Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler

by Simon Dunstan

  164 Blohm & Voss Bv 222: Nick Fielding, Sunday Times, London, December 28, 2003, http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=39672. Reporter Nick Fielding’s interview with a ninety-three-year-old former German navigator, Capt. Ernst Koenig, described a plan to evacuate Nazi leaders “to Greenland” by flying boat. Koenig stated that he had just finished preparing two of the Bv 222s for the escape flight when they were attacked on the water by Allied aircraft and destroyed. “We had another in the workshop, and that, too, was made ready. It required a lot of work, but it was done, and once again stores arrived for loading on board.” KG 200 is known to have included the Bv 222 among its thirty-two different types of Axis and Allied aircraft. With a payload of some 34.5 tons (nearly three times that of the Ju 290), the flying boat could carry ninety-two fully equipped troops, at a speed of 240 miles per hour. It could stay aloft for up to twenty-eight hours, making it ideal for long-distance flights.

  166 Junkers Ju 290: Baumbach, Broken Swastika; see also The Associated Press, Travemünde, June 16, 1945 (delayed dispatch).

  166 “flight plan”: Thomas and Ketley, KG 200.

  168 “I must stay with my men”: Baumbach, Broken Swastika.

  168 “dismantled”: On June 19, 1945, the London Daily Express—under the headline “Is Hitler in Spain?”—described the arrival of a German trimotor aircraft carrying a mysterious passenger who was “saluted deferentially despite his civilian clothes.… His face muffled in a raincoat, the passenger stepped from the plane to the smart Nazi salute of its crew, then took off in a Spanish plane to an unknown destination. The German plane reportedly was dismantled.” See “Claim Nazi Officials Arrive in Spain,” Telegraph Herald, June 21, 1945, http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=XidiAAAAIBAJ&sjid=OXYNAAAAIBAJ&pg=4599,2831598&dq=hitler-in-spain&hl=en.

  169 “recognizable figure”: Interrogation of Angelotty-Mackensen. There is no official record of Degrelle’s plane stopping at Tønder, but details of the flight remain obscure, and it is plausible that it could have landed there to top up its fuel tanks before the long flight south. There is a photograph of Degrelle in Oslo, standing next to a Heinkel with the identification letters “CN” visible on the fuselage.

  169 “flown by Albert Duhinger”: http://home.arcor.de/sturmbrigade/Wallonie/Wallonie.htm; see also Revista Española de Historia Militar magazine, October 2004.

  169 “crash-landed”: The Associated Press, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain, May 8, 1945.

  169 “Degrelle had spoken”: The Associated Press, Madrid, May 25, 1945.

  169 Vidkun Quisling: The Associated Press, Oslo, August 25, 1945.

  169 Pierre Laval: The Associated Press, Madrid, May 2, 1945.

  169 Filippo Anfuso: L’Unità, Communist Party official publication, Rome, May 25, 1945.

  170 Gen. José Moscardo: The Associated Press, Moscow, June 16, 1945. Gen. José Moscardo Ituarte was the head of Franco’s Casa Militar or military household.

  170 Robert Ley: Interrogation of Robert Ley, Nuremberg, 1945, Interrogation Records Prepared for War Crimes Proceedings at Nuremberg, 1945–47, page 101; http://www.footnote.com/document/231909201/.

  170 Albert Speer: Interrogation of Albert Speer, Flensburg; USSBS Special Document, May 22–23, 1945.

  170 Rochus Misch: Interview, Secret History: Hitler of the Andes, Barking Mad Productions for Channel 4 (British public television), 2003. Only two prototypes of the six-engined Junkers Ju 390, designed as part of the so-called America-Bomber project, were ever built. One was test-flown by the Luftwaffe’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Squadron 5, but rumors of a test flight that nearly reached the U.S. coast are no longer given any credence.

  170 Zhukov and Berzarin quotes: Eddy Gilmore, The Associated Press, “Reds Believe Hitler Alive,” Berlin, June 9, 1945, published in Herald-Journal, June 10, 1945, http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=DV8sAAAAIBAJ&sjid=_soEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4259,3091076&dq=hitler+eddy+gilmore&hl=en.

  171 Hitler’s alleged cremation: Erich Kempka was interrogated by U.S. agents at Berchtesgaden on June 20 and July 4, 1945; see also The Associated Press, “With the British Second Army,” May 8, 1945. The Soviets were handed or shown no fewer than six “Hitlers” in the days after the fall of Berlin. One of them had worked as a cook in the Führerbunker.

  171 the dogs: O’Donnell, Bunker.

  171 Högl’s death: Joachimstaler, Last Days of Hitler.

  172 Müller’s funeral: O’Donnell, Bunker.

  172 “Bormann made his own escape”: Beevor, Berlin.

  172 Tiburtius’s account: Interview published in Der Bund, Bern, Switzerland, February 17, 1953, and quoted extensively in Manning, Martin Bormann.

  173 Bormann’s evasion: Manning, Martin Bormann.

  Chapter 16: GRUPPE SEEWOLF

  175 Gruppe Seewolf: Clay Blair, Hitler’s U-Boat War, vol. 2: The Hunted, 1941–1945 (London: Cassell, 2000).

  176 “robot bombs”: The Associated Press, London, July 25, 1944.

  176 U-1229: Maine Sunday Telegram, Portland, October 29, 2000. “Commander” is our translation of the rank of Korvettenkapitän—see “Treatment of Military Ranks” on page xiv.

  176 “corroborated Mantel’s story”: Report on the Interrogation of German Agents, Gimpel and Colepaugh, Landed on the Coast of Maine from U-1230, dated January 13, 1945. Op-16-Z (SC)A1-2(3)/ EF30 Serial 00170716. Located in the archives of the National Museum of the U.S. Navy, Washington, DC, http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/rep/U-1230/.

  176 Speer broadcast: James P. Duffy, Target America: Hitler’s Plan to Attack the United States (Westport: Praeger, 2004); see also www.bbc.co.uk/ww2peopleswar/stories/92/a3641492.shtml.

  177 “robots from submarine, airplane or surface ship”: The Associated Press, “An East Coast Port,” published in Deseret [Utah] News, January 8, 1945.

  177 “V-1 scare”: New York Times, “Robot Bomb Attacks Here Held ‘Probable’ by Admiral,” January 8, 1945, http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0C16F93A5C1B7B93CBA9178AD85F418485F9&scp=2&sq=V-1&st=p.

  177 “British Admiralty cable”: Duffy, Target America.

  177 sea-launched V-1: “Hitler’s Rocket U-boat Program: History of WW2 rocket submarine,” http://www.Uboataces.com. It was not surprising that the United States took the threat seriously; it had managed to reverse engineer the V-1 in just four months, producing the JB-2 Thunderbug. Personnel from the Special Weapons Branch at Wright Field launched a first prototype in October 1944 at Eglin Field, the USAAF base in southwest Florida. The USAAF were enthusiastic about the results achieved by air launches with the B-17 and B-29, but their large production order was cancelled on VJ-Day. Of some thousand JB-2s produced, three hundred were converted for naval use; the improved KUV-1 Loon was first launched from the submarine USS Cusk in January 1946. See Mark Fisher, “American Buzz Bombs: An Incomplete History,” http://mcfisher.0catch.com/scratch/v1/v1-0.htm.

  179 “U-boat Command’s transmissions”: The radio traffic from each U-boat can be found in The National Archives, Kew, London, filed under HW 18. For U-880, see HW 18/400; for U-530, see HW 18/406; for U-518, see HW 18/410; and for U-1235, see HW 18/431.The weekly antisubmarine situation reports are in D. Syrett, The Battle of the Atlantic and Signals Intelligence: U-boat Situations and Trends (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 1998).

  179 “well documented and correct”: Blair, Hitler’s U-boat War.

  180 “treated with great and repeated brutality”: Philip K. Lundeberg, “Operation Teardrop Revisited,” in Timothy J. Runyan and Jan M. Copes, To Die Gallantly: The Battle of the Atlantic (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994).

  180 “no physical evidence of its destruction”: Syrett, Battle of the Atlantic; also Michael Gannon, Operation Drumbeat: The Dramatic True Story of Germany’s First U-boat Attacks Along the American Coast in World War II (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991).

  181 Rodger Winn memorandum: Gannon, Operation Drumbeat. Sir Charles Rodger Noel Winn, CB, OBE, QC (1903–72)—a prewar judge, crippled by childhood polio—made a whole range o
f probably unparalleled contributions to Allied victory in the Second Battle of the Atlantic, but there is no room here for more than the briefest note on his extraordinary career. While still a civilian, he was reassigned from prisoner interrogation to the Submarine Tracking Room (part of the Operational Intelligence Centre), where he quickly mastered the U-boats’ tactics and could frequently predict their actions. Consequently, he was promoted to command the Tracking Room with the temporary rank of commander in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve—unprecedented for someone without formal naval officer’s training.

  182 “surrendered to the authorities”: Good histories of Operation Teardrop can be found in Blair, Hitler’s U-boat War, and Lundeberg, “Operation Teardrop Revisited.”

  183 “recovered the Enigma machine”: http://www.iwm.org.uk/upload/package/10/enigma/enigma12.htm. Francis Harry Hinsley, OBE (1918–98) was an English cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park, who among his other contributions helped initiate a program of seizing Enigma machines and documents from German weather ships. This facilitated the resumption of the decryption of Kriegsmarine Enigma traffic after the interruption in 1942–43.

  184 “massive intelligence-gathering advantage”: F. H. Hinsley and Alan Stripp, Codebreakers: The Inside Story of Bletchley Park (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); see also http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk.

  184 Berchtesgaden: Arthur H. Mitchell, Hitler’s Mountain: The Führer, Obersalzberg, and the American Occupation of Berchtesgaden (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007).

  184 Oscar Oeser: Arthur G. Bedeia, ed., “Guilty of Enthusiasm,” in Management Laureates, vol. 3 (London: JAI Press, 1993); also see online history of St. Andrews University School of Psychology.

  184 Colossus: Peter Thorne and John McCutchan, The Path to Colossus … an historical look at the development of the electronic computer. A presentation to Engineering Heritage Victoria, June 19, 2008, www.consuleng.com.au/The%20Path%20to%20Colossus%20080827%20revcomp.pdf.

  185 “Prof. Oeser was amazed at what he found”: http://www.ellsbury.com/enigmabombe.htm; see also Lewin, Ultra Goes to War. There are references to this machine being introduced for Abwehr signal traffic in December 1944 that refer to it by the designation Schlüsselgerät 41—SG41. (By that date Adm. Canaris was in Gestapo custody, and the Abwehr had passed under the control of the SS Reich Main Security Office.) The Abwehr’s original Enigma system had been broken at Bletchley Park in December 1941 by Alfred Dillwyn “Dilly” Knox, and that used by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) in August 1942 by Keith Batey, but Batey’s obituary (London Times, September 10, 2010) confirms that neither he nor anyone else was able to reconstruct the working system of this new Siemens & Haske machine.

  186 “Bormann’s reply”: Bar-Zohar, Avengers.

  186 “fishing expedition”: Whealey, Hitler and Spain.

  186 Gustav Winter: Juan Luis Calbarro, “Vida y leyenda de Gustav Winter,” Historia magazine, 16, April–May 2005.

  187 “peninsula of Jandía”: “Fuerteventura: geología, naturaleza y actividad humana.” A presentation to Canaries Association for Scientific Education, Fuerteventura, December 5–9, 2007; PDF available online, http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:pjgK76W-XcUJ:www.vierayclavijo.org/html/pdf/cuadernillos/07/0712_fuerteventura.pdf+%22Fuerteventura:+geolog%C3%ADa,+naturaleza+y+actividad+humana%22&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESiaB_KX2fCx0XOM4pKP-cXpXS96Uc-62bJnkDFsj58b06zmhrQdQ264BUDbJ0x2w3LW14C69671ZXNYdyiOL_Q2Nhoq9rPQ9fckQyYWQCH1HCIh5aMlXPD3VhZpNrfOqybAii_9&sig=AHIEtbRrbZszO9TEPoIlRji_uOMXYk-aZA. Quotations from interview with Isabel Winter, Gustav Winter’s wife, are taken from this presentation. In 1984, an extremely colorful tale about the accidental discovery of a “U-boat pen” tunneled into the island was published by a German magazine. This fiction has been exploded by the U-boat historian Jak P. Mallmann Showell in his book U-Boats At War: Landings on Hostile Shores (Hersham, UK: Ian Allan, 2000), for which he carried out field research and a comprehensive analysis of U-boat orders, logs, and mission reports relevant to the Canary Islands. There are detailed records of the U-boat supply base run from an “interned” German freighter in Las Palmas harbor on Gran Canaria, but no suggestion that U-boats visited Fuerteventura. This is hardly surprising: Villa Winter was designed for a single purpose, and anything that might draw attention to it before 1945 was deliberately avoided.

  187 “dark tales”: Elizabeth Nash, “Germans Helped Franco Run Civil War Death Camps,” London Independent, February 22, 2002, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germans-helped-franco-run-civil-war-death-camps-661623.html.

  187 “near Bordeaux”: Interview with Isabel Winter.

  187 “built a runway”: Enrique Nácher, Gran Canaria. “La Leyenda de Gustav Winter: ¿Espía nazi en Fuerteventura?” Historia 16, April–May 2005, republished at http://hispanismo.org/reino-de-las-canarias/5643-la-leyenda-de-gustav-winter-espia-nazi-en-fuerteventura.html.

  188 “relocations to the Canaries”: The Associated Press, Moscow, February 1, 1944.

  188 Walter Winchell: “A Reporter’s Report to the Nation,” syndicated, October 26, 1944. Winchell was scathing about Carlton Hayes, who was appointed U.S. ambassador to Spain in 1942. In spring 1944, Hayes was reportedly obstructive to Operation Safehaven, the U.S. operation designed to find and eliminate German industrial and commercial assets throughout the world. According to Donald P. Steury—a CIA officer in residence at the University of Southern California, writing on the agency’s website—Samuel Klaus, the Federal Economic Administration team leader in Spain, indicated that Hayes was unwilling to cooperate and that for several months the embassy would not allow OSS Madrid to pass Safehaven material or even background economic reporting to Washington.

  188 “Hitler’s change of aircraft”: “Is Hitler in Spain?” Daily Express, London, June 19, 1945.

  189 experience of the crews: Jak P. Mallmann Showell, U-Boat Commanders and Crews 1935–45 (Ramsbury, UK: Crowood Press, 1998).

  190 “augmented by nonregulation items”: http://www.uboataces.com/articles-life-uboat.shtml.

  190 “The usually relaxed atmosphere” to the end of Chapter 16: This section of chapter 16 constitutes one of the very few sections in this book that cannot be documented but is based on our own extensive researches and those of our U-boat expert, Innes McCartney, and in consultation with our Luftwaffe expert, Tony Holmes. The types of aircraft employed by the Spanish air force and the military air routes to Fuerteventura and the Jandía Peninsula are based on rigorous knowledge down to which Ju 52s were passed to the Spanish air force by the Condor Legion, and their respective bases. We have established that the Jandía Peninsula was a secret Abwehr facility that had been planned well before the war and built under severe duress by Franco’s Republican political prisoners at great human cost. Such a massive investment in an area of barren, hostile terrain begs the question: what other purpose did it have but as a staging post for an elaborate escape plan? The airstrip at the southern tip of the peninsula was capable of taking the Luftwaffe’s largest aircraft, such as the Fw-200 Condor or a Ju-290. It is still visible on Google Earth. The whole Jandía Peninsula was a forbidden military zone throughout the war and for years thereafter.

  The Allies were seriously concerned that the Canary Islands were being used by the Germans to support U-boat operations. This suspicion was based on the interception of a secret Kriegsmarine document titled U-Plätze, or “U-Places,” which became interpreted as “U-Bases” with the presumption that they were U-boat bases. The “U” in fact related to Unterkunft, or “refuge,” and there were scores of them dotted around the world, intended to shelter all types of Kriegsmarine vessels—places to undertake repairs or find fresh water. Similarly there were consistent rumors among the Allies that there were U-boat bases along the South American coastline, even as far south as Tierra del Fuego. There is no evidence to support such a proposition, but the list of locations in the U-Plätze does mention a tiny island off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. Nevertheless, the Canary Islands were used by the Nazis to s
upport U-boats; a German tanker was permanently moored at Las Palmas on Gran Canaria to allow U-boats to sneak in at night and refuel clandestinely. Accordingly, Fuerteventura and Jandía in particular were not designed and never acted as a support facility for U-boats or any other activity until April 1945, yet the Villa Winter complex and airstrip had been constructed at vast expense.

  As to the actual circumstances of Hitler’s journey by U-boat, they have perforce to be a matter of conjecture and informed speculation based on solid research as to the realities of living over long periods of time in the claustrophobic world of the submariner. In particular, we have drawn on the experiences of the Yanagi, the secret underwater trade between Germany and Japan conducted by German and Japanese submarines for the transfer of vital strategic resources, such as tungsten, tin, quinine, coffee, opium, high technology, and VIPs, between 1942 and 1945. These voyages between Europe and Japan were immensely long and, with much time spent underwater, tedious in the extreme. They did, however, show us how U-boats and Japanese submarines were modified for the passage of VIPs.

  191 toilets: U.S. Navy report, “Sanitation aboard Former German Type IXC,” March 1946, www.uboatarchive.net/DesignStudiesTypeIXC.htm.

  191 food: http://www.uboataces.com/articles-life-uboat.shtml.

  191 “arrived off the Argentine coast aboard U-880”: Stanley Ross, Overseas News Agency, “U-Boats Base Spy Surge in Latin America,” Christian Science Monitor, January 24, 1945.

  192 “Koehn was back”: The Associated Press, Montevideo, Uruguay, August 18, 1945.

  192 Curtiss Condor II: Peter M. Bowers, Curtiss Aircraft 1907–1947 (London: Putnam, 1987).

  Chapter 17: ARGENTINA—LAND OF SILVER

  194 “when war broke out in 1939”: http://www.archives.gov/research/holocaust/finding-aid/civilian/rg-84-argentina.html.

  195 Hasse quote: Michael Sayers and Albert Kahn, The Plot Against the Peace: A Warning to the Nation (New York: Dial Press, 1944).