Blood and Honor Read online

  He stood waiting in the road as the Hauptsturmführer went into one of the four buildings of the Guard Post South. Not even a Standartenführer of the Sicherheitsdienst was passed into Wolfsschanze (‘‘Wolf’s Lair,’’ Adolf Hitler’s secret command post) without being subjected to the most thorough scrutiny.

  A minute later, the Hauptsturmführer returned, and again gave the stiff-armed Nazi salute.

  ‘‘If the Standartenführer will be so good as to follow me, I will escort him to his car.’’

  ‘‘Thank you,’’ Goltz said, again returning the salute with his palm raised to the level of his shoulder.

  The yellow-and-black-striped barrier pole rose with a hydraulic whine, and the two passed through what was known as the ‘‘outer wire’’ of Wolf’s Lair. The compound, four hundred miles from Berlin and about four miles from Rastenburg, was an oblong approximately 1.5 by .9 miles. The outer wire was guarded by both machine-gun towers and machine-gun positions on the ground and by an extensive minefield.

  Just inside the outer wire perimeter—separated as far as possible from each other to reduce interference—were some of the radio shacks and antennas over which instant communication with the most remote outposts of the Thousand Year Reich was maintained.

  A Mercedes sedan, identical to the one Goltz had just left, backed out of a parking area inside the outer wire and up to the now raised barrier pole. A Rottenführer jumped out, opened the rear door, and raised his arm in salute.

  SS officers in charge of security had decided it was more efficient to require Wolf’s Lair visitors to leave their cars outside the outer wire, and transfer inside the wire to cars from the Wolf’s Lair motor pool. Doing so obviated subjecting the incoming vehicle to a thorough search. It also spared the visitor the waste of time such a search would entail, not to mention the time of the SS personnel who conducted the search.

  As soon as Standartenführer Goltz was seated in the back of the Mercedes, the driver closed the door, ran around the front of the car, and slipped behind the wheel.

  The road passed for three-quarters of a mile through a heavy stand of pine trees, with nothing visible on either side. Then, in the light of the full moon, behind a Signals Hut on the left, railroad tracks came into sight. A parallel spur, Goltz saw, held the Führer’s eleven-car private railway train. A moment later, on the right, ringed with barbed wire and machine gun emplacements and towers, the first of the two inner compounds of Wolf’s Lair came into sight. This one held, essentially, the personnel charged with the administration and protection of Wolfsschanze.

  There were buildings assigned to the Camp Commandant and his staff; the headquarters of the battalion of Liebstandarte troops, and their barracks and mess hall; a second mess hall, dubbed the Kurhaus (‘‘Sanitarium’’); and a thick-walled concrete air-raid bunker, dubbed ‘‘Heinrich,’’ large enough to hold everyone in the compound.

  Past the first inner compound and to the right, lining the road for half a mile, were other small buildings that housed the second level of Thousand Year Reich officialdom. Here, spreading out from the Gorlitz Railway Station, were the offices of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; Albert Speer, Germany’s war-production genius; GrossAdmiral Karl Doenitz, the Commander in Chief of the Navy; senior Luftwaffe officers; and another mess and another huge concrete bunker.

  Across the road, ringed by barbed wire and the heaviest concentration of machine-gun and antiaircraft weaponry, was the Führer’s compound itself.

  Inside were no fewer than thirteen thick-walled concrete bunkers. The largest and thickest, not surprisingly, was the Führerbunker. Across the street from it were two other bunkers. One housed Hitler’s personal aides and doctors; the second housed Wehrmacht aides, the Army personnel of fice, the Signal Officer, and Hitler’s secretaries.

  To the east Reichsmarschal Hermann Göring had both an office building and his own personal bunker. Between these and the Führerbunker was a VIP mess called the ‘‘Tea House.’’ Nearby were the offices and bunker assigned to Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, titular head of the High Command of the Armed Forces (OKW). He shared his bunker with Generaloberst (Colonel General, the equivalent of a full—four-star—U.S. Army General) Alfred Jodl, the chief of the Armed Forces Operations Staff, and Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, Chief of the Abwehr, the military intelligence service of the OKW.

  Once, when they were alone, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann had explained to Goltz that while Jodl was important enough to be given space inside the Führer’s inner compound, he was not important enough to have his own bunker.

  Bormann—who was deputy only to Hitler in running the Nazi party—of course had his own bunker, as did Josef Goebbels, the diminutive, clubfooted genius of Nazi propaganda. But Bormann’s staff also had their own bunker, while Goebbels’s staff did not. Although bunkers were provided for servants, liaison officers, and official visitors, Goebbels’s underlings privileged to be in the Führer compound had to find bunker space for themselves.

  Standartenführer Goltz believed that Wolfsschanze— rather than Berlin—provided the best clues to judging who stood where in the pecking order. And nothing he had ever seen—here, or in Berlin or anywhere else—had caused him to question the very senior and very secure position of Martin Bormann. That perception had provoked an interesting decision: Where did his loyalty lie? With Heinrich Himmler, who as head of the SS was his own direct superior? Or with Martin Bormann, with whom he had been close since the early days?

  It would have been nice if the question had never come up. But when Himmler had assigned him as SS-SD liaison officer to the Office of the Party Chancellery—in other words, to Bormann—it did.

  As Goltz was aware—and Bormann was equally aware— Himmler fully expected him to study Bormann and his immediate staff for signs of anything that Himmler could report to Hitler. And Himmler trusted him to do so. Goltz went a long way back with Himmler, too.

  The question for Goltz had boiled down, finally, to what would best serve the Führer himself. For one thing, Goltz understood that while the Führer should be above politics, this was unfortunately not possible. And he understood further that while Reichsprotektor Himmler certainly could not be faulted for his untiring efforts to protect the Führer, Himmler was not above using the information that came his way for his own political purposes.

  Bormann was, of course, no less a political creature than Himmler, and certainly just as willing to use information that came his way for political purposes. The difference was that Martin Bormann had no purpose in life but to serve the Führer, while Heinrich Himmler’s basic purpose was to serve the State. Himmler would argue, of course, that Adolf Hitler and the German State were really one and the same thing, but in the final analysis, Goltz did not think that held water.

  Thus, in a hypothetical situation, if Hitler were forced to choose between Bormann and Himmler, Goltz had no doubt that he would chose Bormann.

  And so, even before he reported to Martin Bormann’s office in the Reichschancellery, he had decided that his SS officer’s oath required that he transfer his loyalty from Himmler to Bormann. In his mind, he had no other choice.

  At the same time, he had come to believe that what had begun as a selfless act of duty—bread cast onto the water— was going to pay dividends. For one thing, Hitler had often confided in Bormann his suspicions that not all cowards and defeatists were in the Armed Forces. That the Führer was referring to the SS was a not unreasonable inference.

  In Goltz’s professional opinion, as a security man of some experience, defeatists and traitors were indeed in the highest echelons of the Army, just waiting for a chance to seize power, depose the Führer, and seek an armistice with the enemy. It was Himmler’s job, the job of the SS, to ruthlessly root these men out. He had found some. But the Führer was correct in suspecting that he had not found all.

  It logically followed—it was a question of numerical probability—that if there were X number of defeatists and potential traitors in th
e Army, then there were Y number in the Navy, Z number in the Luftwaffe, and even XX number in the SS. Goltz believed that the ratio probably was geometric. If there was one traitor in the SS, there were probably two in the Luftwaffe, four in the Navy, and eight in the Army.

  In Goltz’s view, Hitler might well pardon Himmler for not finding all the traitors in the Army, or even those in the Navy and Luftwaffe, but the first traitor uncovered in the SS would look to the Führer like proof that Himmler was incompetent . . . or even disloyal himself.

  And it reasonably followed that if the Führer decided that Himmler could no longer be trusted, then the Führer would not place a good deal of trust in Himmler’s immediate underlings either. If Himmler was deposed—and this was far from inconceivable, if one remembered Röhm1—so would be those immediately under him.

  And who would be better qualified to replace Himmler than Standartenführer Josef Goltz, who had not only been in the SS at senior levels long enough to know how that agency should operate, but who all along—literally sincethe days of the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich—had been the trusted intimate of the faithful Martin Bormann?

  The Mercedes stopped at the first of the entrances to the Führer compound. Obviously, the Hauptsturmführer at the gate in the outer wire had telephoned ahead not only to Bormann’s office, but to the SS officer in charge of Führer compound security; for an Obersturmführer (First Lieutenant) was waiting for him.

  ‘‘Heil Hitler!’’ he barked. ‘‘It is good to see the Herr Standartenführer again.’’

  ‘‘Well, look who’s here!’’ Goltz said, although he did not remember meeting the tall, good-looking Obersturmf ührer before. ‘‘How have you been?’’

  ‘‘Very well, thank you,’’ the Obersturmführer said. ‘‘If you’ll come with me, Sir, I will escort you to Reichsleiter Bormann’s office.’’

  ‘‘How kind of you,’’ Goltz said, and followed him into the Führer compound, this time returning the guard’s salute with an equally impeccable straight-armed salute.

  [THREE] Wolfsschanze Near Rastenburg, East Prussia 2200 5 April 1943

  There were, of course, no windows in Bormann’s office. Behind the oak paneling was several feet of solid concrete. On one wall hung an oil portrait of the Führer. Facing it on the opposite wall was a monstrous oil painting of the mountains near Garmisch-Partenkirchen. It had been a gift to the Führer, and he had given it to Bormann.

  ‘‘I’m really sorry I kept you waiting, Josef,’’ Reichsleiter Martin Bormann said, sounding as if he meant it. As he spoke, he stepped from behind his desk to greet Standartenf ührer Goltz. ‘‘How was the trip?’’

  Bormann was a short and stocky man, wearing a brown Nazi party uniform decorated only with the swastika brassard on his left sleeve and the Blood Order insignia pinned to his right breast. (The Blood Order decoration, awarded to those who participated in the—failed—1923 coup d’état in Munich, was of red and silver, surmounted by an eagle, showing a view within an oak-leaf wreath of the Feldherrnhalle in Munich, and bore the legend ‘‘You Were Victorious. ’’)

  ‘‘Very long, Herr Reichsleiter,’’ Goltz replied, returning the firm handshake.

  ‘‘Well, at least you won’t have to drive back to Berlin. I’ve arranged a seat for you on the Heinkel.’’

  A Heinkel twin-engine bomber had been converted to a transport for high-speed service between Berlin and Wolf’s Lair. Only six seats were available, and they were hard to come by unless spoken for by someone very high—Keitel, Göring, Bormann, or the Führer himself.

  ‘‘Wonderful. Thank you.’’

  ‘‘Reichsprotektor Himmler was kind enough to tell me early this morning that he had received word from Buenos Aires that a certain highly placed Argentine met a tragic death at the hands of bandits,’’ Bormann said, getting immediately to the point that most immediately concerned Goltz, ‘‘and that he felt you could now travel to Buenos Aires without raising any suspicions that you were personally involved.’’

  A faint smile crossed Goltz’s lips. Oberst Karl-Heinz Grüner, Military Attaché of the Embassy of the German Reich to the Republic of Argentina, had sent a radio message to Himmler reporting the death of el Coronel Jorge Guillermo Frade. A copy of that message was delivered to Goltz in Berlin an hour before Himmler saw it. Goltz had immediately called Bormann.

  ‘‘I did not, of course, tell him that I had already received the same information,’’ Bormann went on. ‘‘I did tell him that was good news, as I had finally received the last signature on the document, and suggested he order you here personally to pick it up. He told me that you were already en route.’’

  ‘‘Everyone has come on board?’’

  ‘‘Canaris last, of course,’’ Bormann said, smiling, and walked behind his desk, pulled open a drawer, and handed Goltz a business-size envelope. Goltz took from it a single sheet of paper, folded in thirds, and read it.

  Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Urbeiterpactei

  Berlin 1 April 1943

  The bearer, SS-SD Standartenführer Josef Goltz, has been charged with the execution of highly confidential missions of the highest importance to the German Reich.

  In his sole discretion, SS-SD Standartenführer Goltz will make the nature of his missions known only to such persons as he feel may assist him in the execution of his missions. Such persons are—1. Directed to provide SS-SD Standartenführer Goltz with whatever support, of whatever nature, he may request.

  2. Absolutely forbidden to divulge any information whatsoever concerning SS-SD Standartenführer Goltz’ missions to any other person without the express permission of SS-SD Standartenführer Josef Goltz, including communication by any means whatsoever any reference to SS-SD Standartenführer Goltz’ missions to any agency of the German Reich, or any person, without the express permission in each instance of SS-SD Standartenführer Josef Goltz.

  •

  Goltz raised his eyes to Bormann.

  ‘‘A very impressive document, Herr Reichsleiter,’’ he said. He refolded the letter and put it back in the envelope. ‘‘Do I understand that I am to keep this?’’

  Bormann nodded.

  ‘‘While you were on your way here,’’ Bormann said, ‘‘Reichsprotektor Himmler called again, to inform me that he had obtained a seat for you on the Lufthansa flight leaving Templehof for Buenos Aires tomorrow.’’

  Goltz put the envelope in an inside pocket of his uniform.

  ‘‘You don’t seem too happy to hear that,’’ Bormann said. ‘‘Is duty about to interfere with your love life, Josef?’’

  ‘‘I never allow duty to interfere with my love life,’’ Goltz replied. ‘‘What you see is a mixture of anticipation, curiosity, and unease, Herr Reichsleiter.’’

  ‘‘Unease about what?’’

  ‘‘I hope you’re not placing too much confidence in me.’’

  ‘‘Modesty doesn’t become you, Josef. And you know how important this endeavor is.’’

  ‘‘I will, of course, do my best.’’

  Bormann nodded.

  ‘‘I had a thought,’’ he said, moving to another subject, ‘‘when they told me you were at the outer wire, and again while you were waiting. Vis-à-vis von Wachtstein.’’

  "Oh?"

  ‘‘I have a feeling his son might be very useful to us. Particularly if the Generalleutnant himself were participating in the endeavor.’’ (A Generalleutnant is literally a lieutenant general, but is equivalent to a U.S. Army— two-star—major general.) ‘‘I won’t say anything to him, of course, until you have a chance to look at the situation in Buenos Aires and let me know what you think. But why don’t you pay a courtesy call on him now, Josef, ask if there is something you could carry for him to his son—a letter, perhaps?’’

  ‘‘A very good idea,’’ Goltz said. ‘‘I was, what shall I say, a little surprised at how close the von Wachtsteins are to poverty. If we are to believe the Generalleutnant’s estate-tax return.’’

  ‘‘
Perhaps he dug a hole with his paws and buried a bone or two in it for a rainy day. After all, he is a Pomeranian.’’

  Goltz smiled.

  ‘‘While he is preparing whatever he wishes to send— give him an hour, say—you come back here and we’ll talk.’’

  ‘‘Yes, Sir.’’

  ‘‘He’s across the road, but I’ll send you in my car so you won’t have to walk.’’

  ‘‘That’s very good of you.’’

  ‘‘In lieu of a drink, Josef. I’m taking dinner with the Führer, and I don’t want to smell of alcohol.’’

  Goltz chuckled. The Führer was an ascetic man who neither smoked nor drank. There was an unwritten law that those privileged to be in his presence also abstained.

  Generalleutnant Graf (Count) Karl-Friedrich von Wachtstein was a short, slight, nearly bald fifty-four-year-old, the seventh of his Pomeranian line to earn the right to be called ‘‘General.’’ Originally a cavalryman, he had joined the General Staff as an Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant Colonel) eight years before.

  When war broke out, he went into Poland at that rank but assumed command of a Panzer regiment when its colonel was killed in his tank turret during an unexpectedly difficult encirclement maneuver. His Polish opponent, they later learned, had instructed his troops to save their rifle fire for officers who gallantly exposed themselves in tank turrets. Afterward, he was promoted to colonel.

  He went into Russia commanding a tank regiment, and was fairly seriously wounded. When Generaloberst Jodl heard this—von Wachstein had worked under Jodl as a major—he decided that the Army could not afford to have an unusually bright general staff officer killed doing something as unimportant as commanding troops in combat, and ordered him back to Berlin. With the transfer came a promotion to Generalmajor (literally, Major General, but equivalent to a U.S. Army—one-star—Brigadier General).

  Earlier this year, in February, following a shakeup in the General Staff after the Sixth Army’s surrender at Stalingrad, he was promoted Generalleutnant, with the additional honor of having the Führer personally pin on his new badges of rank.