Hitler's Peace

by Philip Kerr

  They drove on until a barbed-wire fence and a few buildings came into view. Some had grass growing on their flat roofs; some were covered with camouflage nets to help hide them from reconnaissance planes. It was only after a third checkpoint that the car finally reached Restricted 1, which was the most secure zone of the three.

  Anyone seeing R1 for the first time would have compared the Führer’s Prussian HQ to a small town. Covering an area of 250 hectares and made up of 870 buildings—most of them private concrete bunkers for various party leaders—R1 at the Wolfschanze included a power station, a water supply, and an air-purification installation. The Führer HQ was an impressive-looking redoubt, although to Schellenberg’s more sybaritic sensibilities it was difficult to see why anyone would have wanted to stay more than one night in such a place, let alone the six hundred nights Hitler had spent there since July 1941.

  Himmler’s party left their cars parked inside the gate and walked toward the Tea House, a wooden Hansel-and-Gretel sort of building opposite the bunkers of Generals Keitel and Jodl, where the General Staff took their meals, when they were not obliged to dine with the Führer. Inside, the Tea House was plainly furnished with a dull bouclé carpet, several leather armchairs, and a few tables. But for the presence of several officers awaiting their arrival, it might have passed for a common room in a Roman Catholic seminary. Among the waiting officers were two of Hitler’s personal adjutants, SS-Gruppenführer Julius Schaub and Gruppenführer Albert Bormann. Schaub, the chief of the adjutants, was a clerkish, mild-mannered man who wore spectacles and managed to look like Himmler’s elder brother; both his feet had been injured in the Great War and he used a pair of crutches to get about the FHQ. Albert Bormann was the younger brother of Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary and the man who controlled everything that happened at the Wolfschanze. He was also his elder sibling’s bitter rival.

  “How are things in Berlin?” Schaub asked.

  “There was a bombing raid last night,” Schellenberg answered. “Nothing much. Eight Mosquitoes, I believe.”

  Schaub nodded politely. “We tend not to mention bombing raids to the Führer. It only depresses him. Unless of course he asks about them specifically. Which he won’t.”

  “I have better news, I think,” said Himmler, who had recovered a bit of his former color since murdering his subordinate. “Last night we shot down a Wellington over Aachen. The five thousandth Bomber Command aircraft shot down since the start of the war. Remarkable, is it not? Five thousand.”

  “Please tell the Führer,” said Schaub.

  “I intend to.”

  “Yes. Five thousand. That will cheer him up.”

  “How is he?”

  “Concerned about the situation in the Crimea,” said Schaub. “And in Kiev. General Manstein thinks Kiev is more important. But the Führer favors the Crimea.”

  “Can we offer you gentlemen any refreshment?” Albert Bormann asked. “A drink, perhaps?”

  “No, thank you,” said Himmler, answering for himself and Schellenberg, who had been about to ask for a coffee. “We’re quite all right for now.”

  They left the Tea Room and headed further into the FHQ, where all was bustle and activity. There was a lot of construction work under way—to increase the strength of existing bunkers and to construct new ones. Polish workers trudged by with barrow loads of cement; others shouldered planks of wood. Schellenberg reflected that security was being defeated by the very effort being made to increase it. Any one of the hundreds of laborers who were at work in Restricted 1 could have smuggled a bomb into the Wolf’s Lair. Not to mention the General Staff in attendance, who had no great love for Adolf Hitler, not since Stalingrad, anyway. While it was customary to leave hats, belts, and pistols on a rack outside the Führer Bunker, briefcases were permitted, and no one ever searched these. His own briefcase contained a second pistol and the plans for Operation Long Jump, and had not been examined since his arrival in Rastenburg. It might easily have also contained a hand grenade or a bomb.

  The Führer Bunker was one hundred meters north of the Tea House. As they neared it, Schellenberg continued to dwell on the security system at Rastenburg. How might one have set an assassination in motion? A bomb would be the best way, there could be no doubt about that. Like every other bunker at the Wolfschanze, the Führer Bunker was aboveground, with no tunnels or secret passages. To offset this, it was covered with at least four or five meters of steel-reinforced concrete. Most important of all, there were no windows. This meant that the blast of any bomb detonating inside Hitler’s bunker would have nowhere to go but inward, actually creating a more lethal effect than had the building been made of wood.

  An Alsatian bitch gamboled up to Himmler, its tail wagging amiably, prompting the Reichsführer to stop and greet the animal like an old friend. “It’s Blondi,” he said, patting Hitler’s dog on the head and prompting Schellenberg to glance around for her master.

  “We’re looking for a boyfriend for Blondi,” said Albert Bormann. “The Führer wants Blondi to have some puppies.”

  “Puppies, eh? I hope I can have one. I should like to have one of Blondi’s puppies,” Himmler said.

  “I think it’s safe to assume that everyone would,” said a short, stocky man with round shoulders and a bull neck, who had just arrived on the scene. It was Martin Bormann, which meant the Führer could not be far away. Hearing heels clicking to attention, Schellenberg looked to the left and saw Hitler coming toward them through the trees. “Everyone would like a puppy from the most famous dog in the world.”

  Schellenberg jumped to attention, extending his right arm straight in front of him as, with slow steps, Hitler approached, his own arm partially raised. The Führer was wearing black trousers, a simple open-necked field-gray uniform jacket that revealed a white shirt and tie, and a soft, rather misshapen officer’s cap that had been chosen for comfort as opposed to style. On the left breast pocket of his tunic he wore an Iron Cross First Class, won during the Great War, together with the black ribbon denoting someone who had been wounded, and a gold party badge.

  “Himmler. Schellenberg—good to see you again, Walter,” he said, speaking in the soft Austrian accent Schellenberg knew so well from the wireless.

  “And you, my Führer.”

  “Himmler tells me that you have a plan that will win us the war.”

  “Perhaps when you’ve had a chance to study my memorandum, you’ll agree with him, my Führer.”

  “Oh, I hate written reports. I can’t stand them. If it was up to these officers of mine, I’d never stop reading. Official papers on this, official papers on that. I tell you, Schellenberg, I’ve no time for paper. But let a man speak and I’ll soon let you know what’s what. Men are my books—eh, Himmler?”

  “You can read us all quite fluently, my Führer.”

  “So we’ll go inside and you can tell me everything, and then I’ll tell you what I think.”

  Hitler, gesturing toward the Führer Bunker, placed another peppermint lozenge in his mouth and, walking beside Schellenberg, started to chat aimlessly.

  “I walk a lot in these woods. It’s one of the few places I can walk freely. In my youth I used to dream of vast spaces like this, and I suppose life has enabled me to give the dream reality. I should prefer to walk in Berlin, of course. Around the Reichstag. I always liked that building. People said I was responsible for its being burned down, but that’s nonsense. No one who knows me could say I had anything to do with that. Paul Wallot wasn’t a bad architect at all. Speer doesn’t like him, but that’s no disqualification. Anyway, I walk here in these northern forests like that fellow in Nietzsche’s unreadable book—Zarathustra. I walk because I feel like a prisoner in these dugouts and my spirit needs space to roam around.”

  Walking along, listening to the Führer talk, Schellenberg smiled and nodded, thinking that any small talk he might offer could only injure his chances of selling Hitler on the idea of Operation Long Jump.

  They ent
ered the Führer Bunker, and Schellenberg followed Hitler, Bormann, and Himmler to the left, into a large room dominated by a map table. The Führer sat down on one of the half-dozen easy chairs by the empty fireplace and motioned Schellenberg to join him. Hitler disliked heat, and Schellenberg always came away from a meeting with the Führer blue with cold. While he waited for Himmler, Schaub, and the two Bormanns to be seated, Schellenberg took a closer look at his Führer, attempting to discern any sign of tabes dorsalis or tertiary syphilis. It was true, Hitler looked much older than a man of fifty-four years and seemed quite sparing in his gestures and the movement of his hands; there was, however, a compelling sense of physical force about the man, and Schellenberg did not feel Hitler was on the edge of physical collapse. Certainly he was under tremendous pressure, but the pale face, the globular eyes, and the faraway look of a sleepwalker—or a holy man—that Schellenberg had observed when he had last been to the Wolfschanze, seemed quite unchanged. It had never been possible to look at this morbid, quasi-mad Dostoyevskian figure and think of him as you would have of any ordinary man, but Schellenberg saw no real reason to suppose that Hitler was on the verge of total insanity.

  His thoughts were interrupted as Hitler turned to him and asked him to begin. Schellenberg described the plan he had already sold to Himmler as a backup plan in case the peace negotiations, initiated by the delivery of the Führer’s letters to the Big Three, did not bear fruit. By now, any kinks in Operation Long Jump had been ironed out, and it was eminently practicable. Though Schellenberg did not say as much to Hitler, von Holten-Pflug had returned from Vinnica to report that a team of one hundred Ukrainians were now, with the agreement of General Schimana, a unit within the Galicia Division of the Waffen-SS. All of them had parachute experience and were highly aggressive, fired up by the prospect of assassinating Marshal Stalin. Keeping Hitler in the dark about their true ethnic origin did not worry Schellenberg. He assumed that if the mission failed, the Russians would want to keep it quiet that fellow countrymen had been involved; and if it succeeded, then their origins would hardly matter. So Schellenberg left it that they were all SS volunteers from the Galicia Division.

  Hitler listened, interrupting the briefing only rarely. But when Schellenberg mentioned Roosevelt’s name, he leaned forward in his chair and clasped his hands together in one fist, as if throttling the president’s invisible figure.

  “Roosevelt is nothing more than a repulsive Freemason,” he said. “For that reason alone all the churches in America should rise up against him, for he is moved by principles that are quite at odds with those of the religion he professes to believe in. Actually, the noise he made at his last press conference—that nasal way he has of speaking—was typically Hebraic. Did you hear him boast that he has noble Jewish blood in his veins? Noble Jewish blood! Ha! He certainly behaves like some pettifogging Jew. In my opinion his brain is every bit as sick as his body.”

  Martin Bormann and Himmler laughed and nodded their assent, and, warming to his theme, Hitler carried on:

  “Roosevelt is the living proof that there is no race in the world that is stupider than the Americans. And, as for his wife, well, it’s quite clear from her Negroid appearance that the woman is a half-caste. If anyone ever needed a warning of the menace half-castes pose to civilized society, Eleanor Roosevelt is it.”

  Hitler sank back in his armchair, wrapping his arms about him like a shawl. Then he nodded to Schellenberg to continue. But a minute or two later he was delivering his own idiosyncratic opinions of Stalin and Churchill:

  “Stalin is one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. Quite extraordinary. Have you ever heard him give a speech?” Hitler shook his head. “Terrible. The man owes nothing to rhetoric, that much is certain. And if von Ribbentrop is to be believed, he has no social graces whatsoever. He is half-man, half-beast. He is never able to leave the Kremlin, but governs thanks to a bureaucracy that acts on his every nod and gesture. He cares nothing for his people. Not a thing. Indeed, I quite believe he hates the Russian people as much as I do. How else could he be so profligate with their lives? That makes Stalin a man who demands our unconditional respect as a war leader.” Hitler smiled. “In a way I should be almost sorry to see him dead, because, I must admit, he’s a hell of a fellow. Schellenberg’s quite right, though. If anything were to happen to him, the whole of Asia would collapse. As it was formed, so it will disintegrate.

  “Now, Churchill—he’s quite a different story. I never yet met an Englishman who didn’t speak of Churchill with disapproval. The Duke of Windsor, Lord Halifax, Sir Neville Henderson, even that idiot with the umbrella, Neville Chamberlain—all of them were of the opinion that Churchill was not only off his head but a complete bounder, to boot. Absolutely amoral. It’s all you would expect of a journalist, I suppose. Say anything, do anything just to keep in the fight when any fool could have seen—can still see—that England should make peace. Not just to save England, but to save the whole of Europe from Bolshevism. It did Churchill a huge amount of harm in his own party when he went to Moscow. The Tories were furious about it and treated him like a pariah when he came back. And who can blame them? It will be the same story in Teheran. Shaking hands with Stalin? They’ll love that back in England. He’d better wear gloves, that’s all I can say.”

  By now Schellenberg was dying for a smoke and impatient to carry on outlining his plan, but Hitler wasn’t yet finished with Churchill.

  “I look at him and I can’t help but agree with Goethe that smoking makes one stupid. Oh, it’s all right for some old fellow—whether he smokes or not doesn’t matter in the least. But nicotine is a drug, and for people like us, whose brains are on the rack of responsibility day and night, there’s no excuse for this repulsive habit. What would become of me, and of Germany, if I drank and smoked half as much as that creature Churchill?”

  “It doesn’t bear thinking of, my Führer,” said Himmler.

  With that the tirade ended and Schellenberg was, at last, allowed to continue. But when he reached the part that involved the Kashgai tribesmen of northern Iran, Hitler interrupted him once again, only this time he was laughing.

  “To think that I’m a religious figure in the Muslim world. Did you know that Arabs are including my name in their prayers? Among these Persians I shall probably become a great khan. I’d like to go there when the world is at peace again. I’ll begin by spending a few weeks in some sheikh’s palace. Of course, they’ll have to spare me from their meat. I won’t ever eat their mutton. Instead, I shall fall back on their harems. But I’ve always liked Islam. I can understand people being enthusiastic about the paradise of Mahomet, with all those virgins awaiting the faithful. Not like the wishy-washy heaven that the Christians talk about.”

  He stopped suddenly, and Schellenberg was finally able to finish outlining Operation Long Jump. Almost perversely, it was now that Hitler chose silence. From the breast pocket of his field jacket, he took out a cheap nickel-framed pair of reading glasses and glanced over the main points of Schellenberg’s memorandum, sniffing loudly and sucking more of the peppermint lozenges he was so fond of. Then, removing his glasses, he yawned, making no attempt to cover his mouth or to excuse himself, and said: “This is a good plan, Schellenberg. Bold, imaginative. I like that. To win a war you need men who are bold and imaginative.” He nodded. “It was you who went to Stockholm with the letters, was it not? To see this Finnish fellow of Himmler’s.”

  “Yes, my Führer.”

  “And yet you bring me this plan. Operation Long Jump. Why?”

  “It’s always a good idea to have a plan in place in case another falls through. That’s my job, sir. That’s the essence of intelligence. To prepare for all eventualities. Suppose the Big Three don’t agree to your peace proposals? Suppose they don’t even answer your letters? Better to have my men on the ground in Iran.”

  Hitler nodded. “I can’t tell you everything that’s happening, Schellenberg. Not even you. But I think you might be right. Of
course we could always do nothing and hope that the conference will be a disaster on its own terms. That might well happen, because it’s quite clear the early sympathy that existed between the British and the Americans is not blooming. I tell you, there’s a considerable amount of antipathy on the part of the British toward the Americans, and the only man among them who loves America unconditionally is himself half American—Roosevelt’s poodle, Winston Churchill. This conference in Teheran is going to last for days.” Hitler grinned. “That is, if your men don’t kill them all.” Hitler laughed and slapped his right thigh. “Yes, it will last for days. Like the last one, in Canada, between Churchill and Roosevelt. And now that Stalin’s on board, things will last even longer. I mean, it’s only too easy to imagine how enormous their difficulties must appear to them. The Red Army’s huge losses, the prospect of a European invasion, millions of lives in the balance. Believe me, gentlemen, it will require nothing short of a miracle to harness the British, the Americans, the Russians, and the Chinese to the common yoke of winning a war. History teaches us that coalitions rarely work, for there always comes a point where one nation balks at making sacrifices for the sake of another.

  “The Americans are an unpredictable lot, and, frankly, they haven’t much stomach for any kind of sacrifice, which of course explains their tardiness in becoming involved in this war—and the last one, for that matter. In a tight corner, they’re just as likely to break as stand the course. The British are infinitely more courageous, there’s no comparison. How the Americans have the nerve to cast aspersions on the British after all that they have endured is almost incomprehensible. As for the Russians, well, their powers of resistance are quite inimitable.

  “I won’t be surprised if this conference collapses under the weight of the discord that exists among the Allies. Stalin and Churchill hate each other, that much is certain. The interesting thing will be to see how Roosevelt and Stalin hit it off. I suspect, if only from his speeches, that Roosevelt will behave like a whore for Stalin, trying to seduce the old bastard. Stalin, I’m sure, will just sit there, waiting to see just how far Roosevelt will go to charm him. Meanwhile Churchill’s waiting on the sidelines seething, like some cuckolded husband watching his stupid wife make a spectacle of herself but unable to say anything out of fear she’ll leave him.” Hitler slapped his thigh again. “By God, I’d like to be there to see it.”