Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler

by Simon Dunstan

  On U-518, the toilets were equipped with a flushing supply from the sea, which emptied into a sanitary tank that was “blown into the sea periodically.” Normally there was only one toilet available until the food stored in the other two had been eaten. For this voyage the toilet in the forward torpedo room was kept for the exclusive use of the Führer and Eva Braun; it also had a metal cabinet with a mirrored front, which housed two fold-up washbasins. Fresh water was limited and strictly rationed, but water for washing was made available to the passengers—a privilege unknown to U-boat crews, for whom laundry had to wait, and liberal use of the standard-issue “Kolibri” cologne was ordered.

  Food consisted mainly of canned goods supplemented by a bland soy-based filler called Bratlingspulver; the crew called it “diesel food,” due to its constant exposure to engine fumes. A major problem caused by running submerged for an entire patrol was the disposal of the garbage that inevitably accumulated on board, in humid and fetid conditions. Garbage could be dumped in small quantities from the ejector for the BOLD sonar decoy, but the usual practice was to store it in an empty forward torpedo tube for firing into the sea when safe to do so. After dark on May 4, 1945—two days after the “official” announcement of Hitler’s death, which caused some wry smiles aboard U-518—the boat anchored for four hours off the southwestern side of the uninhabited island of Branco, in the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of West Africa. Taking the opportunity to “air” the boat, Offermann allowed Eva Braun in particular to come up onto the bridge to smoke—she was finding the conditions aboard the submarine almost intolerable. For a fleeting moment four days later, at approximately 30°W, Offermann considered surfacing for the customary equator ceremony of “crossing the line,” but he quickly dismissed the idea. He had a rendezvous.

  SS GEN. HERMANN FEGELEIN arrived off the Argentine coast aboard U-880 on the night of July 22–23, some five days ahead of the Führer’s boat. The boat had maintained maximum speed throughout its journey to enable Eva’s brother-in-law to organize preparations for the Führer’s arrival. He transferred into a tugboat of the Delfino SA line about thirty miles off Mar del Plata in the early hours of July 23. Sailors from U-880 off-loaded forty small but heavy boxes, the size of ammunition chests, from the submarine onto the Delfino tug. U-880’s final service to the Reich had now been performed. The crew transferred to the tugboat, the last men opened the seacocks and scrambled to safety, and as they watched quietly their U-boat flooded with seawater and sank for the last time into the South Atlantic depths.

  Meanwhile, in the tugboat captain’s cabin, Fegelein showered and shaved for the first time in fifty-four days. Fifteen minutes later, Fegelein was dressed in a sharp grey double-breasted suit, courtesy of Buenos Aires’s finest tailor. This had been brought aboard for him by Col. Juan Perón’s personal representative Rodolfo Freude, the son of the Nazi “ambassador” in Argentina, the wealthy businessman Ludwig Freude. For the trip to the shore the two men were joined in the wheelhouse by U-880’s other passenger, Willi Koehn, the chief of the Latin American division of the German Foreign Ministry and former head of the Nazi Party in Chile.

  Koehn had last been in Buenos Aires in January 1944, when he had also made use of the regular U-boat run from Rota in Spain to Mar del Plata to bring in forty heavy boxes. Koehn was well known to the anti-Nazis in Argentina; three weeks after his arrival with Fegelein, democratic Argentine exiles in Montevideo, Uruguay, confirmed that Koehn was back in Argentina. This time he was in Patagonia, with “the knowledge of the Buenos Aires government.” He was not alone.

  When Fegelein and Freude landed on the quay at Mar del Plata, a black Argentine navy staff car was waiting for them. A short while later the SS general and the Argentine Nazi boarded a Curtiss Condor II biplane—freshly painted in the colors of the Fuerza Aérea Argentina, established less than six months before—and took off. This Curtiss was one of four originally ordered by the Argentine navy in 1938; the type was renowned for its short take-off and heavy payload capability. It touched down again just half an hour later, on the grass airstrip at a German-owned ranch four miles from the coast near Necochea.

  IN THE LAST days of the Nazi regime, Ernst Kaltenbrunner conducted the largest armed robbery in history against the wishes of Martin Bormann. Accordingly, he was denied an escape route and was left to face justice. Here, along with other Nazi leaders he stands trial in September 1946 at the Nuremberg International Tribunal for crimes against humanity. Seated in the middle row, from left to right: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, and Kaltenbrunner. He was condemned to death and hanged on October 16, 1946.

  WITH THE BOMB-DAMAGED Old Reich Chancellery looming in the background of this photograph taken some time after 1945, the bodies of the Hitler and Braun doubles were soaked in gasoline and burned in the small depression visible halfway between the tree and the conical ventilation tower. The blockhouse and doorway were above the stairway and emergency exit of the Führerbunker. To the right of the ventilation tower is the ballroom of the Old Reich Chancellery, below which the Vorbunker was situated. Hitler used to walk his dog Blondi in this area of the Reich Chancellery gardens every day up until their escape.

  NAZI MINISTER OF Propaganda Joseph Goebbels poses with his wife Magda, three of their six children, and the Führer at the Obersalzberg, 1938. The entire Goebbels family died in the Führerbunker on May 1, 1945, with the six children poisoned and their parents committing suicide. The bodies were burned in a funeral pyre in the Reich Chancellery garden—the same fate that befell the body doubles of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. The little boy is Helmut Goebbels, who was reputedly the bastard son of Magda Goebbels and Adolf Hitler following a passionate affair during a vacation on the Baltic Sea in the summer of 1934.

  IN “HITLER’S” LAST official appearance, he left the safety of his bunker to hand out medals to members of the Hitler Youth in the Chancellery garden on March 20, 1945. In actuality this was the unfortunate Gustav Weber, whose uncanny resemblance to Hitler deceived even those quite close to him; on this occasion the National Leader of the Hitler Youth, Artur Axmann, was either taken in or warned to play along.

  THE NAZI-FINANCED Gran Hotel Viena built on the isolated shores of Argentina’s inland sea, Mar Chiquita, now in ruins. Hitler and Eva visited the hotel’s hospital and health spa in 1946.

  A MODERN-DAY aerial view of the town center of San Carlos de Bariloche, with its German-influenced architecture. In the background are Lake Nahuel Huapí and the Andes in the far distance, below which was situated “Adolf Hitler’s Valley.”

  A VIEW OF the front of the Berghof, Adolf Hitler’s estate in Obersalzberg, Berchtesgaden, Upper Bavaria, Germany, c. 1938. Note the similarity in design to Inalco.

  Hitler’s main residence in Patagonia between 1947 and 1955. Built in 1943, parts of Inalco are modeled on the Berghof.

  BUILT BY THE same architect as Inalco, the Saracen Tower on Lake Nahuel Huapí guarded the air and water routes to Hitler’s home. While the Saracen Tower overlooked the lake itself, there was a series of refugio [literally “refuges”] situated in the mountain passes from Chile and in the hills above San Carlos de Bariloche. These mountain chalets controlled every avenue of approach to “Adolf Hitler’s Valley.” One refugio above Bariloche was named the Berghof after Hitler’s home in the Bavarian Alps, and it was there that Juan Domingo Perón often came to ski with the Nazi members of the Club Andino Bariloche.

  THE “ARCHITECT OF the Holocaust,” Adolf Eichmann, escaped from American custody early in 1946 and, with the help of Bishop Alois Hudal, sailed for Argentina on a Red Cross passport on July 14, 1950. For the next ten years, he lived openly as Ricardo Klement (see identity card, above) and ultimately worked as a foreman at the Mercedes Benz factory in Buenos Aires. On May 11, 1960, Israeli secret agents kidnapped him in a suburb of Buenos Aires and took him to Jerusalem, where he was tried in 1961. On May 31, 1962, Eichmann was hanged and cremated, and his ashes discarded outside Israeli
territorial waters.

  KNOWN AS “The Angel of Death” for his vile medical experiments on prisoners, particularly on twins and dwarves, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Josef Mengele was one of thousands of Nazis who escaped justice after the war and settled in South America. There he acted as an illegal abortionist, living in San Carlos de Bariloche in Patagonia (where he failed his driving test twice) and Buenos Aires, before fleeing to Paraguay after Eichmann’s kidnapping. Using various names from José Mengele to Wolfgang Gehard, he subsequently lived in Brazil where he died on February 7, 1979, while swimming in the sea. He is shown here during the 1970s in Brazil eating with an unidentified woman (on left), sitting across from an unidentified man and his maid Elza Gulpian de Oliveira. De Oliveira, who worked for Mengele for several years, testified that she knew him as “Mister Pedro.”

  PRESIDENT JUAN PERóN and his wife Eva are seen here with Rodolfo Freude, Perón’s private secretary and intelligence coordinator, in October 1946, several months after Perón took office. Freude’s father, Ludwig, was the de facto Nazi ambassador in Argentina and in control of the massive fortune sent by Bormann, much of which was acquired by the Peróns for their own use. The Peróns also made large amounts of money from the indiscriminate sale of immigration visas that allowed many wanted Nazi war criminals to escape justice in Europe and make a new life in Argentina after the war.

  SHOWN HERE IN 1994, Catalina Gomero was the housemaid—and virtual adopted daughter—of the Eichhorn family. She waited on Hitler at their home in La Falda, in Cordoba Province in 1949. She said that his visit was “kept very, very secret.” She also saw Hitler with the Eichhorns at their mountain retreat, El Castillo, that same year.

  HERNáN ANCIN, Croatian dictator Ante Paveli?’s carpenter, shown in 1995. He met the Hitlers five times in Mar del Plata between September 1953 and October 1954. He described Hitler as “very polite” and said Eva Hitler seemed to have “suffered a great deal.”

  RETIRED POLICEMAN Jorge Colotto, Juan Domingo Perón’s personal bodyguard, in a 2009 photograph. He saw Bormann in 1954 when the Brown Eminence met with Perón. Colotto was entrusted with the task of taking an envelope of cash from Perón every month to the Hotel Plaza in central Buenos Aires, to pay for Bormann’s expenses.

  Chapter 17

  ARGENTINA—LAND OF SILVER

  IN 1536, SPANISH CONQUISTADORES established a settlement on the Río de la Plata (River Plate) that was to become the cosmopolitan city of Buenos Aires. It lay on the edge of the vast pampas or plains that stretched hundreds of miles to the Andes Mountains on the western edge of South America. The conquistadores came in search of gold and silver. Such was their lust for precious metals that they called the newfound territory Argentina, or Land of Silver, after the Latin argentum. There was little gold or silver to be had from the nomadic Native American hunter-gatherers living on the pampas, but the Spaniards brought with them something far more valuable: the horse and the steer. The pampas were ideal for the raising of cattle. The legendary gauchos (cowboys) tended immense herds, spending months at a time in the boundless countryside. The end product was leather, which was exported in huge quantities to Europe. It was a wasteful process, as the only monetary value lay in the hides and the meat was mostly discarded. And then in 1879, with the advent of refrigerated shipping, whole carcasses of beef, lamb, and mutton were dispatched by the millions across the seas from specially constructed ports—Buenos Aires in Argentina, Fray Bentos in Uruguay, São Paulo in Brazil—to feed the workers of the industrial revolution and generate great wealth in South America.

  With burgeoning populations in the Old World, many Europeans sought a new life in the Americas. Between 1850 and 1930, over six million immigrants flocked to Argentina: mostly Italians, but many Spaniards, British, and French as well. This medley of races gave rise to the quixotic nature of the Argentines, who have been described as “Italians who speak Spanish and think they are British living in Paris.” The southern Europeans provided the labor while the Anglo-Saxons supplied the capital for the country’s growing infrastructure of railroads and ports. The English also purchased vast tracts of the pampas for their cattle farms, or estancias, and encouraged the widespread cultivation of wheat for export. After the unification of Germany in 1871, German immigrants began to arrive in Argentina in significant numbers, but the best lands of the pampas were in the hands of the English or the old, established Spanish families. The Germans were obliged to look elsewhere. Their eyes fell on the desolate hinterland of Patagonia that straddled the borders of Argentina and Chile to the south.

  It is difficult to comprehend the scale of Patagonia: one and a half times the size of Texas or nearly four times that of Great Britain. Most tellingly, its population in 1945 was minimal. By comparison, if New York City had the same population density there would be just thirty-five people living in Manhattan. On one side, Patagonia is bordered by the magnificent Andes Mountains and on the other by the cold and forbidding waters of the South Atlantic. Although Imperial Germany had been stripped of all its colonial possessions by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Patagonia, which remained in Argentine and Chilean sovereign territory, was a de facto German colony. When war broke out in 1939, there were 60,000 members of the overseas Nazi Party living in Argentina, the largest group of National Socialists outside of Germany. The total German population of approximately 237,000—not including German Jews—represented a small, but economically and politically important section of Argentine society. Its influence at the government level far exceeded its numerical size.

  IN GERMANY, STRATEGIC DREAMS for the Americas had predated Hitler’s rise to power by at least three decades. As early as 1904, Ernst Hasse, president of the Pan-German League in Berlin, had even been moved to predict that “the Argentine and Brazilian republics and all the other seedy South American states will accept our advice and listen to reason, voluntarily or under coercion. In a hundred years, both South and North America will be conquered by the German Geist [philosophical mind-set], and the German Emperor will perhaps transfer his residence to New York.”

  During the Nazi era, the two key figures in German penetration of Latin America were Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, from 1935 the head of the Abwehr, and Gen. Wilhelm von Faupel, head of the Ibero-American Institute, the headquarters for German espionage and conspiracy in the Western Hemisphere.

  Canaris knew Argentina and Chile well. He had joined the German Imperial Navy in 1905, and by the outbreak of World War I he was serving as an intelligence officer on board the SMS Dresden. The Dresden was the only German cruiser to escape destruction by the British at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914. The Royal Navy finally caught up with the Dresden in March 1915, at Robinson Crusoe Island off the coast of Chile. After a short battle against overwhelming odds, the German crew scuttled their ship and spent the rest of the war interned in Chile. Canaris escaped in August 1915; he was already fluent in Spanish, and during an early stage of his long journey back to Germany he was helped by German settlers in Patagonia, in particular at the Estancia San Ramón outside San Carlos de Bariloche, in the foothills of the Andes. Canaris even evaded capture in England during his sea voyages home (he also spoke good English). He then served as an undercover agent in Italy and Spain before ending World War I as a U-boat commander in the Mediterranean. His brilliant talents and unusual firsthand knowledge of the Patagonian region would be invaluable during the development of the Nazi intelligence network in southern Argentina.

  The preexisting basis and principal cover for this activity was the Lahusen company, a major enterprise with offices and shops throughout Patagonia since before World War I (now defunct). Central to its early profitability was the wool trade, supplied by the German sheep ranches of Patagonia; before refrigeration made meat shipments to Europe possible, wool was Argentina’s largest export and its trade fueled the country’s vibrant economy. The Lahusen organization facilitated the German espionage system throughout Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay in both wor
ld wars. It employed over a thousand people and owned nearly a quarter of a million acres of land in the territory; its headquarters in the Montserrat district of Buenos Aires took up seven floors of a modern office building. Every town and village in Patagonia had its Lahusen store and agent, and it was a standing joke in Buenos Aires’s diplomatic circles that Hitler knew more about Patagonia than the Argentine government did.

  Wilhelm von Faupel, the German General Staff’s primary expert on Argentina, also had experience in Argentine affairs that predated World War I. From 1911 to 1913 he was a professor at the military academy in Buenos Aires. At the outbreak of war, he was relocated to Spain, where he ran German espionage and sabotage activities in the Mediterranean. Following Germany’s defeat, he returned to Argentina as chief adviser to the Argentine General Staff. From 1927, Faupel supported the rise of the Nazis in Germany; he recruited important German émigrés—such as Walter and Ida Eichhorn—to help fund the National Socialist Party; the Eichhorns in particular would, for decades to come, play a central part in Nazi plans for Argentina. From 1938, from a mansion on Fuerenstrasse in Berlin, Faupel organized the training of German and South American agents and saboteurs. He had contacts with the Falange Española—the Spanish fascist political party that underpinned the Nationalist uprising by rebel army officers in July 1936—and was instrumental in the creation of the Condor Legion soon afterward. This force combined cadres of German military instructors and squadrons of combat airmen that assisted the Nationalist forces—and acquired useful experience themselves—during the Spanish Civil War. Wilhelm von Faupel’s activities over three decades would bring him huge influence in Spain after the Nationalist leader, Gen. Francisco Franco, established his military dictatorship in 1939. In time, this influence would enable Martin Bormann’s plans for a “Fourth Reich in the South” to move toward reality.