GettyHistory, it is often said, is written by the victors, but what about when the victors fill their narrative with bias or propaganda?
For decades history text books have told us Adolf Hitler died by suicide at the end of World War II. A bullet to the head in the depths of Berlin’s Führerbunker as the Soviet Red Army consumed Germany’s capital.
The tale is a neat little full stop on a hideous, and possibly the darkest, chapter in the history of mankind. Truth, however, is rarely so convenient or cathartic. The so-called end of the Nazi Third Reich is certainly anything but.
GettySpeaking to investigative journalist, film-maker, and author, Gerrard Williams, UNILAD heard the evidence which flies in the face of society’s understanding of how the Second World War ‘ended’.
Check it out:
Williams has built a formidable reputation for uncovering details previously overlooked, and uncovering new evidence that suggests the leader of Nazi Germany lived for another 16 years after the war.
The findings of Williams and researchers have proved so inconvenient they’ve even reported receiving death threats, presumably from shamed Nazi sympathising nations and bitter exam boards who don’t want to update their syllabus, as surely any genuine historian should at least entertain debate in the face of evidence, and Williams argues plenty.
Hitler’s ‘suicide’ was reportedly followed by the bodies of he and Eva Braun being burned to ashes with petrol used as an accelerant. This is the first point of contention for Williams.
He told UNILAD:
That doesn’t work because you need to get a body to something like 3,000°c in crematorium before it goes to ashes.
When the Russians arrive they find no bodies like this. They do a bit later, funnily enough, but they don’t find any bodies at the time, and the BBC reporter, Thomas Cadet, who’s there says the Russians have been given no bodies that they believe to be Adolf Hitler.
There is no mention of Eva Braun at all, and yet ‘over there’ are Joseph and Magda Goebbels, and they’ve been covered with petrol, and they’ve been set alight, and you can still tell it’s ‘Joey the Crip’, as they used to call him, and Magda.
Williams’ argument is so detailed that it reports a viable escape route to Argentina, with the Führer supposedly fleeing the Fatherland by plane to Denmark, from Denmark to General Franco’s Nazi sympathising Spain, then to Fuerteventura, the final leg of the journey to the Argentinian lake town of San Carlos de Bariloche, with the Führer eventually dying ‘tormented, demented, and betrayed’ after a series of heart attacks on February 13, 1962.
This is, Williams argues, is backed up by the account of German pilot Peter Baumgart.
GettyThe co-author of Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler explained:
We have the reports from Peter Baumgart; Baumgart is arrested but as part of his defence he explains his war history…and at the end of the war that he flew Hitler, and Eva, and a number of other people to Tønder in Denmark.
He sees them board another plane and fly to Reus, just outside Barcelona. General Franco is very tight with Hitler and so he supplies an aircraft of the Spanish Air Force which flies them to Fuerteventura, to Villa Winter, and from Villa Winter they board a convoy of three submarines.
When they get to the coast [of Argentina] they stay overnight at a ranch called Moromar, and then on Moromar, it’s still there at the Estancia, is an airfield and they fly from that airfield to a place just outside San Carlos de Bariloche, which is owned by the Nazi ambassador to Chile.
As to why fleeing Nazis would opt to head to South America, the reason is actually pretty simple. Nazism wouldn’t have survived its infancy without support from this continent, and therefore when the regime was on its knees it retreated to a nation it could regroup within.
WikimediaThis regrouping was not akin to hiding out indefinitely, it was to rebuild.
Williams emphasised to UNILAD that Nazi party directly received funds from the affluent Eichhorn family, who ran a hotel in Argentina which offered grandeur within its walls likened to that of the Titanic.
He explained:
If it hadn’t been for the Eichhorns the Nazi party could never have happened. So the roots of Nazism are as deep in Argentina as they ever were in Nazi Germany.
Places like San Carlos de Bariloche, I’ve woken up there, looked out of the window and thought I was in Bavaria.
The level of German penetration, Nazi penetration, into Argentina is incredible, just incredible. If they hadn’t been funded by the Eichhorns they may never have come to power.
So it’s logical Hitler would return to a nation where he could once again consolidate his power, without sacrificing the luxury to which he had become accustomed.
Williams fervently denies that he is part of conspiracy theory, ‘it’s not a theory,’ he states with unequivocal certainty in his voice, ‘I don’t do conspiracy theories’.
What’s more there a several counts of high profile Nazis traditionally reported as having died in the German capital where tangible evidence suggests otherwise.
Take Martin Bormann for example, a man who utilised his position to control access and information to Hitler to cement his own position as essential to Nazi operations. The account most people are aware of says Bormann died in Berlin at the hands of the Red Army, yet his body was never identified and he was tried at Nuremberg in absentia.
Why would you try a dead man? You wouldn’t. His fate was unknown, but his story did not stop at Nuremberg.
Williams continued:
Martin Bormann is the man behind all of this. Bormann approaches Allen Dulles, who’s head of the security intelligence operation OSS in Switzerland, and he says ‘look we’ve lost, it’s now only a question of time and we need to come to an agreement where we give you something, and in return you give us our freedom, and we take quite a bit with us’.
And yet, for everybody Martin Bormann is dead outside the post office in Berlin in ’45. He’s not.
Bormann was reportedly sighted in many places across South America. Such reports are not so flimsy as to be easily dismissed. In the TV series Hunting Hitler, produced by the History Channel, a woman in Paraguay even identifies Bormann as her adopted father without any hesitation. The adoption would provide cover and assist in hampering extradition attempts.
Given the lack of a body, his trial in absentia, the ties to American diplomats, and the many accounts suggesting Bormann was living well in South America, it stands to reason we should revisit the narrative of his death.
So why is the same not acceptable for Hitler?
This is a particularly frustrating point for Williams:
Martin Bormann at Nuremberg is charged with crimes against humanity, Adolf Hitler never is. They can’t find Bormann’s body, they’ve got no proof Hitler’s body is there, but Hitler has never been charged with a single crime. Why?
If we’d had a body, ‘yeah, he’s dead, end of story’…and you’ve got Eisenhower, Zhukov, Stalin all saying ‘we have no proof this man is dead’, but the international war crimes commission at Nuremberg ignores that.
I don’t like it because I’m uncomfortable with the idea of the Deep State, but there are two Americas. There is the military-industrial complex and, up until Mr Trump, there was the decent side of America.
Allen Dulles and John J. McCloy were part, very much, of that military-industrial complex. Can you imagine what a lot of returning veterans would’ve done if they’d found out the American shadow government had done a deal?
On that basis, there certainly was a secret to hide.
In recent times there have been attempts to undermine these questions as conspiracy, and yet the evidence for counter-arguments are fiercely guarded.
WikimediaIn March and July of 2017, French researchers were given access to Russian intelligence archives, the FSB which replaced the KGB, to examine a jawbone supposedly collected from remains later said to be that of Hitler.
Their findings, available in the European Journal of Internal Medicine, argue the bone is Hitler’s. They base the identification on dental records, identifying the Führer by his false teeth and a lack of trace meat DNA because Hitler was vegetarian.
This French research team was given access to the jawbone for DNA testing, but were prohibited from testing a fragment of skull in the same manner. Contrast this to an American research team from the University of Connecticut who were prohibited from studying the jawbone, but did test the skull fragment.
Testing on the skull in 2009, which was delivered to Stalin as eventual ‘proof’ of Hitler’s death, returned surprising results that stated the skull did not belong to the Nazi leader, but rather the DNA of an unidentified woman.
The french team could not confirm this result as they couldn’t replicate the testing, this means they also cannot refute it.
GettyClearly the waters are murky at best. So what to believe; Societally accepted versions of history which have been enriched by the amount of time they’ve circulated, or fresh arguments which riddle the former account with holes?
Truth is what society deserves. Truth is what we should value. Clearly the story of cyanide and suicide in a bunker beneath Berlin is lacking the evidence to assert it as truth. So, at the very least, while journalists such as Williams are exposing so many flaws in the narrative, the tale must change even if its conclusion for now is there is no certainty.
Who really has anything to gain from denying the story doesn’t add up, and why is it unacceptable to say we don’t know? The longer the account of suicide is maintained without question, the further we move away from being to say anything with certainty in the future.
If you have a story you want to tell, send it to UNILAD via [email protected]
