Did Hitler Escape from the Berlin Bunker?

Why is there no excitement about a new non-fiction book about the escape of Hitler and Eva Braun and their two daughters from the Berlin bunker?

In October, Sterling Publishers in N.Y. launched Grey Wolf, a book written, after five years of research, by journalist and film director Gerrard Williams and military historian Simon Dunstan. Both are British. In the publisher’s words, “they raised serious questions that called the conventional wisdom into question” about the events of May 1945 in the Berlin bunker, and specifically about the validity of Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler. The two people who committed suicide in the bunker in May 1945, we are told, were stand-ins who were murdered.

Apparently, a film based on the book is in production.

The two authors made a plausible case for an alternative scenario and documented it in great detail. There are forty-seven pages of notes in small print. After careful preparation by Reichsleiter Martin Bormann and others, so the story goes, Hitler, his wife Eva Braun and their two daughters – and his dog – escaped through a secret tunnel and proceeded to Argentina in a U-boat via General Franco’s Spain. The journey took fifty-three days.

Subsequently, they lived out their lives in seclusion in the foothills of the Andes in Patagonia, in a landscape not unlike the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. Their stay was facilitated by President Peron and his successors and by a sizeable network of pro-Nazi Argentineans. To finance it, Bormann had arranged bullions of gold and other treasures to be transferred to Argentina. In 1948, when he himself was firmly ensconced there, the authors say, Bormann made the final payment for their continued safe haven by giving the Peron regime the fruits of Nazi atomic research and advanced aviation designs.

They also say that Eva Braun and their two daughters left Hitler in 1952 and that nothing definite was known about their subsequent lives. Demented and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Hitler died in 1962, at the age of seventy-two.

The authors left no important questions unasked. They say that much of their story was known to Allied intelligence officers and that Stalin never believed Hitler was dead. The Israelis abducted Eichmann and not Hitler only after they received information about Eichmann’s whereabouts from a concentration camp survivor and were repeatedly urged to go after him. Seizing Hitler was not on their agenda. [Too bad. Imagine Hitler in that glass box in the Jerusalem courtroom.]

Grey Wolf is available in the bookstores. But its publication has not made a splash. So far, it seems it has not been reviewed in any major paper anywhere.

Perhaps editors sense that the world does not want to read this story. Trevor-Roper’s account of Hitler’s death in the bunker has become a moral, psychological and theatrical necessity. To refute the authors’ version of events, one would have to scrutinize at least their main findings, in Europe and Argentina. That would require a major effort.

The idea of Hitler’s survival, however miserable he must have been in those seventeen years from 1945 to 1962, is, so it appears, intolerable to us.

Will anybody want to go and see the movie version?