Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler

by Simon Dunstan

  These casualties were caused by the SD2 Sprengbombe Dickwandig—the first cluster bomb munition ever to be deployed on the battlefield and typical of the advanced German weapons technology that 30 AU was established to uncover.

  Besides pursuing their customary task of searching out naval intelligence in the ports of Le Havre and Cherbourg, one of the primary missions of 30 AU was to capture a V-1 launch pad. Intelligence reports indicated that the rumored Vergeltungswaffe 1 (V-1 Vengeance Weapon) was almost ready for deployment—the first of several advanced weapons systems that Hitler believed could still win the war for Germany. Sketches and information had reached the British authorities in November 1943 from the OSS via the MI6 staff at the embassy in Bern, thanks to the courageous efforts of a French Resistance fighter, Michel Hollard. They showed the construction of a concrete launch pad in northern France, with a “ski-ramp” for an unidentified weapon. By December 1943, aerial reconnaissance had identified 103 “ski-ramps,” all of them pointing ominously toward London. These were the first visible portent of Hitler’s Unternehmen Eisbär—Operation Polar Bear.

  A concerted bombing campaign against all targets believed to be associated with the V-weapons program had begun with Operation Hydra in August 1943—raids on the V-weapon design center at Peenemünde on the Baltic Sea—followed that November by Operation Crossbow against the heavily protected V-2 bunkers at Watten and the V-3 “supergun” site at Mimoyecques, both in France. After November 15, 1943, all bombing sorties against the V-weapons program came under Operation Crossbow. Despite a massive effort, the ski-ramps proved difficult to hit, let alone destroy. By the summer of 1944, the whole northern tip of the Cherbourg (Cotentin) Peninsula was thick with launching sites, many of them pointing toward the invasion ports of Plymouth, Portsmouth, and Southampton. Fortunately, Operation Crossbow was sufficiently successful to disrupt Polar Bear and postpone its scheduled start date of March 1, 1944, when it could have seriously disrupted preparations for the Normandy landings.

  In the early morning of June 13, 1944, Team 4 of 30 AU, led by Lt. Cdr. Patrick Dalzel-Job, Royal Navy, crept out through the American front lines to find a V-1 launch site that had been identified by the French Resistance some fifteen miles beyond the American beachhead. As the patrol moved out into the French countryside, the very first V-1 flying bomb landed on Bethnal Green, East London, at 4:18 a.m. Once the ski-ramp was secured, technical experts were able to inspect the site and captured examples of the flying bombs, so that new countermeasures could be implemented. These included the activation of the Diver air-defense plan for southern England, combining interception by high-speed fighters and antiaircraft guns aided by new American radar technology. By July 1944, almost half of all flying bombs that passed over the Diver defenses were being destroyed. By the end of August, that figure rose to 83 percent with the first Gloster Meteor jet fighters of No. 616 Squadron RAF coming into action against the V-1s.

  Another target for 30 AU was the crucial German radar installation around Douvres-la-Délivrande to the south of Caen. The Germans defended the facility with fierce determination for more than ten days, even receiving a nighttime parachute drop of ammunition and supplies by the Luftwaffe. It was finally captured, at the cost of heavy casualties, on June 17, after a combined assault by 41 Royal Marine Commando, divisional artillery, and tanks. 30 AU was quickly on the scene and recovered not only much useful intelligence on the capabilities of the radar system itself, but also a map showing the location of all radar stations across Europe and their exact specifications. A subsequent intelligence report stated that this was “assessed in the Admiralty as the greatest single technical capture of the war.”

  On the day before, June 16, Hitler’s Operation Polar Bear had begun in earnest, with 244 flying bombs launched from across northern France. Of these, 45 crashed on takeoff, 144 reached England, and 73 actually fell on London. The British population had stoically borne the Blitz of 1940–41 and nuisance raids up to 1943, but this attack was different. Quickly nicknamed the “buzz bomb” or “doodlebug,” the V-1 carried a warhead of 1,870 pounds of amatol, which caused massive blast damage. This was compounded by the traumatic psychological effect when the loud spluttering noise of its pulse-jet engine suddenly cut out over the target: there was then just twelve seconds of silence before the bomb crashed to earth, and that sudden silence meant that someone, somewhere in London, was going to die. After five years of deprivation and rationing, the morale of Londoners suffered severely under this new threat. Many left the city, while the government organized the evacuation of 360,000 women and children as well as the elderly and infirm. It was the dawn of a new era in warfare—the birth of the cruise missile—and the Germans were once more at the forefront of weapons technology.

  Over the coming months, 30 AU spent much of their time in pursuit of the V-1 and V-2, often working in concert with local Resistance fighters who provided much valuable intelligence. Before the last V-1 launch site within range of London was overrun in October 1944, 2,515 flying bombs—or only one-quarter of those launched—had actually hit the target area, causing 22,892 casualties, including 6,184 deaths. Each one was a personal tragedy. However, at just 1.39 deaths per bomb launched, the V-1 bomb was hardly going to tilt the balance of the war back in Germany’s favor, given the inexorable buildup of Allied forces on both the Western and Eastern Fronts.

  The Western Allies now enjoyed a superiority of 20 to 1 in tanks and 25 to 1 in aircraft; their air forces possessed 5,250 bombers, capable of delivering some 20,000 tons of bombs in a single lift. Germany was fighting on three fronts, while its cities and industries were being pulverized from the air. Between June and October 1944, the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Forces would drop half a million tons of bombs on Germany—more than the entire amount during the war up to that time.

  AFTER THE MILITARY DISASTERS OF 1943, Hitler had assumed the mantle of supreme war leader and was increasingly contemptuous of his Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Supreme Command of the Armed Forces or OKW). His immediate military staff was by now reduced to compliant sycophants, headed by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, commander in chief of OKW, and Gen. Alfred Jodl, chief of the operations staff. The Führer became increasingly dismissive and intolerant of any questioning of his military decisions—decisions that were ultimately disastrous for the Wehrmacht due to Hitler’s impatience with the necessary staff work, his poor grasp of the realities on the ground, and his obsession with holding territory at all costs regardless of tactical considerations.

  To Martin Bormann, such matters were of little concern, and he was usually excluded from military briefings or conferences. He was thus saved from death or serious injury when, at 12:40 p.m. on July 20, 1944, German Resistance leader Col. Claus von Stauffenberg placed a briefcase carrying a bomb under the oak table around which Adolf Hitler was holding a military conference at his Wolfschanze headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia. The bomb exploded as planned, killing three staff officers and a stenographer and wounding several others, but Hitler survived, despite burns, numerous wooden splinters driven into his legs and face, and a perforated eardrum. Operation Valkyrie, the latest of several plots to assassinate Hitler, had come the closest to success, and after its failure the regime exacted a terrible revenge. Some 5,000 people were arrested and nearly 200 executed; under the new laws of Sippenhaft or “blood guilt,” the Gestapo swept up relatives and even friends of the plotters on the grounds of guilt by association. Hitler ordered that the conspirators were to be “hanged like cattle,” and many of them died by slow strangulation while suspended from meat hooks in Plötzensee Prison in Berlin. The Allies did nothing while every vestige of the resistance movement in Germany was ruthlessly eradicated. Since the leading figures in the plot had been old-school military officers, Hitler’s lack of confidence in the traditional Wehrmacht leadership class turned to actual suspicion. Henceforward, he would withhold his trust from all but the SS and his immediate circle—and particularly, Reichsleiter
Martin Bormann.

  Despite the Allies’ material superiority, their progress in Normandy was dispiritingly slow and costly; they had hoped to break out of the beachhead within two weeks of D-Day, but in fact it took two months. On the same day that Col. von Stauffenberg’s briefcase bomb exploded, Operation Goodwood, Gen. Bernard Montgomery’s offensive around Caen at the east of the beachhead, failed with heavy losses. Operation Cobra, Gen. Omar Bradley’s planned American breakout from the west of the beachhead, had been scheduled for July 20, but was postponed for five days. On the Eastern Front, however, the largest land battle of World War II was bleeding the Wehrmacht to death.

  ON JUNE 22, 1944, THE THIRD ANNIVERSARY of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, the Red Army launched its greatest offensive of the war so far. This Operation Bagration was a brilliant example of maskirovka—literally, “deception through camouflage”: a system of sophisticated signals procedures whereby whole phantom armies were created to deceive the Germans thanks to bogus radio traffic, false troop movements, and disinformation via Red Army “deserters.” The Soviets covertly assembled a force of 118 rifle divisions, eight tank and mechanized corps with 4,080 tanks and assault guns, six cavalry divisions to negotiate the treacherous Pripyat Marshes, and thirteen artillery divisions with some 10,563 guns and 2,306 Katyusha multiple rocket launchers. These combined armies of 2.3 million troops were covered and supported by 2,318 fighters, 1,744 Shturmovik ground-attack aircraft, and 1,086 assorted bombers, with another 1,007 in reserve.

  Because of the success of maskirovka, the Germans had no real intelligence as to the time or place of this Soviet summer offensive. It was thought that the main assault would strike their Army Group North Ukraine, but the target was in fact Army Group Center in Byelorussia. This command had some 800,000 troops supported by 9,500 artillery pieces but only 553 tanks and assault guns. Worse still, only 20 percent of the Luftwaffe was now deployed on the Eastern Front, since the bulk of its fighters were needed for air defense over Germany. Army Group Center had just 839 aircraft in support. The battle raged for two months and ended with the destruction of Army Group Center in Byelorussia and the arrival of the Red Army at the gates of Warsaw. German casualties rose from 48,363 in May 1944 to 169,881 in July and a staggering 277,465 in August—higher even than the slaughter at the Battle of Verdun in 1916. Bagration was the most calamitous defeat suffered by the Wehrmacht in World War II; it lost more men in three months than it had in the whole of 1942.

  On August 15, 1944, the Allies conducted a successful amphibious assault in the south of France—Operation Dragoon. On the following day, Hitler finally gave permission for Army Group B to withdraw from Normandy, but it came too late. The bulk of the army group’s forces were surrounded in the Falaise Pocket, where resistance ceased on August 22 after a sustained bombardment by Allied tactical airpower.

  THE DAY BEFORE THE BOMB ATTEMPT on Hitler’s life, on Sunday, July 19, 1944, Lt. Cdr. Dalzel-Job’s Team 4 from 30 AU entered the ruins of Caen on the hunt for enemy documents and equipment. Approaching the Bassin Saint-Pierre (St. Peter’s Basin), Team 4 came across a group of armed Frenchmen and a man in rough peasant clothes who spoke excellent English. The man proved to be S.Sgt. Maurice “Jock” Bramah of the Glider Pilot Regiment, whose aircraft had crashed into an orchard behind enemy lines on the night of June 5–6. Bramah had been shot through the lungs by a German machine gunner and left for dead, but was found by some Frenchmen and cared for in a local village. The Germans learned of his whereabouts and sent two soldiers to capture the wounded pilot on June 16. Bramah killed them both, escaped, and joined the French Forces of the Interior (FFI). Now, just three weeks later, Bramah introduced 30 AU to the FFI and the wider French Resistance network.

  Their assistance and local intelligence would prove extremely valuable in the later stages of the French campaign. In particular, their knowledge of the German dispositions in and around Paris allowed 30 AU to enter the city undetected from the east. On August 25, 1944, Woolforce was able to travel via unguarded roads and streets indicated by the French Resistance on a mission to attack the Kriegsmarine headquarters in the Rothschild mansion on the Boulevard Lannes. Marine “Bon” Royle began systematically to blow open the various safes with plastic explosives. As he recalled,

  I had blown over 80 safes by now and was running short of plastic and fuse and I’d been using potato masher [German hand grenade] detonators for some time.… The safes were proving disappointing and yielding very little. One had a pair of black dress shoes inside that actually fit. I got married wearing them. Another contained a list of German admirals’ birthdays but beyond revealing that some of them were octogenarians it did little else for the cause.

  Other targets were more productive. At the torpedo store at Houilles outside of Paris, 30 AU discovered a new experimental eight-bladed torpedo propeller, a revolutionary powered aircraft gun turret, high-speed Morse and burst-transmission radios, and cipher equipment. In September 1944, 30 AU moved to the Pas-de-Calais in its continuing quest for V-1 and V-2 sites and to track down French scientists who had worked on the V-3 Fleissiges Lieschen (Busy Lizzie) supercannons at Mimoyecques; these were designed to bombard London with 300-pound high explosive shells at a rate of 300 an hour. By then 30 AU had recovered some 12,000 documents dealing with innumerable subjects, from the complete order of battle of the Kriegsmarine to the capabilities of revolutionary new U-boats, and from the latest communications equipment to maps of German minefields in the North Sea.

  AS 30 AU WAS APPROACHING PARIS from the east, Col. Boris Pash and the Alsos Mission were entering the city from the west, at 8:55 a.m. on August 25. So keen was Pash to reach his objective that his jeep was the first American vehicle into the city, following closely behind the tanks of the Free French 2nd Armored Division. Under sporadic sniper fire, Pash’s unarmed jeep was the fifth vehicle in a column of tanks that rolled into the center of Paris. In the late afternoon, Pash reached his destination, the Radium Institute on rue Pierre Curie, where he met the man he desperately wished to interview. Frédéric Joliot-Curie, a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry and the son-in-law of the Curies, was in charge of the only cyclotron—particle accelerator—in Europe and was also a leading authority on nuclear chain reactions. Over a celebratory bottle of champagne that evening, Pash learned that Joliot-Curie knew remarkably little about German research into uranium, but he did disclose that there was a research facility at the University of Strasbourg in Alsace-Lorraine, then still far behind enemy lines.

  Paris also saw the debut of a joint Anglo-American T-Force of some fourteen inspection teams attached to the U.S. 12th Army Group; a comprehensive, coordinated intelligence-gathering organization would become ever more important as the Allied forces approached Germany itself. In Paris, T-Force activities were compromised by the fierce rivalries between Gaullist and communist factions that on occasion bordered on shooting wars. A further problem was a lack of infantry to secure the targets, as the French population was bent on “les arrestations et l’epuration” (arrests and purges) of perceived collaborators, ransacking many properties in the process.

  Yet another of the specialized search units to enter Paris on August 25 were the Monuments Men. Second Lt. James Lorimer of the MFA&A program was attached to the logistical units of the U.S. 12th Army Group, so he was able to enter Paris that day with the first U.S. Army supply convoy to reach the city. Lorimer immediately went to the Louvre, where he stared in despair at the museum’s long, empty galleries, now quite bare of paintings and sculptures. It was there that he met Mademoiselle Rose Valland, a true heroine of the French Resistance.

  Throughout the Nazi occupation, this forty-six-year-old art historian had played on her dowdy appearance to remain in the background at the Jeu de Paume, where she acted as curator. This outstation of the Louvre was used as the main repository for all the artworks looted by Alfred Rosenberg’s ERR (see Chapter 4) in France, where every item was meticulously cataloged and photographed before shipment to Ge
rmany. Every night, Rose Valland removed the negatives, which were then printed by a colleague in the Resistance while she transcribed the notes on every item and its proposed destination in Germany. Early each morning she returned the negatives before the start of the working day. Accordingly, she was able to pass to the Free French government in London lists of almost all the looted treasures that left for Germany. The regular flow of information from the various Resistance movements across Europe was routinely acknowledged by cryptic messages broadcast over the BBC radio service—for instance, a typical communication for Rose Valland might be “La Joconde a le sourire”—“The Mona Lisa is smiling.” She herself had little to smile about: discovery of her activities would result in certain death, either by firing squad or by lingering maltreatment in a concentration camp.

  Even as the Allies were approaching Paris, hundreds of artworks were still being packed into crates at the Jeu de Paume for onward shipment. On August 2, 1944, 148 crates of looted paintings were loaded aboard freight cars attached to Train No. 40044 at Aubervilliers railroad station. As usual, Valland had details of the shipment orders and the destinations in Germany. She provided these to the Resistance and asked if there might be some way to delay the train’s departure, hopefully until the arrival of the Allies.

  By August 10, Train No. 40044 was fully laden and ready to start its journey to Germany. Coincidentally, the French railroad workers in the area went on strike that day. Within forty-eight hours they were cajoled back to work. The train departed only to be mysteriously shunted into a siding. There the engine inexplicably developed mechanical problems; these were eventually rectified, but then broken couplings and seized brakes caused a further forty-eight-hour delay. Eventually, Train No. 40044 got on the move again—only to be halted when two engines collided and became derailed at a notorious bottleneck in the railroad system. The art train was trapped, never to leave Paris.