Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America

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ON THE APPROVED LIST of visitors to Adolf Hitler’s gloomy forest bunker for April 16, 1942, was a short, somewhat stocky German admiral with piercing blue eyes, bustling eyebrows, and a mane of carefully combed white hair. 1 He was accompanied by a very tall, almost cadaverous Austrian colonel. Together, they looked a little like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, except the shorter man was clearly in charge. The admiral exuded a coiled-up energy; his taller colleague had a refined, aristocratic air.

They had flown that morning from Berlin, a 350-mile journey across the plains of what had been northern Poland, now part of the Third Reich. Their plane landed on a grass airstrip near a little town called Rastenburg, in a remote area of East Prussia covered by a swath of primeval forest, interspersed with lakes and gentle hills. A staff car was waiting to meet them. Soon, they found themselves driving into the woods along a winding cobblestone road, over a railway line and past several small lakes that protected the approaches to the place known as Wolfsschanze, the Wolf’s Lair.

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