Der Rächer English

In May 1941, the KMS Atlantis was sailing toward the Kerguelen archipelago, two thousand kilometers from any inhabited territory in the southernmost reaches of the Indian Ocean. It was the deadliest commerce raider of the Kriegsmarine, capable of changing its appearance through sliding steel panels that concealed six one-hundred-fifty-millimeter guns beneath the deck of an ordinary cargo ship. Under the command of Captain Bernhard Rogge, it had sunk twenty-two Allied ships without detection for seventeen months. Three days before departing Hamburg, an irregular incorporation occurred. A man identified as Karl Brenner, a communications technician with orders signed by an authority that did not correspond to any standard Kriegsmarine format, boarded without his registration number returning results in the Kiel archives. On board, he conducted nightly transmissions that radio officer Adolf Wenzel did not recognize as assigned to the vessel. When Rogge ordered the exploration of …