Declassified documents reveal that U.S. intelligence operatives secretly scoured South America for the infamous Nazi leader for ten years following his presumed death.
Recently released CIA files, spanning from 1945 to 1955 and examined by the Washington Post, indicate a covert search for Adolf Hitler in South America that lasted a decade after his supposed demise.
The documents reveal that, despite possessing an autopsy report confirming Hitler’s death, field agents suspected he might have fled to South America using an alias.
According to MI5, Hitler and Eva Braun, his wife of one day, committed suicide on April 30, 1945, in his Berlin bunker to avoid capture. Soviet soldiers later found their partially burned bodies outside the Reich Chancellery. Nevertheless, CIA agents continued to pursue leads well into the mid-1950s.
A 1945 document mentions that U.S. War Department agents informed the FBI that a spa hotel in La Falda, Argentina, had been prepared as a possible hiding place. The hotel owners, who were donors to propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and had close ties to Hitler, were believed by U.S. intelligence to have made “all necessary” preparations to harbor Hitler following Germany’s defeat in World War II.
Another document, dated October 1955, contained a photograph of a man thought to be Hitler sitting with a friend in Colombia. This man, using the alias Adolf Schrittelmayor, allegedly left Colombia for Argentina in January 1955.
The CIA briefly authorized an investigation into Schrittelmayor’s background but subsequently abandoned it, stating that “enormous efforts could be expended on this matter with remote possibilities of establishing anything concrete.”
According to the WaPo, no further publicly available CIA documents suggest that agents continued the search for Hitler after 1955.
These revelations come as Argentina, historically known as a refuge for Nazi fugitives, prepares to declassify government records pertaining to those who sought sanctuary there after World War II.
An estimated 10,000 war criminals are believed to have escaped Europe via so-called ‘ratlines,’ with approximately half settling in Argentina, a country known for its reluctance to comply with extradition requests.
Among those who found refuge in Argentina were Adolf Eichmann, a key architect of the Holocaust, and Josef Mengele, the infamous Auschwitz doctor. Israeli agents captured Eichmann in 1960 and brought him to Israel for trial. Mengele evaded capture and died in Brazil in 1979, succumbing to a heart attack while swimming.
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