Conspiracy: History’s Greatest Plots, Collusions and Cover-Ups (15 page)

T
HE FINAL SOLUTION
In the months leading up to the fall of the Third Reich, Hitler, Eva Braun and his top officials retreated to the so-called “Führerbunker” in Berlin to await their final defeat. By the time the Soviet forces had reached Berlin, Hitler was preparing to commit suicide. He first married his long-term mistress Eva Braun in what must have been one of the most dismal wedding ceremonies ever to take place, using a small map room in the bunker to do so. He then made a will. On the next day, he and his wife said goodbye to their friends and staff, who included Martin Bormann and the Goebbels family. The couple then retreated to Hitler's study, where Bormann and Hitler's valet Heinz Linge later found them lying dead on the sofa. According to their testimony, Hitler was wounded in the head and a pistol lay on the floor. Braun showed no signs of having been shot and was assumed to have taken cyanide.

Linge then told of how he and others on Hitler's staff, including SS guards, took the bodies out to a nearby garden, poured petrol over them, burned them and tried to bury them. However, they could not complete the burial because the Soviet forces were encroaching.

F
ALSE AUTOPSY
The remains of the bodies were found by Soviet troops from a unit known as the “79th Smersh”. The unit, under a forensic pathologist, conducted an autopsy, hoping to discover the cause of death. In order to do so, they used dental records from Hitler's dentist Hugo Blaschke. The pathologist found traces of cyanide in both bodies and pronounced that Hitler and his wife had died of cyanide poisoning. The results were made public on 16 May 1945.

However, Hitler's staff continued to attest that the Führer had shot himself, a death that perhaps seemed more dignified to them than self-poisoning. Their claims could not be ignored and the Soviet authorities finally had to accept that the autopsy had been wrong. Embarrassed by the incompetence of the Soviet army over such an important matter, Stalin issued an extraordinary statement on 9 June 1945, to the effect that the remains of Hitler's body had not been found and that he had probably escaped.

W
HERE DID HE GO?
Stalin and the Soviets made a number of conflicting statements over the question of Hitler's body, so that in the end none of their accounts could be believed. At different times, for example, they alleged that Hitler had escaped; that he was being held alive in prison in the Soviet Union; and that they had possession of Hitler's corpse. Not surprisingly, rumours began to abound and sightings of Hitler began to be reported. He was thought, for a time, to be hiding in a secret Nazi stronghold deep in the Bavarian Alps, along with Martin Bormann, Artur Axmann (the head of the Hitler Youth) and Ludwig Stumpfegger (Hitler's doctor). However, when Axmann was captured, he maintained that Hitler had shot himself, while it appeared that Bormann and Stumpfegger had been shot by troops while attempting to break out of Berlin as the Russians closed in.

In the years after World War Two, it was believed that an organization of former SS men, ODESSA, masterminded the operation to help fugitive ex-Nazis settle in other countries, especially South America. There were those who believed that Hitler was hiding in Argentina and others who thought that he was holed up in Spain. There was even a theory that he was living in a moated castle in Westphalia.

H
ITLER RETURNS?
Harder to credit were the theories that Hitler had travelled to Antarctica and had resumed his earlier career as an artist. He was purportedly painting the frozen landscapes of his new home while planning his next attempt at world domination. Allied to this theory was the notion that he had descended, through a portal at the Pole, to a hollow earth zone populated by an alien master race who were about to take over the planet. Bizarre as these ideas might seem, they were not new to Nazi ideology and, in fact, attempts had been made to establish bases in Antarctica in the early days of the Third Reich. Heinrich Himmler had also championed the cause of Nazi mythologies of the Aryan race and, during his lifetime, Hitler had been revered by some Nazis as a saviour sent by God.

Of course, after Hitler's death – or disappearance – deification was only a short step away. A cult known as “esoteric Hitlerism” grew up: in India, where Savitri Devi and Subhas Chandra Bose claimed that Hitler was a follower of the God Vishnu, sent to restore the Aryans to their former glory; and in South America, where Miguel Serrano put forward the theory that Hitler was planning an imminent return. According to Serrano, Hitler was hiding in Shambhala, a subterranean headquarters in Antarctica, with a master race called the Hyperborean gods. He would eventually emerge to fight the Jews once more and institute a Fourth Reich.

T
HE REALITY
Today, all that remains of Hitler's body is a skull fragment with a bullet hole in it that was found at the Führerbunker and a section of his jaw that was used for dental identification in the autopsy. Rumour has it that Stalin once owned the skull fragment and used it as an ashtray, in a gesture of ultimate triumph over his former enemy. However, it is now in the Moscow Archives.

But the doubts still linger on. Why do the Russian authorities repeatedly refuse to perform DNA tests on the fragments? Why did they secretly dispose of the rest of Hitler's remains? In modern times, few believe that Hitler is currently hiding underground waiting to unleash Nazi terror on the world once again – he would be over a hundred and fifteen if he were! – but a question still hangs over the exact circumstances of his death. It is certainly possible that we do not know the full story of what happened, even to this day. While that remains the case, conspiracy theories about the death of Adolf Hitler will continue to proliferate.

Most people believe that six million Jews in Germany had been rounded up by the end of the Second World War. In what was one of the worst incidents of genocide in human history, they had been gassed, tortured or starved to death in concentration camps. However, there is also a minority view that the Holocaust – the name by which this instance of genocide is known – simply never happened: that it was a gigantic hoax. Adherents of this view claim that the story of the Holocaust is just propaganda. Its aim, they say, was to make American and European non-Jews sympathetic to the cause of the Jewish people by showing them as victims of persecution. Furthermore, the story was fabricated so that the Jews could secure a homeland for themselves at the end of the war, without too much opposition.

On the face of it, such an outright denial of the facts of history seems absurd, but a number of maverick intellectuals and historians have espoused this view, to a greater or lesser extent. They have been accused of anti-Semitism and, indeed, their opinions do seem to be part of a current of extreme anti-Jewish ideology that goes back hundreds of years in Western culture. However, instead of simply dismissing the claims of the “Holocaust deniers” as the ravings of right-wing ideologues, a number of academics, journalists and committed individuals have decided to look into their theories in detail and refute them by means of a careful historical examination of the facts.

M
ASS MURDER?
The view of most historians today is that the Nazi government in Germany intentionally persecuted Jews during World War Two and that their eventual aim, as a matter of state policy, was to exterminate them all. To do this, they set up concentration camps, which used a number of methods, including gas chambers, to effect mass murder.

Those who question this view are generally known as Holocaust deniers, although they refer to themselves as “Holocaust revisionists”. These groups claim that it was never Nazi policy to exterminate the Jews and that although some Jews were murdered during the war, this was not state policy. They also contend that no gas chambers existed, even at Auschwitz: yet most historians believe that over a million Jews met their deaths in this camp. The “revisionists” typically put the death toll of the Jews who died during World War Two at less than a million or, at most, a million and a half.

T
HE CONSPIRACY
The view of Holocaust deniers is that the photographs and the film footage of concentration camps that were shown after the war were in fact manufactured by the British and American Allies. (Instead of being the inmates of concentration camps, they claim, the people shown were either German civilians being treated for injuries after Allied bombing incidents or victims of starvation and typhoid.) The Nazis, according to the deniers, did not use gas chambers to kill their victims. Instead, they claim, the chambers were used to fumigate people en masse, in order to get rid of lice. They admit that many Jews were mistreated during the war but they contend that the top Nazi officials, from Hitler downwards, did not issue orders to exterminate them. Moreover, they go on, most of the Jews in Germany were not murdered: they escaped instead to other countries such as Britain, the United States, Russia and Palestine.

According to the Holocaust deniers, what actually happened at the end of World War Two was that the Jews hatched a plot to demonize the Germans. In this they were supported by the British and American Allies. The purpose of all this was to ensure that Jewish claims to Israel, their potential homeland, would be treated more sympathetically. It has also been alleged that the Soviets also had reason to demonize the Germans. Their object, it has been said, was to make nearby nations such as Poland and Czechoslovakia accept communist rule more easily.

D
ENIAL OF HISTORY
The Nazis themselves destroyed a great deal of evidence that would have revealed exactly what went on in the concentration camps and it is now clear that, after the war, many of their sympathizers went on to rewrite history. Historians such as the German Friedrich Meinecke and the American Frances Yockey published works with an anti-Semitic bias, followed by less obviously anti-Semitic historians such as Harry Elmer Barnes and James J. Martin. Curiously, Barnes and Martin were both anti-war writers who nevertheless became obsessed with the idea that Germany had been vilified by the British in order to involve the United States in World War Two. In France, Paul Rassinier challenged the received view of the Holocaust. Although he had been held in a concentration camp during the war, because of his socialist affiliations, he was still well known as an anti-Semite.

One of the earliest Holocaust deniers in the United States was Austin App, who published a work called
The Six Million Swindle
. In it, he claimed that the Jews had accused the Germans of mass murder in order to gain large sums of money from the Allies as reparation after the war. Critics countered this claim by pointing out that reparations were actually paid out to survivors, rather than those who had died, primarily for resettlement costs.

By the 1970s, the Holocaust denial movement was in full swing, with the publication of books by Arthur Butz and David Irving, which both claimed that the Holocaust was a fabrication. In 1979, Willis Carto founded the “Institute for Historical Review”. Carto was a neo-Nazi, but he also promoted writings by authors from other backgrounds in order to show that the Holocaust deniers enjoyed a wide range of academic support. In 1987, the “Committee for Open Debate on the Holocaust” was set up. This was an anti-Semitic organization that conducted an advertising campaign which promoted Holocaust denial.