Three Conspiracies. Field Marshal Rundstedt, Admiral Canaris, and the Jewish Engineer Who Could Have Saved Europe

By Charles Fenyvesi

Between July and September 1943, emissaries from three anti-Nazi groups in Axis-controlled Europe flew to Istanbul, unbeknownst to one another yet each relying on the same pretext of conducting trade negotiations in neutral Turkey. They headed for the local address of America's intelligence agency, the Offic

• Language: English
• Publisher: Helena History Press LLC
• Release date: Dec 28, 2021
• ISBN: 9781943596256

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Acknowledgements

My first thanks go to archivists of the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in College Park, Md., and especially to John Taylor who encouraged me and offered sage advice, as well as Gregory Bradsher and Larry MacDonald who helped me avoid some pitfalls. While working at the Archives, researchers Prof. Richard Breitman of the American University, Robert Wolfe, Paul Brown, and Miriam Kleiman shared their views and knowledge. Prof. Shlomo Aronson of the Hebrew University and Prof. Siegfried Beer of Karl-Franzens Universität Graz were persuasive debating partners. I was especially fortunate to be able to rely on veterans of American intelligence agencies who not only opened up their wealth of information but agreed to be quoted by name. First and foremost of them was Donald Jameson, with an incomparable encyclopedic recall. James McCargar was a pillar of wit. John Waller, James Critchfield, and Gilmore Abram Flues made themselves available for my questions despite their declining health. Tragically, all of them passed away while work on the manuscript progressed.

In collecting photographic, historic, and other details, Frank Koszorus, Géza Jeszenszky, and Emily and Douglas Jacobson were most helpful. Katalin Thury helped with research, and Julius Varallyay, Jozsef Takacs, and Charles Gati advised on a number of points of history. Special thanks are due to the research institutions of the anti-Nazi Resistance in Berlin and Vienna for supplying photographs, as well as the Twentieth Century Foundation of Budapest for a stipend for archival research. And as always, my agent Joseph Spieler of New York played his role ably.

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Levente Osztovits, head of the Budapest publishing house Európa, who encouraged me to write the book. With tragic suddenness, he died in June 2006, before the book’s publication in a Hungarian translation. I am beholden to his successor at Európa, László Gy. Horváth for his fine-tuning and to translator (and military historian) György Molnár for correcting several of my mistakes and assuring me that this ambitious project is worth the energy we invested in it.

Prologue

Between July and September 1943, emissaries from three anti-Nazi groups in Axis-controlled Europe flew to Istanbul, unbeknownst to one another yet each relying on the same pretext of conducting trade negotiations in neutral Turkey. They headed for the local address of America’s intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Disguised as the Vestern Elektrik Kompani, the OSS station registered as its line of business the exploration of the possibilities of postwar Central European markets. Though the ledgers always showed a loss, the Kompani paid taxes. The contradiction did not trouble the local authorities. With Germany’s Wehrmacht in control of Greece to the west, Britain’s Royal Navy to the south, the Red Army along the Caucasus, and America’s might in evidence across the globe, Turkey’s government took great care not to offend the principal belligerents.

The first anti-Nazi group to dispatch an emissary to Istanbul counted among its leaders five of the Wehrmacht’s most be-medaled generals headed by Germany’s titular First Soldier, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. They pledged that the units under their command will ensure the safe landing of Allied armies in France, to be followed by the joining together of the two forces to march into Germany and crush the fanatically Nazi SS divisions. What the German generals aimed at was not that different from the ceasefire order of November 11, 1942, issued to French forces in North Africa by Admiral Jean-François Darlan, then Number Two in the pro-Nazi Vichy regime.

The ceasefire came out of secret negotiations with General Dwight Eisenhower, then commander-in-chief of the first of the Allied landings, in North Africa. According to André Maurois’s history of France, Darlan’s surprise move clinched Allied victory in North Africa, saved many Allied lives, gained new bases from which to attack the Axis, secured the support of the French military stationed in North Africa, and turned it into an ally.¹ In his history of the American people, Samuel Eliot Morison agreed with Maurois’s interpretation.²

The second anti-Nazi group involved what the OSS called the supreme authorities of Axis member Hungary anxious to switch sides. From the head of state to the prime minister and the chief-of-staff, the Hungarians were eager to link up with a U.S. force they hoped would land on their territory. Prominent Austrians, most of them business executives, submitted the third plan. They asked for assistance in organizing an armed Resistance in their country, then the Alpine Province of the Third Reich.

All three networks had members who supplied intelligence to the OSS.

Until 2002, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), heir to the OSS files, held back the documents dealing with the three conspiracies. This book focuses on files that reveal the super-secret cooperation between the OSS and the war’s mysterious gray eminence, German military intelligence chief Wilhelm Canaris. Astonishingly, Canaris kept up a stream of information to the OSS that proudly listed him as our #659 in its roster of assets.

I. An Alternative to the Normandy Landing

The anti-Nazi generals’ plan constituted an alternative to the high-risk crossing of the Channel that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill dreaded. He feared that a premature invasion would lead to an open-ended massacre and that there would be no second try in case of failure.³ But President Franklin Roosevelt was pushing hard for liberating France as soon as possible because of his concern that the patience of the American people would run out if the war dragged on for too long. He was also eager to placate the dictator Yosif Stalin who demanded that the Western Allies open a second front in Western Europe to relieve pressure on the Red Army in the east. Only FDR could tell which of the two considerations weighed more. But once the presidential mind was made up, neither Churchill nor U.S. Army Chief-of-Staff George Marshall, nor anyone else could change it. Talking to Sir John Dill, Washington representative of the British chiefs of staff, Marshall acknowledged that he and his colleagues were wary of a cross-Channel onslaught but were up against an obstinate Dutchman—FDR.⁴

The German generals’ plan could have limited the scope of the Allied invasion and made things easier, said Donald Jameson, then in the Navy and later a senior CIA officer. But D-Day was too massive an operation to be dropped or even changed in its design. Yes, it was incredibly risky but once Roosevelt decided in its favor that was our plan.⁵

An epic face-off was inevitable. The horror of the Nazi crimes seemed to call for it, and the American spirit demanded a grand spectacle, not a ruse. A frontal attack on the enemy was— and is—the unblinking American way, a winner-take-all gamble. The higher the stakes the more enthusiastic the public’s applause. The good guys have simply got to win, which to Roosevelt and many if not most Americans, was—and still is—a law of nature.

Huge losses of life were foreseen—but that did not seem to matter. It was as if the magnitude of the projected losses helped validate the supreme importance of the landing.

Swept away by the books and films memorializing the unforgettable Allied heroism on June 6, 1944, we seldom pay attention nowadays that on that longest of days, the odds by no means favored a German defeat. To the contrary. In his official history of the U.S. Navy, Morison offered a terse observation about the risks: The Allies were invading a continent where the enemy had immense capabilities for reinforcement and counterattack.⁶ Touring the German defense line along the Atlantic in November 1943, Hiroshi Oshima, Japan’s ambassador in Berlin and a general in the reserves, was most impressed with the vast quantities of concrete and steel used in the fortifications. The display of German engineering and the soldiers’ technical preparedness and morale overwhelmed him. In his report to Tokyo, intercepted and delivered in an English translation to Roosevelt two hours after its dispatch, Oshima expressed his certainty that the Master Race could not be dislodged.⁷

Nevertheless, D-Day ended with some ten thousand Allied casualties which was only a fraction of what had been predicted.⁸ (The official U.S. figure for total Allied casualties in the landings eventually rose to 209,672, of whom 36,976 died.) For generations of Americans to come, the storming of the Normandy beaches offered a template for a decisive confrontation with the enemy and a justified sacrifice.

The miraculous, heart-warming triumph in Normandy anointed the United States as a superpower, and the men of the U.S. Army shaking hands with the men of the Red Army at the German river Elbe ten months and nineteen days later conferred the same status on the Soviet Union. The centuries-old hegemony of Britain and France ended on the continent, as did the brief ascendancy of Germany.

The German generals’ offer dangled the prospect of a relatively easy victory via an Old World ruse as old as diplomacy. The conspirators were to take over the reins from the Nazis whose leaders would be arrested and prosecuted by an international court. That was the plan in the papers the generals’ emissary, Count Helmuth von Moltke, prepared in his Basic Principles, under the heading of The Punishment of War Criminals, dated July 23, 1943 and endorsed by the third meeting of his anti-Nazi circle at the Moltke family estate in Kreisau.⁹

Had the German generals’ proposal prevailed, the war could have ended by early 1944 and millions of lives saved. The continent’s postwar division would have been less favorable to the Soviet Union and the Soviet threat to take over Western Europe would have been less plausible. There might not have been enough Soviet-controlled German territory to scrounge together an East German people’s republic, and the Soviets might not have been able to force all the states of Central and Eastern Europe into satellite status.

The Soviets need not have been involved in deciding whether the second front they demanded was opened by the Anglo-Americans with force or by ruse, and with or without indigenous anti-Nazi assistance. Besides, what could Stalin have done once the Americans landed? Quit the Grand Alliance? Join forces with Hitler and the divisions loyal to him? The weight of Nazi atrocities in Russia was such that even Stalin would have had problems in forcing his people into accepting an abrupt reversal of alliances.

If Stalin had ever received a similar offer of cooperation from the German High Command, he would have surely taken advantage of it, and once such a mission was accomplished and victory declared, Stalin would have wasted no time to liquidate all the German officers who had something to do with the offer.

II. Aristocrats, Black Marketers, Smugglers, and Double Agents

The Second World War tossed out the rules of historic class segregation in Old Europe. It entangled the lives of aristocrats and underworld operatives who would not have broken bread together in pre-Nazi societies. At the high end of the Dogwood Chain that the OSS organized in Istanbul were individuals of conscience and culture. Further down on the chain of command, OSS-Istanbul relied on smugglers, black marketers, and con-artistes who kept themselves—and often others—out of prison and concentration camp by bribing Nazi officials on a regular basis and accepting assignments from them. They traveled across borders, then impossible for ordinary people. Were such double agents sleazy, contemptible war profiteers? Or should they be seen as gutsy survival artistes who found ways to prosper in hard times?

The double agents featured in this book were adventurers, and it is hard to tell whether the thrill of clandestine assignments or the lure of financial gain kept them going. As the years pass, they seem neither villains nor heroes, neither traitors nor patriots. Instead, they strike us as high-wire artistes, the most cunning of survivors who took advantage of the Nazis’ greed for valuables as well as of the Americans’ hunger for information about the enemy about whom they knew little. Some Jews desperate to flee Hitler’s Europe benefited from the schemes devised by double agents, and law enforcement officers in half a dozen countries pocketed the bribes.

III. Promises Broken, Trusts Canceled

The crises that emerged at the dawn of America’s tenure as a superpower foreshadowed those that erupted later on.

The plan for an American force landing in Hungary was planned for before and after the Allied breaching of German defenses in Normandy. From late summer of 1944 to the winter of 1944−45, the OSS team organized to fly in was ready on a two-hour notice. Hungary’s artistic chief-of-staff himself drew the detailed maps of the airfields he recommended for landing.¹⁰ The Hungarians eagerly seized on any hint of a possible American landing, as they did again in 1956 when the American failure to follow up on what sounded like a promise caused almost as much lingering bitterness as the absence of American air support for Cuban émigrés during their abortive invasion in the Bay of Pigs in 1960. Preparing for intervention and then scrubbing that option remains a painful memory in yet another part of the world as well. In 1991, during George Bush senior’s war on Iraq, American planes dropped leaflets urging Iraqis to overthrow the tyrant Saddam Hussein. Bush told us to uprise, the magazine New Yorker quoted an Iraqi Shi’ite’s summation. When we uprose, he went fishing.¹¹

In early 1944, the Austrian Resistance group was betrayed and nearly all its leaders were executed by the Gestapo. But by that time the Austrians had sent to Istanbul a long list of locations where the V-1 and V-2 rockets—the ancestors of today’s guided missiles then ravaging England—were designed, manufactured, and stored. Just prior to their executions, the Austrians also gave the U.S. Air Force some bum tips, and the Americans promptly concluded that the Austrians who called themselves patriots must be traitors to the Allied cause. These days analyses of similar events usually include the phrase the fog of war.

During the Cold War, suspicions surfaced among Americans handling mystic Hmong tribal chiefs who might have been drug lords but hated the Viet Cong and hard-drinking, mercurial defectors from the communist bloc who kept coming up with elaborate schemes guaranteed to unravel Soviet power. At the first sign of information proving contradictory or faulty, the mood in U.S. intelligence swung quickly from enthusiastic welcome to charges of deception and betrayal, and an angry severance of ties often followed.

The three groups of conspirators who pleaded for U.S. assistance in 1943 were forerunners of the petitioners identifying themselves as anti-totalitarian who turned to the United States in the next half a century. The fog of espionage that the young and untried OSS faced presaged the intense debates over American engagement in world affairs that flared up again under Presidents George Bush, father and son.

In the decades that followed the Second World War, U.S. intelligence have had to wrestle with the same fundamental dilemma of trust when approached by defectors once serving totalitarian regimes and by refugees claiming to represent clandestine democratic forces organizing to get rid of a dictator. The suspicion has never entirely vanished that they were in fact double agents planted by the enemy, a line of thinking championed by James Angleton, the CIA’s counter-intelligence chief appointed by director Allen Dulles in 1954 and fired by successor William Colby twenty years later. Angleton, Dulles, and Colby got their training in the OSS in Europe, and all three received the highest ratings of their bosses and peers. However, during the Cold War, two of them, Angleton and Colby, were accused of being Soviet agents—an angry, ugly charge never proved, never disproved. Their OSS confrère, Richard Helms, often called by his colleagues as the best director the CIA ever had, steered clear of the controversy in his memoirs.¹²

But even if postwar refugees and defectors proved themselves democrats committed to the cause of the Free World, how could the United States rely on information that often impressed American specialists as fragmentary and flawed? Could a supposedly friendly enemy national’s word be taken at its face value? Could a Russian or Polish, Vietnamese or South Slav, Somali or Sudanese, Afghan or Iraqi asset be trusted when the future of his or her beloved (or detested) homeland is at stake? On the other hand, who else but a privileged insider could smuggle out high-level information from a tightly controlled and rigidly compartmentalized society sealed off from the outside world?

U.S. policymakers—and especially occupants of the Oval Office light years away from the blood, sweat, and tears of wars hot and cold—have never felt comfortable sitting astride the horns of such dilemmas. They have demanded the kind of slam-dunk certainty that U.S. intelligence officers often ended up supplying. In presenting to President George W. Bush the case for Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, CIA Director George Tenet used the phrase slam dunk. And later, after the case for the existence of those weapons evaporated, regretted it.

Retired CIA official Jameson recalled that over the years when his agency was called upon to deliver an assessment on a hotly debated subject, the director had to indulge the President. That’s the reality we have had to deal with, whether we liked it or not.¹³

The commander-in-chief is unfamiliar with those extra-sensitive local sources of human intelligence and with the maddeningly diverse cultural contexts they come from. But at the end of the day, it is always the President who makes the determination whether the American intelligence assessment based on the word of foreigners is gold or garbage. It must be one or the other, purged of doubt, and to be packaged right for public consumption. From the Oval Office vantage point, it cannot be a mix of both.

---

1 André Maurois, A History of France (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956), 534.

2 Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (Oxford University Press, 1965), 1018.

3 Winston Churchill’s fears are described in William Stevenson’s book, A Man Called Intrepid (New York: The Lyons Press, 2000), 374−75.

4 William Casey, The Secret War Against Hitler (Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1988), 66.

5 Donald Jameson, author’s interview.

6 Samuel Eliot Morison, The Invasion of France and Germany, 1944−45 (New York: Little, Brown, 1959), 152−153.

7 For more details, see Charles Fenyvesi’s article, Japan’s Unwitting D-Day Spy, in The Washington Post, May 26, 1998, A10.

8 Geoffrey Perret, Eisenhower (New York: Random House, 1999), 285. According to Perret, Allied casualties were about 10,000,less than half the figure expected.

9 Ger van Roon, German Resistance to Hitler (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971), 343.

10 Captain László Eszenyi, author’s interview.

11 The New Yorker, February 28, 2005, 38.

12 Richard Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder (New York: Random House, 2003).

13 Donald Jameson, author’s interview.

Chapter 1

The Old World Faced the Enigma of the New

I am a juggler. I never let my right hand know what my left hand does.

Franklin Roosevelt discussing his political tactics.

The Western Allies could have won the Second World War in Europe in late 1943 or early 1944, had they taken up the secret offer of anti-Nazi German generals detailed in this book. On battlefields, in concentration camps, and in population centers, hundreds of thousands of lives, perhaps millions would have been saved. Adolf Hitler would have been taken out by his generals opposed to his dictatorship and alarmed by his fascination with Valhalla, the pagan funeral pyre burning to the ground all that was German civilization. Instead of dangling from the gallows after the last plot to kill the Führer, anti-Nazi activists could have composed the new German government.

But the tug of tragedy proved too strong. Good intentions foundered, as if foiled by a curse. A chain reaction began with Germany’s unprovoked aggression, with each new attack making relief less likely and a correction more and more unlikely. The war’s last year turned out to be far more destructive than it could have been, and it led to a peace that validated the Red Army’s march into the center of Europe and encouraged Yosif Vissarionovich Stalin’s ambition to bring the rest of the Old World under his heel. Like Hitler before him, Stalin came perilously close to carrying out his plan for conquest. My task as minister of foreign affairs was to expand the borders of our Fatherland, pensioner Vyacheslav Molotov recalled with a modicum of modesty in his memoirs four decades later. And it seems that Stalin and I coped with this task quite well.¹ They certainly did. From 1939 to 1942 and then again from 1945 to 1953, there were many depressing days when it seemed to anti-totalitarian Europeans that the Old World was about to succumb to a new Dark Age, if not relapse into the endless cycles of ancient tragedies.

Weaknesses of character in lead players combined with errors of judgment by others ended up buttressing President Franklin Roosevelt’s conviction that the United States had nothing to gain and much to risk in aligning itself with German anti-Nazis. A feckless American diplomat’s snub of an old friend, the impeccable emissary of the anti-Nazi generals, meshed with the well-hidden insecurity of America’s ebullient top spymaster. A Foreign Service professional who kept himself well informed about White House thinking, Ambassador Alexander Kirk was not the kind of person who challenged his superiors or questioned their guidelines. Though heroism in face of enemy fire made him one of the First World War’s two most decorated soldiers, William (Wild Bill) Donovan feared displeasing his Commander-in-Chief Roosevelt who had put him, a hard-core Republican, in charge of America’s first centralized, full- spectrum intelligence agency. Codenamed Victor, Donovan would not risk losing the wartime assignment he valued more than his life. But he was afraid—and probably rightly so—that he did not have enough of a personal standing to take up an argument with Roosevelt, a law school classmate with whom he had had only a nodding acquaintance some three decades earlier. Donovan was loath to see his reputation as an FDR intimate wrecked and the truth revealed: it was British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who played a critical role in securing him the post he had coveted for years.

The reluctance of a senior career diplomat and the seemingly all-powerful spy chief to champion in Washington the cause of the German anti-Nazi conspiracy explains why no ranking decision-maker in the U.S. government stood up to urge a positive reply to the Wehrmacht High Command’s astonishing offer of joint action against the divisions of diehard Nazis, the Waffen (or armed) SS. Reinforcing the U.S. non-response was a Harvard professor of European history, William Langer, who from the bench of his important wartime intelligence job ruled that German anti-Nazis constituted an insignificant group the Allies need not bother with. His argument, relying on his interpretation of history well received by many of his peers in academia, overrode an impassioned plea for opening immediate negotiations with the German generals, submitted by a colleague from Stanford University, intelligence consultant Karl Brandt, an anti-Nazi German émigré au courant with the personalities involved and the changing climate of opinion in the Third Reich. The collision between an in-house specialist whose judgments had jelled decades earlier and an outside contractor who kept up with the latest developments helped set a pattern for postwar American intelligence dilemmas.

The German High Command’s emissary, Count Helmuth von Moltke, made the mistake of not contacting another American friend of his from before the war, diplomat George Kennan. Expelled from Germany after Hitler declared war on the United States, Kennan was transferred to Portugal where he soon became the charge d’affaires. A man of conscience and courage, Kennan admired a likeminded person such as Moltke. Had Kennan been approached, he would not have hesitated to testify to Moltke’s bona fides as a fervent anti-Nazi and he would have probably taken up the cudgels for his fellow conspirators as well. But to Moltke, Kennan must have seemed too junior a Foreign Service officer—not even an ambassador—and thus not influential enough to entrust with a mission of historic importance.

Acting on behalf of five of the Wehrmacht’s most senior officers and the civilian head of the Resistance, Moltke ended up submitting the offer of joint military action to novice American intelligence officers stationed in Istanbul, Turkey. They were raw recruits who had signed up with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s intelligence service Donovan had ginned up in 1942. They faithfully followed orders to leave no stone unturned when looking for anti-Nazis ready to subvert the Third Reich from within. Encouraged by their Czech-born Jewish expert on Central Europe, Alfred Schwarz, they were favorably impressed with Moltke, and in their cables to OSS headquarters they tried their best to promote his plan. However, they had no clout in FDR’s Washington, and soon the time came when U.S. counter-intelligence, egged on by jealous British colleagues, advanced the charge that Schwarz and his American bosses foolishly employed Nazi agents and were possibly Nazi agents themselves.

I. The Unstable Foursome

The supreme leaders in the four principal capitals directing the European war made an unpredictable foursome, and their interactions and misunderstandings could have easily turned the war’s dénouement even more tragic. What if the Western Allies failed to gain a foothold after landing in June 1944 in Normandy and then Roosevelt and Churchill and their generals got into a slugfest of mutual recriminations? What if Stalin and Hitler decided to disinter their pact of 1939 and give it new life? Such nightmare scenarios seemed at the time well within the realm of the possible.

With yellow eyes peering out of a pockmarked face and with a lackluster Russian spoken with a Georgian accent that native speakers found grating, Stalin was low on personal magnetism, while Roosevelt, Churchill, and Hitler had charismatic appeals that extended beyond their nations’ boundaries. With assistance from photographers, painters, and sculptors, Hitler was able to make his followers ignore that he lacked the physical traits (such as tall stature, blond hair, and handsome face) that would have matched the Aryan racial ideal that he and his race experts conjured up. Appearance and head of bad race, half-breed, a leading German eugenicist jotted down in an early, candid assessment of the future Führer. Low sloping forehead, unattractive nose, broad cheekbones, small eyes, dark hair.²

Biographers have diagnosed Stalin and Hitler as paranoiacs, Churchill as manic-depressive but open and generous most of the time, and Roosevelt as a congenital optimist with a devious mind. Hitler was impulsive and Stalin stodgy; Churchill a meticulous planner and Roosevelt a master manipulator and a natural thespian—and the indisputable star of any show in which he chose to play. The world war was the game of the four men, and none of them relied on an adviser, a genius evil or otherwise.

Hitler’s mind was set in the mist of the blood-soaked mythology of the remote Germanic past he projected into an imminent future that was to be dominated by his invincible Master Race of warriors destined to rule over the planet. In contrast, Roosevelt’s eyes were fixed on the future of gradual, peaceful improvement. He never liked to dwell on the past, always wanted to go forward, his wife Eleanor Roosevelt once observed.³ For FDR, the golden age was the foreseeable future of greater social justice he was determined to bring about in America by launching one boldly experimental government program after another and reconstructing the Depression-ravaged present. Abroad, he expected his United Nations of international harmony to usher in postwar democracy everywhere. As for Churchill and Stalin, they both focused on coping with the present that featured grave threats to the brittle status quo in their respective empires. Churchill applied his soaring rhetoric to divert attention from internal divisions and Stalin paid lip service to the communist utopia of a classless, perfect society.

While Hitler demonized Stalin as Enemy Number One, he hated Churchill and Roosevelt far more. Stalin was smart enough to bury publicly the hatchet with Churchill who had once sworn to obliterate the Bolsheviks during Russia’s civil war following the First World War. As the Germans opened their attack on Stalingrad, the sly Stalin surprised Churchill, then his guest in the Kremlin, by announcing, We like a downright enemy better than a false friend. There is no record of a repartee from the great debater of the Western world. For once, Churchill’s wit failed and Stalin scored.

Stalin respected Hitler, once a destitute fellow migrant coming up from another impoverished, backward province far removed from the center of power. They both envied and resented their two highborn Anglo-Saxon peers pampered from birth and groomed for national leadership. Stalin exulted in the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 and its follow-up a month later, the then secret spheres-of-interest agreement. He could not bring himself to believe the news of German tanks rumbling into the USSR in less than two years later. After Luftwaffe planes bombed Odessa, Kiev, and Minsk, and Wehrmacht armored units rolled across the thinly protected border at numerous points, Stalin was the only Soviet potentate who nursed the hope that diplomacy could somehow still undo the conflict. At the emergency Politburo session on the subject of the German juggernaut, Foreign Minister Molotov, a comrade of Stalin’s from before the First World War, openly disagreed with the Great Teacher and Guide. It is war with Germany, noted Molotov, perceived by his critics as a mediocrity, and his face locked into a scowl even more grim than usual. Nothing could be done about it.⁴

Besides Soviet intelligence, American and British leaders also warned Stalin in advance of the German onslaught. Hitler’s intentions were so widely known that ten days before the invasion, even the Colombian charge d’affaires in Stockholm, hardly the best-connected diplomat in that neutral capital, cabled his government about the imminence of a German-Russian war, indicated by the constant movement of German troops on the Polish frontier and the dispatch of war material and probably four divisions to Finland.⁵ Stalin was not misled by German intelligence or by his own services, summed up a recent book based on hitherto classified documents in Soviet archives. He was clearly suffering from self-delusion, constantly inventing rational justifications for his misconceptions.⁶

Under the rubric of misunderstandings, Stalin developed a few that qualified as delusional. At a party at the Soviet embassy in Berlin that just happened to coincide with Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, a Soviet military attaché made the rounds, telling guests that Hitler was in our pocket and he hit his back pocket for emphasis.⁷ He might have had too much schnaps or vodka. But that too could have been the order of the day from Ambassador Vladimir Dekanozov who was in close touch with Stalin and conveyed to small groups of comrades, Soviet as well as German, the boss’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Nazi takeover as a step forward on the march to a Red Germany. Disregarding plenty of intelligence evidence to the contrary, Stalin persuaded himself that Hitler preferred an accord with him and that it was the Wehrmacht High Command that clamored for an attack instead.

Stalin was also unshakably certain in his judgment that Churchill’s original and much-preferred objective was to enter into an alliance with Nazi Germany to crush the communist revolution and when that scheme failed, he plotted to get the Soviet Union to pull the chestnuts out of the fire—to beat Germany in what Stalin perceived as Britain’s war for hegemony. Gorodetsky’s book on Stalin’s foreign policy finds that the lasting feature of Soviet foreign policy in the inter-war period was an intense suspicion that Germany and Britain might close ranks and mount a crusade against communist Russia.⁸

Some of Hitler’s critical miscalculations flowed from the warped precepts of his race-driven Weltanschauung. To the very end, he permitted no one in his circles to doubt for a second that on the battlefield the German Master Race could rout any combination of the decadent British with their a petty-shopkeeper mentality, the stupid Russians who would never amount to anything more than slaves, and the cowardly and mongrel Americans who were half Judaized and the other half Negrified.⁹ After France’s capitulation in 1940, for some time Hitler nursed the hope that Britain, whose population his race scientists determined as racially close to Germany’s, would recognize that kinship and align itself with his Third Reich and his plan for Aryan world conquest.

Of the four leaders, Hitler was the only one limited to one language. His familiarity with non- Aryans was confined to the Czech, Polish, and Hungarian subjects of the Habsburg Empire he had met in his youth in multi-ethnic Vienna where he also laid eyes for the first time on East European Jews whose attachment to their faith and Yiddish language brought him to a boiling point of fury. For Hitler, the Second World War represented an open-and-shut case of Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles.

The two Western leaders shared one enduring misperception based on their long-held anti- German attitudes. Churchill snubbed anti-Nazi Germans who sought contact with Britain, and he fortified Roosevelt’s view that they were inconsequential. To both, Germany appeared as the most dangerous geopolitical rival that had to be razed to the ground. Roosevelt, who invented the Allied demand of unconditional surrender, went as far as calling for Germany’s dismemberment, indifferent to the fact that he thus alienated non-Nazi Germans and helped to vindicate the suicidal romanticism of the Nazi slogan, Victory or death!

The Tehran summit of November 1943 served as an object lesson in unintended consequences. The three Allied leaders loosened up while eating and drinking together but they strained to outshine one another with their toasts. At the sumptuous feast hosted by the Soviets at their embassy, Stalin proposed that after victory, fifty thousand German officers ought to be executed—or perhaps even one hundred thousand. The British sense of justice could never accept that, retorted Churchill, so enraged that he knocked over his tumbler filled with a favorite beverage, well-aged brandy. Then Roosevelt quipped—in jest or perhaps not—that the execution of forty-nine thousand would be a fair compromise.

Charging that Stalin was trying to wreck the Grand Alliance, Churchill got up and strode out, only to be stopped at the door by Stalin’s hands on his shoulders. It was all a joke, insisted the man acclaimed by his propagandists as the Wise Father of Humanity, and at his side the uncharacteristically grinning Molotov echoed the excuse. Peace was restored by Stalin who recommended that the next item on the evening’s agenda should be Molotov reminiscing about his meeting with Hitler. The remark was an example of Stalin’s sense of humor, quick and vicious, and laced with a potentially lethal threat, in this instance aimed against his right-hand man Molotov. Those present wondered whether Stalin might have picked him as the next veteran Bolshevik leader to be convicted of high treason. (At that time Stalin restrained himself. But in 1949 he fired Molotov and some months before his death in March 1953 he reportedly muttered among his cronies that Molotov was a lifelong British spy and must be soon unmasked as such.)

Eyewitness accounts from Tehran reveal that Stalin, the self-educated crude Bolshevik, scored high in the competition with his patrician partners from Western civilization, even though he failed to get them to agree on what appeared to be his primary objective: to open the second front in Western Europe so as to relieve the German pressure on the Red Army. However, the Anglo-Americans would not risk losing their armies and navies that in Churchill’s judgment, backed by his generals and admirals, were far from ready to cross over to the continent. Stalin was well aware of that reality. In his memoirs, pensioner Molotov acknowledged that a second front in Europe at the time would have been a completely impossible operation . . . but our demand was politically necessary, and we had to press them for everything.¹⁰ Stalin’s insistence did make his imperialist allies squirm and that in turn earned him the status of an astute negotiator in the eyes of fellow Bolsheviks. Perhaps the Soviet dictator felt he needed such an endorsement after his disastrous misreading of Hitler’s intentions vis-à-vis the USSR.

Churchill was able to talk Roosevelt into a postponement of an Anglo-American landing in Western Europe that FDR would have liked to stage as early as 1942. Unless it was fully prepared, a cross-Channel action would end up a catastrophe, the down-to-earth Englishman kept warning the visionary Yankee who eventually listened, albeit reluctantly. On the other hand, Churchill failed in his campaign to steer Roosevelt in the direction of an alternative: to open another front in the Balkans.

Americans, especially the Army’s top brass, were wary of the human and natural terrain of the Balkans— discrepant, rough-hewn, and alien. But what probably weighed more in Roosevelt’s mind was that even before the Yalta summit, Stalin considered the Balkans as within his postwar sphere of influence and strenuously objected to any Anglo-American intrusion. Thanks to the enduring impact of Josip Broz- Tito’s courageous defiance of Stalin after the war, it is by now largely forgotten that Tito, Stalin’s obedient guerrilla chief during World War II, was rude to American military officers who sought him out in his secret hideout about once a month from 1943 on. The American visitors complained about the dubious value of the intelligence they received from Tito’s commanders and reported that despite an average of ten tons of supplies dropped by the U.S. Air Force a day, the partisans showed in many cases open hatred of us.¹¹ Tito even threatened that he would fight the Americans and the British if they landed on a territory under his partisans’ control and he would go to the Wehrmacht to negotiate an armistice.¹²

Preparations for the Allied landing on the beaches of Normandy began in earnest shortly after the German High Command’s offer of coordination was first presented to America’s intelligence operatives in Istanbul in July 1943. The pace soon intensified. Finally, in the pre-dawn hours of June 6, 1944, the greatest armada in world history left the English shore and by 6:30 in the morning the first troops waded ashore. The sudden lull in the stormy weather allowed for a smoother than expected crossing. Then Allied soldiers surprised headquarters with their death-defying determination in overrunning the supposedly impregnable German fortifications of reinforced concrete. By mid-day, the fate of that evil empire was sealed.

Six weeks later, in the East Prussian forest that is now part of Poland, Wehrmacht officers came close to blowing up Hitler, wounding him badly but not badly enough, due to a thick slab of an oak tabletop that absorbed much of the force of the explosion. It was the last of as many as fifteen assassination attempts during Hitler’s rule.¹³ Within a few weeks the Gestapo rounded up and hanged most of those Germans who had anything to do with the conspiracy or knew something about it or could be charged with complicity.

Churchill’s reaction to the failed coup d’état of July 20 and Hitler’s subsequent revenge—a case of dog eat dog, the prime minister said—was only a little more discouraging than Roosevelt’s thunderous silence. One can only infer and surmise that some Germans would have reacted enthusiastically if either Allied leader had invested in a bit of praise for the anti-Nazi underground.

In varying measures, all four leaders were deficient in the gift of prophecy. What Hitler called his Thousand Year Reich went up in flames after only twelve years. Stalin failed in his ambition to paint the Old World red in his lifetime. His Soviet Union that he declared mankind’s inexorable future began to recognize his crimes four years after his death and self-destructed a little more than three decades later.

Churchill’s British Empire, holding dominion over palm and pine and dune and headland, began to fall apart soon after victory in the European war. Roosevelt’s high hopes for the United Nations did not materialize, though his grand domestic vision of a just society survived in the social programs promoted by his apostolic successor, Lyndon Johnson.

Yet another way to look at the unstable, fragile foursome is that two high-minded Christian gentlemen faced two unscrupulous, low-class thugs: the enemy who had to be defeated and the ally they felt obliged to indulge. While Churchill entertained no illusions about either dictator, it remains eternally unclear if Roosevelt truly expected to turn Stalin into a democrat. At the same time, for Roosevelt it was axiomatic that Hitler represented unmitigated evil and that there could be no compromise with him. On that subject, Roosevelt and Churchill found themselves in complete agreement, and their armies fought the war on the strength of that rock-solid principle.

Both Hitler and Stalin were lone wolves too distrustful to have intimate friends or to rely fully on likeminded allies abroad, and they reveled in purging those they suspected of less than absolute fealty to their persons and policies. In contrast, Churchill and Roosevelt were naturally gregarious and thrived on the numerous personal bonds they forged—and especially their friendship with each other. Their mutual trust and admiration helped save the world from Hitler though not Stalin.

II. The Implacable Realism of a Hitler-Stalin Linkup

Over the years, both dictators dropped hints that they were entertaining the idea of joining forces.

Four days before his suicide, Hitler mused that in a spirit of implacable realism on both sides he and Stalin could have created a situation in which a durable entente would have been possible. At a time unspecified but probably on more than one occasion, Stalin was quoted as having declared: Together with the Germans, we would have been invincible.¹⁴ After the war, that Stalin statement was often cited at Communist Party meetings and in educational institutions throughout the Soviet bloc. The intended message for the Party faithful and the impressionable youth was that Nazi Germany and the Western imperialists were politically and morally equivalent and that Stalin was extraordinarily wise in patiently waiting to see which one of the forces hostile to communism attacked the Soviet Union first. In the postwar period, speakers sent out by the Party center to indoctrinate local leadership did not treat the 1939 German-Soviet pact as a shameful incident to be flushed down the memory hole. To the contrary, they praised the pact as demonstrating Stalin’s superior realism and subtle understanding of a complex international situation. To this day, Stalin’s successors in the Kremlin still give him high marks for seeking a linkup with Hitler. They revert to Bolshevik vitriol when excoriating their Polish and Baltic neighbors—and some Western intellectuals—for daring to condemn the Hitler-Stalin pact as a moral and political aberration.

Confident of his ability to impress his visitors, Stalin was eager to arrange a tête-à-tête with Hitler—on Soviet territory, of course. To give additional heft to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact signed in 1939, Stalin attempted to coax Hitler into a state visit to the Soviet Union, as documented by archival research in Russia. One detail comes from the lower Volga region where in those days farmers of German origin populated entire villages neater and more