The Leader And The Damned

Colin Forbes
Part One
Mirror Man: Der Fuhrer
Chapter One

13 March 1943. The time bomb which was to kill Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer and Commander-in-Chief of the

German Armed Forces, was assembled at Smolensk with great care.

The terrible Russian winter was still persisting. Temperatures were far below zero as Hitler conferred with Field Marshal von Kluge on the next planned offensive against the Red Army. Wearing his military greatcoat and the peaked cap decorated with a gold eagle clutching the swastika in its claws, Hitler's mood was buoyant and aggressive.

'We shall smash the Russians by attacking earlier than they expect,' he told von Kluge and his staff officers. 'We shall annihilate them with one hammer-blow – because we shall outnumber them, out-tank them, out-gun them…'

'Mein Fuhrer,' von Kluge intervened respectfully, 'I feel it my duty to point out that at the moment Stalin's troops outnumber ours.

'At the moment.'

Hitler paused, glanced round the half-ruined concrete building inside which the conference was being held, and stalked away to stare out through a broken window only half-protected by a canvas flap. The flap whipped in the wind which moaned in the brief silence. It was a typical dramatic gesture, the trick of a superb actor – to grip his audience in suspense before he made his sensational announcement.

Staring out of the window Hitler watched the endless line of Soviet prisoners trudging through the snow and guarded by Wehrmacht soldiers. The white hell of Russia faded into the distance, masked by falling snow. Beyond the line of prisoners stood another half-ruined building, its roof almost collapsed. Even Hitler's extraordinary intuition did not warn him of what was going on inside the relic.

He turned away, returned to the table and smashed his clenched fist on the map of the Eastern front spread over its surface. His voice rose to a manic shriek.

'At the moment,' he repeated. 'What you do not know, what I have come here to tell you is that soon you will have at your disposal another forty divisions – including ten Panzers! Now tell me that you cannot wipe the Red Army off the face of the earth within two months!'

Numbed with the cold despite the oil-heaters placed round the table – the building reeked with the stench of oil fumes – von Kluge, like every man on his staff, was astounded. The Field Marshal was the first to recover his wits. Cautiously, he posed his question.

' Mein Fuhrer, may I ask where these divisions, this truly massive reinforcement, is coming from?'

'From the West, of course!' Hitler shouted. 'The order will be given immediately I return to my headquarters. With these fresh troops and tanks you will be in Moscow by May! Once Moscow – the hub of the Soviet rail network – falls, Stalin is finished!'

'But the West will be left defenceless,' von Kluge persisted. 'It will be wide open to an Anglo-American landing..'

'Your memory is short, my dear von Kluge,' Hitler snapped, 'I conducted the same manoeuvre successfully when we overran Poland in 1939. The western frontiers of the Reich were defenceless then. At that time the British and French armies were on the Continent. Did they attack? No! All went as I predicted.'

'But when Churchill is informed of the withdrawal…'

Hitler was deliberately working himself up into a mood of contempt and rage.

'You think I have overlooked that? Dummy encampments and mock tank laagers are already prepared! When the enemy's reconnaissance planes photograph France and Belgium they will bring back evidence that the forty divisions are still there! It will be a military master-stroke! And once Moscow falls, it will take a mere handful of troops to wipe out the rabble remaining of Stalin's forces. You will have the whole summer to do that at your leisure. Then one hundred and twenty divisions will be transferred back to the West to face Mr Churchill and his American masters. I may put you in command, von Kluge,' he added casually.

Alone inside the other concrete building Hitler had gazed out at, General Henning von Tresckow, GSO1 of von Kluge's Army Group Centre had just completed the fabrication of the bomb and was fixing the timing device. At the doorway his accomplice, Lieutenant Schlabrendorff, stood anxiously on guard. Many years younger than the General, he was a bundle of nerves, half-frozen and his mind occupied with everything that could go wrong with the plot.

'How can we be sure when he will board the plane?' he asked. 'That affects your fixing of the clock. The bomb must explode while he is in mid-air – or we are finished…'

'Calm yourself,' von Tresckow reassured him without looking up from the device he was attending to. 'As soon as the conference is over the Fuhrer is returning to the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia, a flight of eight hundred kilometres. That gives plenty of margin to time the detonation..

'Unless he decides to stay overnight.'

'That he will not do. He never likes to spend a moment longer than necessary from his power base. He trusts no one – he never has.'

And hence Hitler's unique capacity for self-preservation, von Tresckow was thinking. But this time he had slipped up; in Berlin certain generals were only waiting for news of the Fuhrer's death to seize power. Satisfied that the time-bomb was ready, he took two bottles of brandy, placed them on a table, inserted the bomb inside an open package and shoved the bottles on top of it. Then, without hesitating, he walked out of the building followed by his aide and made for the airstrip where the Condor waiting to take Hitler back to Germany stood.

As he approached the machine Otto Reiter, an SS officer, stopped him and demanded to know what he was doing. General von Tresckow stood stiffly, his manner cold and overbearing as he stared back at the white-faced SS man with skeletal cheekbones. After a few seconds Reiter's eyes dropped from the chilly stare and looked at the package which the General shoved at him.

'A little present for a friend at the Wolf's Lair which I am about to place aboard the plane. Now, do I walk through you and over you or will you get out of the bloody way? Alternatively, I can ask the Fuhrer himself – explaining that you have exceeded your rank and a spell at the front might teach you discipline.'

Reiter, his mind half-paralysed with the cold, shivered at the threat and stood aside. Climbing up inside the Condor, von Tresckow walked along between the special seats which had been fitted into the aircraft, peered through a frosted-up window to see the silhouettes of Reiter engaged in conversation with Schlabrendorff, and jammed the package under one of the. seats. Straightening his cap, he left the aircraft, sneezing violently as he passed Reiter, and returned to his quarters a short distance from the conference building.

The General would normally have attended the conference but at the last moment he had pleaded an attack of influenza to his chief, von Kluge, and now – away from his aide's presence – his outwardly calm demeanour changed. Sinking onto the mattress of his trestle bed he was wracked with anxiety. So many things could go wrong and his head was now well and truly on the block.

Would that swine of an SS officer, Reiter, decide to board the plane for a last-minute check? He seemed to have been satisfied with his glimpse of the two necks of the brandy bottles protruding from the package. Would the Fuhrer – as he had so often in the past – change his schedule at the last moment? The man seemed to have an uncanny instinct for danger. He had so far survived six different attempts on his life. There was even a rumour von Tresckow had once heard that he had possessed a double – someone who could pass for Hitler himself in appearance. Was it indeed Adolf Hitler who at this moment was haranguing von Kluge's staff?

'Damnit, I used not to be so full of doubts,' he said to himself. It must be this accursed Russian cold which ate its way into the system and numbed all logical thought. He looked up, the door opened and Schlabrendorff appeared.

'He is just leaving! He is about to board the plane!' 'What did I tell you?'

The General stood up and pressed his palm against the ice-cold glass of the window. His own room was also filled with the stench of fumes from the oil-heater. He was not sure which he hated most: that ghastly stink which kept you alive or the dreaded cold which made it hard to think, an effort to move. Resolutely he held his hand against the numbing glass until they could just see through the outline of his palm-print the blurred figure of the Fuhrer.

'You understand, von Kluge,' Hitler repeated, 'one giant hammer-blow with massed tanks and men. With the huge force under your command – larger than any general has directed in this war – you will drive on and on! Non-stop until you reach Moscow! Not one chance for the enemy to recover from the initial shock! Ignore taking prisoners…' His hypnotic eyes fixed von Kluge. 'As in France in 1940 you keep up the momentum – roll over the swine! On and on until you have the domes of St Basil in your artillery sights!'

'I understand, mein Fuhrer! With the new forces you are sending it shall be done..

Deliberately lingering in the terrible cold as an example, Hitler gripped von Kluge's arm and softened his voice. 'You are about to make history, my friend. A hundred years from now the historians will still be writing about the Second Battle of Moscow which finally destroyed Stalin and burned the Communist plague from the face of the globe!'

He turned away and behind him von Kluge, one of the shrewdest and most experienced of Hitler's commanders, felt a sensation of excitement rising inside him. The unique power of Hitler to inspire men was working again. He saluted as the Fuhrer walked slowly towards the waiting Condor.

Reiter's heavily armed SS guard was ready for his departure, drawn up in two lines as Hitler walked very slowly between them, staring into each face. The cold seemed not to affect him at all; long ago as a pauper during his youth in Vienna he had learned to ignore the elements, to summon up his unique willpower to withstand all discomfort. Then, at the foot of the staircase leading up to the aircraft he paused. Something was wrong.

His intuitive Sixth sense told him something was wrong. What could it be? As the snow fell softly he looked round for a clue. Von Kluge's GS01, General von Tresckow, had been absent from the war council. Something to do with suffering a bout of influenza. Why had that thought come into his mind? He remained motionless, indifferent to the insidious wind from the East freezing his face. The double column of SS guards stood equally motionless, their right arms raised in the Hitler salute. In the far distance the Fuhrer could hear a sound like muted thunder, the rumble of gunfire at the front carried all the way to Smolensk by the wind.

Inside his quarters General von Tresckow watched the scene through the de-frosted shape of his palm- print which was rapidly misting up. He dared not apply his frozen hand again; the movement might be seen – even by the Fuhrer who seemed to miss nothing.

'He's hesitating – he's suspicious…'

In the tension of the moment Schlabrendorff found himself whispering with fear. His legs felt like jelly and he was cursing inwardly. How could they have performed such an insane act?

'Yes,' von Tresckow agreed sombrely, 'that blasted sixth sense is at work. It's uncanny.'

Already he could picture himself standing in front of a firing squad; erect, stripped of all his medals; the order given; the line of rifle barrels levelled at him; the brief command. 'Fire!' Then oblivion. With an effort of will, worthy of the Fuhrer himself, he maintained an outward air of composure and waited.

Hitler had still not boarded the plane. The raised arms of the SS guard were almost frozen rigid in their posture. Field Marshal von Kluge and his staff stood a few yards away at attention. Von Kluge was still experiencing a sensation of exhilaration. Before Hitler's arrival he had been despondent; the more Russians you killed the more of them appeared. It had been a nightmare.

Now he was turning over in his mind the new plan. The more he thought about it the more sure he was it would work. It had done so in Poland and in Russia it would succeed. But this time the victory would be colossal, earth-shaking. The whole Red Army would be annihilated in one shattering onslaught. Only a man with Hitler's mesmeric powers could have changed the mind of so calculating a commander as von Kluge in one short conference.

Suddenly Hitler raised his own arm and the cry ' Heil Hitler ' echoed round the bleak, snowbound encampment of broken buildings. Without a word the Fuhrer turned, mounted the steps to the plane, disappeared inside. The door was closed as the pilot fired his engines, the steps were hauled away and the machine began to move bumpily over the freshly cleared airstrip.

Inside the plane Hitler took off his cap and coat, handed them to an aide who shook them free from snow, and walked rapidly along the corridor. He chose the seat in front of the one under which von Tresckow had placed the time-bomb and called for his briefcase. He needed something to occupy his mind: he detested flying as much as he loved being driven at high speed in a car.

The stern expression he had adopted when facing the SS guard disappeared. Despite his dislike of planes his face relaxed into a smile, the smile which had charmed – and disarmed – so many Western leaders. As he extracted a folded map of France and the Low Countries showing the locations of the dummy encampments, the plane left the ground.

Von Kluge and his staff still stood in the cold, watching the machine disappear into the murky overcast, the machine carrying the greatest political and military genius since Napoleon and Julius Caesar. Evil he might be in many of his methods, but his predecessors had not been saints. And he had not had any of their advantages in upbringing and professional training.

He had risen from the gutter, his only weapons his extraordinary powers of speech and supreme willpower and belief in his own destiny. Alone he had done it: had dragged a nation of eighty million from the depths of degradation and despair to become the most feared and mighty power in the world.

But two other hidden men also watched the tiny blur of the plane disappear into the sky. Von Tresckow and Schlabrendorff turned away from the window and the latter wiped beads of sweat from his forehead. Even the strong-willed von Tresckow sank on to a chair.

'We've done it!' Schlabrendorff said jubilantly.

'The bomb still has to detonate,' his superior reminded him. He roused himself from the feeling of torpor which was a reaction to the strain they had undergone. 'And I must send the signal to Berlin to warn Olbricht…'

Leaving his quarters, he strode briskly through the snow to the signals building which housed the direct line to Berlin. Inside he told the operator to leave him alone. 'I am sending a highly confidential message,' he remarked curtly. Waiting until the door was closed, he rang Berlin and asked to be put through at once to General Olbricht, Chief of the Home Army who commanded the troops in the capital.

'Von Tresckow here,' he informed Olbricht when the General came on the line. 'The present I promised you has been delivered…'

He cut the connection the moment he had spoken the key words; these days no one knew when the bloody Gestapo was monitoring calls Now everything was ready: as soon as the news of Hitler's death reached Berlin, Olbricht would move, using his garrison troops to seize all major control points in Berlin – the War Ministry, the radio stations, the Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment and so on.

He walked out of the signals building and stared briefly in the direction where Hitler's plane had disappeared on its long flight to the Wolf's Lair in East Prussia. Everything now hung on one thing. The explosion of the bomb.