Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (58 page)

122    
“last physical barrier”:
William I. Hitchcock,
Liberation: The Bitter Road to Freedom, Europe 1944–1945
(London: Faber and Faber, 2008).

123    
Operation Sunrise:
Srodes,
Allen Dulles
.

123    
“Soviet spies in the OSS”:
Robert W. Stephan,
Stalin’s Secret War: Soviet Counterintelligence against the Nazis 1941–1945
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).

123    
“Germans have on the Eastern Front 147 divisions”:
Susan Butler, ed.,
My Dear Mr. Stalin: The Complete Correspondence of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Joseph V. Stalin
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

124    
“U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff expressly forbade”:
Srodes,
Allen Dulles
.

124    
Ernst Kaltenbrunner:
Peter R. Black,
Ernst Kaltenbrunner: Ideological Soldier of the Third Reich
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).

124    
“ingratiate themselves with the Americans”:
Breitman,
U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis
.

124    
“transportation of Hungary’s Jewish population”:
NARA, College Park, Maryland; Hüttel [Höttl], SS Officer File, NA-BDC RG 242, A-3343.

125    “valuable crates were offloaded”: Ronald W. Zweig,
The Gold Train: The Destruction of the Jews and the Looting of Hungary
(London: Harper Collins, 2003). At this time, it was common practice for gauleiters to hijack trains going through their territories—particularly coal trains, to provide for their freezing populations. This was often at the expense of the power stations supplying the war industries.

125    
“fanatical anti-Russian”:
Breitman,
U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis
.

125    
Dulles and Donovan quotes:
Ibid.

125    
“guerrilla movement known as
Werwolf
”:
Timothy J. Naftali, “Creating the Myth of the Alpenfestung: Allied Intelligence and the Collapse of the Nazi Police State,” in
Austrian Historical Memory and National Identity
, ed. Günter Bischof and Anton Pelinka (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997). The National Redoubt was intended as the last bastion of Nazi resistance even after conventional hostilities ceased with the capture of Berlin. Because of Allied airpower, a lack of troops, and little fuel to move supplies, it never materialized except in the fevered imaginations of Joseph Goebbels and other fanatical Nazi diehards. Known as the Alpenfestung or Alpine Fortress, it supposedly extended across the Alpine regions of Bavaria, Austria, and Italy with Hitler’s home of Berchtesgaden at its heart. With the collapse of Germany, the Nazi hierarchy was to retreat to the Alpenfestung where they would be protected by Skorzeny’s zealous Werewolves, but in fact Hitler never endorsed the plan and the idea faded as Nazi Germany crumbled. Thanks to Martin Bormann and Operation Feuerland, Hitler had no intention of hiding in the Alps.

126    
“their last stand”:
“Eisenhower’s Six Great Decisions,”
Saturday Evening Post
, July 13, 1946. In retrospect, it is difficult to understand how the Allied High Command was so thoroughly duped by the notion of the National Redoubt. In his autobiography, Gen. Omar Bradley ruefully recalled, “The Redoubt existed largely in the imagination of a few fanatical Nazis. It grew into so exaggerated a scheme that I am astonished we could have believed it as innocently as we did. But while it persisted, this legend … shaped our tactical thinking.” In reality, the “tactical thinking” deliberately overstated the threat of the National Redoubt so that the U.S. armies could occupy the region with its vast caches of Nazi loot and high technology facilities and so deny them to the Soviets.

126    
“three cables”:
Dwight D. Eisenhower,
Crusade in Europe
(New York: Doubleday, 1948).

128    
Campione d’Italia:
Dulles,
Secret Surrender
.

129    
“tried to seek peace”:
Richard Breitman and Shlomo Aronson, “The End of the Final Solution? Nazi Plans to Ransom Jews 1944–1945,”
Central European History
25, no. 2 (1992).

129    
“White Buses”:
Meredith Hindley, “Negotiating the Boundary of Unconditional Surrender: The War Refugee Board in Sweden and Nazi Proposals to Ransom Jews 1944–1945,”
Holocaust and Genocide Studies
10, no.1 (1996).

129    
“no black occupation troops”:
NARA, College Park, Maryland; NA RG 266. This grotesque condition is to be found in Walter Schellenberg’s draft autobiography, written in Sweden in June 1945.

129    
“The Hungarian Gold Train”:
Zweig,
Gold Train
.

130    
“looted artworks”:
NARA, College Park, Maryland; NA RG 263, Wilhelm Hüttel [Höttl], CIA Name File, Vol. 1.

130    
“Villa Kerry”:
Robert E. Matteson,
The Capture and the Last Days of SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the Nazi Gestapo, Criminal Police, and Intelligence Services
(Saint Paul, MN: Private publication, 1993). Matteson was a member of the 80th Company, Counter Intelligence Corps, U.S. Army, who led the team that captured Kaltenbrunner on May 12, 1945, after searching the Villa Kerry.

130    
“acrimonious exchange of cables”:
von Hassell et al.,
Alliance of Enemies
.

130    
“Dulles fidgeted in his chair”:
William J. Casey,
The Secret War Against Hitler
(Washington, DC: Regnery, 1988).

130    
“It is easy to start a war”:
Peter Grose,
Gentleman Spy: The Life of Allen Dulles
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994).

130    
“The air was opaque”:
Kim Philby,
My Silent War: The Story of Kim Philby
(London: Modern Library, 2002).

Chapter 13: “W
O BIST
A
DOLF
H
ITLER
?”

131    
Hitler’s fifty-sixth birthday:
Bernd Freytag von Loringhoven,
In the Bunker with Hitler
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006).

131    
“Third Army Memorials”:
Charles Whiting,
Patton’s Last Battle
(New York: Stein & Day, 1987).

132    
“Hitler’s personal air transport unit”:
Glen Sweeting,
Hitler’s Squadron: The Fuehrer’s Personal Aircraft and Transport Unit 1933–1945
(Dulles, VA: Brassey’s, 2001).

132    
“burning wreckage”:
Geoffrey J. Thomas and Barry Ketley,
KG 200: The Luftwaffe’s Most Secret Unit
(Crowborough, UK: Hikoki, 2003).

133    
“Karl Wolff indicated to Dulles”:
Srodes,
Allen Dulles
.

133    
Hummel and Operation Crossword:
Consolidated Interrogation Report regarding Hans Helmut von Hummel, by Capt S. L. Faison Jr., OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit, dated October 11, 1945; from Prisoner of War Papers, Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Center, Bad Nenndorf, Germany. At the time of his arrest by the Americans, Hummel was carrying a hoard of gold reichsmark coins from the largest bank robbery in history. Intriguingly, so was Martin Bormann’s wife, Gerda, when she was apprehended, but she was grievously ill with cancer and died on March 23, 1946, poisoned by the mercury used as part of her medical treatment.

133    
“personal meeting between Dulles and Kaltenbrunner”:
NARA, College Park, Maryland; Wilhelm Hüttel [Höttl], Third Army Preliminary Interrogation Report No. 17, June 1945, NA RG 263, Wilhelm Hüttel CIA Name File, Vol. 1.

133    
“purely a stooge”:
Dulles,
Secret Surrender
.

134    
“national treasure of Germany”:
Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting,
Nazi Gold
(Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1998).The final reserves of the Reichsbank arrived at the “Bormann Bunker” in Munich from Berlin and outlying branches, by two special trains and a road convoy, on April 28—just two days before the city was captured by Patton’s Third Army.

134    
“most modern weapons technology”:
Neufeld,
Rocket and the Reich
. The principal scientists and technicians of the ballistic missile program, together with fourteen tons of documentation, were moved from Peenemünde by road to Nordhausen. They were under the close guard of SS troops commanded by the ruthless SS Gen. Dr. Hans Kammler, who was under strict orders from Bormann to kill the scientists and destroy the documentation if need be.

134    
“weapons of mass destruction”:
Cornwell,
Hitler’s Scientists
. Although the Allies maintained large stocks of chemical weapons such as chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas, they lagged far behind in the procurement of biological agents based on organophosphate compounds. In 1936 Dr. Gerhard Schrader of IG Farben had developed a highly lethal substance called tabun that attacks and paralyzes the human nervous system, resulting in death from asphyxiation in some twenty minutes. Production of an even more lethal agent known as sarin began in September 1939. By 1945, some 12,500 tons of tabun had been manufactured at Dyhernfurth in Silesia (present-day Brzeg Dolny, Poland) for a variety of delivery systems, including mines and artillery shells, many of which were stored in the underground tunnels of Mittelwerk at Nordhausen, where the V-2 missiles were assembled. A tabun and sarin payload was also developed for the V-1 flying bomb; this was the potential weapon to be used against the United States, launched from U-boats (see Chapter 16). It would also have been used in the A-9/A-10, the first intercontinental ballistic missile, which was still on the drawing board at Peenemünde. Its design specifications formed part of the fourteen tons of research documentation in the hands of SS Gen. Kammler—see previous note.