Disaster at Stalingrad: An Alternate History

CHAPTER 2 A Timely Death

Grossadmiral Erich Raeder had much to think about in his long flight from Rome to Berlin that morning.¹ He was not distracted by the beauty of the mountains before him or the Isonzo River, a silver trickle between the peaks, a vertical battlefield where hundreds of thousands of Italians had been slaughtered in eleven battles against the Austrians in the Great War.

For Raeder, who had commanded the Kriegsmarine since 1928, the problem uppermost in his mind was Hitler’s dilettante approach to naval warfare.² The man was as clueless as Napoleon had been about naval power, and it was naval power that kept Britain in the war. The emperor had commented ruefully, ‘Wherever wood can swim, there I am sure to find this flag of England,’³ a sentiment Hitler by this time no doubt shared. And as with Napoleon it was likely to be his undoing.

When the war started the Kriegsmarine could array against the might of the Royal Navy only 11 cruisers or larger ships, 21 destroyers, and 57 U-boats. The Navy did not even have its own aviation arm. It had to depend on Göring’s Luftwaffe. The overbearing Reichsmarschall had jealously declared, ‘Everything that flies belongs to me.’⁴ Not surprisingly, Goring allocated barely 5 per cent of the Luftwaffe’s aircraft to support the Navy despite its complex requirements. Raeder had counselled Hitler against going to war with Great Britain until the German naval building programme was completed in 1945. Otherwise, he had bluntly told Hitler, the Kriegsmarine’s only option in a naval war with the Royal Navy was to die gloriously.

Raeder just shook his head at how easily Hitler was influenced by men like Hermann Goring, who never lost an opportunity to disparage the Navy in favour of his precious Luftwaffe. Before the war, Hitler had taken a great interest in naval matters and a great pride in the heavy ships slipping off the German shipyard ways. As the war had sunk in the mire of Russia, his enthusiasm had become merely sympathy for the Navy’s problems that yielded not a Reichsmark of further resources. Now his meetings with Raeder were more likely to provoke a denunciation of the Navy as being a relentless futility since the war with Denmark in 1864 with the shining exception of the U-boats. He had threatened to scrap all the heavy surface ships. Raeder had responded in a memorandum that stated bluntly, ‘England, whose whole warfare stands or falls with its control of its sea communications, will consider it as good as won if Germany scraps its ships.’⁵

Where to begin, he thought? The Führer takes no serious interest in the Mediterranean, that which the British themselves call ‘the sea of decision’. Take the Suez Canal and you mortally wound the British, more even than by taking London. He had urged Hitler to send Rommel to North Africa to march on Suez shortly after the fall of France but had been ignored. In the end, Hitler had sent this remarkable general there, but only to stop the Italians being flung out of North Africa on their ear. Yet, the Canal was still within Germany’s grasp as Rommel made himself a legend handing the British one defeat after another. The problem was Malta, though, that island in the centre of the sea from which the British savaged Rommel’s seaborne logistics. Raeder had begged Hitler to take it, but after the heavy losses in the airborne and seaborne invasion of Crete the year before, he was loath to risk it. Consultations with the Italian naval staff over just such an operation were what had taken him to Rome. The Italians were not enthusiastic. He was not surprised. They did not like to get hurt, and the war for them so far had entailed nothing but hurt and humiliation. They would follow only if Germany led. And Hitler was not so inclined.

Even more distressing was Hitler’s failure to understand the concept of a balanced fleet. He was all enthusiasm for the U-boats that were savaging the Allied merchant fleets under the command of the remarkably able Admiral Karl Dönitz, but he had nothing but contempt for the surface fleet. He remembered Germany’s huge investment in its First War navy which fought only one major battle and then rusted away to mutiny in 1918.

Earlier in the war, Graf Spee and Bismarck had savaged enemy shipping only to be hunted down and sunk. Now that Hitler had got himself stuck in a war with the Soviet Union, he had even less interest. If anything, the demands of the Eastern Front were voracious competitors for the same industrial production and fuel. The loss of those ships had made Hitler shy of risking the remaining heavy ships to the point they were under so many restrictions that decisive engagement of the enemy was largely avoided. Raeder did not want to lose them either, but was willing to take more risks, especially in the North Atlantic, to achieve decisive result.

Only the U-boats found favour in Hitler’s eyes. That was due to Dönitz, whom Raeder had appointed Commander of Submarines in 1935. Almost alone among senior naval officers he had advocated a relentless attack on the soft shipping of the enemy and had revived the wolfpack tactics of the First War, vastly improving their capabilities with stronger, more hardy boats and advanced communications, especially the unbreakable naval Enigma cipher. Although Germany had begun the war with fewer than sixty boats, their success triggered a vast expansion of construction so that now they roamed the seas as the terror of the Allies, and like their wolfish namesake, pulling down one victim after another.

Hitler may not have appreciated the surface navy much, but he was not about to let its ships rust away. His fears of an Allied invasion of Norway prompted him to state at the Führer naval conference of December 1941 that, ‘The German fleet must… use all its forces for the defence of Norway. It would be expedient to transfer all battleships there for this purpose. The latter could be used for attacking convoys in the north, for instance.’ Not surprisingly, Hitler stated at the Führer naval conference of 13 February 1942, ‘Time and again Churchill speaks of shipping tonnage as his greatest worry.’ Slowly his concern for an Allied invasion was replaced with the necessity to disrupt the Allied convoys to Russia. By this time most of the Navy’s capital ships had been concentrated there. The next month he issued orders that more submarines and aircraft were to be stationed in Norway to destroy the convoys.⁶ He had fixated on an Allied invasion of Norway which the British had cleverly encouraged. That led him to declare, ‘Every ship not stationed in Norway is in the wrong place.’ He was right but for the wrong reason.⁷

Raeder realized that he was not going to be chief of the German Navy much longer. Sooner or later he would have to offer Hitler his resignation. Who would he recommend as his successor? His preference was for Admiral Rolf Carls, Commander Naval Group North, a man with the breadth of understanding to command the Navy. Second was Karl Dönitz. He worried about Dönitz on two counts. The man had concentrated so much on submarine warfare that Raeder felt he would let the surface fleet wither away. Also troubling was Dönitz’s enthusiastic support of National Socialism and his near worship of Hitler. He was far more political than Raeder believed proper. He had said publicly ‘in comparison to Hitler we are all pip-squeaks. Anyone who believes he can do better than the Führer is stupid.’⁸ So enthusiastic was he that he was referred to as Hitler Youth Dönitz.

If Dönitz’s political enthusiasm unsettled Raeder’s concept of a nonpolitical, professional naval officer, his attitude towards the Jews appalled him. Raeder was firmly in the Christian tradition of the German Navy and fought relentlessly to protect the Navy from Nazi neo-paganism. As a Christian gentleman and naval officer, he had also gone toe to toe with Hitler himself to defend Jewish naval officers and those with partial Jewish blood and even obtained their reinstatement in the Navy.⁹

Against these black marks was the undeniable fact that Dönitz was a brilliant officer and was commanding the Navy’s only successful operation. Still… for the Navy’s sake, and perhaps its soul, it would have to be Carls who would succeed him.

Raeder was jolted out of his concentration as the starboard engine flamed. Then the plane went into a steep dive.

Ramushevo burned on both banks of the mile-wide Lovat River. On the east bank the reinforced Panzerjäger battalion of the 3rd SS Division Totenkopf had broken through the last of the encircling Soviet units that had hemmed in an entire German corps in the Demyansk Pocket. On the west bank, the Jäger divisions of General Walther von Seydlitz-Kurzbach had hammered through five Soviet defence lines to relieve the pocket. Now only the river separated them. It would not be long before German pioneers put a pontoon bridge across.¹⁰

On the east bank, the SS were mopping up the last of the Russians still holding out in the ruins. No prisoners. Tough did not do them justice. They were hard as Krupp steel with a ruthlessness not seen since the Mongols. When the division was formed in 1939, its enlisted ranks were filled with concentration camp guards. Now 80 per cent of them were killed, wounded or missing, but the Soviets had paid many times over.

Krupp steel aside, their losses would have been 100 per cent if had not been for the new automatic rifles that many of them had been issued as a test. This was the Maschinenkarabiner 1942 (MKb 42, quickly dubbed by the troops as the Sturmgewehr — assault rifle). The new weapon effectively outranged the Soviet submachine gun, but at the same time was far more deadly in close combat than the German bolt-action rifle. It also filled the role of a light machine gun and was reliable in the worst cold of the Russian winter. Armed with this weapon, the SS simply shot their way through every Soviet unit in their path.

It would have done them no good if Seydlitz’s Silesian and Würtemberger Jäger had not fought their way through to the river. These were elite light infantry, and they had broken through Soviet defence after defence in a month’s vicious fighting over ground that froze, thawed, and froze again as the Russian winter fought with spring. Seydlitz’s tactical handling of the relief had been brilliant, and his physical courage exemplary. He was the scion of a great military family whose famous ancestor was Frederick the Great’s superb cavalry general and often second-in-command. At the battle of Zorndorf against the Russians in 1758, the king had issued an ill-informed order to Seydlitz, who commanded the other flank of the Prussian Army. He replied, ‘Tell the king that after the battle my head is at his disposal, but meantime I hope he will permit me to exercise it in his service!’¹¹ His descendant was no less determined to use his own judgement.

His ancestor had also been famously known for charging full tilt between the descending blades of two windmills. Seydlitz had inherited that trait as well.

General Vasili Ivanovich Chuikov was chafing at his inaction. The war was almost a year old, and he had seen none of it. At the beginning of May he was finally due to return from the Soviet military mission in China. He had requested immediate assignment to the front. ‘I wanted to get to know the nature of modern warfare as quickly as possible, to understand the reasons for our defeats and to try to find out where the German Army’s tactical strength lay and what new military techniques it was using.’¹²

While in China he and the other officers chafed to get back to the Motherland in its peril as the news of one disaster after another was announced. Chuikov was born a peasant, had thrown in his lot with the Bolsheviks in 1917, and risen through rough talent. A distinguished record put him on the road to success and two tours in China as an advisor to the Nationalist Army followed. He had commanded an army in the invasion of eastern Poland in 1939 and another in the war against Finland in 1940 when failure was clinging to everyone else. He learned a great lesson, concluding that an orthodox military approach would not work in an unorthodox situation. He had been bold enough to write up a summary of why Finnish tactics had been so effective and recommended countermeasures.¹³

He had done so well that Stalin had sent him to China as part of the military mission to advise Chiang Kai-shek and personally briefed him as a mark of his favour. That favour was prized as much as his disfavour was deadly. Four years before Stalin had slaughtered his senior officer corps in fear of a coup led by the brilliant Marshal of the Soviet Union Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the creator of Soviet mechanization in warfare and the concept of deep battle. Luckily for Chuikov, he had not been a part of the great man’s clique and survived when all around him were being shot or sent to the camps.

The men slept in the lullaby rocking of the train as it sped across the Ukraine, Poland, the Reich, and then into France. La Belle France. From the frozen hell of Russia the men would detrain into a dream world of a French spring. From frozen ground to soft beds, from frozen rations to warm bread, from Russians who were trying to kill them all the time, to French women who were willing to please a man, almost all the time. The 6th Panzer Division had been sent to France to re-equip and rebuild as a reward for its fine fighting record, an investment in future glory.

Hardly a man would argue that the division’s survival and success was due to its commander, General Erhard Raus. Not only had he beaten the Russians at every turn, but he had repeatedly rescued his men who had been cut off by the enemy. They had affectionately coined the slogan, ‘Raus zieht heraus!’ (‘Raus gets you out!’). Raus was an Austrian with a talent for armoured warfare that some men had compared to that of Rommel. Both had gone through the hard school of the Gebirgsjäger, or mountain troops, in the First World War and won their laurels. Both were also exacting trainers of men and had inculcated the Gebirgsjäger creed of aggressive initiative and high training to their men. The test had been battle. For Rommel it had been the sand of Africa. For Raus it had been the snow of Russia.

Raus could not afford to sleep. Already in his mind’s eye, he was seeing the transformation of his worn-out division into a resharpened sword. A thousand and one things needed to be done. The absorption of thousands of replacements, reception of hundreds of new fighting vehicles and heavy weapons, then training, training, training, and again training. He had made them lethal, and now they were to rest, rebuild. Already he was planning on making them even more lethal.

The commander of Army Group Centre, Field Marshal Günther von Kluge, counted himself lucky to have an operations officer with the brilliance of Colonel Henning von Tresckow. He had been one of the main architects, along with General Erich von Manstein, of the plan for the attack through the Ardennes in the 1940 campaign in the West that had destroyed France.

Tresckow was from an ancient Prussian military family and in June 1918 he had become the youngest lieutenant in the Imperial German Army at the age of seventeen. In the last few months of that war he won the Iron Cross First Class for his outstanding physical feats and the moral courage to take independent action. His superior at the time remarked, “You, Tresckow, will either become chief of the General Staff or die on the scaffold as a rebel.’¹⁴

What few knew in 1942 was that Tresckow was a determined member of the plot to remove Hitler. A committed Lutheran Christian himself, he once said, ‘I cannot understand how people can still call themselves Christians and not be furious adversaries of Hitler’s regime.’¹⁵ As early as 1938 he had said, ‘Both duty and honour demand from us that we should do our best to bring about the downfall of Hitler and National Socialism in order to save Germany and Europe from barbarism.’ In the 1941 campaign in Russia he had been sickened and appalled by the treatment of Russian POWs, the infamous Commissar Order, and the murder of Jewish men, women and children by the Einsatzgruppen as well as personal observation of the massacre of Jews at Borisov. His appeal to the then army group commander to take direct action had fallen on deaf ears.

Almost single-handedly he began to organize a plot to kill Hitler. He had made contact with like-minded men in Berlin and elsewhere, some of whom had already tried to kill Hitler, but the man had the devil’s own luck. At the same time he recruited into key positions in Army Group Centre a number of sympathetic officers.

He was immediately impressed with a visitor from Oberkommando des Heeres (OKH, Army High Command), the young Major Claus Graf von Stauffenberg who had already made a name for himself as the star of the General Staff. Born to an aristocratic Catholic family from southern Germany, Stauffenberg was descended from one of Germany’s greatest heroes, Field Marshal August Graf von Gneisenau, the soldier who had defied Napoleon’s legions at the moment of Prussia’s overthrow in 1806 and who in 1815 had rallied the beaten Prussian Army to fall on the French Emperor’s flank at Waterloo. The young Stauffenberg had grown up in a spirit of pious Catholicism, aristocratic traditions of service to the state, a classical education, and the aura of romantic poetry. One biographer described the 37-year-old count:

It was at this meeting that Tresckow concluded that his visitor was a ‘non-Nazi, and indeed saw Hitler and National Socialism as a danger’. The mass murder of the Jews had shocked him to the core of his being.¹⁶

He would have been even more impressed if he had known that Stauffenberg kept a large portrait of Hitler behind his desk so that visitors could see that the man was mad. In discussing that madness, he had stated flatly to another officer, ‘There is only one solution. It is to kill him.’ At that time, though, he still thought that sort of thing would have to be accomplished by someone of more exalted rank.

Carl Friedrich Goerdeler had been immensely relieved to draw Tresckow into the Berlin-centred move against Hitler. A World War I veteran, former mayor of Leipzig, and a conservative monarchist, he had had a distinguished career in government and economics. He had also become one of the chief organizers of the anti-Hitler plotters and had been designated by the group to assume the office of chancellor after Hitler’s removal. He had travelled overseas extensively, warning everyone he could of the dangers of Hitler, including Churchill. He had passed on to the British government his opinion that ‘the Führer had “decided to destroy the Jews, Christianity, Capitalism’”.¹⁷

A number of the anti-Hitler plotters were monarchists like Goerdeler. The problem for them was not the restoration of the monarchy but upon whom to place the imperial crown. The old Kaiser had died in exile in the Netherlands. Crown Prince Wilhelm, his oldest son, was passed over. He had too much baggage. He had been too enthusiastic an early supporter of Hitler, although he distanced himself after the Night of the Long Knives. His oldest son and heir, Wilhelm, had been killed in France in 1940 while serving in the German Army. His younger son, Ludwig (Louis) Ferdinand (1907-94), unlike all his male ancestors, had not received a military education and was widely travelled, having lived in the United States for a while, becoming a friend to Henry Ford and an acquaintance of President Roosevelt. Returning to Germany, he became an avowed anti-Nazi.

Goerdeler concluded that, after the chaos of National Socialism, the German people would look back to the Second Reich as a time of stability and prosperity and associate that with the monarchy. For the prince’s sake, he would do nothing to draw him into the plot. Ludwig would remain on the shelf as a possibility.¹⁸

For the U-boat crew somewhere in the North Atlantic, their kill of an American merchant ship off Iceland had been ecstatic. The captain had ordered a round of schnapps to each man since it was their boat’s first sinking. The boat was one of the hundreds produced by German yards and now infesting the waters between Britain and North America. Many ranged ever farther, to the Mediterranean, the South Atlantic, and beyond to the Indian Ocean. A few even reached Japan to carry vital high-value war supplies to their ally.

Yet, while the taste of the liquor was still in the mouths of this crew, the sound of the dying ship as it broke up and sank stopped every man in his celebration. The groans and shrieks of rending metal were all too human as they echoed through the water and the U-boat’s hull. It was like a wounded man in no-man’s-land screaming out his death agonies, something all too common to their brothers fighting in Russia. Like the German infantry, the Landser, they would get used to it.

For the Allies the war had reached a crisis. In the first months of 1942, the Germans had sunk an average of over 500,000 tons of shipping each month. Imports into Britain fell by 18 per cent compared to 1941.¹⁹ At the same time, both Britain and the United States were giving priority to shipments of war materials to the Soviet Union. The strain on resources was simply not sustainable.

Two events in the murky world of cipher decoding had thrown the Allies into their precarious position. The German Navy’s B-Dienst (Beobachtungs-dienst, Surveillance Service), and the xB-Dienst (Decryption Service), which had already broken the main British naval cipher by 1935, had broken Allied Naval Cipher No. 3 in February. This was the system by which the British, Canadians and Americans coordinated their efforts in the Atlantic. The U-boat killings soared. Now the Germans could see into the Allies’ convoy communications, while the Allies were suddenly blinded. The British had largely broken the German Enigma cipher system by early 1942 and even the more complex German naval version.²⁰ Then the German Navy cipher department added another layer of complexity to its Enigma machine by adding a fourth wheel that baffled the British codebreakers at their Bletchley Park centre. Shipping losses soared.²¹

Admiral Ernest King was in a foul mood, a normal setting for the man. His own daughter joked, ‘He is the most even-tempered person in the United States Navy. He is always in a rage.’ This angry temperament made him the most disliked senior officer of the war, but he concentrated his loathing especially against the British ally of the United States. General Ismay, Churchill’s military chief of staff, described him as ‘tough as nails and carried himself as stiffly as a poker. He was blunt and stand-offish, almost to the point of rudeness. At the start, he was intolerant and suspicious of all things British, especially the Royal Navy; but he was almost equally intolerant and suspicious of the American Army.’

His Anglophobia was so pronounced that he had ignored British suggestions after Pearl Harbor to black out American coastal cities and run merchant shipping in more easily protected convoys. The result had been a staggering loss of 2,000,000 tons of shipping in the months after Pearl Harbor.

Now the British were trying to organize the first major British-American naval effort of the war, the escort of a large convoy to Russia to be provided in part by an American battleship and heavy cruisers. King had finally agreed to this against his every Anglophobic instinct, and he knew no good would come of placing American ships under the Royal Navy’s command.

He especially did not like the British First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, who had the reputation of being something of a back-seat driver. It did not help when Pound remarked to King in May that ‘These Russian convoys are becoming a regular millstone round our necks.’²² That attitude was already causing friction with the commander of the Home Fleet, Admiral Sir John ‘Jack’ Tovey. Unlike King, Pound’s staff found their boss easy to work with, despite his habit of dozing off at meetings. He was suffering from a degenerative hip condition which robbed him of sleep. Infinitely more serious was the brain tumour that the Royal Navy’s examining physician did not report.

So King gritted his teeth as the USS Washington, one of the Navy’s two new North Carolina Class battleships, sailed as flagship of Task Force 39 (TF.39) along with the heavy cruisers Wichita and Tuscaloosa, the aircraft carrier Wasp, and four destroyers, in support of the Arctic convoys to Russia. The Washington was one of the most formidable battleships in the world at 36,000 tons and armed with nine 16-inch guns. It would join Tovey’s force of the battleship Duke of York (38,000 tons and ten 14-inch guns), heavy cruisers Cumberland, London, and Norfolk, light cruiser Nigeria, aircraft carrier Victorious, and five destroyers.

The reason that King had to force himself to send TF.39 and its heavy ships to escort the Russia-bound convoys lay under camouflage nets in the fjord at Trondheim. These ships were what Admiral Raeder would have called a fleet in being, that ever-present threat that forced the British to keep a strong home fleet.

The menace anchored at Trondheim was the 43,000-ton battleship Tirpitz, sister ship to the lost Bismarck, and armed with nine 15-inch guns. Laid down in 1936 and commissioned in February 1941, it was the first battleship with a welded hull and armour. With it were the heavy cruisers Hipper, Lützow and Admiral Scheer, each with six 11-inch guns. A half-dozen destroyers balanced out this force. Combined with some of Admiral Dönitz’s submarines and attack aircraft from Goring’s Luftwaffe, these ships loomed as a constant threat to any convoy that dared make the long voyage to Russia.

As soon as Tirpitz had been sent to Trondheim in January, Churchill had made clear the import of its presence. He demanded:

Another German task force anchored even farther north at the port of Narvik. The twin battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau (nine 11-inch guns) and heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen (eight 8-inch guns), and four destroyers. Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were battleships in everything — tonnage and armour — but their guns. Production problems led to the postponement of their fitting out with 15-inch guns. These ships had been stationed in France, but the Royal Air Force (RAF) had too great an interest in bombing them. At the same time Hitler wanted them stationed in Norway to prevent any Allied landings. In a bold dash codenamed Operation Cerberus they had slipped through the English Channel unharmed.²⁴ The British codebreakers at Bletchley Park were still struggling to overcome the latest security upgrade of Enigma and so were unable to warn the Royal Navy of the German plan.

Originally Raeder wanted the two battlecruisers refitted with 15-inch guns, but Hitler would not approve the resources required. Instead of a stay in German yards then, they were sent to Narvik in Norway, to join Destroyer Flotilla 8 and U-boat Flotilla 11, to complicate British efforts to escort convoys to Russia.²⁵ The crews were none too happy about that. France had been the cushiest posting in the entire Wehrmacht, with good food, pleasant weather and friendly French women. In Narvik they were discovering what the crews of the capital ships and submarines at Trondheim already knew. The food was awful, the weather foul and the Norwegian women hated them.

Reinhard Heydrich savoured the man’s death. After all, it was Raeder who had driven him out of a promising career in the Navy over a trifling affair with a woman in 1931. That strait-laced prig had drummed him out of the Navy for dumping one woman for another. That was just what was wrong with the old Germany, too many ideas whose time had passed. Heydrich had given himself to the new Germany that swept away the past and organized itself around the shining ideal of the Volk, the master race, whose advantage was the only real morality.

He paused only long enough in feeding his hatred to consider that he actually owed the late Grossadmiral Raeder a thank you. If he had not been set adrift from the Navy, he would never have found the brilliant calling that was truly his. He was Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, the choicest bits of the old Czechoslovakia. They called him the Blond Beast for the way he had crushed resistance in the protectorate and vastly increased war production. He fed the Czechs on plentiful carrots so their factories would continue to produce the torrent of high-quality weapons the Reich needed in its death struggle with the Bolshevik monster. When that task was completed, he had plans to ‘Germanize the Czech vermin’, but only after a rigorous racial classification of the population. He insisted that ‘making this Czech garbage into Germans must give way to methods based on racist thought’. That meant that up to two-thirds of the Czechs would eventually be deported to Russia or exterminated.²⁶

This assignment had been a reward for his excellent organizational work as the chief of the Sicherheitsdienst or Security Service of the SS. He had become the right-hand man of the head of the SS himself, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, to whom he was personally devoted for their shared vision, and was rewarded with the highest SS rank of Obergruppenführer. It was he, after all who had forged the documents that had fooled Stalin into believing his officer corps was plotting against him and caused him to murder 35,000 of them. It was he of whom the Führer himself had stated that, had he a son, it would be someone like Heydrich. Perhaps it was that Hitler saw the same ruthlessness in Heydrich that he found in himself, and for both of them this focused on the Jews. It was Heydrich who had organized the concentration camps and began the first large-scale killing of Jews, beginning with the invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union where his Einsatzgruppen killed by the hundreds of thousands. When that proved too slow, he had headed up a conference in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee in January 1942 to plan the organized extermination of all eleven million of Europe’s Jews.

He had more than enough malice left over never to overlook the opportunity to injure the Navy, repeatedly backing Himmler and Goring, in their power-play attacks. So no one was more surprised than Heydrich when he received a call from Admiral Karl Dönitz, Raeder’s successor, asking him to lunch. He was even more surprised at the naval honour guard that awaited him at Navy headquarters and the appearance of Dönitz himself as his car drove up. As their hands fell from their mutual salutes, Dönitz reached out to shake Heydrich’s hand. He was shocked to feel how soft and moist it was. He almost recoiled but mastered himself to grip it strongly. At lunch they were joined by a number of officers, all of whom had been Heydrich’s friends before his dismissal from the Navy.

It was clear that Dönitz was courting him. The man positively purred. Heydrich had nothing against him; Dönitz had had no part in the court of inquiry or taken a stand against him. In fact, Dönitz was a good Nazi Party man, an officer in Hitler’s favour not only for his savaging of Allied shipping but for his political enthusiasm. He was that combination almost all his other flag officers were not — efficient and National Socialist.

After coffee the rest of the officers excused themselves. Brandy was poured, and Dönitz got to the point — slowly.

Heydrich’s cold face did not betray his annoyance. He thought that if he had known they were filling Navy orders, he would have put a stop to it. Just another way to torment Raeder. He was a man who enjoyed eating his revenge cold. But that dish was about empty. Raeder was dead, so what was the point? Perhaps there was advantage here. Dönitz was clearly there cap in hand.

‘It is time to let bygones be bygones. The Navy needs your help; said Dönitz. Ah, there it is, thought Heydrich. His blue eyes narrowed, and the faintest flicker of a smile broke his face.