The Leader And The Damned

Chapter Forty-Four

Christ-Rose.

Watch on the Rhine.

These were the first two code-names which Hitler chose for the secret offensive to be launched against the Western Allies through the defiles and forests of the Ardennes.

But this was not May 1940 when the massive Ardennes breakthrough at Sedan across the Meuse had heralded the defeat of the BEF and the destruction of the great French Army – all based on a plan the Rihrer of those days had worked on and approved himself.

Autumn Fog.

This was the final code-name chosen for the new Ardennes operation by the German Army. And the date was 11 December 1944. The Allies had landed in Western Europe on 6 June and were now close to the Rhine. In the East the Red Army was sweeping ever westward across the Balkans and central Europe. And always the advances had been made with prior knowledge of just where the opposing German troops were, on information supplied by Woodpecker and transmitted via Lucy in Lucerne to Stalin.

'Autumn Fog is crazy,' Jodl confided to Keitel in the dining-car as the Fuhrer's train, Amerika, approached Hitler's temporary headquarters in the West.

'Possibly, but why?' enquired the stiff-necked Keitel.

'I remember his exact words in April 1940 when he rejected the idea of reviving the First World War strategy. He said, "This is just the old Schlieffen Plan – you won't get away with that twice running…” Now he's committing the same error himself. Autumn Fog is a repeat performance of his brilliant strategic plan when we were here in 1940..

'Maybe you'd like to voice your objections to this chap,' suggested Keitel as Martin Bormann entered the coach.

The Reichsleiter, self-confident as always, despite his dwarf-like stature, strutted through the coach, his eyes flickering over every passenger in the dining-car as though he might still detect the traitor Hitler was always convinced was buried among those closest to him.

His eyes met Jodl's, who stared back at him ironically until he had passed their table. The Chief of Staff picked up the conversation where he had left off.

'I find the whole business very strange – as though the Fuhrer of 1940 was a different man from the Fuhrer of 1944…'

'He is ill. He was subjected to the bomb explosion at the Wolf's Lair…'

Keitel stopped speaking and began eating some more bread. It was a trait Jodl had noticed often in Keitel – he issued broad statements but if you listened carefully he never really said anything, anything that could be quoted against him.

'We're even going to the same headquarters – Felsennest – as Hitler used in 1940,' Jodl continued. 'The Eagle's Eyrie. I find that an unsettling omen for Autumn Fog…'

' Gentlemen! ' It was. Bormann calling out from the end of the coach. 'Conference in the Fuhrer's quarters. At once, if you please. Breakfast will wait.'

'Breakfast will get cold,' Keitel muttered.

Autumn Fog dissipated. Literally. While fog shrouded the forests of the Ardennes the Panzer divisions advanced, breaking through towards the vital bridges over the river Meuse, as they had in May 1940.

Then the weather changed. The skies cleared and the overwhelming might of the Allied air forces pounded the Panzers, forcing both the German Panthers and Tigers to retreat. Hitler seemed to have lost his military flair.

Hitler arrived at Felsennest on 11 December 1944. He left the place for Berlin on 15 January 1945 with his entourage – including the inevitable trio; Bormann, Jodl and Keitel. He was never to leave Berlin alive.

30 April 1945. Berlin was in flames. Smoke and falling ashes mingled with the red glare of the inferno. The Red Army was advancing into the centre of the city, was very near the underground bunker where Hitler and Eva Braun had committed suicide.

Their bodies, carried up into the courtyard outside the bunker, had been liberally soused with petrol and set alight: Nothing was now left except their bones.

Panic gripped the remaining members of his entourage as they tried to find a route to escape from the Russians, to surrender to the Allies. In the early hours of 1 May Martin Bormann joined a group of fellow-escapers.

They planned to make their way along the underground rail track from the station below the Wilhelmplatz. Out of sight of any Russian patrols in the streets above, they would emerge again above ground at the Friedrichstrasse station. From there they would cross the river Spree and slip through the Russian lines.

The plan went wrong from the beginning. The city, bombarded by Soviet guns, was in ruins, the streets littered with giant pieces of masonry; there was hardly a single intact building in sight. Dust from powdered masonry was everywhere, coating their clothes, polluting their mouths.

'We must keep moving,' Bormann. told Artur Axmann, a Hitler Youth leader. 'Get behind that tank – it will shield us from Russian small arms fire..

They stumbled on through the night, using the German tank as a mobile wall as it fired repeatedly into the enemy lines. Night was turned into day by the incessant blood-red flares drifting down from above. The noise was an assault on the ear-drums. The detonation of Russian shells exploding. The crash of one of the few remaining buildings collapsing, walls heaving outwards, crumbling in the streets. The Asiatic hordes had now over-run one of the West's greatest capitals.

'Get down!' Bormann warned.

There was a sinister hissing noise. Something struck the tank they had been following. It stopped, bursting into a searing flame Bormann's uniform was blackened with smoke, smeared with filth. Leaving Axmann crouched behind a pile of rubble Bormann pressed on.

The last Western witness who saw Bormann alive was an SS Major Joachim Tiburtius who was dose to the Reichsleiter and his companion when the tank was destroyed. He couldn't see Bormann after the explosion and made his way towards the German lines which were still holding.

Fifteen minutes later Tiburtius, alone in the hell Berlin had become, saw one building still intact among its neighbours which were silhouetted against the flaming glare like jagged teeth. The Hotel Atlas. He entered the building. In the lobby he paused in sheer astonishment.

Martin Bormann was- walking across the lobby towards the exit. That he should have survived was a miracle. But he was no longer wearing his uniform. Somewhere he had found a suit of civilian clothes. Major Tiburtius waited eight years before he reported what he saw that night. His story was printed in the Berne newspaper Der Bund in the issue of 17 February 1953.

He (Bormann) had by then changed into civilian clothes. We pushed on together towards the Schiffbauerdamm and the Albrechtstrasse. Then I finally lost sight of him…

Stalin himself had despatched to Berlin the special, highly secret unit of the Red Army charged with a dual task. An unusual aspect of the unit of eleven, heavily-armed men, was the fact that an interpreter was attached to it – and that this individual was a woman, Yelena Rzhevskaya.

Even stranger was the fact that the real commander of this unit was Yelena. For her first task she had been personally instructed by Stalin to find Hitler 'alive or dead…'

Barely one kilometre from the Hotel Atlas, Bormann walked straight into the arms of this unit.

He stood quite still as the unit surrounded him, aiming their machine-pistols. He was astounded when Yelena appeared and addressed him in fluent German.

'You are Martin Bormann?'

'That is so.'

'And where shall we find Hitler?' she asked.

'Outside the underground bunker by the ruins of the new Chancellery. I can tell you how to get there…'

'It will not be necessary,' Yelena interjected, 'we have our map of the whole of Berlin.'

'Only his bones are left,' Bormann continued. 'They poured petrol over the bodies…'

'Bodies?'

'Eva Braun was burnt beside him. They got married just before…'

'You can tell us the details later,' she said brusquely. She gave brief orders in Russian to the unit and seven of the eleven men in Red Army uniform disappeared. 'Now, Mr Martin Bormann,' continued Yelena, 'you will come with us. A plane is waiting to fly you to Moscow.'

The Russian aircraft carrying Yelena, Bormann and the four other members of the special unit landed at a military airfield outside Moscow. Two large black limousines were waiting, their windows masked with amber-coloured net curtains.

'You sit in the back with me,' Yelena informed Bormann.

It was still dark, the gloomy dark of early morning with a sky full of snow, when the first limousine entered the Kremlin. The Reichsleiter peered curiously out, remembering Ribbentrop's description of this strange place after his return from signing the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939 which triggered off the outbreak of the Second World War.

The limousine, which had moved at nerve-racking speed on the drive from the airfield, now barely crawled as it moved slowly into the mysterious inner city. Bormann had the odd feeling he was leaving life itself behind.

The limousine drove across a courtyard past the largest cannon of its day – so enormous that no one had ever dared fire it. He stared at the little wooden houses and cathedrals which formed a world all their own. Finally the limousine pulled up outside a modern administration block. Yelena ushered him inside. Stalin was waiting for them. The only other occupant of the small room was Laventri Beria. The Soviet chief, dressed in his full uniform of Generalissimo, waited until Yelena had left before he spoke, his tone quite casual, a malicious glint in his yellowish eyes.

'This,' said Stalin, pointing at Bormann, 'is Woodpecker.'

Beria was speechless. Word that a special unit had been sent to Berlin had reached his all-hearing ears and he had wondered why the NKVD had not been used. Now he began to understand. He fiddled with his pince nez before he reacted, staring at Martin Bormann who no longer looked like a dwarf. Stalin and the German were of approximately the same height and build.

'So you had a pipeline right into Hitler's headquarters…'

'From the moment he launched his attack on us… 'But it seemed to take you a long time to believe me,' Bormann remarked petulantly.

Beria's normally impassive face froze. No one interrupted Stalin. The Generalissimo seemed unperturbed by the gross impertinence. He pulled at the end of his moustache and his expression was crafty.

'You were planted many years ago. I had to be certain your role as spy had not been penetrated, that you were not being forced to supply disinformation.'

'I dealt with the new Hitler rather well,' Bormann preened himself.

'Ah! The second Hitler…' Stalin was amused. 'He never existed. It was always the same old Hitler. That is our version of history, is it not, Beria?'

'Of course.'

'You. can rely on my discretion,' Bormann assured them.

Stalin chuckled. 'I am sure we can! You will be taken to another place for interrogation, naturally…'

'In a way,' Beria interjected slyly, 'we might even say that Woodpecker won the war…'

'I would not go so far as to say that,' Bormann replied with unconvincing modesty.

'It is time for your formal interrogation,' Stalin said abruptly. 'The car is waiting for you at the main entrance..

He pressed a bell and three men in civilian clothes appeared as though awaiting the summons. The three NKVD men escorted the bewildered Bormann back to the limousine which had brought him to the Kremlin. The same driver drove him the short distance to the notorious No 2, Dzerzhinsky Square, the anonymous grey stone building which was NKVD headquarters. Oddly enough, before the Revolution, it had been the property of the All-Russian Insurance Company.

There was a weird atmosphere as the limousine drove inside the courtyard surrounded by buildings which closed it off from the outside world. All the staff who normally worked there had been given a day's holiday. 'To celebrate the capture of Berlin.'

Two more NKVD officers in civilian clothes joined the three men accompanying Bormann as he alighted from the car. He was immediately hand-cuffed and stood against a wall. Armed with rifles, the five NKVD men formed a firing squad. Bormann sagged against the wall in horrific disbelief as the rifles were aimed at him.

'Fire…!'

Following the precedent set by Hitler's death, the body was soaked in petrol and set alight. The ashes of the Reichsleiter were later scattered from the air over Lake Peipus.

Once the ashes were collected, a much larger contingent of NKVD officers, totally ignorant of what had taken place, arrived. They had been told that certain of their colleagues had been found guilty of treachery against the state. The five men who had formed the firing squad together with the driver of the limousine and the pilot who had flown Bormann to Moscow were shot. There was now only one person left besides Stalin and Beria who knew that Martin Bormann had ever reached Moscow.

In his office at the Kremlin Stalin waited with Beria for the first 'phone call. The Generalissimo was relaxed. He chatted with his Minister of State Security, smoking his pipe.

He picked up the 'phone himself when it rang. He listened for less than a minute and ended the call. He took a few more puffs at his pipe before he spoke to Beria.

'Bormann is dead. You can start the campaign of rumours. I might even give a hand myself…'

'And the bones of the second Hitler..?' Beria ventured.

'Already collected by the special team Yelena took to Berlin. They have been scattered over the Baltic. So they will never be found. It was a necessary conclusion to this war. We cannot risk a cult growing up of new Nazis worshipping the grave of the Fuhrer, can we?'

'Of course not. It was well done.'

Beria wisely said no more. He knew there were a dozen other reasons why the faithful Woodpecker, recruited so many years earlier, must disappear. Generalissimo Stalin was posing as the military genius who had won the war. The myth would be destroyed if it was ever revealed that he had known the German order of battle as the Red Army, a five-million strong horde reinforced from the Far East, swept across Europe.

It was equally essential that no one should ever know of the existence of the second Hitler. If this were exposed there were the makings of a second myth. The real Hitler had been a military genius.

He had over-ruled his generals by sanctioning the audacious invasion of Denmark and Norway in 1940. He had shown the same insight when he tore up the Schlieffen Plan for the invasion of the West, backing Manstein. and Guderian with their operation for a blitzkrieg through Sedan against France and Great Britain.

Had Western Intelligence agents found the remains of Hitler's burnt-out corpse – and under Trevor- Roper's guidance they looked hard enough for it – pathologists could well have proved it was the wrong body.

The savage irony of the story is that it started with blood. When the Fuhrer's plane returning from Smolensk was blown up in mid-air, just before landing at the Wolf's Lair, it triggered off a bloodbath.

It ended in a similar bloodbath. For similar motives Stalin liquidated everyone – with two exceptions – who knew Bormann had been brought to Moscow. The men who shot Bormann in their turn were killed, by men who knew nothing of Bormann's journey to Moscow.

Yelena Rzhevskaya, the woman who commanded the special squad flown to Berlin, was one exception. Even dictators can act inconsistently. There is evidence that Stalin had a soft spot for this remarkable woman who led her team into the raging inferno of Berlin.

'Yelena, apart from myself and Beria, you are the only person alive who knows what really happened. So, if anything should ever leak out I will know where to look, wouldn't you agree?'

It was probably something like that. It is a fact that in 1965, twelve years after the death of Stalin in 1953, Yelena contributed an article to the Russian journal, Znamya, which she called Berlinskie Stranitsky – Berlin Notes. In this she alluded to her special mission to the German capital 'to find Hitler, alive or dead…' The article was vague and no reference was made to Martin Bormann. This was in the days of the 'great thaw'. Two years later in 1967 Yuri Andropov took over the post as Chairman of the Ministry of State Security and revived the sinister power of the KGB.

As he had said he would to Beria, Stalin did take the opportunity to do his bit in fuelling the rumours Beria's Soviet agents in South America were spreading that Bormann had escaped to that continent.

He was talking to Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt's special representative. He inserted the remark casually into their conversation.

'I have serious doubts as to whether the Fuhrer is dead. He surely escaped and is in hiding in Argentina with Martin Bormann.'

This was Stalin's only epitaph for Woodpecker.