As there were no more light signals on the following nights, the whole operation was reduced to observation, and a file classified “secret,” reporting these events, was sent to the admiral in command. Bustos remembered a second incident at the end of June:
One of my soldiers found a cave almost three meters deep. We found that somebody had put three wooden shelves in the inside of the cave, ten or twenty centimeters above the high tide mark. On the shelves there were cans, the size of a beer can, without any type of identification except for one letter. The first we opened contained bread, and the next one chocolate bars. I thought the others would also have food and drinks. I then thought that this was a place to resupply either submarines or clandestine crew members who disembarked in the area. We took photos and wrote a detailed report. We took away the cans and the wood. I do not know what happened afterward to this evidence.
With hindsight, the retired colonel thought it was strange that the local press did not mention what happened, since “everybody in the area was talking about it.”
Col. Bustos was present a couple of weeks later when U-530 arrived in Mar del Plata on July 10, 1945. “When I went on board, two things caught my attention: the nasty smell in the boat (although all doors were open), and finding cans identical to the ones we had seen on the beach.”
THE GERMAN CAPABILITY TO SHIP OUT personnel and cargo by submarines, on an ambitious scale and over long distances, certainly survived into the final weeks of the war. Intriguing proof of this was provided by U-234, which sailed from Kiel on March 25, 1945. This was originally built as a Type XB mine-laying boat; at 2,710 tons displacement when submerged and fully loaded, this small class of eight were the largest U-boats ever built. After suffering bomb damage during construction, U-234 was reoutfitted as a long-range cargo transporter. On this occasion—U-234’s first and only mission—its destination was Japan, and it was carrying not mines, but a dozen special passengers and 240 tons of special cargo, plus enough diesel fuel and provisions for a six- to nine-month voyage. The cargo included a crated Messerschmitt Me 262 jet fighter, a Henschel Hs 293 guided glider bomb, examples of the newest electrical torpedo guidance systems, many technical drawings, and over half a ton of uranium oxide. The passengers included Luftwaffe Gen. Ulrich Kessler, two Japanese naval officers, and civilian engineers and scientists; among the latter were Dr. Heinz Schlicke, a specialist in radar, infrared, and countermeasures who was the director of the Kriegsmarine test facility at Kiel (later recruited by the United States in Operation Paperclip), and August Bringewalde, who was in charge of Me 262 production at Messerschmitt.
The fate of U-234 would be decided by another of Martin Bormann’s “carrot and stick” deals with U.S. intelligence. On May 1, 1945, Lt. Cdr. Johann-Heinrich Fehler opened sealed orders that instructed him to head for the east coast of the United States. He was to deliver his cargo to the U.S. Navy, but was ordered not to let some things fall into U.S. hands. Bormann would have needed to maintain his secure communications links, so the U-boat commander threw overboard his Kurier and T43 encryption equipment and all Enigma-related documents. On May 14 the USS Sutton took command of U-234 and led her to the Portsmouth Navy Yard.
DOZENS OF U-BOAT SIGHTINGS off Argentina are faithfully recorded in police and naval documents. Many of them took place within the crucial period between July 10, 1945, when the Type IXC boat U-530 surrendered at Mar del Plata, and August 17, when the Type VIIC boat U-977 surrendered at the same Argentine navy base. (U-977 allegedly took sixty-six days to cross the Atlantic, submerged all the way, and U-530 made it in sixty-three days.)
On July 21, just a week before the landing at Necochea that delivered Hitler, the Argentine navy’s chief of staff, Adm. Hector Lima, issued orders to “Call off all coastal patrols.” This order, from the highest echelon of the military government, effectively opened up the coast of Argentina to the landings described by the Admiral Graf Spee men. But despite the chase being called off by the navy, the reports of submarines off the coast kept coming in. There was a determined cover-up by highly placed members of the military government to ensure that U-530 and U-977 were the only “real” Nazi submarines seen to have made it across the Atlantic. Columnist Drew Pearson of the Bell Syndicate wrote on July 24, 1945,
Along the coast of Patagonia, many Germans own land, which contains harbors deep enough for submarine landings. And if submarines could get to Argentine-Uruguayan waters from Germany, as they definitely did, there is no reason why they could not go a little further south to Patagonia. Also there is no reason to believe why Hitler couldn’t have been on one of them.
Speaking from exile in Rio de Janeiro in October 1945, Raúl Damonte Taborda—the former chair of the Argentine congressional committee on Nazi activities, and a close colleague of Silvano Santander—said that he believed it was possible Adolf Hitler was in Argentina. Damonte said that it was “indicated” that submarines other than U-530 and U-977 had been sunk by their crews after reaching the Argentine coast; these “undoubtedly” carried politicians, technicians, or even “possibly Adolf Hitler.”
AN AP ARTICLE published in the Lewiston Daily Sun, July 18, 1945: One of many newspaper reports taken seriously by U.S. authorities that Hitler and Eva Braun had been landed by submarine on the Argentine coast and were living in the depths of Patagonia.
Che Guevara’s father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, who was an active anti-Nazi “commando” in Argentina throughout the 1930s and ’40s, was also convinced: “Not long after the German army was defeated in Europe, many of the top Nazis arrived in our country and entered through the seaside resort of Villa Gessell, located south of Buenos Aires. They came in several German submarines.”
When asked by the authors about the submarines as recently as 2008, the Argentine justice minister, Aníbal Fernández, said simply, “In Argentina in 1945, anything was possible.”
Chapter 19
TO PATAGONIA
THE EXILES STAYED JUST ONE NIGHT at the Estancia Moromar. The first thing the couple would have done was bathe in an attempt to wash away the lingering stench of the U-boat. Fegelein had provided a selection of traveling outfits and now arranged for their old clothes to be burned. Hitler and Eva stayed in separate rooms. On the dressing table in Eva’s bedroom was her favorite perfume, Chanel No. 5; a bottle of Canadian Club whisky with an ice bucket and a tumbler; a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes and a silver cigarette case—which Fegelein had not had time to get engraved with her distinctive “EB” monogram; and a gold Dunhill “Unique” lighter.
The grass airfield at the ranch had been laid out in 1933, shortly after Carlos Idaho Gesell had bought the property. The next morning, July 30, 1945, Hitler, Eva, and Fegelein, accompanied by Blondi, boarded the same Argentine air force Curtiss biplane that had picked Fegelein up at Mar del Plata. They would travel the last leg of the months-long journey that had brought them nearly one-third of the way around the globe, from the rubble-strewn battlefield of Berlin to a world of huge, silent horizons.
Although Hitler had been thoroughly briefed about the vastness of Patagonia, such knowledge was theoretical, and during the daytime flight westward he was amazed at the physical spectacle unrolling below him. After what would have been a three-and-a-half-hour flight, the Curtiss Condor landed at another grass strip just outside the town of Neuquén in the north of Patagonia. None of the passengers bothered to leave the aircraft as a small tanker truck drew up, and the pilot supervised a group of men in air force uniforms while they refueled it. Topped up, the Condor was soon back in the air and heading southwest, while from the right-hand windows the three passengers watched the majestic, snow-capped Andes Mountains unrolling under the afternoon sun. Two hours later, with the waters of Lake Nahuel Huapí glinting below as dusk approached on July 30, the biplane came in to land again, bumped over the grass, and taxied to a halt on the airfield at San Ramón.
In this region, the Estancia San Ramón was the first officially delineated estate to be fenced in. The ranch
is isolated, approached only via an unsurfaced road past San Carlos de Bariloche’s first airfield. The family of Prince Stephan zu Schaumburg-Lippe—who had been, with his ardently patriotic princess, one of the regular poker players at the German Embassy in Buenos Aires—had bought the estate as long ago as 1910 and still owned it in 1945. In 1943 Prince Stephan and Wilhelm von Schön, respectively the Nazi government’s consul and ambassador in Chile, had been called back to Germany as part of the planning for Aktion Feuerland. They left South America through Buenos Aires, where they held lengthy discussions with the de facto ambassador, the local millionaire Ludwig Freude.
A MAJOR VULNERABILITY IN THE PLAN had been the fact that it was Adm. Wilhelm Canaris of the Abwehr who had first spotted the Estancia San Ramón, when he had used it himself as a bolt-hole during his escape across Patagonia in 1915. In 1944, when Bormann was finalizing plans for the Führer’s escape, Canaris’s knowledge of the estate, and of Villa Winter on Fuerteventura—which had been set up by his Abwehr agent Gustav Winter—was more than dangerous. Canaris—as mentioned in Chapter 2—was a long-time and effective conspirator against Hitler. Although Canaris had covered his tracks for years, he had still attracted suspicion from Himmler and the SS hierarchy, who, on general principles, had long wished to absorb Canaris’s military intelligence network under the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA). Canaris finally lost his ability to stay one step ahead of the SS and the Gestapo in February 1944, when two of his Abwehr agents in Turkey defected to the British just before the Gestapo could arrest them for links to an anti-Nazi group. Canaris failed to account for the Abwehr’s activities satisfactorily to Hitler, who had had enough of the lack of reporting to the Nazi hierarchy and instructed SS Gen. Hermann Fegelein to oversee the incorporation of the Abwehr into the RSHA. The admiral was dismissed from his post and parked in a pointless job as head of the Office for Commercial and Economic Warfare.
The involvement of Abwehr personnel in the July 20, 1944, bomb plot finally led to Canaris being placed under house arrest; the noose tightened slowly, but eventually he was being kept in chains in a cellar under Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrechtstrasse in Berlin. On February 7, 1945, he was sent to Flossenbürg concentration camp, but even then he was kept alive for some time—there have been suggestions that even at this late date Himmler thought that Canaris might be useful as an intermediary with the Allies.
Bormann could not take the risk that such a potentially credible witness to the refuge in Argentina and the staging post between Europe and South America would survive to fall into Allied hands. In the Führerbunker on April 5, 1945, Bormann’s ally SS Gen. Kaltenbrunner presented Hitler with some highly incriminating evidence—supposedly, the “diaries” of Wilhelm Canaris. After reading a few pages marked for him by Kaltenbrunner, the Führer flew into a rage and signed the proffered death warrant. On the direct orders of Heinrich “Gestapo” Müller, SS Lt. Col. Walter Huppenkothen and SS Maj. Otto Thorbeck were sent to Flossenbürg to tie off this loose end. On the morning of April 9, stripped naked in a final ignominy, Adm. Canaris was hanged from a wooden beam. Although reports of his death vary, his end was not a quick one. At 4:33 that afternoon, Huppenkothen sent a secret Enigma-encoded message to Müller via Müller’s subordinate, SS Gen. Richard Glücks. The latter was “kindly requested” to inform SS Gen. Müller immediately, by telephone, telex, or messenger, that Huppenkothen’s mission had been completed as ordered. The only major figure who could have pieced together the details of Hitler’s escape and refuge in Argentina was dead.
IN 1945, THE GERMANS HAD COMPLETE CONTROL over access to San Carlos de Bariloche and the Estancia San Ramón. No one got in or out of the area without express permission from the senior Nazis in the area. On July 24, Drew Pearson had written in his syndicated column,
It may take a long time to find out whether Hitler and his bride Eva Braun escaped to Patagonia. The country is a series of vast Nazi-owned ranches where German is spoken almost exclusively and where Hitler could be hidden easily, and successfully for years. The ranches in this southern part of Argentina cover thousands of acres and have been under Nazi [note: there were Germans in the area long before the Nazis dominated] management for generations. It would have been impossible for any non-German to penetrate the area to make a thorough investigation as to Hitler’s whereabouts.
The staff at the isolated San Ramón estate had been busy for days since being given advance warning of the impending arrival of important guests. The arrival of a security team of Admiral Graf Spee sailors a week before had already added to the staff’s workload, and two new faces had joined the weekly shopping trip into San Carlos de Bariloche to ensure that no gossip betrayed the guests’ presence. The cook at San Ramón, Carmen Torrentuigi, would have been thoroughly briefed on her guests’ dietary requirements. Her rightly famed “Cordero Patagónico,” Patagonian lamb, was off the menu for the time being, as were many of the other meats from the traditional Argentine “asado” or barbecue. The menu was to be heavy on vegetables, but with classic German dishes like liver dumplings and squab (baby pigeon). She was to find out later that that was “his favorite” of the many meals she would prepare for him and the woman who was soon to be his wife. The Germans on the estate had taken the official news of Hitler’s “death” with an air of calm disbelief; it was with little surprise that Carmen, dressed in a clean starched apron over her homespun clothes, was introduced to the guests before supper.
Hitler and Eva Braun stayed in the main house at San Ramón for nine months. Contact with Martin Bormann, who was still on the move in Europe, was infrequent, but his “Organization” in Argentina was finalizing security plans for the couple’s permanent residence. This more private and secure refuge was nearing completion; named Inalco, it was fifty-six miles from San Ramón, on the Chilean border near Villa Angostura.
URSULA, EVA’S DAUGHTER BY HITLER, arrived at the Estancia San Ramón in September 1945. The six-year-old Ursula, nicknamed “Uschi,” had sailed first-class from Spain; her uncle Hermann Fegelein met her off the ship in Buenos Aires and brought her to join her parents, flying into the airstrip on the hillside above the ranch on the same Curtiss Condor they had used. Uschi’s existence had been kept strictly secret from the German people, as indeed had her parents’ relationship, although the rest of the world knew about Hitler and Eva as early as May 15, 1939, when Time magazine gave details of how “dark-haired, buxom Eva Braun, 28, had her apartment rent paid, as usual, by her old friend in Berlin.… To her friends Eva Braun confided that she expected her friend [Adolf Hitler] to marry her within a year.” It was not to be. Hitler believed that his grip on the public mind depended upon his being seen as wholly dedicated to Germany’s destiny. The child was said to have been born in San Remo, Italy, on New Year’s Eve 1938. Her parents had not seen her since April 11, 1945, the last day of a secret three-day trip to Bavaria to visit Uschi for what they had both thought might be the last time. Hitler’s double Gustav Weber would have covered for the Führer while the couple slipped away. Brought up largely by distant relatives of Eva’s mother, the blonde-haired little girl had spent many happy hours at Berchtesgaden playing with Gitta, the daughter of Eva’s childhood friend Herta Schneider, and was photographed and filmed extensively. After the war, she was variously described as Gitta Schneider’s sister or Hermann Fegelein and Gretl Braun Fegelein’s daughter—yet their only child, Eva, was born after the war ended. Uschi was neither. In 1945, she may have already spoken basic Spanish; in 1943, Bormann would have arranged for both her and her caregivers (her “family”) to be issued with Spanish documents, and on his instructions the “family” had spent much of 1944 learning the language.
When Uschi arrived in Argentina in September 1945, Eva Braun was again pregnant—“as a last mission for Hitler”—having conceived in Munich in March 1945. The couple was still unmarried, and rumors of her pregnancy had been rife among the people in the bunker. (It was in fact her third pregnancy; she had had a stillborn child
in 1943. August Schullten, gynecologist and chief physician of the Krankenhausen Links, a hospital in Munich, attended. He died in a car crash later that same year.) With the family now safe in Argentina, and with Eva’s brother-in-law Hermann Fegelein on hand to give her away, the private Catholic chapel at San Ramón would have made a perfect place for the couple’s real marriage. (The doubles allegedly “married” in the bunker on April 29, 1945—over twenty-four hours after the real couple fled from Berlin. There were no surviving witnesses to the ceremony except for Bormann.)
In March 1946, the San Ramón estate employees were called to a meeting and told that their guests had been tragically killed in a car crash close to the property. They were warned never to discuss the matter again. The trail in Patagonia was to go cold; not only were Hitler and Braun “dead” in the Berlin bunker, but now they were “dead” again in Argentina. If anyone managed to follow the Hitlers to Argentina, all they would find were more stories of corpses burned beyond recognition, this time in an automobile accident.
THE BRITISH AND U.S. GOVERNMENTS had put intense pressure on the Argentine authorities to repatriate to Germany all remaining members of the Admiral Graf Spee crew—those who had not escaped or disappeared—whether or not they had married local women. On February 16, 1946, the British troopship RML Highland Monarch, escorted by HMS Ajax (one of the Royal Navy cruisers that had driven the Admiral Graf Spee into Uruguayan waters in December 1939), arrived first in Buenos Aires, and then in Montevideo, to ship the German sailors home. The Argentine authorities turned over about nine hundred identity books (military identification papers) in a couple of mailbags. The boarding was chaotic, the Highland Monarch was ordered to sea as soon as possible, and no one had the time to check the papers against the individuals who had embarked. Despite the Allies’ insistence, many officers and men of the “pocket battleship” had simply disappeared into Argentina. It was only on the long voyage to Germany that the documents and men were cross-referenced. Rumor had it that among them were eighty-six U-boat crewmen, whose presence in Argentina the Argentine, U.S., and British authorities were supposedly at a loss to explain, since the crews of the surrendered U-530 and U-977 had already been repatriated via the United States. In fact, documents in the British National Archives prove that the British identified everyone on the Highland Monarch, and none of them were submariners—so the fate of the men from the other three boats, U-880, U-1235 and U-518, remains undocumented.
Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler Page 27
