The Unexplained - Howard Hughes - Edition 160 - Did Hitler Escape?

June 7, 2014 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes

01:02:29

Edition 160 - Did Hitler Escape?

Journalist Gerrard Williams on the intensively researched story of Hitler's alleged escapefrom Germany to South America...

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	Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
	My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
	Well, summertime is pretty much here in the Northern Hemisphere.
	I know you're in the depths of winter in the Southern Hemisphere, but the weather's changing.
	Interesting to see in the news today as I record this.
	We're being told that more serious rain events will be happening in the United Kingdom.
	You might remember that I told you about the winter here that was pretty mild, but incredibly wet with a lot of flooding.
	We're being told now that in the future we can expect more of that.
	All part of climate change, maybe?
	Or just the regular cycle of weather and climate?
	Who knows?
	Maybe it's climate change.
	It's certainly starting to look like it, isn't it?
	Now this time around we have a guest, another one that you've suggested, so please keep your guest suggestions coming because you know that I act on them.
	This is one that a number of you emailed me about and something that when I read what you were talking to me about, I had to get straight on to.
	So we'll get into a fascinating guest and an amazing topic coming very soon.
	Thank you to Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his hard work on the website.
	And the website is w dot theunexplained.tv.
	www.theunexplained.tv.
	It's the one-stop shop.
	If you want to make contact with me, tell me what you think of the shows and how they're going.
	Make guest suggestions.
	Increasingly, I'm doing more of your guest suggestions and I find them really useful.
	Thank you.
	And I really find the things that you write to me useful.
	Please keep your feedback coming.
	And also at the website, you can make a donation to the show if you'd like to.
	There's a PayPal link there.
	Now, this time round, we talked to a man called Gerard Williams.
	He and a man called Simon Dunstan were behind a book called Grey Wolf, detailing the supposed escape of Adolf Hitler, codenamed Grey Wolf, at the back end of the war.
	You may have heard, and you may believe, that he died at his own hand, along with Ava Braun, in the bunker in Berlin, when it seemed that defeat was certain.
	And then his body and her body were taken outside, doused in petrol, and burned to be unrecognizable.
	Apparently, says Gerard Williams, who I'm about to speak to and who you recommended, that's not so.
	Now, this man is not just somebody who's an amateur conspiracy theorist.
	He is an accomplished journalist.
	He's worked at some of the places that I've worked in London.
	He's been an editor and a journalist, radio and television.
	He's got a great pedigree.
	And also, he took some persuading, as we will hear, to do this.
	So we're going to get to Gerard Williams at his home in France in just a moment here at The Unexplained.
	Thank you very much for all of your support.
	Please keep it coming.
	Thank you for the nice things that you said.
	I will do some shout-outs in the next edition of The Unexplained.
	But please know that we are a small part of the alternative independent media.
	And increasingly, the traditional mainstream media is dying in front of you.
	I take no pleasure in saying this, but the models that are being used by the traditional media, both audible and visual media, are old models.
	And they're all about milking whatever profit they can from these old models.
	But the people behind the existing media know that things are changing and there's a whole other industry out there developing.
	I don't want to call it really an industry.
	Sector out there developing.
	And I'm just a little tiny part of that machine.
	There are many of us out there now.
	And we're using our own funds and our own methods of communication.
	And we're reaching you with material that the mainstream media may not be willing or able to present before you.
	Okay, enough of my sermonizing for now.
	Sorry for that.
	But I think these things have to be said.
	We're doing something important here, I think.
	And you're supporting me in this.
	And thank you very, very much from the bottom of my heart.
	Let's get to northern France now.
	Gerard Williams, the man behind the Grey Wolf project about the escape of Adolf Hitler and what became of him and Ava Braun in South America after the war.
	Gerard Williams, thank you for coming on The Unexplained.
	My pleasure, Howard.
	Nice to be here.
	And I know that you're in France.
	I believe that you're in the north of France.
	Tell me more about where you are.
	I'm in a little town in the north of France, not very far from the Euro Tunnel, really, about an hour and 20 on a straight road.
	And you know, it's so close.
	I think my American listeners won't appreciate this.
	But from Kent, which is not that far from London, France is incredibly close.
	And yet when you cross the channel, if you go under the tunnel or you take a boat, you step off that boat, suddenly you are unmistakably in another country, literally and in every other way.
	Very much so.
	Very much so.
	And a very nice country.
	The people here are very friendly.
	The weather is very similar to the UK, so it's never any good, or rarely any good.
	But apart from that, the food is good, the wine is excellent, and the people are nice.
	Right.
	Well, I don't think you can say any fairer than that.
	Now, for our technically-minded listeners, we have to say that the best way we can make this connection is via a laptop.
	So we can hear you very clearly.
	But I know some people who hear these things are incredibly critical and want to know the ins and outs of everything.
	I personally think the content is more important than any minor technical problems, but there's a little bit of hum in the background.
	I don't think it's a problem, and I would like to continue with this.
	And that just explains that for those people who might make that point to me later, Gerard.
	That's fine, Poward.
	No problems whatsoever.
	We are both journalists, and I know that we both, checking your biography, worked for Independent Radio News in London at different times.
	So we both have a radio background.
	I'm much more of a TV journalist, I must admit.
	I've worked for Reuters Television for much of my career, foreign juicy editor at the BBC and at APTV and for various networks around the world.
	But yes, I have done my time in radio and loved every minute of it.
	Well, I think the one thing to be said about radio, Gerard, is that, and I've done television voiceovers.
	That's about the limit of the television work that I've ever done.
	Television involves a lot of people, and you do, you're slightly more pampered than you are in radio.
	There are more people to look after you.
	But I think if you want direct control over your product, then radio has to be the way to go.
	Probably very true.
	I don't think that as a Reuters field producer or duty editor, I was ever pampered in any way, shape, or form, having visited most of the unpleasant parts of the world of the 20th century.
	But I do know what you mean about pampered presenters, Howard.
	Well, I think it still goes on even in these straightened times, Gerard.
	Now let's get to the subject of you and the reason why you felt that you needed to research a subject that has been researched and written about more than most others, that is the death and what subsequently became of one Adolf Hitler, the most evil man of his times.
	Well, it's a long story, but it all started out when I was doing documentaries in Argentina.
	I'd gone on to make long-form documentaries for various networks after deciding I was simply too old to go and do Baghdad again as a TV journalist.
	So I thought I'd do something a little more interesting, a little more fun.
	Shot some documentaries in Kenya and Albania, and then had never been to South America, Latin America.
	So decided to start with A, and that took me to Argentina.
	While I was in Argentina, I came across numerous stories that Adolf Hitler and many other Nazis had survived the war and had gone to live there.
	And in 30-something years as a journalist, I had never done a silly film or a silly story or a conspiracy story.
	So originally, I was simply going to do a half-hour rather silly conspiracy theory about a man with a moustache who came to Argentina on a submarine and died there many years later.
	It was only when I started to look at the contemporaneous reporting around Hitler's death and how different that was to what we'd always been told by Hugh Trevor Roper, basically, that it began to dawn on me that the story we'd been told wasn't the real story at all.
	I then contacted my friend and colleague and co-writer Simon Dunstan, who's a military historian.
	And Simon's first reaction to this was, I'm not doing this book, Gerald.
	It's ridiculous.
	And I also spoke to a number of senior journalist friends of mine.
	They said, don't do it.
	You'll ruin your reputation.
	But the more we discovered and the more we dug into it, the more convinced both Simon and I became that we were uncovering or rediscovering, I think is a better way of putting it, the real story of what happened to Adolf Hitler.
	And of course, Gerard, you were walking into a minefield, and as journalists, we both have been aware of this because of many reasons, but one of them being the famous Hitler diaries that were published by the Sunday Times in the UK and subsequently found to be a complete fake.
	So this territory is dangerous territory.
	Yes, it is dangerous territory.
	And interestingly, the diaries, of course, were validated by Hugh Trevor Roper himself, the man who wrote the death of Hitler.
	Yes, yes.
	And it was an enormous embarrassment and a great financial cost.
	I know it's another generation.
	It's what is it, 30 years ago now, 25 years ago.
	But nevertheless, it muddies the waters and it would make one disinclined to go into an area like this, unless, of course, you have a very, very good case to put.
	Well, sadly, Howard, I'm a journalist and have been since I was 19.
	I covered most of the major international news stories of the 20th century, and I happened to be tenacious in my research.
	And as we researched further and further into this and spoke with eyewitnesses to Hitler's presence in Argentina, we traveled back and forth to Argentina 18 times to research this book, spent a huge amount of our own money doing it.
	We were also originally producing a docudrama, which has just been released in the UK and I hope will be released in the United States very shortly.
	It just became a story that really needed telling.
	We have the eyewitness account of the pilot who flew them out of Berlin on the 29th or the evening of the 29th.
	Eyewitnesses of SS officer on the ground in Denmark where the plane landed.
	We have over a dozen people who saw Hitler and interacted with him in Argentina after the war.
	The Americans recently discovered, well, in the last four or five years, discovered that the pieces of the skull that the Russians have held for such a long time are actually those of a woman, some age over 40.
	It's not even a man's skull.
	So it can't be Adolf Hitler's skull and it can't be Ebert Brand's skull because she was 26 at the time.
	And from what I know of access to those particular fragments, a lot of fuss and bother was connected with actually getting access to those fragments.
	The holders of them, the Russians, wasn't it, they didn't want to let them go.
	No, they didn't.
	And they're held by the FSB, which is the nowadays what used to be the KGB.
	But Martin Benananke, who was a DNA expert from America, managed to get in, I think, with the History Channel.
	And he managed to take DNA swabs from the skull and also from the blood-stained sofa, or parts of the blood-stained sofa that allegedly came out of the bunker as well.
	So pretty compelling.
	Now, many stories, as journalists, we discover an inkling of what has been going on at the source.
	In other words, in this case, it would be Berlin, it would be Germany.
	And we work our way out to the destination, which is Argentina.
	But from the sounds of this story, you began to pick up the threads of this in Argentina and work back to Germany.
	Yes, I think that was very true.
	There's some very interesting material written in the 40s and the 50s in Argentine, Spanish, which talks about the Nazis being in Argentina and the level of their involvement with the Perons.
	Juan Perón and the Blessed Vita of media creation were both members of the Abwehr, the German security apparatus in Argentina from 1940.
	The Nazis actually funded the coup by the colonels in Argentina that put Perón eventually into power.
	So it's also incredibly Germanic parts of Argentina, especially the area around Baraloche.
	Well, I was going to say there does seem to always have been a certain amount of admiration for the Nazis, for their uniforms, for the grandeur of their ceremony, for the rigor of their organization.
	Yes, I think you have to go back a little further in Patagonia.
	The bottom half of South America, or the bottom third of South America, Patagonia, which is shared by Chile and Argentina, was a major destination for Germans from about the 1860s, 1870s on.
	After World War I, after the Versailles Treaty when Germany lost all its overseas territories.
	The one place they didn't lose was Patagonia because it wasn't their territory.
	But in effect, it was a de facto colony.
	When Hitler came to power in the 30s, there was a lot of support for him from the German diaspora overseas, both in the United States and in places like Argentina.
	But Argentina was interesting because it was the only country in the world that had its own Nazi party, complete with swallicker device.
	We have fascinating footage from the 1930s of Argentina of the Nazi enclaves all over the country, and a huge rally of Luna Park in Buenos Aires, which is, I mean, there are lunar parks all over the world, but like a massive stadium.
	And it looks exactly like something out of Nuremberg.
	So the infrastructure and the support and the money was there, very much so.
	So, which is why, I mean, originally our research showed that somewhere close to 30,000 European fascists, that's Croats, Scandinavian fascists, plus obviously a huge number of Germans made it out via the rat lines to Argentina after the war.
	Our current research shows that figure to be closer to 100,000 people.
	And there are still villages, if you believe what you see on YouTube, rather shaky footage, that look like bits of Bavaria.
	Oh, no, there are whole areas of Argentina that look like Bavaria.
	I mean, I've woken up in San Carlos de Borroloce, gone outside for my morning coffee, walked past the estate agents, which will be in both German and Spanish, past the German school, past the various beer Kellers and German restaurants that are there, and you could convince yourself very quickly that you were in Bavaria.
	The same is true of quite a lot of larger towns up in the north, in Cordoba.
	So if Adolf Hitler or the people around him had been looking for somewhere that resembled his beloved mountain retreat where he planned most of his work, most of his deeds, then he would be well placed in Argentina.
	Very much so.
	I mean, it would have been, I suppose, similar if Britain had lost the war in 1940.
	If Winston Churchill and the Royal Family had decided to leave, they would have probably headed for somewhere like Canada, Australia, or New Zealand, where they would be at home and could pretty much blend into the background.
	And that was true for the Nazis in Argentina.
	They could blend into the background.
	But they were also welcomed.
	Perron saw them as potentially a major technological force to help him push Argentina onto the world stage.
	They went there and developed jet fighters for Peron and nuclear fusion plants, which didn't actually work, again, around San Carlos de Baraloche, and a huge number of other advances, technical advances that they brought out of Germany after the war.
	There are also people at the more conspiracy end of the scale who say that esoteric technology went with the Nazis to Argentina, that the kind of thing that we believe are UFOs and teleportation, all that sort of stuff, the Germans were working on that and it went out there.
	Well, yeah, I can find no source to that at all any more than I can find a reasonable source to say that there were Nazi UFO bases in the Antarctic or on the moon.
	Do you know anything about a thing called the so-called Nazi Bell?
	I do know about the Bell, yes, but to me it looks like another one of those Nazi technologies that was simply experimented with and looked at, but went nowhere.
	I think the truth of it is that they were just engineering to an incredibly high level.
	London felt the effects of that, of course, with the flying bombs that they developed, and that subsequently became the NASA space program with Werner von Braun.
	So they were just at a very high level of engineering.
	I think there are some really interesting things that have been covered up about the Nazis at the end of the war.
	One of them is their atomics.
	And I'm pretty sure they had tried and tested atomic weapons at the end of the war, just in the last months of the war, actually.
	Well, probably first of the Battle of Kursk in 1943.
	And if Hitler had got that technology and had been able to use it, and we've all seen the heroes of Telemark and various other bits of fiction and non-fiction about this, but if he'd been able to get his hands on that technology earlier, it would have been a game changer.
	Yes, it would have been.
	But I don't think that, or my researchers anyway, haven't led me anywhere near the esoteric side of Nazi Germany.
	Well, let's talk about this fascinating story then, and that is the story we have been fed since the end of the war, that Hitler didn't want to be found or captured, didn't want his body to be put on display like Mussolini's body had been put on display, wanted to make sure that he was dead, and so was Eva Braun, and it was not possible for anybody to display anything.
	Hence the story we get, and you see it in the movie Downfall and in other places, that in the bunker, he decides the game's over, goes behind a closed door, and the pair of them shoot themselves dead, are then taken outside by some loyal troops.
	A number of cans of petrol are deployed, and their bodies are burned to ash.
	Yes, it's interesting.
	And Trevor Oper quotes Gunscher, one of the SS people in the bunker with them, as saying exactly that story.
	If you go and have a look at an issue of In Town Tonight, an old BBC black and white program from 1955, you'll find Gunscher saying that Hitler's body was actually buried in a mass grave near the bunker.
	Completely different story to the one that Hugh Trevor Oper said he said.
	So you can go along with that.
	The BBC reporter, Howard, who arrived at the bunker with the Russians when they took the complex, said they found no body that could have been Hitler's.
	A KGB officer, or NKVD it was in those days, said that they had found an escape tunnel from Hitler's personal quarters in the Chancellery, which led down into the UBAN, the underground system in Berlin.
	We have, as I said earlier, the testimony of a pilot who picked them up and flew them out in a JU-52, the Iron Annie aircraft, from the Hocken Zollendam in Berlin, which is a very wide, very wide street, very long street, which bisects virtually Berlin.
	And interestingly enough, we have aerial photographs at the time, Allied aerial photos, which show an area of that being cleared right near the underground station where we believe Hitler, Eva, and Hermann Fegelein all managed to come out of.
	They were then flown to the Imperial Zeppelin, former Imperial Zeppelin base at Tonga in Denmark, where they were picked up by another aircraft and we believe flown to Travomunda.
	And from Travermunde, they used a JU-252, which is a much bigger, much more long-distance aircraft, to fly down to Spain.
	We have reports at every part of that story from people on the ground who say they either saw Hitler or saw senior Nazis arriving in a major aircraft down near Barcelona, an airfield called Reus.
	We believe they were then taken onto the island of Fuerta Ventura, which there was a Nazi base there from the early 1940s, were picked up by three submarines, spent 53 days submerged under snorkel, under the water, before arriving on the coast of Argentina.
	It sounds like an amazing piece of organization.
	It sounds like the kind of thing that may well have happened.
	A lot of people would be skeptical, but I think those people would have to build into this scenario here that this is the chaos at the back end of the war.
	And it was chaos.
	Europe was in ruins.
	People who perhaps might have noticed that, well, their attention was deflected elsewhere at that time.
	Also, the Nazis were very close with Alan Dulles of OSS.
	They'd been friends with him from before the war and various other high-ranking Americans, bankers and industrialists.
	I mean, for instance, IBM were intimately involved in the Holocaust.
	ITT owned 25% of the Focke-Wolt aircraft company.
	Chase Van Hatten funded the Nazi Party before the war.
	The list is endless, sadly, and horrible.
	So it wasn't just them escaping.
	They were enabled to escape and they were helped in their escape in return for things like Werner von Braun and his technology by members of what became known under Kennedy and Eisenhower as the military-industrial complex in America.
	So this is further fuel to the fire that I've heard other guests tell me on this program.
	That people in this country knew about this, the Americans knew about this, and this was something that was done in the way of a deal, because there were benefits to be gained, and a transition to a more stable post-war Europe was possible if this happened, and that was facilitated by Hitler being allowed to go.
	Yes, and Martin Bormann being allowed to go and them taking or transferring enough money out of the country and patents and various other bits of technology, which eventually came back into Germany to provide Germany with what became known as the West German economic miracle.
	There's nothing miraculous about West Germany's economic state after the war.
	They simply had more capital available because they'd moved it out of the country beforehand.
	So Goebbels was found dead.
	Was he a sacrificial lamb in all of this?
	Again, I don't really have any idea why Magda and Joseph killed their children and then killed themselves in the bunker.
	I think there were probably too many of them to try and get out, and possibly Magda didn't want to leave her children.
	But their bodies were found and identified and photographed and filmed by the Soviets when they came in.
	And although they had been burnt with petrol as well, the bodies were still completely recognizable.
	The children's bodies were not harmed at all.
	They were just found in the bunker itself.
	But I'm not sure about Goebbels why they would have chosen suicide.
	Possibly because they wanted to make it look like they were all killing themselves at the time, and you don't chase dead people.
	And that would be the ultimate sacrifice for the Führer?
	Yes, I think very definitely.
	And Magda Goebbels was virtually the Nazi first lady anyway.
	There's even various rumors which came from senior members of the Nazi party circle that Hitler had fathered a child with her.
	So maybe she was doing it as a final gesture for her Fuhrer.
	People who would do anything for the man they saw as the great man.
	You tell me that you have testimony from every link in this chain.
	When you say testimony at this length of time, is that firsthand?
	Is that secondhand?
	How have you got that?
	Some of it's firsthand, some of it's on tape from interviews that were carried out by other people, and they've allowed us to access those.
	Some of them I have interviewed personally myself and others are newspaper reports by the Associated Press, Reuters, which have appeared in the Times and newspapers all over the world, Time magazine reports from the period as well, or by people and organizations that I have either worked for or have always considered as being pretty impeccable sources, especially in those days.
	So we're talking about the ultimate deception here, but not the ultimate deception that you may have assumed, the ultimate deception of the Allied powers.
	In fact, this was the ultimate deception of right-thinking people here after the war.
	We were all fed a story because it was a convenient story and allowed Europe to progress.
	In the meantime, we got something that helped us with that progression, and Hitler got himself away.
	And not just Hitler.
	I mean, if you actually have a look at how many high-ranking Nazis were executed, I mean, apart from the inner circle, people like Goebbels who killed himself, Himmler, who did kill himself, I think, yes, and Goering, who killed himself.
	Not very many other major Nazis were ever executed.
	Speer got away with it, for God's sake.
	And interestingly enough, at Nuremberg, Martin Bormann was tried in absentia, charged with crimes against humanity, and charged with in absentia and found guilty because they hadn't found Bormann's body.
	But they hadn't found Hitler's body either at the time, and yet he was not charged with any crime at all.
	And something from my boyhood, of course, Rudolf Hess, alone in Spandau prison for all of those years.
	I wonder if he knew anything.
	I think Hess was out of the picture because when he flown to Britain in, what, 1941, he wouldn't have been party, I don't think, to any of the negotiations that were going on.
	He was pretty much a busted flush.
	So he wouldn't have been getting back-channel information, even though he was here.
	I wouldn't have thought so.
	I wouldn't have thought so.
	But again, I don't know.
	It's not an area that I've looked thoroughly into.
	Let's zero in then on this chain of escape, starting in the bunker and then an underground tunnel.
	Let's forensically unpick it.
	Right, there's no tunnel from the bunker.
	The tunnel is behind a concrete sliding panel in Hitler's private quarters in the Reich Chancellery next door to the bunker.
	And what evidence of that do we have?
	We have that being discovered by Soviet troops when they took the bunker and chancellery complex.
	And there's a detailed report by a major nicotine of old names published in Time magazine at the time.
	So that was there for a reason.
	Yes, well, it was an escape tunnel from his personal quarters.
	That's pretty compelling in itself.
	Well, it would be pretty compelling.
	I mean, my understanding is that the exit to that tunnel is still down there in the underground.
	But of course, none of the chancery exists anymore.
	So from there, what happens?
	From there, they walk through the underground system for about six kilometers, and then they come up at an underground station, which is right next door to the Hocken Zollendam, which is this major big road running through Berlin.
	There, waiting for them is a JU-52 piloted by Captain Peter Baumgart, who seems to also hold SS rank as well as Luftwaffe rank, which probably means he's part of KG-200, which was their Special Forces Air Division.
	And from there, they're flown out of Berlin.
	They have to land at Magdeburg, but not the Magdeburg on the other side of the Rhine, which is in control of the American army at that stage.
	They land at a former Luftwaffe base at Magdeburg.
	And then they take off, supposedly, according to Peter Gamgart, under fire from American artillery and fly on to Denmark, where other planes are waiting for them.
	So they were under fire, but they would have been under fire from people who didn't realize what was going on.
	Almost definitely.
	People just shutting an airfield.
	Now, all of Baumgart's testimony appears in Reuter reports and AP reports from Poland in 1947, where he was being tried for being a member of the SS.
	There was another Peter Baumgart who actually was at Auschwitz, but not this Peter Baumgart.
	Baumgart came out with this story of the trial with incredible detail, and the judge thought that he was mad, so he sent him away for six months of psychiatric testing.
	They brought him back, declared him completely sane, and he gave even more details in his trial of how he'd flown them out and who was on the plane and what happened.
	This is all reported by the AP and Reuses at the time.
	Baumgart is then jailed for being a member of the SS and is released in 1951.
	In our original book, Grey Wolf, the Escape of Adolf Hitler, we could find no trace of him from 1951.
	But a researcher, a friend of mine in America, has now found the TWA manifests for the two days after Baumgart's release.
	And he is being sent to America as a passenger, and his destination is the State Department.
	We can't find him after that, but I think he may well have been given what was called a person shine, where his history was completely expunged, and he was given a new identity in America post-war.
	Well, we know the Americans can do that.
	The Americans did it with a huge number of people.
	I mean, thousands of rocket scientists under Van Avon Braun, technicians, people who had practiced their medicine at Auschwitz and Dachau and went on to become accepted members of the American establishment, which is very sad considering that Truman said nobody who had ever been a member of the Nazi party would ever work for the American government.
	But everybody was compromised.
	There was a process, and I studied it years ago when I studied German politics, of denazification after the war.
	The idea being to keep Nazis out of public positions.
	Then, of course, the Germans realized, the West Germans realized, and the East Germans, that they couldn't keep these people out of important positions because they had the capability, they had the knowledge, and it simply, on a practical level, wasn't possible.
	So everybody was left compromised after the war.
	Yeah, denazification is a complete myth.
	I mean, it simply never happened.
	So this man with his testimony, and I want to just bring you...
	Sorry, Howard.
	And Bormann was actually meeting with them in the 1940s, late 1940s in Madrid.
	We've got detailed intelligence reports of this.
	Good Lord.
	And this testimony that essentially said that Hitler had escaped, and it was published, it did appear.
	People listening to this would say, well, that sounds so unlikely.
	If something is put in the public domain, then people get to hear about it.
	But you and I know how enormous news stories sometimes appear in the small print of newspapers and they escape.
	They might return bigger or they might just disappear.
	But they escape and they get through the wire, the fence.
	Because people don't understand what they mean.
	And perhaps at the time, nobody really understood what this meant.
	People just thought this was the testimony of a raving man and it was just part of the fog of that period after the war.
	That's right.
	And if we hadn't had the testimony of a wounded SS officer on the ground at Tonder in Denmark, who actually saw Hitler and Ava arrive, I might have put it down to being, well, not the raving testimony of a madman because he was psychiatrically tested in Poland extensively.
	But I might have put it down to some sort of fantasist.
	But when you find a corroborative testimony as well, it's quite difficult to put it down as raving.
	So they arrive in Denmark and they are looked after from there.
	Yes, they're then flown in another JU-52, which Baumgart describes as leaving, to, we believe, Travermunde, where Hitler's personal pilot Bauer has been preparing a number of long-range aircraft for Nazis to escape in.
	Sadly, for them, I think it's the Royal Canadian Air Force flying typhoons at the time.
	Rocket-firing typhoons destroy a number of these on the ground.
	And the only one that's left is a JU-252, which is big enough to fly well above the ceiling of most Allied fighters and in a pressurized cabin and have the legs to actually make it to Spain without any problems.
	And in terms of dates, where are we now?
	This is roughly.
	Yeah, this is May the 1st, May the 1st, May the 2nd, 1940.
	And so the rest of the world is thinking, you know, effectively, Ding Dong, the Witch is dead.
	And all of this is going on because we're all looking somewhere else.
	Well, the rest of the world isn't actually thinking Ding Dong the Witch is red.
	Marshal Zhukov, who's in command of Soviet forces in Berlin, says they found no trace of him, that he believes he may have escaped, that there was an airfield at his disposal.
	Stalin is saying that he believes he's in Spain or Argentina just weeks later.
	The BBC report, which I think I sent you, Howard, which you have, from Thomas Cadet, says they have found no bodies at the bunker.
	Eisenhower is saying his Russian friends have told him they have not found Hitler and that he may well, they don't know where he is.
	He's very careful about his choice of words, Eisenhower.
	But so the Germans have said that he's dead.
	It's been announced on radio in Germany that the Fuhrer has died fighting at the side of his troops in Berlin against the Soviets.
	But it's only later that Hugh Trevor Roper grabs all these interviews, most of which actually never happened.
	Trevor Roper did not interview, for instance, Hannah Reich, the famous pilot.
	He was not allowed access.
	Hannah Reich was in US custody at the time.
	He was allowed access to a limited amount of her interrogation reports from the Americans.
	Trevor Roper also interviewed the Luftwaffe adjutant in the bunker von Bulow.
	I think it's von Bulow, if my memory serves me correctly.
	And von Bulo, after the war, was regularly quoted as saying he laughed every time he read or saw Trevor Opa's account reported because he lied to the man.
	Wow.
	So, next phase of this escape, Denmark to Spain.
	Yes, Denmark to Spain, an airfield outside of Barcelona, well, 80 kilometers south of Barcelona, a military airfield called Reus, where we have, at the time, that part of the world is very much controlled by Franco's fascists.
	But we have reports published in the Daily Express of a huge aircraft landing with senior Nazis on board within that timeframe.
	That aircraft is then dismantled, so they can deny it ever happened, and the people on board are flown south on another aircraft.
	Again, probably a JU-52 in Spanish Air Force markings.
	And this aircraft that is destroyed, surely some of it remains somewhere?
	Difficult to know.
	I mean, I think that they wanted complete deniability, the Spanish.
	And of course, nobody wanted it known that Hitler was flying away, was getting away.
	So the next stage is what?
	Fuerventura, you said?
	Yes, the island of Fuerventura, where you can actually see, if you go on Google Earth, you can actually see the runway built by the Nazis in the 1940s at the end of the island.
	They go to a German house called Villa Winter, which again is still there.
	And from there, we think they're picked up by three U-boats from the final wolf pack of the Second World War.
	It's an operation called Sea Wolf.
	Now, the US Navy say they sank two out of three of them.
	Well, actually, the US Navy say they sank all three.
	One of them actually surrendered in Buenos Aires, well, not in Buenos Aires, in Mada Plata, about five months later.
	So that one hadn't been sunk.
	And the British Navy, the Royal Navy, described the sinking reports as some of the dodgiest of the war.
	So we don't believe they were sunk.
	We believe they actually were diverted by special message from Bormann to pick Hitler and his party up went to Ventura.
	What the Wolfpack had done was draw the Allies, mainly the Americans, up out of the South Atlantic, into the North Atlantic to go chasing them and to defend the eastern seaboard of the United States, because they were worried that there were V weapons on board these U-boats and that they were going to be fired at cities on the eastern seaboard,
	which saw reported in the Time at the time, New York Times, Chicago, Herald-Tribune, wherever, the threat of the V-1 weapons against the eastern seaboard of the United States was taken very seriously indeed.
	This is an amazing story.
	Now, you told me that Hitler spent, was it, 53 days underwater?
	Perhaps I got that figure wrong?
	No, 53 days underwater.
	A submarine, especially at Mark 9, can travel quite quickly above water, but submerged, where it's running pretty much on battery, even with a snorkel to help it, it's a slow thing, and it's quite a long, long trek from the Canaries across to Argentina.
	So it would have taken them 53 days.
	Talk to me about the quality of evidence and testimony about this part of his escape, the submarine part.
	The submarine part is much more difficult for us to completely verify.
	It's the obvious way that he got out.
	And what we have, it's a difficult one, this, because you have a situation.
	It's like chasing a hunted, wounded animal.
	You'll find a trace here and a trace over there, but you won't know what it did in the middle.
	What we have off the coast of Argentina is dozens of reports from the Coast Guard and the Argentine Navy of U-boat activity off the coast, of landings at the coast, of landings, one particular one at Nacotchia, which is where we're pretty sure Hitler came in, where it was seen, the boats were seen landing, police arrived, they tried to get onto an Argentine, German-owned Argentine estate, and they were held off by men with automatic weapons, with submachine guns.
	And the reports were made to go away, and then they were found by various extremely good Argentine researchers who published books on German submarine activity off the coast of Argentina in the 1940s.
	And any testimony credible from people who may have come into contact with Hitler and perhaps had some kind of dialogue with him?
	I'm just trying to get an idea if we get any sense of the demeanor of the man at that point.
	The first sighting, he's on a ranch just outside San Carlos de Baraloche, which is a German-known ranch.
	It's owned by the Schamburg-Lieper family at the time, who are basically the Nazi consuls in Chile and in Buenos Aires, and also cousins of Prince Ben Hart of the Netherlands.
	But that takes us somewhere else.
	And for instance, a television crew was there in the 1990s because they'd heard this story well before I had, about Hitler having lived on this ranch.
	And they just drove into the ranch and were filming a house.
	And the lady came over to them and said, what are you filming?
	And they said, oh, we're filming the house where Hitler lived.
	And she said, no, you're not.
	It's been pulled down.
	It was over there.
	And she pointed to the place where it was.
	And she had been, her mother had been the housekeeper on the ranch during the 1940s.
	And she'd fed the family, Hitler and Ava, who was joined later by their daughter, Ushi, who was about six at the time.
	And they were then all told that the family had died in a car crash outside of the ranch at the end of 1945, in sometime in the early 1946.
	So there were attempts to close the story down even there.
	But we then had later detailed testimonies from people who had either waited on him, had met him.
	And two of my witnesses in Argentina received death threats while we were out there, which made me think even more strongly about the story, because why do you threaten people in their 80s with death if they've got nothing reasonable to say?
	And of course, we never paid any witnesses, you'd know that.
	You never pay somebody you're interviewing.
	No, because you're not doing anybody a service by doing that.
	This, of course, indicates, doesn't it, that there are loyalists still around and there is still, as we know, an underbelly of this far-right business that went on in wartime.
	One of our ladies who was threatened was told that the Gestapo are still active and that she would be killed unless she stopped dealing with us.
	On any level, are you frightened?
	No.
	That sounds massively brave of me, which it isn't.
	I have been extremely frightened in my life.
	I was cruise missiled in Baghdad by the Americans, and that felt very personal.
	I've been threatened by Bosnian Serb warlords.
	I've been on death lists in various countries, all because of my reporting, which has always made me think I was doing a good job that people were threatening me.
	But no, we haven't been threatened.
	I think that it's easier for the people who are still interested or have an interest in this are quite either very big corporations who have Nazi money behind them or the German government still.
	And they would rather see me dismissed as some sort of conspiracy theory nutter.
	Well, not just me, Simon, as well.
	And you can see in various reviews that have been posted on Amazon and things like that, where people have tried to completely and totally destroy our evidence.
	But the problem with you is that your pedigree is a bit too good.
	You're not just somebody who's decided, you know, you've had another career doing something else and you've suddenly decided, well, I'm coming up for retirement, so I'm going to write a conspiracy theory book.
	Your background is journalism.
	A little way off retirement just yet.
	You know, your background is journalism.
	No, I'm not some spotty 16-year-old who sits up in his bedroom and makes up internet theories.
	We walk the ground.
	Simon went to Twitter Ventura and walked the ground there.
	We've been in America.
	We spent months at the National Archives in the UK.
	We have been to Argentina 18 times, walked all the sites of interest, as well as interviewed as many people as we possibly could.
	And we have been down hundreds of dead ends, Howard.
	I'll give you a great example.
	I was told that there was the remains of a Nazi U-boat off the coast of Chile.
	And I was shown a picture, and I showed this picture to two submarine experts in the UK.
	And they said, yep, that looks like a U-boat to us.
	So I flew to Chile and met the man who had dived on the boat, who said, yes, he thought it was a submarine, and he brought up a small chest of gold from it.
	And so we went over a thousand miles down the coast of Chile to see this submarine wreck and took a boat out and had a look at it.
	And it looked to me like the remains of a very large submarine.
	I took hundreds of photos, sent them to three U-boat experts in Britain.
	One of whom worked for the Ministry of Defense said, yes, it looks World War II vintage.
	It could be Italian.
	The other one who had also worked for the MOD said, yes, it looks like a submarine to me, but I would need to see more pictures.
	And the third one, who I ended up working a great deal with on this project, said, do you think it might be a triple expansion steam engine from the 1870s?
	And I said, I don't know.
	So I then spent, I actually got a diver to go down and pull up some copper off the wreck.
	Had that copper tested by Oxford University's head of metallurgy, who said that the copper had been made in Anglesey in 1850-something, probably.
	And then I checked into the Lloyd Solis records and everything else, and a British clipper called the John Elder had gone down off the Puetwytha in the 1860s, complete loss of life, and it was powered by a triple expansion steam engine.
	Oh, dear.
	Well, more than oh, dear, because that cost you a lot of money and a lot of time, I'd guess.
	We were talking, I don't know, $4,000 to chase down Oli.
	More than I've earned from the book.
	God, well, yes, up to now.
	Up to now, Gerard.
	That's not why it was written, Howard, anyway.
	But it's the ability to be able to filter out the things that are wrong in the story and keep in the things that are correct.
	That's where you score, isn't it?
	Because at least you found that out.
	There would be other people who'd be publishing that as fact.
	Yes, completely.
	And people have published it as fact all the time.
	I mean, at one stage on the internet, you would find Captain Peter Baumgart's story originating in a newspaper in Chile in 1947.
	But it's a Reuters dispatch.
	So newspapers all over the world published it.
	I have it from the Sydney Morning Herald.
	I have it from the Times in London.
	I have it from various Italian dailies at the time.
	People publish Reuters reports, agency Reports all over the world.
	But it had been this Chilean one, which was supposedly the original.
	It had been Chilean journalism that had found it, but it wasn't.
	So, yes, it's been a fascinating and pretty tiring journey in some ways.
	And when did that journey end for you?
	It hasn't.
	You're still researching this.
	We're writing a second book called The Spider's Web, which we had yet to get a publisher for.
	Our publisher in America was very concerned, a publisher of Grey Wolf was very concerned, or the legal department were, that we would be offending the wrong sort of people, including the Vatican Church.
	And they were worried that their Barnes and Noble bookstores might get burnt down by rampaging Catholics after we had exposed Pius XII for being the Nazi supporter that he was.
	So it's quite difficult to get a publisher for the second book because it contains, we follow the money, you know, we follow the money and follow the politics in book two.
	And there are a lot of people who are thought of as being major figures in the American establishment, major figures for good, who aren't and definitely weren't and should be vilified as traitors to the real American world.
	Are you ready for the kind of backlash that you might face when this comes out?
	I was born ready, Howard.
	No, I don't mean that funnily.
	Yes, I'm ready for the sort of backlash.
	I mean, when we published Grey Wolf, Grey Wolf for me is an honest piece of journalism, an honest piece of history from Simon.
	But we have been called everything, from Holocaust deniers to Nazi supporters.
	I'm somebody who's seen fascism on the ground in real life, and I hate it with a vengeance.
	My father was a combat fashion in World War II.
	On what level could you be called a Nazi supporter?
	I have no idea, but you'd be amazed at what people say.
	I suppose for propounding the story and for suggesting that this man was clever enough to get up.
	I don't think this man was clever enough.
	I think Martin Bormann was incredibly clever.
	Very evil, but very clever.
	And, I mean, the book details that it's not really...
	That continued post-war, even though Bormann didn't make it to Argentina until 1947.
	He ran everything from a distance for quite some time.
	He was known as the telex general amongst the Nazi party anyway, because he used very up-to-date, serious communications to keep his party together.
	But Martin Bormann's the evil mastermind behind this.
	And I think he realizes post-war, definitely post-47, that Hitler is again a busted brand and that nobody will ever be able to march behind the Nazi flag again in their Hugo Boss design uniforms, their leather boots.
	But what they could do was control real power.
	And real power is real economic power, politics and money, not the party.
	So what they did after the war is even more fascinating.
	Just on a visceral gut level, though, the thing that doesn't hang together for me, and I know I'll get emails from my listeners about this, is that we all have this vision of Hitler as being a man who wanted ultimate world control.
	He wanted to dominate.
	He wanted to win.
	The idea that this man would skulk away at the end of it all is going to be a hard one for a lot of people to take.
	Yeah, I don't think there was any skulking involved.
	I think that he thought that if he survived, he could build a fourth right in one form or another.
	So what was he doing in those years?
	And I think, do you say that he died ultimately in 1962?
	What was he doing in those years in South America?
	In the early years, he was talking with a number of people who were going back to Germany and trying to rebuild the fascist party there, the Nazi party in Germany.
	From about 48, 49, Martin Bormann keeps him pretty secluded and only trots him out occasionally.
	Because by this stage, Bormann is working towards the West German economic miracle.
	And his friends, people like Alan Dulles and John J. McCloy, want Germany as a bulwark state in Europe against the Red Menace.
	And the world believes Adolf Hitler is dead because the British put in Hugh Treberopa, and I've always wondered why it was a former professor of medieval history who was put in to solve the greatest criminal case of the 20th century.
	Why didn't they put the FBI in?
	Why didn't they put Scotland Yard in?
	Why didn't they put a proper detective in to do this story?
	Why did they put somebody who had only written one book about a medieval bishop, I believe it was Thomas Cranmer, and think that he was going to be the expert who would finally nail this story for us?
	I haven't checked this out, but I'm guessing that he's not alive now.
	Excuse me, no, he's not.
	Okay, so some would say that's pretty convenient.
	You can say what you want about him.
	I'd say the same thing to his face.
	I was lucky enough to have a very good friend's father, who was head of medieval history at Oxford, who knew Trevor Open.
	And sadly, he's dead as well.
	But his wife has just passed away, and I've spoken to her on numerous occasions about the man, but I wish he'd been alive.
	If we believe that Bormann is the great genius of all of this, and Hitler was somebody who was not an incidental part of it, but he was a figurehead for it all, and there he is in South America.
	Are we saying that in those years they just allowed him to believe that he was plotting the return of Nazism and another chance at taking over the world?
	So they just let him get on with it.
	He was never going to succeed.
	Meanwhile, the real stuff was happening behind the scenes.
	In part, I also think that his health wasn't very good.
	I don't think he had Parkinson's, but he did seem to have tremors, according to our witnesses after the war, which I believe may have been because he had scarlet fever post-his First World War service.
	But did he not always have tremors?
	More recent documentaries, films, and things that I've read suggest that he used to keep his hand behind his back because he had the shakes.
	Possibly.
	There is one shot of him walking in Beckersgarten with his hand behind his back, and the hand is moving.
	It doesn't look like palsy tremors to me, but it looks like he's concentrating on something.
	And people had very interesting ways of using their body to maintain levels of thinking about things seriously.
	I mean, so much of it is propaganda, so much it is Allied propaganda, and probably very necessary at the time.
	And he's often described as carpet munching, which is a vision of somebody actually being down on a floor eating the carpet.
	It comes from the German word, which is simply somebody pacing up and down in a room while they're thinking.
	There are so many things.
	People say he was very small.
	He wasn't very small for his time.
	He wasn't the tallest man in the world, but he wasn't tiny either.
	There's lots of propaganda about it, that he was a vegetarian.
	Well, according to various people, he wasn't a vegetarian.
	His favourite foods were baby pigeon and liver dumplings, but he did eat a lot of vegetables.
	And he did also seem to have what we would call today irritable bowel syndrome, which can be incredibly painful.
	It seems Napoleon suffered from it as well.
	So it's so difficult to know the real truth.
	He does seem to be more badly wounded in the July bomb plot, what's become known as the Tom Cruise bomb plot, after Valkyrie film.
	He does seem to be more badly wounded than that.
	There is evidence to show that he was undergoing some sort of facial surgery when he arrived in Argentina, or just post-arrival in Argentina, at a Nazi medical complex that had been built up on the lakes of Machuquita in Cordoba province.
	But I don't think he was...
	And he'd had a bad war.
	He'd had a very tiring and bad war.
	But I think he probably wasn't brilliantly well.
	And post-war faded pretty rapidly.
	But meantime, a coterie of people around him who supported him.
	Yes, and supported Ava and their two daughters by this stage.
	Although we have, again, testimony from a lawyer who interviewed one of Ava's daughters in the 1980s that Ava left him at some stage in the 1950s.
	She became very bored of hiding away in the Andes.
	She was a bit of a party girl anyway.
	And that she and the two children went to live somewhere else in Argentina.
	That's a possibility.
	When they got together, she was incredibly young.
	She was only a girl.
	Yes, completely, only a girl.
	But a girl who was the mistress of the most powerful man in Europe, although nobody knew about her until after the war, which is interesting.
	People think that she was well known.
	She was only well known in Germany to what was known as the mountain people, his friends and close associates at Beckersgarten.
	There was no public acknowledgement of Ava at all.
	What of the children, then?
	Where are they?
	Good question.
	I think both girls are still alive.
	They could be anywhere in the world.
	They have enough money to get by and go anywhere they wanted to.
	So I guess part of your mission now is to try and find them, is it?
	No, I don't think so.
	I feel uncomfortable about that somehow, that the sins of the fathers existed on the children.
	But they are the people, and I totally understand what you're saying, but they are the people who could verify this, aren't they?
	They're the smoking gun.
	And one of the things I've always wanted to do is show the film of Grey Wolf in a cinema in Buenos Aires and hope that somebody stands up in the middle of it and goes, that wasn't the way it happened.
	It happened like this.
	But that hasn't happened yet, so we'll wait.
	The film should be out in Argentina later this year.
	Where was he buried?
	I have no idea, and I don't think they would have buried him either.
	It was just as important for the Nazis for Hitler to have died in the bunker in 1945 as it was for the Bormann organization and for the people behind the Hugh Trevor Roberta myth.
	So my feeling would be that he was probably cremated, this time properly, and the ashes scattered somewhere in the mountains in Argentina.
	But I have no distinct reporting on that.
	What piece of evidence would you like now to cap this project off?
	I don't know that the project will ever be capped off as such.
	Obviously, I'd like a living relative to come forward.
	That would be quite something.
	So if one of the girls contacted you, that's okay, but you're not going to go out and seek them.
	I'm not chasing them.
	But if one of them contacted me, yes, of course, that would be a completely different matter.
	And as you get more publicity, that is a possibility.
	However, so too is a possibility that people will be feeding you with disinformation and just plain garbage.
	Yes, and you have to be incredibly careful about that.
	To a certain extent, I rely on what few skills I have as a journalist of some standing.
	And secondly, you can usually tell when people are trying it on with you because they usually ask you for money.
	Yes, they do, don't they?
	Perfect.
	Yeah, that's always one of those things where I go, actually, we don't pay for any of this.
	It just doesn't happen that way.
	What would you say to those people who inevitably will email me because people email me in their hundreds now from the United States and Canada and Australia and everywhere where this show is heard?
	The ones who will say, this man is clearly accomplished and clearly clever, but just misguided and wrong.
	Fine.
	All I would say to them is read the book.
	It's available in all the countries you just mentioned.
	In fact, it's in 31 countries in 16 languages now.
	Read the book and decide for yourselves.
	That's all I could say to anybody.
	I know what I know to be true.
	And for me, it has been one of the most shocking and unpleasant revelations that I've ever come across in my life.
	I know governments lie to us.
	You only have to look at the Bloody Sunday massacre and the fact that it took 44 years for that to come out as being none of those people having been anywhere near a weapon.
	It's a secret that governments do not tell the truth quite often.
	Weapons of mass destruction come to mind.
	45 minutes, yeah.
	Fight Tony Blair and George Bush.
	But this I found incredibly shocking.
	And it's not just the escape of Hitler.
	It's how the Nazis were allowed to survive post-World War II after what they had done.
	I think is something that needs to be acknowledged.
	Let's say at the end something that We said at the beginning, because I think it's the most compelling thing of all for me.
	This is a project that you really didn't want to do at the beginning.
	No, and I think my wife wishes I'd never started it at all.
	However, I've become very angry while researching this at the level of lying and misinformation that's been put out there about this whole period, this whole story.
	And I wish my father was still alive, but he isn't, because I think he'd be oiling up his Lienfield and going to look for people to kill on this one.
	So it's unfortunately a story I believe that really needs telling.
	And I try not to enter into the world of conspiracy theories or anything like that.
	I know nothing about 9-11.
	I know nothing about JFK.
	I know nothing about UFOs or potential aliens on the planet.
	What I have done is spent now with Simon almost eight years researching this subject.
	And we have been through and found things that should never have been allowed to happen, but they were and still are.
	And that's scary.
	And we have to say that you were a little sceptical about coming on this show because you thought that UFOs and aliens were all that I did.
	I hope you now know that that's not all I do.
	I actually know your reputation anyway, Howard, so I was not too airy about coming on your show.
	It's a great pleasure to talk to you, though.
	I've thoroughly enjoyed this.
	I have.
	And I wish you well with it.
	What about the docudrama?
	Talk to me quickly about that.
	The docudrama is now available in the UK on various media, Virgin, Netflix, I think, soon.
	It's also available as a DVD from Amazon.
	It's 97 minutes, and it's basically a dramatic reconstruction of the key testimonies in Argentina.
	I'm sorry, that's Labrador.
	And one of the dogs of war.
	Just a very noisy boy, sure.
	I think he's telling you you've been on long enough.
	He's looking to go out sometimes.
	They love their walks.
	Just don't say the word walk or whatever the French equivalent is.
	Yeah, no, well, luckily he speaks English.
	Okay, if people want to read about you or perhaps more importantly in this case, get in touch with you, how do they do those things?
	They can go to our website, which is greywolfmedia.com.
	If they message me through there, I pretty much always reply.
	Gerard, thank you very much, and my best wishes to you and your Labrador.
	Thank you very much, Howard.
	Good to talk to you.
	Thank you.
	Hope we talk again.
	Yes, me too.
	A man with a considerable journalistic pedigree in the UK, speaking from his home in northern France, and the story of the man they called Grey Wolf, Adolf Hitler.
	Did he really live out his days in South America?
	And was his escape from Berlin facilitated in the way that he said?
	Sounds pretty compelling to me.
	What do you think?
	If you want to send me an email with your thoughts on this show, your guest suggestions for future shows or just general thoughts about how I'm doing this and how I could do it better.
	Would love to hear from you.
	I really do enjoy getting and reading your emails.
	You can go to the website www.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv, and you can contact me there through the link, or you can make a donation to the show.
	Your donations utterly vital to this piece of the independent media.
	We are on the march.
	More great shows coming soon.
	There's going to be a special about Flight MH370 coming soon and also some other great guests, some of whom you have suggested.
	Keep those suggestions coming and thank you for your support.
	And I mean that from the bottom of my heart.
	Thank you very much for your contacts.
	Please keep them coming.
	And until next we meet here on The Unexplained, stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
	My name is Howard Hughes.
	This has been The Unexplained.
	Take care.

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