It always seemed to happen that when we were conducting full-scale experiments and making a tremendous blaze there was a German aeroplane about. On many occasions it came and bombed us. In this way the Germans must have known what we were doing, and in fact they showed us they expected us to use flames as a defence, for they carried out experiments with asbestos suits.
And the Germans killed thousands of their own troops in an effort to restore confidence where terror of the fire weapon spread fastest – through the ranks of the Wehrmacht. They arranged a great demonstration to show that specially equipped troops could pass unscathed even if the sea was on fire. Thousands of asbestos suits were made, and each man of the troops to take part in the demonstration wore one (10,000 asbestos suits were ordered in Paris alone).
Huge quantities of oil were spread off the French coast and set on fire. The trial armada set out – to disaster. A large number of the headpieces of the suits were defective and the men inside were roasted to death. For weeks afterwards the burnt bodies of German soldiers were being washed up on the south coast. Meanwhile, by pamphlets dropped by planes, radio, and whispering campaigns, stories of Britain’s terrifying fire defences were being spread.
In November 1946 the new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, gave a written answer to the Commons on the subject of the 1940 invasion scare, in which the figure of ‘about 36’ was offered in relation to German army corpses washed ashore. This estimate was endorsed by Churchill in Their Finest Hour, who added a little spin of his own:
We took no steps to contradict such tales, which spread freely through the occupied countries in a wildly exaggerated form, and gave much encouragement to the oppressed populations. In Brussels, for instance, a shop exhibited men’s bathing suits marked ‘For Channel Swimming.’
Against this background it is curious that two other semi-official accounts published soon after the war sought to deny the story. Guy Gibson, the celebrated leader in 617 Squadron for the raid on the Ruhr dams in 1943, had been killed in action the following year, and his ghost-written memoir Enemy Coast Ahead shelved until 1946. In it Gibson dismissed as fictitious rumours that ‘thousands of German soldiers were buried on the east coast of England’, while concluding that ‘no-one will ever know anyone who saw a dead German soldier, although many a man will claim to know someone else who knows someone else who buried one.’ Eleven years later, in his otherwise excellent book Invasion 1940, Peter Fleming too dismissed the rumours of bodies on beaches out of hand, although inadequate research meant that Fleming was unaware of earlier books by Thomson, Bonaparte and Baker White, or even the arrival of the corpse of Heinrich Poncke at Littlestone in October 1940, which had been reported in the press and by the BBC.
In November 1957 Fleming took part in a BBC television programme, The Finest Hour, in which the invasion myth was discussed in detail. William Robinson also appeared on the programme, and told of the part he had played in the recovery of bodies at St Mary’s Bay. Faced with this testimony Fleming was stumped, although despite the fact that Fleming served with both MI(R) and SOE during the war, it is unlikely that his botched debunking of the great invasion rumour formed part of any official cover-up. Indeed his book had drawn attention to an otherwise obscure German film biography of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, whose legendary career is examined in detail in Chapter Ten. Produced in 1954, Canaris offered up a liberal account of the wartime activities of the German chief of intelligence who acted, albeit sporadically, as an Allied informant. During scenes concerning Operation Sealion, an Abwehr agent is seen to remove a canister of secret film from a Whitehall office, which in Berlin is found to contain graphic footage of flamethrowers, fougasses and sea flame barrages. In fact these clips are genuine PWD footage, shot at Studland Bay and Moody Down Farm on 1941, and first shown in public in 1945 by Geoffrey Lloyd. In the 1954 movie, a detailed scale model of a sea flame barrage at Hastings is unveiled, and Canaris has only to exhibit these several ‘beast eating’ devices to the German High Command to secure the cancellation of Sealion as ‘suicidal’.
It is unclear on which sources screenwriter Erich Ebermeyer based this fictionalised version of history, but the scenario is less far-fetched than it might seem. The fact that German counter-measures were tested before the first successful British trial is clear evidence that specific disinformation was fed to German intelligence, and the cover subsequently offered by Banks and Lloyd – that inquisitive German aircraft overflew Dumpton and Titchfield – rings hollow. It is less likely that any Abwehr spies obtained film from Whitehall, or that Sealion was postponed and later cancelled solely on the basis of the threat posed by flame warfare. Nonetheless, on this reading Sefton Delmer of the Political Warfare Executive was probably not guilty of exaggeration when he wrote of his radio broadcasts in September 1940 that:
The line about burning in the Channel fitted in perfectly, as of course it was intended to do, with the information which our deception services had planted on Admiral Canaris … Our rumour agencies, too, had been busy spreading it everywhere. The mean murderous British, it was said, had apparatus in readiness in which they were going to set the Channel and the beaches on fire at such time as Hitler launched his boats. This was a lie. But it went over so well that it is believed by many Germans to this day.
Today, the dual invasion myths of floating bodies and burning seas are less well remembered, having been displaced by the more trivial legend of spies dressed as nuns. In fact, the rumour of the invasion that never was represents Britain’s first substantial deception and propaganda victory of the Second World War, at a time when Britain’s finest hour was fast becoming her darkest. The fact that much of it relied upon secret channels and unavowable black propaganda meant that the truth of the matter was never disclosed, and that even as late as 1992 an identical set of rumours and falsehoods would become attached to supposed wartime events at the village of Shingle Street on the Suffolk coast. If nothing else, the controversy surrounding Shingle Street disproves Sophocles’ dictum that a lie never lives to be old.
In closing, another passage from John Baker White’s The Big Lie deserves mention, for – if correct – it would do much to explain the genuine mystery surrounding the bodies recovered by Gunner Robinson’s party. By the time the invasion rumour swept the country after 7 September the Battle of Britain was already over. Nonetheless, according to White:
When we engaged upon building up the Burning Sea deception we considered a hundred and one ways of adding substance to it. One ingenious plan involved the use of human bodies … Our scheme was to take the charred bodies of Luftwaffe men shot down in the Battle of Britain, dress them in the burnt uniforms of German infantry soldiers and float them ashore on the tide at various points along the invasion coast … So far as I know, it was never put into operation, but it had a much more important counterpart later in the war.
True or not, the counterpart referred to by White is the case of The Man Who Never Was, examined in Chapter Nine. Given that corpse deceptions had been a feature of British military planning since the First World War, White’s suggestion might not be as fanciful as it seems. It might be argued that his broad hint, if true, would hardly have been cleared for publication under the D notice procedure. Or could it be, as the diplomat Sir Lewis Namier once observed, that ‘a great many profound secrets are somewhere in print, but are most easily detected when one knows what to seek’?
7
Hitler Myths
Given that Adolf Hitler was regularly reported as having been killed, it is ironic that in the wake of his suicide in Berlin on 30 April 1945, few were prepared to believe he was dead. The myth of a still-living Hitler in hiding is just one of countless Führer legends to have emerged during and after the Second World War, the most popular of which are examined below.
Rumours that the German Chancellor had ‘gone off with a gun and shot himself’ circulated in Britain during the first week of the war in September 1939, and were followed by regular reports of his death or di
sappearance. In the run-up to D-Day in May 1944 a rumour circulated among British troops that Hitler had been assassinated, and word that he was ‘dead and buried’ was still current in American units at the end of the same year. According to the text of a popular US army talk from February 1945, warning against ‘the Rumor Racket’ (see Appendix Two): ‘Wishful thinking gave that one wide acceptance. Legal minds assembled a lot of evidence that seemed to substantiate the Dictator’s demise. His absence from the German scene could be explained in no other way. It was welcome news. Unfortunately it wasn’t true.’
After the war the reverse held sway. As we saw in Chapter Two, a notable feature of life in postwar Germany was an abundance of rumours that deceased military and party figures were still alive, including Gunter Prien, Martin Bormann, Wilhelm Canaris and Adolf Hitler. A poll taken in Berlin in April 1946 revealed that fewer than 10 per cent of German civilians believed Hitler was dead. Following the German surrender in May 1945 there were any number of dubious sightings, setting a pattern which would become familiar over the next four decades. Hitler was variously seen living as a hermit in a cave near Lake Garda in northern Italy, as a monk in St Gallen, as a shepherd in the Swiss Alps, and working as a casino croupier in the French resort of Evian. Other newspaper stories maintained that he was working as a fisherman in the Baltic, or on a boat off the west coast of Ireland, and reported sightings in Grenoble and Albania. In July 1945 the US Office of Censorship intercepted a letter written to a Chicago newspaper, claiming that Hitler was living in a German-owned hacienda 450 miles from Buenos Aires, protected by two doubles and an underground hideout, from which he was hatching plans for long-range robot bombs. This intelligence was treated seriously by the FBI, although enquiries made via the American embassy in Argentina led nowhere.
The first falsehood about Hitler’s demise had been promulgated by Admiral Karl Dönitz, the German military commander in northern Germany and Hitler’s designated successor. When Dönitz announced Hitler’s death by radio at 10.20 pm on 1 May, the German public was told he had been killed in action that same afternoon, fighting ‘at the head of his troops in Berlin’. In fact Hitler had committed suicide a day earlier, by shooting himself through the mouth in his subterranean bunker, while his new bride, Eva Braun, took cyanide. The falsehood of a hero’s death was intended to bolster the shattered morale of the German armed forces, yet it was not the only confusing announcement made. On 9 June the Russian commander Marshal Georgi Zhukov announced to the world that Hitler’s corpse had not been identified, that the circumstances were ‘very mysterious’ and that the German leader ‘could have flown away’ from Berlin ‘at the very last moment’. Zhukov’s statement informed a subsequent announcement by General Eisenhower, who voiced doubts about Hitler’s death at a press conference in Paris on 16 June. At the Potsdam Conference on 16 July the Soviet General Secretary told President Truman that Hitler was thought to be living in Spain or Argentina, while that same month the Russian newspaper Izvestiia carried a mischievous report that Hitler and Eva Braun were alive and well and living in a moated castle in Westphalia, which lay in the British zone of occupation. British intelligence were not amused, and in September ordered a young major named Hugh Trevor-Roper to conduct an official enquiry, code-named Operation Nursery. The results were published two years later as The Last Days of Hitler, although the book was banned behind the Iron Curtain.
An official Soviet statement released in September 1945 muddied the waters further still:
No trace of the bodies of Hitler or Eva Braun has been discovered … It is established that Hitler, by means of false testimony, sought to hide his traces. Irrefutable proof exists that a small airplane left the Tiergarten at dawn on 30 April flying in the direction of Hamburg. Three men and a woman are known to have been on board. It has also been established that a large submarine left Hamburg before the arrival of the British forces. Mysterious persons were on board the submarine, among them a woman.
Meanwhile the bizarre rumours continued to multiply. In August an American lawyer informed the FBI that Hitler was living as Gerhardt Weithaupt in Innsbruck, together with Alfred Jodl. In 1946 he was sighted in a coffee room in Amsterdam, having developed a very long body and arms, and was also reported as leading a wolfpack of rogue U-boats, albeit suffering badly from seasickness. The FBI received thousands of letters alleging that Hitler was living in America, having purchased land in Colorado, or riding the subway in New York. Another submarine story arose following the discovery of a message in a bottle, which claimed that Hitler had escaped from Berlin only to sink with the U-boat Nauecilus. Another South American report had him living on a farm at La Falda in Argentina, disguised by plastic surgery performed on board the boat which had smuggled him across the Atlantic. A rival story placed him in Zurich, where he had aged dreadfully and affected a demeanour ‘similar to that of a pensioned official’. The motive behind at least some of these reports is hinted at by Hugh Trevor-Roper:
Throughout the summer and autumn of 1945 many resourceful journalists had been pursuing phantoms of Hitler with energy and enthusiasm, and the pleasant lakes of the Swiss frontier and the romantic Tyrolean Alps and the comfortable resorts of Upper Austria were frequently visited by devoted investigators whose scrupulous consciences forbade them to ignore even the most inconsiderable clue. In the course of these researches many engaging theories were propounded; but as winter drew near, and personal excursions became less attractive the consensus of opinion began to allow that Hitler had really remained in Berlin, and the mystery of his fate was one that could best be solved not by strenuous travel in an inclement season, but by ingenious meditation in well-heated saloon bars.
Some of the hoaxes were probably delusional. In December 1947 a German airman calling himself Baumgart claimed he had flown Hitler and Braun to Denmark on 28 April 1945, although the witness afterwards retired to a mental hospital in Poland. Another false report came from a northerly region of Sweden. According to the author of an anonymous letter posted to the American embassy in Stockholm:
If you look in the Bauerska mountains you will find a long cave about 466 metres or maybe even longer, with about 92 doors well camouflaged. Hitler has here a room 30 by 30 metres, with electrical stoves, one big, one small. There is food there, cans of all kinds for several years ahead and lots of money of all kinds of currencies. There is also a pipe from the top of the mountain in which food can be dropped down. Those who bring food there are called ‘Ravens’. Those who built this in the mountains have been killed long ago so it would not be discovered. When you have found it, I demand one sixth of what is there and a jeep and a tractor. You will know my name when you have found him.
Phantom sightings of the erstwhile Führer continued up until 1992, when a Canadian paper reported that Hitler had finally passed away in South America. Even as late as 1980 the author of Hitler’s Secret Life was prepared to treat seriously claims that Hitler escaped from Berlin in a float plane at the last minute, and that four Americans arrested in Brazil in 1966 on smuggling charges were actually detained ‘because they saw an old man near the landing strip at Tres Marias whom Brazilian officials feared they recognised’.
But that is to jump ahead. Back in 1945, in the wake of Russian claims about moated castles and large submarines, the mystery surrounding Hitler’s death was compounded by inconsistencies in the accounts given by bunker survivors, some of whom were released from Soviet jails in 1955. Thirteen years later a licensed Russian journalist named Lev Bezymenski published The Death of Adolf Hitler: Unknown Documents from the Soviet Archives, which admitted for the first time that Soviet troops found Hitler’s remains in a shell crater in the Chancellery garden on 3 May 1945. Bezymenski also revealed that an autopsy was carried out in the Berlin suburb of Buch on 8 May, which concluded that Hitler had chosen poison over a bullet. The author continued that the corpses of Hitler and Braun, as well as the Goebbels family, were afterwards burned completely and ‘strewn to the wind’.
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bsp; The poison revelation came as a bombshell in 1968. A decade later, in 1979, an American author named James O’Donnell published The Berlin Bunker, a meticulously researched account in which a third scenario was offered, combining poisoning and shooting, with Hitler squeezing the trigger of his pistol while simultaneously biting down on a cyanide capsule. The truth emerged only in 1992, when Russian journalist Ada Petrova discovered a series of six previously classified files in a Moscow archive, referenced as I-G-23. These revealed that the Buch autopsy in May 1945 had been flawed, and that a year later further bone fragments were recovered from the shell crater in the Chancellery garden. These included charred sections of skull with an outgoing bullet hole, fired at point-blank range. However, these fresh findings were kept secret since Moscow preferred to hold out that Hitler chose a coward’s death, and to hide the embarrassing mistakes made at Buch. Knowingly or not, Bezymenski had been misled, and Hugh Trevor-Roper had been substantially correct all along. It was a great shame that Trevor-Roper proved less erudite in 1983, when, as Lord Dacre and a former Regius Professor of History at Oxford, he unwisely endorsed the forged ‘Hitler Diaries’ as genuine.
The true fate of Hitler’s corpse was revealed in 1995 in The Death of Adolf Hitler by Ada Petrova and British journalist Peter Watson. After the autopsy, the remains of Hitler, Braun and the entire Goebbels family (as well as General Hans Krebs and two dogs) were buried in wooden boxes at Finow, 30 miles from Berlin. On 3 June 1945 the boxes were moved and re-buried in an isolated forest area near Ratenow, then moved again on 23 February 1946, to a courtyard in Magdeburg. With these premises due to be returned to East German control in 1970, the remains were again exhumed in April of that year and found to consist of a ‘jellied mass’. This grisly consignment was conveyed to an area of waste ground near Schonebeck, burned thoroughly, and the ashes dumped into a tributary of the Elbe. Only two groups of Hitler remains were retained in Russian archives: four parts of the skull in the State Archive of the Russian Federation, and his jawbone in the KGB Archive.
Myths & Legends of the Second World War Page 15
