Mar 5th, 2003, 12:03 PM
....... Bowl it up
PATERSON, N.J. -- Housewife Margaret Palwaski got the surprise of her life when she opened a vintage bowling bag she'd purchased at a garage sale -- and out rolled the mummified head of Nazi monster Adolf Hitler!
"I was looking for a unique birthday gift for my husband, who's an avid bowler and loves classic bowling gear," says the shaken 44-year-old mother of three. "The last thing I was expecting to find in that bag was a severed head -- let alone the head of someone as terrible as Hitler."
The suburban mom's bizarre discovery at the sale of old personal effects of a recently deceased German immigrant named Kurt Hultzberg, appears to confirm the long-held theory of many researchers that Hitler faked his own death at the end of the World War II and was shielded by followers in the German hinterlands for years.
"Like many of my colleagues, I never accepted the story of Hitler's supposed suicide in Berlin in 1945," says Israeli Nazi-hunter Issac Loesch in a telephone interview from Tel Aviv.
"I have always found very compelling the theory that he sought refuge among his most fanatical devotees in the German Alps -- where it turns out this fellow Hultzberg resided before moving to America in '59.
"But this astounding find opens up as many questions as it answers.
"Who killed and decapitated Hitler -- and why?
"Was it, as some here are now suggesting, agents of Israel's Mossad, who quietly dispatched him as they did so many other Nazi war criminals?
"Or, perhaps, did Hitler's own followers, fanatical as they were, grow weary of his barking orders and empty boasts and get rid of him themselves?"
The shriveled, leathery-skinned head bears an uncanny resemblance to the diabolical German leader -- right down to the fuhrer's trademark "Charlie Chaplin" mustache and slanted forelock.
"We are now arranging genetic tests to compare tissue from the head to DNA samples from living relatives of Hitler in Europe, to confirm that it's really his," reveals Loesch, director of the Fugitive War Criminal Research Center in Tel Aviv, where the gruesome relic has been shipped.
Mrs. Palwaski had no idea what was in the bag when she purchased it for $12 from her neighbor, the grandniece of mysterious immigrant Hultzberg. The relative, with whom he'd lodged for many years, was selling off the old man's possessions after he died of kidney failure at age 81 on January 20.
"I could feel something round and heavy was in the bag when I bought it, but I assumed it was a bowling ball," says Mrs. Palwaski. "When I got home and unzipped the bag on our bed, out rolls this thing wrapped in old newspaper. When I realized it was a head I freaked out and screamed.
"Then I took a closer look, because the face seemed somehow familiar. I remember thinking, 'Did I go to high school with this guy?'"
"When it finally hit me who it was, the hairs on my neck stood up on end."
At the center of the mystery is the enigmatic Hultzberg, who lived quietly with relatives after moving to the U.S. and was a regular churchgoer.
"He talked vaguely about having made some big 'mistakes' in his younger days," says his grandniece, who asked that her name not be used.
Nazi hunter Loesch suspects Hultzberg had a sinister past in Germany.
"The Alpine town of Berchtesgaden, where Hultzberg lived from the end of the war through the 1950s, was the headquarters of a pro-Nazi secret society called Sons of Thule, which may have been who sheltered Hitler. One theory is that Hultzberg was a member of the group and that he -- acting alone or with the others -- turned on their master," says Loesch.
But an alternative theory is even stranger.
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