The mesmerized SS man was brought sharply out of his riveted attention and saluted smartly as two of the half-dozen most powerful and dangerous men in the Nazi hierarchy entered the room: Reichsleiter Martin Bormann and SS and Police Gen. Heinrich “Gestapo” Müller, head of the Secret State Police. The guard was dismissed. Bormann and Müller brought news for Hitler alone, and it shook him to the core: Fegelein had divulged a thorough account of how Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler—the Führer’s “loyal Heinrich”—was negotiating with the Allies for the surrender of German forces in the West.
Hitler’s fury over Himmler’s betrayal left Bormann in an unchallengeable position of influence, but timing was now crucial. There had been opportunities aplenty from April 21 on, but Hitler’s refusal to leave earlier had limited Bormann’s carefully planned options. Nevertheless, on April 27 and 28 there were still potentially feasible land routes out of Berlin. The army commandant of the Berlin Defense Area, Gen. Helmuth Weidling, offered to use the forty tanks still at his disposal to spearhead an attempted breakout to the west, across the Havel River bridge at Pichelsdorf, to secure Hitler’s escape from the capital. But Bormann’s planning required that the Führer be flown out, and he needed to be certain of getting Hitler and his party to some location where an aircraft capable of carrying them out of Allied-held Europe could pick them up.
BORMANN HAD RECOGNIZED the inadequacy of the communication system early on. A separate room in the bunker was in use as a telex center, manned by dedicated navy operators with seven machines, three of which were central to the Reichsleiter’s plans. Bormann had already sent and signed the message “Agree proposed transfer overseas” to the key operatives along the Führer’s planned escape route using the Nazis’ still unbroken cipher, designated “Thrasher” by the British. This cipher was employed by Bormann’s private communications network built around the top-secret Siemens & Halske encryption machine, the T43 Schlüsselfernschreibmaschine (see Chapter 11). Adm. Hans-Erich Voss, Hitler’s Kriegsmarine liaison officer, had first brought the Siemens & Halske T43 to Bormann’s attention when the latter approached him late in 1944. Bormann needed to establish a totally secure communications network, one that was capable of reaching U-boats at sea and ground stations in Spain and the Canary Islands and that could relay messages across the Atlantic to Buenos Aires. A modified version of the T43 machine was the answer to his needs.
By February 1945, Bormann had taken control of all these adapted machines, and on April 15, Adm. Voss’s team had installed three of them with their naval operators in the Führerbunker, where they would continue transmitting until Bormann left the bunker on May 1. At least one machine was with the Abwehr operation in Spain, another at the secret outpost Villa Winter on Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, and yet another in Buenos Aires. Eight of Adm. Karl Dönitz’s U-boats also carried these top-secret machines. After April 20, Dönitz had six machines waiting for him at in Flensburg, where he moved his headquarters at the end of the war, thus enabling Bormann to relay the final movement and shipment orders to be carried out by remnants of the U-boat fleet based at Kristiansand in Norway. With his communications network set up, Bormann could set about organizing how to get the Führer and his party out of Berlin.
FROM JANUARY TO APRIL 1945, Martin Bormann and his ally “Gestapo” Müller were the gatekeepers controlling all access to Hitler. In drawing up the final escape plans, they were assisted by Bormann’s drinking companion, SS Gen. Hermann Fegelein. Since early 1943, Fegelein had been Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler’s liaison officer at the Führer’s court and so was party to many secrets. Moreover, as the husband of Eva Braun’s sister Gretl, and Eva’s close personal friend, Fegelein was one of Hitler’s most trusted “mountain people.”
The first essential was to identify a practical location from which the Führer could be flown out and to decide how to get him there. The vast Soviet noose was tightening fast, and the defense of central Berlin was becoming increasingly desperate. In the city as a whole, Gen. Weidling had approximately 45,000 soldiers and 40,000 aging men of the Volkssturm (Home Guard), supplemented by the Berlin police force and boys from the Hitler Youth. On April 22, SS Gen. Wilhelm Mohnke—an ultraloyal veteran combat officer of the Waffen-SS—had been personally appointed by Hitler as commander of a battle group to defend the government quarter around the Reichstag building and Chancellery, operating independently of Weidling. This Kampfgruppe (Battle Group) Mohnke had fewer than 2,000 men: about 800 from the SS Guard Battalion “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler”; 600 men from the Reichsführer-SS Escort Battalion (Himmler’s bodyguard unit); the Führer Escort Company (a mixed army/air force unit); and various others swept up from replacement depots. In addition, there were supposed to be perhaps 2,000 men of the so-called Adolf Hitler Free Corps, comprising volunteers from all over Germany who had rallied to the Führer’s defense, and even a number of secretaries and other female government staff who would also take up arms. With such meager resources, Weidling and Mohnke faced some 1.5 million Red Army troops of Marshal Koniev’s 1st Ukrainian Front and Marshal Zhukov’s 1st Byelorussian Front.
Although Tempelhof and Gatow airports were already either in Soviet hands or under the Soviet guns, there were still a number of temporary landing strips available. The East–West Axis along the Unter den Linden boulevard was still in use by light aircraft, but a last-minute troop landing there on April 25, by Junkers Ju 52 transports carrying naval troops to join the garrison, had wrecked several aircraft that had run into shell holes, damaging their landing gear and making further takeoffs impossible. The Ju 52 trimotor was the type most suitable for flying out the Führer and his party; the standard Luftwaffe transport aircraft throughout the war, it was elderly, slow, but extremely robust, could carry up to eighteen passengers, and needed a relatively short takeoff and landing run. Fegelein had reconnoitered the remaining viable areas for a pickup; the wide boulevard at Hohenzollerndamm was not perfect, but it was the best available. The underground railway system—the U-bahn—offered a safe route from the government quarter to Fehrbelliner Platz, and from there (so long as the area was still held by German troops) it was a short drive to the proposed landing strip.
NEARLY 5,000 JUNKERS Ju 52s were built from 1932 to 1945 and the Tante Ju would serve on deep into the postwar years. It has a 13-mm (.50-inch) MG 131 machine gun in the dorsal position (not shown).
Crucial to the plan was the most up-to-date intelligence about the situation on the ground, and during his reconnaissance sorties Fegelein had identified an officer whom he trusted to supply it. The twenty-four-year-old SS Lt. Oskar Schäfer, a veteran of France and the Eastern Front as a Waffen-SS infantryman, had been wounded several times. Now commissioned as a Panzer officer, he was assigned to SS Heavy Tank Battalion 503, and his Tiger II (“King Tiger”) was one of a handful of these 76.9-ton monsters from that unit that were still fighting in the heart of Berlin. Late on April 27, 1945, Schäfer and two comrades were summoned to the Reich Chancellery command bunker with orders to report directly to SS Gen. Mohnke for a thorough debriefing on the situation at Fehrbelliner Platz and the Hohenzollerndamm. Mohnke closely questioned Schäfer—who had been slightly wounded in action—about the disposition of his troops and the likelihood of a breakthrough by the “Ivans” attacking his positions. Schäfer gave as detailed a report as possible: it was his opinion that they could hold the area for no longer than two more days, and the other two officers agreed. After Schäfer had had a night’s rest, Mohnke awarded him the coveted Knight’s Cross, writing the citation into his Soldaten Buch.
“GESTAPO” MÜLLER COULD NOW PUT into effect his and Bormann’s plans for spiriting the Führer out of Berlin—but first, those who had been chosen to escape had to “die.” Fegelein was the first to disappear into the smokescreen of confusion, lies, and cover-ups that would mask the escape of all the main participants. There would be several versions of Fegelein’s death. One stated that SS Lt. Col. Peter Högl captured him in his Berlin apa
rtment wearing civilian clothes, ready to go on the run with his mistress, variously “identified” as a Hungarian, an Irishwoman married to a Hungarian diplomat, and an Allied secret agent. Fegelein was supposedly carrying quantities of cash, both German and foreign, and also jewelry, some of which allegedly belonged to Eva Braun (though that was also hearsay). Högl, a former policeman well known to Heinrich Müller, would be shot in the head while fleeing the bunker and died on May 2, 1945. One SS officer claimed to have shot Fegelein before he made it back to the bunker, while another supposed witness even alleged that Hitler “gunned him down” personally. Most stated that Fegelein had been shot, perhaps after interrogation by Müller, following a summary court-martial presided over by Wilhelm Mohnke—but Mohnke would later deny that the court-martial ever took place.
According to the book Nazi Millionaires, by Kenneth D. Alford and Theodore P. Savas, Walter Hirschfeld—a former SS officer working for the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps in Germany—interviewed Fegelein’s father Hans in late September 1945. Hans Fegelein stated to Hirschfeld that “I think I can say with certainty that the Führer is alive. I have received word through a special messenger [an SS Sturmbannführer] … after his death had already been announced.” The courier reportedly relayed the following message from Hermann Fegelein: “The Führer and I are safe and well. Don’t worry about me; you will get further word from me, even if it is not for some time.” The courier “also said that on the day when the Führer, Hermann, and Eva Braun left Berlin … there was a sharp counterattack in Berlin in order to win a flying strip where they could take off.” Hirschfeld was said to have been dumbfounded: “Many SS officers claim the Führer is dead and his body was burned!” However, Hans Fegelein allegedly assured him that it was a smokescreen: “They are all trusted and true SS men who have been ordered to make these statements. Keep your eye on South America.”
In actuality, Fegelein had flown into Berlin on April 25 on board a Ju 52 put at his disposal by Heinrich Himmler. He went to his apartment and then, while in communication with Bormann and Müller, reconnoitered the temporary landing strip at the Hohenzollerndamm. He would be waiting in the secret escape tunnel to the underground for his sister-in-law and Adolf Hitler. The Ju 52 then returned to its home base at Rechlin, the same airfield Capt. Peter Baumgart is believed to have flown into Berlin from. The same pilot flew the aircraft back into Berlin on April 28.
Hitler’s personal pilot, SS Gruppenführer Hans Baur, confirmed that Eva Braun’s brother-in-law always flew in a Ju 52, but Baur said he had not seen the landing on the twenty-eighth or had it reported to him. He had accompanied two old flying friends, Hanna Reitsch and Ritter Von Greim, to the temporary landing strip at the Brandenburg gate that same night but denied seeing any Ju 52 on the ground.
However, Reitsch, who flew out of Berlin on the twenty-eighth with the newly appointed head of the air force, Luftwaffe Chief Ritter Von Greim, said that she took off “around midnight” and that just as her Arado AR 96 trainer became airborne they both saw a Junkers-52 transport plane “near the runway.… A lone pilot was standing by in the shadows. He was obviously waiting for somebody.” It is possible that Reitsch and Von Greim, flying at roof-height to avoid Soviet fighters, could have seen the escape aircraft on the ground at the Hohenzollerndamm, less than ninety seconds away by air from the Brandenburg Gate airstrip.
Creating the myth of Fegelein’s execution was the first of Müller’s perfect cover-ups, and it was soon followed by his masterstroke.
(Italics are used in the following section to identify conclusions based on deductive research; see Chapter 16 for further discussion.)
JUST AFTER THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT as April 28, 1945, began, while the rest of the occupants of the Führerbunker were trying to get some sleep, Hitler’s escape got under way. The Führer, his beloved dog Blondi, Eva Braun, Bormann, Fegelein, and six trusted soldiers from the SS Guard Battalion “Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler” slipped quietly away through the Vorbunker and up to his private quarters in the Old Reich Chancellery building. The light concrete panel was slid aside, revealing the secret escape tunnel. At the end of the electrically lit passageway, down a slight incline, they entered the wider space of the third-level bunker. When the party reached the chamber, they found waiting for them two people whom Müller had had brought there from up the tunnel via the underground railway: two doubles—a stand-in for Hitler (probably Gustav Weber) and one for Eva Braun.
GUSTAV WEBER HAD BEEN STANDING IN FOR HITLER since July 20, 1944, when the Führer had been wounded in the bomb attempt on his life at his Wolf’s Lair field headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia. Hitler had suffered recurrent aftereffects from his injuries; he tired easily, and he was plagued by infected wounds from splinters of the oak table that had protected him from the full force of the blast. (His use of penicillin, taken from Allied troops captured or killed in the D-Day landings, had probably saved his life.)
Weber had impersonated Hitler on his last officially photographed appearance, when he handed out medals to members of the Hitler Youth in the Chancellery garden on March 20, 1945. Weber’s uncanny resemblance to Hitler deceived even those quite close to him, and on that occasion the Reichsjugendführer (Hitler Youth National Leader) Artur Axman was either taken in or warned to play along. The only thing liable to betray the imposture was that Weber’s left hand suffered from occasional bouts of uncontrollable trembling. Bormann had taken Hitler’s personal doctor into his confidence, and SS Lt. Col. Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger had treated Weber with some success. Weber was often kept sedated, but his trembling became more noticeable when he was under extreme stress.
Eva Braun’s double was simply perfect. Her name is unknown, but she had been trawled from the “stable” of young actresses that Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, the self-appointed “patron of the German cinema,” maintained for his own pleasure. The physical similarity was amazing, and after film makeup and hairdressing experts had done their work it was very difficult to tell the two young women apart.
Eva paused in the chamber to dash off a note to tell her parents not to worry if they did not hear from her for a long time. She handed it to Bormann, who pocketed it without a word (its charred remains would later be found on the floor—it was too much of a security risk for Bormann to allow it to be delivered). Bormann then saluted the group, shook Hitler’s hand, and led the counterfeit Führer and his soon-to-be bogus bride back up the tunnel to the Führerbunker.
In the anteroom of the third-level chamber, the fugitives donned steel helmets and baggy SS camouflage smocks. Hitler carried slung from his shoulder a cylindrical metal gas mask case; this contained the painting of Frederick the Great that had hung above his desk. Like his dog, this portrait by Anton Graff went everywhere with Hitler, and his final act in the bunker had been to remove the 16 x 11-inch canvas from its oval frame, roll it widthwise, and slide it carefully into the long-model Wehrmacht gas mask canister. It fitted perfectly.
The party entered the U-bahn system near Kaiserhof (today, Mohrenstrasse) station. The walls were painted with a phosphor-based green luminous paint, so the flashlights hanging from the soldiers’ chests bathed the fugitives in an eerie glow. The tunnel was wet, and in places they had to slosh along ankle-deep in water as they made their way to the junction at Wittenbergplatz and on toward Fehrbelliner Platz. The stumbling four-mile journey took three hours, and they were goaded along not only by the sound of bursting shells overhead, but also by echoing small-arms fire in the distance—elsewhere in the system, Soviet and German soldiers were fighting in the railway tunnels.
As the group emerged onto the station concourse at Fehrbelliner Platz they were met by Eva’s other sister, Ilse, and by Fegelein’s close friend SS Gen. Joachim Rumohr and his wife. In January 1945, Ilse had fled Breslau by train to Berlin to avoid the advancing Soviet forces. She had dined with Eva at the Hotel Adlon and—despite furious rows with her sister about the conduct of the war—had remained in the city until her
brother-in-law Hermann Fegelein sent a detachment of “Leibstandarte” soldiers to fetch her. As for Joachim Rumohr, this was the second time in three months that he would escape from a ruined capital city just ahead of the Red Army. A former comrade of Fegelein’s, Rumohr had been wounded in February 1945 during the bloody fall of Budapest. Erroneously reported to have committed suicide on February 11 to avoid capture by the Russians, he had managed to reach the wooded hills northwest of Budapest and from there escaped to Vienna. Now his friendship with Fegelein guaranteed him the chance of another escape, this time with his wife.
When the fugitives reached the main entrance to the Fehrbelliner Platz station, they found three Tiger II tanks and two SdKfz 251 half-track armored personnel carriers waiting to take them on the half-mile drive to the makeshift airstrip on the Hohenzollerndamm.
THE ESCAPEES USED the Berlin U-Bahn system to reach a makeshift airstrip on Hohenzollerndamm where they boarded a Ju 52 piloted by SS Capt. Peter Baumgart.
Chapter 15
THE FLIGHT
RED SIGNAL LAMPS WERE PLACED along an eight-hundred-yard stretch of the wide boulevard, where troops had been set to clearing away debris and filling shell holes. At 3:00 a.m. on April 28, 1945, the lamps were lit, revealing a Junkers Ju 52/3m less than a hundred yards from the parked vehicles. The aircraft, assigned to the Luftwaffe wing Kampfgeschwader 200, had taken off in rainy conditions from Rechlin airfield, sixty-three miles from Berlin, just forty minutes earlier. Rechlin had long been the Luftwaffe’s main test airfield for new equipment designs, but in the closing weeks of the war it had reverted to more essential combat duties. It was one of several bases used by “Bomber Wing 200”—the deliberately deceptive title of a secret special-operations section of the air force commanded from November 15, 1944, by a highly decorated bomber pilot, Lt. Col. Werner Baumbach.
Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler Page 19