The next day, Hoffmann left Berlin for the Penemünde rocket base, leaving behind the three senior generals who were excited about the turn of the situation. It is a fishing village in northeastern Germany, facing the Baltic Sea, about 200 kilometers from Berlin, in a very private location, about 4 hours by car. Speer traveled with him in the same car as usual, but this time did not dislodge the chief aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel Fritz Dahlges.

"It's been a long time since I've seen Comrade Bowman traveling with the Führer." Speer suddenly asked, "He used to be inseparable from you. ”

"Bowman?" Hoffman raised his eyebrows and said with a smile, "He has recently become obsessed with catching spies, and he has endless energy all over his body, and the day before yesterday he reported to me that following the clues of the Canaris treasonous group, he caught a conspiracy gang composed of former Social Democrats and Christian conservative intellectuals and civilian officials, and he called these people the Clessau group." ”

"Clesau?" Speer recalled the name, and suddenly reacted and exclaimed, "This is not the name of the Moltke family's estate?" ”

Hoffman nodded: "That's right, the leader is Count Helmut von Moltke, he was originally an international law expert in the Foreign Intelligence Department of the Intelligence Bureau, and from the family genealogy, he is the grandson of the old Moltke (Chief of the German General Staff of the Franco-Prussian War) and the nephew of Moltke Jr. (Chief of the German General Staff of the First World War), in addition to him, there are also a bunch of characters in the so-called Nine Counts (Graf-Neun), all of whom are Junker nobles. ”

"The royal family is also involved?" Speer knew that the Führer had always been wary of Wilhelm II, who had abdicated the Netherlands, and his direct descendants.

Hoffmann sneered: "No, the old emperor and his two sons are much smarter than the so-called 'young talents' of these Prussian aristocratic families who don't know the sky, and they cleverly avoided it. ”

The Ninth Count, known as the Wehrmacht's 9th "Potsdam" Infantry Regiment, was formerly the 1st Guards Infantry Regiment of the Second Reich and has always been inextricably linked to the royal family and the Junker aristocracy. After the establishment of the Weimar Republic, the 9th Regiment was stationed in Potsdam, a suburb of Berlin, for a long time, and served as a guard on the periphery of the city. Since Treskov had served with Schmund in the regiment in 1918, he used Schmunt's position as the Führer's chief adjutant to place two of his henchmen, Major Karl Hans von Hardenberg, and Count von Röhndorf Stennot, a reserve lieutenant, who were serving in the 9th Regiment at the time, to the headquarters of Bock as his liaison officer and eyeliner, and transferred Major Linstorf, an important member of the Clessau group, to the Ninth Army under Army Group Center. Under his arrangement, Count Fritz Dietlover von der Schulenburg, a member of the Klesau Group, enlisted in the army and joined the supplementary battalion of the 9th Regiment as a reserve lieutenant, plus Lieutenant General von Hazer, who had served in the "Ninth Count", and Ludwig, the son of General Hammerstein Ekward (who had been dismissed in 1939 for the Red General case), and others, Treskov managed to transfer them all to the Eastern Front and establish a network of contacts within Army Group Center. According to Bowman's investigation and Treskov's confession, 19 officers who had served in the 9th Infantry Regiment joined the conspiracy group.

"It's shocking."

"So, you think the Junker aristocracy who resisted the general mobilization system was motivated by economic reasons? No, they seek much more than you think. "Hoffmann said in an appreciative tone, "this kind of thing must be avoided by Goering - he has an instinctive fear and humility of the Junker aristocracy, and Bowman is far more courageous than he is, and he has the strength to stab himself to the end, and the more big the man he is, the more excited he is." Even poor Schmund was targeted by him and had to return to Berlin from the Eastern Front to be questioned by the General Security Service - it was my joint guarantee with Zeitzler that did not shake his position. ”

"He's really getting into trouble by making friends." Speer now knows why those bigwigs are so afraid and hated Bowman, and secretly scolds him as "the Führer's most thorough lackey", thinking that Bowman has always followed the Führer the closest, but he didn't expect the reason to be here. Since the Conspiracy incident, Bowman's terror index has skyrocketed, and there is a tendency to catch up with Himmler, who has always been terrifying.

"I have to say that Bowman seems to be born to do counter-espionage, his sense of smell is very sharp, and several leaders of the General Security Bureau complimented him in front of me as a natural expert. I asked what the reason was, and guess what they said?

This answer was not only Speer's curiosity, but even Lieutenant Colonel Dahlges in front of him pricked up his ears, Bowman was his old superior.

"The General Security Bureau searched the villa of a Junker nobleman, but could not find any evidence, and several people were at a loss, but after a few minutes of thinking about it, Bowman found evidence under the smelly feeding trough in the stable, and he triumphantly declared that no one could think of it if the Junker nobleman thought he was hiding in a dirty place and did not want to approach......"

Everyone who heard it laughed, the Führer had just used the word "smell" too well.

Hoffman seemed to be in a good mood: "I'll tell you another joke, one day Bowman mysteriously came to me and reported to me that he had a special drug in his teeth. ”

“**？” Speer was taken aback.

"Yes. Because he watched the whole process of the interrogation of the prisoners by the General Security Bureau, he said, 'Before watching it, I thought I could last 15 minutes just by imagining it, and after watching the execution process, I thought it would be difficult to last more than 10 minutes, and after carefully understanding the relevant scientific principles and experiencing it myself, I felt that even more than 5 minutes was an extravagant hope', he thought that he had made too many enemies, and decided to do it as a precaution, once he was persecuted by a small person in the future, he could bite it lightly. After I was done, I was specially persuaded to pretend. ”

"You?" Speer was taken aback.

Hoffman waved his hand: "I didn't agree or disagree with his behavior, I just asked: 'Comrade Bowman, what if I accidentally fall and knock my teeth after pretending?' It's like the last time I suddenly fell down in the Eastern Front command.'" He frowned and couldn't answer me for a long time, and the next day told me that he had gone to the dentist again to get it off. So if you look closely at those two days, you can see that he often covered his mouth with his hands - just for the sake of the delusion of persecution in his mind, he was drilled twice by the dentist for nothing. ”

Imagine Bowman covering his mouth, and everyone laughs again.

Taking advantage of the time to hurry, Speer, after laughing, made a brief report on military production: the production efficiency after the implementation of the "three-shift system" adjustment has been greatly improved, and the output in the last two weeks is more than in the previous month. At the same time, he told Hoffman that the expedition to explore tungsten ore had departed, and that earlier the exploration team that had gone to Libya to investigate oil had also departed.

Hoffmann was so pleased with this that he pulled out a map and handed it to Speer, a map of the minerals he had spent the days contemplating, most of which were under the control of the Third Reich and its allies, such as chrome in Albania, nickel in the swamps of Finnish Lapland, and aluminium in the Helikon Mountains of Greece, which he carefully put away after a glance. If all these minerals were true, the resources needed to sustain the war in the Third Reich would have been largely secured, and the only concern was labor, but now that the Führer had arranged for prisoners of war and Jews, Speer felt confident about the future.

The Peneminde base is hidden behind a grove of woods, and the nearby population has long since moved away for safety and secrecy. Before the convoy arrived at the gate of the base, the head of the base, Major General Wald Dornberg, and some important scientists were already waiting at the gate to greet them, and the guards of the Flag Corps, who had arrived in advance, formed a tight guard lineup. Hoffmann greeted the crowd at a glance at the young Third Reich rocket authority Dr. von Braun, who stood out in a suit in a crowd of military uniforms.

After shaking hands and greeting each other, a group of people surrounded Hoffman and others and walked towards the launch site of the base, and Major General Dornberg seized the time to report: "I heard that the head of the Yuan has come to inspect, and we have recently worked overtime to advance the launch of the A-4 rocket (the precursor of the V-2 missile), which was originally planned to be tested in October, to today. ”

"It's great, it's the first time for me to see this big guy take to the skies." Knowing that this was Braun's direct project, Hoffman asked, "Doctor, are you sure?" ”

"There's a lot of certainty." Braun was full of confidence and pointed to the open space in front of him, "Führer, look, there it is." ”

Following the direction of his finger, Hoffman had seen an A-4 rocket standing tall, probably in a hurry, the rocket was not painted, and shone in the sunlight with the true color of aluminum alloy. Braun said that the rocket had already been injected with liquid propellant, so he refused Hoffman and others' request for a close-up tour on safety grounds.