And while the Führer has a deep hatred for the Americans, he also fears and respects George S. Patton, who has laid waste to so many German soldiers. These plans are designed to make sure that Old Blood and Guts is kept off the battlefield at all costs.

2

THE WOLF’S LAIR

EAST PRUSSIA

OCTOBER 21, 1944

9:30 A.M.

The Wolf limps through the woods.

The autumn air is chill and damp. As he does each morning at just about this time, Adolf Hitler emerges from the artificial light of his concrete bunker into the morning sun. He holds his two-year-old German shepherd Blondi on a short leash for their daily walk through the thick birch forest. A fussy man of modest height and weight who is prone to emotional outbursts, Hitler wears his dark brown hair parted on the right and keeps his Charlie Chaplin mustache carefully combed and trimmed.

Hitler spends more time at the Wolf’s Lair than in Berlin—some eight hundred days in the last three years alone. The Führer is fond of saying that his military planners chose the “most marshy, mosquito-ridden, and climatically unpleasant place possible” for this hidden headquarters. On humid summer days, the air is so heavy and thick with clouds of mosquitoes that Hitler remains in the cool confines of his bunker all day long.

But autumn is different. The forests of East Prussia have a charm all their own this time of year, and Hitler needs no convincing to venture outside for his daily walk. These long morning strolls offer him a chance to compose his thoughts before long afternoons of war strategizing and policy meetings. Sometimes he amuses himself by teaching Blondi tricks, such as climbing a ladder or balancing on a narrow pole. While frivolous on the surface, Hitler’s time alone with his beloved Blondi is actually a vital part of his day. The Führer suffers from a condition known as meteorism, the primary symptom of which is uncontrollable flatulence. Time alone in the fresh air allows him to manage the discomfort without wrinkling the noses of his staff, which would be an acute embarrassment to the exalted leader.

Adolf Hitler in 1944

The journey through the dictator’s six-hundred-acre wooded hideaway takes Hitler and Blondi past concrete bunkers, personal residences, soldiers’ barracks, a power plant, and even the demolished conference room where, just three short months ago, Hitler was almost killed by an assassin’s bomb. But despite all these visible reminders that the Wolf’s Lair is in fact a military headquarters, the fifty-five-year-old Nazi dictator who likes the nickname Wolf strolls with an outward air of contentment, utterly lost in thought.

But Hitler is not tranquil. His right eardrum was ruptured in the bomb blast during the assassination attempt and has only recently stopped bleeding. That same blast hurled him to a concrete floor, bruising his buttocks “as blue as a baboon’s behind” and filling his legs with wooden splinters as it ripped his black uniform pants to shreds.

However, the failed assassination plot, engineered by members of the German military who no longer believed that Hitler was fit to rule Germany, did not cause all the Führer’s health issues. His hands and left leg have long trembled from anxiety. He is prone to dizziness, high blood pressure, and stomach cramps. The skin beneath his uniform is the whitest white, thanks to his fondness for remaining indoors and keeping a nocturnal schedule. And his energy is often so low that his longtime personal physician, the extremely obese and medically unorthodox Dr. Theodor Morell, makes it a practice to inject Hitler each day with methamphetamines. A second doctor, Dr. Erwin Geising, also places drops containing cocaine in each of the Führer’s dark blue eyes, in order to give the dictator a daily rush of euphoria.

Despite recent German setbacks on the battlefield, the Wolf still has hope that his plans for global domination will yet be realized. His greatest goal is the eradication of the Jewish people, with whom he is obsessed, despite not having had any intentional contact with a Jew in twenty years. “This war can end two ways,” he said in a January 30, 1942, address to the German parliament. “Either the extermination of the Aryan peoples or the disappearance of Jewry from Europe.”

Prior to the war, Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies led hundreds of thousands of Jewish citizens to emigrate from Germany, a number that includes 83 percent of all German Jews under the age of twenty-one. But no more were allowed to leave once the war began. Now, trapped within Germany and each of the countries that the Nazis have conquered, the remaining Europeans of Jewish ancestry are being systematically rounded up and murdered.

Hitler fancies himself a military strategist, despite no formal training in field tactics. He takes full credit for Patton’s defeat at Fort Driant, because it was his decision to send reinforcements to Metz rather than let the city fall. He is also cheered by the news that Nazi scientists are developing a bomb with nuclear capacity, a weapon that would allow Hitler to wipe his enemies off the face of the earth. In addition, Hitler is quite sure that the audacious surprise attack he will unveil to his top commanders in a few hours will push the Allied armies back across France, and allow Germany to regain control of the European Theater.

And most encouraging of all, Adolf Hitler is finally rid of those top generals who have long despised him. SS death squads were relentless in discovering the identities of each of the men who took part in the July 20 assassination plot, then hunting them down and taking them into custody. Some were shot immediately, which infuriated Hitler, because such a death was far too quick. On his orders, the others were hanged. The executions were done individually, with each man marched into a small room. They entered stripped to the waist, wearing handcuffs. The hangman’s noose was then draped over the condemned man’s shoulders and slowly pulled tight. The other end of the rope was thrown over a hook affixed high up on the wall and left to dangle. A cameraman filmed the event for Hitler’s enjoyment. To ensure maximum embarrassment when the graphic movie was shown, each man’s pants were yanked down to his ankles.

Hitler originally suggested that the assassins be impaled on the hook, to be “hanged like cattle.” But that sort of death would not have allowed the plotters to suffer sufficiently. Instead, the hangman picked up the loose end of the rope and pulled it taut, using the hook as a pulley to lift the condemned man slowly off the ground. The executioner was in no hurry, and very often the hangings lasted fifteen minutes or more, with the victim’s airflow cut off and restored multiple times. Before dying, the accused had plenty of time to memorize the interior of the room: the whitewashed walls, the cognac bottle on the simple wooden table, the door through which he entered alive and would exit quite dead.

Each execution was brutal, but the suffering was not enough for Adolf Hitler. He wanted even more revenge. Hitler then ordered the conspirators’ immediate families and other relatives rounded up. More than seven thousand innocent men, women, and children were arrested—and almost five thousand of them executed.

The most significant of these murders took place just seven days ago, and it means that Adolf Hitler will have to launch his major new offensive, code-named Operation Watch on the Rhine, without the only German general who can even remotely compare with George S. Patton.

The Wolf could have waited until after Operation Watch on the Rhine was completed to pass judgment on his favorite field marshal. From a tactical perspective, it would have been the smart thing to do. But Adolf Hitler needed his revenge. Nothing, not even winning the war, matters more.