The Pittsburgh Press (January 22, 1946)
Hitler looks like a natural to play role in history’s ‘Realm of the Living Dead’
Officially only dust but you can be sure he’ll turn up… often – corpses always ‘coming to life’
By John Elfreth Watkins, North American Newspaper Alliance
WASHINGTON – According to Walter Schellenberg, head of the Nazis’ late Intelligence Service, Adolf Hitler was killed by a hypodermic needle last April 27. But British Intelligence reports have stated that he and his bride of one day, Eva Braun, entered into a suicide pact and died together on April 30 in the bunker of the Reichs-Chancellery, Berlin – he by pistol shot, she by poison, their bodies later being soaked in gasoline, burned until unrecognizable, then crushed to powder and buried.
Despite these official announcements declaring Der Fuehrer dead, Adolf has since been reported alive in Patagonia and various scattered spots. He and Eva were “seen” disembarking from the German submarine U-530 which surrendered to Argentina early last July. And Eva was reported in Munich three months later.
It is a safe bet that, until it can be computed that these two personages would be centenarians if still alive, they will be “discovered,” together or separately, in various parts of the world. For they will have joined that innumerable caravan of historic figures relegated to the “Realm of the Living Dead.”
Napoleon seen on boat
After his death, Napoleon Bonaparte was “seen” by boatmen crossing the English Channel as if in final consummation of his ambition to invade Britain. When Napoleon fled from Elba in 1815 at the head of an army of 600, Michel Ney, Marshal of France, was sent by King Louis XVIII to capture him.
Instead, Ney knelt before his former commander and brought him victorious to Paris. For this reason, Ney was sentenced to execution. On December 5, 1815, after his corpse had dropped to the dust before a firing squad, his body, according to history, was sealed within a leaden case buried inside an oaken casket.
After the Marshal’s funeral, Philip Petrie, a sailor on the deck of a ship in Bordeaux border, saluted a ruddy figure who inquired: “Who do you think I am?”
“My old commander, Marshal Ney,” Petrie replied.
“Marshal Ney was executed two days ago in Paris,” explained the stranger, who, during the voyage to Charleston, South Carolina, was said to have remained in hiding. A few weeks afterward, French immigrants, saluting a figure in a street in Georgetown, South Carolina, cried out: “Mon Dieu! Le Marechal Ney!” whereupon the saluted figure vanished.
Tells of ‘confession’
Years later, Mrs. Mary Dalton of Iredell County, South Carolina, stated that an erudite French schoolmaster of the neighborhood had, on his deathbed, confessed to her that he was “Peter” Ney, saved from execution by Wellington, who had arranged with his executioners to fire over his head.
But the Marshal’s intimates remembered him as an unschooled though brave man, utterly unequipped to teach school. The son of a humble cooper, he had entered the army as a private.
This escape from execution theme goes back to Joan of Arc. According to our school books, the lovely body of the sainted Maid of Orleans was consumed in flames, and her ashes were thrown into the Seine. But thousands of people in Orleans were sure that they saw her later.
One account had it that the English frustrated her executioners by widening the circle of soldiers and churchmen surrounding her pyre to such a distance that an effigy was burned in her stead and that she was thus allowed to escape.
Eight years later, her brothers, Jehan and Pierre, reported her as alive in Orleans. And one story had it that she later married a country gentleman, Robert des Armoises. Court records dated 1476 were said to contain the testimony of a parish priest that in 1472, forty years after execution, her family was entertaining her as their honored guest.
‘Lives’ for 200 years
Don Sebastian, king of Portugal, was killed in the battle of Lxor, Morocco, in 1578, but, for as long as 200 years afterward, he was believed by Portuguese citizens to be hiding in various parts of the world. Six years after his successor’s coronation, he was “discovered” in Spain. And as late as 1807, he was awaited to deliver Portugal from Napoleon.
History states that the Dauphin (Crown Prince) of France, son of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, died in the Temple Prison, Paris, June 8, 1795, at the age of 10. But the day before her death, 19 years later, Napoleon’s widow, Josephine, stated that the Dauphin (titular King Louis XVII) was still alive. If her story was true, the then King Louis XVIII, brother of Louis XVI, was a usurper.
After this, Louis XVII was spotted in at least 40 different places. The most conspicuous of these arrivals from the realm of the living dead was a Berlin watchmaker known as Naundorff.
Taking advantage of rumors that he was Louis XVII, he made up a story that another child had been substituted for the Dauphin in the Temple, and had died there; that he, the real Dauphin, had been allowed to escape through Italy after he had been held in a dungeon by Napoleon.
The king of Prussia, learning of Naundorff, used him to blackmail Louis XVIII into making treaty concessions disadvantageous to France. But, foolishly; Naundorff wrote to Louis XVI’s daughter, the Duchesse d’Angouleme, claiming to be her lost brother, and as a result Louis XVIII’s secret agents persecuted him until he escaped to Delft, Holland, where he died in 1845, and where his tombstone states:
Here Rests
Louis XVII
Charles-Louis, Duke of Normandie
King of France and Navarre
Born at Versailles
March 27, 1785
Died at Delft
August 10, 1845
While Louis Philippe was king of France, his son, the Prince de Joinville, came to America. There was a story that while here he went hunting for the lost Dauphin who, if really alive, would have dethroned his father.
The Prince de Joinville was told that the Dauphin when about 10 had been brought to northern New York by two French noblemen who had paid a half-breed farmer and his Indian wife to adopt him and give him their name, Williams.
Sells his ‘rights’
So, according to this story, the Dauphin was none other than Eleazar Williams, a well-known missionary among the Indians. The Prince de Joinville is said to have contacted Eleazar and paid him handsomely to renounce all claims to the French throne. In any event, his foster-parents were thenceforth very prosperous and Eleazar continued his missionary work until his death in Hogansburg, New York, in 1858, when he was about 73.
One of the other accounts of the lost Louis XVII placed him in Greenwich Village, New York, under the name of Leroy, which, when translated, meant “the King.” Louis was spotted also in New Orleans living as “Mathurin Bruneau.” According to another account, he was really a lad popularly supposed to be the illegitimate son of the French Count d’Arlois.
But the most fantastic of all of these theories was that a certain “Mme. la Comtesse Savalette de Lange,” a pensioner allowed to live in the Palace of Versailles, was discovered after dying, in 1858, to be a man and none other than the titular King Louis XVII.
Late in the last century, Johann Salvator, archduke of Austria, prince of Hungary and prince of Tuscany, got sick of court life in Vienna and assuming the name “John Orth,” married Ludmilla Stubel, daughter of a country shopkeeper.
Chartering the bark Margherita, he sailed away in it with his bride. After they turned up at Buenos Aires in July 1890, they were lost at sea. History states that neither they nor their boat was ever heard of again.
Nevertheless, Johann was later reported as appearing in a score or more of places including Uruguay, Chile, Santa Monica, California, and Tacoma, Washington.
According to one legend, he became the leader of a new thought sect on our Pacific coast. Another had it that Adm. Yamagata of the Japanese Navy was, in reality, this runaway prince.
Reported as Jap hero
Another figure of distinction alleged to have assumed the personality of a Japanese officer after entering the “Realm of the Living Dead” was Sir Hector MacDonald, Scottish hero of the Afghan and South African wars, who, on being recalled from his command in Ceylon, committed suicide in 1903 rather than face a court of inquiry. Later it was reported that the great Japanese hero, Gen. Kuroki, was really “Fighting Mac.”
History states that John Wilkes Booth, after assassinating President Lincoln in Ford’s Theater, Washington, escaped to Bowling Green, Virginia, where he was shot to death by Union soldiers while trying to escape from a tobacco barn.
But after that tragedy, Booth was reported alive in more than 50 places. One persistent story was that he became “Enos,” the famous Latin-American actor. Other names he was said to have assumed are John D. Heley and David E. George.
Civil War historians aver that the Confederate general, John Hunt Morgan, popularly known as “Morgan the Raider,” was killed while trying to escape from his Union captors in 1864. Like a thief in the night, he would descend upon Union forces, take them in large numbers and the next day sabotage bridges and railroad tracks, carrying off horses, raiding stores and terrifying the civilian population wherever he went.
After one of his raids, a Union force locked him in the Ohio Penitentiary at Columbus. But after a few months, he and six of his men escaped. Traveling at the rate of 35 miles a day, they pulled up inside the Confederate lines in Georgia.
‘Discovered’ often
However, he was but another conspicuous figure to enter the “Realm of the Living Dead.” His image later showed up in various spots, one being Marion County, Kansas, where he was said to have been masquerading under the name “Dr. John M. Cole” and to have married. Also he was “discovered” in Oklahoma and was said to have died there in 1899.
Although it was generally accepted by the authorities that little Charley Ross of Philadelphia was murdered soon after his notorious kidnapping in 1874, he was afterward “identified” in various parts of the country.
His father spent $60,000 on 200 long journeys made to run down these false clues, which ruined his career. During the 23 years he survived the crime, there was not a day when he did not work on the case, as did 500 other men and women in various parts of the world.
Thousands of dollars in reward money were subscribed to protect the public against repetitions of the kidnapping. This easy money attracted blackmailers and ill posters from all over the world.
Two hundred and seventy children taken from criminal dens, gypsy camps, orphanages and various spots were presented to the parents for identification, but were all repudiated. Even until recent years, mature men have visited the Ross family falsely claiming to be its stolen scion.
Such has been the procession of spectres appearing from the “realm of the living dead” to give them to history. Eligibility to their ball has forever required a conspicuous role in the technicolor drama in real life.