Did Hitler Escape to Argentina?

Aussie

I saw in another thread James posting some stuff about Hitler and then I saw this article today online. I had never heard this theory before.

http://www.news.com.au/world/europe/did … 6750159306

THOUGH it was approaching midnight in Berlin, the streets were far from dark. On every street, fires raged out of control as the intense and savage Russian artillery bombardment crept closer to the centre of the Third Reich.
By that late hour on the night of April 27, 1945, there was not one person in Germany who thought that the Nazis could still win.
Deep in his bunker, even the man who had brought such destruction to his country - indeed, to the world - knew that the war was over. As Adolf Hitler gazed at a portrait of his hero, Frederick the Great, King of Prussia and a brilliant military mind, he was certain there would be no eleventh-hour reversal of fortune.
The so-called 'miracle weapons' had never arrived, and his once mighty armies existed more in memory than in flesh and steel.
The Führer had three options.
He could allow himself to be captured by the Russians; but the humiliation was unthinkable. He could kill himself, but who could possibly replace him? A Fourth Reich would surely rise, and he would be needed to lead it. That left one option: escape.
Everything had been prepared to the last detail by the shady head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, right down to the clothes worn by the body doubles that would pass for the corpses of Hitler and his intended bride, Eva Braun.
As his office clock struck midnight, Hitler turned to his orderly and nodded.
Twenty minutes later, three figures emerged from a secret tunnel connecting the bunker to the surface.
Had any German citizen spotted them, he or she would have been astonished to see the Führer scuttling away like the cowards he so despised. Accompanying him were Eva Braun and her brother-in-law, Hermann Fegelein.
Dodging fires and explosions, the small party made its way to the vast Hohenzollerndamm that ran through the centre of Berlin. Once a fashionable boulevard, it was now a makeshift runway, and on it sat a Junkers-52 transport aircraft, its engines being gunned by Captain Peter Baumgart, an experienced Luftwaffe pilot.
Hitler and his companions climbed aboard the aircraft, and before they could even sit down, Baumgart pushed the throttle forward. Within a minute, the plane soared into the air, heading north.
The Führer refused to look out of the window, unwilling to face the hell he had left behind. He was heading to a new life - and a new world. That life, as it would be for so many other Nazis, would be in Argentina.
Hitler's route there was tortuous, but necessarily so for the most wanted man in the world. After landing in Denmark, he flew to Spain, where General Franco supplied him with an aircraft to take him to the Canary Islands.
From there, the Führer took a submarine to the Argentine coast, where he disembarked near the small port of Necochea, some 300 miles south of Buenos Aires.
Hitler would never again set foot outside Argentina. And though his dreams of a new Reich would never be fulfilled, he did at least find some form of domestic happiness by marrying Eva Braun, with whom he had two daughters.
Finally, after 17 years in hiding, one of the most evil men in history died on February 13, 1962, aged 73. It was to his bitter disappointment that his old foe, Winston Churchill, had outlived him.
To most of us, such a story sounds like utter fantasy. But there are some who regard it as the absolute truth.
The notion that Hitler escaped from his Berlin bunker has held conspiracy theorists in thrall since the war ended. It has now reared its improbable head once more.
This weekend, it emerged that the story of Hitler's supposed escape to Argentina has become the subject of a bitter plagiarism row.
In their book, Grey Wolf: The Escape Of Adolf Hitler, British authors Gerrard Williams and Simon Dunstan argued that the Führer escaped exactly in the manner described above, and did indeed see out his days in South America.
However, an Argentine journalist, Abel Basti, who comes from the Patagonian town of Bariloche, where so many Nazis 'retired', claims that Williams and Dunstan appropriated his research, and he is seeking compensation.
Williams and Dunstan strenuously deny Basti's accusation.
"Basti did in no way invent the idea of Hitler being alive in Argentina," says Williams. "Books on the subject existed as far back as 1953 and 1987. I have never plagiarised anyone's work."
To outsiders, the row looks like three bald men fighting over a comb. The idea that Hitler could have escaped - and kept that escape hidden - seems fanciful.
And yet many continue to believe it. Tens of thousands of Nazis escaped after the war, including the notorious Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele. Is it not possible that Hitler escaped with them?
As Gerrard Williams says, there have been many versions of the Hitler escape story, and they have been spun ever since May 1945.
In the years immediately after the war, there was no hard proof that Hitler had, in fact, died. One of the problems that investigators encountered was the lack of any physical evidence for his death.
The existence of skull fragments, found by the Russians near the Fuhrer's bunker and believed to be his, was not known to the West until 1968. Then, in 2009, DNA testing of the bones revealed that in fact they belonged to a woman.
This has given the fantasists added ammunition to claim that Hitler didn't die in the bunker.
In the immediate aftermath of the war, British and U.S. intelligence services received countless reports suggesting the former Nazi leader had been spotted alive and at large.
In September 1945, it was claimed that Hitler and his private secretary, Martin Bormann, had boarded a luxury yacht in Hamburg and had sailed to a secret island off the coast of Schleswig-Holstein.
The next month, staff at the British Legation in Copenhagen informed the Foreign Office that a Danish woman had told them that a friend had dreamt that Hitler was disguised as a monk and living in Spain.
In December, the Americans were 'reliably informed' that Hitler had boarded a submarine off the island of Majorca, where he had been living in a hotel with a group of nuclear scientists. Then there were claims that he was living as a hermit in a cave in Italy, or working as a shepherd in the Swiss Alps.
There were those who stated that he'd hidden himself in Antarctica, or even further away still - the moon! All these reports, no matter how ridiculous, had to be taken seriously and investigated. One after the other, they were found to be groundless.
Some were undoubtedly the products of a Soviet disinformation campaign. For a long time, the Russians believed that the Allies were sheltering Hitler, and they put about these fake stories in an attempt to flush out what they thought to be the truth.
In July 1945, the Russian commander Marshall Georgi Zhukov claimed that since Hitler's body had still not been found, he 'could have flown away at the very last moment'. Even General Eisenhower, the former Allied supreme commander, appeared to be taken in.
In 1952, he said: "We have been unable to unearth one bit of tangible evidence of Hitler's death. Many people believe that he escaped from Berlin."
Today, the vast majority accept that Hitler shot himself in the bunker in Berlin on April 30, 1945.
After the war, the historian and MI6 officer Hugh Trevor-Roper was commissioned to investigate Hitler's death. He spoke to many of those who were present in the bunker during those last fateful days.
They all said the same thing: Hitler had killed himself, and his body and that of Eva Braun were cremated with petrol.
If Hitler had hotfooted it to the Southern Hemisphere, then all these people would have had to have been lying - and to have kept it secret until their dying days.
It is simply impossible to believe that so many people could keep such a grand scale deception so quiet.
But there are still some who cling to their conspiracy theories.
Williams and Dunstan maintain that the 'Hitler' and 'Braun' who shot themselves in Berlin in 1945 were, in fact, lookalikes.
But would those who had known Hitler intimately for years and who were in the bunker that night really have been fooled by two doubles?
In truth, the supposed escape of Hitler should be seen as nothing more than a parlour game.
There's not a serious historian who would give the story any more credence than they would to Elvis Presley being alive and well and still hip-swinging in Tennessee.
Guy Walters is author of Hunting Evil: The Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped And The Quest To Bring Them To Justice.

James

Always an interesting theory but it doesn't cut the mustard. Too many witnesses to Hitler being in the bunker, Hitler's own statements about going down with the ship, Hitler's zero interest in a Germany that "failed him", the fact that the Goebells family also killed themselves(they were glued to Hitler in the final years), and witnesses that saw them carry Hitler's body out of the bunker.

He definitely killed himself and didn't fly off into the sunset. He didn't care about a fourth reich because the Third Reich failed him.

Tommie

I'm a big WW2 buff and I know I have a book or two that touched on this subject. As James said, it's a great theory, but there seems to be way too many other sources that call bullshit on it. Gimme a day or two and I'll see if I can find either of the books though.

Aussie

Yeah I thought that surely from the people that were in the bunker with them, for none of them to have spoken out about it if it did happen (even on their death bed), would suggest that it didn't. As James said you would assume that there for it to occur there would have to have been quite a number of people that were silent about it.

I could perhaps see how it might be plausible that the Allies were fooled by body doubles. For example perhaps Hitler called them in and shot them before he left, so they would be found. Depending on who found them and how extensively they examined them before disposing of the bodies, at a stretch I could see how this could happen. But how any of Hitler's own in the bunker as well as involved in a subsequent escape etc kept quiet forever afterwards just seems too improbable.

Aussie

On a similar theme I have watched a program here a few times called "Nazi Hunters", I think that's what it's called, that tell the story of how they tracked down and captured some of the key figures years later. I found it very interesting.

One aspect of it I found completely bizarre was that given what they were directly involved in and the power they wielded etc, some of them were living the most mundane and basic existences post the war. They were the most polar opposite of lives they were leading afterwards compared to during the war. I also find it incomprehensible how they could even return to and function in a normal regular life. Perhaps I have a conscience compared to those monsters, but I would be racked with guilt and live a tortured existence after that. I don't even know how you could return to any sort of normal life?

James

I could perhaps see how it might be plausible that the Allies were fooled by body doubles.

His double was found.

We weren't fooled.

For example perhaps Hitler called them in and shot them before he left, so they would be found.

Just imagining that happening in the bunker made me laugh.

After Hitler bit the cyanide capsule and shot himself in the head, there were orders to burn his body outside the bunker so the Russians couldn't get it. There were witnesses to this. The burnt body was eventually found and was identified as Hitler by his dental work. He was next to a woman and its assumed that it was Eva Braun although it doesn't matter who the woman was. The Russians didn't even know about her.

It would have been much better if the US stormed Berlin and got access to the remains but there's enough evidence from living witnesses to the point where historians can ignore the Russian POV.

One bizarre yet irrelevant occurrence in the bunker is how Goebells body was somehow brought back in. This has never been explained.

That Nazi Hunters series is damn good. Last one I watched was on Stangl.

Lomax

Aussie wrote:

On a similar theme I have watched a program here a few times called "Nazi Hunters", I think that's what it's called, that tell the story of how they tracked down and captured some of the key figures years later. I found it very interesting.
One aspect of it I found completely bizarre was that given what they were directly involved in and the power they wielded etc, some of them were living the most mundane and basic existences post the war. They were the most polar opposite of lives they were leading afterwards compared to during the war. I also find it incomprehensible how they could even return to and function in a normal regular life. Perhaps I have a conscience compared to those monsters, but I would be racked with guilt and live a tortured existence after that. I don't even know how you could return to any sort of normal life?

The only conceivable way was if they still believed that what they did was good.

James

For anyone not familiar with the Einsatzgruppen and just lumps it in with the death camps, here are a couple docs on the subject. Both are disturbing but the first is shorter and doesn't contain as much graphic footage. I recommend them both.

Hitler's Hidden Holocaust

Einsatzgruppen- German Death Squads part 1: Mass Graves

Einsatzgruppen- German Death Squads part 2: Funeral Pyres

I'm gonna watch a couple more hours of The Greatest Story Never Told tonight.

polluxlm

There's a guy here in Norway (deceased now) who claimed, or at least his lawyer seems to claim, that he was the one that flew Hitler from Berlin to a u boat base in Norway, and from there to South America.

It's a good story, but personally I don't see a guy like Hitler finding much pleasure in running some farm in SA after being a world leader. It was the end of the line for him.

This video is very weird:

James

Watched more of that documentary. Sounds like its on the verge of getting into Holocaust denial and that's where it's gonna lose me. Any book/doc that veers into that insults my intelligence. I actually laughed during the segment about the Katyn massacre where they made a big deal about exonerating Hitler. I agree that it was Stalin's baby but it still doesn't really change anything. The British massacre of the Cossacks was interesting. Don't remember hearing about that before.

That war was just pure evil. Atrocities committed by all sides. I've never understood the point of Holocaust denial or trying to "exonerate" Hitler from certain massacres. Is it an attempt to highlight atrocities committed by the allies(Katyn, Dresden, Tokyo firebombing, Russian mass rape of German women/children, US massacres of SS troops,etc.)?

I'll try to finish it tonight. I hate how there's so much music between and sometimes during the segments. Not enough talking and a LOT of subtitles. I have nothing against subtitles but it prevents me from being able to lay down while watching.

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