FBI files reveal scare stories of Hitler living in the US

Published on Saturday 9 April 2011 12:11

AMERICA'S FBI will this week put online its secret vault of files on Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, describing the agency's attempts to find him after 1945.

On 29 April 1945 Hitler and Eva Braun, his wife of one day, killed themselves in the Berlin bunker. But Soviet authorities who found the remains were happy for rumours to persist that he got away.

Now 752 sides of FBI reports chart how agents variously thought he was hiding out on a ranch in Argentina, living in a hotel in Denmark and in New York City. Extracts from them were published in Germany's Bild newspaper yesterday.

He was bearded, clean-shaven, suffered from asthma and stomach ulcers, according to informants who wrote their sightings in to the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover.

The FBI office in Los Angeles noted on 21 September 1945: "Hitler and 50 of his closest family landed approximately ten days after the fall of Berlin in two submarines in southern Argentina. Hitler has grown a beard and is hiding on a ranch."

For almost 30 years, Hoover and the FBI maintained a detailed dossier on Hitler and closely investigated any report that indicated he still was alive, believing the Russian line that he escaped the flames of Berlin.

One theory Hoover ordered his agents to pursue was an extensive 11-year probe into the possibility that Hitler faked his own death with a bogus suicide in 1945.

One sighting came from a doctor in 1954 who claimed to have treated Hitler for an intestinal disorder in St Louis. Others told tales of Hitler dining in a Washington restaurant in 1946.

Years later, the truth emerged from the files of SMERSH - Russia's elite intelligence service meaning 'Death to Spies' - which proved from the reports of Hitler aides in the bunker that he shot himself.

His ashes and bones, together with those of his wife, were buried and uprooted several times in what was former East Germany before being disinterred one last time from a military base near Magdeburg in the 1970s and flung into a river.