Traces of a Nazi
by Marcelo Netto [marnetto@hotmail.com]
The idea was as odd as it was logical: “Why not go to a street market in Cidade Dutra to see if we can find some Nazis? They say Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, so they will be there buying vegetables”. At the time, I wasn’t expecting to find Hitler’s brother-in-law, who introduced himself to me only as Hermann. Instead I was examining the testimony of a Brazilian soldier who assured me that 200 sympathizers of the Führer had settled in this neighbourhood, some 20 kilometres from the centre of São Paulo, after being forced to leave a German colony in Paraná in 1955.
Fernando Nogueira de Araújo, the retired army sergeant whose story features in the book The man who buried Hitler (Contracorrente, 2021), which I co-authored with Aldo Gama, led us up and down the market many times until finally he spotted a potential German couple. De Araújo, who now sells maps on the streets of São Paulo to make ends meet, was armed with one in each hand: “I have maps from Rio Grande do Sul, Santa Catarina, Paraná. Who’s going to buy them?”. Approaching the woman, he held out a map of the city of Cambé in Paraná, which she said she was familiar with.
Having confirmed she was indeed German, de Araújo made up a story that I was his nephew and that he wanted them to test my German skills to make sure he wasn’t overpaying for my German lessons. The woman, who we would later identify as Fanni Erika von Ammon, then introduced us to the man, tall with a felt hat, and asked him to test my German.
I started with the classic Hallo, wie geht’s Ihnen, Herr…?, hoping he might reveal his own name. “Hermann. My name is Her-mann,” he said, pronouncing the syllables pausingly with a certain pride. From then on, the dialogue continued in German.
“My wife said you like Germany. That’s very nice. But I’ve never seen you around here before. Are you new to the neighbourhood?”
“Yes, yes. We just moved here, didn’t we, uncle?” (Araújo nodded in agreement)
“It’s good to see that young Brazilians like you want to learn German and are interested in Germany. Who knows perhaps some time we can arrange a lunch at my place?”
“It would be a pleasure. And you don’t speak any Portuguese?”
“I speak a little, aber nur mit dem empre-ga-da!” (he said, stressing syllable by syllable, again with a certain pride)
At that moment, for no apparent reason, the woman seemed to suspect the real intentions of “uncle and nephew”. Without further explanation, she pulled the man by the arm and both left hurriedly without buying anything — practically on the run — watching carefully every three steps, as if to check if they weren’t being followed.
Fifteen years after this unexpected encounter, forensics of photos and signatures indicate, with a negligible margin of error, that the Mr. Hermann I met at the fair in Cidade Dutra is Hermann Fegelein, one of the best known figures in Hitler’s inner circle; married to Gretl Braun, sister of Hitler’s Mistress Eva Braun and special advisor to Heinrich Himmler.
The evidence gathered during almost two decades of investigation sheds light on a dark episode in the last days of the Third Reich. According to historiography, Fegelein was executed in Berlin on the night of 28 April 1945 after a court martial convicted him of conspiracy against Hitler. He was 38 years old. The accounts of his death are, however, conflicting. It is not known for certain who murdered him and in what manner. And although the German government insists on the theory of execution, his body has never been found.
After analysing the various photographs of the young Fegelein and this German man who took refuge first in Argentina and then Brazil, forensic expert Eduardo Zocchi concludes “The results lead to the conclusion that this is indeed the same person. An approximate certainty in this respect is estimated at around 90%, or even higher”.
His report outlines how the physical and anthropometric characteristics remain compatible in all the images provided; the distances between the eyes and the mouth are aligned, the shape of the face/skull remains unchanged. The physical and dimensional characteristics of the eyes and the expression contained in them are the same; the left eyelid is, so to speak, “droopy” in all photos; there is a curve through which the mouth line develops, with asymmetrical features and unconventional shape; there is something like a “protrusion” on the chin in all the pictures.
The forensic graphotechnical examination of the handwriting supports these conclusions. “Everything leads us to believe that the signatures came from the same hand”, certifies Osvaldo Negrini Neto, author of more than 10,000 expert reports, including investigations into the “Carandiru massacre”.
According to Negrini Neto, the axial inclination, the caliber of the strokes, letter shape and vocabulary and the intergrammatical spacing and other key characteristics in the provided handwriting sampes all converge — notably 1. the peculiar downward/ascending oblique movement to the left is followed by a clockwise curvilinear movement in both Hermann’s “H” and Ramsauer’s “R”; 2. the characteristic development of the “ol” and “el” groups, identical in the signatures and questioned manuscripts and patterns; 3. the “u” garlands forming a characteristic “m” and “n” in all signatures (standard and questioned); 4. the attack, development, and finishing of the gram of the letter “a”, notably at the beginnings of words; and 5. the group of “gramas”at the end of the signature, representing a “u” garland.
“Even though formal elements of our writing undergo various changes every seven years and we may try to modify our individual writing, the graphic genetics are preserved throughout our life. This is because writing emanates from the brain, and it is not possible to modify it without leaving the mark of the effort made to do so”, describes the expert.
There are, however, even more compelling facts than these forensic results. Some of the photos analysed were shared by a descendant of Fegelein, originally sent to Argentinian investigator Jorge Pedro Bordón, who has been investigating the escape of Nazis to South America for decades. “When Juan Pablo Ruppel sent me photos of his family, he wanted me to help him find out who his great-uncle actually was. He knew the man by the name Hans Ruppel; one of the names Fegelein used in Argentina, in addition to Otto Plantz or Otto Bantz,” describes Bordón, who I contacted in early 2021 after finding a Facebook post of his. In the text, Bordón claims Fegelein made a trip from Argentina to Brazil in 2003. To prove it, he offered to send photos of the Nazi in his old age.
Through Ruppel, Fegelein’s great-nephew, Bordón also had access to a book of birth certificates with numerical stamps used by the “cobertura vip;” a program of the Argentine government that allowed Nazis to be housed and included as a relative in German families residing in the country. By following such numbers, the investigator found a woman born in 1931 who would become responsible for including Hermann Fegelein and his brother Waldemar in her family. “Basically, Juan Pablo, who repairs fans in Azul, a small town 300 kilometres from Buenos Aires, wanted more information from his great-uncle in the hope of being able to claim some inheritance, as since the latter had moved to Brazil he had never sent money to him or his ‘guardian’,” Bordón comments.
Ruppel’s tutor went by the name of Horst Schmidt, a former sergeant in the 3rd SS Totenkopf Division. His physical characteristics, unusual for the time, make the story of Fegelein’s escape to South America even more plausible. Schmidt stood about 2 metres tall and was an easily recognised officer in the Totenkopf (“Skull”) division, commanded by Fegelein when the Nazis invaded Poland and France. In a portrait taken in Buenos Aires in 1947, also subjected to facial recognition, Schmidt appears alongside the Fegelein brothers. It was up to the “giant” to look after Ruppel after his father, Fegelein’s nephew, abandoned him.
Deprived of financial assistance from his great-uncle, Ruppel started selling unique Nazi pieces inherited from Fegelein, who preferred to keep the objects in Argentina instead of bringing them to Brazil. The trade aroused the curiosity of the Buenos Aires police, who, in 2016, raided Ruppel’s home and confiscated 14 pistols in his possession, including a Parabellum 45 calibre with the serial number 05 — priceless for having once belonged to Hitler. The pieces were eventually returned to the owner, as they were listed in the country’s National Register of Weapons. All but one: Hitler’s Parabellum, ‘lost at the police station’, according to reports in the Argentine media at the time. Attached to the lawsuit filed by Ruppel, who is trying to get back this most precious piece of his collection, is an original descriptive letter left by Fegelein. In addition to Hitler’s pistol, the letter lists other weapons owned by two emblematic figures of Nazism, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and Otto Skorzeny, responsible for special operations, once described by the Allies as “the most dangerous man in Europe”.
Ruppel told Bordón that his guardian Schmidt told him many times that he had fled Germany in a submarine in the company of 50 other Nazis. Among them, besides the Fegelein brothers were Eva Braun and Hitler himself. The Führer’s alleged escape has resulted in several books, based on accounts of secret documents, and fuels one of, some will call, the most fruitful conspiracy theories of the last seven decades. “When the great-nephew inherited the guns, with them came the detailed files for each one. Then he told me the name of the owner of one of them, Otto Bantz. At the time, I remembered having bumped into that name before. There was information that this man had rented a house in Buenos Aires to Mengele, when he worked for a few months in the Roche laboratory, in 1951,” says Bordón.
Until now, Josef Mengele was the best-known Nazi to have lived out his final days in Brazil. Accused of human experiments on Jewish children and of selecting the victims sent to the gas chamber at Auschwitz concentration camp, Mengele escaped extradition in Argentina in the early 1960s and passed through Paraguay, before changing his identity and being taken in by friends in the state of São Paulo. There seems to be a consensus that the doctor by training, a character in several films about Nazi horrors, died in Bertioga, on the São Paulo coast, in 1979 by drowning, following a stroke, and was buried under the name Wolgang Gerhard. A DNA test in 1992 seems to have proved his identity, seven years after his body was exhumed from a grave in Embu das Artes, in the metropolitan region of São Paulo, under the supervision of Superintendent Romeu Tuma — but still some insist his “death” in 1979 was staged so that he could escape once again.
Unlike Mengele and other Nazis who at one point had to abandon their old identities, Hans-Georg-Otto-Hermann-Fegelein followed a pattern. Hitler’s brother-in-law always kept at least part of his real name: Hans Ruppel was Fegelein, Otto Bantz was Fegelein, Hermann Volkert Ramsauer, the man at the market was Fegelein.
The death certificate, signed by doctors Herbert and Ernst Oltrogge and located by detective Thiago Borges, says that Ramsauer died in São Paulo, at home, at 2.30pm, on 2 October 2008, as a result of colon cancer. His body was cremated at the Horto da Paz, in Itapecerica da Serra. According to messages posted on Facebook by his daughter, Nicola, who lives in the United States, his ashes were scattered in Paraty, on the southern coast of Rio de Janeiro, 16 days after his death. On social media, Nicola posted photos of the funerary urn on its way to the sea. One of them accompanied by a caption in German: “My father had chosen exactly this place, so we all met there and buried him in the sea, according to his will”.
Fegelein entered Brazil for the first time on 11 June 1964, via the recently opened Viracopos Airport in Campinas, under the identity of Herman Ramsauer (without a second “n” and without the “Volkert” that he would later add). He carried a German passport — number B6464010 — issued in Delmenhorst on 14 March 1963. After research in Germany conducted by Klaus Kaufmann, mayor of the city of Laichingen, it was possible to confirm that the couple described as his parents on the entry form to the country — Friedrich Ramsauer and Elise Ramsauer — never had a child with that name. Kaufmann wrote several times to the only known living son of the couple, Gerhard Ramsauer, now 93, but never received a reply. Kaufmann also sent a request for information to the residents’ registration office (Einwohnermeldeamt) in Lübeck, which is listed on the document as Hermann Ramsauer’s birthplace, but the request was mysteriously lost and is still pending. The date of birth recorded in the document, 30 September 1930, is important. It seems to have been chosen so that no suspicion would fall on a man who, at the end of the Second World War, would have been just 15 years old.
Fegelein arrived in Brazil 11 days before his wife at the time, Maria Margarita Baltín Ramsauer, who disembarked in Rio de Janeiro aboard the steamer Palmas on 22 June. She was carrying a two-month-old baby, André Ramsauer, born in Germany. The three met in São Paulo and, on August 8, “Herman” and his wife registered at the Specialized Police Station for Foreigners, but at different times and with different addresses. His residence: Rua Barão de Itapetininga, 46/13th floor. Hers? Avenida 9 de Julho, 543, flat 1.401. Herman’s profession: “Industrialist”. Maria Margarita’s: “Housekeeper”. The police station granted a maximum period of three years to stay in the country. Maria Margarita returned to Germany, however, to give birth to another child, Nicola, on 22 November 1965. There is no information as to whether Herman accompanied her or what her fate was during this period. It is possible that the execution of the Nazi pilot Herberts Cukurs by Mossad on 23 February 1965, during an ambush in Uruguay, raised alarm among Nazis hiding in South America. Cukurs had set up an air taxi company in Brazil, on the outskirts of the Guarapiranga Dam near Cidade Dutra. Ten years later on 28 June 1974, Hermann (with a double “n” now) Volkert Ramsauer, a commercial manager, arrived into Viracopos Airport once again, this time as a widower accompanied by his two sons, André and Nicola, who today live in Germany and the United States, respectively. The entry form shows, among other data, his height, 1.84 metres and address; Rua São José, 880, in the neighbourhood of Santo Amaro.
In 1982, Hermann Ramsauer married again. This time, to Fanni Erika von Ammon (maiden name Hegel Dauch) a divorced, “household woman”, of German origin, born in Guatemala who arrived in Brazil in 1955 at the age of 12. Günther Paul Dauch, a relative who lived in São Paulo and became the guardian of Fanni von Ammon, was a member of the administrative council of Mannesmann in Brazil, a German company controlled by the Nazi Party during the Second World War. The Dauch family was also involved with Demisa Deutz Minas, a manufacturer of tractors with a branch in Brazil, with Ferdinand Vaders, producer of metal cutting machines, and with the insurance broker Weichert. In 1965 at the age of 22, Fanni, was sitting at the table of a general assembly called by Weichert S/A, seven months pregnant with her second daughter and alongside her first husband Fritz von Ammon — and a son of her tutor Günther.
Fritz von Ammon is mentioned in the book Rebirth of the Swastika in Brazil (1977), by Erich Erdstein and Barbara Bean, as the messenger of the reorganised Nazis in the city of Marechal Cândido Rondon, in Paraná, on the border with Paraguay. The German community was the subject of an article in the Jornal da Tarde of 18 May 1968, under the headline “Where the Fourth Reich is being born”. In the same Paraná municipality lived Ingrun Klagges, daughter of the man responsible for having granted German nationality to Adolf Hitler, so he could run for the German presidency in 1932.
When identified by Erdstein, at the time an investigator for the Dops (Department of Social and Political Order) in Paraná, Von Ammon, who was found with two falsified Arab passports, reported that the Paraguayan government sympathized with fugitives from the Third Reich and that the neighboring country was the group’s main base of operations. He outlined how “the Nazis are very well organized throughout South America, receiving orders from the most important people, even from Martin Bormann, who still held the cards”. According to the official story, Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, died in Berlin in 1945. At the time, Von Ammon, according to Erdstein, had predicted: “We are getting stronger and stronger. We will also control the rest of the world”.
There are many versions of how and where Fegelein was killed, as well as the identity of his executioners. The most widespread story is that Fegelein was captured on 28 April in his flat in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district, completely drunk while preparing to flee in civilian clothes to Sweden or Switzerland with his Hungarian mistress. He was accused of participating in a plot against Hitler, planned alongside with his direct superior, Heinrich Himmler, who was trying to negotiate the surrender of the Germans to the Western Allies, excluding the Soviet Union, apparently without the consent of the Führer.
From then on, the testimonies become disjointed and sometimes conflicting. In The Last Days of Hitler (1947), British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper is emphatic: “The true causes and circumstances of Fegelein’s execution are one of the few subjects in this book on which the certainty of an ending seems unlikely. Some say that Hitler ordered Fegelein’s trial by court martial for desertion. Heinrich Müller (the Gestapo chief) is said to have been the first to question him. After the conviction, the Führer’s brother-in-law was executed. The general who presided over the trial, Wilhelm Mohnke, tells another version, however. In view of Fegelein’s drunkenness and inability to defend himself, Mohnke himself decided to end the trial before any conviction.
The journalist Patrick Burnside, in El Escape de Hitler (2000), says that at 9 p.m. on the 28th, shortly after Hitler learned of Himmler’s betrayal
through a BBC bulletin, Gestapo head Müller is said to have led Fegelein out of the bunker and they both disappeared. For Burnside, the two fled together that night. The same thesis is supported by Peter David Orr, in Eyewitness to Hitler’s Escape (2018). Orr says he relies on the account of a German serviceman, identified in the book by the nickname “the adjutant of Gestapo Müller”, who also fled Berlin and ended his days in Buenos Aires.
There is still disagreement as to where and how the execution took place. According to Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary, Fegelein was taken to the garden of the Reich Chancellery and “shot like a dog”. According to other accounts, he was shot by a platoon of soldiers in the basement of the same Chancellery. Finally, some claim that Fegelein was hanged by members of the SS in a cellar. One point, however, unites all historians: no witnesses actually saw Fegelein being executed. Or the body. Likewise, evidence of the death of “Gestapo” Müller in Berlin is missing. A 1978 video, accesible on YouTube, shows an undercover journalist attempting to interview a German in a restaurant in Asunción, Paraguay’s capital, seeking information on Mengele’s whereabouts. The man is said to be Müller.
As for Fegelein’s survival, his parents, in the post-war period, assured a US counter-intelligence agent that a messenger had brought news of their son, saying that he and Hitler were “well and safe in Argentina”, as reported by historian John Toland, author of the biography Adolf Hitler. Yet the official German government account remains — without proof — that Fegelein died in 1945. To support this claim, Peter Gohle, of the central office for “investigation of crimes committed by National Socialism”, based in Ludwigsburg, sent me as his only reference a Wikipedia link. “He was shot in Berlin on 29.04.1945 on Hitler’s orders for desertion. And the German justice system does not investigate the dead,” he summarised. The date cited by Gohle refers to the German and Portuguese Wikipedia pages, whereas the English, Spanish, French and Italian versions record his death on the 28th.
In addition to the Ludwigsburg office, I contacted the branches of the German National Archives (the Bundesarchiv) in Berlin, Koblenz, and Freiburg (where the military archive is located), in search of Fegelein’s fingerprints. I also examined the Bavarian Main Archives in Munich, which houses the personal papers of former members of the state police — since Fegelein was a member of that organisation for a short period in the late 1920s. Checking the authenticity of Herman Ramsauer’s passport, issued in 1963, and making Fegelein’s fingerprints public would allow the German authorities to clear up suspicions surrounding the case.
Deridingly called “Flegelein” (Flatulent) by some and described by many as “opportunistic”, “cynical” and “dishonest”, Fegelein, who ended the war as a division general (Gruppenführer) in the Nazi Waffen-SS, was born on 30 October 1906 in a small town in Bavaria, the son of a lieutenant who owned a riding school in Munich. In 1925 he joined a cavalry regiment of the Reichswehr (the German Armed Forces of the period). After studying for two semesters at the University of Munich, he went to work for the Bavarian police, where he remained until 1929, expelled after being caught stealing questions for a test from a superior’s office.
His passion for horses brought him close to Christian Weber, an early member of the Nazi Party. Influenced by Weber, Fegelein joined the organisation in 1932, under registration number 1.200.158. At the same time, he joined the SS under the number 66.680. It did not take long for him to attract the attention of Heinrich Himmler, military commander of the squad initially created to protect Hitler, but which would become the main instrument of Nazi terror.
Treated as a son by Himmler, to whom he was a special advisor, Fegelein, “the golden boy”, was appointed in 1936, as coach of the German equestrian team that would participate in the Berlin Olympic Games. When war broke out in 1939, he was sent to Poland, where he commanded the 1st Cavalry Battalion of the 3rd SS Totenkopf Division, responsible for the execution of 1,700 “enemies” in the Kampinos woods around Warsaw on 7 December. In 1941, he was formally charged with stealing large amounts of money and luxury goods from a train, as well as raping a Polish woman in Krakow. In both cases, Himmler interceded on his behalf and barred the court-martial trials. In the same year, Fegelein led a combing operation that would become known as the as the “Pripyat Marshes massacres” in an area between present-day Ukraine and Belarus. It is considered to be the first planned mass murder of civilians by Nazi Germany. Fegelein’s final report, dated 18 September, states that under his command 14,178 Jews, 1,001 partisans and 699 Red Army soldiers were killed. With losses of 17 killed, 36 wounded and 3 missing on his side.
In January 1944, after being wounded several times, Fegelein was transferred to the Führer’s headquarters and appointed liaison officer between Himmler and Hitler. The latter had long sought to arrange a marriage of one of Eva Braun’s sisters to a Nazi hierarch, a subterfuge to allow his then mistress to accompany him to official events. With Himmler’s support, Hitler convinced Fegelein to marry Gretl Braun, who was pregnant by another man (the fate of the baby is unknown). After the wedding on 3 June 1944, Fegelein was finally included in Hitler’s inner circle. A month later, he survived the failed ‘Operation Valkyrie’ bombing of the Fuhrer’s “Wolf’s Lair.” As Fegelein was sitting at the opposite end of the table from where the bomb had been hidden, he suffered only minor injuries to his left arm.
On 5 May 1945, a week after Fegelein’s alleged death in Berlin, Gretl Braun gave birth to Eva Barbara Fegelein, named after her aunt, in one of the castles the Nazis maintained in Obersalzberg, a mountainous region of Bavaria 140 kilometres from Munich. Accounts that Fegelein still had time to say goodbye to his wife and daughter before fleeing to Argentina now appear to be confirmed.
Pop character — The obsession surrounding the figure of Fegelein
A scene from the film “DownFall: The Last Hours of Hitler” (Der Untergang, 2004) in which the Führer bangs his hands on the table and shouts Hermann Fegelein’s name repeatedly earned the Nazi hierarch instant internet notoriety. In the film, after being told by a personal aide that his brother-in-law is missing, Hitler replies, “What do you mean you can’t find Fegelein? Keep looking for him. I want to see him immediately. If he has simply deserted us, that is desertion, treason. Bring me Fegelein! Fegelein! Fegelein! Fegelein!”. Numerous parodies have appeared on YouTube. In one, Hitler shouts Fegelin’s name for ten hours. In another, the Führer uses the Death Star to kill his subordinate, in reference to Star Wars. In a third, Fegelein is launched into space.
The Nazi also has several dedicated skins in the game Minecraft, as well as action figures that reproduce the scene of his supposed trial, showing him drunk, sitting on a chair, surrounded by Nazi officers. Even on the social network TikTok you can find short videos with images of his marriage to Gretl Braun. There is also a page dedicated to his trolling on the Desciclopédia, a satirical site that parodies Wikipedia. In the most recent version, Fegelein “trolled death and lives to this day, probably in Brazil”.
The fact that he apparently “defied” Hitler earned him the image of a “rebel” in the popular imagination. In 2012, a uniform of Fegelein’s was auctioned for 32,000 euros (about 160,000 reais) by the Royal Museum of Army and Military History in Brussels, although a former employee recently cast doubt on the authenticity of the garment.
Hitler’s fate still sparks curiosity
The reports that Hermann Fegelein faked his death in Berlin and died unpunished in Brazil have reopened the debate about the escape of Nazi leaders to South America at the end of the Second World War. A stream of serious researchers and amateur investigators have never accepted the version that Hitler himself committed suicide in the bunker in Berlin on 30 April 1945. Is there any way to separate fact from rumour amid so many stories?
During the Potsdam Conference, held about two months after the fall of Berlin, Joseph Stalin, when asked how Hitler had died, said he knew that he had escaped and was “in Spain or Argentina”. The Soviet leader was not, however, the first to raise such a suspicion. An FBI report dated 4 September 1944 (almost one year before the fall of Berlin) already suggested the possibility that the Führer “seek refuge in Argentina”.
In the presentation of FBI file 65–53615, part of the list of documents released to the public in 1998, the following reference appears: “After Germany’s surrender in 1945, the Western Allied forces suspected Hitler committed suicide, but found no evidence of his death. At the time, it was feared that Hitler might have escaped in the final days of the war, and searches were conducted to determine whether he was still alive.” One such declassified report, dated 14 July 1945, even states that “Hitler landed in Argentina around 20 June, his face is different and Argentine Army Major Leon Bengoa Llamas accompanied him to his hiding place in an area of the Chaco”.
A 9 May 1945 audio report by Thomas Cadett, the BBC’s Berlin correspondent, announced from the bunker that Soviet doctors had concluded that the half-burned body “of a man with a lock of black hair and a bit of black moustache” was only “an unconvincing look-alike of Hitler, not Hitler himself”. In 2009, a DNA test conducted by University of Connecticut scientist Nick Bellantoni proved that the supposed Hitler skull in Moscow’s possession since 1945, considered until then one of the most definitive proofs of his suicide, was actually that of a woman in her 40s.
Hitler’s death has become a fertile field for the so-called conspiracy theories because, as with Fegelein, there has never been a “body” or a witness to the death. Germany itself only recognized Hitler as officially dead, in the absence of a corpse, in 1956. The official story — that he took a cyanide pill and shot himself in the right temple — is based on the story told by Britain’s Hugh Trevor-Roper in his book The Last Days of Hitler. Trevor-Roper was sent to Berlin by UK counterintelligence only five months after the fall of the Nazis, while the Soviets had had exclusive access to the bunker and its survivors for nine weeks before the US military was allowed in.
Seen from this perspective, the evidence that Hermann Fegelein died in Brazil increases the credibility of the testimony of another character in this history. Sergeant Fernando Nogueira de Araújo, who took me to the Cidade Dutra market and guarantees that he took part in Hitler’s funeral in 1973, in a bunker located at 202 Avenida España in Asunción. Since 2003, the Hotel Palmas de Sol, owned by a German, has operated from that location. The owner refused to answer recent questions from Paraguayan journalists investigating the events prior to the opening of the hotel.
