In 1945, on this day, a four-engine Junkers JU-290A model aircraft secretly departed from the private airfield at Hoersching located in Linz-Land, Upper Austria. On-board was the Jewish watercolour painter, Adolf Schicklegruber, fleeing from Central Europe in order to avoid the long arm of Heinrich Himmler's "Nazi Justice" And the flight plan executed by forty-eight year old pilot Hans Bauer was devised to safely transport the "Schicklegruber Party" to Barcelona.

Hitler's FlightBecause representatives of the Socialist Government had been dispatched from Madrid with instructions to organize political asylum for the party prior to their onward voyage to South America.

Fellow Bohemian Eric Arthur Blair (popularly known as the author George Orwell and pictured) was also at the airport to meet Schicklegruber. Still wearing his own pencil thin moustache, the author was somewhat surprised to see a large "butt" on his friend's upper lip. Previously this imperfection had been hidden by trademark whiskers which had been recently removed in order to avoid capture whilst crossing the Austrian border.

Blair had in fact travelled the short distance from his Catalan home at Huesca where had had lived since recovering from being shot in the throat during the Spanish Civil War. Musing upon their brushes with death at the hands of the Fascists, the conversation naturally turned to the dangerous political situation in Central Europe.

The fusion of their ideas initiated the creative development of the political novel Nineteen Forty-Eight¹, in which Orwell projected his Civil War experiences into a dystopian future. A quite conceivable future, in fact in which the Fascist Forces that had been defeated in Spain gained the mastery of Europe under "Big Brother", a thinly disguised reference to Heinrich Himmler.