Did Hitler flee bunker with Eva to Argentina, have two daughters and live to 73? The bizarre theory that's landed two British authors in a bitter war

PUBLISHED: 00:46 BST, 28 October 2013 | UPDATED: 15:33 BST, 28 October 2013

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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.

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According to Grey Wolf: The Escape Of Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun (right) accompanied the Adolf Hitler when he escaped through a secret tunnel from his bunker in Berlin

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.

There are some who regard Hitler's escape story as the absolute truth

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 farcical.

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.

Distributed by Galloping Films

There have been many versions of the Hitler escape story from his bunker (pictured) in May 1945

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 dreamed 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.

Today, the vast majority accept that Hitler shot himself in the bunker (pictured) in Berlin on April 30, 1945

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.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2478100/Theory-Adolf-Hitler-fled-Argentina-lived-age-73.html

The notorious claim that Hitler escaped his Berlin bunker to live incognito in Argentina first gained popular currency in 1945, when Stalin spoke of it. Since then the idea has resurfaced occasionally, with alleged photographic and documentary evidence pored over by conspiracy theorists. Now the theory that the German dictator followed his fellow Nazis Adolf Eichmann and Josef Mengele to South America is at the centre of a fresh row.

The authors of the 2011 book Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler, which was made into a documentary film earlier this year, have been accused of plagiarism by a journalist in Argentina. Abel Basti claims his research has been unfairly used to substantiate claims made in the book. Grey Wolf, published by Sterling Publishing, based in New York, challenged the accepted view that the Führer shot himself in his Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945 and that Eva Braun also committed suicide by taking cyanide. Arguing that American intelligence officials turned a blind eye to Hitler's escape in return for access to Nazi war technology, Gerrard Williams and Simon Dunstan set out the case for a scenario almost too horrible to contemplate: that the Führer and Eva Braun made a home in the foothills of the Andes and had two daughters.

Hitler, they claim, escaped punishment and lived out his life in tranquillity in Patagonia until his death in 1962 at the age of 73.

The publisher billed the book as the result "of five years of travelling and interviewing eyewitnesses and piecing together a mountain of evidence". Now Basti alleges that this is "a grossly misleading statement" and that Williams and Dunstan held on to evidence he had spent years putting together.

Williams, a British TV journalist who has worked for Reuters, the BBC and Sky News, and his co-author, Dunstan, firmly deny the claim.

"Basti did in no way invent the idea of Hitler being alive in Argentina," Williams told the Observer. "Books on the subject existed as far back as 1953 and 1987. I have never plagiarised anyone's work. Simon Dunstan, as the author of over 50 books on military history, hasn't either. We're both very aware of the law."

Williams travelled in 2007 to Argentina, where he acknowledges that he received help from Basti, along with other researchers and translators. Basti now claims that on seeing the book and hearing of the new film he realised that the work he had handed over to Williams for use on an earlier documentary film project had been plagiarised.

Basti says he signed a contract conferring all rights to his work to Williams's company in return for substantial payments to come. On this basis, he adds, he introduced Williams to two key witnesses in the case for Hitler's survival, a Jorge Colotto and Captain Manuel Monasterio.

Filming began in September 2008, but was cut short when financiers pulled out due to the worldwide financial crisis. Basti claims his contract was terminated and so asked for his research to be returned but says nothing was sent back.

Following publication of Grey Wolf, Basti says he was incensed to see that he had been quoted as regarding one photograph as proof of Hitler's survival. The book has also annoyed Ricardo D'Aloia, the editorial director of Ambito Financerio, the flagship newspaper of a group that had earlier published reports of Basti's research. D'Aloia is angered at the suggestion that he handed the authors video and potential evidence belonging to Basti.

Williams denies that he was introduced to key witnesses by Basti. He also denies D'Aloia's claims, which, he says, are "simply untrue". He adds that he "cannot see how quoting from taped interviews, thoroughly sourced to the company who made it implicitly clear that it was their material, is any sort of violation of copyright".

The claims about Hitler's life in exile in Argentina have been ridiculed by historian Guy Walters, who pronounced them "2,000% rubbish" when the book came out. "It's an absolute disgrace. There's no substance to it at all. It appeals to the deluded fantasies of conspiracy theorists and has no place whatsoever in historical research," he said.