- [Voiceover] The program originally scheduled
for this time has been canceled in order
that we may bring you reports from overseas.
This afternoon, Grand Admiral Doenitz
announced the death of Adolf Hitler.
This death has not been confirmed by Allied sources.
- [Voiceover] In April 1945,
Hitler was the most wanted man in Europe.
Dead or alive, the victorious Allies needed to see his body.
In the dock, or in the grave.
But in the chaos of war,
proof the dictator had died proved elusive.
Maybe Hitler was dead.
Maybe he'd escaped.
- I have one testimony that tells me
the exact burial spot of where Hitler
is buried in Patagonia.
There are an incredible amount of witnesses
who saw Nazi submarines come to the coast in Argentina
and crates full of Nazi documents and gold being unloaded.
- [Voiceover] Concern has been expressed
over the possibility that Adolf Hitler
might attempt to seek refuge in Argentina.
- We all differ often times on the facts
in why they happened, what happened.
And clearly, one of the biggest examples
of this kind of difference of interpretation
is what happened to Hitler at the end of World War II.
- [Voiceover] The mystery of the missing dictator
drew in spies, scientists and historians
from America, Russia and Britain.
As recently released documents show,
it led the FBI into its most incredible manhunt,
searching for Hitler from the subways of the Bronx
to the jungles of Latin America.
- The FBI did receive information
that Hitler had fled from Germany,
that he was in Argentina,
that he was in various parts of the United States,
that he was in other places
and the areas where we had jurisdiction
in the United States and to some extent in South America,
we conducted inquiries to see
if there was any truth to those allegations.
- [Voiceover] The allies spent six years
trying to defeat Hitler.
It would take them many times longer
to sort out the confusion that surrounded his fate.
Conspiracy, fact and fiction,
all rushed in to fill the vacuum
left by the missing dictator.
- [Voiceover] More extracts from captured German newsreels.
This is said to be the room
in which the alleged attempt on Hitler's life was made.
- [Voiceover] Hitler was no stranger to cheating death.
In 1944, German officers tried to blow him up
at the Wolf's Lair headquarters.
Four men standing near were killed.
- [Voiceover] A nice easy explanation for gullible people.
- [Voiceover] Fearing further attacks,
Hitler sowed confusion about his whereabouts.
Even in 1944, people weren't sure
if he really was dead or alive.
- [Voiceover] As to where they got hurt,
there's no evidence.
Anyway, the Fuehrer looking rather
more round-shouldered than usual,
goes from bed to bed commiserating with the casualties.
Maybe this is Hitler's double
or perhaps his double was killed by the bomb.
While there are scores of theories,
the facts are not yet known.
- [Voiceover] In the final months of the war,
even the Germans couldn't be certain.
Since the 1944 bomb plot,
Hitler kept well out of sight, hidden away in bunkers.
The last ordinary Germans who saw him in the open
were a handful of the Hitler youth.
- There were speculations already in the fall of 1944
about his escape and his whereabouts.
So when the end of the war came,
this was a story that had already long been prepared.
- [Voiceover] Many of Hitler's
most senior supporters did try to escape.
Himmler was captured dressed as a private soldier.
Heinrich Muller, head of the Gestapo was never captured.
And down in the Chancellery bunkers,
Hitler's staff tried repeatedly
to persuade him to get out before it was too late.
Flight was certainly possible.
- Up till the 22nd of April, when the net closed,
they could get out by air.
Big airplanes could take off on the 22nd
and a whole convoy of them went off
from Berlin to Berchtesgaden on the 22nd
carrying quite a large number of people out,
all those who opted to get out.
The Russians couldn't be everywhere.
- [Voiceover] During the final weeks of the war,
this was the easiest route out of Berlin.
The main east-west avenue was used by the Nazis
as a runway right up until the last moment when Berlin fell.
The Nazis even had captured British planes at hand
to try and make their escape without being shot down.
The man who was the switchboard operator in Hitler's bunker
claims that this was the plan in place and ready
to spirit Hitler from under the noses of the Allies.
- There were two planes waiting to the north of Berlin.
One of them was the JU 390 and a Blohm and Voss
that could fly the same distance.
It could fly 18,000 kilometers without refueling.
So Hitler could have escaped if he wanted to.
- [Voiceover] The possibility of losing Hitler
gave the advancing Soviets added urgency.
On April the 22nd, the first Soviet armies
reached the outskirts of Berlin still fiercely defended.
They desperately hoped that Hitler was still in the city.
- Stalin organized special teams in SMERSH.
SMERSH was the military
counterintelligence service during the war.
As we all know from the James Bond movies,
it means death to spies,
whose job it was to find Hitler
and hopefully, Stalin would find him alive.
- Of course, Stalin wanted to capture Hitler.
He intended to put him on trial.
- [Voiceover] But capture was the one thing
Hitler was determined to avoid at any cost.
The reality of what lay in store
for fallen dictators was not what he had in mind.
- Just before the end, it came the news
of what had happened to Mussolini,
how he had been shot and strung up
upside down in a garage in Milan.
He didn't want that to happen to him.
- [Voiceover] As Stalin's SMERSH teams
advanced to the center of Berlin,
they questioned prisoners, checked corpses.
Where was Hitler?
Could he have slipped through the noose and escaped?
The first news of Hitler's fate
did nothing to dispel the confusion.
On May the 1st, Soviet commander Zhukov
received a message from Hitler's bunker
claiming that Hitler had committed suicide
on April the 30th.
Just a few hours later,
came a radio broadcast that told a different story.
(german radio broadcast)
- [Voiceover] German radio claimed
that Hitler had died fighting at the head of his troops.
This wasn't what the Soviets had been told at all.
They thought Hitler had died a day earlier by his own hand.
In the confusion of Allied victory,
doubt about the fate of the fallen dictator
filled the airwaves.
- [Voiceover] The Berlin announcement
that Hitler is dead has left this part
of Germany speechless and resigned.
There is no further confirmation, of course,
as to the authenticity of this report.
- [Voiceover] We bring you now Seymour Carmen from Munich.
- [Carmen] There is some caution
about accepting the German announcement as fact.
It might be a trick.
It might be a desperate effort by Hitler
to disguise himself and escape.
- [Voiceover] The mere possibility
that Hitler had escaped struck at the heart
of Allied fears and paranoia about the Nazis.
If Hitler cheated the hangman,
how could justice ever really be done?
If the dictator of the German Reich survived,
how could anyone be sure the evil he brought was dead?
- The most important thing was, of course,
that there was no body.
I think that fueled everything.
No one could produce--
no one was able to produce the corpse.
- [Voiceover] As the First reached Berlin,
it was the Soviets who were best placed
to bring the mystery to an end.
Everything depended on what they found
when Berlin finally fell.
On the 2nd of May, Soviet troops
captured Berlin's government buildings.
This was the final symbolic defeat of Nazi Germany.
It was two days since the radio announcement
of Hitler's death and the world waited for proof.
If he was dead, where was the body?
Hitler's own headquarters had barely fallen
when a special Soviet search team arrived on the scene.
Its mission was to find Hitler.
It didn't take long before they were rewarded.
Elina Rozovskaya was the team translator.
- One of the men just arrived from the headquarters
of the first Belorussian army was passing by.
He said, "Oh, that one looks really like Hitler.
"He is Hitler."
- [Voiceover] Here was proof that Hitler had died after all.
At last there was a body.
The Soviets called in some captured Nazis
to confirm that this Hitler was the Hitler.
- The body had a little moustache and a fringe,
but many Germans said, "No, no, no."
Only one thought he saw a certain resemblance.
- [Voiceover] Finding dead dictators
was turning out to be an inexact science.
This body, the Soviets noticed, was wearing darned socks.
Surely, they thought, Hitler
wouldn't have died wearing darned socks.
So they decided that this body was not Hitler after all.
There were 15 corpses in the Chancellery garden,
amongst them that of Joseph Goebbels.
Goebbels and his wife had murdered their children,
then killed themselves.
It was as they were investigating the end
of the Goebbels that the Soviets
stumbled on a second possible Hitler.
- We were taken to Hitler's bunker
where Goebbels' body was first found.
And at that point, one of the soldiers
drew our attention to a crater.
The crater had been filled with earth and he sank into it.
Beneath his feet he discovered a fragment
of a human leg and a piece of burnt blanket.
They dug up that crater and found two bodies,
a man and a woman.
Their faces were unrecognizable.
- [Voiceover] If the bodies could be identified,
then worries about Hitler's escape might be laid to rest.
So the Soviets picked them up and put them in wooden crates.
They took them here to Buch,
an old lunatic asylum just outside Berlin.
But identifying the bodies was almost impossible.
The corpse of the man they had on the slab
was so badly burnt that hardly any
of the lower body was left.
Yet the Soviets refused even to tell
the Americans or the British what they were up to,
let alone, ask for help.
- All the particulars had to be noted.
The body's height, all the physical data,
all the internal data, whether any organs were missing.
But in those conditions it was impossible to do all that.
- The autopsy was carried out
under less than ideal conditions.
It was a war time situation, it was quite chaotic.
The field hospital operation,
it wasn't a perfect autopsy
by any stretch of the imagination.
- [Voiceover] The only way of identifying
this as Hitler's body was through the teeth.
So the Soviets scoured Berlin
trying to find Hitler's dentist.
Two of the people they found said
they were part of Hitler's dental team.
They drew pictures from memory
of what Hitler's teeth looked like.
According to the Russians, the dentists' hand drawn pictures
matched the body on the slab.
But Stalin held back the findings of the autopsy.
And at a time of increasing international tension,
he made a staggering claim.
- Stalin told President Truman
at the Potsdam Conference,
in late July and early August of 1945,
that Hitler was alive in Argentina.
- He used it as a stick to beat the West with
after the war, but it also, he evidently
at some level actually believed
that Hitler had survived the war.
- [Voiceover] Stalin had reasons
to doubt the Soviet autopsy.
Everything hinged on the evidence of the teeth.
No x-rays were available which might prove without doubt
that this was Hitler's body.
Stalin was also suspicious and paranoid
to the bottom of his heart
on something as important as the fate of Hitler.
He had no problem discounting
the conclusions of a handful of surgeons.
- Stalin turned the search for Hitler's body into a mystery.
It became a state secret.
If you reveal that secret,
you could be sentenced from 7 to 15 years in jail.
- [Voiceover] Thanks to Stalin,
the identity of this body was clouded with doubt.
Stalin's deputy, Marshal Zhukov
had announced that Hitler was dead.
Now he changed his mind.
- Zhukoff gave a second press conference
and he completely withdrew the substance of his first.
He said that there was no evidence that Hitler was dead,
that he could easily have escaped,
that the runway was open,
that he was probably in Spain or in Argentina.
- [Voiceover] Stalin's claim threw his allies into turmoil
and caught the imagination of the world.
Amongst those most taken with the news
was General Eisenhower.
Months after Berlin had fallen,
Eisenhower's doubts were publicly quoted.
- [Eisenhower] We have been unable to find
one tangible piece of evidence of Hitler's death.
Even though I initially believed that Hitler was dead,
there are now reasons to assume that he is alive.
- [Voiceover] The press rushed in to spread the confusion.
- [Voiceover] Russian sources stated
that the Soviet government did have some lingering doubts.
- [Voiceover] The United States Army
does not know whether Hitler is alive or dead.
- [Voiceover] Allied Germany, December 19th,
Soviets not convinced Hitler dead.
- [Voiceover] As they poked around the ruins of his office,
the allies still couldn't make up their minds
about what had happened to Hitler.
Four months after victory in Europe,
confusion still reigned as to whether
the dictator was dead or alive.
Far from being brought to justice, Hitler had melted away.
- [Voiceover] The entrance to Hitler's air-raid shelter.
It was just outside that the bodies of Hitler
and Eva Braun are said to have been destroyed.
At any rate, that's one story,
but we can all form our own opinion as to whether
these are relics of the event or not.
The Germans said petrol was poured over
their bodies and they were burnt.
It might be true, it might not.
- [Voiceover] In the summer of 1945,
the Soviets made yet another shattering claim
that the British were secretly holding Hitler alive.
To counter this, British military intelligence sent out
a young army major, Hugh Trevor-Roper
to tie up the loose ends.
- The Russians accused the British
of harboring Hitler and Eva Braun in their zone
alive for some nefarious,
but unstated purpose in the future.
And at this point my superior officer
who's called Dick White decided enough is enough.
It's perfectly ridiculous that the facts
had not been established so he charged me with this mission.
- [Voiceover] But starting over a month
after the first reports of Hitler's death,
Trevor-Roper's mission was fraught with difficulties.
The bunker had already been ransacked by the Russians
and what evidence remained was rotting
in the dark, damp interior.
- It was an extraordinary experience to go down
into that deep bunker and find this buried headquarters
which was dark because the electricity had gone.
It was flooded.
Everyone's ankles in water.
- [Voiceover] Tying up Hitler's loose ends
was proving a lot harder than the British had hoped.
And Trevor-Roper's task was hardly helped by the fact
that neither the Soviets nor the Americans
nor the British shared information or evidence.
Most important of all, the Soviets had imprisoned
nearly all of the key witnesses who were in the bunker
at the time of Hitler's alleged escape.
- I realized here were several of the people
I was looking for, rather important people,
Baur, Hitler's pilot, Rattenhuber,
the head of Hitler's guard, people I wanted to interrogate.
- [Voiceover] Trevor-Roper had to base
all his most important conclusions
on the evidence of just one man,
Erich Kempka, Hitler's chauffeur.
Kempka left him in no doubt what had happened to Hitler.
- And to him the only alternative
was complete success or annihilation.
All the evidence is that he shot himself,
that he used a revolver certainly.
- [Voiceover] This became the official British version.
But the British uncovered no blood stains,
no bullet holes, no bullets in the room
where they thought Hitler had shot himself.
And Britain's findings made no difference to the Soviets
who still said Hitler was alive.
Depending on whom you listen to,
he had shot himself, taken poison,
died at the head of his troops or even escaped.
In this climate of doubt, the lack of evidence
for Hitler's death would have a strange
psychological effect on the world.
Across the Atlantic, the Americans were on the verge
of their own extraordinary investigation
into the missing dictator.
In September 1945, the FBI started
one of its most extraordinary investigations
into whether Adolf Hitler had escaped Berlin
and made it across the Atlantic.
- [Voiceover] In a big spy round-up in the States,
the FBI, America's CID,
have done a good job under J. Edgar Hoover.
- [Voiceover] The director of the FBI,
J. Edgar Hoover was a paranoid, suspicious, neurotic man
who had built his career on finding the enemy within.
- [Voiceover] They're traitors, while the rest are spies.
- Hoover had no sympathy whatsoever for the Nazis.
He, as well as the rest of us,
regarded Hitler as a prime evil
and a prime enemy of the United States.
- [Voiceover] These FBI documents only recently released
point to the hysteria and worry that spread from Berlin
across the Atlantic within a matter of days.
- [Voiceover] Dear Mr. Hoover, recently I saw a poll
on whether Hitler was alive.
I am one of many others that thinks that Hitler
is still alive and possibly here in the good country
we're so fortunate as to live in.
- Polls at the time showed that majority of people
actually believed that Hitler
had survived the war and was still alive.
And this led to a lot of Hitler sightings.
- All these lonely people, all across America
would write Hoover letters from their lonely rooms saying
that they felt they saw someone who looked
like Hitler in a cafe they frequented
or they passed someone in the street who looked like Hitler.
- [Voiceover] The FBI received thousands of tip-offs
from across the United States, all claiming to offer
invaluable information as to the whereabouts of Hitler.
- I remember one in there, it seemed that a woman
said that she had seen Hitler on a subway stop in the Bronx,
as I think, I recall.
- [Voiceover] The FBI tip-offs ranged
from full blown accounts, including descriptions
of height and weight, to simple one line teasers,
offering no more than, "If you want to know
"where Hitler is, then call this number."
- [Voiceover] Dear Sir, I'll bet a dollar to a doughnut
that Hitler is located right in New York City.
There's no other city in the world
where he could so easily be absorbed.
- [Voiceover] He has spent the past winter bussing dishes.
Is it possible that this is none other
than Adolf Hitler of Germany?
- [Voiceover] I've read in the papers
about you hunting Hitler.
Maybe you will laugh, like my family, at me,
but I thought I saw him at the--
- [Voiceover] Adolf Hitler, German Fuhrer,
owns 8,960 acres of land in Colorado.
- In many cases these people are psychotic
or they have other type of medical difficulties.
In some cases there are people who are hostile
to other people and report these things falsely.
Some people, they have just a desire to associate
themselves with something that's prominent.
- [Voiceover] It is to be noticed that at the time
of the interview, the interviewee would interrupt
the interviewer and play the violin.
- You can waste a lot of time and effort there on it
and money, but then again you have to be careful
that you don't overlook something that might be serious.
- [Voiceover] At the height of the Hitler hysteria,
every bureau across the United States
received sightings of Hitler somewhere in America.
With the mystery still mushrooming out from Berlin,
the FBI investigations grew to 1,000 agents
working on these reports at any one time.
They generated over 1,200 separate FBI
documents and reports on Hitler's escape.
- So much is crossed out, so you have, you know,
black block, said at, black block,
that Hitler, black block, you know.
And it adds a layer of mystery that doesn't exist
if the stupid FBI censors had just, you know,
allowed us to read the original reports.
- [Voiceover] People even sent in handy hints from the press
on how Hitler might have altered his appearance.
The most enthusiastic Hitler hunter of them all
was the Police Gazette.
Few news counters and barbershops failed to provide
their customers with this sensational sheet,
in which hardly a week passed without
the latest scoop on where Hitler had been sighted.
All these reports had to be noted by the FBI as well.
- Usually the articles didn't have any specifics.
They just gave a statement that it was quite possible
that Hitler might be somewhere.
But that doesn't give you much to go on.
- There's a chicken and egg problem
with the Police Gazette accounts, you know.
You don't know which came first,
the accounts in the Police Gazette,
which then had the Police Gazette readers
seeing Hitler in every, you know,
roadhouse and cafe, or whether the people
at roadhouse and cafes wrote Hoover and it began to spread.
And then it entered into the Police Gazette
and, you know, it became a self-perpetuating phenomenon.
- [Voiceover] While the FBI chased phantoms
in the United States, the Soviet Union sat on
any evidence that might settle
Hitler's fate one way or the other.
There was one bit of evidence
that could have sewn things up once and for all,
the body that was found in Berlin.
But the Soviets never looked at it again
after the first autopsy of 1945.
In fact, Hitler's remains,
if they were Hitler's remains,
were treated by the Russians with staggering neglect.
- We buried the body secretly,
when no one was around, in a little wood.
We put a secret guard there
because the bodies were not buried very deeply.
And even dogs could dig them up,
but that was never officially reported.
- [Voiceover] Soviet intelligence continued to confuse
the West by arguing that Hitler might be alive.
- SMERSH and KGB did their best to prove
that Hitler hadn't killed himself,
but had somehow vanished.
And that marked the start of a mysterious operation
called Operation Myth.
- [Voiceover] Nobody knows whether Stalin really believed it
or whether it was just a Cold War ruse,
but Operation Myth was the cornerstone of Stalin's claim
that Hitler had escaped and was being
looked after by Western fascists.
- In Spain was General Franco,
in Argentine was Colonel Peron
and these, from Stalin's point of view,
were both semi-Nazi
reactionary dictatorships who supported the Germans.
And, therefore, that is where he would have gone.
- [Voiceover] Stalin's belief
was not completely unreasonable.
Even before 1945, Argentina had a large German population.
Hitler wouldn't be the first German
to escape to South America after the war
and certainly not the first Nazi.
- I found 300 confirmed war criminals
who escaped to Argentina.
Now these are people with court cases,
that have had had court cases
opened against them in Europe.
Now if you extend that to the amount of SS officers
or persons who are suspected of having committed war crimes,
but did not have cases opened against them,
that number would probably rise to thousands.
- [Voiceover] Alongside all the crazy theories
on Hitler's sightings inside the United States,
a more persistent notion of Hitler's fate took hold.
- The basic scenario of his survival
was that a double had died in his place
in Berlin, and he and Eva Braun
had managed to escape to Norway
and there taken a U-boat, a submarine
to Latin America.
- [Voiceover] This scenario took the FBI
into one of its most remarkable inquiries.
One of the reports that fueled their suspicion
concerned the voyage of U-977.
- We left Norway on the 7th, 6th or 7th of May.
After we left Norway, we practically became a phantom boat,
all the way around north of Scotland,
past Ireland, past France and Biscay.
They were looking for us and searching for us
and all we could do was listening above it
to hear if there was anybody above us or near us.
- [Voiceover] This was a voyage
that most people had thought physically impossible.
- The clothes we were wearing got damp and had mold on it.
Our bunks were damp.
We couldn't shave, of course.
You never shave on a submarine.
Our teeth became loose through lack of fresh food
and things like that.
We felt tired and we felt--
became more and more miserable.
- [Voiceover] U-977 made it to the coast of Argentina
on August the 17th, 1945.
The crew was immediately taken prisoner
and accused of hiding Hitler onboard.
- Those U-boats came and surrendered to Argentina.
The press reports there indicated that somebody
in either Montevideo or in Argentina
suggested that Hitler had been on those boats.
And I think that that caused a number of people say,
"Well, we have to look into that possibility."
- [Voiceover] More reports of U-boat landings
came into the FBI over the next couple of weeks.
- [Voiceover] September the 21st, 1945,
reports of Hitler hideouts, Los Angeles letter to Bureau.
The first sub came close to shore about 11 p.m.,
after it had been signaled safe to land
and a doctor and several men disembarked
and Hitler and two women.
Another doctor and seven more men said Hitler
had suffered from asthma and ulcers,
had shaved off his mustache
and had a long "but" on his upper lip.
- [Voiceover] Argentina's navy tried to capture the U-boats,
but the huge coastline made it easy
for escaping Nazis to get ashore.
- They'd arrived at a farm,
lost in the immense desolation of Patagonia.
And once there, unload all that could be unloaded,
people, personal belongings, useful bits of the U-boats.
Those areas weren't patrolled
and the farms had land on the coast.
And besides, at that time, those were German owned farms.
The question that remains is who came in the U-boats.
Why plan these U-boat trips?
- [Voiceover] The FBI took this question
extremely seriously.
The combination of submarines and so many Nazis
already in Argentina was enough to make the possibility
of Hitler hiding out in the wilderness a genuine concern.
To investigate the matter further,
the FBI set up an operation behind the walls
of the American Embassy in Buenos Aires.
- I guess there are other places in the world
where you could go and it would depend upon
how you escaped and where would be
a logical place for concealment.
But I'd say Argentina would not be a bad place to live.
I can vouch for that.
- [Voiceover] John Walsh found himself
working under very odd conditions.
The FBI's power of interrogation was restricted.
Their agents had to operate covertly.
They had difficulty establishing the crucial network
of informants on the ground.
They were also limited by the fact
that the G-Men were very conspicuous.
- While we were there in Argentina,
that those of us who were in the embassy,
in the consulate, we did come under
surveillance by the local police.
And I know a number of times that where I was out
with other agents and we would see people
there who are obviously watching us.
And they would be behind a newspaper
and every once in a while they dropped
the newspapers to look at us.
And I recall the person who was with me said,
"Well, you know, they look just like us,
but they all have mustaches."
- [Voiceover] As information began making its way
into the Argentine Bureau,
the G-Men were soon able to piece together
a pattern of Hitler's possible movements
based on reports of local sightings.
Information from outside Argentina
was relayed from Washington to Buenos Aires
by the FBI radiogram system.
All messages received were subject
to further investigation by the team of G-Men on the ground.
- [Voiceover] Discovered two sets of footprints
leading in one direction only from high water mark.
Then across mud flats to shore proper near San Julian.
At point where footprints ended, tire marks found,
indicating car had turned at right angles to shore.
Inquiries continuing.
- [Voiceover] In another report,
Hitler was seen moving quickly inland,
heading across the Argentine Pampas
towards the southern Andes.
The path was leading to a German owned hotel
in a remote region of Cordova.
Could this be Hitler's mountain hideaway?
In late 1945, six months after the end of the war,
the FBI thought it might be about to make
the arrest of the century.
The bureau had received reports linking Adolf Hitler
to the Eden Hotel in La Falda, Argentina.
Nestled in the splendor of the foothills of the Andes,
the Eden Hotel was the centerpiece
of a long established wealthy German community.
- It was beautiful.
It is sad to see how it is now.
This was an international hotel,
a hotel that had everything,
all that a guest needed,
comfort, service, orchestras at midnight.
Aristocrats from Cordova and Buenos Aires
came to the parties.
Their dancing would last
until the early hours of the morning.
- [Voiceover] Since the 1930s,
the Eden had been a paradise
for its predominantly German clientele.
The hotel was owned by Eda Eyckhorn,
a wealthy German socialite, whose connections in Germany
reached the highest echelons of power.
- I know she often went to Europe.
It was said she went to get more clients.
The cream of Europe came here.
- [Voiceover] It was Eyckhorn's European connections
that first brought her to the attention of the FBI.
A dossier compiled on her at the end of 1945
revealed disturbingly close links to the German Reich.
- [Voiceover] Even before the Nazis came into power,
she placed immediately by cable
her entire bank account amounting to 30,000 Marks,
at Goebbels' disposal.
- [Voiceover] Most compelling of all,
the FBI discovered from European sources
that she had over the years become
one of Hitler's closest friends and confidants.
The area surrounding the hotel was populated by Germans,
amongst them were believed to be
a number of Nazi sympathizers.
The trouble was, it was difficult for the G-Men
to go to La Falda in person without blowing their cover.
- We personally did not do surveillance work there.
We would have sources that were outside
the embassy that would do that.
You just can't walk in and say, you know,
that you are looking for something.
You have to develop a rapport
and have some area of interest
with the people that are going to help you on that.
- [Voiceover] A 17-year-old girl
working as a maid at the Eden Hotel at the time
is today still clearly able to recall her years of service
and the people she worked for.
- Everybody around here thought the Eyckhorns were Nazis.
Even after they died, people always
referred to them as Nazis.
There were a lot of his belongings in the house.
There are letters which have been given
to the authorities in Cordova.
There were a lot of photographs of him around the house.
- [Voiceover] According to the FBI,
if Hitler had come to Argentina,
this would be his natural destination.
- [Voiceover] If the Fuehrer should at any time
get into difficulties, he could always find
a safe retreat at La Falda,
where they'd already made the necessary preparations.
- [Voiceover] Catalina de Mero
confirms all the FBI's fears and suspicions.
After the fall of Berlin, after the British investigation
into Hitler's death, after two Soviet investigations,
Catalina says Adolf Hitler came to the Eden Hotel in 1948.
- After the war he stayed in the house.
At that time they weren't working in the hotel anymore.
- [Voiceover] There is no doubt in Catalina's mind
that she remembers Hitler's visit.
- [Catalina] He arrived one night.
The driver must have brought him.
He was put up on the third floor.
- [Voiceover] Catalina even recalls what Hitler ate.
- [Catalina] We were told to take his breakfast upstairs
and leave it at the door,
to knock at the door and leave the tray on the floor.
He ate very well, the trays were always empty.
Most of the meals were German,
cheese soufflés and others,
meals of German origin, old German recipes.
- [Voiceover] According to Catalina,
the Hitler of the Andes was clearly recognizable
as the Hitler of so many people's imagination,
even though he'd lost his mustache.
- He must have shaved it off, but he had a wig,
definitely a wig, not hair.
He might have had a little hair, but he did wear a wig.
There were usually people in the house all day,
but for those three days, the third floor was private.
Downstairs, everything was normal.
Mrs. Eda told me, "Whatever you saw, pretend you didn't."
One of the drivers and I used to joke,
"I saw nothing and you saw nothing."
It was as if it had never happened.
It was kept very, very secret.
But now after so many years, I don't care anymore.
If they don't want to believe me, they don't have to.
What else can I say?
I just saw what I saw.
- [Voiceover] Like all the best mysteries,
Catalina's story has an enigmatic ending.
- [Catalina] Two weeks later, Mrs. Eda said
we were going to go to Pandazucar.
Up in the mountains, we took food
and in a wooden house, there he was.
From what I overheard from their phone calls,
he went to La Rioja and then he vanished.
- [Voiceover] If the man Catalina saw was Hitler,
the FBI certainly failed to get him.
Yet the events that she describes took place
when the senior Nazis, men like Adolf Eichmann
and Josef Mengele were arriving in South America.
And it wasn't until at least the mid 1970s
that American intelligence officers
closed their files on Hitler.
- The information that we got, much of it was not credible.
Others, where there was a possibility of some credibility,
we took, made inquiries, but in none of them
we found any true indication that Hitler
was actually in Argentina or in the United States
or in any place that, where we had any responsibility.
All the investigations we made then
came to a dead end because there was nothing
really specific had been found.
- [Voiceover] There aren't many people today
who still think Hitler made it to Argentina.
The KGB claims to have flushed Hitler's corpse
into a Magdeburg river in April, 1970.
The Soviet files on Operation Myth
were finally made public in the 1990s,
revealing that Stalin had deliberately confused
and misinformed the West about Hitler's fate.
Even though the official search for Hitler has ended,
his phantom continues to be relentlessly pursued.
Fantasists who have for years hung on to every word
published in the Police Gazette,
still follow him from the foothills
of the Andes to Antarctica.
There, they say, he awaits a flying saucer
to take him to conquer another world in another universe.
- The myth of Hitler's physical survival is really about
the survival of a unique kind of evil
embodied in Hitler, about the survival
of the mystery of Hitler, the fact that
in some way he escaped explanation.
- [Voiceover] The remarkable story of Hitler's
life after death is a clear warning of what can happen
when a dictator melts away.
The world wanted a clear sign that the cataclysm
of World War II had ended,
but Hitler's death went missing.
And the fate of the last century's most terrible dictator
took over 50 years to sort out.