Hitler Is Alive!

  Even as Eichmann’s son was making his admission to a badly shaken West German government, fresh insight on the mind and personality of Adolf Hitler was disclosed by trusted Germans who had lived and worked with him in the last two years of his reign. What they had to say, while only a revelation of character rather than facts, served to prop up the belief that Hitler was still among the living.

  These ex-colleagues of the Nazi tyrant painted him as a man alternately friendly, charming, furious, brutal and playful, childishly playful—but always optimistic. Hardly a man to kill himself, unless all means of escape were closed to him.

  “Hitler would never commit suicide,” an aide of Dr. Bauer told the Police Gazette. “He was obsessed with the idea that he had divine guidance, was always too concerned with his own health and safety. The people who were closest to him are convinced he escaped.”

  To his very last day in Berlin, Hitler was a picayune eater, inordinately concerned with what food was harmful to him, what good. He considered meat deadly. He enjoyed making guests disgusted with meat by spinning horrible yarns about “what goes on in slaughterhouses.”

  His idea of good food was flaxseed or oatmeal gruel, raw vegetables and vegetable juices. He especially enjoyed a dish of baked potatoes with sour milk, which he practically flooded with raw linseed oil.

  He always had coffee boiling for his friends, but he would have none of it. He considered it bad for the nerves, harmful to the body. He preferred caraway tea, or, strangely enough, a tea brewed from apple peelings. For dessert he was especially fond of generous slices of freshly baked apple cake.

  He never drank alcohol. He never smoked.

  His passion to preserve himself was revealed in other ways. Wherever he went, he was followed by a retinue of Germany’s best doctors. He dosed himself with cough medicine at the very first sneeze.

  He drove in an armored-car with bullet-proof glass. Even that wasn’t enough. He always made sure the car shades were drawn.

  Bomb-Proof Hideouts

  His shelters during the war were bomb-proof hideouts strong enough to resist the blast of the most powerful air bombs. His principal headquarters was the “Wolves’ Redoubt,” a series of giant concrete and steel structures hidden in a forest near Rastenburg, East Prussia. The roof of Hitler’s shelter was covered with grass, as a means of camouflage.

  On July 20, 1944, a bomb exploded in the Fuhrer’s “situation barracks.” It had been planted there as part of an officers’ plot to assassinate him.

  He emerged from the barracks with his black pants torn, his hair in disorder, but his belief in his star undamaged. “This is proof, gentlemen,” he said with a twisted smile, “that Providence has chosen me for my mission.”

  Later, when the shock had worn off, he flew into one of his rages. “Those fools don’t know what chaos would set in if I’m no longer around!” he cried. “But I’ll show them! These criminals, who wanted to get rid of me. … Once Jewry with all its hatred gains power over us, goodbye to German and European civilization!”

  From Berchtesgarten, his mistress, Eva Braun, bombarded him with letters filled with anxiety for his safety. Touched, he mailed her his torn pants “as a souvenir.”

  When he visited the mountain eyrie in Berchtesgarten his constant companion, the fear of death, would vanish briefly and then he’d cut up like a kid.

  One April evening, just before his birthday, he and Eva and some friends were sitting around the roaring fireplace. He began playing with his police dog, “Blondi.”

  “Stand up!” Der Fuehrer ordered, and “Blondi” stood on her hind legs.

  “Now sing for us.” With that, apparently to inspire “Blondi,” the dictator of the Third Reich let out a prolonged howl.

  “Blondi” did some howling herself, in a high-pitched voice. It rose to falsetto and then Hitler, with mock sternness, commanded, “Sing lower down!”

  And “Blondi,” with a howl or two of accompaniment from her master, would drop her voice and sing contralto.

  Most of the sycophants around Hitler would laugh. A few looked embarrassed. They found it almost inconceivable that the man who was master of a large chunk of Europe could fling away his dignity to howl with a dog.

  Banned Smoking

  Hitler like many lesser men, got sleepy right after he ate and would doze off in his chair, no matter how important the dignitaries seated at his table. Such moments as this delighted his guests, because it gave them their first chance to rush out of the room and enjoy a smoke. Smoking in Hitler’s presence was strictly banned.

  Supper was usually served at 8 p.m. in the main house. Guests who were not remaining for the night had to wait quite some time before taking their leave. Hitler had a terror of being alone in waking hours. He wanted people, laughter, conviviality, around him all the time. No guest could leave until 4 or 5 in the morning, when finally the host felt like retiring.

  There was only one guest Hitler didn’t care to have around long. This was the wife of Baldur von Schirach, formerly Reich Youth Leader and later Reich’s Governor of Vienna.

  One day Mrs. von Schirach, clearly a compassionate woman who let her heart get the better of her head, broke into the chatter of a tea with this naive statement:

  “My Fuhrer, I recently saw a trainload of deported Jews in Amsterdam. They were starving, miserable. And each wore the Star of David on his chest. God knows where they were being deported. I’m sure you don’t know, my Fuhrer!”

  A thick silence blanketed the room. Hitler suddenly leaped to his feet and marched out the door.

  Mrs. von Schirach left Berchtesgarten next day. She was never seen there again.

  Hitler loved being a dictator, and yet there were moments when he would have enjoyed being like common men.

  “If you only knew how I’d like to be able to walk through the streets alone sometimes,” he would say longingly. “Maybe buying Christmas presents in a department store. Or sitting in a sidewalk cafe, watching the people pass by.”

  He was constantly issuing statements and required a crew of 10 girl secretaries. It was with them that he revealed a Hitler virtually unknown to the outside world, a kindly, almost fatherly boss who quite considerately always dictated slowly, so the girls could keep up with him.

  One girl, who had just landed the job, entered Hitler’s office all atremble. The man who ruled Germany with an iron fist almost tenderly led her to a typewriter table near his desk.

  She noticed that Hitler was wearing spectacles, the old-fashioned kind, with a metal frame. It made her think of a village schoolmaster.

  Shakily she removed the cover from the typewriter and tried to insert a sheet of paper. She had trouble doing this, because of her fit of shakes.

  “You needn’t be so nervous,” Der Fuehrer said softly. “You know, I myself make more mistakes in dictation than you possibly can.”

  That calmed her down.

  When she had finished typing a page, Hitler said, “May I see it a moment?” She handed it to him and he read it carefully. He looked up, beaming. “You typed it well.”

  Fatherly Warning

  He got off the subject of typing and questioned her about her family, her schooling, whether she wanted to remain at her new job. Then he issued a fatherly warning.

  “You’re still young, Miss. And here at headquarters there are so many men. Men who seldom get home. And the attraction of the eternal feminine is strong in soldiers. What I mean is, you must be careful and reserved. And if you have any complaints, don’t hesitate to come to me!”

  By the last year of the war, Hitler was pretty fed up with uniforms. “You don’t know how well off you are,” he told one Berchtesgarten guest who arrived in shorts. “That’s how I used to go about.”

  “Surely,” protested his visitor, “you can do that here. After all, here you’re in private life.”

  “No, as long as we’re at war, I won’t take off the uniform. And what’s more,” Hitler added with a twinkle in his eye, “my knees
are very white. That looks dreadful in shorts.

  “But after the war I’m going to hang up my uniform and retire. Someone else can take over the government. Then, as an old gentleman, I’ll surround myself with witty clever people and I’ll write my memoirs.”

  And that is exactly what Adolf Hitler may be doing at this very moment!

  THE SECRET HIDEOUT OF HITLER AND HIS HENCHMEN

  by KENNETH KAASEN

  One of the most infamous Nazis from Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich has now admitted to West German authorities that Der Fuehrer’s last deputy is without question still alive in South America. Martin Bormann has been pinpointed in the Brazilian state of Parana, located near the border with Paraguay.

  Germany’s top Nazi hunter, Hesse state prosecutor Fritz Bauer, and Simon Wiesenthal of Vienna believe it is only a matter of time before Bormann is arrested. It was Simon Wiesenthal, a man with a mission, who hunted down Adolf Eichmann.

  Spotlight on Hideout

  The Nazi war criminal Franz Stangl plans to throw the spotlight on Hitler and at least ten of his top henchmen still living in Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, some of them prosperous businessmen.

  Franz Stangl, who is now being interrogated in West Germany, was the former commandant of the notorious Treblinka extermination camp in Poland.

  Stangl, awaiting trial on charges of war crimes, is talking about ex-Nazis other than Bormann.

  After Adolf Hitler, the most wanted Nazis are Martin Bormann, Josef Mengele, and Richard Glucks.

  Another most wanted man on the Bonn government’s list is Heinrich Muller, the former S.S. Intelligence chief.

  In July, 1967, the Brazilian newspaper Folha da Tarde published a report that Hitler’s right hand man Martin Bormann was living in the industrial city of Sao Paulo, in southern Brazil. The information came from a Roman Catholic priest who in turn got it from Helmut Bordeon, a former Nazi Elite Guard officer.

  Hitler’s chauffeur, Erich Kempka, was the first to spread the lie that Hitler and Bormann were killed early on the morning of May 2, 1945.

  Kempka told US Army Intelligence that Bormann and Dr. Werner Naumann, the State Secretary to the Nazi Propaganda Ministry, made their way from the Chancellery to the Friedrichstrasse railway station early that morning without incident.

  Joined by the deputy Hitler Youth Leader, Artur Axmann, they stopped near the station to discuss how to get away from the advancing Russians.

  “Others joined them behind a large German tank and some armored vehicles,” Kempka said. “They walked alongside the armored column as it moved toward the Russian lines. The column, preceded by men on foot, passed through a tank trap and had gotten fifty yards or so past it when the tank was hit by a bazooka shell.

  “I was about three or four yards behind the tank. Bormann and Naumann were directly beside it. The shell smashed into them and I saw their bodies hurled away. They could not have survived.”

  However, Werner Naumann did survive and was active in neo-Nazi circles after the war. What really happened to Bormann? Noting that Bormann’s companions, Erich Kempka, Naumann and Artur Axmann had no trouble getting away, investigators dismissed the Kempka story.

  The fact is that after Hitler escaped, Bormann, Naumann, Axmann and Kempka fled the flaming ruins of Berlin together.

  As far as US Army investigators could learn after the war, they crossed through the weakest spot in the Soviet lines, commandeered a German staff car outside the city and drove over back roads to Hamburg, in the British occupation zone. From there, they made their way south to Bavaria.

  Among those who confirmed the escape of Bormann were Major General Otto Ohlendorf, an S.S. officer, and Hartman Lauterbacher, the chief political officer of Southern Hanover.

  Before Ohlendorf was hanged for the murder of some 90,000 Jews during the year he commanded one of Himmler’s extermination squads, he flatly stated that Martin Bormann had escaped Berlin. Bormann was known to have a mountain retreat a short distance from Hitler’s Berchtesgaden, called the Halali, meaning “tallyho.”

  Lauterbacher told British officials: “He (Bormann) told us all many times that ‘in a certain circumstance we will meet in Halali.’”

  Nazi Youth Packs

  Later in 1945, Allied intelligence received reports that Bormann was hiding in the Bavarian mountains with young Nazi youth packs led by Axmann. When American troops drove out the youth packs, Bormann fled to the German-Austrian frontier with its snow-covered slopes, and helped to create a new guerrilla band call the “Edelweiss Pirates.”

  Bormann hid in the hills for four months, but then apparently decided to risk a visit to an old hangout … Munich. He was seen there in October, 1945, by J. A. Friedl, a former Nazi sergeant in the Munich police

  Friedl knew Bormann from early days of the Nazi party.

  He signed a sworn statement for the US Army and Bavarian authorities. “I saw Martin Bormann with some men in a car parked in front of the Spanish Consulate,” Friedl said.

  “I approached the car and greeted Bormann. He remembered me and we chatted together for a few minutes. From what I saw and heard, I gathered that Bormann was trying to arrange a visa to enter Spain.”

  Nine months after this incident, Bormann was again reported seen in Munich.

  This time he was seen by Jakob Glas, who was Bormann’s personal driver up to 1944. On July 26, 1946, Glas was standing on a Munich street corner. Glancing into a passing auto, he saw his old boss riding in the front seat next to the driver. “I know Bormann and the man I saw was Bormann,” he told US intelligence officers.

  On December 11, 1946, two Stockholm newspapers, Arbetet and Aftontidningen, reported that Bormann had found his way to South America. US and British intelligence also received word that Bormann was in Argentina.

  According to their informants, Bormann left Bavaria in the summer of 1946, went to Switzerland to get travel funds from a secret Nazi bank account, then traveled to southern Spain where a mysterious submarine was waiting to take him to the Argentine. Bormann’s destination was the province of Patagonia.

  The Patagonian pampas were crawling with former Nazis, including the late Adolf Eichmann.

  Arrived by Sub

  Intelligence reports revealed that Bormann arrived off the Argentine coast on the German submarine U-435 and came ashore near the small city of Rawson.

  Bormann and his staff reportedly had gone inland to lose themselves in the vast grasslands after American agents picked up his trail.

  This a far from complete story on how Bormann escaped from the crumbling Third Reich. The full story of how he got to South America may never be told. This much is known: Spruille Braden, American Ambassador to Argentina at the end of World War Two, sent an intelligence group to Patagonia to investigate U-boat landings.

  The big Nazis got away.

  At various times in the late 1940s, Bormann was reported to be living on a ranch in Patagonia, and in the jungles of Brazil.

  At the time of his arrest in Sao Paulo, Brazil, last Spring Franz Stangl revealed that Bormann has been moving about between three South American countries … Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil.

  Stangl reports that Bormann is now an old-looking man and completely bald. Bormann also has a heart disease. At one time, Stangl claims, he was in the Monastery of the White Padres in Asuncion, Paraguay, where Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Doctor of Auschwitz” was called in to treat him.

  The West German government now concedes that it believes Martin Bormann is still alive, something which cannot be denied in the weight of evidence. His arrest may be only months away.

  The most wanted Nazi after Hitler’s elusive deputy is Heinrich “Gestapo” Muller. Muller’s whereabouts are a mystery. But there is no doubt that he is still alive. During the last year of the war Heinrich Muller collaborated with the Russian secret service.

  As an S.S. lieutenant general, Muller was chief of Hitler’s secret police, the Geheime Staatspolizei, or Gestapo for short. In addition, he
was also the Lord High Executioner of the Third Reich.

  As commander of the Gestapo, he was partly responsible for some 12,000,000 murders. At his orders, Adolf Eichmann sent millions of Jews to Nazi death camps. At his orders, Gestapo men turned Germany and occupied Europe into a vast slave empire.

  A British intelligence agent, Captain S. Payne Best, who was once kidnaped by the Gestapo’s intelligence branch, observed that Muller “had rather funny eyes which he would flicker from side to side with the greatest rapidity, and I suppose that this was supposed to strike terror into the heart of the beholder.”

  Hitler’s Gestapo chief vanished without a trace in April 1945, within days of Der Fuehrer’s fake “suicide.”

  S.S. Lieutenant Colonel Willi Hoettle, a former member of the Gestapo’s Foreign Intelligence Service, was convinced that his boss joined the Soviet Secret Service after the war. Another former Nazi official revealed that he saw Muller in Moscow. He said Muller, wearing a Russian police official’s uniform, was dining in the old Sovietskaya Hotel.

  The most reliable information, from former Red agents, reveals that Heinrich Muller was until recently the most secret of Soviet secret police. Reports hint Muller was a colonel in Russia’s foreign intelligence bureau.

  Muller was reported to have said in 1943: “Joseph Stalin is immeasurably superior to the leaders of the Western nations, and if I had anything to say in the matter, we’d reach an agreement with him as quickly as possible.”

  William L. Shirer wrote: “Muller was never apprehended after the war … some of his surviving colleagues believe he is now in the service of the Soviet secret police, of which he was a great admirer.”

  In 1950, a German officer who had been a prisoner of war in Russia said he had seen Muller in Moscow in 1948.

  Today Heinrich Muller is free to carry on his murderous profession. Recent reliable reports put him in Albania working for the Albanian secret police. Wherever he may be now, he was never captured and brought to justice. The Third Reich’s official race exterminator is still free.