RED SIGNAL LAMPS WERE PLACED along an eight-hundred-yard stretch of the wide boulevard, where troops had been set to clearing away debris and filling sh.e.l.l holes. At 3:00 a.m. on April 28, 1945, the lamps were lit, revealing a Junkers Ju 52/3m less than a hundred yards from the parked vehicles. The aircraft, a.s.signed to the Luftwaffe wing Kampfgeschwader 200, had taken off in rainy conditions from Rechlin airfield, sixty-three miles from Berlin, just forty minutes earlier. Rechlin had long been the Luftwaffe"s main test airfield for new equipment designs, but in the closing weeks of the war it had reverted to more essential combat duties. It was one of several bases used by "Bomber Wing 200"-the deliberately deceptive t.i.tle of a secret special-operations section of the air force commanded from November 15, 1944, by a highly decorated bomber pilot, Lt. Col. Werner Baumbach.
The Ju 52 that landed on the Hohenzollerndamm was flown by an experienced combat pilot and instructor named Peter Erich Baumgart, who now held the parallel SS rank of captain. More unusually, until 1935 Baumgart had been a South African, with British citizenship. In that year he had left his country, family, and friends and renounced his nationality to join the new Luftwaffe. In 1943 he had been transferred from conventional duties into a predecessor unit of KG 200; by April 1945 he was thoroughly accustomed to flying a variety of aircraft on clandestine missions, and his reliability had earned him the award of the Iron Cross 1st Cla.s.s.
Baumgart prepared his aircraft for takeoff and his pa.s.sengers boarded. Baumgart"s orders were to fly to an airfield at Tnder in Denmark, forty-four miles from the Eider River, which runs through northern Germany just below the Danish border. Thankfully, the rain in which he had taken off from Rechlin had now stopped, at least for the time being. Baumgart pushed the throttles forward, and the old "Tante Ju"-"Auntie Judy"-rattled and shook its way down the patched length of roadway until it lifted its nose into the air. It would take seventeen minutes to climb to 10,000 feet, where Baumgart could level and settle the Junkers at its cruising speed of 132 miles per hour. It was not until he was airborne and the escape party had removed their helmets that he realized who his main pa.s.sengers were. Knowing that as soon as the daylight brightened he would be in grave danger from enemy aircraft, Baumgart motioned his copilot to keep a sharp lookout. It was essential to fly as far as possible in darkness at treetop level, given sufficient moonlight, to avoid marauding night fighters protecting the Allied heavy bombers flying between 15,000 and 20,000 feet. At Rechlin he had been promised an escort of at least seven Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters, but there was no sign of them.
Baumgart would say later that he followed an indirect flight plan, landing for some time at Magdeburg to the west of Berlin to avoid Allied fighters and then flying northward through what the pilot said was an Allied artillery barrage to the Baltic coast. His luck held, and he encountered no further Allied aircraft before finally touching down on April 29 at Tnder, a former Imperial German zeppelin base. It was strewn with wrecked machines; just four days earlier, this field and that at Flensburg had been strafed by RAF Tempest fighters (of No. 486 "New Zealand" Squadron) that had destroyed twenty-two aircraft on the ground. As Baumgart closed down the engines and waited for the ground crew to approach, he caught sight of at least six Bf 109s dispersed around the field-the promised escort. Baumgart unbuckled himself and pulled the flying helmet from his head. In the rear he could hear his pa.s.sengers getting ready to disembark; they had brought little luggage with them. He climbed out of his seat and walked back down the fuselage, coming to attention and saluting when he reached Hitler. The Fuhrer took a step forward and shook his hand, and Baumgart was surprised to find that he was being slipped a piece of paper, which he put in his trouser pocket to look at later. He watched as the ground crew opened the door from the outside, and Hitler, Eva Braun, Ilse Braun, Hermann Fegelein, Joachim Rumohr, and Rumohr"s wife disembarked.
LEAVING FROM HOHENZOLLERNDAMM, the Ju 52 detoured to Magdeburg to avoid an Allied bomber group. Baumgart flew the Ju 52 on to the former German Imperial Zeppelin Base at Tnder in Denmark. The party transferred to another Ju 52 to reach the long-range Luftwaffe base at Travemunde, where they boarded a Ju 252 for their flight to Reus, near Barcelona, in Spain.
CAPT. BAUMGART HAD been sent for psychiatric tests when he first made these claims which the a.s.sociated Press and other news outlets reported in contemporary newspapers. Declared sane, he repeated his story in detail in court in Warsaw. Released in 1951, he was never heard of again.
Friedrich von Angelotty-Mackensen, a twenty-four-year-old SS lieutenant of the "Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler," would claim to have seen Hitler on Tnder airfield. Wounded in the fighting around the government quarter on April 27, he and three comrades, including his superior, SS Lt. Julius Toussaint, had been lucky enough to be put aboard one of the last medical evacuation flights out of Berlin. Mackensen-running a fever and slipping in and out of delirium-was unable to remember the place from which he had left. He described lying on a stretcher in the dimly lit interior of the plane and asking for water. At Tnder, where he would have to wait for several days, he was carried out of the plane by his comrades and laid on the ground. At some point he heard somebody say, "The Fuhrer wants to speak once more." Mackensen was moved nearer and laid down again with a knapsack to pillow his head. Hitler spoke for about a quarter of an hour. He said that Adm. Karl Donitz was now in supreme command of the German forces and would surrender unconditionally to the Western powers; he was not authorized to surrender to the Soviet Union. When Hitler finished speaking, the a.s.sembled crowd-estimated by Mackensen at about a hundred strong-saluted, and Hitler then moved among the wounded, shaking hands; he shook Mackensen"s, but no words were exchanged. Eva Braun was standing near an aircraft, which Hitler then boarded, and it took off.
For this next leg, on April 29, the Junkers was not flown by Capt. Baumgart, who was ordered to fly another aircraft back to Berlin for further evacuation flights. The piece of paper in his pocket turned out to be a personal check from Adolf Hitler for 20,000 reichsmarks, drawn on a Berlin bank. The Fuhrer"s aircraft returned to the field at Tnder, flying over it about an hour later, and a message canister was thrown down onto the airfield; it held a brief note to the effect that Hitler"s party had landed at the coast. Hitler"s flight from Tnder to Travemunde on the German coast northeast of Lubeck had taken the Ju 52 just forty-five minutes. Waiting there was Lt. Col. Werner Baumbach of the Luftwaffe, the commander of KG 200.
Baumbach had been a.s.sessing his diminishing options. At the start of that month, three huge six-engined Blohm & Voss Bv 222 flying boats, with a range of at least 3,300 miles, had been made ready to take senior n.a.z.is to safety. To provide another possibility, a four-engined Junkers Ju 290 land aircraft with a similar range had also been ordered to Travemunde. Two of the flying boats were now at the bottom of the inlet, destroyed by Allied air attack. The Ju 290 had also been caught by strafing RAF pilots just as it landed on a specially lengthened concrete strip beside the sh.o.r.e; it was. .h.i.t several times, forcing the pilot to overshoot, and had pitched over to one side, ripping off a wingtip. Baumbach had one Bv 222 flying boat left in the hangar, but he had never liked the type; its great size made it unwieldy, and although heavily armed it would be no match for an Allied fighter.
PART OF A lengthy March 15, 1948 U.S. interrogation of Friedrich von Argelotty-Mackensen, a wounded SS officer who had seen Hitler and Eva Braun at Tnder airfield after their flight from Berlin. He watched as they flew away to destinations unknown to him.
MARTIN BORMANN HAD FINALLY RECEIVED confirmation from the Abwehr in Spain, through the modified T43 communications system, that an airfield had been made ready for the Fuhrer"s arrival. Hitler would be flown to Reus in Catalonia, a region in which Generalissimo Franco"s fascists maintained an iron grip following their defeat of Catalan Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. Lt. Col. Baumbach personally drew up the flight plan. With the Ju 290 out of action, the mission would be entrusted to a trimotor Ju 252-a plane Baumbach knew well, having flown them during his time with KG 200"s 1st Group. While a descendant of the old "Tante Ju," the Ju 252 was a vast improvement; its top speed was still only 272 miles per hour, but it had a range of just under 2,500 miles, a pressurized cabin, and a ceiling of 22,500 feet. It could reach the Spanish airfield at Reus, just over 1,370 miles away, with fuel to spare.
As the pa.s.sengers disembarked from the Ju 52 at Travemunde after its short flight from Tnder, the Ju 252 was waiting on the tarmac with its engines already turning. Eva Braun now bade her sister Ilse a fond farewell-Ilse had decided to take her chances in Germany. Hermann Fegelein also embraced her. His own wife-Eva and Ilse"s sister Gretl-was heavily pregnant with their first child, and it had been considered too dangerous for her to flee with her husband. Bormann had a.s.sured his colleague that there would be plenty of time later to bring his wife and child to join him in exile. Joachim Rumohr and his wife had also decided to stay in Germany. Born in Hamburg, the cavalryman knew the countryside of Schleswig-Holstein well, and he felt sure he and his wife could find sanctuary there. (The overwhelming motive for Hitler"s hangers-on had been to escape the threat of Russian captivity; the Allied forces now advancing fast to the coasts north of Lubeck and Hamburg were from the British Second Army.) The remaining members of the escape party then boarded the Ju 252, and Baumbach saluted his Fuhrer for the last time on German soil. As the aircraft rolled down the runway and took off, he felt great relief: Thank G.o.d that"s over. I would rather leave some things unsaid, but it occurs to me that these diary notes may one day shed a little light on the strains, the desperate situation and maddening hurry of the last few days. At that time I had almost decided to make my own escape. The aircraft stood ready to take off. We were supplied with everything we needed for six months. And then I found I could not do it. Could I bolt at the last moment, deserting Germany and leaving in the lurch men who had always stood by me? I must stay with my men.
THE FINAL ESCAPE party-Hitler, Eva, Fegelein, and Blondi-flew to Reus in a long-range Ju 252 of KG 200. On arrival at Reus, a Spanish air force Ju 52 picked the party up for the flight to the Canary Islands. To eliminate evidence, the KG 200 aircraft was dismantled. Hitler and his party flew from Reus to Fuerteventura, stopping to refuel at the airbase at Moron, before arriving at the n.a.z.i base at Villa Winter to rendezvous with the U-boats of Operation Seawolf.
THE SPANISH MILITARY AIRBASE at Reus, eighty miles south of Barcelona, dated back to 1935. (During the Civil War there were three military airfields near Reus, the other two being at Maspujol and Salou.) After perhaps a six-hour flight from Travemunde, Hitler and his companions stepped down from the Ju 252. The crew lined up on the tarmac to salute; the Fuhrer returned the compliment, and his party was taken away quickly in two staff cars to a low building on the edge of the airfield. The KG 200 pilot had been in radio contact with the military commander at Reus during his approach to the airfield, and that officer in turn had called the military governor of Barcelona. Fifteen minutes later a Spanish air force Ju 52 in national markings landed at the far edge of the field. The Ju 252 in which the party had arrived would be dismantled; there was to be no physical evidence that the flight had ever taken place, thus allowing Franco complete deniability.
The fugitives" next stop would be the Spanish Canary Islands in the Atlantic, where Villa Winter, a top-secret facility, had been established on the island of Fuerteventura. From there they would embark on the next leg of their journey to a distant place of safety. For a number of other n.a.z.is, however, Spain would be the final destination of choice.
On May 8, 1945-the day victory in Europe was celebrated-the wounded SS Lt. Friedrich von Angelotty-Mackensen was at last about to leave Tnder airfield in Denmark, destination Malaga. He would report that before his plane took off he saw another recognizable figure there: the Belgian SS Col. Leon Degrelle, the leader of the fascist Rexist Party and, as the highly decorated commander of the Belgian Waffen-SS contingent, a much-photographed personality. Degrelle had fled from Oslo that day in a Heinkel He 111H-23 bomber stripped out for pa.s.senger transport, flown by Albert Duhinger (who later lived in Argentina flying commercial aircraft). As a fighting soldier on the Eastern Front, Degrelle had earned Hitler"s respect; the Fuhrer had once told him, "If I had a son, I would want him to be like you." The Heinkel made it as far as Donostia-San Sebastian in northern Spain, right at the limit of its range, and Degrelle would survive the injuries he suffered when it crash-landed off a beach. On May 25, Degrelle was quoted as "expressing his belief that Adolf Hitler is alive and is in hiding." A Spaniard who saw him in the hospital said Degrelle had spoken of visiting Hitler in Berlin the day before the Russians entered the city; the Fuhrer had been preparing to escape and was in no mood for either suicide or a fight to the death.
Among other European collaborators to be offered a way out was Norway"s puppet leader, Vidkun Quisling. At his trial in Oslo in September 1945, he related how Josef Terboven, the n.a.z.i Reichskommissar of Norway, had offered him pa.s.sage in an aircraft or a U-boat to get to Spain or some other foreign country. Quisling said that as a "true patriot" he had refused the offer and stayed to face his countrymen; he would soon pay for this decision in front of a firing squad. At the beginning of May, Pierre Laval, the former Vichy French prime minister, was flown to Spain aboard a Ju 88. (Franco would expel him, and he too would be executed by his countrymen in autumn 1945.) It was reported that the Berlin amba.s.sador of Italy"s rump Fascist republic, Filippo Anfuso, had also escaped late in April 1945, apparently aboard a "Croat plane."
As early as April 26, 1945, Moscow Radio had charged that Spain was receiving n.a.z.i refugees at an airfield on the Balearic island of Minorca. Quoting Swiss sources, the Soviets said, "To supervise the business, Gen. Jose Moscardo, an intimate of Franco ... visited Minorca last month. Recent arrivals at the airdrome are the family of [Robert] Ley and several Gauleiters." Robert Ley, the head of the German Labor Front since 1933, committed suicide while awaiting trial for war crimes at Nuremberg in October 1945. During his interrogation, however, Ley stated that when he last met Hitler in the bunker during April, the Fuhrer had told him to "Go south, and he would follow." Albert Speer, Hitler"s armaments minister, said much the same about a meeting in the bunker on Hitler"s birthday, April 20: "At that meeting, to the surprise of nearly everyone present, Hitler announced that he would stay in Berlin until the last minute, and then "fly south."" SS Staff Sgt. Rochus Misch, the telephone operator in the Fuhrerbunker, said, "There were two planes waiting to the north of Berlin. One of them was a Ju 390 [sic], and [the other] a Blohm & Voss that could fly the same distance. So Hitler could have escaped if he had wanted to."
The feasibility of Hitler making a last-minute escape from Berlin was apparently accepted by the most senior Soviet officers. On June 10, 1945, the commander of the Soviet Zone in Germany, Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov, stated that Hitler "could have taken off at the very last moment, for there was an airfield at his disposal." The Soviet commandant of Berlin, Col. Gen. Nikolai E. Berzarin, said, "My personal opinion is that he has disappeared somewhere into Europe-perhaps he is in Spain with Franco. He had the possibility of taking off and getting away."
Whatever the popular image of total Allied air superiority over Western Europe in the last days of the war, in reality it was unnecessary to maintain total surveillance of thousands of cubic miles of sky; the remnants of the Luftwaffe were encircled in an ever-decreasing area. For Allied fighter pilots it was a "target-poor environment"; the very fact that air-to-air encounters were at this point so rare argues that single machines flown by intrepid, experienced, and lucky German airmen could slip across it unnoticed. Since it is established that Leon Degrelle was flown all the way from Norway-and according to Mackensen, via Tnder in southern Denmark-to northern Spain as late as May 8, there is certainly nothing inherently impossible about Hitler having beaten him to it on April 29.
IN BERLIN, BORMAN AND MuLLER were meanwhile "tidying up" with ruthless efficiency. During April 2829, the two actors in the private quarters of the Fuhrerbunker played out a ghastly pantomime orchestrated by the n.a.z.i Party"s grand puppet-master, Martin Bormann. It ended on April 30 in a fatal finale that would have been executed by "Gestapo" Muller. At some time that afternoon Eva Braun"s double was poisoned, and Hitler"s double, probably Gustav Weber, was shot at close range by Muller in person. Shrouded in blankets, the two bodies were carried upstairs to be burned in the sh.e.l.l-torn Chancellery garden, as described by Erich Kempka, the head of the Chancellery motor pool. Although accounts by witnesses are confused and sometimes contradictory, this iconic scene has become an accepted historical fact. Indeed, everything about it may be correct-apart from the true ident.i.ties of the two burning corpses. A picture of an unburnt Hitler "corpse" with a gunshot wound to the forehead circulated extensively after the war. It is now believed to be possibly that of a cook in the bunker who bore a vague resemblance to Adolf Hitler. It was just one of at least six "Hitler" bodies, none of them showing any signs of having been burnt, that were delivered to the Soviets in the days after the fall of Berlin. A third impersonator would also die: Dr. Werner Haase, one of Hitler"s physicians, used a cyanide capsule on Blondi"s double. Her recently born pups-which the Goebbels children loved to play with in the bunker-as well as Eva"s Scottish terriers Negus and Stasi, and Haase"s own dachshund, were killed by Sgt. Fritz Tornow, who served as. .h.i.tler"s personal veterinarian.
Bormann communicated the news of "Hitler"s" death to Adm. Karl Donitz, appointed as the new Reich president in Hitler"s will. Before Bormann and Muller could finish their "cleaning," there was one more potential witness to be silenced. SS Lt. Col. Peter Hogl, the last person to have seen Hermann Fegelein, was also shot in the head, as the final groups of would-be escapers left the bunker on the night of May 12 (see Chapter 14) At this point, SS and Police Gen. Heinrich Muller, Bormann"s princ.i.p.al co-conspirator and hit man, disappeared from the "official" history record without a trace. A few days later his family would bury a body in a Berlin cemetery; the casket bore the touching inscription "To Our Daddy," but it would later be determined that it contained body parts from three unknown victims.
In the early hours of May 2, Bormann made his own escape from the Fuhrerbunker along with Werner Naumann, Goebbels"s nominated successor as propaganda minister, who later in 1945 would turn up in Argentina; Artur Axmann, the leader of the Hitler Youth; Hitler"s doctor, Ludwig Stumpfegger; and Waffen-SS Capt. Joachim Tiburtius. This party clambered aboard two Tiger II tanks, which tried to make their way up Friedrichstra.s.se, but the attempt was short-lived. One of the tanks took a direct hit from a Soviet ant.i.tank weapon, and the wreck blocked the other Tiger"s path. Bormann and Tiburtius made it on foot separately to the Hotel Atlas; Bormann had already stashed escape clothes, new ident.i.ty papers, and cash there (as he had at various other points around the city.) Tiburtius and the Reichsleiter pushed on together toward the Schiffbauerdamm, a long road running beside the Spree River in Berlin"s Mitte district; then the SS captain lost sight of Bormann.
The following day Bormann was in the town of Konigs Wusterhausen, about twelve miles southeast of the Chancellery. He had been wounded; a sh.e.l.l fragment had injured his foot. He managed to commandeer a vehicle that took him to a German military first aid station for medical treatment. A young, slightly wounded SS sergeant found himself seated alongside a familiar-looking, short, heavyset man wearing a leather overcoat over a uniform stripped of insignia. The young NCO said that he was on his way to the house of his uncle, a Luftwaffe pilot who had been killed in Russia, and invited Bormann to go with him. Joined by another officer, they later walked through the dark streets to the house at Fontanestra.s.se 9 in the Berlin Dahme-Spreewald neighborhood.
Bormann later made it safely through the British lines by following the autobahn to the outskirts of Flensburg, where he had planned to make contact with Donitz. Waiting for him at a safe house just outside the town was "Gestapo" Muller, who had also managed to slip through the British lines. Muller told Bormann that it would be impossible to meet Donitz, who had by now carried out unconditional surrenders in both Reims and Berlin. The plans had to be changed; Martin Bormann headed south, for the Bavarian mountains.
Chapter 16.
GRUPPE SEEWOLF.
THERE WAS LITTLE OPTION but to choose a submarine as the means to carry Hitler across the Atlantic to Argentina, but it was still a high-risk plan. Since the tipping point in the Battle of the Atlantic in May 1943, the balance of power in the sea war had shifted. The Kriegsmarine had lost its French U-boat bases in the summer of 1944, making the approach voyages to possible patrol areas much longer, more difficult, and more dangerous. Allied antisubmarine naval and air forces with greatly improved equipment now dominated the North Atlantic sea-lanes and the waters around most of Europe, so Allied shipping losses were a small fraction of what they had been. In 1944, U-boat loss rates had outstripped the numbers of new boats being commissioned; consequently, the remaining crews and most of their commanders were much less experienced. From January through April 1945 alone, no fewer than 139 U-boats and their crews were lost. The chances of a successful submarine escape directly from northwest Europe to South America would have been slim; however, the odds improved significantly with Spain as the point of departure.
The only available U-boat cla.s.s that had the range and capacity to carry pa.s.sengers to Argentina in anything approaching comfort was the Type IXC. In March 1945, nine Type IX boats sailed for the Atlantic; this was the last major U-boat operation of the war, and the first such operation since the scattering of the failed Gruppe Preussen a year previously. Two of the boats, U-530 and U-548, were directed to operate in Canadian waters, to "annoy and defy the United States." The other seven, designated Gruppe Seewolf-U-518, U-546, U-805, U-858, U-880, U-881 and U-1235-were to form a patrol line code-named Harke ("Rake"). It is believed, however, that in mid-April three of these boats opened sealed orders that would divert them southward on a special mission.
THIS U-BOAT TYPE was designed to be able to operate far from home support facilities. As an example of their endurance, the Type IX boats briefly patrolled off the eastern United States. Some 283 were built from 193744.
IT WAS NOT BY CHANCE that the word "Wolf" was used in the operation"s designation. From early in his career and throughout his life Hitler used the pseudonym Wolf. Among the most successful German operational techniques during the war were the "wolf-pack tactics" (known as Rudeltaktik, literally "pack tactics") by which the U-boats preyed on Atlantic shipping, and the submarines themselves were lauded by the Propaganda Ministry as "Grey Wolves."
It was typical of Bormann"s meticulous planning that three separate U-boats of Gruppe Seewolf were a.s.signed to the escape mission to provide alternatives if needed and that the mission was concealed within a conventional Atlantic operation so as not to attract Allied curiosity. The planning for this phase of the escape had begun in 1944, when Aktion Feuerland had already been under way for more than a year. On Bormann"s instructions, navy and air force a.s.sets across the Reich had been allocated to play contingent parts in the complex and developing escape plan. One such part was a misinformation phase.
IN JULY 1944, NEWS AGENCIES REPORTED that Hitler had approved a plan for an imminent attack on New York, with "robot bombs" launched from submarines in the Atlantic. On August 20, the Type IXC boat U-1229 (Cdr. Armin Zinke) was attacked and forced to surface off Newfoundland on the Canadian east coast, and among the captured survivors was a German agent, Oskar Mantel. Under interrogation by the FBI, he revealed that a wave of U-boats equipped with V-1 flying bombs was being readied to attack the United States. In November 1944, U-1230 landed two agents off the Maine coast; they were spotted coming ash.o.r.e and arrested. During their interrogation, Erich Gimpel and William Colepaugh (an American defector) corroborated Mantel"s story. This also seemed to be supported by the prediction in a radio broadcast by the Reich armaments minister, Albert Speer, that V-missiles "would fall on New York by February 1, 1945."
On December 10, 1944, New York"s mayor Fiorello La Guardia broke the story to an astonished American public. On January 8, 1945, Adm. Jonas H. Ingram, commander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet, announced that a new wave of U-boats approaching the United States might be fitted with V-1 rockets to attack the eastern seaboard. The n.a.z.is might launch "robots from submarine, airplane or surface ship" against targets ranging from Maine to Florida, but the U.S. Navy was fully prepared to meet the threat. Many Americans took this V-1 scare seriously. The British dismissed it as propaganda, and-with the grim experience of four years" bombardment and some 60,000 civilian deaths behind them, about 10 percent caused by V-1s-believed that even if such attacks occurred they would not cause a great deal of damage. After all, Hitler"s Operation Polar Bear had succeeded in hitting London with 2,515 V-1s (about one-quarter of those launched), so the handful that might be fired by a few U-boats seemed negligible. On February 16, 1945, a British Admiralty cable to the U.S. Navy chief of operations, Adm. Ernest J. King, played down the threat, while conceding that it was possible for U-boats to store and launch V-1 flying bombs. (The Germans had indeed tested a submarine-towed launch platform with some success, but were nowhere near any operational capability. There was even an embryo project, Prufstand XII, to launch the much larger V-2 ballistic missile at sea from a sealed container, which would be flooded at the base to swing it upright.) However, the planted misinformation achieved its purpose. It would focus American attention toward any detected pack of U-boats, such as the majority of Gruppe Seewolf, thus drawing USN and USAAF a.s.sets in the Atlantic eastward and northward-away from the lat.i.tudes between Spain"s southern territories and Argentina.
CENTRAL TO THE ESCAPE PLAN was the use of the Schnorkel, a combination of air intake and exhaust pipe for a submarine"s diesel engines, which became widely available from spring 1944. This allowed a U-boat to cruise (very slowly) on diesel power a few feet below the surface, while simultaneously recharging the batteries for the electric motors that had to be used for cruising at any depth. Using the Schnorkel limited a boat"s range to about 100 miles per day; it was normally raised at night, and in daylight hours the boat cruised submerged (again, very slowly) on electric power. While the theoretical ability to remain underwater twenty-four hours a day was a lifesaver for many U-boats, using the Schnorkel was noisy, difficult, and sometimes dangerous, especially in choppy seas. The low speed it imposed robbed the boats of their tactical flexibility on patrol, and remaining submerged made navigation difficult. While no transits to Argentina could have been contemplated without the concealment offered by the Schnorkel, it also worsened the U-boats" communication problems.
Remaining submerged almost permanently made the reception of radio messages a hit-or-miss affair. Neither U-boat Command nor the British eavesdroppers at Bletchley Park near London could ever be certain when, or even if, a specific U-boat had received the orders transmitted to it. In order to receive and send anything other than long-wave signals, a U-boat had to bring its aerials above the surface, exposing the conning tower and risking radar detection. In theory, long-wave messages were detectable while submerged if the conditions were perfect, but Schnorkel boats had a poor record of picking up long-wave transmissions.
THANKS TO THE DECRYPTION EXPERTS at Bletchley Park, the Allies were well aware of the dispatch of Gruppe Seewolf in March 1945, and the relatively slow speed of Schnorkel boats-whether or not they were the rumored "V-1 boats"-gave the U.S. Navy time to organize a ma.s.sive response, code-named Operation Teardrop. Convoys were rerouted further south with limited escorts, leaving most of the U.S. Navy a.s.sets free to concentrate on hunting down Gruppe Seewolf and the two a.s.sociated boats. The U.S. Navy supposedly achieved devastating results, claiming seven sunk and two surrendered; however, until this day there remains uncertainty as to the extent of the attacks, and while the Kriegsmarine remained relatively ignorant about the extent of Allied naval radar capabilities-one of the best-kept secrets of World War II-the U-boat commanders were well aware of the dangers of radio location and recognized that maintaining radio silence was central to a U-boat"s chances of survival.
High-frequency direction finding-HF/DF, or "Huff-Duff," introduced by the British Royal Navy-was a means of locating U-boats by taking cross bearings on the high-frequency radio transmissions they employed. Numerous long-range listening stations were built on many of the Atlantic"s coasts, and "Huff-Duff" was also installed on the warships of Allied escort and hunter-killer groups. Any transmission from a U-boat risked betraying its rough position, allowing the hunters to close in for more sensitive searches by radar and sonar. It was not necessary to understand what the U-boat commander was saying-figuring that out was a lengthier task for Bletchley Park; for the hunters, it was enough that the commander was making himself "visible" by transmitting.
In obedience to their orders, none of the Gruppe Seewolf boats transmitted any traffic after April 2, 1945. While U-boat Command sent occasional orders to the boats of patrol-line Harke, there is no actual evidence that any of them picked up these messages and acted on them. After that date, the Royal Navy"s submarine-trackers at Bletchley Park, and Western Approaches Command in the northwestern English port of Liverpool, were unable to verify the actual positions of the U-boats by using any form of direction-finding. All they had to work on was the information decrypted from U-boat Command"s transmissions to the boats, filtered through past experience and gut instinct, and as a result they had only a vague idea where the boats might be. The Admiralty situation report for the week ending April 2 stated that the U-boats were "likely to operate against convoys in mid-Atlantic but may tend to move along the estimated convoy routes in the general direction of the U.S. departure ports" (italics added).
THE U.S. NAVY OFFICIAL HISTORY claims that of the nine U-boats that sailed for the Atlantic in March and April 1945-seven of them forming Gruppe Seewolf-two surrendered at sea and seven were claimed as having been sunk. However, there was no real evidence to support the destruction of four of these boats. These four were some of the last unconfirmed U-boat sinkings at sea; the few losses of Type IX boats that sailed subsequently are well doc.u.mented and correct. From December 1944, the U.S. Navy would employ four escort-carrier groups in Operation Teardrop-the carriers USS Mission, Croatan, Bogue, and Core, with no fewer than forty-two destroyers. This largest Allied hunter-killer operation of the whole Atlantic war was undertaken in the North Atlantic"s worst weather in forty years, with high winds and mountainous seas.
Of the seven Gruppe Seewolf submarines facing this overwhelming force, only one was a confirmed kill. U-546 (Lt. Cdr. Paul Just) left Kiel, Germany, on March 11, 1945, and joined the Harke patrol line on April 14. On April 23, aircraft from USS Bogue spotted her; the next day the Edsall-cla.s.s destroyer escort USS Frederick C. Davis made contact, but Paul Just got his torpedoes off first, sinking the destroyer with the loss of 115 lives. A subsequent ten-hour hunt ended with the U-boat being hit and forced to the surface; Just and thirty-two survivors were rescued and shipped to Newfoundland. It has been confirmed that both there and after being transferred to Washington, Lt. Cdr. Just, two of his officers, and five seamen were treated with great and repeated brutality. The reason seems to have been American fears about submarine-launched V-1 attacks-grim confirmation of the success of the misinformation plan.
Lt. Cdr. Richard Bernadelli"s U-805 sailed from Bergen, Norway, on March 17 and also joined patrol line Harke on April 14, later surviving several attacks from aircraft and warships. After the breakup of Gruppe Seewolf, U-805 operated off Halifax, Nova Scotia, eventually surrendering at sea on May 9-five days after Adm. Donitz transmitted his surrender order to all U-boats still on patrol. This crew were also interrogated about the supposed V-1 boats, but apparently were not roughly treated-after all, the war with Germany was now over.
Lt. Cdr. Thilo Bode"s U-858 left Horten in Norway on March 11 and was judged by the Royal Navy"s Submarine Tracking Room to have joined the patrol line on April 14. It seems not to have been detected before Bode surrendered at sea on May 14. Bode"s crew were also questioned about the alleged V-1 launchers.
U-881, helmed by Lt. Cdr. Dr. Karl Heinz Frischke, was late joining the line. It left Bergen belatedly on April 7 after problems with its Schnorkel. Frischke clearly did not pick up Donitz"s surrender order of May 4, and U-881 was detected and claimed to be destroyed by the destroyer escort USS Farquar as it approached the carrier USS Mission Bay on May 6. However, no physical evidence of its destruction ever came to light.
Nor was there any proof of the destruction of U-1235, U-880, and U-518, all claimed as sunk during Operation Teardrop. In reality, they were nowhere near where the Submarine Tracking Room thought them "likely" to be.
U-1235 (First Lt. Franz Barsch) left Bergen on March 19 and was judged by the Submarine Tracking Room to have joined patrol line Harke on April 14. Officially, this boat was lost during the night of April 1516 to an attack by the destroyers USS Stanton and Frost, which a.s.sumed from a violent underwater explosion that U-1235 had been destroyed-and that it had, indeed, been carrying V-weapons. No wreckage came to the surface, and no other evidence was produced to confirm this kill. In conformity with the orders of April 2 to all Gruppe Seewolf boats, U-1235 sent no radio messages at all during its last patrol. U-boat Command certainly had no idea that the submarine was "lost," continuing to send it orders as late as April 22.
Lt. Cdr. Gerhard Schotzau"s U-880 had left Bergen on March 14, and the British tracking room plotted its arrival on the line exactly a month later. The U.S. Navy claimed that this boat, too, was "killed" in a joint attack by the destroyers Stanton and Frost on April 1516, within an hour of the destruction of U-1235. "Several underwater explosions" were a.s.sumed to have destroyed the boat, but no wreckage came to the surface or was recovered. Again, U-boat Command kept transmitting messages to U-880 until April 22.
Finally, the veteran U-518, commanded by First Lt. Hans-Werner Offermann, left Kristiansand on March 12. U-518 was judged by the Admiralty to have joined the Harke patrol line on April 14. The official U.S. Navy description of the loss of this boat was similar to the descriptions of U-1235 and U-880. The Cannon-cla.s.s destroyers USS Carter and Neal A. Scott claimed the kill on April 22, but again no wreckage came to the surface.
The Royal Navy"s brilliant Capt. Rodger Winn, head of the Submarine Tracking Room, highlighted the shaky nature of these claims. In a memorandum of May 20, 1945, he noted, with cla.s.sic British understatement, that the outcome of these actions had been reconsidered in an optimistic light, and as a result it is thought that possibly as many as 14 U-boats were sunk.... On this a.s.sumption it would follow since the ident.i.ties of the boats in Norway are now well established that 11 remain to be accounted for. So far as is known these 11 boats are at sea but the Americans claim, possibly rightly, to have sunk 2 of them.... What the remaining boats are doing or intend to do is a fruitful and intriguing subject for speculation.
The same memorandum implicitly cast some doubt on the U.S. Navy"s claim to have sunk U-530, commanded by First Lt. Otto Wermuth. For a confirmed kill, that boat did indeed look surprisingly intact when it surfaced off Mar del Plata, Argentina, and surrendered to the authorities on July 10, 1945.
SEALED ORDERS MUST HAVE BEEN DELIVERED to the commanders of U-1235, U-880, and U-518 before they sailed in March 1945, with instructions for them to be opened at a specified longitude. Drafted in Berlin on Bormann"s instructions, the contents of these orders would be known only to a select few.
The specified longitude was reached before the formation of the Harke patrol line on April 14; the orders instructed the three commanders to break away from Gruppe Seewolf at a time that would allow them to rendezvous on April 28 at Fuerteventura in Spain"s Canary Islands, off the Atlantic coast of Morocco. They were to maintain complete radio silence, while monitoring reception in the Thrasher cipher over their Siemens & Halske T43 encryption machines, and were to ignore all orders destined for the Gruppe as a whole. The British Admiralty"s daily war diary for April 15 stated that an independent Liberty-cla.s.s merchant ship, SS Samoland, saw a surfaced U-boat in the approximate position where U-518 could have been. It was steering a course of 101 degrees, back across the Atlantic in the direction of the Canary Islands-1,300 miles away, and thirteen days" submerged cruising with Schnorkel a.s.sistance.
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. Donitz"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 Donitz 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 Schlussel 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 ma.s.sive 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 n.o.body had ever encountered before and that n.o.body 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 a.r.s.enal; 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 Africanborn 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 n.a.z.is" 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 doc.u.mented. The Fuhrer"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 doc.u.mented sighting would be deep in Argentina in the Southern Hemisphere, at the San Ramon estate near Bariloche in Rio 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 n.a.z.is 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 lat.i.tude 280700 N and longitude 142830 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 sh.o.r.e 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 Jandia 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 n.a.z.i 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 Fuhrer to be picked up by the "last wolf-pack."
The n.a.z.is had first begun their search for a base in the Canary Islands when Hermann Goring 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 Jandia peninsula as a base for n.a.z.i 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 Goring"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 Jandia comprised nearly 44,500 acres of uninhabited land, and in 1941, Gustav Winter purchased the whole area through a Spanish front company, Dehesa de Jandia 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 Tefia 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 n.a.z.i agents made their way into the Canary Islands and the Spanish Saharan colony of Rio del Oro, via the Spanish port of Cadiz. 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 Winch.e.l.l-a close friend of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and usually well informed by both U.S. and British intelligence services. Winch.e.l.l 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 n.a.z.i 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. Winch.e.l.l said that there were two major n.a.z.i bases on Gran Canaria: Gando airfield and a nearby submarine base. If civilians had been able to travel to the islands, Winch.e.l.l 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 n.a.z.i 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 Ejercito del Aire markings, was carried out quickly and in secrecy. The Fuhrer"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 airs.p.a.ce 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 Moron 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 pa.s.sengers 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 pa.s.senger to Buenos Aires and the man responsible for the Aktion Feuerland shipments from Spain-had flown in the day before from Cadiz, 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 n.a.z.i Ibero-American Inst.i.tute-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 Schotzau"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 pa.s.sengers 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 Fuhrerbunker. 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 Cadiz 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 Fuhrer 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 pa.s.sengers" ident.i.ties and the new destination using the boat"s internal speaker system. Some s.p.a.ce 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 Zaunkonig 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 pa.s.sengers" 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sengers-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.
On U-518, the toilets were equipped with a flushing supply from the sea, which emptied into a sanitary tank that was "blown into the sea periodically." Normally there was only one toilet available until the food stored in the other two had been eaten. For this voyage the toilet in the forward torpedo room was kept for the exclusive use of the Fuhrer and Eva Braun; it also had a metal cabinet with a mirrored front, which housed two fold-up washbasins. Fresh water was limited and strictly rationed, but water for washing was made available to the pa.s.sengers-a privilege unknown to U-boat crews, for whom laundry had to wait, and liberal use of the standard-issue "Kolibri" cologne was ordered.
Food consisted mainly of canned goods supplemented by a bland soy-based filler called Bratlingspulver; the crew called it "diesel food," due to its constant exposure to engine fumes. A major problem caused by running submerged for an entire patrol was the disposal of the garbage that inevitably acc.u.mulated on board, in humid and fetid conditions. Garbage could be dumped in small quant.i.ties from the ejector for the BOLD sonar decoy, but the usual practice was to store it in an empty forward torpedo tube for firing into the sea when safe to do so. After dark on May 4, 1945-two days after the "official" announcement of Hitler"s death, which caused some wry smiles aboard U-518-the boat anch.o.r.ed for four hours off the southwestern side of the uninhabited island of Branco, in the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of West Africa. Taking the opportunity to "air" the boat, Offermann allowed Eva Braun in particular to come up onto the bridge to smoke-she was finding the conditions aboard the submarine almost intolerable. For a fleeting moment four days later, at approximately 30W, Offermann considered surfacing for the customary equator ceremony of "crossing the line," but he quickly dismissed the idea. He had a rendezvous.
SS GEN. HERMANN FEGELEIN arrived off the Argentine coast aboard U-880 on the night of July 2223, some five days ahead of the Fuhrer"s boat. The boat had maintained maximum speed throughout its journey to enable Eva"s brother-in-law to organize preparations for the Fuhrer"s arrival. He transferred into a tugboat of the Delfino SA line about thirty miles off Mar del Plata in the early hours of July 23. Sailors from U-880 off-loaded forty small but heavy boxes, the size of ammunition chests, from the submarine onto the Delfino tug. U-880"s final service to the Reich had now been performed. The crew transferred to the tugboat, the last men opened the seac.o.c.ks and scrambled to safety, and as they watched quietly their U-boat flooded with seawater and sank for the last time into the South Atlantic depths.
Meanwhile, in the tugboat captain"s cabin, Fegelein showered and shaved for the first time in fifty-four days. Fifteen minutes later, Fegelein was dressed in a sharp grey double-breasted suit, courtesy of Buenos Aires"s finest tailor. This had been brought aboard for him by Col. Juan Peron"s personal representative Rodolfo Freude, the son of the n.a.z.i "amba.s.sador" in Argentina, the wealthy businessman Ludwig Freude. For the trip to the sh.o.r.e the two men were joined in the wheelhouse by U-880"s other pa.s.senger, Willi Koehn, the chief of the Latin American division of the German Foreign Ministry and former head of the n.a.z.i Party in Chile.
Koehn had last been in Buenos Aires in January 1944, when he had also made use of the regular U-boat run from Rota in Spain to Mar del Plata to bring in forty heavy boxes. Koehn was well known to the anti-n.a.z.is in Argentina; three weeks after his arrival with Fegelein, democratic Argentine exiles in Montevideo, Uruguay, confirmed that Koehn was back in Argentina. This time he was in Patagonia, with "the knowledge of the Buenos Aires government." He was not alone.
When Fegelein and Freude landed on the quay at Mar del Plata, a black Argentine navy staff car was waiting for them. A short while later the SS general and the Argentine n.a.z.i boarded a Curtiss Condor II biplane-freshly painted in the colors of the Fuerza Aerea Argentina, established less than six months before-and took off. This Curtiss was one of four originally ordered by the Argentine navy in 1938; the type was renowned for its short take-off and heavy payload capability. It touched down again just half an hour later, on the gra.s.s airstrip at a German-owned ranch four miles from the coast near Necochea.
IN THE LAST days of the n.a.z.i regime, Ernst Kaltenbrunner conducted the largest armed robbery in history against the wishes of Martin Bormann. Accordingly, he was denied an escape route and was left to face justice. Here, along with other n.a.z.i leaders he stands trial in September 1946 at the Nuremberg International Tribunal for crimes against humanity. Seated in the middle row, from left to right: Hermann Goring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel, and Kaltenbrunner. He was condemned to death and hanged on October 16, 1946.
WITH THE BOMB-DAMAGED Old Reich Chancellery looming in the background of this photograph taken some time after 1945, the bodies of the Hitler and Braun doubles were soaked in gasoline and burned in the small depression visible halfway between the tree and the conical ventilation tower. The blockhouse and doorway were above the stairway and emergency exit of the Fuhrerbunker. To the right of the ventilation tower is the ballroom of the Old Reich Chancellery, below which the Vorbunker was situated. Hitler used to walk his dog Blondi in this area of the Reich Chancellery gardens every day up until their escape.
n.a.z.i MINISTER OF Propaganda Joseph Goebbels poses with his wife Magda, three of their six children, and the Fuhrer at the Obersalzberg, 1938. The entire Goebbels family died in the Fuhrerbunker on May 1, 1945, with the six children poisoned and their parents committing suicide. The bodi