Killing Hitler (26 page)

Despite these successes, however, his greatest scalps eluded him. The first, the German minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, descended on Rovno in the summer of 1943, but his attendant security regime left little opportunity for Kuznetsov to carry out an attack.
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The second was the German governor-general of the Ukraine, Erich Koch. Though he succeeded in making the acquaintance of Koch’s orderly and a member of his personal guard, Kuznetsov only once got close enough to Koch to make an attempt.
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On that occasion, despite engaging in conversation with his target, he was unable to act, presumably due to the presence of security personnel. Legend has it, however, that during the exchange he learned crucial details of the forthcoming Kursk offensive, which, of course, he duly passed to Moscow.
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As the front neared in 1944, Kuznetsov went underground again and joined a local partisan group, the People’s Avengers. On trying to cross the front line, however, he was captured by Ukrainian nationalists, and opted to commit suicide with a grenade. In a letter to be opened in the event of his death, he wrote of his love for his Russian motherland and concluded: “I will go into the mortal fight with the name of Stalin: my father, my friend and my teacher. Give him my greetings.”
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He was posthumously awarded the title of Hero of the Soviet Union.

One of Kuznetsov’s fellow agents was Nikolai Khokhlov. Described by later historians as “one of the outstanding Soviet heroes of World War Two,” Khokhlov was infiltrated into a POW camp to perfect his German, and became one of the first NKVD agents to operate behind enemy lines.
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He apparently began his underground career as a member of a group of circus performers—a “theatrical combat team”—who, somewhat bizarrely, planned to throw grenades at visiting Nazis while juggling.
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In 1943, however, Khokhlov graduated to more serious matters. That autumn, he was flown into Minsk, behind the front line, where his target was the local Nazi commander, Wilhelm
Kube. A journalist and nationalist agitator from Silesia, Kube had joined the Nazi Party in 1927 and had advanced rapidly through the ranks, mainly due to his talent as a public speaker. After holding a number of administrative positions within the Nazi hierarchy, he was appointed
Generalkommissar
for Byelorussia three weeks after the attack on the Soviet Union. Though he would later gain a reputation as a moderate and even fall foul of the SS, he was nonetheless ultimately responsible for the barbaric occupation policy pursued in the region. To the Soviets, Kube was a war criminal to be slated for execution. As Khokhlov’s handler put it: “The grave has been waiting for him for too long.”
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Once established in Minsk, Khokhlov savored the frisson of life undercover. Smartly turned out in his German uniform, he and an accomplice would visit the officers’ club or the casino, saluting their superiors, being saluted in turn, and falling easily into conversation with their neighbors. He had been given the identity of
Oberleutnant Otto
Witgenstein, an officer of the German
Feldpolizei
, or Military Police. He would explain that he was on leave from the front, and had immaculately forged orders to back up his story if required. He would later recall: “I began to feel almost exuberant. Here we were…with a bunch of Nazi soldiers, and they did not have the least suspicion who we were.”
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In due course, and in cooperation with the local partisans, Khokhlov set about planning the assassination. A frontal attack was out of the question. Kube ran a tight security regime, which had been honed by a number of unsuccessful attacks.
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He employed loyal bodyguards, traveled in a closed car, and was never seen out in public. Even his office hours were erratic, and a personal audience with him was unlikely. His only possible point of weakness, Khokhlov concluded, was his housemaid, a Byelorussian named Jelena Masanik. After engineering a meeting with Masanik, Khokhlov played on her patriotism and persuaded her to help him. At their next meeting, he brought with him an innocuous-looking bundle in garish pink wrapping paper, containing a British-made magnetic mine. He suggested that she might conceal it in Kube’s quarters during her cleaning rounds.
She was alarmed at such a prospect, protesting that she wanted to keep away from “the terrors of war.” Yet, after Khokhlov’s expert persuasion, she left promising to think about his proposal. Three days later, on 23 September 1943, Khokhlov received the news that Kube had been killed. The previous evening, Masanik had placed the bomb beneath Kube’s bed, set it to explode in the early hours, and then disappeared into the partisan underground. Khokhlov was stunned. He had expected that another meeting would be necessary to convince his reluctant assassin to act. Yet, he mused, “the mission was accomplished…the Butcher of Byelorussia had been assassinated.”
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Khokhlov went on to fight with numerous partisan groups in Byelorussia and Lithuania before being recalled to Moscow. He was being groomed for covert activity abroad, and in the postwar years he would undertake missions in Romania, France, Austria, Italy, and Denmark. His last mission, in 1954, was the assassination of an exiled Russian émigré in Frankfurt, West Germany. Disillusioned, he confronted his target and told him that he intended to defect. He became the first major intelligence defector of the Cold War, and his astonishing testimony to the CIA seriously weakened KGB foreign actions for years to come.
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It has been claimed that Khokhlov, Kuznetsov, and their fellow agents assassinated as many as 137,000 German officers and soldiers during World War Two.
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This figure is highly questionable and smacks somewhat of the fevered imaginings of a Soviet statistician. But one thing is incontrovertible: the assassins of the NKVD clearly had the skill, training, and sheer audacity to operate for long periods behind enemy lines and to carry out their missions quickly and without detection. As Stalin had demanded, they had made life for the occupier on the Eastern Front distinctly uncomfortable.

By 1941, Hitler no longer had the boyish enthusiasm for the front that had been in evidence in the Polish campaign. Nonetheless, at times of crisis, he felt the need to be closer to the action.
Soon after the start of Operation Barbarossa, therefore, he began looking for a suitable location for a new headquarters on the Eastern Front, and in September 1941, one was found near the town of Vinnitsa in western Ukraine. The site, surrounded by pine forests and farmland, was swiftly cordoned off and a complex of wooden huts and log cabins was erected using local forced labor and prisoners of war. By the time Hitler arrived in July 1942—descending with his traveling circus of advisors, stenographers, doctors, and secretaries in a fleet of sixteen aircraft—it already boasted two bunkers, a cinema, and a further dozen or so buildings.
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It was given the code name “Wehrwolf.”
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Contemporaries described Wehrwolf as comfortable rather than luxurious. Its paneled ceilings and pine-clad walls were faintly reminiscent of an Alpine ski lodge, while Albert Speer haughtily described the dining hall as “rather like a railroad station restaurant in a small town.”
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Hitler’s secretary, Christa Schroeder, was even less complimentary, complaining about the mice and the all-pervasive damp.
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The quarters were simply furnished, with plain wooden tables and chairs, and food, though plentiful, was monotonous, due to the requirements of Hitler’s sensitive stomach. As at Rastenburg, mosquitoes were a constant plague, and all those present had to take a bitter-tasting antimalaria medicine every day. The greatest problem, however, was the climate. Unbearably hot and humid in the summer, Vinnitsa was also bitterly cold in winter.

Hitler hated Wehrwolf. He loathed both the daytime heat and the nightly invasions of mosquitoes. He endured interminable headaches and was invariably in a foul temper, frequently arguing with his generals. His Luftwaffe adjutant recalled Vinnitsa “plunged in gloom” after one such confrontation:

Hitler had withdrawn into seclusion. The situation conferences were no longer being held in the
Wehrmacht
Command Staff house, but in the large study at Hitler’s quarters. When one entered he would not offer his hand but acknowledge the caller’s presence by merely extending his arm. He dined alone in his bunker.
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Some sources have suggested that the cause of Hitler’s ill-temper and his headaches was radiation poisoning emanating from the granite used at the site.
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There may be something in this. Many of Hitler’s closest associates noticed a profound change in his behavior during his time at Vinnitsa; he would descend into uncontrollable rages and became worryingly unpredictable.
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Nonetheless, he spent two extended stays in the complex: more than three months in the late summer and autumn of 1942, and a month in the spring of the following year.

Security was predictably tight. The Nazis had succeeded in removing the real and imagined threats to their rule in the region the previous autumn by a brutal program of ethnic cleansing. In Vinnitsa that September, around fifteen thousand Jews and other “undesirables” were murdered in a two-day killing spree.
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The executions continued sporadically until the following summer. In January 1942, the Jews of the village of Strizhevka, close to Wehrwolf, were liquidated, as they were considered to pose a special risk to the site.
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In all, only about one thousand of Vinnitsa’s Jews were spared for use in the construction program, and once Wehrwolf was complete, they, too, were murdered. Those local inhabitants who were permitted to remain in the vicinity were strictly vetted. Everyone over the age of fourteen was issued with a personal pass to be carried at all times on pain of death. They were not permitted to plant crops within a hundred meters of the forest and were forbidden to enter the complex unless they had written authorization.

Wehrwolf itself was set in a secured rectangular enclosure of about 1 square kilometer. It was surrounded by a 2-meter mesh fence and an elaborate cat’s cradle of barbed wire called the “Flanders hedge,” which stood around a meter high and fully 3 meters wide.
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The perimeter was also studded with machine-gun nests and patrolled by SS guards with dogs. A sign on the road entrance proclaimed the fiction that the site was a sanatorium. Inside that enclosure, a smaller security zone—barely 400 meters square—contained the complex of huts and barracks blocks that made up the headquarters. Within this zone, all food was strictly controlled and sampled by a taster, the water supply was checked
daily, and oxygen tanks stood ready if required. Even the returning laundry was X-rayed.
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With Hitler encamped on its northern outskirts, Vinnitsa naturally became a hotbed of military activity and a virtual outpost of the German General Staff. In addition, the SS, Gestapo, and SD all established their own presence in the town. Numerous other residences were also created in the vicinity for Nazi paladins. Relations with the local Ukrainian population were apparently good, at least initially. Göring was chauffeured around in an open-top Mercedes,
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and Speer felt safe enough to dispense with his guard detail.
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Another regular visitor noted that “we used to walk unescorted through the woods and swam in the River Bug nearby…there were never any incidents.”
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Such confidence, however, was misplaced. Though the Germans went to some lengths to conceal the installation and preserve its secrecy, it was difficult to hide a flight of sixteen transport aircraft and the influx of thousands of associated personnel. Stalin, meanwhile, was extremely keen to know of Hitler’s whereabouts and pestered the British in the spring of 1942 with requests for the relevant intelligence.
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The same urgent demands would have been transmitted to the partisans. And, though the Ukraine was generally unfavorable territory for the partisan movement, there was nonetheless a substantial underground network in and around Vinnitsa. One contemporary source noted the existence of five groups in the region, with the largest of them consisting of up to three hundred men.
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They soon began to target the new arrivals. Attacks on German patrols in the region proliferated. Himmler’s pilot, Karl Schnäbele, was murdered in broad daylight by partisans in Zhitomir, in October 1942.
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Göring’s car was ambushed and machine-gunned near Vinnitsa.
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Farther west, the head of the SA, Viktor Lutze, was attacked in his car and fatally wounded.
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Ominously, Hitler’s arrival at Wehrwolf, in July 1942, had coincided with the transfer to the region of the Central Staff of the Ukrainian partisan movement.

The NKVD was also soon alerted to Hitler’s new headquarters. One source states that its interest had initially been spurred by an announcement in a local Ukrainian newspaper of a performance
in Vinnitsa of Wagner’s
Tannhäuser.
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It may also be that a downed German fighter ace, Franz Josef Beerenbrock, betrayed the location while under interrogation in November 1942. (Beerenbrock had received the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross from Hitler in person at Wehrwolf only three months earlier.) Subsequent investigations in the Vinnitsa region revealed the comings and goings of numerous prominent Nazis. Soon, a detachment of partisans was sent to establish the exact location of the headquarters. And, following the capture of two German officers, maps and even detailed plans of the Wehrwolf complex were passed to Moscow.
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