The year of April in the year 1945 also brought the end of the war in Europe. The Soviet’s red
army was charging in to call dibs on Berlin. Hitler had no options left but to witness his
‘empire of hate’ crumble to the ground. On April 30th, 1945 Soviet soldiers charged to the Fuhrer
bunker to apprehend the chief conspirator of the Second World War, but all they found were heaps
of rubble and ash. According to the eyewitnesses present in the bunker, Hitler had locked himself
and his new wife Eva Braun up in his study and killed themselves before their security
personnel burned the corpses and buried them in the ground. But was it truly the case? Welcome to
Nutty History and today, let’s explore if Hitler faked his death and escaped the Fall of Berlin.
It had been less than 2 days since Adolf Hitler proposed and married his long-time mistress and
secretary Eva Braun. At 1 AM on the morning of April 30th, 1945, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel
reported to Hitler that Berlin was breached. This was the end for Germany in the second world war,
the last fort was about to fall and it seems Hitler had nowhere to run. With the Soviets
only about half a kilometer away from the bunker, Hitler had lunch with his wife in the afternoon
and then they moved to his study. After a few minutes, Hitler’s adjutant Otto Günsche,
who was stationed outside the study, heard a gunshot. Günsche along with Hitler’s valet
Heinz Linge unlocked the room after a while to find the corpses of the Fuhrer and his wife.
They found Hitler with a gun wound on his temple and Eva Braun had chewed a cyanide capsule. Hitler
had left a set of specific instructions for his funeral to make sure his body won’t be desecrated
the way Mussolini and his mistress’s corpses were besmirched in Italy a few days ago. Following the
orders, Günsche and Linge took the corpses of Hitler and Braun to the garden behind the Reich
Chancellery, doused them with petrol, and burned the bodies before burying them in the ground.
The first news of Hitler’s suicide was announced by the Germans themselves, on May 1st the
Reichssender Hamburg radio station interrupted their normal program to announce that Hitler
had died that afternoon and Karl Donitz would be replacing him as the new President of Germany.
Joseph Stalin was informed of Hitler’s supposed suicide thirteen hours later.
The Soviet dictator responded with a demand of unconditional surrender from Germany
and ordered the red army’s SMERSH unit to find the corpse. But, when Stalin was asked at the Potsdam
Conference in July 1945 about the whereabouts of Hitler, Stalin shocked the world with his reply.
According to the dictator, Hitler wasn’t dead like everybody had believed
but was living in either Spain or Argentina. The shocking reveal created a massive controversy and
debate on the international platform. In the same month, British newspapers repeated comments from
a Soviet officer that a charred body discovered by the Soviets was “a very poor double.” American
newspapers also repeated dubious quotes, such as that of the Russian garrison commander of Berlin,
who claimed that Hitler had “gone into hiding somewhere in Europe."
The hype from western media created enough doubts in the minds of experts to cast shadows on what
was till now an accepted fact that Hitler was dead. So, this begs the question, if Hitler really
fooled the world by faking his death, where would he have gone? The first detailed investigation by
Western powers began in November 1945 after Dick White, then head of counterintelligence in the
British sector of Berlin, had their agent Hugh Trevor-Roper investigate the matter to counter
the Soviet claims. A report by British Agent Roper concluded that Hitler indeed died by his own hands
but the report left some doubts regarding the conduct of Soviets who were the first ones to
find Hitler’s supposed remains. For starters, the SMERSH agents who found Fuhrer Bunker and Reich
Chancellery contaminated and almost destroyed the crime scene which had already endured heavy
shelling during Hitler’s suicide and cremation in the open. Moreover, Soviet authorities never
produced the formal death statement of Adolf Hitler to Trevor-Roper which was supposedly handed
by Wehrmacht General Hans Krebs while negotiating a temporary surrender on April 30th after Hitler’s
presumed death. Surprisingly, the Soviets had announced Hitler’s death after capturing Berlin
but later kept on changing their official stance on Hitler’s death or escape. Some of the Soviet
officers were intentionally avoiding the topic giving more flames to the speculation that the
death of the Fuhrer was merely a hoax. And if that was the case, how did Hitler get away?
With the Soviets playing Hide and Seek with the establishment of Hitler’s death and Western Media
giving wind to flames, the rumors and theories about Hitler’s escape from Berlin ran amuck.
Since the fall of Berlin, many amateur historians and conspiracy theorists have
written about the possibility of Hitler’s escape and how he could have done it. The whole affair
was sensationalized to the point that the Federal Bureau of Investigation started documenting every
rumor of Hitler’s appearance in history. An FBI report in the months following the Nazi surrender
listed the multiple destinations where Hitler was said to have been seen alive.
The report listed possibilities as varied as they were contradictory. Rumors had reached the agency
that he had been killed in the bunker; he had escaped from Berlin by air or in a submarine.
Some claimed Hitler was living on an island far from the Baltic, in a fortress in the Rhineland,
in a Spanish monastery, or a South American camp. There were also claims that Hitler fled to Japan,
the last standing Axis power to regroup and plan an invasion of Europe from the East. On October
19, 1945, more than two months after Japan’s surrender and half a year after Hitler’s reported
suicide in his Berlin bunker, a U.S. newspaper reported that the dictator had planned to escape
to Japan. Citing Japanese sources, this newspaper based its report on one of the documents dated
October 21, 1945, and compiled by the now-defunct Central Liaison Office, the intermediary between
Tokyo and the Allied Occupation powers. However, the liaison office responded quickly to deny the
existence of any such plan to rescue Hitler or his wife. Another theory states that Hitler escaped
to Spain on a plane with the help of Spain’s Dictator General Franco. This claim originated
from none other than General Franco’s driver. He had stated that on the night of April 30th, 1945,
he was sent to pick up Fuhrer Hitler at Madrid Airport. A Venezuelan person Julio Barreiro Rivas
also claimed later that Hitler lived peacefully for the rest of his days in Spain and was buried
in a cemetery in Galicia, in the northwest part of Spain. The historians who believe in
this theory claim that Hitler exited the bunker beneath the Chancellery in Berlin via a tunnel,
which took him to Tempelhof Airport, from where a helicopter took him to Spain.
But the theory that has garnered the most strength and debate over the years
of possible escape of Nazi Supreme leader is that he fled to Argentina.
Many factors support this theory with the strongest being that Argentina was a Nazi Haven.
Many Nazis who managed to escape the defeat of Germany chose Argentina as their retreat.
Argentine army general Juan Peron, who later became President for three terms, secretly ordered
diplomats and intelligence officers to establish escape routes - which later became nicknamed
“ratlines”. The routes or ratlines were designed to go through ports in Spain and Italy, to smuggle
thousands of former SS officers and Nazi party members out of Europe to South America. So,
if the Supreme leader of the Nazi Party would have chosen to escape, Argentina would have been the
perfect place to hide for the rest of his life. But was it possible? We will talk about it in the
next video in the series of Hitler’s Escape. Till then we recommend you watch a video about what
happened to the Nazis after the second world war or the Secret Origins of the Fourth Reich
and the rise of the actual Super Villain Otto Skorzeny. Thanks for watching Nutty History.