The Last Blitzkrieg

Prologue

The second engine sputtered. It was only a matter of time before it gave out too. The pilot tapped the fuel gauge again, knowing full well that it was lying to him.

He had first noticed that the needle hadn’t budged while giving Smolensk a wide berth. He was tapping away at the dial when the radio squawked to life and a sergeant of the Soviet air defense system challenged the Ilyushin bomber’s passage into Russia.

The Il-4 had impeccable credentials as a bomber converted into a hospital transport. The Luftwaffe’s Kampfgruppe 200 had seen to that. Still, the Soviet sergeant only relented in his demand for an on the ground inspection when the bomber’s co-pilot let loose a barrage of colorful and vigorous Russian curses. The Soviet sergeant finally relented with a laugh at the suggestion of a particularly challenging sexual act and wished the Ilyushin happy landings.

The worst part now – if anything could be worse – was that not only had fuel been leaking from the tanks, the Il-4 used a floatation bobber inside the tank as a fuel gauge, and it must have been hit too. The pilot had no idea how much fuel he had lost, or how fast he was losing whatever was left. He hadn’t logged enough hours in this type of aircraft to ‘feel’ the weight of the tanks by gently rolling the huge plane from side to side. There had been plenty of fuel for the one way trip, but now he noticed he had been unconsciously trimming the aircraft more and more to compensate for the lost weight of the fuel. That was bad.

He had thought they had escaped their bad-luck encounter with the Stuka without any serious damage. Most Russian equipment was made to very forgiving tolerances, and if something worked, it would work forever. The only problem was finding something that worked. With luck, maybe one in five of anything manufactured in the Soviet Union actually worked after it rolled off the assembly line. This principle applied equally to bombers as it did to fountain pens. The pilot was very grateful at the moment to Barney Ilyushin, the Soviet engineer who had designed the sturdy long range bomber. It had taken a dozen or so hits from the Stuka’s 20mm cannon and still had been able to continue on its mission with only a slight drift to the right that could be corrected by adjusting the flaps.

The all-important cargo in the bomb bay was untouched and he thought there was nothing worse to show for the attack than a few thumb-sized holes in the fuselage. It took a lot more than that to hurt one of these big, primitive airplanes. Still, it was incredibly bad luck to run into one of their own fighters on the way out. They were supposed to have a clear run, but communications were almost non-existent along the German front. The pilot wondered if he knew the man who attacked them in the Stuka. He had flown them himself in Poland and Russia, but most of the men he had flown with were now dead or grounded. No fuel, no ammunition, no help from the ground or air. It was a long way from when they roamed unchallenged over the skies over Europe.

In the last half hour the small fuel leak from a nicked tank turned into a hemorrhage. The pilot gave the navigator the order to break radio silence and he quickly sent off a high-speed radio burst with a precise message of their problem and their coded coordinates.

When the Il-4 lost altitude it was like riding a piano out a third storey window. The pilot didn’t so much choose a crash site as it chose him. There were no paved roads and the ground was mostly forest broken up with swamp and rock. Any of it would tear the aircraft apart and spread its cargo all over the Russian countryside. At the last minute he saw a clearing that was flatter and less rock-strewn than most and stomped hard on the rudder. The Ilyushin wallowed to the right and its metal skin creaked in protest.

Only two hundred more kilometers and we would have made it.

He pulled the blunt glass nose up with difficulty. Yanking on the stick was like playing tug of war with a giant. The tops of the passing birch trees whipped the undercarriage. The tanks were empty, but he gave a fleeting thought to the massive round object that occupied most of the bomb bay. Since they were supposed to drop it on their target he assumed it was a bomb, but no one had officially told him that as part of his briefing. The kind of missions he flew didn’t invite a lot of questions. He was just a taxi driver. He just hoped that whatever it was it wouldn’t go off when they hit. Not that he would notice. The airplane’s glass nose between him and the Russian countryside made worries about his own future pointless.

The bomber lurched toward the ground once over the ring of trees. The clearing was shorter than it appeared from the air and a lot less even. At less than ten meters he could now tell that the high spot in the middle of the clearing was a massive flat rock covered with a thin layer of moss. Not good. Especially since they were still going 150 kilometers an hour.

‘Hals und Bein!’ he yelled to his crew. He yanked on the unresponsive stick to pull the blunt glass nose up, and dropped the big aircraft the last few meters towards the ground.

Chapter 1

‘Jazz is a type of music to which one can only dance with the upper body bent back and the abdomen pressed forward against someone else’s, while wiggling one’s hips like a lustful homosexual’

Das Schwarzes Korps – The official newspaper of the SS - November 25, 1937

Louis Armstrong played on the gramophone in the corner of the dark office. It was a rare record, not just in Germany where ‘perverse jazz music’ had been banned by the Reich Chamber of Music since 1934. It was a 1926 recording of Heebie Jeebies by Louis Armstrong’s band the Hot Fives on the Okeh label. It was also the first jazz record SS-Oberstgruppenführer Friederich von Glatz had ever bought.

Only a single pool of light from the shaded desk lamp gave any definition to the few objects in the sparse room. Oberstgruppenführer von Glatz leaned back in his chair with his eyes closed, his feet resting on an open desk drawer. Blue gray smoke from his cigar rose in tight curls through the light from the desk lamp on the massive leather topped desk, and then disappeared into the darkness of the room beyond.

Thinking was what von Glatz did best. His phenomenal mental agility had made him one of the most senior SS generals in Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s inner circle. Unlike other SS generals, he had no specific tasks and was not the head of an official SS department. His task was to simply know much about everything, and think. With his few dozen staff, he absorbed the mountains of information that arrived hourly by way of official announcements, foreign news, military situation briefs, scientific and technical reports, and the large network of police and Gestapo informants. He digested incredibly diverse information at a tremendous speed, and recalled most of it when needed. More than any one person, von Glatz knew what was going on in Germany and the world beyond. He even knew what he was secretly called behind his back: ‘Himmler’s Oberstgruppenfühler’ - Himmler’s highest tentacles.

Far more valuable than his ability to amass information was his talent in bringing together many seemingly unrelated things and see a previously hidden pattern. Maybe that is why he loved jazz so much. Von Glatz loved jazz because it brought together unrelated sounds and rhythms. He could hear each sound, and mentally remove each note from the music, and understand how it fit in with the rest. Jazz was a puzzle, and von Glatz got his only real enjoyment out of puzzle solving. Jazz was also improvisation, something German jazz musicians seemed unable to master. Unlike German jazz musicians, as well as being a meticulous planner, von Glatz had a natural gift for improvisation.

He discovered jazz in his mid-twenties. It was impossible to avoid jazz in Germany after the Great War. It was everywhere. It was all Berlin’s many nightclubs played. Black American Jazz performers often stopped in Berlin on their tours of London and Paris. In the summer of 1925 a curious von Glatz had seen Duke Ellington and his all-black jazz revue, Chocolate Kiddies, in Berlin. It was then that he fell in love with Jazz. There was already plenty of jazz in the nightclubs, and every bar along the Spree River had someone inside who played the saxophone. Jazz seemed to suit Germany even better than it did America. Berlin after the war had all the excesses and eccentricities of any large American city in the 1920s, with one exception. Berlin’s night life was still fueled by booze while America suffered through Prohibition.

Down the Kurfürstendamm there were bars for lesbians, homosexuals and transvestites - where you could go because you were one, or because you just wanted to watch. Marlene Dietrich’s style of wearing men’s clothes originated in the clubs of the K-Damm. Walking down the street you were offered all sorts of illegal pleasures, from tall blonde prostitutes in green and gold leather thigh boots to cocaine sold openly in perfume bottles. Exquisite black singer and dancer Josephine Baker was Berlin’s darling, and had her picture taken being pulled down the streets of Berlin by an ostrich. Roller skating and six-day indoor bicycle endurance racing were the rage, as well as clubs featuring women wrestlers, who had apparently fascinated an as yet unknown young man named Hitler on his first visit to Berlin.

It was natural that jazz became the unofficial anthem for Berlin between the wars, but German jazz always lacked the quality of the imports. Even home-grown acts like the all-girl Sylvester Jazz Band were, in von Glatz’s opinion, novelty acts and poor imitations of the real thing. In fact, von Glatz was even disappointed by Paul Whiteman, world acclaimed white ‘King of Jazz’. His show in Berlin lacked the life and raw vitality of black jazz musicians. His music was pompous and over-arranged, without spontaneity. No one could touch Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong as far as von Glatz was concerned.

Von Glatz selected a new record from the table and put it on the Gramophone. It was Louis Armstrong’s only recorded duet with Earl Hines: Weatherbird. As the needle touched the thick black disk Hines’ wild piano ride began pushing Armstrong into dazzling trumpet improvisations in this breakthrough jazz session.

The heady excess of Germany’s jazz era was also partly responsible for Hitler’s popularity. He promised the large numbers of less than tolerant provincial Germans living outside of Berlin that he would clean out these dens of foreign immorality and bring boring Germanic purity back. Shortly after coming to power, the Nazis closed down the clubs, forced homosexuals to wear a pink triangle and put them in concentrations camps. Jazz was disapproved of, then banned altogether in favor of more ‘Aryan’ forms of music and dance. Dr. Rave, president of the Reich Chamber of Music, went so far as to ban the saxophone altogether as a ‘symbol of Negroid lewdness’.

On the wall beside his gramophone von Glatz had framed the cover to the program of Munich’s 1937 ‘Degenerate Art Exhibition’. It was a cartoon of a Negro in a top hat, playing the saxophone with a star of David on the lapel of his tuxedo. The National Socialist defenders of German culture presented the exhibition to show the sickness and depravity of modern art and music in comparison to healthy - and boring - Aryan art. They hadn’t guessed that Germans would flock to the Degenerate Art Exhibition, for all the wrong reasons. They wanted to see expressionist paintings and listen to real jazz.

With his eyes still closed, von Glatz rolled his Davidoff cigar between his thumb and second finger. Standartenführer Dollmann had brought two much-prized boxes back from Switzerland after his meeting with the Americans. Without looking, von Glatz instinctively knew precisely how much ash was on the end, and leaned forward to tap it against the inside of a large crystal ashtray in the corner of his near empty desk.

It was rare for von Glatz to have an unscheduled moment, but Kammler was uncharacteristically late, most likely due to the disrupted rail lines. He traveled everywhere by armored train. Things had to be bad for Germany if even the fanatically punctual Dr. Kammler couldn’t be on time.

Von Glatz sat up and pushed in the desk drawer he was using as a foot rest with his toe. Turning around in his chair he began rooting through a small pile of buff folders resting in a tray. They were the reports delivered that hour. A memo from Reichsminister Speer on the pitiful trickle of small arms production. A transcript of a radio message to Hitler from Skorzeny stating that Vienna would fall to the Russians within 24 hours.

None of the reports was of immediate interest, and were replaced in the tray. Instead he rose and walked over to the gramophone and turned over the record. He loved Louis Armstrong’s songs because they were so full of life. They were a stark contrast to the way his own life had turned out. His own marriage at a young age had ended without children and in a polite society divorce. Except for a few short and largely unsatisfactory affairs since university, von Glatz hadn’t had much else in the way of relationships. He had no vices, and did everything in moderation, except work. He loved his work, but on rare occasions he regretted all the things he had given up.

Von Glatz had been largely confined to his underground headquarters for the past two weeks. That much subterranean living played tricks with a person’s sense of time. He looked at his wall calendar. His secretary, Frau Edelbaum, made sure it was turned over every midnight. April 14, 1945. Von Glatz also had a 24 hour clock on the wall opposite his desk so he would know if it was night or day in the outside world.

He rose from behind his desk and moved towards the padded green leather door in the dark wall beside him. A second outer door pushed open behind that, and a rush of noise and activity hit his ears. This was the nerve center of von Glatz’s own information empire. His junior officers called it ‘the Mailroom’. Two connecting rooms, each the size of a large gymnasium, studded with deep wooden cubicles and large tables. Each cubicle and table had some sort of communications equipment on it. Only half of the bank of Teletype machines chattered against one wall, as a gray uniformed lieutenant moved up and down the line watching and occasionally tearing off the printed messages. Over the past few weeks they had grown increasingly silent as cities and information gathering posts fell to the advancing allies. His eyes and ears were being cut off.

No one stood up as he walked around the room. His staff was too well trained to observe military niceties and waste time looking up from their work as he passed, and his ego didn’t require such a perfunctory display of respect.

‘Oberstgruppenführer,’ a lieutenant spoke to get his attention as he walked by the desk. In the Kamradenschaft of the SS, fellow members of the SS were addressed using only their rank, unlike the class-conscious Army which required the respectful use of ‘Herr’ when addressing superiors. Even the lowliest SS private had the right to address Himmler simply as ‘Reichsführer’, and not the more subservient ‘Herr Reichsführer’.

Von Glatz paused to look down at the situation report the young man was offering. The one-armed lieutenant was a veteran of Stalingrad and was responsible for monitoring the activities of the Supreme Stavka, the Soviet High Command. The one advantage of the Soviet advance was the amount of direct radio and telegram traffic with the Stavka. Von Glatz had noticed that even the smallest aspects of the Soviet campaign were still directed and coordinated through Moscow. The Stavka was the head of an enormous, blundering Soviet war machine. Little room was left for individual initiative on the part of even the highest ranking Soviet field commanders. Any army has to have central co-ordination and planning, but since Stalin’s purge of the Soviet officer class before the war, few Soviet officers, even at the highest ranks, were willing to take risks or exploit the unexpected opportunities that often presented themselves in war without specific permission. They reminded von Glatz of his summers in Greece as a boy. The fishermen there pulled enormous octopuses from the sea, flipped them over and quickly bit them, severing the brain from the rest of the writhing body with their teeth. The Russian advance was like the tentacles of an enormous octopus. All you needed was big enough teeth to bite them.

Radio messages continued to come in, both from commanders along the shrinking front and by short wave from the capitals of Europe. Extra staff had to be taken on because an increasing number were in Russian and English. Von Glatz had himself spent two years at Cambridge polishing his English. It not only allowed him to understand Louis Armstrong’s lyrics, but also meant he could read intercepted American and English military communiqués for himself without first having them filtered through a clumsy interpreter who had never set foot outside the Reich. The latest addition to the operations room had been the installation of a dozen additional telephone switchboards. Not only was the telephone being increasingly used for internal German military communications, the Allies often found the German telephone system the most effective way to keep in touch with their own troops as their front advanced. Von Glatz had even overheard an American General simply calling up his German counterpart in a besieged city and personally asking him over the telephone to surrender.

The telephone operators he had picked were skilled at re-routing calls. They not only kept von Glatz’s lines of communications open throughout Germany, but also frequently allowed them to listen in on Allied conversations. His staff routinely overheard uncoded Allied telephone calls delivering battle orders and operational plans. Most of the time the Allies didn’t even bother to code their messages any more, so the large crypto staff had little to do. It was frustrating that there was little von Glatz could do with this new wealth of information, except pass it on to the paralyzed German high command.

The only thing in his ‘hot’ tray was the regular Reuters news report, so von Glatz picked it up along with a handful of papers from the less urgent tray outside his door, and turned towards his office. More cities fallen. A list of Wehrmacht groups no longer deemed ‘operational’. Synthetic petrol production figures for March. At the bottom of the stack was a copy of Life magazine, which, although a month late, still kept inexplicably arriving through a post box in Spain.

The thick door closed out the chatter of the communications center behind him. The record on the gramophone was just finishing. Inside his office was Frau Lütze, the cleaner. How she managed to still report to work every day was something of a mystery. Von Glatz rarely left his office these days, and Frau Lütze took every brief absence as an opportunity to get inside to dust.

‘Make sure you’re careful with that,’ he gently chided. Frau Lütze had picked up an autographed photograph in a silver frame and was giving it a vigorous wipe. ‘Do you know who that is?’

Frau Lütze squinted at the picture. A tall thin man in a white suit stood between two officials of the German Foreign Ministry in swallow-tailed coats. Over the shoulder of the man in the white suit was a wide red sash, and he was looking at one of the Germans while the other pinned a large star on his jacket.

‘No, General.’ Her job was to clean, not notice.

Von Glatz took the photo from her and read the inscription scribbled in English between the heads: ‘To Fred, and your monkey talk and jungle squeals. With thanks, H. Ford.’

‘Who is Herr Ford?’

‘He is an American automobile manufacturer, like Dr. Ferdinand Porsche, or Herr Daimler.’

Von Glatz had met American car maker Henry Ford several times. The first time was in 1931, just after the death of von Glatz’s father. Von Glatz had just inherited his father’s business, and was on his first buying trip to the United States.

On his death, his father had left him with one of the largest manufacturing concerns in Europe. His father had been one of the first of the old Junkers aristocracy to voluntarily leave behind the old ways of a Prussian landowner. When as a young man he himself had inherited from his own father in the mid-1800s, he sold off much of the family’s extensive land holdings. Land gave the Junkers their identity and social status in old Imperial Germany. He turned his back on the old ways, and invested the money in chemical factories. He sent his son to university not to drink and duel like the useless child of a nobleman, but to study business and economics.

Von Glatz’s first trip to the United States in 1931 was mostly an excuse for his real purpose - to see live American jazz in its natural environment. He was interested in American mass-production techniques and wired the Ford Motor Car Company in Michigan to see if he could have a tour of their assembly line. Instead of being met by some clerk, he was personally shown around the plant by Henry Ford himself, all too anxious to discuss a strange combination of manufacturing techniques and European politics.

Throughout the tour Ford seemed extremely interested in von Glatz’s assessment of German politics, and especially Hitler. When von Glatz told him that had recently met Hitler, he was immediately invited to dine with him and his son Edsel at Fair Lane, Ford’s private two thousand acre estate.

Von Glatz put the photo back down. Aside from the obligatory picture of the Führer, the only other photo in his office was of his father.

Von Glatz’s father had profited immensely during the Great War, but like many in the 1920s had been scared by the growing support of the Communist Party in Germany. In the crushing inflation and depression that followed, his careful investments largely protected him, but the ineptness of the Social Democrats and the threat of the Communists were enough to make him take interest in politics. Finally, late in life, he had become one of the first industrialists to make substantial contributions to the NSDAP - Hitler’s struggling Nazi Party.

Hermann Göring was the ‘respectable’ Nazi used in the early days when contacting aristocrats. As a fighter ace and last commander of the Red Baron’s squadron, Göring had a air of celebrity about him. His wife was a famous movie actress, and his easy going manner made him popular with both millionaires and the roughest of the Party’s street fighters. Von Glatz’s father took an immediate liking to Göring, and impressed with his promises to crush the Communists and rebuild the German economy, he made substantial donations to the NSDAP.

His regular and generous contributions to the Party did not go unnoticed. In the time leading up to the general election in September, 1930, Hitler campaigned around the country by airplane. No one had ever campaigned like that before. Von Glatz’s father was dying of cancer, and news of it reached Hitler while electioneering in the area. As a significant contributor, Hitler came to see him. They landed his airplane on the long gravel drive leading up to the house.

After visiting with his father, Hitler had grasped von Glatz’s hand and told him of how his mother had died of cancer too. His pale blue gray eyes had moistened at the mere mention of her name. Then almost immediately his mood changed and he began speaking animatedly about the future of Germany, and the struggle against its enemies - the communists and the Jews - who worked together to turn it into a moral cesspool.

Von Glatz repeated this story to Ford at dinner, but he didn’t add that he thought most of the Nazi philosophy was rubbish that had been circulating in one form or another among simple-minded people for years. He certainly did not undergo the spiritual re-awakening so many claimed after meeting Hitler. Rather, he assessed Hitler as a shrewd, intelligent and ruthless man. He was impressed by his photographic memory and complete lack of limits. With a man like this, so completely free of all constraints, anything was possible. The next week he joined the Nazi Party. The day after joining, his father died leaving 30 year old Friederich his industrial empire.

After their first meeting von Glatz kept up his relationship with Henry Ford. Later, while working in the Ausland SD, von Glatz had arranged for Ford to be awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle. It was the highest award Germany could bestow on a foreigner, and only the fourth time it had ever been awarded. It was the first ever awarded to an American. Von Glatz arranged to attend the ceremony in Dearborn, Michigan on July 30, 1938, and was among the 1,500 at the dinner that followed. The evening was marred only by the protests of the anti-Nazi crowd outside, who Ford dismissed as ‘communists and Jews’.

A month after returning to Germany from Henry Ford’s ceremony he had received the photograph. He looked at the inscription again. Monkey talk and jungle squeals. That’s how Ford had described jazz to von Glatz whenever the subject of music came up.

Von Glatz could already see that war was coming again to Europe, and knew at that early date the value of promoting goodwill among influential Americans, like Ford. The last thing Germany wanted was for America to enter another European war, and von Glatz had worked hard within the Ausland SD to develop sympathetic alliances with influential Americans. Indirectly, von Glatz’s efforts created an effective lobby of American isolationists and even admirers of Nazi Germany, and contributed to the United States staying on the sidelines for the first two years of the war and Germany’s greatest victories.

Von Glatz was happy enough when Hitler outlawed the unions and reorganized them into the Nazi-controlled Labor Front. From a business point of view, he had profited handsomely from the expulsion and removal of the Jews from the industrial and financial world. He bought their property and factories for next to nothing. Soon he found that running his late father’s industrial empire was not enough of a challenge. It largely looked after itself and the only challenge was how much money it could make. Von Glatz had grown up with the luxury of having more money than he could possibly spend in a lifetime, and so earning more of it was not of great interest. He assembled a highly competent board of directors and managers, and left them to turn a substantial annual profit for him with a minimum of personal supervision.

This left him free to pursue other interests. While others who had been handed such financial security on a platter had spent their lives indulging in every kind of excess imaginable, von Glatz took the opportunity to travel and study politics. He had no interest in becoming a politician. He quickly realized that few of those who strutted around and made speeches wielded any real power. Power came from information, carefully gathered and sorted, and then applied at the right moment.

When Himmler offered him an honorary rank in the SS, von Glatz took it. The rest, as they say, was history.

‘Oberstgruppenführer,’ von Glatz’s adjutant interrupted quietly, opening the connecting door. ‘The station master has just notified us that Dr. Kammler’s train has arrived.’

Chapter 2

‘So where is it?’

Obergruppenführer Dr. Hans Kammler didn’t even unbutton his black leather topcoat before sitting down at the small round table in the corner of von Glatz’s office.

‘So, where is this miracle you promised?’ he said without introduction. He was unhappy about having to come to von Glatz’s HQ to find out what had gone wrong. He himself had many things to do these days, and his other business was in the opposite direction of von Glatz’s HQ. At least the connecting rail lines were still intact.

‘You are on your way to Nordhausen, I understand,’ von Glatz said, deflecting the direct question. All his career Kammler had also tried to keep himself outside the usual lines of command and away from official scrutiny. Von Glatz occasionally needed to let him know that his activities were known to him. It helped to keep him from trying to depart from von Glatz’s carefully constructed plan.

‘Yes, I have some final business there.’ Kammler habitually volunteered little. He was not in the habit of answering to anyone. ‘And this is a delay I can ill afford. The Americans are approaching from two sides, and there are another four thousand useful people who have to be evacuated to the south.’

Von Glatz knew exactly what he was talking about. It could hardly have passed without notice to him that northwest of the Nordhausen concentration camp in the Harz mountains was the largest operational V-2 factory. Von Glatz had seen the internal SS requisitions for materiel and slave labor used to carve a cavern under the mountain large enough for an entire rocket factory and assembly plant.

‘The five hundred specialists you moved yesterday to Oberammagau are safe if we need them?’ von Glatz said evenly, emphasizing the ‘we’. They were to be a bargaining chip for the Americans, if needed. Von Glatz knew from intercepted communiqués that a Colonel Toftoy of U.S. Technical Intelligence in Paris led an American scientific recovery team called Special Mission V-2. Kammler was planning to buy his own hide with Germany’s rocket expertise. That was selling it far too cheap.

‘Of course they will be safe,’ Kammler said testily. ‘Now you know why am I here and not seeing to them. I want some answers.’ His eyes narrowed and he ran his hand over the side of his hair. Von Glatz gave a mission summary with an economy of words.

‘I told you the package was retrieved from Norway without complications. It was met by an Soviet Il-4 bomber provided courtesy of KG 200 out of their base in the Heinkel works at Rostock. The flight out of Norway was uneventful, until it passed over our troops in Kurland.’ The over 200,000 German troops of Army Group Kurland had been trapped on the northwest tip of Latvia during the Russian advance. They could not break out, but the Russians were content to simply keep them contained and by-pass them on the way to Berlin.

‘In spite of the order to flak and air crews to cease all activity,’ von Glatz continued, ‘a Stuka flying on general patrol engaged it as it crossed the front. The crew of the Il-4 had strict orders to maintain radio silence unless contacted by the Russians, and so could not identify themselves as Luftwaffe. The bomber of course had appropriate Soviet markings.’

Kammler was impatient. He already knew the plan from the briefing a week before. The Soviet bomber had been difficult to find, especially considering the special requirements. The markings were to allow it to pass unchallenged as far as possible into Soviet territory. It was hardly anticipated that the Luftwaffe posed a danger, now barely able to muster a dozen aircraft across all Germany.

‘Our bomber was finally forced to break radio silence, but not before Stuka had fired off almost all its ammunition. In spite of the attack, it appeared the damage to the bomber was superficial, not severe enough to compromise the mission. It appears now the crew was wrong and a fuel tank was damaged. Some instrument problem prevented the crew from knowing they were out of fuel until the last moment.’

Kammler listened with increasing anger. He did not get to where he was by tolerating incompetence. At 45 years of age he was considered Reichsminister Speer’s successor and stood solely responsible for most of the important projects in what remained of the Reich.

‘So,’ Kammler summarized bitterly, ‘we have shot down our own secret mission to drop the world’s first atomic bomb on Moscow?’

‘Let me finish,’ von Glatz said with an evenness he did not feel. Although at one time not so long ago he had the power to make anyone in Europe disappear, he prided himself on never raising his voice.

Kammler continued to stand. He was sweating, but not because he was still wearing his heavy coat.

‘I will not let you finish! You persuaded me not to go to the Führer with the weapon that could win the war for Germany. You got me to participate in your hare-brained scheme. And now you sit there calmly telling me that the one working atomic bomb my physicists’ he paused and repeated stabbing his finger into the leather-topped table, ‘my physicists created through years of research, is lost and plastered all over the Russian countryside due to your incompetence!’

‘It’s not lost,’ von Glatz said calmly. ‘I know exactly where it is, and more or less what condition it’s in. All we have to do is retrieve it and continue as planned.’

Kammler sat down, suddenly quiet and sullen. ‘Retrieve it, like it’s sitting in a department store’s lost and found,’ he said sarcastically. ‘You knew we are working on a two stage rocket. With it we could have reached out and destroyed London, or even an American city. Then we could have bluffed the entire world into a truce saying we have more.’

‘We’ve been through this before. Your rocket is far from ready and we agreed that Hitler would have happily squandered it in destroying London, provided you could guarantee your rocket would land there and not end up in the Channel.’ One V-1 buzz-bomb in the first launch against London inexplicably reversed its course and exploded on top of Hitler’s command bunker while he ate lunch.

‘If you had waited, the new Reichenberg IV would have been ready. They can deliver an eight hundred kilogram warhead exactly on target,’ Dr. Kammler said with bitter pride.

Von Glatz had seen the specs on the trials of the weapon. The Reichenberg series of manned glider bombs was quickly built by his department after they were first proposed in March, 1944. Germany’s famed woman pilot, Hanna Reitsch had tested it twice for the German Institute for Glided Flight. Officially designated the Fi 103, it was based on the smaller V-1 flying bomb - what the British called buzz bombs - with a small pilot’s compartment added. It was designed to be towed near to the target strapped under a bomber. Once released the pilot sat behind the warhead, and manually steered the pulse jet for thirty-two minutes over a distance of three hundred kilometers. It would then glide towards the target. The pilot was supposed to eject, but at dive speeds of over eight hundred kilometers an hour an exiting pilot would be crushed like an egg in the slipstream. Since the pilots would likely die anyway, it was finally decided that the Reichenbergs would be suicide weapons, like the Japanese Kamikaze. When Speer, who opposed the project, brought it to Hitler as a ‘Selbts-Opferung’ or self-sacrifice weapon, it was rejected just as Speer had hoped. Kammler was so desperate to revive the project he finally suggested that criminals, clinically depressed or already suicidal people be used as pilots.

‘Herr Dr. Kammler, you know we could not get near enough to England to launch a Reichenberg rocket, although I have no doubt you could find a volunteer to pilot it.’ Kammler had no shortage of fanatics at his disposal. ‘You will also recall that their cruising speed is slower than most Allied fighters, and this is something we cannot afford to have intercepted.’

‘Which is exactly what your plan has accomplished,’ Kammler said petulantly. ‘There were so many options open to us. We could have sold it to the Americans for any price, or revealed its existence to them and demanded their surrender.’

‘There was only one option open to us, and we have discussed this all before,’ von Glatz said rubbing is eyes partially in fatigue and partially to show his tiredness in re-arguing the issue with Kammler again. ‘We are in no position to negotiate with the Americans. They would not believe we have an atom bomb, and the only way we can prove to them that we do - either to bargain or to threaten - is to use the only one we have. Their reaction is too unpredictable. If we used it on them I doubt we could count on their being particularly well-disposed towards us.’

Von Glatz was tired of going through this yet again. It had taken a great deal of convincing to bring Kammler over the first time.

‘But,’ he continued, ‘we can demonstrate it by using it on Russia – America’s uneasy ally. At the same time, a little friction manufactured between the East and West may give us the opportunity to drive a wedge between the Allies sue for peace on favorable terms - favorable for both Germany and us personally. No, we are following the only correct plan.’

Kammler sat in silence. When he was away from von Glatz he had a thousand doubts and alternate plans he felt sure would bring a more direct result. Von Glatz was always able to convince him the right path was being followed. It did not make Kammler happy, but he was left with a grudging recognition that the course being followed was best.

‘In any event,’ von Glatz continued, ‘the Führer would never agree to the peace. He is by all accounts beyond reason now, and while he lives, he will want to continue the war. Do you remember his vow? ‘This time we will not surrender five minutes to midnight!’ Frederick the Great achieved an impossible victory in the face of certain defeat by not giving up too soon. His miracle came, and he went on to his greatest triumph. But there will be no miracle for Hitler. His time is past, but the miracle is within our grasp.’

They had received the news a mere ten days before that Professor Nagy’s bomb was finally ready, sitting in an underground facility off the coast of German-controlled Norway. Kammler had no choice in letting von Glatz call the shots. Kammler had access to most of the equipment and personnel, but von Glatz had access to resources that were not available to Kammler - resources like the research of other scientists, and a network of people in key places around the world. And money. Von Glatz had made sure Kammler’s atomic research continued when official sources of funding ran dry. He diverted money from other projects and put half a billion Reichsmarks into it out of his own substantial pockets. Von Glatz was also the man coordinating most of the secret German peace overtures with the Allies.

Whatever else, Kammler knew he would do well allying himself with von Glatz. Crossing him would have similarly unfortunate results.

‘So,’ Kammler said after a pause long enough to show he was still unhappy, ‘where is our bomb?’

Von Glatz walked over to the wall of his office with a set of double sliding maps. He slid a heavily-marked map of Germany aside to reveal a clean one showing the area between Latvia and Moscow. There was a single red grease pencil circle.

‘We have calculated this to be its position.’ He pointed to an area about two hundred kilometers northwest of Moscow, between Rzhev and Kalinin. The topographical map was almost featureless. Swamp, forest, and the dotted path of unmaintained mud road. No towns or villages. Empty, like most of Russia. ‘We have been in brief contact with the navigator, who appears to be the only survivor of the crash. His own assessment is he will be