(tense music)
- Tonight, one of the most notorious dictators in history.
A man who led Germany into World War II.
- You could go down the line.
Mass murderer, destroyer of cities,
destroyer of life.
Basically, anything terrible
you wanna say about Hitler
would probably be accurate.
- Most historians agree that Hitler perished
as the War in Europe came to an end.
Some claim there is not sufficient proof of his death.
- Right from the outset, lies were being spread
about how Hitler actually died.
- They've never produced anything that can convince us.
The human remains are not convincingly
Adolf Hitler's human remains.
- Now we uncover the top theories
about Hitler's end.
Did the Nazi leader really die in Berlin,
or was he able to escape?
- If Hitler can get to Spain,
then Franco will welcome him with open arms
and keep him cozy in secret.
- There's a reason that we look suspiciously at Argentina,
and that's because people did escape and make their way there
in the aftermath of the Second World War.
- Could Hitler have survived
the last days of World War II?
And if so, where did he go?
(theme music)
(tense music)
May 1, 1945...
- [Newscaster] The war is over.
Six years of suffering, sacrifice, and death...
- [Laurence] After 12 years in power
and six years of war,
the Nazi regime has come to an end.
According to news reports,
Adolf Hitler commits suicide
as Soviet forces close in
on his underground bunker in Berlin.
- [Man] On April 30, 1945,
the final fall of the last pocket
of holdout Soviet troops move into the bunker
and they confirm not just the fall of the Third Reich,
but the death of Adolf Hitler himself.
- Thanks to the work of Hugh Trevor-Roper,
a British intelligence officer from MI5,
we have a very good timeline of the events in the bunker.
On April 26th, Hitler was briefed
that his army could not counterattack,
that the war was essentially lost,
and he had a complete meltdown in the bunker.
By April 29th,
he was clearly contemplating suicide.
- There had to be a Hitler legacy--
if Hitler wasn't gonna survive the war,
he needed to sort of martyr himself for the Nazi cause.
- On the night of April 29th,
probably slightly after midnight,
he married Eva Braun, and then they had
a celebratory breakfast before
going on to kill themselves the next morning.
- [Man] Shortly afterwards, newspapers worldwide
printed the announcement that Hitler is dead.
- International reaction to the news of Hitler's death
is at first joyous.
- [Newscaster] The sights and sounds of victory
in Europe echo across the Atlantic
and around the world.
- [Martin] That gave way rather quickly to suspicion.
And that suspicion was based on the fact
that there was no body.
- [Laurence] The first Soviet troops into the bunker
are allegedly more interested in trophies than evidence.
- The Soviets, in taking Berlin,
they're gonna shell the city to basically rubble.
So by the time the Russians get to the bunker,
they're not going in with scientific teams.
It's really being discovered by frontline troops.
- [Man] The Soviet troops who found Hitler's bunker
weren't looking for evidence that Hitler shot himself.
What they were actually looking for were mementos,
were trophies that they could take home at the end of the war.
So the people who were there, who could have provided us
the evidence that Hitler shot himself,
weren't looking for it.
- [Martin] It's very difficult to contain
the exuberant energy of a conquering army
because the Soviet people had suffered
brutally under the German invasion.
No one is treating Hitler's bunker
the way that it should be treated.
- They weren't doing it with any kind of great caution.
People were just digging everywhere.
People were tramping through the bunker,
they were going into the rooms, grabbing souvenirs.
But it's done in a very ad hoc way.
- [Laurence] Despite the chaos in the bunker,
the Soviets are initially confident that they have found
the dead bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun.
- That confidence then erodes pretty quickly.
Within weeks, Joseph Stalin himself
is commenting that Adolf Hitler escaped from Europe.
- Most historians think that Stalin was basically
playing a political game.
It was a way to strengthen Stalin's hand
in territorial negotiations
by suggesting that the threat of Hitler could mean
that it's safer for Red Army soldiers
to remain in disputed areas.
- He was almost certain that they had Hitler's remains,
but he was gonna keep it ambiguous to be able to wield it
like a cudgel against the Western Allies.
- [Laurence] The United States is one of several countries
that quietly tries to ascertain the truth about Hitler's death.
- In the aftermath of the conflict,
the United States military
is not allowed immediate access to Berlin.
The Soviets eventually allow us there,
but it's nearly two months later.
What that leads to is, within months,
nearly half of America
believes that Adolf Hitler did not die in Berlin.
(tense music)
- When General Eisenhower is asked about it,
he honestly responds, we don't have tangible proof.
We have not seen anything.
We're just relying on what the Soviets are giving us.
J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI,
He looks into it and he says, I don't have any evidence
that Hitler's remains were found,
because he didn't.
The Soviets kept this stuff very secret.
- [Martin] These narratives about the death of Hitler--
we must remember at all times
that what information we do have
went through a Russian filter.
Ooh, and it's worse than.
It was a Stalinist filter.
The worst one of them all.
- Hitler is so iconic that any inconsistency is going to be
examined or exploited.
- [Laurence] As the world recovers from the war,
confidential investigations begin, and no one can quite
find the answers they're looking for.
- [Kevin] Adolf Hitler's death certificate is not issued
until 1956, 11 years after his death.
And that's really because there wasn't a body to identify,
and there was a lot of confusion in Berlin at that time
and in Germany as it's trying to rebuild,
so it wasn't a priority.
- This death certificate is produced without the presence
of physical evidence because in 1956,
there was no dead body to stand over.
- [Jesse] What we see is that the prevailing theory
among most historians, most governments,
is that Hitler shot himself in the bunker.
- [Martin] The official story looks like this:
Adolf Hitler was aware he wasn't going to escape.
- He had promised that he would never be captured alive.
He also said he was not going to leave Berlin,
that he realized this was his fate.
- [Laurence] Those convinced Hitler died
by his own hand point to the dramatic death
of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini
two days earlier.
- The word comes into the bunker
that Mussolini and his mistress
were captured, hung upside down, killed.
And Hitler decides he does not want this for himself.
He is gonna control his own death.
- [Martin] And so a decision was made
that he would kill himself,
that Eva would kill herself as well.
The bodies would then be burned
so that they could not be recovered,
so that no spectacle could be made of
Adolf Hitler's dead body
the way that it was made of Benito Mussolini's dead body.
(tense music)
- [Robert] On April 30th, Hitler calls his staff together
and says goodbye to them,
shaking hands with each of them as he goes around the room.
One of his secretaries noted
that he wasn't even looking at her.
Rather, he was looking through her.
- Otto Gunsche, one of Hitler's senior officials,
stands outside the door while Hitler
goes in with his wife, Eva,
Eva Hitler now, and at about 3:15,
he opens the door, and there's Eva,
she had taken her shoes off, she's laying peacefully.
Hitler, however, had put a gun in his mouth...
(cocking gun)
...and blew his brains out.
(gunshot)
- [Laurence] Gunsche is captured by the Soviets on May 2nd.
He claims to be one of just a few people who handled
the bodies of Hitler and Braun.
- The witnesses, Gunsche especially,
report that there was also the smell
of burnt almonds in the room.
Now, that's a sign of cyanide.
- The Soviets, when they interview Gunsche
about Hitler's suicide, they ask him,
is there any other access to this room besides
the one door you stood by?
And he said, no, there was not.
This was the one, and that Adolf Hitler
and Eva Braun did commit suicide.
- Hitler had already instructed his adjuncts to gather petrol
to burn his body, he was very clear on that.
Otto Gunsche, along with a couple
of the other people present,
will wrap Hitler's body in carpet.
Gunsche will carry them out
into the Chancellery Garden.
They place their bodies in a shell crater,
douse them with petrol...
(fire crackling)
And then they will light them on fire
and their bodies will begin to burn.
- [Laurence] According to Soviet soldiers, Hitler's body
was unrecognizable and reduced nearly to ash.
- [Luke] The Soviets dug up two really badly
fire-damaged sets of human remains.
And from these remains, they took Hitler's
jaw and teeth and they sent it back to Moscow.
- The jaw is intact enough that they can examine the teeth
and what they do is they find the two dentists
that worked on Hitler's teeth,
and they were able to point out specifically a bridge
that they had done in the upper right jaw.
- Dental assistants.
That's how little the Soviets have.
They've got nothing, they've got a couple
of fragments of a jawbone with some teeth.
- Stalin is so paranoid that he starts to think
there's real doubt about basically the remains
of Hitler that had been verified by the dental assistant.
So he sends another group of military intelligence officers
back to Berlin in 1946, a year after the war.
That's when they find the skull.
The skull with a bullet hole in it.
(gunshot)
- [Laurence] In 1946, a year after the end of World War II,
Stalin sends a team to Berlin
to search for further proof of Hitler's death.
- He says, I want you to go through that
Reich Chancellery Garden again
and look for remains of Hitler.
And that's when they find the skull.
They couldn't know that was Hitler's skull.
They weren't doing DNA testing,
but it was in the same area where they found the teeth,
it had a hole, and he'd been shot in the head.
- [Laurence] The skull fragment is filed away
in Soviet archives.
It's not until 2009,
well after the fall of the Soviet Union,
that this 1946 discovery can be properly examined.
- [Luke] In 2009, Nick Bellantoni led a team
of scientists to conduct DNA analysis
on this skull fragment with the bullet hole in it.
And what they found was that
the skull was actually that of a female,
and that it was the wrong age to be Eva Brown.
- There's a bullet wound in the skull,
and we know from eyewitness accounts
that she poisoned herself.
That skull fragment cannot have belonged to Eva.
There were over 150 bodies surrounding
the Chancellery building,
so there were human remains everywhere.
And the skull fragment,
it's irrelevant because of the jawbone
in the dental work that almost definitely confirms his death.
- The evidence for Hitler's suicide in the bunker
on the 30th of April, 1945,
is forensic evidence, it's eyewitness evidence,
and it's documentary evidence, and it all adds up.
- [Laurence] Nonetheless, some question
the identity of those bodies in the bunker.
Thanks to information gleaned at
the Nuremberg War Crime Trials.
- [Man] The United States of America,
presents count one of the indictment.
That all the defendants participated as organizers
or accomplices in a common plan or conspiracy
to commit crimes against peace,
war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
- The Nuremberg Trials were the first
large scale war crimes trials in international history.
It was an effort to hold Nazi leadership responsible
for the horrors, the crimes against humanity that had been
perpetrated during World War II.
- What quickly emerges at Nuremberg is this realization
that there were a large number of people that we thought
were eyewitnesses,
but they didn't actually see a thing.
(tense music)
"Did you actually see Adolf Hitler?"
Was it definitely him?"
"Yeah, well, I saw a person
"that was rolled up in a carpet, and we set that on fire.
I saw that happen."
- Hitler's body from the head was covered in blood,
so it made sense to wrap that body up.
These people were close to Hitler
and they wanted to preserve dignity of the dead bodies.
- [Laurence] The eyewitness evidence is divisive.
Does it prove Hitler's death,
or suggest something else entirely?
- [Martin] Adolf Hitler was also a little bit pragmatic,
every now and then, when he absolutely had to be.
As a result of the war,
Germans were forced to recognize that
they might have to retreat and continue fighting
from some other location.
They'd establish a headquarters complex elsewhere
where the Reich would live on.
And so Hitler is the one who approved plans
for continuity of government
in the event of the fall of Berlin.
- [Laurence] But if Hitler somehow escaped,
where would he go?
- [Geoffrey] If you're trying to escape Nazi Germany,
you needed to get into a neutral country
that can shelter you.
If you can get to the Spanish border,
you will get asylum from Franco.
(tense music)
- [Kevin] Throughout World War II,
Hitler wanted Franco to come on board
to join the Axis Powers.
Franco holds back, stays neutral,
but is friendly with Hitler.
- Was it possible for him to slip away?
Yes, and he could have done it
without ever seeing the light of day.
- Underneath Berlin,
like a lot of major European cities,
you have a complex tunnel system.
- [Laurence] Early in the war,
Hitler expanded Berlin's subway system.
Some of these tunnels were converted into bunkers
and air raid shelters.
Together, they made up a vast underground network
that might allow travel through the entire city.
- A number of people are able to get out at
the bitter end using the tunnel system.
Famously, Martin Bormann,
the chairman of the National Socialist Party,
makes an attempt to get out, and doesn't make it in the end,
and is killed by Soviet troops.
- So the theory is that Hitler could have used that same
bunker system to get out of Berlin himself.
(tense music)
- [Laurence] Some speculate that Hitler fled
via a tunnel to Tempelhof Airport,
a fortified airfield in Berlin.
- Tempelhof Airport is the last exit
out for the Nazi hierarchy.
- [Robert] There are some people who have theorized
that Hitler escaped by air.
Now, that seems somewhat plausible in that there were
some planes that made emergency escapes
while under Soviet fire.
Hannah Reitsch, the famous German female pilot,
flew into Berlin on April 26th
in the company of Robert Ritter von Greim,
a high ranking officer in the German Luftwaffe.
They flew out on April 29th in the middle of the night,
so they were able to escape.
Because of that, it does seem plausible
to some people that Hitler may have also flown out of Berlin.
- One of the many stories about Hitler's escape
from Berlin was that he, and Eva Braun, and some others,
they flew out of Berlin
and they made their way to a monastery
called the Monasterio de Samos
in Galicia, in the northwestern corner of Spain.
- [Kevin] Francisco Franco is a fascist
who rises to power in Spain
through a large civil war.
Because of his victory and his rise to power,
he really owes it to Adolf Hitler
and German equipment, and therefore stays
friendly with Hitler throughout World War II,
even though he holds back and never joins the Axis Powers
like Hitler wants him to.
- [Robert] Franco was a deeply religious,
deeply conservative leader.
He saw in the Nazis and in the Italian Fascists
these rigorous systems worthy of emulation.
There's no question that if Hitler had wanted to escape
into Spain, he would certainly have allowed it to happen,
and allowed Hitler to go into hiding in Spain
and then denied all knowledge of Hitler's whereabouts.
The view of the Catholic Church was that we need to protect
the Nazis because we've got this godless Bolshevik,
Joseph Stalin, and he's subsidizing
Communist parties in Italy and in France.
He's trying to make the revolution everywhere.
"The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
- From a political standpoint,
that made a certain amount of sense that there would be
elements within Spain's Catholic Church
that were sympathetic in some ways to the German regime.
- The Roman Catholic Church was really thick as thieves
with the Nazis after the war.
They were the ones who basically got travel documents, passports,
visas for thousands of Nazi war criminals,
and they would pass through monasteries,
like the one in Spain.
This monastery of Samos,
along the Atlantic and the Bay of Biscay
would've been a perfect rat line for Nazi leaders,
because they could've gone in there and then they
could've had safe haven in neutral Spain.
The abbot of the Samos monastery
was a close friend of Francisco Franco,
the Spanish leader, so he could have made
himself available to host Hitler there secretly.
- [Laurence] The monastery in Samos may be part of
a vast escape network.
These overland routes are known as "rat lines."
They connect escaping Nazis with sympathizers who provide
falsified documents and identities.
- The rat line itself had people who understood
what they were doing and who they were helping
slipping through gaps in the line
and escaping to another country.
- There are some monasteries that are used as waypoints
in the escape from Nazi Germany.
They're a good place to conceal yourself short term
as you're transitioning to your next mode of transportation.
- If you were trying to escape Germany,
it wasn't that hard,
because there were something like 12 million ethnic Germans
who'd all been expelled by the Soviets.
These people were all going west as well.
If you were senior a Nazi official,
you could kind of disguise your appearance
and you could just say, hey, I'm a German
from Romania, and I have no documents
because I was expelled from my country by the Red Army.
- So you've got these rat lines, which are really a way to get
Nazis, or Germans out of Germany
by having friendly folks along the way helping you out,
providing you money, clothes, food.
And so the idea was that Hitler was going to make his way
to this monastery and stay there,
I don't know, as a monk,
until he was ready to go further.
- [Laurence] The 1945 fall of Berlin means the end
of the Nazi regime in Germany.
But at the end of World War II,
did Hitler really commit suicide,
as most historians agree, or did he somehow escape?
- If you were going to try to escape in 1945,
the best place to go would be Spain.
- The theory here is that if Hitler could make it to Spain,
there's a monastery, the Samos Monastery,
that was very friendly to Nazis escaping Germany.
- [Geoffrey] There was one guy who was
a stonemason's apprentice, a teenager,
and then he told the story when he was 80,
"I was at Samos, and I remember when Hitler arrived
"and he was hiding in the monastery with Eva Braun.
They were both so kind to me. They tipped me so well."
None of it could be true.
None of it could, but he talked about it
with absolute and utter conviction.
- [Laurence] Many believe this theory is flawed.
- A lot of this is a lot of stretched reality.
The belief that they had gone through tunnels,
the Tempelhof Airport, and flown out of there
over occupied Allied territory and landed in Spain.
Historically speaking, this idea of Hitler
being content with staying in a monastery
and living the life of a monk is pretty preposterous.
This guy's a megalomaniac.
He's pretty much insane by the end of World War II,
and we're expecting him to keep a low profile?
Ain't going to happen.
- [Laurence] But is it possible
Hitler moved on to another destination?
- The idea is that if Hitler can get himself out of Berlin,
get himself into Spain, Hitler's going to be safe
for maybe the next leg of his journey.
(tense music)
- Then a number of noteworthy cases emerge of war criminals
who escape justice in Europe, and they flee to South America,
and they find a home in Argentina.
Argentina ultimately joins the Allies during World War II,
but does so very late in the game.
There were those in the country
who were sympathetic to Nazi Germany,
and it's because of these sympathies that we have
to recognize the possibility
that Adolf Hitler could have gotten there himself.
- [Robert] Germans had migrated into Argentina
in significant numbers, in different waves.
They were able to build communities,
particularly in the southern part of the country,
where they concentrated slightly more.
- [Newscaster] The symbol of tyranny began to appear
in the large South American cities
and in the backwoods of Patagonia.
- So would Hitler have found a welcome reception there?
Could he have hidden there?
Most likely.
So the theory that Hitler escaped to Argentina
seems plausible to some theorists,
partly because it is plausible.
- [Laurence] But if Hitler did escape to Argentina,
how did he get there?
- [Jesse] During the war, Germany had a group
of submarines called U-boats.
They were incredibly lethal,
and they were far ranging,
really traveling all around the world.
- German U-boats could certainly range
across the Atlantic into Argentinian waters.
They frequently attacked Allied shipping.
They had an incredibly dangerous fleet.
They were sinking Allied shipping
almost as fast as it could be built.
- [Newscaster] Ordered out from Atlantic bases to destroy
or be destroyed themselves,
hundreds of newly built Nazi submarines
take to the open sea.
- [Laurence] When the Allies declare victory,
all German submarines or U-boats
are ordered to give themselves up to the Allied forces.
Most do so, but not all.
In fact, the U-530 submarine
resurfaces in a surprising place.
- On July 10, 1945, you actually have a U-boat
showing up at
an Argentinian naval base
called Mar de Plata.
- It's impossible not to recognize that
U-530 could have potentially carried
very important cargo in the form of Eva Braun and Adolf Hitler.
The timing works out.
- [Kevin] With this U-boat show up at Mar de Plata
on July 10, 1945,
that's almost two months to the day
that Hitler commits suicide,
and it takes two months for a U-boat
to get from Spain to Argentina.
- [Martin] There's a reason that we look
suspiciously at Argentina,
and that's because people did escape and make their way there
in the aftermath of the Second World War.
Most notoriously, Adolf Eichmann is living on
a house on Garibaldi Street in Buenos Aires.
- [Laurence] Eichmann, one of the main architects
of the Holocaust, escapes Europe
and reinvents himself in Argentina.
He changes his name to Ricardo Clement,
and works as a mechanic
at the Mercedes-Benz factory in Buenos Aires before
being captured and hanged by Israel's Mossad agents in 1960.
- In 1954, the US Federal Bureau of Investigations
conducts an investigation about sightings,
supposed sightings of Adolf Hitler in Argentina.
The FBI files include material about
an unnamed German expatriate who is living in Argentina
and exchanging correspondence with an Adolf Hitler
who is alive and well and living somewhere in Argentina.
- [Laurence] If he could somehow make it to Argentina,
is it possible Hitler would have gone further than the coast?
Archaeologists have recently unearthed something astounding
deep in the Argentine jungle.
- This could be an answer
to what happened to Hitler after World War II.
- In 1945, the Soviet Union
told the world it had evidence
that Hitler committed suicide in a bunker in Berlin.
FBI documents declassified in 2014 bolster that fact.
But there are those who speculate
a different end, and believe
a remote location in Argentina
holds important new clues.
- Destination number one for Nazi war criminals
was Argentina.
These guys came ashore,
and there was no attempt by
the Argentine government to punish this,
they were welcomed into the country.
- [Laurence] In 2015, a team led by
former CIA agent Bob Baer travels to Argentina
to pressure test 700 pages
of recently declassified FBI documents.
- Bob Baer goes down to Argentina to sorta
check this out in 2015,
and what he finds
is a big school,
a Hitler Youth school,
and finds out it was used to teach Nazi doctrine to children,
just like the Hitler Youth in Germany in the '30s and '40s.
- What he was finding was evidence of a colony
where they flew the Swastika flag,
where they were raising youth
and teaching them in the ways
of National Socialism, and teaching them
about the history of Adolf Hitler.
It appears that a colony lived on
that kept the torch going
about National Socialism
even after the fall of Berlin.
- This is almost like a cult waiting for its leader
to come back to lead them to power.
- [Laurence] But Bear's team doesn't stop
at San Antonio Oeste.
The trail takes them from the coastal town
to areas that would be much harder
for prying eyes to find.
- [Kevin] In the Argentinian jungle
in Missiones, there's a compound,
and farmers there discover a bunker
but it's not wood and dirt.
It's tiled, looks rather fancy,
they find Nazi coins and other Nazi memorabilia.
- [Laurence] To Bob Baer, the complex seems
intended for use by someone important.
- Also in the FBI files,
the locals have noted a network of roads
that are controlled by the local German community.
These roads, which are small and run through jungle towns
and rural communities,
could be used to move anyone,
or anything anonymously.
- Simple military engineering.
If you have one way out, one way in,
It's very easy to control
who moves back and forth on that road complex.
If anyone approached and began snooping,
there would be plenty of warning
whereby you could skirt off to someplace else.
- [Schug] The Missiones complex does seem like a place where
Hitler could survive safely and comfortably,
and Argentina itself does seem like
an ideal place for Hitler to be.
But Germans have a strong presence in Argentina
after the war, so having Hitler exist
secretly among them seems like it would be a tall order.
- [Martin] There's always the possibility that Argentina
wasn't a great place to go because
we were looking there after the war.
Certainly U-530 provided us with a big fat arrow
pointing directly at Argentina.
If people are looking, maybe it's not
the best place to hide,
maybe someplace else more remote would be a better place to hide.
- It's a hop, skip, and a jump
from the southern tip of Argentina to the South Pole.
(tense music)
- There's a possibility that Adolf Hitler may have
ended up in Antarctica.
- There's been a lot of exploration of Antarctica
by Germany even before World War I.
- The first of two German Antarctic expeditions
occurs between 1901 and 1903.
The goal of this expedition was to survey a part of
the Antarctic continent and to determine
if it had strategic value.
- The German industry needs fuel,
and the concept is that the answer to this is whale oil.
And so these German patrols go down to Antarctica.
They survey the grounds.
The idea is to build a plant
to produce whale fat into fuel.
- During the National Socialist period, there was an actual
Nazi Antarctic expedition
that carved out a slot of the Antarctic continent
that was for National Socialist Germany.
- [Kevin] In 1947, a book comes out claiming
that German U-boats after the war were actually
delivering ex-Nazis
to Antarctica and the South Pole.
But later, one of the German U-boat commanders,
a guy named Heinz Schaeffer,
he comes out and denies the whole thing.
- The captain denies that they proceeded to Antarctica.
But, of course, if he was trusted
with moving the German head of state
to an unidentified, undisclosed location,
wouldn't that be the story he tells?
- [Laurence] By the spring of 1945,
Nazi Germany has fallen.
But some international intelligence reports
suggest that Hitler may have escaped and is on the run.
Some theorists raise the possibility
that his ultimate destination is Antarctica.
- Prior to World War II, Nazi Germany is actually
looking to establish bases to support its whaling fleet.
- In 1938, the Germans take possession of an area
of Antarctica called Neuschwabenland.
This actually belonged to Norway,
and the Germans basically just plucked up
the Norwegian flag and put down their own.
- [Jesse] Now, it sounds strange that Germany would send
U-boats to Antarctica, but at that time,
the continent was considered
to be a treasure trove of resources,
especially for countries that were looking
to expand their empires.
- [Newscaster] A season's catch may be valued
at over 2 million pounds.
- [Martin] The purpose of these bases was to get Germany in
on the whale oil game,
when whale oil was as good as gold or as good as oil.
But those same bases could also be used
at the end of the war to harbor fugitives.
In 1943, Grand Admiral Karl Donitz claims
that Germany's submarine fleet
has created an unassailable fortress
on the other end of the world.
- Now, while this sounds like, oh, there's obviously
a fortress down there, this is what he would have said
about any locations the Germans possessed
during World War II.
He understands the power of propaganda
and what to use against the enemy.
(tense music)
- The German U-boat fleet was also known
for sneaking off and doing secretive things
and conducting secretive landings that we don't
find out about until years later.
In the example of U-537, it actually sails
to what would eventually become part of Canada in 1943
and it establishes a weather station that
nobody knows a thing about until the 1970s.
So we're not writing science fiction
when we imagine the Germans using a U-boat to sail
to a remote and very cold place
to conduct a landing and put structures ashore.
- Articles come out with this theory
that months after the capitulation of Germany,
April of 1945,
a German U-boat shows up in Antarctica,
and the crew gets off and they don't get back on.
They stay and they start building
shelters for themselves.
- That leads to this tantalizing possibility
that they may have been laying the infrastructure
for the Fuhrer himself to come there
and to begin this continuity of government program
from Antarctica.
- [Luke] Nazi Germany definitely had interest in Antarctica,
but there's absolutely no evidence to suggest
that Hitler escaped to Antarctica.
Hitler wouldn't want to have lived in Antarctica.
He would have hated living in Antarctica.
- From a psychological perspective,
it would seem odd for a person
who's used to having all of this power
and control to end up at the bottom of the world
with no one around him.
Doesn't seem like a good fit.
- [Laurence] But talk of a German
Antarctic base persists,
and the international search continues.
- Down the road, articles, books come out saying
that after World War II, in August of 1945,
just months after Germany's surrender,
the British launched Operation Tabarin,
the idea being that they sent troops down to Antarctica
to take this fortress,
but were held back by the Germans,
who possessed it for decades after.
So again, every time they tamp down,
one rumor or another is gonna pop up.
- [Paul] As the foremost maritime power in the world
prior to World War II,
it's unsurprising that the British Navy
is involved in a substantial number
of expeditions mapping out the rest of the world
and looking for basing opportunities.
However, Operation Tabarin
was not a secret military mission
to attack some Nazi base in Antarctica.
It was a scientific mission
designed to study the climate of Antarctica.
- [Jesse] It doesn't look like the theory that Hitler
left Germany after World War II
and went to a secret Nazi base
in Antarctica is in any way true.
The only evidence that we've been able to find shows that
Germany had a base in Antarctica for whale oil.
- [Laurence] After the fall of Germany in 1945,
some intelligence reports suggest Hitler may have escaped.
Others have made an even more startling claim,
one that boggles the imagination.
- [Martin] There were a lot of people that didn't like him,
and there were a lot of people who wanted him dead,
even in Germany.
So there's a possibility that the person who killed himself
in the bunker in Berlin was somebody
who just looked like Hitler,
that it wasn't him at all, that it was a body double.
- [Laurence] To support this theory, some turn to
the many assassination attempts made against the Nazi League.
- There were 42 assassination attempts, if we're counting
actual attempts, and if you add up plots
that were foiled before they could be sprung,
the number reaches over 100.
- One of them was a general
was gonna hug him with two hand grenades
in his hands and blow him up.
They also put explosives on his airplane
when he was traveling to the Russian front.
- The most famous one probably being Operation Valkyrie,
which has been immortalized in the film starring Tom Cruise.
(tense music)
- [Kevin] Valkyrie becomes known as the July 20 bomb plot,
because it occurs on July 20, 1944,
just a little bit after D-Day,
where the Allies are coming across France.
- [Laurence] By the summer of 1944,
a growing number of Germany's senior military leaders
are losing hope.
Many blame Hitler for leading Germany to disaster.
- [Kevin] One of Hitler's army officers,
Von Stauffenberg, is going to bring
a briefcase bomb
down into his Wolf's Lair,
and he's going to break two little glass tubes
in the briefcase that will start a timer.
He's gonna put the suitcase under a table
and get out of there.
(explosion)
(tense music)
Because of the heavy legs of the table,
one of those legs absorbed a lot of the blast.
Hitler survived it.
He actually gets on the phone and begins calling people,
putting down this insurrection,
and it's probably the best known attempt
to kill Hitler
and restore some degree of normalcy in Germany.
- [Martin] According to Bauer, he may have been killed
in the July 20 assassination plot
and they just didn't want to let Germany know
because it was at a critical moment in the war.
This is not a good time to have to go, oh, yeah, hey,
by the way, somebody killed him,
and it was one of our guys that did it.
(tense music)
- In 1939, Maximilian Bauer writes this book called
"The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler"
and claims that Hitler died in 1938.
And so all events that are gonna take place
hence on is actually gonna be from a body double.
- [Martin] According to Bauer, Adolf Hitler is dining with
some of his critical leaders,
and he's poisoned during the meal.
So the senior leadership, they felt like that would
just be too much of a blow to morale.
And so what they did was replace him
with a series of body doubles.
(tense music)
- The Nazi propaganda machine
is one of the most well-oiled machines there is.
Joseph Goebbels is using every incident, everything,
to churn out language of the Nazi Party.
And so if anybody's going to be able to cover up
the death of Adolf Hitler
and convince everyone
that this other person is him,
it's gonna be Joseph Goebbels.
(explosion)
- [Laurence] If Hitler was dead
long before the end of the war,
is it possible he was replaced by a body double?
As proof, some turn to a body found
in the wreckage of the Reich Chancellery.
- And he looks so much like Adolf Hitler
that all these Soviet soldiers kind of pile in around him.
They're taking photos of him.
It actually belongs to a man named Gustav Weller,
but he looks so much like Adolf Hitler,
they at first thought, "Oh, my gosh,
here's his dead body, we found him."
They even placed a painted portrait
of Adolf Hitler on the chest of the dead body,
as if to confirm, see, it's the guy in the painting.
- [Schug] Is this a coincidence?
A man who looks exactly like Adolf Hitler is found
just feet away from where he's cremated?
- Maybe Weller is exactly
what they wanted the Russians to find.
You have personal accounts describing the bitter end.
You have a body double that looks like Adolf Hitler
with a bullet wound to the head.
- [Laurence] Detractors of this theory
point out that a body double would be unlikely to fool
those who knew Hitler well.
- [Luke] Hitler first met Mussolini in 1934,
and although Mussolini was a very bad man,
he wasn't an idiot, and I think
he would notice if Hitler was replaced by a double.
Similarly, Hitler was dating Eva Braun since 1932,
and I think she would definitely tell the difference
if Hitler had been replaced by a double in 1938.
- There is no evidence, there is nothing written by Adolf Hitler,
by anybody in his inner circle
that said there was a doppelganger,
there was a person looking like Hitler
that we used to trick people.
There's nothing like it.
It was simply people found that look like Hitler,
that this assumption was made
that there was a doppelganger.
- The idea of Hitler living anonymously as a Mr. X
somewhere in Spain or in Argentina,
in Antarctica, it's not Hitler's style.
He was the Fuhrer of Germany,
he wanted to go down as such.
And one of the reasons why he killed himself
is because he wanted to avoid
the shame of overthrow or surrender.
- [Jesse] Thousands of historians have spent decades
looking at all of the theories
of what possibly could've happened to Hitler
at the end of World War II,
and more outlandish theories
seem to come out every day.
- Hitler's death is a mystery
that's really deliberately fanned by
the specific circumstances of Hitler's demise
in Berlin on April 30, 1945.
And really, Stalin did his work too well.
He clouded the issue so much at the outset that
he left the mystery alive,
and then the mystery just festered
and persists down to this day.
- Nazi Germany's downfall remains a source of fascination
nearly 80 years later.
The overwhelming majority agree
that the official story
is the true one.
Hitler committed suicide
in Berlin.
But why is the idea
of Hitler escaping
such a long lasting theory?
Perhaps it's the quest
for justice that appeals
to many of us.
Regardless, Hitler's death
may remain the subject of investigation
for many years to come.
I'm Laurence Fishburne.
Thank you for watching
"History's Greatest Mysteries."