As bad as things had already been for Germany since the United States entered World War II on the Allied side, they would get exponentially worse following the sinking of the Tirpitz and the German 6th Army’s defeat at Stalingrad. The forces unleashed by Heydrich’s ill-advised North America terror plot could not be held back or even diminished. In the Mediterranean, U.S. troops fought side-by-side with the British 8th Army as it chased what was left of Rommel’s Afrika Korps out of Tunisia; in Norway, OSS personnel were smuggling arms and other vital equipment to that country’s anti-Nazi resistance movement; in the Atlantic, the U.S. Navy was sinking U-boats left and right; and all over occupied Europe, U.S. Army Air Corps bombers were mercilessly hammering away at the beleaguered Nazi war machine. Any idea of reviving the espionage network Berlin had had in place in America before 1940 was basically out of the question, as the FBI had for all intents and purposes shattered it during its hunt for known and suspected Nazi collaborators on U.S. soil following the Penn Station bombing.

But perhaps the biggest blows to the Third Reich on the Western Front were still to come. In Great Britain a vast invasion force was being assembled in anticipation of the moment when the Allies would at last be able to force a landing on the French coast; in Egypt, British and American generals were putting the finishing touches on plans to mount an amphibious landing in Sicily following the conclusion of the North Africa campaign. By March of 1943 American bombers had attacked Rome for the first time, dealing a critical setback to what was left of Axis power in the Mediterranean-- within less than ten days after the historic bombing mission, the German ambassador to Italy sent an ominous report back to Berlin suggesting that the 21-year-old fascist regime of Benito Mussolini would more likely than not collapse before
the beginning of summer.

Within little more than a month after the report reached its intended recipients in Berlin, the last remnants of the Afrika Korps had been evacuated to Germany and anti-Fascist rallies were being held in every major Italian city. Hitler was beside himself at the way the Axis cause in Europe seemed to be falling apart at every turn-- and he wasn’t any happier at the misfortunes befalling his Japanese allies in the Pacific. Relations between the Führer and SS commander-in-chief Heinrich Himmler, which had been somewhat strained in the aftermath of the failure of Fall Schlange, deteriorated still further as the Nazi war machine continued to sustain defeat after on both the Western and Eastern Fronts.

The situation only got worse for Hitler as spring became summer. By the time America’s Independence Day holiday arrived, the Mussolini regime was on the brink of collapse and Allied troops were not only in full control of the islands Sicily and Sardinia but also gaining an increasing foothold on Italy’s mainland; Allied bombers had stepped up their attacks on Germany and German bases in occupied Europe; Japan found itself unable to knock China or India out of the war in Asia; and Germany’s chief Balkan ally, Hungary, was starting to show signs
of drifting out of the Axis orbit. Even within Germany itself there were rumblings of discontent among Hitler’s subjects, rumblings that found their way to the ears of the Gestapo and led to a crackdown on anyone who so much as looked cross-eyed at an SS officer. The White Rose youth dissident movement, organized by two high school students outraged over the detention of a mutual friend, became a particular target of the Gestapo’s wrath and collapsed after its founders were brutally put to death.

But there was little if anything the Axis powers could do to roll back the tide of defeat now increasingly flooding over their totalitarian regimes. On July 15th, 1943 Italy became the first of the Axis powers to have its dictator overthrown when Mussolini was voted out of power by his own Fascist Grand Council and arrested on direct orders from King Victor Emmanuel III. Desperate to try and turn the war’s fortunes back in favor of the Axis powers, Hitler ordered the Wehrmacht to occupy Italy and dispatched an SS commando team to break Mussolini out of jail; while these acts might have thrown the Allies off their game in the short term, in the long run they only served to delay the inevitable.

Within two months after Mussolini was ousted Italy had defected to the Allied camp and cells of Italian partisans, some of them former soldiers trained by the Germans, were waging a no-holds-barred type of guerrilla war against their erstwhile Axis comrades. Hitler tried to keep the Fascist flame burning in Italy by creating a puppet state he called the Salo Republic, but the overwhelming majority of Italians wanted nothing more to do with Mussolini or Fascism and resisted all of Hitler’s attempts to drag their country back into the Axis camp. With support from the American OSS and its British cousin SOE(Special Operations Executive, a forerunner of today’s MI-5 and MI-6 agencies), the Italian anti-Nazi insurgency hammered at German occupation forces in Italy like a boxer who had his opponent on the ropes and was ready to give him the knockout punch.

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By the end of 1943 only deeply committed Nazis and congenital pessimists still believed Germany could win the war. To more sober bservers it was readily apparent that the best the Third Reich could hope to achieve now was a stalemate, and even that would require more time, resources, or luck than Berlin had at that point. The Red Army’s victory at Stalingrad had energized anti-Nazi resistance all across eastern Europe; the Allied campaign in Italy was tying up Wehrmacht troops and equipment that might otherwise have gone to shoring up the vulnerable coastal defenses in German-occupied France; and at sea, the Kriegsmarine had for all intents and purposes lost the Battle of the Atlantic. 1944 began on a sour note for the Third Reich as two key U- boat bases on the French coast were knocked out of action by Allied bombers and Finland, one of Germany’s staunchest remaining allies in continental Europe, lost its second war with the Soviet Union and had to accept peace terms even more harsh than those Moscow had imposed on her after the first Russo-Finnish war in the winter of 1939-40.

The coming of spring brought still more setbacks for the Nazis. American bombers operating from Italian bases struck German military and industrial facilities in Romania and Yugoslavia and the Italian capital, Rome, fell to Allied troops after one of the hardest ground campaigns seen in any theater of combat; in Poland, complacent Nazi beliefs that the Poles had been permanently terrified into submission to the Reich were dramatically and violently proven wrong as Polish guerrillas started an anti-Nazi insurrection in Warsaw; and the German army’s long siege of Leningrad, Russia’s second-most important city, finally collapsed as Soviet regular troops aided by local partisans broke through the siege ring and liberated the metropolis once known as St. Petersburg(and would be so called again after the Soviet Union dissolved at the end of the Cold War).

But the Reich’s doom was truly sealed in June of 1944, when the Anglo-American coalition began its long-awaited invasion of France and the Soviets commenced their Bagration offensive to drive what was left of German occupation forces in the Ukraine and Belarus out of Soviet territory. It was then that Hitler’s regime started reaping the bitter harvest it had planted on that fateful day nearly four years earlier with his ill-fated decision to approve Fall Schlange. Once the Allied foothold in France had been solidified and the Red Army had taken back the Ukraine from Nazi control, the story of the Wehrmacht during the summer of 1944 became one of endless retreat toward the borders of the Reich. The U-boat, once the most feared class of warship on the high seas, was irrevocably on the defensive as the Kriegsmarine crumbled to
pieces before commander-in-chief Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz’s helpless eyes; the Luftwaffe was a pale and fading ghost of its once proud and magnificent self; and even the SS was starting to experience morale problems in its ranks as the full scope of the Nazi empire’s impending
collapse became steadily clearer.

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For Heinrich Himmler, a man of weak character at the best of times, the thought of accepting even the smallest measure of blame for the fiasco Fall Schlange had ultimately turned out to be was utterly out of the question. He certainly wasn’t going to acknowledge that he’d been the primary architect of a covert operations scheme gone utterly and catastrophically wrong; doing so would have meant being stripped of his power and prestige, possibly even being put to death in the same ruthless manner with which his SS had killed so many other people under Nazi rule. And Himmler was above all else a man who prized power and was supremely committed to self-preservation. With that in mind, the SS commander-in-chief issued a secret executive order to his most trusted senior staff in the early autumn of 1944 in which he directed them to hunt down and destroy all remaining papers that could even tenuously link him to the ill-fated operational plan for Fall Schlange.

That same secret order also made provision for the execution by“black ops” agents of any personnel who were deemed a security risk or thought likely to break under Allied interrogation in the event they were captured. Ironically, one of the first victims of this grim edict was a man who’d long been one of Himmler’s most trusted confidants-- Adolf Eichmann, architect of the murderous death camp system that was the centerpiece of Hitler’s Final Solution. Eichmann had had a small but crucial role in laying the groundwork for Fall Schlange(he’d given advice on target selection to the late Reinhard Heydrich), and so by Himmler’s lights represented a potential leak in the dam of secrecy which the SS commander-in-chief was now trying to construct around his ill-conceived and fatally bungled terror plot. On September 28th, 1944, as Allied advance units in Holland were fighting the tattered remains of Kurt von Rundstedt’s Army Group North for control of the historic city of Amsterdam, assassins shot Eichmann twice through the heart and a third time in the neck as he was preparing to board a plane to flee to Argentina.

As it turned out, Himmler’s efforts to hush up the facts about his role in Fall Schlange were in vain: between the information U.S. authorities had garnered from the Justice Department’s interrogation of the perpetrators of the Penn Station and Charleston attacks, the files at SS headquarters that Allied intelligence agents had managed to surreptitiously microfilm, and timely leaks by some of Himmler’s own staff seeking to protect themselves against possible war crimes prosecution, it was inevitable that the truth Himmler was so urgently trying to conceal would eventually see the light of day. His fate was effectively sealed when an SOE undercover operative gathering evidence about SS atrocities happened to come across a copy of the top secret communiqué in which Himmler officially gave Heydrich the green light to proceed with the terror attacks on North America; the information was duly passed on to the U.S. military attaché in London, who then in turn telegraphed it to the War Department in Washington. This was the smoking gun that definitively tied Himmler to the operational plan for Fall Schlange-- and doomed what little chance the SS commander-in- chief might have had of escaping his grim fate. In the spring of 1945, as the Anglo-American forces under Eisenhower were racing the Red Army legions of Zhukov and Koniev towards Berlin, Himmler was spotted by a U.S. 3rd Army patrol while attempting to cross the German-Swiss border wearing civilian clothes. Frantic to avoid getting arrested and tried for the myriad war crimes he’d either sanctioned or taken part in, he made a break for it only to be cut down by a burst of machine gun fire just inches from the Swiss frontier. (To prevent future generations of fascists from turning the spot of Himmler’s death into a Nazi shrine, U.S. military authorities subsequently ordered the site designated as a memorial to local Jews who’d perished in the Holocaust. The body of Himmler himself was cremated and the ashes scattered in the Baltic.)

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Scarcely four months after Himmler’s demise, the war in the Pacific ended with Japan’s surrender to the Allies after two of her cities were destroyed by atomic bombs. The atomic attacks marked a fiery postscript to the story of vengeance American forces had been writing since the Penn Station bombing; indeed, in one of the odd coincidences war sometimes brings about, the tail gunner for the B- 29 which carried out the second atom bomb raid was a cousin of one of the victims of the Penn terror attack.

While it’s hard to say whether the United States would have entered the Second World War in 1940 without the impetus of the SS terror attacks is a topic on which we can only speculate. But this much is indisputable: those attacks made the American people and their leaders much more interested in the question of how to strike a balance between the basic freedoms that are a bedrock of our way of life and guarding those freedoms against those who would try to eradicate them. To this day, the questions first raised by the FallSchlange attacks are still being debated more than seven decades later.