Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler

by Simon Dunstan

  But the Monuments Men were not always able to reach their objectives in time. On the night of September 7, just hours before the arrival of the Allies, the Bruges Madonna sculpture by Michelangelo was stolen from the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Bruges and shipped off to Germany. The task of the MFA&A teams was immense; the U.S. First, Third, Ninth, and Fifteenth Armies, with some 1.3 million troops, had just nine frontline MFA&A personnel, and in all there were only 350 people working for the organization in the whole European theater of operations.

  Moreover, in the fall of 1944, the Allied advance faltered due to a lack of supplies—particularly gasoline—reaching the frontline troops. The railroad system of northern Europe had been completely destroyed by Allied bombing, and the failure to capture a major port intact was proving critical; the approaches to Antwerp from the sea were still in German hands and the city was now under constant bombardment by V-1 and V-2 missiles. Lacking the resources to advance on a broad front, but heartened by the apparent imminence of German defeat, SHAEF embarked on Operation Market Garden, a bold strategy of using the three divisions of the First Allied Airborne Army to seize vital bridges along a narrow corridor through Holland and on to the River Rhine, the last natural obstacle protecting the Ruhr and the heartlands of Germany. Despite worrisome Ultra decrypts, aerial reconnaissance photos, and warnings from the Dutch Resistance suggesting that major SS tank units stood in the path of this attempt, the high command went ahead with Operation Market Garden on September 17, 1944. Despite the skill and bravery of the American, British, and Polish paratroopers, the operation failed, ending in the destruction of the British 1st Airborne Division at Arnhem.

  By October 1944, the mood of the Allied high command had switched from euphoria to despondency, just as the weather turned foul. In the north, the British and Canadians fought a wretched, muddy campaign to clear the banks of the Scheldt Estuary in order to open Antwerp to Allied shipping. The U.S. First Army was to be held up by the battle for the Hürtgen Forest from September 1944 to February 1945. Further south, the U.S. Third Army ground to a halt in Alsace-Lorraine, just short of Metz on the Moselle River, purely due to a lack of fuel; this delay allowed the Germans to reinforce that heavily fortified city for another grueling battle. In the breakout from Normandy, Patton’s Third Army had advanced 500 miles in less than a month, and suffered just 1,200 casualties; over the next three months it would advance one-tenth that distance and suffer forty times the casualties. The war would by no means be over by Christmas.

  GEN. LESLIE GROVES, THE DIRECTOR of the Manhattan Project, remained highly concerned as to the whereabouts of 1,200 tons of uranium ore belonging to the Union Minière—a Belgian uranium mining company based in the Congo—that the Germans had captured in 1940. Once processed into the isotope uranium-235, such an amount was sufficient to make several viable atomic bombs, which required about 140 pounds of enriched uranium each. After their foray into Paris in late August 1944, Col. Boris Pash and the Alsos team traveled to Toulouse in southern France to follow up on a tip-off. There they found 31 tons of the uranium ore stored in a French naval arsenal. The haul was immediately shipped to the Manhattan Project’s production facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to be processed through the electromagnetic separation calutrons into enriched uranium for “Little Boy,” the uranium bomb being developed at the project’s massive laboratory in Los Alamos, Nevada.

  Back in southern France, Col. Pash had procured several half-tracks, armored cars, and armed jeeps; thus mounted and armed, the Alsos unit followed the advance of the Allied forces toward the German border. In November 1944, the team arrived in newly liberated Strasbourg, in whose university they found a nuclear physics laboratory and bundles of documents. These revealed that the German nuclear weapons development program—known as Uranverein, the “Uranium Club”—was not only in its infancy, but based on flawed science. This confirmed the earlier British intelligence assessment, but Gen. Groves was still not satisfied. Fortuitously, other documents revealed the locations of all laboratories working with Uranverein, greatly simplifying Col. Pash’s mission once the Allies advanced into Germany.

  Groves was equally determined to forestall the chance of any Uranium Club scientists or their documents falling into the hands of the Soviet Union—whose own nuclear program, as we now know, was only a matter of months behind the U.S. research, thanks to the comprehensive penetration of the Manhattan Project by Soviet spies. Germany’s leading theoretical physicist was Werner Heisenberg, who occasionally traveled to occupied Denmark or neutral Switzerland to give scientific papers and lectures. Groves proposed that Heisenberg be kidnapped during one of these trips and interrogated to ascertain the extent of German progress. If that was not possible, then Heisenberg should be assassinated—in Groves’s telling words, “Deny the enemy his brain.” The task was given to an OSS agent named Morris “Moe” Berg, a former catcher and coach with the Boston Red Sox. Berg was also a graduate of Princeton who had studied seven languages, including Sanskrit. Now he immersed himself in the theory and practice of nuclear physics so that he would be able to follow Heisenberg’s next university lecture, to be held on December 18, 1944, at the Physics Institute of the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland.

  During the last week of November, Moe Berg arrived in Bern to be briefed by the OSS station chief, Allen Dulles. Like Groves, Dulles was now firmly convinced that the Soviet Union posed a greater threat to Western interests than the death throes of the Third Reich, so, given the danger that the former might inherit the latter’s resources in this field, he was happy to assist. It seems that by this time the kidnapping mission had turned into an assassination mission. Berg noted at the time, “Nothing spelled out, but Heisenberg must be rendered hors de combat. Gun in my pocket.” This was a .22-caliber Hi-Standard automatic with a sound suppressor; he was also given a cyanide pill in case escape became impossible after the assassination. Admission to Heisenberg’s lecture was not a problem, since one of Dulles’s innumerable contacts was Dr. Paul Scherrer, the director of the Physics Institute at ETH. Scherrer had organized many such lectures and always passed on any pertinent information to the OSS and MI6.

  Heisenberg’s presentation concerned quantum mechanics rather than nuclear physics; it did nothing to help Berg decide his course of action so he arranged to have dinner with Heisenberg at Scherrer’s home. During the course of the conversation, Heisenberg reveled in the success of the ongoing German offensive in the Ardennes, but when asked if Germany was going to lose the war, he replied, “Yes—but it would have been so good if we had won.” This comment probably saved his life, as it showed that Germany did not possess any weapons of mass destruction that might contribute to another outcome. The pistol remained in Moe Berg’s pocket.

  A YOUNG ALLEN WELSH DULLES in his office at the State Department, 1924. Allen Dulles joined the OSS in 1942 before moving to Bern in Switzerland in October, where he became one of the most successful spymasters of World War II, with numerous contacts across occupied Europe and with the Nazi high command.

  ALLEN WELSH DULLES [left] greets his brother John Foster Dulles after a flight on October 4, 1948. After the war, Allen Dulles became the director of the Central Intelligence Agency while John Foster Dulles became secretary of state during the Eisenhower administration. Together, they were among the most influential American officials of the immediate postwar period and leading figures in the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union.

  REICHSLEITER MARTIN BORMANN stood in the shadow of his beloved Führer, Adolf Hitler, and served him faithfully from 1933 for the rest of his life. It was Bormann’s business acumen that made Hitler immensely wealthy and allowed the creation of Aktion Feuerland to effect the escape of the Führer to Argentina.

  WILHELM “OLD FOX” CANARIS headed up the Abwehr, the German military intelligence organization, from 1935–44. He was a brilliant spymaster but he also ensured that his closest colleagues were not members of the Nazi Party. Since befo
re the outbreak of war, Canaris had been active in the resistance movement of Germans attempting at first to frustrate and then to overthrow Hitler—a group known to the Gestapo as the Schwarze Kappelle (Black Orchestra) and to the OSS as “Breakers.”

  HEINRICH HIMMLER AND HERMANN GöRING shake hands at a Nazi Party event, April 1934. By 1943, the two would be embroiled in a plot with Joseph Goebbels and Albert Speer to thwart Bormann’s Council of Three plan; at the same time Himmler would take part in a separate plot with Bormann to gain more power at the expense of Göring. Such divisions in the Nazi hierarchy allowed Hitler to rule the Third Reich with undisputed absolute power.

  A BERLIN STREET after Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938: One of the many Jewish businesses with shattered storefronts. That night Jewish homes, properties, and synagogues across Germany and parts of Austria were attacked in an orgy of destruction—the clearest warning yet to German Jewry of their peril.

  HEINRICH HIMMLER, center, briefs SS commanders Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Müller, Artur Nebe, and Franz Josef Huber on the day’s work at Gestapo headquarters, Berlin, c. 1939. These Nazis were among the principal architects of the Final Solution—the extermination of European Jews, together with other “untermensch,” a term the Nazis used to refer to what they called “inferior peoples.”

  AFTER THE FALL of France, Adolf Hitler made a triumphal tour of Paris on June 23, 1940. Here he poses for the camera in front of the Eiffel Tower in company with his favorite architect, Albert Speer (left), and his favorite sculptor, Arno Breker. His visit to Paris marked the start of the Nazi rape of artworks from France and the Low Countries to feed Hitler’s lust for the greatest works of art of Western civilization.

  ADOLF HITLER RELAXES at his favorite mountain retreat at the Berghof in the Bavarian Alps together with his mistress Eva Braun and their dogs, c. 1940. Hitler holds the leash of his German shepherd, Blondi. Hitler declared that “a woman must be a cute, cuddly, naive little thing—tender, sweet, and dim.” Eva Braun was all of these.

  URSULA “USCHI” HITLER was the daughter of Hitler and Eva Braun. Here, Hitler and Uschi pose for a picture taken at the Berghof, c. 1942. The press was told that this girl was Uschi Schneider, the daughter of Herta Schneider, a close childhood friend of Eva Braun’s. Frau Schneider and her “children” spent a great deal of time at the Berghof, Hitler’s Bavarian estate.

  ADOLF HITLER, WITH BORMANN behind him as always, stands surrounded by officers after the failed assassination attempt on July 20, 1944, at Wolfschanze or Wolf’s Lair, the Führer’s field headquarters in East Prussia. Gen. Alfred Jodl, with a bandage around his head, is on the right.

  A GROUP OF senior Nazi officials congregate in 1944 at Wolfschanze. On the far left is Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Next to him is Luftwaffe Gen. Bruno Loerzer, a friend of Field Marshal Hermann Göring, who is standing in the center. Next to him is Adm. Karl Dönitz, who became Reich president following Hitler’s departure for Argentina. Key to the escape plan was Gen. Hermann Fegelein, shown with his arms crossed at the far right, and displaying the sleeve band of the Waffen SS unit he commanded in summer 1943, the 8th SS Cavalry Division “Florian Geyer.”

  THE BIG THREE—Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin—at the Yalta Conference in the Crimea during February 1945. By now Roosevelt was gravely ill and still did not realize the dangers posed by the Soviet Union and its destructive communist regime to Europe and the world, in spite of the warnings of Churchill and others such as Allen Dulles.

  IAN FLEMING, 1960. Fleming, popularly known as the creator of the fictional spy James Bond, was a British naval intelligence officer during the war. 30 Commando Unit (30 CU), which was tasked with gathering military intelligence documents and items of enemy weapons technology before they could be hidden or destroyed, was another Fleming brainchild.

  GEN. DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER, Supreme Allied Commander, accompanied by Gen. Omar N. Bradley and Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr., inspects some of the paintings from the salt mine stash, April 1945. In February 1945, the bulk of the remaining German gold reserves and monetary assets, including one billion reichsmarks, had been transferred to the salt mine at Merkers. The rest remained in the Reichsbank in Berlin, where it was ransacked by Gen. Ernst Kaltenbrunner in the largest bank robbery in history.

  INMATES IN A slave labor barracks at Buchenwald, photographed April 16, 1945, when the camp was liberated by American troops. The concentration camp at Buchenwald provided slave labor for the construction of V-2 rockets at the Mittelwerk underground assembly lines at Nordhausen. Between 20,000 and 30,000 workers died under conditions of the utmost bestiality making Hitler’s vengeance weapons. Of particular note, the prisoner in the second row from the bottom and sixth from the left is Elie Wiesel, the Jewish-American winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, renowned as a “messenger to mankind.”

  Chapter 10

  THE FOG OF WAR

  WHILE THE ALLIED ARMIES were still rampaging across northwest Europe, creating the deceptive prospect of peace before Christmas 1944, the Roosevelt administration was laying plans for the structure of a postwar Germany. Both President Roosevelt and his longtime secretary of the treasury, Henry J. Morgenthau Jr., were vehemently anti-Nazi and had little regard for the Germans as a nation. For months they had deliberated over a plan for a demilitarized Germany that would never again be able to wage war. The country was to be divided into northern and southern zones that were to be completely “deindustrialized” and turned over solely to agriculture in order to feed the German people on a subsistence level. In Roosevelt’s words, “There is no reason why Germany couldn’t go back to 1810, where they would be perfectly comfortable, but wouldn’t have any luxury.” The industrial Ruhr was to be administered as an international zone, with its products benefiting those countries that had suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

  The Morgenthau Plan was presented to Winston Churchill at the Second Quebec Conference on September 16, 1944. Churchill yielded to no one in his loathing for the Nazis, but he did have an instinctive understanding of history and he dismissed this more draconian repetition of the Treaty of Versailles as “unnatural, unchristian and unnecessary.” However, after the secretary of the treasury extended another line of credit to Britain to the tune of $6 billion, Churchill agreed to consider a somewhat modified version of the plan.

  Details of the Morgenthau Plan were soon in the hands of both the Soviets and the Abwehr. Moscow was informed immediately, since the author of the plan was Morgenthau’s deputy, Dr. Harry Dexter White—a Soviet spy, code-named “Jurist.” By reducing Germany to an impotent pastoral society, the plan would render the country more vulnerable to a communist takeover in the near future. The information reached Adm. Canaris by a more devious route. Two of the Abwehr agents he had activated in Switzerland in 1940 were “Habakuk,” in the Swiss Foreign Ministry, and “Jakob” in the Swiss Secret Service. Both organizations received a mass of high-value intelligence via the Swiss ambassador to Washington, Dr. Charles Bruggmann. Yet Bruggmann was no spy: his source was his brother-in-law, Henry Wallace—who happened to be the vice president of the United States. Wallace was a popular, left-wing New Dealer; privy to many of America’s most important secrets, he was also notoriously indiscreet.

  By autumn of 1944, Canaris had long been dismissed as chief of the Abwehr and was being held under house arrest under suspicion of involvement in the July bomb plot against Hitler. Nevertheless, as a German patriot, he was horrified at the prospect of his country being reduced deliberately to abject poverty after unconditional surrender and he quickly passed details of the Morgenthau Plan to Martin Bormann and Joseph Goebbels. The propaganda minister used the information to galvanize the German people to greater resistance, to avoid their country being turned into a “potato field,” in Goebbels’s telling phrase.

  Soon afterward, details of the plan appeared in the Wall Street Journal; this revelation caused serious divisions within the Roosevelt administration and in co
rporate America, whose investments in Germany were now at further risk. Both Gen. Marshall and Gen. Eisenhower complained bitterly that German resistance stiffened appreciably, with the result that the front lines became stabilized along the Siegfried Line just as winter was closing in. Roosevelt’s opponent in the presidential election of November 1944, Thomas E. Dewey, said that the Morgenthau Plan was worth “ten fresh German divisions” to the enemy. In a cable from Bern, Allen Dulles was barely able to contain his indignation at the scheme’s propaganda value to the Nazis:

  [The average German] now trembles at the idea of what the foreign workers and prisoners of war would do, when disorder comes, and these millions of aliens are let loose to plunder and ravage the cities and land.… The soldiers at the front, the workers in the ammunition factories, and the inhabitants of the bombed cities are holding out because they feel that they have no choice, and their existence is at stake. The Nazis are profiting by this state of mind for their own purposes.… So far, the Allies have not offered the opposition [inside Germany] any serious encouragement. On the contrary, they have again and again welded together the people and the Nazis by statements published, either out of indifference or with a purpose.