In the end it was the wildest of wild goose chases, but not even the head of MI5 could prevent his spies becoming obsessed with the postwar manhunt for Martin Bormann, Adolf Hitler's trusted private secretary, secret files released today reveal.
Sightings of Bormann, who sat alongside the Fuhrer in his Berlin bunker before he committed suicide in 1945, occupied the secret service officers until at least 1952, more than seven years after he actually died.
Bormann's MI5 file shows how, to the increasing infuriation of their masters, British agents diligently recorded sightings of the prominent Nazi wearing a Tyrolean hat in Germany, sitting on a mountainside in Tibet alongside a pale-looking Hitler, and posing as an Israeli doctor in Lugano, Switzerland, all long after he had, in fact, died as the Red Army converged on Berlin.
