Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler

by Simon Dunstan

  Surging ahead of 21st Army Group, Team 4 of 30 AU was the first Allied unit to enter the major port of Bremen. They accepted the surrender of the city by the mayor some twenty-four hours before the arrival of conventional forces, and a small detachment of Royal Marines captured sixteen U-boats. Further south, Lt. Cdr. Jim Glanville’s Team 55 set off on April 14 for Schloss Tambach near Bad Sulza in Thuringia, where they captured the complete records of the Kriegsmarine from 1850 up to the end of 1944, including all the logs of U-boats and surface ships. These archives were of immense value to Allied naval authorities and were judged to be one of the most important intelligence hauls of the entire war. Meanwhile, after their success locating the uranium ore for the Alsos Mission, Team 5 under the command of Lt. James Lambie was searching the Harz Mountains for the underground V-2 assembly facility at Nordhausen, following instructions from SHAEF to capture documentation and personnel connected with the ballistic missile program. The Monuments Men were also hard on the heels of the combat troops, on their way to safeguard the major caches of artworks hidden across Germany, including the castle of Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, which was saved from destruction on May 4, 1945, and with it the treasures of France and the Low Countries.

  THROUGHOUT APRIL 1945, BORMANN pursued his plans for Aktion Feuerland with ruthless efficiency. It was time to tie up loose ends, of which one of the most outstanding was Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, now held in Flossenbürg concentration camp. Canaris knew far too much about the site of the refuge that Bormann had prepared for Hitler in Argentina and about a major staging post for the Führer’s journey between Europe and South America. On April 5, Ernst Kaltenbrunner presented Hitler with some highly incriminating evidence against Canaris. The Führer flew into a rage and signed the admiral’s death warrant. He was hanged in humiliating circumstances on April 9.

  In the detached netherworld of the Führerbunker—dubbed the “cement submarine” by many of the staff working there—Hitler was living the claustrophobic life of a U-boat captain on the ocean floor, with little sense of time or reality of actual events in the world above. The Führer had always been subject to mood swings, but his rages became more frequent as the military situation deteriorated inexorably and he was confronted with the self-deluding futility of the orders he had been issuing. At a military situation conference on Sunday, April 22, attended by Bormann, the Führer exploded in a fit of unrestrained fury. For the first time he declared openly that the war was lost and announced repeatedly that he would die in Berlin. Bormann insisted that this was the time to fly south to the Obersalzberg to finalize the Führer’s personal affairs before fleeing in accordance with the preparations made for Aktion Feuerland, but Joseph Goebbels persuaded Hitler otherwise; Goebbels saw it as their duty to die among the ruins of their city. Gen. Jodl pointed out that Germany still had armies in the field theoretically within reach of Berlin—Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner’s remnant of Army Group Center and Gen. Walther Wenck’s Twelfth Army. The Führer became vague about the military steps to be taken, but repeated that he was determined to remain in Berlin to the last.

  Frustrated, Bormann nevertheless continued juggling the possilities that remained open to him. That night, he sent a telex to Göring at the Obersalzberg indicating that the Führer was indisposed. It was a trap and Göring fell straight into it. On the following day he sent a telegram to the Führerbunker stating that if he did not hear instructions to the contrary, he would assume full command of the Reich from 10:00 p.m. that night, in accordance with his responsibility as designated successor to Hitler. Bormann immediately informed the Führer, urging the need to annul the decree of succession as Göring was obviously staging a coup. At first, Hitler demurred. Bormann then sent Göring a telex accusing him of treacherous behavior but also stating that no further action would be taken if he resigned from all his many offices of state. Within an hour, Göring’s resignation was on the Führer’s desk. This was seen as confirmation of his treachery, and the SS detachment at the Obersalzberg was ordered to place the Reichsmarschall under house arrest.

  With Göring sidelined, Bormann turned his attention to ousting Himmler. It was time for him to use his ace in the hole. He had known from late March 1945 that Himmler had begun negotiations with the Allies in Stockholm. His close friend Gen. Fegelein, Himmler’s representative in the bunker, had kept him well informed. The Reichsleiter had prepared a detailed dossier detailing Himmler’s treachery, which he would present to Hitler. Bormann had achieved his ultimate ambition—to destroy all competing candidates for the power and influence of being the Führer’s only unquestionably trusted deputy. It was something of a Pyrrhic victory, though, since on April 25 the Red Army completed its encirclement of Berlin and the Obersalzberg was comprehensively bombed by the Lancasters of No. 617 Squadron RAF, thereby rendering it useless as a bolt-hole during any planned escape to the south. The rush for the shelters probably saved Göring’s life, since his SS guards were on the point of executing him when the sirens sounded. The confirmation of Bormann’s total victory in the intrigues of the Nazi court came on April 26, when Hitler promoted Gen. Robert Ritter von Greim to the rank of field marshal and appointed him commander in chief of the Luftwaffe. Bormann must have been ecstatic over Hitler’s first order to Ritter von Greim: he was to fly to Karl Dönitz’s headquarters at Plön and arrest Heinrich Himmler for treason. This was impossible, however, since Ritter von Greim had been badly wounded earlier that day by Red Army gunfire shortly before landing in Berlin in a plane piloted by the daredevil aviatrix Hanna Reitsch.

  ALTHOUGH THE BULK OF THE REICHSBANK’S HOLDINGS had been transferred to the Kaiseroda mine at Merkers, much still remained in Berlin, ostensibly to pay the city’s Wehrmacht defenders in cash. At a meeting between the Führer, Dr. Funk, and Bormann on April 9, it had been decided to transfer the remaining gold and currency reserves of the Reichsbank to Bavaria. They were to be transported to the so-called “Bormann Bunker” in Munich, by road in a convoy of six Opel Blitz trucks and by two special trains code-named Adler and Dohle—“Eagle” and “Jackdaw.” The trains and trucks left Berlin on April 14 but took almost two weeks to arrive in Bavaria, due to the devastated road and rail networks and the chronic lack of gasoline.

  Following the Operation Seraglio/Harem exodus of nonessential personnel from the Führerbunker on April 22, Bormann instructed SS Gen. Kaltenbrunner to fly south in order to pursue Allen Dulles’s Operation Crossword. Kaltenbrunner decided that he should make his own arrangements for survival rather than relying solely upon Aktion Feuerland. In his capacity as head of the RSHA, he ordered SS Gen. Josef Spacil to take a party of SS troops to remove everything of value left in the vaults of the Reichsbank—securities, gems, and 23 million gold reichsmarks, worth $9.13 million (approximately $110 million in today’s money). One of the last transport planes to get out of the city flew this loot to Salzburg in Austria. From there it was taken by truck to the high Tyrolean town of Rauris and buried on a wooded mountainside nearby.

  This largest armed robbery in history soon came to the notice of Martin Bormann, who commented to his confederate, “Gestapo” Müller,

  Well, Ernst is still looking out for Ernst. It doesn’t mean much to the big picture. But find out where he has it taken. When it’s buried—and it will probably be in an Austrian lake close to his home—we might want one of our party Gauleiters to watch over it. Kaltenbrunner may never last the war out, and it would be useful to the party later.

  In reality, by striking out on his own, Kaltenbrunner had signed his own death warrant, but he was still useful to Bormann as long as the talks with Dulles continued. The Allies recovered less than 10 percent of this enormous booty. The rest was used to finance the various escape networks for Nazi war criminals fleeing justice in the postwar years.

  The final authorization for the implementation of Operation Crossword came in the form of three “highest priority signals” from Washington on the morning of April 27, 1945. It took two days for all the various
representatives to meet and sign the actual surrender document for the German forces in Italy. In the meantime, Bormann had just barely enough time to activate the final option for Aktion Feuerland (see Chapter 15 and the escape to Tønder). At 2:00 p.m. on May 2, 1945, a simultaneous Allied and German ceasefire came into effect in northern Italy. Five minutes earlier, an eighteen-year-old radio announcer, Richard Beier, made the very last broadcast by Grossdeutscher Rundfunk (Greater German Broadcasting) from its underground studio on Masurenallee in Berlin: “The Führer is dead. Long live the Reich!” But where was Hitler’s body?

  THIS WAS THE QUESTION ASKED by the first Soviet troops to enter the Führerbunker at 9:00 that morning. A few days earlier, on April 29, a special detachment of the SMERSH (NKVD counterespionage) element serving with the headquarters of the 3rd Shock Army had been created at Stalin’s insistence, specifically to discover the whereabouts of Adolf Hitler, dead or alive. The SMERSH team arrived at the Reich Chancellery moments after its capture by the Red Army. Despite intense pressure from Moscow, its searches proved fruitless. Although the charred bodies of Joseph and Magda Goebbels were quickly found in the shell-torn garden, no evidence for the deaths of Adolf Hitler or Eva Braun was found.

  Close behind the assault troops and NKVD officers, a group of twelve women doctors and their assistants of the Red Army medical corps were the first to enter the bunker in the early afternoon of May 2. The leader of the group spoke fluent German and asked one of the four people then remaining in the bunker, the electrical machinist Johannes Hentschel, “Wo bist Adolf Hitler? Wo sind die Klamotten?” (“Where is Adolf Hitler? Where are the glad rags?”). She seemed more interested in Eva Braun’s clothes than in the fate of the Führer of the Third Reich. The failure to find an identifiable corpse would vex the Soviet authorities for many months, if not years. That day, the Soviet official newspaper Pravda declared, “The announcement of Hitler’s death was a fascist trick.”

  PART III

  THE ESCAPE

  This 1945 photograph shows the New Reich Chancellery devastated after years of bombing and the savagery of the Battle of Berlin. Constructed as the centerpiece of the Thousand-Year Reich, this grandiose building lasted less than a decade. This view shows the Courtyard of Honor with two armored cars parked on the left. These were always on hand in case Hitler needed to escape Berlin in an armored vehicle. In any event, they were not used.

  Chapter 14

  THE BUNKER

  THE FÜHRERBUNKER, under the rear and the garden of the Old Reich Chancellery building on Wilhelmstrasse in the government quarter of Berlin, was built in two phases. The contractor was the Hochtief AG construction company, through its subsidiary the Führerbunkerfensterputzer GmbH—which also built the Berghof, Hitler’s Bavarian mountain retreat, as well as his Wolf’s Lair in Rastenburg. The initial Führerbunker structure, which later became known as the Vorbunker (ante-bunker), was intended purely as an air raid shelter for Hitler and his staff in the Reichskanzlei (Reich Chancellery). Construction began in 1936 and was usefully obscured by the work on a new reception hall then being built onto the western, rear face of the Old Chancellery. The construction of Albert Speer’s massive New Chancellery building, fronting onto the Voss-Strasse and adjoining the Old Chancellery in an L-shape to the south, was essentially complete by January 1939. This range of buildings, and the adjacent SS barrack blocks aligned north–south on Hermann-Göring-Strasse to the west, incorporated from the start two very large complexes of linked underground shelters, working quarters, garages, and tunnels.

  On January 18, 1943, in response to the heavier bombs then being used by the Allied air forces, Hitler ordered Speer to extend the shelter under the Old Chancellery by constructing a deeper complex. Under the supervision of the architect Carl Piepenburg, an excavation for this Führerbunker or Hauptbunker (main bunker), code-named “B207,” was dug below and to the west of the Vorbunker. The major works were completed in 1943, at a cost of 1.35 million reichsmarks—five times the amount of the original shelter. However, it was not until October 23, 1944, that Dr. Hans Heinrich Lammers, the state secretary of the Reich Chancellery, was able to inform Hitler that the new facility was entirely ready for his use.

  The new bunker lay twenty-six feet below the garden of the Old Chancellery and 131 yards north from the New Chancellery building. Two floors deeper than the Vorbunker, the Führerbunker adjoined its west side and was linked to it by a corridor, an airtight compartment, and a staircase down. The new complex had two main means of access: this route from the Vorbunker and another staircase from the far end leading up to the Chancellery garden. The ceiling of the Führerbunker was formed of reinforced concrete that was 11 feet, 3 inches thick; the external walls were up to 13 feet thick, and heavy steel doors closed off the various compartments and corridors. The bunker was built in Berlin’s sandy soil below the level of the water table, so pumps were continuously at work to keep the damp at bay. The complex incorporated its own independent water supply and air-filtration plant, and it was lit and heated with electricity generated by a diesel engine of the type used on U-boats.

  The general layout of the Führerbunker was a series of rooms leading off each side of a central corridor, divided into outer and inner ranges. The outer range, nearest to the access from the Vorbunker, contained the practical amenities such as machine rooms, stores, showers, and toilets. The inner half of the corridor functioned as a reception and conference space, and leading off it were telephone and telegraph rooms; a first aid station; quarters for orderlies, valets, and medical personnel; and the Führer’s private quarters. Beyond a small refreshment room, these comprised a study, a living room, and Hitler’s bedroom and bathroom; from the bathroom a second door led to Eva Braun’s bedroom and dressing room. None of these rooms was larger than 140 square feet. Comfortably furnished with items brought down from the Chancellery and with paintings lining the walls, the bunker complex had a kitchen stockpiled with luxury foods and wines. It has been portrayed in movies as a drab, damp, concrete cellar, but while conditions certainly deteriorated in late April 1945, when leaking water and dust from the shelled streets above penetrated into the upper parts of the complex, some late visitors to the Führerbunker—such as the pilot Hanna Reitsch—described it as “luxurious.”

  The bunker’s major weakness was that it had never been designed as a Führerhauptquartier, or command headquarters. After the intensity of Allied bombing forced Hitler and his staff to move underground permanently in mid-February 1945, the means of communication were woefully inadequate for keeping in touch with daily developments in the conduct of the war. The telephone exchange, more suited to the needs of a small hotel, was quite incapable of handling the necessary volume of traffic.

  Apart from the Vorbunker’s above-ground access to the Old Chancellery building, three tunnels provided the upper Vorbunker with underground links. One led north, to the Foreign Office; one crossed the Wilhelmstrasse eastward, to the Propaganda Ministry; and one ran south, linking up with the labyrinth of shelters under the New Chancellery. However, the Old Chancellery—a confusing maze of passages and staircases, much altered over the years—also had an underground emergency exit to a third, deeper, secret shelter, known to only a select few. Hitler maintained his private quarters in the Old Chancellery throughout the war until forced underground in February 1945. To get to the secret shelter, Hitler did not have to leave his private study: as part of Hochtief’s extensive underground works, a tunnel had been built that connected Hitler’s quarters directly with the shelter. The tunnel was accessible via a doorway covered by a thin concrete sliding panel hidden beside a bookcase in the study. This tunnel, in turn, was connected to the Berlin underground railway system by a five-hundred-yard passageway. The third shelter had been provided with its own water supply, toilet facilities, and storage for food and weapons for up to twelve people for two weeks. Bormann had never really planned for it to be used; it was simply one of the range of options available to get Hitler out of
Berlin. But by Friday, April 27, 1945, it was the obvious means of escape to take the Führer away from the devastating shells that were raining down on the government quarter of Berlin as Soviet troops fought their way in from three directions.

  DESIGNED BY HITLER’S favorite architect, Albert Speer, the New Reich Chancellery was to have been the seat of power of the Thousand-Year Reich. During the war as the Allied bomber offensive intensified, the Führerbunker was built to protect Hitler from the increasingly devastating aerial bombs employed by the RAF and USAAF.

  IN THE FINAL months of the war, Adolf Hitler retreated to the depths of the Führerbunker beneath the Old Reich Chancellery; Bormann had organized a secret tunnel that allowed the Führer and his select companions to escape via the Berlin subway system to an improvised airstrip and flee to Denmark and onward to Spain and Argentina.

  ON THAT DAY, IN THE PRIVATE STUDY in the bunker, Eva Braun was seated at the table, writing; Hitler was fidgeting on the sofa. An SS bodyguard stood to attention at the open doorway. Hitler walked over to him and asked about casualties outside; the dull thud of artillery shells could be heard and felt even this far underground and through the thick walls. The SS officer recalled that Hitler then appeared to make a decision. Speaking as if to an assembled audience, the leader of the collapsing Third Reich said that as long as he lived there could never be a hope of conflict between the Western Allies and Russia. But his was a difficult decision: alive, he would be able to lead the German people to final victory—but unless he died, the conditions for that victory could never be achieved. “Germany,” he said, “can hope for the future only if the whole world thinks I am dead. I must …”—his words tailed off.