Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (59 page)

134    
Hitler’s “Nero Decree”:
William L. Shirer,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
(New York: Touchstone, 1959). Hitler was utterly merciless toward a German people that he believed had failed him. In a conversation with Albert Speer, he stated: “If the war is lost, the nation perishes. This fate is inevitable. There is no necessity to take into consideration the basis which the people will need to continue a most primitive existence. On the contrary, it will be wiser to destroy those things ourselves because this nation will have proved to be the weaker one and the future will belong solely to the stronger Eastern nation. Besides, those who remain after the battle are only the inferior ones, for the good ones have been killed.” Not everyone agreed with the Führer’s monstrous nihilism; some tried to countermand the Nero Decree, including Albert Speer and many in the Wehrmacht. Foreseeing this opposition, Hitler declared in the decree that “All directives opposing this are invalid.” Bormann saw Speer’s disobedience as an opportunity to have him dragged before a court-martial but was unsuccessful. Enough of Bormann’s gauleiters followed his orders to make his threat to the Allied agents credible, including gauleiter August Eigruber of Oberdonau, who ensured that bombs were placed in the Altaussee art repository so that it did not “fall into the hands of Bolsheviks or International Jewry.” Ironically, Hitler’s Nero Decree was a remarkably similar concept to the Morgenthau Plan for reducing Germany to pastoral status.

135    
Bormann’s letter to his wife:
Sayer and Botting,
Nazi Gold
.

136    
“Kaiseroda potassium mine”:
Greg Bradsher, “Nazi Gold: The Merkers Mine Treasure,”
Prologue: Quarterly of the National Archives and Records Administration
31, no. 1 (1999).

136    
“134 repositories”:
Whetton,
Hitler’s Fortune
.

136    
“Do Not Drop”:
Edsel,
Monuments Men
. Oddly, the stencils on the crates were misspelled: they should have read
stürzen
, not
stürtzen
.

137    
“one of the most important intelligence hauls”:
The National Archives, Kew, London; File ADM 223/214.

137    
Allied seizures of Nazi assets and recovery of loot:
see notes, passim. In the final week of the war, numerous Allied Special Forces units descended on selected sites across the length and breadth of the Third Reich. In the north, 30 Advance Unit stormed into the port of Kiel ahead of the frontline troops to acquire the secrets of sophisticated U-boat designs and high-speed underwater propulsion devices. To the south, they captured Nazi V-2 rocket engineers and many tons of ballistic missile data and plans that formed the basis for the development of ICBMs during the Cold War and the race to the moon. Further east, a TICOM unit reached Hitler’s home at Berchtesgaden to seize the latest secure encoding machines that allowed the Nazi high command to communicate in total secrecy. Later, they discovered German interception equipment that was capable of decrypting Soviet radio traffic: a vital tool in the coming Cold War. Fifty miles east of Berchtesgaden, several Special Forces detachments, including OSS and British Special Operations Executive teams, code-named Historian, landed at Altaussee to secure Hitler’s fabulous hoard of artworks buried a mile below the surface of the earth in the labyrinthine Kaiser Josef salt mine before they were blown to smithereens by Bormann’s fanatical henchman, Gauleiter Adolf Eigruber. Among the hoard were 15 Rembrandts, 23 Bruegels, two Vermeers, 15 Canalettos, 15 Tintorettos, 8 Tiepolos, 4 Titians, and 2 da Vincis as well as sublime sculptures such as Michelangelo’s Madonna of Bruges. Days later, the Monuments Men arrived with the first American troops to retrieve all the priceless artifacts before the area became part of the Soviet zone of occupation.

137    
“the Führer flew into a rage”:
von Hassell et al.,
Alliance of Enemies
.

137    
“cement submarine”:
Blaine Taylor,
Hitler’s Headquarters: From Beer Hall to Bunker 1920–1945
(Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007). SS Capt. Helmut Beermann of the SS Begleit Kommando des Führers—Hitler’s personal bodyguard—gave a graphic description of life underground: “The whole atmosphere down there was … like being stranded in a cement submarine, or buried alive in some charnel house. People who work in diving bells probably feel less cramped. It was dank and dusty.… The ventilation could now be warm and sultry, now cold and clammy.… Then there [were] the fetid odors of boots, sweaty woolen uniforms and acrid coal-tar disinfectant. Toward the end, when the drainage packed in, it was as pleasant as working in a public urinal.”

139    
“Führer’s only unquestionably trusted deputy”:
von Lang,
Bormann
.

139    
“useless as a bolt-hole”:
Farago,
Aftermath
.

139    
“Bormann Bunker”:
Sayer and Botting,
Nazi Gold
.

140    
“Ernst is still looking out for Ernst”:
Manning,
Martin Bormann
.

140    
“war criminals fleeing justice”:
Sayer and Botting,
Nazi Gold
. Kaltenbrunner was captured by the Allies on May 12, 1945 (see note for Chapter 12, “Villa Kerry,” page 304), condemned by the Nuremberg International Tribunal, and hanged on October 16, 1946.

140    
“highest priority signals”:
von Hassell et al.,
Alliance of Enemies
.

140    
“ceasefire came into effect in northern Italy”:
On April 27, 1945, Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were captured by Italian communist partisans; the next day they were shot dead and their bodies mutilated before being strung up by the feet on the forecourt of a gas station on the Piazzale Loreto in Milan. The news of his ally’s gruesome fate was a significant factor in Hitler’s late decision to flee from Berlin.

140    
“The Führer is dead”:
Antony Beevor,
Berlin: The Downfall 1945
(London: Viking, 2002).

141    
“Where is Adolf Hitler?”:
O’Donnell,
The Bunker
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978.) O’Donnell interviewed Johannes Hentschel, who recalled the senior doctor well. Her fluency in German was impressive: “
die Klamotten
” is typical Berlin slang for “duds” or “party clothes” and not found in the average German language schoolbook.

141    
“an identifiable corpse”:
The Soviet authorities instituted a thorough investigation, code-named Operation Myth, of the events in the Führerbunker during the final days of the Third Reich and the supposed death of Adolf Hitler. All the surviving captured eyewitnesses from the bunker were subject to intense, prolonged interrogation by the NKVD/MVD. An interim report was completed in late 1946 but it did not satisfy Joseph Stalin. A more comprehensive investigation was then undertaken, resulting in
The Hitler Book
, which was submitted to Stalin on December 29, 1949. The Soviet leader read the 413-page report and, after appending some annotations, locked the single copy of the file in his desk drawer, where it remained until his death in March 1953.

141    
“fascist trick”:
Beevor,
Berlin
.

Chapter 14: T
HE
B
UNKER

146    
“general layout of the Führerbunker”:
After the Battle
magazine, “The Reich Chancellery and the Berlin Bunker Then and Now,” 61 (1988).

147    
“emergency exit”:
Seidler and Zeigart,
Hitler’s Secret Headquarters
; see also “Politicization of the Construction Industry 1933–1945,” pp. 3–4, from the history section of Hochtief website
http://www.hochtief.com/hochtief_en/97.jtml
; also
http://berliner-unterwelten.de/fuehrer-bunker.328.1.html
. The escape tunnel’s exit into the U-bahn near Mohrenstrasse is still there, although the Chancellery buildings were finally destroyed in 1950 and the Führerbunker in 1989.

150    
“speaking as if”:
Time
magazine, “As Long As I Live …,” May 28, 1945, quoting a Berlin dispatch dated May 1, 1945,
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,775644,00.html
. This dispatch was based on an interview with Maj. Ivan Nikitine, who is believed to have been the deputy commander of the SMERSH team from 3rd Shock Army, which had entered the bunker immediately after the first assault troops and interrogated many of the captured survivors. Nikitine reported that, under questioning, Germans who had told of Hitler’s death “twisted their stories, clashed in detail,” and finally admitted that no one had actually seen the Führer die.

150    
“powerful and dangerous men”:
On two points the description of the scene on April 27 is problematic. One is trivial: the eyewitness was described by a nonexistent rank, “SS-Untergruppenführer.” However, a number of members of the SS-Begleit Kommando des Führers holding the rank of SS-Untersturmführer (second lieutenant) were present in the bunker. More puzzlingly, the original
Time
article has Bormann entering with Heinrich Himmler, not Müller. On May 1, Maj. Nikitine’s interrogatee might not have known that Himmler had left Berlin months earlier, retiring to a sanatorium on March 13; or it may simply have been a slip of the tongue—hardly impossible, under SMERSH questioning. In any case, Müller, always one of the least visible members of the hierarchy, would have been unknown by sight to a junior officer. Under U.S. interrogation, Erich Kempka, head of the motor pool in the Chancellery, said that he had never seen Müller and was even uncertain of his exact job.

151    
“to secure Hitler’s escape from the capital”:
Weidling to Soviet interrogators, 1945.
Descent into Nightmare
(The Third Reich series) (New York: Time-Life Education, 1992).

151    
“sent and signed the message”:
Michael Bar-Zohar,
The Avengers
(London: Arthur Barker, 1968).

151    
T43
Schlüsselfernschreibmaschine
:
Josef Langer, “SFM T-43,” online research paper, Vienna, June 2001,
http://www.alpenfestung.com/funk_sfm_t_43.htm
. See also Jack B. Copeland et al.,
Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park’s Codebreaking Computers
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). The T43 had been in development since before the war, and an earlier version had been on the warship
Admiral Graf Spee
when it was scuttled off Uruguay in December 1939.