Hitler's peace

The German army had hoped that withdrawing forces to the western bank of the Dnieper would provide them a respite from the Red Army, but Stalin had other ideas. Almost as soon as the withdrawal was completed, with enormous loss of life, he ordered his soldiers to attack. By November 6, Hoth’s Fourth Panzerarmee had been forced out of Kiev, and likewise the armor the Germans had concentrated on Zhitomir, a town eighty kilometers west of Kiev, with the aim of counterattacking the Russians. There was little appetite among German soldiers for a new offensive. The courage of the Wehrmacht was undiminished, but it was only those few reinforcements who had arrived from Germany and who lacked all experience of the Russian winter who were fanatical enough to believe that the war in Russia could still be won. Deeply demoralized, poorly equipped, and inadequately supplied, Germany’s soldiers-far from home in a vast and inhospitable country, and lacking any overall battle plan-faced an army that grew stronger every day, and for whom retreat now seemed impossible.

Of all the problems that faced Manstein’s army, none was greater than Hitler’s vacillating leadership: just as the counterattack on Kiev seemed ready, Hitler ordered his armor south, to defend the Crimea, leaving Zhitomir to be captured by the Red Army. It was recaptured by the 58th Panzerkorps on November 17, but long before then the headquarters for Operation Long Jump had been shifted seventy-five kilometers south, to the village of Strizhavka.

Strizhavka was the location of Hitler’s Wehrwolf Headquarters and close to Vinnica, a largish Ukrainian city with several cathedrals, a smaller, more parochial version of Kiev. The city was the center of a Jew Free Zone ruled by the Reichkommisariat of the Ukraine, the Vinnica Oblast. Some 200,000 Jews from Vinnica and the surrounding areas-some from as far afield as Bessarabia and northern Bukovina-had been murdered at the local brickworks and in the Pyatnychany Forest. Every one of Strizhavka’s 227 Jews had been “evacuated” before Hitler’s Ukrainian headquarters were built. Death, it was said by the local people, was a way of life in the Vinnica Oblast.

Even as Schellenberg was driven from the airport to the country house on the edge of the Yuzhny Bug River, where the Special Section from Friedenthal was now stationed, an execution was taking place at a gibbet erected in the main square of Vinnica. Six terrorists from the Trostyarets partisans were seated on the edge of a truck with nooses around their necks-seated because they had been brutally tortured and none of them was able to stand.

“Do you want to watch, Herr General?” asked the SS sergeant driving the surprisingly luxurious Horch that had fetched Schellenberg from the airport.

“Good God, no.”

“It’s just that these are the bastards who murdered and mutilated some friends of mine. All we found were their heads. Four of them. They were in a box with the word ‘shit’ painted on it.”

Schellenberg sighed. “Get out and watch, if you must,” he sighed impatiently.

The sergeant left Schellenberg alone in the back of the car. He lit a cigarette and placed his pistol on the seat beside him, just in case the partisans had any friends ready to attempt a revenge attack or carry out a robbery-the trunk of the car contained a box of gold he had brought from Berlin to reward the Kashgai tribesmen of northern Iran. He even removed his cap to make his rank seem less obvious, and, turning up the collar of his leather coat, tried to stay warm. Outside the car it wasn’t much above freezing, and a layer of damp fog hung over the town, chilling his bones and penetrating the distributor on the execution truck, which appeared to be having some trouble starting. Schellenberg laughed scornfully and shook his head. Serves the army right for trying to make a show of it, he thought; better to shoot a man and have done with it instead of this performance. Himmler would not have agreed with him, of course. Himmler was all for making an example of the victims of Reich justice. Which probably explained why, after Hitler, he was the most hated man in Europe. Not that he seemed to be aware of the loathing with which he was held, even in Germany. And it seemed ludicrous to Schellenberg that the Reichsfuhrer-SS should ever have believed that the Allies might choose to make a peace with him instead of Hitler. There was no doubt in Schellenberg’s mind; at some stage, Himmler would have to be removed.

It wasn’t just the Reichsfuhrer’s lack of realism, or his continuing, debilitating loyalty to the Fuhrer that offended Schellenberg’s scheming mind. It was also his apparent prevarication. Even now, Himmler wanted Operation Long Jump to proceed only as far as parachuting the team into Iran; the final order-if it ever came-to assassinate the Big Three was to be withheld until the last possible minute, much to Schellenberg’s irritation. He and Himmler had argued about it the day before his departure.