October 2, 2009

Given reports of Adolf Hitler’s escape to his lunar base, you just can’t be too careful anymore

The Führer is with us still –- or so some think. After American researchers claimed, in a History Channel documentary broadcast in the United States, that the skull fragments of Adolf Hitler held in the Russian federal archives are those of a woman, conspiracy theorists were re-energised to claim that Hitler escaped from the bunker and is living abroad.

Perhaps that should be in the past tense since, if he is still alive, the twinkling-eyed mass murderer is 120 years of age and eligible for admission to the Guinness Book of Records for yet another reason: longevity. The London-based Daily Telegraph has now done a roundup of the various theories relating to Hitler’s alleged survival and they make interesting reading.

One theory is that Hitler fled on one of two U-Boats –- U-530 and U-977 –- in the so-called “ghost convoy” to Argentina and started a new life there. A variation on the same theme suggests that he escaped in a U-Boat to the Antarctic and was found there in the late 1950s by American and British forces which destroyed his base with atomic weapons. The obvious question is: why nuke him, why not just arrest him? In fact, a U-Boat could not have penetrated the winter ice of Antarctica and the atomic explosions in the southern hemisphere in 1958 took place high up in the atmosphere.

I much prefer the ultimate counter-knowledge text on the issue which claims that Nazi rocket technology was more advanced than the Allies realised, so that Hitler was able to escape to the Moon. A variation suggests that the Nazis had made contact with UFOs and established a base on the Moon, where the air is breathable and the environment habitable, but NASA claims otherwise, to keep other nations from exploring there.

The beauty of the lunar thesis is that it cross-fertilises another famous conspiracy theory: that the Moon landing was simulated in a Hollywood studio. If the Moon is in the hands of the Third Reich, the US flag cannot truly be flying there. Then we get into all the geometric technicalities of how the shadow of the flag was lying in the wrong direction. Better not to go into all that again, at a time when NASA is fighting for funding.

My own view is that these rococo theories are really off-the-wall, when the obvious explanation is staring us in the face. If the Hitler skull belongs to a woman, that does not necessarily make it a fake. What if Hitler was a woman all along? That Charlie Chaplin moustache always looked a bit phoney. The further objection is that the skull allegedly belongs to a woman under 40, but Hitler was 56 when he died. So what? Women lie about their age –- in fact that characteristically female trait strengthens my case, though admittedly women usually reduce rather than inflate their age.

It should be added that the Russian archive authorities deny that the researchers ever visited their premises and insist they would not have been allowed to take away such historic material for analysis. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? They will be telling us next that Elvis is really dead.