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Bauer edged the window open, cool air rushing in, and looked through his binoculars. It was coming up on 3:30 p.m., half an hour before the young men of the Hitler Youth would begin their march. “Your choice, mein Führer,” he mumbled. “I kill you by yourself or in front of a bunch of kids.”
He grabbed his walkie-talkie and spoke into it. “Berta, this is Anton. What’s your status?”
“I thought I got to be Anton this time,” squawked Erich von der Haas.
“You want to handle the dirty work while I sit in a getaway truck, you can be Anton.”
“Being the intelligence guy is boring. I should’ve been a pilot.”
“You wanted to fly?”
“Oh, yeah, I went through aviation training and everything. Then someone saw my score on some aptitude test and forced me into signals intelligence.”
“I didn’t know that. You can fly a plane?”
“There’s a lot of things you don’t know about me. You want my life story, or do you want to know if the exit plan is ready?”
“Your life story can wait.”
“The exit plan is ready. What’s your status?”
“Nothing. Not even the FBK.”
The Führerbegleitkommando, Bauer meant. Before Hitler would step out on the balcony, Bauer would expect the FBK to walk out first and inspect the surroundings.
“Well, they’re not on the street anymore,” said von der Haas. “So they’re probably up in the apartment with him.”
Just then, Bauer twitched at the sight of one of the FBK guards, with his gray coat and Walther pistol, walking onto the balcony. He was followed by two other guards, who reached the edge of the balcony and looked around, two of them with binoculars.
“FBK on the balcony. Going dark.” Bauer pulled back, his heart pounding, removing the barrel of his sniper rifle from sight. It would all be timing now. Count to five, give them a chance to sweep across his position and find nothing.
No, ten. Count to ten. He steeled himself, forced himself to hold back. If he jumped out with the rifle too quickly, he could reveal himself.
He rose again, slid the barrel of his sniper rifle out the window, and looked through his scope. Just the same three FBK guards, though one of them was turning—
And then he appeared, the trademark slicked black hair with the single bang falling over his forehead, the toothbrush mustache.
Bauer had him. His target was in his sights.
It felt like slow motion now, as the man he’d so longed to assassinate walked to the railing of the balcony and rested on it.
“Look at me, you fascist pig,” Bauer whispered. “I’ll blow that stupid mustache off your face.”
As if summoned, Hitler did, in fact, turn in Bauer’s direction. Bauer squeezed the trigger.
It felt like an eternity. He relived all those years separated from his family in that one instant, as he locked eyes with his sworn enemy and watched the top of his head explode from the impact of the bullet.
104
BAUER TOSSED HIS WEAPON and rushed down the stairwell and out the rear exit, where von der Haas waited in a large truck bearing the name Hultquist Metzgerei, a butcher shop. Bauer jumped into the rear of the truck, filled with hanging slabs of meat, and the truck sped away.
He was buzzing. He had to concentrate on escaping, on getting out of Nuremberg alive, on returning to his family, but his body shook with the realization of what he’d done. As he held on to a railing along the rear meat locker, as the truck skidded and swerved and the sides of meat swayed side to side, one word kept springing to his lips.
“Finally,” he whispered.
Nazi leadership immediately departed Nuremberg and holed up in a secured concrete bunker in nearby Fürth on Beim Korwinkel Straße, guarded by nearly an entire regiment of SS guards. Fifty feet belowground, two hours after the shooting, Martin Bormann entered the dimly lit bunker with the latest developments.
“It appears to have been a lone gunman, who remains at large,” he said. “They recovered the rifle used. It was,” he read from a piece of paper, “a Gewehr 98 bolt-action rifle.”
