Welcome back to Zero Signal. I'm your host, David,
and tonight we're going to walk into one of the
most radioactive what -ifs of the last century,
a theory that refuses to die no matter how many
official reports say the story is over. You've
seen the memes, the YouTube thumbnails, the TikToks
with grainy black and white photos. Adolf Hitler
didn't die in a bunker. He escaped. He slipped
through the ruins of Berlin, rode a rat line
out of Europe, and ended up in the mountains
of Argentina or hiding in some sleepy South American
town. Most of us were taught one clean ending
in school. What we're going to do tonight is
something different, not announce a verdict,
but lay out the long, weird trail of documents,
eyewitness accounts, submarines, secret files
that keep this story alive for a lot of people.
We're not here to tell you how he did escape
or how he didn't. We're here to show you why
80 years later, so many of us are still asking.
the same question. many secrets and I'm about
to take you to see one of them between the never
ending flow of beer to the restaurants dedicated
to the art of the sausage to the lush green forests
blanketing this town. You might guess that I'm
in Germany. But you're totally wrong. I'm all
the way in Argentina. This is Villa General Belgrano.
It's a small town nestled in the Sierra Mountains
of Cordoba, which is a province right in the
center of the country. And even though this town
is only home to about 6 ,000 people, it's known
for holding one of the biggest Oktoberfests in
the world. Every year, thousands of people come
here from around the world to take part in the
beer making and worst traditions that dominate
this town. There are many locals here that continue
to maintain German traditions. There's a group
that has built a German community center and
they hold special German events using typical
traditional German clothing like Oktoberfest.
Villa General del Grano is one of the few historically
German speaking villages at DOT Argentina. And
while visiting here may seem like all fun and
games, this tiny town is home to a dark history
that many know little about. It was an escape
haven for the Nazis. Some even say that Hitler
passed through. Let's go back in history. When
World War II broke out in Europe in 1939, it
changed the face of the world, even all the way
in the most southern point of Latin America.
Here in Argentina, General Juan Domingo Perón
was rising to power in the 1940s, bringing along
with him fascist -friendly ideas. And even though
Argentina appeared to condemn Germany for the
atrocities committed during the Holocaust, when
the war ended, a secret apparatus had been set
into place to help Nazi criminals escape prosecution
by allowing them to hide in Argentina. From the
moment they arrived in Argentina, the Nazis spread
across four different points. The most important
were Buenos Aires, Bariloche, Barrio Rio Negro,
and right here in Córdoba. What the Nazis were
looking for when they arrived in Argentina was
a similar kind of climate and temperatures to
their homes. Topographically speaking, we're
talking about mountains and lakes, places that
look just like Germany and Austria. According
to historical records, Hitler died in a bunker
in Berlin in 1945. But there are also theories
that the Nazi leader actually escaped to Argentina
that same year in a secret submarine. Some say
he lived his final years among these very mountains.
I believe they're more than rumors. Hitler was
in the province of Cordoba, specifically in a
town called La Falda. He was there in 1947, according
to lots of data that I've collected from multiple
sources in the area. Pablo Weschler is a journalist
that has been filming a documentary about Hitler's
alleged escape to Argentina since 2005. And he
says he has the information to prove it. First
of all, I traveled to La Falda and I met with
local historians that provided this information.
I interviewed Miss Catalina Camero, one of the
only two people who agreed to speak about this.
She said in 1947 she was a waitress and served
Adolf Hitler in Hotel Eden in La Falda in the
course of three days. Hotel Eden is just a couple
dozen kilometers from Via General Pograno. And
what is for sure is that Hitler was in the province
of There are also reports that say the Eichhorn
family in La Falda were making lots of preparations
to help Hitler arrive to Hotel Aden. This information
comes directly from the Americans. The FBI passed
this information along to Edgar Hoover, who at
the time was the director of the FBI. Question
I still have is why didn't they go after him?
We'll never truly know, but Argentina is a nation
of complex contradiction. My family is from Cordoba,
Argentina, and has been here for generations.
We're Jewish, and luckily for me, my grandmother
and her immediate family escaped to hear from
Europe when World War II broke out. That's why,
as a teenager living in Cordoba, I found Argentina,
my family's country, a nation full of confusing
contradictions. In this country, many Jews have
found a safe haven. But so have many Nazis. Here
in Villa General del Grano, the village has managed
to maintain the more charming side of its history.
In 1932, the village was established by German
immigrants. And until today, the shops here have
artisanal products, all sorts of pickled goods
and chocolates. the vestiges of the town's central
European history. My grandparents came from Germany
and Austria. They already knew there was a German
colony here that was looking for new residents,
and so that's how they came to immigrate to Via
General Belgrano. We continue maintaining the
German language in our house. Both my husband
and I speak German, and we made sure that our
daughters would also know the language. German
is no longer the main language that's spoken
here. Now it's Spanish, but there's no doubt
that this village remains dependent on its history.
whether or not its true colors are always shown.
People come here because they're attracted to
the architecture that looks so European. I'm
Argentinian. I was born here in this town. So
I'm more Argentinian than anything else. But
we have an affinity to our German history. It's
important to transmit this to our children and
that they should be proud of the sacrifices that
their ancestors made to come here and build this
beautiful town. The version you get in history
books goes like this. In late April, 1945, Berlin
is collapsing under Soviet artillery. The Red
Army is closing in on the government quarters.
Block by block, deep underground in the concrete
Warren or the Fuhrer bunker, Hitler is a wrecked
figure, physically shaking, paranoid, lashing
out at generals who no longer command real armies.
On April 29th, he marries Eva Braun in a tiny
bunker ceremony, dictates his political testament.
And then the next day, the story says he and
Eva withdrew to his private room. Moments later,
a gunshot is heard. Staff in her find Hitler
dead from a gunshot wound and poison. Eva is
dead also from cyanide poisoning. Their bodies
are carried upstairs, doused in gasoline. in
a shattered garden of the Reich Chancellery and
set on fire under incoming Soviet fire. Soviet
troops eventually take the area, recover the
charred remains, and announce that Hitler is
dead. On paper, that sounds like closure, but
even in 1945, there were cracks. The remains
are in Soviet hands only. No British or American
team is allowed to independently verify them.
Stalin himself hints to Western leaders that
maybe Hitler got away. Soviet press puts out
confusing, sometimes contradictory accounts.
The body is supposed to have been burned, buried,
dug up again, moved, then quietly destroyed.
years later by the KGB. What survives, we're
told, is a jawbone and some dental work in a
Moscow archive. And for decades, nobody outside
the Soviet system is allowed to get near them.
No public autopsy. No photographs of recognizable
body parts. No court room with Hitler on the
dock. The most hated man of the 20th century,
the one person everyone would have watched a
trial for, dies off camera in a locked room controlled
by one of the least transparent regimes on earth.
You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to
see how this leaves space for doubt. Fast forward
to the late 20th century. 20th and early 21st
centuries, and you finally get a small burst
of access, a piece of skull with a bullet hole,
shown off in Moscow, and said to be Hitler's.
Turns out, under testing, to belong to a woman,
the fragment had been presented for years as
physical proof of Hitler's death. And suddenly,
it isn't anymore. Russian authorities insist
that jaw and teeth are still genuine, perhaps
even if the head bone isn't. And in 2018, a French
team compares them to wartime x -rays and dental
charts and concludes they match Hitler's dental
records, arguing he did in fact die in a bunker.
But for people who already distrust official
stories, the fact that one key Hitler skull artifact
turned out to be someone else's is enough to
keep the door to escape theory open wide. When
part of the physical story was wrong or misrepresented,
what else might be? It would be easy enough to
fake dental records. To understand why the escape
theory has such staying power. You have to move
out of Berlin and look what was happening thousands
of miles away in South America long before the
war ended. Argentina had a deep German presence
and a government under Juan Peron that was at
least sympathetic to parts of the Axis and openly
welcomed European migrants afterward. Declassified
material, modern research, so that Argentina
became one of the main endpoints for rat lines.
Clandestine escapes routes that move Nazi officials,
SS officers, and collaborators out of Europe
using the help of a sympathetic like clergy,
forged red cross papers, and networks through
Spain and Italy. In recent years, Argentina has
been declassifying roughly 1 ,850 documents related
to these routes. And even unearthed dozens of
boxes of Nazi -linked material in a Supreme Court
basement, reinforcing how deeply those networks
run. We know for a fact that high -ranking Nazis
like Eekman and Mangeli escaped justice and lived
there for years in South America. So the question
people ask is pretty simple. If they could do
it, why not Hitler? Now add the submarines. In
July and August of 19... 1945, months after Germany
surrendered. Two German U -boats, a U -530 and
a U -977, surfaced off Marndell Plata, Argentina
and surrendered. On paper, both had plausible
explanations, confusion over surrender order,
fear of becoming POWs, decision by their captains
to head for a friendly country instead of giving
up to the Allies in Europe. But the timing is
pretty strange. These subs had been at sea for
a very long time. Their logs raised questions.
There are gaps, odd routes choices, and in the
aftermath, rumors, were they carrying gold, secret
documents from people. Allied interrogators pressed
the crews hard about whether they had dropped
someone off, especially Nazi leaders along the
Argentina coastline or in Patagonia, before turning
themselves in. Officially, nothing was proven.
Unofficially, the image of German submarines
gliding up to a remote shore months after the
war ended and quietly discharging passengers
at night has become one of the more core visual
beats of the escape story. Those images aren't
just imagination. Some of them come from actual
eyewitness claims recorded and post -war documents.
Thank you so much for your time. We have some
questions for you. If we go back for a moment,
how old were you in 1945? What were you engaged
in? Okay, great. What I'd like to ask you just
in general terms, what you saw, if anything,
related to Germans or Nazis in Spain? And these
Germans were Nazis? Yes. And one of these guys
was out of here. He was right there. He wasn't
wearing a mask. So just for clarification, which
mob? Tell me about the airplane. How many people
came in that plane? He said it was five people,
and they were German. Did anybody that you know
saw Hitler and get off that plane and told you
this? So if Hitler was on that plane, is that
what you're saying? was the location of this
plank. A set of FBI -linked accounts, highlighted
in later books and articles, describe coastal
witnesses in Argentina who say the two German
submarines surfaced near their shorelines one
night in 1945, that a group of perhaps 50 people
disembarked in the dark and made their way into
waiting buses, and that those buses drove them
inland without any lights or markings. These
stories are second -hand. and from an historian's
standpoint, uncooperated. But they existed in
the official files. Someone sat in front of an
American or Argentinian official and said, I
saw this. And that story was serious enough that
it was typed up, circulated, and in some cases,
sent across borders. For believers, the blend
of U -boat reality and a nighttime bus convoy
feels less like fantasy and more like a partially
uncovered operation. If you follow those buses
in your mind, the trail tends to lead to one
place, Patagonia, in the mountains around San
Carlos. German communities and Nazi sympathizers
really did put down roots. Barloci became known
as a haven for ex -Nazis. Journalists and historians
have documented local rumors of former SSF officers
living there under their own names, and others
under new identities. There are persistent stories
of Grand Lakeside estates, sometimes identified
as specific house, said to have hosted a mysterious
German VIP with heavy security in the late 1940s
and early 1950s. Locals talk about supply trucks,
restricted access, and German speaking guards.
Some of those stories whispered in bars and passed
down to families that hidden guest has simply
been El Jefe, the boss. When later writers went
back and put a face and a name to the boss, the
myth of Hitler hiding in Barloche. practically
wrote itself. Alongside the place -based rumors,
he had personal I -saw -him accounts. Over the
years, Argentinas in various towns have told
reporters or relatives they have encountered
an older German man with a distinctive mustache
and presence, guarded by men who look like ex
-soldiers. None of these accounts rise to the
level of photographic proof. They are memories,
often reported decades after the fact, colored
by local lore and the knowledge that Nazis really
had lived nearby. But if you're building a conspiracy
narrative, they become puzzle pieces. The submarine
landings, the nighttime buses, the isolated estates,
the charismatic foreigner everyone is afraid
to name out loud. If you put them together, you
get a picture that, while blurry, is emotionally
convincing to a lot of people. It wasn't just
locals and bar conversations keeping this rumor
alive. Western intelligence agencies kept the
question open for far longer than many people
realize. The FBI's publicly available Hitler
file, hundreds of pages you can read today, shows
that in years right after the war, the Bureau
collected and reviewed a steady stream of reports
claiming Hitler was alive. Some said he was in
Argentina, others in Brazil. or elsewhere in
South America. The FBI treated most of these
as low probability, but not automatically impossible.
Memos survived where senior officials acknowledged
that there was no hard evidence of Hitler's death
available to them in 1945 and 1946, and that
until they had more, they couldn't absolutely
rule out that he might have escaped. That's very
different from saying that they believe he did,
but it shows that for a while, even inside the
system, he might be out there. Was it considered
completely crazy? Inside those FBI files are
specific detailed tips that read like scenes
from a thriller. one cluster of documents later
publicized in books and articles, an informant
describes a network that allegedly moved Hitler.
from a collapsing bunker into an aircraft, then
into a sub, and finally into Argentinian soil,
where an estate had been prepared for him. The
format names people, describes the estate's location
in terms of rivers and landmarks, and insists
that local authorities were complicit. The FBI
doesn't validate this story. Notes attached to
some memos make it clear the Bureau doubted the
source's reliability. But the very existence
of these narratives and official channels is
enough for many listeners to feel that it's kind
of like Perf. Perf that at least some people
close to the events thought in his plan was technically
possible, and maybe even in motion. Then there
are the CIA's documents, which pushed the story
beyond Argentina and to Colombia. In one now
famous 1955 memo, declassified and available
on CIA's reading room site, the CIA station reports
an informant codenamed Semelody. has passed along
the claim from a former SS man, Philippe Cotron,
and Cotron insisted he met Hitler regularly in
a town called Tijuana, Colombia, where the dictator
was supposedly living under the alias Adolf Schittlmayer
in a community of ex -Nazis. The statue in the
memo is a now widely shared photograph. Two men
on a bench. One identified as Cotron and the
other said to be Hitler. Older, heavier, but
recognizable to those who want to see the resemblance.
In the back of the photo, the writing supposedly
reads Adolf Schittlmayer. The CIA doesn't take
this for gossipable. The memo itself notes that
the source's reliability is unknown and that
the whole story could be fantastic. Later coverage
of the document often points out that the CIA
headquarters essentially filed it away rather
than launching a massive global manhunt. But
again, if you're paying attention to the pattern,
you notice certain things. Forma puts his name
on the line. A former SS officer is willing to
claim in the 1950s that he not only saw Hitler,
but spoke with him on a monthly basis in South
America. Someone risks stealing a photograph
of this supposed meeting and getting to American
intelligence. Then years later, that photo ends
up in a CIA file that the public can read. Regardless
of whether the man in the picture really is Hitler,
that's an extraordinary chain of belief, action,
and documentation. The CIA has other material
in this orb, too. One declassified document simply
reads, Hitler's hideout in Argentina. It relays
information from a source about a possible Hitler
refuge in the country, including geographic clues
and a description of a compound. The memo explicitly
says the reliability of the source is unknown.
but it's there in black and white in an official
CIA file. When people say even the CIA thought
Hitler escaped, they're usually pointing at pages
like this. Not a conclusion, not a stamp of certainty,
but evidence that questions could he still be
alive was investigated at an official level years
after the war in multiple countries based on
eyewitnesses or informant claims. Beyond governments,
there are a lot of private testimonies and local
legends that swirl around this topic. In those
German Argentina communities, older residents
sometimes tell stories of a man they weren't
supposed to talk. about. A guest who arrived
quietly, was surrounded by security, and seemed
to command difference without any formal title.
In remote ranches and small hotels, people also
claimed to have seen sketches or photographs
long since destroyed. An older man with a familiar
voice, a barber who was told to shave a mustache
but not too short. A doctor who swears he was
asked to treat a patient under a false name with
the same ailments Hitler was reported to have
in Berlin. None of these stories stand up as
evidence on its own, but taken together, they
form sort of a oral conspiracy archive that can
be incredibly persuasive if you live inside it.
Overlay in the human layer is the structural
one. We know that Argentina and other South American
countries weren't just randomly attracted to
fleeing Nazis. They were actively prepared as
destinations. Recently declassified Argentina
documents show how officials facilitated the
arrival and protection of Nazi figures and the
discovery of more than 80 boxes of Nazi -related
material propaganda and correspondence in a court
basement reinforces how extensive those ties
were. When people argue that Hitler could have
escaped, they point to this infrastructure. You
had shipping routes, sympathetic embassies, corrupt
officials, false identities, money pipelines,
even pre -war ideology beachheads laid by Nazi
propaganda in places like Baroloche. It's not
hard to picture how certain people might have
been moved along those channels in the order
that had been given. So what do we do with all
of this? On one side, you have mainstream historians
and a body of forensic work saying he died in
Berlin. We have matching dental records, multiple
eyewitnesses from inside the bunker. And every
serious official inquiry has landed on that conclusion.
On the other, You have unanswered questions about
Soviet handling of the remains, a misidentified
skull fragment, German submarines arriving in
South America after the surrender, documented
Nazi rat lines in Argentina, FBI and CIA files
full of tips and informant stories, photographs
from Colombia, and decades of local eyewitness
claims in two continents. If you want a neat,
clean answer, this is not the story for you.
The record here is pretty messy, fragmented,
and emotionally charged. Notice how often the
words unsubstantiated, questionable reliability,
and rumor pop up in docu - But also notice that
the documents existed at all. The FBI didn't
toss every Hitler and Argentina letter in the
trash. They logged and evaluated them. The CIA
didn't just laugh at C. Melody and his SS friend,
Citrone. They wrote up the report, attached the
photo, and circulated it. Argentina governments
didn't eagerly open their archives. They held
onto thousands of pages of Nazi -related files
for decades. And now we're only starting to release
them. None of that proves Hitler escaped. But
if your baseline assumption is that powerful
institutions hide things, it kind of feels like
smoke and where people see smoke you're gonna
be looking for that fire as well. At the same
time, there are hard practical questions that
any he escapes scenario has to answer. How do
you move from one of the most recognizable faces
on earth through a collapsing capital, cross
front lines into an aircraft or out of a city
totally surrounded by enemy troops? How do you
get him into a submarine without someone talking?
How do you hide him for years among people who
know exactly who he is, in towns where everyone
gossips? In a world where allied intelligence
is explicitly hunting for Nazi fugitives, what
kind of plastic surgery, disguise or controlled
environment would it take? Some escape narratives
try to solve this by shrinking the circle. Only
a tiny core of ultra loyalists know the truth.
Everyone else thinks he died in Berlin. That's
possible in theory, but every new eyewitness
story, you add every barber, every doctor, every
driver, increase the number of people would have
to keep it a secret perfectly for many decades.
And yet if history has taught us anything, it's
that impossible sounding things do sometimes
happen. Eekman really did vanish into a normal
looking light in Buenos Aires until the massage
team grabbed him off the streets. And jelly really
did. They moved between countries, farming and
practicing medicine under false papers, and died
on a Brazilian beach, never having stood trial.
There is documented Nazi presence in Barra Luce
and other parts of Argentina. that went deep
into local politics and business. There are genuine
mysteries about certain German U -boats and their
cargo, their intelligence files that hint at
things we still don't fully understand. So when
someone says maybe the biggest Nazi of all slipped
through our fingers, they're plugging that ideal
into a landscape that already has real stories
of escape. Tonight we've walked through the landscape
piece by piece. The burned bodies in a bunker
under Soviet control. The misidentified skull
fragment. The jawbone in Moscow that some scientists
say matches Hitler's teeth. The German summer
marines surfacing in Argentina months after the
war. Eyewitnesses claim of nighttime landings
and secret bus convoys, the Nazi enclaves of
Patagonia. The FBI memo is taking Hitler and
Argentina tips seriously enough to file them.
This CIA's Hitler hideout memo. the photograph
from Columbia labeled Adolf Schottemeyer, the
informer who swore he talked to Hitler monthly
in a South American town, the Argentine archive
full of rat line documents only now coming into
light. We put as much as possible on the table
as we could in one setting, not to close the
case, but to show you why the case never really
closes for a lot of people. So where does this
leave us tonight? With two overlapping stories
running at the same time, and one Hitler dies
in Berlin in April of 1945, a dictator choosing
suicide and fire over surrender. remains half
destroyed, his fate confirmed mostly through
the testimony of those around him, the Tief left
and Moscow vault and other, he gets out. by plane,
by U -boat, by rat light, threaded through sympathetic
priests and friendly ports, and ends up on a
ranch in Argentina or a beach in Columbia, living
in the shadows among the very networks that he
created. The first story is the one in the textbooks.
The second one is in the classified files, late
night conversations, and grainy, declassified
photographs, which story you lean towards says
as much about you and how you see power, secrecy,
and institution as it does about 1945. Maybe
it doesn't really matter in the end. whether
he died in that bunker or slipped away in the
dark. The man himself has gone either way, but
lingers is the way the question clings to us.
We keep circling the story, not because we secretly
want Hitler to have lived, but because we've
unsettled by the ideal that something so huge,
so monstrous, can vanish into a badly written
report in a locked drawer in somebody else's
archive. We want evil to end in a courtroom,
under bright lights, with a verdict and a final
image we can all agree on. Instead, we get a
fire, rubble, contradictions, missing bones,
and decades of classic And in that space, our
imaginations do exactly what they're wired to
do. They start looking for doors where there
might only be cracks. Maybe that's the real conspiracy
here. Not a single secret submarine run. Not
a hidden ranch in the Andes. The simple fact
that power almost never gives us clean stories.
It leaves us with redactions and partial answers
and demands that we trust what we can't see.
Some people can live with that. Others fill the
silence with theories. Whether Hitler escaped
or not, the system that allowed his officers
and architects to build quiet lives on the far
side of the world is very real. The paper trails
are real. The governments that buried those trails
for half a century are real. of the story we
know and it's ugly enough on his home. So maybe
the question isn't did he get away so much as
why are we still chasing him? Maybe we keep following
his shadow into the mountains and across the
ocean because it's easier to hunt one ghost than
to face the boring grinding truth that evil rarely
ties itself off neatly. It bleeds into new passports,
new uniforms, new institutions. It survives in
the people who weren't in the bunker at all.
You can walk away tonight convinced he died in
Berlin or half convinced he didn't or suspended
somewhere between the middle. doesn't care. The
archives don't care. What matters is what those
loose ends do to your senses of how the world
works. They make you certain that everything
is a lie, or do they remind you to move through
the world with a little bit more doubt, a little
bit more patience, a little bit more insistence
on seeing the evidence for yourself. That's where
I'm going to leave you tonight, in that narrow
space between certainty and paranoia. where the
real work of thinking lives. Not every gap in
the record is a coverup. Not every official story
is the truth. Most of the time, history is just
a bad signal picked up on a damaged receiver.
We're all trying to decide what is noise and
what is real. I'm David. This is Zero Signal.
Please stay curious, stay skeptical, and keep
listening to the quiet parts where the story
doesn't quite line up. That's where the important
questions usually are. Until next time, we are
Zero Signal, and we're out.