“Back to the Battle of the Bulge,” Cohen resumed. “Skorzeny set up and then executed Operation Griffin. A false-flag mission. He recruited about twenty-five American-English-speaking soldiers from all over the Wehrmacht. Then he put them in uniforms he took away from American POWs and sent them behind American lines in the Ardennes forest.
“They misdirected road traffic, tried to blow bridges, that sort of thing. They had some minor successes, but they were quickly rounded up and most of them, after quickly convened field court-martials, were shot. They did succeed in convincing their captors that not only were there more of them than was the case, that some of them were headed, under Skorzeny, for Paris to assassinate Eisenhower. For the next couple of weeks, Ike was reluctant to leave his headquarters at all, and when he did, he was surrounded by a small army of military police.”
“You have to admire the guts of the Germans who did that. I mean, everybody knows if you get caught wearing the enemy’s uniform, you get shot,” Ziegler said.
“I’ve thought about that,” Cohen said. “It’s possible they were dedicated Nazis, or even simply dedicated soldiers. I think it was equally possible that they were offered the choice between refusing to obey the order, in which case they would be shot on the spot for disobedience, or taking their chances in the Hürtgen forest.
“In any event, Hitler was pleased with Skorzeny. He named him an acting Generalmajor and sent him to the East, to command Waffen-SS troops defending Frankfurt-on-the-Oder against the Russians. He did that well enough to get Oak Leaves for his Knight’s Cross. But the Russians took Frankfurt anyway.
“By then, just about everyone but Hitler recognized the war was lost, but Hitler, and some others, decided to fight to the last man. In mid-April 1945, Hitler ordered Kaltenbrunner—which brings us back to him in my lecture—to reorganize his intelligence agencies as a stay-behind underground net. Kaltenbrunner picked Skorzeny to be in charge of the scorched earth—leave nothing standing the enemy can use—policy, and a fellow named Wilhelm Waneck to both keep an eye on Skorzeny and to set up a program of stay-behind agents.”
“Two questions, if I may,” Cronley said.
“Ask away.”
“‘Keep an eye on Skorzeny’?”
“Somebody, probably Himmler, but maybe Hitler himself, worried that Skorzeny would have problems with blowing up everything in what was left of Germany. As it turned out, the suspicions were justified. Next question?”
“Who is Wilhelm Waneck?”
“I’d really like to know. All I really know about him is that he was very close to Himmler. I’ve seen him identified as both a light colonel and a three-star general. I think—with absolutely nothing even remotely concrete to back this up—that he’s probably running Odessa. He just vanished. He could be looking upward at the grass.”
“But you don’t think so,” Cronley said.
“No. My gut tells me he’
s running Odessa. Somebody smart is.”
“Yeah,” Cronley agreed.
“Turning to Skorzeny,” Cohen went on. “He realized that the Werewolf operation, fighting to the last man, was nonsense so he turned his considerable talents to setting up escape routes for his friends. Then, on May 16, 1945, he sent a message that he was prepared to surrender, but only to us. He didn’t want to wind up in the hands of the French. When I heard this, I went for a look.
“I got there—a road a couple of miles inside Austria, not too far from where he was supposed to fight to the death near Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest—about ten minutes before he showed up. They took him to a POW collection point. There something very interesting happened. The protocol was that the first field-grade officer who captured a field-grade or up German would make an on-the-spot decision whether the guy was a soldier, in which case he would be sent to a prisoner of war camp, or a Nazi—on the Look For list or not—in which case, he would be turned over to the CIC.
“There was a CIC unit there into whose hands the Army promptly turned Skorzeny. Then the OSS showed up, led by a colonel. He overrode the Army major—and the Look For list, on which Skorzeny was close to the top—and said that Skorzeny was to be treated as a soldier, and that his men would take charge of him, and take him to the special POW enclosure for senior officers at Darmstadt.”
“What was that all about?” Cronley asked.
“I’ve been wondering ever since,” Cohen replied. “The best answer I have come up with is that the colonel decided that since Skorzeny hadn’t done anything the OSS had done routinely, he was entitled to be treated as a soldier. Fair’s fair, so to speak. The OSS colonel who made that decision was Harold Wallace.”
“Jesus!” Cronley said, visibly shocked.
“So Skorzeny has been in Darmstadt ever since, rather than here awaiting trial,” Cohen said. “And now my lecture turns back to SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei und Waffen-SS Dr. Kaltenbrunner . . .”
“Why the hell would Wallace do that?” Cronley pursued.
“Colonel Wallace, when I raised that question to him, told me it was none of my business,” Cohen replied, and then went on: “Toward the end of April 1945, Kaltenbrunner moved his headquarters from Berlin to the Villa Kerry in Altaussee, a small Dorf in the Salzkammergut region of Austria. To which Dorf I will now turn my lecture, aware that I may be accused of going off at a tangent.”
“Colonel, I’m all ears,” Cronley said. “And Ziegler better be.”
“Altaussee, which had a prewar population of less than two thousand souls, is on the shores of Lake Altaussee. It has the biggest salt deposits of Austria, which have been continuously mined since the middle of the twelfth century. Since 1147, if memory serves.”
And I’d bet that it does, Colonel.
And give odds.
“There are miles of tunnels in the mines, so beginning in August 1943, art treasures from Austrian churches, monasteries, and museums were sent to the mines for safekeeping. Then in February 1944 the Sonderauftrag Linz—”