Adolf Hitler's great escape

A YOUNG newspaper reporter was pursuing inquiries in Whitburn when he was struck by an agonising migraine. And that was the beginning of an uncanny chain of events that has now, more than 30 years later, led to the publication of what may well become regarded as the year's most thought-provoking novel, The Hitler Scoop.

The journalist was Revel Barker, based on Tyneside for ten years from 1965 while working for a Fleet Street tabloid, who suffered from a rare and particularly painful form of migraine.

He felt an attack coming on that day in 1972, while he was in the village following up a lead in the South Tyneside and Wearside areas while delving into the local government bribes-for-contracts corruption scandal, that would lead to the imprisonment of Newcastle City Council supremo Dan Smith and top Leeds architect John Poulson.

A photographer colleague drove Barker to the surgery of his GP in Heddon-on-the Wall, in Northumberland, and he was hurriedly admitted to the renowned neurology department at Newcastle General Hospital.

After the pain had passed, he agreed to remain as a voluntary patient at the request of doctors who wanted to test new drugs on him, and it was while he was in a deep sleep induced by them that he had a remarkably vivid dream.

In it, he was driving in Ireland when he was hit by migraine that forced him to stop in a small village where a kindly old woman, seeing him so distressed, led him to her own home in which her husband, a retired doctor, gave him an injection that, as if by a miracle, cured him instantly.

It was all still crystal-clear when he awoke, even down to the doctor's distinctive name: Theo Morell. So unnervingly stark had the dream been that Barker actually embarked on discovering if such a doctor existed. He found only one so-named - and he had been the personal physician to Adolf Hitler in the Fuhrer's Berlin bunker as Soviet forces advanced and defeat loomed. Not regarded as a war criminal, he had been freed by the Allies but died soon afterwards.

Barker, now aged 59 and still an intermittent migraine sufferer, says: "Although I couldn't recall it, I must at sometime have come across a reference to Morell and so his name was buried in my sub-conscious to emerge in the dream."

That would have been that, except that it all sowed the seeds of a possible plot for a novel.

It was well known that, in the chaotic aftermath of the war, many Nazis fled to freedom with the assistance of the Allies and connivance of the Vatican, some to be recruited by Western intelligence agencies or to work in other capacities against the Communists.

What if Morell had not remained in Germany and reports of his death amid the confusion were false? What if he and his wife Johanna, fearing their fate under the Russians, had taken advantage of one of the so-called "rat lines" to escape to a new life? Where better to make a fresh start than Ireland where wartime neutrality had been maintained?

And did Hitler and his bride Eva Braun really commit suicide, their bodies, on his prior instruction, being burned and buried just outside the bunker?

As Barker points out, this "official" Soviet version has been much challenged and even the Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, while US President in 1952, acknowledged there was "not one tangible bit of evidence" of the Fuhrer's death. In 1969 the Germans actually arrested a man they suspected of being Hitler living under an assumed name.

So was it totally unfeasible that, with the aid of top Nazis, the couple were not spirited away, leaving behind decoy charred bones? And wouldn't he want to remain close to the trusted and resourceful doctor who he credited with curing his blinding headaches, stomach cramps and eczema

The plot was taking shape and, during infrequent lulls in a hectic career, in which Barker travelled the world as reporter, war correspondent and foreign editor, he carried out extensive research now manifest in his compelling text - even gaining access to the physician's diaries now held in Washington.

But it was only when, in semi-retirement, he moved to the island of Gozo in the Mediterranean just off Malta six years ago, that he at long last assembled his notes and jottings and sat down at a computer keyboard.

The beginning is a virtual rerun of his dream.

Set in the spring of 1967, Tynesider Charles "Tex" Ritter, aged 29, who began his journalistic career on a Newcastle evening paper but is now a top reporter on the Post, a national daily, is on an assignment in Ireland when a blinding headache strikes.

In the same way, a doctor's injection not only removes the pain but also cures the migraine completely. Back in Fleet Street, Ritter endeavours to find out who the doctor is so that he can write and thank him.

But his inquiries hint at the hardly believable. Could he really be Hitler's physician living in anonymous obscurity in a tiny village? Has the reporter stumbled on an exclusive story that would startle the world?

As he delves further his investigation alerts MI6, the CIA and Mossad as well as a persistent German rival reporter and the action switches between London, Tel Aviv, Dublin, Munich, Hamburg and Northumberland where Ritter's estranged wife lives. Indeed, villagers in Heddon will easily recognise the Northumbrian pub called The George as their own local, the Three Tuns Inn.

Then Ritter is confronted by the truly sensational possibility: that the reclusive doctor is still caring for a Fuhrer who had pulled off the greatest escape of all.

It is a ripping yarn filled with vivid characters, fuelled by gripping twists and turns and a narrative that reveals not only the extent of the writer's research but also his deep insight into newspaper methods and the murky world of intelligence agencies.

Its firm foundation of historical fact gives credibility to the seemingly incredible. And the final denouement will not leave readers disappointed.

Barker, a frequent visitor to Tyneside, drove through Whitburn last year. He says: "It revived very painful memories, and yet had it not been for that migraine attack all those years ago I would never have got the idea for my novel."

* The Hitler Scoop by Revel Barker is published by PenPress at £7.99 and is available from bookshops, libraries and amazon.com