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“I thought I could relax after my previous lecture,” Cohen said. “But what the hell, Ivan, you’re picking up the bill.”
Cohen’s being awfully obliging to Serov, and he obviously knows the sonofabitch is NKGB, so what the hell is he up to?
“Before Hitler committed suicide, he named Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz as his successor—”
“I wondered about that,” Cronley interrupted. “Why Doenitz and not Göring?”
“Because Himmler told him Göring was trying to arrange an armistice with Eisenhower, which he was. There is an unconfirmed scenario that Hitler ordered Hermann arrested and shot.
“Doenitz moved the German government to Plön, in Schleswig-Holstein. When Himmler, who was then Reichsführer-SS, C-in-C of the Reserve Army, Reichsminister of the Interior, and chief of police, showed up there on May 6, 1945, Doenitz, who had hated him for years, fired him from all of his posts.
“Himmler probably was not happy getting canned, but since Doenitz had what was left of the Wehrmacht and the Navy behind him, there was nothing he could do about it.
“On May tenth, he started for Bavaria . . .”
“Was he headed for Wewelsburg?” Cronley asked.
“We don’t know. Possibly. We do know that before he left, Himmler and the twelve people in his entourage disguised themselves and equipped themselves with phony ID documents. Himmler’s said he was Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger of a special armored company, attached to the Sicherheitsdienst Field Police, who had been demobilized on May 3, 1945.
“He put on civilian clothing, shaved off his mustache, took off his famous pince-nez eyeglasses, and put a pirate’s patch over his left eye.”
“That I hadn’t heard,” Serov said. “Why didn’t he get papers saying he was a simple sergeant?”
“Good question,” Cohen replied. “I just don’t know. Anyway, by October eighteenth, Himmler and entourage moved to Bremervörde, a small Dorf on the Oste River.
“On May twenty-second, Himmler and two of his escorts, a Waffen-SS lieutenant colonel and a major, were picked up by an alert British infantry patrol suspicious of their ph
ony documents. They took them to a checkpoint run by British Field Security—the Brit version of the CIC—where they were arrested.
“Did they know who they had?” Cronley asked, and then went on without waiting for a reply. “The reason I ask is that when I ran a CIC checkpoint . . . which seems like fifty years ago . . . we had a list from the OSS of people to look for. Himmler’s name, plus a long list of SS officers’ names, were on my list, but no enlisted men.”
“Apparently, the suspicious identity documents were enough to get them arrested. They didn’t know who they had. The three of them were fed and put into a small building at the checkpoint. The next morning, they were sent by truck to the Civil Internment Camp at Barnstedt. On the way, they had to pass through another Field Security checkpoint.
“The officer—a captain, I used to know his name—took a look at the phony credentials and ordered them sent to the Military Internment Camp at Zeven.
“At 1900 that night, Himmler asked to see the camp commandant—Captain Thomas Selvester, who is my source for all this—and when Selvester saw him, fessed up. Selvester then called the G-2 at Headquarters of the British Second Army, who sent an intelligence officer to Zeven with a document bearing Himmler’s signature. Himmler signed a blank piece of paper, the signatures were compared, and they now knew who they had.
“He was immediately—he and the other two—taken to 2nd Army Headquarters at Lüneburg, where the G-2, Colonel Michael Murphy—my source for what follows—took over. He immediately ordered a complete change of clothing and supervised two body searches. Murphy knew all about cyanide capsules and was taking no chances.
“He next ordered up a doctor to perform a professional body search. A Royal Army doctor, a captain named Wells, showed up and at quarter after ten started his search. When he got to Himmler’s mouth, he saw a small blue object between the teeth and the skin.
“He put his finger into Himmler’s mouth to get it out. Himmler bit the doctor’s finger, jerked his head away, and bit the cyanide capsule. Ten minutes later, he was dead.”
“Ten minutes later?” Dunwiddie asked. “I thought cyanide works immediately.”
“That’s what they tell people who may have to bite one,” Cohen said. “It took Himmler ten minutes to die. They propped the corpse up in a hospital bed, folded his hands on his chest, made a formal identification, performed an autopsy, and then buried him somewhere around three a.m. the next day.”
“Where?” Serov asked.
“In a remote farmer’s field outside Lüneburg. In an unmarked grave.”
“Do you know where, precisely?” Serov asked.
“Colonel Murphy reminded me that the more people who know a secret, the less likely it is that it will remain a secret, and with impeccable British tact told me to butt out.”
“Obviously, the Brits didn’t want the faithful turning his grave into a shrine,” Serov said.
“Too late,” Dunwiddie said. “He already has his shrine in Castle Wewelsburg.”
