104
BAUER TOSSED HIS WEAPON and rushed down the stairwell and out the rear exit, where von der Haas waited in a large truck bearing the name Hultquist Metzgerei, a butcher shop. Bauer jumped into the rear of the truck, filled with hanging slabs of meat, and the truck sped away.
He was buzzing. He had to concentrate on escaping, on getting out of Nuremberg alive, on returning to his family, but his body shook with the realization of what he’d done.
As he held on to a railing along the rear meat locker, as the truck skidded and swerved and the sides of meat swayed side to side, one word kept springing to his lips.
“Finally,” he whispered.
Nazi leadership immediately departed Nuremberg and holed up in a secured concrete bunker in nearby Fürth on Beim Korwinkel Stra?e, guarded by nearly an entire regiment of SS guards.
Fifty feet belowground, two hours after the shooting, Martin Bormann entered the dimly lit bunker with the latest developments.
“It appears to have been a lone gunman, who remains at large,” he said. “They recovered the rifle used. It was,” he read from a piece of paper, “a Gewehr 98 bolt-action rifle.”
“An older weapon,” said Hermann Goring. “Not the Kar 98s our troops are using now. But a reliable sniper rifle. The shooter probably fought in the first world war. Or it’s the best weapon he could get hold of.”
The room went silent. Bormann knew the next question.
“But was it him?”
These words came from the corner of the room, where the Führer, Adolf Hitler, stood with his left arm curled behind his back.
“Was it him?” he repeated. “The same man who tried to kill me at Berchtesgaden? The man who nearly blew me up the Bürgerbr?ukeller? What is the name they call him—der J?ger? Was it him?”
Bormann cleared his throat. “Mein Führer, to answer that, we will want to recover the bullet from your body double’s skull. We have yet—”
“You told me that would-be assassin was dead!” The Führer was furious.
“You told me that the man who tried to kill me at Berchtesgaden was dead!” He paced the small, poorly lit room with its concrete walls.
“You told me you found too much blood on his escape path, that he couldn’t have survived!
You told me this, Heinrich!” he said to Himmler.
“You told me this, Hermann!” to Goring. “You, Martin, told me this!”
The men bowed their heads. They’d never guaranteed to their Führer that the man at Berchtesgaden had perished. They’d allowed him to believe it, but the truth was that the SS and Gestapo had searched high and low for der J?ger—“the hunter”—to no avail.
“Why do you fail me like this?” Hitler mumbled, continuing to pace with his halting, stooped shuffle, the veins nearly popping on his forehead. “Perhaps you wish it had been me whose head just exploded on that balcony?”
The others quickly denounced the thought, assuring Hitler of how grateful they were that Providence spared him once more, how eagerly they would trade their lives for his.
“It was him. I know it was him. I can…” Hitler stopped, cupped his right hand. “I can feel it. It was him.” He turned to Himmler. “I want this man found.”
“We will find him, mein Führer,” said Himmler, snapping to attention. “We will find him and fill his body with bullets.”
“No. No, no, no!” Hitler slammed his hand on a table. “You will find him and bring him to me.”