Hitler's peace

After the call Schellenberg went to his room and tried to sleep, but his mind was still fizzing with the mechanics of a plan he was already calling Operation Long Jump. He could see no obvious reason why the plan couldn’t work. It was daring and audacious, yes, but that was what was called for. And while he disliked Skorzeny, the man had at least proved that the apparently impossible could be pulled off. At the same time, the last person he wanted in command of such an operation was Skorzeny-that went without saying. Skorzeny was much too hard to control. And, besides, the Luftwaffe would never have agreed to Skorzeny, not after Abruzzi. Of the dozen glider pilots who had landed near Il Duce’s makeshift prison on the loftiest peak in the Italian Apennines, all had been killed or captured-not to mention the 108 SS parachutists who had accompanied Skorzeny. Just three men had flown off that mountain: Mussolini, Skorzeny, and the pilot of their light aircraft. Abruzzi might have been worth the heavy sacrifice of men and materials if something useful had been achieved. But Schellenberg thought Il Duce was finished and that rescuing him seemed pointless. The Fuhrer might have been delighted enough to award Skorzeny the Knight’s Cross, but Schellenberg and quite a few others had regarded the whole operation as something of a disaster; and he had told Skorzeny as much on the train to Paris. Predictably, Skorzeny, a large and violent man, had been furious and would probably have attacked and possibly even tried to kill Schellenberg but for the silenced Mauser pistol the young general had produced from underneath his folded leather coat. You didn’t criticize a man like Skorzeny to his face without having something in reserve.

Schellenberg finally fell asleep, only to be awoken at eight o’clock that evening by an SS-Oberscharfuhrer who told him Field Marshal Milch had arrived and was waiting for him in the officers’ bar.

Like everyone who worked for Hermann Goring, Erhard Milch looked rich. Thick-set, smallish, dark-haired, and balding, he offset his unremarkable appearance with a gold marshal’s baton that was a smaller version of the one Goring carried, and when he offered Schellenberg a cigarette from a gold case and a glass of champagne from the bottle of Taittinger on the table, the SD man’s keen eyes quickly took in the gold Glashutte wristwatch and the gold signet ring on Milch’s stubby little finger.

As with Heydrich, it was strongly rumored that Milch was of Jewish blood. But Schellenberg knew this for a fact, just as he also knew how, thanks to Goring, this was not a problem for the former director of the German national airline, Lufthansa. Goring had fixed everything for his ex-deputy in the Reich Air Ministry when he had persuaded Milch’s gentile mother to sign a legal affidavit stating that her Jewish husband was not Erhard’s true father. It was a common enough practice in the Third Reich, and in this way the authorities were able to certify Milch as an honorary Aryan. These days, however, Goring and Milch were no longer close, the latter having criticized the Luftwaffe for its poor performance on the Russian front, a criticism that Goring was not likely to forget. As a result it was also believed that Milch had transferred his allegiance to Albert Speer, the minister of armaments-a rumor that had only been fueled by their arrival together in Posen.

Over champagne, Schellenberg told Milch about Agent Cicero’s intelligence, and then came quickly to the point: “I was thinking of resurrecting Operation Franz. Only instead of disrupting supplies on the Iran-Iraq railway, F team would try to assassinate the Big Three. We could coordinate their attack with a bombing raid.”

“A bombing raid?” Milch laughed. “Even our longest-range bomber would barely make it there and back. And even if a few bombers did get there, enemy fighters would shoot them down before they could do any damage. No, I’m afraid you’d better think again on that one, Walter.”

“There is a plane that could do the job. The Focke Wulf FW 200 Condor.”

“That’s not a bomber, it’s a reconnaissance plane.”

“A long-range reconnaissance plane. I was thinking of four of them, each armed with two thousand-kilogram bombs. My team on the ground would knock out the enemy radar to give them a chance. Come on, Erhard, what do you say?”

Milch was shaking his head. “I don’t know.”

“They wouldn’t have to fly from Germany, but from German-held territory in the Ukraine. Vinnica. I’ve worked it out. From Vinnica it’s eighteen hundred kilometers to Teheran. There and back is just within the 200’s standard fuel range.”

“Actually it’s just outside, by forty-four kilometers,” said Milch. “The published figures on the 200’s range were inflated. Wrongly.”

“So they throw something out to save a bit of fuel.”

“One of the pilots, perhaps.”

“If necessary, yes. Or one of the pilots could take the place of the navigator.”