The Rise of the Fourth Reich - ThereAreNoSunglasses

THE WRITING ON THE WALL 107Six months later, after the disastrous Battle of Kursk, in which the Naziwar machine lost nearly three-fourths of its entire mechanized force, itbecame clear that the defeat of Germany was more than a possibility, itwas a probability. Top Nazis began to draw up plans for escape and thecontinuation of their goals.Curt Reiss, a noted news correspondent of the time, who traveled extensivelyin Europe, wrote in detail about the Nazis’ plans for survival, inhis book The Nazis Go Underground. Astonishingly, this was published inthe spring of 1944, prior to the Allied D-Day landings in France thatJune. Reiss wrote, “They had better means for preparing to go undergroundthan any other potential underground movement in the entireprevious history of the world. They had all the machinery of the wellorganizedNazi state. And they had a great deal of time to prepare everything.They worked very hard, but they did nothing hastily, left nothing tochance. Everything was thought through logically and organized to thelast detail. Himmler [along with Bormann] planned with the utmostcoolness. He chose for the work only the best-qualified experts—the bestqualified, that is, in matters of underground work.”Reiss pointed out that when the Nazi Party gained control in Germany,the apparatus of the party was simply transferred over to the apparatus ofthe state. “Now, when the party wished to go underground and still retainits organization, all it had to do was simply to act in reverse order; that is,to transfer—or, more accurately perhaps, retransfer—the apparatus of thestate into the party apparatus—a not-too-difficult enterprise, since bothapparatuses were still organized along parallel lines,” he explained.According to Reiss, some misgivings about the fate of Germany aroseeven before the defeat of the Sixth Army at Stalin grad. He reported on aprivate meeting on November 7, 1942, in Munich, between SS chief HeinrichHimmler and Hitler’s top lieutenant Martin Bormann. This meetingoccurred only two days after Allied armies had landed in North Africa.Himmler later confided the topic of discussion, telling his most trustedassociates, “It is possible that Germany will be defeated on the militaryfront. It is even possible that she may have to capitulate. But never mustthe National Socialist German Workers’ Party capitulate. That is what wehave to work for from now on.”