Why neo-Nazis are still fired up by the myth of Hitler’s great escape
Ever since his April 1945 suicide, there have been those who believe that the Führer didn’t really die in his bunker, says Roger Boyes. And now, in the post-truth world of the internet, there is a renewed interest in conspiracy theories about his survival
A colleague from Washington rang me at an unearthly hour and told me a strange story. An American collector claimed to have stumbled across the gun, a Walther PPK, that Hitler allegedly used to kill himself. Could I, asked my colleague, look into it? It was the 1990s, I was based in Germany [as a correspondent for The Times], and everything relating to Hitler had a habit of landing on my desk.
The call took me down into the rabbit warren of Nazi militaria crackpots with basements full of Third Reich junk, yellowing magazines parading stories of German derring-do, blackened ashtrays with welded-on swastikas. They concealed only lightly their devotion to the memory of the Führer, but they were no stormtroopers. There was nothing remotely dangerous about these dried-up middle-aged men in carpet slippers, and they did at least concede that Hitler “almost certainly” died in his bunker in 1945. But when I asked what they knew of Hitler’s gun, their eyes lit up: it was, for them, the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. I left them, as always, feeling queasy.
The gun turned out to be a dud.
The collector was trying to drum up auction interest in the weapon, rather than offering up an authentic slice of history. In his telling, a Red Army soldier who had been among the first to enter the bunker found the weapon in Hitler’s study and pocketed it. Now that communism had collapsed, the gun had found its way to the West. After a bit of digging, my colleague and I concluded it was an opportunistic fantasy. But how did those final hours in Berlin, blazing with artillery fire and rumbling with tanks, manage to generate so much conspiratorial legend? How did they unleash years of uncertainty about the true fate of Hitler?
For a decade or more, supposed sightings of the Nazi leader were reported from Latin America and Asia. In 1944, an American wartime intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services, had mocked up the ways that Hitler could have changed his appearance while on the run: grey beard, black beard, pebble glasses, shaved head. It served as an for reporters determined to hunt down the fugitive Führer.
aide-mémoire
Some days before killing himself, Hitler told his staff of his intention. When he became aware of how Benito Mussolini had ended up, shot by Italian partisans and strung from a lamp post, together with his mistress Claretta Petacci, the Nazi leader made clear that, when the time came, he wanted to be cremated. There was no question, it seemed, of escaping the city. But the exact unfolding of the suicide had enough uncertainties to feed decades of speculation. Hitler and Eva Braun, wed for only 40 hours before killing themselves, had been given cyanide pills, like many in the core leadership. These had, however, come from security chief Heinrich Himmler, who had betrayed Hitler by trying to negotiate directly with the British and the Americans. Hitler pondered if Himmler had given the couple strong sleeping pills, not cyanide, to ensure they would be alive when the Russians moved in, resulting in a trial, public humiliation and execution.
Hitler wanted to die on his own terms. He tried out some of the cyanide on his dog, Blondi, and watched it writhe in agony. By his side, he had the Walther. When his valet, Heinz Linge, and Martin Bormann, a key figure in the inner circle, entered the room, they saw (according to Linge) Hitler on an armchair, slumped to one side, and Braun on the sofa, legs pulled up under her. They didn’t call Hitler’s doctor to confirm the cause of death. Together with the leader’s adjutant, Otto Günsche, Linge carried the two bodies into the garden, dumped them in a shell crater, poured petrol on them and cremated them. Because of the wind, they took two hours to burn.
“It suited Stalin to tell the world that Hitler could still be on the run. As long as he
was at large, he could stage a comeback”
Both Linge and Günsche were captured by the Red Army, interrogated, and told to write a full account of what had happened. Both assumed that Hitler had shot himself. The British, without access to these two witnesses – Bormann had disappeared – used Hitler’s driver as their chief source. The driver had asked Günsche how Hitler had died. Günsche had made a gesture indicating that he had shot himself in the mouth.
This became the accepted Western version. Hitler’s lower jaw and teeth were put into a cigar box and taken to Moscow. His dental technician, also in Russian captivity, confirmed that the teeth matched the work that had been completed on Hitler’s rotting mouth. Stalin wasn’t satisfied, however. It suited him to tell the world that Hitler was not officially dead, that he could still be on the run. That reflected his paranoia but also his tactical sense. As long as Hitler was at large, there was the possibility he could, like Napoleon on Elba, raise a new army and stage a comeback.
The ruins of the bunker were in the Soviet sector of Berlin and Moscow held the chief witnesses. That gave Stalin leverage and ensured that the Russians could not be written out of the history
of the final years of the Reich; the struggle would continue. In a private meeting with the US envoy Harry Hopkins, Stalin said: “Hitler is not dead, but is hiding somewhere.” An FBI report, mopping up the rumours, said that he had been “spotted” entering a German submarine, that he was holed up in a Spanish monastery, that he was in the foothills of Albania, or on a ranch in Argentina. Tass, the Soviet news agency, reported that he had been seen dressed as a woman in Dublin. The world had to wait until after Stalin’s death before an official German court investigation was launched, and only in 1956 was Hitler formally declared dead.
That 11-year interval gave intrepid reporters (the Daily Express was particularly enthusiastic) a chance to flex their expense accounts in pursuit of the phantom. It was known that Hitler had used doubles – so did a double die in the bunker?
The answer to that was only nailed down many years later when the Russians opened up about Hitler’s dental records. Yet there were enough anomalies in the various investigations to keep alive journalistic curiosity in the fate not only of Hitler, but also of Bormann, who had fled the bunker through underground passages. He, too, was supposedly seen multiple times in the shelter of South American dictators, until a DNA test in 1998 on a body found in a Berlin building site clearly identified him. He had managed to get about 400 metres away from the bunker before he was either caught in the crossfire or took a cyanide pill to evade capture.
“An FBI report, mopping up the rumours, said he was holed up in a Spanish monastery, that he was in Albania, or on a ranch in Argentina”
Stalin’s reluctance to say what he knew about Hitler’s death was partly because of his reluctance to concede a “hero’s death” to his arch enemy. Shooting yourself in the head was a soldier’s death, and Stalin preferred to keep current the idea that Hitler had either run for his life or taken the supposedly less valiant course of cyanide poisoning.
An investigation by a French journalist, Jean-Christophe Brisard, raised questions about the Western version of the death. From tartar scraped from the jaw taken from the bunker, it was clear Hitler couldn’t have shot himself in the mouth. He could, however, have shot himself in the temple – but there is no skull to confirm that. Some blue staining could indicate that he poisoned himself with cyanide. But did he really both poison and shoot himself, a belt-and-braces suicide? There are differences, too, in the testimonies of Linge and Günsche.
As the historian Richard J. Evans says in an intriguing new book, The Hitler Conspiracies (Allen Lane £20), it is a mark of the conspiracy theorist to seize on small, often technical, inconsistencies. “Conspiracy theories exhibit a strong obsession with detail, often taking the form of highlighting a tiny piece of evidence and blowing it up out of all proportion, buttressing their claims with a display of pseudo-scholarship,” he writes. “When they examine the real evidence, conspiracy theorists do not accept that minor inconsistencies come from mistakes in reporting.”
Evans deals with the paranoid fables that played a role in supporting the Nazi regime. The manifest forgery that was The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an early 20th century tract that argued the Jews were plotting to undermine civilisation. The idea that the German army could have won the First World War, if it hadn’t been stabbed in the back by Jews and socialists. That Winston Churchill crushed a supposedly Hitler-sponsored flight to Britain of his deputy, Rudolf Hess, that was intended to make peace between the two countries.
These may not seem overwhelming conspiracies to the modern reader brought up with an internet that regurgitates alternative and increasingly threadbare secret narratives about the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Centre, or the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Believers in the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon say the American government is controlled by a sinister elite of child abusers and only Donald Trump can beat them. In this crowded, paranoid world, what price some ancient fake history about the Nazis?
Yet the details of Third Reich history are profoundly important. “If serious historians are wrong about Hitler’s death,” writes the journalist Roger Clark, “and he really did survive for years after 1945, then perhaps they’re wrong about everything else too, including the Holocaust. It’s disturbing to see just how many Hitler survivalists are also anti-Semitic and Holocaust deniers. Bogus history does harm.” If you don’t get Hitler history right, which is the reference point for political evil, then you are in danger of going astray. Godwin’s Law states that the longer an internet discussion continues, the more likely it is to mention Hitler.
As the far-right seeks to be an open player in establishment politics, so the gap narrows between taboo-breaking extremists and the scrubbed-up mainstreamers. Some years ago at a demonstration in Dresden, I had a front tooth knocked out by a supporter of the anti-Islam movement Pegida. My crime, I think, was to carry a British newspaper. When I complained to the Pegida wardens, they told me to shut up and leave Germany. One of the movement’s leaders, Lutz Bachmann, saw nothing wrong with having himself photographed as Hitler.
Today, Pegida alumni find a political home in Germany’s right-wing Alternative for Germany party, which polls just below 10% nationwide. The Greek Golden Dawn party, which had more than 20 members of parliament after the euro crisis, had plenty of Hitler enthusiasts. In October, the appeals court in Athens found its party leader and six other former MPs guilty of running a ten-year campaign of terror against immigrants.
Signing up for bogus history places you on a dangerous spectrum. The post-truth era allows the British secret service, for example, to be presented as murderers – of Rudolf Hess, lest he declare publicly how his peace mission was sabotaged – and gives Hitler a free pass. The internet, once a reliable and handy historical prop for young inquiring minds, has become increasingly toxic.
The far-right conspiracy theorist starts off from the premise of
cui bono – who benefits from the keeping of secrets? To them, the due diligence of professional historians is just a way of muzzling free speech and keeping the establishment safe. That’s why real historians do have to stand up and present solid evidence, be honest when history is incomplete, and face down those who are trying to insert palpable nonsense into the public domain.
Richard Evans’s book, informed by the work of a multidisciplinary team on conspiracy and democracy at Cambridge University, shows how it can be done. And he was surely right to take on the myths engulfing Adolf Hitler and the manipulative techniques of his followers.
A longer version of this article appeared in The Times.