The Knight´s Legacy

Gulf of San Matías

CALETA DE LOS LOROS

SAN MATÍAS GULF

NATIONAL TERRITORY OF RIO NEGRO

ARGENTINE PATAGONIA

AUTUMN OF 1945

In the early hours of the morning the U Boot 734 emerged slowly in the calm waters of the cove. Taking advantage of the high tide it approached up to about five hundred meters from the coast, and several men with binoculars climbed to the turret to visually explore the shore. Before the captain of the ship had been examining the prolonged coastline with the periscope for a couple of hours, at the timid light of the Sun that had just appeared in the East, until he was convinced that both the sea and the coast were uninhabited, and that no intruder would witness the landing.

Suddenly a light shone on the beach, sending pulses in a rhythmic fashion. Once decoded, the Morse message confirmed that they could proceed to the landing without fear. Three inflatable rubber rafts were thrown into the sea, and several crew members secured them to the side of the submarine. The rafts, once occupied by crew members and passengers, were driven to enter the narrow cove helped by the tide. They soon arrived to the sandy beach near the mouth of a stream in the sea where the passengers disembarked in moments in which three armed men emerged from behind some bushes to receive them. Meanwhile the rafts returned to the submarine in order to return to be loaded. In successive trips fourteen passengers and numerous boxes were brought to the beach, being properly inventoried and stacked. Then, most of the crew disembarked as well with their sailor bags  and some boxes with supplies, remnants of the long and hazardous journey. For those people the war was truly over. They showed faces of infinite fatigue, sadness by the defeat and the futility of so much effort for years, but also relief.

Indeed, the news of April 30th 1945 reflected that Adolf Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun had committed suicide in their Berlin bunker. Subsequently, on May 7th, General Alfred Jodl had signed the surrender of all the German troops although a handful of Nazis tried to continue the war for a few days before they were disbanded and captured.

On May 8 the Admiral Doenitz gave the order to surrender and cease fire to all troops and German units. According to previous orders, the commanders of the U-Boots began to destroy their ships to avoid surrendering them, what they could do in an unspecified number. The Allied Command ordered Doenitz to cease this practice and deliver intact all submarines, threatening the captains who disobeyed with being judged martially. The U-Boots had to navigate on the surface with black flags, to publicize their position by radio and surrender in certain predetermined ports. In this way, numerous submersible surrendered in Europe, United States and Canada.

Also in Argentina those actions took place not by having been specified as point of accountability, but because the captains hoped a deal less severe than in other countries. Indeed, although Argentina had declared war on the Axis towards the end of the war, had done so unwillingly and because there were no other alternatives. Perhaps these German officers counted with receiving support from some minor but powerful sectors of the armed forces and some local communities. Thus, on June 10th 1945 the U-530 surrendered at the Naval Base of Mar del Plata commanded by a 26 years old officer called Otto Vermouth, with his 53 men, ill-equipped, exhausted and despondent. Also, on August 17th the U-977 surrendered in the same place commanded by Lieutenant Heinz Schäffer. The boats were delivered without weapons, torpedoes or their logs, which would have enabled to reconstruct their movements. These events brought a wave of rumors about activities of German submarines in Argentine waters. In July 1945 the inhabitants of San Clemente del Tuyú, on the Argentine Atlantic coast near the mouth of the Río de la Plata  reported sightings of submarines at sea. Argentine Navy aircraft were immediately sent to locate them but did not find any traces of them. Certain estimates, probably exaggerated, put between 10 to 20 the number of U-Boots  arriving at the Argentine Atlantic coast most of them in the very long Patagonian coastline; they would have then been sunk in deep waters or would have made again to the sea.

Horstmann was one of the first to walk on the beach. He noted the narrow entrance of the Cove, flanked by dunes and cliffs. He looked with pleasure the smooth contour of the semicircular beach, and the slope which climbed to the Patagonian plateau. The creek actually resembled a broad lake due to its quiet waters, where dove swans and flamingos. The peace of the place admired him, after the feverish activity of the last few months. So, this was to be his new home, after the great interregnum produced by the war, which had kept his life and that of so many others in suspense. As I auspice the picture could not be more receptive and promising; Indeed, in that arid plateau America promised refuge to the fugitives. However, he did not want to cheat himself for he somehow sensed that he would not enjoy peace after the conflict. The secretive nature of his work in Antarctica would prolong its consequences even after the defeat of the Nazi Germany. The interests that moved behind the southern project had already provided and discounted this defeat and would surely have taken precautions for their self-protection and subsistence after the end of the war. Reflecting on this, Horstmann wondered if the entire project, whose name he ignored, was not really a B Plan, a program of contingency for the alleged breakdown of all the structure assembled by Himmler fanatics. He also boasted that the plan had been orchestrated by men who, although belonging to the kidney of Nazism, had a high share of realism. In particular he suspected that Hermann Goering and his followers from the Luftwaffe. Goering had been the inspirers of the Neuschwabenland project in general since it had been developed with a strong support from the air force. Another area likely to support for the project was headed by Admiral Doenitz, Chief of the U-Boot Flotte, the powerful fleet of German submarines, which so much damage had caused to the Allied Nations shipping during the conflict, by attacking and sinking innumerable merchant ships carrying precious supplies needed to continue England and its allies war  efforts, particularly food, fuel and raw materials. Anyway, there were powerful interests, even after the surrender of Germany. The dementia seers who followed Himmler, believed Horstmann, would only  have had in this scheme a secondary role, perhaps by adding the dose of fanatical madness required for specific tasks.

Horstmann wondered what kind of relationship would he have with those survivors of Nazism in the new post-war period, but had no illusions. On the one hand, it was clear that he was not a member of those nuclei, and that they actually regarded him with distrust by his poorly disguised divergence with national-socialism, although he had fulfilled his tasks in the war with patriotism and courage. Unaware of the nature of the interests that such groups would attempt to protect in the future , certainly material interests rather than ideological or based on anthropological fantasies. However, he was in possession of data about the locations of the activities that these groups had being preparing, sites where enormous efforts and economic means had been invested. He had thoroughly recorded his knowledge in a typically German systematic way in his agendas, of which he had never separated, even on trips back to Germany during the war at the risk of being discovered  which would have given rise to interrogation by the Gestapo with questions he could not satisfactorily answers. However, Horstmann had the vague hope, not formulated clearly even to himself that those notebooks, in which there was a mass of information impossible to retain in the memory, and could serve someday as pledge of change to ensure his safety, even though they posed an immediate danger. The time would dispel these illusions.

Two old ramshackle trucks came to search the passengers and cargo, which was uploaded to the vehicles by the U-Boot crew. It caught Horstmann´s attention  the fact that after the successive trips in inflatable rafts from the ship to the shore and back, also sailors were now landing with their bags and other belongings. This implied abandonment, albeit partial, of the ship by its crew, a rather unusual fact in the Kriegsmarine. He  didn't know that the submarine would be carried to a certain distance from the coast and sunk by their officers to erase all traces of their presence on the shores of the Argentine Patagonia.

The truck carrying Horstmann started almost simultaneously with the other and both climbed the cliff leading to the Patagonian plateau and after a while reached a dusty path. At the end of two hours of travel by desert roads, actually just tracks in the vastness of the landscape, the directions of both vehicles split with no explanation. Surprised, Horstmann masked his feelings, while he began to inspect his fellow travelers. He noticed with some surprise that he was the only military on board. Aside from several gray characters, possibly fleeing members of the Nazi party he glimpsed in the shadows a character who made him feel uneasy for reasons that he could not specify. Indeed, something in his face and attitude triggered an internal alarm bell and the Colonel had already learned to pay attention to the signals of his instinct, useful in situations where objective information was absent. Immediately realized what the reason for his feelings was: the man was presumably a member of the SS. A lump in his chest had informed him that the man was armed, which increased his uneasiness. Although there was no way to verify the presumed affiliation, Horstmann decided to assume it as real, and take precautions against the individual. As time passed Horstmann felt he was being observed, monitored he was observed. Long years of exposition to dangers had created in him a sixth sense, linked to survival that had kept him safe up to that moment. He concluded that the simultaneous presence in the truck of the SS and his own was not a coincidence, and decided to proceed accordingly.