Killing Hitler (28 page)

A week or so ago he heard of [the General Staff] at Minsk, and Minsk was heavily bombed. Then it had moved to Vilna, and three days ago Vilna had been bombed. It was now believed to be back at Minsk and, as we were talking, Minsk was being bombed again. Could we keep him constantly and quickly informed of any news we had on the whereabouts of Hitler?
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On this occasion, London regretted that it was unable to furnish Stalin with the necessary intelligence, though a promise was made to “pass on immediately any information…receive[d].”
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Accordingly, two months later, when it was learned that Göring was due to visit the Ukrainian city of Poltava, Moscow was
informed without delay.
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On the night in question, Poltava sustained a heavy air raid, but Göring, who was never a willing visitor to the East, had changed his plans. Receipt of accurate intelligence, it appeared, was only one piece of the puzzle. And even if the target had deigned to show up, the blunt weapon of aerial bombing was clearly of only limited use in carrying out an assassination.

The other option available to Stalin, of course, was to target Hitler on German soil, where he was easier to locate and where his movements could be better predicted. Indeed, his agents already had some experience of wartime “wet” operations abroad—not all of it positive. In the spring of 1942, for example, the mastermind of Trotsky’s murder, Leonid Eitingon, was ordered to plan the assassination of the German ambassador to Turkey (and former chancellor), Franz von Papen, who, it was rumored, was plotting a separate peace with the Western powers.
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His chosen assassin, a Macedonian named Omar Tokat, did not share his employer’s expertise, however, and, while following von Papen on an Ankara street, succeeded only in blowing himself up while standing behind his target. Lightly injured and covered in his assassin’s blood, von Papen initially had no idea what had happened:

I picked myself up…noting with some satisfaction that no bones seemed to be broken. “Don’t go a step further!” I shouted. I could only assume that we had set off a mine. This was my first reaction, for when I looked round there was not a soul to be seen.
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In the aftermath, two Soviet consular officials were arrested and charged with organizing the attack, but the whereabouts and identity of the assailant were unknown. According to the official Turkish account, the would-be assassin had “completely disappeared.”
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Only the subsequent discovery of Tokat’s foot, lodged in a nearby tree, enabled the macabre mystery to be solved. Though Moscow gamely sought to shift the blame onto
unknown German agents, the two officials were sentenced to twenty years’ imprisonment, contributing to an acrimonious diplomatic rift between Moscow and Ankara in the process.
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In the case of Hitler, the NKVD could be spared any such wider concerns, but they were under no illusions. They knew that security would be tight. Their agent could not expect to simply sidle up to Hitler in the street with a bomb, or walk into the Reich Chancellery and gun him down. The action would require meticulous planning, watertight cover stories, and, most important, a well-placed contact to engineer a meeting between the Führer and his would-be assassin.

The agent selected appears, at first sight, to be a peculiar choice. Lev Knipper was a former White émigré and the nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov. Already over forty by the time war broke out in 1941, he had established himself as a composer, penning rousing patriotic works such as his Symphony No. 4,
Poem of the Komsomol Fighters
, which included the moving
“Polyushko Pole,”
and Symphony No. 6,
The Red Cavalry.
However, he was also leading a double life as an NKVD agent.
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In the autumn of 1941, he was recalled to Moscow from the Caucasus, where he was training recruits. He was informed that an independent network of “battle groups” was to be established to remain behind enemy lines should Moscow fall into German hands. His group, he was told, was charged with the special mission of assassinating Hitler during the latter’s expected victory visit to the cradle of communism.
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This was a sound plan. Hitler had held a victory parade in Warsaw in 1939 and had paid a fleeting visit to Paris after its capitulation the following summer. It was perfectly reasonable to assume that Hitler would wish to see a defeated Moscow. As we now know, however, Hitler had no intention of visiting Moscow, even in the event of the defeat of the Soviet Union. As he confided to his intimates, he planned simply to turn the city into an enormous artificial lake.
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In other comments, he was still more forceful: “Moscow,” he said, “must disappear from the earth’s surface.”
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When Moscow failed to fall and Hitler failed to appear, Knipper was given a new mission. He was a willing agent. Though doubtless
living in fear of his capricious NKVD masters, he also appeared to have become something of a Russian nationalist. As he wrote to his aunt in the winter of 1941, he felt that he had found a cause for which he was willing to give his life:

It’s not even so frightening to die. There are at last some powerful things in which I believe…. I am Russian, Russian to the marrow in my bones. I’ve realised that I love my ridiculous, idiotic, uncultured and dirty Motherland, love her with a tender…love, and it’s a pain to me to see her big, beautiful body violated.
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His new mission was simple. With his privileged background, Aryan good looks, and fluent German, he was to pose as a defector, make his way to Berlin, and target Hitler there.

Knipper’s contact in Berlin was to be his elder sister Olga Chekhova. Like him a Russian émigrée, Chekhova had remained in Berlin and had forged a successful career as an actress. By 1941, she was already an established star, having appeared in over a hundred films, regularly cast as the elegant and seductive “grande dame.” She had also become part of the cultural élite of the Third Reich and was often seen entertaining the troops or dining with Goebbels. Indeed, when she was photographed having her hand kissed by Hitler, the rumor rapidly spread that the two were romantically attached. One fan even wrote to congratulate her, enthusing: “It is good to know that you will marry Adolf Hitler. At last he has found the right partner…. Make him happy—he has deserved it!”
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But Chekhova was also moving in circles of which the Führer would scarcely have approved. As a Russian émigrée, with family still in the Soviet Union, she was an easy target for the foreign agents of the NKVD, and contact had been made as early as 1923. In return for allowing her family to join her in Berlin, she could be persuaded to divulge low-level intelligence or simply promise to keep her eyes and ears open. Though she would certainly not have recognized herself as such, Moscow considered her to be a “sleeper.”
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Indeed, in 1939, the NKVD sought to
activate her. With the Nazi-Soviet Pact only recently signed, Stalin was keen to maximize the positive aspects of his relations with Germany. To this end, he considered a clique of influential pro-Russian individuals in Berlin to be essential, and thought that Olga Chekhova might serve as the nucleus for just such a group.
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In due course, she was visited by NKVD agents, who presumably briefed her on her new task. However, given that there are no records of any such clique ever being formed, it must be assumed that the plan failed. Though well connected, Chekhova was clearly either unwilling or unable to act in the capacity required of her. She went back to being a sleeper—at least as far as Moscow was concerned.

Lev Knipper, meanwhile, was in Iran, where he was plotting his defection. His cover story was that he was researching Iranian folk music, and later that year, his musical labors bore fruit with the completion of his “Two Preludes on Iranian Themes.” His political labors were more complex, however. It was planned that he would defect to the Germans in Iran, or possibly Turkey, and then travel to Berlin, where he would make contact both with his famous sister and with one Igor Miklashevsky, a former boxer and fellow NKVD agent who was also posing as a defector.

Miklashevsky had been in Germany since late 1941. He had followed in the footsteps of his uncle, a genuine defector, who had become a Russian-language radio announcer for the Nazis. While living in his uncle’s home, he also became the contact for two Soviet agents who had been sent to form an NKVD cell. He first met Chekhova in the summer of 1942, and subsequently reported to Moscow that an assassination of Göring was feasible.
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Moscow was unimpressed, however, and new instructions were issued requesting that Miklashevsky wait for Knipper to arrive.

As far as Moscow was concerned, the plan was simple. Having probably seen photographs and newsreels of Olga Chekhova with Hitler, the NKVD had concluded that Chekhova’s position was such that she would be able to bring the assassins and the target together. This was preposterously unrealistic, however. It would have been ambitious even prior to 1939, when Hitler still attended gala functions and was featured on the celebrity circuit.
But by 1943, he was barely seen in public and spent most of his time at Rastenburg or Vinnitsa, surrounded by his generals. Chekhova, in fact, had last seen the Führer in the summer of 1940. Nonetheless, the NKVD naively believed that she could still act as a facilitator and introduce Miklashevsky and Knipper to their target.

Then, in the summer of 1943, the entire project was suddenly canceled. Stalin no longer saw the logic of killing his rival. With the defeat at Stalingrad heralding a long German retreat, he had recognized that Hitler could no longer feasibly vanquish him. His own star was clearly in the ascendant, while Hitler’s was inexorably on the wane. An assassination at this juncture, he considered, could even prove counterproductive, leading to a revitalization of the German military and, possibly, a separate peace with the Western Allies, leaving the USSR to fight on alone.

Thus, all the agents plotting to kill the Führer, from Miklashevsky in Berlin to Medvedev in Vinnitsa, were ordered to stay their hand. Knipper was recalled from Iran to resume his day job as a composer. Medvedev disappeared back into the partisan underground and dreamed of becoming a writer.
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Miklashevsky murdered his uncle, but refrained from murdering anyone else, and escaped from Berlin in 1944. Olga Chekhova, meanwhile, was probably none the wiser. She was made aware of the role that Moscow had had in mind for her only during an interrogation in Moscow in the summer of 1945.
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She doubtless would have been horrified that her life had been put at risk in such a madcap scheme. In later life, she would strenuously deny her involvement in any espionage activity. The postwar rumor mill, meanwhile, would claim that she had been awarded the Order of Lenin for her services.

Stalin’s suspension of the plans to assassinate Hitler made good tactical sense. Having survived the second winter of the Great Patriotic War and scored a hugely significant victory at Stalingrad, he realized that Hitler had passed the zenith of his power and influence.
Moreover, with the threat of defeat by Germany receding, Stalin’s new priority was to ensure that Germany remained in the war and was prevented from making a separate peace with the British and Americans. Thus, he recognized that the primary targets for his assassins should now be those who were best placed to supplant Hitler in the event of a coup in Berlin.
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Ironically, therefore, Stalin suddenly found that he had a vested interest in Hitler’s continued survival.

There was also little ideological sense in assassinating Adolf Hitler. According to the dictates of Marxism-Leninism, fascism represented the last, violent death throes of the capitalist body politic. It was something that had to be defeated, certainly, but, like communism, it was also part of something much greater—it was a world-historical force. And just as communism was seen as inevitably, even scientifically destined to triumph, so fascism was just as inevitably destined to run its bloody course and ultimately destroy itself, dragging capitalism with it into the abyss.

Seen in this light, there was little ideological rationale for the devoted communist to murder the leaders of European fascism. One or two individuals might be eliminated, but the social and political conditions that had created and nurtured them would remain, and others would soon emerge to take their place. Like a latter-day Hydra, it was believed, fascism would not be defeated by the simple removal of its head.

And yet, aside from all these strategic and ideological concerns, it was perfectly natural for a politician to wish to eliminate his enemy. Rage, hatred, and betrayal have just as powerful a role to play in politics as the more sober considerations of doctrine or strategy. And, as we know, Stalin was a man of raging passions. As countless contemporaries and eyewitnesses observed, he was a man for whom the normal rules of engagement did not apply. He was motivated as much by petty spite as by grand theory.
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He was a paranoiac, a megalomaniac, and a man of innate cruelty, who had brought the Georgian culture of the vendetta and the blood feud to Moscow.
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As the Yugoslav communist Milovan Djilas summarized, Stalin was “the greatest criminal in history,”
an unlikely amalgam of “the senselessness of a Caligula…the refinement of a Borgia and the brutality of a Tsar Ivan the Terrible.”
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