Published in Washington,
D.C. Vol. 15, No. 11 -- March 22, 1999
www.insightmag.com
Adolf Hitler's
secret FBI files By Timothy W Maier For
almost 30 years, J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI
maintained a detailed dossier on Adolf Hitler
and closely investigated any report that
indicated he still was alive. ADOLF Hitler lives -- in
cyberspace, that is, where 734 pages of Hitler's
raw FBI file can be downloaded from
the Internet. The files
contain speeches, rare photographs, old newspaper
clippings, details about discovery of the
Führer's personal notes and chinaware and
assassination plots -- as well as an extensive
11-year probe into the possibility that Hitler
faked his own death with a bogus suicide in
1945. At times these files read like a supermarket
tabloid, with outrageous conspiracy theories that
remind readers that FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover was a suspicious man. At other times,
the files reveal how serious the FBI considered
allegations that one of this century's most evil
despots may have escaped his Berlin bunker. The records begin with President Franklin
Roosevelt becoming enraged upon learning of a
1933 New York conspiracy to kill Hitler and
continue into the fifties with a Western Union
telegram declaring, "I have positive proof that
Hitler is living." There are seven volumes of these records. A
photographic exhibit of Hitler in uniform dominates
the final volume. Scattered throughout are
clippings from newspapers. The last story is a 1956
article about the plans of Hitler's sister,
Paula Wolf, to write a book about her
brother to "set some facts straight" as soon as a
Munich court declares her brother dead. "The
readers will forgive me," she says, "if I abstain
from depicting my brother at all costs as a wicked
character just for the sake of profit." An
accompanying Associated Press article noted boldly,
"He Is Officially Alive 'Til Court Issues
Certificate." As for that Western
Union tipster, the FBI never tracked down the
sender nor did it ever identify the members of
the 1933 conspiracy plot to kill Hitler. But
that plot sure kept Hoover's G-men busy. The
file reveals that the plot began when the German
Embassy asked the State Department to initiate
an investigation based upon a letter signed by a
"Daniel Stern," which said that unless FDR
rebuked Hitler for his outrages against Jews,
then "I notify you that I shall go to Germany
and assassinate Hitler." The State Department handed off the probe to the
FBI, which never found Stern. But the probe opened
the door for Hoover to look at pro-Nazi
organizations. Don Whitehead, one of the few
authors to research the plot, wrote about it in his
book, The FBI Story, A Report
to the People. He calls it a "diplomatic
fumble" by the German ambassador in Washington, who
probably wished he never had called the State
Department. That's because Hoover's investigation
ultimately became "a valuable reference when the
Department of Justice requested additional
investigations. And Hoover passed the information
to the president," Whitehead observes. All of this is in Hitler's FBI file -- even
Whitehead's observations -- and now is available at
www.fbi.gov.
Between the poor copies -- some nearly impossible
to read because, says FBI Freedom of Information
Officer Linda Gloss, the copies were not
made from originals -- and the heavy black ink
blocking out what today still is considered
classified, there rests a fascinating tale of the
FBI's role during the World War II era. For example, deep in the files are a series of
memos written by Hoover on Oct. 5, 1939, reviewing
intelligence from a confidential informant. The
Hoover memos to various U.S. military-intelligence
agencies and the president's chief of staff warned
of future Japanese aggression and Germany's attack
on France. "The Japanese will attack British
Indochina and other colonies without warning,
simultaneously with the German advance on France,"
Hoover wrote. And there is ample evidence in the files to
undermine rumors that Hitler's personal physician
tried to poison him or "administer narcotics that
might have contributed to the impairment of
Hitler's health" or that "Hitler inherited certain
[psychophysical] traits in his childhood
and later on, and that these might account for his
crimes and other actions," according to an FBI
investigation into the matter.  The
FBI's Hitler files have been available for some
time to anyone who cared to schedule an appointment
at FBI headquarters in Washington, but few have
done so. Two recent critically acclaimed books,
Hitler: Diagnosis of a
Destructive Prophet by Fritz Redlich
and Explaining
Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum, fail to mention
the FBI files -- although some of the records used
to support these authors' opinions, such as
Hitler's medical records, are duplicated in the
files from other sources.
Redlich and Rosenbaum may have avoided Hitler's
FBI file because some of the information there
concerns allegations that border on the absurd --
for instance, that Hitler survived the war.
Historians generally accept that Hitler committed
suicide April 30, 1945, in a Berlin bunker as
Allied troops closed in on him. The Soviets
recently made available forensic proof of this in
their possession since the war's end. But there was
no such certainty in the West 50 years ago when
opinion polls showed that two of every three
Americans believed Hitler indeed was alive. Hoover
didn't rule it out but never concluded that the
Nazi dictator was dead. Besieged with letters from
witnesses swearing they had spotted the defeated
Nazi dictator, the files show, the Hitler hunt
began. Some tips were
considered credible. One of these came from a
doctor who claimed to have treated Hitler for an
intestinal disorder in St. Louis -- an alarming
story because the FBI obtained Hitler's
classified medical records and verified that
Hitler suffered from a similar condition. That
information was not publicly known at the
time. Other reports simply were bizarre. A 77-year-old
man claimed to have found a letter written by
Hitler in 1947. "Call it a Hitler hoax, if you
will," the man wrote Hoover, "and believe its
delivery in German over a USA radio would be the
most startling sensation since Orson Welles'
attack of the Martians." During an FBI interview with the elderly man, he
admitted to "perpetrating this hoax to create a
sensation," according to the interrogating agent's
notes. "He seemed to be a psychopathic case," the
agent wrote. And that was far from the only nut to
roll out of the barrel. Others told tales of Hitler
dining in a Washington restaurant in 1946; jumping
out of a New Orleans train in 1948; purchasing
8,960 acres of land near Kit Carson, Colo.; and
finding work as a butler in London in 1946. Most of the letters had one thing in common:
suspicions and allegations but no proof -- such as
this Oct. 15, 1945, letter from a New York man who
wrote, "I'll bet a dollar to a doughnut that Hitler
is located right in New York City. There's no other
city in the world where he could so easily be
absorbed. No doubt you have considered this
possibility, but I mention it for what it is worth
anyway." As incredible as all of this sounds now, the FBI
treated such matters very seriously. If the G-men
couldn't chase down the tip, they made every effort
to find the tipster and either expose a mistake or
identify a prankster or mental case. For instance,
on Oct. 10, 1948, a Washington woman who operated a
boardinghouse wrote to the FBI, claiming one of her
borders was Hitler. She mostly was worried about
whether she might be prosecuted for harboring him
and wanted to know if any "action could possibly be
taken against her." The FBI dismissed the complaint
with the note: "She is obviously demented." But while some sightings were dismissed without
an intense investigation, others weren't. The files
show that Hoover's G-men conducted a massive
manhunt for Hitler on a scale not seen since
Charles Lindbergh's baby was kidnapped and
murdered, with agents trekking to the four corners
of the globe in search of the Nazi leader. The most frequent sighting was in South America
-- a notoriously safe haven for Nazi war criminals,
according to the FBI files. And so the FBI
dispatched a team of G-men to investigate reports
from newspaper articles (many contained in the FBI
file) and independent witnesses apparently claiming
Hitler was in Argentina. The Argentina stories intrigued Hoover. In 1944,
a year before Hitler's reported death, Hoover
received a tip that Hitler would receive refuge in
Argentina, according to a Sept. 4, 1944, memo
written by an FBI agent. The memo noted that
Argentine political leaders had plans to conduct
clandestine meetings with Hitler "for the arranging
of importing arms and technicians into Argentina."
The memo notes that bicycle factories there had
been converted to plants for manufacturing
munitions and that a "large wealthy German colony
in Argentina affords tremendous possibilities" as a
refuge for Hitler and his henchmen. "One of the
members [of the postwar German planners],
Count Luxburg, has been mentioned as operating a
ranch which would serve in providing a haven." Within a year witnesses began flooding the FBI
with Hitler sightings in Argentina. Some of these,
the FBI rationalized, resulted from tabloid press
reports claiming Hitler had escaped and was waiting
for war to break out between the Soviet Union and
the United States before emerging as a leader in
the new world. And there were outspoken Nazi
sympathizers such as Otto Abetz, Germany's
wartime ambassador to France, boasting that Hitler
"is certainly not dead" and was "not a coward -- I
believe one day he will return." The most sensational story appeared June 20,
1948, in El Tiempo, a Spanish newspaper published
in Colombia, claiming Hitler had escaped via
submarine to Bogotà. The paper provided a
detailed account of Hitler's supposedly cowardly
flight and fueled dozens of similar stories around
the world. Many of those appeared in the FBI files
as clippings ranging from obscure magazines to the
Associated Press. One such story claimed that the Swedes observed
a mysterious yacht moving in and out of inlets on
the North Sea or a Brazilian ship reportedly sunk
by an unidentified submarine transporting a woman
some claimed to be Eva Braun, Hitler's wife.
Braun landed from that submarine off the coast of
Argentina, one article claimed. The same article
suggested a Japanese navy staff officer had
volunteered details of a plan to evacuate Hitler
and Braun to Japan after the fall of Germany. Closer to home a mysterious submarine reportedly
was seen about 1,300 miles north of Catalina,
Calif., in a location where Theodore Donay,
a wealthy Detroit importer, disappeared. According
to wire reports, Donay was convicted in 1943 as a
traitor for aiding Hans Peter Krug, an
escaped Nazi, and never was found. But none of these reports apparently could be
directly linked to Hitler and the FBI repeatedly
concluded they were baseless rumors. One agent
expressed shock in the files that the Chicago Times
carried such rumor and innuendo and chastised an
unnamed writer. "His reputation is extremely poor
and he is generally considered to be a journalist
of the most sensational and unreliable nature." One reason that
Hitler's death was not believed for so long was
that the Russians deliberately withheld
information, writes Redlich. In fact, it wasn't
until Russian journalist Lev Bezymenski
wrote a book translated into English in 1968
that the West learned that the Russians
performed autopsies on corpses recovered May 2,
1945, in shallow graves in a garden near the
Berlin bunker. The bodies were believed to be
Hitler, his wife and their two dogs. The United States was angered by the slow
Russian revelations -- but the Russian government
defended its actions, saying 30 years was customary
for declassification of secrets. Meanwhile, at the
Yalta conference in 1945, Stalin declared
that Hitler had escaped. Further adding to continuing suspicions are the
autopsy reports concerning a missing testicle and
superficial accounts of main body organs. Indeed,
Bezymenski since has acknowledged that the autopsy
reports were false, casting more mystery on
Hitler's death. Redlich says, "This only confirms
what Western historians and forensic experts
suspected: that the Soviet investigation was
fraught with deceit, secrecy and incompetence." Compounding the mystery was how Hitler died. It
generally was believed by historians that Hitler
bit down on a glass ampoule containing potassium
cyanide while shooting himself in the head on April
30, 1945. But Redlich observes, "The question can
be raised as to whether Hitler's Parkinson's tremor
would have allowed him to follow this procedure."
Proving that theory ended after it was learned that
Hitler's remains had been transferred nine times
from one burial site to another and, finally, to
the Lefortove prison in Moscow where they were
cremated. It wasn't until 1973 when two Western experts in
forensic dentistry compared Russian medical reports
and X-rays of Hitler's teeth that it became evident
that the corpse found outside the bunker indeed was
the Führer. For Redlich and others that is
enough proof. "It is certain that Hitler, who at
present would be over 100 years old, is dead and
that he died by suicide. No serious student of
history maintains that he escaped with the help of
his paladins." Meanwhile, the definitive proof that the X-rays
of the corpse provided by the Russians to that
forensic dentistry team are legitimate, rests in a
Russian classified vault. What's inside that
archive? Hitler's lower jawbone. At least that's
what the Russians claim. Such details no doubt are
being added to Hitler's FBI file even
now. Copyright © 1997
News World Communications, Inc. | 
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