Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler

by Simon Dunstan

  On July 28, 1945, three Admiral Graf Spee petty officers named Alfred Schultz, Walter Dettelmann, and Willi Brennecke were at the Estancia Moromar, equidistant between Necochea and Mar del Sur on the Argentine coast. With submachine guns slung from their shoulders, the sailors were organizing eight trucks to drive to the beach. The vehicles all carried Lahusen markings; five of them had been brought in by a potato farmer from his Lahusen-run property thirty-eight miles north of the Estancia Moromar, at Balcarce.

  AFTER FIFTY-THREE DAYS at sea, U-518—carrying Hitler, Eva, and Blondi—arrives at Necochea on the Argentine coast. Fegelein is there to meet them. The next day the party flies to the Estancia San Ramón on the outskirts of San Carlos de Bariloche to begin their exile.

  AT 1:00 A.M. ON JULY 28, 1945, SS Gen. Hermann Fegelein, wrapped in a borrowed greatcoat to protect him from the Argentine winter’s night, was waiting under a starlit sky on the beach at Necochea for his sister-in-law and his Führer. U-518 arrived off the coast an hour later.

  Hans Offermann brought his submerged boat as close to the shore as he could, moving dead slow and with a tense hydrophone operator straining for the sounds of surface vessels; the commander had little detailed or recent information about the coastline he was approaching. Eventually he ordered the boat to periscope depth and cautiously raised the observation periscope; a careful 360-degree sweep satisfied him that no vessels or aircraft were nearby and that the light signals from shore coincided with those in his orders. Still taking no chances, he ordered his gun crews to prepare to man the 37mm and 20mm antiaircraft cannons as soon as the boat surfaced, although they had little ammunition in the lockers.

  Fegelein sent out a small motorboat belonging to the ranch to meet the submarine. For the middle of the Southern Hemisphere winter, the water was surprisingly calm. As the launch approached the beach, lit by sailors’ flashlights, Fegelein raised his arm in the classic Nazi salute. The Admiral Graf Spee men splashed into the small breakers on the beach and helped pull the craft up onto the sand, and Fegelein moved forward to help Eva Braun from the boat. Hitler was helped down by the boat crew, returned Fegelein’s salute, and shook him by the hand.

  The one-time ruler of the Thousand-Year Reich was almost unrecognizable. He was pasty-faced from the long voyage, the trademark moustache had been shaved off, and his hair was lank and uncut. Eva had made an effort to look good throughout the trip, but the prison-house pallor of her skin was highlighted by the lipstick and rouge she had applied before leaving the submarine. Of the three arrivals, Blondi probably looked the best; her excitement at being in the open air at last was controlled with the familiar red leather lead, gripped firmly in Hitler’s right hand as the party walked up the beach to a waiting car. No doubt Fegelein took the opportunity of the short drive to brief Hitler on the immediate arrangements. An avenue lined with tamarisk trees led to the main house of the Estancia Moromar, where they would spend the first night. Security at the ranch house was surprisingly light: the fewer people who knew about the visitors, the better.

  The petty officers Shultz, Dettelmann, and Brennecke helped in the subsequent unloading of many heavy boxes, which were ferried ashore from the U-boat on repeated trips by the motorboat and the submarine’s rubber boats. The boxes were loaded onto the farm trucks and driven to outbuildings on the Estancia Moromar; repacked in new boxes, the contents would be taken to Buenos Aires and deposited in Nazi-controlled banks. At the end of the unloading, most of the crew from U-518 came ashore in the rubber dinghies and marched in column in civilian clothes, their kitbags slung over their shoulders, to quarters on the estancia. Meanwhile, an eight-man skeleton crew took U-518 out on its final voyage, to be scuttled further from shore. They would return in the motorboat, to join their shipmates for their first fresh meal in two months. They did not know that their operation had almost been compromised.

  DON LUIS MARIOTTI, THE POLICE COMMISSIONER at Necochea, had called his off-duty men in from their homes on the evening of the previous day, July 27, 1945, and ordered them to investigate unusual activity reported on the coast. The officers arrived at the beach to see an unidentified vessel offshore making Morse code signals, and they found and arrested a German who was signaling back. Interrogated through the night, he eventually admitted that the signaling vessel was a German submarine that wanted to put ashore at a safe place on the coast to unload.

  The next morning a six-man police squad led by a senior corporal decided to comb several miles of beach north and south of the place where they had caught the signaler. After some hours, they found a stretch of sand bearing many signs of launches and dinghies being beached; heavy boxes had also been dragged toward the tire tracks of trucks. The police squad followed the tire tracks along the dirt road that led to the entrance of the Estancia Moromar. The corporal sent one of his men back to the station with his report, and then, without waiting for orders, he decided to enter the farm. The five police officers had walked a couple of miles in along the tree-lined drive when they came to some low hills, which hid the main buildings. Four Germans carrying submachine guns challenged them. The corporal had no search warrant and was seriously outgunned; he decided to withdraw and report back to his superior.

  Commissioner Mariotti telephoned the chief of police at La Plata. The call was taken by the latter’s secretary, who told him to do nothing and remain by the telephone. Two hours later Don Luis was ordered to forget the matter and release the arrested German. The following month an FBI message from Buenos Aires stated: “Local Press reports indicate provincial police department raided German colony located Villa Gesell … looking for individuals who possibly entered Argentina clandestinely via submarine and during search a short-wave … [illegible] receiving and transmitting set found. Other premises along beach near same area searched by authorities but no arrests made.”

  FBI REPORT RECORDED in August 1945, substantiated in Argentine police files, of the landings at Necochea and the support system awaiting Hitler.

  ANOTHER SAILOR from the Admiral Graf Spee also had recollections of the landing. Petty Officer Heinrich Bethe, whose later role in Hitler’s life is discussed at length in Chapter 23, was interviewed by one Capt. Manuel Monasterio in 1977, when Bethe was living in the Patagonian coastal town of Caleta Olivia under the pseudonym Pablo Glocknick (he was also known as Juan Paulovsky). Bethe had repaired Monasterio’s car one day after it had broken down. The captain and the former Kriegsmarine petty officer immediately hit it off, and on a number of occasions over bottles of wine and local seafood, the former sailor recounted his time as Hitler’s companion in exile. Bethe said he had escaped the clutches of the Bormann organization after Hitler’s death in Argentina and had lived in obscurity on the coast, working as an occasional mechanic, his trade aboard the Admiral Graf Spee.

  Petty Officer Bethe’s recollections of the U-boat landings are essentially similar to those of Schultz, Dettelmann, and Brennecke, but his description of the location of the landing site differs substantially (see map). Bethe spoke of a landing area “several hours” of driving over rough roads from the city of Puerto Madryn, which is much further south than Necochea. Bethe recalled that on the evening of July 28, he directed trucks to a determined point on the coast and from there proceeded to load a large number of boxes that came ashore on rubber dinghies from two submarines. The trucks carried the boxes to two large depositories where they were carefully unloaded. Later, about seventy people disembarked from the U-boat. In Bethe’s opinion, “the cargo was very valuable, and the people that arrived were not common sailors like [himself], but presumably hierarchy of the Third Reich.”

  The two accounts may seem to describe the same landing, but there were in fact two such missions: one at Necochea that delivered Hitler, and one further south that unloaded the loot to finance his future. Ingeborg Schaeffer, the wife of First Lt. Heinz Schaeffer, commander of U-977, which surrendered at Mar del Plata on August 17, 1945, was asked in 2008 if her husband had brought Hitler to Argentina. Mrs. S
chaeffer replied, “If he did not bring him, there were another two U-boats that could have brought him, and [my husband] could have given them food and so forth, because the others went on to Puerto Madryn.” Although her comments are somewhat cryptic, she was obviously aware of other Nazi submarines in Argentine waters at the same time as U-977, information she could have got only from her husband. Schaeffer’s U-977 was a Type VIIC from U-Flotille 31. The Allies had believed that Argentina was beyond the range of this smaller class of U-boat, but the fact remains that Schaeffer reached Mar del Plata. However, Puerto Madryn was indeed beyond his range unless he stopped to refuel, as it was more than 500 miles away as the crow flies and much more following the coastline. Ingeborg Schaeffer’s testimony, and other evidence from Argentine navy documents, clearly point to two separate groups of U-boats.

  One pair was U-880, which likely passed Fegelein over to a tug off Mar del Plata on July 23, and U-518, which is believed to have landed Hitler at Necochea on July 28. Both of these were Type IXC boats from U-Flotille 33, large enough to carry passengers and cargo (as also were U-530 and U-1235).

  A separate group included U-530, which First Lt. Otto Wermuth surrendered at Mar del Plata on July 10—two weeks ahead of the boat that brought Hitler. This boat was in terrible condition and contained nothing of value; it may already have offloaded cargo at Necochea for Estancia Moromar. Wermuth’s interrogation report—translated from German into Spanish, and finally into English by the U.S. Navy—says that he considered landing at “Miromar” before deciding to surrender at Mar del Plata. He said that he had left Kristiansand on March 3, 1945, and proceeded to Horten in Oslo Fjord, Norway, where for some reason “not stated” he remained for two days (possibly to load cargo). U-530 had no torpedoes, weapons, or ammunition on board; by contrast, U-977 was carrying its full complement of weapons and torpedoes when it surrendered on August 17—a full five weeks after U-530. Wermuth’s mention of “Miromar,” and the fact that getting rid of the torpedoes would have provided space for clandestine cargo, suggest that he may have had something to hide from his interrogators. He refused to say whether or not U-530 was alone, but he did say that he operated under direct orders from Berlin and that the last direct contact he had was on April 26. Wermuth said that he did not know of any other submarines headed for Argentina, but that if any more were coming, they would arrive within a week of his own arrival.

  REPORT FROM FBI in Buenos Aires recorded in August 1945, concerning arrivals in Argentina by U-boat.

  INGEBORG SCHAEFFER’S TESTIMONY suggests that a second group of boats, responsible for the landings near Puerto Madryn described by Heinrich Bethe, might have been escorted by her husband’s fully armed U-977, which left Kristiansand on May 2, 1945—the day before U-530 sailed. Both U-530, and U-1235 from Gruppe Seewolf, had the range for the southernmost landings. The presence of a second group of three boats is also suggested in two separate television interviews conducted in Buenos Aires with Wilfred von Oven. Oven was the personal press adjutant to Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels between 1943 and 1945. He had accompanied the Condor Legion in Spain as a war correspondent and was acquainted with Gen. Wilhelm von Faupel of the Ibero-American Institute. Oven went into hiding in 1945 under an assumed name and fled to Argentina in 1951; a committed Nazi, he was declared persona non grata by the Federal German Embassy in Buenos Aires. Before he died in 2008, Oven was asked about a “fleet” of Nazi submarines coming to Argentina in 1945. On two occasions—once to an Argentine author, and again to a British TV crew—he replied, in what appeared to be almost a conversational slip, “No, there were only three, just three.” His interviews are rambling and given in an arch manner suggesting that he knew more than he was willing to tell, but on the matter of the three U-boats he seemed quite lucid.

  An Argentine government memorandum of October 14, 1952, stated:

  I bring to your attention that our agents [names deleted] have detected at Ascochinga, in the mountainous region of Córdoba province, a farm located on the Cerro Negro, which has been acquired by a former officer who disembarked from U-235 [sic] at the Mar del Plata naval base. This boat, together with other German submarines, came to Patagonia from Germany after the conclusion of hostilities.

  The Canadian author William Stevenson also mentions a U-235:

  It was reported that members of the brotherhood began to quarrel over money during the 1960s, and this seemed probably true. The leader of the rebellion against Bormann was described as the commander of U-235. He was said to have brought his vessel to Argentine waters, discharged a cargo of stolen Nazi treasures, scuttled the U-boat, converted the cargo to money and bought a large estate.

  Confusion in these sources between the numbers U-235 and U-1235 seems quite plausible. It is certain that the real U-235, a Type VIIC, was lost with all hands in the Kattegat Bay area off the Danish coast on April 14, 1945, to a depth-charge attack in error by German S-boat T-17. There is no official record of a third boat in addition to U-530 and U-977—which might have been U-1235—surrendering to the Argentine authorities at Mar del Plata. However, on July 19, 1945, the Buenos Aires daily newspaper Critica reported that yet another U-boat had been “surrounded by Argentine Navy vessels thirty miles off the coast of Mar del Ajo” just north of Mar del Plata. Nothing more is ever heard of this boat.

  The question of what happened to the crews that landed from those U-boats that were scuttled rather than surrendering—potentially, U-518, U-880, and U-1235—naturally arises. Despite the story that the commander of what was probably U-1235 (Lt. Cdr. Franz Barsch) survived to buy a farm in Córdoba, where he was still living in 1952, there are no reports of any of the other submariners surfacing in Argentina after the war. The three boats together had a total of about 152 crewmen. The simplest answer is that it would have been perfectly possible to disperse these sailors among the hundreds of German communities scattered across Patagonia. It is possible to imagine that numbers of them might have preferred this prospect over a return to ruined, starving, occupied Germany, especially if their families had perished in the air raids or were now lost somewhere in the Soviet zone. A much more sinister alternative explanation is that they may have been disposed of shortly after their arrival. Nobody was looking for them in Argentina, after all, just as nobody was looking for Hitler, Eva Braun, Hermann Fegelein, or the masterminds of the entire escape plan, Martin Bormann and Heinrich “Gestapo” Müller. Bormann’s and Müller’s utter ruthlessness is beyond question; and Fegelein’s service in Russia had been spent commanding SS units employed in “antipartisan” warfare behind the fighting front.

  IN 1945 THERE WAS NOTHING CONTROVERSIAL about the idea that German submarines were operating clandestinely along the coast of Argentina. The possibilities were outlined in a letter dated as early as August 7, 1939, from Capt. Dietrich Niebuhr, the naval attaché at the Buenos Aires embassy, to his Berlin espionage controller Gen. von Faupel: “The strategic situation of the Patagonian and Tierra del Fuego coast lends itself marvelously to the installation of supply bases for [surface] raiders and submarines.” The Nazi-hunting Argentine congressman Silvano Santander had no doubts that such plans were carried out: “These [contact points] were established, and served to supply fuel to the German submarines and raiders. The Argentine government’s tolerance of this provoked numerous protests from the Allied governments. Later on, after the Nazi defeat, these bases were also used so that mysterious submarines could arrive, bringing both people and numerous valuables.” Allied intelligence services were aware of such possibilities from at least 1943, when the Americans began actively seeking a secret U-boat refueling and resupply base near the San Antonio lighthouse.

  On May 22, 1945, after the end of the war with Germany, the Argentine foreign ministry informed the navy of “the presence of German submarine warships in the waters of the South Atlantic, trying to reach Japanese waters”; and on May 29, the Argentine navy carried out antisubmarine operations in the Strait of Magellan to prevent submarines pass
ing from the Atlantic to the Pacific. This did not stop the traffic. The federal police reported that on July 1, 1945, two persons landed from a submarine near San Julián, on the Atlantic coast near the southern tip of Argentina and the Strait of Magellan. The two Germans paddled ashore in a rubber boat and were met by “a person who owned a sailboat.” The police said that the submarine was refueled from “drums hidden along the coast.” Such stories were nothing new. In January 1945, Stanley Ross, who had been a correspondent in Buenos Aires for the Overseas News Agency, reported that Nazi submarines had intensified their activities, bringing “millions of dollars in German war loot to this hemisphere to be cached here until the Nazi leaders could claim it.” Ross went on to write,

  A Nazi submarine surfaced near the Argentine coast at Mar del Plata. It was seen to transfer to a tugboat of the Axis-owned Delfino line of Buenos Aires some forty boxes, and the person of Willi Koehn, chief of the Latin American Division of the German Foreign Ministry. While the submarine waited to take him back, Koehn, the former head of the Nazi Party in Chile, conferred in Buenos Aires with key Nazi agents and collaborationists.

  By July 1945, Koehn was already back in Argentina, having joined Fegelein for U-880’s last voyage from Fuerteventura.

  COL. RÓMULO BUSTOS COMMANDED an Argentine coastal antiaircraft unit at Mar del Plata in the southern winter of 1945. In early June he was ordered by his superiors to cover a broad section of the coast between Mar del Plata and Mar Chiquita, to oppose any attempts by German U-boats to land and disembark; if anybody did disembark, he was to take as many prisoners as possible. “My group had to cover the area near Laguna Mar Chiquita, a few miles to the north of the naval base. We had nine cannons; we were ready to open fire. One dark night I saw light flashes from the sea to the coast, [directed] at a spot near the place where we were. I contacted the leader of our group. When he arrived at our position, the flashes had stopped,” but when the commander was about to leave, the flashes started again.