Killing Hitler (23 page)

The resultant confusion was not helped by a curious report, released from the British archives in 1998, that formed part of SOE’s planning for their own proposed assassination of Hitler. That account, apparently supplied by Polish intelligence, gave a date of autumn 1941 and cited a
third
nearby location, Czarna Woda.
¹¹⁵
It claimed that while Hitler’s train was inexplicably delayed at a neighboring station, a scheduled passenger train passed it and was then derailed at the cost of 430 lives. Despite arousing some considerable interest in the British press at the time of its release, the document appeared to be little more than an amalgam of other events, half-truths, and embellishments. German sources, for example, make no mention of such a spectacular derailment, and (as is now known) Hitler was safely ensconced at Rastenburg at the time and did not leave until early October. Most implausibly, the document claims that the rails were detonated by shortwave remote control. Given that the AK often struggled to arm itself with even the most basic weaponry, this seems improbable in the extreme. One can only conclude that the SOE officer charged with drawing up the report either was fed spurious intelligence or allowed his imagination to run away with him.

So, what
can
be salvaged from the wreckage of Sable’s operation? It is at least incontrovertible that a derailment occurred on the stretch of track between Dirschau and Konitz on the night of 8 June 1942. It is also known that Hitler
was
intending to travel to Berlin that night.
¹¹⁶
Barring a most fortuitous coincidence, this would suggest that the Pomeranian underground
had
been furnished with details of Hitler’s itinerary by an inside source, most probably a railway employee. Sable’s team, therefore, staged their attack in the sincere belief that their target was Amerika, and it was therefore logical that their own subsequent accounts of the event should conform to that preconception. Thus, an earlier scheduled service was assumed to be the dummy train, and regular German soldiers stumbling from the wreckage were considered to be the
Leibstandarte.

But this is not to denigrate the efforts of Sable and his men; it is merely to acknowledge that there is much work still to be done before a definitive version of the events of that night emerges from the gloom of unreliable memoirs and speculation after the fact. Sable, for his part, was not discouraged. He continued to lead his men, and by 1944 had the confidence to harass and ambush German forces in his district. Wounded three times, he ended the war in a Soviet field hospital.
¹¹⁷

Neither did Forest cease his subversive activities. Indeed, he masterminded a second derailment—this time of a goods train—on the same stretch of track barely two weeks later. Appointed an AK regional commander at Kościerzyna, he was arrested by the Gestapo in April 1944. Following sustained torture and interrogation, he attempted to poison himself by eating soap, but succeeded only in securing a transfer to the Stutthof concentration camp, where he was finally executed in July 1944.
¹¹⁸

The Polish underground has, until very recently, been strangely absent from the pantheon of would-be assassins of Adolf Hitler. This absence may, in part, have something to do with language. Though the events outlined here have been openly discussed in Poland, especially in the last decade, they have not yet found an echo in German-or English-language works on the subject.

It should also be conceded that the savagery of the German occupation was such that comparatively few of the participants involved in such risky operations survived the war to put pen to paper. Many, such as Forest, found only death in the concentration camps or in the torture cells of the Gestapo. Others were slaughtered in the Dantean hell of the Warsaw rising. Of the élite Parasol battalion, for example, which carried out many of the “liquidations” of German officials, only around three hundred soldiers survived the war, barely one in three of their former number.
¹¹⁹

But there is another, darker reason for this absence. After the defeat of Nazi Germany, Poland was occupied by another totalitarian power, the Soviet Union, which was just as inimical to the
activities of the wartime Polish underground as the Nazis had been. The Soviets could not tolerate any rival power base in their new satellite, so they began their reign by hunting down the leaders of the underground, denouncing them as spies, “crypto-fascists,” and collaborators and putting them on trial.
¹²⁰
In a string of high-profile court cases, the surviving members of the wartime underground were slandered, humiliated, and in many cases judicially murdered. Few escaped the maelstrom. In such circumstances, the historian should not be too surprised by the relative dearth of memoir accounts from veterans of the actions against Hitler. Those who were fortunate enough to survive the war also had to survive the peace, and the latter was best achieved by keeping one’s mouth firmly closed.

Sable, for instance, who would become the primary source for the attack on Hitler’s train, was handled in a less than heroic fashion by the Soviets. Arrested by the communist secret police in 1946 and again in 1950, he was sentenced to eighteen months of imprisonment for his role in the Polish underground. Thereafter, he suffered a nervous breakdown.
¹²¹

Another example was Theodore, the mastermind of the failed bomb attack on Hitler’s convoy in 1939. After returning to Poland from a German POW camp at the end of the war, Theodore was arrested by the communist secret police in Kraków the following year and was charged with membership of an illegal organization. Though condemned to death in 1947, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, of which he served ten years before being freed in the amnesty of 1956.
¹²²
Thereafter, to his death in 1974, he understandably refused to speak of his wartime activities and denied all knowledge of the attempt on Hitler’s life, even claiming not to have been in Warsaw at the time. One tiny clue suggests that his amnesia may have been tactical, however. As his wife later recounted, he would always refuse to travel along the stretch of New World Street where his bomb had been placed.
¹²³

In retrospect, it might appear surprising that the Polish underground—rightly hailed as the most active and effective resistance organization of the Second World War—should have failed
to target Hitler more often, or indeed more successfully. This conclusion is understandable, but only from the comfortable, peaceful perspective of the early twenty-first century. During the war, Poland was being crushed under the heel of the Nazi occupation, and the very survival of the Polish people was at stake. For all their ingenuity, daring, and skill, the agents of the Polish underground had much more immediate concerns. Their failure to assassinate Hitler was doubtless a tribute to the security arrangements surrounding their target, but it should also be seen as evidence of the diabolical conditions under which they were forced to operate. One should therefore not bemoan the fact that they tried and failed; one should applaud the fact that they tried at all.

^*
The title
“Armia-Krajowa”
was only used from the spring of 1942 onward, but for the sake of simplicity the term will be used here throughout.

CHAPTER 5
The Implacable Foe: The Soviet Union

I am extremely anxious to see Hitler dead.

—
JOSEF VISSARIONOVICH STALIN
¹

IN THE HOUR BEFORE DAWN ON THE LONGEST DAY OF
1941, the code word “Dortmund” crackled through countless field telephones and radio receivers on the eastern frontier of the greater German Reich. On that signal, forward German assault troops advanced, while 7,000 artillery pieces opened a withering barrage on the Soviet lines. They were embarking on the largest military operation in European history: 3.5 million men, supported by nearly 4,000 tanks and more than 2,500 aircraft, advancing along a front stretching 2,000 kilometers from the Baltic to the Black Sea.
²
Their Führer, in a message to the soldiers, described the coming conflict as a “war for…Europe’s destiny, for the future of the German Reich and the existence of our people.”
³
Operation Barbarossa had begun.

The Soviet response was initially one of surprise, confusion, and outright panic. Front-line soldiers, shaken from their sleep by
the crash of incoming artillery rounds and the rattle of advancing German armor, often fled. Baffled unit commanders radioed their superiors in vain to request instructions. Meanwhile, Soviet forces were being decimated where they stood. As the German columns advanced, prisoners were taken by the tens of thousands. Communications collapsed and entire Soviet armies ceased to exist. On that first day alone, twelve hundred aircraft—fully 20 percent of the Red Air Force—were destroyed.
⁴
The vast majority of them had failed even to get into the air. When Göring received the figures, he ordered a recount, convinced that they were exaggerated. A revised report increased the total by a quarter.
⁵

Yet for all the shock at the front, the only real surprise of Barbarossa was that the Soviets could have been surprised by the attack at all. British intelligence pinpointing the likely date, gleaned via the decryption of German Enigma signals, had been duly passed to the Soviet ambassador. Churchill himself had sent telegrams to Moscow. Soviet intelligence, too, primarily via the virtuoso spy Richard Sorge in Tokyo, had long been warning of an “initiation of hostilities” with Nazi Germany.
⁶
For weeks, Wehrmacht forces had been massing on the Soviet western frontier; the Luftwaffe had flown countless reconnaissance missions over Soviet territory. All of this had been noted and reported to Stalin.

Shortly before the attack, German deserters even braved crossing the front line to inform the Soviets of the impending assault. One, a former communist by the name of Alfred Liskow, swam the river Pruth to announce to the Red Army that the order to advance had been given. Yet all such reports were dismissed in Moscow as the work of “disinformers” and agents provocateurs—Sorge was ridiculed, Liskow was ordered shot. Stalin, terrified of offending the Germans, preferred to prevaricate and refused to believe the mounting evidence. Even as the most catastrophic reports began to arrive from the front, he refrained from ordering his forces to resist.
⁷

In the ensuing confusion, the Germans made rapid gains. Within the first week, the front had advanced by an average of around 200 kilometers. The cities of Riga, Minsk, and L’vov had
already fallen. Within a month, German armies had made further enormous advances in the north and center, and in the south they were approaching the Ukrainian capital, Kiev. Moscow was already under air attack.
⁸
In places, the front line fractured as huge encirclement battles yielded whole armies of Soviet prisoners; at Bialystok over 300,000 were captured, at Smolensk nearly 350,000. Hitler’s optimistic assessment of the parlous state of Stalin’s army appeared to have been borne out. Though the Soviets’ will to fight remained unbroken, they were poorly led and ill-supplied, with little answer to the now well-rehearsed tactics of the
Blitzkrieg.

The near collapse at the front was mirrored by a near collapse at the heart of the Soviet state. When Stalin learned of the size of the catastrophe he was facing and realized his own error in ignoring the imminent German attack, he suffered an apparent emotional and nervous breakdown, alternating between bleak depression and impotent rage. Briefly, the “Man of Steel” was broken, sulking unshaven and unwashed at his dacha for two days, receiving no one and refusing to answer his telephone. One colleague admitted that she had never seen him “so crushed.” Stalin himself was brutal in his assessment of the situation that he faced: “Lenin left us a great heritage,” he cursed, “…and we have fucked it up.”
⁹

Aside from the more immediate fears of military defeat and political collapse, Stalin doubtless felt that he had been personally humiliated. His earlier flirtation and alliance with Hitler had been, in part, the result of his fearful realization that the Western democracies would do little to halt German expansion. But that fear had been married to a wary admiration of the Führer. Despite their ideological differences, Stalin had instinctively felt that he could do business with Hitler, perhaps better than he could with the leaders of the Western democracies. He had admired his rival’s rise, his evident popularity and his brutal, uncompromising way with his opponents. In 1934, for example, when Hitler engineered the Röhm Purge against his own former allies in the SA, Stalin was said to have heartily approved, exclaiming “Hitler, what a lad!”
¹⁰

In alliance with Hitler from 1939, Stalin had also prospered politically. His own profile had been raised worldwide and, of course, he had succeeded in expanding the Soviet Union to the west, annexing new territories and restoring an approximation of the old Russian Imperial frontier. Yet, for all this, Stalin cannot have been under any illusions. He would have suspected that Hitler intended ultimately to attack him, and for this reason he had half-formed offensive plans of his own.
¹¹
Nonetheless, when he was beaten to the draw in the summer of 1941 and fell victim to a German attack, he would have viewed it as a stab in the back and a betrayal. And Stalin did not take betrayal at all well. He nurtured his hatreds and delighted in harboring grudges. He was, as a colleague recalled, a man for whom the very sweetest of victories was the perfectly executed revenge on an enemy.
¹²