The CIA investigated whether Adolf Hitler was living in South America under an assumed identity a decade after the fall of Nazi Germany, according to declassified documents.
Agents opened a file in 1955 after being passed a photograph by an informant taken in Colombia of a man called “Adolf” who appeared extraordinarily similar to the fallen megalomaniac.
The picture was quietly declassified by the CIA in 2017, but has surfaced because Argentina—a country where senior Nazis fled to in 1945—is set to release its own secret post-war files.
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The document reveals that a friend of the informant claimed to have spoken to the Hitler look-a-like multiple times while visiting Colombia from Venezuela and even took a photo with him. The person told the informant that the man, who went by “Adolf Schrittelmayor,” departed Colombia for Argentina in January 1955. The file does not include any details about what their interactions looked like.
Despite noting that “enormous efforts could be expended on this matter with remote possibilities of establishing anything concrete,” the agency approved passing along this information for further investigation.
A second file, titled “Hitler hideout in Argentina” and dated from 1945, was also opened up by the agency. It describes a spa hotel in La Falda, Argentina, owned by friends and supporters of Hitler, where he could have fled if he survived the war.
The document claims that the spa’s proprietor had said that Hitler could find refuge there if he “should at anytime get into difficulty” and that it “had already made the necessary preparations.”
However, the documents offer no firm evidence that Hitler survived the war and there is no indication that the CIA continued to pursue the possibility after 1955.
The CIA has also released an autopsy report that supports the conclusion that Hitler killed himself on April 30 in Germany alongside his longtime romantic partner, Eva Braun.
Made public eight years ago, the documents are resurfacing in social media posts this week after the Trump administration released documents related to JFK’s assassination (containing no bombshells for conspiracy theorists) and ahead of Argentina’s planned release of documents on Nazi fugitives who came to the country after World War II.
But many of the posts about the CIA’s investigation of Hitler’s possible life in South America falsely suggest that the agency verified—or had any solid evidence at all—that he had actually survived.
The popular X account @_HistoryNerd wrote in a post, “BREAKING: The CIA just confirmed in declassified Argentina files that HITLER LEFT GERMANY and went to Argentina after WW2″—all of which is untrue.
It is estimated that thousands of Nazis, though, were able to flee to South America to evade capture and punishment for their war crimes using “ratlines”: escape routes from Germany to the region.
Some of them were later caught, tried, and executed—like Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazi officials chiefly responsible for carrying out the Holocaust. Others, such as Josef Mengele—the Nazi doctor known for carrying out heinous human experiments on Jewish Holocaust victims—were able to evade capture. Mengele died at age 67 of a stroke in a Brazilian swimming pool.
Martin Bormann, one of Hitler’s top lieutenants, was for many years rumored to have escaped to South America, but in 1973 forensic experts determined with near certainty that a skeleton unearthed in West Berlin the previous year was the Nazi. In 1998, it was confirmed by DNA.
