The release of some of the last of the government’s files concerning the assassination of President John F. Kennedy got seriously buried by other news. It was already pretty clear by the amount of material being dumped into the public domain that any news coming out of the release of the files would be buried by the sheer volume of the material. But that doesn’t make what The Miami Herald found any less weird.

But a handful of recently-declassified CIA documents, unveiled with the highly anticipated JFK files last week, show that the Central Intelligence Agency was investigating whether Hitler escaped from Europe and was hiding in Colombia in 1954. The first document, dated Oct. 3, 1955, says that an unnamed CIA agent referred to as “CIMELODY-3” was contacted by “a trusted friend who served under his command in Europe and who is presently residing in Maracaibo (Venezuela).” That friend, who also remained anonymous, told the CIA agent that a former German SS trooper named Phillip Citroen told him that Hitler was actually still alive — and that the former dictator could no longer be prosecuted as a criminal of war because it had been over 10 years since the end of World War II.

According to that CIA memo, Citroen told a former member of the CIA base in Maricaibo that he met a person “who strongly resembled and claimed to be” Hitler in “Residencias Coloniales,” which was located in Tunja, Colombia. The document says that Citroen claimed many former Nazis were living in that area — and that they held the alleged Hitler in high esteem, “addressing him as ‘der Fuhrer’ and affording him the Nazi salute and storm-trooper adulation.” But the CIA remained skeptical — in a letter dated Nov. 4, 1955, higher-ups casted doubt on the reports. “It is felt that enormous efforts (spent trying to confirm the rumors) could be expanded on this matter with remote possibilities of establishing anything concrete,” the letter said. “Therefore, we suggest that this matter be dropped.”

Spoilsports.

Obviously, this is an example of the amount of free-floating Strange that piles up in intelligence documents. It’s also a star-spangled argument in favor of the need for the History Channel, which has made a series out of this very topic. It’s not of the caliber of work done by The Most Awesome Man On Television, but they got a second season out of it.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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