Bite-Size History #3 — Did Hitler escape to South America in 1945?

Examining the evidence, theories, and counter-theories

The many potential faces of Adolf Hitler as shared by the US Secret Service in 1944 in the event he disguised himself to avoid capture (Image credit: Wikipedia)

It doesn’t matter where you look in history, you’ll always find a conspiracy theory lurking nearby.

Whether it’s that Shakespeare didn’t write his own plays, that Lewis Carroll was Jack the Ripper, that the CIA had President John F. Kennedy Senior (D-Massachusetts), assassinated [the topic of a future Bite-Size History] or that the Apollo moon landings were faked by NASA, there’s no shortage.

One of the most enduring is whether Nazi leader, Adolf Hitler, faked his own death in 1945, fled the bunker, and escaped to South America. On the face of it, this seems ridiculous, and not something you’ll see any prominent historian put their name to. But the theories and questions remain almost 80 years later.

Let’s examine just what happened at the end of World War II and the credibility of some of the “Hitler escaped theories.”

The Last Days of Hitler and the Third Reich

The failure of Hitler’s Ardennes Offensive, or The Battle of the Bulge, (16 December 1944–25 January 1945), was the last significant German offensive of World War II. The aim of this last desperate military gamble was an attempt…