"The cleverest trick used in propaganda against Germany during the war was to accuse Germany of what our enemies themselves were doing
--Joseph Goebbels
“He doesn’t have a birth certificate, or if he does, there’s something on that certificate that is very bad for him."
--Donald J. Trump
Berlin, April 30, 1945.
Traudl Junge, 25 years old, has been one of Adolph Hitler's personal secretaries for just over two years and was among his closest and most trusted intimates, along with the former bricklayer who became his personal valet, Heinz Linge.
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| Traudl Junge |
With Russian artillery enfilading the compound grounds outside the Fuhrer bunker, the Fuhrer realized the time had come, it had come down to capture, suicide or an attempt to escape.
The idea of escape with the Russians on the doorstep strikes many today as preposterous. But the bunker was not surrounded, and Martin Bormann managed to walk out of it in full uniform, and to reach a railway station and a panzer tank.
Linge walked away from the bunker, only to be captured at See-Strasse.
Most remarkably, Traudl, as depicted in the movie "Downfall" was able to walk through Russian lines, holding the hand of a young boy. Russian soldiers were well known to rape any woman--as Stalin said, that's what soldiers do--but they were said to be surprisingly kind of children.
So, people emerging from the bunker, did manage to escape the tightening noose.
Two bodies, burned beyond recognition were found outside the bunker, but hands and feet had been burned off, so no fingerprints could identify them, even if there had been on record fingerprints of der Fuhrer. The only possibility, in the days before the advent of DNA profiling was identification by teeth and dental records. Hitler had a dentist, who could not be found, but an assistant to that dentist was produced, eventually, who verified the teeth found belonged to Hitler.
That ended the problem of Hitler, for Stalin, for the new President of the United States, for everyone.
Traudl said she heard the shot from Hitler's room. Linge said he found the bodies and carried them out to burn them outside the bunker. He had performed his last service to his Fuhrer. As he tells the story, before Hitler turned to go into his suicide room, Linge asked him for whom he and the rest of the Wehrmacht should now fight and Hitler replied, "For the coming man."
Linge
How could such a fantastic idea that Hitler and Eva Braun escaped be taken seriously?
On the other hand, had Hitler asked Linge and Traudl to help him escape, who could doubt they would have done their last duty?
That Traudl walked free, walked right out of the bunker and past the Russian troops says one thing pretty clearly: It could be done.
Adolf Eichmann lived in Germany and Egypt for 5 years after the war before sailing for Argentina from Italy. And when he arrived in Argentina, he lived in communities where German was the language of the village, so many Nazi's had arrived there.
The idea that a submarine bearing Hitler and Eva could have arrived in Argentina does not seem so far fetched.
Eva Braun
A new start on a new continent. Hitler was said to be in fragile health, but Eva was clearly in her prime and if she conceived in September, 1945, her child would be born in June, 1946.
Blonde Eva
But hiding in Argentina would have, quite literally, have been to hide in plain sight. There were so many Nazis in Argentina it had become a joke. A New Yorker cartoon from the 1950's showed an SS officer in full uniform smoking by himself while his Argentine cowboy friends speculate about where he had learned to ride horses.
"The Boys from Brazil" was a 1976 thriller about an attempt to clone Hitler, and implant his genes around the world, in dozens of young boys, in hopes another Hitler might be produced to lead the world to a Fourth Reich.
The Couple
A less fantastic story would be the simple transport and adoption of a child from Argentina to an American family of German origins, to raise as a sort of child rescued from the bulrushes to become the next leader of the coming Reich.
All you'd have to do is play around with his birth certificate.
