Guarding Hitler Read online

  To Fang Fang,

  with love

  Contents

  List of Plates

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  1. Time of Struggle

  2. Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Führer!

  3. Trains and Automobiles

  4. Eagle’s Eyrie

  5. The Führer’s Squadron

  6. Eagle’s Nest

  7. Wolf’s Lair

  8. Enemies Within

  9. Valkyrie

  10. Storm of the Century

  11. The Eagles Have Flown

  Appendix 1: German Commissioned Ranks

  Appendix 2: Present in the Führerbunker 30 April 1945

  Notes

  Bibliography

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  PEN & SWORD MILITARY

  an imprint of

  Pen & Sword Books Ltd

  47 Church Street

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  Copyright © Mark Felton, 2014

  ISBN 978-1-78159-305-9

  eISBN 9781473838383

  The right of Mark Felton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

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  List of Plates

  Hitler being driven by Julius Schreck in the early 1930s.

  The approach road to Hitler’s mountain retreat, the Berghof, on the Bavarian-Austrian border.

  Hitler and his girlfriend Eva Braun pictured with their dogs on the sun terrace at the Berghof, 1936.

  The Great Hall at the Berghof.

  Reich Chancellery guards from the elite Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, Berlin, 1938.

  Hitler greeting his adoring public whilst standing in the passenger seat of one of his Mercedes-Benz armoured limousines.

  The results of Georg Elser’s failed assassination attempt on Hitler at the Burgerbraukeller in Munich, 1939.

  Hitler being greeted by Generalfeldmarschall Keitel at the Wolf’s Lair.

  Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair pictured with some of his SS-Begleit Kommando and RSD bodyguards.

  Henning von Treskow, one of the central plotters against Hitler in the Wehrmacht.

  Hitler’s Focke-Wulf Fw 200 Condor.

  Hitler addressing Reich Gauleiters in a conference hut at the Wolf’s Lair, 4 August 1944.

  Generalfeldmarschall Wilhelm Keitel, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Hitler and Reichsleiter Martin Bormann pictured at the Wolf’s Lair the day after Stauffenberg’s bomb attempt.

  Hitler’s uniform trousers shredded by the bomb blast on 20 July 1944.

  Hitler presents medals to Hitler Youths in the Reich Chancellery Garden, 20 March 1945.

  The Führerbunker emergency exit.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to acknowledge the kind assistance of the staff at the following institutions and individuals who were of invaluable assistance during the researching and the writing of this book: The British Library, London; Bundesarchiv, Abteilung Milita¨rarchiv, Freiburg; The Imperial War Museum, London; The National Archives (Public Record Office) Kew; The National Army Museum, London; Shirley Felton; Brigadier Henry Wilson, Matt Jones and the staff at Pen & Sword Books; my editor Barnaby Blacker, and a special thank you to my wife Fang Fang.

  Introduction

  Hitler’s body lay inside a shallow shell crater in the Reich Chancellery garden. It was wrapped in a grey army blanket. Only the Führer’s black trousers and black lace-up shoes protruded from the blanket. Beside his body was that of his wife of just forty hours, Eva. A group of SS officers, their field grey uniforms dusty and stained, stood close by, sheltering inside the Führerbunker’s emergency exit, a single thick green steel blast door. The garden was a churned up mess of fire blackened trees, broken statuary and craters, the once elegant Reich Chancellery buildings behind windowless and smoke blackened, with great gaping holes in its roof from Allied bombs and Soviet shells. In the distance the crump of artillery rumbled like thunder, while closer by the sudden burp of machine gun fire or the bark of rifles echoed off the surrounding buildings. The men standing by the bunker exit hardly noticed.

  Around the crater were several empty army petrol cans. The stench of gasoline was very strong, the bodies both soaked with petrol and lying in a small puddle of fuel. One man stepped forward from the group, a short, heavyset man in a grey nondescript uniform, his receding black hair slicked back from his thuggish face. Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, quickly lit the thick twist of papers that had been fashioned into an impromptu torch and flung it into the hole. The petrol ignited with a loud whoosh, orange and yellow flames shooting skyward before they died back a little and began to consume the blankets and the corpses beneath. The small group of Nazis came swiftly to attention, their right arms shooting out one last time in the ‘German salute’. Hitler’s loyal valet Heinz Linge stood beside the club-footed Dr. Goebbels, Hitler’s brilliant propaganda minister, while the Führer’s tall SS adjutant Otto Günsche betrayed no emotion, his face like granite beneath his field grey cap with its death’s head badge. Erich Kempka, Hitler’s driver since the mid-1930s, stood with them – he and his men had brought the petrol to consume ‘the Boss’.

  For three men present, the Viking funeral for their leader was their final act. They were men who had devoted their lives to protecting Hitler, his senior bodyguards. Now they would ensure that the Soviets would not find Hitler’s body. For the rest of the day these most loyal men of all, whose own fates had been so inextricably interwoven with the fate of the man they guarded, would tend to the task of reducing their leader’s mortal remains to a tangled mass of burnt flesh and bone. Where once they had guarded the world’s most famous man, travelling the length and breadth of Europe as Hitler’s power bestrode the continent like some great octopus, now they stood silent beside a muddy hole in the ground beside the shattered remains of the Thousand Year Reich. Their futures looked grim. Berlin was surrounded and they were marked men. Suddenly the air was rent by the whistle of incoming shells – quickly the little group of mourners piled through the open bunker exit door, which was slammed firmly shut behind them by more of the Führer’s elite bodyguards who were in full battle kit with steel helmets and MP44 assault rifles. The group descended once more beneath the earth, into the damp and fetid underworld of the Führerbunker, the last funk hole of Nazism.

  Hitler’s end was remarkable for one fact: his bodyguards remained absolutely loyal to him during the final days of his life, when his power was at an end, and even long enough after his death to ensure that h
is body was disposed of properly. This loyalty was borne not from financial gain but of professionalism and adoration. The men who staffed Hitler’s bodyguard units were pioneers in the field of personal protection. The senior officers who founded and commanded Hitler’s close protection details effectively wrote the book on modern VIP body guarding techniques. And this was because Hitler himself evolved a completely new type of leadership style.

  He was the first politician to combine different forms of travel, using aircraft, trains and cars, and the first world leader to use multiple homes and headquarters complexes, all requiring differing types of protection to match particular circumstances. He was unusual among twentieth century leaders in actually going to war fronts and placing himself in harm’s way on several occasions. In fact, Hitler’s security needs, and the needs of his inner circle of Nazi paladins, required multiple bodyguard units drawn not only from the SS but also from the army and the police.

  The Führer’s bodyguards were probably the first such units to conduct threat assessments, keep complex files on suspects, and carefully guard routes and venues. They were the first to use modern technology to protect their asset, including X-ray machines and ‘bombproof’ materials. Hitler was easily the world’s most carefully guarded man, particularly during the latter half of the war, and in this regard we can see a lot of the methods pioneered by the Führer’s close protection details in the techniques used by today’s US Secret Service in its guarding of American presidents and Congressional leaders. Armoured limousines, guarded routes, high-tech gadgets, the monitoring of potential threats, and special VIP aircraft all originated with Hitler’s protection. But no American president has ever been the subject of so many assassination attempts. The figures vary, but it is believed that during his lifetime over forty separate attempts were made to kill Hitler by both individuals and groups. Some, like the 1944 July Bomb Plot, came very close to succeeding. But Hitler’s security was virtually impenetrable and extremely professional, and through a combination of his bodyguards’ vigilance and his own almost unearthly luck, the Führer survived every single attempt on his life.

  As the bodyguards stood before the shell crater and watched the man they had guarded for almost twenty years slowly burn on 30 May 1945 their duty was at an end. They had shielded Hitler from his enemies so successfully that in the end the person that killed Hitler was himself. Much of the misery inflicted by the Nazis upon humanity was caused by Hitler’s elite bodyguards, for on countless occasions the Führer was destined to be struck down by bomb or bullet but had miraculously survived every attempt. Now these selfsame bodyguards who had kept the tyrant alive long enough to destroy Germany and much of Europe would themselves face their own judgment, trapped in a burning city that was about to be conquered.

  Chapter 1

  Time of Struggle

  ‘Like a nursery gardener trying to reproduce a good old strain which has been adulterated and debased, we started from the principles of plant selection and then proceeded quite unashamedly to weed out the men whom we did not think we could use for the build-up of the SS.’

  (Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, 1933)

  The long column of chanting men slowly wound its way through Munich’s Odeonsplatz during the afternoon of 9 November 1923. Hundreds were dressed in the drab brown uniforms of the Sturm-abteilung (SA), the Nazis’ quasi-military bullyboys, while others wore a motley collection of First World War steel helmets or uniforms. Red party armbands were worn by virtually everyone, while large swastika flags were carried by standard bearers, adding an almost festive splash of colour to the drab grey streets through which the angry young marchers tramped. A few open trucks and cars joined the throng while hundreds of Bavarians watched the procession. It was a revolution, a putsch, and an attempt by the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, formed four years before by a group of disgruntled right-wingers, to overthrow the city government and take control of Bavaria. It was supposed to be the first stage in the Nazis’ seizure of power, the beginning of a grand march on Berlin aping Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome the year before. But it was all going wrong.

  Marching at the head of the column, flanked by his lieutenants and bodyguards, was 34-year-old Adolf Hitler, the controversial leader of the NSDAP and the man who had started the revolution. Earlier, at the Burgerbraukeller beer hall, Hitler had interrupted a meeting of the local city leaders and had taken the civil leader, army commander and police commissioner hostage. After whipping up the huge crowd, orders had been sent out for his Nazi supporters to seize important buildings in the city. But mistakes had been made and the plot had begun to unravel. In a last desperate gamble to prevent the putsch from failing Hitler had led his followers in a march . . . but to where no-one really knew.

  Hitler was counting on a last show of strength and unity to overthrow the elected government, but the march was a desperate move. Blocking his path were 100 Reichswehr soldiers and policeman. Many in the Nazi column were openly carrying rifles and pistols. Faced with the order to halt, Hitler encouraged his followers on, marching straight for the line of grey uniformed troops who were kneeling on the ground, their Mauser rifles pointed directly at the head of the column. Hitler did not believe that German soldiers would fire on him. But he was wrong. The officer in command shouted one word above the Nazis’ chanting: ‘Fire!’ In a few murderous minutes of mayhem four policemen fell dead while sixteen Nazis were killed. The man next to Hitler was killed instantly while others in the front row fell wounded onto the pavement, screaming in agony. It seemed as if Hitler, the other leaders and the Nazi movement were finished. Not for the first time during his inexorable rise from beer hall agitator to political leader was Hitler in the gun sights of his enemies and not for the first time was he saved from almost certain death by his bodyguards.

  Hitler was a target for assassins long before he became German chancellor in January 1933. Mired in rough street politics, his extreme views made him a target for assassination from the earliest days of the National Socialist movement. Hitler therefore required protection virtually from the first. In the beginning his bodyguards were no more than enthusiastic thugs, but Hitler’s personal protection would slowly evolve through the 1920s and early 1930s from its street fighting origins into the prototype multi-layered security that is so familiar to anyone who has seen an American president interacting with his public. In the same way that Nazi propaganda chief Dr. Josef Goebbels invented the mass political rally, Hitler’s extreme security needs created modern presidential and VIP protection.

  Guarding Hitler was to prove a challenge, not only because so many people wanted to kill or harm him, but also because Hitler held bizarre views about his protection. Although people took occasional potshots at him during the years of struggle, Hitler remained remarkably unfazed by this potentially lethal attention. This apparent insouciance in the face of mortal peril ran deeper than his being a grizzled veteran of the horrific trench warfare of the First World War. Hitler was notoriously difficult to guard because he held a very contradictory view of his own life. He believed himself to be a great ‘man of destiny’ yet at the same time thought that his time on earth was limited.

  Hitler was not particularly fazed by dangerous situations – he had proved his physical bravery during four years service in the front lines between 1914 and 1918. Hitler was a regimental runner, a position that held him back from the very worst of the trench fighting, but still exposed him to artillery barrages and occasionally to machine gun and rifle fire. During the Battle of the Somme in October 1916 shrapnel wounded him in his left thigh when a British shell exploded inside the runners’ dugout. Hospitalised for two months, Hitler was decorated with the Wound Badge in Black. He had already been awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class for bravery in 1914. In 1918 Hitler, only a lance corporal, received the prestigious Iron Cross 1st Class, rarely awarded to the lower ranks. He was gassed during a British attack at the end of the war and hospitalised again.1 There was an element of the reckle
ss in Hitler, and sometimes he would deliberately place himself in danger.

  His first association with what would become the Nazi Party was not as a supporter but as an army intelligence agent sent by the Reichswehr, Germany’s postwar military, to monitor its activities. But Hitler joined the party, left the army when he found the party’s message to be genuinely appealing, and was soon elected its leader. Hitler became part of the violent political world of postwar Germany, representing one of many competing ideologies and groups seeking power in the weak Weimar Republic. His style of politics, his ideology and his desire to take power by means of direct action against the state meant that Hitler was often in physical danger. He had to be tough, and the younger Führer had no compunction about taking matters into his own hands. At a rowdy meeting in Munich in 1922 ‘he stormed the speaker’s platform and physically attacked the speaker, surrounded by an unfriendly crowd; he was sentenced to three months in jail for this.’2 This was but one of several occasions when Hitler got violent with his enemies. ‘Once, in the Black Forest city of Freiburg, when his car was pelted with stones, he jumped down from the vehicle waving his whip, forcing his astonished attackers to scatter.’3

  Germany had a long history of political assassinations, a fact that Hitler was fully aware of. During the nineteenth century the ‘Iron Chancellor’, Prince Otto von Bismarck, had escaped two murderous plots. During the unsettled Weimar Republic era after the First World War German leaders were particularly prone to assassination. One of the most notorious examples was the fate of Matthias Erzberger, the head of the German Armistice Commission charged with signing the hated Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Erzberger argued forcefully that Germany had to accept the humiliation of Versailles or face occupation by Allied forces. But ideological elements on both the Left and the Right were almost pathologically incapable of accepting this position and vented their anger through the medium of political assassination. The first attempt to kill Erzberger was made by the regular German Army in Weimar, but failed. A few days later someone fired shots through Erzberger’s office window in Berlin. A grenade was also flung into the hapless negotiator’s bedroom. Erzberger was finally killed while hiking in the Black Forest in August 1921.