The former tennis champion Boris Becker has backtracked after airing a debunked theory that Adolf Hitler faked his suicide and escaped to South America at the end of the Second World War.
There is overwhelming consensus among expert historians that the dictator took his own life in a Berlin command bunker on April 30, 1945, as the Red Army advanced into the city.
Ever since then, however, myths have circulated to the effect that his death was a sham and he had in fact been smuggled across the Atlantic by submarine. This week Becker, 57, gave fresh oxygen to the old canard on his social media account on X.
Referring to a post from a popular history account that suggested Hitler had been seen in Argentina in 1955, Becker wrote: “Wow … What’s wrong with all the movies that claimed Hitler died in Germany & Austria…”
After coming under heavy criticism, he deleted the post a few hours later. Christian-Oliver Moser, a lawyer acting for Becker, insisted that his client had not meant to endorse the theory, but simply to express his “astonishment” at it.
“Inasmuch as his tweet was misunderstood, he regrets this and for this reason he deleted it immediately,” Moser told the German Press Agency.
The notion that Hitler might have lived on in South America has a long pedigree. Initially put about by Soviet propagandists, it took on a life of its own and in the 1980s it was so widespread that the Franco-American polymath George Steiner turned it into a literary novel, The Portage to San Cristobal of AH.
It was also the subject of a 2014 British documentary that has been roundly dismissed by professional historians.
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The tweet Becker picked up referred to a declassified report from the CIA’s station chief in Caracas in 1955, who said one of his agents had heard second-hand of a purported former SS trooper called Phillip Citroen who claimed that an “Adolph Hitler” was still alive and based in Argentina.
The file also included a grainy photograph that supposedly depicted Hitler, posing under the pseudonym Adolf Schrittelmayor, in the Colombian city of Tunja.
The CIA report is genuine and was released in 2017. Yet the station chief who submitted it described the story as “fantastic”, presumably in the sense of far-fetched.
There is also extensive archival evidence demonstrating that Hitler did in fact shoot himself dead in the Führerbunker and the German judge investigating his death in 1956 ruled that there was “no longer the slightest doubt” about the matter.
Becker, a three-times Wimbledon champion and former BBC pundit, was expelled from the UK after being released from prison in 2023, following a conviction for concealing £2.5 million from his bankruptcy trustees.
