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Nick Cook’s Rogue Icons

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The Light Beyond The Mountains

The Light Beyond The Mountains

Chapter 29: The Sentinels

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Nick Cook
Apr 12, 2025
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(Cover illustration © Tristan Maduro)

Chapter 29: The Sentinels

Thoughts, dominated by one question, bring me back to the present. Why hadn’t Hitler, desperate for a miracle in the war’s final months, used his nuclear weapons?

It was a question Dr Todd Rider had thought about a great deal too. Critically, he points out in Forgotten Creators, the Allies had stockpiled chemical weapons ready for use in the event Hitler showed any sign of using weapons of mass destruction, as exemplified on 8th June 1943, when President Roosevelt issued a warning to Germany and its allies: ‘From time to time since the present war began,’ he said, ‘there have been reports that one or more Axis powers were seriously contemplating use of poisonous or noxious gases or other inhumane devices of warfare. I feel now obliged to warn the Axis armies and the Axis peoples, in Europe and in Asia, that the terrible consequences of any use of these inhumane methods on their part will be brought down swiftly and surely upon their own heads.

‘Any use of gas by any Axis power, therefore, will immediately be followed by the fullest possible retaliation upon munition centres, seaports and other military objectives throughout the whole extent of the territory of the Axis country.’

It seems that the Nazi high command, where some semblance of rationality still existed, believed in this threat, which had also been repeated by Churchill.

In a cable sent on 1st April 1945 from his office in Bern, Switzerland, Allen Dulles, head of the OSS’s Swiss Section – who, post-war, would become the longest-ever serving head of the CIA – relayed progress to Washington regarding his talks with Nazi commanders in Italy regarding the separate surrender of German troops in the Italian north, a deal Dulles had been negotiating for almost two months.

The cable referred to discussions between SS General Karl Wolff, head of German forces in Italy, and Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, who had been appointed Commander-in-Chief West on 10th March 1945 by Hitler in the wake of the Allies’ crossing of the Rhine.

‘In his conversation with Kesselring,’ Dulles reported in the clipped prose of his coded teletype, ‘latter said to Wolff our situation is desperate, nobody dares tell the truth to Fuhrer, who, surrounded by a small group of advisers who still believe in a last specific secret weapon which they call ‘Verzweiflunge’ [Verzweiflungeswaffe: desperation weapon]. Kesselring believed this weapon can prolong the war, but not decide it, (and) might cause terrible blood bath on both sides. Kesselring said if Fuhrer gave him the order to use weapon, he would surrender his command.’

Even the SS, supposedly loyal to Hitler to the last, had become queasy at the prospect of using the bomb, according to Werner Grothmann, Himmler’s chief adjutant. ‘At the meetings I attended, or about which I learned in hints,’ he relayed in testimony to Wolf Krotzky before his death, ‘no one was so crazy to use a weapon which could no longer help us but would only make things much worse.’

By now, Himmler, head of the SS, had himself begun to discuss the possibility of a negotiated surrender with the Allies through Count Folke Bernadotte, the head of the Swedish Red Cross. Vainly believing he might escape the hangman’s noose, he asked Bernadotte in mid-April 1945 to convey a peace proposal to Churchill and President Harry Truman, who had succeeded Roosevelt upon the latter’s sudden death from a cerebral haemorrhage on 12th April.

It appears that in the crazed beliefs of people like Himmler that conciliatory behaviour at this eleventh hour would go in their favour, use of the bomb would serve only to underscore their death warrants and send them straight to the gallows. It didn’t seem to occur to them that, use of the bomb or not, they were dead anyway.

Grothmann took this idea a step further. ‘If we were now to use such a weapon on Hitler’s order, for example to employ it on London, a completely new situation would arise, but not in our favour. When the horror has subsided, it is clear the supply of potential British troops in the Reich is still possible via their ports (which would still be) under their control.’ Besides, he said, the British were by then on German soil ‘and we could picture their reactions (against) our population …’

According to Grothmann, Hitler was fully aware in the latter part of March that a bomb had been tested and was ready for use – after the failure of the 1943 test, the SS had been waiting for one more successful test after Rugen before telling him. ‘After the third attempt,’ he said, ‘the one in March in Thuringia, Hitler was informed.’

It seems that with little fissile material available for the series production of bombs needed to make a real impact on the strategic picture, uncertainties within the Nazi high command about the reliability of a delivery system – the options ranged from adapted V-2 rockets to the V4 Rheinbote to bombers, none of which had been tested as integrated nuclear delivery systems – together with the threat of massive chemical retaliation, had led the Fuhrer’s more pragmatic advisers to urge him to exercise restraint, mindful of the retribution that would befall what was left of the Reich.

There was talk, too, in the bunker of sabotage.

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