Colin Forbes - The Leader And The Damned

'You were planted many years ago. I had to be certain your role as spy had not been penetrated, that you were not being forced to supply disinformation.'

'I dealt with the new Hitler rather well,' Bormann preened himself.

'Ah! The second Hitler…' Stalin was amused. 'He never existed. It was always the same old Hitler. That is our version of history, is it not, Beria?'

'Of course.'

'You. can rely on my discretion,' Bormann assured them.

Stalin chuckled. 'I am sure we can! You will be taken to another place for interrogation, naturally…'

'In a way,' Beria interjected slyly, 'we might even say that Woodpecker won the war…'

'I would not go so far as to say that,' Bormann replied with unconvincing modesty.

'It is time for your formal interrogation,' Stalin said abruptly. 'The car is waiting for you at the main entrance..

He pressed a bell and three men in civilian clothes appeared as though awaiting the summons. The three NKVD men escorted the bewildered Bormann back to the limousine which had brought him to the Kremlin. The same driver drove him the short distance to the notorious No 2, Dzerzhinsky Square, the anonymous grey stone building which was NKVD headquarters. Oddly enough, before the Revolution, it had been the property of the All-Russian Insurance Company.

There was a weird atmosphere as the limousine drove inside the courtyard surrounded by buildings which closed it off from the outside world. All the staff who normally worked there had been given a day's holiday. 'To celebrate the capture of Berlin.'

Two more NKVD officers in civilian clothes joined the three men accompanying Bormann as he alighted from the car. He was immediately hand-cuffed and stood against a wall. Armed with rifles, the five NKVD men formed a firing squad. Bormann sagged against the wall in horrific disbelief as the rifles were aimed at him.

'Fire…!'

Following the precedent set by Hitler's death, the body was soaked in petrol and set alight. The ashes of the Reichsleiter were later scattered from the air over Lake Peipus.

Once the ashes were collected, a much larger contingent of NKVD officers, totally ignorant of what had taken place, arrived. They had been told that certain of their colleagues had been found guilty of treachery against the state. The five men who had formed the firing squad together with the driver of the limousine and the pilot who had flown Bormann to Moscow were shot. There was now only one person left besides Stalin and Beria who knew that Martin Bormann had ever reached Moscow.

In his office at the Kremlin Stalin waited with Beria for the first 'phone call. The Generalissimo was relaxed. He chatted with his Minister of State Security, smoking his pipe.

He picked up the 'phone himself when it rang. He listened for less than a minute and ended the call. He took a few more puffs at his pipe before he spoke to Beria.

'Bormann is dead. You can start the campaign of rumours. I might even give a hand myself…'

'And the bones of the second Hitler..?' Beria ventured.

'Already collected by the special team Yelena took to Berlin. They have been scattered over the Baltic. So they will never be found. It was a necessary conclusion to this war. We cannot risk a cult growing up of new Nazis worshipping the grave of the Fuhrer, can we?'

'Of course not. It was well done.'

Beria wisely said no more. He knew there were a dozen other reasons why the faithful Woodpecker, recruited so many years earlier, must disappear. Generalissimo Stalin was posing as the military genius who had won the war. The myth would be destroyed if it was ever revealed that he had known the German order of battle as the Red Army, a five-million strong horde reinforced from the Far East, swept across Europe.

It was equally essential that no one should ever know of the existence of the second Hitler. If this were exposed there were the makings of a second myth. The real Hitler had been a military genius.

He had over-ruled his generals by sanctioning the audacious invasion of Denmark and Norway in 1940. He had shown the same insight when he tore up the Schlieffen Plan for the invasion of the West, backing Manstein. and Guderian with their operation for a blitzkrieg through Sedan against France and Great Britain.

Had Western Intelligence agents found the remains of Hitler's burnt-out corpse – and under Trevor- Roper's guidance they looked hard enough for it – pathologists could well have proved it was the wrong body.

The savage irony of the story is that it started with blood. When the Fuhrer's plane returning from Smolensk was blown up in mid-air, just before landing at the Wolf's Lair, it triggered off a bloodbath.

It ended in a similar bloodbath. For similar motives Stalin liquidated everyone – with two exceptions – who knew Bormann had been brought to Moscow. The men who shot Bormann in their turn were killed, by men who knew nothing of Bormann's journey to Moscow.

Yelena Rzhevskaya, the woman who commanded the special squad flown to Berlin, was one exception. Even dictators can act inconsistently. There is evidence that Stalin had a soft spot for this remarkable woman who led her team into the raging inferno of Berlin.

'Yelena, apart from myself and Beria, you are the only person alive who knows what really happened. So, if anything should ever leak out I will know where to look, wouldn't you agree?'

It was probably something like that. It is a fact that in 1965, twelve years after the death of Stalin in 1953, Yelena contributed an article to the Russian journal, Znamya, which she called Berlinskie Stranitsky – Berlin Notes. In this she alluded to her special mission to the German capital 'to find Hitler, alive or dead…' The article was vague and no reference was made to Martin Bormann. This was in the days of the 'great thaw'. Two years later in 1967 Yuri Andropov took over the post as Chairman of the Ministry of State Security and revived the sinister power of the KGB.

As he had said he would to Beria, Stalin did take the opportunity to do his bit in fuelling the rumours Beria's Soviet agents in South America were spreading that Bormann had escaped to that continent.

He was talking to Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt's special representative. He inserted the remark casually into their conversation.

'I have serious doubts as to whether the Fuhrer is dead. He surely escaped and is in hiding in Argentina with Martin Bormann.'

This was Stalin's only epitaph for Woodpecker.

Returning from abroad a few years ago, the author met David Stein (that is not his real name), a diamond broker living in Hampstead. He was shown an opened envelope containing a black, leather-bound diary. On the outside of the envelope were the following words.

Account of my visit to the Third Reich in the year 1943 and my subsequent sojourn in Yugoslavia. In the event of my death to be handed to Lieutenant Jock Carson, Section 3, Grey Pillars, Cairo, Egypt. Ian Lindsay, Wing Commander.

He was not permitted to take away the diary, so he read it as he sat in Stein's study. When he returned it, he gained the impression the diary would shortly be destroyed. Stein explained that the thought of his home being invaded by security men was abhorrent. In any case, his brother, Aaron, had died in a car crash recently.

The fate of certain leading characters in this story is now a matter of record. All the facts can be found in historical archives.

Colonel-General Alfred Jodl. Tried for war crimes at Nuremberg. Condemned. Hanged.

Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel. Tried for war crimes at Nuremberg. Condemned. Hanged.

Brigadier Roger Masson. The head of Swiss Intelligence survived the war. The man who protected Lucy (and therefore, without realizing it, Woodpecker) retired at the end of World War Two. Accused of collaboration with the Nazis, because of his dealings with Schellenberg, he had to endure a government inquiry which completely exonerated him. Nevertheless, it was an embittered man who took up residence in his home overlooking Vevey on Lake Geneva.