The Berkut (65 page)

Fact:
Skorzeny met alone with Hitler on many occasions.

Fact:
Skorzeny's units had a record of remarkable successes in unusual military undertakings.

Fact:
American interrogators worked hard on Skorzeny to get him to admit that he was on the Oder front in late April '45. (Here Valentine jotted an aside that
it was unlikely that such questioning was the result of creative thinking or individual initiative on the part of the interrogators. In all likelihood there had been a directive from above instructing the interrogators to pursue the subject. If it
did
come from above, then there must be reasonable doubt at higher levels about Hitler's fate.)

Fact:
Skorzeny was not on the Oder front in late April; he was in Austria on Hitler's orders. This has been corroborated by Radl, his number two, and by several other witnesses. No matter what magic or mischief he was capable of, Skorzeny couldn't be in two places at once. If Hitler's body was spirited away, 5korzeny was not the culprit.

Fact:
The Russians sent two men to Munich to search the records of Skorzeny's unit at its special training annex. Their prob
able intent was to construct an organization chart of Skorzeny's unit. I saw for myself that the records of the 55 unit were complete, with the exception of two missing personnel folders.

Fact:
The Russians sent the same two men to Austria to inter
view Skorzeny immediately after he surrendered to the American army.

Fact:
Skorzeny confirms the interview by the two Russians. He believes that they wanted to find out
more about his number three, Gü
nter Brumm.

Fact:
One of the t
wo missing folders is that of Gü
nter Brumm.

Fact:
Unlike 5korzeny and Radl, Brumm is a professional sol
dier, a career man.

Fact:
Brumm was on the Oder front at the end. He was close to Berlin. This provided opportunity. His ability provided means. (Here it occurred to Valentine that he was beginning to see a direction in the facts.)

Fact:
Brumm is still missing. Possibilities: he is dead, his body missing; he is alive and actively evading capture; he is alive and being held by the Russians." (Valentine stopped himself here; he must stick to facts and not speculate or draw conclusions.)

Fact:
Brumm's home was in Bad Harzburg.

Fact:
Brumm was last seen in
his hometown in the summer of
44, when he went camping after visiting his grandfather's grave. Strange behavior given the war situation and Brumm's unique level of responsibility. Highly unusual to take a leave at such a time, stranger yet for one to be granted." (He made a note to himself:
Ask Skorzeny about Brumm/
leave/summer '44? Who authorized?)

Fact:
Hitler ordered development of a last-gasp escape system. (Another note: Possibly operational. He placed a question mark behind the note and bracketed it.)

Fact:
If anyone has found Hitler or his body, they aren't saying.

Valentine scratched his ear and sipped cold coffee. Those were the facts. He could see three common threads: Hitler, Brumm, and a Russian effort to identify Brumm. While it wasn't verifiable fact, he was also sure that Russian agents had been operating in Brumm's hometown after the war ended, and there could be no other reason for their presence than to seek information about the colonel. He had three strong threads, and he underlined them in his notes. Now it was time to begin a little creative weaving.

On a new piece of paper Valentine wrote "Hitler," and under the name listed the possibilities:

He studied the entries under Hitler's name, which seemed to cover all the possibilities. It was time to thin out the list. He eliminated both possibilities involving the Russians. While they might keep the infor
mation secret from the Allies, it was clear by their actions that they were still searching hard. There was no point to a search if they had either the man or the corpse. They were also saying publicly that they didn't have him, and for once Valentine decided to believe them. The Russian options were out. He also crossed out the possibility of the
body still being buried in the rubble. G-2 said that the Russians had dug in the Chancellery garden like moles, even after claiming they had found the bodies of Hitler and Braun. If they really had the bodies, why more digging? This was further evidence that the Russian options weren't viable. For a moment he considered the chance that the body had been obliterated by Russian artillery. Very small, he decided. The Russians had found lots of bodies in the area, or at least so they had told the Allies.

This left only two alternatives: Hitler was dead, his body spirited away by his fanatical followers, or he was alive and hiding. Valentine felt sweat building under his arms. Could he be crazy? He was just one man, and he didn't have all the information available to G-2 or the higher levels of the OSS. Yet here were two seemingly inescapable conclusions that seemed solid enough to pursue. Could it be that the Allied intelligence services simply hadn't come to grips with these possibilities? Could he have erred in his reasoning? No, dammit. His facts, while few in number, were substantial. In his entire life he'd never made a mistake in this kind of reasoning exercise; he knew he was right.

The prospects excited him. Hitler dead or alive? The Russians reported that he had committed suicide. Both the Americans and the Brits had captured people who had been in the bunker at the end, and the Russians had their own witnesses. Our bad guys against your bad guys. But was it true? Would Hitler kill himself? No matter what the Krauts claimed, he wasn't sure.

The OSS had developed a psychological profile of Hitler, the result of a project begun in '41, before Pearl Harbor. At the time Wild Bill Donovan was head of an obscure agency from
which the OSS was spawned. By 19
43, OSS lived and Donovan was at the helm; he ordered the completion of the profile of Hitler, one that ideally would have some predictive value; otherwise it would be a waste of time and resources. Psychoanalysts were assembled in teams. People were lo
cated in Allied countries who had known Hitler personally at some point during his life, and were interviewed over and over until every nuance of their impressions of the Nazi leader was captured. Libraries and other sources were plumbed by teams of researchers. By the fall of '43, the OSS had a detailed picture of their adversary. They knew how he talked, how he thought, the location of every wart. The report was shared with Allied leaders and intelligence services.

Valentine had gotten wind of the report from Ermine and she had pilfered a copy for him, which he had devoured. It had concluded with a projection of eight possible ends for Hitler, with a probability anal
ysis for each. On one end of the spectrum, under "least probable," the report cited endings of a natural death for the German leader or capture by the Allies. Possibilities of higher probability included assassination, flight to another country and insanity. Further up the scale, the report listed his being toppled in a revolt, followed by death in battle. While the report wasn't explicit, there was an inference in this evaluation about the strength of the German underground
. In July of 1944
,
it had warm
ed Valentine to know that some German generals had tried to assassinate Hitler in France. The report had been off base on that count, so it certainly wasn't infallible. It concluded finally that a Hitler suicide was the "most plausible outcome." To support its contention, the experts offered a bunch of shrink jargon, which boiled down to Hitler's being a true psychopath, and of his having made so many threats of suicide.

Valentine couldn't refute the report's conclusion. "Hitler dead, body stolen," he wrote. He circled Brumm's name again. "Why?" One of Hitler's own bizarre ideas, a final touch of theatrics? His final denial of what the world wanted most? If not alive, the world needed the corpse to see for itself that the monster was finally dead. Only the forensics people could officially proclaim an end to the nightmare. Without the body, the Germans would say he'd gotten away and the fantasy of the Third Reich would persist. This had to be it, Valentine decided. Brumm had to
have been in cahoots with the Fü
hrer. But where would he take the body?

Valentine reviewed his notes.
Fact:
Brumm's home was in Bad Harzburg.
Fact:
Brumm was on leave in the summer of
'
44
,
was seen in the village and he went camping. Holy shit! It hit him like a fist in the stomach. The Harz Mountains! That's where Brumm would go. That's what he knew best, them thar hills!

The initial elation soon passed. It wouldn't make sense to hide the body in Germany permanently, mountains or no mountains; Brumm would want to get it out of the country. So he was right back where he'd been. The question was not so much where he would go as how he'd get there. He tried to speculate, but didn't get far. He took a final drag on his cigar and stamped it out on the floor. A cloud of acrid smoke curled up from his feet.

Okay, Brumm's running some kind of zany gambit. Call it fact. Where to? But no matter what he speculated, there just wasn't any evidence to hang it on. And despite what the evidence pointed to, there was still the matter of the ghost and his glider. Hitler did not want to die; of that Beau was certain.

It was no good. There was not enough information to make even a wild-ass guess about a destination. Valentine crawled onto his cot, covered his head with a pillow and tried to will himself into deep sleep. Instead, his mind remained active. He saw the coffin of Addie Bundren on the back of a wagon, bumping across the red clay of Mississippi. If Faulkner could conjure up such a strange obsession, why not Brumm? The thought stayed with him throughout the night.

94 – April 9, 1946, 6:00 A.M.

It was early morning when Brumm's group reached the steep banks of the river. By his reckoning, they were several kilometers downstream of Worms on an isolated stretch of the Rhine.

Four days and nights had passed since the two strangers first ap
peared in their wake and began stalking them; there was no other way to describe it. There was no more pretending about drifters or petty criminals; not only were they following them, but they knew what they were doing. No matter what Brumm did, the two pursuers had managed to stay with them, keeping their distance. The Germans had tried forced marches and radical changes in direction, but to no avail. Sometimes the pair was behind them, sometimes on their flanks, but they were always pressing, almost taunting them. The two were unpredictable; they weren't amateurs, of that he was certain. It was their constant distance that bothered him the most. Had they closed for a fight he would have felt better, but no attack came. The two men simply stayed with them, pushing gently. He could sense a trap, but he kept his feelings to himself.

At Bad Konig, Brumm had decided to try something new. He turned his party west and made directly for the Rhine, going two days and a night without resting for more than a few minutes at a time. The pace had reduced Herr Wolf to a state of near physical collapse; he was deteriorating fast and his whining turned to gasping pleas. "You're killing me, Colonel," he whispered angrily during the long night run. "We're going west. It's not part of the plan. We have to get to Mem
mingen."

Brumm stopped him in his tracks and held him by the shoulders. Herr Wolf's chest was heaving, and he sucked air in loud gulps. "Cir
cumstances have changed," the colonel told him. "We're under active surveillance. We have to do something to lose them. We're going to get a boat and take it up the Rhine."

Herr Wolf complained no more thereafter.

There was a low mist on the river at sunrise. Until it cleared, Brumm could only hope that their sudden spurt had given them a little distance and time.

Soon after dawn the fog lifted like a slow curtain. Brumm found a spot along the riverbank where the water curled in a wide turn. Several craft passed, either too small or too large for their purposes, but after an hour a wooden boat with high gunwales chugged into view, headed upriver. Raw lumber was stacked on its decks, and it rode low in the water. Brumm positioned Beard in a cluster of brush and high grass and made Herr Wolf lie down on his back. As the boat neared, the colonel shouted and waved his arms to attract the crew's attention. Two men amidships waved back and the boat turned a few degrees closer to shore.