Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (27 page)

The “stick” was simple.
Germany now claimed to be capable of bombarding the eastern seaboard of the United States with
weapons of mass destruction
; considerable effort had been invested in selling this disinformation to U.S. intelligence agencies, with some success (see
Chapter 16
). These weapons incorporated warheads armed with the most toxic nerve agents ever devised, sarin and tabun. In addition, many repositories of artworks hidden in deep mine shafts would be destroyed with explosives and buried forever. A high proportion of the greatest works of art produced during centuries of Western civilization was now held hostage, and this threat was entirely credible following
Hitler’s “Nero Decree
” of March 19. Officially titled “Demolitions on Reich Territory,” this decree ordered the utter destruction of all German industrial infrastructure and technology; although not included in the official order, it also implied the destruction of cultural assets and the elimination of any key personnel who might be useful to the Allied powers.

The decision lay with the Allies, but the clock was ticking.
On the previous day, April 25, the city of Berlin had been surrounded by the Red Army, and troops from Gen. Ivan Konev’s army group had made contact with GIs from Hodges’s U.S. First Army on the Elbe River. Germany was cut in half by a broad belt of Allied-occupied territory, with only the extreme north and south still under Nazi control.

THE LARGEST DAYLIGHT RAID ON BERLIN
so far had been launched on February 3, 1945. In total, 937 Flying Fortresses dropped 2,298 tons of bombs, killing thousands of people and inflicting massive damage on the city, including the government quarter.

Among the other government buildings hit that day were the Reich Chancellery on the corner of Wilhelmstrasse and Voss-Strasse, where Bormann’s office was badly damaged; the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz Albrechtstrasse and the Reichsbank on Hausvogteiplatz were virtually demolished by a string of bombs. In a
letter to his wife
on February 4, Bormann wrote:

I have just taken refuge in my secretary’s office which is the only room in the place that has some temporary windows. Yesterday’s raid was very heavy. The Reich Chancellery garden is an amazing sight—deep craters, fallen trees, and the paths obliterated by a mass of rubble and rubbish. The Führer’s residence [in the Old Reich Chancellery] was badly hit several times. The New Reich Chancellery was also hit several times, and is not usable for the time being. The Party Chancellery buildings [offices on the upper floor of the central block of the New Reich Chancellery], too, are a sorry sight. Telephone communications are still very inadequate and the Führer’s residence and Party Chancellery still have no connection with the outside world.

To crown everything, in this so-called Government Quarter, the light, power and water supply is still lacking! We have a water cart standing in front of the Reich Chancellery and that is our only water supply for cooking and washing up! And the worst thing of all is the water closets. These commando pigs [the SS bodyguards] use them constantly and not one of them even thinks of taking a bucket of water with him to flush the place. From this evening I am apparently to have a room in the bunker in which to work and sleep.

By the middle of February, Hitler and his entourage—including Bormann—had been forced to take up permanent residence in the Führerbunker.

The president of the Reichsbank, Dr. Walter Funk, decided to transfer the bulk of the bank’s cash and gold reserves to safety outside of Berlin. The treasure was shipped to Merkers in Thuringia, two hundred miles southwest of the capital. There, bullion and currency with a value of about $238 million were deposited deep underground in the
Kaiseroda potassium mine
, alongside a huge cache of artworks. This was but one of
134 repositories
dotted across the Third Reich under the control of Martin Bormann. In accordance with Hitler’s Nero Decree of March 19, many of them were now rigged with high explosives to prevent their falling into the hands of the Allies. In the salt mines at Altaussee were the most valuable pieces in Hitler’s collection, including Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna, Jan van Eyck’s
Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
or Ghent Altarpiece, and many other priceless treasures. Among the innumerable crates were eight that were marked
Vorsicht—Marmor—nicht stürtzen
(Attention—Marble—
Do Not Drop
). Placed underground between April 10 and 13, these contained not statues but half-ton Luftwaffe aerial bombs. Also primed for destruction was the accumulation of most of the artworks looted from France and the Low Countries, now stored in the fairytale castle of Neuschwanstein in Bavaria. Nothing was intended to survive the coming Götterdämmerung of the Third Reich.

AMONG THE ALLIED TROOPS POISED
to deny the Nazis the chance to destroy their secrets were Cdr. Fleming’s Red Indians of 30 Advance Unit. Intelligence on where to search was now flooding in from the OSS office in Bern, thanks to the dialogue between Dulles and Bormann. The unit’s Team 4, under Lt. Cdr. Patrick Dalzel-Job, began driving northward between Bremen on the Weser River and Hamburg on the Elbe. Their task was to capture the latest U-boat technology.

Surging ahead of 21st Army Group, Team 4 of 30 AU was the first Allied unit to enter the major port of Bremen. They accepted the surrender of the city by the mayor some twenty-four hours before the arrival of conventional forces, and a small detachment of Royal Marines captured sixteen U-boats. Further south, Lt. Cdr. Jim Glanville’s Team 55 set off on April 14 for Schloss Tambach near Bad Sulza in Thuringia, where they captured the complete records of the Kriegsmarine from 1850 up to the end of 1944, including all the logs of U-boats and surface ships. These archives were of immense value to Allied naval authorities and were judged to be
one of the most important intelligence hauls
of the entire war. Meanwhile, after their success locating the uranium ore for the Alsos Mission, Team 5 under the command of Lt. James Lambie was searching the Harz Mountains for the underground V-2 assembly facility at Nordhausen, following instructions from SHAEF to capture documentation and personnel connected with the ballistic missile program. The Monuments Men were also hard on the heels of the combat troops, on their way to safeguard the major caches of artworks hidden across Germany, including the castle of Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, which was saved from destruction on May 4, 1945, and with it the treasures of France and the Low Countries.

THROUGHOUT APRIL 1945
,
BORMANN
pursued his plans for Aktion Feuerland with ruthless efficiency. It was time to tie up loose ends, of which one of the most outstanding was Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, now held in Flossenbürg concentration camp. Canaris knew far too much about the site of the refuge that Bormann had prepared for Hitler in Argentina and about a major staging post for the Führer’s journey between Europe and South America. On April 5, Ernst Kaltenbrunner presented Hitler with some highly incriminating evidence against Canaris.
The Führer flew into a rage
and signed the admiral’s death warrant. He was hanged in humiliating circumstances on April 9.

In the detached netherworld of the Führerbunker—dubbed the “
cement submarine
” by many of the staff working there—Hitler was living the claustrophobic life of a U-boat captain on the ocean floor, with little sense of time or reality of actual events in the world above. The Führer had always been subject to mood swings, but his rages became more frequent as the military situation deteriorated inexorably and he was confronted with the self-deluding futility of the orders he had been issuing. At a military situation conference on Sunday, April 22, attended by Bormann, the Führer exploded in a fit of unrestrained fury. For the first time he declared openly that the war was lost and announced repeatedly that he would die in Berlin. Bormann insisted that this was the time to fly south to the Obersalzberg to finalize the Führer’s personal affairs before fleeing in accordance with the preparations made for Aktion Feuerland, but Joseph Goebbels persuaded Hitler otherwise; Goebbels saw it as their duty to die among the ruins of their city. Gen. Jodl pointed out that Germany still had armies in the field theoretically within reach of Berlin—Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner’s remnant of Army Group Center and Gen. Walther Wenck’s Twelfth Army. The Führer became vague about the military steps to be taken, but repeated that he was determined to remain in Berlin to the last.

Frustrated, Bormann nevertheless continued juggling the possilities that remained open to him. That night, he sent a telex to Göring at the Obersalzberg indicating that the Führer was indisposed. It was a trap and Göring fell straight into it. On the following day he sent a telegram to the Führerbunker stating that if he did not hear instructions to the contrary, he would assume full command of the Reich from 10:00 p.m. that night, in accordance with his responsibility as designated successor to Hitler. Bormann immediately informed the Führer, urging the need to annul the decree of succession as Göring was obviously staging a coup. At first, Hitler demurred. Bormann then sent Göring a telex accusing him of treacherous behavior but also stating that no further action would be taken if he resigned from all his many offices of state. Within an hour, Göring’s resignation was on the Führer’s desk. This was seen as confirmation of his treachery, and the SS detachment at the Obersalzberg was ordered to place the Reichsmarschall under house arrest.

With Göring sidelined, Bormann turned his attention to ousting Himmler. It was time for him to use his ace in the hole. He had known from late March 1945 that Himmler had begun negotiations with the Allies in Stockholm. His close friend Gen. Fegelein, Himmler’s representative in the bunker, had kept him well informed. The Reichsleiter had prepared a detailed dossier detailing Himmler’s treachery, which he would present to Hitler. Bormann had achieved his ultimate ambition—to destroy all competing candidates for the power and influence of being the
Führer’s only unquestionably trusted deputy
. It was something of a Pyrrhic victory, though, since on April 25 the Red Army completed its encirclement of Berlin and the Obersalzberg was comprehensively bombed by the Lancasters of No. 617 Squadron RAF, thereby rendering it
useless as a bolt-hole
during any planned escape to the south. The rush for the shelters probably saved Göring’s life, since his SS guards were on the point of executing him when the sirens sounded. The confirmation of Bormann’s total victory in the intrigues of the Nazi court came on April 26, when Hitler promoted Gen. Robert Ritter von Greim to the rank of field marshal and appointed him commander in chief of the Luftwaffe. Bormann must have been ecstatic over Hitler’s first order to Ritter von Greim: he was to fly to Karl Dönitz’s headquarters at Plön and arrest Heinrich Himmler for treason. This was impossible, however, since Ritter von Greim had been badly wounded earlier that day by Red Army gunfire shortly before landing in Berlin in a plane piloted by the daredevil aviatrix Hanna Reitsch.

ALTHOUGH THE BULK OF THE REICHSBANK’S HOLDINGS
had been transferred to the Kaiseroda mine at Merkers, much still remained in Berlin, ostensibly to pay the city’s Wehrmacht defenders in cash. At a meeting between the Führer, Dr. Funk, and Bormann on April 9, it had been decided to transfer the remaining gold and currency reserves of the Reichsbank to Bavaria. They were to be transported to the so-called “
Bormann Bunker
” in Munich, by road in a convoy of six Opel Blitz trucks and by two special trains code-named
Adler
and
Dohle
—“Eagle” and “Jackdaw.” The trains and trucks left Berlin on April 14 but took almost two weeks to arrive in Bavaria, due to the devastated road and rail networks and the chronic lack of gasoline.

Following the Operation Seraglio/Harem exodus of nonessential personnel from the Führerbunker on April 22, Bormann instructed SS Gen. Kaltenbrunner to fly south in order to pursue Allen Dulles’s
Operation Crossword
. Kaltenbrunner decided that he should make his own arrangements for survival rather than relying solely upon Aktion Feuerland. In his capacity as head of the RSHA, he ordered SS Gen. Josef Spacil to take a party of SS troops to remove everything of value left in the vaults of the Reichsbank—securities, gems, and 23 million gold reichsmarks, worth $9.13 million (approximately $110 million in today’s money). One of the last transport planes to get out of the city flew this loot to Salzburg in Austria. From there it was taken by truck to the high Tyrolean town of Rauris and buried on a wooded mountainside nearby.

This largest armed robbery in history soon came to the notice of Martin Bormann, who commented to his confederate, “Gestapo” Müller,

Well,
Ernst is still looking out for Ernst
. It doesn’t mean much to the big picture. But find out where he has it taken. When it’s buried—and it will probably be in an Austrian lake close to his home—we might want one of our party Gauleiters to watch over it. Kaltenbrunner may never last the war out, and it would be useful to the party later.

In reality, by striking out on his own, Kaltenbrunner had signed his own death warrant, but he was still useful to Bormann as long as the talks with Dulles continued. The Allies recovered less than 10 percent of this enormous booty. The rest was used to finance the various escape networks for Nazi
war criminals fleeing justice
in the postwar years.

The final authorization for the implementation of Operation Crossword came in the form of three “
highest priority signals
” from Washington on the morning of April 27, 1945. It took two days for all the various representatives to meet and sign the actual surrender document for the German forces in Italy. In the meantime, Bormann had just barely enough time to activate the final option for Aktion Feuerland (see
Chapter 15
and the escape to Tønder). At 2:00 p.m. on May 2, 1945, a simultaneous Allied and German
ceasefire came into effect in northern Italy
. Five minutes earlier, an eighteen-year-old radio announcer, Richard Beier, made the very last broadcast by Grossdeutscher Rundfunk (Greater German Broadcasting) from its underground studio on Masurenallee in Berlin: “
The Führer is dead
. Long live the Reich!” But where was Hitler’s body?