Killing Hitler (25 page)

After reporting the incident to Center, Foote was ordered to maintain surveillance, while a second agent, another Briton by the name of Len Brewer, was sent to assist him with what was now called the “Hitler scheme.” Foote and Brewer watched the comings and goings of Hitler and his entourage, noting details of the times of the visits and the apparently lax security. On one occasion, they decided to try an experiment. While Foote sat at his regular table, Brewer stood on the other side of the restaurant as the Führer’s party passed through to a function room in the rear. At a given signal, Brewer reached into his inside pocket (as though reaching for a pistol) and pulled out a cigarette case. To his amazement, he elicited no reaction from the bodyguards.
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As a number of sources would recall, security at the Osteria Bavaria was certainly not what it might have been. In 1935, for example, Unity Mitford was lunching there with a friend when one of them allegedly dropped a bag of explosive stink bombs, which “all went off together…with sensational effect.” Hitler, who was
at his regular table at the time, did not react. His bodyguards reached for their weapons, but no further action was taken.
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One of Hitler’s secretaries would later confirm this apparent laxity. Invited to dine at the restaurant with the Führer and a small group of four other intimates in the spring of 1943, she was amazed to discern no special measures in force for Hitler’s visit at all:

Of course I looked to see if [the few other diners in the restaurant] were police officers, wondering what precautions were taken for Hitler’s security in such cases. But, either they were particularly intelligent agents or genuine customers, because they acted entirely normally, looked with interest at the distinguished guest, and some of them left quite soon.
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Meeting his NKVD handler in the summer of 1939, Alexander Foote learned that his suggestion to target Hitler in the Osteria Bavaria had “burgeoned in the mind of the Kremlin into a fullblown scheme for assassination, with [Brewer] and myself apparently cast for the principal roles.”
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He agreed to pursue the matter in greater detail and make further inquiries. Hitler, it transpired, had known the proprietor of the restaurant since the First World War and visited as often as three times per week when he was in Munich. It was there that he had first been stalked by Unity Mitford, and it was there that he had wooed Eva Braun, who worked nearby. Most important, Foote and Brewer ascertained that the function room was separated from the main restaurant by only a thin partition wall, and that a bomb placed against the partition would cause a great deal of destruction within:

As far as we could gather there was no special surveillance of the place, and no extra precautions were put into force when the
Führer
honoured it with his presence. What could be easier, we argued, than to put a time bomb in an attaché case along with our coats, and, having had an early lunch, abandon the lot in the hope that our bomb would blow Hitler and his entourage, snugly lunching behind the…boarding, into eternity?
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Hitler, they concluded, was vulnerable, and the option of a bomb attack would even afford them a safe escape. Yet, strangely, when they finally reported their plans to Center, they were met with a stony silence.

Foote had the misfortune to have presented his plan for an assassination at the exact time when Stalin was seeking to ally himself with Nazi Germany. Despite years of fulminating against the depredations of the “fascist beast,” Stalin switched seamlessly to praising the achievements of the “German government.” “Just think how we used to curse each other!” he quipped to Ribbentrop during the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact.
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He now became a supplier of grain and oil to Hitler’s Germany and an accomplice in the invasion of Poland. Naturally, any plot to assassinate his new ally, though viewed favorably only weeks before, was now out of the question. Back in Munich, Alexander Foote, who had become an enemy national with the outbreak of war, was obliged to make his escape before attracting the attentions of the Gestapo. With that, the “Hitler scheme” was shelved indefinitely.

Though Center had apparently, albeit briefly, considered Foote’s plan to be a blueprint for an assassination attempt, Foote himself was curiously blasé about his activities in Munich. The planned murder of Hitler, he wrote, was one of the “innocent sports” with which he “whiled away the time.”
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In due course, he would turn his hand to more serious matters. As a key player in the famed Lucy Ring, he would become one of the most prolific spies of the war.
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With the outbreak of the German-Soviet war in 1941, such halfhearted dalliances appeared to belong to another, altogether more genteel age. At the beginning of the campaign, Hitler’s armies scored an almost unbroken series of victories, which brought them to the gates of Moscow by early December. Yet,
bogged down by winter weather and stiffened Soviet resistance, their advance stalled. Moscow was held; Stalin survived.

The following year, German armies drove to the south, hoping to secure the oil fields of the Caucasus and eliminate Stalin’s military reserves. They made huge advances in the Ukraine and southern Russia, taking a succession of cities in the drive for Stalingrad, which was reached in mid-September. However, as some German forward units gazed on the Volga and the “immense steppe” beyond, they had little inkling that they were also witnessing the high-water mark of German military might.
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The Soviet victory at Stalingrad, in the type of encirclement battle that had hitherto been a staple of the German advance, marked a very real turning point in the war on the Eastern Front. Hitler’s troops were no longer seen as invincible. They had been halted this time not by the weather or by the desperate deployment of reserve armies but by superior tactical thinking and its practical application. Their war would now play itself out as a long and bloody fighting retreat back into the very heart of Germany.

The fighting on the Eastern Front bore no relation to that in North Africa or the later Western European campaign. It was brutal in the extreme. It was a clash of two regimes that were ideologically opposed and had trained their soldiers to view their opponents not as fellow human beings but as so many vermin to be exterminated. No quarter was asked or expected. German soldiers facing capture would invariably save their last bullet or grenade for themselves. Soviet captives, meanwhile, could expect little charity from the Germans and were even viewed by their own superiors as traitors. For both sides, therefore, fear, rather than ideology, was often the primary motivator. As one German veteran explained:

We no longer fought for Hitler, or for National Socialism, or for the Third Reich—or even for our fiancées or mothers or families trapped in bomb-ravaged towns. We fought from simple fear, which was our motivating power. The idea of death, even when we accepted it, made us howl with powerless rage. We fought for reasons which are perhaps shameful, but are, in the end, stronger than any doctrine. We fought for ourselves, so that we wouldn’t die in holes filled with mud and snow; we fought like rats…with teeth bared.
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One of the greatest fears for German soldiers was falling into the hands of Soviet partisans. These irregular units had been formed, in Stalin’s words, “to spread the partisan war everywhere, blowing up bridges, destroying roads…to create intolerable conditions for the enemy and his accomplices.”
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Naturally, their creation was officially credited to Stalin, but the reality was more mundane. They were often made up of civilians and ex-soldiers caught behind the front by the rapid German advance. They came together and fought, in the first instance, only to survive and usually sought to avoid conflict rather than provoke it. Often their martial spirit had to be stiffened by an influx of NKVD officers and “interceptor battalions” deliberately left behind the lines.
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In time, however, the partisan movement grew into something much more fearsome. From the Baltic to the Black Sea, few regions of the occupied Soviet Union did not see partisan activity. Some units emerged spontaneously; others were spirited through German lines. Each one was approximately fifty to eighty members strong. Within a month of Barbarossa, there were already more than two hundred partisan detachments in the Leningrad district alone. A further ten thousand guerrillas were active in the Moscow sector.
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By the end of the year, their total numbers would exceed three hundred thousand.
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The German suppression of the partisans was grimly predictable. Hitler initially welcomed the guerrilla war, as it gave his forces the opportunity to “eradicate” their enemies. Thereafter, all captured partisans were assumed to be communists and would be treated accordingly—that is, shot out of hand. Every German death, meanwhile, was to be avenged by the execution of between fifty and one hundred “prisoners.” Large-scale anti-partisan sweeps of the rear areas were undertaken, invariably yielding hundreds of weapons and thousands of victims. In one instance, only 492 rifles were discovered on 4,500 dead “partisans.”
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Clearly
the Nazi definition of a partisan could be extremely elastic. The troops assigned to such grisly activities were usually the most brutal and brutalized of the German war machine. Among them were the notorious
Einsatzgruppen
murder squads and the so-called Dirlewanger Brigade, a ragtag collection of ex-poachers, turncoats, and criminals who delighted in their hideous work.
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Yet, under NKVD guidance and using stocks of “liberated” weapons, the partisans continued to flourish and soon developed into a genuine force, committing acts of sabotage and harassing German supply columns in the rear. As one SS officer admitted:

The greatest difficulties were posed by the partisans. Militarily they were the biggest threat to be found behind a fighting army. Ruthless, brave up to the moment of annihilation, with Asiatic cruelty. This enemy forced our units to stay on constant alert on account of their broad-based organization and their excellent communications network. Their familiarity with the terrain, their continual blocking of roads by laying mines and destroying bridges, their ability to dig in quickly and build machine-gun nests at strategic points, and their display of calm during hand-fought battles in the marshlands are the hallmarks of their fighting skills.
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Derailing German trains was another specialty, as was the destruction of military hardware. Ambushes, too, claimed countless German lives. Some units were even given performance quotas; the Yalta Brigade, for example, stipulated that “each partisan must exterminate at least five fascists…per month.”
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Few prisoners were taken, and torture and mutilation were commonplace. In one instance, the heads of four captured German soldiers were returned to their unit commander in a leather box.
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Countless others simply disappeared. In total, it is thought that more than fifty thousand German soldiers were killed by partisan forces in the occupied Soviet Union.

In the wide expanse of territory behind the Eastern Front, some partisan units were more ambitious still and organized
autonomous regions, such as the grandly named Partisan Republic of Lake Palik, a short-lived experiment in self-government established in rural Byelorussia. Indeed, a confidential German report of July 1942 conceded that large tracts of the German rear were “endangered.” An appended list outlined the thirty-two regions considered most at risk.
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This expansion of partisan activity in 1942 coincided with a growth in NKVD influence. Increasingly, the NKVD viewed the partisan network as a useful ally for the infiltration, support, and exfiltration of its agents into German-occupied areas.
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In the course of the war, more than ten thousand such agents were sent behind enemy lines.
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The majority fought, at least temporarily, with the partisans, serving to bolster their military and ideological resolve in the process. Their primary purpose, however, was often the targeting of senior German military and civilian personnel. In many cases, they were working from a list, which had been prepared in Moscow, containing the names of those tried and sentenced in absentia for crimes against the Soviet people.

In pursuing their quarry, a few Soviet agents posed as German officers. One of those was Nikolai Kuznetsov. Code-named “Fluff,” Kuznetsov was tall, blond, and handsome and, with his cold, reserved manner, could easily pass for a Nazi. Indeed, it was said that he could speak seven German dialects, as well as Russian with a German accent.
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In the summer of 1942, he was parachuted into Rovno in the Ukraine, where he adopted the identity of
Oberleutnant
Paul Siebert, an officer from the Wehrmacht Transport Corps. Expertly trained in covert operations, he succeeded in spending eighteen months behind German lines, where his primary task was the assassination of prominent functionaries of the occupation. His methods were simple. He would approach his targets in broad daylight, confirm their names, and announce their death sentence before dispatching them from close quarters with his service pistol.
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Operating in Rovno, the German “capital” of occupied Ukraine, and later in L’vov, he had no shortage of targets. He was credited with the murders of, among others, the SS judge Alfred Funk and the vice governor of Galicia, Dr. Eugen Bauer; the attempted murder of Paul Dargel, the deputy
Reichskommissar
for Ukraine; and the kidnapping of General Max Ilgen, who was spirited to Moscow for interrogation and never heard of again.
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