This is a writing sample by “nycghostwriter,” AKA Barbara Finkelstein. It is “A historian rejects claims of Hitler’s post-war survival,” published in the July 19, 2019 issue of Ami magazine. You can get professional ghostwriting services from a published non-fiction writer. Email me or fill out the short form on my contact page.
Luke Daly-Groves talks about the moral and intellectual poverty of conspiracy theories
By Barbara Finkelstein
An interview on Britain’s Sky News TV got the attention of Luke Daly-Groves. A man named Gerrard Williams asserted on camera and in a book called Grey Wolf that Adolf Hitler had escaped to South America after the collapse of the Third Reich. Daly-Groves, a history Ph.D. candidate at the U.K.’s University of Leeds, heard Williams insist that Hitler entered Argentina via submarine some time after April 1945 and lived there until the age of seventy-three as the husband of Eva Braun and the father of two daughters. As for the historians who accepted the official version of events in the Führerbunker — Hitler shot himself in the head; Eva Braun took cyanide — Williams thought they were dupes of a cynical disinformation campaign engineered by British and American intelligence agencies.
“I came away with more questions than answers,” Daly-Groves says about his reason for writing Hitler’s Death: The Case Against Conspiracy, published earlier this year in the U.K. Had Williams and his co-author really uncovered declassified documents in U.S. and U.K. intelligence files that proved not only Hitler’s survival but also American and British complicity in his escape?
Luke Daly-Groves’ investigation into Grey Wolf and other conspiracy theories began with his reading all the books he could find about Hitler’s last days, including memoirs of intelligence officers, eyewitness accounts from the bunker, Soviet files and an array of materials claiming that Hitler had been sighted in Spain, Egypt and Charlottesville, Virginia, among other places. “I approached the task with an open mind, being prepared to investigate wherever the evidence led me and report my findings according to what the evidence suggested,” Daly-Groves told Ami Magazine.
The plots Luke Daly-Groves stumbled upon were more often the stuff of Hollywood than evidence-based research.
One popular conspiracy theory argues that Hitler and Eva Braun, Hitler’s wife, did not die in the Führerbunker. Instead, Hitler’s henchmen murdered and burnt two body doubles, paving the way for Hitler and Braun to escape undetected from Berlin to South America.
In his research, Daly-Groves discovered that American and British intelligence agents began their investigations after the Soviet Union’s strategic offensive assault on Berlin in April 1945. One of them was Hugh Trevor-Roper, a British historian and agent who interviewed eyewitnesses and examined primary documents after the fall of Berlin. In The Last Days of Hitler, Trevor-Roper quotes from Hitler’s dictated will: “My wife and I choose to die in order to escape the shame of overthrow or capitulation. It is our wish that our bodies be burnt immediately in the place where I have performed the greater part of my daily work.”
In case Hitler’s own words were not sufficiently convincing, Daly-Groves calls upon the testimony of a Hitler aide: “Otto Günsche, Hitler’s personal adjutant and bodyguard, having received orders from both Hitler and [Martin] Bormann [Hitler’s private secretary], set about making preparations for the disposal of Hitler’s body . . .”
Daly-Groves says Günsche observed that the “lifeless bodies of the newly-wed couple [i.e., Hitler and Braun] were carried outside the bunker into the Reichschancellery garden. From the bunker doorway, a rag doused in petrol was lit and thrown on to the bodies, causing them to burst into flames.”
Based on investigations by trained agents and historians, “I had to conclude that Gerrard Williams’ theory was unfounded,” Daly-Groves says.
A loose cannon posits a theory
Yet another popular conspiracy theory purports that Hitler was murdered by his doctors on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, the chief architect of the Holocaust.
The main advocate of this charge was Colonel W.F. Heimlich, an American intelligence officer in post-war Berlin who accused Trevor-Roper of ignoring crucial evidence that would have proved Heimlich’s assertion. Recently declassified American military intelligence files at the National Archives and Records Administration, however, reveal that higher-ranking American intelligence officers suspected Heimlich was a loose cannon “attempting to capitalize on sensational rumors.”
“Heimlich was out of his intellectual depth with the Oxford-trained Trevor-Roper and resented him,” Daly-Groves says.
Ultimately, Heimlich published a book called Who Killed Hitler in which he asserts that the Reichschancellery garden, where he supposed Hitler and Braun to have been buried, had not been excavated until December 1945, more than seven months after the fall of Berlin. “Heimlich may not have known that the Soviets had dug up the remains of Hitler and Eva in 1945 and reburied them, believing that another corpse in the chancellery building was Hitler,” Daly-Groves says. “Realizing their mistake, they re-exhumed the actual remains of Hitler and Eva the following day. These were autopsied on May 8 — nine days after Hitler and Braun’s suicides.”
More interesting than Heimlich’s “theory,” says Daly-Groves, is his motivation for pressing it. “As my book demonstrates,” the author told Ami, “Anglo-American intelligence agencies were often more concerned with those spreading rumors than with the rumors themselves. This fact is crucial for effectively challenging the claims made by numerous conspiracy theorists.”
Soviet-style fake news
Daly-Groves says conspiracy theorists got a boost in 2009 when Nick Bellantoni, an archaeologist and bone specialist at the University of Connecticut, traveled to Moscow to analyze a skull fragment the Soviets thought belonged to Hitler. Bellantoni’s DNA testing proved beyond a doubt that the skull, complete with bullet hole, did not belong to Hitler, but rather to an unknown woman.
“This allowed conspiracy theorists to claim that, aha, the Soviets never actually had Hitler’s skull,” Daly-Groves told Ami. “Suddenly Gerrard Williams had seeming scientific proof to attach to his theory that Hitler and Braun had escaped to Argentina — with the help of Martin Bormann.”
What Williams conveniently did not acknowledge, Daly-Groves says, was another personal artifact in the Soviets’ possession: Teeth found near the spurious skull were indisputably Hitler’s, as ascertained by a dental assistant in Hitler’s inner circle and corroborated last year by French forensic pathologist Philippe Charlier.
“What the skull could not prove, the teeth did,” Daly-Groves says.
Ironically, the Soviets — specifically Stalin — fomented a rumor that Hitler escaped to Spain in the chaos of the Berlin offensive. Daly-Groves has observed that the Soviets’ reason for spreading rumors of Hitler’s post-war existence is baffling. “No documentary evidence has yet been produced to explain why the Soviets repeatedly stated that Hitler was alive, despite possessing large quantities of evidence to the contrary,” he says. Indeed, Stalin had seen the autopsy report stating that Hitler had committed suicide by poison. The report may have been mistaken in regard to method, but the fact of suicide was unmistakable.
Stalin also learned that the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, identified blood on Hitler’s sofa and concluded that it was consistent with Hitler’s blood type.
Keeping Hitler “alive” may have had political benefits for the Soviets. “A potentially resurgent Hitler would have strengthened Soviet claims to German territory,” Daly-Groves told Ami. “Moreover, an external threat, like the existence of Hitler, could be advantageous to Stalin’s totalitarian aims of quashing dissent across all the Soviet republics.”
Does it matter how and when Hitler died?
“Conspiracy theorists like Gerrard Williams like to say that history is wrong,” Daly-Groves says. “‘We’ve been lied to’ is one of their catchphrases that gives them an easy and quick position of authority. In actuality, the conspiracy theorists are very selective with the evidence they use. They’ve gone through several volumes of intelligence files and picked out stories reported by various individuals with dubious motives that support whatever theory they set out to ‘prove.’ If, for example, they decide that Hitler escaped to Argentina, they ignore competing claims that Hitler had been spotted just about everywhere in the world.”
Daly-Groves says he thoughtfully considers any new evidence that conspiracy theorists cite to support their theories, even as most academics typically are loathe to do. “But based on the evidence, I conclude it’s unfathomable that our intelligence agencies would have allowed a figure like Hitler to get away,” he told Ami. “Why would they actively encourage people to distrust democracy, and distrust our intelligence services? For our intelligence services to function, trust in them is absolutely vital.”
If Daly-Groves faults conspiracy theorists, it is primarily for their obtuseness about Nazi ideology. He says that Hitler’s inglorious end is a fitting metaphor for the innate destructiveness of Nazism. Suicide was not an “unusual form of death for Hitler and Eva to have chosen, and due to the circumstances, it was one that many other Nazis chose to take as well,” Daly-Groves says. “ Members of the Hitler Youth shot their comrades and themselves when their defensive positions were overrun, homeowners jumped to their deaths in despair at losing everything, husbands and wives committed suicide together, mothers and fathers killed daughters and sons before killing themselves.”
Advancing the notion that Hitler escaped, thereby fooling the British, Americans and Soviets, “romanticizes Hitler and ignores the nihilism inherent in Nazi ideology that resulted in his demise,” Daly-Groves says. “By researching Hitler’s death, historians research not merely the death of one man, but rather the death of the Nazi regime.”
Luke Daly-Groves points to the Nazis’ most gruesome expression of nihilism — the belief that life is meaningless — when he recalls that Joseph Goebbels’ wife, Magda, collaborated with a bunker doctor after Hitler’s death to poison all six of her children as they lay on their beds. Joseph and Magda’s own bodies were relatively easy to identify as there was little petrol left to burn them, “most of it,” Daly-Groves says, “having been used up earlier on Hitler and Eva.”
Read the opening paragraphs in Ami
Ami pdf [TK]
