“Can you remember the names of the others in that funeral party? It’s important, Horst.”
Horst screwed his eyes up and put his hand over his mouth as he tried to bring back the names. “One was definitely Erich Kempka, Hitler’s chauffeur, another non-combatant raised to Obersturmbannführer. Hitler tended to raise all his dogsbodies to colonel rank. I remember Obersturmbannführer Högl—he was my immediate superior, in charge of the guard—but I’m sorry, Dan, I think there were two others. I can’t remember them though.”
“That’s okay, you’ve done really well remembering that much. Peter Högl, by the way, was killed trying to cross the Weidendammer Bridge during the attempted breakout. I remember his name from the reports. Well, that pretty well covers everything …” Kelly paused and dropped his head into his hands. “I’ll tell you, Horst, I’m struggling to get my head around all this. Part of me feels that we are overthinking this, that Hitler and Braun died in the bunker and that Trevor Roper was absolutely right in the conclusions he drew—albeit from very unreliable source data—and part of me keeps saying … what if? What if?” He paused again, then sat upright in the chair, his face grim.
“If Hitler survived the bunker, we have a big problem. If Eva Braun survived and is now bringing up Hitler’s son … we have a huge problem!”
Skadi Investigates
Sybilla Thorstaadt emerged from the Davidwache Police Station and walked up Davidstrasse. She had been allocated two rooms, a desk and a telephone by the very obliging Hamburg police to aid her investigation. Sybilla had been instructed by McFarlane, her chief in London, to investigate allegations, fed to him by the KGB in Moscow, that a war criminal was living openly in Hamburg. She had tracked the man, Walter Busch, to a small semi-detached house on the outskirts of the city, where he lived with his wife and two children.
Busch’s life had been turned upside down when Sybilla, accompanied by two armed policemen, had turned up on his doorstep one morning. He was detained for questioning while Sybilla investigated the KGB allegations that he had been guilty of a number of atrocities when serving as part of an Einsatzgruppen commando unit in Belarus.
After painstaking investigation, it transpired that several Walter Busches had served in the Wehrmacht and the SS during the war—and the Soviets had picked the wrong man. This particular Walter Busch had only joined the Wehrmacht in 1944, being too young prior to that, and his only military claim to fame was that he had finished third out of a class of twelve on his storeman/clerk technical course at a Wehrmacht training centre. Thereafter, he spent the rest of the war counting boxes of ammunition. Walter had never been on the Eastern Front and, given a map of the world, it is questionable whether he could even have located Belarus.
Busch’s idea of hellraising was shouting abuse at opposing teams—and sometimes his own—when he went along to the Sportplatz am Rothenbaum, the SV Hamburg football ground. The only atrocity he had ever committed was on the answer paper of his end of school exams.
Busch had been returned to the tranquillity of his idyllic life in his semi in the suburbs of Hamburg with an abject apology and best wishes for the future. He had expressed himself annoyed and angry with his treatment by the Hamburg police, who had made it clear that they were annoyed and angry with the British Secret Service for wasting their time. The Secret Service, in turn, had informed the KGB that they were annoyed and angry with them for feeding them duff intel. Sybilla had no doubt that the KGB would have advised some poor agent that they were very annoyed and very angry at being so embarrassed by his or her incompetence. She wondered idly in what part of Siberia that agent was now working.
Sybilla had been on the point of packing up her papers and documents with a view to vacating her borrowed office when she received a call from McFarlane. Dan Kelly, he informed her, had uncovered evidence that suggested Hitler might—unlikely, but just might—have escaped from the Führerbunker. He was aware of a submarine having been seen delivering two people to a place in Argentina just a few months after the war ended. He thought the submarine may have sailed from Hamburg. Would she investigate?
As ‘No!’ was not an acceptable answer to any question McFarlane asked, she assured him that she would.
Cap in hand, she approached the police officer who had allocated her the rooms and asked if she could extend her tenure. He had agreed amiably, but warned that his limited human resources meant it would be unlikely he’d be able to offer much in the way of manpower assistance.
Sybilla had set to work immediately. British military services held much of the information she needed, and scrutiny of captured naval documents now carefully archived in state depositories in Hamburg, Kiel and Bremerhaven completed the eventful story of the transatlantic U-boats.
It seemed that two U-boats had crossed the Atlantic immediately after the end of the war, the U-977 and the U-530. It was the U-530 that was reported as having transferred two people in civilian dress into a small boat in the waters off the coast of Argentina. The submarine had then turned up at Mar del Plata where the captain had surrendered his boat, his crew and himself to the Argentine Navy on 10 July 1945.
Sybilla had obtained a transcript of the interrogation of the captain, Oberleutnant Otto Wermuth, who had refused to answer key questions: What were they doing off the coast of Argentina? Why did the crew carry no identification? What had happened to the boat’s log? The crew were interned for a while before they and the boat were transferred to the United States.
Sybilla had scrutinised the details
