Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (20 page)

REICHSLEITER MARTIN BORMANN stood in the shadow of his beloved Führer, Adolf Hitler, and served him faithfully from 1933 for the rest of his life. It was Bormann’s business acumen that made Hitler immensely wealthy and allowed the creation of Aktion Feuerland to effect the escape of the Führer to Argentina.

WILHELM “OLD FOX” CANARIS headed up the Abwehr, the German military intelligence organization, from 1935–44. He was a brilliant spymaster but he also ensured that his closest colleagues were not members of the Nazi Party. Since before the outbreak of war, Canaris had been active in the resistance movement of Germans attempting at first to frustrate and then to overthrow Hitler—a group known to the Gestapo as the Schwarze Kappelle (Black Orchestra) and to the OSS as “Breakers.”

HEINRICH HIMMLER AND HERMANN GöRING shake hands at a Nazi Party event, April 1934. By 1943, the two would be embroiled in a plot with Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer to thwart Bormann’s Council of Three plan; at the same time Himmler would take part in a separate plot with Bormann to gain more power at the expense of Göring. Such divisions in the Nazi hierarchy allowed Hitler to rule the Third Reich with undisputed absolute power.

A BERLIN STREET after Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938: One of the many Jewish businesses with shattered storefronts. That night Jewish homes, properties, and synagogues across Germany and parts of Austria were attacked in an orgy of destruction—the clearest warning yet to German Jewry of their peril.

HEINRICH HIMMLER, center, briefs SS commanders Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Müller, Artur Nebe, and Franz Josef Huber on the day’s work at Gestapo headquarters, Berlin, c. 1939. These Nazis were among the principal architects of the Final Solution—the extermination of European Jews, together with other “
untermensch
,” a term the Nazis used to refer to what they called “inferior peoples.”

AFTER THE FALL of France, Adolf Hitler made a triumphal tour of Paris on June 23, 1940. Here he poses for the camera in front of the Eiffel Tower in company with his favorite architect, Albert Speer (left), and his favorite sculptor, Arno Breker. His visit to Paris marked the start of the Nazi rape of artworks from France and the Low Countries to feed Hitler’s lust for the greatest works of art of Western civilization.

ADOLF HITLER RELAXES at his favorite mountain retreat at the Berghof in the Bavarian Alps together with his mistress Eva Braun and their dogs, c. 1940. Hitler holds the leash of his German shepherd, Blondi. Hitler declared that “a woman must be a cute, cuddly, naive little thing—tender, sweet, and dim.” Eva Braun was all of these.

URSULA “USCHI” HITLER was the daughter of Hitler and Eva Braun. Here, Hitler and Uschi pose for a picture taken at the Berghof, c. 1942. The press was told that this girl was Uschi Schneider, the daughter of Herta Schneider, a close childhood friend of Eva Braun’s. Frau Schneider and her “children” spent a great deal of time at the Berghof, Hitler’s Bavarian estate.

ADOLF HITLER, WITH BORMANN behind him as always, stands surrounded by officers after the failed assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, at Wolfschanze or Wolf’s Lair, the Führer’s field headquarters in East Prussia. Gen. Alfred Jodl, with a bandage around his head, is on the right.

A GROUP OF senior Nazi officials congregate in 1944 at Wolfschanze. On the far left is Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Next to him is Luftwaffe Gen. Bruno Loerzer, a friend of Field Marshal Hermann Göring, who is standing in the center. Next to him is Adm. Karl Dönitz, who became Reich president following Hitler’s departure for Argentina. Key to the escape plan was Gen. Hermann Fegelein, shown with his arms crossed at the far right, and displaying the sleeve band of the Waffen SS unit he commanded in summer 1943, the 8th SS Cavalry Division “Florian Geyer.”

THE BIG THREE—Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin—at the Yalta Conference in the Crimea during February 1945. By now Roosevelt was gravely ill and still did not realize the dangers posed by the Soviet Union and its destructive communist regime to Europe and the world, in spite of the warnings of Churchill and others such as Allen Dulles.