THE “STAUFFENBERG BOMB” of July 20, 1944, had injured Hitler more extensively than the Nazi propaganda machine had made public. The deep cold of the Patagonian winter now contributed to his “rheumatism” and he suffered from inflamed joints and stiffness in his right hand, but more distressing was the fact that the surgeons had been unable to remove all the oak splinters that had sprayed from the table that saved his life. The constant pressure from an oak fragment lodged deep in the nasal bones between his eyes caused him acute neuralgic pain during the stay at Estancia San Ramón. Hitler needed surgery.
Since it was judged too much of a security risk for him to attend a hospital in Buenos Aires, he and Eva traveled north to the province of Córdoba and the Nazi hospital and health spa at the Gran Hotel Viena, at Miramar on the Mar Chiquita lake. The Gran Hotel Viena was built by an Abwehr agent, an early Nazi Party member named Max Pahlke, between 1943 and 1945—the same period as the construction of Villa Winter on Fuerteventura and the extension of the airfield at San Carlos de Bariloche. Pahlke, the capable manager of the Argentine branch of the German multinational Mannesmann, had acquired Argentine citizenship in the 1930s, but was well known to the Allies for his espionage work in South America.
The building contained eighty-four rooms, a medical facility staffed by doctors, nurses, and massage therapists, a large swimming pool, a library, and a dining room that seated two hundred. Every room had air conditioning and heating, granite floors, walls lined with imported Carrara marble, and bronze chandeliers. The facilities included a bank, a wine cellar, a food warehouse, a bakery, a slaughterhouse, an electricity generating plant, and garages with their own fuel supply. Of the seventy hotel employees, only twelve were locals from Miramar, all of whom worked outside the facility and had no contact with hotel guests. The remaining fifty-eight employees were either from Buenos Aires or from Germany, and all spoke German. In addition to a modern telephone system that connected guests with the rest of the world, the Gran Hotel Viena also had a tall telecommunications antenna on the seventy-foot-high water tower. This vantage point, and a further tower just down the coast, enabled watchful guards to spot any approach to the hotel by land, water, or air.
The tiny market town of Miramar was a strange location for a huge, state-of-the-art hotel and spa complex, miles away from any major roads or other commercial routes. Pahlke, known for his business sense, had built Mannesmann Argentina into a massively profitable business. Pahlke supervised the opening of the hotel from December 1945 to March 1946; he then left. A former German army colonel named Carl Martin Krueger, the Viena’s “chief of security,” was put in charge. An immaculate figure known locally as “The Engineer,” Krueger had arrived in Miramar in 1943. He did everything to make the Hitlers’ stay at the medical facility as comfortable as possible; they had an exclusive suite complete with AH-monogrammed blankets, sheets, towels, and dishes.
With many local supporters, Hitler and his wife often took day-trips to Balnearia, a town some three miles from Mar Chiquita, to take tea. He had his photograph taken with other senior Nazis and would sign copies of Mein Kampf for well-wishers. One witness to these mundane encounters said that Hitler was often “lost in thought” and would say, “Now, I am far from here.” The Hitlers enjoyed their stay at the exclusive, luxurious waterside hotel. One of his bodyguards recalled that the couple would regularly walk along the shore, Hitler commenting on the wonderful sunsets. The operation to remove the splinters at first seemed to be successful, but the pain in Hitler’s face would return to plague him in later life.
In February 1946, Juan Domingo Péron was finally voted into untrammeled power as president of Argentina, which must have eased any latent fears of pursuit on the part of some of the fugitive Nazis. During the late 1940s, Hitler himself would move fairly freely between strategic points in Argentina, around a triangle based on San Carlos de Bariloche; the home of his friends and early financial backers, the Eichhorns, at La Falda; and Mar Chiquita. He owned huge tracts of land in all three areas.
MEANWHILE, MARTIN BORMANN WAS STILL IN EUROPE, controlling the network in Argentina from afar. He was in regular contact with Ludwig Freude through the portable T43 encryption system. He also made good use of his wide-ranging contacts, most importantly inside the Vatican, to advance his own plans for exile. After his abortive trip to Flensburg in May 1945 (see end of Chapter 15), Bormann had hidden in the Bavarian hills for five months before risking a visit to the old Nazi heartland of Munich, the Bavarian capital. J. A. Friedl, a former Nazi Party member and senior sergeant of Munich police who had known Bormann since the early days, saw him there in October 1945. Friedl recollected that Bormann had been “with some other men in a car, parked in front of the Spanish Consulate.” When Friedl approached the car and greeted his old comrade, they chatted briefly; Bormann told Friedl that he was trying to arrange a visa to enter Spain.
Bormann stayed in Munich until July 1946, when he was spotted again, this time by a man who held no love for him. Jakob Glas, a disgruntled former chauffeur of Bormann’s—who had been fired in a disagreement over stolen garden vegetables from the Führer’s personal Berchtesgaden plot—also saw his old boss in a car, riding in the front seat next to the driver. The car was moving slowly, and Glas got a good look at Bormann; he was dressed in ordinary, rather shabby civilian clothes. According to the associated press, Glas said, “There were some other men with him, but I didn’t get a close look at them. I was too busy staring after Bormann.” Glas’s report prompted the U.S. Army to mount a house-to-house search for Bormann, but without success. He returned to his personal “Alpine Redoubt,” where he was protected by two hundred former members of the Waffen-SS (see Chapter 21). Toward the end of the summer of 1947, it was time for Bormann to get on the move again.
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
ADOLF HITLER’S VALLEY
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). Wh
en 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.”
“Schmidt’s” childhood memory was of three small neighborhoods widely spread out in a big, beautiful valley. In a solemn voice, his father told them that the place they had arrived at was called “Adolf Hitler’s Valley” and that the neighborhoods were called respectively Deutschland (Germany), Heimat (loosely, Homeland), and Vaterland (Fatherland). Schmidt recalled his father telling him that German submarines had come to Argentina carrying the immense treasures of the Third Reich and that other treasures captured by the SS during the conquests of Europe had come by various different means. The family moved into a big, attractive house with a garden in the Heimat community. After the hunger of postwar Germany, they led an “almost luxurious life”—the family even had a servant, an old SS subordinate of his father’s who took care of all the work in the garden and the house.
Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler Page 28
