The problems of victory are more agreeable than those of defeat, but they are no less difficult.
WINSTON CHURCHILL1
Now that the war was over and the Allied occupation firmly in place, Heidemann wanted to move his trucking operation from an unimportant backwater in the American Zone (the Bavarian Alps) to the center of American power—Frankfurt. General Eisenhower himself was there as head of the American Military Government, in the massive IG Farben Building.
Axmann had sent his leadership to Upper Bavaria because it was to be part of the National Redoubt from which the Nazis would continue the fight if Berlin fell. And the Werwolf operation there could fight even if all of Germany fell. But now that Germany was occupied, and Heidemann and his followers were working with the Americans and British to deliver goods, Heidemann wanted to keep the office in Bad Tölz while transferring the group’s leadership to the heart of the American occupation.
This brazen attempt to hide a postwar Nazi operation as a mere trucking concern achieved some significant initial success. They did business with the Military Government, and it provided them with the travel passes and other permissions they required to conduct their commercial and political enterprises.
Heidemann hoped to be able to move Tessmann’s HQ to Frankfurt once he concluded his negotiations for coal in the Ruhr. Dr. Wandel, as the assistant manager, would go with him. While awaiting Heidemann’s return, Dr. Wandel confessed to Kulas that “he was becoming worried over having so many high ranking former officials of the REICHSLEITUNG [national leadership] of the HJ, hiding in the HAUS ZEPPELIN in WACKERSBURG.”2
HJ leaders kept streaming into Upper Bavaria—many of them had been unable to come earlier owing to the chaos at the war’s end and the difficulty of traveling once Germany was occupied. Few Germans had access to working automobiles, the gas needed to run them, or the Military Government papers authorizing them to travel by any means, let alone with a vehicle. Former leaders of the HJ would generally have to travel on foot, along with the hordes of displaced persons and others clogging the roads.
As the HJ and BDM leadership arrived into the Bad Tölz area, it became increasingly important to expand the business and move people to offices elsewhere. If the Allies, through the CIC, were to get word that a large group of former HJ leaders were congregating in one place, they would certainly investigate.
Dr. Wandel had no idea that his concerns were moot, as the CIC already knew all about those HJ leaders who were in Bavaria. Ironically, he was revealing his fears to the very person who had already made them come true by telling the CIC everything he knew about the operation.
Max Lebens, who toward the end of the war had been in charge of setting things up in Bad Tölz for arriving Werwolves, now returned to Bad Tölz. His father-in-law had donated the Tessmann company corporate shell to the HJ. Lebens had been busy setting up and running the local office for Tessmann in Bruck by Zell am See in the nearby Austrian Alps. He’d had a close call on his trip to Wackersberg, when the American Military Police (MPs) arrested him for speeding. He’d spent eight days locked up without anyone questioning him about his Nazi past. Despite his desire to meet with Heidemann, Lebens had to rush back to Austria before his travel permit for Germany expired.
Siegfried Kulas had heard that Tessmann was opening an office in Munich. Bannführer Moser, who had worked in the KLV, had been tasked with setting up a branch office at Trogerstrasse 15 in central Munich.
On June 30, the CIC sent Kulas to Munich to find out more about what, if anything, was happening there. They would meet him there the next day. There had been a lot of talk at Tessmann about expanding quickly and setting up new offices, but it was not clear as of yet which plans would actually come to fruition. For example, when Lebens had visited Tessmann’s headquarters, he’d mentioned the possibility of opening up a new office in Lübeck—a major port city in the north of Germany. Before Lübeck had been heavily bombed during the war, the prior incarnation of Tessmann had been based there.
Whether Lebens would be successful or find himself unable to compete with existing transportation companies, only time would tell.
In Munich, Kulas found that an office for Tessmann’s transportation business had been set up with a small staff, but that since it lacked any vehicles, it was not yet a going concern. With nothing more to do in Munich, Kulas went back to Bad Tölz to await Heidemann’s return.
When in Munich, Reis and Nordheim stayed in a private residence they had requisitioned near the local CIC office. The shift in control of Munich from the Seventh Army to the Third Army, which had initially threatened to pull this case from them, ended up giving them a great deal of freedom. Reis still turned in weekly reports, but he and Nordheim were able to work on this case full-time without having to put in face time at their office. They could stop by the local CIC office in Munich to enjoy the free food, but were otherwise on their own. They only had to visit Seventh Army territory every few weeks to get their mail and check in. This was the only case to which they were assigned.
On July 5, CIC agents Nordheim and Reis recruited Pommerening as their second informant. They gave him the codename of “Paul” and revealed to him that the people he was working for had been high-ranking members of the HJ adult leadership. He “was very much surprised and agreed to these Agents’ request that he cooperate with them by supplying all available information on the daily happenings and operations of the firm, and that he follow their future orders. PAUL was told to report to these agents at Anna Str 2 every day in the evening, or in the event of something important, as soon as possible. The instructions given him were to report the arrival and departure of any new people in TESSMANN and SONS firm, and to make copies of any correspondence passing through his department or available to him without revealing his purpose as to the disposition of such papers. PAUL was further told not to endanger his person and under no circumstances make himself suspicious by an unexpected display of knowledge concerning TESSMANN and SONS.”3
Unlike Kulas, Pommerening had nothing in his past that would be considered criminal now that Germany had lost the war. Nor did he ask for money or a car. He helped because he genuinely hated the Nazis and was upset to discover that he’d been working for them.
The next morning, July 6, Pommerening met his handlers and gave them copies of letters that he’d found at Tessmann. These letters included mention of an office in Augsburg and of three new offices in the works: Regensburg, Nuremberg, and Wurzburg.
Kulas finally arranged to meet with Heidemann, and an unexpected opportunity arose. Heidemann’s car had broken down, and he asked Kulas to drive him and his companions on a five-day trip to Austria. Kulas’s penetration of the firm continued with Dr. Wandel asking him to move into their residential facilities at Haus Zeppelin.
Meanwhile, Pommerening continued to gather intelligence on Tessmann. He was not hobnobbing with the firm’s leadership like Kulas, but he had access to routine documents and correspondence that Kulas did not have.4
When CIC Agents Nordheim and Reis tried to meet with Kulas in Zell am See, at 8 P.M. near the town post office, they saw him talking with Heidemann and a buyer for Tessmann. The agents watched discreetly for half an hour, until Kulas walked by them and “whispered that he would return to the same place at 2200 hours.”5 When they came back at the appointed time, they all stayed in their respective vehicles. They weren’t taking any chances on being spotted together in town. Instead, Kulas drove a mile or so outside of town while his handlers followed him to this secluded spot.
As Reis later described them, “Our meetings with [Kulas] varied from village taverns to a manure pile behind a farmer’s barn with an occasional meeting in our quarters at the Pension. It was like having a good hunting dog on an invisible leash and following him around from one interesting scent to another.”6
At this debriefing, Kulas told his handlers about the meetings Heidemann had in Austria regarding Tessmann and the distribution of coal. He informed them that Max Lebens had to give up Tessmann’s operations in Austria and leave there, as he was one of many Germans being expelled from the country. The company was turned over to Austrians, with Heidemann still controlling the business as the primary stockholder (he had 500,000 reichsmarks invested in the company). They changed the name in Austria to Klug and Company.
Reis was surprised to learn that Tessmann had a penetration agent of its own working in the Third Army’s Military Government office. As Reis recalled, “During his visits to Bad Tolz [Kulas] came to know that the local MG office had a girl secretary, a former BDM member who…was able to influence the officer in charge of the MG unit, to issue permits to their transportation firm to travel to Frankfurt on the Main over 400 kms. away. This was fantastic! All Germans were under strict curfew not to travel over 30 kms. from their residence and only with passes. Their arms had been confiscated, they were not allowed to operate vehicles, had to stand in ration lines, not allowed to fraternize with their conquerors and to cease all political activity—but in Bad Tolz a favored few were furnished passes, supplies, gasoline and allowed a line of communication denied other civilians. [Kulas] also reported that he had seen several young teenagers, 14 to 16 year olds, at the transportation firm on his visits and he thought that they were being used as couriers. This was something we had overlooked but very logical to the structure of the HJ organization and an arm that could very well be used quite effectively on roadblocks, because of the sympathetic nature of our GI’s.”7
This underground group of former HJ leaders often used BDM girls as couriers, in addition to HJ boys, as they were unlikely to arouse suspicion. Also, they used BDM personnel to infiltrate MG offices. The local Bad Tölz MG office was not the only one with a BDM plant to help this burgeoning HJ-based conspiracy. Reis eventually found out that these plants were more widespread than he had initially suspected.
Later in life, Reis reflected on this stage of his investigation, writing that “this once small organization…seemed to be springing up everywhere and infiltrating MG and other units of our military by placing attractive young women in secretarial and other sensitive positions. FRAGEBOGEN which are questionnaires required to be filled out by the civilian population for screening purposes were some of the ‘sensitive’ areas that these young women would be of great help to their fellow HJ members.”8 Through their administrative positions, these women could, among other things, interfere with the Fragebogen process if it threatened any of their comrades, such as HJ leaders.
Reis went on to say that “Some officers in MG were later embarrassed by our disclosures on breaches of security”9 when these young women were exposed as part of this operation.
On July 9, while still in Austria, Kulas ran into the head of the BDM, Dr. Jutta Rüdiger. He’d heard rumors before that she was in Austria. The CIC, in the person of Agent Reis, very much wanted to locate her.
As Agent Reis later put it, “The whereabouts of Jutta Rudiger and her staff were now our goal for two reasons: (1) If it became known that she had survived [the fall of Berlin] she could become a rallying point for other members of the BDM and possibly form a nucleus for an organization with similar aims to the original one; (2) If we were able to work [out] a plan that would enable us to remove her from the scene without creating too much of a ripple in our operation and, through interrogation extract pertinent information now, it could mean saving time and effort and eliminate a major threat to MG’s prime objective—the re-indoctrination of the German masses from National Socialism to a democratic form of government.”10
When Kulas saw Rüdiger, she was with her counterpart for adult women—Reichsfrauenführerin (Reich Women’s Leader) Gertrud Scholz-Klink. Scholz-Klink had been head of the women’s wing of the Nazi Party, but she had no control over the BDM or Dr. Rüdiger, who instead reported to Axmann. Also with them was Bannführerin Karola Hedwig Böhmer (who had been a personnel officer in the Reich Youth Leadership in Berlin).11
Dr. Rüdiger was a psychologist who specialized in treating young people (pediatrics). In November 1937, at the age of twenty-seven, she had taken over control of the BDM. Her predecessor, Trude Mohr, had just resigned, in accordance with Nazi Party policy, when she married.
As head of the BDM (Reichsreferentin des BDM or Reichs Deputy of the BDM), Rüdiger reported directly to Reichsjugendführer Baldur von Schirach and later to his replacement, Artur Axmann. Although the BDM and the Nazis in general had a policy of not using women to fight in the war, at the end there were BDM girls who did directly fight the enemy along with their HJ peers.
Rüdiger credibly maintained that she had nothing to do with this, and that such actions were taken by the girls themselves during the confusion of the end of the war. Also, one BDM leader, Ilse Hirsch, took part in the Werwolf operation that assassinated Aachen mayor Franz Oppenhoff, but that operation was not run by Dr. Rüdiger.
While Martin Bormann had expressed a strong interest in having women fight, both Axmann and Rüdiger were against this. Rüdiger later said, “Only at the very end did I allow the girls to be trained in pistol shooting, in order to defend themselves if they were in dire need or even to kill themselves.”12
What she did sanction though was the use of BDM girls to assist at antiaircraft artillery batteries, starting in 1943. This resulted in casualties because such groupings of antiaircraft guns were of course targets for Allied planes. BDM girls also served in supporting roles during the end of the war, which could be quite dangerous, such as helping wounded soldiers. Serving in any capacity toward the end was perilous. One such example was Berlin BDM leader Gisela Hermann, who was seriously injured after exiting Axmann’s final command post near the Reich Chancellery.
Unlike Artur Axmann and Gisela Hermann, Dr. Jutta Rüdiger had not stayed in Berlin until the bitter end. She took a train on April 13, 1945, from Berlin, arriving in the Bad Tölz area a week later to meet up with other HJ and BDM leaders.13
As she later recounted, “from the Reichsjugendführer [Axmann], we were given the instruction that all the leaders of the Reich Youth Leadership should be sent home to their parents, but not the section chiefs who should be sent to the south into [the Highlands Camp] of the HJ near the area of Bad Tölz.”14 According to Rüdiger, when Axmann gave these orders, he “had promised to follow us into the camp” but “he remained in Berlin, after the Führer had decided not to leave the capital.”15
From Bad Tölz, she went to the KLV camp in Zell am See on April 30, and later made her way to Austria, where Kulas eventually found her.
Kulas only spoke with Rüdiger briefly that day, but he learned that she was hiding out on a nearby farm. Heidemann told Kulas that he felt “responsible, in a sense, for all former High HJ personalities, and that he wouldn’t rest easy until women like JUTTA RUEDIGER and other high ranking BDM people were safely out of his territory, because of the danger of arrest and possible disclosure of facts pertaining to the present activities and future goal of HJ.”16
Reis and Nordheim were in a bind—they wanted to capture Rüdiger, as she could tell them more about the current HJ conspiracy, and she had been a high-ranking Nazi, but they didn’t want to compromise Kulas. And they didn’t have much time to come up with a way to capture her without raising Heidemann’s suspicions that Kulas had something to do with it. She was going to move soon and hide out far away from Tessmann’s operations, so they knew that they might never find her again.
The first part of his handlers’ plan was for Kulas to visit Rüdiger at her hiding place on an Austrian farm and volunteer to drive her to her next location. This took advantage of the fact that he had a car, gasoline, and travel passes for himself and his vehicle. Of course, he had all of this thanks to his CIC handlers. It made him appear as a godsend to those who needed to travel in occupied Germany and Austria.
Kulas was supposed to try to find out where Rüdiger was traveling, so even if something went wrong while he was driving her or she got a ride with someone else, the CIC would know where she was going. However, the key was for Kulas to make the offer casually, because if he appeared too eager to give her a ride, it could raise Rüdiger’s suspicions. While a wanted woman hiding out in occupied territory might not look a gift horse in the mouth, there still was the danger that Rüdiger could realize that even someone who had served with the SS and the HJ could have his reasons for turning her in.
When Kulas made contact with Rüdiger at her hiding place outside of Bruck, Austria, he was in luck. She’d previously made plans to get out of the country, but they had just fallen through. She would be stuck where she was unless she could come up with a new way out. And so Kulas had what his handlers called “the perfect opening” to offer her a ride.17
With this stroke of good fortune (for Kulas that is, not so much for Dr. Rüdiger), they were in business. Rüdiger would ride with him on the afternoon of July 13.
Moreover, Rüdiger clearly trusted him, as she not only agreed to the ride, but also told him in advance of her travel plans. The smart move would have been for her not to trust anyone more than she needed to, even an SS war veteran. She could have waited until they were under way to tell him her final destination.
On the morning of July 12, Kulas told his handlers what the plans were for the next day’s travels. Given this information, Reis and Nordheim decided to allow the trip to play out and apprehend Rüdiger, and any companions she brought with her, once they arrived at their destination. They theorized that this would minimize the chance that anyone would suspect Kulas of having something to do with Rüdiger’s capture.
On July 13, Kulas met his handlers in the nearby town of Zell am See an hour before his scheduled departure. Everything was a go, he reported, with a new passenger, BDM Bannführerin Melita Maschmann, added to his little group for a total of four female Nazis.
Maschmann had been a press officer in the Reich Youth Leadership in Berlin. She joined her fellow BDM officers after she had “chanced to hear where they were living. They wanted to avoid being arrested by the Austrian Resistance, and as I had some experience of crossing frontiers illegally, they asked me to take them to Reichenhall. Just as we were ready to start, a former employee of the Personnel Department of the Reich Youth Leadership suddenly appeared and offered to drive us to Reichenhall in his car. I did not even know him by sight, but my colleagues had worked with him.”18
The man who offered to drive them was, of course, Kulas. After meeting with CIC Agents Reis and Nordheim, Kulas drove to Bruck to meet up with Rüdiger, Bannführerin Karola Böhmer, Bannführerin Melita Maschmann, and a BDM leader named Gerda Dinglinger.19
They squeezed into Kulas’s car and left Bruck, driving east, then heading north via Wefen and Hallein toward Salzburg. Salzburg is a major Austrian city close to the German border for Upper Bavaria.
None of these passengers noticed they were being followed. Because Reis and Nordheim knew where Kulas was heading, they could hang back and follow from a distance without worrying about losing him.
Outside of Salzburg, Austria, their first destination was an intersection of three different major highways. This intersection lay near the border with Germany. The Americans had a checkpoint in operation along the road into Germany where they inspected people’s papers.
According to the CIC report filed by Agent Reis, Kulas dropped off his passengers before the checkpoint and then proceeded to drive up to it on his own.20 His papers were in order—the CIC had made sure of that. Meanwhile, in this version of events, Rüdiger and her three comrades hiked through the surrounding woods.
The CIC report for July 12, 1945, stated that “where the three autobahns meet…RUEDIGER would get out and walk through the woods to avoid the border control post because she didn’t think her pass papers were in order enough to let her through. After passing the border, RUEDIGER would meet [Kulas] about one kilometer in Germany, and continue the journey.”21
Seven years before, in March 1938, Germany had annexed Austria. The border between them was not fortified—there was no fence or other barrier for Rüdiger to have to slip past. The long, mountainous border through the thick forests of the Bavarian Alps was all but impossible to police. All the BDM women had to do was walk about a kilometer into Germany, and then meet back up with Kulas.
Unlike Axmann, who was then hiding out with no papers at all, these BDM leaders did have some documents. Walter Bergemann, Tessmann’s legal adviser and an Oberbannführer (major) in the HJ, had earlier furnished three of the women with ID documents known as Kennkarten.22 They also had on them half a year’s pay each, provided by Heidemann. As she had just arrived, Maschmann had not received any documents from Bergemann. Instead, she had papers that she had forged herself. During the time since Germany lost the war, Maschmann had gained the ability to “forge every kind of American pass on a typewriter.”23 She also had a legitimate certificate from the local police in Zell am See.
Melita Maschmann’s recollection of this border crossing appears to differ from what is in the CIC report. Decades later, she wrote, “Getting past the sentry at the frontier, a negro soldier, was so easy that looking back, I realize that we should have guessed he was expecting us.”24 She didn’t mention any walk through the woods, despite what was in the CIC report. Nor did Jutta Rüdiger’s account in her memoir of this trip.25
Regardless of how they crossed the border, once they were in Germany, Kulas drove the women to their final destination—the town of Bad Reichenhall. Like Bad Tölz, this was a small Upper Bavarian spa and vacation village. Bad Reichenhall, though, was even closer to the border—from the center of town to the Austrian border was about a mile.26
Rüdiger’s sister-in-law was at the hospital there. Kulas did not know what their travel plans were after they visited this hospital.
However, Kulas did know that Heidemann had relayed to Rüdiger that he wanted her to relocate to the British Zone. Heidemann was afraid that she was too high-profile, and that if the Americans found her, she might inadvertently lead them to him and the rest of the Tessmann operation. Heidemann also wanted to hold on to the funds he had accumulated. He worried that she might lay claim to some of them, given her position directly below Axmann. As such, he wanted her to have nothing to do with his ongoing buildup of Tessmann.
Now was the time for the CIC to capture Rüdiger, while she was in American controlled territory and they knew exactly where she was. Picking up these unarmed women would be easy. Reis did not expect them to resist. The tricky part was to do so without implicating Kulas. They didn’t want anyone back at Tessmann to suspect his treachery.
Agents Reiss and Nordheim figured out a way to make these first arrests in Operation Nursery without Kulas being there. In the hospital, Reis arranged to pretend to have someone happen to recognize Rüdiger and so arrest her and her companions. Rüdiger was high-profile enough that this was plausible—many young German women and girls, at least, would recognize their former leader.
Reis later described this operation: “We carried off the chance encounter in the hospital and the ensuing automatic arrest and loaded them bag and baggage in our jeep and headed for Munich arriving late in the night. After a little rest we transferred them to a larger vehicle to the Seventh Army Detention Center for interrogation. It had taken us just 36 hours of continuous travel to pull off this snatch—taking one of the bigger HJ personalities out of circulation and apparently without causing much commotion in our operation of the case.”27
Once arrested, Maschmann wrote, “We were taken into Munich in a jeep the same night. On the way I tore up my forged passes with tiny movements of my hands, so that our guard did not notice, and scattered them to the night winds.”28 The CIC did not discover this and so had no idea that she had possessed forged papers. The only document they found on her was her certificate from the Austrian police.
Despite the precautions taken by the CIC, those captured did suspect that Kulas had betrayed them. “The ‘helpful’ comrade had deliberately driven us into a trap,” Maschmann later wrote. “At least that is how we interpreted what happened.”29 However, these BDM officers had no way to get word back to their comrades in the HJ leadership about their suspicions regarding Siegfried Kulas.
Although they tried to deny their true identities, all four captives quickly cracked and admitted the truth.
Kulas had dropped off his passengers and left the hospital before they were arrested. Now that they had been picked up, he anxiously kept an ear out for any word about their capture. This was the first action that he had taken that could result in his Nazi comrades suspecting him of being a rat. Until now, the only risk he had taken was in meeting with the CIC; this time the CIC had actually done something based on the intelligence provided to them.
If the HJ leaders at Tessmann figured out that Kulas was working with the Americans, they would likely kill him as a traitor. While the CIC would then try to quickly arrest everyone they knew about and shut down Tessmann, it might take them some time to determine that their operation was blown. So not only would the operation then end before they found out who else was involved in this Nazi conspiracy, but those hidden in the shadows would be able to go to ground. The CIC did not know where the Tessmann funds were being stored (beyond what was in the company’s accounts), so these HJ leaders might be able to take the money and disappear into the chaos of postwar Germany.
When the news of the BDM arrests reached Tessmann headquarters two or three weeks later, no one suspected Kulas at all. In fact, Heidemann assumed that Rüdiger was caught because she had been careless and he was relieved that she was out of the picture. He didn’t think she knew enough about his current operations to be a danger, or that if she did, she wouldn’t say anything. He had no idea that she had talked, and everything she’d said validated what Kulas had been reporting to the CIC.30
One night, while with Siegfried Kulas and various HJ leaders, Willi Heidemann proclaimed that “when Hitler died, Frederick the Great died a second time.”31 Frederick the Great had been the King of Prussia in the eighteenth century, and he was a popular German historical figure. Hitler admired him greatly and famously had a portrait of Frederick the Great with him in the bunker.
When asked which of the three Western occupation forces (American, British, or French) he found the easiest to work with, Heidemann said they were all sons of bitches, “but that the English were the most polite and smoothest of the three.”32
While in Austria, Heidemann met up with Max Lebens. There they had a nasty fight over money. When Lebens had been in jail for speeding, someone had taken 100,000 reichsmarks from his bags. He thought it had to be someone from Tessmann, but instead of trying to figure out who exactly took the money, he told Heidemann to pay up. This was a lot of money. Heidemann felt there was no reason for him to hand it over, as he didn’t know anything about this incident and he’d had nothing to do with it.
Heidemann said to Kulas, “I have worked very hard in the past three months, but if I am to be blackmailed by one of our own men, I’ll give up the whole idea.”33 He went on to say, “I was ordered to invest the money of HJ for future use, and if the things I was ordered to do are not possible, I will give up!”34 Although Heidemann did not use his name in this talk with Kulas, Axmann had given him this order.
The U.S. Army in Europe had been part of Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (“SHAEF”). In the middle of July, SHAEF ceased to exist. Now that the war in Europe was over, there was no longer any need for this joint command of American, British, Canadian, and French forces. American forces in Europe were now organized as United States Forces, European Theater (“USFET”).35 General Eisenhower had been in charge of SHAEF, and he was now in charge of USFET.
However, life in the Farben Building was the same for Hunter under either name. He still worked in Frankfurt much of the time.
As his brother later told the story, one summer day in Frankfurt, Jack Hunter was driving around in a Mercedes while wearing civilian clothes. He pulled up to a stop by a traffic cop, and while waiting to be waved through, a jeep full of army nurses pulled next to him. The driver asked him in bad German which way it was to the IG Farben Building. He mustered his best Brooklyn accent to give directions in English, and the nurse who was driving was still sitting there with this look on her face like she didn’t know what had happened to her.36
He enjoyed being a bit of a goofball. In a postcard he sent to his wife that summer, he wrote about being in Germany: “Lots of Germans—many, many Germans. They speak German too.…”37 On the face side of the postcard was the Hotel Nassauer Hof, which was in use as a rest facility for CIC personnel.
What he didn’t know at the time was that he had just become the father of twin daughters. On July 23, 1945, his wife gave birth, but it took time for the news to reach him.
Meanwhile, Artur Axmann spent June and July of 1945 continuing to hide out in northern Germany.
If he could be useful to the occupying powers, then he could turn himself in and hope that they would cut some kind of deal with him. For example, the OSS recruited German scientists and technical personnel who had worked with areas the Third Reich had excelled at, such as rocketry, cryptography, synthetic fuel, and aeronautics.
As part of OSS Operation Paperclip, even scientists who had been Nazis or who had committed war crimes were relocated to the United States. The OSS used various tricks to hide the scientists’ troubled pasts because President Truman had ordered them not to recruit Nazis. If Truman’s order had been followed though, many valuable scientists would have been left behind for the British, French, or Soviets to recruit.
Another group of Nazis recruited by the Allies had previously spied for Germany. With tensions rising between the United States and the Soviet Union, German intelligence agents who had knowledge of the Soviet Union were in demand. The most prominent of these was General Reinhard Gehlen, who turned himself in to the CIC in late May. Brigadier General Edwin Sibert, Eisenhower’s G-2, eventually approved the use of Gehlen and his former associates to continue their work against the Soviet Union. This time they spied for the Americans, instead of the Nazis.
However, Axmann was neither a scientist nor a spy. Turning himself in to one of the occupying powers would accomplish nothing for him, as he was not useful to them.
Some other high-ranking Nazis in this situation tried to escape Europe altogether. One of the best known examples is SS Obersturmbannführer (Lieutenant Colonel) Adolf Eichmann, who eventually fled Europe using a fraudulently issued Red Cross travel document with a fake name and escaped to Argentina. Different escape routes for wanted Nazis came into existence in the years after the Third Reich collapsed. They were known as ratlines and often ended in South American countries like Argentina.
However, Axmann had no desire to leave his beloved Germany. His wife Ilse still lived in Berlin with their young son. Although things were over with his wife, they had decided not to go through a divorce in the midst of the chaos of the war turning against Germany. Now that he was in hiding, a divorce was out of the question. His girlfriend, Erna, lived in the German countryside with her family.
He had another reason to stay—his followers were still hard at work building up Tessmann. Although he knew his former underlings in the HJ and BDM had gathered in the Alps (as he was the one who sent them there), trying to contact them now would have been risky and difficult.
He had no money, as the HJ funds he’d tried to take with him out of Berlin had been lost during the breakout. He did own some real estate in Berlin, but he could not claim it since he was in hiding. If things had gone according to plan, though, Heidemann would be busy in Bavaria building up a future for them.
He felt it best to wait until things calmed down a bit in Germany, and he was in a better position to travel safely.