Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler
by Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams
Sterling
German dictator Adolf Hitler and his bride Eva Braun are said to have committed suicide in a Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945. Not so, say British military historian Simon Dunstan and his journalist co-author, Gerrard Williams. In their readable and well-mapped what-if history, they say the Hitlers swapped places with lookalikes three days earlier, and landed at Necochea, Argentina, from a U-boat three months later.
Historians have dismissed such claims, but Dunstan and Williams clear the way for their story by saying past accounts are also flawed.
Bunker residents lied for Hugh Trevor-Roper's 1947 widely accepted history, The Last Days of Hitler, and the author was duped into thinking the forged Hitler Diaries were real in 1983, they write.
There is 'no conclusive forensic evidence' that charred bodies outside the bunker were Hitler and Braun's, particularly as the 'Hitler Skull' fragment in Moscow was DNA tested to be that of a 40-year-old woman, they add.
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin told the Potsdam Conference in July 1945 that Hitler had escaped 'probably to Spain or Argentina' while his top commander, Marshal Georgi Zukhov, admitted his troops 'found no corpses that could be Hitler's', the authors say.
No wonder, because the Hitlers had several stand-ins, including a 'perfect' Propaganda Ministry starlet and the 'uncanny' Gustav Weber, who, the authors claim, was last photographed decorating Hitler Youth, on March 20, 1945. Both could have played their roles to the last, they explain.