Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair

On Monday 23 June 1941, the second day of the war with the USSR, Adolf Hitler left Berlin. His special train, then called “Amerika”, left the Anhalter Bahnhof heading east for East Prussia. Its destination was a new headquarters hidden in a forest a few kilometres from Rastenburg, today’s Kętrzyn in Poland. Hitler named it the Wolfsschanze – the Wolf’s Lair. It was meant to be a command post for a few months, since that was how long, according to the German high command’s plans, the campaign against the Soviet Union was to last. It became the place where Hitler spent more time than anywhere else during the war.

That evening or the next day?

Some lists state that Hitler first arrived at the Wolf’s Lair late in the evening of 23 June. In studies of the history of the headquarters, however, both Polish and German, 24 June is taken as the day of his arrival. The discrepancy is small: the train left the Reich capital on 23 June and reached the headquarters during the night, after midnight, that is, formally on the following day. Hitler thus spent the evening of 23 June on the journey, and his first full day at the new headquarters was 24 June. The date of 23 June is nonetheless supported by the fact that this was the day on which the decision to move the headquarters from Berlin to the East was taken and carried out.

The make-up of the train that left Berlin that day is one of the few that are well documented: two locomotives; armoured wagons with anti-aircraft guns at the front and rear; Hitler’s personal carriage; a command car with a conference room and radio station; an escort car; and dining, sleeping and press cars. In the Polish campaign of 1939 and in the Balkans in the spring of 1941 the Führersonderzug had served as Hitler’s mobile headquarters. From now on it would be used only for travel between headquarters, Berlin and the Berghof in the Alps.

A headquarters in the Gierłoż forest

The idea of building a permanent headquarters in the East grew out of the experience of the French campaign. In May 1940 Hitler had directed operations from the Felsennest bunker in the Eifel hills, close to the front but out of the enemy’s reach. When in the autumn of 1940 the decision for war with the USSR was taken, and on 18 December Hitler signed Directive No. 21, Barbarossa, a similar site was sought in the East. The choice fell on a forest east of the village of Görlitz, today Gierłoż, about 8 km from Rastenburg. Much spoke in favour of the location: proximity to the Soviet border; its distance from the main roads; the belt of Masurian lakes and the marshes, which hampered an attack on land; the dense deciduous forest, which made camouflage easier; and the railway line from Rastenburg to Angerburg (Węgorzewo) (PL), in existence since 1907, which crossed the site of the future headquarters. Nearby there was a holiday home frequented by Fritz Todt, the armaments minister and founder of the construction organisation that bore his name; according to Polish researchers of the headquarters, it may have been he who suggested the site.

Construction was carried out by the Organisation Todt from the late autumn of 1940. To preserve secrecy, local inhabitants were told that a chemical plant of the Berlin firm Askania was being built, and the project bore the code names “Askania Nord” and “Anlage Nord” (Installation North). Some 2,000–3,000 people worked on it at any one time – Germans and forced labourers from several countries – round the clock, winter included. By May 1941 the first part of the headquarters was ready to receive Hitler.

The Wolf’s Lair of June 1941 did not yet resemble the massive ruins that tourists see today. Since the war in the East was expected to last a few months, a temporary headquarters was built: a few light reinforced-concrete shelters, brick and concrete buildings and wooden huts, hidden under camouflage netting, artificial trees and green-tinted plaster. The site was surrounded by barbed-wire entanglements and divided into restricted zones that could be entered only with a pass. In the most closely guarded zone, Sperrkreis I, lived and worked Hitler; the chief of the High Command of the Wehrmacht (OKW), Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel; the chief of the OKW operations staff, General of Artillery Alfred Jodl; and Martin Bormann, who after Rudolf Hess’s flight to Scotland had become head of the Party Chancellery in May; as well as adjutants, doctors and secretaries. Security was provided by the Führer-Begleit-Bataillon (PL) and by the SS men of Hitler’s personal bodyguard. The headquarters had a railway siding, a landing strip for courier aircraft and its own airfield at nearby Wilamowo, as well as permanent telephone and radio links with Berlin and the front.

Not everything was ready. The field echelon of the OKW staff arrived by special train only at dawn on 26 June and for a while worked in railway carriages on the siding. It also soon turned out that a site chosen for its marshes and lakes had its price: in summer the headquarters was damp and swarming with mosquitoes, of which its inhabitants complained in the first weeks.

The Masurian command complex

The Wolf’s Lair was the heart of a network of headquarters that grew up in Masuria over the following months and years. The most important of them was the headquarters of the High Command of the Army (OKH), “Mauerwald”, in the forest at Mamerki on Lake Mamry, about 20 km north-east of Gierłoż, built at the same time, also by the Organisation Todt and under the same Askania cover. From the first days of the war the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch, and the Chief of the Army General Staff, Colonel General Franz Halder, who in practice ran operations on the Eastern Front, worked there and drove over to Hitler for conferences. The two high commands – the OKW alongside Hitler and the OKH at Mamerki – were thus separated by a drive of a few dozen minutes, which aptly reflected their rivalry for influence over the conduct of the war. Other dignitaries of the Reich also settled in the area: Heinrich Himmler had his field headquarters, “Hochwald”, near Pozezdrze; the Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, had his office in the Lehndorff palace at Sztynort (Steinort); the head of the Reich Chancellery, Hans Lammers, in a forest near Radzieje; and Hermann Göring used his train and his hunting lodge in the Rominten Heath. For more than three years the centre of power of the Third Reich moved from Berlin to the Masurian forests.

A day at headquarters

A daily rhythm soon took shape at the Wolf’s Lair, governed by the habits of Hitler, who went to bed in the early hours and rose shortly before noon. The most important event was the midday situation conference: Jodl, Keitel and the liaison officers reported on the situation at the fronts, marked on maps spread out on the table, and Hitler gave his orders. The conferences often lasted two hours or more. Then came lunch in the mess, an afternoon devoted to non-military matters, conversations and visits, the evening conference and dinner, and finally the late-night gatherings over tea at which Hitler held forth for hours in monologues before adjutants, secretaries and guests. From the beginning of July 1941, on Bormann’s orders, Heinrich Heim, an official of his chancellery, began writing these remarks down. The surviving notes, published after the war as the “Table Talk”, are one of the more important sources for Hitler’s views on the future of the conquered East.

The first days at the headquarters were marked by reports of success. The army groups were driving deep into the USSR, the Luftwaffe was destroying the Soviet air force on the ground, and in the Białystok area the first great pocket was beginning to close. Already, however, the tensions that would accompany the whole campaign were becoming apparent. Hitler, worried that the armoured spearheads were breaking away from the infantry, pressed for smaller encirclements to be closed and for the armour to be handled more cautiously, while Halder noted irritably in his diary that the Führer was meddling in operational details. The disputes over whether the chief objective was Moscow or Leningrad and Ukraine were to be settled at Gierłoż itself, at conferences attended by Brauchitsch and Halder, who drove over from Mamerki.

Its place in the war

Hitler’s departure for East Prussia the day after the attack on the USSR meant that from then on the Reich’s centre of decision lay close to the Eastern Front, which absorbed most of its forces. From the Wolf’s Lair Hitler directed the campaign of 1941; in December of that year, after Brauchitsch’s dismissal, he himself took over command of the army, and in the following years he interfered ever more heavily in operations at the front. He left the headquarters for weeks or months at a time: for stays at the Berghof and, in 1942 and 1943, for the forward headquarters “Werwolf” near Vinnytsia in Ukraine. Even so, Gierłoż remained his main place of residence. According to the most frequently repeated calculations, Hitler spent a total of more than 800 days there, more than anywhere else during the war. The figure is an approximation, arrived at after subtracting his absences.

In 1944, for fear of air raids, the shelters of the Wolf’s Lair were encased in layers of reinforced concrete several metres thick. On 20 July that year, in the conference hut in Sperrkreis I, Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg detonated a bomb during the midday conference; Hitler survived the assassination attempt with minor injuries, and it was followed by the arrest and execution of those involved in the plot. On 20 November 1944, with the Red Army already in East Prussia less than a hundred kilometres from the headquarters, Hitler left the Wolf’s Lair for good. On the night of 24–25 January 1945 German sappers blew up the shelters. Their ruins near Kętrzyn, which Polish sappers were still clearing of mines a decade after the war, are today one of the best-known traces of the Second World War in Poland.