One item that did not get the president’s attention that night was feedback from an American liaison officer attached to the British forces landing in Greece. He reported that the humanitarian situation in that country was desperate and that with the Soviets massing on the border the chance of the British over-reacting and plunging the country into full-blown civil war were very real. Roosevelt had always opposed Churchill’s efforts to retain Greece as a British sphere of influence. Now he missed the gathering of the storm in the newly-liberated country.
2pm, 25th September
Reichskanzlei
Berlin
Goerdeler sat quietly at the end of the long table as if not chairing the meeting. Beck was away and around him the only other civilians were Leber and Adam von Trott. Despite being Secretary of War, Stauffenberg was somewhere else avoiding for the moment the delicate issue of having to cross swords with von Witzleben again. Relations between the two were not getting any better, especially after Stauffenberg had put together the cease-fire around Warsaw. Adam would be Claus’ eyes and ears at this meeting. In any event Goerdeler mused, it was unlikely to be von Witzleben’s kind of meeting; even as Wehrmacht commander he was overshadowed by the presence of Rommel and Dietrich. The two were here today to receive final approval for their planned offensive Wintererwachen, the Wehrmacht’s last ditch effort to stem the Soviet tide. Dietrich was still in his Waffen-SS uniform and had accidentally snapped a Nazi salute at Goerdeler when he entered. But even Leber had taken that in his stride, remarking that since they had not gotten around to removing all the hooked crosses from the Reichskanzlei walls, Dietrich could be forgiven for giving in to instinct. Only Leuschner had grumbled.
The Chancellor and Leber let the details of the planned offensive wash over them. They had no intention of meddling in technical matters beyond their skill. What Rommel and Dietrich outlined was a daring plan, a large-scale Panzer assault along two prongs to push Soviet forces away from both central Poland and the Baltic coast. Since the 22nd of July the two men had overseen the strategic retreat from France. Ten panzer or motorized divisions had been relocated to the polish sector of the eastern front. What remained on the western front was largely infantry, less than 40 Panzers and some minimal horse drawn artillery, mainly to give the civilian population the impression of substance where there was none on the ground. Over von Witzleben’s objections the cabinet had taken the decision to strip the west front irrespective of the opportunity this might present to the Anglo-Americans. Most of the troops withdrawn from the Italian sector or the Balkans had been fed into a newly formed defensive line across Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria. Here the tattered remnants of the Wehrmacht’s Army Group South Ukraine and Army Group A and the bits escaping northwards from Greece and Yugoslavia gathered to make a stand. Now with this small strategic reserve, comprised more than half of the Waffen-SS divisions Rommel and Sepp Dietrich proposed ripping open the Soviet front and pushing the Red Army back hopefully towards the pre-war 1939 Polish-Russian border. If they were lucky, they would stabilize the front there for a few weeks; long enough to create an opportunity for a new set of negotiations. Negotiations that could involve two groups of Poles.
Goerdeler looked at the map. It was a gamble. On their way from the west to the east most of the units had been reequipped with the best that Speer’s armaments factories could offer at short notice. Strategic reserves of ammunition, fuel and spare parts had been built up to give the Panzers wings. The bulk of Germany’s special forces would be deployed to create havoc behind the Russian lines. Special units had been formed from even among the former camp guards – units that would be bled white to reduce the political liability that these men represented. The new jet fighters would be thrown into battle in significant numbers for the first time to give the Panzers air cover. But still the reality was that Germany was betting on less than well-equipped 150 000 veterans. Once they and their machines were gone, the cupboard would be bare. Speer had made that very clear.
The only consolation von Witzleben could offer was that with the redeployment of literally 15 000 heavy Flak guns – most of them 88mm and 105mm – away from protecting the Reich against allied bombers. Germany’s ground defences in general looked stronger than they had for months. That could change quickly if the Americans or the British suddenly rediscovered their interest in bombing civilians.
When Rommel and Dietrich finished, there was a brief discussion about whether the objective was to hold territory or simply to create a spoiling action that would slow the Soviets down. Goerdeler, with Leber’s support had won the day by arguing the political imperative of avoiding being seen to be conquering again. The offensive would exploit opportunities but would not seek to drive too deeply into Russian territory. At most the diplomats would have some smaller pieces of land to hand over symbolically.
When the meeting ended Adam von Trott walked straight to his office and motioned his secretary to send in the expected visitor.
The clean-shaven swarthy man in the dark, expensive suit who sat down in front of the Deputy Foreign Minister was every inch the diplomat his title proclaimed him to be. He had also been on the payroll of German intelligence for years, even before Spain’s Generalissimo Franco had posted him to Switzerland to keep an eye on things.
“Your Excellency, a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance.’ The diplomat was smooth and he and Adam exchanged pleasantries before they got to the point.
‘You have a message for me from a former German General, I believe?
“Yes your excellency, he asked me to assure you that all three packages had arrived in the new world and have been deployed as per instructions. All traces have covered. He asked me to assure you that the traced coverers had been taken care of as well and that he remained at your and the Reich’s service should this be your wish.
Adam forced a smile. Apart from Claus and Leber, no-one else in the cabinet knew why the Spaniard was here.
‘Thank you Consul, please convey my assurances that the forth package will be delivered as agreed. I do believe that you and the General remain business partners.’
He got a curt nod.
‘Excellent, it may be that we need to make use of your wonderful business communications skills in future.’
Not if he could help it. This Spanish fascist bastard had worked for Hitler out of conviction but such waffle would make him think there was more money coming his way. It would ensure that this money was well spent. This was von Trott’s first venture into the murky world of espionage and intrigue and he hoped that was doing the right thing. It had all started when Leber had come to him with a summary of the activities of German intelligence and suggested they quietly decide which activities to continue and which to cease. It was then that they had stumbled across Operation Bernard.
Bernard was an SS-run operation that over the years had managed to come up with the technology required for forging British bank notes to a level of perfection that even the Bank of England could not tell the original from the forgery. By the time of the coup, there had been over two hundred specialists, many of them imprisoned in SS-concentration camps working on the production of more than 100 million pounds in forged notes. SS intelligence had used these forged notes to bankroll some of its generous payments to foreign informers like the valet of the British ambassador in Istanbul. Walter Schellenberg and his cronies had certainly stopped by the Bernard vaults with a set of big suitcases before disappearing. Still, Leber’s men had discovered more than 50 million pounds in cash and were at a loss as to what to do with it. Once the experts had assured them that even the Bank of England could not tell the fakes from the originals, von Trott and Leber had jointly decided that some of this should be immediately used to finance the purchase of raw materials from abroad, particular the invaluable wolfram from Portugal. But Leber, ever the politician, also had another idea. They would use the funds to influence the American presidential elections. Three crates, each containing 5 million ‘Germa
n-made’ pounds had been rushed to Abwehr contacts in Mexico and other South American countries. All in all that little exercise together with its insurance had cost them more than a million pounds, paid for with ‘German-made pounds’ of course. In Mexico, with the help of one of General Schellenberg’s former agents had they begun the process of converting the pounds into dollars that were now finding their way into the accounts of groups representing the interests of Polish Americans and Americans with Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Czech, and Hungarian ancestry. The message from these groups to the Democratic Party was simple; help us keep Stalin out of our mother countries. A few pacifists close to the president’s wife had also benefited from the Abwehr’s largesse. All had received the funds in cash from ‘supporters’ who had generally disappeared when pressed for details. But the amounts were never enough to raise eyebrows; 100 dollars here 50 dollars there. The Internal Revenue Service could not bother about such amounts even if there were sometime hundreds of them.
When the Spaniard was gone von Trott sat quietly fretting, what if something went wrong and the operation was detected. The fall-out could be disastrous. He had not wanted to meet the Spaniard but that had been part of Schellenberg’s demand, a means of reminding his friends that he could still deal at the highest level.
Adam need not have worried, with access to so much cash, Schellenberg’s men had seen to it that that the US customs officials who had let his crates with the real US dollars off the planes un-inspected at Los Angeles did not live to collect their pension cheques. Equally all of the bank clerks who had facilitated the illegal conversion of the funds that could not be converted in South America, had, with three weeks, met an untimely end, some very spectacularly in seedy motels practicing what the police would describe as unusually bizarre sexual deviancy. There were quite a few such deaths because the conversion of that much money could not be accomplished any other way without attracting attention. Even though the FBI had picked up the trail, it was cold and 14 such cases would not be solved. Hoover’s men did spot the sudden increase in mortality of Californian bank clerk’s but failed to find a link. Also the ‘depraved habits’ of some the victims led the puritanical G-men to back off quickly. Just for good measure and a sense of irony the Schellenberg man had contracted the hit men from the killers of Meyer Lanksy’s Jewish mafia from New York for the job of wiping out the small-time goons he had hired to do the killing of the clerks. With this kind of money one could afford double insurance.
While Adam was playing amateur sleuth, Stauffenberg and a group of colonels headed off for a meeting with a Russian General in the training camp of Dabendorf on the outskirts of Berlin. General Andrei Anrejewitsch Vlasov had played a major role in the defensive battle that had saved Moscow from the Germans in December 1941 for which he had receive the Order of the Red Banner. In mid-1942 he had been given command of the 2nd Shock Army when it participated in a futile offensive to crack the German encirclement of Leningrad. Sent forward with inadequate supplies and poor training Vlasov’s troops had suffered heavily and had been encircled and crushed by the counter-attacking Germans. For three weeks Vlasov had evaded capture during which he had had time to think about how Stavka had callously expended the lives of his troops in pursuit on an abstract objective. Crucially he had been, upon his capture, treated well by the Germans. Within months of Vlasov was writing letters to Nazi authorities in which he advocated setting up a Russian National Army to rid the country of communism. Among the many Nazis who had toyed with Vlasov in the ensuing years in pursuit of their own propaganda objectives, a young captain with the improbable name of Wilfred Strik-Strikfeldt from the Russian wing of Wehrmacht intelligence had seen Vlasov’s true potential. Although Hitler’s view of the ‘subhuman nature of the Slavs’ had prevented any real progress towards the realisation of an anti-Bolshevik Russian force, by mid-1944 Vlasov had a political organisation and a training camp for a possible force.
Strik-Strikfeldt had managed to contact Stauffenberg and get his attention with the simple argument that arming and training a hundred thousand Russian soldiers to fight against Stalin was preferable to holding and feeding them in prisoner of war camps. Stauffenberg had been intrigued and when General Gehlen, the head of German military intelligence lent his support to the idea a meeting had been set up.
Vlasov, a tall skinny man with Asian features and round rimmed glasses stood up when Stauffenberg was ushered into the room by Strik-Strikfeldt and extended his hand. He flinched when Stauffenberg offered his crippled hand in return, but nevertheless both men, through an interpreter, got on well. Vlasov frustrated by two years of obstruction by racist Nazi beliefs put forward a cogent argument concerning the anti-Stalin sentiment to be found among the population at large, and prisoners of war in particular. Despite harsh treatment at the hands of the Germans he believed that it would still be possible to recruit a quarter of a million men for the fight against Stalin, provided that camp conditions for Russian prisoners quickly improved and the racist Nazi beliefs were formally repudiated.
Stauffenberg who was there on von Trott’s advice, had no real interest in Russia’s political future and almost no faith in his ability to influence it. Nevertheless he listened patiently. Vlasov presented letters written by POWs seeking his leadership and told of the groundswell of support among Russian people for Germany when initially the collectivized farms had been abolished in liberated zones. If Hitler’s racism was buried with his regime, Germany had the opportunity to turn the war into an anti-Bolshevik crusade.
Stauffenberg would later record that much of what Vlasov said did not appeal to him but that the immediate rationale of acquiring up to a quarter of a million able bodied men to fight on the Eastern front sounded positive. After the meeting with Vlasov, Strik-Strikfeldt’s had also pointed out how such a move could weaken and potentially undermine Stalin’s regime and divert considerable Soviet resources towards internal security as opposed to the army also made sense. Any talk of influencing the future of Russia was swept aside for the moment.
That evening Strik-Strikfeldt was promoted and made liaison officer between the Wehrmacht and the new Committee for the Liberation of the peoples of Russia and its Army the Russkaja Oswobodennaja Armija (ROA). The next day the recruiting for the ROA’s first division began. Within a month more than 25 000 men had volunteered.
September 30th
Mittelwerk
Former Nordhausen Concentration Camp
With returning health came restlessness. Dominique Lafarge had spent most of August sleeping and eating whatever the nurses put in front of him. His infested leg wounds had healed and gradually he was gaining weight. But he was restless, in part because they were actually getting newspapers as well as food. He had been promised repatriation. In part the delay stemmed from the Red Cross logistical constraints. The camp officials also raised the concern that a previous train carrying French and Belgian forced labourers home had gone into a river after a bridge it was travelling on was taken out by allied fighter bombers – over 600 men had died in the event. The Germans had obviously made the most of the incident’s propaganda value but it had substantially slowed down their efforts at repatriating the thousands of western nationals that Hitler’s war machine had pressed into service. Dominique was not amused. Indeed he was growing strong enough to border on being indignant. Since production of V2s had been stopped the camp inmates had been left to brood for weeks. Only a few hundred of them had been hired – against real wages – to demolish the assembly line and strip for salvage all available metal for shipment to a nearby tank factory. Another two hundred had been paid to look after some fields nearby. It was a stop-gap measure that would do little but keep them busy. The guards, though less threatening, remained.
Then just as the situation looked to turn ugly, another official appeared wearing yet another improvised uniform of the new regime, an old uniform without the various hooked crosses, lighting rods or most of the other colourful attachments. It looked, Dominiq
ue felt as they gathered into the open square, a bit plucked.
The official, a short, slightly corpulent individual who certainly would have failed Hitler’s test for Aryan supermen at the entry level, read aloud from a proclamation from the new Government. Every few sentences he would stop and let his words be translated into French, Polish and Dutch. The message was short and simple: The new regime acknowledged the guilt of the ‘previous administration’ with respect to the crime of forced labour and as a goodwill gesture sought to provide some means for the uprooted individuals to rebuild their lives upon their return. Apologies were made for the slow pace of repatriation and blamed on the fact that de facto a state of war still existed on the western front. Every inmate would receive a once-off payment in British pounds or French francs to help ease the transition. Those who had helped strip the plant and send the metal for new, more productive uses, would receive the agreed additional pay.
When the translations ended there was stunned silence. The guards, who were still there to prevent the inmates from roaming the countryside, looked as stunned as the prisoners. The short official did not ask whether there were any questions; he merely handed the camp commandant a copy of the order and a set of administrative instructions regarding the determination of the salaries. The commandant, contrary to the official had not yet gotten around to getting rid of the SS runes on the collar of his uniform and Dominique wondered whether he had cleared the SS-mentality from his mind yet; or had even thought about it.
The Valkyrie Option Page 44