The Nazi Lies Podcast Ep. 1: Hitler Lived

The Nazi Lies Podcast

Mike: Hitler’s dead, right?

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Mike: In the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Berlin, during which Adolf Hitler took his own life, there was a lack of clarity on the part of the Allied forces as to the fate of the Führer. This was because in the hours before the final surrender of the bunker in which Hitler hid out with his top military commanders, Hitler’s underlings burned the bodies of himself and his wife Eva Braun.

That story took months to piece together and years to confirm. In the meantime, intelligence agencies and news outlets around the world were assailed with reports of sightings of Hitler.

Based on selections of these reports, a genre of conspiracy literature asserted that Hitler survived the Battle of Berlin, fled to Denmark, then to Argentina. According to some tellings, he departed from there either to a subterranean base in the South Pole, or to a base on the moon.

Hitler survival theories became popular among post-war neo-nazis who saw themselves in service of a secret shadow reich, biding their time and preparing the infrastructure for a national socialist resurgence. Neo-nazi publishers and writers began promoting the conspiracy theory in the service of the survival of national socialism, and continue to do so to this day.

Today, we are joined by Dr. Luke Daly-Groves whose book Hitler’s Death: The Case Against Conspiracy delves through declassified archives from the US and UK to discover the truth about what happened in the Berlin bunker. Daly-Groves has his PhD (congratulations) from the School of History at the University of Leeds. He’s currently a teaching fellow at his alma mater and an associate lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire.

Thanks for being here with us Luke.

Luke Daly-Groves: It’s my pleasure, thanks very much for having me on.

Mike: So based on the way you tell it in the book–it’s riveting, I would guess you’d like to tell our listeners about the final days of Hitler.

Luke: Definitely. I think the last days of Hitler are a really good subject to try to convince somebody to not be a nazi or to sort of go against nazi ideas which I think is one of the aims of your– one of the noble aims of your podcast. Because what it does in the last days of Hitler, when you study it, is it encapsulates all the horrors of the Third Reich in this really small confined space of the Führerbunker below the streets of Berlin. So all the horrors of Nazism, they basically come to a head in the final days of Hitler in April; this is April 1945. So Berlin at this stage is already a shell of its former self because it’s been bombed to bits by the Allied airforces, itself a symbol of the failings of Hitler.

Hitler is increasingly old, sick, frail. He’s displayed symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. So this isn’t the sort of Messiac-style figure which early Nazi propaganda portrays. This isn’t the great savior of Germany. This is a sick, old, frail man with terrible ideas giving orders to ghost armies, orders which are sometimes impossible to carry out, in a war which almost certainly in some senses he doesn’t fully accept that he’s lost. So he sort of oscillates between– as i say in the book, he oscillates between despair and hope. So sometimes he thinks, you know, “Someone might come at the last minute to save us.”

So there are sort of key stages in the Battle of Berlin which sort of mark the fall of the regime. And one of them is Hitler’s final birthday on the 20th of April where he emerges from the bunker–a very rare emergence. And he speaks to members of the Hitler Youth who’ve gathered in front of the Reichschancellory garden. Another key highlight, what’s wrong with Nazism; this man has young boys fighting the war for him, sometimes as young as eight years old.

And then on the 22nd of April, he has the famous sort of breakdown in the map room where he admits that the war is lost. He says he’d rather shoot himself than be captured. And then he says that people are basically free to an extent to do what they want. After several attempts to convince him to flee to Berchtesgaden where he has his sort of holiday home, he doesn’t take the opportunity. But other Nazis do, and one of those Nazis is Göhring. And Göhring sends an offer to basically tear the Third Reich. Hitler considers this a betrayal. And you know, he goes off the rails because of that. So he’s being, as he sees it, betrayed by those around him.

And then there is this rather– I talk about it sort of illuminating the horrors of Nazism and the absurdity of it all. Hitler, shortly before his suicide, he marries Eva Braun who becomes Eva Hitler. And then he dictates his last will and testament. Now, in the last will and testament, it’s really an important document because he blames the war on the Jews; he gives a nod to the holocaust which is really grim; he sort of alludes to this prophecy speech that he makes throughout the war; he predicts that if there’s another World War, it will result in the death and annihilation of Jewry in Europe; and he sort of leaves this in the final will. And the final thing he says in the will is that he wants the world to sort of uphold the racial laws and oppose international Jewry. And he says in the will as well; he explains his marriage that he’s only felt that he’s able to undertake marriage because now he’s completed his duties as führer; he’s chosen to die rather than be humiliated by capture; and he wants the body of him and his wife to be burned in the place where he’s done much of his work.

If that’s not grim enough– Of course it’s now somewhat infamous that the two bodies are carried outside–of him and Eva Braun or Eva Hitler at the time– are carried out of the Führerbunker; the party that carried them out had to retreat because the Red Army artillery shells are so relentless pounding the area around the Führerbunker. He’s eventually set alight, and shortly after that, Goebbels kills all the young children in the Führerbunker with cyanide. So you have the sort of complete Nazi disregard for human life there. You have the allusions to the holocaust. And then, you know, the fanaticism which results in them killing their own children because they didn’t want them to live in a world without Hitler, without National Socialism.

So it’s completely horrific, and it’s apocalyptic in a lot of ways. It’s– If you read sort of the accounts of the Battle of Berlin, it’s a scene of– As British intelligence put it in the book, it’s a scene of hideous ruin; it’s destruction. And it’s what national socialism led to, and I think that’s really important to get across. So that’s the sort of Hitler’s last days in a nutshell.

Mike: So the reason I picked this for my first episode is because I am fascinated by how far the Hitler survival myth goes and where it crosses into neo-nazi conspiracy. Before I get into that, let’s talk a bit about why you got into this line of questioning for your book.

Luke: Well I– The reason, what really sparked the idea for me to investigate, was that I saw a man called Gerald Williams on Skye News which is a big news channel in the UK. And he was on there giving an interview promoting his book Grey Wolf which is a conspiracy theory book. He sat on the news and he says, you know, he’s got concrete proof that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun survived the Second World War, fled to Argentina with the knowledge and help of the Allied intelligence services. And obviously when I saw this on the news reported as fact, I thought, “This is incredible.”

And I received the book as a Christmas present, and I read it. But when I read the book, I was left with more questions than answers. And as a sort of budding young historian, I’m rather old fashioned in that I think it’s the duty of historians to discover the truth about the past. So I wanted to find out what was the actual truth of the matter, which inspired me to look for years, really, into the evidence surrounding the case. And what I found and eventually published in my book about the case of conspiracy is that there is very little basis in fact to what the conspiracy theorists allege. And it’s actually really damaging when you see it reported in the way that it’s often reported as well. So that’s why I did this, and what inspired the book.

Mike: Okay, so I first heard about Hitler survival myths from the book Black Sun by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke which I’ve talked to you about. He does an excellent job of covering in great detail the various forms of neo-nazi conspiracy theory and political religion that has existed since the Second World War. In it he dedicates a chapter to the Hitler survival myths and how it relates to theories of secret underground bases, UFOlogy, and a Nazi shadow government at the center of the earth.

This strain of mythology emanates from a book by Hungarian emigré to Argentina, Ladislao Szabó, called Hitler Esta Vivo (or Hitler Is Alive in Spanish) written in 1947. In the book, he claimed that Argentina (and Denmark) were only waystations on a journey to Antarctica where the Third Reich had established a secret underground base miles below the ice and earth. This, Szabó explains, was the reason why the US mission to Antarctica in 1946 ran into difficulties and had to abort. So this book was translated into French and caused a bit of a media row.

Then, there was Nazi UFO theory owing to an interview in Der Speigel in 1950 in which a former Nazi Flugkapitän said that in 1942 he had come up with the idea of a flying saucer powered by a rotary turbine disk and three jet engines below. He claimed the project was put into development at BMW later that year. He was convinced that the Czechs stole his design in a 1948 burglary and had since flown their own version of his designs. Additional reports claimed that the model had actually been built in the Third Reich and taken on a test flight in April of 1945.

Novels and conspiracy theory books elaborate on these theories claiming that UFOs sightings were Nazi surveillance flights from Hitler’s Antarctic base. So yeah, I’m definitely looking to make several episodes delving into this weird mythology.

But anyway let’s talk about sources. So your sources mostly come from where.

Luke: So the sources that I– The key sources in my book are from intelligence organizations, primarily British and American intelligence organizations. In America a sort of favorite among the conspiracy theorists is the FBI files. So they’ve got several volumes on Adolf Hitler and the sort of rumors of his escape. In Britain, it’s mainly several War Office files; files that were collected by the War Office, and they’re entitled “Whereabouts of Adolf Hitler.” And they haven’t really been published in much detail, at least not from these angles by historians before. And I also use Soviet intelligence documents as well, or at least I’ve read them and refer to them. They’re published in English translation in a collection–edited collection–called, “Hitler’s Death.” and they were really useful as well. There’s also memoirs of Hitler’s staff from the final days in the bunker, which I’ve used. So it’s a real sort of international perspective on the Hitler case.

Mike: Okay, so as we’ve discussed, our politics are pretty different, so my reaction to all these intelligence agencies and law enforcement was to be immediately suspicious that your sources you know were CIA, MI-5, military, etc. But I’ve kind of warmed up to that because it’s like why would these agents lie to each other? You know these are internal documents. So how redacted were these documents and did you figure out ways around that?

Luke: Yeah, so this is a really important point because this is something which conspiracy theorists– And you’ve probably seen them yourself on social media platforms, they’ll like say all, “Oh you can’t trust these sources because they’re from the FBI; they’re from the CIA; they’re from MI-5.” And of course, intelligence services by their very nature are there to try and sort of cover things up.

But there’s two points– There’s several points, in fact, to make on this question. The first is that conspiracy theorists can’t have it both ways. So they take a lot of their evidence for this idea that Hitler escaped to Argentina from FBI and CIA documents. At the same time, they can’t turn around and say, “Every other document that’s filed alongside it is nonsense because you can’t trust it because it’s in an FBI or CIA file.” So they select and say, “Well, this document says Hitler escaped to Argentina.” But they ignore the conclusion of the FBI agent on the page later which explains that he’s investigated and that the rumor isn’t true. Similarly they’ll take another rumor which says he’s escaped to South America, and they’ll ignore the rumor which says that he’s in New York on the next page. So you can’t have it both ways. And it’s the same with eyewitness testimony. You can’t turn around and say that none of the eyewitnesses from the Führerbunker are reliable because they’re all Nazis; they could be lying, and at the same time say, “But all of these eyewitnesses from Argentina are reliable.” At the same time as questioning sort of the very credibility of eyewitness testimony as a source of historical evidence. So I guess that’s the first point.

Second point which I make on this is that– And I open a chapter in the book with Christopher Hitchen’s razor, you know, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that which can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” So there’s absolutely no evidence, in all the documents that I’ve read on this topic, that MI-5, the FBI, or any intelligence agency, for that matter, internally covered up the truth about Hitler’s death. Quite the opposite, what comes through in the files is that they are concerned with historical truth. And they in fact are so concerned with historical truth that they’re suspicious of each other which is really useful for historians because then what you get several semi-independent, and in the Soviet case almost fully independent, investigations which all reach really very similar conclusions using different evidence. And that conclusion is that Hitler killed himself in the bunker. And that’s so important.

So if this was a cover-up, you wouldn’t see the disputes. So the FBI and American military intelligence on the ground in Germany to some extent, they are initially distrustful of British sources because they’re just distrustful of British intelligence to some extent. Yet they do their own investigations, and they end up agreeing with the conclusions of British intelligence using different evidence. So that’s important knowing that independent sources are consistent with the conclusion that hitler killed himself.

Another way that you get around it is you– You’ve already alluded to a key point which is that a lot of these sources weren’t intended for publication. So I use MI-5 files. And you know, the British Government for decades didn’t admit that MI-5 even existed. So these files were never meant to be seen by historians. And yet within them, and we can talk about this later, you can see the motives of the intelligence officers and why they’re sort of undertaking it.

And another way around it is you look at private papers. So you look at private letters sent between intelligence officers which I’ve done to some extent with Trevor-Roper’s correspondence in my book. And you know everything argues against a cover-up.

The fact that the evidence comes slowly: Hugh Trevor-Roper returns to England, and it’s only then that he’s called back to Germany to look for Hitler’s last will and testament. It’s not sort of like clockwork. And there’s disagreements over how to deal with the evidence and how it should be published and dealt with. So it’s real; it’s live; it’s an unfolding case; and you can tell that from the documents. You know, historians are trained to look at these things, and we’re sort of aware of the issues with intelligence files, and it’s always important to question your sources. And I’ve done that throughout, and I can’t come to any other conclusion than that there is no cover-up.

And finally, you asked about redactions. The British files are hardly redacted at all, so I think in Britain the way the intelligence organizations deal with it is they tend to weed full documents rather than redact them. Whereas, in America, especially FBI files, are much more sort of liberal with the black censor’s pen. It’s not usually a problem because what they tend to do when they do that is just protect sources. So they’ll sort of black out names of informants or agents and that sort of thing. WIth the Hitler case, it’s not really been a big problem at all because what you can do, say if very rarely you get a really large redaction, you can judge sort of reactions to the case by looking at, “okay, well what do the agents talk about around the case? What are their attitudes towards it?” And again you know cropping up to deal with these Hitler rumors, they use language such as, you know, fantastic which at the time simply meant, you know, it’s not believable. It’s a fantastic story, and this sort of thing. So you can judge the attitudes of intelligence officers even around the redactions.

Mike: Cool. Okay, so now that we’ve talked about the documents, let’s talk about, you know, about what the documents actually say. So what did you glean from the documents? And how do they change over time?

Luke: Okay so there’s three things, key things, that I got from the secret intelligence investigations into Hitler’s death and the documents that describe them. The first is the motivations of those who spread the survival rumors. So why did people spread rumors about Hitler surviving the Second World War? The second is the motivations of the intelligence officers and the intelligence organizations that were investigating. So why did they investigate it? And the third is evidence of Hitler’s death, of his suicide, and on the same coin, evidence to disprove the survival rumors, so the idea that he survived. The documents contain these three things.

So on the first point, evidence of why people spread rumors of Hitler’s survival, and you can read all sorts of examples of this in the book. But journalism, sensationalism, moneymaking, newspaper owners tended to be quite common, spiritualists tended to be quite common. Because don’t forget, the FBI investigate these things, and they trace them back to the source. And when they find out the source is unreliable, they tend to conclude against the rumor accordingly. But also ideological reasons as well. So I know that this is The Nazi Lies Podcast, so we probably don’t want to talk too much about the Soviet motivations for spreading the Hitler survival rumors.

Mike: We can definitely get into it.

Luke: What’s that?

Mike: You can definitely get into that.

Luke: I don’t want to get into it too much because I could talk a while about it. But historians don’t know for certain why Stalin did this, but for whatever reason, Stalin decided it was to his advantage to claim that he hadn’t found Hitler’s body, and that he could have flown away to Spain or Argentina at the last moment. And this then encourages a wave of other conspiracy theories, and people sort of jump on the bandwagon with all these different motivations. So on the theme of ideology you have sort of Stalinism is one aspect of it.

And on the other side of the coin, you have nazis in Germany on the ground. So in the book, I mention the Werwolf Movement claims that Hitler is with them at one point. They interview a Nazi U-boat commander about the rumors, and he says it’s being spread to keep the idea of nazism alive, to keep the flame alive. So the German people seem ready to receive the Führer when he returns. And this is a theme in some zones of British-occupied Germany. Swastikas are painted on walls with the warning that the Führer is going to return and deal with the traitors. And this goes on. I think the latest example in my book is 1949, there’s somebody at Cologne railway station handing out leaflets with swastikas on them saying, you know, “The Führer is alive. Be ready to welcome him back. Heil Hitler.” And this was obviously a concern for the intelligence organizations who were investigating.

So why did they investigate the rumors? Well, we talked about several motivations. There’s newspaper men, there’s journalists, and these themselves are sort of revealing as to why the survival rumors aren’t true. Because there was sort of a key rumor that Hitler was in an Argentinian ranch. J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, himself, he sort of traces this to a 97-year-old spiritualist prophet, and then obviously concludes that there’s no reliable or tangible evidence that he escaped to Argentina. And he says this himself in the FBI files. He says, “I have not received any credible evidence that Hitler’s escaped.” And it’s so important to sort of point that out.

So why do intelligence officers investigate? At first they– They give several reasons in the documents themselves. So at first they want to know the truth about Hitler’s death. How did he die? And this is evident throughout the documents. And Trevor-Roper himself says he concerned with historical truth. He even says, “The truth is the best form of propaganda.” And I agree with that because the way that the Nazis go down, it’s not a good thing for their regime, especially not in the modern world, at all. As I’ve said before, it’s a scene of hideous ruin. So they’re concerned with historical truth. They want to find out what actually happened to Hitler.

But then later, once they’ve sort of made themselves certain that Hitler has committed suicide, and I’ll discuss how they do that a little bit in a moment, then they’re more concerned about why these people are spreading these rumors than the rumors themselves. So they convince themselves of the evidence that they’ve gathered that Hitler’s dead and he committed suicide, but then they start to think, “Okay, well why are people saying that he survived the war?” And of course they get concerned when they see that it’s Nazi sympathizers and nazi movements to some extent that are spreading these rumors because one of the missions of the Allied occupation was denazification and democratization. And obviously you can’t have people using the idea of Hitler surviving the Second World War to further the nazi ideology. So that was a concern. And they also wanted to try and see if other Nazis escaped down the same sort of routes that they are claiming that Hitler and Martin Bormann may have escaped as well because the rumors of them two became quite linked.

Within that, and the third thing I got from the documents, is the evidence of Hitler’s death. The Western Allies started accumulating this from May 1945 and started just a little bit later than the Soviets because of course the Soviets were the first at the Führerbunker. But they all start collecting different evidence. The Soviets don’t really share their evidence with the Western Allies as the Cold War begins to frost. But I can see from the documents that the Western Allies were right to be sort of certain that Hitler had killed himself because they had a huge variety of evidence to conclude that. So they had several eyewitnesses who’d been interrogated, including the head of the Hitler Youth, Artur Axmann, who saw Hitler dead on his sofa. They had captured telegrams from the Führerbunker and also sort of from other officials who were dealing with the Third Reich which refer to Hitler’s death. They had his last will and testament in which he talks about his death in there. His marriage certificate. On the Soviet side they had Hitler’s dentist identify Hitler’s jaw and his teeth which they dug up in front of the Reichschancellory garden. In the Soviet intelligence files you can actually read the interrogations of the dental staff. And they also confirmed later that the bloodstains on the sofa were Hitler’s as well. So you have an abundance of eyewitness evidence, an abundance of documentary evidence, and some forensic evidence as well. So you get all this from these documents. It really is fascinating.

Mike: So your book, Hitler’s Death, has been out for about two years now. Have you gotten any reactions to it?

Luke: Yeah, so the reactions from academics and sort of experts has been largely positive. In fact, I’d almost go as far to say mostly positive. So I was happy with that, and I’ve had some really nice reviews from members of the general public as well. It’s a bit of a weird sort of hybrid book in that it is an academic book, and it is written in a largely academic style. But it’s pitched towards a more general audience because I think the conclusions and the topic are important, and I wanted to sort of get them out there to a wider audience.

It’s largely succeeded in doing that and doing its job which is to give historians and other people that want to investigate this a sort of central reference to tackle any sort of future Hitler survival nonsense which might come about, and also to squash the current Hitler survival nonsense. And I think it’s done a good job in doing that. I’ve noticed myself on social media, the amount of people claiming that Hitler survived the war has reduced.

But, you know, the sad thing about it is I don’t think you can ever permanently kill an idea. And I think it’s the same with nazism and neo-nazism as well. There’s always going to be a few people who believe this stuff, but what we can do is to keep that number to the minimum possible. And that would be perfect if we could do that.

Mike: Well for what it’s worth, I think it’s a fascinating read and does a great job of taking readers through the Anglo-American military and intelligence agency documents pertaining to Hitler’s death. Luke Daly-Groves thank you so much for being on the first episode of The Nazi Lies Podcast. The book again is Hitler’s Death out from Osprey Publishing.

Luke: Pleasure, thank you very much.

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