Hitler of the Andes

- The program originally scheduled

for this time has been canceled in order

that we may bring you reports from overseas.

This afternoon, Grand Admiral Doenitz

announced the death of Adolf Hitler.

This death has not been confirmed by Allied sources.

In April 1945,

Hitler was the most wanted man in Europe.

Dead or alive, the victorious Allies needed to see his body.

In the dock, or in the grave.

But in the chaos of war,

proof the dictator had died proved elusive.

Maybe Hitler was dead.

Maybe he'd escaped.

I have one testimony that tells me

the exact burial spot of where Hitler

is buried in Patagonia.

There are an incredible amount of witnesses

who saw Nazi submarines come to the coast in Argentina

and crates full of Nazi documents and gold being unloaded.

Concern has been expressed

over the possibility that Adolf Hitler

might attempt to seek refuge in Argentina.

We all differ often times on the facts

in why they happened, what happened.

And clearly, one of the biggest examples

of this kind of difference of interpretation

is what happened to Hitler at the end of World War II.

- The mystery of the missing dictator

drew in spies, scientists and historians

from America, Russia and Britain.

As recently released documents show,

it led the FBI into its most incredible manhunt,

searching for Hitler from the subways of the Bronx

to the jungles of Latin America.

The FBI did receive information

that Hitler had fled from Germany,

that he was in Argentina,

that he was in various parts of the United States,

that he was in other places

and the areas where we had jurisdiction

in the United States and to some extent in South America,

we conducted inquiries to see

if there was any truth to those allegations.

The allies spent six years

trying to defeat Hitler.

It would take them many times longer

to sort out the confusion that surrounded his fate.

Conspiracy, fact and fiction,

all rushed in to fill the vacuum

left by the missing dictator.

- More extracts from captured German newsreels.

This is said to be the room

in which the alleged attempt on Hitler's life was made.

- Hitler was no stranger to cheating death.

In 1944, German officers tried to blow him up

at the Wolf's Lair headquarters.

Four men standing near were killed.

- A nice easy explanation for gullible people.

Fearing further attacks,

Hitler sowed confusion about his whereabouts.

Even in 1944, people weren't sure

if he really was dead or alive.

As to where they got hurt,

there's no evidence.

Anyway, the Fuehrer looking rather

more round-shouldered than usual,

goes from bed to bed commiserating with the casualties.

Maybe this is Hitler's double

or perhaps his double was killed by the bomb.

While there are scores of theories,

the facts are not yet known.

- In the final months of the war,

even the Germans couldn't be certain.

Since the 1944 bomb plot,

Hitler kept well out of sight, hidden away in bunkers.

The last ordinary Germans who saw him in the open

were a handful of the Hitler youth.

- There were speculations already in the fall of 1944

about his escape and his whereabouts.

So when the end of the war came,

this was a story that had already long been prepared.

Many of Hitler's

most senior supporters did try to escape.

Himmler was captured dressed as a private soldier.

Heinrich Muller, head of the Gestapo was never captured.

And down in the Chancellery bunkers,

Hitler's staff tried repeatedly

to persuade him to get out before it was too late.

Flight was certainly possible.

- Up till the 22nd of April, when the net closed,

they could get out by air.

Big airplanes could take off on the 22nd

and a whole convoy of them went off

from Berlin to Berchtesgaden on the 22nd

carrying quite a large number of people out,

all those who opted to get out.

The Russians couldn't be everywhere.

- During the final weeks of the war,

this was the easiest route out of Berlin.

The main east-west avenue was used by the Nazis

as a runway right up until the last moment when Berlin fell.

The Nazis even had captured British planes at hand

to try and make their escape without being shot down.

The man who was the switchboard operator in Hitler's bunker

claims that this was the plan in place and ready

to spirit Hitler from under the noses of the Allies.

- There were two planes waiting to the north of Berlin.

One of them was the JU 390 and a Blohm and Voss

that could fly the same distance.

It could fly 18,000 kilometers without refueling.

So Hitler could have escaped if he wanted to.

- The possibility of losing Hitler

gave the advancing Soviets added urgency.

On April the 22nd, the first Soviet armies

reached the outskirts of Berlin still fiercely defended.

They desperately hoped that Hitler was still in the city.

- Stalin organized special teams in SMERSH.

SMERSH was the military

counterintelligence service during the war.

As we all know from the James Bond movies,

it means death to spies,

whose job it was to find Hitler

and hopefully, Stalin would find him alive.

- Of course, Stalin wanted to capture Hitler.

He intended to put him on trial.

- But capture was the one thing

Hitler was determined to avoid at any cost.

The reality of what lay in store

for fallen dictators was not what he had in mind.

Just before the end, it came the news

of what had happened to Mussolini,

how he had been shot and strung up

upside down in a garage in Milan.

He didn't want that to happen to him.

As Stalin's SMERSH teams

advanced to the center of Berlin,

they questioned prisoners, checked corpses.

Where was Hitler?

Could he have slipped through the noose and escaped?

The first news of Hitler's fate

did nothing to dispel the confusion.

On May the 1st, Soviet commander Zhukov

received a message from Hitler's bunker

claiming that Hitler had committed suicide

on April the 30th.

Just a few hours later,

came a radio broadcast that told a different story.

German radio claimed

that Hitler had died fighting at the head of his troops.

This wasn't what the Soviets had been told at all.

They thought Hitler had died a day earlier by his own hand.

In the confusion of Allied victory,

doubt about the fate of the fallen dictator

filled the airwaves.

The Berlin announcement

that Hitler is dead has left this part

of Germany speechless and resigned.

There is no further confirmation, of course,

as to the authenticity of this report.

- We bring you now Seymour Carmen from Munich.

There is some caution

about accepting the German announcement as fact.

It might be a trick.

It might be a desperate effort by Hitler

to disguise himself and escape.

The mere possibility

that Hitler had escaped struck at the heart

of Allied fears and paranoia about the Nazis.

If Hitler cheated the hangman,

how could justice ever really be done?

If the dictator of the German Reich survived,

how could anyone be sure the evil he brought was dead?

The most important thing was, of course,

that there was no body.

I think that fueled everything.

No one could produce--

no one was able to produce the corpse.

As the First reached Berlin,

it was the Soviets who were best placed

to bring the mystery to an end.

Everything depended on what they found

when Berlin finally fell.

On the 2nd of May, Soviet troops

captured Berlin's government buildings.

This was the final symbolic defeat of Nazi Germany.

It was two days since the radio announcement

of Hitler's death and the world waited for proof.

If he was dead, where was the body?

Hitler's own headquarters had barely fallen

when a special Soviet search team arrived on the scene.

Its mission was to find Hitler.

It didn't take long before they were rewarded.

Elina Rozovskaya was the team translator.

- One of the men just arrived from the headquarters

of the first Belorussian army was passing by.

He said, "Oh, that one looks really like Hitler.

"He is Hitler."

- Here was proof that Hitler had died after all.

At last there was a body.