the shocking story that reveals his time in Cordoba

“A cousin”. This was announced to Catalina. This is how she saw him and this is how she took care of him by bringing him breakfast and lunch for about a week. For this teenage girl, who had been adopted by the German marriage of Walter and Ida Eichhorn, for whom she was cleaning, the man who stayed at the guesthouse was a relative from Germany. His face, his gesture, they were familiar to him as well, although biologically it had nothing to do with it, as Catalina was called Gamero. But since he saw the “relative” he was sure that his last name was Hitler.

And he didn’t feel that a ghost was presented to him. Perhaps because in those years, in the late 1940s, communications weren’t as smooth and the ability to overhear had a different flight than today. But this man she claimed to have seen up close in 1949 had “officially” committed suicide on April 30, 1945, when the war was desperately lost to the Nazis after the Soviet army had taken over Berlin. This event marked the beginning of the end of World War II and, also, the beginning of one of the greatest myths and mysteries in contemporary history. Did Hitler commit suicide in his bunker or was he staged and ran away?

At that time, German radio left no doubt about Hitler’s death with his young wife, Eva Brown. “Our Führer, Adolf Hitler, fell this afternoon at his command post in the Reich Chancellery fighting to his last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany,” said a statement to which, later, the Reich naval chief Karl Dönitz – who would later be sentenced at the Nuremberg trials – completed by revealing that their leader had had “the death of a hero”.

Death hitler

The media and the news of Hitler’s death.

However, as of that moment, some did not believe the official version. The New York Times, for example, published an article the next day in which its correspondent in Germany questioned the veracity of Hitler’s suicide announcement, calling him a “master of lies” and claiming that “he attempts to commit a great fraud ”. . final before the world in an effort to save itself ”. And he quotes former political prisoners of Nazism, who claimed the dictator was “so criminal he couldn’t even die honestly.”

The Soviets, through Josef Stalin, were the first to follow up on reports that Hitler had fled. For some, it was a strategy to smear the United States, a country which, although it fought Nazism during the war, had something that attached it to the ideology of National Socialism: its contempt for the Communism. Over time, we realized that few Nazis had found refuge in North America …

Hitler? In the theoretical context of its escape and survival after the war, South America became its main refuge, as it also was for other Nazi leaders. The secret FBI files declassified half a century after the end of the war made it secure; also various journalistic investigations in the form of television documentaries and books, such as those of journalist Abel Basti, who searched for evidence that the Nazi leader was living clandestinely in Argentina, among other countries in the region, after the end of World War II. global.

This journey, which began on the Rio Negro coast of the Argentine Sea, in addition to passing through Patagonia, found accommodation, support and confinement in the province of Cordoba, more precisely in the Punilla Valley, in the town of La Falda. The Hotel Eden was working there previously, a VIP accommodation place with ultra modern technology for Argentina at that time, although when Hitler passed, in reality, it was no longer functioning as a hotel because our country had officially declared war on the Axis at the end of March 1945, a month and a half before the German surrender, leaving only Japan in combat until September 2 after the fall of the second atomic bomb, in Nagasaki, and the government National seized this building and used it as a “prison”. Japanese diplomats, now prisoners of war.

Hitler in Argentina

Walter and Eva Eichhorn had taken over the hotel in the first decades of the century when the area was practically a wasteland that developed around the Hotel Edén. This luxury hotel required supplies and manpower, and the area has grown at its own pace. “Eden” was also a descriptive name, as it was heavenly accommodation. And with a level of industrialization typical of the most developed countries, especially in what had to do with hygiene (there were modern washing machines for linen and linen, with water drawn from sources) because tuberculosis was a scourge that strongly affected the country especially in the first half of the twentieth century and cleaning care was essential. The hotel took strict care of these details, as well as the food (there was a refrigerator), importing most of the food, while water and wine were only served packaged. It was a real revolution in the national hotel industry, with world-class services, such as electric light generators, a first telegraph then a telephone, an 18-hour golf course, an Olympic swimming pool, horse rides at through the mountains and a cinema.

Hitler in Argentina

The Eichhorns embraced Nazi ideology from the start and joined the Nazi Party in the early 1920s. But, above all, they were financiers of Nazism. Europe emerged from World War I and would soon enter World War II, while Argentina was a land of immigration and a prosperous and wealthy land. Here the money was collected to be sent to Germany. And not only did they make a great contribution to the cause that Hitler was championing, but they also turned the hotel and the whole area into a Nazi stronghold. As Alfred Rosemberg and his Nazi worldview asserted, where there was German blood, the land belonged to them. Eden and its surroundings were their construction and it was a kind of parallel state.

During one of their trips to another “class A” hotel of the time and also with strong Nazi roots, the Hotel Viena, in Laguna de Mar Chiquita (Córdoba), the Eichhorn couple met the family of Catalina Gamero, the fifteen-year-old who he attended to Hitler and that years later he would confirm his passage through La Falda. The young woman lived in Miramar, a town with beaches in the Laguna, which is the second largest salt water in South America. The certainty that the mountain climate would be more favorable to his health, as well as in La Falda, with the German family, he would find food, an education and a good life, favored the move. With the Eichhorn, he finished learning household chores, becoming a kind of personal assistant. They adopted her and she lived with them in the house which was about 200 meters from the hotel. It was in this chalet that Aldolf Hitler stayed.

Hitler in Argentina

The Eichhorn found Hitler in Germany.

While the Third Reich was in force, Walter and Ida used to travel to Germany and spend time in their country every year (they alternated their lives between La Falda and Berlin). During one of these trips, Hitler himself decorated and thanked them at a specially organized event, for the collaboration and disposition that the Eichhorn had towards German National Socialism. It was May 1935 and the party took place at the German Chancellery itself. The diploma, written in the hand of the Führer, read “dear comrade Einchhorn: since your accession in 1924, you and your wife have supported the National Socialist movement with an enormous spirit of sacrifice and wise action, and I personally, since it was their financial support which allowed me – in the truest sense of the word – to continue guiding my organization ”.

As the journalist Abel Basti revealed, moreover “there are innumerable crossed letters which prove the fluid link between marriage and Hitler”. The investigator also ensured that Catalina Gamero’s version was confirmed by a local journalist who, as a teenager, entered Walter and Ida’s house and saw photos of them with Hitler, as well as letters from after -war. And that there is an FBI document, which he reproduces in one of his books, which says that “since 1945 everything was prepared in La Falda to receive Hitler and the informant was the gardener of the family”. During his stay in this city of Cordoba, the Führer, in addition to having been in the Eichhorn house next to Eden, was then transferred to another of their houses, on the hill Pan de Azúcar (Cosquín), before to continue towards Misiones., The jungle and go to Paraguay, where since 1954 the dictator, and linked to his ideology, Alfredo Stroessner had already reigned.

Hitler in Argentina

Old Eden Hotel, owners’ silver wedding anniversary (1937)

The Argentine government, already with Juan Domingo Perón in the presidency, returned the hotel to the family that owns it two years after seizing it and it was put up for sale. Over time, Eden was a ruin until in 1998 it passed into the hands of the municipality of La Falda, which declared it a Municipal Historic Monument. Currently it is open to the general public although it does not function as a guesthouse but as a “Cultural and Historical Leisure Complex”, which includes day and night tours, while work continues for its restoration and its total development.

Its century-old history, which began in 1897, when the Prussian officer Roberto Bahlcke bought the 900 hectares of Estancia La Falda de la Higuera, is crossed by another story, that of its Nazi owners, the Eichhorn, and its shortwave antenna. the speeches of Hitler in the days of the Third Reich, the giant autographed portrait of the Führer which dominated the stage of the meeting room, the porcelain which displayed Nazi symbolism and the greetings raising his arm. And for the greatest myth and mystery of the twentieth century: Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945? If this never happened, as documents, journalistic investigations and Catalina Gamero have said, Adolf Hitler took refuge in Argentina and passed through the Hotel Edén.