Did Hitler Flee to Argentina? CIA Documents Resurface Amid JFK File Release

By: Fern Sidman

As newly declassified materials related to the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy continue to make headlines, another thread from the Cold War archives has captured renewed public interest — a CIA report that entertains the possibility that Adolf Hitler may have survived World War II and fled to South America, living for years under an assumed identity.

According to published reports, among the re-examined documents is a particularly intriguing three-page CIA report signed by David Brixnor, then-chief of the CIA station in Caracas, Venezuela, and dated July 26, 1963. The report was microfilmed as part of the wider CIA file collection linked to the Kennedy investigation, revealing an unexpected and chilling narrative about one of the most notorious figures of the 20th century.

The CIA document recounts a 1955 account passed on by an undercover informant codenamed “Cimelody-3.” According to the report, Cimelody-3 relayed information from Phillip Citroen, a former Nazi SS officer, who claimed to have had direct contact with Adolf Hitler — more than a decade after the dictator’s reported suicide in Berlin in April 1945.\

Citroen, then employed by the KNSM (Royal Dutch Steamship Company), allegedly made monthly trips from Maracaibo, Venezuela to Colombia, where he told the CIA source he would meet a man known as “Adolf Schrittelmayor” — who, he insisted, was none other than Hitler himself.

The document reads: “Phillip Citroen confidentially told him that Adolf Hitler is still alive.” According to Citroen’s account, Hitler was living among a community of former Nazis in Tunja, Colombia, where he was treated with near-reverent status by others who continued to refer to him as der Führer.

In the later sections of the same memo, Citroen claimed that Hitler left Colombia in January 1955 and relocated to Argentina. No further substantiating evidence was provided in the document, though photographs and other claims were alluded to, and the CIA ultimately concluded there was not enough reliable data to pursue the matter further at the time.

The notion that high-ranking Nazis fled Europe and took refuge in South America has long been supported by historical fact. Well-documented cases include Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Holocaust’s logistics, who lived in Argentina under the alias Ricardo Klement until he was captured by Israeli Mossad agents in 1960. Another case is that of Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death” from Auschwitz, who evaded capture for decades while hiding in Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil.

Unlike Eichmann and Mengele, however, Hitler’s survival has never been definitively proven — and has been the subject of both serious investigation and conspiracy theories since the war’s end. Allied forces claimed in 1945 that Hitler and Eva Braun died by suicide in the Führerbunker, their bodies burned in the garden of the Reich Chancellery. Soviet troops claimed to have recovered their remains, but inconsistencies in their reports, coupled with a lack of independently verifiable physical evidence, left the door open to speculation.

Although the CIA formally received Citroen’s claims via Cimelody-3, the agency did not consider the information actionable or credible enough to initiate a serious search. As the report indicates, the claims were filed without further investigation, and the identity of “Adolf Schrittelmayor” was never officially verified.

That said, the CIA’s preservation of the report and inclusion in the JFK-related archives has reignited debate about whether U.S. intelligence had reason to believe Hitler could have escaped and whether political calculations during the Cold War discouraged further inquiry.

The late David Brixnor’s signature on the report adds another layer of intrigue. As CIA station chief in Caracas — a hotbed of Nazi escapees in the post-war years — Brixnor’s position made him an important node in the CIA’s tracking of Axis fugitives. The fact that his office even entertained the possibility of Hitler’s survival enough to file a report suggests that U.S. intelligence agencies, at minimum, did not dismiss such claims outright.

The claim that Hitler fled to Argentina has been the subject of numerous books, documentaries, and speculative investigations. Most notably, journalist Abel Basti and authors like Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams have suggested that Hitler lived out his days in Patagonia, dying in the 1960s or 1970s.

In 2017, the FBI’s own declassified files revealed that tips and rumors of Hitler’s survival poured in throughout the 1940s and 1950s, many citing sightings in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Though none of these were substantiated, the consistency of such reports has continued to fuel public curiosity.

While the idea of Adolf Hitler surviving the war and escaping to South America is widely regarded as speculative and unsupported by concrete evidence, the CIA’s own documents show that U.S. intelligence was aware of such claims and cataloged them—even if they ultimately dismissed their veracity.

As the CIA document signed by David Brixnor illustrates, Cold War intelligence was filled with gray zones, competing narratives, and mysteries that remain unresolved to this day. The resurfacing of this report in the wake of the JFK assassination file release raises provocative questions not only about Hitler’s end, but also about the political boundaries of truth and conspiracy in a postwar world.

In the end, the theory that Hitler lived on in Argentina remains unproven, but the fact that it was taken seriously enough to be reported by CIA operatives is an enduring reminder of how history and myth continue to collide in the shadowy world of espionage.