Nazi radio broadcasts reminded Berliners that they were required to fight to the end. According to Goebbels, “A single motto remains for us: ‘Conquer or die.’ ” Hitler blamed everything on the Jews and the Slavs. “The deadly Jewish-Bolshevik enemy with his masses is beginning his final attack,” he told troops on the eastern front, in a last appeal on April 15. The Russians were determined to exterminate all German people, Hitler promised, “the old men and children will be murdered, women and girls will be degraded as barracks whores.” Everybody else would be marched off to Siberia.
In the heart of Berlin, in the Wilhelmstrasse district, where the Reich’s ministries were located, Colonel Siegfried Knemeyer tried to maintain order over the vast group of personnel he was responsible for at the Air Ministry. It was a miracle that the building was still standing. Constructed of reinforced concrete, the Air Ministry was a prized symbol of Nazi Party intimidation architecture, seven stories tall, with twenty-eight hundred rooms, four thousand windows, and corridors that totaled four miles in length. At the height of the air war, the place bustled with four thousand Nazi bureaucrats and their secretaries. This was no longer the case. The Luftwaffe was in ruins.
Since 1943, Siegfried Knemeyer had served as chief of all air force technical developments for the Luftwaffe. His title was technical adviser to Reichsmarschall G?ring, who adored Knemeyer, calling him “my boy.” From aircraft engines to instruments, if a new component was being developed for the Luftwaffe, G?ring wanted to know what Knemeyer had to say about it before he gave the project the go-ahead. But now, in the second week of April 1945, most orders that arrived at the Air Ministry were impossible for Knemeyer to fulfill. In the second half of 1944, the German Air Force had lost more than twenty thousand airplanes. The Speer ministry had since managed to produce approximately three thousand new aircraft, but they were of little use now. Across the Reich, German aircraft sat stranded on tarmacs. The Allies had bombed Luftwaffe runways, and there was barely any aviation fuel left. The plan for IG Farben to make synthetic fuel at its Buna factory had ended when the Red Army liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Germany’s fuel sources in Hungary and Romania were tapped out. The German jet was superior to conventional Allied fighter planes in the air, but that didn’t mean much anymore, with most Luftwaffe aircraft stuck on the ground.
Soon Knemeyer would flee Berlin, but not before he completed a final task assigned to him by Speer. According to Nuremberg trial testimony, Speer instructed Knemeyer to hide Luftwaffe technical information in the forest outside Berlin. Stashing official documents was a treasonable offense, but according to Knemeyer’s personal papers, Speer and Knemeyer had agreed that Germany’s seminal scientific progress in aeronautics could not, under any circumstances, fall into Russian hands. There was also a second unofficial job that Speer tapped Knemeyer for, one that was not discussed at Nuremberg but which Speer admitted to decades later. Speer asked Knemeyer to help plot his escape.
Speer’s plan to flee Germany had been in the works for some time; it was the details he needed help ironing out. Ever since Speer had seen the film S.O.S. Iceberg, starring Leni Riefenstahl and Ernst Udet, he knew he wanted to escape to Greenland should Germany lose the war. In Greenland Speer could set up camp and write his memoirs, he later explained. Of course he’d need a pilot, which is where Knemeyer fit in.
Knemeyer was an aeronautical engineer, but he was also one of the Luftwaffe’s most revered pilots, ranked among the top ten aviators in all of Germany. His specialty, back when he flew missions in the earlier stages of the war, had been espionage. From 1938 to 1942, Knemeyer flew a number of the most dangerous Abwehr (military intelligence) missions on record, including ones over England and Norway. And it was Knemeyer who made the first high-altitude sortie over North Africa, flying at forty-four thousand feet. But Knemeyer was also a pragmatist. He knew, apparently more so than Speer, that attempting to fly out of Germany and into Greenland transporting one of the most wanted war criminals of the Third Reich during the final days of the war would be a near-to-impossible feat. There was brutal weather in Greenland and fierce terrain. The mission would require a very specific aircraft that could handle the harsh conditions and difficult landing, namely, the Bv 222, designed by Blohm & Voss. Only thirteen had ever been built. There was only one man who had access to that kind of airplane, and that was Knemeyer’s friend Werner Baumbach, a twenty-eight-year-old dive-bomber pilot whom Hitler had made general of the bombers.
Knemeyer knew that bringing Baumbach on board was imperative for a successful Greenland escape. During the war, Baumbach had flown missions between Norway and a German weather station located in Greenland. Speer agreed and Baumbach was brought into the plan. In secret, Baumbach and Knemeyer began gathering “food, medicine, rifles, skis, tents, fishing equipment and hand grenades” at Speer’s behest. At the Travemünde airfield, north of Berlin, Baumbach earmarked a Bv 222 for use. The only thing that remained was Speer’s command for the group to flee. Time was running out. Berlin was nearing its downfall.
CHAPTER FOUR
Liberation