Hitler Has Won

by Frederic Mullally

  Otto Dietrich had installed himself, with his staff, in the offices of the Osservatore Romano within the eastern walls of the Vatican City. An SS man escorted Kurt from the Saint Anne Gate, past the cordoned-off barracks of the Swiss Guard into the Pilgrim Street entrance to the newspaper building. Dietrich was being shaved at his desk by an orderly. He was haggard from lack of sleep, but he seemed pleased to see Kurt.

  “Well, well, my dear fellow! What can I sell you? A rosary, maybe—blessed by the Holy Father himself?”

  “Better than that. You can tell me how I can do what I’m supposed to do here and then get back home out of this madhouse.”

  “You think this is a madhouse? The whole world’s gone berserk!” Dietrich swept a hand over the cables stacked on his desk. “All our missions have been expelled from Spain and Portugal, and the Spanish frontier has been sealed off. De Gaulle has landed in Dakar and the Cape Verde islands, and the Yanks have occupied the Canaries and Madeira without a peep of protest from Franco and Salazar. Badoglio, with ten combat divisions of the imperial Italian army and most of the bloody navy, has installed himself in Sicily, put Mussolini behind bars and called on the Home Army and the Carabinieri to throw the Germans out. Tito took Sarajevo a few hours ago. Martial law has been declared throughout the Ostmark, Albert Speer has disappeared somewhere in Sweden, and Himmler flew off at midnight, threatening to execute every slacker and absenteeist on the home front. As if all that weren’t bad enough, I think I’m getting another attack of the piles.”

  “I have to see Donati, urgently.”

  “You have to! So does most of our top brass. No one can get to the Fuehrer—beg your pardon, His Holiness—except through that Italian Svengali. But he’s locked himself up with Pope Adolf, planning his coronation, and won’t have him bothered by such trifles as the botched-up offensive in Russia.”

  “I haven’t made myself clear. It was Donati himself who sent for me. But I can’t get past those Leibstandarte robots.”

  “Hm-m-m.” Dietrich took a hand mirror from the orderly and examined his shaven jaws. “That does put a different complexion on it. We’d better get your message to Rattenhuber. He’s at least in a position to put it on the lunch tray.”

  Donati greeted Kurt at the entrance to the papal apartments and led the way to a loggia overlooking the courtyard of St. Damascus. He had aged a great deal since Kurt had last seen him, five weeks back.

  “We must be brief, my son. Did you see everyone on that list?”

  “All of them, Father. Stuelpnagel seemed very satisfied with my report. And Admiral Canaris asked me to tell you that the asparagus is now ready for eating.”

  The priest’s wide mouth flickered with the faintest of smiles. It opened in dismay at Kurt’s next words.

  “Schellenberg’s men seized my sister after she’d been to the U.S. Embassy in Madrid. She died in Berlin under interrogation, Father. Canaris says she told them nothing.”

  Donati had lowered his head before Kurt finished. Now it drooped lower and he seemed to be praying, silently. When he looked up again, his dark-brown eyes were awash.

  “I beg your forgiveness.”

  “She would give you hers, Father, I’m sure of it. That’s what matters most to me.”

  “Thank you. And now you are in danger.”

  “Perhaps. It’s probably why Canaris sent me here.”

  “There’ll be no sanctuary for any of us here, my son, when the storm finally breaks.” He looked away, frowning. “I don’t want you to return to Germany. You must get rid of that uniform and go south.”

  “South?”

  “To await the arrival of Badoglio’s troops in Naples. See their commander. Tell him what you know. Beg him to delay his advance on Rome until the German generals have seized power. They will spare the Holy See. Hitler and his Waffen SS will bring it down in ruins about them. Go now, my son. When we meet again, the storm will have passed.”

  Hermann Goering’s message to Hitler was an act of inspiration.

  “I must return to the Reich, Your Holiness, to attend to more mundane affairs on Your behalf. But I shall be flying into danger. May I therefore crave the immense distinction of being the first person to make his Confession to Your Holiness?”

  “But the Reichsmarschall is not even a Catholic, so far as I know,” Donati protested after Hitler had passed him the note.

  “Then we shall declare him one. The formalities can follow, elsewhere.” Hitler popped a dried fig into his mouth and chewed away energetically, his eyes twinkling. “You mustn’t deny Us a little harmless amusement, dear friend.” He started to giggle. “Goering’s confession! Be sure to interrupt us after the first two hours!”

  In the event, it took only ten minutes. Kneeling on a cushion at Hitler’s feet in the private papal study, the fat Deputy Fuehrer reeled off a list of minor peccadilloes, mostly to do with his looting of other people’s property.

  “So you’ve sinned against the seventh and the tenth Commandments,” Hitler grunted. “Now, what about the sixth?”

  “The sixth, my F—Your Holiness?”

  “ ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ Make a proper confession, my son.”

  “But I am guiltless! I was completely faithful to my darling Karin, just as I am to Emmy!”

  “May the Almighty forgive you,” Hitler scowled. “Very well, then.” He gave his absolution. “And for penance you will abstain from all evening meals for the next seven days.” His voice rose to a shout. “And that’s an order!”

  Goering pushed himself, wincing, to his feet.

  “Have I Your Holiness’s permission to speak?”

  “Two minutes.”

  “The Bolsheviks and the Jews are hammering at Fortress Europe. Is it Your Holiness’s wish I should immediately take over the temporal leadership of the Reich?”

  “I suppose so. But not the Chancellorship. I intend retaining that post.” Hitler adjusted his white skull cap and slipped smoothly into the royal plural. “Did We tell you about Our plans for St. Peter’s?”

  “Not yet, Your Holiness.”

  “I sent for Speer. Isn’t he here yet?”

  “Speer is a traitor. He has fled the Reich.”

  “Then have him shot at once,” Hitler snapped. “Now about St. Peter’s. It’s absurd that it should remain in this decadent provincial city. We’re going to have it dismantled, stone by stone, and reassembled in Berlin, the capital of the New Order.”

  “Fantastic! Talking about Berlin, Your Holiness, the Oberkommando of the Wehrmacht is in complete disarray and squabbling among itself. Is it your wish I should take over from Keitel?”

  “Yes, you’d better do that.” Hitler stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse Us—”

  “Including, naturally, the Waffen SS?” Goering, sweating freely, pressed on.

  “Naturally. And don’t forget to shoot Albert Speer. When I think of the honors We showered on that ingrate! . . .”

  The SS orderlies attending on Pope Adolf had done a good job of wiring up the Sovereign Pontiff’s study. At the monitoring desk up on the second floor of the Apostolic Palace, immediately below the study, SS Oberfuehrer Rattenhuber switched off the recording machine and put a top-priority call through to Himmler in Berlin.

  There was a long silence when Rattenhuber finished his account of the Goering-Hitler dialogue. Then: “We have to be clever about this, Rattenhuber. That clown still has his public, and the way everything’s breaking, back here—”

  “My thoughts, exactly. I propose having my own technicians thoroughly examine the aircraft our fat friend will be taking from Ciampino. It would be such a tragedy if it blew up in midair.”

  “Unthinkable. I leave it in your hands, then. Oh, and Rattenhuber—I shan’t forget this.”

  Feldmarschall Keitel, stunned by Goering’s curt message relieving him of the OKW command and in despair of making contact with the Fuehrer, left the airport for Berlin twenty minutes after Goering took off in a converted Heinkel bomber.
The news of the Heinkel’s disintegration over the Austrian alps greeted him on landing at Tempelhof and, correctly identifying the cause of the tragedy, Keitel drove at once to Himmler’s headquarters on the Prinz Albrecht Strasse. The Reichsfuehrer SS, whose nervous twitch had gotten worse, was hanging up the telephone as Keitel was shown in.

  “That was the Doctor. We’re having a meeting at his Ministry and you’d better come along.”

  General Halder, chief of the Army General Staff, was already at the Wilhelmplatz when they arrived, and the four men sat at a round table in the conference room adjoining Goebbels’s office and began to debate what the little propaganda chief acidly referred to as “the new situation created by the untimely explosion of our Deputy Fuehrer.” It was agreed that Adolf Hitler could no longer be counted upon to provide sane leadership of the Reich and that it would be disastrous if either Bormann or Ribbentrop, still hanging on in the Vatican, were to talk the Fuehrer into delegating his supreme authority to them. As to Donati, opinion was divided. Himmler and Keitel branded him as an agent of Roosevelt. Goebbels, with his Catholic upbringing, found it inconceivable that a dignitary of the Church would engineer Pope Pius’s dethronement, out of whatever ulterior motive. Halder advanced no views, remaining silent until the discussion moved on to the military situation. At this point, he produced from his briefcase the latest figures of casualties on the eastern front and the shortfall of tanks, aircraft and ammunitions from the factories.

  “Gentlemen, gentlemen!” Doctor Goebbels expostulated. “This is not a General Staff conference! We have to settle the vital question of leadership. What am I to tell our people— that their Fuehrer has abandoned them for higher things? That there is a leadership vacuum here in Berlin?”

  Keitel was the first to break the heavy silence. His faith in the Fuehrer’s genius, he said, was undiminished, and he himself was confident that Hitler would lead them eventually out of the crisis. In the meantime, however, the Wehrmacht High Command should set up a military council charged with restoring order and morale in the Reich and with securing its frontiers against all external threats. “The loyal support of the Party,” he concluded, looking straight at Himmler, “and the Waffen SS, will guarantee the council’s effectiveness.”

  “Out of the question!” Himmler snapped. “The Party is the supreme power in Germany and must remain so. Our morale and organization—unlike the Wehrmacht’s—remain unshaken. The Fuehrer will decide—perhaps he already has—on a new deputy, and the Party and the SS will loyally serve that person. Even—” he favored Goebbels with a thin smile—“if it should turn out to be you, Herr Doktor.”

  The meeting ended as Himmler and Goebbels had planned it should end. Pending new and intelligible instructions from the Fuehrer himself, the Party Chancellery, which in effect meant the political direction of the Reich, would be in the caretaker hands of Doctor Goebbels, thus filling the vacuum created by Bormann’s immobilization in the Vatican City. For his own good reasons, Hitler had already removed Keitel from the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, and there could be no question of reinstating him except on explicit orders from the Fuehrer himself. Franz Halder must, therefore, assume immediate command of the OKW, but his authority would not extend over the Waffen SS, whose disposition would be a matter for consultation between Halder and Himmler, with the Reichsfuehrer SS making the ultimate decisions. Alfred Jodi would continue as commander in chief of Wehrmacht Operations and Friedrich Fromm as commander in chief of home forces. Halder would call a meeting of all senior Wehrmacht generals as soon as this could be arranged, and there he would explain how the leadership crisis had been solved and secure the generals’ approval and loyalty.

  Wilhelm Keitel, who had been sinking into a deeper and deeper depression as the decisions were reeled off, at last found his voice. “And what, gentlemen, is to be my role from now on?”

  Halder remained silent. Himmler and Goebbels exchanged quizzical glances.

  “Why not take a little time off to think things over?” the Propaganda Minister purred. “I’m sure you’ll come up with something.”

  III

  THE “ELECTION of Pope Adolf had taken place on a Saturday, making it impractical to stage his coronation on the first Sunday following, in accordance with Vatican convention. The event was scheduled, therefore, for the second Sunday, namely October 15.

  On the night of Thursday, October 12, the Military Governors of France and Belgium, Generals von Stuelpnagel and von Falkenhausen, ordered the arrest of all SS and SD personnel in the territories under their command and, in a communique endorsed by every corps commander of the reserve army in the West, called upon General Halder to form a Supreme Military Council for the Defense of the Reich and to take “appropriate measures against any opposition, from whatever quarter, to this unavoidable solution to the leadership crisis in the Greater Reich.”

  That same night, in Berlin, General Paul von Hase, commander of the capital’s garrison, moved the main body of his troops into the Tiergarten and cordoned off the Deutschlandsender and Reichssender radio stations, the Ministry of Propaganda, the R.S.H.A. headquarters in Prinz Albrecht Strasse and the Berlin SS Security main office in the Anhalt Station quarter. Not a drop of blood had yet been shed when at 8:03 a.m. the following day, General Halder—preceded by the playing of “Deutschland über Alles”—addressed the nation over the radio. He called for calm and discipline in “these difficult days” and, without once mentioning the name Adolf Hitler, invited the German people, in or out of uniform, member or nonmember of the Party, Catholic or Protestant, to unite behind the new Supreme Military Council, in whose sane—and he stressed the word—hands Germany’s honor would be upheld, her lawful achievements secured and her peaceful future assured.

  In his private residence on the Hermann Goering Strasse, Joseph Goebbels listened to Halder’s broadcast in silence while his aide Rudolf Stimmer took the speech down in shorthand. When it was over, Goebbels switched off and limped over to the window. He turned suddenly around to face Stimmer, his dark-brown eyes blazing with emotion.

  “I would have followed the Fuehrer into the jaws of hell itself! He lost me when he walked into the Vatican.”

  “And now, Herr Doktor?” Stimmer ventured.

  “Let the dice fall! In twenty-four hours’ time, either you and I will be under lock and key or Halder and his generals hanging from meat hooks. There’s not a thing we can do about it.”

  Heinrich Himmler had taken another view. Alerted by a Paris call from SS Standartenfuehrer Knochen minutes before Stuelpnagel’s troops stormed his hotel on the Rue Castiglione, Himmler had ordered Rudolf Brandt to assemble a strong bodyguard and had then driven at break-neck speed to Potsdam, a hundred and fifty miles east of the capital, where the crack Viking Division of his Waffen SS was encamped. From Potsdam he had made contact with the commanders of every SS division in Germany and on the eastern front. The orders were explicit. In the event that the Wehrmacht insurrection in France and Belgium should spread, the Waffen SS would engage all rebel elements of the regular army, disarm them and execute every officer from the rank of lieutenant upward.

  While Himmler was barking out his orders over one telephone, Brandt was talking over another one to General Fromm, commander in chief of the Home Forces, who currently had a whole army corps within striking distance of Berlin. Fromm, the last of the Wehrmacht generals to be sounded out by Halder and Canaris, had taken a wait-and-see attitude toward the army plot. Now he declared himself and his troops “for Himmler and the Reich.” He was told to put a ring of steel around the capital and await the arrival of the Viking Division, at that moment heading in motorized columns for Berlin.

  A call to Feldmarschall Kesselring, who was “mopping up” in northern Italy after his Operation Clamp-Down, confirmed his loyalty to the Party, and it was decided that he should move part of his forces into southern France to discipline and replace the Wehrmacht coastal garrisons that were now declaring for Stuelpnagel. The remainder of
his forces in Italy would establish a defense system south of the river Arno and would be stiffened by the Leibstandarte division of the Waffen SS, now ordered northward from its barracks near Rome.

  “Is that wise?” Obergruppenfuehrer Brandt frowned. “It leaves the Fuehrer isolated in a hostile city, with only one regiment of the Leibstandarte to protect him.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” Himmler snapped. “The Fuehrer has God on his side. He doesn’t need us any more.”

  At noon the next day, October 13, Jodi sent an ultimatum to Halder to surrender himself and his staff to General Fromm and to order the troops of the Berlin garrison back to their barracks. If he failed to comply, the Viking Division, backed by Fromm’s army corps, would move in, and the resulting bloodshed and destruction of civilian property would be on Halder’s head.

  Halder replied as Chief of the OKW and head of the provisional Council for the Defense of the Reich. General Jodl was dismissed, with immediate effect, from the post of Chief of Wehrmacht Operations and General Fromm was ordered to withdraw his troops from the periphery of Berlin.

  The battle for Berlin was over by nightfall and cost the lives of the entire garrison—either before or after surrender. General Halder and his staff were strung from lampposts in the Bendlerstrasse. At 11 p.m. Doctor Goebbels announced over the Deutschlandsender network that Heinrich Himmler had assumed all the Fuehrer’s responsibilities, including supreme command of the armed forces. The rebel Wehrmacht generals were invited to hand over their commands to the nearest Waffen SS generals in their regions.