The Peace of Amiens

by Nicholas Sumner

  ​By this time Bormann had skilfully turned himself into the second most powerful man in the Third Reich, he was effectively Hitler’s deputy and closest confidant. Disparagingly referred to by other members of the regime as the ‘Brown Eminence’ his brutality, crudeness and apparent insignificance led many of them to misjudge his subtle perseverance and ability to make himself indispensable. He had an uncanny knack of exploiting the Fuhrer’s weaknesses and idiosyncrasies and thus increasing his own power. He seemed always to be in attendance on Hitler, taking care of tedious administrative detail and expertly steering him into approving his own schemes.

  ​As a result of his machinations, Hitler had dismissed Rudolf Hess in 1942. Hess’ increasing distraction with high living and the trappings of authority enabled Bormann to present him to the Fuhrer as too flippant and superficial to be trusted with power. This opened the way for his ‘transfer’ from head of the Parteikanzlei (Party Council) to that of Germany’s Ambassador to Britain and Bormann’s appointment in his place.

  ​Hitler’s trust now resided in Bormann, whom he once called ‘my most loyal Party comrade’ but Bormann did not cease his Machiavellian intrigues against his rivals. He began to gather the reins of the Party into his own hands and progressively undermined all his competitors for power. Working in the anonymity of his modest office, the diminutive, thickset Bormann showed himself to be a master of intrigue, manipulation and political in-fighting. Always the guardian of Nazi orthodoxy, fanatically anti-Semitic and a keen exponent of the Kirchenkampf (‘War on the Church’, the Nazis attempts to destroy Christianity in Europe), he increased his grip on domestic policy until he decided most issues concerning the security of the regime. The rising power of the SS concerned him greatly, and he viewed the notion of a separate SS fiefdom in Burgundy as an intolerable schism within the party that would undermine his own authority. Himmler and Goebbels, frustrated by the waning of their own influence over Hitler, began to make clumsy attempts to sideline Bormann.

  ​The leaders of the armed services, Goering, Keitel, and Carls [84] (heads of the Luftwaffe, Army, and Navy respectively) already felt that the SS was becoming an over-powerful state within the state. There were hundreds of SS-controlled corporations and large numbers of its members in political posts. [85] Even the Gestapo was an SS organisation and the growth of the SS was not only a potentially destabilising influence but could be seen as an attempt at a ‘slow coup’. Bormann had little difficulty persuading Carls that action would have to be taken. Carls had recently taken over from Raeder and was not really a political animal, whereas Bormann was a shrewd and wily plotter. Goering, on the other hand, was more ambivalent; while lesser members of the party saw which way the wind was blowing and made their alliances accordingly. The example of Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect, is illustrative of this trend; he simply opted for the faction he felt was most likely to win.

  ​In implementing his plans against the SS leadership, Bormann enlisted Admiral Wilhelm Canaris (head of the German intelligence service, the Abwher) whom he found most helpful. There was little love lost between Himmler and Canaris. The Reichsfuhrer SS distrusted the spymaster and believed him to be in contact with the MI6 branch of the British intelligence service. [86] Both Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler, had done a detailed investigation of Canaris’ sources of information on Operation Barbarossa and had arrived at the conclusion that there had indeed been contact between him and the British. Canaris wanted to protect himself from Himmler and in collusion with Bormann he manufactured evidence that Himmler and Goebbels were planning to murder the Fuhrer. He was also very careful to cover his trail, the forgers and even the typist who created the documents were killed as soon as they were complete.

  ​Bormann acted quickly to present this ‘evidence’ not only to Carls, Kietel, and Goering but also to several of the more fanatical and impetuous middle ranking officers of the Liebstandarte 1st SS Panzer Division. The division was reforming at Warschau (formerly Warsaw) but the decline in munitions manufacture in Germany after 1942 meant that this was a slow process. Originally constituted in 1933 as Hitler’s bodyguard, the formation had grown into a motorised division and had distinguished itself in the fighting between 1939 and 1942. It drew the most fervent and bloodthirsty soldiers in Germany to its ranks and was responsible for many war crimes and atrocities.

  ​After meeting with Kietel and Carls on the afternoon of 19th November 1943, Bormann took a scheduled overnight train to Warschau (some 500 kilometres from Berlin) and met with Major Kurt Meyer, Captain Gerhard Bremer and Major Wilhelm Mohnke the following day. [87] He had consulted Kietel and chosen the men he wished to carry out his plan carefully. They were ruthless, fanatically loyal to Adolf Hitler, would obey orders without question and could be relied on to be discrete. It is also worth noting that in any state other than Nazi Germany, they might well have been considered to be criminally deranged and Mohnke was actually a morphine addict.

  ​The resulting operation was known as Betreib Kaninchenfell (Operation Rabbit Skin – a reference to Himmler’s hobby of breeding rabbits) took place just after midnight on the 23rd November. Units under the command of Meyer, Bremer and Mohnke arrested most of the senior leadership of the SS. The incident was to become known as ‘Die Nacht der Lanze’ (The Night of the Lance). Keitel had mobilised all Wehrmacht formations within Germany in case the SS rank and file decided to oppose the arrests of their senior officers, but while there was some fighting, the basic loyalty to the person of Hitler of most of the junior and middle ranks of the SS meant that it quickly ceased. Nevertheless, more than 300 SS men were killed, Bormann, Carls, Keitel and Goering [88] presented the ‘evidence’ of the plot to Hitler at his Alpine retreat on the following morning while the operation was still taking place.

  At first, Hitler did not believe that his trusted lieutenants were capable of treason, but Bormann was persuasive, and explained his unilateral action with the reason that he had acted only to protect his Fuhrer and the need to act quickly was pressing. Hitler was swayed by the deception and had thirteen of the implicated SS officers – including Himmler, Goebbels and Heydrich – tortured to death. Meyer, Bremer and Mohnke were all decorated and promoted, the idea of a separate SS state in Burgundy was dropped.

  ​While Bormann’s actions on Lanze Nacht were certainly risky, his daring paid off. Crucially, he had used SS officers as the instruments of his plan, making the coup seem a matter of internal SS house cleaning. If he had used Wehrmacht or Luftwaffe troops the outcome might have been civil war.

  ​Having dispensed with his most dangerous opponents and consolidated his power and influence, Bormann continued to ‘rule from behind the throne’ through management of the Party administration. This inevitably led to an increase of the authority of the Gauleiters (regional party leaders), who remained an important prop for Bormann. Unsurprisingly, in the fallout from the neutering of the SS as a political force, they were quickly purged of elements Bormann deemed to be disloyal. The Reich became more and more bureaucratised and, in that respect, became even more like the regime in the USSR that the Nazis claimed to despise and had so recently destroyed.

  ​What can best be described as a reshuffle followed the violence of 23rd November, and many SS men were removed from important posts, such as SS Obergruppenfuhrer Dr. Hans Kammler, who had taken over from Albert Speer at the Armaments ministry in late 1942, was replaced by his deputy, Karl–Otto Saur. Those that remained in important offices, like all holders of the Party’s most eminent posts, became members of the Reichsenat, Germany’s newly formed Senate. This was a legislature that wielded very little real power. Its main function was to enable Bormann to keep an eye on any potential rivals. The Reichstag was also preserved, though it too was little more than a rubber stamp assembly. Bormann, as head of the party bureaucracy, was in many ways the most powerful man in Germany.

  CHAPTER 20: WEDNESDAY 18TH AUGUST 1943

  “Stalin? I killed him, I killed him with my o
wn gun, I looked into that bastard’s eyes and I shot him in the guts. I watched him die, I enjoyed it, he cursed me with his dying breath. But the last thing he saw on this earth was me, it was my face, smiling at him. I hope he burns in Hell.”

  ​The teahouse is crowded with men. Their clothes are ragged, their heads wrapped in black turbans, dark faces worn by hardship and fatigue. The broken window has been patched with newspaper. They sit on cots that stand around the room. The yellow walls are painted with simple patterns in blue; a fireplace in the corner heats a dented brass samovar. The man reaches again for his glass of tea. His hands shake as he takes a bottle from inside his jacket. The lip of it rattles against the glass as the clear liquid creates a swirling pattern in the green tea.

  Lieutenant Commander John Leighton looks at him evenly. He says,

  ​“That isn’t the only thing that I came to ask you about.”

  The man’s eyes narrow. He rubs his hand over the stubble of his shaved head. As he speaks his Adam’s apple bobs noticeably up and down in his thin throat.

  ​“What is it that you want?”

  That was a good question, and the answer wasn’t as clear as it had seemed when Leighton had set off from England two months previously.

  The third man at the table looks at him, his name is Carstairs, he is the local British Consul.

  ​“I wanted to ask you…” He stops, groping for the words “I wanted to ask you about the 470th rifle division?”

  ​“I was in the first Regiment. What about it.”

  ​“Were you in the action around Patomnik?”

  ​“Of course. The division was almost wiped out, hardly any of us survived but God wanted me to live, he had a purpose for me, he wanted me to kill Stalin.”

  Leighton waits for a moment then comes to a decision and stands up.

  ​“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come.”

  ​“Yes, yes you should have come, God brought you here. Don’t say you shouldn’t have come. It is blasphemy.”

  ​Blasphemy? Perhaps it is.

  ​“Tell me, tell me why you are here, you are from England? That is a long way. Tell me why you are here?”

  *

  Leighton had not been happy about his transfer away from Istanbul and his new fiancée in July of ’42. Still he did as he was ordered and took the BOAC flight to Teheran and from there an RAF transport to Kraznovodsk to become one of the British military observers attached to the Russian forces. The Russians had been cruel in their taunts, mocking the British and French for their capitulation, affirming that Russia would fight the Germans to its last drop of blood. He had swallowed these insults with outward equanimity, but inward chaffing, and concentrated on his job, which was to gather as much information about the war, the tactics used by each side and their methods and equipment, as he could.

  In 1941 when operation Barbarossa had started the government in Britain had sent almost a hundred observers, as well as some aid. All of the observers were career military men, many of them specialists and the information that they gathered had proved vital in rebuilding Britain’s armed forces after 1940.

  ​Leighton had expected a post on a Soviet ship or at least to a naval base. He was surprised when he was ordered to report to a line infantry regiment, the Third Regiment of the 470th rifle division. It had been a long train journey across the steppe to Stalingrad, but the commanding officer was a captain in the Red Navy and his soldiers had all been ratings in the Soviet fleet. Their ships had been sunk or trapped in harbours and Russia’s desperate need for manpower meant that they were required to fight as infantry. The captain had been impatient, condescending;

  ​“You want to see what the Red Navy does? This is what we do: we fight the Germans. We fight them any way that we can.”

  ​To his surprise they had let him talk to the men, after the morning parade. The captain had interpreted, they had seemed confident, self-assured, laughing and joking like schoolboys. Leighton didn’t doubt that many of them had been schoolboys until very recently. If he had been asked to guess their average age he would have said sixteen. As the two men had walked towards the officer’s mess afterwards he had complimented the captain on his troop’s élan. The captain’s response had been flat, matter-of-fact, brutal.

  ​“We are leaving for the front tomorrow, I have eight hundred and fifty rifles and a thousand men – a week from now they will probably all be dead.”

  ​He had not gone with them. He was transferred to Batumi and was on board the destroyer leader Kharkov during the action of 28th August 1942 when the Soviet Black Sea Fleet was almost annihilated by the Luftwaffe. He was transferred again to Guryev on the Caspian Sea.

  The transfer had perhaps saved his life. In the chaos and confusion as the Soviet Union unravelled in the autumn of 1942, some of the British observers were killed. He had stolen a sailing boat and piloted it back to Bandr-I-shar on the Persian shore. It had taken him two weeks staying close to land, travelling mostly at night, hunger and the cold had almost killed him. Dorothy, his fiancée, barely recognised him when he saw her again.

  ​He had tried to find out about the fate of the 470th Rifle Division. As far as he could tell they had been thrown into a counter attack south west of Stalingrad near a town called Patomnik and the division had been destroyed. And that had seemed to be an end of it, until he had received orders to travel to Mazar-I-Sharif in Afghanistan to investigate the story of a man who had deserted from the Red Army and slipped over the border. A man who claimed to have killed Stalin, a man who had been a lieutenant in the 470th.

  ​Leighton had barely recovered from the ordeal of his escape and had been hoping for a seagoing commission on a carrier. The brand-new Indefatigable was working up. Intrepid was about to return to the fleet after her reconstruction, but he was going to one of the wildest and most inaccessible regions on earth. The orders came from MI6, along with his promotion. The fact that the 470th had been one of his postings in Russia had selected him for the job. “You might even have met him,” as the briefing officer said. He also said that the man he was going to see might be completely insane, or simply telling a story in the hope of notoriety, asylum or both.

  What had happened to Stalin was one of the mysteries of the war, it was certain that he was dead, but how he had died was not known.

  ​The journey had taken weeks: a flight to Istanbul, another to Karachi, the train to Lahore, then another train to Peshawar and from there the tiny train of the Khyber Railway as it puffed laboriously up the switchbacks to Landi Kotal below the pass where he met the two men who would guide him through the Hindu Kush on horseback to Kabul.

  The guides spoke some English and had a suit of local clothes for him to wear. He had allowed his beard to grow and almost looked the part. The men were Pashtuns, smiling and affable. Leighton had been assured that they would guarantee his safety for two reasons: firstly, there were the laws of Moslem hospitality; secondly, they had been handsomely paid. Still, on the fourth day of the journey they had unnerved him. When they had come to the village of Gandamak they had delightedly shown him the hill where the 44th Regiment of Foot had made its last stand a hundred and one years previously. Laughing and slapping his back they had said, “Many British killed here!” but he had kept his face impassive, and waited until the joke wore thin even on them.

  ​Two weeks later he had finally reached Mazar-I-Sharif and the tiny house that served as the British Consulate. The Consul – Carstairs – was pathetically glad to meet another Briton. He begged Leighton for news of home and he answered the questions as best he could until finally the questions came to an end and Leighton asked to be taken to the man he had come so far to see.

  *

  Leighton sits down again and looks at the man carefully. “How were you able to get so close to Stalin?”

  ​The man sneers as if responding to a foolish question. “After Patomnick, I was posted to his bodyguard.”

  ​“By whom?”

  ​“Ber
ia, who else.”

  ​“Why did you kill him?”

  The man smiles, takes another drink from the glass. Leighton searches the lines of the tired, cynical, prematurely aged face in front of him. He cannot reconcile its expression with the faces he remembers. The man gets up, opens the window. Outside the street is crowded. The sound of the call to prayer comes drifting across the rooftops: distant, ethereal, achingly beautiful. He remains standing.

  ​“Why do you ask me why I killed him? Everyone in the country had a reason to kill him. I just got to be the lucky one. What you are trying to ask me is who put me up to it. Well, who do you think? Who stood to profit the most?”

  ​“Beria?”

  ​“Yes Beria, and Kaganovitch too, and Bulganin – those three, the bosses now. Beria came to me personally, offered me money. I took it, but I would have killed Stalin if he had offered me nothing. It was God’s purpose for me. My family died because of Stalin; my wife, my son, gone because of him. Our village was overrun by the Germans because we weren’t ready, because he had a pact with them, because he killed all the officers who knew what they were doing. My regiment, my friends – they died because of Stalin. They died because the only way we had to fight the Germans was to throw half trained men at them: men with no weapons, men with no hope, only rage, rage at the enemy, at what they were doing to our country. What was Stalin hoping? That eventually the Germans would just run out of bullets? What trade was he making? One Russian soldier for every Nazi bullet? My country came apart because of him. But it isn’t over. They will go on fighting. The Germans will have to kill every Russian, every last one. And perhaps they will, but that is the only way they will win, the only way.”