Needless to say, these command appointments were nominal rather than executive: Himmler was devoid of military insight or talent so actual day-to-day command was exercised by professional soldiers. However, since “Himmler’s” army groups were doomed to failure by the strength of the opponents they faced, the Führer’s faith in his “treue Heinrich” was shaken—just as Bormann had intended. Others in the Nazi hierarchy saw which way the wind was blowing, concluding that any hope of surviving the maelstrom of defeat was more likely to lie with Bormann rather than with the waning, faltering Himmler or the drug-addled Göring. Bormann now had a strong coterie of allies in his bid for power and exclusive access to the Führer. These included SS and Police Gen. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Himmler’s deputy as head of the RSHA; the enigmatic SS and Police Gen. Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo; and SS Gen. Hermann Fegelein, the brother-in-law of Eva Braun, who was Himmler’s adjutant and representative of the SS at Hitler’s headquarters. Fegelein’s defection to Bormann’s camp was crucial; like Bormann, he was a sensualist and the two became close drinking companions.
By the end of January 1945, the Red Army had created a vast westward salient reaching to the Oder River, only sixty miles from Berlin. A counterattack on the salient’s northern flank from Pomerania failed, and on February 20, Bormann wrote to his wife, Gerda, in triumph: “Uncle Heinrich’s offensive did not work out. He did not properly organize it and now his reserve divisions must be assigned somewhere else.” Himmler retired to the military hospital at Hohenlychen and asked the Führer to be relieved of his command on “medical grounds,” so as to be able to concentrate on all his other responsibilities. Meanwhile, Göring had retreated to Carinhall, his country residence, to try to save his vast art collection from the advancing Red Army.
Bormann now sought to eject from Hitler’s inner circle even minor figures who were beyond his easy control. One of these was Heinrich Hoffmann, the Führer’s personal photographer, art adviser, and long-time confidant, who had introduced Hitler to Eva Braun. Out of apparent concern for Hoffmann’s health, Bormann suggested that Hoffmann needed a medical examination by Hitler’s physician, Dr. Theodor Morell. After various tests, Hoffmann was informed that he was a carrier of the dangerous Type B paratyphoid bacterium; accordingly, he represented a threat to the health of the Führer and must be banished from his presence and from headquarters. Mystified, Hoffmann sought a second opinion. The tests proved negative but the medical report crossed Bormann’s desk and Hoffmann remained in exile. Next Bormann turned on Hitler’s personal surgeon, Dr. Karl Brandt, the originator of the Nazi Project T4 euthanasia program. Bormann’s purge continued with ruthless efficiency. Any Germans, from ordinary citizens to top party officials, were expendable if their removal would benefit Bormann and his plan for saving the lives and fortunes of a handful of the Nazi leadership.
With his grip on the Nazi court now increasingly assured, Bormann turned his attention to asserting his absolute authority over the gauleiters—the party chiefs who governed the forty-two regions of the Greater German Reich. In “Gestapo” Müller, Bormann had a powerful ally to enforce his will. As always, Bormann’s technique was the carrot and the stick. Total loyalty to the Führer remained paramount, and the faithful execution of all orders emanating from the Führer’s headquarters was vital for the well-being of the party. In the office of every gauleiter a torrent of instructions poured out of the teleprinters from the “Telex General.” Invariably, these began: “National Socialists! Party comrades! By the Führer’s command, I hereby direct …” Thanks to Müller’s Gestapo spiderweb, Bormann’s intelligence on activities across the shrinking Reich remained extensive. The Gestapo was a vast organization, embracing many sections and subsections responsible for a wide range of surveillance and executive functions in the Reich and beyond. When the gauleiter of Bayreuth had the temerity to consign Bormann’s telexes to the trash bin, he was shot as a defeatist by Müller’s men on Bormann’s orders. That was the stick: the carrot was a new identity at the end of the war for those who toed the party line. The new identity papers were produced by the Jewish forgers at Sachsenhausen concentration camp through Operation Bernhard.
Following the failure of the Ardennes offensive, Hitler returned to Berlin and took up residence in the Old Reich Chancellery until repeated air raids forced him to seek permanent shelter in the Führerbunker, situated beneath the chancellery gardens, in mid-February. Thursday, April 12, 1945, was a day of rejoicing in the underground bunker. In the midnight hours, when Hitler was at his most energetic, the news arrived of President Roosevelt’s death. To Hitler, this seemed like a salvation reminiscent of the death of Empress Elizabeth of Russia in 1762, which had saved Hitler’s hero Frederick the Great of Prussia during the Seven Years’ War. In his order of the day to the Wehrmacht on April 13, Hitler predicted that the fortunes of war had changed “now that destiny has removed the greatest war criminal in the world from the Earth.” Bormann was equally exultant; immediately contacting all his gauleiters by telex, he prophesied “a total reversal in the attitude of the Western powers toward the Soviet offensive in Europe.” Stalin’s ultimate fear of a separate peace between the Western Allies and Germany, and Hitler’s ultimate hope of an accommodation with the Allies, now appeared feasible, since the champion of unconditional surrender was dead and Nazi Germany was still not defeated. Bormann concluded his telex message with the claim that this was “the best news we have had in years.… Tell all the men, the most dangerous man of this war is dead.” To Bormann, Roosevelt’s death provided a golden opportunity to make the ultimate deal to secure the success of his Project Land of Fire.
IN BERN, THE OSS STATION CHIEF Allen Dulles had continued to cultivate his own web of contacts, despite the frustration of his hopes to support the German resistance movement prior to the July bomb plot. Both Britain and America still discouraged contact with any envoys extending peace feelers from the Nazi hierarchy, for fear of offending Joseph Stalin and compromising the agreement to demand unconditional surrender. However, with the death of Roosevelt and the very heavy casualties suffered by the Western Allies during the winter of 1944–45, opinion was beginning to soften slightly in some quarters. Similarly, perceptions of “Uncle Joe’s” Russia as simply a stalwart ally against Nazi Germany were changing rapidly. To Dulles, the advance westward of the Red Army presented a clear and present danger to Europe and to American interests in the future.
Now that Allied forces had opened the Swiss borders from the west, communications with the outside world were much easier. Dulles was able to travel to Paris or London for conferences with his director, Gen. Donovan, and others in the intelligence community. At the same time, Dulles enjoyed far closer liaison with the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps and the G-2 staffs at SHAEF and the U.S. 6th and 12th Army Groups, as well as with the U.S. Seventh Army as they advanced into Germany. In the winter of 1944–45, Dulles reached an agreement with Gen. Masson, head of the Swiss Secret Service, to allow the American legation in Bern to install a secure radio-teleprinter transmitter for direct communications with London, Paris, and Washington. The Swiss authorities were far more amenable to the clandestine activities of the Allies now that defeat was looming for Nazi Germany.
Nevertheless, in February 1945, the military situation both on the German border and in Italy remained problematic. The campaign in the Rhineland had become a protracted battle of attrition as the Allies fought their way up to the Rhine, the last physical barrier to Germany’s industrial heartland in the Ruhr. In Italy, the Allies were stalled below the Gothic Line, which stretched from coast to coast across the Apennine Mountains. On both fronts, Allied casualties were depressingly high and German resistance remained dogged. The whole Italian campaign had been a grinding series of costly attacks against successive German hilltop defense lines, and now there was a prospect of the Wehrmacht’s retreating in good order into the mountain reaches of the Alps. In SHAEF there were growing concerns about the existence of a National Re
doubt in that region, where the last remnants of the Nazi regime and its diehard defenders could congregate for a final stand that might last for months or even years. The able German commander in chief of Army Group Southwest, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, still had more than a million troops under arms in northern Italy and the Alpine regions. Worse still, the Soviet Union was now claiming hegemony over Austria and Yugoslavia. The latter would give the Soviets possession of warm-water ports on the Adriatic and immediate access to the Mediterranean Sea—a strategic nightmare for the West.
Despite the stern injunctions from London and Washington, Dulles did not ignore the increasing number of approaches he received from various parties and individuals representing members of the Nazi hierarchy—notably Heinrich Himmler—in search of a separate peace agreement with the West. The first came in November 1944 through the German consul in Lugano, Alexander von Neurath. He was followed in December by SS and Police Gen. Wilhelm Harster, the immediate subordinate to SS and Waffen-SS Gen. Karl Wolff, the supreme SS and police leader and de facto military governor of northern Italy. In January 1945, an emissary from Wolff reaffirmed the possibility of a separate agreement for the surrender of all German forces in Italy. To Dulles this seemed too good an offer to refuse out of hand, so he initiated negotiations with Wolff under the designation of Operation Sunrise (also subsequently known as Operation Crossword).
The first face-to-face meeting between representatives of Dulles and Wolff took place on March 3, 1945, at Lugano. Paul Blum, the X-2 counterespionage chief for the Bern station, acted for the OSS, and SS Gen. Eugen Dollmann represented Wolff. As a gesture of good will, the Germans agreed to release two prominent Italian partisan leaders—one was Ferruccio Parri, who became prime minister of Italy in June. Five days later, Dulles and Wolff met in person at a safe house in Zurich. With Kesselring’s departure for the Western Front on March 10, the negotiations faltered, but they resumed on March 19 when Wolff actually agreed to permit an OSS radio operator dressed in German uniform to be stationed in his own headquarters at Bolzano for better communications. This agent was a Czech known as “Little Wally,” who had escaped from Dachau concentration camp. Significantly, Wolff also submitted a list of art treasures from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence that he was willing to return intact if the surrender talks prospered.
Throughout these delicate negotiations, Dulles kept Washington informed via Gen. Donovan at OSS headquarters, but from there, news of the contacts was quickly passed to the suspicious Soviets. There were several Soviet spies in the OSS, including Maj. Duncan Chaplin Lee, a counterintelligence officer and legal adviser to Donovan, and Halperin, head of research and analysis in the Latin America division. Fearing a separate peace, incensed Stalin cabled Roosevelt and Churchill:
The Germans have on the Eastern Front 147 divisions. They could without harm to their cause take from the Eastern Front 15–20 divisions and shift them to the aid of their troops on the Western Front. However, the Germans did not do it and are not doing it. They continue to fight savagely for some unknown junction, Zemlianitsa in Czechoslovakia, which they need as much as a dead man needs poultices—but they surrender without resistance such important towns in Central Germany as Osnabrück, Mannheim, and Kassel. Don’t you agree that such behavior by the Germans is more than strange, [it is] incomprehensible?
Both Roosevelt and Churchill angrily rejected the Soviet leader’s implications, but the damage was done. Roosevelt finally recognized the threat posed by Stalin and the Soviet Union just two days before his death. This episode was, essentially, the beginning of the Cold War.
Stalin now refused to endorse the agreed separation pact of Austria and Germany to allow the former to become once again an independent state. The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff expressly forbade the continuation of the talks with Wolff. Intelligence about these contacts had reached Bormann, and SS and Police Gen. Kaltenbrunner also ordered that such negotiations cease immediately—he and Bormann did not wish to jeopardize their own agenda.
A FELLOW AUSTRIAN, ERNST KALTENBRUNNER had joined Hitler’s inner circle following the July bomb attempt, when as chief of the Reich Main Security Office he took charge of the investigations leading to the arrest and execution of the plotters and the imprisonment of their families. The fearful retribution exacted by the tall, cadaverous, scar-faced Kaltenbrunner earned him much favor with the Führer. In December 1944, he was granted the parallel rank of General of the Waffen-SS (important in that it gave him military as well as police authority) and the Gold Party Badge. On April 18, 1945, he was appointed commander in chief of the German forces in southern Europe.
Kaltenbrunner’s adjutant, the former SD intelligence officer Maj. Wilhelm Höttl, had already passed information to Allen Dulles concerning the creation of the National Redoubt (see Chapter 10). Höttl renewed the connection with the OSS in February 1945 through an Austrian friend of his, Friedrich Westen—a dubious businessman who had profited from expropriations of Jewish property and from slave labor. Both wished to ingratiate themselves with the Americans (though not at the expense of offending Kaltenbrunner and, by extension, Martin Bormann), and the stories they told soon became even more misleading and devious.
During early 1944, when Höttl was in Budapest organizing the transportation of Hungary’s Jewish population to the extermination camps, he had become friendly with Col. Árpád Toldi, Hungary’s commissioner for Jewish affairs. Now, a year later, Toldi was in charge of the “Gold Train.” This was laden with Hungary’s national treasures, including the crown jewels, precious metals, gems, paintings, and large quantities of currency, much of it stolen from Hungary’s Jews. The train—whose value was put at $350 million (approximately $6 billion today)—was destined for Berlin and was moving westward to escape the advance of the Red Army. As it passed through Austria, Höttl advised Kaltenbrunner of its presence, whereupon the train was stopped near Schnann in the Tyrol and many especially valuable crates were offloaded onto trucks. The contents and the whereabouts of those crates remain unknown to this day. Ostensibly, Höttl was instructed to use the Gold Train as a bargaining chip with the OSS in an attempt to arrange a separate truce for Austria like the deal that was under discussion in Italy.
Yet again, Dulles sent an intermediary—this time a senior OSS officer named Edgeworth M. Leslie—for the first meetings with Höttl on the Swiss-Austrian border. In his debrief to Dulles, Leslie reported that Höttl “is of course dangerous”:
He is a fanatical anti-Russian and for this reason we cannot very well collaborate with him … without informing the Russians.… But I see no reason why we should not use him in the furtherance of [common] interests … namely the hastening of the end of the resistance in Austria by the disruption of the [Redoubt].… To avoid any accusation that we are working with a Nazi reactionary … I believe that we should keep our contact with him as indirect as possible.
Believing that Höttl was a conduit to Kaltenbrunner, Dulles agreed: “This type requires utmost caution.” Concurring, Gen. Donovan advised, “I am convinced [that Höttl] is the right hand of Kaltenbrunner and a key contact to develop.”
During these early meetings, Höttl revealed more details about the National Redoubt. He also stated that a Nazi guerrilla movement known as Wehrwolf (Werewolf) had been organized over the past two years, with access to hidden arms dumps, explosives, and ample funds. They could muster some 100,000 committed SS soldiers and fanatical Hitler Youth under the command of another Austrian, SS Lt. Col. Otto Skorzeny—an old friend of Kaltenbrunner’s and Hitler’s favorite leader of Special Forces, whose impressive reputation was well known to the Allies. These “details” were actually disinformation created by Bormann, but they succeeded admirably in causing consternation at SHAEF, particularly to Gen. Eisenhower. As his chief of staff, Gen. Bedell Smith, stated, “We had every reason to believe the Nazis intended to make their last stand among the crags.”
SINCE THE BREAKOUT FROM NORMANDY, Gen. Eisenhower had pursued a measured strate
gy whereby the disparate Allied armies, under their often fractious and competitive commanders, advanced on a broad front. Although ponderous, this plan was politically astute and in tune with the moderate capabilities of conscript armies. Massed firepower, inexhaustible logistics, and overwhelming air support were the answer to superior German tactical performance on the battlefield. Only once did Eisenhower deviate from this strategy, when a failure of Allied logistics halted the broad advance and he accepted the bold plan for Operation Market Garden—the attempted airborne thrust deep into Holland. If it had succeeded, then a rapid advance eastward across the north German plains would have brought Berlin within reach. The capture of the enemy’s capital city and the triumphal parade through its streets following victory has always been the ultimate ambition of all great commanders. But Eisenhower’s ambitions were maturing and he had every reason—both humanitarian and pragmatic—to shrink from the prospect of losing 100,000 GIs during a prolonged and bitter street battle for Berlin.
Over days of brooding, Eisenhower revised his strategy for the campaign in Europe. On the afternoon of March 28, 1945, he declared his intentions in three cables. One was a personal message to Joseph Stalin—the only occasion during the war when Eisenhower communicated directly with the Soviet leader. The second was to Gen. Marshall in Washington, and the third was to Field Marshal Montgomery, commander in chief of the British-Canadian 21st Army Group in northern Germany. Against vehement protests from some of his generals—particularly Patton and Montgomery, who each wished to lead an assault on Berlin—Eisenhower stated that the main thrust of his armies was to be southeastward toward Bavaria, Austria, and the supposed National Redoubt. Berlin was to be left to the Red Army. Eisenhower was seeking valuable military plunder, not empty glory.
Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler Page 16