The Saint Peter’s Plot

Patiently, Dietrich nosed his way through the little cleric’s dogma and blind fanaticism. “If — let us just say if — some of the top men wanted to escape when there was no longer any possibility of victory, would you help them?”

“If they weren’t escaping purely because of cowardice.”

Well put, Dietrich decided, regarding Hudal with new respect. “If they were escaping to form a new order elsewhere. The cream of Aryan manhood. To form an alliance between the Church and National-Socialism,” Dietrich suggested slyly.

Hudal’s eyes gleamed. “Then of course I would help.”

“And you have many followers here who would help?”

“Of course.”

“Inside The Vatican?”

“I have many friends inside The Vatican. The Teutonic College itself is on neutral territory.”

Dietrich stood up. He stuck out his hand. “Then let us hope we never have to make use of them.”

Hudal stood up. “Are things really as bad as you make out?”

“They’re not good,” Dietrich said.

* * *

That night as he lay between the soft sheets of a bed in the luxurious Excelsior Hotel where many German officers stayed, Dietrich, unaware that he had escaped death by a couple of seconds, reappraised his day. A bad one.

Soon he would be back fighting in Russia — the Führer couldn’t afford to keep the Leibstandarte “slummocking” (as Field-Marshall Günther von Kluge had put it) in Italy much longer — and today he had finally acknowledged to himself that only defeat lay ahead. So much for those shining dreams of the ’30’s, for the glorious victories of the Leibstandarte as they swept through Europe.

Dietrich, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling, knew that he would fight to the last tank, the last man. And he would execute the Führer’s every order even if he had lost that intuitive touch of genius of the early days. Hitler had resurrected the pride of Germany: had shown its men that they still had balls. Elevated me from a nonentity to the commander of the most feared military machine in the world.

Dietrich reached for the suitcase beside his bed. Underneath a copy of Mein Kampf was a well-thumbed sheet of paper, a copy of Hitler’s remarks at the birthday celebrations for Hermann Göring on January 12th, 1942.

The role of Sepp Dietrich is unique. I have always given him the opportunity to intervene at sore spots. (Sore, well that was a bit of an understatement). He is a man who is simultaneously cunning, energetic and brutal. Under his swash-buckling appearance Dietrich is a serious, conscientious and scrupulous character. And what care he takes of his troops. He is a phenomenon … someone irreplaceable. For the German people Sepp Dietrich is a national institution. For me personally there is also the fact that he is one of my oldest companions in the struggle.

And I would die for him, Dietrich thought. Or, more practically, save him from the vengeance of the enemy.

Which was precisely what Dietrich proposed to do.

This was the plan known only to a handful of other top-ranking SS officers. To snatch Hitler from the muzzles of the enemy guns when Germany was finally on the brink of defeat. Regardless of the Führer’s wishes. Dietrich smiled fondly as he imagined Hitler’s ferocious reaction if he heard of Grey Fox.

And it was Grey Fox — Dietrich’s description of the Pontiff — that had prompted Dietrich to seek an audience with the Pope. How could Pius XII refuse with the 3rd Panzergrenadier camped on his doorstep?

Dietrich had proposed to sound out the Pope’s true feelings towards the Nazis. To test his reactions to any proposal to spirit top Nazis to freedom via The Holy See. To threaten, in the vaguest terms, retribution if he didn’t agree to collaborate. To extract a promise from the one man who couldn’t break his word.

But it hadn’t worked out like that. Dietrich had lost his motivation in the presence of the Pontiff with his long eloquent fingers, pallor of sanctity, aescetic features and gaze of total understanding.

The Pope had promised nothing, given no hint of his sympathies. He had handled the exchange with the practised ease of the career diplomat.

And finally Dietrich had kissed his ring a chastened man. Out-smarted by a priest!

But still, Dietrich comforted himself in his hotel room, the Pope had not denied any of his faltering proposals. Cold comfort.

Dietrich swore tersely and, thrusting aside the memory of the humiliating experience, took a green folder from the suitcase. On the first page was a list of eight names. The possible candidates to implement Grey Fox. Not Dietrich himself, nor the other SS conspirators, because they were all soldiers, nothing more, and they intended to fight to the last.

The chosen candidate had to have exceptional qualifications to carry out the most daunting mission of World War II. Bravery obviously — if he was Leibstandarte that went without saying. Authority. Resourcefulness. Unquestioning loyalty to the Führer.

But he had to have more even than these qualities. Much more. He had to be a man whose moral fibre had not been corrupted by the brutality of war. Untouched by cynicism. A man who still believed.

Inside the green folder were reports on the eight candidates. All good men. The finest examples of the Waffen-SS. But only one man had those additional qualities that Dietrich sought.

Now he would have to be put through the tests that the Committee of SS officers had devised. Tests far more exacting than the gruelling training of the SS.

With a thick-leaded pencil Dietrich scored out seven names on the list. The eighth name was Kurt Wolff.

VI

The Russian T-34 tank seemed to have lost its way. It stopped 150 yards from the German foxhole, its 75 mm gun swivelling slowly like the proboscis of some prehistoric animal scenting danger.

The young officer seconded to the 5th SS Panzer, the Viking, raised his head over the lip of the foxhole and cautiously surveyed it.

He turned to the Sergeant crouched beside him. “Do you think they know we’re here?”

“I don’t know, Hauptsturmführer.”

“Then it’s time we let them know.”

“If you say so, Hauptsturmführer.”

The blond Captain with the startling blue eyes looked at the T-34 — perhaps one of the survivors of Kursk, the greatest tank battle in history — through a pair of captured Russian binoculars. No movement except the slowly rotating gun.

“A pity to lose a fine specimen like this, Unterscharführer.”

“You are not suggesting we capture it?” the Sergeant asked. He hadn’t yet made up his mind about this laconic young officer, the embodiment of the Teutonic dream, who had so mysteriously arrived in the midst of the exhausted Viking, now in full retreat towards the Dnieper, the last natural barrier before the Polish border.

Ordinarily he would have assumed that he was a fanatic, dispatched from headquarters to bolster morale. My God it needed bolstering! The Viking had been fighting since the invasion was launched over the River Bug on June 22nd, 1941. More than two years in this bastard wilderness that the Ivans called Mother Russia!

But no, this man was no instrument of discipline, instructed by generals skulking far behind the sound of gunfire. This man was a soldier, albeit a rash one. There was the Knight’s Cross at the throat of his tunic, open at the neck, and a Silver Wound Medal, and a scar on his cheek which the Sergeant recognised as the furrow from a bullet.

Nevertheless he was an enigma. The scar long healed, the tunic miraculously well-preserved, standing out like a spare prick on a honeymoon among the crumpled, lousy, bloodstained clothing of the old soldiers.

The Sergeant glanced curiously at the captain as he surveyed the tank through the field-glasses. He noticed a muscle moving in the Captain’s jaw-bone, the needles of his close-clipped hair, the small cleft in his chin. Not a man to argue with, this one.

But who are you? Where have you come from?

The Captain lowered the field glasses: “You’re right, Sergeant.”

What had he said?

“We can’t capture it. We’ll have to destroy it,” he remarked conversationally, apparently overlooking the fact that all they possessed between them was a Schmeisser machine-pistol and a 9 mm Walther pistol.

The Captain pointed and the Sergeant raised his head to follow the line of his finger.

A Panzerfaust, a grenade launcher, lay on the wheat-coloured grass fifty yards from the foxhole.

He wants me to go and get that? No, my friend, those days are long past. We fight only to survive. Wait till you’ve been two years on the steppe.

“Cover me,” the Captain snapped.

The Sergeant was ashamed of his suspicion. “With a machine pistol, Hauptsturmführer?”

“At least it’s better than the Walther,” the Captain said.

God in heaven, he was making jokes!

“But they’ll spot you. One burst and they’ll have you.”

“There’s some cover over there,” the Captain said. Some scrub on which the first frost of autumn was just beginning to melt.

And then he was up and over the edge of the foxhole, wriggling flat-bellied over the grass.

The turret of the T-34 swung round.

You’ll dirty that precious uniform, the Sergeant thought inconsequentially. But they hadn’t spotted him. Not yet. The Sergeant raised the Schmeisser. Did the idiot want a bullet scar on the other cheek? Or through his chest?

The Captain was ten yards from the grenade-launcher when a machine-gun opened up from a belt of woods to his left. He flung himself to the ground and stayed there until the burst spent itself.

The Captain raised his head — For Christ’s sake keep down! — then his shoulders. As the machine-gun opened up again he scuttled behind a boulder.

Instinctively the Sergeant aimed the machine-pistol in the direction of the machine-gun. But what was the point? They were well out of range. Vaguely the Sergeant wondered what they were doing there. How they had got there. Had the Ivans secretly mounted yet another attack? Had the tank lumbered up merely to give the machine-gunners some target practice? Usually, the Sergeant thought grimly, they preferred prisoners for target practice. But what fighters. Even the Waffen-SS had to admit that.

The barrel of the gun on the tank swung lazily in the direction of the Captain hidden behind the boulder. One shell and both boulder and brave Captain would be no more. But they didn’t fire. Giving the machine-gunners some sport, the Sergeant decided. And after the Captain, me … Why in God’s name had this crazy two-man reconnaissance mission been mounted in the first place?

An aircraft with gull-shaped wings and a silver belly flew overhead. A Stuka. Perhaps one burst from its cannon might change the situation. But the Stuka flew away across the steppe — the infinite steppe — in the direction of the Dnieper.

Their only chance was if the Captain could make it back to the fox-hole. Then, if the machine-gunners are fool enough to move nearer, I’ll have them with the Schmeisser.

If … Peering over the top of the fox-hole the Sergeant realised that the Captain was indeed on the move. In the opposite direction. Towards the grenade-launcher.

And had reached it!

As bullets whipped over his head the Captain rolled into a hollow.

Now the tank must finish him off.

The Sergeant saw the snout of the Panzerfaust protruding from the hollow. Its grenade was said to be capable of punching a hole through eight inches of armour-plate. But the tank was beyond its effective range. Still, it was worth a try.

Machine-gun bullets plucked viciously at the ground around the hollow.

Then the Captain fired the grenade-launcher.

The Sergeant had no doubt of this because he heard the grenade clang against the tank’s armour. The hollowest clang of them all. A dud.

So this is how I am to die, the Sergeant thought. After two years of battle, after glorious victories and a few defeats, I am to die here in a foxhole.

For what? he wondered, failing at first to hear another sound on the crisp autumn air. But when the machine-gun stopped firing he heard it. The Stuka had returned. And was diving as only a Stuka can dive. It opened up with machine-gun and cannon.

The shells and bullets fell short but when the Sergeant again peered over the edge of the foxhole the T-34 was on the move heading for the cover of the woods. And the machine-gun was silent.

The Stuka climbed, wheeled, prepared for another attack. But as it came into a screaming dive the tank had reached the woods.

Inside the Russian tank the two German SS officers, instructed by Sepp Dietrich to put Kurt Wolff’s courage and initiative to the test, nodded at each other before abandoning it for their own armoured car.

When they reached the German machine-gunner he stood up and said: “Excuse me, Gruppenführer, I know I shouldn’t question an order but what was that all about?”

He never found out because one of the officers blew out his brains with a Luger pistol.

* * *

Kurt Wolff’s principal regret in his youth — he was only twenty-two now — was that he hadn’t been born early enough to be a fully-fledged member of the SS in those exciting, formative years of the struggle.

But he was old enough to remember the Congress of Victory, the Nazi rally at Nuremberg, in September, 1933. He was twelve years old then and he was wearing a black vest and shorts, marching in the Zeppelinwiese, with sixty thousand members of the Hitler Youth, in intricate formations that spelled out in black, red and white slogans, BLOOD AND HONOUR or GERMANY AWAKE.

In the centre of the formations was a swastika.

Military bands thumped out Lehar and Beethoven, flags fluttered in the late summer breeze. Then the finale: Sixty thousand knives simultaneously drawn like a flash of summer lightning.

Wolff was not an emotional man but he was still deeply moved when he gazed at the photograph of the rally, saw the child-like trust on the faces of the boys. Ten years later, how many of those boys had died for the cause?

He remembered the scene in the Luitpoldhalle after the display. At the back of the stage the German eagle clasping a swastika; at the sides of the hall a hundred or so SS resplendent in the black and silver uniforms.

One day, the twelve year-old Wolff had thought, I will wear that uniform. And I will fight the Führer’s enemies. I will die, if need be, for the man who has made my country great again. I will die for my God!

A fanfare of trumpets had heralded the arrival of Hitler. Beside him were two men whom Kurt hadn’t recognised. (They were Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Central Security Office.) But he was to know them well in the years to come.

Then all the lights had been switched off. Snap. Total darkness. And a single beam of light picking out the figure of Adolf Hitler. And spotlights finding the SS men in silver and black as they lowered their drawn swords.

Kurt didn’t understand a lot of what the Führer said — perhaps he shouldn’t even have been in the hall — but it was more exciting than anything he had heard anywhere else. A super breed of men was emerging; one day he might be one of them. They would dominate the world, they would eradicate weakness and treachery, Bolshevism (whatever that was), and the rich capitalists (whatever that meant) who stole the hard-earned monies of the ordinary German. Forget Versailles (wherever that was). Germany would be great again.

Tears formed in Kurt Wolff’s eyes as he witnessed what was in fact the official recognition of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler.

From then on it was the only unit to which Kurt Wolff ever wanted to belong.

* * *

The Leibstandarte first came into being on March 17th, 1933 as a personal bodyguard to Hitler before his power was absolute, when the brown-shirted SA and the black-shirted SS — derived from Schutzstaffeln, meaning Protection Squads — were competing, and the Communists and Nationalists were still to be reckoned with.

One of the first duties of the Leibstandarte under the command of Sepp Dietrich was to shoot the leaders of the SA rounded up by the SS, now a unified force under the leadership of Himmler, in the summer of 1934. The purge became known as the Night of the Long Knives.

The SS became an independent unit within the Nazi Party and the cream of them, the Leibstandarte, were honoured with a special oath of allegiance: “I swear to you, Adolf Hitler, as Führer, and Reich Chancellor, loyalty and bravery. I vow to you, and to those you have named to command me, obedience unto death, so help me God.”

When the German Army reoccupied the Rhineland in March, 1936 — Hitler had announced conscription a year earlier — it was spear-headed by the Leibstandarte. Hitler’s dream of a Thousand Year Reich was under way; and he had made it clear that the elite of his dream was the ideological SS, and that the kernel of the elite was the Leibstandarte.

At the time of the Rhineland occupation Kurt Wolff was fifteen. And, like the other boys at his school, he was intoxicated with the deeds of these fair-haired heroes, the embodiment of Himmler’s schemes for racial purity, these supermen in their black overcoats and breeches adorned with silver, their boots as bright as mirrors. Had they not cowered the French Army by their very presence in Saarbrucken?

By the time the Leibstandarte, attached to the 2nd Panzer Division of the 16th Corps, had moved into Austria two years later, and the Czech Sudentenland eight months after that, Kurt was approaching call-up age.

But two factors stood in the way of Kurt’s enrolment into the Leibstandarte. In the first place his father, a Major in the German Cavalry in the First World War, wanted him to join the Fourth Cavalry Regiment. To become a ‘real soldier’ instead of an ‘asphalt soldier’ as the Wehrmacht, the conventional armed forces, termed the SS which was now a fully-fledged force of police troops. ‘Asphalt’ because they spent so much time stamping the parade ground.

Kurt loved his father, a prosperous landowner with extensive vineyards in the Main valley of north-east Bavaria, but he could not understand his father’s attitude towards the SS.

“What do you have against them?” he would ask as they sat at dinner in the great yellow-bricked house overlooking the ranks of vines heavy with fat green grapes. “They’re the best soldiers in the world.”

His father, grey-haired, monocled, a widower, would sip a goblet of white wine and reply: “They’re not soldiers, Kurt, they’re policemen.”

“Then why did Hitler send them into the Sudetenland before the soldiers?”

His father never had much of an answer to that. Instead he would evade the issue by describing the SS as the guinea pigs of Himmler’s racial theories. “Aryan manhood! We were good enough to fight in 1914–18 without such experiments. And we nearly won,” he would say waving his cigar at Kurt. “Never forget that. If the Americans hadn’t come in we would have won.”

But the First World War was merely history to Kurt. “But the Führer has stated that one day the SS will fight on the battlefields.”

Wearily his father asked: “What battlefields? Haven’t there been enough battlefields already?”

“The battlefields in The Struggle,” his son replied. Of course there would be battlefields. They had been told so in their history lessons which encompassed the future as much as the past.

Usually his father left it at that and Kurt was relieved, because one of his friends had once repeated a remark made by his father derogatory to Hitler and next day his friend’s father had been arrested by two civilians in long leather coats. Not, of course, that he would sneak on his own father.

Once in their town house in Munich, the seat of the Nazi party, his father said: “I want you to be a soldier, Kurt. But in an army committed to peace.”

“The Führer has said that armies for the preparation of peace do not exist — they exist for triumphant exertion in war,” his son quoted.

And there Kurt Wolff senior left it. But he didn’t abandon his plans for his son to enter the Cavalry. Although the second factor standing between Kurt and the Leibstandarte also affected his father’s ambitions for him.

Kurt was nearly six feet tall. But he was also physically weak and the knowledge embittered him.

His ribs protruded from his chest like the ridges of a washing board, his limbs lacked muscle and his lungs wheezed with asthma. However, he was never set upon because the bullies respected his flinty character. Even at seventeen Kurt Wolff had presence.

But sometimes, standing in front of the mirror in his room adorned with Nazi insignia, and gazing at his thin body, he felt like weeping. Although, of course, he never did.

When the Germans launched their Blitzkreig on Poland in the autumn of 1939, Kurt made a determined effort to improve his physique and his health. He took up weight-lifting, he tried to barrel out his rib-cage with chest-expanders, he devoured enormous steaks and went climbing in the mountains south of his home.

Then secretly he tried to enlist in the Leibstandarte. Because his credentials were impressive, because he was tall enough — minimum height five feet and eleven inches — he got as far as a medical. But the elite of the SS required supermen — a filling in a tooth could disqualify a candidate. And when the doctors saw his scrawny body they shook their heads.

But the ultimate humiliation was rejection by the Cavalry. Not because of his physique but because of his asthma.

The possibility of a desk job within the Wehrmacht remained.

Kurt fled to a health clinic in the Bavarian Alps.

There for six gruelling months, under the supervision of an ageing athlete named Muller, he punished himself.

He hung from wall-bars until it seemed as if his arms were being pulled from their sockets; he ran hundreds of miles along mountain paths; he exercised with the chest-expanders until the springs broke; he swam thirty lengths a day in an ice-cold pool; he boxed with professional pugilists so that his eyes were permanently blacked for the entire six months; he lifted weights so heavy that Muller warned him about the dangers of a hernia; every morning at dawn he stood on the balcony of the health centre and breathed deeply of the frosted mountain air; he climbed ropes and vaulted leather-topped boxes and he performed press-ups until he collapsed on the floor gasping with pain.

He ate steak and fish, cheese and eggs, and fresh vegetables and slept precisely eight hours a night. He walked always with his chest thrust forward and his belly pulled in. He didn’t smoke, he didn’t touch liquor, and he didn’t visit the whores in the nearby town like some of the young men who left the health clinic with new diseases instead of cures.

And he won.

When he returned to war-time Munich — Germany was now at war with Britain and France — he was hardly recognisable as the weakling who had left six months earlier.

The bellows of his chest no longer wheezed: his back was straight, his ribs were finely muscled, his biceps bulged the arms of his old suits, his face was still pale but there was health in his lips and eyes.

He immediately reapplied to join the Leibstandarte, and kept out of his father’s way for a week.

When he was accepted he went to a bar and drank a beer and a Schnapps, and angrily brushed at his eyes with the sleeve of his jacket as joy expanded inside him.

While he was being trained and crammed with Nazi doctrinaire, the Leibstandarte were blazing trails across Holland and France as the demoralised Allies fell back to the final withdrawal at Dunkirk.

At college Kurt had always shown a flare for engineering and he knew more about armoured vehicles than many a Wehrmacht general. After his initial training, the toughest in Germany, he went on a tank course and astonished his instructors with his knowledge of the Mark IV.