When on April 30, 1945, German admiral Karl Dönitz announced urbi et orbi the death of the Führer, the news traveled around the world at the speed of light. The next day, May 1, no less, General Hans Krebs, last head of the High Command of the Third Reich, added, with Moscow’s agreement, that Hitler had committed suicide, while asking the Allies to recognize the Government chaired by Dönitz. There was no deal and after the Allies insisted on demanding an unconditional surrender, Krebs, like hundreds of other Nazis, took his own life.
Ah, but a few weeks later, Stalin slipped to the American legate in Moscow that “Hitler is not dead, but is hiding somewhere”, thus giving rise to all kinds of conjectures and conspiracy theories regarding his whereabouts, each more bizarre, some of which have even survived to this day, which demonstrates the incombustible force of false news (fake news) well placed at the right time.
Because since then there have been sightings of Hitler in the most unlikely places, some with all kinds of documentation and supposedly reliable evidence. The evil Stalin knew what he was doing: by saying that Hitler had fled, leaving his people at the mercy of the victors, he turned him, at least to those who wanted to believe it, into a despicable fugitive coward.
As it could not be otherwise, the FBI took action on the matter and soon filled out a dossier with alleged sightings of the escaped Nazi leader. What if he had escaped from Berlin by plane, or from some Baltic port by submarine. Later, he would appear again in a Spanish monastery, on a ranch in South America or riding with bandits in Albania. The Soviet news agency Tass, which could not be outdone, claimed that Hitler had been seen in Dublin, dressed in women’s clothing, which, no matter how you look at it, was not bad as fake news.
It was expected that with the passage of time these supposed sightings would diminish until they disappeared, but this was not at all the case. It would appear again in distant destinations such as Indonesia, Colombia or Argentina. Illustrations of how he could be disguised were even published. What was feared most, in the event that Hitler was really still alive, was the risk that he would return to Napoleon.
It was not until 1947, with the publication of The Last Days of Hitler, the result of an on-site investigation by the young Oxonian historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, that Eva Braun’s sordid suicide in Hitler’s Berlin bunker became known in great detail. and other Nazi bosses. Of course, it was an editorial bombshell worldwide. Even so, rumors continued about his supposed whereabouts in distant lands.
The legend of Hitler has no signs of exhausting itself anytime soon. There are neo-Nazis everywhere. Evil taken to the extreme seduces, as seen in the plethora of novels, films and series that deal with that horror that was the Third Reich, which leads, as Hannah Arendt well understood, to the banality of evil, both in its executors as in his apologists and emulators.
In 2015, German midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger, recently signed by Manchester United after a dazzling football career with Bayern Munich and the German national team, got out of bed with an unpleasant surprise. A Hong Kong company had just put on sale a toy Nazi doll whose face could only be his. Furthermore, to avoid misunderstandings, the doll was taking care of Bastian. When the Hong Kong manufacturers were sued by the player’s lawyers, they argued in his defense that “to us Chinese, all Germans look the same, with a face like theirs.”
With the one that is falling, it would seem that Hitler is not dead.