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Dec. 2, 2014 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:20:34
Edition 184 - Sharkhunters

This time - American Harry Cooper who researches German U-Boats, their crews - and Hitler's"escape" after the War...

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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, I don't know about you, but I think things seem to be getting busier as we get towards the end of the year.
We're now at the beginning of December.
It is grey and it is damp in the UK.
It has been cold at times, but once again, the temperatures seem to be higher than they might have been.
I know that having spoken to somebody in Buffalo in the US recently, you've had some terrible snow over there.
And the death toll from that, I think, is probably something like 12 or 15 right now.
And state and federal services are doing their best to cope with it, but it is a very difficult thing to get to grips with, isn't it?
But the weather?
Very different once again, both sides of the Atlantic.
You seem to be getting colder, certainly East Coast USA, and we seem to be just as warm as we were this time last year.
But all bets are off for what will happen next.
Personally, I don't like the damp and I don't like it being cold.
So, you know, those are just things that I don't do.
So they don't leave me in my best frame of mind.
But having said that, I've been going through your emails every day.
Please know that if you email the show, that I do get to see the emails and I have a little routine every day.
I pour myself a big cup of coffee and I sit there, turn off the phone, and go through what you have to say.
So even if you're not about to hear your name now, please know that I have seen what you said, taken it on board, and thank you for it.
If you want to get in touch with the show, go to our website, www.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv, the website designed and created by Adam Cornwell, a creative hotspot in Liverpool.
And there you can follow the link and send me an email, a guest suggestion or your thoughts on the show, or if you'd like to, then you can make a donation there.
And while you stop by the website, if you can make time to complete our poll, that would be great.
I'll be telling you in a few weeks the results of the poll and the direction that we're going to take the show in in the future.
Hopefully we'll have a better idea of all of that.
That said, got an email in from Matt who said that the introductions on these shows getting too long.
Matt, I think the one you were talking about was quite a lengthy one.
I think it was seven minutes.
So I'm going to keep this one shorter.
Probably means I can't get to quite as many people, but here goes.
I've written it all down on the back of an envelope.
So organized am I. Hello, Mo, thank you very much for your very nice email.
Vince in South Queensland, Australia.
Listens on his commute, which is three hours long.
It's about the same length as my commute daily, Vince.
Listens on his way to work in Brisbane.
What a nice place to work, Vince.
You lucky man.
Jim in South Bend, Indiana, thank you for your email.
Chuck in Phoenix, suggesting John Antony West as a guest.
Megan in State College, Pennsylvania, nice email, thank you.
Lindsay in Glasgow, good to hear from you again.
Jose Aguillar, thank you very much indeed for your points, and I will I'll take those on board and do something about them.
Peter, please know that I've noted all of your points.
Thanks for the email.
Shane in Toowoomba, Australia, thanks for your email.
Justin, big fan as many of you are.
In fact, I didn't get a single negative email about him.
Didn't expect any.
Justin loved Lionel Fanthorpe and so did Kathleen Nezovich.
Kinezovich, have I got that right, Kathleen?
Sorry if I didn't, but thank you very much for your email.
Like I say, if you want to get in touch with the show, let me know what you think.
Drop me an email, triple w.theunexplained.tv.
Please keep your donations coming, and please, above all, keep your support for this show coming.
Okay, now another guest this time who you suggested.
His name is Harry Cooper, and he's behind a website and a lot of writing to do, well, loosely around the submarine service of Germany during World War II, but also about other related topics, including the way that Russia is using submarines at the moment.
The website is called Shark Hunters, and I guess the most interesting aspect of Harry Cooper's work, and Harry's in Florida, by the way, is a book that he wrote recently about Hitler in Argentina and how he was got there and what happened when he was there.
So I think this will be an interesting one.
I know it's a subject we've talked about before.
But there seems to be this groundswell of evidence that Hitler, in fact, did escape.
And whether he did it with anyone's collusion, I mean anyone from our side or not.
Well, I know people have speculated about that, but that's one of the reasons we've got Harry Cooper on now.
Thank you very much for your support.
Please keep it coming.
And thank you to Roger Saunders in California for your support.
Martin with the theme tune as we come to the end of the year.
Please get in touch.
It would be nice to hear from you.
All right, let's cross to Florida now, where I think it's probably a damn sight warmer than here and talk to Harry Cooper from Shark Hunters.
Hello, Harry.
Well, good morning.
Nice to talk to you.
And good afternoon from the UK, Harry, because we've got that time difference going.
We've also got the weather difference going because we've got cold and damp over here.
And I think you're going to depress me terribly by telling me what Florida's like now.
Yeah, that's why we don't live in Chicago anymore.
Are you a snowbird then?
Did you go south?
No, we moved permanently many years ago.
We're in this same location coming 25 years.
Okay, whereabouts of Florida?
I know the sort of Ocala area quite well.
Are you around there?
Oh, do you?
Okay, well, we're directly 20 miles west of Ocala.
Okay, well, then familiar territory.
Nice place.
Between Ocala and Crystal River.
Right.
Good place to get to, good place to go places from, I seem to remember.
Oh, absolutely.
It is beautiful.
It's quiet here.
Out my back, you would call it my garden.
My backyard goes out about 150 feet, maybe 200 feet, up to the lake.
My wife calls it a swamp.
I think my wife is correct.
And we've been here 25 years.
Never have seen an alligator, but I hear them all the time out back.
We had a female deer made a nest back there a couple of years ago.
We see deer walking down the road in front of our house.
It beats the hell out of coming from Chicago.
Chicago's a great city.
Great city.
Great culture, great food.
But it's cold, nasty cold in the wintertime, and it's damn expensive.
Well, you know, listen, I've got friends in Chicago.
I keep getting invited there.
I've never been there, Harry, but they tell me that really seriously at this time of year in Chicago, if you get some of that lake effect snow and the big freeze-up, then you can go out and your eyebrows and your eyes will freeze over.
Oh, that's no joke.
There were times, now we lived 45 miles northwest of the city, so we didn't even get the buffering effects of the lake.
And there were times when it was 25 below zero.
There were also times when it was 10 below zero was the highest for a whole week.
And there were many days I'd walk to my car in the apartment, parking lot.
I'd be literally above my knees in snow.
I had a brand new car some years, many years ago, and within one year, it had all rotted through at the fenders because of all the salt on the road.
So much nicer living down here.
Besides, I had a burglar come into my house one night, and he tried to grab his gun, but I had mine out first, and so I'm the only one that got a shot off that night.
I haven't had to shoot any burglars here in Florida because everybody's got houses full of guns.
Well, yeah, well, that's true.
And if I listen to some of those talk radio shows at night, the ones that come out of Florida, it just sounds like another world because, of course, gun ownership here is a hot topic like it is there.
But by and large, the only people who own guns over here are criminals.
People do not have them for self-defense, and I hope we stay that way here.
Well, if somebody could wave a magic wand and make all the guns disappear, that would be nice.
But if you take the guns away from law-abiding people and let only the criminals have them, you've got kind of a lopsided.
In my opinion, one of the most intelligent laws that was ever passed was here in Florida under when Jeb Bush was our governor.
He was a good governor, outstanding.
He passed a law called the 1020 Life Law.
If you commit a crime and show a gun, minimum 10 years in prison.
If you fire the gun, minimum 20 years in prison.
And if anybody gets hurt, life in prison.
That's the way it should be.
Just because somebody uses a gun to stick up a store or to shoot somebody, as in the case of James Brady during the Reagan administration, I don't see any reason why the government should tell me I have to give up all my guns just because somebody else committed a crime with their guns.
So that just my theory.
Well, look, I understand what you're saying, and I understand why you're saying it, and I understand also the cultural background that goes with that.
It's so different for us to get our heads around here in the UK, because by and large, you know, although we have exceptions to the rule, people don't use them here.
Now, that's not to say that we don't have gang culture here, and we don't have people using them to assassinate other members of other gangs on the streets of London, because we do.
And it happens all the time, sadly too frequently.
But the routine ownership of guns is something that we don't have here.
But I understand why you've got that debate there.
Most countries are like the UK.
You just don't have them.
But, you know, if you have had them since the beginning of time in your country and everybody's got them, you don't want to give them up.
And what did you think of this is completely, and we'll get into the main subject in just a second.
I haven't asked anybody American about this.
My countryman, Piers Morgan, now I have no views about him whatsoever, let me tell you.
I'm not a fan.
I'm not a supporter.
I don't have any views about him.
But of course, he did champion the anti-gun ownership campaign out there.
And that got a lot of backlash from people who said, well, how dare some British guy come over here, go on our television screens and try and lecture us?
What do you think?
I agree.
I think he's a total clown.
As far as his talent, okay, I neither plus or minus.
But he, I remember he came out, first off, it's none of his business what we do over here.
And secondly, it doesn't matter what somebody thinks, it's part of our Constitution.
The law cannot take guns away.
It has to be a change in the Constitution.
But the one point where I say he's a clown, he made the same stupid comment that many other left-wing liberals do and said, if this doesn't pass, I'm going to leave the country.
And all through the last, oh, 20, 30 years, liberals have made that statement regarding one thing or another.
If this doesn't pass or if this guy's elected or whatever, I'm going to move out of the country.
None of them ever do.
Hell, I'll pack their suitcase for them if they want.
But if you threaten to move out of the country, if something doesn't happen and then it doesn't happen, you really owe it to the people you've spoken to to move out of the country, either that or don't make such a stupid remark in the first place.
Okay.
Let's talk about you.
Much more interesting than talking about Piers Morgan.
I want to know your background.
What are you?
Are you an ex-military man?
What's with your fascination with the things we're about to talk about?
Yeah, I know me a lot better than I know Piers Morgan.
I had a normal upbringing.
I was a kid during the war years, and I had wanted to be a fighter pilot.
That's all I ever wanted to be from the time I was old enough to remember.
So right out of high school, like a dummy, I went and joined the Air Force without bothering to look into it a little further because I just kind of assumed you joined the Air Force, they issue you a fighter plane.
Well, it doesn't work that way.
Well, no, I think you probably have to change tires and change the oil and polish the planes first, don't you?
Yeah, exactly.
So they told me, first off, they told me I had to be 21 at least to be an officer.
Now, during the war years, you know, 18, 19-year-old kids were flying the fighters, but we weren't at war.
So, okay, so I went through intensive six-month training in weapons, explosives, et cetera.
My career field was special weapons, which is thermonuclear bombs, hydrogen bombs.
So I got misassigned, fortunately, to a base about 100 miles south of Chicago, where I, you know, 100 miles south of my home when I was a kid.
And I was assigned to the base swimming pool as a lifeguard.
So I worked one day on, one day off, and on the weekends I had Friday, Saturday, Sunday off, and then the next one I worked those days and I could run home all the time.
Well, come wintertime, they wanted me to paint white lines on football fields.
So I made a complaint.
They shipped me to an active base where I spent two and a half years commanding a six-man team loading hydrogen bombs onto bombers.
And when I was almost 21, I took the OCS exam.
I was the only guy out of 30 who passed it two days of tests.
I got a class assigned, and you'll have to pardon me.
This change in the weather's got me sniffling a bit.
Almost when I'm in London.
Listen, as long as you don't tell anybody, I'm exactly the same right now, and that's because of the change of the weather here.
Yeah.
So anyhow, I had a class assigned for Officer Candidate School, and on my own, I went to the base hospital for a pilot's physical.
Everything came out perfect, and they wanted me to sign up for six more years, which is understandable.
But then the guy broke my heart.
He says, fighter pilot?
He said, forget it.
You're never going to be a fighter pilot.
I said, why is that?
Everything clicked in.
He says, nope.
We got so many pilots left over from Korea and from World War II.
He said, we've shut down air cadets.
You'll never be a pilot.
And then I realized, yeah, my squadron commander, which should be a major, was a full colonel.
They were just pigeonholing these old guys until they retired.
So, forget it.
When my hitch was up, I got out.
I went to college, got my bachelor's degree in business administration, and became a typical normal working guy.
I was an upcoming executive seat with big company in Chicago.
And as a hobby, I drove stock cars, local at first for the first few years.
Then I went up to the Grand National Circuit.
I was running the Super Speedways, chasing A.J. Point and Bobby Unzer and Al Unzer at 190 miles an hour.
And my last race was Texas 500 in 1976.
And just everything went wrong.
I went home.
I sold all my race car equipment.
I sold my trucks.
I sold my house.
I sold everything I owned, bought a 30-foot sailing yacht, and put an ad in cruising magazines for female crew companion wanted Bahamas cruise.
And I got over 200 replies.
And I left Chicago with a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead that were 24, 24, and 25 years old, and I was 40.
And went and sailed off to the Bahamas.
And let me tell you, sounds a bit Hugh Hessner to me.
Yeah.
Well, it just sounded awfully damn selfish, and I guess I was.
But aside from the fairly obvious, the greatest thing about it, Howard, there was no stress.
Stress will kill you.
I didn't have, I always get up early anyhow, but I didn't have to fight the crowds on the expressway.
I didn't have to fight the battle in the office.
I didn't have to have a cranky boss or nasty underlings.
I didn't have to have angry customers.
Now, this is either the most sensible thing I've ever heard anybody do, or it's a classic case of a midlife crisis.
Which do you think it is?
I never took the time to analyze it.
But, you know, I'd usually get up nice and early.
I'd sit in the cockpit with a hot mug of tea in my hand.
I was raised in a British household.
And I'd watch the sun come up behind the palm trees.
And I'm trying to think, well, do I want to go swimming?
Do I want to run on the beach?
Do I want another cup of tea?
Now, I would just put off the decision until later.
And it was a great time, and that's what got me hooked on the U-boat history because I ran across an island in the south of the Ixuma chain, Darby Island, which was owned by a British guy, a crown subject.
And according to locals, he did not like the crown because he was being taxed heavily and allegedly.
We all have that problem over here.
I know that, but you get free health care even though you pay 50% income.
That's another story.
So anyhow, the rumor was that he had provided some fresh water and food to some German U-boats from his plantation on Darby Island.
Now, we never found out that was true or not true.
But I remember my first thought when I heard that, those dirty Nazis, because that's what we taught in school.
Germans were all Nazis.
They machine gunned people in the water for sport.
They pray to Hitler because they hate God.
So I just put that in the back of my head because I had more important things on my mind like Debbie, Karen, and Lynette.
Okay.
But look, you can understand why people feel like they felt.
If you go to Liverpool, my home city, on the waterfront there, even though Liverpool has a big German heritage, you know, the Liverpool accent, people say disdem demonzoes.
Well, that comes from the German.
That comes from the influence of German people in Liverpool.
So the Liverpoolian people are a bit conflicted when it comes to that, but you will find a monument at the Pier Head in Liverpool for all of those people who died on the convoys.
Now, you know that during World War II, and for those who perhaps are a little young to know this, well, I read about all this stuff.
You know, I didn't live through the war, but I read about it.
And my grandfather had books and magazines, galore.
When he died, we found them all about the convoys.
Very much a part of Liverpoolian's heritage here because so many people were in the merchant navy.
Convoys were what brought in food and vital supplies from the United States because we could not have got through the war without those things.
Oh, absolutely.
Brave seafarers.
Well, brave seafarers had to set sail in ships full of cargo and run the gauntlet of U-boats across the Atlantic, many of which were sunk because these U-boat guys were very efficient at their job.
You know, they came out of, I think, Saint-Nazaire in northern France.
And, you know, they were just...
Okay.
Okay.
Well, they took a great toll and sank a lot of shipping, and hence you will find that monument there.
So, of course, people, certainly as I was growing up, had some very hardened attitudes towards these people.
And I think those attitudes only started maybe changing a little when we saw dramas like that Das boat on the TV that you may have seen, that TV series.
Oh, wow, I've seen it so many times.
It's one of my favorites.
I've watched it time and time again.
Congratulations for pronouncing it correctly.
It's dust boat, like you said.
It's not dust boot.
It's not a piece of footwear.
No, no, it is.
It's boat.
And those guys became, in all of our minds, and I think they first of all showed this in about 1979 or so, but it's been on TV many times, and I've got the DVD.
But they were real people.
They had feelings.
The captain himself was not the most committed.
In fact, he wasn't the committed Nazi at all.
He wondered what the hell he was doing there, but he had to do it or be shot, I think.
And, you know, they were all ordinary people tasked with this awful, awful duty in the most terrible conditions.
Yeah, nobody, except a lunatic, nobody enjoys war.
Lunatic or weapons manufacturers.
And of course, it was much more pronounced in the UK because it was your people getting, well, our people were getting sunk too, but your cities were being bombed and ours were not.
So to look at them as an enemy, that's understandable.
But we got hit with the propaganda that they were all Nazis, which they were not.
They machine gunned people in the water for sport, which is not true.
And, oh, they prayed to Hitler because they hated God.
That's not true either.
And I'm sure there was propaganda against the Brits and against the Americans that were told to the Germans.
So taking that out of it, you know, I was so lucky.
I got to meet so many of these people.
Carl Frederick Smerton, Reinhardt Hardegen, who sank the first ship in American waters.
He's still alive.
He turned 101 last March.
And I got an email from his son.
He's panic stricken because his father still drives his Mercedes.
And I told him he should move to Florida because 101-year-old drivers down here are everywhere.
And Otto Kretschmer, the top submarine commander of the whole war, I had a sleeping room in his house.
He was like family with me.
Same with Eric Topp.
And the list goes on.
Hess, the youngest combat submarine commander of the war, 21-year-old kid.
They gave him command of a combat submarine.
He became my best friend in Germany.
And some of these people, I think, featured in a British TV series called The World at War that chronicled the entire history of the war, went around the world, this thing, and they interviewed people.
Well, they interviewed people from both sides.
And I think some of these guys, I remember seeing them on that program.
And when you see the human beings and what it was like, well, you know, their service was just as tough as our guys.
They both had it hard.
Right.
And truth be told, the U-boaters had it worse than any because, as a comparison, the American submariners had the worst lost percentage of any American forces.
We lost one man out of seven was killed.
That's a horrible rate.
But on the German side, the U-boaters was just the opposite.
One man out of seven came home, and they still stood in line to get on their submarines and going out, going to combat.
Did anybody volunteer for that service in Germany?
It was all volunteer.
And so they wanted to go and perhaps they didn't realize those awful statistics against them, but they wanted to go and serve under the sea.
Howard, do you think the recruiter lied?
Recruiters always lie.
Yes.
We have a copy of a recruiting film here.
I forget the name of it, but it was a Kriegsmarina recruiting film for the U-Boaters, and it shows them on their submarine wearing brand new uniforms, nice and neat and clean.
And they see a target.
They fire a torpedo.
They blow up a ship.
And now the destroyers come, but the destroyers can't find them.
They're dropping their depth charges three miles away, and the men are just sitting there eating wonderful food.
And, you know, you run right down to your local recruiting office.
And then you find out it's not quite that way.
I can speak from experience, not that I was in combat, thank God, but I remember what my recruiting sergeant told me, and then what it was when I got to my base boot camp.
Not the same.
I couldn't have my hair cut as long as I liked it.
I couldn't keep my civi clothes.
I couldn't keep my electric razor.
Recruiters lie.
I think they do.
both sides of the Atlantic.
You know, you've got to get people to take the king or the queen shilling, as they used to call it over here.
Now, the fact of the matter is, though, there was tremendous, of necessity, tremendous secrecy involved in these U-boat missions.
And that's why we're talking now, isn't it?
Because some of the stuff they did, we're only just now getting to hear about, and you've been researching yourself.
Well, that's true.
This is not a hobby.
This is not something I do in the evening when I come home from work.
This is my work.
I was vice president of a large company in Chicago decades ago, and I was making between $3,000 and $4,000 a week.
And I walked off that job with no retirement, no pension to do this at no salary because I met all these great guys, Americans too, and even the last living winner of the Victoria Cross from the British submarine service.
These guys all gave me their stories, their memories, and I promised them I would keep it alive.
So that's what I do for no charge.
And when you say, I do this, and I gave it all up to do this, I think you have to explain in words that, you know, I can understand and my listeners will understand what this is.
It's chronicling, is it?
Chronicling those people's lives and their sake.
We have, outside of, well, we've got the second largest archive in the world dedicated to the U-boats.
There's a much bigger one in Germany, as you might expect, and that's a huge one.
But in addition to having a very, very large archive here, we also publish a monthly magazine.
Your listeners can check it out, go to sharkhunters.com, and we have a monthly magazine that we publish filled with history, not theories like you find on some of these dumb websites that have come along in the last five, ten years,
where, for instance, if you were to send in a post to one of those websites and say that you just found a sunken submarine, a German U-boat, of course, full of gold hidden in the Queen's bathtub, they'd publish it as if it were fact.
No, I heard that story.
But look, the myths and legends of these people are truly, I mean, they literally are.
Legion.
My dad used to tell me, because my dad served in the army, and he told me many, many stories.
And he used to walk me along the beach in Liverpool, in Crosby, in Liverpool, where I was brought up.
And he would say, you know, out there there were U-boats.
And there were U-boats sunk in Liverpool Bay.
This is very much a part of my history.
Right.
And even though I know I didn't live through those years, I've had to read about those years and research them, I am still, just like the people who probably subscribe to your magazine, absolutely compelled and impelled to find out more.
And I can't tell you why, but I just know that it's in my DNA.
Yeah, something about submarines just triggers something inside people's minds.
They have to know more.
And sunken ships is one thing, but a sunken submarine, geez, people get all wound up about that.
And, you know, the Brits lost, I think, 70-something submarines, which is a pretty large amount, because when a submarine goes down, normally it takes the entire crew with it.
The Americans lost 52, only about 48 in combat.
I think there were a handful that got lost through accidents.
But the Germans lost hundreds and hundreds of submarines.
They lost as many submarines in Black May, which is May of 1943, as the U.S. Navy did lost in the entire war through combat.
As I say, we lost about 48 submarines through combat.
The Germans lost 44 just in that one month alone.
And after Black May of 1943, nine out of ten boats didn't come back from their very first war patrol.
And they were still standing in line to get into the U-boats.
Harry, talk to me about the submarines.
Before we talk about Hitler and his reported escape from Germany after the war, aided and abetted by the submarine service.
But talk to me about those stories that we often hear about submarines that actually came across to the coast of the U.S., the east coast of the U.S. And most people don't know about this stuff, but apparently there were submarines on secret missions that used to come to the coast right off New York.
Well, they were on combat missions and they came here pretty doggone regularly.
They sank ships left and right all along our coast from the Canadian border all the way down to Key West and around into the Gulf of Mexico as well.
And what about the missions that were said to involve men coming ashore and undertaking secret surveillance?
Well, if you go to just about any dive shop on any coast of the Gulf or the East Coast, they'll tell you, oh, there's a Nazi U-boat.
Can't be German.
It's got to be Nazi.
Sunk right out there, full of gold and diamonds and all that stuff.
Fact of the matter is there were only two missions where people came ashore from German U-boats into the United States.
The first was Operation Pestoros, which was in June of 1942.
U-202 under Hans Linder put four men ashore at Amaganset in Long Island, New York.
And a day or two later, U-584 under command of Joachim Diga put four more men ashore down at Ponte Vedera Beach, Florida, which is a little town outside of Jacksonville.
Their mission was to sabotage the American aluminum production to cut back on the planes that we were building.
Well, to send eight men to do that kind of massive business is just kind of stupid.
Eight guys had no chance to do that.
Well, they picked guys who had lived in the U.S. for a while and could speak American-style English.
Unfortunately for the Reich, fortunately for everybody else, I guess, the German spy service was horrible.
Their combat troops, they were about the best there were, but their spy service stunk.
We had a good spy service.
The Brits had a much better spy service, and the Soviets, we found out now, had infiltrated the British.
But the Germans, they sent these eight guys over here.
They didn't do much background screening because one guy, his name escapes me right now, but he was more commie than Nazi.
And the first thing he did when he got to the United States was start calling the FBI, trying to turn everybody in.
Yeah, not a very good choice of spies.
So you said that the recruiters lied, but sometimes the recruits lied to the recruiters by the sounds of it.
Yeah, apparently that happened.
So this was by no means a massively successful infiltration expedition.
Those eight people, they didn't do much good for the Third Reich.
Oh, no, they were just screwing around and doing not much of anything.
And finally, the FBI believed them, and they all got rounded up.
And one of them was a young guy, about 18 years old.
His name was Ernst Berger.
He helped the prosecution by turning state's evidence.
And he was supposed to get a light sentence, but in reality, when all was said and done, he got a life sentence.
They put him in prison for life.
And the other guy, the one who turned him in, he got 30 years.
The other six guys were marched right off to Sing Sing and put into the electric chair and were executed very quickly.
The other operation was Operation Elster.
Now an Elster is a German word for a bird like a magpie.
And that was two agents were put ashore in Frenchman's Bay, Maine, in November of 1944.
And their mission was to disrupt the Manhattan Project, which, you know, was the American nuclear bomb program.
Well, one of them was one of the top Avwehr agents.
His number, his serial number was 146 out of more than 20,000 Avwehr agents.
And he became a member of Shark Hunters later and a good friend, and he lived up to more than 100 years old.
The other guy was named William Colpaugh.
He was a U.S. Navy officer who had deserted and went over to the German side.
Really?
Yeah, and he and Gimbel, that was the other guy, Agent 146, Eric Gimbel, they didn't get along, and I don't know how they managed to pair these two up again, but anyhow, they came ashore from U-1230 at Frenchman's Bay, November of 1944.
They looked like, from what I understand, they looked like they had stepped off the cover of Gentleman's Quarterly magazine, dressed as if they were going to some kind of ball at the palace in a fishing village in the middle of a blinding snowstorm.
So you're going to stick out like a sore thumb, aren't you, if you arrive like that?
Yeah, pretty much.
And especially in a quiet little sleeping village where everybody knows everybody.
But as I say, the German spy service was terrible.
They were sent to disrupt the Manhattan Project, which was code named for the University of Chicago.
But where did they go?
They go to Manhattan.
And they had a big war between the two of them over who had control of the money, because they had been given $60,000, which was a hell of a lot of money in those days, plus 100 diamonds.
So I never found out what William Colpaugh was going to do with the money if he got it, but I knew what Kimball was doing with it because he was a big, tall, blue-eyed, blonde, good-looking German.
And he found out that the girls at Macy's department store loved big, tall, blue-eyed, blonde, good-looking guys that had pockets full of money.
So all he did was chase women the few weeks he was there.
So the whole thing, a complete shambles, totally shambolic.
I think a lot of people will be surprised to know, and I didn't know, that this was going on in 1944.
I would have thought that these sorts of missions will be something that you would have heard about, say, 1942-3.
Well, no, they had missions like that into England, but every one of the German agents that parachuted or came into England was caught and turned by the British.
I guess it was MI6 or MI5, something like that.
And so they were sending back false information to Germany.
One or two refused to do it, and they were publicly tried and executed, which made the Germans think that the rest of their guys were still on scene and doing the right thing.
The Brits had something called the 20 Committee to oversee these guys.
And the Roman numeral for 20 is XX, which also means double cross.
But back to Gimple and Colpaw.
Gimple, I guess, really must have upset Colpaw beyond rationality.
and cold pa called the f_b_i_ and turned the two of them and so uh...
Yeah, it didn't work out that way for him because the FBI took him right away.
And then based on his information, they intercepted Gimple and arrested him.
Both of them were tried and sentenced to death.
But in prison, from what we learned, Gimple said that most of the inmates respected him because he was doing his duty for his country, but they really didn't like Coldpaw because he was a traitor to the U.S. And then about three days before the scheduled hanging, Roosevelt died.
And Truman came in, vice president, moved up to president, and he put a stop on all executions for a while.
So that saved Gimple for a while.
And almost very shortly thereafter, the war was over.
So Truman said, well, we don't need to hang these two guys.
So they sent them to Leavenworth for, I think they had 12-year sentence.
Well, Pol Paul was, he was docile.
He served whatever time he was supposed to serve.
And when he got out, he moved up to Paoli, Pennsylvania, where he lived quietly, wouldn't talk to anybody, because I tried.
But Gimple, he didn't like being locked up, so he tried to break out.
Who breaks out of Leavenworth?
You can't do it.
Not the right to wrong place, wrong place, wrong time.
Amen.
So they said, well, okay, you want to try to break out?
They sent him out to Alcatraz, but he can't break out of Alcatraz.
So he served his time.
And finally, somebody came along, one of the presidents came along and said, oh, get this guy out of here.
He's no longer a danger.
So they kicked him loose, and he went where all good German spies go, South America.
And that's where he lived until he died about four or five years ago.
Now, that brings us very neatly to the whole story about Hitler getting out of Germany.
I interviewed recently a man called Gerard Williams, who's a journalist and researcher living in northern France, British guy.
Yeah, I know who he is.
Well, Gerard told me a fascinating story about how Hitler got out of Germany.
There's a lot of evidence for that and lived in South America, as indeed a lot of the Nazis did.
And I think it's now pretty, I won't say accepted, but it's widely known that that is quite likely to have happened with quite a number of these people.
I think the difficult thing to take on board for most people is that Adolf Hitler got away because we were told that he committed suicide along with Avon Braun and their bodies were burned.
We've seen it in a million movies.
We've read about it.
That's what we accept.
You say that as well.
That's what we were told.
Yeah, well, that's what we were told, and it's still the story that we are being told right now.
But you say not so.
Absolutely correct.
That's one point where I have to agree with Williams.
Hitler did indeed die in Argentina without question.
The fact that it's reported Hitler got away, absolutely fact.
He was a broken man.
He was ready to die in the bunker.
Martin Borman, the number two guy, wanted to keep the Reich alive and he needed a figurehead.
So one of our members who has since passed away, a guy by the name of Don Angel Alcazar de Velasco, he was a Spaniard, but he was working for the German, first for the Avwehr, and then later when Canaris was deposed, then he was working for the SS intelligence, which was the Sicherheinstienst.
His last three months, the last three months of the war, Don Angel was posted inside the Führer bunker, and every day he was supposed to make a report to Hitler on certain parts of intelligence coming in.
So he knew Hitler and he made his report every day.
And one day, right after Hitler's birthday in 1945, he saw, he personally saw Hitler and Ava Brown drugged forcibly under orders of Martin Bormann and removed from the Fuhrer bunker.
We have just learned this month alone, we have just learned the name and background of the double who got brought into the Fuhrer bunker right after Hitler left.
Up until 23rd of April, 1945, all the major orders were signed by Hitler.
From 23 April until the end of the war, all the orders were signed by Bormann.
Where was Hitler?
Why wasn't he signing orders?
Well, that's because he was gone.
So are we saying that the double and whoever was doubling for Everbraun, presumably, they both sacrificed themselves?
Oh, I don't know if they did or if they had any choice or whatever.
But it's all covered in my book, Hitler in Argentina, but I'll give you a quickie thumbnail here.
Three SS officers, all with the rank of major, which I think is Haufsturmfuhrer, Linga, Kemke, and Guncha, all three saw the suicide, if you believe the history.
Then, under questioning, two of them said, well, they didn't see the suicide, but they heard the gunshot.
And the third guy said he didn't even hear the gunshot, he just smelled the gunpowder.
And they listed the times, and each one, they were like two or three hours apart.
Now, if you hear a gunshot and you run into a room and find a dead guy, you know within a minute or two whether you got there first or the other guy.
But these guys were off by a couple hours.
Two of them said that Hitler was seated on one end of the couch, slumped over.
Ava Brown was seated on the other end of the sofa, and her dress was wet because when Hitler shot himself, he knocked over a vase of flowers and the water flew up onto her dress.
The third guy said Hitler was seated in the chair on the other side of the room and Ava Brown was laying on the sofa.
How do you make a mistake like that?
You know, was he wearing two buttons or three buttons?
Okay, you can understand that mistake, but was he sitting on this chair or was he sitting on that sofa on the other side of the room?
Was Ava Brown seated or was she laying down?
Then Linga and Kempke died not too long after the war, maybe a decade or so.
And Gunsha, who we knew that was Hitler's adjutant, Kempke was his driver and Linga was his valet, Gunche wouldn't speak about it anymore.
And finally, his wife passed away, normal, old age.
And people figured maybe now there was no sword over his head, so to speak.
And he had his 88th birthday, and we talked to people who were there.
He was a big man, six foot, I think, six foot six.
And his 88th birthday, he was in really excellent physical shape.
I think it was eight days later, his housekeeper found him in the sauna at nine in the morning.
He had been there since three in the afternoon the day before, and the sauna was set at 85 degrees Celsius.
So he didn't do well in that steam bath.
Now, could that have been some kind of accident, or are you saying that perhaps he was about to tell all and that's why he ended up like that?
That's the theory.
So many people in sensitive positions suddenly had accidents.
Now, I'm not saying that happened.
Maybe he did just have a heart attack, but he was in great shape eight days before at his birthday party.
Well, there's another guy, a Brit, as a matter of fact.
You might even know the name.
His name was Charles Hyam.
Apparently, you don't know the name.
He's a very, very respected researcher and writer.
And he was an expert on the Third Reich.
He was also a member of Shark Hunters.
Matter of fact, he was member number 34, I think, and we're up to member number 7,800 and something now.
So he, about four or five years ago, I guess it was, he was looking into, digging deeply into the Rudolph Hess mission.
Because according to Hayim, Hitler kept making peace proposals to England, but Churchill kept refusing them.
So this time, according to Hayim, Hess was going to parachute onto the estate of the Duke of some darn thing or another, who was a relative of the king, and trying to get the peace proposal directly to the king.
Let's just say for people who don't know, Hess was the intermediary.
That's correct.
He was the message carrier, the messenger.
And so, well, the Churchill people knew he was coming because, like I say, the German spy service was terrible and the British service was excellent.
So they knew he was coming and they grabbed him.
We had a report, which we read in our magazine many years ago, about two RAF fighters that were scrambled.
They were flown by Polish pilots who had come over to England.
They were scrambled because an unidentified aircraft had come into England and they were going to get it.
And they had just swung in behind this ME-110 and were about to shoot him.
And they got the word from the ground, abort, abort.
They had just realized this was Rudolph Hess.
And they didn't want to shoot him down just any little place.
They wanted him to land where the people were waiting for him.
And we all know what happened to Hess.
He got thrown into the slammer and nobody could talk to him.
And when he was ready to be released, he was so happy that he hanged himself.
Now, I talked to Haim two, three years ago, something like that.
And he was just about to release this book.
And he suddenly died.
I don't know if there's any correlation or if it was just coincidence.
Like a lot of things, it may be coincidence, it may be not, but when enough of these things happen, people start asking questions, don't they?
Well, sure.
The death of Patton, the death of John F. Kennedy, the death of you filling the blanks.
But anyhow, there's no question.
Adolf Hitler got away, got to Argentina.
I've been to that country four times, a beautiful country, and the Yankee dollar or the British pound carries a lot of weight down there because their economy is in shambles.
I've been to the estate where Hitler lived from 1945 until 1955.
It was built in the closing moments of the war by Mercedes money, allegedly for fishing, hunting lodge for Mercedes executives, Mercedes of Argentina.
But nobody ever lived there until Hitler or Naval Brown moved in.
And after they moved out in 1955, nobody's lived there since.
It's been locked up and deserted.
So if anybody's looking for clues about whether or whether he wasn't there, then it's still possible to go back and find out.
I was there twice at this estate.
Now, the first time I went there, it's on a lake.
You can only get there by water, unless you don't mind tromping about 20 miles through the jungle.
And we went into the little town.
It's called San Carlos di Berilochi.
This is also where Otto Scorzini and what the heck, Rudol, Hanzo Ric Rudel, the pilot.
This is where they came to go skiing.
Now, why would they come to the Andes to go skiing down there when they could ski in the Bavarian Alps?
But anyhow, we went into this little restaurant, nice little restaurant.
The owner, who's an older man, about six foot three tall, blue eyes, blonde hair, not your typical gaucho.
He met us at the door.
He didn't speak English.
I don't speak Spanish.
So he was explaining the specials of the day to my two friends in Spanish, and they were translating to me in English.
And of course, it changes, and it didn't make sense when it came out.
So just on a whim, I said, Better mein here, Ich must dine Spicekat, Betiocheschreiben.
Please, sir, I'd like an English menu.
Bingo, just instantly, oh mein Freundam Zi Nicht, my friend, I don't have one for you.
And we talked for about two minutes in German.
And I don't know if he realized he switched or not, but then I said, Despreche good Deutsch Verum.
You speak good German.
Why?
Then all of a sudden, old hand went up to his mouth.
Oh, Ich means Weizer.
I'm Swiss.
Really?
So later in the evening, we were eating some really great Argentine beef.
Oh, man, the food is outstanding down there.
And this old guy was playing Schiffel Clavier, which is an accordion with buttons instead of keys.
And they're playing, and he had a buddy, a little Argentine guy, and he was playing a guitar, and they were singing Argentine songs.
So I went over and I asked him in German, could he play the Matrosen Lied, the sailor song, which the U-boats always sang when they were going out to attack shipping.
You saw it in the movie, Dasboat.
And so anyhow, he said, nope, don't know that one.
Oh, all right, fine.
So I'm back with my two buddies, still eating my steak.
And suddenly we hear, he went through the entire Metrosan lead, and then we go, I'll serve this night.
He went through the entire Panzer lead, the song of the armored divisions.
How would he know those things?
Well, that's it.
He got done and smiled at me, and I smiled.
I gave him a thumbs up.
He stood up, clicked his heels together, and stuck his right arm out in the air.
That's how he knew those things.
So you don't know whether he was playing along with you in some way or whether you just stumbled on the smoking gun?
Oh, no, he's got a restaurant there, and we just stumbled into it.
The next year I went back.
I brought a small group with us, a couple of old hardheads from Germany.
They had this poor old guy there until 2 in the morning singing the old songs until he finally told him, hey, you got to get out of here because I need my sleep.
Well, then the next day, I took this group back to the estate where Hitler lived.
There's lots of pictures on it on my website, sharkhunters.com, under previous tours.
So I rented two small cabin cruisers to go across the lake to the estate, and we got off the boat at the beach.
They grounded the boats, and we had to walk about 150 feet to the house.
And as we're walking, one of the boat captains, who was about 20, 60 years old, come goose-stepping past me with his right arm out in the air.
And he had never been out of that town in his life.
And his left little finger stuck under his nose like a mustache.
And I said, what in the hell are you doing?
And he said, I know who lived here.
And he did the right arm in the air again.
I said, yeah, how do you know that?
He said, I grew up here.
My father was the caretaker.
And he went marching off.
So, and we met SS officers in the town.
There's just no question he lived there.
Now.
You say you met SS officers.
You mean you met people who were formerly serving with the German forces who got themselves out and lived there?
Yes, absolutely.
And they verified to you that Hitler was there?
They refused to answer my questions on that particular topic.
So they took the fifth.
Yeah, they took the fifth.
I don't think they knew what the fifth was down there, but they, you know, like Sergeant Schultz, I see nothing, I hear nothing, I know nothing.
Right.
Also in this little lake, on an island, Hoimel Island, in 1947, two years after the war ended, German scientists came and built an atomic research laboratory on this island.
The ruins are still there.
I was in those ruins.
I took a bunch of photographs.
They're on the website, too.
And, you know, the more we dig, Kurt Tank, Professor Kurt Tank, was the guy who designed the Fokker Wolf Fw-190 fighter plane, the one that Goering called the Butcher Bird because it was so good at fighting.
Kurt Tank didn't want to come to the U.S., didn't want to go to Soviet Union, so he made his way down to Argentina along with 50 other aeronautical engineers.
They were designing fighter planes for the South American Air Forces.
He was there.
And then when I was there just this past January, I spent a day with this nice old man who was head archivist for the Argentine Air Force.
Nice old man.
He's probably younger than I am.
But anyhow, he gave me a DVD, a couple of DVDs, and I was watching one of them.
And in this particular DVD, it was shot probably around 1960, I'm guessing.
They had a camera mounted on the top of the hangar, and they would just taxi all the planes of the Argentine Air Force past the camera.
It was sort of a recruiting or public relations deal.
And holy smoke, there was a Horton.
Are you familiar with the Horton?
No.
The flying wing bomber, the jet-powered flying wing bomber that the Horton brothers built, that the U.S. modeled our B-2 bomber after.
So I'm thinking, what the heck?
So I called this guy up.
I said, am I going crazy?
Or was there a Horton in there?
Oh, yeah, he said, the Horton brothers came down here, and they sent me a photo of a Horton flying wing jet bomber that was flying over the Brazilian rainforest.
I got that photo on my computer.
So no matter where you went, we went, for instance, to the main hotel in Buenos Aires, which incidentally is a beautiful city.
They call it the Paris of the South.
And my research indicated that Martin Borman lived in that hotel, the Plaza Hotel, for two years after the war ended with two young women.
And you have to give him extra points for that, living there with two young women.
So anyhow, I went into the hotel, talked to the manager, Senora Rodriguez, and I introduced myself, told her what I was doing there, and I said, the reason I'm here at the plaza, my research indicates That Martin Borman lived here for two years after the war.
Without batting an eye, the lady said, Yeah, in room 704.
I says, What?
You knew it?
She says, Yeah, we all knew he lived here.
That's the presidential suite.
He lived there for two years after the war.
Well, if this was such an open secret locally, if everybody knew, how come our Secret Service people didn't go down there and get Bormann and get Hitler if they were living quite openly down there?
It's very hard to keep an absolute secret in this world.
Or was there some other agenda being played out here?
Oh, you bet there was another agenda.
And that's in my book, too, in much more detail than I can give you on the phone.
But whenever I'm speaking to somebody, either for an interview like this or researchers, whatever, you know, the first question is, why didn't they go get him?
And I ask, well, who is they?
Oh, and they look a little shocked for a minute.
Well, Israel.
Why didn't Israel go get him?
I tell them, well, in 1945, there was no such place as Israel.
It didn't come along until 1948.
Oh, well, then what about the Mossad?
Well, the Mossad didn't even start until after Israel started.
Well, why not the United States?
Bingo.
There's the question.
As I told you, I was, and this is my theory now, and I think it's right on spot, but I haven't proven it yet, so I have to say it's a theory.
You remember I told you I was a nuclear weapons specialist in the U.S. Air Force, and I went through special weapons school from January until July 1958.
And the early stages of the training, we saw all the films of the American nuclear scientists, how they were working and struggling.
And as a matter of fact, Japan test-fired their first atomic weapon one week before the U.S. test fired our first one.
So you say that there was a quid pro quo going on?
That is my theory, and I believe it hardcore.
Yep.
Because right after Germany surrendered, we suddenly had, our scientists suddenly got brilliant.
And our weapons were working.
We had uranium.
And I didn't know it at the, oh, what, 10, 15 years ago, we had another fella join Shark Hunters who was on the submarine U-234 when it surrendered in Norfolk.
It was full of scientists on their way to Tokyo, but the war ended, so they came to the U.S. and surrendered.
He was the guy who designed the infrared trigger mechanisms for the atomic bombs.
Now, with an atomic bomb, you've got a big sphere with 64 precisely shaped charges and detonators, and each detonator must fire at exactly the same micro-milli instant to create a nuclear explosion.
He's the guy that designed those triggers.
I knew nothing about it at the time when he was a member.
He wound up living in Milwaukee, working for a defense contractor for the U.S., made a ton of money, but unfortunately he died.
But as I say, these guys, in my opinion, were the quid pro quo.
Plus, when Borman and all the rest got down there, Borman had all the codes for all the secret bank accounts.
Plus, he brought down tons of gold, jewels.
This has been proven.
And we look at Juan Piron, 1945, he was a colonel with no money, no property.
1947, he was a very wealthy landowner general and president of Argentina.
Where did he get all that money?
Did he win the lottery?
Did he win the Irish sweepstakes?
No.
Borman brought it.
So, my theory again, and I'm quite certain it's correct, anybody who would have wanted any of those high-ranking guys would have had to actually come in with a full invasion, a military invasion of Argentina because they were all protected, with the exception of Eichmann and maybe one or two other small potatoes.
Eichmann had no money.
He had no protection.
He and his sons built their home, which was 20 foot by 20 foot.
Now, that's not much of a home.
I've been there.
The house is torn down now, but we've got photos of it.
He rode a bus three hours each way to his job in the factory at Mercedes of Argentina.
And on the weekends, he sold fruit juices at the seashore on the Rio de la Plata because he had no money.
So he had no protection.
And the Mossad, now by that time, the Mossad was large and powerful.
They sent, I think, six guys, and they looked over the area and, oh, okay, it's a bad neighborhood.
This is where he gets off the bus at night.
No lights.
Bang, zoom, they grabbed him.
So, but others, like Mengele, we found three of his houses in Buenos Aires, and one of them, literally Howard, was backyard to backyard with Peron's presidential palace.
But there is a theory, and it's been proved time and time again, even if you're a Osama bin Laden, there is no protection in the world if somebody wants to get you.
Oh, yeah, if somebody wants to get you, they'll get you.
And one of our members who's retired U.S. Army intelligence, he said the same thing.
However, the degree of difficulty they could have gotten Hitler if they wouldn't have minded literally invading Argentina.
And of course, there's another issue here, and that is another issue here, and that is the issue of letting sleeping dogs lie.
In other words, we were getting on with our rebuilding here.
You know, Europe was rebuilding after the devastation and the carnage.
Would you want to rock the boat by saying, well, actually, the story that you were told About Hitler dying ain't true.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're absolutely correct.
We have tracked down the escape route.
Now, Borman left Europe on board a submarine with this Don Angel that I was telling you about.
They left out of a little Spanish town called, oh, geez, what the heck was it?
Anyhow, it was right up the river from Vigo, Spain.
And you'll remember in the movie Das Boat, there was a German ship in the harbor at Vigo.
They also had it in Cadiz and El Ferrero.
And they would supply German U-boats during the war.
Well, this one, oh, Villa Garcia, that's the name of this little fishing town.
They came out of Villa Garcia and met a U-boat, and they went down to Argentina.
We have followed their tracks all the way down to Argentina.
Don Angel went back to Madrid, still working for Borman and the movement.
Then he was sent to Mexico City, and ultimately he was sent down to meet with Hitler in 1952.
Now, in 1989, when we were still in Tampa, Florida, one of our members, who's now deceased, Captain Robert Thew, who was naval intelligence his whole time in the Navy, then he was with the NSA, which as we all know means no such agency, after that.
And he was visiting in our house, and I asked him if he had ever heard of a German agent by the name of Don Angel Alcazar Dubelasco.
He chuckled.
I said, you know, it's so funny, Bob.
He says, well, yeah, sure.
He was a spy.
Because he was such a bad spy.
Everybody knew he was a spy.
And I said, well, this guy was a real nut.
I said, he told me that he met with Hitler in August of 1952.
I says, everybody knows Hitler committed suicide in April of 44.
And without batting an eye, without any emotion, Bob Thu said, no, he didn't.
We knew he got away.
I said, well, we, who's we?
He said, the intelligence community.
We knew he got away.
And every time we'd run down another high-ranking SS or Abwehr guy, we'd grill him on, where's Hitler?
So he said, we knew Hitler got away, and we knew Don Angel was working for him.
So apparently, like you say, leave sleeping dogs lie or whatever.
And another one of our members, Peter Hansen, was very high up in the Abwehr.
And he said the same exact thing.
So, and with all the smoking guns pointing in that direction, there's no question.
We also talked to the waitress who waited on Hitler and Ava Brown, who by then was Ava Hitler, in 1949.
We stayed in the little guest house where they stayed in 1949.
That's up in Cordova province.
If you look on my website, you'll see the secret compound up there near this hotel.
Long story with that, longer than you're going to want to listen to, but that's also on my website.
Previous Tours, Argentina 2014.
You go down a long road through a tunnel that's only big enough for one car.
You go another mile or two into the forest, and suddenly here's this compound.
It's all deserted now.
But there was a barracks building.
There was a headquarters building, an orderly room.
The showers still work.
There's a big swimming pool that's deserted.
And there's a little grotto.
What do you call it?
A shrine.
You know, these so-called godless Nazis had a shrine to the Holy Mother, so obviously they weren't so godless.
And they were operating up until 1960.
We also went to some hotels up in Cordova province in the northwest.
One of them was built with German money in the closing months of the war, and they had all the most modern amenities.
They had air conditioning.
They had elevators.
And they also had a plastic surgery clinic.
Well, they don't need it that if they were changing identities, making people look different, they needed exactly that.
They had lots of plastic surgery clinics around South America.
And this one was a big resort.
And it was right on the shore of a great salt lake in the interior of Argentina.
And for some reason, I don't know, you know, people will say maybe God was mad at them.
But this lake started to rise and rise and rise.
And what was the seashore 100 yards away now flooded the hotel and the water got so deep it was touching the ceiling of the first level.
Well, obviously, that was the end of the hotel.
And so it was abandoned.
The water went down.
The hotel is a shambles.
But this one fellow I know, he won't tell who his father was.
His father was very high up with the Third Reich.
I met with him.
I spent a week with friends out in New Mexico.
And he was in the same hotel, a couple rooms down from me.
He was at this same hotel on the shore of that lake in 1960.
This was before it started, the water started to rise.
And he said all the guests were Germans, and the plastic surgery clinic was going full speed.
So, as we bring this to a conclusion for this time, and if you would be happy to do this, I'd like to talk to you again.
Whatever you say.
Say next year, we'll do one early next year, I think, when there's a lot more to talk about.
But let's ask this because it's important.
Hitler turns to be quite a passive character at this time.
Was he a broken man, or was he somewhere deep down planning to come back?
And if he was planning to come back, why did that never materialize?
From what we've learned, he was pretty well broken.
He just wanted, he didn't even want to leave Berlin.
Remember, he was forcibly drugged under orders of Martin Bormann and hauled away.
He just was very passive, wanted to live out his life.
It was a darn nice place he had out there.
You had to go up the finger of this lake.
He had a huge big manor, estate, whatever it was like.
I think it had like 10 bedrooms in it, and guest cottages all around there, and a small little building outside that was built right over a little creek, and a little paddle wheel down in there to turn the, I think you call them a dynamo to provide the electrical energy.
And also the little heating unit was in another building outside with the steam pipe going in.
It's quite a nice place and a boathouse.
But, you know, Ava Brown was still alive way after he died.
He died in the early 60s.
As of 2002, we had indications she was still alive.
Good lord.
Well, she would have been 90 years old.
That's not a big deal.
My grandma got restored.
She was 90 when she died.
She was born within the sound of bow bells.
In London town.
Yeah, and she died because she fell down too many times and broke her hip.
And old people don't recover from it.
Well, yeah, my grandmother, the same, it was very much downhill for her after she fell and broke her hip.
Yeah.
It's such a sad thing, but that's what happens.
What an amazing story.
Tell me finally then, for this time, Harry, why do we need to know this now?
Well, that's a good question.
Do we need to know it or do we want to know it?
We don't need to know it, really, because that phase of history is no longer even taught in our high schools over here because that is ancient history to these kids.
I'm an old guy, but my 23-year-old daughter is in her master's program for psychology.
They don't even teach World War II.
We had the most highly decorated American submarine skipper ever in history.
He was a guest in my house.
Nobody knew who he was.
Admiral Flucky with the Medal of Honor and four Navy crosses.
These kids don't know who he was.
Captain Joe Enright, who sank the Shenano, the biggest ship ever sunk by a submarine.
He sat right on the sofa I'm looking at.
Nobody knows who he was.
The chief of intelligence of the Soviet Navy was here.
That's all ancient history to these kids.
So we don't need to know it, but we want to know it.
Why do we want to know it?
Because my own personal motivation, I hate a question with no answer.
I've got to get an answer.
And so because I do this 12 hours a day for the last almost 32 years now, I have become one of the world's experts on the U-boats and now probably the world's expert on Hitler escaping.
I'm not patting myself on the back.
It's just that's the way it is.
And so you will never retire from this by the sounds of it.
No, I can't.
I can't.
Like I say, these old guys gave me their memories, gave me their history.
I was a guest in their homes, Kretschmer, Topp, Hardigan, Hess, so many of them.
And the American side, too.
They gave me their history.
But the Germans especially, because I promised to tell their true and honest story, not the propaganda.
So they opened up, and I go over there every year.
There's almost no U-boaters left, but I go over there every year in September for the Ulrichsburg Memorial, in which hundreds and hundreds of German veterans come out, and Italian and Czech, et cetera, but mostly German.
And they have the only memorial of its kind that I know of in which they remember everyone who fell in battle, no matter what uniform, no matter what flag.
And, you know, in our conventions where the guys that get together, Americans, Germans, even a few Brits, they found that they weren't different at all.
They just wore different uniforms.
And that is very much the message of my father down the generations.
I lost my dad last year.
Very sadly, I miss him every single day.
But that's the message that basically we're all the same.
The ordinary people in their military service, it's just the same.
And they're all serving some greater end, somebody else's dream, not theirs.
Right.
Our motto is yesterday's enemies are today's friends.
And when we had our first big convention in Germany, 1988, at the farewell dinner, there were hundreds of people in this room, ten people to a table, round tables.
And I made sure we didn't have all Germans here and all Americans there, everybody interspersed.
And the chanticoir was playing, and I looked out.
I was standing in the back, and I looked out, and here these people were, Americans, Germans, Brits, former enemies, arm in arm, swaying and singing to the music.
And I thought, how could we have ever shot at each other?
And remember, of course, the song that both sides sang, they sang it in London, they sang it in Berlin, was Lily Marlane.
Oh, Lily Marlane.
Got to pocket there.
I mean, there are lots of other things we could talk about.
And we could also get into some moral questions.
Like, of course, the Nazis included some utter criminals, utter megalomaniacs, psychopaths.
That's another story.
But we mustn't ever forget all of those people who perished for Hitler's ideal.
And the very thought that this man lived until the 1960s and Ava Braun lived until 2002 or whatever, it's very, very chilling for a lot of people, I'm sure.
It's very, very chilling for me to even contemplate that because he needed to be brought to justice somehow.
And clearly, all right, he faced a form of justice because he was exiled out there, but that was not appropriate in any way.
Well, it's not the same, of course, but There were war criminals on both sides, Howard, and I am a historian.
I am not a moral commentator, so I can tell you all the history you want to know.
But was this guy good, bad, or otherwise?
I stay away from that entirely because anything I would say would just be an opinion and not a fact.
Plus, of course, the blacks and whites we've been told, having done this show for a number of years and having been a journalist for a lot of years, the blacks and whites often melt into shades of gray.
You're not really, in most things that happen, even stuff that's going on right now, we're not apprised of the truth until an awful lot later.
But that is another subject for another time.
Harry, just tell people what your website is so they can go there.
Very well.
It's sharkhunters.com.
And make sure you've got plenty of time to roam through it because it'll just suck you right in.
And Howard, I'm going to stick you on as a member for one year, and you'll get my magazine.
And so you get a better idea of where we're at.
Well, no, a wonderfully curated is the word, curated website you have.
Harry, thank you very much.
Give my love to Florida.
I sure will.
It's about to rain.
I think I'm in London.
No, we can give you rain, plenty of it.
We'll talk again next year.
Thanks, Harry.
Very well.
Happy New Year and Merry Christmas.
Same to you, too.
Bye-bye.
Harry Cooper, in Florida.
If you have any thoughts about him, any suggestions for future guests or anything you'd like to say, please get in touch.
Go to the website, triple w dot theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv.
And there you can send me an email by following the link.
And if you'd like to make a donation, and please, while you're there, for the next week or so, the poll will still be up and we'll bring you some results of that poll, hopefully in the very early new year.
Amazing that we're talking about 2015 already.
I remember sitting here recording these shows back at the end of 2009 and 2008.
Boy, I know I'm sounding like my father now and my mother.
Where has the time gone?
These years do go quickly.
But maybe that's just a sign of getting older.
I don't know.
Thank you very much to Adam Cornwell, my webmaster at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool for his hard work getting the show out to you, maintaining the website and everything else that he does.
Roger Saunders in California, thank you for your support as ever.
Martin, thank you for the theme tune.
And like I say, please do get in touch, Martin.
And above all, to you for continuing to support me here at The Unexplained and for the kind things that you say.
Until next, we meet here, wherever you are in the world, whether you're in one of the warm parts or one of the cold and damp parts, please stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
I am in London and I'll see you again soon.
Take care.
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