Whereas most historians tend to ignore "the little people", I've found many valuable leads come from these sources - like former Rotary International president, Walter D. Head, who addressed the Nashville Rotary Club on October 11, 1949. In that speech, Head revealed that he learned something shocking at the International (Rotary) Conference in New York City. While attending the conference as a delegate in July of '49, he was talking with a French delegate who said that "No intelligent Frenchman believes Hitler is dead; they believe he is in Patagonia." Head knew this well-respected Frenchman and thought highly of him. Nevertheless, Head dismissed the statement until he had a second conversation with "a close friend" who "worked at US State Department". When Head laughingly raised the question of Hitler's survival, this high-ranking official turned to him and said, “Would you be surprised to know that one of Hitler’s personal bodyguards - a man closer to Hitler day by day than perhaps anyone else, who spent every minute at his side and slept outside Hitler’s door - was found? And would you be surprised to know that he was found in Patagonia?”
In his Rotary address, Head was careful not to reveal the his State Department friend's identity. After months of research, three pieces of strong circumstantial evidence point to Allen Dulles. First, Allen Dulles attended the '49 Annual Conference in NYC. Second, Head and Dulles worked together on the advisory council for two Rotary International projects in 1948-49. Third, Head and Dulles were friends.
I've spent several months searching for documentary evidence of a Hitler bodyguard turning up in Argentina between the end of WW2 and October of 1949. Considering the language Walter Head used to describe this man, he must have been a valet. But why refer to him as a bodyguard? Would such a conflation be unusual? No. Hitler's valets were SS - bodyguards, by definition. Consider Traudl Junge's description of the duties of Hitler's valets, from Hitler's Last Secretary A Firsthand Account Of Life:
"To say ‘valet’ doesn’t really cover it — the post was more like that of household manager, travelling companion, butler and maid-of-all-work combined. The valet on duty had to wake Hitler in the morning, that is to say knock at his bedroom door, announce the precise time, and give him the morning news. He also had to decide on the menu for the day, fix mealtimes, pass instructions on to the kitchen, and serve the Fuhrer when he ate. He was in charge of a whole staff of orderlies who looked after Hitler’s wardrobe and had to clean the rooms and run the establishment, and he made appointments with the dentist and barber and supervised the care of the dog."
Traudl Junge's description is a reminder that "Ordonnanz" is perhaps the best all-encompassing German term that fits. Ordonnanz is a military term for an soldier-orderly assigned to an officer for specific tasks, such as delivering messages, acting as a personal assistant, or, historically, performing domestic chores.
Establishing the Identity of the Man Found in Argentina
It can't be Heinz Linge. He was a Soviet POW until October of 1955. But Linge didn't work alone. He oversaw a team of bodyguard-valets who could be candidates.
In Rochus Misch's memoirs (first published in 2006), we find the following curious mention of Hitler's valets:
"In the five years that I was with Hitler I got to know five of his servants: Hermann Bussmann, Willy Arndt, Hans Junge, Fehrs Linge, and Heinz Linge".
"Hermann" Bussmann (Bußmann) in Misch's memoirs is called "Eugen" Bussmann in Linge's memoirs. However, only one Bussmann (Bußmann) exists in SS records: Franz Bussmann. Franz wasn't an officer. Hitler's valets were all SS officers. Eugen/Hermann/Franz could only have been a table servant. He doesn't match Walter Head's description of the man found in Patagonia, and can be eliminated.
Since we're only interested in finding which of these men may have been the one found in Argentina, we can also eliminate Hans Junge, who died on the Western Front in 1944. We can't eliminate Willy Arndt. What about "Fehrs Linge"? No such person existed. Why Misch (or his editor/ghostwriter) invented this name, is another mystery. We can eliminate Fehrs Linge.
Or can we?
Not until we consider the list that historian, Anton Joachimsthaler, offers in his book, The Last Days of Hitler (1996):
"SS-Oberscharführer Werner Schwiedel was responsible, together with the other orderlies Krueger, Wauer, Jakubeck, Fehrs, Becher and Arndt, for serving Hitler's guests. Hitler himself was served by Linge."
So, we've eliminated "Hans Junge" and "Fehrs Linge" but added Werner Schwiedel, Krueger, Wauer, Fehrs, Jakubek, and Becher. But we can't simply throw together valets and orderlies like that. Walter Head's description is clear: the man we're after spent "every minute at his [Hitler's] side and slept outside Hitler’s door". Therefore, we can eliminate the orderlies - Schwiedel, Wauer, and Jakubeck - but not the valets. However, the identity and position of "Fehrs" and "Becher" remains uncertain.
Where on earth did Joachimsthaler and Misch get the name Fehrs? The context leads us to naturally assume Fehrs is a last name. This assumption is backed by the following paragraph in Helmut Bukowski & Christel Trilus' book, "Fliegerhorst Schönwalde/Berlin: Ausbildungs und Erprobungsstätte der Luftwaffe, 1935-1945 (1999):
"On April 20, 1945 Sgt. Wilhelm Arndt (a wounded SS veteran twenty years old, who acted as one of Hitler's personal servants), along with one other soldier-valet named Fehrs, loaded ten trunks (metal containers), onto a truck. The trunks contained Hitler's personal property. Arndt dressed in full field uniform, and armed with a machine pistol, climbed in back of the truck with the trunks. The truck headed for Schönwalde airfield ten miles north of Berlin. Because of heavy attacks on Berlin, the Ju-352 did not take off until 5am morning of April 21. The pilot was Major Friedrich Gundlfinger, with Arndt, the trunks and 15 passengers. The Ju-352 had only been in the air for half an hour, when something went wrong. An Allied plane or even German Flak shot up the plane. It was seen just before 6am low over the tree tops, on fire. The large transport ploughed nose first into the ground, burning fiercely near Börnersdorf."
I know what you're probably thinking: since Heinz Linge was chief of Hitlers' valet staff, he'd know the men under him best. That makes sense. What did he tell his Soviet captors when he was a POW? While imprissoned at Tallinn, on Nov. 22, 1945, Linge's SMERSH interrogator noted the following:
"...Two of Hitler's valets were also sent to Berchtesgaden with the Führer's personal belongings. Remaining with the Führer were...Major LINGE and the SS valets STEFFELBAUER, KRÜGER".
So TWO (unnamed) Hitler valets were sent by plane to Berchtesgaden with Hitler's personal belongings. That means we're back to the names Arndt and Fehrs being aboard that fateful flight. We can check this, since there's a list of the names of the men and women who perished when this plane supposedly crashed:
1. Eugen Bassler (crew)
2. Friedrich Gundlfinger (pilot)
3. Wilhelm Budack (crew)
4. Hermann Schleef
5. Unknown Soldier
6. Max Fiebes (DOB 27.3.10)
7. Wilhelm Arndt
8. Unknown Woman
9. Unknown Woman
10. Gerhard Becker (crew)
11. Franz Westermaier (crew)
Where's Fehrs? Perhaps he's the "unknown soldier". Perhaps Fehrs never boarded that doomed plane. Either way, a different name on this list demands attention: "Gerhard Becker". What if this "Becker" is Joachimsthaler's "Becher"? If "Becher" and "Becker" are the same guy, then Becker could be the second of the two valets who were "sent to Berchtesgaden", and he can be eliminated as the man "found in Patagonia". In any case, if we believe this crash really happened and wasn't a part of the elaborate fraud perpetrated by Gerd Heidemann in support of his phony "Hitler Diaries", then we can eliminate Becher/Becker and Willy Arndt.
Back to Fehrs. There's only one Fehrs in the records of the SS: SS-Rottenfuhrer Rudolf Fehrs (SS Nr. 101 081). He was captured in the last days of the Battle of Berlin and held by the Soviets as a POW for a decade. Rudolf Fehrs' returned to West Germany in October of 1955, in the same group of returnees as Linge. Thereafter, he lived in Neumünster, passing away in 1979. He never spoke to the media and was never sought for questioning by Amrican or British intelligence. His grave stone in Neumünster's Südfriedhof indicates he was born in 1903, and he's listed in the Neumünster phone book, from 1955-1960. He was never in Argentina. At least we now know for sure that Fehrs didn't board the Ju-352 piloted by Gundlfinger, and that he can't be the "unknown soldier".
We've made some headway, but we'd better go back and check on what Heinz Linge said about the men who worked under him. Problem: in Linge's memoirs, With Hitler to the End, which first came out in 1980, he makes no mention of other valets - not one. Since this is an odd ommission, I turned to other public or written mentions by Linge of his fellow valets, and discovered that in over 80 public statements, articles, interviews, and on-camera appearances, he named one person, one time. Check out the pertinent sentences from October 25, 1955:
"...on the afternoon of April 25 ['45]...I received a message from Krüger, an under-valet. 'Linge', he told me urgently on the phone, 'the Führer wants to see you at once'."
Interesting. The reader will recall that Linge mentioned Krüger to the Soviets back in 1945. This 'under-valet' was obviously stationed by or near Hitler's private quarters in the Berlin Führerbunker. Linge wasn't on duty or "at hand" on that day, Krüger was. Of course, Linge never mentioned Krüger's first name, and nobody has figured it out.
To ID this Krüger, I turned to the diary of Hitler's long-term personal physician, Dr. Theo Morell, on the theory that in his many visits to Hitler that he'd encounter and perhaps might mention one or more of these gate keepers. My hunch was borne out. "Arndt" is mentioned in Morell's entry of December 10, 1944. His February 10, 1945, entry mentions "Hitler's valet Krüger". Morell's diary mentions only Linge, Arndt and Krüger as valets. Unfortunately, first names were not noted.
Before continuing with the Krüger investigation, I had to deal with Linge's mention of a valet named Steffelbauer to his Soviet interrogators in 1945. It's an uncommon name. The German Federal Archives, and the largest list of SS personnel includes the name Ferdinand Steffelbauer, born in 1904. Ferdinand was an officer of unknown rank who worked at the main office of the Ordnungspolizei in Berlin. Though the "Green Police" were technically integrated into the SS during WW2, nobody thought of them as SS, and nobody among Hitler's bodyguard or valets were Ordnungspolizei. The only other Steffelbauer was Eduard Steffelbauer, an SS-Unterscharführer born in 1898. He would have been 47 years old in 1945. Hitler's valets were all young men. Neither man fits Walter Head's description of the "bodyguard" who turned up in Argentina.
Sifting the Krügers
This investigation involved a time consuming audit of the SS personnel records. Given that "Krüger" is among the most common surnames in Germany, the Bundesarchiv is a veritable haystack of candidates. By applying a "Valet Profile" filter—specifically looking for men in Hitler's SS-Begleitkommando (Bodyguard) born between 1910 and 1920 who were physically present in the Führerbunker during the final breakout—the massive list could be whittled down. Most were eliminated by age, unit discrepancy, or confirmed postwar deaths in Germany. However, a singular, high-probability match emerged: SS-Untersturmführer Heinz Krüger (born April 7, 1914).
This Heinz Krüger fits the profile. While historical focus often remains fixed on Heinz Linge, records of the final hours in the Berlin bunker place this Heinz Krüger at the very epicenter of the suicide's aftermath. It was this Heinz Krüger who, along with SS-Oberscharführer Werner Schwiedel, was ordered by Linge to roll up the blood-stained rug from Hitler's sitting room and carry it into the Chancellery Garden for burning. Unlike Linge and Schwiedel, who were captured by the Soviets and spent a decade in captivity, the fate of SS-Untersturmführer Krüger is a historical "black hole." Listed merely as "vermisst" (missing) in Berlin, he vanished without a confirmed location of death.
The Architecture of Silence
The discovery of a witness who bolsters the official history is a public relations asset; a witness who contradicts it is a liability whose account needs to be supressed or burried. While researchers can find thousands of pages on the bunker witnesses, little to nothing about Heinz Krüger is known his boss and colleagues were strangely silent about him. We have Schwiedel's account. Why not Heinz Krüger's? As of the posting of this article, no record, document, or even a mention in a memo about the discovery of a former Hitler valet-guard has turned up. Nevertheless, I'm not giving up. If anyone has credible leads or information on this historical cold case, please use the Contact Page to reach out to me, or post it to the Facebook Group Hitler's End - Debating the Evidence.