Von Wachtstein found himself in a small room. An oberstleutnant, a stabsfeldwebel, and a feldwebel, who had been sitting behind a simple wooden table, jumped to their feet.
The oberstleutnant gave the straight-armed Nazi salute.
“Good morning, Herr General,” he said. “You are expected. If you would be so good as to accompany the stabsfeldwebel?”
Von Wachtstein followed the warrant officer farther into the bunker to another steel door, which he pulled open just enough to admit his head. He announced, “Generalleutnant von Wachtstein, Herr Generalfeldmarschall.”
“Admit him.”
The door was opened wider. Von Wachtstein marched in, came to attention, and gave the Nazi salute.
Keitel, a tall erect man who was not wearing his tunic, had obviously just finished shaving; there was a blob of shaving cream next to his ear and another under his nose.
“Well?” he demanded.
“Reichsmarschall Göring, Herr Generalfeldmarschall, reports there is some mechanical difficulty with his aircraft, and there is no way he can get from Budapest here before three this afternoon, or later.”
Keitel considered that a moment.
“In this regrettable circumstance, von Wachtstein, I see no alternative to you informing the Führer. He will, of course, want to know of this incident as soon as possible.”
“Jawohl, Herr Generalfeldmarschall.”
The “incident” was the suicide of Generaloberst Hans Jeschonnek, chief of the general staff of the Luftwaffe, who had shot himself just after midnight.
Among his other duties, Jeschonnek, Göring’s deputy, had been charged—personally, by the Führer—with the protection of the rocket establishment at Peenemunde. Hitler believed that once rocket scientist Wernher von Braun “worked the bugs out” of the V2 missile, it would cow the English into suing for peace.
The V2, which had a speed of about a mile a second, carried 1,620 pounds of high explosive in its warhead. It had a range of two hundred miles, enough to reach large parts of England. The bugs that Hitler expected von Braun to soon work out concerned navigation. The best accuracy obtained so far was that half of all missiles launched could be reasonably expected to land within an eleven-mile circle.
The rockets considerably annoyed the British, but they didn’t by any means cow them. Their solution to the problem was to ask the Americans to destroy Peenemunde with B-17 bombers, as Peenemunde was too small a target to be seen by their Lancaster bombers at night.
Jeschonnek was not only unable to stop the Americans, whose bombs just about destroyed the Peenemunde installation, but made things far worse for himself by deciding that a large formation of fighter aircraft near Berlin were American and ordering the Berlin antiaircraft to shoot them down. The attack had knocked nearly one hundred of them from the sky.
Unfortunately for the Reich, they turned out to be German fighter planes. When Jeschonnek learned of this, he put his pistol in his mouth and blew his brains all over the concrete walls of his bunker quarters.
The only question in von Wachtstein’s mind about Jeschonnek’s sui - cide was whether he had killed himself out of shame for failing to protect Peenemunde, or because nearly one hundred of his fighter pilots were dead because of his orders, or whether he did so rather than face Adolf Hitler’s legendary wrath.
On his way back to the Führerhauptquartier bunker, von Wachtstein wondered if Keitel had any inkling at all of the contempt von Wachtstein felt for him. And he felt that not only because the man—referred to by his colleagues as Lakaitel (“Little Lackey”) and as the “Nodding Donkey”—was sen
ding him to face Hitler’s wrath.
Von Wachtstein considered Keitel a disgrace to the German officer corps. While Hitler had appointed himself Oberster Befehlshaber der Wehrmacht—Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces—it was still clearly the duty of his officers to advise him when they thought his judgment was wrong. Keitel never disagreed with anything Hitler decided.
Stalingrad was an example. Keitel never said a word when von Paulus, nearly out of ammunition and reduced to eating his horses, had requested permission to fight his way out of his encirclement, but Hitler instead ordered him to fight to the last man. Hitler had then promoted von Paulus to field marshal and pointedly told him that no German field marshal had ever surrendered, a clear suggestion that von Paulus was honor bound to commit suicide.
The result of that had been 150,000 German soldiers dead and 91,000 captured—von Paulus among them—when the Red Army ultimately and inevitably triumphed.
Von Wachtstein knew that not only had Keitel tacitly approved the horrors that Himmler’s death squads had visited on Russian soldiers and civilians, but that he had personally ordered that French pilots flying in the Normandie-Niemen fighter regiment of the Soviet air force not be treated as prisoners of war when captured. He ordered them summarily executed.
Von Wachtstein thought again that Keitel—not Adolf Hitler himself—was the real reason he had joined Operation Valkyrie. Hitler was in power solely because Keitel and the clique that surrounded him kept him in power. If Keitel survived the attempt on Hitler’s life, von Wachtstein would happily shoot him himself, or preside over the court of honor to strip him of his field marshal’s baton before standing him against a wall. Or, better yet, hanging him.
SS-Obersturmführer Otto Günsche, a very handsome blond man in his early twenties, who was Hitler’s personal adjutant, was sitting on a Louis XIV chair outside Hitler’s living quarters, obviously waiting for the Führer to appear.
“Günsche, would you please ask the Führer to receive me? It’s quite important.”
“Jeschonnek?”
“Has he heard?”