Hitler Has Won

by Frederic Mullally

  “Now, how about being an officer and a gentleman and getting me some food?”

  “Someone’s got in ahead of me. Here comes good old Peter, bearing gifts.”

  The next evening, when he telephoned home to wish his parents and Sophie a happy Christmas, his sister let him know—in carefully guarded language—that the stratagem had worked, “quite satisfactorily.”

  “No bad scene, then?”

  “Well, let’s say he took it as I expected.”

  The same might have been said—though in terms of a much more massive frustration—of Adolf Hitler, when he heard how the two great Churches of Germany had presented the Bormann prayer to their congregations. Most of the Protestant pastors had offered the prayer without comment. Here and there, individual Catholic priests had done likewise. But the overwhelming majority of Catholic priests had followed the formula used by Clemens, Count von Galen, the Bishop of Muenster, who introduced the prayer with the words: “I shall now recite a form of prayer which has been distributed by our Government to the churches of all denominations throughout the Reich. I might add that there is nothing in this directive that obliges any of the faithful to utter the word ‘Amen!’ ” In his own Church, on Christmas morning, Bishop Galen’s congregation greeted the end of the prayer with complete silence. In other Catholic churches, the amens were as sparse—in Bormann’s savage words—“as Jews in Berchtesgaden.”

  The story circulating around the Berghof was that, instead of flying into one of his uncontrolled rages, the Fuehrer had received the report with “a terrible icy calm.” One version had it that he even smiled, muttering something to the effect that there would be more than one way to teach the Catholics to pray.

  II

  WERNER YOEGLER slept badly, the night of Hitler’s party for the young people. At one point, tormented by images of the prize that had escaped him that evening, he switched on the light and prowled about the room, trying to summon up, if not the enthusiasm, then at least enough misogynist rancor to fuel a rampage through the SS bordello up in the pinewoods.

  It was no good. He wanted Sophie Armbrecht, with an intensity no dumb and compliant whores could assuage. Her identification card, which should by now have been back in Rattenhuber’s files, was lying on the bedside table, and he snatched it up again, for the umpteenth time that night, and sat staring at the piquantly smiling face, working his thin lips between his teeth. He would get this girl, sooner or later. Dedication was all—that same single-minded thrust that had propelled him in thirteen glorious years from the lowest brown-shirted ranks of the Hamburg SA to Obersturmbannjuehrer in the most prestigious regiment of the elite of elites, the SS Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Brigade.

  In September 1930 he had just turned twenty and had achieved nothing except the capacity to hate. Negative and sterile. A couple of tin-pot athletic awards. And one precious private endowment: the memory, cherished over the years, of his father.

  When Werner Voegler was born, in a middle-class suburb of Hamburg, his father, Hans, at twenty-four, was already a lieutenant in the Imperial Naval Reserve and the owner of a small but profitable coffee-importing business in the heart of the city. Voegler remembered him not as the handsome smiling image framed on his mother’s mantelpiece, but as a towering tobacco-scented presence, at once warming and highlighting his childhood memories up to 1918—memories mostly to do with greeting and waving farewell to his uniformed father at the gates to the naval dockyards. He had total recall of the day they came with the telegram confirming his father’s death in action commanding his U-boat on its first and last mission into the North Sea. He remembered, as if it were yesterday, all the terror of being held with his older sister against the heaving, weeping bulk of his mother, of screaming, over and over again, “What’s the matter, Mother? What’s the matter?” And he could still evoke, through a somewhat cloudier prism, the bitter-sweet reflected glory of remaining seated in his classroom, four days later, while the rest of the boys, in response to a patriotic speech from the headmaster of his school, stood to honor his hero-father.

  The years that followed—up until 1930 anyway—were years the locusts had eaten. There was the locust of postwar German bankruptcy, with his mother struggling to save their smitten business from ruin and Voegler and his sister obliged to leave their fashionable private school for a state school. There was the locust of his mother’s second marriage in 1920, to a Hamburg policeman whose feet stank abominably, who had dodged wartime service and who, in a drunken rage one day had destroyed the gilt-framed photograph of Hans Voegler. And there was the locust of those tedious wasted years locked up in a classroom with snotty-nosed working-class kids, half of whom were too hungry, most of the time, to concentrate on their lessons. This was not Voegler’s excuse for being temperamentally ineducable. It was more a case of his having decided that he was cut out to be a man of action like his father. The proof of this was already becoming self-evident. At the age of twelve his prowess on the sports field was in strictly inverse ratio to his progress in the classroom. At fisticuffs and wrestling he could easily lick boys a year older than himself, and in the Protestant Youth Club, which he joined the following year, he was almost immediately marked out for special coaching by a boxing instructor, who recognized promising material for the annual interclub championships.

  Until September 1930, Voegler knew little of politics and cared even less. He was thirteen in April 1924, when the Munich agitator Adolf Hitler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for his part in the Feldherrnhalle Putsch. But, outside Bavaria, the Nazi Party meant little, and neither Hitler’s incarceration in Landsberg Prison nor his release eight months later made any impact on Voegler or his friends. Nor would the publication of Mein Kampf, in July 1925, have interested the book-shy teenager. At fifteen, Voegler was still bent on a naval career. Alas, there was hardly a German navy to talk about. As a result of the infamous Treaty of Versailles, Germany had been left “heerlos, wahrlos, ehrlos.” The country had also been left in penury, although that state of affairs was now beginning to right itself, through the wizardry of Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, and for the first time in years the family coffee business was actually beginning to show a small profit.

  Voegler left school at fifteen and for the next three years worked in the family business, delivering the weekly orders of coffee to hotels and restaurants throughout the city. Being ingratiating to restaurant managers and kitchen staff was an inglorious way to earn his pocket money, but at least it was an open-air job, and his leg muscles throve from the hours of pedaling the heavy box tricycle from one end of Hamburg to the other. Four years later, when the worldwide depression of 1929 hit Germany with all the force of an economic avalanche, his mother’s coffee-importing business was one of the first to go under, and Voegler was lucky to be taken on—again through his stepfather’s connections—as casual labor in the dockyards. It was here that he was exposed for the first time to the violence and bitterness of the power struggle going on beneath the surface of the democratic Weimar Republic.

  His first physical involvement in the war for Germany’s soul came toward the end of August 1930, when a large group of dockers tried to break up an outdoor Nazi Party meeting at one of the main gateways to the dockyards. Voegler floored a burly docker who described the Nazi speaker’s Iron Cross as “Kaiser-vomit” and, in the melee that followed, gave such a good account of himself, fighting shoulder to shoulder with the Brown Shirts, that he was whisked away to safety, together with the speaker and scharjuehrer, as soon as the police reinforcements arrived. He did not go back to work at the docks. He accepted membership in the SA, volunteered his services as steward at the campaign meetings for the September Reichstag elections, and celebrated with his new comrades the exciting results: 6,409,600 votes for the Party; the Nazis now were second-strongest party in the German Reichstag.

  Over the next year, unemployment in Germany mounted to five and a half million, while membership of the Nazi Party more than doubled itself, reachin
g over 800,000 by the end of 1931. Voegler stayed with the SA, giving his full-time services and paying his way in the beer cellars with money scrounged from his mother’s dwindling savings. His stepfather, an apolitical policeman fed up to the teeth with the street brawling between the Nazis and the Left, delivered his ultimatum the week after Voegler was promoted to Unterscharjuehrer, at the age of twenty-one.

  “Get that bloody uniform off your back and find a job, or clear out of the house. You’re not sponging off your mother any longer.”

  It was all Voegler needed. Disgusted with having to wheedle for every mark he needed, he had already set his sights on Munich, where an elite corps of bodyguards, the Schutzstaffel, was being built up by Heinrich Himmler into a powerful national organization, with the funds, moreover, to pay wages for fulltime service. His release from the Brown Shirts was aided by his former boxing coach—now a Sturmbarmfuehrer in the local SA —and, armed with a letter of recommendation from the Hamburg Party headquarters, Yoegler took the train to Munich. He also went armed with something else, without which he would never have made first base with the SS. From the data provided by his mother, plus a painstaking search through the local parish registers and the Town Hall archives, he had documents attesting to two full centuries of Aryan stock, unsullied by Jewish blood.

  When Hitler came to power in January 1933, Voegler was an SS Untersturmfuehrer and the holder of an SS Silver Medal for boxing. And in March of that year, when the Nazis won 43.9 percent of the votes in the Reichstag elections, he was transferred to the Berlin Chancellery as an officer of the Stabwache under the command of Sepp Dietrich. The errand boy of Hamburg was coming along fast. At the Nuremberg rally of September 1933 the Fuehrer renamed the Stabwache the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, constituting a regiment of three battalions. And when Yoegler, eight months later, was promoted to Obersturmfuehrer, he knew he had at last arrived. But his moment of greatest personal glory was now only one month away.

  On June 29, 1934, a detachment of one hundred picked men of the Leibstandarte, including Voegler, were flown to Augsburg and thence transported by trucks during the night to the outskirts of the small town of Wiessee, where they immediately took cover in some woods. All the men had been briefed before leaving Augsburg. The SA, under their commander Ernst Roehm, were planning to oust Adolf Hitler from power. The Fuehrer was going to strike first by arresting Roehm and a bunch of high-ranking SA officers in their conspiratorial headquarters, the lakeside Hanslbauer Hotel at Wiessee. The task of the SS was to surprise Roehm’s guards and overcome any resistance before the Fuehrer made his avenging entrance.

  Shortly after dawn a convoy of several cars and army trucks, coming from Munich, stopped by the woods and a rapid discussion took place between Dietrich and Hitler. Orders were quietly given, and an army truck pulled out and took its place at the head of the convoy, where the soldiers climbed out to make way for a platoon of armed SS under Voegler’s command. Sepp Dietrich sat up front with the driver. The truck stopped a hundred yards from the hotel and, with Dietrich silently directing the operation, Voegler and his men entered the hotel and swiftly disarmed the three sleepy SA guards slumped in a room off the foyer. By the time Hitler, pale and trembling with inner fury, strode into the foyer, one of the SA officers, Julius Uhl, had appeared on the staircase, revolver in hand. At Hitler’s cry, “Where’s that swine, Roehm?” Uhl raised his revolver, pointing it at Hitler. A second later, as Voegler stepped squarely in front of his Fuehrer, Uhl lowered the weapon and was seized and propelled down the steep steps to the hotel cellar. Voegler was promoted by Hitler on the spot to Hauptsturmfuehrer.

  Throughout the whole of that summer day—so inaptly named the Night of the Long Knives—Voegler and his men drove tirelessly from place to place in the Munich area carrying out the executions of SA leaders and other “enemies of the state” in accordance with orders that streamed from Hitler’s offices at the Brown House. He had never killed before, and this was his baptism of blood. When the butchery was over, Werner Voegler knew himself, and his SS troops, to be apart from other men.

  Two years later, his regiment was given the honor to be the first unit to enter the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland. He was cheated of front-line action during the conquest of Poland through the sheer speed with which the Wehrmacht overran that country, but on the first day of the invasion of the Low Countries, Voegler’s company was in the spearhead of a Leibstandarte advance of 135 miles into Holland. He was recommended for promotion, and after the British evacuation of Dunkirk, when his battalion drove farther south in pursuit of the French Army than any other unit of the Wehrmacht, he got his promotion to Sturmbannfuehrer, together with the Iron Cross, First Class.

  By the spring of 1941, the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler was a full brigade attached to Army Group A for the drive through the Ukraine toward Kiev and Rostov. It was Voegler’s regiment of the Waffen SS that bore the first brunt of the surprise Red Army counterattack on Rostov and, by holding its position to the north of the city, gave Rundstedt the precious hours he needed to assess the enemy’s tactics and take the necessary countermeasures. Voegler’s own regiment was decimated to a little over company strength, but he himself came through with minor flesh wounds and was posted back to Germany, to the headquarters staff of the Leibstandarte.

  With the fall of Moscow and Leningrad, Hitler closed down his field headquarters on the eastern front and spent the rest of the winter and the spring of 1942 at the Berghof, directing the campaign in the Caucasus and blueprinting the Eastern Wall defense system running from Archangel to the Caspian Sea. Meanwhile, Voegler received his promotion to Obersturmbannfuehrer and became chief adjutant to SS Oberfuehrer Rattenhuber, with special responsibility for the security of the Berghof and an area of two hundred square miles around it.

  He never set foot in Hamburg again and he never answered any of the letters from his mother and sister congratulating him on the successive promotions and decorations announced in the party press. In 1936, when Heinrich Himmler took over the whole of the German police apparatus, Voegler seriously entertained the thought of settling accounts with his stepfather by denouncing him, but finally dismissed it, reflecting that if it hadn’t been for his stepfather he might never have taken the train to Munich. He had also toyed with the idea, at one stage, of sending for the only one of his girl friends in Hamburg with whom he had kept a fairly regular correspondence—Margit, the fullbreasted daughter of a tavern keeper. She had been an excellent cook, marvelous in bed, and would have passed the stringent racial Marriage Code for SS men. But she could never have kept up with him socially in his rapid promotion, and he was glad now that he had ended the correspondence, brusquely, a week after Hitler had made him a Hauptsturmfuehrer.

  Now, Sophie Armbrecht—she was something else. Not for marriage, since Voegler was firmly determined to enjoy his privileged bachelorhood for several years to come, but as a nubile bourgeois girl friend he could flaunt before his men and fellow officers and a superb amenity for the small apartment in Munich where he spent most of his leave days. Fräulein Armbrecht hadn’t risen as eagerly as she should have to his suggestion. Her SD dossier made no mention of emotional or sexual involvement with any male. The key that would unlock those shapely legs was right here on the mountain—the good will of her brother, Kurt.

  He would have to go to work on it.

  III

  THERE WAS no leave for Voegler or for any of the Fuehrer’s immediate entourage over the next eighty days, Hitler having decided to maintain his headquarters at the Berghof while certain structural alterations were being made to the main reception salons of the Berlin Chancellery by Albert Speer. And on the few occasions during this time that Voegler found himself in Munich on official business, Sophie Armbrecht was either genuinely or conveniently “caught up with lessons” at the language institute or able to plead from her home an “urgent job of translation that’s going to keep me up most of the night.” Far from discouraging Voegler, these evasive tactic
s by the young Fräulein Armbrecht only fanned the hot core of his lust for her.

  In the meantime, he proceeded to cultivate Kurt’s good will by inviting him to an occasional dinner in the SS officers’ mess, to film screenings and—an especially appreciated favor—by pulling strings that gave Kurt a private sitting room, next to his bedroom in the staff quarters. It was over a drink in this same room that Kurt unwittingly provided the opening Voegler had been waiting for so patiently. He had just been telling the SS officer that he had finished restructuring Mein Sieg along the lines proposed by the Fuehrer and that Hitler had brought up the idea, at their last session, that Kurt should now go out and see for himself how the New Order was evolving in the conquered territories of the Greater Reich.

  “Frankly,” Kurt added, smiling, “I think the Chief just wants me out of the way for a few weeks while he and Reichsleiter Bormann concentrate on their war with the Vatican. I know Mussolini and Ciano are expected next week.”

  Voegler swirled the good French cognac around his glass. “Excellent idea, Armbrecht—provided you’ve got the stomach for it.”

  “It’ll be all right. I know it’s pretty rough out there, but don’t forget it wasn’t always a picnic for us poor gunners on the western front.”

  Voegler slowed the circular motion of his right hand. He said, after a long silence, “Have you the faintest idea of the superhuman tasks we are coping with in the General Government of Poland, in White Russia and the Ukraine, all the way up to the eastern front?”