35 “bureaucracy of murder”: John Cornwell, Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War and the Devil’s Pact (London: Penguin Books, 2004).
35 “safekeeping of works of art”: Richard Z. Chesnoff, Pack of Thieves: How Hitler and Europe Plundered the Jews and Committed the Greatest Theft in History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000).
36 “painter of idyllic landscapes”: Ronald Pawly, Hitler’s Chancellery: A Palace to Last a Thousand Years (Ramsbury, UK: Crowood Press, 2009).
36 “Look at those details”: Delaforce, The Hitler File.
36 Rosenberg and “the character Wilhelm Furtwängler”: Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (London: Allen Lane, 2000). Museums were also required to provide some of their acceptable masterpieces for the decoration of the New Reich Chancellery. For instance, in 1938–39 Speer requisitioned “on loan” many works from the Art Historical Museum in Vienna, including twenty-one enormous seventeenth-century Dutch and Belgian tapestries; see Pawly, Hitler’s Chancellery.
37 Committee for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art: Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).
38 “extraordinary bargains”: Ibid.
38 “triumphal progress through Vienna”: Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews (London: Phoenix, 2009).
38 Rothschilds: Hitler reserved a special loathing for this famous Jewish family of financiers and art collectors whose collections in Vienna and Paris he plundered for his planned Führermuseum at Linz. His grandmother had once worked as a maid for the Vienna branch of the family, and rumors persisted that her bastard son, Hitler’s father Alois Schicklgruber, had been sired by a Rothschild—which would have made Hitler one-quarter Jewish.
39 “his eyes glittering” and “It was the dream of my life”: Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970).
40 “Jewish-owned works of degenerate art”: Nicholas, Rape of Europa.
40 Jeu du Paume: Hector Feliciano, The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
41 Aktion-M: Chesnoff, Pack of Thieves.
41 “Soviet Union lost 1.148 million artworks”: See footnotes of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_plunder.
41 “cultural center of the Thousand-Year Reich”: Mazower, Hitler’s Empire.
42 “Bormann knew the location”: Whetton, Hitler’s Fortune.
42 “bogus art dealerships in Latin American locations”: Stanley G. Payne, Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany and World War II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
42 “flow of confiscated art”: Nicholas, Rape of Europa.
43 “involving 137 freight cars”: Shoah Resource Center, www.yadvashem.org, “Einsatzstab Rosenberg.”
Chapter 5: NAZI GOLD
44 German gold reserves: John Weitz, Hitler’s Banker: Hjalmar Horace Greely Schacht (London: Little, Brown, 1999).
45 “abundance of gold”: Chesnoff, Pack of Thieves.
45 plunder of European gold reserves: Arthur L. Smith, Hitler’s Gold: The Story of the Nazi War Loot (Dulles, VA: Berg, 1996).
46 “Eventually the French agreed to hand over the Belgian gold”: Ibid.
46 “saga of the Belgian gold”: Ibid.
47 “gold items taken from the victims”: Yeadon and Hawkins, Nazi Hydra in America. The scale of Aktion Reinhardt—the theft of prisoners’ possessions prior to their extermination in the death camps—was staggering, involving the expropriation of 53,013,133 reichsmarks in cash; foreign currency in bank notes to a value of 1,452,904 reichsmarks; foreign currency in gold coins to a value of 843,802 reichsmarks; precious metals to a value of 5,353,943 reichsmarks; other valuables, such as jewelry, watches, and spectacles, to a value of 26,089,800 reichsmarks; and clothing and textiles to a value of 13,294,400 reichsmarks, to give a grand total of 100,047,983 reichsmarks. The obscene exactitude of the Nazi accounting of the Holocaust utterly beggars belief.
48 “favored the Bank for International Settlements”: von Hassell et al., Alliance of Enemies.
50 “In 1939 the Banco Nacional de Portugal held 63 tons of gold”: Antonio Louça and Ansgar Schäfer, “Portugal and the Nazi Gold: The ‘Lisbon Connection’ in the Sales of Looted Gold by the Third Reich”; see online PDF at www.yadvashem.org.
52 “$890 million in gold”: John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). It was not until May 1997 that the BIS admitted to accepting shipments of Nazi gold that had been melted down and stamped with prewar German markings to disguise the fact that it was looted from other countries.
52 François-René de Chateaubriand: von Hassell et al., Alliance of Enemies.
Chapter 6: EAGLE FLIGHT AND LAND OF FIRE
53 Operation Citadel: Davies, Europe at War 1939–45.
54 “sales of ‘degenerate art’”: Nicholas, Rape of Europa.
55 “290,000 carats of diamonds”: Chesnoff, Pack of Thieves.
55 “high-value minerals”: Ladislas Farago, Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich (New York: Avon Books, 1974).
56 Operation Andreas/Bernhard: Yeadon and Hawkins, Nazi Hydra in America. The forgeries were so good that the Bank of England could do little to call them in after the war without destroying faith in British paper money; as a result, nothing was said or done and they remained in circulation until 1954, when a new design of the five-pound note replaced the old white “bedsheet.” The scale of the operation was considerable: 3,945,867 five-pound notes, 2,398,981 ten-pound notes, and 1,337,325 twenty-pound notes were produced, in addition to a quantity of fifty-pound notes. Work on counterfeit U.S. dollar notes began in the spring of 1944, and the first examples together with real bills were presented to Heinrich Himmler in January 1945. He was unable to tell the difference between the true and fake notes, but serious production of counterfeit dollars was never undertaken in quantity. For a fuller account of Operation Andreas/Bernhard, see “Report on Forgery in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp,” dated December 15, 1945, compiled by the Central Criminal Office of the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior.
56 Project Eagle Flight: Manning, Martin Bormann.
57 “heavy water”: Chesnoff, Pack of Thieves.
57 “create some 980 front companies”: Yeadon and Hawkins, Nazi Hydra in America.
58 “every known device”: Manning, Martin Bormann.
58 “Bury your treasure deep”: Ibid.
59 “self-contained refuge for Hitler”: Jim Marrs, The Rise of the Fourth Reich (New York: William Morrow, 2008).
Chapter 7: RED INDIANS AND PRIVATE ARMIES
63 “Naval Intelligence Commando Unit”: The National Archives, Kew, London; Enclosure 1 to File ADM 223/500.
63 “Abwehrkommando”: Steven Kippax, “Hitler’s Special Forces,” Military Illustrated 155 (2001).
64 “Fleming’s ‘Red Indians’”: This section is drawn from The History of 30 Assault Unit 1942–1946 (London: King’s College Library Military Archives, Ref GB99). Lt. Cdr. Fleming’s room number was 39; Admiral Godfrey, in Room 38, was the role model for “M” in the James Bond novels. See also http://www.30AU.co.uk.
65 “Maj. Wurmann”: Richard Breitman, U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
66 30 CU’s jeeps: David Nutting and Jim Glanville, eds., Attain by Surprise: The Story of 30 Assault Unit Royal Navy/ Royal Marine Commando and of Intelligence by Capture (London: David Glover, 1997).
66 Tiger tank: David Fletcher, historian, Royal Armoured Corps Tank Museum, Bovington, Dorset, UK, in interview with Simon Dunstan, August 2010. This Tiger tank—turret number 131 of Panzer Abteilung 504—now resides at Bovington. It is the only remaining Tiger I in the world that can still motor on its own tracks. Very heavily armored and mounting an 88mm main gun, the Tiger was twice the weight and possessed twice the firep
ower of the M4 Sherman medium tank that was the mainstay of both the American and British armored forces in 1943–45.
67 30 Assault Unit: Nutting and Glanville, Attain by Surprise.
67 “Monuments Men”: Robert M. Edsel, Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History (London: Arrow Books, 2009).
68 “Prior to this war”: Nicola Lambourne, War Damage in Western Europe: The Destruction of Historic Monuments during the Second World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001).
68 “Second Punic War”: National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), College Park, Maryland; RG 239/ 47.
69 “Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino”: Report of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946). Arguably, the destruction by Allied bombing of the Mantegna frescoes in the Ovetari chapel, Church of the Eremitani, Padua, on March 11, 1944, was a comparable artistic tragedy.
69 “Tutti questi vaffunculi quadri!”: David Tutaev, The Consul of Florence (London: Secker & Warburg, 1966).
69 “immense hoard of artistic plunder”: Edsel, Monuments Men.
70 Uranium Committee and Manhattan Project: Jim Baggott, Atomic: The First War of Physics and the Secret War of the Atom Bomb 1939–1949 (London: Icon Books, 2009).
71 “Jewish physics”: Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (London: Penguin Books, 1986).
72 “Unless and until we had positive knowledge”: Cynthia C. Kelly, ed, The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians (New York: Atomic Heritage Foundation, 2007).
72 Alsos Mission: Baggott, Atomic.
73 “bearer of this card”: Patrick Dalzel-Job, Arctic Snow to Dust of Normandy: The Extraordinary Wartime Exploits of a Naval Special Agent (Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword, 2005).
73 “targets of military or scientific importance”: Sean Longden, T-Force: The Race for Nazi War Secrets 1945 (London: Constable, 2009).
73 “Gold Rush” teams: See Bernard Bernstein Papers at http://www.trumanlibrary.org/hstpaper/bernstein/htm.
Chapter 8: THE HUNTING TRAIL TO PARIS
74 “peculiar fluttering noise in the air”: Dalzel-Job, Arctic Snow.
75 “V-1 Vengeance Weapon”: Steven J. Zaloga, V-1 Flying Bomb 1942–52: Hitler’s Infamous “Doodlebug” (Oxford: Osprey, 2005).
75 “Operation Crossbow”: George S. Patton, War, As I Knew It (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1947). Between August 1943 and March 1945, Allied air forces flew 68,913 sorties and dropped 122,133 tons of bombs on V-1 and V-2 installations; this represented some 14 percent of all heavy bomber missions during that period.
76 “fifteen miles beyond the American beachhead’: The National Archives, Kew, London; File ADM 223/214, History of 30 Commando Unit (later 30 Assault Unit and 30 Advance Unit).
76 “high-speed fighters”: Zaloga, V-1 Flying Bomb.
76 “greatest single technical capture of the war”: The National Archives, Kew, London; File ADM 223/214.
77 V-1s: Zaloga, V-1 Flying Bomb. A total of 8,617 V-1s were fired, of which 1,052 crashed on takeoff. Of the 5,913 that reached Britain, 3,852 were destroyed by the air defenses, including 1,651 by antiaircraft guns; only 2,515 hit their target areas. The others missed their targets and landed in the countryside. The very last (air-launched) V-1 struck the village of Datchworth, Hertfordshire, on March 29, 1945.
77 “20,000 tons of bombs”: Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Allen Lane, 2006).
77 “pulverized from the air”: Mazower, Hitler’s Empire.
78 “hanged like cattle”: Toby Thacker, The End of the Third Reich (Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2008).
79 maskirovka: The Red Army were past masters in their ability to hide whole military formations from enemy observation by a host of means that collectively was known as maskirovka. For Operation Bagration the deception was so effective that the Germans believed the main Soviet summer offensive in 1944 would be in the Ukraine when in fact it was in a completely different country, Byelorussia. Similarly, the Western Allies created false armies prior to D-Day to deceive the Germans as to where the actual amphibious landings would happen through Operation Fortitude. The phantom “First U.S. Army Group” commanded by Gen. George S. Patton was “formed” in southeast England—in much the same manner as maskirovka—with such success that the Germans believed the main Allied offensive was to be in the Pas de Calais region of France even after the D-Day landings in Normandy. It is interesting to note that the German army military intelligence unit on the Eastern Front (Fremde Heere Ost or FHO), which was comprehensively deceived by maskirovka prior to Operation Bagration, was commanded by one Col. Reinhard Gehlen. After the war he sold his “expertise” on the Red Army to the CIA, which funded the creation of the “Gehlen Organization” that was staffed by many former SS personnel. Riddled with Soviet agents throughout its existence, the Gehlen Organization was just as ineffective in its provision of military intelligence to the Western Allies as the FHO had been to the German army in 1944.
79 “Operation Bagration”: Jonathan W. Jordan, “Operation Bagration: Soviet Offensive of 1944,” World War II magazine (July–August 2006).
79 “most calamitous defeat”: Steven J. Zaloga, Bagration 1944: The Destruction of Army Group Center (Oxford: Osprey, 1996).
80 “Team 4 from 30 AU”: Dalzel-Job, Arctic Snow.
80 S.Sgt. Bramah: For an account of S.Sgt. Bramah’s extraordinary exploits in Normandy, see http://www.nasenoviny.com/GPREN.html.
80 “Woolforce”: The National Archives, Kew, London; File ADM 1/15798, Operation Woolforce: activities of No.30 Assault Unit in Paris 1944.
80 “I had blown over 80 safes”: Nutting and Glanville, Attain by Surprise.
81 30 AU: The National Archives, Kew, London; File ADM 223/214.
81 “first American vehicle”: Steven J. Zaloga, The Liberation of Paris 1944 (Oxford: Osprey, 2008).
81 “celebratory bottle of champagne”: Baggott, Atomic.
81 “T-Force activities”: Longden, T-Force.
82 “long, empty galleries”: Edsel, Monuments Men.
82 “148 crates of looted paintings”: Ibid.
83 “art train was trapped”: Ibid. These exploits were dramatized in the 1964 movie The Train, directed by John Frankenheimer and starring Burt Lancaster, Paul Scofield, Jeanne Moreau, and Suzanne Flon as “Mlle. Villard”—Rose Valland.
Chapter 9: CASH, ROCKETS, AND URANIUM
84 “steps to be taken”: Manning, Martin Bormann.
85 Fritz Thyssen and his wife detained: Yeadon and Hawkins, Nazi Hydra.
85 “Thyssen family’s private bank”: Office of the Director of Intelligence, Field Information Agency/Technical, Report No. EF/ME/ 1, September 4, 1945; Examination of Dr. Fritz Thyssen, U.S. Group Control Council Germany.
85 “industrial and commercial patents”: Yeadon and Hawkins, Nazi Hydra.
86 “after the defeat of Germany”: Manning, Martin Bormann.
86 “leading coordinator”: Marrs, Rise of the Fourth Reich.
86 “good offices of the Spanish banks”: Manning, Martin Bormann.
87 “It is possible that Germany will be defeated”: Marrs, Rise of the Fourth Reich.
88 Operation Penguin: Steven J. Zaloga, V-2 Ballistic Missile 1942–52 (Oxford: Osprey, 2003).
88 V-2 attacks in London: A4/V2 Resource Site, www.V2rocket.com.
88 “under rocket attack for some weeks”: Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (New York: Free Press, 1995).
89 “We have invaded space”: Walter Dornberger, V-2 (New York: Viking, 1954).
89 “first actual record on film”: Roy M. Stanley II, V Weapons Hunt: Defeating German Secret Weapons (Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword, 2010).
90 “Polish Home Army partisa
ns”: Marek Ney-Krwawicz, The Polish Home Army 1939–1945, trans. Antoni Bohdanowicz (London: Polish Underground Movement (1935–1945) Study Trust, 2001). See also www.polishresistance-ak.org/2Article.htm, courtesy of the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum, London.
90 Operation Hydra: Neufeld, Rocket and the Reich. Tragically, the majority of the casualties were press-ganged Polish workers, although the head of engine development, Dr. Walter Thiel, was also among some 735 people who were killed. Forty RAF aircraft were lost.
91 slave laborers: Ibid.
91 “far exceeds anything ever done in Europe”: Ibid.
91 Operation Penguin: Zaloga, V-2 Ballistic Missile. One of the worst incidents occurred on November 25, 1944, when a V-2 fell on a Woolworth’s store in New Cross, East London, killing 168 people. The final V-2 directed against London landed in Orpington, Kent, on March 27, 1945, killing Mrs. Ivy Millichamp—the last of the 60,595 British civilians to be killed in World War II. The greatest single loss of life was the 571 people killed on December 16, 1944, when a V-2 struck the Rex Cinema on Avenue De Keyserlei in Antwerp, Belgium.
91 “sixty missiles per week”: Tooze, Wages of Destruction.
92 “Confidence was so high”: Davies, Europe at War.
92 Chartres Cathedral and the Bruges Madonna: Edsel, Monuments Men. Along with a vast repository of Hitler’s fabulous art collection, the Madonna of Bruges was stored in a salt mine at Altaussee in the Bavarian Alps, where it was primed for destruction by high explosives on Bormann’s orders. The Madonna of Bruges was rescued by the Monuments Men on July 10, 1945, and returned to its home in the Church of Our Lady in Bruges, Belgium, where it resides to this day.
93 “apparent imminence of German defeat”: Thacker, End of the Third Reich.
93 Arnhem: Lewin, Ultra Goes to War; Stephen Badsey, Arnhem 1944: Operation Market Garden (Oxford: Osprey, 1993).
93 “another grueling battle”: Steven J. Zaloga, The Siegfried Line 1944–45: Battles on the German Frontier (Oxford: Osprey, 2007).
94 “electromagnetic separation calutrons”: Kelly, Manhattan Project.
94 “Gen. Groves was still not satisfied”: It is indicative of Groves’s influence that he was able to demand specific bombing missions to hamper Germany’s nuclear researches. At his request, the Berlin suburb of Dahlem—home to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics—was included in the bombing plan for the night of February 15–16, 1944. During this heaviest RAF raid against the city of Berlin, the laboratory of leading Uranverein scientist Otto Hahn was hit and all his papers were destroyed. Thereafter, the Uranverein facilities were dispersed around Germany—but by now Alsos knew most of these locations across the country.
Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler Page 34