Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (17 page)

To Martin Bormann, such matters were of little concern, and he was usually excluded from military briefings or conferences. He was thus saved from death or serious injury when, at 12:40 p.m. on July 20, 1944, German Resistance leader Col. Claus von Stauffenberg placed a briefcase carrying a bomb under the oak table around which Adolf Hitler was holding a military conference at his Wolfschanze headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia. The bomb exploded as planned, killing three staff officers and a stenographer and wounding several others, but Hitler survived, despite burns, numerous wooden splinters driven into his legs and face, and a perforated eardrum. Operation Valkyrie, the latest of several plots to assassinate Hitler, had come the closest to success, and after its failure the regime exacted a terrible revenge. Some 5,000 people were arrested and nearly 200 executed; under the new laws of
Sippenhaft
or “blood guilt,” the Gestapo swept up relatives and even friends of the plotters on the grounds of guilt by association. Hitler ordered that the conspirators were to be “
hanged like cattle
,” and many of them died by slow strangulation while suspended from meat hooks in Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. The Allies did nothing while every vestige of the resistance movement in Germany was ruthlessly eradicated. Since the leading figures in the plot had been old-school military officers, Hitler’s lack of confidence in the traditional Wehrmacht leadership class turned to actual suspicion. Henceforward, he would withhold his trust from all but the SS and his immediate circle—and particularly, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann.

Despite the Allies’ material superiority, their progress in Normandy was dispiritingly slow and costly; they had hoped to break out of the beachhead within two weeks of D-Day, but in fact it took two months. On the same day that Col. von Stauffenberg’s briefcase bomb exploded, Operation Goodwood, Gen. Bernard Montgomery’s offensive around Caen at the east of the beachhead, failed with heavy losses. Operation Cobra, Gen. Omar Bradley’s planned American breakout from the west of the beachhead, had been scheduled for July 20, but was postponed for five days. On the Eastern Front, however, the largest land battle of World War II was bleeding the Wehrmacht to death.

ON JUNE 22
,
1944
,
THE THIRD ANNIVERSARY
of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the Red Army launched its greatest offensive of the war so far. This
Operation Bagration
was a brilliant example of
maskirovka
—literally, “deception through camouflage”: a system of sophisticated signals procedures whereby whole phantom armies were created to deceive the Germans thanks to bogus radio traffic, false troop movements, and disinformation via Red Army “deserters.” The Soviets covertly assembled a force of 118 rifle divisions, eight tank and mechanized corps with 4,080 tanks and assault guns, six cavalry divisions to negotiate the treacherous Pripyat Marshes, and thirteen artillery divisions with some 10,563 guns and 2,306 Katyusha multiple rocket launchers. These combined armies of 2.3 million troops were covered and supported by 2,318 fighters, 1,744
Shturmovik
ground-attack aircraft, and 1,086 assorted bombers, with another 1,007 in reserve.

Because of the success of
maskirovka
, the Germans had no real intelligence as to the time or place of this Soviet summer offensive. It was thought that the main assault would strike their Army Group North Ukraine, but the target was in fact Army Group Center in Byelorussia. This command had some 800,000 troops supported by 9,500 artillery pieces but only 553 tanks and assault guns. Worse still, only 20 percent of the Luftwaffe was now deployed on the Eastern Front, since the bulk of its fighters were needed for air defense over Germany. Army Group Center had just 839 aircraft in support. The battle raged for two months and ended with the destruction of Army Group Center in Byelorussia and the arrival of the Red Army at the gates of Warsaw. German casualties rose from 48,363 in May 1944 to 169,881 in July and a staggering 277,465 in August—higher even than the slaughter at the Battle of Verdun in 1916. Bagration was the
most calamitous defeat
suffered by the Wehrmacht in World War II; it lost more men in three months than it had in the whole of 1942.

On August 15, 1944, the Allies conducted a successful amphibious assault in the south of France—Operation Dragoon. On the following day, Hitler finally gave permission for Army Group B to withdraw from Normandy, but it came too late. The bulk of the army group’s forces were surrounded in the Falaise Pocket, where resistance ceased on August 22 after a sustained bombardment by Allied tactical airpower.

THE DAY BEFORE THE BOMB ATTEMPT
on Hitler’s life, on Sunday, July 19, 1944, Lt. Cdr. Dalzel-Job’s
Team 4 from 30 AU
entered the ruins of Caen on the hunt for enemy documents and equipment. Approaching the Bassin Saint-Pierre (St. Peter’s Basin), Team 4 came across a group of armed Frenchmen and a man in rough peasant clothes who spoke excellent English. The man proved to be
S.Sgt. Maurice “Jock” Bramah
of the Glider Pilot Regiment, whose aircraft had crashed into an orchard behind enemy lines on the night of June 5–6. Bramah had been shot through the lungs by a German machine gunner and left for dead, but was found by some Frenchmen and cared for in a local village. The Germans learned of his whereabouts and sent two soldiers to capture the wounded pilot on June 16. Bramah killed them both, escaped, and joined the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). Now, just three weeks later, Bramah introduced 30 AU to the FFI and the wider French Resistance network.

Their assistance and local intelligence would prove extremely valuable in the later stages of the French campaign. In particular, their knowledge of the German dispositions in and around Paris allowed 30 AU to enter the city undetected from the east. On August 25, 1944, Woolforce was able to travel via unguarded roads and streets indicated by the French Resistance on a mission to attack the Kriegsmarine headquarters in the Rothschild mansion on the Boulevard Lannes. Marine “Bon” Royle began systematically to blow open the various safes with plastic explosives. As he recalled,

I had blown over 80 safes
by now and was running short of plastic and fuse and I’d been using potato masher [German hand grenade] detonators for some time.… The safes were proving disappointing and yielding very little. One had a pair of black dress shoes inside that actually fit. I got married wearing them. Another contained a list of German admirals’ birthdays but beyond revealing that some of them were octogenarians it did little else for the cause.

Other targets were more productive. At the torpedo store at Houilles outside of Paris, 30 AU discovered a new experimental eight-bladed torpedo propeller, a revolutionary powered aircraft gun turret, high-speed Morse and burst-transmission radios, and cipher equipment. In September 1944, 30 AU moved to the Pas-de-Calais in its continuing quest for V-1 and V-2 sites and to track down French scientists who had worked on the V-3
Fleissiges Lieschen
(Busy Lizzie) supercannons at Mimoyecques; these were designed to bombard London with 300-pound high explosive shells at a rate of 300 an hour. By then 30 AU had recovered some 12,000 documents dealing with innumerable subjects, from the complete order of battle of the Kriegsmarine to the capabilities of revolutionary new U-boats, and from the latest communications equipment to maps of German minefields in the North Sea.

AS 30 AU WAS APPROACHING PARIS
from the east, Col. Boris Pash and the Alsos Mission were entering the city from the west, at 8:55 a.m. on August 25. So keen was Pash to reach his objective that his jeep was the
first American vehicle
into the city, following closely behind the tanks of the Free French 2nd Armored Division. Under sporadic sniper fire, Pash’s unarmed jeep was the fifth vehicle in a column of tanks that rolled into the center of Paris. In the late afternoon, Pash reached his destination, the Radium Institute on rue Pierre Curie, where he met the man he desperately wished to interview. Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry and the son-in-law of the Curies, was in charge of the only cyclotron—particle accelerator—in Europe and was also a leading authority on nuclear chain reactions. Over a
celebratory bottle of champagne
that evening, Pash learned that Joliot-Curie knew remarkably little about German research into uranium, but he did disclose that there was a research facility at the University of Strasbourg in Alsace-Lorraine, then still far behind enemy lines.

Paris also saw the debut of a joint Anglo-American T-Force of some fourteen inspection teams attached to the U.S. 12th Army Group; a comprehensive, coordinated intelligence-gathering organization would become ever more important as the Allied forces approached Germany itself. In Paris,
T-Force activities
were compromised by the fierce rivalries between Gaullist and communist factions that on occasion bordered on shooting wars. A further problem was a lack of infantry to secure the targets, as the French population was bent on “
les arrestations et l’epuration
” (arrests and purges) of perceived collaborators, ransacking many properties in the process.

Yet another of the specialized search units to enter Paris on August 25 were the Monuments Men. Second Lt. James Lorimer of the MFA&A program was attached to the logistical units of the U.S. 12th Army Group, so he was able to enter Paris that day with the first U.S. Army supply convoy to reach the city. Lorimer immediately went to the Louvre, where he stared in despair at the museum’s
long, empty galleries
, now quite bare of paintings and sculptures. It was there that he met Mademoiselle Rose Valland, a true heroine of the French Resistance.

Throughout the Nazi occupation, this forty-six-year-old art historian had played on her dowdy appearance to remain in the background at the Jeu de Paume, where she acted as curator. This outstation of the Louvre was used as the main repository for all the artworks looted by Alfred Rosenberg’s ERR (see
Chapter 4
) in France, where every item was meticulously cataloged and photographed before shipment to Germany. Every night, Rose Valland removed the negatives, which were then printed by a colleague in the Resistance while she transcribed the notes on every item and its proposed destination in Germany. Early each morning she returned the negatives before the start of the working day. Accordingly, she was able to pass to the Free French government in London lists of almost all the looted treasures that left for Germany. The regular flow of information from the various Resistance movements across Europe was routinely acknowledged by cryptic messages broadcast over the BBC radio service—for instance, a typical communication for Rose Valland might be “
La Joconde a le sourire
”—“The Mona Lisa is smiling.” She herself had little to smile about: discovery of her activities would result in certain death, either by firing squad or by lingering maltreatment in a concentration camp.

Even as the Allies were approaching Paris, hundreds of artworks were still being packed into crates at the Jeu de Paume for onward shipment. On August 2, 1944,
148 crates of looted paintings
were loaded aboard freight cars attached to Train No. 40044 at Aubervilliers railroad station. As usual, Valland had details of the shipment orders and the destinations in Germany. She provided these to the Resistance and asked if there might be some way to delay the train’s departure, hopefully until the arrival of the Allies.

By August 10, Train No. 40044 was fully laden and ready to start its journey to Germany. Coincidentally, the French railroad workers in the area went on strike that day. Within forty-eight hours they were cajoled back to work. The train departed only to be mysteriously shunted into a siding. There the engine inexplicably developed mechanical problems; these were eventually rectified, but then broken couplings and seized brakes caused a further forty-eight-hour delay. Eventually, Train No. 40044 got on the move again—only to be halted when two engines collided and became derailed at a notorious bottleneck in the railroad system. The
art train was trapped
, never to leave Paris.

Chapter 9

C
ASH,
R
OCKETS, AND
U
RANIUM

THE SIMULTANEOUS DESTRUCTION of Army Group Center in Byelorussia and Army Group B in Normandy convinced Martin Bormann of the need to accelerate his projects Eagle Flight and Land of Fire. He accordingly convened an extraordinary meeting of German industrialists, business leaders, and selected party officials that took place on August 10, 1944, at the Hôtel Maison Rouge on the rue des France-Bourgeois in the eastern French city of Strasbourg. Bormann was not present in person, since he needed to be at the Führer’s side, but the conference was chaired by his personal emissary, SS Gen. Dr. Otto Scheid. Among those present were representatives of Krupp, Messerschmitt, Rheinmetall, Büssing, Volkswagen, and a host of other companies—including, of course, IG Farben.