Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (49 page)

Hitler was clearly not well; he could barely walk unaided, and his bodyguards practically carried him. These meetings were held in private, but both leaders’ security men were constantly present. Ancin said Hitler seemed dependent on his bodyguards, who set his schedule. He and Paveli
would converse until one of the guards said words to the effect of “that’s enough,” and then they would leave.

Like most other people who gave descriptions of Hitler after the war, Ancin said that while the Führer’s appearance had changed, he was “basically the same. He had white, short hair, cut military style. No moustache.” One particular moment stuck out in Ancin’s memory. “When Hitler [arrived] he raised the closed fist of his right hand with his arm extended. Paveli
went to him and put his hand on Hitler’s fist, enclosing it. Afterward, they smiled, and Paveli
shook hands with Hitler. This was always the greeting.”

Ancin saw Hitler with Paveli
on five or six occasions. Paveli
’s Argentine mistress (a woman from Córdoba named Maria Rosa Gel) practically never intervened in their conversations, simply serving the coffee. Hitler’s wife also kept silent; Eva had not aged well, and she was unable to lose the weight she had gained when her second daughter was born late in 1945. Ancin said:

Hitler’s wife was a little heavy. She seemed to be just over forty years old. She was large, well-fed you could say. She wore work clothes, very cheap, beige, just like his. She was a woman who gave you the feeling that she had suffered a great deal, or at least that she was suffering from something, because it was reflected in her face. She always seemed worried, and almost never smiled.

From
Ancin’s testimony
it seems that the conversation was carried out for the most part in Spanish. “Hitler’s wife, I don’t remember—I assume she spoke a bit of Spanish, because she always said ‘thank you for the coffee.’ … Hitler spoke Spanish with difficulty, and had a strong German accent.” At one of these meetings, Paveli
introduced Hernán Ancin to Hitler as the carpenter who was working on the building, and invited him to join them for coffee. Hitler smiled at Ancin and made a gesture of greeting with his head, but did not offer his hand or speak. Ancin was “totally convinced” that the man was Hitler.

He also saw Hitler elsewhere in Mar del Plata, at an old colonial-style house behind the San Martin Park. He saw Hitler’s car enter, and the guards at the door; he was not sure if Hitler lived there or was simply visiting (the house was in fact a Lahusen property). While in the city Hitler always traveled by car, but on one occasion the carpenter saw him near the shore; he had gotten out of the car and was sitting on a bench contemplating the sea. Ancin thought Hitler had problems with his circulation and could not walk far; he dragged his feet, and Eva held his arm when he walked. In contrast to Paveli
, whom the retired carpenter remembered as rude and hard-eyed, Ancin recalled Hitler as having “light eyes, a friendly gaze—[he was] quiet and very polite.”

Both Hitler and Paveli
disappeared from Mar del Plata in August or September 1954.

HITLER’S DETERIORATING HEALTH
, and the fading of any fanatical dream of expanding a “Fourth Reich in the South” that had never really existed, led to a steady running down of activity at the Center during the early 1950s. Naturally, as time passed and reality sank in, many of the formerly committed Nazis became preoccupied with their new lives and jobs, and the appeal of working for a defeated leader and ideology simply dissipated. Even SS Gen. Ludolf von Alvensleben, who had become a firm friend of Juan Perón during their skiing trips together at San Carlos de Bariloche, resigned from his post as “governor” of the valley community in October 1952. He took up a post in Buenos Aires as President Perón’s “Head of the Department for Fishing, Hunting and Yachting for Area R10111,” and Perón also granted him a new identity in the name of
Carlos Luecke
.

Prominent among the few still keeping the flame alive was a man who was not a wanted war criminal, but a famous combat airman.
Hans-Ulrich Rudel
, the Stuka dive-bomber and tank-buster ace who had lost a leg when he was shot down late in the war, was Nazi Germany’s most decorated pilot. Even so, he had moved to Argentina in 1948 and become a confidant of both Hitler and President Perón. Still nurturing dreams of a sort of “Fascist Internationale,”
Rudel
was in touch with Sir Oswald Mosley, prewar leader of the British Union of Fascists, and with the Paraguayan dictator Alfredo Stroessner. Mosley and Rudel met in Buenos Aires in 1950, and in Britain two years later Mosley published Rudel’s wartime memoir,
Stuka Pilot
, under the imprint of Euphorion Books—a company that he had set up with his aristocratic wife, née Diana Mitford. The book included fulsome praise for the principles of National Socialism; one must suspect that the legless British fighter ace Douglas Bader, who contributed a foreword, was manipulated into doing so on the pretext that this was simply the flying memoir of a one-legged airman. Rudel was an unrepentant Nazi whose only regret was that Germany had lost the war. During his time in Argentina he met regularly with Heinrich “Gestapo” Müller, whom he used as a reference and contact point, and would have also met with Hitler. In 1953, Rudel returned to West Germany, where he made a failed attempt to launch the belligerently named Deutsche Reichspartei.

IF ANCIN HAD THOUGHT EVA HITLER LOOKED SAD
, it was hardly surprising. She had been a high-spirited, shallow-minded young woman who loved lively company and parties, and her life on the sprawling, isolated estate at Inalco was not what she had hoped for. Her formerly beloved “Mr. Wolf,” once so impressive at the center of his fawning court, was now constantly ill or busy in mundane meetings, and the shine had quickly worn off a remote rural life spent caring for two young children. It is widely documented that despite the demonic energy and conviction that Hitler could display, both publicly and within his close circle, when his emotions were engaged, he was a fundamentally lazy man, easily distracted from practical work by resentments and abstract preoccupations. Without even the illusion of controlling great events, or a circle of toadies to play up to his pretensions, he must have been wretched company indeed for a woman who could feel her youth fading. Since her “death” in the Führerbunker, nobody had been looking for a young mother with two children, so Eva’s relocation under another false identity would not present any great difficulty. Probably in 1954, after their return from the dismal holiday at the Lahusen-owned house in Mar del Plata (during which Hitler’s meetings with Paveli
had been observed by Hernán Ancin),
Eva finally left Inalco
and Hitler. She and her daughters moved to Neuquén, a quiet but growing town about 230 miles northeast of San Carlos de Bariloche. The “Organization” would, as always, continue to look after them.