Hans Baur
Hans Baur was Adolf Hitler's personal pilot.
Biography[[edit] | [edit source]]
On 30 April 1945, after Hitler's suicide, Baur flew the secretly-pregnant Eva Braun and Reichsleiter Martin Bormann out of the Tiergarten in Berlin before it fell to the Red Army. Baur landed in Hamburg where Braun and Bormann made their escape via a waiting submarine to Neuschwabenland in Antarctica. Baur himself fell into Allied captivity after the British captured Hamburg.
After Nazi Germany's surrender, Baur was interrogated by Lieutenant George Simmonds of the United States Air Force on 14 July 1945 in attempt to piece together what happened on 30 April. His testimony spoke of "business with the doubles" before he flew Bormann and others out of Berlin, including "A double of the Führer [who] turned up". The transcript was lost.
Baur, badly wounded, later became a prisoner of the Soviet Union. They discovered the surviving fragment of his testimony in the East Berlin in 1947 but claimed it was an American fabrication, or attempts by Baur to bargain for his own life. Nevertheless, they kept the surviving transcript in their archives. (PROSE: The Shadow in the Glass)
Behind the scenes[[edit] | [edit source]]
In the historical note for The Shadow in the Glass, Stephen Cole and Justin Richards clarify that Hans Baur was never reported to have been a prisoner of the Americans and that his testimony as detailed in the novel was entirely fictionalised for the purposes of the narrative. It is the only such instance in the novel, as all other references to historical documentation are based on real-life records. The real Baur was considered by the Russians to be at best an "unreliable" witness.
