THE H CLONE | INTRODUCTION | CHAPTER 1

....... Chapter 1 ........

I.Berlin, End of April 1945

 On the 20^th of April, on his 56^th birthday, the Führer inspected a battalion of German soldiers for the last time. They were:  very young, almost children, from the Hitler Youth brigades and they were very old from the Volkssturms.  The shoot, exhibiting a leader, weary albeit hopeful of some miracle, dressed in a long black leather coat with a raised collar, greeting, conversing and connecting with the smiling soldiers during the review, was the last screening in which this character appears alive.

 On the same day, Zhukov, commanding the First Byelorussian Front and Koniev commanding the First Ukrainian one broke the last ring of defense of the capital and over 500,000 Russian soldiers and two armies of tanks entered the center of the city.

 The 22^nd of April 1945, twenty meters below the ground, in his private bunker, Hitler commanded his last battle.  He designed a battle plan for Operation Steiner. The attack, this attack, in Hitler’s mind, would change the outcome of the war.  Each man and each solider ready to bear arms would have to participate.  Each plane of the Lufwaffe would have to take off.  A general of the SS, Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant General) Felix Steiner would command the operation.

 On paper, Steiner would attack from the Eberswalde in a zone that was between the Von Manteuffel’s Third Army Panzer division and Busse’s Ninth Army, to wipe out Zhukov’s armies’ Soviet spearhead.  Steiner had no communication with any military unit, or lists of troupes, or weapons, or anything.  With the few troupes he gathered, he couldn’t stop the power of the Russian armies, three battle fronts, over two million soldiers, ten thousand cannons and some fifteen hundred tanks.  The city’s fate was a done deal.  No internal or external power could change it.  It was only a question of time and of how many more fatalities.

 The German retreat from the Northern part of the city, that were resisting the enormous Soviet pressure to assemble Steiner’s line of attack, actually made it easier for Russian tanks, without opposition, to run around free through the streets of downtown Berlin.  Only the accurate firing from the 8 mm canons out of the immense towers of reinforced concrete from the Zoo kept them away from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  The German military portions of the city were composed of dispersed troupes of the Wermacht, KriegsMarine, and Luftwaffe, two divisions of the Waffen SS, Military Police, Civilian Police, GESTAPO, Volkssturm Infantrymen and several Battalions of the Hitler Youth who were armed with automatic guns, rifles, Panzerfaust grenade launchers, light mortars and machine guns.  Twelve different kinds of Panzers in operational condition completed this sorry collection.  Over ten thousand Allied soldiers, Russians, Ukrainians, Hungarians and Norwegians fought beside their German brothers.  The Norwegians were organized in the only SS division that was not German, the Norland Waffen SS.

 One hundred thousand German soldiers were pushed Northward by the Third Army Clash and to the South by the Eighth Army of the Russian Guard.  Troupes of the First Ukrainian Front commanded by Marshal Ivan Konev were in Charlottenburg.  The Ravensbruk Concentration Camp in the Northern part of Berlin was liberated by the brave soldiers of the Second Byelorussian Front commanded by Marshal Konstantin Rokosovsky.  There were over one million Soviet soldiers fighting just in the three rings surrounding Berlin.  This figure was continuously growing each day by the arrival of new troupes that were gaining ground on the German resistance, which upon the final collapse, tried to save themselves by surrendering to the West.

 In April, upon noticing Russian intent to conquer more German territory, the Americans and the English advanced immediately to Hamburg and to the outskirts of Kiel with the assistance of the Germans rather than fighting them.

 The Operation Steiner attack didn’t take place!  It never even crossed the firing line.  It ended on the afternoon of the 30^th of that month.

 Goebbel’s only and last contribution to the Battle of Berlin was to send two groups of aged laborers from the Ministry of Propaganda to paint the slogan:  Berlin bleibt deutsch (Berlin remains German) all over the city walls. But this ended up being no more than a joke within the incessant advances of Zhukov’s and Koniev’s Russian Front spearheads.

 A correspondent of the Soviet periodical, the Red Star, described the city as follows:  “On the 25^th the German capital is totally cordoned off and cut off from the rest of the country.  During the bloody street battles, Berlin was without water, without electrical power, no airports and no radio stations.  The city ceased to look like Berlin.”

 At sunrise on the 29^th of April, 1945, the Russians were only one hundred and fifty meters from the Reich’s Foreign Ministry.  The Germans at this time controlled only a 4.5 Kilometer wide by 4.8 Kilometer long strip of the city from East to West.  There was ferocious resistance in small isolated areas, only by those trying to avoid executions perpetrated by the SS Details on anyone who had the slightest idea of surrendering.  Over 4500 soldiers were executed as a result of this presumed cowardice.

 The brave Russian combined operations under fire: 60 MM field artilleries, Katiuska rockets, automatic firearms and hand grenades, conquered the city one street at a time, one building at a time, one house at a time and one room at a time.

 The XII^th German Army, commanded by General Wenk, was driven back by the superior Russian forces after fighting ferocious battles and all hope that the Russian circle around the capital could be broken dissipated.

 General Weidling, who on April 25^th was personally appointed by Hitler himself as General Commander of Berlin, was considering an alternate escape plan in the event the Führer’s General Quarters didn’t want to approve the General Plan.  At the time he was appointed, he already knew that the city was virtually surrounded.  The circle around the city was composed of eight Soviet armies.

 That same day, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to establish contact with the city attacking from the Northeast, Southeast and South, to take the battle of Berlin to “a conclusive victory.” Weidling’s only troupes that they would still have in the future were too weak to resist the pressure of Russian fire much longer.  The remnants of Panzer Corp #56 with less than a dozen operational tanks and several Panzerfausts defended the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and these were the only ones that could be considered as launching points for any attack preceding a sortie from the city.  Since Hitler’s bunker was in the building underground, the removal of this corps would leave him virtually without any other defense.  Without this unit and its few Panzers, coordinating a launching point and a subsequent exit from the city was a hypothesis that could not materialize.

 Nevertheless, the morale of the troupes was raised when they heard of plans to leave Berlin.  Weidling was pressuring Krebs so that Hitler would take a decision in this regard.  The reply from Krebs was that Hitler was totally turning down the idea of leaving the capital.  This news hit the Ministry of German Defense on Bendlerstrasse, currently the headquarters of the Berlin Garrison, like a bucket of cold water.

 During this time, over ninety Russian field canons, 155 and 205 mm Howitzers, rockets and bazookas were firing daily at the Reichstag.  The Russians knew from personal experience that a city in ruins is very easy to defend, even by the very young and the aged.  When the entire isolation of the German capital by the Russian troupes was completed and it was certain that the Americans were not going to intervene, a more tranquil Stalin left the initiative tactic to his field commanders.  New guns and automatic weapons were delivered to all of the Russian officials.

 On April 26, considering all the defense shortages of Berlin, General Weidling had a valid and up-to-date plan to get the Führer out of the city.  Hitler rejected him.  All hope was lost.

 The only point of German resistance they had against the Russians in this case was the ferocious SS defenders, the antiaircraft canons, the formidable 8 mm and flacks of the enormous cement platform of the Berlin Zoo, over the house of the hippopotamus (of which one survived), at about two thousand meters to the North of the bunker.  Their radius of action covered almost the entire territory still defended by the Germans.  There, over fifty canons of the fearful weapons of 88 millimeters, guided by radar, radio and a network of staked out observers on adjacent buildings, delivered such precise and mortifying fire, that only the surrender of the city was going to silence them.

 In the West, the bridge over the Harel River and the Spandau bridge, two thousand three hundred meters from the bunker, adjacent to Heerstrasse and Pichelsdorf streets were solidly in the hands of the fanatical Hitler Youth.

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 Berlin, Russian front line |  Gardenstrasses Street.  Advanced Position of the 79^th Regiment of Guards.  Red Flag Army Clash III.  Neustroev’s Battalion.

At night, a Russian patrol brings in a slightly injured German woman dressed in a field uniform.  She is locked in a room after being seen by the bald Russian nurse and raped by the guard.  No one speaks German and the order is that those prisoners captured around the Foreign Ministry be interrogated immediately.  The information is passed on to the division.

 Just in time, an interpreter from a military police detail arrived, something known by very few and feared by many, the SMERSH Unit.  The Russian interpreter, Rzeykaya, interrogated the prisoner:  she was a nurse that worked the day shift in the Krankenstube (field nursing station) of the Foreign Ministry.  At night she tried to cross the Russian lines to visit her mother.  She is harmless.

 “Where is Hitler,” asked Rzeykaya.

“In the bunker below,” answered the nurse.

 The information was immediately passed on to the commander of the division, General V.M. Shatilov, elated by the news, and confused, announces to his chiefs in Moscow that he is about to conquer the symbolic building of the Third German Empire, the Foreign Ministry, and that he might capture Hitler alive.

  The Reichstag Building   May 13, 1945

 II. The samples

 It was a miracle that the field telephone worked.  The call went out from Hitler’s bunker’s switchboard, through the Defense Ministry, to an advanced position of the German defense on Tiergartenstrasse at the Ladwebr Canal.  There, a sergeant answered and identified himself as Unteroffizier Hoffman.  On the other side of the line, no more or less, was the personal aide of the Führer, the terrible Martin Bormann.  He wanted to know where Lieutenant Balder, a physician dispatched in this sector of the front, was.  Hoffman replied that Lieutenant Balder was taking care of some wounded Germans from the last Russian attack.  Bormann’s very stern order was that the doctor should immediately return to the Führer’s bunker.  The phone line cut off at that very moment.  Hoffman remained a few more seconds with the receiver to his ear, as if to protect himself from the Russian artillery barrage that had just begun.  He closed the Telefunken, grabbed his helmet and his rifle, and went to get Lieutenant Balder.

 Johhan Balder graduated from the Graduate School of Military Medicine in June of 1939.  He was medium height, blond, light eyes, a pleasant face and always smiling, the son of a businessman and a teacher.  He was born in the capital in 1914, exactly when the First World War began.  He specialized in blood bioanalysis at the University of Berlin, and worked for a while with Doctor – Captain Joseph Mengele at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin.  He was the physician who was sometimes called in for Hitler when it was necessary to take some blood samples for testing.

 The shells of the over one thousand Russian canons positioned around Berlin were exploding all over the place.  Large and small pieces of earth, pieces of pavement, bricks from buildings and metal splinters were raised by the explosions and were flying through the air, killing every living soul in the area.  Their deadly effect on the soldiers and civilians on either side was greater than the explosions themselves.

 When Sergeant Hoffman arrived at the firing line, Balder was taking care of a young soldier, no more than 15 years old, a member of the Hitler Jungend, who suffered a chest injury.  The bullet entered in the proximity of where the soldier had worn an Iron Cross won for destroying three Russian tanks.  The soldier had no chance to survive, but the doctor was caring for him a few minutes longer until an aide arrived to support him.

 “Bormann called from the Führer’s bunker to ask him to come there immediately. My Lieutenant:” Hoffman said with his look towards the fatally wounded soldier.  His thoughts went back to a small village in Cologne, to where his family and his son of almost the same age were.

 Upset over the death surrounding the young soldier he was unable to save, Balder got up, wiped the sweat and dust from his forehead, shut his medical case  brandishing the red cross painted on the cover, picked up his automatic pistol, grabbed his metal helmet and left without saying anything.

 He was located no more than one thousand meters from his current position in a straight line all the way to the bunker.  He needed to follow along the same avenue, almost parallel to the canal, until Herman Gorring Strasse, follow along Voss Strasse and then turn left towards the gray cement building that housed Hitler’s famous bunker in the basement.  The flames shooting out of burning buildings, the danger of walls toppling as a result of the almost direct hits coming from Russian artillery stationed on the other side of the canal increased the peril of making this crossing as much as if he would have been in the direct line of fire.  Skipping from door to door, observing the intervals between artillery fire and mortars, attempting to protect himself from the machinegun fire and from shrapnel, he arrived at the building’s entrance almost an hour later.  The ground floor SS guards knew him and they had been notified of Bormann’s orders to allow him to enter as soon as he arrived.  He left his automatic and Luger pistols with the SS guards.  He quickly descended several levels of stairs until he arrived at the level where the Führer’s General Quarters was located.

 The bunker smelled bad by comparison to the air outside which was saturated with smoke from the explosions and low in oxygen as a result of the fires.  There was continuous background noise resulting from the ventilator and extractor motors of the poorly designed air conditioning system which worked sporadically.

 Martin Bormann was in the foyer with his usual unpleasant face.  “Wait,” the Lieutenant told him, recognizing him and motioning him towards a green chair.  It was the first time that day that Balder felt secure from the perils of the front line, no longer having to keep his guard up against enemy fire, and he was able to rest.  Exhaustion drained him at that very moment.

 A few minutes later, the office door upholstered in brown leather, opened and Hitler, Dr. Goebbels, General Weidling, Krebs and others came out.  Balder witnessed Hitler’s farewell to his collaborators.  

 Balder stood up and saluted with the Army salute, not the SS one.  The German leader’s appearance was worse than the last time he had seen him:  his hands were afflicted, his face was the most pale it had ever been, his facial muscles were unresponsive, his look lost.  Not appearing lethargic, his general state was abominable.

 When the group started heading towards Goebell’s offices, Martin Bormann approached Balder who was still standing at attention.

“I need you to take 3 samples of blood and skin from the Führer for some tests.  In each of these three boxes, you are going to place a flask of blood and in the other the skin and the hair.  They’re for some special exams.  I want you to work professionally and fast.  In this glass flask you’re going to place a sample of hair.  Then, I want you to also take a sample of my blood” he told him in a low voice, in an amicable and conspiratorial tone, pushing him on the back towards his office.

 “I don’t want Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger (Hitler’s personal physician) and Dr. Theodor Morell (Goebbel’s physician) to know about this.  This is a secret operation.  The Führer has given his approval.  Only you and I know of this.  Can you keep a secret?

 “Yes…, for sure,” Balder answered, his brain beginning to analyze the consequences of this action which meant that only the two of them knew about this.  That Hitler would be dead within a short period of time.  That the secret is better kept by one who is dead.  And that now, he, Balder, was also in danger.

 The two entered their private office and Bormann showed him the cylinders and the glass.  Three extremely unusual looking glass flasks, which fit into stainless steel cylinders the size of a German hand grenade, were on Bormann’s desk.  They were well-made, water and fire resistant, with fine threading, rubber seals and well polished ends.  It was obvious that this was the work of a specialist and a professional.  The double wall of the main cylinder was, Balder thought, made to preserve the contents at low temperatures with the aid of a cryogenic liquid.

 Bormann stayed behind and Balder took the glass flasks in a box and headed towards the Führer’s office.  He waited in Hitler’s foyer.  Half an hour had transpired and Balder almost fell asleep in the chair in the bunker’s relative tranquility away from the terrifying sound of the barricades.  When the Führer rang the bell, Hitler’s private secretary, Junge, invited him to enter the Führer’s private room.

 He saluted.  He asked permission to wash his hands in the leader’s private bathroom.  He left the coat of his uniform, dirty and full of dust there.  He put on his surgical gloves and without intervening words, got to work.  Hitler was sitting in an armchair, resting his arms with the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up against the chair’s arms that were upholstered in green leather.  Looking at the map of Germany---talking almost to himself, “I know we can win, I know we can win over those damned Bolsheviks…”  The doctor looked for a vein from which he could take blood in the soft part of the left elbow.  Having identified the vein in the forearm, he placed a rubber strap to cut off the circulation.  The Führer’s skin appeared yellow, like the skin of someone who was sick.  A set of 10 cm³ glass syringes was beside him, prepared and sterilized.

 He stuck him with the needle and immediately, upon moving the piston, the force of the vacuum went down and the cylinder filled up with very dark blood.  To fill the three flasks he had to repeat the procedure two times.  Each time, Hitler breathed deeper, absorbed by the pain of the needle.  The flasks contained an anticoagulant.  He immediately placed the flasks into a larger metallic container which needed to be filled with liquid nitrogen to preserve the contents by freezing, exactly as they did at the Kaiser William Institute. 

 Out of the three, two spaces were reserved for the glass flasks with the blood, skin and hair.

 Each large cylinder already contained a round 3-4 cm³ glass flask like the ones used to collect semen.  These were filled with a white gelatinous material, and were already under the effect of the cryogenic cold.

 When he closed the cover of the third cylindrical cryogenic thermos with all the flasks inside, these were immediately picked up by an assistant who silently left towards Bormann’s office.  Balder placed a small bandage around the vein from which he had taken the blood and another around the skin where he had taken a sample of skin.  Hitler was still in the armchair, under the effect of a sedative the doctor had previously administered.

 Having finished the job, Balder left the room.  He went to Bormann’s private office at the end of the hall.  There he repeated the routine and placed samples of blood taken from Commander Bormann into a flask identical to those used for Hitler.  There was only one difference in the markings of the cylinders.  Bormann’s were marked with a small B on the cover.  Hitler’s had an H.  He finished his professional work in silence.  Borman thanked him and murmured something that sounded like he was going to consider him at the final hour.  Lately, the final hour and in general the word final had a macabre meaning.  Balder saluted and left.  Outside of the office, at the exit, the secretary gave him a bottle of Cognac and a box of sausages and ham.

 A sentry of the SS with the insignias of the Das Reich Divison was waiting for him and returned his automatic weapon and his Luger.  He escorted him to a hallway which started in the basement of the Foreign Ministry, twenty meters below the street level and went up to the ground level of the building above.  At the end of the hallway, the narrow stairs ended in a room that had high windows facing Herman-Goerring Strasse.  Everything was broken into pieces at this level by fires from machine guns, canons and explosions.  Beneath the debris, the elegant decoration of the past was vaguely remeniscent.

 “You may return to your post Lieutenant,” he was told by the SS sentry.  Balder left the bottle and the box on the window sill and jumped out to the street.  He looked around, straightened his uniform, the automatic pistol and raised his hands to get the bottle of Cognac and the box with the ham.  At that moment, the SS sentry had an automatic pistol pointed at him.  Without mincing words, he fired a burst, the sound of which was perfectly confused with the continuous background noise from the Russian artillery and machine guns from the other side of the Landwebr Canal.

 III. The End

 Martin Bormann was satisfied.  He was holding in his hands the three stainless steel containers containing the samples of blood, skin, hair and semen marked with the letter H in his hands.  Three samples from Hitler and a sample of his own.  He had only three refrigeration boxes.  One problem:  so he eliminated a set of Hitler’s samples and substituted it with his own.

 He had an idea of how the samples will be used, of their significance, importance and transcendence.  Weeks before his disappearance from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Complex, he talked with Mengele by phone, and he explained and suggested what could be done with the samples in a not too distant future.  They had the technology and the means.  It was like an insurance policy for the continuity of the Nazi regime.

 …On the other had, Mengele was familiar with Dr. Hans Spemann and his work with Genetic Theory, because he had been his teacher at the Medical Institute of Berlin.  Since 1938 when Spemann released his work to the scientific world and advanced the real possibility of cloning in animals, Mengele was fascinated by the idea.  All that Spemann said was that an embryo needed to be fused with an egg cell.  The possibility of cloning was there, only the tools and the experiments were needed.  Entering the SS was a determining factor because they controlled the network of extermination and concentration camps where he could move his science forward.

 Bormann put each set in one of the metallic boxes.  From another metallic cylinder which looked like an extinguisher, wearing special heavy leather gloves, he filled the containers with liquid nitrogen, the cryogenic agent which would maintain the freshness of the genetic samples.  He followed Dr. Mengele’s instructions.  Having finished the operation, he closed them with a hermetic cover and with a combination lock.  Only he and Mengele knew the combination.  Once he had the boxes filled and shut on the desk, he sat down to write three letters.

 One letter was addressed to a Commander of a submarine.  The letter, together with one of the metallic boxes would be transported to Kiel by a motorcycle riding messenger from the Greater State of OKW in an official pouch.

 The second was sent to a pilot at the Tempelhof airport.  The destination of the second box was to the same port of Kiel where the UB-293’s departure was delayed upon Bormann’s express orders until the material was received.  It was only a precaution in case the motorcycle or the airplane didn’t arrive in time to their Kiel destination.

 The third was directed to a Captain with some specific instructions.  He was a member of the SS Mohnke Brigade, which at 9:30 PM were gathering at the Friedrichstrasse metro station.  They were trying to leave the city via the tunnels of the metro towards the north to Wanasse, the weakest ring of the Russian ring, to escape northward towards Hamburg.  All were dressed in the regular uniforms of the Wermacht without insignias or rank, as privates.  It was the most secure route out of the besieged capital and to get to where they could surrender to the Americans.  They would have a better chance of surviving the treatment they would receive from the Americans than from the Russian prison camps.

 Hitler’s aides, Julius Schaub and Major Otto Gunsche gave him a document written in large letters so that the Führer could read it without glasses.  It was the report regarding the fates of Mussolini and Clara Petacci.  Having read it, Hitler made his final decision and sealed his destiny.  He gave detailed instructions of what should be done with his body after the suicide.

 That Berlin had no way out and that the situation was hopeless was confirmed that very night when General Wilhelm Keitel, OKW, informed him that no German military outfit from the outside could penetrate the Russian rings.  Not only were there no fresh troupes, but at the current pace of fighting, there were munitions left only for another two days.  The resistance would collapse for lack of weapons.  Ironically, the only military outfit that was operating properly was one formed by foreigners from Norway, the Waffen SS Division Norland.  

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