The sceptical Christian

At home I have a pile of books stacked on my coffee table, and this was the last one I read; Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler. Its authors, Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams, are accomplished in their respective fields of journalism, military history, and documentary film making, so they've gone out on a limb to risk their professional credibility with this book. Mainstream historical scholarship has long accepted as an undeniable fact that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in April 1945. As the allied powers closed in on the ruins of Berlin, Hitler took refuge in his Fuhrerbunker.

There he hastily married his long time mistress Eva Braun, dictated his last will and testament, said farewell to a remnant of his closest acolytes, and then retreated to an adjoining room. He placed a cyanide capsule in his mouth and shot himself. Eva Braun sat beside him and poisoned herself. Afterwards their bodies were removed and burned outside. A few days later, Nazi Germany surrendered and the war in Europe ended.

Nazism was crushed, but thousands of Nazis, aided and abetted by sympathetic governments, and even elements of the Vatican, used forged travel documents to escape justice and flee overseas, to Australia, the United States, and most notably South America. The truth is that a body double masquerading as Hitler was the one who died in Berlin, so Dunstan and Williams claim that Hitler himself escaped Germany and lived out the remainder of his days in a remote German enclave in Argentina, dying in 1962, fathering two daughters who are alive today.

Anticipating the coming Cold War with the Soviet Union, the United States government covertly instituted Operation Paperclip, a secret program that allowed them to access German military technology by recruiting German scientists and engineers, who were granted the right to immigrate to the United States in return for their expertise. Dunstan and Williams claim that allowing Hitler to escape was a secret part of this deal.

To back up these sensational claims, the authors produce reams of previously classified documents, and interviews with purported eyewitnesses who claim to have seen Hitler alive in Argentina. For the reader to accept their claims, Dunstan and Williams need to explain why the eyewitness accounts of Hitler's suicide, given by those occupants of the Fuhrerbunker who survived the war, including Erna Flegel, Traudl Junge, and Rochus Misch, and those who testified under oath that they saw his dead body, are unreliable. In his book Selling Hitler, Robert Harris refers to the well known report into Hitler's death by Hugh Trevor-Roper, which contained statements from Erich Kempa, who provided the gasoline to burn Hitler's body, and the guard Hermann Karnau, who witnessed the funeral pyre.  Dunstan and Williams fail to do this in their book, or even mention them in passing. I cannot accept that all of these people lied or were duped.

If Hitler and Eva Braun had two daughters, why didn't Dunstan and Williams attempt to track them down, or provide some documentary evidence of their existence? They also neglect to mention that Hitler did have nephews living in the United States, some of whom are alive today, and may or may not have made a pact to never marry so that the family line will die out with them.

They also claim that Martin Bormann was the one who organized Hitler's escape and refuge in Argentina. Bormann was also the main liaison between Hitler and the Argentinian government, even closely associating with President Juan Peron. Again, while it is true that Bormann was missing and unaccounted for at the end of the war, his remains were found at a Berlin building site and positively identified in 1998.    

Operation Paperclip is a fact of history, as is the fact that Nazi war criminals escaped to South America and other parts of the world after the war, and some of them evaded justice for the rest of their lives. On the basis of this book, I do not believe that Hitler was amongst them. He died by his own hand as a sickly, paranoid and thoroughly evil man in Berlin in 1945, with the blood of millions of people on his hands.