Nazi war criminals. Without Dulles’s complicity, it is much less likely that Hitler or any of the other Nazi henchmen like Eichmann and Mengele would ever have escaped. Without Bormann’s funding, it is much less certain that Ronald Reagan would have had the economic base from which to challenge Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.
When the Nazis escaped Germany at the end of World War II, they brought with them not only the advanced technical genius of Nazi science and capital derived from the conquest and slavery the Nazis imposed on Europe—they also brought their ideology with them. Ironically, the Nazis lost World War II, but through the economic deceit of free trade agreements, Hitler’s dream of a united Europe ruled by Germany has been partially realized in today’s European Union. Through the same route of deceitful trade agreements that formed the World Trade Organization and NAFTA, the United States has championed international organizations, beginning with the United Nations and continuing with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, that threaten to end US sovereignty once and for all. The Constitution for which tens of thousands of patriotic and brave men and women fought Germany in two twentieth century wars is being eroded today as internationalists of both the Republican and Democratic Parties look to enrich themselves in a global economy that favors Germany in the West and China in the East.
“America today is a national socialist’s dream come true,” Jim Marrs wrote.181 As the National Security Agency engages in a program of universal domestic surveillance unimaginable even to the Nazis at the height of their power, American businesses have abandoned Detroit to go bankrupt as cars and trucks sold in the United States are manufactured via the mechanisms of a one-world economy. Meanwhile, those Americans who dare champion principles of US freedom
s as traditionally defined by the US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights face ridicule and derision as “tea-baggers,” instead of the Tea Party Patriots they truly are. Shockingly, the once proud US mainstream media has abandoned its role as the Fourth Estate to buy into the dominant government welfare state ideology with a willing compliance Hitler would never have thought possible. Just as Hitler was allowed to escape Berlin and permitted to enter Argentina by submarine, national socialism has thrived in what is arguably the Fourth Reich that we ourselves have unwittingly become.
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178 Ladislas Farago, Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich, op.cit., p.36.
179 Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, quoted in Shelby Foote, The Civil War: Red River to Appomatix, Vol. 3, (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 765.
180 Jim Marrs, The Rise of the Fourth Reich: The Secret Societies that Threaten to Take Over America (New York: William Morrow, 2008), p. 5.
181 Ibid., p. 363.
INDEX
Aarons, Mark, 100
Abwehr, 92
Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich (book), 95, 127
Aktion Adlerflug, 84
Aktion Feuerland, 87, 88
Alaric, 38
Andropov, Yuri, 15
Angleton, James Jesus, 100–101
Argentina, 2, 29, 62–66, 124–25. see also Hitler, Adolf, escape of
art treasures, 83, 88
Auschwitz, 91, 100
autopsy, 4, 9, 11–12, 18, 20