Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 14, 1993 TAG: 9303140072
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: B-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILLIAM H. HONAN THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. LENGTH: Long
HITLER'S LETTERS TO BRAUN STILL AN UNSOLVED MYSTERY
On Jan. 15, investigators converged on a bleak, unpainted stucco hacienda at the fringe of the desert to acquire what they hoped would be one of the biggest publishing discoveries to come out of World War II: several hundred letters exchanged by Adolf Hitler and his mistress, Eva Braun.Historians have long suspected that many letters between Hitler and his mistress of more than 12 years still exist.
Because Hitler insisted that Braun remain at his Alpine villa, the Berghof, and only rarely allowed her to visit him in Berlin or at the various headquarters where he spent most of his time, a substantial correspondence developed between them. Hitler finally married Braun in his Berlin bunker on April 29, 1945, the day before they committed suicide.
If their correspondence still exists (and that is uncertain), it is one of the best-kept secrets of the last 50 years.
The people who came here in January included Michael Walsh, a writer for Time and Life magazines who is based in Munich; Marian Earnest, a London specialist in the authentication of artworks and documents; Norman Scott, a Florida treasure hunter who has recently turned his attention to "Nazi loot"; and one of Scott's financial backers who lives here in Albuquerque.
Kenneth D. Alford, a Richmond, Va., banker and amateur World War II historian, had given them 642 pages of U.S. government and Army documents about the correspondence that linked it to Robert A. Gutierrez, a retired real estate broker who lives at the house where the investigators converged.
Gutierrez, now 78, was a special agent in the Army's Counter Intelligence Corps in World War II and discovered many personal effects of Hitler and his mistress. Much of what he found - photo albums, eight reels of home movies made by Braun documenting her relationship with Hitler and a diary she kept for a few months in 1935 - is in the National Archives in Washington.
Previous investigators have established that Gutierrez, who rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel by the war's end, kept at least some of Braun's silverware and one of her dresses as souvenirs. For that reason, and because Gutierrez has never unequivocally denied that he has the Hitler-Braun correspondence, scholars, journalists, authors and souvenir hunters have worn a path to his door.
When the team led by Scott first approached Gutierrez late in 1992, he would neither confirm nor deny that he had the letters, but he agreed to receive the group in his home. When they arrived, they found him surrounded by four of his five children, including Col. Sidney M. Gutierrez, an Air Force officer who flew a nine-day mission in the space shuttle Columbia in June 1991.
The meeting dragged on for three days. The investigators were well aware that in April 1983 the German magazine Stern paid more than $3 million for some 60 handwritten volumes purporting to be Hitler's diaries, which later were exposed as fakes, but Scott made Gutierrez an offer anyway. Gutierrez soon ended the meeting, remaining as ambiguous about the Hitler-Braun correspondence as he had been at the start.
The story began on April 22, 1945, when Hitler ordered SS Oberfuehrer Johannes Goehler to destroy his and Braun's personal effects.
Goehler told his American interrogators after his capture that he had found two tin trunks containing hundreds of Hitler's and Braun's letters to each other at Fischhorn, a horse farm near Salzburg where they had been hidden. Goehler said there were also photo albums, eight reels of motion pictures, monogrammed silverware, gold watches, liquor and clothing.
Goehler said he had ordered Hauptsturmfuehrer Franz Konrad to burn or otherwise destroy all the items. Konrad, who was later hanged in Poland as a war criminal, gave Goehler a signed certificate of destruction.
The Goehler-Konrad story fell apart when Gutierrez discovered most and perhaps all of these personal effects hidden behind a false wall in a tool shed at Fischhorn. But the Hitler-Braun correspondence was not in the cache he turned over to Seventh Army headquarters. It was presumed that the letters had been burned by Konrad.
That explanation of the fate of the letters seemed credible until 1965, when Goehler's former wife, Ursula, told her story to David Irving, a British journalist and author. She said that after the war, when her husband had been interned, she had been employed by the U.S. Army's 307th Counter Intelligence Corps near Stuttgart and had developed a close personal relationship with a man named Gutierrez, who commanded the unit.
Gutierrez, she said, found the Hitler-Braun effects and kept the two tin trunks filled with letters. She spent many days reading through the letters, Irving said he had been told, and when Gutierrez was about to return to the United States, she packed them in his suitcase.
Eighteen years later, Willi Korte, a German scholar examining newly declassified files of the Army Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Meade, Md., found documents relating to Special Agent Gutierrez.
Korte said he had also found an undated letter from Konrad, the man who had been ordered to burn the letters, to his mother in Schladming, Austria, instructing her to "turn over the letters from Hitler and Eva Braun" to the American officer who presented her with the letter. Special Agent Gutierrez was not mentioned by name, but Korte said it was reasonable to assume that he had been the officer bearing the letter, since he had spent many hours interrogating Konrad.
Korte said that when he had asked Gutierrez if he had any of the Hitler-Braun effects in his possession, Gutierrez had at first insisted that he did not but later gave him 30 pieces of sterling silver flatware monogrammed E.B. and a silk gown, all of which he said had belonged to Eva Braun.