“Himmler. Schellenberg-good to see you again, Walter,” he said, speaking in the soft Austrian accent Schellenberg knew so well from the wireless.
“And you, my Fuhrer.”
“Himmler tells me that you have a plan that will win us the war.”
“Perhaps when you’ve had a chance to study my memorandum, you’ll agree with him, my Fuhrer.”
“Oh, I hate written reports. I can’t stand them. If it was up to these officers of mine, I’d never stop reading. Official papers on this, official papers on that. I tell you, Schellenberg, I’ve no time for paper. But let a man speak and I’ll soon let you know what’s what. Men are my books-eh, Himmler?”
“You can read us all quite fluently, my Fuhrer.”
“So we’ll go inside and you can tell me everything, and then I’ll tell you what I think.”
Hitler, gesturing toward the Fuhrer Bunker, placed another peppermint lozenge in his mouth and, walking beside Schellenberg, started to chat aimlessly.
“I walk a lot in these woods. It’s one of the few places I can walk freely. In my youth I used to dream of vast spaces like this, and I suppose life has enabled me to give the dream reality. I should prefer to walk in Berlin, of course. Around the Reichstag. I always liked that building. People said I was responsible for its being burned down, but that’s nonsense. No one who knows me could say I had anything to do with that. Paul Wallot wasn’t a bad architect at all. Speer doesn’t like him, but that’s no disqualification. Anyway, I walk here in these northern forests like that fellow in Nietzsche’s unreadable book- Zarathustra. I walk because I feel like a prisoner in these dugouts and my spirit needs space to roam around.”
Walking along, listening to the Fuhrer talk, Schellenberg smiled and nodded, thinking that any small talk he might offer could only injure his chances of selling Hitler on the idea of Operation Long Jump.
They entered the Fuhrer Bunker, and Schellenberg followed Hitler, Bormann, and Himmler to the left, into a large room dominated by a map table. The Fuhrer sat down on one of the half-dozen easy chairs by the empty fireplace and motioned Schellenberg to join him. Hitler disliked heat, and Schellenberg always came away from a meeting with the Fuhrer blue with cold. While he waited for Himmler, Schaub, and the two Bormanns to be seated, Schellenberg took a closer look at his Fuhrer, attempting to discern any sign of tabes dorsalis or tertiary syphilis. It was true, Hitler looked much older than a man of fifty-four years and seemed quite sparing in his gestures and the movement of his hands; there was, however, a compelling sense of physical force about the man, and Schellenberg did not feel Hitler was on the edge of physical collapse. Certainly he was under tremendous pressure, but the pale face, the globular eyes, and the faraway look of a sleepwalker-or a holy man-that Schellenberg had observed when he had last been to the Wolfschanze, seemed quite unchanged. It had never been possible to look at this morbid, quasi-mad Dostoyevskian figure and think of him as you would have of any ordinary man, but Schellenberg saw no real reason to suppose that Hitler was on the verge of total insanity.
His thoughts were interrupted as Hitler turned to him and asked him to begin. Schellenberg described the plan he had already sold to Himmler as a backup plan in case the peace negotiations, initiated by the delivery of the Fuhrer’s letters to the Big Three, did not bear fruit. By now, any kinks in Operation Long Jump had been ironed out, and it was eminently practicable. Though Schellenberg did not say as much to Hitler, von Holten-Pflug had returned from Vinnica to report that a team of one hundred Ukrainians were now, with the agreement of General Schimana, a unit within the Galicia Division of the Waffen-SS. All of them had parachute experience and were highly aggressive, fired up by the prospect of assassinating Marshal Stalin. Keeping Hitler in the dark about their true ethnic origin did not worry Schellenberg. He assumed that if the mission failed, the Russians would want to keep it quiet that fellow countrymen had been involved; and if it succeeded, then their origins would hardly matter. So Schellenberg left it that they were all SS volunteers from the Galicia Division.
Hitler listened, interrupting the briefing only rarely. But when Schellenberg mentioned Roosevelt’s name, he leaned forward in his chair and clasped his hands together in one fist, as if throttling the president’s invisible figure.
“Roosevelt is nothing more than a repulsive Freemason,” he said. “For that reason alone all the churches in America should rise up against him, for he is moved by principles that are quite at odds with those of the religion he professes to believe in. Actually, the noise he made at his last press conference-that nasal way he has of speaking-was typically Hebraic. Did you hear him boast that he has noble Jewish blood in his veins? Noble Jewish blood! Ha! He certainly behaves like some pettifogging Jew. In my opinion his brain is every bit as sick as his body.”
Martin Bormann and Himmler laughed and nodded their assent, and, warming to his theme, Hitler carried on:
“Roosevelt is the living proof that there is no race in the world that is stupider than the Americans. And, as for his wife, well, it’s quite clear from her Negroid appearance that the woman is a half-caste. If anyone ever needed a warning of the menace half-castes pose to civilized society, Eleanor Roosevelt is it.”
Hitler sank back in his armchair, wrapping his arms about him like a shawl. Then he nodded to Schellenberg to continue. But a minute or two later he was delivering his own idiosyncratic opinions of Stalin and Churchill:
“Stalin is one of the most extraordinary figures in world history. Quite extraordinary. Have you ever heard him give a speech?” Hitler shook his head. “Terrible. The man owes nothing to rhetoric, that much is certain. And if von Ribbentrop is to be believed, he has no social graces whatsoever. He is half-man, half-beast. He is never able to leave the Kremlin, but governs thanks to a bureaucracy that acts on his every nod and gesture. He cares nothing for his people. Not a thing. Indeed, I quite believe he hates the Russian people as much as I do. How else could he be so profligate with their lives? That makes Stalin a man who demands our unconditional respect as a war leader.” Hitler smiled. “In a way I should be almost sorry to see him dead, because, I must admit, he’s a hell of a fellow. Schellenberg’s quite right, though. If anything were to happen to him, the whole of Asia would collapse. As it was formed, so it will disintegrate.
“Now, Churchill-he’s quite a different story. I never yet met an Englishman who didn’t speak of Churchill with disapproval. The Duke of Windsor, Lord Halifax, Sir Neville Henderson, even that idiot with the umbrella, Neville Chamberlain-all of them were of the opinion that Churchill was not only off his head but a complete bounder, to boot. Absolutely amoral. It’s all you would expect of a journalist, I suppose. Say anything, do anything just to keep in the fight when any fool could have seen-can still see-that England should make peace. Not just to save England, but to save the whole of Europe from Bolshevism. It did Churchill a huge amount of harm in his own party when he went to Moscow. The Tories were furious about it and treated him like a pariah when he came back. And who can blame them? It will be the same story in Teheran. Shaking hands with Stalin? They’ll love that back in England. He’d better wear gloves, that’s all I can say.”
By now Schellenberg was dying for a smoke and impatient to carry on outlining his plan, but Hitler wasn’t yet finished with Churchill.
“I look at him and I can’t help but agree with Goethe that smoking makes one stupid. Oh, it’s all right for some old fellow-whether he smokes or not doesn’t matter in the least. But nicotine is a drug, and for people like us, whose brains are on the rack of responsibility day and night, there’s no excuse for this repulsive habit. What would become of me, and of Germany, if I drank and smoked half as much as that creature Churchill?”
“It doesn’t bear thinking of, my Fuhrer,” said Himmler.
With that the tirade ended and Schellenberg was, at last, allowed to continue. But when he reached the part that involved the Kashgai tribesmen of northern Iran, Hitler interrupted him once again, only this time he was laughing.
“To think that I’m a religious figure in the Muslim world. Did you know that Arabs are including my name in their prayers? Among these Persians I shall probably become a great khan. I’d like to go there when the world is at peace again. I’ll begin by spending a few weeks in some sheikh’s palace. Of course, they’ll have to spare me from their meat. I won’t ever eat their mutton. Instead, I shall fall back on their harems. But I’ve always liked Islam. I can understand people being enthusiastic about the paradise of Mahomet, with all those virgins awaiting the faithful. Not like the wishy-washy heaven that the Christians talk about.”
He stopped suddenly, and Schellenberg was finally able to finish outlining Operation Long Jump. Almost perversely, it was now that Hitler chose silence. From the breast pocket of his field jacket, he took out a cheap nickel-framed pair of reading glasses and glanced over the main points of Schellenberg’s memorandum, sniffing loudly and sucking more of the peppermint lozenges he was so fond of. Then, removing his glasses, he yawned, making no attempt to cover his mouth or to excuse himself, and said: “This is a good plan, Schellenberg. Bold, imaginative. I like that. To win a war you need men who are bold and imaginative.” He nodded. “It was you who
