Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler

by Simon Dunstan

  Canaris, like Heinrich Himmler, sought to discover the probable attitude of the Western Allies if and when Hitler was removed or killed. Canaris needed to know what support might be forthcoming for the conspiracy itself or in the political aftermath once the deed was done. Mindful of Dulles’s proclivities, he directed one of his resident agents in Switzerland, Halina Szymaska, the widow of a Polish officer, to develop a relationship with the American. Providentially, she was Canaris’s close companion during his visits to Switzerland, so pillow talk proved beneficial to both sides. Szymaska was also Canaris’s liaison with British intelligence—it was through her that Canaris had informed the British in late 1940 of Hitler’s plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union. However, Canaris’s attempts to sound out Washington and London about a possible future for a Germany without the Führer came to nothing. Neither leadership was willing to support any resistance movement inside Germany or any plot to kill Hitler and neither had any sympathy for conspirators whom President Roosevelt dismissed as “these east German Junkers.”

  For months, the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park had been deciphering Dulles’s cables, and the transcripts were in the hands of the British Foreign Office’s Secret Intelligence Service or MI6. In disparaging reports, Dulles was described as “a Yankee Doodle Dandy blow-in who has little to provide in real intelligence” and “seems to get too excited about small successes.” But one MI6 officer took a different view of the transcripts—the British traitor Kim Philby. He immediately dispatched a report on Dulles’s activities to his controller in Moscow. The response he received was clear: Dulles and his informers must be discredited—Moscow was paranoid about any possibility of the Western Allies negotiating a separate peace.

  Some time thereafter, Dulles received a telegram from his superiors in the OSS: “It has been requested of us to inform you that ‘all news from Berne these days is being discounted 100 percent by the War Department.’ It is suggested that Switzerland is an ideal location for plants, tendentious intelligence and peace feelers, but no details are given.” Dulles was mortified that policy-makers in Washington were dismissing his intelligence-gathering operations, and when he discovered the part played by MI6, his distrust of the British intensified. He became determined that his future operations would exclude any meaningful British participation. Nevertheless, he continued building up his web of contacts across Europe and in the Middle East. Bern remained an important center of OSS operations in Europe and Allen Dulles remained at the center of the web.

  OPERATION TORCH, THE ANGLO-AMERICAN INVASION of French North Africa, began on November 8, 1942, when 100,000 Allied troops landed in Morocco and Algeria against spasmodic French resistance. Under the command of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the landings were a complete success and a ceasefire was arranged on November 11—the same day that Hitler responded with the occupation of Vichy France. Operation Torch coincided with the first major British land victory of the war, at El Alamein on the Libyan-Egyptian frontier, where Gen. Bernard Montgomery’s Eighth Army inflicted a major defeat on Rommel and forced his Afrika Korps into headlong retreat. As the New Year of 1943 dawned, the German forces in North Africa were confined to a diminishing enclave centered on Tunisia, with the British Eighth Army advancing from the east and the U.S. Fifth and British First armies from the west. Heavy fighting would continue over the following months as the German-Italian Armeegruppe Afrika fought to the last, but surrender became inevitable. On May 12, 1943, a last radio message was transmitted: “All ammunition spent. Weapons and equipment destroyed. In accordance with its orders, the Afrika Korps has battled on until it can fight no more. We shall rise again.” The message signed off with the Swahili battle cry that had been adopted by the Afrika Korps—“Heia Safari!” (roughly translating as “Tallyho!”). In this last African campaign, some 60,000 Axis soldiers had died and 240,000 went into captivity. Despite the brave words about rising again, the German troops dubbed this disaster “Tunisgrad.”

  ON THE DAY THAT VICHY FRANCE WAS OCCUPIED, the German Sixth Army’s last assault through the rubble of Stalingrad ground to a halt in the appalling conditions of the Wehrmacht’s second Russian winter. At the end of their enormously extended lines of supply, ammunition and all other essentials were running short. One week later, on November 19, Gen. Georgi Zhukov launched Operation Uranus with major offensives to the north and south of Stalingrad. By November 22, the Sixth Army was surrounded. Out of bravado or sheer ignorance, Marshal Hermann Göring promised Hitler that his Luftwaffe could supply the trapped army by air. The daily minimum requirement of supplies needed to sustain the Sixth was 550 tons, but the Luftwaffe rarely exceeded 300 tons and, as the weather worsened, with temperatures dropping to –22°F in mid-January, deliveries diminished to just 30 tons a day. The freezing German soldiers subsisted on a few slices of bread and a small hunk of horse meat daily and were soon suffering from dysentery and typhoid. The fighting continued until February 2, when the last defenders inside the Red October Factory laid down their arms. The German forces suffered 750,000 casualties over that dreadful Russian winter, and of the 94,000 who were captured at Stalingrad just 5,000 would ever see Germany again.

  The Red Army had paid an immense price for the defense, encirclement, and final recapture of Stalingrad, losing almost 500,000 killed or missing and a staggering 650,000 wounded—to say nothing of a further 40,000 civilians dead. Yet these horrendous sacrifices had bought the Soviet Union a genuinely pivotal victory. For the first time, a whole German army had been decisively beaten and then destroyed on the battlefield. To mark this unprecedented reverse on the Eastern Front, Radio Berlin played somber music for three days, but it would take much longer than that for the German people to come to terms with the catastrophe. The prestige of the Red Army soared, both in the Motherland and in the Western democracies. Basking in the glory of the victory at the city named after him, Stalin grew in stature both at home and abroad—and his repeated demands for the opening of a second front in Europe by the Western Allies, to relieve the pressure on the Soviet Union, became more insistent.

  IN JANUARY 1943, ALL THE GREAT POWER LEADERS had been invited to attend a conference in the Moroccan coastal city of Casablanca. Stalin declined, since the battle for Stalingrad was then reaching its climax. Between January 14 and 24, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, together with the Combined Chiefs of Staff, met at the Anfa Hotel to decide the future strategy for the war in the West and in the Pacific. Churchill was anxious for the war in Europe to be given top priority and his view prevailed. More resources were to be allocated to fight the Battle of the Atlantic, since Britain’s very survival and America’s ability to deploy armies in Europe depended on defeating the U-boat threat. Despite Stalin’s urgings, the outcome of the disastrous Dieppe raid in August 1942 had confirmed that a major landing on the coast of mainland Northwest Europe simply was not feasible during 1943. Instead, once the anticipated victory in North Africa was achieved, Allied forces were to invade first the island of Sicily and then Italy.

  In order to mollify Stalin, the Western Allies issued the Casablanca Directive, which dealt with the closer coordination of the strategic bombing offensive against Germany by the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Force. The objective set for the Joint Bombing Program was “the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to the point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened.” The priority targets were U-boat construction yards and operating bases, followed by the German aircraft industry, the transportation system, and all oil-producing facilities. The USAAF retained its faith in daylight precision-bombing missions against specific point targets while the RAF preferred area bombing by night. This combined Operation Pointblank would condemn Germany to round-the-clock aerial bombardment on an unprecedented scale, testing the will of the German people to the utmost.

  However, there was one aspect of th
e Casablanca Conference that did not meet with full accord. President Roosevelt retained a deep disgust for the German military caste that he dismissed as “the Vons,” and he would not countenance any sort of deal with a German government short of unconditional surrender. Neither Churchill nor the Combined Chiefs of Staff were at ease with such a strategy, but Roosevelt remained adamant and in this his will prevailed, just as Churchill’s had over the planned Italian campaign. Citing the implacable resolve of Ulysses S. Grant—“Unconditional Surrender Grant”—during the American Civil War, Roosevelt required a complete and unequivocal victory over Germany. There was to be no repeat of the armistice that had ended the Great War with German troops still on French soil. Its result had been a widespread illusion during the interwar years that the German army had remained undefeated on the battlefield and that Germany was only forced to capitulate by devious politicians.

  Objections to the policy of unconditional surrender were advanced by, among others, Roosevelt’s U.S. Army chief of staff, Gen. George C. Marshall, and his rising field commander Gen. Eisenhower, on the grounds that it would inevitably increase the resolve of German armies on the battlefield. The intelligence community recognized that the policy would effectively scupper any real dialogue with or support for the resistance movement inside Germany, since its leaders would know that even the death of Hitler would not spare their country from utter ruin and humiliation. As Allen Dulles wrote, “We rendered impossible internal revolution in Germany, and thereby prolonged the war and the destruction.” Apart from Stalin, the only belligerent leaders whose interests were served by this decision were the Nazi hierarchy.

  Chapter 3

  THE BROWN EMINENCE

  AFTER THE STAGGERING SETBACKS of Stalingrad and North Africa, it was vital to galvanize the dispirited German people for a protracted war. Hitler’s complete military strategy had been predicated on a short conflict of conquest before the material superiority of his opponents—France and Britain, then the Soviet Union—became overwhelming. The era of rapid victories in 1938–42 had allowed Germany to loot raw materials, agricultural production, and industrial capacity from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the western USSR. These years of pillage had delayed the tipping point after which the imbalance of resources between the Allies and the Axis became at first chronic and then terminal; but they had gained Germany only capital—not a revenue stream—and the point of no return had now been reached.

  Nazi Germany entered spring 1943 with no coherent overall military strategy to prosecute the war further. The failure of the invasion of the USSR was already obvious for the world to see. In May 1943, due to a combination of Allied technical and operational advances, the monthly losses suffered by U-boats in the Atlantic suddenly tripled. This forced Adm. Dönitz to withdraw his wolf packs from the convoy lanes for three months; they would never recover their dominance. In June and July 1943, the first RAF Thousand-Bomber raids devastated cities such as Essen, Cologne, and Hamburg, and during that summer USAAF daylight raids penetrated deep into Germany to hit industrial targets, drawing Luftwaffe fighter squadrons back from other fronts. In July, the defeat of a new German offensive around Kursk in the Ukraine finally crushed any hope of regaining the initiative on the Eastern Front. Also in July, the Western Allies successfully invaded Sicily, and in September, Italy became the first of the Axis nations to sue for peace. In the coming winter nights the RAF’s baleful focus would shift to Berlin itself—in November alone, 400,000 Berliners were rendered homeless. Despite occupying most of Europe, German forces were now wholly on the defensive and trapped in a war of attrition, reduced to waiting, with dwindling resources, for the Allies to unleash new offensives in the east, the south, and the west. Moreover, there was simply no coherent mechanism for addressing Germany’s situation. The Führer’s word was absolute and there was no one in the Nazi hierarchy or the armed forces to contradict him.

  The German regime’s response to the disaster of Stalingrad and President Roosevelt’s demand for unconditional surrender was a call for “total war.” In a widely reported speech given to the Berlin Nazi Party in the Sportpalast (Sports Palace) on February 18, 1943, the Reich minister of propaganda, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, demanded of his audience and the German people their complete commitment to “der totaler Krieg.” Warning that “two thousand years of Western history are in danger,” Goebbels called for even greater sacrifices in support of the Wehrmacht, the last defenders against the Bolshevik hordes that were threatening the territory and the very cultural identity of Europe. To this end, he called for the full mobilization of the German economy and the German people for the exclusive support of the war effort. On the podium with Goebbels was Albert Speer, Reich minister of armaments and war production. Speer was desperate to put the mismanaged German economy on a proper war footing, but was frustrated by a lack of skilled workers. In the face of ever-wider military conscription and Hitler’s reluctance to mobilize Germany’s women for the same sort of effort that Britain and America had made, much of industry was dependent upon slave labor from the East and conscripted workers from the occupied countries of Europe.

  Hermann Göring, that great collector of titles, had proved equally incompetent in the position of Reich commissioner for the Four-Year Plan as he was in strategic command of the Luftwaffe. Sensing that Göring—after the failure of his boast that he could sustain the Sixth Army at Stalingrad—was falling out of favor with Hitler, Goebbels and Speer tried to persuade Hitler to dismiss him so they could take over control of the domestic economy for more efficient war production. This attempt soon failed, however, in a welter of other plots. In the turmoil following Stalingrad, pent-up rivalries among the hierarchy came boiling to the surface.

  Having the ear of Hitler, Party Chief Reichsleiter Martin Bormann suggested that a triumvirate representing the state, the party, and the armed forces be established as a Council of Three with dictatorial powers to control the economy—exactly what Goebbels and Speer were proposing for themselves. They immediately changed tack and now sought an alliance with Göring and Himmler to thwart Bormann. But Himmler was in a separate plot with Bormann to gain more power at the expense of Göring. As the controller of Hitler’s personal finances, Bormann finessed the plotters by giving Göring six million reichsmarks to indulge himself away from Hitler’s court. In the end, none of these plots succeeded in its object since Hitler was indifferent to such ploys beyond creating divisions among his acolytes.

  IN THE WORDS OF DR. OTTO DIETRICH, the Reich press chief, “Hitler created in the political leadership of Germany the greatest confusion that has ever existed in a civilized state.” The plots and counterplots of 1943 were a prime example of how Hitler exercised his absolute power by fomenting fierce rivalries among his immediate subordinates so that none could ever acquire sufficient power or influence to challenge the Führer himself. Indeed, such episodes represent the whole Nazi regime in microcosm.

  The popular perception holds that the Third Reich was a monolithic totalitarian state that controlled a reluctant population through terror and Teutonic efficiency. While the reign of terror was real enough, the government institutions of the Third Reich were in fact massively inefficient, hampered by conflicts of interest and muddled chains of command and absurdly wasteful of money, time, and manpower. Hitler showed little interest in or talent for administration; he preferred to wield power through many competing organizations that owed their very existence to his good offices. In line with his conception of creative chaos, different individuals and agencies were given ill-defined responsibilities in closely related fields of activity in everything from postal administration to weapons development. The price demanded for Hitler’s support in the resulting turf wars was total personal loyalty. This might earn supplicants a loosely expressed general directive that they could interpret as endorsing their particular agendas. In pursuit of these rivalries, empire building and bureaucratic obstruction were rife and wer
e deliberately encouraged by Hitler, according to his simplistic view that the strongest would prevail through competition.

  The architecture of the Nazi state machinery defied all logical explanation. Before the war, the operations of government were nominally entrusted to seventeen ministries, yet the last actual cabinet meeting had taken place in November 1937. On August 30, 1939, the Ministerial Council for the Defense of the State had been formed. It was composed of six of Hitler’s closest followers and bureaucrats; this body, chaired by Göring, could enact laws at Hitler’s will. Commissioners were appointed with broadly defined powers within various areas of government activity, but there was no actual machinery for coordinating their work. Worse, there was at every level a divisive duplication of authority caused by the parallel prerogatives of state and Nazi Party functionaries. Virtually every state body was replicated with a party equivalent, with each vying for resources and favor.