Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler

by Simon Dunstan

  The remaining share was still huge, and Bormann had no option but to accept this brutal unilateral increase in the premium for his insurance policy. He had been planning his bolt-hole for four years; everything was in place. Hitler was already in Patagonia and with the crimes of the Nazi regime now finally exposed for the world to see, there was nowhere else to go. Within the next nine months both Bormann and SS and Police Gen. Heinrich “Gestapo” Müller planned to settle in Argentina themselves, and they would need their reception arrangements to function smoothly. Bormann knew that Evita was a tough, experienced negotiator, whom he would later describe as far more intelligent than her husband.

  However, the Bormann “Organization” had a keen memory. After the spring of 1948, when Müller based himself in Córdoba and became directly responsible for the security of the Organization, the bankers who had betrayed Bormann would begin to suffer a string of untimely deaths. Heinrich Doerge died mysteriously in 1949; in December 1950, Ricardo von Leute was found dead in a Buenos Aires street, and Ricardo Staudt would survive him by only a few months. Ludwig Freude himself, the kingpin of Aktion Feuerland in Argentina, died in 1952 from drinking a poisoned cup of coffee, and Evita’s younger brother Juan Duarté met his end in 1954 with a gunshot to the head. Officially he was said to have committed suicide.

  AFTER ECSTATIC RECEPTIONS IN LISBON AND PARIS, Evita took a break at the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo, where Dodero introduced her to his friend, the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. The predatory millionaire would later boast that he slept with her there and in the morning gave her a substantial check for one of her many charity organizations.

  After her short layover, the “Rainbow” went to join her pot of gold in Switzerland. When she arrived in Geneva on August 4, 1947, she was met by the chief of protocol of the Swiss Foreign Service. He was an old friend; Jacques-Albert Cuttat had worked at the Swiss Legation in Buenos Aires from 1938 to 1946. He was deeply involved in the transfer of Nazi assets to Argentina and had been one of the account holders of the many gold deposits in the city’s banks. After meeting Swiss president Philipp Etter and foreign minister Max Petitpierre, Evita dropped out of sight. She joined Dodero and other friends at the mountain resort of St. Moritz, but there was more business to take care of in Zurich, the banking capital of Switzerland’s German-speaking cantons. One meeting took place in a closed session at the Hotel Baur au Lac, where Evita was a guest of the Instituto Suizo-Argentino. The president of the institute, Professor William Dunkel, introduced her to an audience of more than two hundred Swiss bankers and businessmen, briefing them on the many opportunities in the “New Argentina.” Many of these opportunities would be under the control of familiar friends and clients.

  A MAY 15, 1948 memo to FBI director Hoover on a postwar Nazi radio network that had mentioned Bormann by name twice in 1947 before being broken up by the British.

  BORMANN RETURNED BRIEFLY TO HIS HIDEOUT in the Austrian mountains—by now a slimmer, fitter, and poorer man than he had been for years. Although believed by some to be dead, he had been tried in absentia by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in October 1946 and sentenced to death. In late 1947, the British Army had broken up a clandestine Nazi radio network that had mentioned Bormann twice by name in May 1947, information the FBI took seriously (see document on opposite page). On August 16, 1947, a guide led him and his bodyguards over a secret route through the Alps to a base just north of Udine in Italy. In December he was ready for the next leg of his journey, but it would not pass unnoticed. Capt. Ian Bell, a war crimes investigator based in Italy from the British Army’s Judge Advocate General’s office, had been tipped off about Bormann’s presence. Bell, who had captured a number of wanted Italian war criminals, ordered a spotter plane to fly over the area where he had been told that Bormann and his two-hundred-man bodyguard were gathered. Two days later Bell called in an air strike; an American aircraft flew over and dropped a bomb, a number of the SS men made a break for it and were arrested, and under interrogation they admitted that they were shielding Martin Bormann. The SS told the British that Bormann was planning to flee, and provided details of the route and timing.

  Bell and two of his sergeants lay in wait at a spot where they had been told Bormann would pass, reversing their jeep and trailer into a farm driveway. A short while later they saw a small convoy on the road below them—a large black car and two trucks with trailers. Capt. Bell estimated there were sixteen men in total, six in each truck and another three with Bormann in the staff car—too many for him and his two lightly armed NCOs to take on. They followed the convoy until Bell had the chance to use a telephone in a roadside inn to contact his headquarters. He was shocked by what his commanding officer told him: “Follow, but do not apprehend, now I repeat, do not apprehend.” Over the next two days the British officer followed his quarry for more than 670 miles.

  The German convoy passed through police and military roadblocks without any trouble, arriving at the docks in the Italian port of Bari in the early hours of a December morning in 1947. From cover, Bell and his men watched the vehicles being hoisted aboard a freighter by cranes and Martin Bormann walking up the gangway. The moment the last vehicle was put into the hold, the cranes swung away, the mooring cables were thrown off, and the ship moved away from the quayside. When Bell checked the ship’s destination with the port authorities later that morning, he was told it was Argentina.

  As Bell explained during an interview in a documentary aired on British television in 1999, he “very much” regretted not arresting Bormann:

  We were absolutely devastated and it took us a little while to get over the trauma of seeing him get away, one of the biggest; Hitler’s right-hand man to just be at liberty to board a ship and go to freedom. After all the trouble and the journey we had and the strain of having to restrain ourselves from doing something was very hard on us. And just to see that, just go away like that and not be able to do anything about it, yes, I was very upset about, I was very disheartened. But that was life, we had to get on with it, and go back to headquarters and take on another role, another brief.

  Bell was asked how Bormann could have been allowed to go free and who he thought was responsible.

  We were sure that the Vatican had a lot to do with Martin Bormann’s escape, because nowhere down the whole line was he ever stopped by the Carabinieri [the military force charged with police duties among civilian populations in Italy] or any army personnel; he was allowed through with complete liberty. It had been well organized. Who else could do that but the cooperation [sic] between the Vatican and the Italian government?

  Martin Borman arrived in Buenos Aires on May 17, 1948, on the ship Giovanna C from Genoa. (Although it is not evident when or where Bormann changed ship, the Giovanna C was almost definitely not the same vessel that Bormann and his vehicles had boarded in Bari.)

  He was dressed as a Jesuit priest, and he entered the country on a Vatican passport identifying him as the Reverend Juan Gómez. A few weeks later he registered at the Apostolic Nunciature in Buenos Aires as a stateless person and was given Identity Certificate No. 073, 909. On October 12, 1948, he was given the coveted “blue stamp” granting him permission to remain in Argentina permanently. With dreadful irony, Martin Bormann was now known, among other pseudonyms, by the Jewish name Eliezer Goldstein.

  Bormann and the Peróns met in Buenos Aires shortly after the Reichsleiter arrived. The final negotiations over the Nazi treasure would have been heated and protracted. Documents made public in 1955 after the fall of Perón, and later in 1970, showed that the Peróns handed Bormann his promised 25 percent. The physical aspect of the treasure—outside of investments carefully structured by Ludwig Freude on behalf of his Nazi paymaster, which the Peróns had left untouched—was impressive:

  187,692,400 gold marks

  17,576,386 U.S. dollars

  4,632,500 pounds sterling

  24,976,442 Swiss francs

  8,370,000 Dutch florins

/>   54,968,000 French francs

  192 pounds of platinum

  2.77 tons of gold

  4,638 carats of diamonds and other precious stones

  Bormann’s quarter of these physical assets was still a massive fortune. Coupled with investments in over three hundred companies across the whole economic spectrum of Latin America—banks, industry, and agriculture—with Lahusen alone getting 80 million pesos—this money became “a major factor in the economic life of South America.”

  The sailor Heinrich Bethe was present when Bormann once again met with his Führer at Inalco later the same year. Bormann, now disguised as “Father Augustin,” arrived wearing priest’s clothing. He was there for just over a week. On the final day of his stay, Hitler and Bormann had a private meeting that lasted almost three hours, after which he left the Center.

  By the time Bormann arrived in Argentina in 1948, the world was a very different place from the one in which Col. Perón had first got involved in Aktion Feuerland with the agents of the Third Reich. The time for swastikas and defiant rallies was long over; Bormann, ever the realist, recognized that, and he would be content (once he had settled certain scores) to oversee the substantial remaining part of the looted wealth. He would be a regular visitor to the Center, but, confident of the close protection he had bought from the Peróns, he spent most of his time in Buenos Aires, where he could oil the wheels of the Organization and plan for a secure financial future.

  TWO OF THE MOST IMPORTANT PLAYERS in the Nazis’ attempted seduction of Argentina were the millionaire La Falda hoteliers Walter and Ida Eichhorn. They had been supporters and friends of the Nazi Party and Hitler since at least 1925, and Hitler would visit them—without Eva—in 1949 at La Falda.

  The Eichhorns first came to the attention of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in a couriered document from the American embassy in London in September 1945. After reporting what was known of the Eichhorns’ relationship with Hitler, the document ends with a paraphrased quote from Ida Eichhorn: “if Hitler should at any time get into difficulty wherein it was necessary for him to find a safe retreat, he would find such safe retreat at her hotel (La Falda), where they had already made the necessary preparations.” Hoover wrote to the American Embassy in Buenos Aires several weeks later, apprising them of the situation (see reproduction of both documents).

  The relationship between Ida Eichhorn and her “cousin,” as she always called Hitler, went back much further than 1944, though there is some dispute over the date the Eichhorns actually joined the Nazi Party. On May 11, 1935, Walter and Ida were awarded the “honor version” of the Gold Party Badge; fewer than half a dozen of the 905 such badges awarded were given to non-Reich citizens. The Führer sent the Eichhorns a personal congratulatory letter dated May 15, an unusual extra compliment accompanying the award. In the letter, which thanked Walter Eichhorn for his services, the Führer used the words “since joining in 1924 with your wife,” which seems to indicate that the Eichhorns were among the earliest members of the party. They were also personally given No. 110 of the limited edition of 500 copies of Mein Kampf when they first met Hitler at his apartment in 1925—the year the book was published.

  The Eichhorns saw him again in 1927 and 1929, and thereafter they began to travel more regularly to Germany. At least one letter of Hitler’s from 1935–36 directly thanks them for a generous personal money donation. The couple were described by their grandniece Verena Ceschi as “big idealists who were really enthused by the ideas of the Führer, like all Germany at that time, [and] they became great friends.” At their luxurious Hotel Eden at La Falda, when Ida Eichhorn was asked if something could be accomplished, she would say anything was possible, “Adolf willing.” On her office wall there was a large photo of Hitler personally dedicated to her. There was also a room in the hotel set up as a shrine to the Führer and always decorated with freshly cut flowers. The Eden’s crockery, cutlery, and linen were stamped with the swastika, and there were many other pictures of Hitler throughout the hotel. Hitler’s speeches were captured by a shortwave antenna on the roof of the Eden and broadcast on speakers both inside and outside the hotel. The hotel had more than one hundred rooms with thirty-eight bathrooms, central heating, a huge dining and ballroom, an eighteen-hole golf course, tennis courts, a swimming pool, and many other amenities. Even today, the now semi-derelict Eden shows signs of its former magnificence, which attracted many international celebrities in the 1930s, including celebrated Jewish physicist Albert Einstein and the Prince of Wales. (The prince was crowned Edward VIII in January 1936, but abdicated eleven months later to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson; as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, both suspected Nazi sympathizers, the couple visited Hitler in 1937). It appears that Einstein may have stayed at the hotel when the anti-Semitic Eichhorns were not present.

  The Eden was the meeting place for many of the Nazi organizations of Córdoba province, and military training was carried out in a camp called “Kit-Ut” on land owned by the Eichhorns. Ida also founded the German School in La Falda in 1940. Its primary teachers had to swear an oath of allegiance to Hitler at the German Embassy in Buenos Aires, secondary teachers had to join the National Socialist League of Teachers, and the school provided a complete program of Nazi indoctrination. This devotion to Nazism, which by 1940 applied in almost two hundred German schools in Argentina, persisted—especially in the countryside—despite a 1938 decree by President Roberto Ortiz prohibiting the exhibition of foreign flags or symbols in schools.

  The schoolchildren were present at a commemorative ceremony held at the Eden on December 17, 1940, the first anniversary of the scuttling of the Admiral Graf Spee. Most of the supposedly “interned” crew marched in full uniform and paraded the Nazi flag under the eyes of dozens of Argentine dignitaries and senior members of the military. The parade ended on the hotel’s esplanade, where the Nazi Party marching song, the “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” was sung, and there were impassioned pro-German speeches. However, despite the protection of the Argentine police and armed German sailors who were billeted nearby, the Nazi presence in La Falda did not go completely unchallenged. When the Eichhorns decided to raise money by showing Nazi propaganda films to a large audience, members of an anti-Nazi, pro-Allies group called Acción Argentina punctured the tires of the parked cars of the film attendees. Among the attackers was Ernesto Guevara Lynch, father of Ernesto “Che” Guevara—the Argentine Marxist leader and Fidel Castro’s chief lieutenant of the Cuban Revolution.

  AN FBI MEMO dated September 17, 1945, from the American embassy in London, outlining details of Hitler’s relationship with the Eichhorns—filed four months after the “suicide.”

  A NOVEMBER 13, 1945 FBI report sent to the American embassy in Buenos Aires, recapping the September FBI report detailing the Eichhorns’ relationship with Hitler.

  THE EICHORNS CONTINUED TO ORGANIZE COLLECTIONS for the Nazi cause, and as late as 1944 they were still transferring tens of thousands of Swiss francs to the Buenos Aires account of Joseph Goebbels. However, in March 1945, under intense pressure from the United States, Argentina finally declared war on the Axis powers—the last of the Latin American nations to do so. After this declaration, the Hotel Eden was seized as “property of the enemy” and—now surrounded by barbed wire and guards to keep people in rather than out—used for eleven months to intern the Japanese embassy staff and their families. Shortly after the Japanese were repatriated, anti-Nazis in La Falda broke in, pulled down the eagle from the facade of the hotel, and destroyed anything with the swastika on it.

  In May 1945, Ida Eichorn told her closest circle that her “cousin” Adolf Hitler was “traveling.” The Eichhorns, shutting themselves away in their chalet a short distance from the hotel, created a network of distribution centers that sent thousands of clothing and food parcels to a devastated Germany. They also helped the network for Nazis who fled to Argentina, and Adolf Eichmann would often visit La Falda with his family. One of his sons, Horst Eichmann—who led Argentina�
��s Frente Nacional Socialista Argentino (FNSA) Nazi party in the 1960s—married Elvira Pummer, the daughter of one of the Hotel Eden’s gardeners.

  The Eichhorns maintained close contact with the Gran Hotel Viena on the shores of Mar Chiquita; they owned a property just 150 yards from the hotel. They would have met Hitler and Eva there while he was convalescing in 1946. (Whatever the Nazis’ long-term plans were for the Gran Hotel Viena, they never came to much. After the Hitlers’ second visit in early 1948, the property was virtually abandoned. In March of that year the head of security, Col. Krueger, was found “poisoned” in a room off the hotel garage—the same fate that befell Ludwig Freude four years later.)

  CATALINA GOMERO WAS FIFTEEN YEARS OLD when she went to live with the Eichhorns in 1945. She suffered from asthma and came from a poor family who believed she would have a better life at the Hotel Eden than they could offer her. Although a servant, Catalina was treated by the Eichhorns almost as a daughter. She said that Hitler arrived at their house in La Falda one night in 1949 and stayed for three days; she recognized him right away. “The driver must have brought him. He was put up on the third floor. We were told to take his breakfast upstairs and … knock at the door and leave the tray on the floor. He ate very well, the trays were always empty. Most of the meals were German.” He had shaved his moustache off. There were usually people in the house all day, but for those three days, the third floor was private. “Mrs. Ida told me, ‘Whatever you saw, pretend you didn’t.’ One of the drivers and I used to joke, ‘I saw nothing and you saw nothing.’ It was as if it had never happened. It was kept very, very secret.” Hitler left his clothes, including green canvas trousers and a black collared shirt, outside the room, and Catalina would clean and iron them. She took him three breakfasts, three lunches, and three complete teas. On the fourth day she was told he had left.