550: UNREDACTED: Hunting the Führer: Investigating the Rumors of Adolf Hitler's Survival
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A Junkers JU-52 airplane races away from Berlin. The Soviet Red Army has the city surrounded. Germany's capital is just days from falling.

It's 3:00 AM on April 28th, 1945. The Ju 52 and its two fighter plane escorts are heading for Tønder, Denmark, a small Danish town just over the German border. A barrage of artillery fire stands between the convoy and its destination.

But the JU pilot, Captain Peter Baumgart, presses on. He's an Iron Cross award winner with 128 credited kills of Allied warplanes. And he's been tasked with the transport of two very important passengers. Due to artillery fire, he's forced to land in the city of Magdeburg, west of Berlin. One of the passengers insists they get back in the air as soon as possible. Keeping with the mission, Baumgart takes off the next day and heads north toward Denmark.

He lands in a field about 44 miles from the Eider River. His passengers quickly disembark. He can't say for sure, but Baumgart believes they're heading toward the shores to board a German U-boat, but he won't be staying around to confirm that. And that's because the passenger who first summoned him to make the flight out of Berlin shakes his hand and gives him a check for 20,000 marks. The man then orders him to return to the German capital immediately. And so he does. His mission is complete.

Thanks to Captain Peter Baumgart, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun have escaped Berlin, boarded a submarine, and are now heading to safety. The Soviet Red Army reached the heart of Berlin in early May 1945, and they were already aware that Adolf Hitler was dead. At least, that's what was announced to the world on May 1st. Nazi Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz informed the German people that Hitler had died, and he was now the president of Germany.

Russian dictator Joseph Stalin wanted Hitler's body handed over, so he sent his Red Army marching in to collect it. But when the Russians arrived at the Führerbunker at the Reich Chancellery, they only found two badly burned bodies in the garden outside the bunker's entrance. The smoldering remains were in a crater made by Soviet artillery shells. It was a confusing scene, but several key eyewitnesses were present.

These included the infamous war criminal and Hitler's secretary, Martin Bormann, Hitler's valet, Lieutenant Colonel Heinz Linga, and Hitler's bodyguard, Rokas Misch. They all claimed to hear a gunshot in Hitler's private chambers. Led by Bormann, they entered Hitler's room. There, they found the bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. Otto Guntje announced to a group waiting outside that Hitler was dead.

a group that included the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. But everyone claiming that the bodies were those of Hitler and Braun were Nazis. All of them were closely associated with Hitler up until his alleged final moments. Though they claimed that the burning of the bodies was done at their Fuhrer's last wishes, the bodies were burned beyond recognition. Marshal Gregory Zhukov, one of Stalin's most trusted officers, would later say, "We have found no corpse that could be Hitler."

The Russians took the remains in custody and had them tested. On June 5th, the Russians confirmed the deaths and announced that both Hitler and Braun had died of cyanide poisoning. Case closed.

Except, four days later on June 9th, the Russians held a press conference and told a different story. It was a rare instance of Russian candidness. They had not successfully identified the bodies. Adolf Hitler had escaped. If one of the most recognizable faces in the world were to escape his secluded bunker while Allied armies approached, he'd have to stay underground and hidden for as long as possible. And he'd have to know exactly where to go.

It wasn't a mad dash escape. This would have been planned well in advance. Nazi Army Lieutenant Friedrich Ohms was later interrogated. Though he said he had no proof that Hitler was alive, he did say he was aware of Hitler's plans and psychology.

SS Colonel Nicholas von Bilow said that Hitler had agreed to go south on April 20th, his birthday and last known public appearance. A series of tunnels and subway routes had been established underneath Berlin. These tunnels were part of a larger escape plan. The Rattenlinien, or German rat lines, were a series of escape routes established to get Nazis and their sympathizers out of Europe following the end of the war. And they were very effective.

so effective that US military intelligence officers would later use them to get German scientists and officials out of the country, and more importantly, out of Soviet custody. There were two primary ratlines out of Nazi Germany, one to Spain and one to Rome. You could then escape Europe from there.

It was along those rat lines that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun headed for safety as the Soviet Red Army marched above them. The tunnel they used led straight from the Führerbunker to the Tempelhof Airport. They waited for dark, then emerged in a field just outside the airport. The airport was very busy just days earlier. Flight records indicated several planes took off from the airport on April 21st, just a day after Hitler agreed to go south.

One of the planes containing Hitler's personal belongings departed around 5 a.m. with Major Friedrich Gudelfinger as the pilot. Many high-ranking members of the Nazi Party escaped on this day as well. And now it was Hitler's turn. Some reports claim a helicopter was waiting for him. Others stick to the airplane story. His destination was said to be Spain, or maybe as far as the Canary Islands.

Captain Peter Baumgart's story remains the most detailed account of Hitler's flight out of Berlin. Baumgart's story about landing outside Turner, Denmark makes the most sense. No matter how he flew out of Berlin, Hitler, Eva Braun, and anyone going with them reached the shores of the Atlantic. From there, German U-boats were standing by.

Some say a U-boat left the German city of Kiel, south of the Denmark border, and headed for the South Pole. This launch point is very close to the Denmark landing spot in Baumgart's claim. From there, the story goes that Hitler traveled deep into the earth via a hole in the South Pole. And from there, under the ice of Antarctica, he began building the army of his Fourth Reich.

The Nazis in Antarctica then repelled attacks from British special forces and used a flying saucer-like technology to shoot down U.S. warplanes. All this before the U.S. military used nuclear weapons to clear out the Nazi stronghold there in the 1950s.

Because sources are from Soviet intelligence, the information should be viewed suspiciously. But the report could be true. It is a fact that a German expedition to the South Pole was conducted in 1938 and 1939.

In July 1945, the British military did take part in classified operations there, two days after VE Day, also a fact. The US military ran Operation High Jump in the region in 1946 and 1947. It was the largest known expedition to the area, with a stated mission of establishing the Little America IV Research Station. But Operation High Jump consisted of an armada of military ships and aircraft

armed to the teeth. I have a full episode on this if you want to learn more.

In that episode, I get into Admiral Byrd and some of the incredible things he said he saw down there. Also, three known nuclear weapon tests took place in the South Atlantic in 1958, called Operation Argus. Though some claim they weren't tests, but actually nuclear attacks used to decimate the remaining Nazi presence there. So there are clues that point to Adolf Hitler escaping to the South Pole.

But when Hitler and his cohorts left Europe in a U-boat, only one location made sense. It was far enough from the war-torn land he had terrorized. Its citizens were ready to cheer his arrival. Its leader would soon be eager to shelter him. And there was already a previous history of Germans emigrating there. Adolf Hitler had arrived on the shores of Argentina.

So hard to tell apart.

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There are 700 pages of declassified FBI documents related to Adolf Hitler's escape. One of these files covers the eyewitness account of a man known only as "Guidano." He was one of four men sent by Argentinian officials to welcome Adolf Hitler and his party to the country. Guidano witnessed Hitler, two women, a doctor, and as many as 50 people come ashore from two German submarines. And Guidano was paid $15,000 for his help.

and his silence. The FBI report stated that Hitler and his party had come ashore about two and a half weeks after the fall of Berlin.

This puts the arrival at mid to late May of 1945. Argentinian officials devised a plan as early as 1944. Pack horses and four guides met the Nazis at the Valdez Peninsula in the Gulf of San Matias. The entire party was taken to a ranch in the South Andes Mountains. So why would anyone in Argentina or anywhere in South America be willing to take in the escaping leader of the Nazi party?

Argentina was a neutral country during most of World War II, as it had been during World War I. But secretly, it supported the Axis powers. Argentina continued to trade with both the Axis and the Allied powers, but its economic interactions with Germany and Italy were significant.

Argentina exported agricultural products and raw materials that were crucial to Germany's war efforts. Also, Argentina was slow to break diplomatic relations with the Axis powers.

It wasn't until January 1944 that Argentina was pressured into severing relations with Germany and Japan. It only declared war on the Axis powers in March 1945, shortly before the end of the war. Juan Perón was the vice president and secretary of war in 1945. But he would go down in history as a president sympathetic to Nazis and other fascist leaders.

His wife Evita received money and gifts taken from rich Jewish families sent to concentration camps.

All as payment for keeping the Nazis secret. But Juan Perón didn't become president until 1946. So the story really begins in neighboring Paraguay. That's where Bernard Förster and his wife, Elizabeth Nietzsche, as in the sister of Friedrich Nietzsche, arrived from Germany in 1887 to start an Aryan Empire. The result was Nueva Germania, and it did not survive.

Most of the 14 founding families battled diseases and had no success with crops. Within two years, Forster had committed suicide. Elisabeth returned to Germany. She later tarnished her brother's legacy by turning his work into Nazi propaganda. Hitler honored her with a state memorial service after she died in 1935. Greatly influenced by Forster's beliefs, Hitler ordered German soil to be spread over his gravesite.

This failed Aryan colony was a key part of the legacy of German emigration to South America, especially Argentina. It began in the late 1800s and continued to flourish. 1923 and 1924 are considered the two largest years of German emigration to Argentina. Many Germans fled their homelands post-war conditions. The language and traditions of German culture have often been considered more important than the country of origin itself.

So these immigrants made Argentina their new home, but retained much of who they were as Germans. Another immigration surge began in 1933. When the Nazi Party took over, though there was anti-Nazi sentiment from Germans in Argentina, it would soon not be the norm. The rise of fascist sympathizers came with the outbreak of World War II, and it would become very public after the war.

Remember when I said Argentina was neutral for most of World War II? Well, that's true from an official perspective. But all through the war, Argentina helped the Axis powers when they could. This included buying weapons from Germany, hosting Nazi agents, and providing their own spies to work in occupied Europe. Axis intelligence networks operated within Argentina, utilizing the country's strategic position and its ports to gather and transmit information.

The German and Italian embassies were believed to be involved in espionage activities. An anti-Semitic viewpoint was growing in the country as well. Shortly after the Second World War began, Argentina banned all Jewish immigration.

Political pressure is what eventually made Argentina break with the Axis powers. Some describe the mood after the Allies won the war as far from celebratory. It was almost mournful. Once Perón became president, he became a vocal Nazi sympathizer and spoke out against the Nuremberg trials. He called them a "farce unworthy of the victors." He, along with the Catholic Church, lobbied for amnesty on behalf of war criminals.

Perón reopened the rat lines in Germany. He wanted to help the people he viewed as his "brothers in arms" escape post-war Europe, and South America was the perfect home for them.

As many as 300 high-ranking Nazis were believed to find safe haven in South America. The confirmed list is a who's who of World War II war criminals, some of the worst offenders in history. Two of the most famous cases are that of former SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann. Another is the angel of death, Dr. Josef Mengele.

Both were considered architects of the Holocaust, and both settled in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Eichmann was eventually captured by Mossad, Israeli intelligence. He was executed in 1962. Mengele lived in hiding all around South America until his death in 1979. So, with so much German history and German culture in Argentina, Adolf Hitler arrived in 1945.

There are many different versions of the kind of life he led there, but one story is the most repeated. There's an isolated home in the Patagonia area of Argentina, near the Chilean border. It's called the Incajo House. Its design bears a striking resemblance to Hitler's Bavarian vacation house, the Berghof. The Incajo House was built in 1943 by architect Alejandro Bustillo. He sold it to Enrique Garcia Maru, a Buenos Aires lawyer

with known ties to German businesses. Maru was also known to have assisted Perón with the rat lines that brought many Nazis to the region. Argentinian journalist Abel Basti published a book in 2004 that detailed Hitler's life at this house and beyond. The 2011 book, "Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler," recounted a similar tale.

Hitler and Eva Braun settled at Ancal House after first hiding out at a ranch located at Hacienda San Ramon. They had a daughter named Ursula, but Eva Braun left Hitler in 1954. Juan Perón was overthrown by a military coup in 1955, and the new government began actively looking for Nazis in hiding. This pushed Hitler deeper underground.

Despite sightings and massive manhunts from many of his former colleagues, Hitler is said to have lived quietly for the rest of his days. According to many, Dr. Otto Lehmann was Hitler's doctor in South America. Dr. Lehmann said that with moans of anguish and despair, Hitler suffered a stroke and went into a coma on February 12th, 1962. The following day, February 13th, Adolf Hitler was finally dead.

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A few factors make the escape of Adolf Hitler plausible. First, there's the uncertainty factor. Between July 17th and August 2nd, 1945, U.S. Secretary of State Jimmy Barnes was in attendance at the Potsdam Conference. It was held in a Soviet-controlled occupation zone.

Post-war peace plans were being negotiated by the leading Allied powers. Burns wrote in his book Speaking Frankly that at one point Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin approached him in a friendly manner. They clinked glasses like old pals and then Burns asked him directly, Marshall Stalin, what is your theory about the death of Hitler? Stalin answered, he's not dead. He escaped either to Spain or Argentina.

The conquering Russian army never saw any proof. The alleged bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun were unrecognizable by the time they arrived. And no one else in the Allied Army saw the bodies. In fact, when Stars and Stripes magazine announced the news of Hitler's death in their May 2nd, 1945 edition, the first line read, "The Fuhrer is dead. At least, the Nazis say so." Joseph Stalin was not the only one talking about Hitler being alive.

Future U.S. Senator Thomas J. Dodd was then the U.S. executive trial prosecutor at Nuremberg. He said no one can say he's dead. Dwight D. Eisenhower's chief of staff, Walter B. Smith, was on record saying, no human being can say Hitler is conclusively dead. And Eisenhower agreed. The future president said in 1945 that the Russians have been unable to unearth one single bit

of any tangible evidence of Hitler's death. In 1952, he added, many people believe that Hitler escaped from Berlin. Then there's the extraction factor. While there were many tunnels underneath Berlin, it took investigators from the history channels hunting Hitler to confirm a key fact in 2015.

Using sonar equipment, they discovered the remains of a tunnel system underneath what is now known as the Lufsberga subway station. And anyone emerging from that tunnel system, they would end up right at the doorstep of the Tempelhof airport. Whether Hitler flew to Denmark first or went straight to Spain, traveling by submarine was the only logical way out of Europe. Many believe he and his party boarded submarines at the Canary Islands.

Using the Canary Islands was not a random choice. The Germans had built a way station on the island. It was well stocked with fuel and supplies for long-range U-boat missions. This is a fact. And two German subs most certainly arrived in Argentina in the summer of 1945.

The first was the submarine U-530, commanded by Otto Vermuth. His vessel arrived off the coast of Mar del Plata in July of that year. The second U-boat, U-977, arrived in August, commanded by Heinz Schaefer. The arrival of Vermuth's U-530 sub caused quite a stir in the area. A reporter covering it said he discovered a Buenos Aires police report that contained a startling statement.

A high-ranking Nazi official and a woman wearing men's clothes had been brought ashore. The police report said it was Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. And then there's the anecdotal factor. If Adolf Hitler were truly in Argentina, it would make sense that someone would have seen him. And they did. There are many sightings on record.

There's the claim of an Argentine woman named Catalina Gomero. In 1949, she was 15 years old and working for a family known to have supported Hitler. This family, the Eichhorns, often talked of visiting Germany in the 1930s. They even proudly shared a movie reel of them visiting with the Fuhrer.

That same year, a mysterious German man came to visit for a few days. Gomero claimed she had to get the house ready for him, delivered meals to his room when he was there. They even went on a picnic together. Mrs. Eichhorn would later say that the visitor was Adolf Hitler. Among the claims from the now elderly Catalina Gomero was that Hitler had often called the house and spoke with the Eichhorns up until 1962, the year most believe Hitler died.

Ante Pavelic was a fascist Croatian leader who worked alongside Germany and Italy during World War II. By 1948, he had found his way to Argentina, eventually working as an advisor to President Perón.

A carpenter named Hernan Ancin claimed to have seen Hitler six times while working for Pavelich. These meetings all took place in the early 1950s. There are many other reported sightings on record with the FBI and CIA, but one of the most notable is the 1955 claim from a former SS soldier named Philip Citroen.

He didn't just claim to have met with Hitler often during that time. He provided a photo. The CIA office in Venezuela had filed the report. The eventual response from the chief of the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division was simple and direct: "We suggest that this matter be dropped." Sightings, submarines, and world leaders cast doubt on Hitler's death. It's all compelling, but the most important piece of evidence or lack of evidence came decades later.

In 2000, a skull fragment was put on display in Moscow. It was reportedly dug up in 1946 from just outside the Führerbunker. It was believed to settle the debate on Hitler's true fate. The fragment had what appeared to be a bullet wound. In 2009, the Russian state archives gave the US access to the bone fragment.

Archaeologist and bone specialist Nick Bellantoni took samples from the skull fragment. Bellantoni was already suspicious. The skull appeared to be thin and light. This indicates a younger woman, not the 56-year-old Nazi leader. With only one hour to work with the remains, Bellantoni extracted DNA samples and shipped them back to the University of Connecticut.

At the university's Center for Applied Genetics, researchers worked for three days to analyze the samples. It did appear to be a skull fragment belonging to a woman. And there are no records of Eva Braun dying by gunshot. The test results were clear. It was not a DNA match for Hitler. But the Russians already knew that.

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There are many different versions of the Hitler escape story. While we can't follow every thread and debunk them all, we can try to trace the story back to its original source. The legend of Hitler's escape begins with one group, the Russians.

Taking Berlin was a point of pride for the Russians, but the investigation into Hitler's death was a failure. They couldn't prove it to the world, and observers say this drove Joseph Stalin mad. The Red Army was shown two badly burned bodies in an artillery shell crater. Those bodies were taken in for testing, but the Russians were not able to prove it to the world.

But the Russian investigation found several concerning discrepancies. Discrepancies that convinced them these bodies were not those of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. But they also found evidence that convinced them they were.

You might now be as confused as the Russians were back then. There are many details in this investigation, and British historian Mark Felton documented it well in his 2023 series. It boils down to this. The Russians had a body conundrum on their hands. Russia technically never found the bodies of Hitler and Braun, but they did find evidence indicating it was them.

The flames were not hot or concentrated enough to completely burn the bodies. They were unrecognizable, but some of the remains were able to be studied. The ages and heights roughly matched, but more importantly, both bodies had enough of the jawbone intact to determine that the bridges and teeth inside seemed to match Hitler and Braun's records.

The Russians even interrogated Hitler's dentist. He led the Russians to the office in the Führerbunker that contained previous x-rays of their teeth. But there was one problem. The teeth had simply been placed in the mouths of the corpses, as were two broken cyanide capsules. When someone bites down on a cyanide capsule, their teeth are known to grind uncontrollably. But there was no sign of that here. They tested for the poison in the brain and organs that were still intact.

cyanide did not kill these two people and the female body had shrapnel damage fatal shrapnel damage Berlin was a war zone in those final days and hours but no shells had gone into the bunker there was no way this was Eva Braun's body and there were enough discrepancies with the male body to doubt that this was Adolf Hitler this included the absence of a gunshot wound

But every one of the Nazi witnesses to Hitler and Braun's final hours never wavered from their stories, even under intense interrogation. They all said the same thing. Both took cyanide capsules, and then Hitler shot himself. Both bodies were hastily burned and buried in the garden outside the bunker. That story never changed.

And therein lies the conundrum. There were two bodies that appeared not to be Hitler and Braun, but there were two sets of teeth and jawbones that possibly were. The Russian counterintelligence agencies handling the investigation were looking foolish. This is one of the reasons Russia went back in 1946 to dig up the gravesite, to find something, anything that would give them their proof. And that's when they found the skull fragment with the bullet hole in it.

So they would just have to make do and use it. So what really happened? Well, in 1955, Hitler's personal valet, Heinz Linga, had been released from Soviet prison and was now living in West Germany.

In an interview that year, he held to the story of Hitler's suicide and the manner in which he and Braun died. But when asked about the bodies, Linge gave a simple answer: The Russians have never found Hitler's body. I know that because they questioned me repeatedly about it. It's buried in a common grave. The Nazis, who had remained at Hitler's side to the end, had roughly 31 hours to handle the bodies of Hitler and Braun before the Soviets arrived.

Felton's theory is that two nearly matching bodies were quickly found in the rubble of the besieged city. The teeth of both were replaced with those of Hitler and Braun. Two cyanide capsules were broken and placed in their mouths. They even buried the bodies of Hitler's two dogs nearby to add to the deception.

The actual bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were buried in the woods nearby, never to be found, never to be taken by the enemy. None of the details of the Soviet investigation were shared with the public until 1968.

That's when Lev Bezemensky released his book, The Death of Adolf Hitler. But many consider that book to be just more Russian propaganda. And Russian propaganda is at the heart of this legend. Joseph Stalin and the Soviet army were allies of the United States and the UK during the war, but that partnership was tense. The Second World War was ending, but the tensions of the coming Cold War were building.

Stalin was faced with embarrassment. The investigation was botched, and the supposed proof of Hitler being dead was inconclusive. This was a problem. Stalin said, we shall not make this public. The capitalist encirclement continues. So a disinformation campaign began. It all started with that June 9th press conference where they announced the circumstances of Hitler's death.

General Zhukov was sent out to start the rumor that Hitler was not only alive, but had escaped into Western-controlled territories. It would be to Stalin's benefit to create doubt in the world that the West had something to do with the escape. And it worked. By 1947, 45% of Americans believed Hitler was still alive. And Hitler being alive, along with the spirit of his Nazi beliefs, was valuable to Stalin.

As Germany was about to be divided up, Stalin wanted the threat of Hitler to remain. And he wasn't shy about spreading the rumors. In addition to telling Secretary of State Jimmy Burns that Hitler was alive, Stalin told others. This included Harry Hopkins, who had been in FDR's inner circle. So it's no wonder that even someone as respected as Dwight D. Eisenhower is often quoted as suggesting Hitler might have been alive. Except that's not exactly what he said.

On Saturday, October 13th, 1945, the New York Times ran a small article titled, Eisenhower didn't say Hitler was alive. Eisenhower clarified previous statements by saying, what I said was, there is every presumption that Hitler is dead, but not a bit of positive proof that he's dead. He added, the Russians have been unable to unearth one single bit of tangible evidence of Hitler's death. And that's the part of the quote that's often referred to.

Some even attribute it to Eisenhower in 1952, but that seems to be incorrect. You can trace it right back to the New York Times in 1945. Even the rumors of Hitler's escape started with Stalin. There was clearly enough evidence for people to run with the idea. And let's look at some of that. Did an airplane take off from Tempelhof Airport on April 21st with Hitler's belongings? It would seem so.

But by digging deeper into these claims, you learn the truth. Hitler's belongings weren't being sent out ahead of the Fuhrer's escape. It was quite the opposite. They were actually sent to places like Hitler's vacation home, the Berghof, to destroy Hitler's papers and his personal belongings. And when Allied troops did arrive at the Berghof, they found it burned and ransacked. Did German submarines arrive in Argentina? They did.

Two submarines were observed there, and the crews were eventually captured and questioned. While some Nazi officials may have been transported to Argentina, none were Hitler. Both crews were given the orders by their superiors to turn back and surrender. Yet both subs pushed for Argentina, hoping they'd be treated better if they surrendered there.

The FBI and CIA did receive many tips about possible sightings. They couldn't investigate them all, but they did look into most cases. The sightings began almost immediately after the announcement of Hitler's death, and they never stopped. Historian Luke Daley Groves poured through all the reports for his book, Hitler's Death, and

And when you put them all into context, what emerges is not the idea that these agencies wanted to find Hitler. It was that they wanted to find out who is spreading the rumors.

One reason was that by 1949, the agencies were seeing clear signs of the Hitler is alive myth being used to inspire neo-Nazi activity. They were also aware that Nazis did escape to South America, so any investigations into Hitler sightings could possibly lead to the discovery of the others. While most of the sightings were in South America, there were just as many sightings in North America, Japan and other parts of the world.

But since those didn't lend themselves to the theory of Hitler escaping to South America, those sightings don't often get brought up in the stories about his escape.

As for the claims of those people in Argentina who saw Hitler, there is no corroborating proof. Catalina Gomero's claims came decades later, and her story changed over time. Sometimes she claimed she spoke with Hitler, served him food. Other times she was never allowed to see him. We can't exactly write off the claims, but it's hard to take them as fact. And there was one more story investigated thoroughly in 1948, and it was that of Captain Peter Baumgart.

The intelligence division of the British occupation force in Germany took six months to investigate Baumgart's claims. Claims that he never retracted, even when told of Hitler's death. But German pilots stationed in Berlin and Magdeburg, where Baumgart said he first flew Hitler, all said the same thing. Baumgart was lying.

The investigation also pointed out another truth. On the night Baumgart claimed to have landed in Magdeburg, it had already fallen into the hands of the Allied forces. No German planes could have landed there.

And regarding the claims of Hitler going to the South Pole, there was a Nazi expedition to the South Pole in 1938. A base was even established. But it wasn't to await the arrival of their Fuhrer and build a Fourth Reich. It was to gather whale oil. Hitler wanted to improve Germany's production of fat from raw materials and become less reliant on countries like Norway for fat imports. Fat and oil were important resources. They're used to make fuel and to make food.

And no, the U.S. did not use three nuclear weapons to clear out the Nazis. That was Operation Argus. Three nuclear weapons were tested deep in the South Atlantic in 1958, but nowhere near the South Pole.

But the definitive proof against the idea of Hitler escaping came in 2017. The Russian government gave unprecedented access to a team led by French forensic pathologist, Philippe Charlier. The findings were published in May 2018. Fragments of the jawbone teeth were compared against an x-ray taken of Hitler's teeth in 1944.

Charlier said there is no possible doubt the teeth were a perfect match for Adolf Hitler, confirming what the Russians had known since 1945. Hitler did not escape his bunker. He died there. By April 1945, it was clear that Germany was going to lose the war. Hitler's thousand year Reich was not coming to pass. As he hid in his bunker, the entire world was closing around him.

On April 28th, Hitler's former ally, Benito Mussolini, was executed by Italian partisans. His naked, beaten body was taken to Milan and dumped in a town square. So was the body of Mussolini's mistress, Claretta Pitacci. The citizens he once ruled took turns throwing stones at them, spitting on them, and even shooting the bodies. Word of this reached Hitler on April 29th, as he readied his last will and testament.

This now included the orders to burn his body along with Eva Braun's. He did not want what happened to Mussolini to happen to him. Hitler then had a simple lunch with close associates, shook hands with the staff who had remained at his side, and then he and Eva Braun killed themselves. Heinz Linge had said Hitler was telling everyone he would do it for more than five days. Eva died of cyanide poisoning.

Hitler may have taken cyanide, but before the poison could take him, he fired one shot from his Walter PPK into his head. This was the inglorious end of one of history's greatest monsters. But that was not necessarily the end of the beliefs that fueled the actions of Hitler, the ones that drove him toward military conquest and mass genocide. Evil never just simply ends, especially not with the death of one man.

The legend of Hitler's escape is compelling. It's full of realistic possibilities and enough circumstantial evidence to make you wonder, to maybe even make you believe. But it didn't happen. There are too many conclusive tests, too many eyewitnesses, too many realities to erase the fantasy.

Yet, almost from the very moment questions were raised about Hitler's death, the idea of him being alive was used as inspiration to many. Neonazism immediately rose from the ashes of Hitler's hastily made funeral pyre. Historian Luke Daly Groves wrote about this: "Hitler's death is not about the death of one man, but carries a greater significance as to the end of the regime and the ideological impact it left behind.

And to be clear, not every person seeking the story behind the legend is doing it to keep Hitler's memory alive. Some are just seeking the truth. But Adolf Hitler died on April 30th, 1945. And maybe that truth can be used to fight the evil that still presses on in his name.

If we want to prevent the re-emergence of the darkness and evil that Hitler brought to the world, it will require cooperation between all nations. It will require all citizens of the world to coexist with and respect one another. It will require the end of hatred due to someone's race or religion. It will require the end of the hunger for money and the thirst for power.

I know what you're thinking. It sounds impossible. There will always be hatred and greed. It's human nature. And you know, you're right. It's human nature to want and it's human nature to fight. But I'm human and so are you. If we really want peace, it can start right here today with us.

Thank you so much for hanging out with me today. My name is AJ. This has been the Y-Files. If you had fun or learn anything, do me a favor, leave the podcast a nice review. That lets me know to keep making these things for you. And like most topics I cover on the Y-Files, today's was recommended by you. So if there's a story you'd like to learn more about, go to the Y-Files.com slash tips. And special thanks to our patrons who make the Y-Files possible. I dedicate every episode to you and I couldn't do this without your support.

So if you'd like to support the Y-Files, consider becoming a member on Patreon. For as little as $3 a month, you get all kinds of perks. You get early access to videos without commercials. You get first dibs on products like the Hagglefish Talking Plushie. You get special access on Discord. And you get two private live streams every week just for you. Plus, you help keep the Y-Files alive. Another great way to support is grab something from the Y-Files store.

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