Giving Hitler Hell

Three years passed, and I did not hear from Weiss. I'd run into him at the occasional Christmas party or EMP function requiring black tie and spousal attendance, but he never brought up the subject. Then, a few months ago, Weiss left me a message: If I was still interested in hearing his story, he was at last prepared to tell it.

Weiss is almost 81 now, officially -- and grudgingly -- retired, though you'd never know it, since he still gets up each morning, dons a tailored suit and drives his big Mercedes to EMP's offices on Pennsylvania Avenue. He's married and has two grown sons. He missed three months of work last year recovering from a triple bypass and heart valve surgery, and while he certainly looks fit and healthy, perhaps an impending sense of mortality has made the time seem right.

The buzz around the office is that Weiss will outlive the interns. That he has outlasted most of his WWII buddies is not, however, a source of comfort to him. Virtually every time he logs on to the Web site of the Army Counter Intelligence Corps veterans association -- Weiss is member number 3326 -- there's news of yet another colleague's passing. Soon, Weiss worries, all the eyewitnesses will be gone, and only the written record will remain. And that record is incomplete. "They took their secrets to their grave," says Weiss of his deceased fellow officers.

Ironically, an almost identical consideration recently prompted Adolf Hitler's devoted nurse, Erna Flegel, to break her 60-year silence on Hitler's deteriorating mental and physical health in his final days. "I don't want to take my secret with me into death," the 93-year-old Flegel told a German newspaper in May. There are still many missing pieces of the WWII puzzle, and every time one is found history gets rewritten a bit. Sometimes, as in the case of the unrepentant Flegel, whose existence became known only a few years ago when the CIA declassified old OSS interrogation transcripts, the added testimony merely warrants a footnote. But on other occasions, material surfaces that requires entire chapters of the official record to be scrapped. It was only after the collapse of communism, for instance, that the Kremlin grudgingly admitted that the Soviet secret police, not the German SS, murdered thousands of Polish POWs during WWII. In 2000, it was Poland's turn to reexamine its war record, and the larger issue of anti-semitism, when an American scholar uncovered evidence that the massacre of the entire Jewish population of a village called Jedwabne was the work of Polish compatriots and not the Nazis, as had been the official version.

History has a habit of sweeping the inconvenient under the carpet. Despite the passage of more than half a century (not to mention the passage of U.S. legislation in the late 1990s ordering WWII records unsealed) there are still countless documents from the era that the CIA has deemed either too sensitive or embarrassing to declassify. Like those partially opened files, parts of Weiss's account have also emerged slowly over the years, and the snippets of the past they offer contain eerie parallels to some of the things happening in the world today. But he, too, has held back crucial portions of the narrative. Now, for the first time, he's willing to tell the whole story, from its improbable beginning to the strange new relevancy of its long-buried end.

Munich in autumn of 1945 was a devastated and demoralized city. With every passing week, the arrest lists sent from American intelligence headquarters in Frankfurt only seemed to grow longer. The teletype machine next to Weiss's desk spat out names almost round-the-clock: rocket scientists, nuclear engineers, chemists and physicists; party clerks, accountants and financiers; valets, chauffeurs and cooks. Anyone closely associated with the fallen regime had to be hauled in and detained. And in a town like Munich, whose smoky beer halls had hosted the earliest Nazi rallies, that meant a great many people.

Weiss and two dozen other Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) officers worked out of the requisitioned home of Munich's gauleiter, or local Nazi Party boss, who had seized the villa from a wealthy Jewish industrialist. The mansion had somehow survived Allied air raids and was in a quiet, upscale neighborhood that was also relatively undamaged. But perhaps its chief recommendation was a deep, dry basement that had been converted into holding cells.

From Gauleiter Haus, Weiss's beat -- Region IV of the American Occupied Zone -- stretched south through the lakelands and forests of Bavaria to the Alpine passes and mountainous redoubts along the Austrian border. Bavaria was the cradle of the Nazi movement, the birthplace and home of many of its leading figures. And because of its mountainous terrain and the fanaticism of some of its inhabitants, it was the one area in the American Sector that posed the greatest risk of insurgency, the German equivalent of the Sunni Triangle.

Throughout Germany, the Allies were anxious to restore basic services and get local governments up and running again, and one of Weiss's responsibilities was to vet potential officials for past Nazi Party membership. It was an important and time-consuming duty, but he still kept a special eye out for high-value targets who had evaded capture. Many of Hitler's henchmen, particularly from the dreaded SS, were still at large, along with mountains of gold bullion, and if there was to be an uprising, they would surely lead and finance it. Already, sporadic attacks by a group of insurgents ominously known as the Werewolves had prompted standing orders for GIs to execute insurgents by firing squad. This wreaked havoc on the morale of U.S. servicemen, especially since many of the troublemakers were 16- and 17-year-old former Hitler Youth members.

More worrisome, though, were the persistent rumors that Hitler was still alive. "We were certain that he had committed suicide at his bunker," Weiss recalls. "But since Berlin was part of the Russian zone, and no witness and no body had been produced by the Soviets, many Germans refused to believe the Fuhrer was gone."

The rumors that Hitler had survived were becoming a serious issue, not to mention a potential rallying cry for those Germans who refused to accept defeat. There was talk that Hitler was hiding in a cave in northern Italy, that he was disguised as a shepherd in the Swiss Alps, that he was working as a croupier in Evian, France. One report in August 1945 had him living in Innsbruck under the alias Gerhardt Weithaupt. (Thirty CIC agents chased down that lead, according to the 1996 book The Death of Hitler, by Ada Petrova and Peter Watson.) In another account, Hitler was with a fleet of U-boats off the coast of Spain.

The Russians, who knew full well where the late Fuhrer was since they had his charred remains in a secret laboratory in Moscow, further stirred the pot. Izvestia, the official Communist daily, ran a front page story claiming that he and Eva Braun had installed themselves in bourgeois splendor in a castle (complete with moat) in Westphalia, in the British Zone.