Eden Denied Her

hotel eden

Hotel Eden, La Falda, Argentina. December 2004 – From Wikimedia Commons

“Senora, everyone else has fled. It is not safe for you here.”

“A moment longer, Juan.”

They stood by the car looking at the distant Eden Hotel. Then the ten-year-old boy emerged from the shadows.

“I got it for you. He visited here once in disguise as did Herr Goebbels,  Herr Eichmann and many others.”

“Let’s see it Adolpho.” Juan took the box and handed it to the German. “Your husband’s legacy, Senora. You are to carry on here in Argentina.”

She held the strong box like fragile porcelain smiling bitterly at the child named for her husband.

Juan ushered the pregnant woman into the car and then got behind the wheel. “You and your child will lack for nothing.”

She muttered, “It was Adolf’s last wish that I raise his unborn son to follow him. The Reich will rise again, and this time we will have the bomb too.”

I wrote this for the What Pegman Saw flash fiction writing challenge. The idea it to take a Google maps location and street view and use it as the inspiration to craft a story no more than 150 words long. After a great deal of editing, my word count is down to 150.

einstein eden

Undated photo of Albert Einstein posing with a group of visitors at Argentina’s Eden Hotel

Today the Pegman takes us to Córdoba Argentina. The city itself has an incredibly rich history and I was considering a tale perhaps having to do with the Jesuits but then, given my recent interest in World War II and the old atomic weapons programs that were under development by the Axis powers, I thought about how many high-ranking Nazis used Argentina as a sanctuary at the end of the war. That’s when I discovered The Eden Hotel in La Falda, not far from the city of Córdoba but still in Córdoba Provence. I looked at another article and discovered that the hotel was owned by and sheltered Nazis before and during World War II, though shortly before the war ended, an anti-Nazi movement took over the country and seized the Hotel.

Legend states that Adolf Hitler once visited the Eden in disguise. The Hotel had a radio antenna strong enough to receive Hitler’s public radio broadcasts live, and it was later discovered that the owners had actually bankrolled the early Nazi party, funding Hitler’s rise to power.

Although it is a virtual certainty that both Adolf Hitler and his wife (they were married shortly before committing suicide) Eva Braun died in Berlin on 30 April 1945, there have always been rumors up to the level of conspiracy theories saying that Hitler, Braun, or both managed to escape to Argentina. When I was growing up in the 1960s, any number of movies, television shows, and books, leveraged these rumors to tell tales of a mythical rising of a Fourth Reich, like a phoenix from the ashes of the Third.

hitler and braun

© dpa/Corbis – Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun 1944

I leveraged all of that for my wee tale, a pregnant Eva Braun arriving in Argentina, contacting Hitler’s underground network of supporters, retrieving a metal strong box hidden in the Eden Hotel, perhaps by Hitler himself, containing the nuclear secrets of the Nazis, and with the amassed wealth of the Reich now at Braun’s disposal, she brings up Hitler’s son to follow in his bloody father’s footsteps.

I hadn’t thought about this while writing the story, but it later popped into my head that I once saw a film called The Boys From Brazil starring Gregory Peck and Laurence Olivier. It was based on a 1976 novel by Ira Levin about the Nazi “Angel of Death” Dr. Josef Mengele somehow managing to create numerous clones (at the time of the novel, all aged 13 years) of Adolf Hitler with the insane idea of recreating both Hitler and the Reich.

To read other stories based on the prompt, go to InLinkz.com.

I’ve written an expanded version of this story that offers a bit more than I could squeeze into 150 words.

24 thoughts on “Eden Denied Her”

    • I’ve never seen Marathon Man. As I recall, it has a dental torture scene I’ve been avoiding for decades. Thanks. Oh, are you suggesting that Hitler really did escape with the CIA’s help? Interesting since the agency wasn’t founded until September 18, 1947.

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      • Yeah man. I’ve read Legacy of Ashes too. I doubt very much that the OSS was doing very much in intelligence prior to the Eisenhower Administration. Everything that they touched was a disaster then and now. But it’s possible that Hitler did escape and the CIA found out about it. Possible, but not likely, considering that they don’t seem to know much about anything at any given time. Their main skill seems to be painting colossal failure as glowing success. Marathon Man features a doctor similar to Mengele who escapes and lives in South America. He uses CIA assassins as couriers because Nazis are anti-communist.

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      • Interesting. I wrote a story not long ago (you probably read it) about the Dalai Lama’s involvement with the CIA in the 1960s and it seems like to this day, he regrets it.

        I seem to remember reading that there was an unconfirmed report that the Soviets took Hitler’s corpse back to Russia but I can’t recall how they disposed of it. Of course it’s just one of the many rumors about Hitler. I did read an alternate history story once called something like “The Trial of Adolf Hitler.” What would have happened if the Americans had gotten to Berlin first and captured Hitler. The terrifying thing is that Hitler almost got off, at least of most of the serious war crimes.

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  5. “Boys from Argentina?” I couldn’t help but think about “The Boys from Brazil” as I read your story. It makes for entertaining conspiracy theory. I never gave much credence to the conspiracies, but enjoyed the stories they spawned. Fantastic research on this one. I really enjoyed the afterward as well.

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  8. that levin book sounds interesting – and a while ago I saw a show about the “twins city in Brazil” where a Nazi scientist was believed to have used science to make generations of twins and that small town has more twins than anywhere else in the world.
    and your fiction was succinct and super well done to give us that great history in 150 words – because even without the backstory I was able to grasp most of it – but the author’s notes filled in a lot – and my favorite shock was how it was
    “discovered that the owners had actually bankrolled the early Nazi party”

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    • It could go in a number of directions. One is that Hitler Jr. could lead Europe into WW3 in the 1970s but it’s also a big assumption on Mommy’s part that he would even want to. Maybe when he grows up he has completely different plans that have nothing to do with taking over the world.

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