Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler

by Simon Dunstan

  Eight days after the “important visitor” left La Falda, Mrs. Eichhorn told Catalina to pack a picnic lunch. With the chauffeur driving the Mercedes-Benz and Walter Eichhorn seated next to him, the four drove to the Eichhorns’ house on Pan de Azucar Mountain. This brick-and-timber construction had a large radio antenna and was part of the network of Nazi safe houses across the country. Hitler stayed for fifteen days at what the family called “El Castillo,” but after that Catalina never saw him again. However, she remembered taking telephone calls from him at the Eichhorn home through operators in La Rioja and Mendoza; she recognized his voice. The calls continued until 1962.

  John Walsh, an FBI agent stationed in Buenos Aires at this time, admitted the difficulties he and his operatives encountered in doing any undercover work in Argentina. Of the Hotel Eden and the Eichhorns, Walsh said, “We personally did not do surveillance work there. We would have sources that were outside the embassy that would do that. You just can’t walk in and say, you know, that you are looking for something.” Walsh said that he and his colleagues came under surveillance by the local police. A number of times when he was out with other agents they would see people who were obviously following and watching them.

  DESPITE HIS DIRECT PROTECTION by the “Organization” and the more indirect but essential collaboration of the Perón government, the fact that Hitler moved around during the late 1940s and early 1950s rather than remaining buried at the Center made sightings almost inevitable. In time, Catalina Gomero would not be the only person willing to tell stories of meeting the former Führer in Argentina after the war.

  Jorge Batinic, a bank manager from the city of Comodoro Rivadavia in the southern Patagonian province of Chubut, vividly remembered the story told to him by his Spanish-born mother, Mafalda Batinic. In summer 1940, she had been in France working for the International Red Cross, and on several occasions she had seen Hitler at close quarters when he was visiting wounded Wehrmacht soldiers. In later years she would often say, “Once seen, the face of Hitler was never forgotten.” After the war Mafalda moved to Argentina, and by the beginning of 1951 she was working as a nurse in the Arustiza y Varando private hospital.

  One day, a German rancher was brought in for treatment for a gunshot wound, and a few days later three other Germans arrived to visit the patient. It was noticeable that two of them treated the third one as “the boss.” Mafalda had to choke back an involuntary cry of amazement when she recognized him as Hitler. He had no moustache and was somewhat graying, but she had no doubt that it was him. Shocked, Mrs. Batinic told the owners of the clinic, Drs. Arustiza and Varando; they watched him and were surprised, but did nothing. Apart from greeting the patient, Hitler hardly said a word. When the three Germans left, Mrs. Batinic asked the patient the identity of his important visitor. Realizing that she had already recognized the Führer, the injured rancher told his nurse, “Look, it’s Hitler, but don’t say anything. You know they’re looking for him, it’s better not to say anything.”

  KEY SIGHTINGS OF Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun in Argentina post-World War II.

  Chapter 22

  DEPARTURES

  THE GERMAN NAZIS WERE NOT THE ONLY FASCISTS to escape to Argentina after the war. One of their most bloodthirsty allies had been Ante Paveli, the leader of the Ustaše regime in the short-lived puppet state established by the Germans in Croatia. Styling himself the Poglavnik (equivalent to Führer), Paveli had been responsible for the murders of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children of Serbian, Jewish, and other origins in the ethnic jigsaw puzzle of wartime Yugoslavia; even some members of the Gestapo had thought Ustaše methods “bestial.” Croatia was historically a Roman Catholic region, and contacts in the Vatican enabled Paveli and his whole cabinet, followed later by his wife, Mara, and their children, to travel along the ratlines to Argentina. The Perón government issued 34,000 visas to Croats in the years after the war. Indirectly, Paveli’s escape from justice led to some of the clearest eyewitness testimony to Hitler’s presence in Argentina in 1953–54.

  A carpenter named Hernán Ancin met the Hitlers on several occasions in the 1950s, while he was working for Paveli as a carpenter in the Argentine coastal city of Mar del Plata. The Croatian former dictator had a property development business there. Paveli was known as “Don Lorenzo,” but one of his bodyguards said he had been president of Croatia. (Unsurprisingly, Hernán Ancin had never heard of him before—Paveli was living under an assumed name and heavily protected, but he was not well known in Argentina for his crimes.) Ancin worked for Paveli’s company from the middle of 1953 to September or October 1954. In the southern summer of 1953, the Hitlers were regular visitors to the building site where Ancin was working. On the first occasion when the carpenter saw the two former dictators together, Hitler arrived with his wife and three bodyguards.

  Hitler was clearly not well; he could barely walk unaided, and his bodyguards practically carried him. These meetings were held in private, but both leaders’ security men were constantly present. Ancin said Hitler seemed dependent on his bodyguards, who set his schedule. He and Paveli would converse until one of the guards said words to the effect of “that’s enough,” and then they would leave.

  Like most other people who gave descriptions of Hitler after the war, Ancin said that while the Führer’s appearance had changed, he was “basically the same. He had white, short hair, cut military style. No moustache.” One particular moment stuck out in Ancin’s memory. “When Hitler [arrived] he raised the closed fist of his right hand with his arm extended. Paveli went to him and put his hand on Hitler’s fist, enclosing it. Afterward, they smiled, and Paveli shook hands with Hitler. This was always the greeting.”

  Ancin saw Hitler with Paveli on five or six occasions. Paveli’s Argentine mistress (a woman from Córdoba named Maria Rosa Gel) practically never intervened in their conversations, simply serving the coffee. Hitler’s wife also kept silent; Eva had not aged well, and she was unable to lose the weight she had gained when her second daughter was born late in 1945. Ancin said:

  Hitler’s wife was a little heavy. She seemed to be just over forty years old. She was large, well-fed you could say. She wore work clothes, very cheap, beige, just like his. She was a woman who gave you the feeling that she had suffered a great deal, or at least that she was suffering from something, because it was reflected in her face. She always seemed worried, and almost never smiled.

  From Ancin’s testimony it seems that the conversation was carried out for the most part in Spanish. “Hitler’s wife, I don’t remember—I assume she spoke a bit of Spanish, because she always said ‘thank you for the coffee.’ … Hitler spoke Spanish with difficulty, and had a strong German accent.” At one of these meetings, Paveli introduced Hernán Ancin to Hitler as the carpenter who was working on the building, and invited him to join them for coffee. Hitler smiled at Ancin and made a gesture of greeting with his head, but did not offer his hand or speak. Ancin was “totally convinced” that the man was Hitler.

  He also saw Hitler elsewhere in Mar del Plata, at an old colonial-style house behind the San Martin Park. He saw Hitler’s car enter, and the guards at the door; he was not sure if Hitler lived there or was simply visiting (the house was in fact a Lahusen property). While in the city Hitler always traveled by car, but on one occasion the carpenter saw him near the shore; he had gotten out of the car and was sitting on a bench contemplating the sea. Ancin thought Hitler had problems with his circulation and could not walk far; he dragged his feet, and Eva held his arm when he walked. In contrast to Paveli, whom the retired carpenter remembered as rude and hard-eyed, Ancin recalled Hitler as having “light eyes, a friendly gaze—[he was] quiet and very polite.”

  Both Hitler and Paveli disappeared from Mar del Plata in August or September 1954.

  HITLER’S DETERIORATING HEALTH, and the fading of any fanatical dream of expanding a “Fourth Reich in the South” that had never really existed, led to a steady running down of activity at the Center during
the early 1950s. Naturally, as time passed and reality sank in, many of the formerly committed Nazis became preoccupied with their new lives and jobs, and the appeal of working for a defeated leader and ideology simply dissipated. Even SS Gen. Ludolf von Alvensleben, who had become a firm friend of Juan Perón during their skiing trips together at San Carlos de Bariloche, resigned from his post as “governor” of the valley community in October 1952. He took up a post in Buenos Aires as President Perón’s “Head of the Department for Fishing, Hunting and Yachting for Area R10111,” and Perón also granted him a new identity in the name of Carlos Luecke.

  Prominent among the few still keeping the flame alive was a man who was not a wanted war criminal, but a famous combat airman. Hans-Ulrich Rudel, the Stuka dive-bomber and tank-buster ace who had lost a leg when he was shot down late in the war, was Nazi Germany’s most decorated pilot. Even so, he had moved to Argentina in 1948 and become a confidant of both Hitler and President Perón. Still nurturing dreams of a sort of “Fascist Internationale,” Rudel was in touch with Sir Oswald Mosley, prewar leader of the British Union of Fascists, and with the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner. Mosley and Rudel met in Buenos Aires in 1950, and in Britain two years later Mosley published Rudel’s wartime memoir, Stuka Pilot, under the imprint of Euphorion Books—a company that he had set up with his aristocratic wife, née Diana Mitford. The book included fulsome praise for the principles of National Socialism; one must suspect that the legless British fighter ace Douglas Bader, who contributed a foreword, was manipulated into doing so on the pretext that this was simply the flying memoir of a one-legged airman. Rudel was an unrepentant Nazi whose only regret was that Germany had lost the war. During his time in Argentina he met regularly with Heinrich “Gestapo” Müller, whom he used as a reference and contact point, and would have also met with Hitler. In 1953, Rudel returned to West Germany, where he made a failed attempt to launch the belligerently named Deutsche Reichspartei.

  IF ANCIN HAD THOUGHT EVA HITLER LOOKED SAD, it was hardly surprising. She had been a high-spirited, shallow-minded young woman who loved lively company and parties, and her life on the sprawling, isolated estate at Inalco was not what she had hoped for. Her formerly beloved “Mr. Wolf,” once so impressive at the center of his fawning court, was now constantly ill or busy in mundane meetings, and the shine had quickly worn off a remote rural life spent caring for two young children. It is widely documented that despite the demonic energy and conviction that Hitler could display, both publicly and within his close circle, when his emotions were engaged, he was a fundamentally lazy man, easily distracted from practical work by resentments and abstract preoccupations. Without even the illusion of controlling great events, or a circle of toadies to play up to his pretensions, he must have been wretched company indeed for a woman who could feel her youth fading. Since her “death” in the Führerbunker, nobody had been looking for a young mother with two children, so Eva’s relocation under another false identity would not present any great difficulty. Probably in 1954, after their return from the dismal holiday at the Lahusen-owned house in Mar del Plata (during which Hitler’s meetings with Paveli had been observed by Hernán Ancin), Eva finally left Inalco and Hitler. She and her daughters moved to Neuquén, a quiet but growing town about 230 miles northeast of San Carlos de Bariloche. The “Organization” would, as always, continue to look after them.

  MARTIN BORMANN STAYED OUT OF POLITICS. His interest now lay purely in protecting and multiplying the Organization’s funds. His trips to the valley became less and less frequent, as he distanced himself and his network from the ailing Hitler. He spent much of his time in Buenos Aires; his front was a company that manufactured refrigerators, behind which he extended his financial dealings across the world. His regular meetings with President Perón were detailed by Jorge Silvio Adeodato Colotto, the head of Perón’s personal police bodyguard from 1951 until the coup against him in September 1955. Now eighty-seven, well over six feet tall, dressed smartly, and carrying a pocket Derringer pistol, Colotto remains an impressive figure, lucid and happy to talk to us about his time as the head of the former Argentine president’s personal security detail.

  Colotto explained that while he was with Peron he wrote down every interesting episode about the president, including many one-liners, on small pieces of paper—and he had stored them all in a can! From this unusual archive of 6,200 papers, which Colotto had itemized and translated into an as-yet unpublished English-language book, came his recollection of a key encounter.

  Colotto was present on one occasion in the spring of 1953 at Perón’s house on Teodoro Garcia Street in Belgrano, an exclusive suburb of Buenos Aires. This was the house that the Nazi “ambassador” Ludwig Freude had given to Evita as a wedding present in 1945. The twice-widowed president, who now used it for private meetings and romantic liaisons, would arrive wearing a hat and glasses as a disguise. (Another frequent visitor was the shipping magnate Alberto Dodero. He had fallen out with Perón in 1949 when the president nationalized his shipping interests at a fraction of their true value, but the rift did not last long.)

  On this occasion, Colotto was on duty at the house when Perón told him, “Bormann is coming at 8:00 p.m. Be careful—he is German, not Argentine, and they are punctual.” At 8:00 sharp, Colotto was waiting at the door when Bormann arrived in a taxi. They shook hands, and the bodyguard showed him through to the president’s living room. Colotto remembers the Reichsleiter as “all German.” Bormann had grown a moustache and was wearing a jacket and tie. He spoke very little Spanish, but could make himself understood. Perón was in his office, and the bodyguard went to tell him his guest had arrived. When they met in the living room they greeted each other with a tight hug, like old friends; then they went to the office, where they stayed until 10:00 p.m. As the house was used mainly for clandestine meetings, Colotto said security was minimal. “There were two agents outside during the day when Perón was not there. But when Perón was there, the agents were dismissed. I was the only guard in the house when Perón was there.” Perón’s butler Romano and cook Fransisca were also in the house; the president was going to invite Bormann to stay for dinner, but the visitor said he had other commitments. When the two of them came out of the office, Perón told Colotto to “walk with Mr. Bormann” to Cabildo, an avenue three hundreds yards from the house, to get him a taxi. When Colotto returned, President Perón said, “Bormann gave me an undeserved present.” He did not say what it was, but Colotto guessed that it could have only been something small and valuable.

  Colotto saw Bormann at the house on a second occasion during the weeks that followed, and the German’s presence in the capital became part of his working life. Bormann kept a suite at the luxurious Plaza Hotel, facing the Plaza San Martin at the end of Calle Florida, the world-famous shopping avenue in Buenos Aires. Colotto would go to the Plaza Hotel every month to pay Bormann’s expenses and accommodation with money that Perón gave him in a brown envelope. Bormann’s mistress, a German-Brazilian named Alicia Magnus, stayed there with him. Located across the plaza from the hotel are the impressive buildings of the Círculo Mílitar (a military club founded in 1881) and the Argentine Foreign Ministry, in an area that is also close to the banking district. Colotto thought Bormann held regular business meetings at the Círculo Militar.

  ANOTHER WOMAN IN BUENOS AIRES who was convinced she knew Martin Bormann well was Araceli Méndez, who had arrived in Argentina from Spain in 1947 when she was twenty-four. She met him in 1952 at a café in Buenos Aires; when he needed someone to write letters and documents in good Spanish, she introduced him to her brother. Araceli said that the relationship deepened; they became good friends, and she went to work for him. He told her that he was a senior Nazi and that the Curia (the Vatican papal court) had helped him to reach Argentina—he had been very specific about this phrasing. He also said that he had been in the hospital and had work done to alter his hairline.

  Bormann apparently had four or five different passports; Ar
aceli knew him as Ricardo Bauer, but he would also use the name Daniel Teófilo Guillermo Deprez, from Belgium. Under that name he was the owner of a factory that produced “Apis” refrigerators, on Ministro Brin Street in Lanús, Buenos Aires. Araceli Méndez ended up doing bookkeeping work for him in an office at Pasaje Barolo, and she claimed that he then began to woo her (his greed for sex seems to have been as great as his personal financial avarice). She witnessed many of his financial dealings; he once received a bank transfer for US $400,000 from Europe. He told her that he had shares in a factory in Belgium and another in Holland and that this transfer and many others were part of his profits. Bormann had also brought many precious stones from Europe, including one diamond that he sold in Buenos Aires for US $120,000.

  THE RELEASED FBI FILES on sightings of Hitler in South America, sparse as they are, are relatively extensive when compared to the mere dribble of information that has come out of the Central Intelligence Agency, but one report from the agency’s Los Angeles office does stand out. This allegedly placed the Führer in Colombia in January 1955. While ultimately unconvincing, it is unusual in that it contains a very poor quality photostat of a photograph, alleged by the CIA informant’s contact (a former SS man named as Phillip Citroen) to show Hitler, using the identity of one Adolf Schüttelmayer (on the written report, shown on page 282, it is spelled “Schrittelmayor”). In the photo “Hitler”—who at this date would have been sixty-five—still has dark hair and the classic moustache, and it is thus at odds with other, apparently better-founded testimonies. The picture is marked “Colombia, Tunga, America del Sur, 1954.” There is a town of Tunja in central Colombia, but it has no known Nazi affiliations; indeed, after World War II it became home to many Jewish refugees from Europe.