A TRADITIONAL VIEW ON THE DEATH OF HITLER In the May-June 2007 issue of The Barnes Review, Harry Cooper, president of Shark- hunters, a respected submarine warfare-studying organization, reported on a letter by Spanish spy Don Angel Alcazar de Velasco claiming that Martin Bormann drugged his boss, Adolf Hitler, in May 1945 and escaped to South America. Hitler was, in effect, kidnapped by his own people. However, an alternative point of view is strongly argued by nationalist author John Nugent, who says that Hitler did indeed kill himself in the bunker. By John Nugent M any “Nazis” and SS men did flee to South America, to Spain or to Arab countries to escape jail, torture and death. However, the facts point to Hitler’s suicide ( Selbst- morel) or, as Germans might call it, Freitod (“free-death”), a positive word for an honorable suicide, as do the decisions for “free-death” made by Eva Braun and Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda. Hitler’s decision was entirely in keeping with his char¬ acter and his strategy for the resurrection of his move¬ ment: to die honorably as a commander in Berlin while his regime, army and people were perishing about him, and never to surrender or run for it. Can Freitod be a supreme statement of heroism, defi¬ ance and dignity, even for generations to come? In many cases throughout history, Freitod has proved the ultimate statement to inspire others to stick to their post, no mat¬ ter what happens. David Irving holds the record among historians for the most first-hand interviews with the men, or the widows of the men, who made history in the Third Reich or who attended as young soldiers on those who did. In his massive 1995 work Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich , Irving reports, based on such interviews and on Goebbel’s own voluminous private diaries, especially BARNESREVIEW.ORG • 1 -877-773-9077 ORDERING from the last months of the war. According to the diary: “Hitler speculated: ‘I would think it a thousand times more craven to finish myself off down on the Obersalz- berg [Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps] than to make a last stand and die in battle here.’ ” (p. 915) And: Regarding Hitler’s pondering of his own image in his¬ tory: “ ‘Better to fight honorably to the bitter end than to live on a few months or years in disgrace and dishonor.’ If worse comes to worst, and the Fuehrer dies an honorable death in Berlin, and Europe goes Bolshevik, then in five years at most the Fuehrer will have become a legendary figure and National Socialism a mythos sanctified by a last grand finale, and all of its mortal errors that are criticized today will have been expunged at one fell swoop.” (p. 916) HITLER PRAISED HARA-KIRI One must remember that in Hitler’s “Political Testa¬ ment” of April 30, 1945, he specifically praises those who fight to the death, especially in the German navy. He was doubtless thinking of the commander of the battleship Graf Spee, Capt. Langsdorff, who chose free-death in December 1939 after surrendering his crew and scuttling his ship, and Capt. Ernst Lindemann of the Bismarck in May 1941. He was also perhaps thinking of the 10,000 officials of the NSDAP, Hitler’s party, who committed suicide, often with their families, to avoid being tortured and murdered THE BARNES REVIEW 27 by either the Soviets or the Western Allies. Hitler would not live to see it, but within a week after his death (beginning on May 7, 1945) the Germans in the Sudetenland, now again part of Czechoslovakia, were killing themselves by the thousands—probably 3% of all the Sudeten Germans (perhaps 60,000) killed themselves to avoid the even more satanic fate then befalling their fel¬ low ethnic countrymen. To whom was Hitler truly closest in the last 15 years of his life? A case can be made that it was the beautiful, bril¬ liant, dedicated Nordic, Magda Goebbels, born Magda Ritschel in 1901. Her mother, divorced when Magda was 3, remarried two years later to a Jewish man named Richard Fried- lander. Magda married multimillionaire Gunther Quandt in 1921. Magda eventually grew to despise being mar¬ ried to Quandt and divorced him in 1929, but they remained on friendly terms. Magda began courting again and was on the verge of marrying a Mr. Hoover, nephew to President Herbert Hoover, but was too occu¬ pied with her new freedom that she said she would never marry again.At this point in her life she became inter¬ ested in National Socialism. One day, while still unmarried to Goebbels, she was introduced to Hitler over tea at the Kaiserhof Hotel [in Berlin]. Both Goebbels and Otto Wagener, who was a close member of Hitler’s entourage, arranged this invita¬ tion for Magda. Even at first glance, Frau Quandt (Magda) “made an excellent impression” wrote Wagener. “She [had] bright blue, shining eyes and manicured hands. She was dressed well, but not excessively. She appeared calm in her movements, assured, self-confident with a winning smile. I am tempted to say ‘enchanting.’ I noticed the pleasure Hitler took in her innocent high spir¬ its. I also noticed how her large eyes were hanging on Hitler’s gaze.” Hitler later told Wagener how taken he was with her. Later Hitler learned from the rest of his group who had visited Magda’s apartment that Goebbels had turned up there after midnight and let himself in with his own key— an unmistakable sign of intimacy. According to Wagener, Hitler said of Magda: “This woman could play an impor¬ tant role in my life, even without being married to her. In all my work, she could represent the female counterpart to my one-sidedly male instincts. Too bad she isn’t mar¬ ried. Indeed, if she were married to someone [resembling me] who was . . . wedded to politics, I could be permitted 28 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2007 a platonic intimacy with her of a depth impossible with a single woman.” Hitler depended on the political support of women. Almost half of those who voted for the NSDAP were female. Cynically he once remarked of the fairer sex: “Women will always vote for law and order and a uniform, you can be sure of that.” It is even believed by some, including Otto Wagener (an early Hitler supporter, economic adviser and World War II general who wrote his memoirs in 1946, published as Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant , Yale University Press, 1987), that Magda married—and then put up with—the gifted but self-centered Joseph Goebbels in 1931 mostly to be near Hitler and to help him in any way possible. Finally, Magda was determined to make “the greater commitment”—and married Goeb¬ bels in December of 1931. Hitler was one of their two witnesses. Her value to the party was quickly recognized. She broadcast the first Mother’s Day address in May 1933just after the party seized power. “The German mother instinctively should place herself at the side of our Fueh¬ rer,” declared this blue-eyed mother who was to have six children by her husband. It is well known that Hitler was very close emotionally and spiritually to Joseph Goebbels’s wife, and to their chil¬ dren; he especially loved to bounce their daughter Helga on his knee. Helga later became a classic dark-haired, pigtailed Teu¬ tonic beauty. (Hitler in effect put the propaganda minister “in the doghouse” for years after his affairs with actresses became well known in the 1930s.) Just before Hitler chose free-death, he removed his own historic NSDAP party pin and pinned it on Magda’s blouse. Thus it may be revelatory of the inner workings of Hitler’s mind to read a remark by Magda Goebbels toward the very end, found in Irving: In Dresden Magda visited Elio Quandt at the White Hart sanitarium. “The new weapons will be our salvation,” she encouraged her sister-in-law [meaning the V-2 rockets, jets and other Third Reich inventions], then guiltily checked herself: “No, I’m talking nonsense. There is nothing else. Germany’s defeat is only a matter of weeks.” Elio asked what she intended to do. “We’re all going to die, Elio,” she replied. “But by our own hand, not the enemy’s.” (894) BARNESREVIEW.ORG • 1 -877-773-9077 ORDERING “If killed in combat, his body could be desecrated. Just the day before, Mussolini’s body had been hung upside down in a public square on a meat-hook, with that of his mistress. ” HANS LANGDORFF ERNST LINDEMANN JOSEPH GOEBBELS MAGDA GOEBBELS Went down with Graf Spee. Went down with Bismarck. Rather die than be taken. Free-death in bunker. They had been the leaders of the Reich, she explained; they could not duck the responsibility now. “We have failed.” Of course, such a view would be in harmony with the “Fuehrer principle” Hitler enunciated in Mein Kampfi The leader has full authority to act and full responsibility for the outcome. And, whatever the extenuating circum¬ stances, such as fighting a war against crushing interna¬ tional odds and treason within, the Third Reich did lose the war. Why would Joseph and Magda have joined Hitler in Berlin, also choosing free-death (and euthanizing their children) on May 1, 1945, if Hitler, the day before, April 30, had escaped to South America? Why would Eva Braun have joined Hitler in Berlin, married him, then taken poison if he had left behind a double and gone to South America? Would his mistress of 12 years have been convinced on the afternoon of April 30, 1945 at 3:30 pm when she and “Hitler” withdrew to their private quarters to end their lives if “Hitler” were an impostor? HITLER WANTED TO DIE IN COMBAT The day before that, on April 29, with Stalin’s Guards Division firing directly into the once-beautiful Reich Chancellery—underneath which his bunker was located— Hitler stated that his preference was to die in actual com¬ bat against the raping, torturing enemy, and not by his own hand. In fact, American author and white activist leader Matt Koehl of Wisconsin says that Hitler’s pilot, Hans Baur, told him that Hitler, in retrospect, wished he had already died fighting with his men at Stalingrad. (See Two Witnesses, page 30.) There were three grave problems with Hitler going out BARNESREVIEW.ORG • 1 -877-773-9077 ORDERING with a machinegun or a rifle and hand grenades or a Panzerfaust (bazooka) and facing the Soviet barbarians. First, physically, the 56-year-old Hitler, who had served as head of state for the previous 13 years, six of them in wartime, was not the man he had been even one year before. (Even American presidents who have never faced a disastrous war on their own soil can age visibly and tremen¬ dously in just four years or less, with the stress of high office.) Hitler’s hands were shaking violently toward the end, probably from Parkinson’s disease; certainly he was under tremendous stress due to the military and humanitarian disasters his nation was suffering since Stalingrad (January 1943); and as a result of the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt by Count von Stauffenberg, a bomb blast that killed three associates standing next to him and temporar¬ ily blinded, deafened and wounded him. Second problem: Hitler quite logically feared being merely knocked out in combat and then captured—for torture and death, possibly after a show trial, as indeed happened to most of his Cabinet at Nuremberg during 1945-46. Third problem: If killed in combat, his body could be desecrated—as he knew had happened to Mussolini. Just the day before, on April 28, 1945, Mussolini’s body had been hung upside down on a meat-hook, with that of his mistress, at a Standard Oil gas station in Milan’s “Piazza of the 15 Martyrs.” (A dozen of the Duce’s staff had been shot in the back as well. Mussolini’s corpse, with arms flop¬ ping, was abused by a Communist mob.) All three problems with respect to Hitler’s natural wish to charge out into a combat death were logically insur¬ mountable. Regardless of Hitler’s strong desire to die “John-Wayne style,” so to speak, a “free-death,” with the THE BARNES REVIEW 29 body burned thereafter—using 180 liters of gasoline lit by SS valet Heinz Linge and/or chauffeur Erich Kempka— was the only absolute guarantee whatsoever of fully avoid¬ ing a humiliating spectacle. Goebbels chose this solution: free-death and then burning. Ghoulishly and typically, the Allied media delighted in showing the Soviet-generated photos of his blackened, charred corpse. As to why the Soviets did not display photos of the burned Hitler and his new wife Eva Braun-Hitler, the para¬ noid Stalin was convinced at the time, and for years there¬ after, that Hitler had escaped. He wanted all Soviet troops and authorities, and the Western Allies, to keep searching for Hitler worldwide. One may say, with the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, that Stalin was “projecting” his own anti-values. Stalin would indeed have run away and had a double killed to cover his tracks. It was typical of Stalin, for exam¬ ple, to have sat out the heavy fighting of the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War (1917-20) as the editor of Pravda and a member of the Politburo while letting Leon Trotsky do the fighting (and in due time, like a patient chess play¬ er, to have Trotsky expelled from the Communist Party of the USSR and eventually murdered). Only a wrongful equating of Hitler’s and Stalin’s characters and values makes a Hitler-on-the-run-as-his-people-die scenario even remotely plausible. 1 For a man such as Hitler who all his life had been a master of mass psychology, his end had to be dignified and command respect, and for one main reason: Hitler believed in the eventual resurrection of his cause—but only if his final acts, and the final resistance of the Reich, were above reproach. PAULUS’S SURRENDER For this reason, Hitler was outraged at how Gen. Fried¬ rich Paulus at Stalingrad had ended the debacle there with the even worse debacle of surrender. He had ordered By Matt Koehl I t was this writer’s good fortune to have known two very remarkable individuals from Nazi Ger¬ many: Hitler’s personal pilot, Hans Baur; and the head of the Hitlerjugend (“Hitler Youth”), Arthur Axmann. Both men stood close to the Fuehrer and were with him in the bunker at the end of World War II. As eyewitnesses they were therefore in a unique position to relate to me the circumstances surrounding the leader’s departure from this Earth. Based on their testimony, there can be no doubt that Hitler chose to stand to the very end in solidarity with the brave defenders of Berlin. In the many hours of conversa¬ tion I had with these two men, never was there the slight¬ est suggestion that Hitler ever contemplated abandoning his frontline post and fleeing. To even have raised the pos¬ sibility would have astounded them and been regarded with absolute disbelief, as something fit only for the news tabloids. That Martin Bormann might have had the Fuehrer forcibly drugged and whisked out of the Reich capital is a tale without credible foundation. Less than an hour before his death, a completely composed and rational Hitler met to bid farewell to both Baur and Axmann, as 30 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2007 well as to other members of his staff and immediate cir¬ cle—including Martin Bormann. A short time later, Hitler’s body was borne to the funeral pyre just outside the bunker, where it was consigned to the flames and, despite contradictory rumors, was never more seen. In the breakout that ensued, Bormann left, in the com¬ pany of State Secretary Werner Naumann; a doctor with the SS, Ludwig Stumpfegger, MD and Baur. Completely surrounded by the Soviets in the flaming cauldron, the men came under intense artillery and small-arms fire, and Bormann and Stumpfegger were killed. Axmann recalled personally seeing their bodies lying face up under the bridge where the Invalidenstrasse crossed the railroad tracks. Hans Baur mentioned earlier rumors circulated in March 1945 that Hitler had left Berlin and speculated that these were deliberately planted by the Allies to demoralize the German population. Had Hitler elected to leave Berlin, he could, of course, well have done so before the last planes flew out and the city was sealed off. But Hitler had taken the decision to stand and fall at his post in the Reich capital, and not at some other suggested redoubt. Hitler would retreat no further. In the immediate postwar years, there were many who entertained the hope that the Fuehrer might somehow be BARNESREVIEW.ORG • 1 -877-773-9077 ORDERING the Sixth Army to fight literally to the end, in the style of the immortal Leonidas and his 300 Spartans—or, two years later on, the Japanese at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He promoted Paulus to the rank of field marshal on January 30, 1941, since no one of that rank has ever surrendered before, and promoted 118 other officers as well. But Paulus surrendered, dirty and unshaven. Hitler’s position was clear: the soldiers should have “closed ranks, formed a hedgehog and shot themselves with their last bullets.” (The Japanese would do similar things in the caves of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima.) On February 1, he told Gen. Zeitzler that he thought highly of those Stalingrad officers who had chosen free-death: How easy it is to do that! And a revolver makes it easy. What cowardice to be afraid of that. Better to be buried alive. . . . And in a situation like this [Paulus] knows well enough that his death would set a sterling example for behavior in the [sectors] of the front alongside. But when he sets an example like this, he can hardly expect others to go on fighting. . . . He could have gone out of this vale of tears and into eternity and could have been immortalized by the nation [as Leonidas was among the Greeks and still is to this day worldwide—Ed.]. But he’d rather go to Moscow. What kind of a choice is that? It does not make any sense at all . 2 The Soviets immediately went to work, setting afire the old Soviet military garrison building, which the Germans had converted to a hospital. Hundreds of wounded were burned to death. Russian soldiers wandered around the town taking prisoners and stripping them of valuables. In a cellar north of the Red Square in Stalingrad, 50 German wounded were doused with gasoline and turned into human torches. After all was over, 91,000 had surrendered and were then in general starved and worked to death in the gulag. Only 5,000 returned to Germany in 1955. physically alive and return in the manner of Napoleon from Elba in 1815, to march in triumph through the Brandenburg Gate once more. But this was to overlook geopolitical realities 130 years later. Even Stalin was convinced that Hitler had somehow escaped, using a double. As a matter of fact, SS Gen. Johann Ratten- huber [who headed the SS bodyguard corps—Ed.] had proposed use of a dou¬ ble, and suggested someone from Lower Silesia as a candidate. Hitler, however, dis¬ missed the whole idea as something that might be worthy of the Soviet dictator, but not of him. In captivity, Rattenhuber did happen to disclose the name and address of the double to the Russians, who pro¬ ceeded to track him down. “I always wondered what became of that fellow,” Baur said. “After that, none of us heard any¬ thing more.” Flugkapitaen Baur related that during his captivity, the Soviets—following their failure to discover the Fuehrer’s remains—were so obsessed with the idea that the Fuehrer had somehow escaped, that he was subjected to repeated interrogation and torture in an attempt to get him to dis¬ close Hitler’s supposed whereabouts. Had there been a strategic plan to withdraw from Ber¬ lin in order to resume the military struggle later on, Hitler would have wanted, along with Joseph Goebbels, inter alia, BARNESREVIEW.ORG • 1 -877-773-9077 ORDERING to have precisely these two men with him: Hans Baur, as his personal pilot; and Artur Axmann, as coordinator of insurgent activity by the Werewolf organ¬ ization within the Reich. Axmann had, in fact, developed tentative plans for just such an insurgency, plans that were sub¬ sequently abandoned as unrealistic in the existing circumstances. On one occasion, the former Hitler Youth leader told me categorically: “Hitler was convinced that he had to die here in Berlin. At the same time, he saw ‘the Idea’ as so great that it would one day arise anew.” Despite the historic denouement of the events of 1945, of which they were both a part, Baur and Axmann remained convinced of the higher mission of their Fuehrer. They believed that the world was not ready for this extraordinary figure, their chief, and that he died only to ultimately win in the same sense that one might say that Jesus Christ had to “lose” and die to win. To the end, they remained committed to him and to the cause he still rep¬ resents. ♦> Matt Koehl is the leader of a group called the New Order. Following the assassination of American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell in 1967, Koehl took over his party, renaming it the National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP). In 1982, Koehl dropped the name NSWPP in favor of the name “the New Order.” THE BARNES REVIEW 31 IN CHARGE TO THE END Maintaining command was so important to Hitler that he had ordered deserting SS officer Hermann Fegelein executed on April 29, 1945—and he was Eva Braun’s brother-in-law. In his Political Testament of April 30, the day he died, he expelled his longtime associates Reich Ma¬ rshal Hermann Goering and SS chief Heinrich Himmler from both the party and the government for their unau¬ thorized contacts with the western Allies, Britain and the U.S. Previously, he had stripped Waffen-SS general Sepp Dietrich (highly popular within the Waffen-SS) and his division of special honors for not fulfilling an order ade¬ quately in a battle in Hungary; Dietrich had been with Hitler for 17 years, since 1928, and was a bearer of the Knight’s Cross with oak leaves, swords and diamonds. (When Dietrich died in 1966, 7,000 comrades attended his funeral.) Theo Junker, the former Waffen-SS soldier with the Viking division who set up a Hitler- and Waffen-SS Me¬ morial on his farm in Wisconsin (see Mayjune 2007 TBR), told this writer in May of 2007 that while he was held at a British POW camp for SS and Waffen-SS in Neuengamme after the war, he met a former SS telephonist in the Fuehrerbunker, who told him that Hitler was basically cool, calm, collect¬ ed—and very much in command— right up until his last day. Despite all the stress, he never “cracked up,” Juenker quoted the man as saying. For these reasons, it is hard to imagine how Martin Bormann—a man unusually subservient to Hitler, albeit high-handed toward others—could have dared to drug and abduct Hitler and spirit him somehow out of sur¬ rounded Berlin to a U-boat (and thence to South America). Once Hitler came to, he would have had Bormann shot on principle if he had any SS guards with him, or he would have shot him himself. (On June 30, 1934 Hitler personally arrested, and then had shot, his longtime friend Ernst Roehm.) There can be no question of Hitler’s courage to engage in a final act of combat or to end his own life. The two-time Iron Cross winner in World War I, as even the most hostile English and postwar German historians have conceded, was a man of exemplary courage during 1914-1918. As British activist-writer Michael Walsh wrote, in “Hitler’s War Record” ( Historical Review Press Online ): Werner Maser, former head of the Institute of Contem¬ porary History at the University of Munich, although very hostile to Hitler, wrote a large neutral biography called Hitler, Legend, Myth and Reality (Harper and Row, 1971). The objective record is clear: “Hitler’s wartime record— campaigns, decorations, wounds, periods in hospital and on leave, is fully documented. In addition there is evidence to show that he was comradely, level headed and an unusu¬ ally brave soldier, and that a number of his commanding officers singled him out for special mention.” . . . In 1922, at a time when Hitler was still unknown, Gen. Friedrich Petz summarized the High Command’s appreci¬ ation of the gallant and self-effacing corporal as follows: “Hitler was quick in mind and body and had great powers of endurance. His most remarkable qualities were his per¬ sonal courage and daring which enabled him to face any combat or perilous situation whatsoever.” Even those historians least favorably disposed toward Hitler, like Joachim Fest, conceded that “Hitler was a courageous and efficient soldier and was always a good comrade.” The same man noted: “The courage and the composure with which he faced the most deadly fire made him seem invulnerable to his comrades. ‘As long as Hitler is near us, nothing will happen to us,’ they kept repeating. It appears this made a deep impression on Hitler and reinforced his belief that he had been charged with a special mission.” Even Sebastian Haffner, a Jewish writer and fanatical Hitler hater, was forced to admit “Hitler had a fierce courage unmatched by anyone at the time or since.” Hitler’s war heroism is a matter of record and it was only when he entered politics, in a bid to stem his rising popularity, that it was ever questioned. Typically, however, detractors were forced to recant and pay damages. In his massive and hostile Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris (New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), the first vol¬ ume of his two-part Hitler biography, Prof. Ian Kershaw admits (88): “From all indications, Hitler was a commit¬ ted, rather than simply a conscientious and dutiful soldier, and did not lack physical courage. His superiors held him in high regard. His immediate comrades, mainly the group of dispatch runners, respected him and, it seems, even quite liked him. ...” WAGNER & THE HERO’S DEATH It is well known that Hitler adored the heroic operas of Richard Wagner, and there was mutual adoration between Hitler and the next generation of the Wagner family run¬ ning the festivals at Bayreuth in Bavaria. 3 What is less knowable—although very probable—is “There can be no question of Hitler’s courage to engage in combat or to end his own life. The two-time Iron Cross winner in WWI was a man of exemplary courage during 1914-1918. ” 32 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2007 BARNESREVIEW.ORG • 1 - 8 7 7 - 7 7 3 - 9 0 7 7 O R D E R I N G Hitler Wild About Wagner Adolf Hitler was enthusiastic about the operas of Richard Wagner (right), who lived 60 years before him. Wagner lived from 1813 to 1883 while Hitler was born in 1889 and died in his bunker in 1945 (see article in this issue, pages 27-35). Wag¬ ner’s operas, such as Lohengrin, apparently influenced the German leader’s thinking about the Jews. Wagner explored the ideas of Nordic mythology and wove Jewish-seeming charac¬ ters into many of his works, such as the malevolent dwarves in The Ring of the Nibelungs. (Surprisingly, Wagner’s works inspired not only the Nazis of Germany but also the Zionists who established the Middle Eastern state of Israel.) Wagner is among the most revolutionary and controversial composers. The products of his creative genius have been colored by his frequent, overzealous personal references to militarism and nationalism and his overt “anti-Semitism.” His influence extend¬ ed far beyond the Nazis and the Zionists, however. He even had influence on minimalists like Brian Eno and Philip Glass. His ideas have become so pervasive in modern musical culture that we barely recognize them today. His music was “cinemat¬ ic” before movies existed. The sophisticated ear can even hear Wagner’s presence in Charlie Chaplin’s film The Dictator, according to William Berger, author of Wagner Without Fear. Wagner wrote: “It has been made quite clear that we should have no history of man at all, had there been no movements, creations and achievements of the white man. . . .” (Wagner essay, Herodom and Christendom) that Richard Wagner was the primary influence on Hitler’s view of how a Germanic leader should die. In October (or November) of 1906 Hitler, then 17 (he was born in 1889 in Austria, in Braunau on the Inn River, the border between Austria and Germany), was living in Linz, the capital of upper Austria, and with his close boy¬ hood friend August Kubizek, who was studying music, they went to see a performance of Wagner’s earliest (1840) opera, Rienzi, der Letzte der Tribunen (“ Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes’) . 4 He had been attending Wagner opera pro¬ ductions at the Linz Opera Theater, “religiously” and told Kubizek he had read everything that the master wrote (including his 1850 “anti-Semitic” monograph, Jewry in Music.) In 1953, eight years after Hitler’s death, Kubizek pub¬ lished the only extensive first-hand account of Hitler, the teenager: Adolf Hitler, Mein Jugendfreund, 1953 (in English, Young Adolf Hitler, the Story of Our Friendship, 1955, 1976). Much of it has since been documented, and the mistakes appear few and trivial. Kubizek pursued his music and got a local civil service job; he never joined the NSDAP; and he and Hitler saw each other only a few times during the BARNESREVIEW.ORG • 1 -877-773-9077 ORDERING Third Reich, once for a Wagner festival at Bayreuth. For this and other reasons his book has been considered fair, partial and very revealing by both Hitlerophobes and Hitlerophiles. And it reveals how Wagner became the pri¬ mary source for Hitler’s values of racial heroism and racial community. While many Wagner operas feature a hero who dies (notably Siegfried in Goetterdaemmerung, “ The Twilight of the Gods,” stabbed literally in the back by Hagen and Parsifal in the opera of that name), it is clear from Kubizek’s book that Wagner’s early opera, Rienzi, was the critical formative experience, a mystical turning point, in young Hitler’s life—just a few months before his beloved mother Klara got the cancer verdict that would rob Hitler of his last anchor in the world of mundane concerns—money, career, women and pastimes. First, a plot summary: Cola di Rienzo, a real medieval Italian populist figure (1313-54), outwits and defeats the corrupt, selfish Roman nobles and their followers and rais¬ es the power of the people, dreaming of restoring the long-vanished Roman Republic and its glories. Magnani¬ mous at first, he is forced by events to crush the nobles’ THE BARNES REVIEW 33 One of Last Survivors Tells Bunker Tale R ochus Jordan Misch (born July 29, 1917, now alive at 90) was a . staff sergeant in the 1st SS Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (the “Guards” divi¬ sion) who worked as a courier, bodyguard and telephone oper¬ ator for Adolf Hitler from 1940 to 1945, and was the only person permitted to carry arms in the bunker after the assassination attempt on Hitler of July 20, 1944. Misch handled most of the telephone calls to and from the bunker. As a junior member of Hit¬ ler’s permanent staff, Misch trav¬ eled with Hitler from bunker to bunker throughout World War II. On January 16, 1945, follow¬ ing German defeat in the Battle of the Bulge, Misch and the rest of Hitler’s personal staff moved into the Fuehrerbunker in Ber¬ lin. He stayed there almost with¬ out interruption until two days after Hitler’s death. Misch was captured after fleeing the bunker on May 2, only hours before the Red Army seized it. With the death of Bernd von Freytag-Loring- hoven on February 27, 2007, Misch is one of the last two survivors of the Fuehrerbunker. The other is Hitler Youth courier Armin Lehmann, who was one of the Hitler Youth heroes decorated by Hitler in the famous “last photo of Hitler” on his final birthday, April 20, 1945, with Artur Axmann walking behind the chancellor. Lehmann moved to the U.S. after the war and became a major executive in the U.S. travel industry as well as an outspoken pacifist; the baron became the second-in-command of the West German Bundeswehr army. Both wrote derogatory things about Hitler after the war. But they both, along with Rochus Misch, who remained loyal to his supreme commander, confirmed that Adolf Hitler died in the bunker. The heroic Austrian Revisionist writer Gerd Honsik, who has been in Span¬ ish political exile since 1992, picked up a broadcast of MDR- TV (Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk television) from the eastern half of Germany on May 16, 2007, containing an interview with Misch. He was imprisoned for eight years by the Soviets 1945-53, and was viciously tortured by a commissar Stern, who enjoyed stripping him and, the old gen¬ tleman reported as the movie camera turned, “My swollen tes¬ ticles caused me gigantic pain after each whipping.” Then, Honsik writes, “I could not believe my ears when Misch continued: T was never asked [by Stern] about concentration camps or gas chambers. I heard about that only after my return to Germany. None of that makes sense. And Hitler was a good boss.” MDR also showed in the program its interview with Misch’s Czech housekeeper, who in broken German took a stand for the former SS soldier: “Anyone who knows Mr. Misch knows that this man does not lie. He always tells the truth. I don’t believe any more what they taught us in [Czech] school about the evil Germans and about Auschwitz, about what they did there. Misch is such a good man; he cannot lie!” Misch stated, according to Honsik, that the bod¬ ies of Hitler and of Eva Braun, lying in an indenta¬ tion in the dirt outside the entrance to the bunker, did not burn well with the 180 liters of gasoline, and that the wood available in the area should have been used for a proper cremation. Of course, bod¬ ies never burn well on the ground; they are 80% water and need plenty of air circulation and 30-40 minutes to burn to ash—which, incidentally, is also a fatal problem with the stories of the Holocaust body-burning pits. ❖ 34 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2007 BARNESREVIEW.ORG • 1 -877-773-9077 ORDERING PAID ADVERTISEMENT rebellion against the people’s power, but popular opinion changes and even the church, which has earlier urged him to assert himself, turns against him. In the end the populace burns the capitol, in which Cola and a few adherents have made a last stand; he dies with his beloved sister and her lover by his side. Specifically, there are repeated, serious assassi¬ nation attempts against Cola. In the end, Cola hears a malediction and sees the ecclesiastical dignitaries placing the ban of excommunication against him upon the doors. Adriano hurries to Irene, Cola’s sister, to warn her of her brother’s danger, and urges her to seek safe¬ ty with him in flight. She, however, repels him, and seeks her brother, determined to die with him, if need be. She finds him at prayer in the capitol, but rejects his counsel to save herself with Adriano. Cola appeals to the infuriated populace, which has gathered around the capitol, but they ignore him. They fire the capitol with their torches, and hurl stones at Cola and Irene. As Adriano sees his beloved one and her brother doomed to death in the flames, he throws away his sword, rushes into the capitol and perishes with them. To anyone familiar with Hitler’s last days with his inner circle in Berlin, the opera seems prophet¬ ic indeed. ♦> BIBLIOGRAPHY: Hansig, Ron T., Hitlers Escape, Athena Press Pub. Co., 2004-5, 136 pp. Thomas, Hugh, Doppelgangers, Fourth Estate, 1995 & 1996, 320 pp. Yeadon, Glen, The Nazi Hydra in America: Wall Street and the Rise of the Fourth Reich, Progressive Press, 2007, 670 pp. http://www.blackraiser.com/nredoubt/identity.htm ENDNOTES: Whe following summary of Trotsky’s role in 1917 was given by Stalin himself in Pravda (Nov. 6, 1918): “All practical work in connec¬ tion with the organization of the uprising was done under the imme¬ diate direction of Comrade Trotsky, the president of the Petrograd Soviet. It can be stated with certainty that the party is indebted prima¬ rily and principally to Comrade Trotsky for the rapid going-over of the garrison to the side of the Soviet and the efficient manner in which the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee was organized.” y[ohn Toland, Adolf Hitler, Doubleday, New York, 1976, vol. II, page 834. ^Winifred Wagner (1897-1980), who was on very close terms with Hitler, also warmly greeted the American neo-National Socialist leader Matt Koehl, as seen in photos on his website www.theneworder.org. ^Written in 1840, Rienzi was first performed in 1842.—Ed. ESCAPE FROM THE BUNKER The Escape of Top Nazis from the Fiihrerbunker As Told by Axis/Nazi Spy Don Angel Alcazar de Velasco T his book is the faithful transcription of a 1984 letter from a man I knew through my organization, Sharkhunters, which focuses on the authentic history of WWII sub¬ marines and their captains and crews from all nations in KTB Magazine. This fellow contacted me one day, telling a fan¬ ciful story of his experience as a WWII Axis spy and “Nazi smug¬ gler.” He claimed he was a Spaniard and that his name was Don Angel Alcazar de Velasco. He claimed he smuggled Hitler’s sec¬ ond, Martin Bormann, out of the Berlin bunker and got him to South America after many close calls. De Velasco said he had heard that Hitler had been kidnapped from Berlin, drugged and whisked away by those in his inner circle. The “dead Hitler” was a double. The more I read the manuscript—spending hours with other experts trying to poke holes in the story—the more I real¬ ized there was a very good chance this man was telling me the truth. Now I know he was. Here is Don Angel’s story. —Harry Cooper, Founder of Sharkhunters John Nugent majored in German at Georgetown University, participated in NATO exercises with the Marines in northern Germany, and has undertaken numerous trips and lengthy stays in Germany and Austria. He speaks fluent standard German and one of the Tyro¬ lean dialects. ESCAPE FROM THE BUNKER (softcover, 90 pages, $13) is available for a limited time from Poisoned Pen Publishing, PO. Box 2770, Stafford, VA. 22555. No charge for S&H inside the U.S. Outside the U.S. add $11 per book for S&H. Cash, check or money order drawn on U.S. bank only. BARNESREVIEW.ORG • 1 -877-773-9077 ORDERING THE BARNES REVIEW 35