Thunder Point
Copyright
Harper
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HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd 1993
Copyright © Jack Higgins 1993
Jack Higgins asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
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Source ISBN: 9780007456058
Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007456055
Version: 2015-01-13
Dedication
For my daughter Hannah
Epigraph
Whether Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, Head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Secretary to Adolf Hitler, the most powerful man in Germany after the Führer, actually escaped from the Führer Bunker in Berlin in the early hours of 2 May 1945 or died trying to cross the Weidendammer Bridge has always been a matter of conjecture. Josef Stalin believed him to be alive, Jacob Glas, Bormann’s chauffeur, swore that he saw him in Munich after the war and Eichmann told the Israelis he was still alive in 1960. Simon Wiesenthal, the greatest Nazi hunter of them all, always insisted he was alive and then there was a Spaniard who had served in the German SS who insisted that Bormann had left Norway in a U-boat bound for South America at the very end of the war…
Table of Contents
30 April 1945
The city seemed to be on fire, a kind of hell on earth, the ground shaking as shells exploded and, as dawn came, smoke drifted in a black pall. In the eastern half of Berlin, the Russians were already formally in control, and refugees, carrying what they could of their belongings, moved along Wilhelmstrasse close to the Reich Chancellery in the desperate hope of somehow reaching the West and the Americans.
Berlin was doomed, everyone knew that, and the panic was dreadful to see. Close by the Chancellery, a group of SS were stopping everyone they saw in uniform. Unless such individuals could account for themselves they were immediately accused of desertion in the face of the enemy and hung from the nearest lamppost or tree. A shell screamed in, fired at random by Russian artillery. There were cries of alarm and people scattered.
The Chancellery itself was battered and defaced by the bombardment, particularly at the rear, but deep in the earth, protected by thirty metres of concrete, the Führer