The Official Nonsense Thread

[Minty]

My favourite conspiracy theory currently is Heinrich Himmler survived WW2 by escaping to Sweden after the allies were duped into capturing a pretend Himmler. Two people were convinced to their dying day the swine managed to escape justice - Kim Philby and Walter Schellenberg.

Philby was working for MI6 in WW2 & became suspicious about Himmler's death - not least of all the way his corpse was buried in a secret location "no one knew about", only to be dug back up again & cremated months later after the post-mortem results became public (other documents about Himmler are hidden under the Official Secrets Act until 2020!), which revealed the "Himmler" they'd buried lacked the prominent Y shaped duelling scar on his left cheek & a bullet wound, not the sort of detail a pathologist would miss.

Walter Schellenburg, the former head of the SD (the SS's version of MI6) & Coco Chanel's lover, was puzzled why he'd not been executed like all other high ranking Nazis, even more so when he only did a few years in prison when most involved in spying could expect a life sentence at least, & wondered the allies feared he might spill the beans about something he "knew" on the gallows (always a popular place to blurt out a last minute confession!) or if he knew he was never going to get out of prison (he was writing his memoirs at the time).

He later learned that Ernst Kaltenbruner (Security Chief of Nazi Germany) had given a sneaky smirk when asked to formally identify Himmler's corpse before the post-mortem (as per protocol), & Rudolph Hoess (Commandant of Auschwitz) has remarked in his memoirs before his execution that on the day Himmler had called all the top SS officers in & told them they were to flee, he was looking very happy & jaunty unlike previous weeks where he'd appeared strained.

Was this because he'd already devised a cunning plan where the allies would capture a fake Himmler (someone with a remarkable resemblence to him he'd encountered by chance) trying to hide in the regular army after a "tip off", leaving the way clear for him to bolt for Sweden with no one attempting to stop someone that looked like Himmler because the Pathe newsreels were saying they'd already caught him, only to discover later they'd been had? If so, logic would suggest Schellenburg would have known all about it considering his position - unless of course Himmler had kept this particular trick up his sleeve hidden from everyone. He always was a slippery git.

Both Philby & Schellenburg thought so, & went to Sweden of their own accord looking for clues but found nothing, Schellenburg soon died of cancer and Philby was forced to flee for his life to Russia after being unmasked as part of the famous Philby-Burgess-McLean-Blunt Soviet spy ring. We'll have to wait until 2020 perhaps to find out if they were right.

But here's something for you to see for yourselves. In the Imperial War Museum in London, Himmler's death mask is on display, taken from the corpse at the post-mortem back in 1945. Here's a picture of it on the left side.




Can you see any Y shaped duelling scar? I can't!