Killing Hitler (22 page)

It is unclear precisely why the explosives failed to detonate. It may be that the lookout was moved on by the army or police and that this prevented the signal being given to the detonator team. Perhaps the final order was not given because of fears about the hostages held by the Germans, or perhaps the wiring was defective.
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One commentator considered that human error was to blame. The officer in charge of the detonator, it was claimed, had been ordered to act upon his own initiative, but only if he was sure that Hitler himself was there. Given the high stakes and the confusion, however, he hesitated, and the moment for action was lost.
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Whatever the cause, Theodore’s first foray into diversionary tactics had failed; Hitler had escaped once again.

Though that was to be Hitler’s only visit to Warsaw, he would also be an infrequent visitor to Polish territory beyond the former capital. He established two makeshift field headquarters on Polish soil, for example, prior to the attack on the Soviet Union: one near Tomaszów Mazowiecki (100 kilometers southeast of Warsaw), code-named “Installation Centre,” and the other near Strzyzów (130 kilometers east of Kraków), code-named “Installation South.” Both consisted merely of reinforced tunnels to accommodate Hitler’s train, with some hastily built platforms and wooden buildings.
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By far his most famous field headquarters, however, was Wolf-schanze, or Wolf’s Lair, near Rastenburg in East Prussia, barely 70 kilometers from the prewar Polish border. Begun late in 1940, under the guise of a chemical works, Wolfschanze consisted initially of a small group of bunkers with associated outbuildings, all disguised with camouflage netting and elaborate landscaping. By the time Hitler moved in—on 24 June 1941, two days after the attack on the Soviet Union—it was already a substantial installation, with its own airfield, barracks, weather station, and sauna. It would become his home away from home. In the twenty months that followed, Hitler left Wolfschanze only four times, and was absent for only fifty-seven days.
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In total, he would spend more than eight hundred days—more than two years—inside the complex.
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The location had been well chosen strategically. The district of Masuria, a charming landscape of gently rolling hills, was sparsely populated and well forested. It was also fairly easily accessible, with good local roads and a nearby railway line providing a simple connection to the main line to Berlin. Wolfschanze itself was located immediately to the west and south of a network of lakes and waterways, which effectively defended the site from land-based attack, while from the air it was practically invisible, with netting, trees, and landscaping providing near-perfect camouflage.

For all these advantages, however, Wolfschanze failed to impress its intended resident. Hitler protested that he felt “like a prisoner” in its bunkers and complained that his “spirit” could
not escape.
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Worse still, the nearby lakes caused an infestation of mosquitoes, which terrorized everyone from the Führer to the lowliest laborer or guard. Hitler was evidently driven to distraction and even threatened to call in the Luftwaffe to deal with the problem. He concluded angrily that his planners had chosen for him “the most swampy, midge-infested and climatically unfavourable area possible.”
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Naturally, security at Wolfschanze was tight. The entire site, measuring 2.5 by 2 kilometers, was divided into three concentric security zones, each with its own checkpoints, fences, and patrols. The outer perimeter consisted of minefields and a 5-meter-wide barbed-wire fence, with machine-gun nests located approximately every 150 meters. The second zone contained additional flak batteries, watchtowers, and anti-tank gun emplacements.
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In all, approximately two thousand personnel were employed at Wolf-schanze. Of these, the vast majority provided security, yet few of them would ever catch a glimpse of the man whom they were charged to guard. Barely a hundred individuals, all strictly vetted and cleared, had access to the inner security zone.
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Any legitimate visitor, therefore, whether arriving by road, rail, or on foot, would have to pass through a minimum of three security checks before even approaching the inner compound, where further checks could be expected. Access to the entire complex was controlled by a system of passes, which could be issued solely by the headquarters commandant after consultation with senior security staff. Only those with the correct pass would be permitted into the inner security zone.

Officially at least, those found inside Wolfschanze without a pass would be liable to arrest and interrogation. The reality could be more brutal. In the summer of 1942, a Polish laborer inadvertently strayed inside the outer perimeter while seeking a shortcut home. He was unceremoniously shot.
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On another occasion, a German guard was shot and seriously injured when he gave the wrong password approaching a checkpoint at night.
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At the center of it all stood a complex of bunkers and barracks blocks including Hitler’s private quarters. The barracks and
workrooms, often erroneously described in postwar literature as wooden huts, were solid brick structures often measuring over 30 meters in length. The bunkers, too, were enormous, especially after being revamped in 1943. Constructed of reinforced concrete, they were up to 12 meters in height, with a further 7 meters of foundation below ground.
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Some boasted additional features: Hitler’s had a single-story kitchen appended to its western side, while Göring’s sported an anti-aircraft gun on its roof. Inside, they generally consisted simply of a corridor with a number of small rooms accessed from it. Albert Speer described Hitler’s bunker in Wolfschanze in the following accurate but unflattering terms:

From the outside it looked like an ancient Egyptian tomb. It was actually nothing but a great windowless block of concrete, without direct ventilation, in cross section a building whose masses of concrete far exceeded the usable cubic feet of space. It seemed as if the concrete walls sixteen and a half feet thick that surrounded Hitler separated him from the outside world in a figurative as well as a literal sense, and locked him up inside his delusions.
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Yet, despite being probably the best-guarded facility in the German Reich, even Wolfschanze was not immune to the attentions of the Polish underground. One memoir claims that the Poles considered using a Russian colonel from the renegade Vlassov army as their informant within Wolfschanze, but rejected the idea out of concern that their activities might be compromised.
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Whatever the truth of that suggestion, a more promising source soon emerged. In 1942, a glamorous Warsaw socialite by the name of Slawa Mirowska was involved in an affair with a Waffen-SS general, Wilhelm Bittrich. Subsequently “persuaded” to inform for the AK, she became in effect a latter-day Mata Hari. That summer, she accompanied Bittrich to his own headquarters on the eastern front and stopped at Wolfschanze en route. During the visit, she surreptitiously noted everything she saw, from
the layout of the site to the security procedures then in force.
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In due course, the details would be forwarded to her superiors in Warsaw.

Despite this knowledge, the Poles do not appear to have planned any attacks or “diversions” on the site of Wolfschanze. It may be that they thought better of targeting the complex, where the prospects for an assassin were decidedly bleak, or else simply lacked the local manpower to do so. Wolfschanze, after all, was situated in the heart of the then German province of East Prussia, beyond the official remit of the AK, and little in the way of an infrastructure existed there for the maintenance of an underground cell. One more promising possibility, however, was to try to target Hitler during his infrequent trips to and from his headquarters. Though he sometimes traveled by air, he usually shuttled between Wolfschanze and Berlin by rail, using his personal train. His route, along the old main line from Königsberg via Konitz and Küstrin to Berlin, took him straight across the territory of the prewar Polish Republic.

With the outbreak of war, Hitler’s train, the peacetime Führer Special, was given the code name “Amerika.” It was also substantially upgraded. An extra locomotive was added, as well as a communications carriage and two anti-aircraft cars.
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According to those who traveled in it, the train offered every luxury: silk bedspreads, polished wooden paneling, and hot and cold running water.
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More important, perhaps, it was built entirely of high-grade welded steel panels and was sufficiently robust to withstand all but the most determined attacks.

As has been shown, the Polish underground was adept at sabotage operations, and train derailment was one of its specialties. Right at the outset of the occupation, a special unit had been formed for that purpose, and quotas were even issued by the high command, stipulating the number of German trains to be derailed each month. In total, over seven hundred such operations were carried out.
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Tactics were largely left to the discretion of the saboteurs involved, but they could involve blowing the rail with explosive charges or simply dismantling the tracks. Either
method, of course, would prove devastatingly effective against a speeding train.

The problems were encountered when saboteurs attempted to target a specific train, such as Hitler’s. As would be expected, Amerika was placed under guard when in a station, or in the sidings at Wolfschanze, and security was no less tight when on the move. It could not be passed by scheduled or freight services, and a dummy locomotive often preceded it down the line. The problem for a would-be saboteur, therefore, was to have advance knowledge of exactly when Amerika would be passing a particular point. For that, he would need inside information.

It would appear that on one occasion, at least, this vital precondition was met. On the evening of 8 June 1942, Hitler left Rastenburg aboard his train en route for Berlin, where he was to attend the state funeral of Reinhard Heydrich, assassinated by Czech agents some days previously. However, news of Hitler’s travel arrangements seems to have reached a local AK commander, Captain Stanislaw Lesikowski, code-named “Forest,” whose area of operations included a section of the main rail line between Königsberg and Berlin. A former optician and a veteran of the defense of Warsaw in 1939, Forest was already a hardened resister, having organized numerous underground groups in Pomerania.
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He would devise the operational plan for the derailment of Hitler’s train, which he code-named
“Wiener Blut”
(Viennese blood) in reference to the Führer’s Austrian origins.

Forest entrusted the mission to a local resistance organization called
Gryf Pomorski
, or Pomeranian Griffin, under the command of Lieutenant Jan Szalewski, code-named “Sable.” Another veteran of the battle for Warsaw, Sable had escaped German captivity and found his way to the underground. After a briefing from Forest, he assembled his men—all dressed in stolen Waffen-SS uniforms and speaking only German—into two teams: one group of saboteurs to cut the line and a second to secure the target area. For the location of the attack, he chose a site close to the village of Strych, just west of Preussisch Stargard, where the rail line ran through woodland.
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According to Sable’s deposition, at around 2:45 that morning, his sappers allowed the dummy locomotive to pass before hurriedly dismantling the track and retreating to a fortified area in nearby woods.
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In the ensuing chaos, as the train crashed off the rails and slewed down an embankment, they reemerged to machine-gun the survivors, whom they identified as members of the
Leibstandarte
, Hitler’s bodyguard.
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Eventually forced to flee by superior numbers, they withdrew without sustaining any losses and disappeared back into the underground. They were firmly convinced that they had succeeded in their task. As Sable recalled: “When I met with my unit after the action, we were all radiant with joy: [we] were saying ‘Hitler has gone to hell!’”
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In the aftermath, it was claimed, two hundred German soldiers lay dead, including two generals.
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Hitler, however, was not among them. He had apparently opted to break his journey at Marienburg, to confer with the
Gauleiter
of Danzig, Albert Forster. Nonetheless, the German response was typically brutal. Reprisals were carried out in the villages surrounding the crash site, and 150 suspects were arrested, of whom some fifty unfortunates were sent to the concentration camp at Stutthof, near Danzig. Some weeks later a bounty was offered for information leading to an arrest—the figure on offer was the princely sum of 250,000 Reichsmarks.
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One might conclude, therefore, that Hitler had pulled off yet another lucky escape. However, little in this story is as it seems. German sources, though confirming that a derailment took place on the night in question, do not consider it to be an attempt on Hitler’s life and state merely that a Berlin-bound scheduled passenger service was attacked at the cost of three lives.
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Indeed, the German authorities appear to have learned about the assassination attempt only two years later, following the capture and interrogation of one of Sable’s team.
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The available Polish accounts, even those of participants and eyewitnesses, are also contradictory. The source of the information about Hitler’s movements varies between rail employees, the German resistance, the Wehrmacht, and even the SS. Some accounts place the attack at Rytel,
40 kilometers down the line, while others have the train traveling in the opposite direction,
away
from Berlin.
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