There is nothing simpler, more fruitful and irreversible than lighting the fuse of conspiracy theories. This is demonstrated wonderfully by the fact that perhaps, and with the permission of the Neil Armstrong moon walkbe the mother of them all: the death of Adolf Hitler. Although there are recent research which show that the Fuehrer He passed away in 1945 with the help of a sip of cyanide and a bullet. Throughout the last three quarters of a century, stories have circulated, each one more outlandish than the other, placing him after May 1945 as—watch the list—a hermit in a remote italian cave, pastor in the Swiss Alps, croupier in a french casino, family man in Argentina or wandering around Ireland or Colombia.
One of these theories, however, is much closer to us.
And it aims for an escape worthy of Hollywood with a stop in Galicia.
A well studied death. In 2018 the coroner Philippe Charlier published in European Journal of Internal Medicine a study which aroused almost as much interest among historians and conspiracy theorists as among his own pathological colleagues. The reason: corroborated that Adolf Hitler died in 1945. The conclusion is valuable because between March and July 2017 Charlier and his colleagues achieved a milestone: the Russian secret services allowed them to analyze the supposed remains of the Fuehrer which are preserved in Moscow for independent examination.
Their study concludes, first, that the teeth are real because they could be identified thanks to complicated dental history of Hitler. Second, the remains show blue stains that indicate that their owner may have ingested cyanide to end his life. The researchers did not find traces of gunpowder, but they did analyze a skull fragment attributed to the Fuehrer with a hole in the left side, probably made by a bullet. Both data confirm the most accepted version about the death of the Nazi leader: Hitler died on April 30, 1945 in his bunker with Eva Braun after consuming cyanide and shooting himself.
End of the speculations, then? This is certainly true for Professor Charlier, who he even guaranteed to the AFP agency that he has no doubts about the authenticity of the teeth and that his study puts an end to any conspiracy theory. “Now we can stop them all. Hitler did not go to Argentina on a submarine, he is not hiding in a base in Antarctica or on the dark side of the Moon,” the coroner insisted: “Our study proves that he died in 1945.”
Of course, not everyone shares his conviction. Over the decades, theories have circulated that the Nazi leader managed to escape the bunker and the Soviet siege and started a new life in places as remote as northern Italy, the Swiss Alps, eastern France and of course Argentina, perhaps the version that has achieved the most popularity among conspiracy theorists.
Why’s that? Such conspiratorial fecundity is largely explained by the circumstances in which Hitler died and date back to 1945, practically the same day of his death. On May 1, 1945, Hamburg radio broadcast without going any further a version which is quite far from what is considered official today: the chain claimed that Hitler had fallen “fighting until his last breath” and with “the death of a hero.” Little to do with a suicide with cyanide and a gun. It didn’t take long for stories to spread about an alleged murder, a brain hemorrhage, euthanasia and of course a successful escape.
The end of Fuehrer did not help extinguish those stories. As the BBC remindshistory tells us that Hitler’s body was burned and ended up in a ditch in the Chancellery garden opened by a bomb. Soviet counter-surveillance agents found his body there shortly after, on May 5. The state of Fuehrer It was such at that time that, to identify him clearly, they decided to use his jaw. During the process they had the help Käthe Heusermannwho had served as Hitler’s dentist’s assistant. The remains were moved from one point to another until in 1970 it was decided to cremate them and throw their ashes.
Hitler on a walk through Galicia? At the root of the conspiracy theories surrounding the end of Hitler there is a lot of geostrategy and politics, such as explains to the BBC Luke Daly-Groves, a historian at the University of Leeds, who remembers that Stalin weakened his opponents every time he claimed that Hitler could have escaped to Spain or Argentina. “Their strategy was to associate the West with Nazism and make it appear that the British or Americans must be hiding it,” agrees Anthony Beevorauthor of ‘Berlin: the fall of 1945’. With that backdrop, one of the versions that is closest to us emerged: that the Fuehrer ended up in Galicia.
What it tells us such a theory is that after simulating his suicide Hitler managed to escape from the bunker, get on board a plane in the templehof airport and fly to Barcelona, from where he went to Galicia. Once in Vigo he managed to board a submarine and flee to Argentina, where he lived until 1960 and started a new life with Eva Braun. another version talks about how shortly after the episode of FührerbunkerIn May 1945, a German plane arrived in Lugo with Hitler on board. There are those who even goes further and places it in the monastery of Samos.
Worthy of Hollywood… and History Channel. True, the story may seem like something out of a book Dan Brown or the script of a Hollywood thriller with uchronic overtones, but Vigo’s theory has more preaching than it may seem a priori. Good proof is that a few years ago he starred in a History Channel documentary that was based, in turn, on 700 documents declassified by the FBI shortly before. There are variants about the supposed stay of the Fuehrer in Galician lands, but it is usually pointed out that he ended up getting on a submarine with which he managed to escape to the Canary Islands to reach his definitive refuge, in Argentina.
The historian Eduardo Rolland remember in GCiencia that the escape theory was fueled by a handwritten note from the same J. Edgar HooverFBI director: “U.S. military officials in Germany have not located Hitler’s body nor is there any reliable source that can say without a doubt that Hitler is dead. There is a possibility that he is alive.” To put together its Galician story, History Channel shows images of the Vigo estuary, the Samos monastery and A Coruña. In the first half of the 20th century Vigo had a large German community and are preserved parade photos with swastikas along its main streets.
Are they all conspiracy theories? For researchers like Philippe Charlier, what happened in 1945 leaves little room to stories like the one put together by the History Channel scriptwriters, but that does not mean that there were hierarchs and prominent figures of Nazism who did manage to circumvent the Soviet siege and the surveillance of the Allies to seek a new life away from the dreams of the Third Reich. A term with seafaring resonances has even been coined to refer to this phenomenon: ratlines. There is even talk of three well-organized and laid out routes to facilitate their escape: one Nordic, another Iberian and, the most popular, through Italy.
Their final destinations would be distributed among points as distant as the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, the Middle East and, above all, South America. There are even those who talk about an organization created to make their lives easier, ODESSA. Neither does Spain remained oblivious to the phenomenon, although it is one thing if there were Nazis who managed to find refuge on the Costa del Sol and another, quite different, that the “resurrected” Hitler himself came to taste Padrón peppers in a tavern in Vigo.
Cover image | Der Untergang
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