Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (44 page)

DURING THIS PERIOD, THE FBI
was taking reports of Hitler being in Latin America very seriously. Thousands of documents pertaining to Hitler from these years are still classified as Top Secret on both sides of the Atlantic; nevertheless, and despite the very heavy censorship of the few files released into the public domain, some information can be gleaned.

A report from the Bureau’s Los Angeles office to Director Hoover on June 5, 1947, details material that reached the office on May 16 of that year. The origin of the information was rather naively located near either Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro (thousands of miles apart), but it apparently came from a familiar and trusted contact. The contact knew a former French Resistance man, who had visited Casino, near Rio Grande, a town on the southeast coast of Brazil just above the Uruguayan border. The
Frenchman claimed
to have seen Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler sitting at a table in a crowded hotel dining room. This was enough to prompt Hoover to ask for
more detail
. He received it via secret air courier on August 6, 1947, in a seven-pager from his Rio de Janeiro office entitled “Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun Information Concerning.” The former member of the French Resistance—who was traveling commercially in the Americas and had ambitions to move into journalism—had been told, through a number of contacts in Latin America, that the town of Casino in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande de Sol might provide something of interest. (The FBI was thorough in checking the provenance of their informant, whose name has unfortunately been lost to the censor’s pen.)

The Rio office of the FBI described Casino as consisting “of approximately two hundred scattered residences. The majority of the inhabitants are German nationalists or are of German descent.” The field officer also reported that “no one could live in Casino except persons who had homes there prior to the time it became a military area and blocked off from the rest of the surrounding community. This area allegedly became restricted three to four months before the end of the war in Europe.” It is no coincidence that this was the time when Aktion Feuerland was getting into top gear and Bormann was moving people and matériel around. The Resistance veteran’s account continued: “This was an unusual community in as much as it was necessary to secure a pass to enter the vicinity of the town, and furthermore it was practically of one hundred percent German population. This area lacked commercial establishments and consisted of villas or homes and a large hotel, which had been remodeled and was very modern. It appeared in size out of proportion to the size of the community.” Hotel Casino had one other feature in common with Villa Winter on Fuerteventura and Gran Hotel Viena at Miramar: a very large radio antenna, in this case parallel to the ground and fenced off.

The Resistance man had booked at the hotel in advance (and simultaneously arranged passes to the area) as part of a group, with another Frenchman, a Russian, a Nicaraguan, an Australian, and an American. Their reason was ostensibly to attend three nights of entertainment, including a performance of
Les Sylphides
, the famous ballet in one act set to Chopin’s music. With the exception of the Russian—a man well known in Brazil, at whom the management apparently looked somewhat askance—the party were welcomed courteously, both at the hotel and when invited into local homes.

The first hint of something a little strange came when the Frenchman observed one of the hotel maids speaking to an attractive teenage girl with chestnut hair, who caught his eye when she gave the servant a “Heil Hitler” salute. For the first evening’s ballet performance, a large ballroom was filled to capacity by several hundred people, described by a stage manager as “rich South Americans,” but the Frenchman noticed that they all spoke German. In the course of the evening, spotlights played extensively over the audience, and at one champagne-filled table the Frenchman suddenly recognized a distinctively scarred face. He identified him as a former Nazi officer named Weismann—a man who he feared might remember his own face, from occupied Paris. The former Resistance man had been trained in the old Bertillon or
portrait parlé
system of identification, and he was sure of his powers of recognition.

Now alerted, the Frenchman claimed also to have recognized—from her many photographs—a woman whom he identified as Eva Hitler, née Braun. When he realized who she was he scanned the table more closely, and sure enough, “There was one man … having numerous characteristics of Hitler.” Though thinner, he had the same general build and age as Hitler, was clean-shaven (as described by almost all of the witnesses in Argentina), and had very short-cropped hair. He appeared to be friendly with everyone at his table.

Later that same evening, the Frenchman was introduced to the young girl he had seen earlier. She gave her name as Abava, a recent German immigrant who was now a Chilean citizen. He learned that she was a “niece” of the woman he had recognized as Eva Braun and that most of the group was from Viña del Mar in central Chile, close to Villa Alemana (literally, German Town), a small city founded by immigrants in 1896. The Frenchman did not believe her; he had the distinct impression that “this young girl as well as the persons believed to be Hitler and Eva Braun actually lived in Casino.” (However, the couple was simply vacationing there.) His general curiosity about the town, expressed under the cover of planning to write a travelogue describing this delightful and uncommercialized location, prompted the girl’s immediate advice that it would not be a “fit subject” to write on—the people of Casino did not like tourists. Subsequent brushes with the hotel management and Casino chamber of commerce verified her opinion, and an hour after his meeting with the latter his party were asked abruptly to vacate their rooms, as “the hotel was full.”

The next day, as the Frenchman was waiting, bags packed, for his car to pick him up, he saw the girl’s “aunt” and two other people leave the hotel and walk toward the sea. The woman was wearing a short beach skirt, and in the daylight he was
even more positive
that she was Eva Braun.

INITIAL REPORT TO J. Edgar Hoover of Hitler’s presence in Casino, Brazil, June 5, 1947. Hoover immediately asked for more details.

AN FBI REPORT to Hoover, dated August 6, 1947, giving further details of Hitler and Braun’s time in Casino, Brazil.

Chapter 20

A
DOLF
H
ITLER’S
V
ALLEY

IN 1943
ADM. KARL DÖNITZ had declared
, “The German U-boat fleet is proud to have made an earthly paradise, an impregnable fortress for the Führer, somewhere in the world.”
The following year Dönitz told
a graduating class of naval cadets in Kiel, “The German Navy has still a great role to play in the future. The German Navy knows all hiding places for the Navy to take the Führer to, should the need arise. There he can prepare his last measures in complete quiet.”

Of all such possible locations, few fit the bill better than somewhere in Patagonia.
The region extends
over 386,000 square miles of Argentina and Chile—one and a half times the size of Texas. Its scenery is dramatically varied, from the windswept, barren coastal plains around San Matías Gulf to the alpine foothills of the Andes, from the lush pastures in the north to the glacier fields in the south. Philip Hamburger, writing for the
New Yorker
in 1948, was wrong when he dismissed it simply as
“barren, wind-swept and rainy
, a dreary, remote stretch of rock, thorn and sand, of black lava and volcanic ash. Only its western part is irrigated and under cultivation.” However, he could not be faulted when he went on, “Scattered about are lonely sheep ranches, many of them owned by settlers of German descent. To an ex-Führer … Patagonia would presumably be an attractive refuge.”

Hamburger continued:

The way the Patagonian part of the stories goes, shortly after the arrival of the U-boats with their mysterious human cargo, travelers through this vast region began to hear tales of a huge estancia remote almost beyond imagination and surrounded by an electric fence. Behind the fence fierce dogs bark continuously. The Führer is naturally behind the fence. He never leaves the estate. He is unable to do so. Drugs, defeat and the shattering of his nervous system have left him monumentally wrecked and insane. He looks like a man over seventy. Eva Braun stays with him, for there is no other place to go.

Hamburger based his account on numerous tales that he heard while visiting Argentina—“this strange country, so different from the rest of the world, so far removed and other-planetary.”

SOME DETAILS OF THE NAZIS’ LIFE IN PATAGONIA
, and of the refuge that Hamburger had imagined, were given to the Polish press in 1995 by a man who identified himself only as “Herr Schmidt.” He said that his father had “worked in the Reich Main Security Office at Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin … in the Gestapo center.” Schmidt explained that his father was a high-ranking SS official who during the war often traveled around Europe; where, and what crimes his father had committed, Schmidt didn’t know. In 1945, Schmidt was twelve years old and living with his mother and younger sister in Munich. His father had not come back from the war. Then, in 1948, his mother received extraordinary news: her husband was alive, living in Argentina, and his family was to join him. A few weeks later they went to Italy and from there sailed for Argentina on a Spanish ship. Ferdinand Eiffler, a senior Argentine Nazi organizer and close associate of Ludwig Freude, met them as they disembarked in Buenos Aires. The family was taken to a safe house in the suburb of Vicente López, where they were given new identity papers. A week later Schmidt’s father came to the house, and, after an ecstatic family reunion, Eiffler took them in his car on a two-day trip.

They drove through towns with “exotic” names until they saw the Andes on the horizon. On a rough rural road, which Schmidt said was “barely visible” at times, they drove through San Carlos de Bariloche and around Lake Nahuel Huapí, then through the village of Villa La Angostura. They arrived at a set of gates; Eiffler showed papers to an armed guard, the gates were opened, and the car drove in.

“Schmidt’s” description
of his destination fits with similar accounts of the location of a Nazi colony called “the Center.” The Center in “
Adolf Hitler’s Valley
” (see
map
), was located around Inalco, the mansion owned by Hitler. The property surrounding Inalco—1.75 square miles—is known as Estancia Inalco. The Center was
described by Heinrich Bethe
, the former petty officer from the
Admiral Graf Spee
, who had met a second U-boat landing (the one not carrying Hitler) on the evening of July 28, 1945 (see
Chapter 18
). When Bethe’s party was being driven to the Center in 1947 from his temporary base in the city of Neuquén, “There were valleys at first, but then they began to see mountains on whose summits they could see perpetual snow.” After more than nine hours’ driving, they finally arrived at what was apparently one of the classic ranches in the skirts of the Andes. After passing the first gate, they kept going for about three miles until they began to see some people; after that they saw a house in the distance, then some sheds and the main building. This also mirrors the mention in Paul Manning’s book of
Martin Bormann’s hideout in Patagonia
, where he lived until 1955, when President Juan Perón was forced from power: “A mountain retreat in the Argentinean Andes, a 5,000-acre cattle and sheep ranch about 60 miles south of San Carlos de Bariloche.”