It sounds like a bad supermarket tabloid headline from the nineties. You know the ones—"Elvis spotted at a Kansas gas station" or "Batboy found in Oregon cave." But when the National Archives started dumping thousands of previously classified documents related to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, there it was. A declassified memo, dated October 3, 1955, sitting right there in the official records.
The document suggested that Adolf Hitler didn't actually die in a bunker in Berlin in 1945. Instead, it claimed he was alive and well in Colombia in the mid-fifties.
People lost their minds.
Naturally, the internet did what the internet does. Conspiracy theorists claimed this was the "smoking gun" that proved the official history of World War II was a lie. But if you actually sit down and read the Hitler in JFK files documents, the reality is a lot more nuanced—and, honestly, a lot more like a game of historical "telephone" gone wrong.
What the CIA actually heard in 1955
Let’s look at the source. The memo came from the CIA’s station chief in Caracas, Venezuela, a guy named David Brixnor. He wasn't saying he saw Hitler. He was reporting what an informant, code-named CIMELODY-3, had told him.
CIMELODY-3 had been contacted by a former German SS trooper named Phillip Citroen. According to Citroen, Hitler was living in a town called Tunja, Colombia. He even claimed that the local Germans there followed this man around with "an idolatry of the Nazi past," calling him "der Führer" and giving him the Nazi salute.
It gets weirder.
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Citroen even provided a photograph. It shows two men sitting on a bench. One of them looks strikingly like Adolf Hitler—mustache, side-parted hair, the whole bit. On the back of the photo, it said "Adolf Schüttelmayor, Tunga, Colombia, 1954."
Why this ended up in the JFK assassination records
You’re probably wondering why on earth a 1955 report about a Nazi in South America is buried in a file about an American president murdered in 1963. It feels random.
It isn't.
Under the JFK Records Act of 1992, the government was required to release everything that had even a tangential connection to the investigation. Because some of the agents involved in the Kennedy investigation had previously worked on monitoring former Nazis or Latin American intelligence leads, their entire personnel files and relevant station reports were swept into the collection.
So, it’s not that the CIA thought Hitler killed JFK. It’s just that the bureaucratic vacuum cleaner of the National Archives sucked up every piece of paper touched by certain intelligence officers. That's how we got the Hitler in JFK files mystery. It's a byproduct of transparency, not a hint at a deeper conspiracy between the Third Reich and Lee Harvey Oswald.
The CIA didn't actually believe it
Here is the part most people skip. If you keep reading the files, you see the follow-up.
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The CIA station in Bogota checked into the story. They were skeptical from the jump. In a separate memo, they basically called it a "fantastic" story—and not "fantastic" as in great, but "fantastic" as in "this sounds like a fairy tale." They noted that "neither the contact [CIMELODY-3] nor the station is in a position to give an intelligent evaluation of the information."
Basically, they thought it was a rumor.
Eventually, the CIA dropped the matter. Why? Because they couldn't find any concrete evidence, and they figured it was a "wild" lead. They weren't "covering it up" so much as they were moving on to actual threats during the Cold War. In the mid-fifties, the agency was a lot more worried about Soviet influence in the Caribbean than a guy with a mustache in a small Colombian town.
The death in the bunker remains the fact
Historians like Hugh Trevor-Roper and Ian Kershaw have spent decades piecing together the final days of the Berlin bunker. We have the charred remains. We have the dental records. We have the testimony of the people who were actually there, like Hitler’s valet Heinz Linge and his secretary Traudl Junge.
They saw the bodies. They helped burn them.
Could Hitler have escaped? Theoretically, anything is possible in the world of spy fiction. But the logistical reality of getting the most recognizable man in the world out of a totally encircled city, across an ocean, and into a public life in Colombia is, frankly, absurd.
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What's more likely? Phillip Citroen was lying, or he was being pranked, or he met a lookalike who was enjoying the attention. History is full of "pretenders." After the Russian Revolution, dozens of women claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia. None of them were.
Why we still care about the Hitler in JFK files
I think we’re obsessed with this because it touches on the "Great Escape" trope. We want to believe that the world’s biggest villains didn't get off that easily. There is a certain terrifying mystery to the idea that a monster could just vanish and live out his days in a quiet South American village.
But the Hitler in JFK files serve a better purpose as a lesson in intelligence gathering. They show us how "raw intelligence" works. Not everything a spy hears is true. In fact, most of it is garbage. A station chief’s job is to record everything, even the crazy stuff, just in case.
When you see these documents today, you're seeing the raw, unedited "inbox" of the CIA. It’s messy. It’s full of dead ends.
How to research the JFK files yourself
If you want to dig deeper into the Hitler in JFK files without falling down a rabbit hole of fake news, here is exactly how to handle it.
- Access the National Archives directly. Don't rely on screenshots from social media. Go to the National Archives (NARA) website. You can search the database for "CIMELODY-3" or "Adolf Hitler" to see the original scans.
- Read the marginalia. Often, the most important part of these documents is the handwritten notes in the margins or the "routing slips." These tell you how senior officers reacted to the info. In this case, they reacted with extreme skepticism.
- Cross-reference with the DNA evidence. In 2017, a team of French pathologists was finally allowed to examine the teeth and skull fragments held in Moscow. The results were published in the European Journal of Internal Medicine. The teeth matched Hitler's dental records perfectly. No doubt. No escape.
- Compare dates. Note that the memo was written in 1955, ten years after the war ended. If the CIA had truly believed Hitler was alive, the response would have been an international manhunt involving thousands of agents, not a couple of bored memos between Caracas and DC.
The real story isn't that Hitler escaped. The real story is that in the chaotic aftermath of World War II, rumors were the primary currency of the underground, and even the CIA had to spend time filtering out the noise.
Actionable Insight: When you encounter a "shocking" declassified document, always look for the evaluation code. Intelligence agencies often grade reports from A (reliable) to F (unreliable) and 1 (confirmed) to 6 (cannot be judged). The Hitler report was never given a high reliability rating. Always check the "Evaluation" section of a memo before sharing it as fact.