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March 15, 2020 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:08:22
Edition 435 - Gerrard Williams

Another conversation with journalist/author Gerrard Williams on his latest work suggesting Hitler escaped and the Nazis ran a covert network out of 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.
Thank you very much for being part of my show.
Thank you for recent emails.
I will be giving a couple of mentions in just a second.
Not a lot, just a couple of poignant points, as they say, coming very soon.
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And thank you very much for being part of my family here.
The guest on this edition, a return visit for Gerard Williams, a man who wrote a book essentially about the escape of Adolf Hitler after World War II.
His latest research, which is leading to his newest book, I think you will find truly fascinating.
The title, at the moment, Shadow Reich, How the Nazis Ran the Cold War, Got Away with the Biggest Heist in History, and Helped Create the New Age of Nationalism.
There is much, much more in this.
A fascinating book.
Gerard Williams, former television journalist, broadcast journalist, somebody who's got many friends in common with me, has a great pedigree and writes remarkable books on these subjects.
So Gerrard Williams, the guest on this edition.
Just a couple of people to say hello to.
David Wallington says, I've donated to your past shows.
Thank you, David, for that.
And at the moment, I'm going through your archive and really enjoying it.
Good news.
I have a guest suggestion for you, Dr. Anthony Attala from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
I know nothing about that, David.
I have talked about regenerative medicine before.
A topic, rather, that I find truly fascinating for reasons because, like all of us, I'm getting older.
And of course, I'm interested in those things.
There was a story around recently about the possibility getting nearer.
I think it was my friend Dr. Ian Pearson, the futurist, who was behind this newspaper story, that we may be able to somehow remove our brains and put them into some kind of artificial intelligence robotic framework for the future.
So we can essentially live forever, I think was the tone of that piece.
Now, that is interesting, maybe to some, those who could afford it appealing, but I wonder if you would want to go on forever.
I'm not entirely sure whether I would, and whether things would continue to be as enjoyable as they were, say, 20, 30 years ago.
If you're living for 150 or 200 years, I wonder if you still get the same kind of buzz out of the good things in life when they come along, and whether those good things would be as special if they keep coming along, if you know what I'm saying, in the words of Carly Simon coming around again.
Sam, Sam Gallias, nice to hear from you again.
Nancy in Watsonville, California, Central Coast, asks me a big question, Nancy, and I probably am not going to answer you in enough words here, because I think I could probably speak for half a day about this.
But what makes a good broadcaster?
Now, before I answer, I am not going to say by any stretch of the imagination that I'm one.
But what does make a good broadcaster?
I think the key to it all is just being yourself.
If you can identify, or maybe somebody can do that for you, the things that they like or maybe you like about yourself, and then just be the person that you are.
You know, the best broadcasts that I've done are probably more recently than ones that I've done years ago, because I simply have got to an age and a stage where I've been through it all.
I've had the kicks and the knocks and the bangs and the horrible treatment from some people and the wonderful experiences with others.
And I've got to a stage where I can only be me.
And maybe that's the place you have to get to.
And once you've got to that place, then you're in a very good space.
And that is the place to build any career that you may have as a broadcaster.
I think so.
But Nancy, maybe you can tell me what do you think makes a good broadcaster.
I'd be interested to know.
Because it is an elixir, an elixir of life and longevity in this bizarre field in which we are engaged.
And I would be more than interested to know what that is.
You know, you have to have a certain amount of technical understanding, timings and things like that.
I'm constantly learning.
And as I say, I do not consider myself to be God's gift to broadcasting.
But I just think the key to it all, and I've spent a lifetime on the way there, I'm not saying I've got there, is simply being yourself.
And if you can do that, and the greatest broadcasters can, then you win, assuming you've got something that people want.
And that's the next part of the equation.
I had a wonderful email, and I've replied to you personally, Claire.
Thank you very much for taking the time to assess my situation and give me your thoughts.
They meant a great deal to me, and thank you very, very much.
All right, let's get to the guest now, Gerard Williams, journalist, author, and the idea that Adolf Hitler and others escaped.
And what became of them and what became of their evil regime after that?
I think you'll be fascinated in.
So Gerard Williams, thank you very much for coming back on my show.
Howard, it's a pleasure.
Thank you very much.
So I understand that you are no longer in France, Gerard.
You've now moved to the Thames Valley, the back end of the Thames Valley.
I've moved back to the UK for various reasons, but mainly to be near my family.
Right.
I enjoyed my time in France, but with that ridiculous Brexit happening and various other things going on in my life, I decided it was time to come back to the UK.
So many people seem to be relocating one way or the other in the midst of the political events that we're going through.
And of course, now we've got coronavirus.
And by the time people hear this, the situation will have changed again.
So these are worrying times for all of us.
Question.
Is it easier to do the sorts of research that we will be talking about here in France, which of course was occupied and still very much has the imprint of those days?
Or is it easier to do it here?
It doesn't really matter where I do it.
I mean, the important thing for me has been to walk the ground in Germany, Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, all places that I've been to.
Much of the other research is simple slog.
Kew is always good to get to the National Archives on occasion, but most of the material I'm after at Kew has been stamped top secret for another 50 years.
The area that you're in is an area that used to be derided by people.
The whole idea that maybe Hitler got away and that the Nazis continued in some form somewhere else and were planning whatever they were planning, and we'll talk about that too.
People used to deride that, but now more and more authors and researchers and people of credibility are coming forward and saying there may well be a lot in this.
But even so, there are still historians who say that couldn't have happened.
I spoke to one who I think we will both know.
I don't need to give you his name, but you've heard this before, who said there is no credible evidence that anything other than dying in the bunker happened to Adolf Hitler at the end of World War II.
You would disagree with that, I guess.
Well, sadly, there is no credible evidence that Adolf Hitler did die in the bunker at the end of World War II.
I have to admit, Howard, that when I first came across this story, I was in Argentina doing other things.
And I thought that for the first time in my long career as an international television newsman, that I would do a rather silly story about a man with a moustache escaping by a submarine and going to South America at the end of World War II.
I had never done a conspiracy theory story.
I'd always been in hard news, you know, 90-odd countries as a journalist, covering some of the biggest stories of the late 20th century and the early 21st.
And I thought that I would do it for a laugh.
And then I started to look into it.
And I looked at the contemporaneous reporting from the BBC, from Reuters, from AP, from Time, from Newsweek.
And a whole new picture started to emerge that Hitler had not died in the bunker, that he had escaped.
He'd been flown out of Berlin and eventually had ended up on the Argentine coast on a submarine.
And I was gobsmacked.
And I must admit, I talked about it with quite a few of my senior news friends and people who are senior Sky at the Bieb, Reuters Television, and quite a few of them said, Gerard, you're incredibly mad to even do this.
You've got a good reputation, which I feel I have a reasonable reputation as an international newsman.
And if you do this, people will think you're a complete nutter.
And I could not not do it.
The truth is very different to the lies that we have been sold and continue to be sold by historians.
Was there a tipping point for you where you decided this piece of information simply means that I have to do this, whatever the downsides may be at the time when you started it, got to do this?
No, you know, there was no smoking gun, Howard.
There still isn't.
What there was was a wealth of material.
I mean, we had people like BBC's reporter Thomas Cadet, who was, as we would call it nowadays, embedded with the Soviet forces when they took the bunker.
Cadet said they found no body that could have been Hitler, that he had disappeared.
There's no sign of two partially incinerated bodies or anything like that.
Magda and Joseph Goebbels and their children are there, but there's no sign of Hitler.
And of course, nobody knew about Ava Brown internationally at that stage.
That was only to come out sometime later.
Now, Thomas Cadet said it.
Zhukov said it, the Soviet commander commanding forces on that front.
Eisenhower said, we have no proof that Adolf Hitler is dead.
And then Stalin actually went up to the foreign affairs guy of the US at Potsdam, and he said he escaped.
He went to Spain or Argentina.
Now, why has none of this ever been reported by historians who continue to sell this complete idiocy that Hitler died in the bunker?
You say Stalin said that, but I always thought, and I may be wrong, that the so-called Hitler skull, the one with the bullet hole in it, purportedly, the Hitler skull, its final resting place was Russia, I thought.
It was in Moscow.
Yeah, interestingly enough, that skull is that of a woman in her 40s.
It's been proved by DNA analysis by an American scientist called Bellatoni, who did that seven or eight years ago.
It's not even a bloke.
So the skull with the bullet hole in it is that of a woman in her 40s.
So it couldn't have been Ava Brown either, because she was in her 20s when they left Berlin.
What you're saying here, though, is not the random escape, the panicked escape is a better word, of somebody who was losing and realized that despite his dreams of hegemony or whatever the word is, hegemony, despite those dreams, it was time to get out.
That wasn't a panic escape.
What you're saying is that this escape, removal, was well organized and supported.
Completely.
There were many different types or ways out for the Fuhrer at the end.
I don't think that he wanted to go, but I think he was persuaded by Martin Bormann and General Müller of the SS that he had to, that it was the only way that there was any chance that the whole idea might survive.
Martin Bormann had been planning for this since 1943, and there were numerous routes out of Berlin.
The one that the Russians discovered and was published in a newsweek at No Time magazine was that they found a door in Hitler's private apartments in the Chancery, not in the Führerbunker, but in the Chancery, which was a concrete slab which slid to the left,
and behind that was a tunnel Which led down to another underground bunker, a series of rooms, where they found evidence of a letter from Ava Brown to her parents saying, I won't be able to see you for much, I won't be able to see you again for a while.
And then that tunnel, that series of rooms connected to another tunnel, which connected to the Berlin Underground railway system.
Now, all this is reported at the time.
It's not something I've made up.
I don't do that.
If you look at Gray Wolf, The Escape of Adolf Hitler, that Simon Dunstan, my military historian friend and I wrote, there are 83 pages of notes in the back, Howard.
There are references to everything.
I'm an agency-trained journalist.
I don't do things without sources and references.
So how come this was never put together in this way before?
We know history teaches us that sometimes people do not join the dots.
Is that a case of this?
No, in part, I think it's deliberate.
In 1945, the world was tired of war.
And for the war to be finished, Hitler had to be dead.
And that was the easiest thing to tell the general public and to tell that wonderful generation, which included my father, which had fought to rid the world of fascism.
So I think it was easier, but there's also a really darker side to this.
A deal was done at the end of World War II between Martin Bormann and the head of the OSS, later to be the CIA, Alan Dulles, and a few of his contemporaries and friends, to give America all the rocket secrets, the whole operation of Vener von Braun, various nuclear materials, and all the artwork and gold that was recovered in the Merkers mine.
And in return, Bormann, Fageline, who did not get executed, and General Müller and Adolf Hitler were all allowed to escape to Argentina, where the ground had been set since, well, the late 30s.
And according to Dean Reuter, who I interviewed recently, whose work you might be aware of, also a man we probably haven't heard of most of it, General Hans Kamler, architect of the Holocaust.
He was also allowed to get away in a similar way.
Not convinced about the Kamler theories.
The idea that Kamler was also responsible for some esoteric wonder weapon called the Bell is something that I've never seen any serious proof of.
Camler's interesting, but I think if Camla disappears in Czechoslovakia in 45, if Kamla went anywhere, he went to the United States and just disappeared, was given a purcel shine, as they called it.
And yet it was claimed that he was the person who may have facilitated the American rocket program.
They needed people like Werner von Braun and others who were experts in rocketry because of what they developed in World War II.
And, you know, the theory goes that Hans Kammler was allowed to get away because he was the person who oiled the wheels and facilitated those people getting across to the U.S. That's possible, but it's not something that I have direct knowledge of.
I mean, the interesting thing about the Vener von Braun story is Vener von Braun supposedly just walked up to Patton's troops and surrendered.
His brother had got on a bicycle and rode to Patton's troops, and Patton picked up all of Vener von Braun's scientists.
The truth is that they were actually picked up from their homes by members of 30th Assault Unit.
Ian Fleming, the man who goes on to write the Bond novels, Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming of the Royal Navy at the time, ran an operation called his Red Indians, called 30 Assault Unit.
And 30th Assault Unit were British commanders who operated, British commandos rather, who operated behind the lines as they were collapsing.
So 30 AU knew exactly where von Braun's top technicians lived.
They were all in an area that was going to be Soviet controlled after the war.
30 AU went in, picked them all up, put them all together, and then handed them to Patton.
This has only come out in the last five or six years and still isn't accepted as history.
But it's come out because people are finally writing the history of 30 AU.
Now, for them to know where every single one of those men lived and be able to deliver them to the Americans, somebody had to tell them Howard.
And that's part of the deal.
Borman gave British and American intelligence details of where these people lived, and they were able to go and pick them up.
So as we've come to appreciate, and your father wouldn't have accepted it, my father and his father would not have accepted it.
It would have been too difficult for them.
But uneasy accommodations out of supposed necessity are made in circumstances like this.
And that is how people like Hans Kamle get away, it is claimed.
But also, perhaps you think it was also the way that Hitler and Bormann got away.
Is that so?
Yeah, very definitely.
I mean, you could call it real politic if you want to.
I'm not sure the 11 million people who were industrially murdered by those Nazi swine would accept that real politic was a defense in anything.
And it's interesting that you mentioned our fathers, our father's generation.
My dad died sadly before I finished Grey Wolf.
My father had been a combat soldier in World War II, joined up at 18 in 1939, fought all the way through North Africa, up through Italy and was wounded at Monte Cassino for the third time, and was then back in Germany at the end of the war because he spoke German, working with displaced people.
If my dad had read Grey Wolf, he would have picked up his 303, oiled it, and gone looking for people to kill.
He was lied to.
His whole generation were lied to.
It is, I mean, it is for me unacceptable on a lot of levels that something like that could happen.
You know, whatever benefits you might accrue, the fact that, as you say, that number of people were industrially murdered, and it was done in such a systematic way, and it was kept quiet from the world for a period, and then at the end of the war, we discovered the full horror of it.
You know, the people who did that, by any standard of today's morality, had to be brought to some kind of justice.
And that did not happen, it seems.
Well, it's interesting.
Martin Bormann is actually found guilty in absentia at Nuremberg of crimes against humanity, despite the fact they haven't found his body.
Adolf Hitler isn't even mentioned in Nuremberg in terms of writs being put against him or him being found guilty in absentia.
He's never put on trial at Nuremberg for crimes against humanity.
And I find that very, very strange.
It's also interesting how, you know, the actual scale of the Holocaust of what these people did, never mind what they did during the war, during combat, whatever, what they actually did to these 11 million civilians only started to come out in 46, 47.
And that's where the true horror, the true scale of things started to become realized.
The deal had been done by then.
And I think, and it's something that I'll be developing in the second book, which at the moment is being called The Spider's Web.
It's something that I think that Bormann realized in 47, 48 was that it was over for the Nazis in the form that they had been in.
No more swastikas, no more polished jackboots, no more putting your arm in the air, no more Heil Hitler.
There were other ways to get to what they wanted to do.
And that's what they managed to achieve.
And that was about political control and economic control.
But once the horror, I mean, just beyond belief, horror.
I mean, even today, there was an article that in a Polish market a couple of weeks ago, somebody found a book which was covered in human skin, which came from one of the concentration camps.
And that is appalling and terrible, terrifying to read about and hear about.
But the worry is that today's generation are not going to get to hear those stories, and they need to.
This has to reverberate down history.
Otherwise, it's going to happen again.
Completely.
I mean, there's a phrase in Spanish which is nunca mas, which means never again.
And it's something that they do in Argentina following the disappearance murder of 30,000 of their own people during the dirty war in the 1970s.
And although we have the Holocaust memorials, we have the Adveshen Museum, and we have people out there who do still talk about this.
People are forgetting, and you cannot forget this.
It should not be allowed.
On our side, Gerard, who facilitated or who turned a blind eye to the escape of Hitler?
Alan Dulles, the most important man who was head of the CIA later, but head of OSS during World War II.
Another American called John J. McCloy, who was the American plenipotentiary in Germany after the war.
He was responsible for freeing all the industrialists, so none of them ever served out the terms that they were given at Nuremberg.
They're two of the keys.
I also think that probably Henry Kissinger, as a very young man, was involved in the same group of people.
In Argentina, it's Sejwan and Devita Perón.
They're the key figures there.
But there's a huge infrastructure in Argentina just waiting for these people to go there.
Because from accounts, not only your own, of the way these people assimilated themselves into society once they got to their new home, it's all remarkably smooth.
It's a whole network.
And if you watch movies, which I love the Odessa file, I don't know what you think about that, but if you watch movies like that, you know, there was a whole infrastructure in place.
Well, just think what would have happened if we had lost the war.
The Royals would have gone to Canada.
Many of our troops would have gone out to the then empire and would have become integrated with Australians and New Zealanders or whatever.
Even if Germans were hunting them, Nazis were hunting them.
So when you have somewhere like Argentina, which had a massive German population and a massive Italian population as well, you have to remember that many of them would have been supporters of Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator in Italy.
There was also a huge amount of money being pumped into Argentina by the Nazis.
I mean, over a third of what they looted from Europe at the end of World War II or during World War II has never been recovered.
And you have to remember that when every single Jewish person or person was sent to the extermination camps, the German state, the Nazis, took not only their stocks and shares, their gold, their life belongings, their inheritances, their houses and everything.
So, I mean, they made a fortune.
The biggest criminal gang in history is a great description of the Nazis.
And they were good at stealing.
And we see on documentaries, we see the great room that I think is Adolnier Auschwitz of suitcases.
Row upon row, stacked many times higher than a person, of suitcase, suitcase, suitcase, all looking the same.
Every suitcase telling a story of somebody who went there and probably never got out.
But there's more to it, isn't there?
And the bodies we used at the stuffed coats.
Yes, and the scale of theft.
We forget this.
The scale of theft from people was enormous.
And like a lot of things today, a great American phrase fits here.
Follow the money.
What happened to the money?
The money that eventually made out of Nazi Germany, and it's not just money, Howard, it's patents, it's scientific discoveries, it's intelligence, it's material that can be used for blackmail later on.
Much of the money, the physical money, goes out to Switzerland.
And the Swiss don't care where it comes from.
They charge 4% on every transaction and they telegraphically transfer it to wherever the Nazis want it to go.
It's not an idea of, you know, U-boats filled with gold.
There was no need to fill a U-boat with gold.
It couldn't carry that much anyway.
It just, you had an agreement with a Swiss bank, and that Swiss bank said, yes, we'll be your third party, and we will transfer these funds to the Banco Alemano or the Banco Germanico In Buenos Aires.
And that's what they did.
They also transferred it to banks in Turkey and banks in Syria, as well as lots of other front companies around the world.
I mean, Bormann and his organization set up 750 front companies around the world that were able to receive funds.
And then, of course, you have the international arms of major companies like Siemens, for instance, which still exists today, but was described by MI5 during the war as the international arm of the SS.
And, you know, it's very simple to transfer money and patents and everything else out to Siemens in Buenos Aires or Siemens in Istanbul or Siemens in Damascus, which is exactly what they did.
So what was Hitler and his henchmen doing with that money?
How were they deploying it in those early years after the escape?
Peron gets his hands on a fair amount of it, a fair amount of it.
But I mean, the money was being used to build networks, to pay networks in Germany, to run the network in Spain, which is the Cameraden work, or Edessa, or I don't actually believe it was ever called Edessa, or Deschmini, which is the spider's web, which is what it was called amongst the Nazis.
So money is being used to run these operations.
Money is also being used to get back to West Germany, to the man who's running West German intelligence, to fund the Cold War.
I mean, this is a ridiculous thing.
The Americans put a man called General Galen in charge of the intelligence operation in Germany, and they believe Galen about what the Soviets are doing.
Galen's whole purpose is to work for Bormann to make sure the Americans are so scared of what the Soviets might be doing that they don't look at what's happening in Germany on the ground.
Hold on.
So you're saying that this organization stoked up the Cold War, which wouldn't have been as intense, in order to deflect attention from what the ex-Nazis and continuing Nazis were doing?
Yeah, there's no such thing as an ex-Nazi Howard, sadly.
But yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.
And that's what I'll expose in detail in the spider's web.
You also say it's an astonishing figure that the hardcore of people willing to support them, ready to support them, and being supported from South America by all of that money, there were 20,000 of those people.
No, there were 20,000 former Nazi soldiers who were willing to pick up guns and go back into uniform at the drop of the hat.
And what was the plan?
Was there a plan?
Well, it was a plan if necessary.
And the wonderful thing, wonderful, awful word to use when you're talking about Bormann's plans, they're so multi-layered.
They plan for every possible occurrence.
They plan for the idea that they may have to build an armed resistance in Germany.
They don't in the end.
Werewolf, which they had planned and planned in detail, never really happens.
There's a few actions, but not very many.
And they pull back from werewolf because they have a deal with the Americans, which will enable them to continue.
They have a plan for a standing army, arms, sorry, a standing army in Germany because Germany isn't allowed to have an army.
But what Germany has is huge amounts of ex-soldiers, and it has huge amounts of weapon caches all over the bloody place, excuse my language, all over the damn place.
And they are available to a group of officers who had thought with the Nazis, generals down, who aren't being treated as war criminals.
There's no such thing as denazification.
It's a complete farce.
So were these people waiting for the go-ahead, an order, the green light?
Yeah, I mean, they're very good at obeying orders.
Very good at obeying orders.
They didn't have to because eventually the West German government, and I can't remember what it was, is it 48, 49, they're allowed to build a German army, a German army again.
Sorry, I have a problem with saying Germany and army at the same sentence.
Fine.
I have problems with hegemony.
I'm afraid.
Yes, but they were allowed to build the Bundeswehr.
So many of the men who had been set up to form this Nazi army in waiting simply rejoined, joined up.
I mean, there's a line.
I'm not sure whether it's mine.
I like to think it was mine.
But at the end of World War II, the Nazis took off their Hugo boss designed uniforms, went home, put on their Hugo Boss-designed suits, and just carried on.
And how about the dimension of East and West?
Because we forget, a lot of young people don't even know this.
You know, it's not even taught in their history, I don't think.
But, you know, there was an East Germany that was communist controlled and was very rigid and very old-fashioned by the end of it.
That's one of the reasons it fell apart.
And then there was modern, forward-looking, American-facing West Germany.
How did all of this, this plan, this organization, fit in between those two systems?
Well, I mean, it's interesting.
You know, there's something that happens in the 50s and 60s in West Germany called the West German economic miracle.
And this is often used as an example of how Germans work harder than Frenchmen and Brits and Spanish and whatever.
No, they didn't.
All the money that the Bormann organization had taken out, all the capital that they had taken out, just flooded back into West Germany.
And the Americans just went, oh, this is brilliant.
We've got a proper industrialized ally in the center of Europe.
I'm not sure it actually was an ally.
They were still making sure that the Americans were so worried about what the Soviets were potentially up to that they didn't see what was happening and how West Germany was rebuilding and becoming the economic powerhouse it was when it was able to bring East Germany back into the fold at the fall of the Berlin War.
This is a long plan, Howard.
This isn't like a four-year parliamentary democracy presidential or prime ministerial thing.
These guys planned for 20 to 30 to 40 years' time.
But the problem was they were all getting older.
There was always a chance that they would get found or found out.
Eventually Hitler would have died, I assume.
He dies in 1962, and he has become completely shelved by the Bormann organization.
There's no way that this man can come back.
There's no way that it can be known that he has survived.
And there's no way that it can be known that he died either.
the Bormann organization are perfectly happy with the myth that Hitler died in Berlin in 1945.
So did Hitler lose the plot in his last years then?
Because you talked mostly about Bormann.
Hitler, of course, was the figurehead during World War II, but it sounds to me like did he live out his final years wearing Lederhosen and drinking beer?
Not quite, but almost.
I mean, from 1943, if you wanted to get to meet Adolf Hitler, even if you were part of the inner circle, Goering, Himmler, Goebbels, whatever, you had to go through Martin Bormann.
I mean, Bormann's place in history just seems to be like he was Hitler's secretary.
Well, this is ridiculous.
He was secretary of the party, and he was the gatekeeper for everything Hitler did.
I think he adored the man, he loved the man, and it was important to him that he got away.
But he realized, Bormann and the organization, General Müller, is very important in this, they realized that there was no place for Hitler in the new Germany.
And as such, they looked after him, but they kept him very much away from the planning.
So, yeah, I mean, from what I can gather from the things I've been told, from the information that I've received, Hitler dies in 1962 and he's been betrayed effectively.
He's mentally a mess and he's physically very ill.
And it's a great way for that horrible creature to have died.
How did, according to you, an SS officer, end up with one of Hitler's medals, his Iron Cross, the greatest honor that anybody in that regime could get as they saw it?
Right.
So I'm filming hunting Hitler down in Barralocho in Argentina, and I have to pretend for television reasons that I haven't been to places like the Saracen Tower, which is this incredible building overlooking the lake, which gives you complete control of the lake as one of its important pinch points.
And one of the local historians who's with us is somebody I've met before, and he shows me a couple of things while we're on the dock side.
He's a lawyer.
He's no idiot.
You know, he's got some conspiracy fool.
And he hands me a copy of a book, which is the autobiography of Hitler's favorite pilot, Hans Ulrich Rudel, who in the 50s actually goes back to Germany and tries to rebuild the Nazi party.
But Rudel is a one-legged ex-Stuka pilot who's a very close friend of Juan Domingo Perron, spends a lot of time skiing in Baraloce and is very close to the Furious Operation.
And inside, it's handwritten to my dearest comrade, Hans Urich.
And the book's printed in Buenos Aires in 1947 by a German publisher there who published a load of Nazi material.
And then the guy hands me a little pouch, you know, like the sort of thing you would have a ring in or a piece of jewelry.
He says, have a look at that, Gerard.
So I open it and I go, yeah, it's an Iron Cross.
And it's a World War I Iron Cross first class.
Now you see loads of iron crosses in Argentina.
A lot of them are fake.
Some of them aren't.
But they're mainly World War II.
So from the Nazi era.
And I say to this guy, what's an Iron Cross first class from World War I doing here?
Why have you got it?
And he says to me, it was in the belongings of the father of one of my clients, one of his clients as a lawyer, who at one stage had a whole collection of memorabilia from her father, who was an SS officer.
And I said, so did he fight in World War I?
And the guy says, no, no, this is Hitler's Iron Cross, which he handed to the SS officer as a thank you for looking after him during his time in Baralocho.
Is there any way to verify that?
No, I looked at that.
There are no numbers on the back or anything else.
So there's no absolute provenance on this.
All I would say, Howard, because I can't be convinced by something like this, it's an interesting story, is that Hitler only ever wore one decoration apart from his Nazi Party badge, his large gold party badge, and that was the Iron Cross that he got for valor in World War I. He got the Iron Cross first and second class, but he only ever wore his Iron Cross first class on all his uniforms and everything else.
And the idea that an SS man's daughter would have an Iron Cross in her possession from her father, who was an SS officer, I know that much, I know his number and I know his rank and everything else.
And who told her that he'd been handed it by Adolf Hitler for running his security detail in Argentina post-war.
Yeah, I mean, you come across stories about the Nazis in Argentina all over the place.
I've been to Argentina 23 times on this damn story now, Howard.
And every time I go, there's another story about a Nazi, a senior general, or a Borman, or very few stories about Mengele or Eichmann.
I mean, people go on about them as if they were terribly important characters.
But in terms of the Nazis post-war and in terms of actually the crimes they committed, in comparison to the crimes that were committed by the generals in Argentina, the Nazi generals were allowed to live out their lives there and the Nazi generals who were allowed to live out their lives in Germany.
And indeed, if we buy into all of this, they were protected.
I've seen videos of investigative journalists go out there and even in recent days, be in fear.
Now, you went two dozen times or thereabouts.
Did you feel that you had to be extra careful?
Were you in fear?
No, I've had witnesses threatened with death.
People who've told me stories have then been threatened.
And those crimes Have been reported to and investigated by the Argentine Federal Police.
I've never received personal death threats.
I've had people be a bit unpleasant to me, sometimes a little more than a lot unpleasant to me.
And my co-host in Hunting Hitler, Tim Kennedy, who's an American special forces operative, Tim was convinced that we were being followed throughout our time filming in Argentina and in Chile.
And in fact, in one location in Chile, the disgusting Colonia Dignadad, I could not film there because they recognized me.
So that blew my cover completely.
Right, but the idea that it was like the Odessa file and there was somebody in a trench coat carrying a gun with a Luger with a silencer walking behind you, that wasn't quite like it was.
Oh, no, no, I think they're a little more clever than that, to be perfectly honest.
And one of the things I've learned in having covered many complex zones around the world is that you don't need to be scared of the people who make threats to you.
You need to be scared of the damn people who don't make the threats.
Because they will just execute whatever they want to do.
They're people who are going to do it anyway.
There are a lot of people with dirty hands through this story.
They start with Pope Pius XII at the Vatican.
They include Generalissimo in Madrid, Franco, and others in all of this.
You know, there are people who had, through history, reasons to be ashamed.
Completely.
There are no heroes in this story, only villains.
They've just opened up the archives in Rome for Pius' time as the pontiff.
I'm not sure about Pius as an individual, whether or not he was pro-Nazi.
What I do know is that a huge amount of the, and we're talking a huge amount, of the clergy and the Vatican government, the Curia, were pro-Nazi.
And, you know, something many more than 50 or 60,000 European fascists escaped via the Vatican in 46, 47, and 48.
And they were helped by the International Red Cross, and they were all given passports and travel documents.
Many of them went to Argentina.
Some of them went to Egypt.
Some of them went to Syria.
Quite a few of them went to Chile.
But yeah, we're talking upwards of 50,000 people who were helped, actively helped, by the Vatican.
And it was done because they were seen in some perverse way as being soldiers of Christ.
Because they had been fighting against the communists, the godless communists.
And as such, there were people within the Vatican and people within the Jesuit order especially, which Hyderabad was thought of as the Catholic Church's equivalent of the SS anyway, who believed that these people had been heroes.
And were willing to suspend some of the tenets of their faith and their morality.
Yes, it's a very strange time for us in the 21st century.
And, you know, those of us like you and I who grew up in the 20th century, these people believed in things in a way that we don't nowadays.
So that's why I said earlier on our conversation, Howard, that there's no such thing as an ex-Nazi.
When you swore your oath to give your life for Adolf Hitler, you meant it and you meant it forever.
So what became of all of those people then?
Those who swore the allegiance?
Those senior Nazis who ended up, it seems, in South America?
What became of them all and the network that they created?
The network still exists.
It's mainly about money nowadays.
Yeah, it's about money and running stocks and shares and foreign exchange and various other things and industries.
There are industries in Germany today that you still can't get hold of their shareholding details.
Yeah, really.
But you don't think they still believe in the thousand-year Reich?
I think they probably believe in a thousand-year Germany at the heart of Europe.
And I don't think they're fascists anymore, and they're distinctly not anti-Semitic anymore.
And they don't believe in marching up in their jack boots and swastikas.
But this idea of Deutschland, Deutschland, über Aales, Germany, Germany overall, is not something that just happened in World War II.
It goes back through World War I. It goes back all the way to Bismarck.
I mean, people jokingly say that, you know, the Chinese have a thousand-year plan.
Well, I think there are elements of German society, fascist society, that also has a very, very long-term plan.
And they don't care how long it takes them to make it work.
The money that came out of Nazi Germany, the money that was siphoned out, millions upon millions upon millions upon millions of it.
Billions.
Presumably some of that.
Some of that was used to pay expenses, keeping people on side, keeping people quiet.
But I guess some of it was used for investments, which must still be growing today.
Yes, no, completely.
And also, I mean, the Germans, the Nazis had actually managed to forge very successfully the British £5 white fiverr at Sachsenhausen and Operation Bernard.
And they also managed to forge the American dollar.
And that operation didn't just collapse at the end of World War II.
It moved down to a castle in Italy and then probably went to Argentina.
And they were happily printing funny money, which could run most of the day-to-day running of this organization.
The amounts they have in terms of capital were able to be reinvested in Germany, either through Swiss banks or quite openly.
And they're still there.
And they're not just in Germany.
I mean, they're in multinational corporations all over the world.
If you were to ask somebody young today, maybe studying history, they might tell you that this was all about a crazy, perverted bunch of people in Germany who tried to rule the world, ultimately failed, and it's a lesson from history that we need to bear in mind.
But it doesn't have relevance to us today.
I think you might disagree with that.
In part, it's true, and in part it's right, but it does have relevance today.
When you see people like the American president looking at a Nazi rally being met by anti-Nazis and him saying there are good people on both sides, when you see that in February in Budapest, thousands of people got together to honor the SS and the SS uniforms and marched to the capital of Hungary.
When you see, you know, simple idiotic racism being propounded by the prime minister and his government in this country, and you see them not.
Yeah, they might do.
And a lot of people disagreed with those people who tried to warn about Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, and General Franco coming to power in the 1930s.
And in some ways, I look at what's happening across the world and I think we have learned nothing.
And what is happening now in the way in which we have a wave of populism that seems to be running across the world is incredibly similar to what was happening in the 1930s.
Scarily, and with what's happened today with the collapse of financial markets, or not collapse, but pretty heavy hit to financial markets.
Yeah, we have to say that in the wake of something to do with the oil price and also principally coronavirus, we're recording this on a day, and maybe there's going to be more of this after we've recorded this, but when the financial markets are not looking so rosy, we're looking at something that looks scarily a little bit like what happened 10 years ago.
So that is a concern.
Well, also, we're looking at something that's scarily.
It's what fascism grew out of in the 1920s and 1930s.
But are you saying that some of this is organized and it is the legitimate heir, if you can use the word legitimate, but it is the heir of those people who went to South America?
Or are you just saying this is something that can arise from a situation like the one we may find ourselves in now?
This is very arable ground for fascist ideas and populist ideas.
And they will be funded by certain elements of things that have never gone away, Howard.
I'm not, you know, I hate this.
I'm a journalist.
I don't believe in the Illuminati.
You know, I don't believe in lizard men controlling the world.
I do believe in operations like Bilderberg.
And I do know that when there's something that they can make money of, whoever they are, that groups of very important and powerful people get together and decide that they will act in concert in certain ways to achieve certain ends.
And I sometimes think that that shadow, shadowy operation is sitting there laughing at us as we try and defend what we call democracy.
So what you're saying then, and this is part of the thesis, is it, of the new book, is that we mustn't think of a bunch of people who have polished modern uniforms and jack boots at the ready, but there are people who in this day and age have benefited from what happened after the war and in whose interest it may be to foment discontent in the future.
And that's what we need to watch for.
Oh, God, I hate to say it, Howard.
Yes, but you just put it very concisely.
We do need to watch for it.
You know, it should never be allowed to happen again.
And when people accept lies and fake news and propaganda, anybody with any sense can look back at the works of Joseph Goebbels and his propaganda ministry in Germany in the 30s and the 40s while they were at war and see many examples of exactly what is happening to us today.
But of course, we have much freer speech these days.
We have, if we see something we don't agree with, you know, in a way that we couldn't when we were kids, everybody has the right to go on there and counter it.
You know, your view, my view, anybody's view in the street has some weight these days in a way that it never happened, you know, it never had before, which is why I think there's a bit of hope there.
Yes, I'm like you.
I'm a very hopeful guy.
But I also think it's massively important to show to people that what happens when certain organizations, companies, and people decide that they would like some things to happen that we don't necessarily want to happen, if that makes any sense at all.
So you're saying that the German people, and I've studied that era in history, not as intensely as you have, but I have studied it, that the German people found themselves being swept along by a tide of events.
And cometh the hour, as they say, cometh the man.
So Hitler rose at a time when he was fed by those events.
The people bought into it.
And that chain of circumstances, or an approximation to that chain of circumstances, could repeat again anywhere.
Yes, and has repeated anywhere.
So is your book a historical account of what you believe happened and what happened to the people and the money?
Yes.
Or is it more of a warning from history?
I think once people have read what happened to the money, how the deals were done, especially with this shadow grouping in America, this military-industrial complex that even Eisenhower warned us against, once people see that, hopefully they will see that this is a warning from history.
I'm not here to polemicize.
Trevor Roper, the man who wrote the death of Hitler, the final days of Hitler, if you read that book, you'll see that it is in great part a polemic against Nazism and fascism.
Well, I'm not there to do that.
I'm a journalist.
People can make up their own mind.
What I will do is present the facts and present the knowledge that seems to have been hidden either deliberately or inadvertently.
In some ways, I believe it's been hidden deliberately.
But while I've been researching this house, one of the funny things is, is you come across a great many people who contact you, or contact me in this case, and they come at you with these ideas and theories, and then they make those ideas and theories public.
And they're the ramblings of people who've been spending time in their bedrooms on the computer typing one-handed.
And this material then gets picked up.
There's this ridiculous story that Hitler died, I think it's Paraguay, Brazil, in his 80s.
And there's a shot of an old man with a black girl on his arm, a woman of colour on his arm.
Well, the idea that the man who wrote Mein Kampf and believed in an Aryan civilization would at any time in his life have an intimate relationship with a person of colour is just ridiculous.
It does stretch credulity, which brings me to the question, what happened to Ava Braun?
The Mail ran it as a story, Howard?
Sorry?
The Daily Mail ran it as a story.
I'm not even going to go there with a comment on that.
But the Mail ran it as a story, quite happily.
Well, that's astonishing.
What became of Ava Braun?
I've been told by people who are very sensible people that she was still alive in Argentina in the early 2000s.
It seems that she and the Fura split up in the 50s and that she took the girls, his two daughters, off to live with her in not quite such an isolated place as the one that Adolf ended up in.
Of those two daughters, I understand that one of them died in a car crash in the 1950s, but that the other one is still alive.
I don't know where they would have been extremely wealthy.
They could have gone anywhere and been anybody, as you can when you have money.
So they would be very, well, that person would be very hard to track down.
The bodies.
What about the bodies then?
Eva Braun would have been buried somewhere, presumably, and so will Hitler.
Eva Braun may well have been buried somewhere.
I'm not sure, under a different name.
I'm pretty convinced that Adolf Hitler's body was cremated and his ashes just scattered in the Andes.
So there was never anywhere that people could go on pilgrimage to.
It's as important for the Bormann organization, or whatever they call themselves nowadays, for Hitler to have died in Berlin in 1945 as it is for the rest of the world to believe that myth.
And as such, yeah, I don't think there's any body there at all.
There are stories about him being buried in the hotel in Asunción in Paraguay, but I think they're just nonsense, personally.
You told me you've been to South America 23 times, researching all of this.
Do you have plans to go back at 24th?
Is there anything more you can do there?
Yes, I plan to go back.
There's more interesting stuff where that Iron Cross and Hans Ulrich Rudel's book came from in Barralocho.
There's some much more interesting stuff in Buenos Aires as well.
I mean, part of the problem is, although we know a huge amount about the Nazis, because they left such incredible records of what they did, huge amounts of the records in Argentina were burnt in the 60s accidentally.
Occasional bits of paperwork come up, and occasionally you get offered in on the black market.
I've been offered documents on the black market.
Really?
But they're usually not worth having.
But you can't actually go in and research in the Argentine National Archives because they burned them all.
So is the lesson from this research and about-to-be book that if we observe ideologies or groups emerging, then if we're interested and maybe we're concerned, we need to be looking at where the money's coming from because we may be shocked at the source of the cash if we get to learn where that might be.
I don't think we'll find out where the source of that cash is, sadly.
But we do need to realize that there are, at the moment, and maybe for the last six, seven years, there have been actively financed operations to change the way in which we look at things.
I think the Cambridge Analytica scandal is one of the obvious ones there.
You know, the fact that bots are supposedly changing our attitudes towards things on Facebook, whether they're run by the Russians or the Americans or some shadow operation that has got lots of money.
I don't really know.
So you're saying that if the Third Reich was around now, it would be using social media.
Goebbels was the most amazing proponent of the media that the world has seen in the last 150 years.
And of course, the whole idea of the big lie.
Yeah, I mean, the whole thing is, I can't, I'm not sure actually where the source for the quote comes from, Howard, whether it's a quote from Adolf Hitler himself or whether it's a quote from Joseph Goebbels.
Let's just say it's a quote from a very senior member of the Nazi Party.
But if you tell a lie long enough and loudly enough, it becomes the truth.
I think there's a lot of veracity in that statement.
I think it's simple, effective, and probably right.
Yes.
Thank you, Joseph Goebbels.
And people are learning from that every damn day.
If you were able to get, and I know the Iron Cross is a very interesting thing, but if you were able to get a piece of solid evidence that proved that Hitler met his end in the way that he did and lived out his remaining years after the war in the way that you say that he did, what would you like?
Would you like a uniform, a pair of boots, some more documentation, somebody who perhaps is on their deathbed to come forward and speak with you?
What's your greatest dream at this point?
Again, I don't think there's ever going to be one smoking gun.
I know there are people, and I know there were Argentine soldiers who looked after him in the 1950s and were part of his security detail.
And some of them are finally coming up and telling their children about it.
And stories do turn up in Argentina now every month or so About Hitler being in Argentina after the war.
Those are interesting and they add to the weight of evidence that makes this story real.
But I don't know whether there's one smoking gun.
I mean, you know, we're never going to.
I suppose I'd love a picture of him, Howard, after the war.
I know they exist, or I've been told they exist.
And I would love a picture of him after the war that was good enough, close enough, and I had decent enough provenance on that I could check against actual pictures of Adolf Hitler.
And no matter how camera-shy he might have been, and for as long as he was with Ava Braun, she may have been.
That must exist.
That picture or those pictures must be somewhere.
We had a lady, Mrs. Muller, up in Marchiquita in Cordoba province in Argentina, who said that she had friends who had copies of Mein Kampf signed by Hitler in the 50s, and that they had pictures of the happy couple, Eva and Hitler, again in the 1950s, and that she would ask amongst her friends in the German community around March Keita if they would be willing to show them to us.
And she received a phone call saying, if you deal any more with these British people, we will kill you.
The Gestapo are still active.
That was in 2007.
So presumably that was enough to frighten her off.
We never heard from Mrs. Monda again.
She wouldn't take our calls or anything else.
How astonishing.
Is it worth following, if there is a way of following that trail again?
There are many of them.
I mean, the problem with following all these trails, Howard, is that 75% of these trails end up as dead ends or they are somebody's fantasy.
I'll give you an example.
I had one girl contact me from Norway who said, I'm Adolf Hitler's daughter.
Oh, my Lord.
Yeah, I've had quite a few of these, and Adolf Hitler's grandkids contact me once a month.
So I say, that's interesting.
And I try to be polite because, like you, that's the way I was brought up to be.
I know you're a liver puggian.
My mum is a liver puggian too.
So I was brought up quite strictly to be polite.
And so I went back and forth with this woman on Facebook.
And then she sent me a picture.
And she was African.
Okay.
Yeah.
But one of these days somebody will get in touch who might be.
Well, I had a couple get in touch with me who were convinced that the husband was Adolf Hitler's grandson and they live in America and their father was brought up in Argentina and they had quite a lot of details about it and they happened to be radical Trump supporters and thought that the Nazis had had a bad press.
Yeah, okay, bad press.
Of course, you know, my American listeners, those who support Donald Trump and who email me on a regular basis, would say, you know, please don't blame Donald Trump for that kind of thing.
I don't really want to get into a political debate about it, but I just have to make that marker there.
I would just say at this stage, you know, that I find the Conservative Party in this country and their leadership and the Republican Party and its leadership in America something that is not to my taste.
And I think we'd leave it there.
However, this couple who seem to be, for me, quite radically right-wing, I could no longer speak to.
I mean, I asked them for evidence and documentation or anything else, and they weren't able to supply it.
So I have to file them away in that rather large overflowing box of nutters who contact me.
And I'm perfectly happy to be contacted, Howard.
If people want to find me on Facebook and contact me and talk about this, I like to get involved with people who find this subject interesting.
And also, I'm more than happy for the first 10 of your listeners, if they want to, I could supply them with an e-copy of Grey Wolf and give them something to think about.
So you can find me on Facebook as Gerard Williams, or you can find a group called The Spider's Web, which also has my name attached to it.
But I'm on Facebook.
Well, that's excellent.
So my listener needs to contact you about that, or if there's anything they'd like to discuss with you, they must contact you.
Now, at the moment, the new book, which has a lot to tell us, hasn't been published yet.
You're trying to get it published, rather.
Tell me that story.
Why?
Well, one publisher in America, and I don't want to name them, turned it down because they thought that the information contained about the Catholic Church in the new book would end up with people burning down bookshops in the United States.
And would I be willing to take out large amounts of insurance for it?
As the insurance premium was bigger than the advance they were offering, we didn't get much further than that.
It's difficult because I do not want to self-publish.
I do not want this to be seen as some silly little conspiracy idea.
And the last time Grey Wolf was published, it was published by Sterling, who are the wholly owned publisher of Barnes and Noble, America's biggest bookseller.
And it was put in their history section.
And that's what I'm looking for now as a publisher who will treat this with the same amount of skepticism that Sterling did.
But once they have seen the details and the sources for those details, we'll treat it as something that deserves as much publicity as possible.
And, you know, a publisher like most good publishers will realize that people publish books with theories and views in them that not everybody will agree with may upset some people, but that's called free speech.
Yes, you know, people have accused me of making money out of this and everything else.
I can promise you how it.
I have not made a penny.
I've made a living out of doing some television on Hunting Hitler for three series, but I haven't made money out of this.
In fact, it's cost me a great deal of money.
So why are you continuing to do this?
Sometimes I ask myself the same question.
But I think the answer is, as a journalist, I'm angry.
I'm seriously angry.
We were lied to.
And I've always hated being lied to on stories.
I did Iraq twice.
I was in Baghdad post-Gulf War I and Gulf War II.
I spent two and a half years running the Serb side of the Bosnian war out of Belgrade.
I did the tsunami.
I did famines in the 80s in Africa.
I've covered lots and lots of stories.
I hate being lied to.
And I would have thought in that desire not to be lied to and in that passion that you have for this, you definitely have tapped into the spirit of the time, the zeitgeist, because so many people feel that way now.
They don't like politicians who lie.
Politicians who have appeared to lie have paid the price in every country, including this one recently.
So I think there's something there that a publisher might tap into.
I've been fascinated by this.
Is there anything that we haven't said?
No, only, as I say, I mean, I'm perfectly willing to be contacted by your listener and his friend.
And, you know, they can find me.
They can find me on Facebook.
That's the easiest route.
And even if some of those people who I'm sure I will get emails too want to take you to task, are you happy to hear from them?
Yeah, you know, I'm not interested in politics in terms of what's happening nowadays.
I'm here to write a historical expose, if you like.
What I feel is information that I have found, I've researched and been given that tells the truth of exactly what happened after World War II.
And if people would like to, yeah, people want to get involved and talk to me about that, I think they'll find that I'm a reasonable person.
If people want to shout and scream at me, they'll get closed down very quickly.
But I think that's only fair.
Gerard Williams, good to talk with you again.
I hope you get the book published.
If there's a publisher listening now, or if you know a publisher, maybe you work for one, that might want to take this on on reasonable terms, I think we have to say.
Then I'm sure Gerard will be willing to hear from you.
I'm speaking for you now, Gerard.
Yeah, thank you, Howard.
Thank you very much.
Good to speak with you again.
That's the truth of it.
Gerard, thank you very much.
And you.
Well, I'm sure you'll agree, both chilling and fascinating, too.
Gerard Williams, your thoughts about him?
Welcome.
Please go to my website, theunexplained.tv, and you can leave me your thoughts and reactions there.
And don't forget, as I said at the beginning, when you get in touch with me, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
I love to hear from you, and I love to hear your stories too.
On the radio show, we're thinking about doing some more listener stories.
So if you want to send me a story about something that's maybe happened to you or somebody close to you, then send me that.
Just title the email in the subject, My Story or Listener Story.
Don't mind either of those.
And then I will definitely get to see it.
And if you can also include your phone number, a good way of getting in touch with you, that would be great too.
And we'll try and get that together.
Well, we have more great guests in the pipeline here at The Unexplained online.
So till next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
We are online.
Please, whatever you do, in the midst of all of the things that are happening in this world, coronavirus, problems with the economy and all the other things to be miserable about, please stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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