Doenitz Blows Cool When Giant, Uber-secret Flying Boats Show Up in Flensburg

Rather than drive directly back to the Marineschule, Cremer drove to a hillside overlooking the tiny harbor. There must have been a hundred ships and boats crammed in there; U-boats, destroyers, freighters and tankers, along with dozens of tugs, gunboats, patrol craft and minesweepers. None flew flags. Floating on the glistening water, in the bright morning light, they looked colorless, except for streaks of red oxide and rust.

“Let me show you something,” said Cremer, pointing to the far corner of the harbor. Ziggy looked and to his utter shock, saw that there was a scattering of seaplanes and behind them, three monstrous four-engine flying boats bobbing in the water. He couldn’t believe it. Until now, the only flying boats he’d ever seen had been much smaller British Catalinas. Early in the war, there had been a lot of enthusiastic talk about some getting built for the German Navy. But since, as the saying went, everything that flew belonged to fat Hermann Goering, a man with a pronounced antagonism towards naval affairs, the matter was apparently shelved. But now, here, a few hundred meters from him, three of them floated like a fact of life.

“My God,” exclaimed Ziggy, “I didn’t even know we had any!”

“Neither did the Grand Admiral,” said Cremer giving a bitter smirk. “Needless to say he flew into a rage when they suddenly appeared the other day. They’re special operations stuff. Flew in two days ago from Bornholm, right when the Russians were moving in. They’re part of something called KG200, a top secret unit no one has ever heard of, not Jodl, not Keitel, not even anyone from the Luftwaffe High Command. Officially they’re Luftwaffe, but under SS command. Of course your friend Westerby seemed to know all about them. Apparently he believes Himmler ordered them here for his getaway.”

“Do you think it’s true?”

“It could be. It’s just that the SS has vanished once they found out that the British were looking for them. Nobody has seen neither hide nor hair of Himmler in days. We heard he was up at Field Marshall Busch’s headquarters for a while, but then Busch withdrew his hospitality and no one knows where he is now.

“So why are the flying boats here?”

“That is the big mystery,” mused Cremer. They just showed up here one morning, like a flock of snow geese. Doenitz had the pilots brought in and demanded they tell him who ordered them to come here. They say they don’t know, that it all comes from a secret source.”

“So what did they claim they’d been using those boats for?”

“Supplying weather stations in Spitzbergen and Greenland.”

“What a waste!” sighed Ziggy. “Think how many U-boat crews we might have saved if we’d had access to them.”

“That’s what the Old Man said."

For a minute, neither of them said anything as they continued to stare at the huge, floating aircraft.

“So how is everything here?” asked Ziggy. “Are things calming down at all?”

“Oh sure, a little,” answered Cremer. “The night the surrender got announced, there was a lot of howling. A mob of U-boat officers stormed into the Old Man’s offices demanding to speak to him. It was about three in the morning. Ludde Neurath sent them all away. He told them the Grand Admiral was sleeping, that they had their orders and they were to follow them and keep their mouths shut. It was really quite a performance. I never imagined Ludde Neurath had it in him. Half of those guys were senior to him. But at the moment, yeah, things are quiet. I don’t know how long that will last. Anything could set it off.”
(An abbreviated version of this chapter appears in Germania, Simon & Schuster, 2008; Kindle download available here).

Speer and Baumbach: Drunk at Schloss Glucksburg.

Placing his feet on the table, Baumbach pushed himself even further backward to get a fuller view of their visitor. The man just stood there looking so comically angry that it made Speer giggle. Then suddenly he realized the man was Himmler and in an instant the drunkenness dried up in him. He struggled to his feet. “Reichsfuhrer, I’m sorry, I didn’t recognize you!” he said.

Boiling with anger, Himmler stepped into the room, followed by several tall SS men with machineguns in hand. He smiled icily. “It was a nice try, Speer,” he said. “But once again you were not successful.”

“Whatever are you talking about, Reichsfuhrer?” asked Speer. “I haven’t done anything.”

“You’re not the Reichsfuhrer,” protested Baumbach. “The new Reichsfuhrer is Gauleiter Hanke. I know. I personally flew him to Prague in a helicopter.”

“Be quiet!” Speer hissed. “I’m sorry, Reichsfuhrer, he means no disrespect. Please, is there something I can do for you?”

“What makes you think, even for a second, that you are entitled to my gold, Speer?” seethed Himmler. “I never took your things. Why are you trying to take mine?”

“But I haven’t done anything,” said Speer.

“Done anything?” Himmler cried. “You and your friends just tried to kill me, tried to take my gold! But it didn’t work.” Himmler gloated and raised his finger threateningly. He started accusing Speer of foiling his escape plan, taking over command of KG-200, blowing up his flying boat and oddest of all, selling him to the Jews. And now he was here to settle accounts.

“No, Reichsfuhrer, you’re completely wrong. I-, we- haven’t done anything. We’ve been just sitting here getting drunk all evening. There must be a misunderstanding. Isn’t that right, Werner?” Speer turned to Baumbach, but he had fallen asleep on the couch.

For the first time Himmler stared at Baumbach. “What’s Baumbach doing here? He was supposed to be on the airplane, dead.”

“Sorry?” asked Speer, thoroughly confused. But then, seeing that Himmler’s confusion was even greater than his own, he stepped forward and the next thing he knew, some other part of himself, shrewd, implacable and unaffected by alcohol, had commandeered his mouth, laying out iron-clad reasons why neither he nor Baumbach could have had anything to do with the incident Himmler had escaped from. He assured Himmler that he had never, ever done anything disloyal to him- in fact, he had spoken up for him to Doenitz that very day.

He went on, making complex explanations, and to his surprise, saw Himmler nodding at the different points he was making. Then Himmler waved him to silence. “In that case, Speer, yes, there is something you can do for me.”

“Yes, just tell me what it is, Reichsfuhrer, and it’ll be done at once,” Speer heard himself say.

“I need another airplane, Speer.”

“Yes, of course, Reichsfuhrer,” said Speer. He suddenly felt the waves of drunkenness washing back over him. He wanted to sit down. He wanted to get rid of Himmler quickly so he could go lie down. He wanted to go to the bathroom, but he knew he couldn’t ask Himmler to hold the thought a second while he left the room.

“I need it now, Speer.”

“Yes,” agreed Speer. “Let me see what I can do.” An airplane. He imagined snapping his fingers like a headwaiter. An airplane at once for the Reichsfuhrer! “Airplane?” he repeated. “Yes, ummm, come to my office first thing in the morning and I’ll have it taken care of at once,” he said.

Himmler glared at him. “Not in the morning, Speer. Now!”

“Yes, Reichsfuhrer.”

Himmler was getting angry again. Speer tried to summon up the eloquent person inside himself to explain for him again, but that person seemed to have wandered off. “Ummm, unfortunately under the current circumstances,” he paused to stare at the swimming ceiling, “my current brief as Grand Admiral Doenitz’s chief of ummm, economic and industrial,” his knees were beginning to buckle, Himmler’s face now a grotesque caricature of something from some other time. “Does not allow, allotments of unauthorized,” he imagined having pliers to grab words with, the words like fish, fish like airplanes. “Ummm, airplanes to, ummm current or former members, of the previous government, in accordance with Grand Admiral Doenitz’ explicit, explicitly express, uhhh...agreement with the Allied Control Commission.”

“Allies?” shouted Himmler. “It would seem to me, Speer, that you are considerably more concerned with insinuating yourself into their good graces than with preserving Germany’s life spring! You always thought you were better than the rest of us, that you were exempt, just because you were the Fuhrer’s favorite. Now you think because there is a new order taking hold in Europe, you can just disassociate yourself from us and become part of it. Well it’s not that simple. They have to have a reason to want you.

“Let me tell you something else, Speer. There are still numerous changes about to take place, changes which you couldn’t begin to grasp. Being able to design buildings isn’t enough. Now they’re going to want someone who knows what’s going on in the streets, someone who understands the forces of destiny, of karma. You’re nothing more than a grubby little technocrat, Speer. You will never be Eisenhower’s architect!”

Speer felt the words cascading past him and wondered how long it would take for Himmler to tire and either shoot him or just go away. He was staring past Himmler and his aides to the doorway and to his shock saw Manni Loerber wedged between two men like he was their prisoner. Speer stared at Manni, but Manni looked away as though he didn’t know him. What was going on?

And somewhere in his drunkenness, Speer remembered that time in the Ruhr when he’d told him, “If you ever want to trap Himmler, all you have to do is wait outside my office for him to show up in the middle of the night.”

“...for the karmic convergence requires very specific...”

ThenSpeer noticed a shadow moving behind the men in the doorway. From nowhere a hand clapped itself over one of the troopers’ mouths. The other hand was clutching a knife which plunged into the man’s neck. Immediately the body went limp and was pulled noiselessly into the darkness. A moment later the same thing happened to the other trooper. The way they were taken, both seemed almost compliant in letting their throats be cut.

The assailant emerged, looking directly at Speer, finger on his lips. It was Manni, clearly Manni. He smiled at Speer for a second as he tapped his brother on the shoulder. A look of sudden understanding flashed through his eyes, then he too disappeared.

Suddenly there was machinegun fire outside. Himmler’s aides sprang to action, pushing Himmler behind them, running up to the doorway and firing shots into the corridor. There was a rapid exchange of fire farther down the hall.

“They’ve killed Bauer and Schmidt!” somebody shouted.

“How’d they get in here?”

“I don’t know.”

“We have to go now!” one of them shouted. “Reichsfuhrer, stay behind us!”

Speer pitched forward, collapsing onto the thick carpet. He gazed up to watch Himmler and the others leave. Outside there was a gun battle going on. But he couldn’t tell what was real anymore and what wasn’t.

(Excerpt from Germania, first published by Simon & Schuster in 2008, now also available on Kindle here).

SS Flying Boats to Wherever

One morning, several days after the Germans surrendered, a group of gigantic, six-engine, BV-222 flying boats appeared unannounced in Flensburg harbor. They were from KG-200, a shadowy, SS-run Luftwaffe unit, commanded by Col Werner Baumbach, which was being used to fly top Nazi officials to safe havens abroad. For several days they just sat there. Then, one night, word got out for anyone wanting  to leave that they needed to show up right away and bring plenty of gold in exchange for passage.  For Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, who had been in hiding, this was good news. But to Colonel Heinz Macher, Himmler's chief of security, it sounded suspicious.

Down in the harbor, the flying boat’s six engines began to sputter loudly and the large, three-bladed propellers started turning, slowly at first, then faster and faster as the engines’ metallic whine turned into a loud roar. At the same time, the passengers at the jetty started boarding barges that ferried them out to the aircraft. One of the Luftwaffe men shouted, “Make up your mind. We’re leaving in five minutes.”

“We’re coming down,” Macher shouted back. “Put out that light now!”

“We need it on! We’re still loading!”

“That’s your problem,” barked Macher. “Kill it now!”

A moment later someone hit a switch and everything was back in darkness. “All right, then,” said Macher. He ordered the remaining security men to walk ahead of the cars while the three men already on perimeter were to take up the rear. Everyone else got back in their cars and with their headlights turned off, they began making their way slowly down the hill.

Then the shooting started. Machinegun fire erupted from all over the boatyard and illumination flares shot up into the air, bathing everything below in cold white light. Macher’s men returned fire, while out on the jetty the remaining passengers scattered and collided into each other in panic. Women screamed. Grenades exploded. The three cars immediately slammed into reverse and, tires screeching, careened back up the hill, where they stopped long enough to pick up the rest of the men. Then there was a deafening roar as the flying boat exploded in a huge burst of flame that lit up the sky.

Driving back toward the gates, Franzi looked out the shattered rear window and saw the monstrous aircraft breaking apart as it burned in the water, accompanied by a continuous cracking of smaller explosions as ammunition inside the aircraft cooked off. Himmler was nearly hysterical. This was all Speer’s doing, he kept telling them. Speer was a usurper, Speer wanted his gold, Speer coveted his position as ruler of postwar, Speer had always been plotting against him, Speer wanted to unseat him, from the beginning Speer had set out to unbalance everything! Well he was going to show him. Yes he would! He’d show Speer what for.

Franzi looked around the inside of the car and realized all the windows were shot out. Everything was riddled with bullets, but aside from some minor wounds, no one seemed to be hurt. Fraulein Potthast held the collar of her fur coat tightly around the back of her head, shielding her ears, not saying anything. Kiermaier looked unperturbed as usual. Franzi felt the cold wind blasting at his face and wondered where they were going.
(Excerpt from Germania, first published by Simon & Schuster in 2008, now also available on Kindle here).

Person of Interest: Werner Baumbach

Werner Baumbach is a person on the fringes of history whom I've been interested in for a very long time. Apparently, so are a lot of other people. During the war, he was Germany's leading dive bomber pilot. He flew the JU-88 two-engine bomber on a number of fronts. He also got pulled out of combat in the middle of the war to help develop the "Mistel", an unmanned bomber. Shortly before the end of the war, he got put in charge of a secret, SS-run squadron known as KG200, which he reorganized into a special escape squadron to fly high-level Nazis out of Germany to safe havens abroad. They used any available aircraft, including captured B-17s, to do this.

KG200 remains one of the top mysteries of the Third Reich. Very little is actually known about it. It was organized into several different staffels, none of which apparently knew anything about each other's existence. Some staffels flew captured Allied aircraft, which they used for a variety of tasks, including parachuting secret agents abroad, as far away as Jordan and Iraq. They also flew massive BV222 Wiking flying boats to remote weather stations in the Arctic, as well as for who knows what else. It appears that not even Hermann Goering or Luftwaffe High Command knew anything about their activities. KG200 took its orders from Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler.

What almost no one, including Hitler, knew, was that Himmler was not quite the "Faithful Heinrich" everyone believed him to be. He had secret negotiations going with the West and when he started flying top Nazis out of Germany, most people who knew about it assumed that it was being done on Hitler's orders, but in fact it was not. By all indications, Baumbach was a die-hard Nazi. And to this day, he is regarded as such within certain neo-Nazi circles. But according to some sources, most notably Albert Speer, his long-time friend, Baumbach was so disgusted with what he was being ordered to do, that he was entertaining notions of flying Hitler and other top Nazis into Allied hands, should he be given the opportunity. It is also rumored, though there is no way of proving it, that Baumbach had flown a giant JU-390 bomber out of Prague's Ruzyne airport, loaded with top Nazis, including SS General Hans Kammler, to Barcelona. Officially, Kammler died in Prague just as the Russians were coming in, but many now believe Kammler had been alowed to leave after cutting a deal with the Americans for German rocket scientists and secret weapons technology.

But possibly the strangest thing Baumbach is believed to have done was the way he broke with Heinrich Himmler. When Hitler found out Himmler had betrayed him, he removed him from the post of Reichsfuhrer SS and gave the post to Karl Hanke, Gauleiter of Breslau. The moment Hitler did that, Baumbach's loyalty to Himmler ended and was transfered to the new man. The problem was, Hanke was in Breslau, a German city inside Poland that had been surrounded by the Russians since February. Hanke was a die-hard Nazi, who had been hanging anyone in Breslau who questioned his orders to fight to the last. He had by this point executed more than two thousand citizens, hanging them from lamp posts. But when his new appointment came, he immediately got Baumbach to fly him out of Breslau in a helicopter. Baumbach flew him to Prague and after dropping him off, somehow high-tailed it north to Rugen, an island in the Baltic, where KG200 had a fleet of five fiant BV222 flying boats. Apparently the plan was to take them to Flensburg and load them up with Nazis that were gathered there, waiting eagerly for a flight out. It alone would have been his greatest feat, flying several thousand top Nazis out in one fell swoop. But instead, once he arrived in Flensburg with his aircraft, rather than carrying out his plan, he simply stopped. He holed up at Schloss Glucksburg, a nearby castle owned by one of his friends, he invited Albert Speer to stay with him, and the two proceeded to get very drunk. At one point, they talked about flying one of the Wikings to Greenland and spending the summer fishing, hunting walrus, kayaking and writing their memoirs together. Perhaps they would have done this, had Speer not been visited by a group of American economists, bankers and Wall Street lawyers, who wanted to interview him on the effects of strategic bombing on the German war economy.

It's not clear exactly what happened after that. Somehow the flying boats got blown up and sunk in the harbor. A few days later, the British rolled up the Flensburg government, taking Speer, and presumably Baumbach, prisoner. Baumbach spent two years in Britain in a POW camp. He apparently cooperated with his captors and testified against members of the SS during the Nurenburg war crimes trials. After that, he moved to Argentina and joined the Argentinian airforce. He gave interviews to Time Magazine and to visiting American scholars. There is a famous picture of him demonstrating an aircraft simulator to Juan Peron. Then one day in 1953 he was selected to take a newly purchased British Lancaster bomber on a test flight. But shortly after he got the Lancaster up in the air, the aircraft unaccountably exploded, killing Werner Baumbach.

Werner Baumbach is the main protagonist of Baumbach's Run, the novel I am currently writing. It will be a sequel, of sorts, to my first novel, Germania (Simon & Schuster, 2008, now also available on Kindle here). Both Baumbach and Speer are major characters in Germania.