Killing Hitler (27 page)

Once Hitler’s presence in Vinnitsa had been definitively established, a special operation, code-named “Munich,” was set up to investigate his routine there and examine the possibility of an assassination attempt. The plan was to use the experienced agent Dmitri Medvedev, one of Kuznetsov’s former accomplices from Rovno, to mastermind an infiltration of Hitler’s Vinnitsa headquarters.

Medvedev was a veteran NKVD officer who had long experience of life behind enemy lines. Since his infiltration in September 1941, he had headed a number of detachments operating in the German rear and had carried out numerous “special actions,” including the kidnapping of Prince Lvov, who was foreseen by Germans as the post-Soviet governor of Moscow.
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In the spring and summer of 1943, Medvedev began his observation of Wehrwolf. Yet, though his men on the ground claimed on one occasion to have spotted Hitler traveling through Vinnitsa in a black Maybach limousine, they had, in truth, missed their chance.
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Hitler had last stayed in the complex in March, and he paid a final, fleeting visit on 27 August 1943.
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When he left, he ordered that Wehrwolf was to be destroyed. “It is most important that there should be no furniture left,” he insisted, “otherwise the Russians will send it to Moscow and put the whole lot on display.”
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Had he remained much longer, the fate of his furniture would have been the least of his worries.

•                •              •

Hitler naturally placed himself at risk every time he left Berlin and decamped to one of his field headquarters. His preferred mode of transport was flying, and he had a well-established staff, under the leadership of Captain Hans Baur, with whom he had first flown in 1932. By 1941, Baur’s fleet consisted of over twenty aircraft, from the sleek Focke-Wulf Condor and the workhorse Junkers Ju-52 to the tiny Fieseler Stork spotter plane. Of these, it was the Fw-200 Condor that was to serve most regularly as Hitler’s personal plane. Entering service in 1937, the four-engine Condor had originally been a commercial airliner and was renowned for its nonstop Atlantic crossings. In its military variant, it was armed with four machine guns and uprated engines, and it specialized in long-range naval reconnaissance. Hitler’s aircraft boasted a number of additional modifications, including improved soundproofing, and, from 1942, a “Führer seat” with an armor-plated base, integral parachute, and emergency trapdoor.
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Yet, despite all these precautions, flying in the 1940s was still a most hazardous occupation, even away from the combat zone. In November 1941, for example, the German fighter ace Werner Mölders was killed while attempting to land in fog at Breslau. Three months later, the Reich armaments minister, Fritz Todt, was killed during an aborted takeoff from Hitler’s headquarters at Rastenburg, and Field Marshal von Reichenau died of heart failure during a forced landing at Kraków. Even Hitler’s fleet experienced a number of close shaves. In December 1941, the Führer’s accompanying aircraft, another Focke-Wulf Condor, was destroyed on landing at Orel on the Eastern Front.
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The following summer, Hitler’s own plane narrowly avoided catastrophe when a wheel caught fire upon landing at Micheli in Finland.
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As well as the risk inherent in flying, it must be remembered that Hitler did most of his traveling during wartime, often shuttling to and from the front, at times facing attack from enemy fighters and anti-aircraft fire. On one occasion, on a flight to Poltava in the Ukraine, Hitler’s Condor was attacked by Soviet planes while leaving an airfield outside the city of Nikolayev. Though Hitler was not on board at the time, his pilot reported the event with startling nonchalance:

As I taxied forward for the take-off there was a fountain of dirt where the man who had given me the signal had been. At the same time I became aware that my machine was being fired on. Russians were over the airfield, and my big four-engined plane—it was Hitler’s own, the D-2600—must have looked a tempting morsel for them. When I had gained sufficient height, I flew straight at one of the Russians…he preferred not to wait for me. He turned away and disappeared into the clouds, and all we suffered was a few bullet holes.
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In another incident, Hitler was almost caught by a surprise Soviet attack on the ground. In February 1943, he paid an urgent visit to the field headquarters of Field Marshal von Manstein at Zaporozhye in the Ukraine, where Army Group South was taking a battering. While Hitler proceeded to a conference with von Manstein, his pilot, Baur, waited at the airfield to the east of the city, where they soon received the alarming news that a column of two dozen Soviet tanks had breached the German defenses and was approaching at speed. As Baur noted: “There was nothing between them and the airfield.”
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With Hitler still in conference with von Manstein, a defense force was hastily assembled, despite lacking artillery and anti-tank weaponry. When the column of twenty-two Soviet T-34s appeared at the airfield perimeter, Baur hurried to find Hitler and request a tactical withdrawal, but Hitler refused, replying that such measures would not be necessary. Soon after, the Führer duly returned, boarded his aircraft, and departed. As Baur later learned, the Soviet vanguard was running low on fuel and, expecting stiff resistance at the airfield, had opted not to press their attack. When informed of the seriousness of the situation, Hitler would describe their escape simply as “a bit of luck.”
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The problem common to all Soviet forces wishing to target senior Nazis on Soviet territory was that of locating their quarry. Beyond the few months that Hitler and his henchmen spent near Vinnitsa, their visits to the Eastern Front were fleeting and surrounded by the tightest security. NKVD assassins operating
behind German lines were rare enough, but it would have been a stroke of the most improbable good fortune if one of them had ever come face-to-face with Himmler, Göring, or even Adolf Hitler. If serendipity would not lend a hand, Soviet planners would be forced to rely on Allied intelligence to supply information on the whereabouts of prominent Nazis.

The problem with Allied intelligence, however, was that it was rarely trusted by the Soviets. The assumption in Moscow after 1941 was that their new Western Allies were merely reluctant partners in a marriage of political and military convenience, and that they would use every opportunity to induce the twin threats of Communism and Nazism to bleed each other white. This analysis was not entirely fanciful. After all, Churchill’s quip on the occasion of the German attack on the USSR about making “at least a favourable reference to the Devil, if Hitler invaded Hell” would have done little to calm Soviet paranoia. Thus, though British policy was not nearly as Machiavellian as Stalin believed, its intelligence offerings were still treated with the utmost suspicion.

Whether he trusted it or not, Stalin’s most accurate source of information in trying to find Hitler was still British intelligence, much of it gleaned from German Enigma decrypts. That information and its origins were top-secret, and there were discussions among the British about whether such high-grade, sensitive material should be handed to the Soviets at all.
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In the end, it was considered prudent to pass on the information but to withhold its precise provenance. Yet for all that, it is highly probable that Stalin already knew a great deal about the Enigma decrypts via Kim Philby and his other agents within the British Secret Service.

In November 1941, British intelligence learned crucial information on Hitler’s possible whereabouts. Accordingly, the British military mission to Moscow relayed the news to Stalin, saying:

Most reliable source reports conference to be held in special train at Orsha during daylight 13
^th
November between High Command of Army and all Army Commanders on Eastern Front. If daylight attack impracticable suggest night attack on 12
^th
or 13
^th
.
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The conference in question was called to address the failing momentum of the German advance on Moscow. Its participants, under the chairmanship of the chief of the General Staff, Franz Halder, included the chiefs of staff of all the armies and army groups on the Eastern Front. Its agenda was clear: should the Wehrmacht press its advantage and push for the Soviet capital, in spite of the worsening weather and strained lines of communication, or should it dig in for the winter and resume the advance on the spring thaw? Given the crucial nature of these discussions, it was assumed in London that Hitler himself would be present.

To aid the deliberations at the conference, Halder supplied a number of maps. One—showing a line from Lake Ladoga near Leningrad, stretching 250 kilometers east of Moscow and then south to Stalingrad and the Black Sea—purported to show the
minimum
targets for the offensive.
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Though discussion was lively, there could be only one outcome. After all, Operation Typhoon—the attack on Moscow—was already in progress, and the Red Army was widely considered to be on its last legs.
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One final push, it was thought, would bring the whole edifice of Soviet Communism crashing to the ground.

Stalin, however, had other plans. A few days earlier, on the morning of 8 November, with snow swirling around Red Square, he had presided over the traditional military procession celebrating the anniversary of the revolution. After seeing off a parade of tanks and conscripts en route to the front, barely 80 kilometers away, he had spoken briefly to the assembled crowd. Mother Russia was imperiled, he said, but she would prevail.
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That night, as the Russian winter began in earnest, reserve troops from Siberia were thrown against the freezing German vanguard. The Nazi
Blitzkrieg
had stalled.

Stalin’s Red Air Force was also preparing a few surprises. Though mauled in the opening phase of the Barbarossa campaign, and still unable to wrest battlefield air superiority from the
Germans, it had nonetheless recovered sufficiently by late summer to restart limited offensive operations of its own. In August, for example, it was claimed that long-range bombing raids had been launched against Berlin using the Ilyushin Il-4, a twin-engine medium bomber with a crew of four and a laden range of around 3,500 kilometers.
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By November, with Berlin now effectively out of range, other targets had to be found. The conference at Orsha would be ideal.

As dusk fell on the evening of 12 November, a force of around twenty Ilyushin Il-4 bombers from the newly formed Long-Range Bombing Division prepared to leave their airfield, probably at Pushkino, near Leningrad. Their target was the rail-yards at Orsha, where Halder’s special train, code-named “Europa,” was thought to be stationed. The ninety-minute approach flight, almost all over enemy-held territory, would have been made in V-formation at around 6,100 meters, beyond the range of most anti-aircraft weaponry. According to established procedure, the engines would then have been cut on the final approach and the bomb run would have been made in silence, the planes gliding down to a height of around 2,000 meters before releasing their payload of high explosives, restarting their engines, and turning for home.
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This is a good story, but it is mostly supposition. There is a great deal of confusion as to whether the Orsha raid ever took place at all. The only known archival reference to the event came from the British mission to Moscow. Working on information supplied by the Soviets, they recorded:

The Russians bombed Orsha…railway station heavily on the night of 13 Nov. They lost one aircraft. From information of Hitler’s movements subsequently received, they think it unlikely that he was at Orsha on the day in question.
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On this last point, they were certainly correct. The Führer had, in fact, spent the whole week comfortably installed at his headquarters in East Prussia. Yet beyond this observation, little else rings
true. The primary failing is the lack of any corroboration for the story. A search of the available Russian archives, for example, yields little. More tellingly, there is a similar lack of evidence on the German side. None of those who participated at the conference appear to have recorded that it was attacked. General Halder, for example, who hosted the meeting, made no mention of the raid in his diary,
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while a photographic record of the conference contains no evidence of an attack.
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The German military archive, meanwhile, which contains numerous relevant files, throws up nothing definitive beyond a vague reference to “lively air activity” on the night in question.
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It could be, of course, that the Long-Range Bombing Division lost their way and bombed another hapless Byelorussian town, or that they found Orsha but were unable to target the railyards. Or it may be that they never took off at all. Some modern commentators clearly believe the story to have been a myth or a Soviet fabrication.
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Whether he ordered his planes to Orsha or not, Stalin appears to have pursued his enemy with some considerable determination. As the British ambassador in Moscow reported to London, the Soviet leader needed only the necessary information on Hitler’s whereabouts and he would dispatch the bombers. He showed the same approach in pursuing the German General Staff. As London was informed: