Original subtitles

(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."