Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 24, 1993 TAG: 9303240164
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. LENGTH: Medium
LETTERS OF HITLER TANTALIZE
Clues to the existence of a trove of letters between Adolf Hitler and his mistress, Eva Braun, have long led searchers to the door of Robert A. Gutierrez.Gutierrez, who spent months in Germany at the end of World War II as a U.S. Army counterintelligence officer searching for Hitler, has been noncommittal in the past.
Now, he insists he doesn't have the letters.
"I never had them in the first place," he told The Associated Press. He wouldn't comment further.
Gutierrez, 78, has been harassed for years by collectors, historians, treasure hunters and writers who believe he found the correspondence, said his daughter, Sarah Gutierrez, an Albuquerque elementary schoolteacher.
Days before Hitler and Braun committed suicide in Berlin on April 30, 1945, the story goes, Hitler told SS Oberfuhrer Johannes Gohler to destroy the couple's personal effects.
Gohler later was captured, and told Allied interrogators he found two tin trunks containing hundreds of letters from Hitler and Braun, along with photo albums, eight reels of home movies, silverware, jewelry and clothing.
Although Gohler said he ordered another officer to destroy everything, much of it was recovered. The National Archives in Washington has the home movies as well as thousands of photographs.
The letters never turned up.
Sarah Gutierrez, 46, said her father had three pieces of silverware and a dress belonging to Braun. Eventually, they went to a German museum, and her father took no money for them, she said.
"If there had been two tin trunks, we would have known about it. There aren't any."
Still, history buffs and treasure hunters have been beating a path to Gutierrez's Albuquerque home.
The supposed documents include reports on investigations and interrogations, some by Gutierrez himself, said Kenneth D. Alford, a Richmond, Va., banker and amateur historian.
Norman Scott, a treasure hunter from Florida, and Alford believe another man might be able to clear up the mystery.
They say Gutierrez's counterintelligence team included Sgt. William Conner, whom Scott described as the "field man."
Alford said he's never been able to track down Conner and that it's possible Conner has the letters. And Scott suggested Conner is the one person who can say whether Gutierrez ever had them.