Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler

by Simon Dunstan

  THE STORY OF THE CODE-BREAKERS and computer pioneers of Bletchley Park, the sixty-acre facility fifty miles northwest of London where the British government’s Code and Cypher School—Station X—was installed in August 1939, has been told at length elsewhere. The bare essentials are that in January 1940, British specialists, building upon invaluable prewar Polish research, managed to crack the encrypted German Army transmissions generated by the Enigma machine (see Chapter 1). Decryption of the Luftwaffe’s transmissions soon followed; however, the Kriegsmarine’s encryptions for message traffic between Adm. Dönitz’s U-boat Command and his boats at sea remained unbroken.

  The huge toll of Allied and neutral shipping that the U-boats were taking in 1940 made solving this mystery a priority. It became even more urgent from September 1940, when Dönitz successfully pioneered his wolf-pack tactics, using encrypted communications to vector multiple boats into the path of a sighted convoy. Lt. Cdr. Ian Fleming of British naval intelligence concocted a scheme to crash-land a captured German aircraft in the English Channel, wait for rescue by a German patrol boat, overpower its crew, and capture an Enigma machine. The men and the aircraft for this Operation Ruthless got as far as Dover before the plan was canceled, on the sensible grounds that none of the vessels operated by the Germans in the Channel at night was a suitable target (and that there was no guarantee that the ditched plane would float long enough for its crew to be rescued).

  On May 9, 1941, U-110 was attacking convoy CB318 in the North Atlantic, south of Iceland, when Royal Navy escorts forced it to the surface by a depth-charge attack. The U-boat crew abandoned ship after setting scuttling charges, but these failed to detonate; the British apparently shot the submarine’s captain, the U-boat ace Lt. Cdr. Fritz Julius Lemp, when he tried to return to the vessel to finish the job. Royal Navy sublieutenant David Balme of HMS Bulldog led a boarding party across, risked going down the hatch, and recovered the Enigma machine and its priceless accompanying instruction books—a success that the British went to great lengths to conceal from the captured crew. Constant radio intercepts and ceaseless work to keep up with the changing settings of the naval Enigma machines were still necessary to maintain the flow of Ultra intelligence, and (as mentioned in Chapter 1) the introduction of the Schlüssel M four-rotor Enigma machine defeated Bletchley Park from February to December 1942 and continued to hamper the decrypters until September 1943. Nevertheless, Ultra gave the Allies a massive intelligence-gathering advantage; concealing the Allies’ knowledge of Enigma transmissions—their greatest secret “weapon”—from the Germans was a matter of life and death.

  THE GERMANS NEVER DID DISCOVER that the Enigma codes had been broken, but in February 1945, a new sort of traffic was coming over the radio speakers in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park—traffic that nobody had ever encountered before and that nobody had the slightest idea how to break (see Chapter 11). The British gave the names “Tunny” and “Thrasher” to these two latest weapons in Germany’s cryptographic arsenal; neither seemed to be generated using the now relatively familiar Enigma systems. In time, a stupendous effort and the use of the Colossus computer would allow Tunny, produced by the Lorenz SZ42 machine, to be read (at least intermittently), but Bormann’s communications network based on the Siemens & Halske T43 machine remained secure. On April 23, 1945, Adm. Karl-Jesco von Puttkamer, Hitler’s navy adjutant (and another survivor of the July 20, 1944, bomb attempt), was sent to the Berghof in Bavaria to destroy Hitler’s private papers there. Puttkamer had three T43 machines in mobile radio trucks in an underground garage at Berchtesgaden, guarded by forty SS troops, and on April 25 the machines began transmitting. They continued to communicate with a variety of stations until May 1, and many of the messages were for German agents in South America.

  Hut 3 at Bletchley Park housed a team headed by Prof. (RAF Wing Cdr.) Oscar Oeser, a South African–born physicist; this group sifted incoming traffic for deciphering by Colossus. In late April 1945, Oeser received a visit from Ian Fleming, whose latest target was Thrasher and the Siemens & Halske T43 machine; this was still defying all efforts at decryption, and Thrasher was being used with increasing frequency. Fleming said that he had located at least two of the latest machines, and he asked if Oeser would join a commando mission into Germany to capture and evaluate them. Oeser was unique in holding degrees in both physics and psychology, and he had studied in Germany. Despite the forty-one-year-old academic’s unwarlike and sedentary background, his work at Bletchley Park, his breadth of expertise, and his fluency in German made him the perfect candidate for the task of both evaluating equipment and interrogating its operators. Oeser was immediately interested. A week later he was on the ground near Berchtesgaden as part of TICOM (Target Intelligence Committee) Team 5.

  On May 2, 1945, the TICOM team targeted Adm. von Puttkamer’s group, met with no resistance from the SS guards, and captured the three T43 machines. (Oeser later handed two of the machines over to the Americans under Operation Paperclip.) Prof. Oeser was amazed at what he found, which he described as “a digital computer system … decades ahead” of anything the Allies had. Bletchley Park never did break the Thrasher cipher. However, the TICOM team also captured the premier signals-intelligence unit and almost eight tons of its most secret equipment. With this apparatus the decrypters were able to break the cipher of the latest Soviet military teleprinter that was known by Bletchley Park as “Russian Fish” and subsequently “Caviar.” The TICOM team was in awe of the Nazis’ advanced technology, which gained many German operators comfortable employment in Britain for the next few years decoding Soviet military traffic.

  HITLER’S ESCAPE FROM BERLIN IS, as can be seen from preceding chapters, remarkably well documented. The Führer’s trail led us as far as Reus near Barcelona, where his trimotor escape plane was dismantled and he boarded a Spanish aircraft. His next documented sighting would be deep in Argentina in the Southern Hemisphere, at the San Ramón estate near Bariloche in Río Negro province, in June 1945.

  It has not been possible to establish precisely how Hitler and his party reached Argentina, but taking into account the “pieces on the board”—to use a chess axiom—it is likely it happened in the following way. By using logic, deduction, and research on what vessels, aircraft, locations, and people were available to the Nazis and how they could be used, we believe Hitler would join with the three missing boats from Seewolf and some six weeks later arrive at Necochea on the coast of Argentina.

  The deductive pieces of our reasoning have been italicized to separate them from what we know are the established facts. As when you are hunting an animal, you do not always see your quarry, but you can see traces of where it has been and where it is going. The hunt for Grey Wolf is no different.

  ON APRIL 28, 1945, THE THREE DESIGNATED U-BOATS from Gruppe Seewolf—U-518, U-880, and U-1235—arrived one-half nautical mile off Fuerteventura at Punta Pesebre, at latitude 28°07′00″ N and longitude 14°28′30″ E. Their crews had no knowledge of what their mission was to be; they had simply been ordered to this position and told to wait for further orders for up to ten days if necessary. A signal lamp from shore had been flashed at a specific time for the previous two nights. When the submarines arrived, a single, brief message was sent to Berlin from Villa Winter, confirming their presence. Bormann’s reply was equally brief: “Agree proposed transfer overseas.” While they awaited further orders, the U-boat crews took the welcome opportunity to relax in the warm sunshine.

  THE VILLA WINTER BASE on the deserted Jandía peninsula of Fuerteventura had been built in 1943 under the supervision of the senior Abwehr agent in the Canary Islands and had then been manned by personnel of the SS intelligence service. The base had deliberately been excluded from utilization during the Nazi war effort. Bormann intended this facility to serve one purpose only: to act as a key link in the escape route from Berlin. It was the perfect place for the Führer to be picked up by the “last wolf-pack.”

  The Nazis had first begun their search for a base in
the Canary Islands when Hermann Göring financed a “fishing expedition” to the islands between July 14 and August 14, 1938. Leading the search was Gustav Winter, a German engineer and senior Abwehr agent, “in the Canary Islands in charge of observation posts equipped with radio, and of the supplying of German submarines.”

  It was Winter who had conceived the idea of developing the uninhabited Jandía peninsula as a base for Nazi operations. Born at Zastler, near Freiburg, on May 10, 1893, Winter studied in Hamburg before deciding to travel to the new German frontier in Patagonia in 1913. After the outbreak of World War I the following year he sailed for home, but his ship was stopped, and he was interned by the British on a prison ship in Portsmouth. He first came to the attention of British intelligence in 1915, when he escaped by swimming to a Dutch ship, the Hollandia, and making his way to Spain. Winter spoke English fluently; upon his arrival in Spain he went to the British consulate, persuaded the consul that he was a British citizen in dire economic straits, and received a cash payment that enabled him to return to Germany. Between 1921 and 1937 he lived in Spain, traveling back to Germany regularly “to continue his studies.”

  Winter had been on the verge of buying Isla de Lobos (“Wolf’s Island”), a small barren rock to the north of Fuerteventura, but Göring’s funded “fishing trip” in 1938 and Winter’s own travels aboard his yacht Argon led him to a much better site for a clandestine operations base. The desert-like southern peninsula of Jandía comprised nearly 44,500 acres of uninhabited land, and in 1941, Gustav Winter purchased the whole area through a Spanish front company, Dehesa de Jandía SA. The ostensible intention was to develop this barren area for agriculture, and tens of thousands of trees were planted to support this story.

  Construction started in 1943. Franco’s dictatorship provided a ready supply of disposable labor among its political prisoners; the road to Villa Winter is still known as the “Way of the Prisoners.” Details are unknown, since the story of the concentration camps at Tefía on the island has yet to be written—as have many other dark tales from the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath.

  Gustav Winter himself spent much of his time between 1940 and 1944 at the U-boat base near Bordeaux, returning to Spain only in August 1944 as the Allies overran the French Atlantic coast. In his absence, roads, tunnels into the mountains, defensive positions, and a strange castle-like structure—the “villa” itself—were all built between 1943 and 1945. Villa Winter had an extensive, sophisticated military telecommunications system that was probably centered on the Siemens & Haske T43 machine, giving it constant contact with Germany, Argentina, and the U-boats that were hungry for resupply from other bases on Spain’s supposedly neutral Canary Islands. The villa itself was equipped with tiled medical treatment rooms and a range of attics fitted out for the accommodation of troops and senior personnel. By late 1944, with the movement of funds out of Germany in top gear after the Hotel Maison Rouge meeting of that August (see Chapter 9), the Germans had built a runway at the end of the peninsula; 1,650 yards long by 66 yards wide, this could easily handle four-engined aircraft like the Junkers Ju 290 or the Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor. Bormann was covering all the bases, providing his escape plan with built-in redundancies.

  Between late 1943 and February 1944, at least 250 Nazi agents made their way into the Canary Islands and the Spanish Saharan colony of Rio del Oro, via the Spanish port of Cádiz. The Spanish authorities did not hinder them in any way. At least four months before the long-awaited Allied invasion of France, Bormann was moving key personnel involved in Aktion Feuerland to new bases, and these relocations to the Canaries rapidly increased later in 1944.

  In October 1944, German activities in Spain were increasingly annoying the influential U.S. broadcaster and columnist Walter Winchell—a close friend of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and usually well informed by both U.S. and British intelligence services. Winchell reported, “Hitler had been building air bases in Spain since 1939.… Work was supervised by German Army engineers, done by Franco’s political prisoners who worked at bayonet point.” He went on to state that “Spanish islands off the coast of Villa Garcia were cleared of their civilian population last year. Landing fields, advance Luftwaffe, and three whole regiments of Nazi flyers took over the islands. All civilian travel has been suspended between the Spanish mainland and the Balearics and the Canaries.” Civilian travel to the islands was indeed banned. Winchell said that there were two major Nazi bases on Gran Canaria: Gando airfield and a nearby submarine base. If civilians had been able to travel to the islands, Winchell said, they “would see the great storage tanks for submarine fuel, in Las Palmas they would see German officers marching with the Falangists and ten times as many soldiers as in normal times. They would also see the great Nazi seaplane base in Baleares [on the Mediterranean island of Mallorca].”

  HITLER’S CHANGE OF AIRCRAFT ON APRIL 29 at the Spanish military base at Reus, from the Luftwaffe Ju 252 to a Ju 52 with Ejército del Aire markings, was carried out quickly and in secrecy. The Führer’s party was then flown to Villa Winter on Fuerteventura. During this leg of the journey, the sense of relief on the aircraft must have been palpable. The refugees were flying through neutral Spanish airspace while Allied eyes were still focused on Berlin and, in the case of U.S. intelligence, Bavaria. In the back of the plane Blondi slept peacefully, sedated with drugs supplied by Dr. Haase. Stopping briefly to refuel at the Spanish air force base at Morón in southern Spain and guided by the extensive communications network from the Villa Winter, the aircraft was on the ground in the Canary Islands by late on April 29 or early on the thirtieth. Its passengers were driven along dirt roads from the airstrip to the luxurious villa, to receive a good meal and to sleep—for the first time in months—free from the ominous rumble of bombing and artillery.

  Willi Koehn—a regular U-boat passenger to Buenos Aires and the man responsible for the Aktion Feuerland shipments from Spain—had flown in the day before from Cádiz, Spain. Koehn was the chief of the Latin American division of the German Foreign Ministry and a close confidant of Gen. Wilhelm von Faupel, who ran the Nazi Ibero-American Institute—the headquarters for German espionage in the Western Hemisphere. Koehn’s last two shipments had preceded him by sea and were waiting to be loaded aboard two of the U-boats.

  Hitler and Eva Braun were apparently ferried out to U-518 aboard one of the eleven fishing boats at the disposal of the base. Although Franz Barsch of U-1235 was, at thirty-three, the oldest and most experienced commander, his crew had made their first patrol only in May 1944—as had the sailors of Gerhard Schötzau’s U-880. Twenty-five-year-old Hans-Werner Offermann, although the youngest of the three commanders, was a seasoned submariner with personal experience in South American waters, and his crew had been sailing on war patrols since May 1942. By 1945—when the average life expectancy of U-boat men was one and a half patrols—that longevity set them apart as unusually lucky and skillful veterans, and this combination of experience made U-518 a sensible choice for Hitler’s boat.

  When the passengers had been made as comfortable as possible in the cramped conditions of a fighting U-boat, it departed the island for its voyage of 5,300 miles. The trip would take fifty-nine days, during which the time must have hung as heavily as it had in the “concrete submarine” of the Führerbunker. Meanwhile, U-880—with Hermann Fegelein and Willi Koehn aboard—and U-1235 continued to shelter safely on the seabed off Punta Pesebre. Both submarines would have disposed of their torpedoes, firing them into the deep waters off the island to make way for one final cargo. Over the next two days, boxes of loot transferred from Cádiz were stored in the torpedo compartments.

  CONDITIONS ABOARD U-518 must have been normal for an operational boat: it stank. U-boat crewmen were allowed only the clothes on their backs and a single change of underwear and socks, a wardrobe that tended to be augmented by nonregulation items of the crew’s own choosing. The usually relaxed atmosphere among U-boat officers and men must have changed immediately after the Führer came on
board, even though Hitler would have asked for formality to be kept to a minimum, recognizing that constant saluting in the cramped confines of a U-boat would be ridiculous. First Lt. Offermann informed the crew of the passengers’ identities and the new destination using the boat’s internal speaker system. Some space for the couple, their luggage, and a cargo of small but heavy chests had been made by stripping U-518 of almost all its munitions and transferring a number of its seamen. Torpedoes and extra ammunition for the deck antiaircraft guns were off-loaded, and twelve crew members who were considered inessential for a noncombat patrol were transferred to the other two U-boats. For a sting in the tail in case of emergencies, however, Offermann did keep his stern torpedo tubes loaded, with two T5 Zaunkönig acoustic homing torpedoes—“destroyer-busters.”

  On combat patrol, the forward torpedo room was also crew quarters. With the stowed torpedoes removed and the normal crew of forty-four reduced to thirty-two, the compartment now provided a bare degree of comfort for Hitler, Eva, and Blondi, but the passengers’ privacy must often have been disturbed by sailors carrying out routine maintenance on essential equipment. Most of the crew of a U-boat, apart from specialists such as the radio operators, worked in eight-hour shifts. Crew space was always at a premium, privacy was nonexistent, and even with twelve of their shipmates transferred out the men of U-518 must have been unusually cramped during this voyage. They must also have felt constrained by the presence of the passengers—or of two of them, anyway. To have a dog on board a submarine was not absolutely unknown; Blondi was given the free run of the boat and became a firm favorite with the crew. She quickly got used to the tray provided for her toilet needs, but for humans using the toilet in a submarine was something of a trial.