Original subtitles

Powell: Adolf Hitler caused the deaths of 50 million people.

An entire nation followed him to ruin.

He was hated by those he persecuted

and even by some of his own commanders,

yet in 25 years, no one managed to kill him.

Winston Churchill had very few bodyguards,

whilst Hitler had thousands.

He needed them.

During his travels across Europe,

there were over 40 attempts on his life.

Now with access to captured original SS records,

the producers of "Churchill's Bodyguard"

can reveal for the first time in this new series

how fate and a small number of handpicked bodyguards

helped this evil genius to cheat death

on so many occasions.

Why did no one manage to kill Adolf Hitler?

Enough people wanted to, but as this series shows,

it was not as simple as it sounds.

Hitler was at his most vulnerable when traveling,

and his Bodyguard had to take particular precautions

tailored to each method of transport used.

His favorite way of traveling was by road.

He loved luxury cars

and early on in his political career

settled on the Mercedes-Benz

as his official car.

But cars could be particularly exposed,

and they were relatively slow.

As Hitler started

nationwide political campaigning in the early 1930s,

he needed a mode of transport that could take him further

and faster.

In 1932, he hired aircraft for a dramatic election campaign

over Germany.

It impressed many people and won him many votes.

But flying was risky,

and once Hitler became Chancellor in 1933,

another means of transport became available --

trains, the official German government coaches

which the Weimar Republic had kept available

for the heads of state and government

and visiting dignitaries.

At first, Hitler used these,

requisitioning trains

from the German national railway as required,

Expresses equipped with luxury Pullman coaches

and sleeping cars for guests and staff.

Their size gave them a particular advantage.

They could carry his entire staff

plus his bodyguards.

Hitler quickly saw their potential

as a mobile headquarters.

But as his march towards war increased its pace

in the late 1930s,

Hitler ordered a series of new carriages

for a permanent train to be called the Fuhrersonderzug,

the Fuhrer's Special Train.

This was an armored monster

which became his mobile military headquarters.

Heavily defended with antiaircraft guns,

packed with dedicated bodyguards,

and equipped with the latest communications equipment

operated by signals and intelligence officers.

This train was given the code name "Amerika".

At the time, it seems that Hitler did not think

that he might one day be at war with this nation.

But if anyone doubted Hitler's intention

to plunge Europe into conflict,

they only had to step onto Amerika in the summer of 1939.

It was a warlord's stronghold built on rails.

Inside, he would travel across the vast expanses

of his European conquests,

from the Atlantic coast of France

to the depths of the Russian steppes.

It took him to the battlefronts

and ferried him back to Berlin or Berchtesgaden

or to his main military headquarters,

the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia.

Sometimes the Fuhrer Special would pass

another type of train, a train of cattle wagons.

On at least one occasion, they shared the same station.

Out of the cattle wagons came the moans of human beings

sent to a concentration or extermination camp.

Behind the drawn curtains of the other train sat Hitler,

making plans for more death and destruction.

After the war had begun,

British intelligence studied the Fuhrersonderzug

to see whether it would be possible to kill Hitler on it.

Their secret report, based on discussions

with several Germans who had worked on it,

gives the most detailed picture of how Amerika was made up.

Two locomotives powered it.

Behind them came an antiaircraft gun carriage

with two four-barreled 20mm guns.

The next coach contained Hitler's SS-Begleitkommando,

his eight-man close escort of bodyguards which had served him

since the early days of the Nazi Party.

They were commanded by Bruno Gesche,

a giant of a man who had a weakness for drink

but always remained loyal to his Führer.

Then there was a carriage for the staff who ran the train

after which was the bath car,

which was particularly heavy because of the water it carried.

The next coach was the heart of the train's

communications system.

This contained the latest telephone equipment

and a powerful shortwave radio transmitter.

Next was a carriage for Hitler's secretaries,

processing the hundreds of memos

that arrived and left the train at each stop.

Martin Bormann had a coach to himself.

His title was Hitler's private secretary,

but he was much more than that.

In addition to controlling

who had access to Hitler, he supervised his finances.

In the middle of the train was a dining car and kitchen.

It had a fresh water tank

that was considered a particular target

by potential saboteurs considering poison.

Next came a carriage for Hitler's adjutants,

his military assistants,

drawn from each branch of the armed forces.

The most senior was Rudolf Schmundt,

a career officer who ended up becoming a general.

Hitler also had personal adjutants,

such as Otto Gunsche,

a former member of his closest bodyguard,

the SS-Begleitkommando.

Then came the Fuhrer's saloon car

with his sleeping quarters. It

was a Pullman-style coach, elegantly decorated,

but avoiding the luxury that Hitler so detested,

especially in a military context.

More carriages followed,

containing cabins for Hitler's senior guests,

including his top generals.

Then came a car with space for baggage

and an auxiliary power plant.

At the end of the train

was another armored antiaircraft carriage.

The train usually had about 14 carriages,

but extra accommodation could be added when necessary.

The train would carry Hitler many thousands of miles

through often hostile territory,

but there was one thing his bodyguard on board

could not keep him safe from -- an accident.

Only one is known to have happened,

and Hans Bewilogua, the supervisor of the train,

later described it.

[Man speaking German]

Interpreter: About five hundred meters away from one station,

there was a sharp bend.

Suddenly, there was a terrible noise and we braked.

We jumped down to see what happened.

The bath wagon, which weighed 81 tons, had derailed.

Overnight, the coach was put back on the tracks.

During all of this activity,

Göring graced us with his presence,

and bought crates of beer for the engineers.

And we had to put up with his endless stupid advice.

Powell: The Begleitkommando bodyguards on board

were not the only protection.

The Fuhrer Special did not travel by itself.

A separate train traveled in advance of it

with the code name "Kleinasien,"

and a third train traveled behind it

with the code name "Asien."

These trains carried the men

and equipment of Hitler's Begleit Battalion,

the elite military unit detailed to protect his headquarters.

Whenever Hitler left his train to visit a location

near the front or in occupied territory,

he was accompanied by a motorized escort

manned by the Fuhrer Begleit Battalion.

This included armored cars and motorcycle troops

with heavy machine guns and other heavy weapons.

The convoy they formed was nicknamed

the "Grey Column" after the drab military color

the Mercedes six-wheelers were painted.

To breach the Special's defenses,

you would need a small army --

tanks, aircraft, anti-armor weapons.

But Hitler's best defense was uncertainty.

Assassins never knew exactly where he would be.

Before Hitler traveled,

decoy trains would set off across Germany.

Frequently, to confuse potential assassins,

he changed his mind at the last moment

and traveled by air or road.

Wherever the special train stopped

to act as a headquarters, Condor aircraft

captained by Hitler's personal pilot, Hans Baur,

would be stationed at a nearby airfield

in case the Fuhrer needed to make an unexpected trip.

All this uncertainty wrecked the carefully managed timetables

of the German rail road,

but the Third Reich was now devoted

to protecting its Fuhrer,

and nothing was allowed to interfere with that.

When Hitler traveled by train,

the disruption was enormous.

He believed that unpredictability

was the key to avoiding assassination,

and insisted that his train routes remain secret.

[Whistle blows]

But this meant that timetables

had to be altered at the very last moment.

It caused havoc throughout the German rail network,

as regular trains were held back or diverted.

Journeys begun at short notice

worked best on familiar routes, such as Berlin to Munich,

where a two-hour warning was thought to be sufficient.

Sometimes the Fuhrer Special

would run without Hitler on board,

the ghost trains adding another level of uncertainty.

When the Fuhrer Special was running in Germany,

locomotives carrying local train managers

were told to run 15 minutes ahead of it.

Their nerve-wrecking job was to test the track

and attract any danger intended for the Fuhrer.

SS security guards inspected entire sections of track,

searching for mines or any kinds of bomb.

Generally, Hitler enjoyed his train journeys.

He felt relaxed and very secure.

In the first two years of the war,

when his train stopped at a station,

Hitler would wave to people from his Pullman car,

sometimes even lowering the window

to shake their hands or receive gifts.

These occasions must have given the bodyguard

near heart failure, since any of the packages

could have contained a bomb.

But for the moment,

their Fuhrer was the most popular man in Germany.

For his first military campaign --

the invasion of Poland that began World War II --

Hitler used the Special Train

to visit the front.

It acted as a mobile fortress and HQ,

closely guarded wherever it stopped

by the Begleit Battalion.

And from this base,

the Grey Column would take Hitler

out to watch his troops in action

and meet his senior commanders.

In May and June 1940, as German armies swept

into Holland, Belgium, and France,

the Special Train was again used

to take Hitler to view his advancing troops.

This time, a series of field headquarters

had been established, but the train was always on hand

to provide secure accommodation when necessary.

And it was shortly after the brilliant Blitzkrieg victory

that Hitler used his special train

for several important journeys.

On July 6, 1940, he left his forward HQ,

code named Tannenberg

near Freudenstadt deep in the Black Forest,

to travel back to Berlin for an official victory celebration.

Once again, it was an anxious time for the bodyguard,

for this time there was no secret about Hitler's route.

The track was lined with adoring crowds.

And at many stations, the train stopped

so the Fuhrer could be touched by his loyal subjects

and receive their homage.

In Berlin,

fresh opportunities for assassins awaited.

The SS and Berlin police had planned as best they could,

but no one could have anticipated the greeting

which awaited the conquering hero.

Girls of the Hitler Mädchen

had been up since dawn

strewing the parade route with flowers.

The crowd of more than a million people

came close to overwhelming the guards trying to control it.

Hitler was met at the Anhalter Station

by his top military commanders...

and then driven slowly over the carpet of flowers

to the Reich Chancellery.

There an immense crowd had filled

the Wilhelmsplatz,

and Hitler and his senior commanders

appeared repeatedly on the balcony.

[Crowd cheering ]

Three months later,

on October 23, 1940,

the Sonderzug took Hitler

on a diplomatic mission from Berlin to Hendaye,

the most southwesterly town in France,

for a meeting with the Spanish dictator

General Francisco Franco.

Hitler was anxious to lure Spain

into the war against Britain so as to block

his sole remaining enemy’s supply route

through the straits of Gibraltar to the Middle East,

and if possible, capture the rock itself.

The wily Caudillo greeted the Fuhrer effusively,

listened closely to his arguments,

but avoided being drawn into the war.

As he returned from this unsuccessful mission,

Hitler stopped his train in the unoccupied zone of France

to meet Marshal Philippe Petain,

head of the nominally independent French government

in Vichy.

A few weeks later,

Hitler again used the train as his traveling hotel

to go to Florence and confer with his new ally.

Mussolini had brought Italy into the war

as soon as the runaway German victory in France

had made Hitler seem unstoppable.

This time, the bodyguard had to rely on

the Italian Secret Service and police

for the protection of their Führer.

The crowds were immense

and could easily have contained an assassin,

but once again the trip passed off without incident.

In December 1940,

Hitler decided that he wanted to celebrate Christmas

with his troops in France.

He had been a front-line soldier

on the Western Front for much of World War I,

and military company was like family for him.

On December 22,

Hitler flew from Berlin to southern Belgium

where he joined his Special Train.

For the next four days, the Grey Column took him

to visit his troops in the Pas-de-Calais area

and bask in their adulation.

Christmas Day was spent

at a Luftwaffe base where the Fuhrer lunched with a unit

commanded by the leading ace Adolf Galland.

The Special Train acted as his hotel and command post,

stationed by a tunnel near Renaix.

Throughout the war, tunnels made perfect air raid shelters

for the Fuhrer Special.

At this stage, with the RAF still rebuilding

after its losses in the Battle of Britain,

the Germans had air supremacy,

and there was little threat.

But within a year,

using its new longer-range aircraft,

such as the Mosquito fighter-bomber,

the RAF began sweeps

across occupied Europe

to shoot up anything that moved on rail or road.

The Special Train would have been at considerable risk,

but by then, Hitler's interest had shifted far to the east,

and he barely ever visited the west again.

This Christmas holiday ended on December 27th,

when Hitler flew back to Berlin.

The bodyguard must have breathed a sigh of relief

to get him back on safer ground.

He was in the capital for just one day

before flying down to his private retreat

at Berchtesgaden.

This now became the planning center for the greatest,

most crucial, and most destructive

military adventure of his career,

the invasion of Russia.

It was a decision which would not only imperil

all Hitler's achievements so far,

but introduce a whole new

scale of threats to his personal safety,

which his bodyguard would have to confront.

And one of the most immediate attempts

would involve a deadly attack on the Special Train.

On the June 22, 1941,

Hitler sent three massive German armies --

three million men and over three thousand tanks --

to invade the Soviet Union.

Operation Barbarossa had begun.

The next day, Hitler stepped onto the Fuhrer Special

at the Anhalter Bahnhof in Berlin

at 12:30 in the afternoon.

He was going to the Eastern Front.

Traveling overnight, he arrived for the first time

at the Wolf's Lair, his military headquarters near Rastenburg

in present-day Poland.

The Wolf's Lair now became

Hitler's principal base

during his titanic struggle with Russia.

The speed of his armies' early advance

and the immense distances to be covered

meant that Hitler now used aircraft

as his main method of getting to the front

for conferences with his commanders.

But the Fuhrer Special remained his usual method of transport

between the Wolf's Lair and Berlin.

This presented his bodyguard with a particular problem.

The trip meant passing through part of occupied Poland.

The Nazis were enforcing a savagely harsh regime

in the conquered land, and Polish resistance fighters

saw the railway as a good target.

In the autumn of 1941,

Polish agents got word that Hitler was traveling

from Rastenburg to Berlin by train.

[Whistle blows]

When the Special left Königsberg,

they swung into action.

Several 12-kilogram explosive charges

were laid alongside the track just 20 minutes

before the Fuhrer Special was expected to pass by.

The explosives would be ignited by radio control

from a transmitter held just 400 meters from the line.

Usually, throughout Germany and Nazi conquered territories,

trains ceded priority to the Hitler Special.

The Polish saboteurs knew this.

They also knew that a bodyguard train

might also travel ahead of the main train.

But on this one occasion,

Hitler's train was held back

while another train -- nothing to do with his Special --

hurtled onwards.

It was this train that hit the explosives

as they were detonated by the Poles.

The train was derailed

and 430 Germans were killed in the crash.

Amazingly, Hitler had avoided the train bomb by pure chance.

But it set his many enemies thinking.

Suddenly, the Fuhrer seemed vulnerable

on his armored Special.

Among those who were prompted to look at the challenge

of getting round the many defenses

of Hitler's mobile fortress

was Britain's Special Operations Executive -- SOE.

This organization had been set up, as Winston Churchill put it,

"to set Europe ablaze"

by supporting resistance movements

across Nazi-occupied Europe.

Because of Hitler's extraordinarily complex

and widespread security measures,

Germany was considered largely impregnable.

The control of the SS and the Gestapo

was too great for British-backed agents

to carry out operations inside its borders.

But in May 1942,

this attitude began to change.

SOE-trained Czech agents were sent to kill Reinhard Heydrich,

the brutal deputy Reich Protector

of Bohemia and Moravia.

His official residence was in Hradcany Castle

in the center of Prague,

but his family lived at Panenske Brezany

on the outskirts of the city.

Every morning, Heydrich drove to his office

in an open-topped Mercedes

with only his driver to accompany him.

His route never varied.

Heydrich believed that the Nazis

had completely cowed the Czech population,

and he had nothing to fear from them.

At 10:35 A.M.

on May 27,1942

this overconfidence proved fatal.

The car roared down a hill in the suburb of Liben,

and slowed to take a sharp bend.

It was then, as the car was virtually at a standstill,

that two men stepped forward, one just ahead of the car.

Foolishly Heydrich's driver stopped the car.

The men were British-trained Czech agents,

Jan Kubis

and Jozef Gabcik.

Gabcik pointed a Sten submachine gun at Heydrich, but it jammed.

Kubis then threw

an armor-piercing bomb at the back of the Mercedes.

It exploded, spraying shrapnel

and fragments of the car through the air.

Heydrich was stunned by the explosion

but managed to stagger out of the car.

Heydrich was rushed to hospital,

and it appeared as if he would survive.

But splinters from the bomb

had embedded themselves inside him.

Seven days later, he died from blood poisoning.

Hitler was shaken and enraged by the attack

and ordered savage reprisals,

including the killing of over 5,000 civilians.

It was an appallingly costly operation for the Czechs

but proved that top Nazis could be reached,

and that this might include Hitler.

In spring 1944,

as German forces in occupied Europe

prepared to face an Allied invasion,

SOE ratcheted up the tension

by mounting a coordinated assassination offensive.

Code named Operation Ratweek,

this targeted senior Nazis throughout Norway,

Denmark, France, and the Netherlands.

Few details have ever emerged

about this operation,

but at least a dozen SS and other officers

were killed in France.

SOE even had a new weapon designed for the task --

a silenced 9mm automatic gun called the Welrod,

which could be easily dismantled and hidden.

The success of these assassinations

now encouraged SOE to consider aiming

for the greatest wartime target of all.

And SOE's director of operations,

Brigadier Colin Gubbins,

sent a request to Britain's war' cabinet

for guidance as to whether proposals

to assassinate Hitler should be considered.

A cautious reply came back.

"The chiefs of staff were unanimous that,

"from the military point of view,

"it was almost an advantage

"that Hitler should remain in control of German strategy,

"having regard to the blunders he has made,

"but on the wider point of view,

the sooner he was got out of the way the better."

So Gubbins initiated Operation Foxley,

an examination of every possible way of killing Hitler.

His researchers spoke to many German prisoners of war

who had worked for Hitler.

Major General Sir Stewart Menzies,

chief of the Secret Service,

provided information on Hitler's movements

and methods of transport.

As they began work,

the SOE planners faced one particular problem,

that many Allied decision makers

were strongly opposed to killing Hitler.

The chiefs of staff had touched on the military reason --

that Hitler's operational blundering

made him worth more to the Allies alive than dead.

But there was also a political consideration --

that if Hitler were killed too obviously by Allied action,

the Nazi party would be left in power.

Some planners suggested

that it would be best to make the assassination look

as if it had originated inside Germany.

Otherwise, there was the risk of turning Hitler into a martyr.

That was the last thing Churchill or any of the Allies

wanted at this late stage of the war.

The hunt was on to find ways of making Hitler's death

look as if it had resulted from a German plot,

and soon his train began to seem

one of the most likely possibilities.

As Operation Foxley,

the British plot to kill Adolf Hitler,

got under way, the SOE planners

seemed swiftly to have rejected the idea of an attack

on either his East Prussian HQ at Rastenburg

or the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.

They were too far away and too heavily guarded.

Soon, the focus was on attacking him either at the Berghof,

his residence in Bavaria, or while he was on his train.

Strafing

or bombing the train were briefly considered but rejected

because of the difficulty of pinning down

precisely where it would be

and whether Hitler would be on it.

Also, these methods of killing Hitler

would risk making him look like a martyr

who had been killed by enemy action.

So SOE agents looked for more subtle ways

of infiltrating the Fuhrer’s defenses,

and bizarrely, one area of interest

became Hitler's eating habits.

He was a notoriously fussy vegetarian

and suffered from stomach complaints

throughout his career.

His food was tasted by his personal doctor, Theo Morell,

to check that it was not too salty or spicy.

And Morell frequently had to treat the Fuhrer

for what he described as "colossal flatulence.'

By 1944, all food and drink deliveries

to Hitler's residences and his train

were supervised by Martin Bormann,

his personal secretary.

And SOE began to look for ways of poisoning these.

A full study was made of the Fuhrer Special.

By then its code name had been changed from Amerika --

not surprisingly --

to the more Germanic "Brandenburg".

Key information came from a German prisoner of war

who had worked on the Special.

He confirmed that, while traveling,

Hitler was permanently accompanied

by his Begleitkommando close protection squad.

And the total number of staff and extra bodyguards

on the train was reckoned to about 100.

When the train was at rest in a railway siding,

armed railway police guarded it,

working under the jurisdiction of Captain Hans Rattenhuber,

chief of the Reich's Security Service or RSD.

When the train was acting as a mobile HQ,

it was surrounded by men

of the Fuhrer Begleit Battalion.

It was a formidable ring of steel to break through.

But the main problem with getting at Hitler's Special

remained the unpredictability

insisted on by Hitler.

The main German train controller

was given warning of Hitler's route only 12 hours

before a journey.

Local stations were usually told just 30 minutes

before the Special passed through.

The SOE's informant

mentioned that in Austria, Hitler's homeland,

security generally seemed to be less strict,

and this began to suggest

a weak point in Hitler's defenses.

The Fuhrer Special was frequently serviced

and resupplied at Salzburg in Austria,

the nearest major station to Berchtesgaden.

And the staff at the station were given advance warning

that the Special would be arriving

so that special security precautions

could be put in force.

Railway personnel used several cafes.

It should not be difficult for agents to discover

when the Fuhrer Special was in town.

And even though the RSD or Begleit Battalion

guarded it closely, resistance groups

in occupied Europe had shown that marshalling yards

could be breached and bombs attached to trains.

There were also opportunities to get at the train.

Over 100,000 foreign workers

had been brought to work in Salzburg.

And many were used at Salzburg station

as cleaners and laborers.

Hitler's Special was usually cleaned

by members of the Begleit Battalion,

but SOE's informant reported that one time at least,

the train used by Joachim von Ribbentrop,

Hitler's Foreign Minister,

had been cleaned by French women,

a surprising lapse in security which might be repeated.

Water was taken by hose at Salzburg from hydrants

into the freshwater tank in the dining car.

There seemed a real possibility that an agent

could be infiltrated to poison Hitler's drinking water.

SOE labs had developed a slow-acting poison,

code named "I" which was tasteless and odorless.

Its presence could not be detected

in either coffee or tea.

And the assassins at SOE

knew Hitler never drank alcohol,

much preferring cups of tea with milk.

The poison would kill him over about six days.

The blackout at the marshalling yard

would help cover the operation

as agents contaminated the train's water supply.

An alternative weak point was identified by SOE --

a railway siding at Klessheim,

where Hitler usually disembarked for the Berghof.

The siding was surrounded by thick woods

which would provide good cover for a sniper

armed with a high-velocity rifle.

The main problem was that a barracks

of the Fuhrer Begleit Battalion was nearby,

and it frequently patrolled the woods.

The plans for Operation Foxley were beginning to come together,

but the plotters still faced two problems.

Would they be able to make Hitler’s assassination

look as if it had been carried out by renegade officers?

And would they be able to get to Hitler

before his own errors brought his regime crashing down?

July 20, 1944.

A bomb devastated the conference hut

at Hitler's Eastern Front HQ, the Wolf's Lair at Rastenburg.

Hitler stumbled out only slightly wounded.

Inside, six senior officers lay dead or dying.

The most serious attempt by German officers

to get rid of their Fuhrer had narrowly failed.

News of the attempt reverberated across the English Channel,

where Britain's SOE was deep into Operation Foxley,

an investigation of ways

that Hitler might be assassinated.

One of the planners' key objectives

was to make any attempt look as if it came from within Germany

so as to prevent Hitler being seen as a martyr.

Scores of senior officers had been swiftly executed

or purged in the subsequent Nazi show trials,

but were there more who might be implicated in another attempt?

Some German prisoners of war were willing to volunteer

for a mission to kill Hitler.

But what was the genuine feeling

in the German army following the Stauffenberg attempt?

To find out,

British intelligence interrogated the German generals

in their custody at a special center set up near London.

Aware that the Germans would not necessarily tell

the truth in a formal interrogation,

their rooms were bugged.

German-speaking stool pigeons

lulled the prisoners into a false sense of security

and asked them questions about the war,

and any indiscreet responses were recorded.

General Dietrich von Choltitz was army commander of Paris

when he was captured in August 1944.

Soon afterwards,

the interrogation center officers overheard him

admit to knowing Stauffenberg and his associates.

Man: "The general atmosphere among the top military leaders

"was that it was time for a change.

"There was not a single general who did not want it.

"They all knew that events could not go on

"as they were.

"There was no great surprise when we heard of it.

It was expected."

Powell: Choltitz was then asked if he thought

there might be another attempt on Hitler's life.

Man: "I would put my hand in the fire and swear to it.

Fate must remove this man."

Powell: Choltitz was not alone.

Numerous other captured German officers

voiced similar views

in these secret recordings.

It was enough to convince the planners of Operation Foxley

that any attempt on Hitler, so long as it was discreet,

would almost certainly be blamed on people within his own ranks.

But events now moved too fast

for Operation Foxley and its poisoned water plan.

On the Eastern Front,

the relentless advance of the Soviet Union

was grinding down what remained of the German army.

In western Europe, following their breakout

from Normandy, the Allies were advancing

towards the German border.

On July 14th,

Hitler had left Berchtesgaden

in the Special Train for Rastenburg.

He would never return.

And SOE would never have the opportunity

to put any of its plans into action.

From July to November 1944, Hitler spent most of his time

at his Wolf's Lair headquarters at Rastenburg.

There, he would stare at his maps

and rage at his generals for not fighting hard enough.

By November, with Soviet troops on the border of East Prussia,

Hitler was forced to leave Rastenburg.

On November 20th, he flew to Berlin,

not daring to take his Special Train

through what remained of occupied Poland.

He would never return to the Eastern Front again.

But Hitler still had one final hand to play.

He had convinced himself that,

if only he could fight the Americans and the British

to a standstill in western Europe,

he might be able to achieve a peace treaty

that would secure his regime.

So his armies

on the Belgian border were secretly reinforced.

Operation Winter Storm was planned

to split the U.S. and British forces,

capture Antwerp,

and force the Western Allies to negotiate.

With the German forces heavily outnumbered and short of fuel,

it was a forlorn hope,

as everyone except Hitler understood.

Nevertheless, on December 11, 1944,

Hitler took the Sonderzug to a forward HQ

so as to supervise the coming battle in person.

It would be the last major outing

for his mobile headquarters

and its Begleit Battalion bodyguard.

As the train rattled through the dark German forests,

the Fuhrer knew this would be

his final chance to save himself.

When his train stopped at stations,

the curtains in his carriage stayed drawn.

He no longer wished to see his people.

He no longer wished to see the destruction

he had brought to his country.

It was a dangerous journey.

The German air force no longer controlled the sky

over its country.

Allied fighters and bombers roamed at will...

attacking any German trains they spotted.

It was only marginally safer to travel by train than by air.

Hitler's Western headquarters was code named Adlerhorst,

the Eagle's Eyrie,

and was located near Bad Nauheim.

On December 16th,

German tanks and soldiers burst through

the fog-shrouded hills and forests of the Ardennes,

taking the U.S. troops completely by surprise.

Many of them were expecting a quiet Christmas.

It turned into an inferno.

Appropriately, Hitler's closest bodyguards

were heavily involved

in this last desperate assault.

Sepp Dietrich commanded a complete SS Panzer army,

which included the men

of the original Leibstandarte regiment.

As this SS elite surged forward, Hitler's bodyguard

again showed its utter ruthlessness

in the defense of its Führer.

A U.S. unit of about 100 men was captured near Malmedy.

Rather than being sent back as prisoners,

the Americans were herded into a snowy field

and machine-gunned.

A few survived to tell the tale.

At his trial after the war,

Dietrich denied all knowledge of this terrible atrocity,

but received a life sentence for his complicity.

By January 1945,

the offensive in the Ardennes had run out of steam.

The Americans and British soon pushed the Germans back.

Hitler boarded his train on January 15, 1945,

and fled back to Berlin.

He would not be needing the Fuhrer Special ever again.

The war was effectively over for Hitler,

and he spent the last months of the conflict

in his bunker deep beneath the Reich Chancellery.

Some die-hard Nazis hoped they could form

a bastion in southern Germany.

There, they would establish an alpine redoubt

that would be so costly to subdue

that the Allies would be forced to negotiate.

To this end,

a group of officers requisitioned the Fuhrer Special

and rode south into Austria.

The train's last stop was in the Carinthian mountains

at Mallnitz.

But the alpine redoubt was a mirage

and the train and the officers on it soon captured

by advancing American forces.

Hitler's Pullman coach,

where he had planned his warmongering,

was blown up.

The Allies did not want it to become a shrine

for die-hard Nazis after the war.

The Sonderzug,

Hitler's special headquarters train,

had been instrumental

in enabling the warlord to exercise personal control

over his armies as they swept across Europe

and deep into the Soviet Union.

It had taken him on some of his most triumphant journeys

and brought him back from some of his most critical defeats.

For his bodyguard,

it had been the mobile fortress in which they had been able

to keep their Fuhrer safe from his enemies

even when his world was collapsing in ruins around him.

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