Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler

by Simon Dunstan

  The “secret” CIA report bears a disclaimer that neither the unnamed informant nor the Los Angeles station is “in a position to give an intelligent evaluation of the information and it is being forwarded as of possible interest.” Even so, the fact that the CIA’s Los Angeles office thought it worthwhile to do so is significant. Neither the FBI nor the CIA seems to have been convinced by the declaration, made with absolute confidence nearly ten years earlier by the British historian and former intelligence officer Hugh Trevor-Roper, that Hitler had died in the bunker—an assertion made despite a complete lack of forensic evidence.

  A CIA DOCUMENT from 1955, detailing a report that Hitler was in Colombia.

  UNDER THE PROTECTION OF PRESIDENT PERÓN, Argentina had become a haven for German, French, Belgian, and Croatian fascists. They would meet Perón in his official residence, the Casa Rosada, facing the square at the eastern end of the Plaza de Mayo. Rodolfo Freude, son of Ludwig and friend of Evita’s brother Juan Duarté, managed the secret network of former Nazis’ contacts with the regime. He had risen to become Perón’s chief of presidential intelligence and had an office in the Casa Rosada.

  Juan Perón was reelected president in June 1952 by a margin of over 30 percent (this was the first time that Argentine women had been able to vote). A month later, on July 26, 1952, his charismatic wife Evita died of cancer at the young age of thirty-three. By the time of her death she had spent much of the stolen money that she, in her turn, had stolen from Bormann, mostly to finance philanthropic work for the Argentine poor—her descamisados (literally, “shirtless”). The country went into mourning. Crowds kept vigil throughout the night in front of the presidential palace and later in front of the Ministry of Labor, where she was taken to lie in state. Carrying candles, people knelt in prayer in the wet streets, and women cried openly. On July 27, the whole country came to a standstill.

  “Little Eva” had been Juan Perón’s lucky charm and his main hold on public affection. By 1955, much of the money the couple had taken had run out, and without her by his side his luck ran out with it. His economic reforms had divided the country, and a number of terrorist attacks and consequent reprisals were moving Argentine politics rapidly in the direction of yet another revolution. Ironically, the last straw was not some new oppressive measure, but Perón’s liberalizing plan to legalize divorce and prostitution. The leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, whose support for the president had been dwindling, now began to call him “The Tyrant.”

  A serious blow to Perón’s popularity with those who worshipped the memory of Evita was a scandal, aired in the gossip pages of the press, concerning the fifty-nine-year-old president’s relationship with a thirteen-year-old girl named Nelly Rivas. He misjudged the public mood when he replied to reporters’ questioning about his girlfriend’s age, “So what? I’m not superstitious.” But his sense of humor soon failed him, and in response to what he perceived as the church’s support for the opposition he expelled two Catholic priests from the country. Pope Pius XII retaliated by excommunicating Juan Perón on June 15, 1955.

  The following day, navy jet fighters flown by rebel officers bombed a pro-Perón rally in the Plaza de Mayo opposite the Casa Rosada, reportedly killing no fewer than 364 people. Maddened Perónist crowds went on a rampage, burning the Metropolitan Cathedral and ten other churches in Buenos Aires. Exactly three months later, on September 16, 1955, a Catholic group from the army and navy led by Generals Eduardo Lonardi and Pedro Aramburu, and Adm. Isaac Rojas, launched a coup from Argentina’s second city of Córdoba. It took them only three days to seize power.

  Perón—who had himself come to power through the military coup of 1943—had never been blind to the danger of revolution. On Martin Bormann’s advice he had built his very own “Führerbunker.” On the ground floor of the Alas building at Avenida Leandro N. Alem in San Nicolas, Buenos Aires, a secret passage led to an underground vault lined with rosewood. A bedroom there had silk pajamas, an emergency supply of oxygen, and a walk-in wall safe. At the back of the safe was a plaster wall, concealing a long underground passage leading to a secret exit in the docks of Puerto Madero. It is not known if Perón used the bunker to escape through the cordon of troops closing in on him. It is known that he made it to Puerto Madero. Waiting there for Perón was a gunboat sent by Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner. Without bothering to collect his teenage lover, the once-and-future president fled the country.

  THE “REVOLUCIÓN LIBERTADORA” sent shockwaves through the Nazi community in Argentina. Bormann issued instructions to close the operations in the Estancia Inalco valley and arranged for Hitler to move to a smaller house where he could live in complete obscurity. Now accompanied only by his two closest aides—his personal physician, Dr. Otto Lehmann, and the former Admiral Graf Spee petty officer Heinrich Bethe—Hitler moved to a property called La Clara, even deeper within the Patagonian countryside. Bormann was the only one within the Organization who knew its location, and he told everyone else that this was necessary for the Führer’s security. Once again, he completely controlled access to Hitler. The frail, rapidly aging Hitler was now nothing more than a distracting problem for the international businessman Martin Bormann—a problem that time would solve, as the Führer faded away into an exile within an exile.

  Chapter 23

  GHOSTS IN THE SHADOWS

  LITTLE IS KNOWN ABOUT HITLER’S PERSONAL PHYSICIAN, Dr. Otto Lehmann. “Lehmann” may or may not have been his true name. From what can be gleaned from the little documentation that exists, he had been a Nazi Party member from the early years, but had not held a senior military position in the Reich. During the last years of the war he had apparently been involved in a review of the Wehrmacht medical corps. He said he had been captured by the Allies immediately after the war, but after an arrest warrant was issued for him by the Soviets, he managed to escape. He arrived at Estancia Inalco in 1947, via the Vatican-controlled escape route, and was immediately appointed as the medical officer for “Adolf Hitler’s Valley.” A man of few words, Lehmann avoided political discussions at the Center, preferring to spend his leisure time reading and writing.

  Otto Lehmann’s supposed memoir detailing his life as Hitler’s physician was preserved by the Admiral Graf Spee sailor Heinrich Bethe, with whom Lehmann shared the care of the sick and aging Hitler. Bethe is believed to have handed over the “Lehmann papers” to Capt. Manuel Monasterio, who befriended Bethe in the late 1970s (the captain said the papers were unfortunately lost during many house moves over a long life). Monasterio’s 1987 book, Hitler murió en la Argentina, incorporates both the Lehmann papers and Bethe’s recollections, which he shared with Monasterio (see Chapter 18)

  The Lehmann papers, as recounted in the Monasterio book, are not a straightforward narrative; they are full of references to mysticism, the occult, and the radical thinkers behind the growth of National Socialism in Germany in the 1920s. Lehmann appears to have known many of these figures well. His strange ramblings, which make Hitler out to be some sort of medium for occult powers determined to destroy the earth, come across simply as an absurd apologia for the all-too-human evil of the Holocaust. (At one stage Lehmann even suggested that there was some sort of “magical battle” between Hitler and occultists in Great Britain who managed to save the country from invasion in 1940.)

  Hitler murió en la Argentina also relates Lehmann’s observations of Hitler’s decline; Lehmann laid much blame at the door of Dr. Theodor Morrell, the society “pox doctor” (a practitioner who treats sexually transmitted diseases) who had been introduced to the Führer by the photographer Heinrich Hoffmann and his assistant Eva Braun in 1936. Lehmann accused Morrell of “the dangerous administration of drugs and other substances of dubious effect.” He gave his fellow medical man some credit for apparently resolving some of Hitler’s gastric problems, but said that the treatments had left Hitler’s already delicate nervous system “chronically affected” and that Morrell had “severely poisoned tissue that could not easily reco
ver.” Lehmann also accused Morrell of having administered “hallucinogenic substances” to increase his control over his patient.

  IN MONASTERIO’S BOOK, Lehmann’s notes on Hitler’s condition grow more detailed after the move to La Clara in 1955. Adolf Hitler had turned sixty-six, and his health, which had improved when he first arrived in Argentina, now began to decline. Numerous medical historians have theorized that Parkinson’s disease had affected Hitler since perhaps the 1930s; after 1950 his symptoms worsened, and he now spent a large part of his time resting or brooding. Politics were becoming less and less important. Bormann, whom he still trusted, had told him that the fall of Perón threatened great danger to the Organization, but, due to his growing depression, the aging dictator was no longer in a condition or a position to do anything about it. Deprived of contact with the outside world and no longer at the head of any sort of effective network, he was left in solitary retirement.

  The captain writes that, according to Dr. Lehmann, Hitler’s days were mundane. Normally he would appear on the scene a little before noon. After greeting Lehmann and Bethe, he would take a walk with his dog—the second in the line of Blondis. For the rest of the day he alternated between resting, chatting with his two companions, or taking more walks. After dinner he maintained rambling “work” meetings with Bethe, which often kept the sailor up until three or four in the morning. Lehmann said that Hitler’s spirits would sometimes “bloom again,” but only briefly. His nervous system had been damaged permanently, and as the years dragged by, “melancholy” became his most common state.

  The three men talked a lot. Lehmann described the little group as “strange,” “banished,” and removed from all external events. From his notes, the doctor’s feelings about Hitler seem to have been complex. He expressed the normal concern of any doctor for his patient, but at other times he reviled Hitler as a “monstrous dictator who has now lost his mask and his uniform.” He was also dismissive about Heinrich Bethe, “a man who appears to have died years ago.” His own plight prompted Lehmann to outbursts of self-pity—he was “an old, forgotten doctor who has found himself, in the final stage of his life, in circumstances that inevitably are just too much for him.”

  ON HIS SIXTY-SEVENTH BIRTHDAY, April 20, 1956, Hitler was expecting to receive four important guests (Lehmann did not mention who they were). Hitler had been informed that he would be given a thorough briefing on the Nazi Party’s situation—but in any event, no one arrived. It was then, for the first time, that Hitler began to suspect that Bormann had finally betrayed him. In September of that year he had to take to his bed due to a heart complaint. Dr. Lehmann forbade him to indulge in any kind of worry, and he abandoned thoughts of politics for good.

  Lehmann recalled that at the start of November 1956, Bormann, who had been visiting Chile, arrived at La Clara. At first, he was received coolly by Hitler. They talked for more than three hours, and at the end of the meeting Hitler once again appeared optimistic; his old deputy had assured him that the Organization was once more moving ahead solidly. Bormann stayed for two days, and on the morning of his departure he took Bethe aside. After thanking the sailor for his invaluable services to the cause, he begged him not to worry Hitler with questions of any sort, and to try to make him live as quietly as possible. Bormann said that the day would arrive when Hitler would speak to the world once again, but for now the most important thing was his health.

  Hitler’s optimism did not last; he was beset many times by the idea of suicide, from which he was dissuaded by Lehmann and Bethe—by now his closest companions. Unlike eyewitnesses in the bunker, who suggested that up until April 28, 1945, Hitler was tired but otherwise in complete control, Lehmann believed that Hitler had thought of suicide before: “An identical suicidal mania attacked him in the bunker in 1945, but at that stage Bormann still considered Hitler key to his post-war plans, and prevented what would have meant a severe setback for the ambitions of organized Nazism to become reality.” However, we must recall that Lehmann had not been in the bunker himself.

  IN THIS WEIRD LIMBO IN WHICH HE WAS TRAPPED with two such ill-assorted companions, Hitler also had some surprising confessions to make. He told Bethe of a love affair he had had with a “true representative of the Aryan race,” the athlete Tilly Fleischer. This Nazi Olympian had won gold for her javelin-throwing at the infamous Munich games of 1936, and Joseph Goebbels had introduced her to the Führer. Immediately smitten, Hitler installed her in a country house on the outskirts of Berlin. The romantic interlude lasted eight months, but when Hitler found out that Tilly was expecting a baby, he asked his friend Dr. Fritz Heuser to marry her. Heuser obliged, and when Tilly was five months pregnant he was amply compensated for his “patriotic” assistance by being appointed chief supervisor of the medical service throughout the Frankfurt area. When the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, Dr. Heuser obtained a divorce, packed his bags, and left Germany. Hitler had only once seen the child, who was named Gisela.

  Bethe, who revered Hitler as a god and had dedicated his life to the Nazi cause, was shocked by this revelation. He remembered another story that had appeared in October 1946. The wife of Hitler’s former secretary of state, Otto Meissner, astonished the world with a claim that Magda Goebbels had had a son by Hitler in 1935, the result of a passionate affair while both were vacationing on the Baltic Sea in the summer of 1934. Frau Meissner claimed that Magda herself had told her that Hitler was Helmut Goebbels’s true father. Magda killed Hitler’s son in the bunker along with her five daughters before she and her husband committed suicide.

  HITLER TRIED TO REVISIT HIS OLD PASSION for painting, but Parkinson’s disease made holding a brush almost impossible. The doctor described him as in a state of near collapse, complaining of “sharp neuralgic pains in his face” caused by a botched operation to remove the splinters driven into it by Stauffenberg’s bomb. Hitler also suffered from migraines that became stronger and more prolonged with time. According to Monasterio, Lehmann, who had an old-fashioned turn of phrase, admitted, “Oh God, help me! At times I have felt a strange pleasure in the face of the terrible sufferings of this man. It has seemed to me that all the incalculable blood spilt clamors from the arteries of the Earth for vengeance on Hitler’s person.”

  The years between 1957 and 1961 passed with dreary monotony while Lehmann detailed a steady decline in Hitler’s physical and mental state. One night, just before dawn in late January 1962, he and Bethe heard “horrifying moans” and went to Hitler’s bedroom. He was sitting on the edge of his bed in “a deplorable state of nervous depression.” Scattered on the bed next to him were photos of the aftermath of the war. Lehmann claimed that one of them showed “a group of massacred Jewish children.” Hitler was crying rhythmically, rocking back and forth on the edge of his bed, and did not even notice their presence.

  Nowhere in Lehmann’s memoirs was there any suggestion that Hitler either did not know of the Holocaust or had not been central to its planning. The doctor’s diary made many references to Hitler’s complete and total hatred of the Jewish race—a point of view, incidentally, that Dr. Lehmann shared, although he wrapped it up in esoteric pseudo-intellectual language.

  As January 1962 progressed, Hitler’s mental and physical condition deteriorated more rapidly, and his face became partially paralyzed. He spent hours sitting watching the horizon of lake and mountain, like “a person possessed.” Lehmann felt that there was nothing to do but wait, until “the ghosts of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Treblinka and so many others end up dragging him from this life. It won’t be long now.” For several nights Hitler suffered hallucinations of “mutilated faces, fields blanketed with cadavers rising up to accuse him with trembling gestures.” He could hardly sleep; despite the efforts of both Lehmann and Bethe, he refused to eat, and he spent his time “between sobs remembering the days of his infancy.”

  On February 12, 1962, at midday, the seventy-two-year-old Hitler collapsed as his two caregivers were helping him to the bathroom. Three hours later he
suffered a stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body. After spending a restless night, the dictator slipped into a coma. On February 13, 1962, at 3:00 p.m., Dr. Lehmann verified that all signs of life were absent.

  WITH HITLER’S DEATH, Otto Lehmann and Heinrich Bethe were no longer useful to the Organization; they had become nothing more than mouths to be silenced. Knowing this, Lehmann warned Bethe to escape. Taking with him Lehmann’s papers and some other minor documents, Bethe managed to elude Müller and Bormann’s network of killers and spies. Having changed his name to Juan Paulovsky, he died on the outskirts of the small Patagonian coastal town of Caleta Olivia in 1977. It seems that Dr. Lehmann was not so lucky; he disappeared shortly after Hitler’s death, probably murdered on Bormann’s orders. It was the final act in the life and death of Adolf Hitler in Argentina.

  Bormann’s and Müller’s trail ran out later. In 1971, the Boston Globe of Monday July 26 quoted Zwy Aldouby, a former Israeli Intelligence officer and co-author of a 1960 book on Adolf Eichmann entitled Minister of Death, as saying that Martin Bormann lived on a ranch in Paraguay. The author Ladislas Farago said he had seen Bormann personally—seemingly senile and having lost the will to live—in a remote part of Bolivia the same year. With Juan Domingo’s Perón’s return to power on June 20, 1973, Farago said Bormann moved back to Argentina and lived in a house north of the affluent San Isidro district in Buenos Aires. The Reichsleiter was still there when Farago wrote his book in June 1974.