The Ghost Mumblers

I hate idiots. Really, there's nothing worse in the world. Except, perhaps, for self-important idiots with a talent for negotiating contracts with the idiots in charge of Cable programming. Yep, those idiots are the worst.

So, I guess what I'm really saying is that I hate self-important idiots who have their own TV shows. Why? Well, the simple answer would be, I suppose, because I don't have my own Cable TV show. I mean, I can be a self-important idiot, too . . .

But what is giving rise to my current eruption of spleen is a bit of channel-surfing I did earlier tonight. As I passed by the SciFi Channel - or, as they now like to call themselves in a fit of trying to shove their own heads up their rectums, SyFy - I caught a bit of the latest episode of Ghosthunters International. It seems that that intrepid band of bungling ghost-wranglers - I mean, really, the fact that they've never actually "caught" a ghost does not speak well of their "hunting" abilities - took a little trip to Argentina. To "hunt" for the ghost of Adolf Hitler.

Oy. So many people to smack in the back of the head, so little time.

Leaving aside the fact that there are no ghosts or, if we were to be exceptionally generous, that no one has ever produced bullet-proof evidence of spirits from the hereafter, I again have to just ask, are people really that stupid? Or is this just another example of us not bothering to teach History in school any more?

"Oh, no, senor, Mister Hitler is no here . . ."

I really can't stand bad History, probably because that was one of my Majors in college. Of course, given that I'm talking about a bunch of gullible but, I suppose, ultimately harmless nitwits, I probably wouldn't care all that much . . . except for having also recently suffered through a "documentary" on The Discovery Channel that purported to investigate the "disappearance" of Mr. Adolf at the end of the war, and his "possible" escape to South America.

Again, so mny people to smack . . . but I digress.

Yeah, I know, there's nothing like a good conspiracy theory, because it makes dumb people feel like they're smart. But come on, every good theory has to have some plausible fact on which to hang, which this one does not. Let's face it: how, exactly, did our little Bavarian corporal make it from Berlin to Argentina?

Let's leave aside the fact that we have the testimony of witnesses who were present tha Hitler shot himself in the bunker. Let's also leave aside the fact that we have the testimony of the people who burned his body and the body of Eva Braun in the garden of the Reichschancellery. Hell, let's even toss out the fact that some partial remains of the not-departed-quickly-enough leader of Nazi Germany reside in the Russian national archives - to wit, fragments of his skull and jaw. We'll even ignore that the jaw matches Hitler's dental records, and that DNA testing of the remains - the man did have relatives, you know, who survived the war - confirms their identity. After all, a good conspiracy theorist would tell you all that information could be faked. What possible reason there could be for perpetuating the idea that the greatest war criminal of all time lived out an apparently quiet and happy retirement on a ranch in Argentina is a bit more slippery to explain, but oh, well . . .

Quick History lesson. At the time Uncle Adolf put the Walther in his mouth and finally did the world an overdue favour, Berlin was surrounded by the Red Army. There was no way in, and no way out. Let's remember, the Nazi leaders who survived the fall of Berlin - namely, Goering and Himmler - had gotten out of the city long before the Soviets arrived. Now, do we really think it possible for Hitler to waltz through fifty or so miles of territory controlled by the Red Army in order to reach German lines unnoticed to be credible? The only way he could do it would be to fly and, well, there's a problem with that. By the time he committed suicide, the Soviets had overrun all the airfields in and around Berlin. Yes, Hannah Reitsch managed to fly into the city, using the Unter den Linden as a landing strip, and managed to get her plane shot to pieces in the process. And, yes, she managed to fly out, too, but once again got her plane shot to pieces. Are you really going to put der Fuehrer in that position?

Furthermore, even if you turn your brain off and swallow the idea that Hitler got out of Berlin, you run into another problem. Where, exactly, do you go? I mean, how do you get him from Germany to Argentina? It's not like he could book passage on Queen Elizabeth, you know, and I'm pretty sure that Lufthansa was out of business by then.

Right, so he'd have to go by submarine. I mean, by that time in the war, someone would have noticed a German surface ship, right? So, u-boat it is. But then we run into another little problem: we knew where the u-boats were and what they were doing.

The Allies, you see, were cheating. They were reading the Germans' mail. The British called it "Magic." With a little help from the Poles, they had broken the German Enigma codes at the beginning of the war. In addition, at the end of the war, every German u-boat that was at sea was required to surface and turn itself in to the nearest Allied port or task force. Most did exactly that, and the few that didn't scuttled themselves and hoped that the nearby Allied warships would be kind enough to pick up the now-swimming crews. In any event, no u-boats showed up unexpectedly in Argentine ports or anywhere else in South America.

Finally, consider this. Hitler had literally just turned 56 when he killed himself. In other words, he had a few good years left in him. Even if we presume that he made it all the way from Berlin to Argentina, what did he do with himself for the next twenty or thirty years? This was a man with an ego bigger than God's, who had been a vocal political agitator since the 1920s, and who had run Germany since 1933. Somehow, I just can't picture him sitting around on the veranda, sipping margaritas and waiting to die. Not to mention the fact that he'd have had to spend all that time rubbing elbows with people he would have considered as untermenschen, which would have driven him even more berserk than he already was . . .

Bad History, folks. I've seen enough episodes of Ghosthunters and its spin-offs to know that they conclude every show with a presentation of some sort of "evidence" of paranormal activity. From "personal experiences" to technical glitches with the equipment that get blithely explained away as supernatural forces at work, confirmation bias is truly a wonderful thing to behold.

Except that in a case like this, the whole smoke-and-mirrors thing and the idea of "I believe in the paranormal, therefore it is" tends to trivialize and render mundane something that really shouldn't be. We are, after all, talking about a man who started a war that ultimately claimed over 60 million lives, and who's wishes resulted in the deaths of 12 million people in the industrial machinery of the concentration camps. So, please, rather than chase phantom phantoms and try to spike ratings with what is really nothing more than an insulting publicity stunt, just stop this nonsense.