Forbidden History - Hitler: Suicide or Survivor?

Episode Date: October 1, 2024

The history books tell us that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker in Berlin towards the end of WWII. In this episode of the Forbidden History podcast, we investigate theories that the man shot in the head was a double and that the real Hitler escaped from Germany…  Cast List: Richard Felix: A historian and lecturer specialising in local and paranormal history  Guy Walters: A British author, historian, and journalist who has written several books on WWII. As a journalist for The Times, he writes on historical topics for the national press.  Andrew Gough: Writer, presenter and editor of The Heretic Magazine Gerrard Williams: Author, Grey Wolf - The Escape of Adolf Hitler Jamie Theakston: Investigative Journalist  Ross Andrews: Author & Historian  Heather Osborn: Author & Historian  Eric Meyers: Narrator  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Was Adolf Hitler killed in his bunker under Berlin, as we've been told? Or did he secretly escape to Argentina with his wife, Eva Braun, and live out his last years in the hills of Patagonia? Eyewitness reports, FBI documents, and new evidence. seemed to contradict the official account of his death

and keep the debate of what happened to the most infamous dictator of modern history alive. There is probably more evidence to say that Hitler survived and escaped and ended up in the South America than there is to say he actually died in the bunker. The silver bullet that leaves this debate wide open is the fact that nobody has ever been discovered. The testimony and the evidence for Hitler's death is absolutely. It was never on the cards that he wanted to survive and he wanted to live. There are definitely questions as to whether Hitler died in the bunker. All that was really found was part of a job.

So the question remains, did Hitler really commit suicide or did he escape? I think it's very plausible that Hitler survived. He did not commit suicide. I believe he escaped. Hitler did not die in the bunker in 1945. We've been lied to. And for whatever reasons we're continuing to this day, 70 years on, we're still being lied to about this.

On the night of April 27, 1945 in Berlin, fires raged out of control as the intense and savage Russian artillery bombardment crept closer to the center of the Third Reich. Deep in his bunker, the man who had brought such destruction to his country and indeed the world, knew that the war was over. The Fuhr's options were limited. He could allow himself to be captured by the advancing Russians, but the humiliation was unthinkable. He could kill himself, but who could possibly replace him? Or he could try and escape and live to fight another day. Journalist Jamie Thexton is on the hunt for some answers to what could be the greatest cover-up of modern history. Many people believe that he survived.

The reason being that nobody was ever found. And so basically that left the door wide open for all of the conspiracy theories. If Hitler survived, yes, it's perfectly possible he may have fled to Argentina, but he would have had to have stayed hidden for a number of years in order to achieve that. I think that therefore in the immediate aftermath of the war, I think he probably would have tried to escape either to the outs, and in which case he may have had a good chance of getting down perhaps to the Middle East.

I think this is a man who is extremely determined, and he would have had an exit strategy before he even began. He wouldn't have been in Berlin if he didn't know how he could get out. The Russians themselves thought he escaped, and they're the ones who ended up trying to identify the bodies. There's witnesses that said we helped him escape. There's pilots that went, well, I flew him out of there. And he's all been ignored because the agreed story is the story that everyone wants to believe. We want to know the war stopped. He died. That was it.

According to a book, Grey Wolf, the Escape of Adolf Hitler, Hitler, his wife, Eva Braun, and a handful of close aides and top-ranking Nazis, did escape, using a network of secret tunnels from the Fuhrer bunker in Berlin. Its author is Gerard Williams, a former reporter for the Reuters News Agency, and he agreed to meet journalist Jamie Fexton in Paris. There's no forensic evidence whatsoever to suggest that Adolf Hitler or Ava Brown died in the bunker in Berlin in 1945. There is a huge amount of contemporaneous reporting to say that Adolf Hitler escaped

and made it eventually to Argentina where he lived, according to our research, until 1962. People often think that that's complete idiocy, conspiracy theory, whatever. I've been a journalist of a very long time, Jamie, and I went back to look at the contemporaneous reporting from organizations like the BBC, the Associated Press, Reuters,

all of whom at the time, quote Stalin is saying that Hitler has escaped to Spain or Argentina, Time magazine has detailed accounts of the bunker, the escape route from the Reich Chancery, from Hitler's private quarters in the Reich Chancery. This is published in Time. Newsweek carried details of how it could have happened. And then in 1947, in a Polish court, Captain Peter Baumgart of the secretive KG-200 Luftwaffe group described how he flew him out from a temporary airfield on the Hockens Olendandandand,

which is a huge boulevard in Berlin. According to Williams, everything had been prepared down to the last detail for Hitler's escape, including the clothes worn by the body doubles that would pass for the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun. He claims that as his office clock struck midnight, Hitler turned to his orderly and nodded. Twenty minutes later, a small group emerged from a secret tunnel connecting the bunker to the streets of Berlin above. So if they didn't die in the bunker, what happened to the bunker? I don't make things up, so I'll tell you where the information comes from. Major nicotine of the NKVD, which is the Soviet secret police at the time,

who's tasked with finding out what's happened to Adolf Hitler, is quoted extensively in Time magazine at the time, saying that there was an escape tunnel from the Reich Chancellery from Hitler's private quarters. It was hidden behind a concrete panel, which slid back to expose a series of steps down to another bunker. And from that bunker, there were another series of steps, steps down to the underground and train network in Berlin.

U-Bahn. So they escape to another bunker, they then, from that bunker, find their way into the underground network. And how far would they then have to have traveled to them? It's not terribly far. 10, 15 kilometers, depending on which way they go, when they can then come up out of the underground, via an underground station, onto what is the temporary runway,

of which we have seen REF aerial pictures of time. This piece of the road has been cleared. and a JU 52 is a short takeoff and landing plane, so it's able to get off pretty quickly from the ground. The Third Reich was really quite switched on to the reality of the situation, and they saw that Russia encroaching on Berlin did not bode well for them.

So again, preservation is their motivation, and so is a Fourth Reich, and that's what they would have planned. And it wasn't just Hitler who disappeared unaccounted for. Other senior officials do as well. which tells you that they're planning a return. They're not done just yet. According to Williams, dodging fires and explosions, the small party made its way to the vast Hoenzalendam

that ran through the center of Berlin. Once a fashionable boulevard, it was now a makeshift runway, and on it sat a Juncker's 52 transport aircraft, its engines being gunned by Captain Peter Baumgart, an experienced Luftwaffe pilot. Hitler and his companions had almost escaped the iron grip of Russia's military assault. But aren't the Russians bombarding the city?

The Russians bombarding part of the city. You have to remember this is a ground offensive. They're taking houses building by building. Berlin is not a small city, and it's also, you know, there are various rivers running through it and all the rest of it. Large areas of concrete that have to be cleared, hand to hand. And it's also being held by some of the most fanatical SS troops in the whole war.

Perhaps the weak link here is that there was a plane waiting form in Berlin that took him to the airport that allowed him to leave Germany. And I say that because there's hundreds of thousands of Russians descending on the city. Would you risk being shot down and not even being able to lift off in the first place, wouldn't you have a slightly different exit strategy for the first mile? Presumably the whole of Berlin is a no-fly zone. The Russians wouldn't allow planes to fly. It's pretty much a no-fly zone, except there isn't that much air cover. You know, what air cover there is, the Stornovics, which is a Russian ground attack aircraft,

coming in trying to take out strong points. There's no sort of, there's no radar for a start, so you know you don't know where anything is. The whole of German airspace leaks like a sieve. We're not running combat patrols over air. every single level of German airspace at that time. Our pilots are shattered. So are the Americans. We're all shattered by this state.

It's very easy to fly an aircraft out of Germany at the end of 1945. There were several plans of escape. One of the most famous ones is that the Nazis would come down through Italy, escape from Italy, head across sometimes through Spain or the Canary Islands and onto South America. Another plan was, and you saw a lot of action

going on with airplanes landing, near the building and the bunker and taking people out. One pilot even testified saying he flew Hitler and Eva Braun in a very small airplane to Denmark, onto a submarine and down to South America. There actually was a pilot who admitted to flying out Hitler and Eva Braun as well as some other top generals. And this was publicized in the press,

but yet it didn't stick. No one paid attention to it. There must have been plans in place. to remove the Fuhrer from the bunker. And Martin Borman, legend has it, took them out, flew them somewhere, put them in a submarine, sent them to Argentina, to the South Pole, somewhere.

So the plane's taken off, it's left Berlin. Where's it headed? It heads first to the Luftwaffe base at Magdeburg. It stops there. I'm not sure why, maybe to refuel. That doesn't go into details. and from there it flies to Tonda in Denmark, where Hitler is seen to leave the plane by an SS officer on the ground,

as well as Captain Baumgart's personal testimony. He hands Baumgart a check, I think, for 20,000 Reichmarks, which isn't worth the paper it's written on, but it's a nice thank you, I suppose. And then they are flown in another JU 52, we believe, onto Travamunder. It's quite detailed, this flight plan. What evidence, though, is there that they were flown from Berlin to Denmark? The evidence is the evidence given by Captain Peter Garmgarde at his trial in Warsaw in 1947.

He said that he'd flown Hitler and this party out. He explained the route that he had taken. And we also have another SS officer on the ground at Tondo, wounded, who describes the party arriving and Hitler addressing the wounded soldiers on the ground at the time. We also have Hans Bauer, Hitler's personal pilot, talking about being at Travimundo, and making ready things for the final escape. Bauer doesn't go into details in his autobiography, but he does say he was asked to go with them,

and he refused because he wanted to stay with his men. But there's obviously a group of senior Nazis leaving from Travamunder. If Williams is correct, and Baumgart did fly Hitler out of Berlin, then their route to Argentina was by no means direct. According to Williams, after landing in Denmark, Hitler flew to Spain, where General Franco supplied.

him with an aircraft to take him to the Canary Islands. From there, the Fuhrer is said to have taken a submarine to the Argentine coast, where he disembarked some 300 miles south of Buenos Aires. Stalin had said that Hitler had escaped to Spain or Argentina. We know that on Fuetta Ventura in the Canary Islands, there was a major Nazi intelligence base run by Gustav Winter. It's called Villa Winter. We believe that three submarines are then tasked from the last submarine

operation of World War II, which is known as Sea Wolf, which Speyer and a number of other people have said are heading to the Atlantic coast of America carrying V-1 weapons filled with chemicals and gas. They're going to take out New York. So the Americans take this seriously and they move their whole naval blockade up to the North Atlantic to get in the way of Sea Wolf. And most of the boats in Sea Wolf are destroyed. We believe that Hitler and Ava boarded one submarine. General Faglain is on another submarine, which leaves before. and gets to Argentina before them. And after 53 days,

so pretty much hell, they arrive off the coast of Argentina. The Americans and the Russians both thought that Hitler could well have survived. And there are FBI documents that have been leaked out or declassified now that state they were investigating that fact. They thought he arrived in one of two or three submarines on the coast of Argentina and they think in the second submarine, Hitler and Eva Braun got out, Braun got out and then were ferried away inland. Researchers have found correspondence to J. Edgar Hoover and from J. Edgar Hoover talking

about the fact that Hitler may have gone to Argentina. It appeared that Zohi did in a U-boat and is living there in sort of a Nazi community of the fourth right. What's interesting is that there's no apparent action. It's almost as though they don't care or perhaps they already knew because they had struck a deal and that is the most intriguing part of it all. There is a possibility that a deal could have been engineered certainly between Martin Borman and the Americans where they actually said, let us go.

We'll not bother you anymore. We'll give you Nazi scientists the atomic bomb. Landing on the moon, just let us go. Let us take some money with us and we'll be out of you. It is a possibility. There are many FBI documents now being circulated that actually do state that there is a possibility that Hitler survived. If Hitler did survive and was allowed to escape by the U.S. government, then the Nazis would have been planning this for months, moving funds and building communities in Argentina.

It seems like a very logical assumption that Hitler would want to plan a fourth right. that he wouldn't give up so easily, that he would formulate an escape land and put the necessary procedures into action to create a Fourth Reich. And we actually have some recent documentation that's come to light that shows that there were meetings, there was an agenda, to create financial backing, to actually monetize this forthright. There are areas of Argentina that, to be honest with you, you could refer to as Little Germany,

with churches and chalets and built in the same style. as they were in Bavaria. A lot of Germans, Nazis emigrated to Argentina even before the war and in the early stages of the war. And I'm also sure that quite a few of them, like rats from a sinking ship, left Germany when they realized that things were going wrong, over to Argentina, with a view to starting the Fourth Reich. What they were doing was channeling money out of the country and building places in South America, in Argentina, especially, as basis to start again. And they'd had meetings with German businessmen

and American businessmen and businessmen from all over the world to take over the world, but instead of militarily, they were going to do it through finance. And it was going to build this new Fourth Reich from Argentina. This was Martin Borman's dream, and he had removed trillions of Reichmarks all over the place, and especially into Argentina. And I mean, Argentina was was, was, was, was,

pro-German, or anti-British, I should say. And what better place for everyone to go to, including the viewer. William says that according to his research, Hitler was essentially duped by Martin Borman and was left out of important meetings and discussions about the Fourth Reich. There's peace after piece after piece, which says that he lived in Argentina post-war. What it seems happens is as soon as Martin Borman arrives in 47, Bourbon realizes that Hitler is no longer of any use to the new Germany. And he is left with his private doctor, who stays with all the time,

and his butler come Batman, come Factotum, Pablo Glocknik, who looks like he's a Grafschbeckerman. And the meetings don't happen. If Hitler did in fact escape in the closing days of the war, what was the scene like once the scene like, once the war? allies closed in on the bunker back in Berlin. A BBC reporter who is led into the bunker after the war claims that it wasn't Hitler who was burned in the trench outside.

Skull fragments supposedly belonging to the Fuhrer are proved to be that of an elderly woman, and sightings of Hitler start to pour into Allied command and the CIA from locations around the world, including Argentina. in his bunker at the end of April 1945, the Fuhrer's options were limited. He could allow himself to be captured by the advancing Russians. He could kill himself, or he could try and escape and live to fight another day. Shortly after the war ended, a BBC journalist Thomas Cadet was allowed into Hitler's ruined bunker by Russian forces. Interestingly, this is what he said. Outside the front door of the shelter, are

the five perforated petrol tins that were believed to have been used for scattering petrol on the body of Hitler and of burning it. But there at any rate, my Soviet friends found no trace of Hitler himself. But there was the half-burned body of a man with a lock of black hair on the right-hand side of his face and a little black mustache. And they looked at him more closely, and their doctors came to the conclusion that it was

what they call a bad double of Hitler and not Hitler himself. and not Hitler himself. If that is so, then all trace of him has disappeared. In the years immediately after the war, there was no hard proof that Hitler had in fact died. One of the problems that investigators encountered was the lack of any physical evidence for his death. The skull fragments, bound by the Russians near the Fuhrer's bunker and believed to be his, were not known to the West until 1968. Then in 2009, DNA testing of the bones revealed that in fact they belonged to a woman.

The most important thing in an investigation is the body, to some extent. Now, the BBC get invited into a bunker by the Russians and say, come and have a look, we've blown it up, there's nobody here now, and they go in, and there was literally nobody there. So when the Russians are asked to produce a body, they go, well, we haven't got one. We took it away, we've buried it somewhere else. Now in the 70s they claimed they dug it up and destroyed it and cremated it, but they kept some skull fragments, which were then later tested

and proved to be from a woman who was under 40 years old. So there's still no evidence of a dead body anywhere. There's no witnesses to that dead body. Hitler and Eva Braun's body were never found, and the fact that only a fragment of a job bone was found leaves the door open that perhaps they would have formulated an escape plan. And wouldn't it be a smart thing to do rather than suicide? If you could get away, wouldn't you go ahead and try to do that?

If Hitler did escape, then he escaped without his jaw and his teeth. Because these were found, and they were found to match Hitler's dental records. And as a result, to me, utterly compelling. So this idea that there's no physical evidence for Hitler's body is pure junk. And of course, naturally a conspiratorist will say, well, they're not really Hitler's teeth, there's somebody else. This is all confused, of course, with bits of skull fragment that were found near the body that have proven to be that of a woman and not Hitler. But the teeth, for me, it's utterly compelling and, you know, having spoken to fellow historians about this,

the world's at one about this, but there are these sort of outliers who think that somehow they're not his. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of the war, British and US intelligence services received countless reports suggesting the former Nazi leader had been spotted alive and at large, giving people added to the added. ammunition to claim that Hitler didn't die in the bunker. In September 1945, it was claimed that Hitler and his closest advisor and confidant, Martin Borman, had boarded a luxury yacht in Hamburg and had sailed to a secret island off the coast of Schleswig Holstein. And in December, the Americans were reliably informed that Hitler had boarded a submarine

off the island of Majorca, where he had been living in a host of a holstead. hotel with a group of nuclear scientists. There are numerous eyewitnesses accounts of people, waiters, porters, all sorts of people that say they have seen Hitler. Also, Eva Braun, his children, and even blondie, his Alsatian dog. One of the Argentine generals who's very grateful for the Nazis help says in the national newspaper, our friends from Germany is safe. Doesn't mention their names, we says our friends from Germany are safe. There are reports back to the FBI that Hitler has been seen, Poover believes them, and Farsen.

There's a report which I've recently been given to the head of naval intelligence in the US, that the Vatican legate in Argentina has been told by a very believable source that Hitler is there and that the White House know. One guy who contacted me, Roberto Brun, was a waiter in a sort of private naval military dining room in Buenos Aires in the 50s. And Robesso describes in some detail how Hitler and Eva Brown on two occasions he saw them there. What's really intriguing is the eyewitnesses who say they saw Hitler, his wife, Eva Braun,

and other German officers and Hitler and Eva Braun's children in Argentina, going out for dinner, going for a boat ride, just going about their normal life. And the accounts are really rather credible. There is so much nonsense. about this story and there are people in these countries who are happy to peddle that nonsense to credulous researchers. I wrote a book about how the Nazis escaped. I went to Paraguay to look at the theories behind Martin Borman and you know you turn up to a cemetery in ITER

and Paraguay. There's an old lady out the gate you'll say Martin's tomb is that way or she'll go Martin's tomb is that way the next day. It's just a massive disinformation and fraudsters essentially. As you would expect these eyewitness accounts have been absolutely met with the Spanish Inquisition, if you will. People of researchers have asked them, no, come on, are you sure that was Hitler? And they're like, no, no, absolutely positively recognized it as him. And in one account, a woman from Germany who knew him before recognized him when he came into a hospital. And she said she just got the chills because there was no doubt in her mind.

That was Hitler. Journalist Jamie Thigston is on the trail of evidence, trying to extract the truth from the fiction. It would seem acceptable that you and I could leave Europe and start a new life in South America. It's not inconceivable that the most familiar face on the planet could live out the rest of his life without being noticed or photographed or recorded in some way? Jamie, I quite agree with you. There are photographs allegedly of Adolf Hitler in Argentina and in Colombia. The CIA have one of him in Colombia. I have one of him allegedly in Missione's province in Obera.

There are FBI reports from what seems to be people that Hoover actually believes are telling the truth. Lots of FBI reports of Hitler's presence in Argentina post-war. You will see as you go through the newspapers and magazines of the day, there are constantly reports of Hitler being in Argentina and people saying, we have seen Hitler here, we have seen him there. Now, it's a bit like hiding in plain sight, because the people they're hiding amongst, or the people who they visit and go and see,

are oath-bound members of the Nazi Party. Most of the eyewitnesses who say they saw Hitler were working for or working in places that were very Nazi-friendly. You've got hotels run by people who funded the Nazi party, who were personal friends of Hitler and high-up Nazis. You've got farmland that was owned by people who were Nazi sympathizers.

So the witnesses are in the right place, if that makes sense. You know, if they're going to see him, that's where they're going to see him. And a lot of them didn't come forward to years later. They've got no financial gain by saying it. They're not trying to sell a book or a film or anything like that. There's no reason for them to say it. But there are so many witnesses in certain areas that say they saw it.

So it's not implausible that even in the latter days of the war, he would have had still multiple escape plans to get out, to find another way to create the Fourth Reich. Why would that be part of his actual planning, why would he commit suicide and just, you know, give up on everything that he had created? For a long time, the Russians believed that the Allies were sheltering Hitler. And it's possible they created these fake stories as part of a disinformation campaign in an attempt to flush out what they thought to be the truth.

In July 1945, the Russian commander Marshal Yorgi Zukhov claimed that since Hitler's body had still not been found, he could have flown away at the very last moment. Even General Eisenhower, the former Allied Supreme Commander, appeared to be taken in. In 1952, he said, we have been unable to unearth one bit of tangible evidence of Hitler's death. Many people believe that he escaped from Berlin. The Russians were at first quite happy to accept that Hitler had died, but then there became very quickly emerging a narrative that the Soviets were thinking, hang a minute, do we really want to go around saying that Hitler's dead? Does it not suit our propaganda purposes to make it look as though Hitler's escaped and in some way

may have fallen into the arms of the Allies who are now sheltering him? Of course, there was massive distrust against the Soviets and the Western Allies. And so as a result, there was a huge disinformation battle being played on both sides, largely and successfully by the Soviets to spread uncertainty about whether he was. Hitler had died or not. There's lots of discussion amongst world leaders at the time about what happened to Hitler. Most poignant is Truman asking Stalin, is Hitler dead? To which Stalin responds, no.

So did the Russians make up the story that Hitler escaped from his bunker in Berlin? Was this all part of a larger plan to confuse and confound the Allies, at the start of the Cold War. And just how much did the Allied commanders really know? According to some, Hitler, his wife Eva Braun, and a handful of close aides and top-ranking Nazis secretly abandoned their bunker in the last days of World War II. They then flew via several refueling stops to the Canary Islands,

where they boarded a U-boat and then sailed largely underwater to Argentina. To most, such a story sounds like utter fantasy, and yet the rumors and conspiracy theories have persisted and continued to this day. It's claimed by some to be a Cold War disinformation campaign by the Russians. So is it true? Most historians think it's unlikely. I think it's absolute rubbish. When I first came across this book a few years ago, I dismissed it as being 2,000% junk. I've now revised my opinion. It's 3,000% junk.

I have no opinion as to whether Jared Williams believes his story or not. If he does, then I think he's a fool. Because the testimony and the evidence for Hitler's death is absolutely compelling. And I don't really know why he would want to sell a book that flew in the face of what is well-researched, well-proven, credible history. We don't know at all, and we make this quite clear in the book, parts of the escape route are scenario, parts of a complete fact, but they're the scenarios that work best with what is available to the Nazis at the time.

They have U-boats available to them. We have reports in the Argentine police and the Argentine coast guards of U-boats being off Argentina at the time, reports from the FBI of people being landed in Argentina at the time. So although it's impossible to say exactly that yes, they came on Group C-Wolf on these U-Boats, we know that the Americans said those U-Boats were sunk and we know they weren't sunk. We know that one of them turned up and surrendered at Mada Plata a month later. If it's true that he actually went there, Hitler would never again set foot outside of Argentina.

And though his dreams of a new Reich would never be fulfilled, he might at least have found some form of domestic happiness with Eva Braun, with whom he had two daughters. According to Williams' theory, after 17 years in hiding, one of the most evil men in history died on February 13, 1962, age 73, in Argentina. I think the more you look into this, the more you do your own research, I think he survived. The silver bullet of nobody? That's not the important bit. It's the other evidence, the documents, the firsthand accounts in Germany, in Argentina, in the United States. Surprisingly, the possibility that Hitler lived and escaped is quite compelling.

I think he definitely would have tried to escape. It would be a smart plan, wouldn't it? And it would go in line with the way he thought and planned out things. So it makes sense that he would try to escape. Hitler did not leave the bunker. He didn't leave it alive. He did not go to Argentina, except in the imaginations of people like Gerald Williams. and he certainly did not die at a grand old age.

All we've done is gone back to the reporting from the time and put it out in a book. That book shows, I think, pretty conclusively that Adolf Hitler did not die in the bunker in 1945. I think it also shows that we had been lied to extensively about the real end of World War II and how things happened after that. And I think that these things are as relevant today

to us as they would have been in 1945. It's one of the great mysteries of the last century. What really happened to Adolf Hitler? Most historians agree that he committed suicide in his bunker in the final days of the war, and that his remains were burnt to ashes to prevent any relics surviving. But with no remains, there's no conclusive proof. And with a figure as important and reviled as Hitler, without any solid evidence of his death, it's almost inevitable that he's inevitable that he's

almost inevitable that alternative theories would arise. Add to this the FBI and CIA documentation, the confessions of the pilot, and eyewitness sightings of the furor in various countries after the war, and a solid, if unproved conspiracy theory emerges.