Killing Hitler by Moorhouse Roger

Author:Moorhouse, Roger [Moorhouse, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

His new mission was simple. With his privileged background, Aryan good looks, and fluent German, he was to pose as a defector, make his way to Berlin, and target Hitler there.

Knipper’s contact in Berlin was to be his elder sister Olga Chekhova. Like him a Russian émigrée, Chekhova had remained in Berlin and had forged a successful career as an actress. By 1941, she was already an established star, having appeared in over a hundred films, regularly cast as the elegant and seductive “grande dame.” She had also become part of the cultural élite of the Third Reich and was often seen entertaining the troops or dining with Goebbels. Indeed, when she was photographed having her hand kissed by Hitler, the rumor rapidly spread that the two were romantically attached. One fan even wrote to congratulate her, enthusing: “It is good to know that you will marry Adolf Hitler. At last he has found the right partner…. Make him happy—he has deserved it!”127

But Chekhova was also moving in circles of which the Führer would scarcely have approved. As a Russian émigrée, with family still in the Soviet Union, she was an easy target for the foreign agents of the NKVD, and contact had been made as early as 1923. In return for allowing her family to join her in Berlin, she could be persuaded to divulge low-level intelligence or simply promise to keep her eyes and ears open. Though she would certainly not have recognized herself as such, Moscow considered her to be a “sleeper.”128 Indeed, in 1939, the NKVD sought to activate her. With the Nazi-Soviet Pact only recently signed, Stalin was keen to maximize the positive aspects of his relations with Germany. To this end, he considered a clique of influential pro-Russian individuals in Berlin to be essential, and thought that Olga Chekhova might serve as the nucleus for just such a group.129 In due course, she was visited by NKVD agents, who presumably briefed her on her new task. However, given that there are no records of any such clique ever being formed, it must be assumed that the plan failed. Though well connected, Chekhova was clearly either unwilling or unable to act in the capacity required of her. She went back to being a sleeper—at least as far as Moscow was concerned.

Lev Knipper, meanwhile, was in Iran, where he was plotting his defection. His cover story was that he was researching Iranian folk music, and later that year, his musical labors bore fruit with the completion of his “Two Preludes on Iranian Themes.” His political labors were more complex, however. It was planned that he would defect to the Germans in Iran, or possibly Turkey, and then travel to Berlin, where he would make contact both with his famous sister and with one Igor Miklashevsky, a former boxer and fellow NKVD agent who was also posing as a defector.

Miklashevsky had been in Germany since late 1941. He had followed in the footsteps of his uncle, a genuine defector, who had become a Russian-language radio announcer for the Nazis.

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