The Leader And The Damned

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13 March 1943. The time bomb which was to kill Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer and Commander-in-Chief of the

German Armed Forces, was assembled at Smolensk with great care.

The terrible Russian winter was still persisting. Temperatures were far below zero as Hitler conferred with Field Marshal von Kluge on the next planned offensive against the Red Army. Wearing his military greatcoat and the peaked cap decorated with a gold eagle clutching the swastika in its claws, Hitler's mood was buoyant and aggressive.

'We shall smash the Russians by attacking earlier than they expect,' he told von Kluge and his staff officers. 'We shall annihilate them with one hammer-blow – because we shall outnumber them, out-tank them, out-gun them…'

'Mein Fuhrer,' von Kluge intervened respectfully, 'I feel it my duty to point out that at the moment Stalin's troops outnumber ours.

'At the moment.'

Hitler paused, glanced round the half-ruined concrete building inside which the conference was being held, and stalked away to stare out through a broken window only half-protected by a canvas flap. The flap whipped in the wind which moaned in the brief silence. It was a typical dramatic gesture, the trick of a superb actor – to grip his audience in suspense before he made his sensational announcement.

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