Waiting behind his desk for his subordinates to arrive for the meeting, Schellenberg turned to a nearby trolley table and pressed the button that activated the room’s secret microphones. Then he pressed the button that switched on the green light outside his door, signaling that it was permitted to come in. When everyone was assembled and the door light was changed to red, he outlined the bare bones of Operation Long Jump and then invited comments.
Colonel Martin Sandberger went first. He had a lawyer’s way of speaking-measured and slightly pedantic-which was not surprising, given his background as an assistant judge in the Inner Administration of Wurttemberg. It was always a source of surprise to Schellenberg how many lawyers were involved at the sharp end of genocide; that a man could be teaching the philosophy of law one week and executing Jews in Estonia the next was, Schellenberg had decided, a real clue as to the shallowness of human civilization. Even so, the thirty-three-year-old Sandberger, with his wide jaw, thick lips, broad nose, and heavy brow, looked more a thug than a lawyer.
“Yesterday,” said Sandberger, “as instructed, I drove out to the Special Section at Friedenthal, where I met SS Sturmbannfuhrer von Holten-Pflug.” Here, Sandberger nodded at a young, aristocratic-looking Waffen-SS major who was sitting opposite him.
Schellenberg regarded the major with something close to amusement-even without their names he could always tell the aristocrats. It was the tailoring that gave them away. Most officers had their uniforms made up by the SS-Bekleidungswerke, a clothing factory in a special camp where Jewish tailors were put to work; but von Holten-Pflug’s uniform looked made to measure, and Schellenberg guessed it had come from Wilhelm Holters, in Tauentzienstrasse. The quality was quite unmistakable. Schellenberg himself bought his uniforms from Holters, as did the Fuhrer.
“Sturmbannfuhrer von Holten-Pflug and I conducted a materials check,” continued Sandberger, “with a view to the present readiness for Operation Long Jump. We found that some weapons and ammunition had been requisitioned by Hauptsturmfuhrer Skorzeny for the Mussolini rescue. Apart from that, however, everything is pretty much there. SS winter uniforms, SS fall- and spring-pattern uniforms, all the usual gear. Most important of all, the special stores we put together as gifts for the local Kashgai tribesmen are still there, too. The silver-inlay K98 rifles, and the gold-plated Walther pistols.”
“It’s not stores we lack,” said von Holten-Pflug. “It’s men. Skorzeny left us very shorthanded. Fortunately, those men who remain in the section are Farsi-speakers. I myself also speak a little Gilaki, which is the language of the northern Persian tribesmen. Of course, most of their leaders have some German. But given that we’ll very likely be up against Russian troops, I’d like to make a recommendation that we use a team of Ukrainians, and base the operation at Vinnica.”
“How many men do you think you would need?” asked Schellenberg.
“About eighty to a hundred Ukrainians, and another ten or fifteen German officers and NCOs, commanded by myself.”
“And then?”
Von Holten-Pflug unfolded a map of Iran and spread it out on the table in front of him.
“I recommend that we stick to the plan from Operation Franz and fly from Vinnica. Six groups of ten men wearing Russian uniforms to parachute into the country near the holy city of Qom, and another four groups near Qazvin. Once there, we’ll rendezvous with our agents in Iran and head for the safe houses in Teheran. We can then reconnoiter the embassy areas and radio precise coordinates back to Berlin for the air strikes. After the bombing, the ground force will move in and deal with any survivors. Then we’ll make our way to Turkey, assuming that it remains a neutral country.”
Schellenberg smiled. Von Holten-Pflug made the whole operation sound as straightforward as a stroll around the Tiergarten. “Tell me more about these Ukrainians,” he said.
“They’re Zeppelin volunteers. Naturally I’ll need to go to Vinnica to sort things out. There’s a local intelligence officer I’d like to use. Fellow named Oster.”
“No relation, I hope,” said Schellenberg.
Von Holten-Pflug adjusted the monocle in his eye and regarded Schellenberg blankly.
“There was an Oster in the Abwehr,” explained Sandberger. “Until a month or two ago. A lieutenant colonel. He was dismissed and transferred to the Wehrmacht on the Russian front.”
“This Oster is a captain in the Waffen-SS.”
“I’m very glad to hear it.”
Von Holten-Pflug smiled uncertainly, and to Schellenberg it was plain to see that the major had no idea of the intense rivalry that existed between Amt VI of the SD and the Abwehr. Indeed, Schellenberg thought “rivalry” hardly strong enough to describe his relations with German military intelligence and the man who was its chief, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. For it was Schellenberg’s greatest ambition that Amt VI should absorb the largely ineffective Abwehr; and yet, for some reason Schellenberg was unable to fathom, Himmler-and perhaps also Hitler-hesitated to give Schellenberg what he wanted. In Schellenberg’s view, there were obvious economies of scale a merger of the two agencies would bring. As things now stood, resources ended up being duplicated, and sometimes operational initiatives as well. Schellenberg understood Canaris wanting to hang on to power. He would have felt the same way. But it was quite futile for Canaris to resist a change that everyone-even Himmler-saw as inevitable. It was just a question of time.
“Captain Oster speaks Ukrainian and some Russian,” said von Holten-Pflug. “He used to work for the Wannsee Institute. And he seems to know how to handle the Popovs.”
“I think we have to be careful here,” said Schellenberg. “After the Vlasov affair, the Fuhrer is not at all keen on using so-called subhuman military resources.”
Captured by the Germans in the spring of 1942, Andrei Vlasov was a Soviet general who had been “persuaded” to create an army of Russian POWs to fight for Hitler. Schellenberg had worked hard to achieve the independence of Vlasov’s “Russian Liberation Movement”; but Hitler, infuriated by the very idea of a Slav army fighting for Germany, had ordered Vlasov returned to a POW camp and forbade any mention of the plan again.
“I haven’t given up on Vlasov and his army,” continued Schellenberg, “but at Posen, Himmler made a special mention of his being ostracized, and it would be unwise not to be mindful of that.”
The Zeppelin volunteers were not much different from Vlasov’s RLM; these were also Russian prisoners fighting for the German army, except that they had been organized into guerrilla partisan units and then parachuted deep into Soviet territory.
“I don’t think a team of Zeppelin volunteers is likely to meet with the Reichsfuhrer’s approval any more than a unit from Vlasov’s army.” Schellenberg turned to Captain Janssen. “No, we’d best try to make this an SS operation from top to bottom. Horst, you were in the Ukraine. What’s the name of the Ukrainian Waffen-SS division that’s fighting there?”
“The Galicia Division. Waffen-SS Fourteenth Grenadiers.”
“Who’s the commanding officer?”
“General Walther Schimana. I believe the enlistment of Ukrainian cadres is going on even as we speak.”
“I thought as much. Speak to this General Schimana and see if we can have our Zeps operate from within the Galicia Division. As long as I can refer to our men as Waffen-SS instead of Ukrainians, or Zeps, then I think we can make Himmler happy.
“Go back to Friedenthal,” he told von Holten-Pflug, “and take everything-men, stores, money, the lot-to the Ukraine. You and the other officers can stay at Himmler’s place in Zhitomir. It’s an old officers’ training college, about eighty kilometers north of Hitler’s Wehrwolf HQ, at Vinnica, so you’ll be quite comfortable there. I’ll clear it with Himmler myself. I doubt he’ll be needing it again. And be careful. Tell your men to stay out of the Russian villages, and to leave the women alone. Last time I was there, Himmler’s pilot got himself murdered in the most horrible circumstances by local partisans after he went chasing some local skirt. If your boys want to relax, tell them to play tennis. There’s quite a good court there, as I recall. As soon as your team is operational I want you to come back here and make your report. Use the Wehrmacht’s courier plane to Warsaw, and then by train to Berlin. Got that?”