Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler

by Simon Dunstan

  Heinrich Bethe also lived in the Center and described his more modest dwelling as “a small typical local cabin, it had one big room which served as a bedroom and living room, a small hearth, and all that was apparently needed to live comfortably in that area. On the left side was a bathroom and on the right a small room designed for keeping personal belongings.” Bethe was allocated one of several offices off a corridor in one of the larger houses. The “quartermaster general” had his center of operations in the Center’s main building, where sixteen people worked looking after the facilities and the grounds; nine Germans, three Chileans, and four Argentines.

  “Schmidt” was sent to the German school in San Carlos de Bariloche. On the classroom walls there were portraits of Hitler, swastikas, and other decorations; it reminded the boy of his old school in Munich during the time of the Third Reich. All the students, regardless of age, had to join a youth organization. Although it was not called the Hitler Youth, it seemed very much like that paramilitary group to the young Schmidt. He recalled that he enjoyed the meetings, the marches, the drums, the military instruction, the war games, and the training with different firearms, all of which were pursued with an almost religious fervor. The discipline was severe, and youngsters were beaten for breaking the rules, poor grades, or a lazy attitude. There were lessons about the Third Reich and Hitler’s activities, and everything was illustrated with films, slides, and photographs. The school had a “splendid” library that contained many copies of Mein Kampf, Hitler’s and Goebbels’s speeches, Rosenberg’s books, annuals, old copies of the weekly Nazi propaganda newspaper Das Reich, and other Nazi books published during Hitler’s time or secretly in West Germany after the war. The children were told that the Center was a small piece of the Third Reich, a haven where one day the struggle for a new and great Germany would begin, where the survivors would begin to seek vengeance for the lost war. “We were educated as the avengers who would continue the work of our fathers.” His schoolmates secretly told him that their fathers had also been in the SS or Gestapo or had held other important positions in the Third Reich, but they were not allowed to reveal their true surnames or ask others about theirs.

  Nobody lived outside the valley; the members of the community grew most of their own food, and anything else they needed was brought in from the outside, from the nearby towns of San Carlos de Bariloche and San Martín de los Andes. Philip Hamburger told a similar tale in the New Yorker:

  Once a month the gates of the estancia swing open and a large black truck races down the driveway, careens onto the main road and heads for the main hamlet many miles distant, where a dozen stalwart blond men hop down and wander through the streets for ten or fifteen minutes, purchasing a bite to eat here and a trinket there. Then they hop into the truck and race back to the estancia.

  IN 1946, “ADOLF HITLER’S VALLEY” was controlled by a mass murderer and wanted war criminal, SS and Police Gen. Ludolf von Alvensleben, known to his friends as “Bubi” (Little Boy). Born in 1901, Alvensleben came from the Prussian officer class and fought as a hussar at the end of World War I. After he became a Nazi Party member of the Reichstag in 1933, his rise was rapid: he commanded the 46th SS Regiment in Dresden the following year and became senior adjutant to Reichsführer-SS Himmler. During the war, he commanded SS and police units in the Crimea, and as commander of the Selbstschutz paramilitary forces in occupied western Poland he presided over mass executions and other atrocities. Married with four children, Alvensleben also fathered at least one illegitimate child as part of Himmler’s “Lebensborn” program to breed a master race—Himmler was the “godfather” to Alvensleben’s illegitimate son. Captured by the British in April 1945, Alvensleben walked out of his prison later that year while the guards at Neuengamme internment camp in Hamburg were celebrating Christmas. He fled with his family down the Vatican-organized ratlines through Italy (see Chapter 21), arriving in Argentina early in 1946. President Perón and his “Blessed Evita” would welcome many such mass murderers to the Nazi home away from home among the lakes and mountains of Patagonia.

  THE HITLERS MOVED INTO INALCO, THEIR NEW MANSION, after returning from holiday at Casino in Brazil in June 1947. Inalco Mansion is located in what had been plot number eight of the Nahuel Huapí agricultural colony, planned at the beginning of the twentieth century. The area was almost inaccessible until the 1960s, when the road that crosses the Andes into Chile was built. The area between San Carlos de Bariloche and Villa La Angostura in Río Negro province looks and feels distinctly European—specifically, Bavarian. It is an area of outstanding natural beauty, with snow-capped mountains and several lakes set amid mile after mile of untouched forest.

  A short distance from the international border with Chile, at the very furthest end of Lake Nahuel Huapí, Inalco is almost hidden from view from the lake by two small islands. The offshoot of the lake where the house was built is called Última Esperanza or “Last Hope,” since it was believed by early explorers to be the last hope of finding a water-borne route through to Chile. In the 1940s and ’50s, Inalco was easily accessible only by boat or seaplane. One regular visitor, who was said to take Hitler on regular trips to meetings in the area, was a pilot coincidentally named Frederico Fuhrer, whose Grumman Goose seaplane was often tied up at the concrete jetty to the left of the main house’s lawn. In the boathouse next to the jetty was Hitler’s personal motorboat.

  A ten-bedroom mansion, Inalco is a typical example of the style of famed Argentine architect Alejandro Bustillo, who openly acknowledged the influence of Albert Speer’s work. Known colloquially as “Perón’s favorite architect,” Bustillo had designed the Llao Llao Hotel complex in San Carlos de Bariloche in 1939, and in mid- or late 1943 he was commissioned, almost certainly by Ludwig Freude, to work on a future home for Hitler. The mansion looks out on Lake Nahuel Huapí and the Andes—a stunning panorama of water, forest, and snow-capped mountains that rivals Obersalzberg. It is difficult to imagine a more beautiful alpine setting nor one that was so far beyond the reach of any but the most determined intruder. At the time, the house was accessible by motor vehicle only after an arduous journey along unmade roads and tracks from the nearest township, Villa La Angostura (as described by both “Schmidt” and Bethe). Lookout points were dotted around the neighboring forested hills, guarding the air and water approaches to the property. One puzzling aspect—considering how expensive the mansion must have been to build in the 1940s, and what a major task it must have been to bring the building materials to such an isolated location—was that its position, surrounded by hills and native towering trees, left it in constant shadow, never in direct sunlight.

  Behind the house was a huge underground fuel tank that powered the electrical generators for the valley, and to one side a mound, now covered with trees, shows evidence of underground chambers and ventilation shafts. Heinrich Bethe’s account of the Center described underground steel-lined chambers beneath the offices, where the “most important and sinister documents of that century” were kept. In 2008, the caretaker on the property warned that the mound was dangerous and kept collapsing in on itself. He said that when he first took over the job at Estancia Inalco he had to attend an interview at a local house where the property manager lived, and he remembered two massive bronze plaques decorated with swastikas on the wall of the main hall.

  As well as the main house, Bustillo also designed and built a pastiche of a medieval-style watchtower at Peninsula San Pedro called the “Saracen tower” by locals; invisible from the main road, it can be seen only from the waters of Lake Nahuel Huapí or from the air. From the top of the tower a watchful observer could see virtually the whole lake and any aircraft or boats approaching Inalco from the Argentine side. Omar Contreras, a former journalist who is now the minister of tourism for Río Negro province, remembered visiting this tower as a young boy with his father at the end of the 1960s; Contreras senior worked for SS Col. Friedrich “Fritz” Lantschner’s construction company. Contreras remembered being surpr
ised when he saw the tower; he thought it was a castle, and beyond it he could see Lake Nahuel Huapí. A tall, fair-haired German chatted with his father and took them into the tower; Contreras thought he was Friedrich Lantschner. The hall had a double wooden door leading to a big room. Being a curious boy, Contreras walked through, and he remembered being surprised at seeing a number of Nazi flags inside—he recognized them from war comics. Back in the main room, he saw a group of about ten people talking in what he thought was German. In the car on the way home, he asked his father about the flags, but his father replied, “We do not talk about that.”

  INALCO WAS HITLER’S MAIN RESIDENCE from June 1947 until October 1955, and it was here that the former Kriegsmarine petty officer, Heinrich Bethe, was to become his closest servant. For Eva and her young daughters, living at Inalco was at first idyllic; during the summers they swam in the ice-cold waters of the lake, and in the winter enjoyed the skiing at the nearby mountain resort Cerro Catedral. In the early years, President Perón would visit too, skiing and climbing in the mountains with his Nazi friends from the Club Andino Bariloche, a mountaineering association set up in 1931 by Otto Meiling.

  Hitler was in congenial company at the Center and on his regular trips to San Carlos de Bariloche; the town was home to hundreds of Nazis after World War II. A small yellow-brick building in the town center housed a delicatessen once owned by SS Capt. Erich Priebke, who was also chairman of the board of governors of the city’s most prestigious German private school, Primo Capraro. (In 1996, after intense international pressure, Argentina finally extradited him. At the time of this writing in 2010, Priebke was serving a life sentence in Italy for his role in the massacre of 335 Italians at the Ardeatine caves in Rome on March 24, 1944.) Across the road from Priebke’s delicatessen was the Club Andino Bariloche. Its membership from the late 1940s included the famous Stuka pilot Col. Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the Luftwaffe’s most highly decorated ace and a close confidant of Hitler, as well as Friedrich Lantschner and his brother Gustav.

  The town was also home for many years to an Austrian SS sergeant named Josef Schwammberger, a noted sadist who was eventually convicted of killing thirty-four victims personally and being directly responsible for the deaths of 274 others in the Polish ghetto and camp at Przemysl. (Argentina finally agreed to his extradition in 1987; found guilty of murder by a West German court in 1992, he died in prison in 2004.) At the town hall, the “Angel of Death” Dr. Josef Mengele, the SS captain notorious for his medical experiments at Auschwitz, had to take his driving test twice in the 1940s. Others who lived in or visited the area at various dates included SS Lt. Col. Adolf Eichmann, the functionary who made Reinhard Heydrich’s “Final Solution” a reality; SS Capt. Eduard Roschmann, christened “the Butcher of Riga”; SS Capt. Aribert Heim, Mauthausen concentration camp’s own “Dr. Death”; and Martin Bormann himself. None of them except Eichmann were ever caught, and he only when he returned to live in the Argentine capital and became more accessible to his hunters.

  President Juan Perón explained: “When the war was over, some useful Germans helped us build our factories and make the best use of what we had, and in time they were able to help themselves too.”

  IN 1947, WITH HITLER AND HIS FAMILY SECURE under the watchful eyes of senior SS officers and with Perón newly sworn in as president, Martin Bormann began to conclude his clandestine work in Europe. He was ready for his own final move to the south. One last meeting in Europe would seal his pact with the Peróns.

  Chapter 21

  GREEDY ALLIES, LOYAL FRIENDS

  ON JUNE 6, 1947, ARGENTINA’S FIRST LADY left for a “rainbow” tour of Europe aboard a Douglas DC-4 Skymaster lent by the Spanish government. The metaphor came from a July 14 Time magazine cover: “Eva Perón: Between two worlds, an Argentine rainbow.” President Perón, most of his government, and thousands of well-wishers saw her off. A second plane followed, carrying the first lady’s wardrobe, the party’s luggage, and numerous boxes (with their contents making a second clandestine trip across the Atlantic)—the “Rainbow” was prudently carrying her pot of gold with her. Evita was accompanied by her brother Juan Duarté, her personal hairdresser Julio Alcaraz (who also guarded her extensive collection of jewelry), and two Spanish diplomats sent by Franco to accompany her to her first destination, Madrid. Also on the aircraft was Alberto Dodero, a billionaire shipping-line owner who financed the trip. Dodero was a “flashy free-spending tycoon who dazzled even the free-spending Argentines.” His ships would bring thousands of Nazis and other European fascists to Argentina.

  Traveling ahead of Eva’s party was Father Hernán Benítez, a Jesuit priest and an old friend of her husband’s. Benítez had been briefed by Cardinal Antonio Caggiano, the archbishop of the Argentine city of Rosario, who was a strong link in the chain that led escaping Nazis to their new lives in Argentina. Caggiano had visited Pope Pius XII in Rome in March 1946 to collect his red hat. At a meeting with Cardinal Eugène Tisserant, Caggiano, in the name of the “Government of the Argentine Republic,” had offered his country as a refuge for French war criminals in hiding in Rome, “whose political attitude during the recent war would expose them, should they return to France, to harsh measures and private revenge.” Now it was the turn of the Germans. Bishop Alois Hudal was Bormann’s main contact in the Vatican. A committed anticommunist, the Austrian-born, Jesuit-trained Hudal had been a “clero-fascist” (clerical supporter of Mussolini) and an honorary holder of the Nazis’ Gold Party Badge. Bishop Hudal was the Commissioner of the Episcopate for German-speaking Catholics in Italy, as well as father confessor to Rome’s German community. In 1944, he had taken control of the Austrian division of the Papal Commission of Assistance (PCA), set up to help displaced persons. The PCA, with the help of Bormann’s money, was to form the backbone of the ratlines organized to help escaping Nazi war criminals. (Note: ratline, a term often used in reference to Nazi escape routes, is formally defined by the U.S. Department of Defense dictionary of military terms as an organized effort for moving personnel and/or matériel by clandestine means across a denied area or border.)

  Among the thousands of men Hudal helped to escape justice were the commandants of both Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps, SS lieutenants Franz Stangl and Gustav Wagner. After escaping American captivity in Austria, Stangl reached Rome, where Hudal found a safe house for him, gave him money, and arranged a Red Cross passport with a Syrian visa. Erich Priebke, Josef Mengele, and Eichmann’s assistant Alois Brunner were just a few of the infamous murderers who also passed safely through the Nazi bishop’s hands on the way to Alberto Dodero’s ships.

  In 1947, Hudal’s activities were exposed for the first time when a German-language Catholic newspaper, Passauer Neue Presse, accused him of running a Nazi escape organization, but this did not stop him. On August 31, 1948, Bishop Hudal wrote to President Perón requesting 5,000 Argentine visas—3,000 for German and 2,000 for Austrian “soldiers … whose wartime sacrifice” had saved Western Europe from Soviet domination.

  WITH A LARGE ESCORT OF SPANISH FIGHTER PLANES, Evita’s airliner took off on June 7 from the town of Villa Cisneros (present-day Dakhla) in the Spanish Sahara, destination Madrid. A crowd of three million Madrileños awaited her at the airport, which was decked with flowers, flags, and tapestries. Like visiting royalty, her arrival was marked by a twenty-one-gun salute, and she rode with El Caudillo—“the Leader”—Franco to the El Prado palace in an open-topped limousine, through adoring crowds chanting her name. Awaiting her was a cornucopia of expensive gifts. She was adored in every city she visited; the dazzling first lady behaved like a queen, and Spaniards—after years of civil war and the drab authoritarianism of the Franco regime—took the beautiful Argentinean to their hearts.

  The all-conquering Evita left Spain for Rome on June 25, 1947. Father Benítez would smooth her way in the Vatican with the aid of Bishop Hudal. Two days after she arrived she was given an audience with Pope Pius XII, spending twenty minutes with the Holy Father—“
a time usually allotted by Vatican protocol to queens.” However, there was a more sinister side to the Rome trip. Using Bishop Hudal as an intermediary, she arranged to meet Bormann in an Italian villa at Rapallo provided for her use by Dodero. The shipowner was also present at the meeting, as was Eva’s brother Juan. There, she and her former paymaster cut the deal that guaranteed that his Führer’s safe haven would continue to remain safe, and allowed Bormann to leave Europe at last for a new life in South America. However, she and her team had one shocking disappointment for Bormann.

  PROVING THAT THERE IS NO HONOR AMONG THIEVES, the Peróns presented Bormann with a radical renegotiation of their earlier understanding. Evita had brought with her to Europe some $800 million worth of the treasure that he had placed in supposed safekeeping in Argentina, and she would deposit this vast sum in Swiss banks for the Peróns’ own use. As her husband Juan Domingo reportedly said, “Switzerland is the country … where all the bandits come together [and] hide everything they rob from the others.” This treasure—comprising gold, jewels, and bearer bonds—likely went straight to Eva’s trusted contacts in Switzerland, who were awaiting her arrival later in her European tour to set up the secret accounts. The Argentines were leaving Bormann with just one-quarter of his looted nest egg in Argentina. This swindle had been accomplished with the connivance of Bormann’s most trusted Argentine contacts—Ludwig Freude, Ricardo von Leute, Ricardo Staudt, and Heinrich Doerge—all of whom had been signatories of the Aktion Feuerland bank accounts set up in Buenos Aires.