Walter Flegel, the man who for seven days was the Nazi leader Martin Bormann

Walter Wilhem Flegel, born in 1912 in Pagelinen, Insterburg province, East Prussia, a temporary worker at a sawmill in Chile, imprisoned for 11 years for theft in the Argentine province of Mendoza and finally an exemplary employee at a company in Buenos Aires, was Martin Bormann, Adolf Hitler’s most trusted man, between September 23 and 30, 1960.

Flegel’s story captured the attention of Argentines as the world searched everywhere for Nazi leaders who had fled Germany after the fall of the Third Reich. A mysterious list alerted them that this humble German was none other than Bormann himself, who had vanished like a ghost on April 30, 1945, from the Führer’s bunker and reappeared dozens of times in places as far apart as Moscow, Cape Town, Sydney, and Bariloche, in the Argentine Andes. Bormann was now hiding in a small wooden house he built with his own hands in Zárate, 100 kilometers from Buenos Aires, with his wife and three young daughters, whom he saw only once a week because he worked as a night watchman in the warehouses that Construcciones Claussen operated in the Argentine capital.

Flegel was famous for a week, much to his chagrin, as evidenced by the more than 100 pages devoted to his arrest in the Argentine police archives on the Nazi issue, declassified in 1992 and made available online last week at the initiative of Javier Milei’s government. Among the hundreds of documents, the most notable are photos of a skinny man with a bony face, posing for the camera with a combination of surprise and stupor. The police report from that day describes Flegel as a man who “expresses himself fluently and without inhibitions, revealing a moderate level of culture” and the “psyche of an ordinary man.” “The palpebral fissure [the eye opening] is small, the eyes are brown with a senile arch, the nose, with a somewhat concave back, ends in a point, vaguely reminiscent of a duck’s beak, is of medium size,” wrote the police expert. A little closer inspection reveals that Flegel is missing his right arm.

The man who was, supposedly, Bormann had arrived in Chile in 1930 “as a crew member on a 10,000-ton cargo ship” and dedicated himself to “rural work.” “It was during these duties that in July 1931, a mill’s transmission belt tore off his entire right arm,” the police report states. Given the difficulties in Chile, Flegel crossed the Andes mountain range to Argentina, “on horseback,” to the province of Mendoza. “It was there that his situation became unbearable, which is why he had to turn to crime to survive. On one occasion, in April 1932, he attempted to rob a business and was discovered by one of the caretakers, whom he wounded with his revolver,” reads one of the declassified documents.

Flegel was imprisoned until 1935, and once released, he “stole a horse.” “The owner attacked him with whips, and Flegel defended himself with a revolver.” Sentenced to six years in prison, he was released again in 1943. From then on, Flegel’s life was that of a nomad, earning a living as a street vendor, until, in 1944, Construcciones Claussen hired him as a night watchman. Sent by the company to Corrientes, on the border with Brazil and Paraguay, Flegel met Haydee Colinett, a 16-year-old girl whom he married in 1947 after “having obtained the necessary permission from her father.” In 1948, Flegel finally settled in Zárate, in the house where he would be arrested 12 years later by two plainclothes police officers. In his statement, he told police that he “only dedicates himself to work, not attending meetings or clubs, nor does he frequent the neighborhood or socialize with fellow citizens.”

The Argentine press had a field day with the fake Bormann. Today we know that the Nazi leader had been dead for 15 years when Flegel was imprisoned, but his arrest then brought the democratic government of Arturo Frondizi into the spotlight. The diplomatic messages sent by Germany to Buenos Aires are evidence of the interest the case aroused. Common sense, however, was on the side of the detainee: while his features could have caused some confusion, “it would have been easy for the police to determine that Flegel was not Bormann, simply considering that the former is 48 years old and the latter 60,” wrote the newspaper La Razón in an editorial.

From Germany came the testimony of a sister, while the Israeli tabloid press claimed there was no doubt Bormann had been caught in Argentina. The newspaper La Razón revealed from Argentina, “based on sources that leave no room for doubt,” that Bormann frequented a bar at 545 Lavalle Street in Buenos Aires. “There, the ‘Brown Eminence,’ the man in whom Hitler placed his trust, while sipping his favorite drink, beer, engaged in conversation with other leaders of the Third Reich, including Adolf Eichmann.” According to the press, the testimony of Eichmann, who had fled to Argentina, was the source of the lead to Flegel, a fact that the Israeli government was keen to deny.

The “unimpeachable” source turned out to be an Italian doctor who had met Bormann in Munich and told La Razón that he had seen him several times at the bar on Lavalle Street, that he dressed “elegantly,” and that “his artificial right hand was covered with a black leather glove.” The newspaper concluded by lamenting that Argentina had been “a refuge for Nazis, protected by powerful figures.”

In the absence of social media, the residents of Zárate were responsible for fueling all kinds of fake news. In a box titled “Doubts,” a special correspondent stated that “some obscure details” suggested that Flegel, while not Bormann, “could well be an individual linked to the Hitler regime.” The journalist then quotes local resident Moisés Fridman: “The police came on Friday to protect Flegel, who was already surrounded by Israeli commandos. They knew his whereabouts because of Eichmann’s denunciation.” A certain H. García, a public auctioneer, recounted that in 1952 Flegel’s wife told him that her husband had been a crew member of the battleship Graf Spee and that “that was why he was prohibited from entering the country.” The Nazi cruiser Graf Spee was scuttled by its captain in the Río de la Plata on December 17, 1939, after Flegel had been in Argentina for almost a decade.

“Bormann’s fingerprints are not yet available [they would arrive from Germany only at the end of November], but it can now be established concretely that Walter Flegel is not Martin Bormann,” declared Interior Minister Alfredo Vitolo on September 30, 1960. The main argument was that Flegel had been in Argentina since 1931. Then the political repercussions began. In an editorial dated October 5, the German-language newspaper Argentiniesches Tageblatt, published in Buenos Aires, wondered “why the bluff” of arresting Flegel. The newspaper emphasized that the arrest was based on “a list of 20 names of Nazi war criminals residing in Argentina” submitted to the government. “And Flegel was consciously chosen from among those 20 names by certain people who had no desire to arrest real Nazi war criminals,” the newspaper concluded.

On September 30, 1960, Flegel was finally released. Waiting for him at the entrance to the Federal Police headquarters were “Engineer Claussen,” who had always maintained his employee’s innocence, and dozens of journalists. Stunned by the questions, Flegel explained that he had encountered Hitler “during a meeting in Allestein in 1927, but nothing more after that”; that he only spoke “poor” German and Spanish; and that he wouldn’t return to Germany because he didn’t have the means to do so. The next day, the now-defunct Argentine newspaper El Mundo concluded its report thus: “Yesterday, Flegel, a modest worker forged by hard work, returned to his routine as warehouse manager at the Claussen & Co. building at Alsina 465. It may be a desperately monotonous routine, but tranquility and anonymity are sometimes invaluable gifts.”

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