The Man in the Bunker

Tom Wilde is an American, recently returned to Cambridge after the war, during which he worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the US intelligence agency, in London. He is happy to re-join his wife and young son and to resume his work as a professor of history but is unable to resist when asked to make a trip to Germany for a very specific purpose.

Although Hitler’s body is said to have been burnt after his suicide in a bunker in Berlin shortly before the end of the war, evidence is unconclusive and many believe he is still alive. The OSS want the uncertainty resolved and, after a previous pair of investigators were killed under dubious circumstances, they ask Wilde to help, with Dutch soldier Mozes Heck to assist him.

The task requires movement about Germany in the immediate post-war period, so the background is a devastated environment, people sheltering in broken buildings, with minimal food and scraping a bare survival, suffering psychological as well as physical trauma. Wilde and Heck also visit displaced persons’ camps full of those in an even worse state, whose survival has been a very close-run thing.

It soon becomes clear that Heck is more interested in finding news of his family, who appear to have been murdered in Nazi camps, and exposing Nazis attempting concealment. When he finds any, Heck is inclined to administer summary justice, and Wilde is barely able to restrain him.

Wilde is on his own much of the time, interviewing those he can find who were present in the Fuhrerbunker at the time of the supposed death, or who for other reasons might know the truth. Many of these are real characters, for whom Rory Clements gives a biographical note at the end of the book.

Although it takes some time before Wilde gets any information to help with his quest, it is quickly apparent that someone is hostile, and Wilde narrowly escapes death several times before he gets evidence to suggest that the mountains on the German/Austrian border might be a fruitful hunting ground.

I had some difficulty with the basic premise here, as Hitler’s survival could hardly have had any real impact on post-war events, which as a historian Wilde would no doubt have appreciated. That the professor would be keen to leave his family for a further period on a potentially dangerous ramble in Germany seemed unlikely.

That aside, however, the book is no doubt a well-informed description of a country devastated by war, with some ruing their erstwhile enthusiasm for fascism, and others unreformed Nazis irredeemably wedded to the warped ideology that brought about so much suffering. The Man in the Bunker has some exciting moments and is particularly likely to appeal to those who find WWII an interesting setting.