Prince was astonished by the security around the camp. As they approached it, the ground around them was a sea of barbed wire, their route in a narrow path with the machine guns from the watchtower trained on it. Entering the camp itself was a lengthy process: he reckoned they went through half a dozen gates, each leading into a more secure area, but Émile had been right: all the guards were interested in was counting them and ensuring their group wasn’t smaller than when it had left the camp that morning.
* * *
‘Here, Mister Churchill – wake up! You’re now Pierre Breton. You even look a bit like him.’ It was the early hours of the morning and Émile was leaning over his bunk. ‘I knew they had a spare prisoner identity card in the next block; they got it from a prisoner who died. I had to give them two packets of cigarettes and my sausage. They’ll make sure Pierre Breton’s name is entered on the work list.’
So Richard Prince became Pierre Breton, a slave labourer. His first day at the camp was unusual, the others told him, because that night they were given what they considered to be a better meal than they’d had for a while. It was a strange stew, watery and oily at the same time, and the most identifiable ingredients were chunks of potato, more raw than cooked. Prince thought it was one of the most disgusting meals he’d ever tasted, but the others made him eat it. ‘We only get something like this a couple of times a week.’
They were right. The rest of the time it was a mug of soup, a hunk of stale bread and sometimes some jam. Within two days Prince felt the hunger gnawing away at his body and strange chilling sensations attacking his limbs. Food became his main obsession, so much so that he had to force himself to concentrate on what he was there for: to find out as much as he could about Peenemünde, and especially its layout.
The French group was regarded as one of the most useful as far as the Germans were concerned. Most of them were mechanics or electricians, and they knew how to play the system. They cooperated with the Germans just enough to ensure their work was usually less physically onerous than that of other slave labourers. That wasn’t to say the Germans trusted them. They had an inherent dislike for the French, but they also regarded them as being intellectually smarter than the Russians and the Ukrainians and more able than the Poles.
It was rare for a group to work in the same area for more than a day at a time. ‘Don’t ask me why,’ said Émile. ‘Maybe it’s something to do with minimising the chances of sabotage, or it could be because they don’t want people to gather too much detailed information about what’s going on here.’
It was common knowledge in the camp that this was where the V-1 and V-2 rockets were being developed and manufactured. The slave labourers talked about them openly.
‘The Germans know there’s only one way we’ll leave this camp alive.’
‘What’s that, Émile?’ They were in their hut after what passed as the evening meal and the final roll call. It was bitterly cold, the wind whistling through gaps in the wood, a single layer of which was all that stood between them and the Baltic.
‘If they win the war – which they think they will do with these rockets. If they don’t win, they’ll kill us.’ The other men nodded in a matter-of-fact manner.
‘Even if they do win the war,’ said Alain, ‘we’ll be dead by then. How much longer do you think we can survive in these conditions?’
Prince asked a few more questions while they were gathered together: he needed to get on with his map of the camp. Where did they think the power station was and the main rocket test fire area?
They all joined in with their advice. He was now building up a good picture of the layout.
‘We’re helping to sign our own death warrant.’ It was Alain again, one of the few men not from Tours.
‘In what way?’
‘What do you think they’re going to use your map for, Mister Churchill? To put on Christmas cards? No, they’ll use it to bomb this place.’
‘Good,’ said Émile. ‘Just make sure you clearly mark where we are – and maybe ask them not to bomb that part!’
By 24 January, Prince believed he had as much information about the camp as he was going to get. He took out a sheet of paper he’d been hiding under his straw mattress and managed to sharpen his pencil using a stone. He’d been drawing for ten minutes when Alain came over.
‘That’s shit. You can’t draw. Give it to me, I’ll do it.’
‘Hang on, why would you—’
‘I’m a draughtsman, Mister Churchill. Are you a draughtsman?’
‘No.’
‘What do you do?’
‘I work in an office, actually.’
‘Ha! Your map will look like a child’s drawing of a bus. Mine will look like a map of Peenemünde: I’ll even be able to give it a sense of scale.’
Two days later, Alain had finished his map. To Prince it looked like a masterpiece: accurate and clear. The northern tip of Usedom, where Peenemünde was located, was shaped like a thick cucumber. Alain had drawn the airfield in its north-western corner, with the power station below it on the banks of the River Peene. Just inland from there was the liquid oxygen plant, and then on the north-eastern tip of the island the main rocket test-firing area. Below that, on the Baltic coast, was the experimental works, just above the V-2 production works. South of the V-2 production area and closer to the Baltic coast was the housing estate and the army barracks. ‘Make sure you mark that properly,’ Émile instructed Alain. ‘We want as many of those bastards killed as possible.’ At the southern end of the camp, less than two miles from Zempin, was Trassenheide, the camp where the foreign slave labourers were housed: the camp where they were now.
When it was complete, they all gathered round to admire it. Émile pointed to Trassenheide. ‘If your RAF bomb us, Mister Churchill, I’ll kill you!’
Chapter 17
Berlin; Copenhagen, January 1943
It was a complete bloody mess.
There was no other way Kriminaldirektor Frank could describe the situation, with the possible exception of saying it was a complete fucking mess, but the president of the police in Berlin, Gruppenführer von Helldorf, had quite a Lutheran streak, and there was a limit to what kind of language he’d tolerate.
It was the middle of January: Oberst Albert Kampmann had been shot on Wednesday 2 December – six weeks previously – and died in the early hours of the following morning. Since then, the Gestapo had insisted that this was their case. They’d assured everyone they’d solve it very soon: this was a sensitive political issue, almost certainly involving matters of espionage and state security. No other organisation had the ability to investigate the Oberst’s case or could be trusted to do so.
But as December turned into January and the irritation of those who mattered increased, it became evident that the Gestapo had no idea what they were doing. So von Helldorf was instructed to put his best man on the case. These were the circumstances that had led to Gunther Frank of the Kripo – the criminal police – sitting in von Helldorf’s office on a bitterly cold Tuesday morning. Von Helldorf’s secretary had attempted to light a fire, but after a few failed attempts he told her not to bother.
‘You’re not too cold, are you, Frank?’
‘I’m fine, thank you, sir.’ Frank was pleased he’d not yet removed his coat. He’d been warmer when he’d taken his dog for a walk just after dawn. He slipped his hands into his pockets, hoping von Helldorf wouldn’t notice.
‘The Kripo should have had this case from the beginning in my opinion.’
‘I agree, sir.’
‘You’d have solved it by now.’
‘One would hope so, sir.’
‘This is the file – getting it from them was like prising sweets from a spoilt child. Go away and study it, then get on with the case. How long do you think you’ll need – three, four days?’
‘To read the file, sir?’
‘No, Frank, to solve the case.’
* * *
It had already been dark fo
r five hours when Frank finally finished reading the file marked Oberst Albert Kampmann. The only light in his office came from the Anglepoise lamp illuminating his desk and the glowing end of what must have been his thirtieth cigarette of the day.
He closed the file and looked at his notebook. He read through what he’d written, then turned to a fresh page and started writing again: just a few salient points, the most important ones. This was his method: to make notes as he went along, edit them, refine them and extract no more than a dozen key facts or questions to work through. It was a system that rarely failed, but he had a nagging feeling in his stomach that this case might prove to be the exception.
It was indeed a bloody mess.
Sometime in November – incredibly, they hadn’t even made a note of the date – the Gestapo had received an anonymous tip-off that an Oberst in the Luftwaffe’s scientific division based in the Air Ministry on Wilhelm Strasse was passing on secrets to the enemy: first name either Alfred or Albert. They soon established that there was only one Oberst in that division with the first name Alfred or Albert. Even the Gestapo could manage that: Oberst Albert Kampmann.
Their incompetence did not stop there. They failed to contact the security division of the Luftwaffe; they didn’t speak with anyone at the Air Ministry, not even any of their own people there. They simply put a tail on Kampmann, and according to the notebooks of the half-dozen or so idiots responsible for following him, they somehow managed to lose him for a crucial few minutes here, a few minutes there.
Not that their notes suggested the Oberst was up to anything. He lived in the officers’ quarters at the Luftwaffe base next to Tempelhof, from where he travelled to work before seven thirty most mornings, returning some twelve hours later. Outside of work he swam two or three times a week (mostly front crawl) or drank with colleagues in a bar near the Air Ministry. He was not a member of the Nazi Party and like so many Luftwaffe officers was not known to be political. His family were from Augsburg and contact with them appeared to be limited to a letter each way once a month, the language in them polite and formal, the subject matter inconsequential.
On the evening of Wednesday 2nd December, Oberst Albert Kampmann was followed after leaving work on Wilhelm Strasse. He didn’t go into one of his regular bars, nor did he catch a tram or the U-Bahn back to the airbase. Instead he took a particularly circuitous route, one that aroused the suspicions of even the Gestapo: north on Wilhelm Strasse to Unter den Linden, up and down Unter den Linden before picking up his pace quite considerably and hurrying down Friedrichstrasse, where they lost him for a few minutes, before eventually picking him up turning left into Leipziger Strasse. He was followed across Jerusalemer Strasse into Donhoff Strasse, where he disappeared again. They looked everywhere for him: the notebooks weren’t terribly explicit, but from as far as Frank could ascertain, it was a good ten minutes before they decided to look in a restaurant on Donhoff Strasse called Das Bayerischer Haus. One of the Gestapo offers had noted: We have reason to believe this could be a Bavarian restaurant.
They couldn’t see him downstairs, but a waiter told them there was a group of men in the private dining room upstairs. When they went up there, the room was empty. Unbelievably – though Kriminaldirektor Frank could actually believe it – it took them another five minutes to work out that there was a door concealed in the panelling, behind which was a staircase leading to the yard of a neighbouring building.
They searched the area and through what Frank reckoned was probably luck more than anything else, came across Oberst Kampmann further down Donhoff Strasse. They challenged him to stop; he refused and opened fire with his Mauser semi-automatic, hitting one of the Gestapo officers in the leg. Two of them returned fire with their sub-machine guns and Kampmann was mortally wounded. He was taken to the Charité hospital but never regained consciousness.
Idiots on every count, not least for using sub-machine guns: the idea surely was to capture Kampmann alive. But worst of all – the kind of basic error Frank wouldn’t have expected of a police cadet in their first week – was their failure to secure the restaurant and stop potential witnesses from leaving. The catalogue of errors continued: the Gestapo left it a day before they examined Kampmann’s quarters at the Luftwaffe base, and a further day before they asked permission to search his office. They had floundered around like this until Christmas, seemed to do nothing for a week, and when they resumed their investigation in the new year, it was to no effect. And now Kriminaldirektor Gunther Frank had to pick up the pieces.
The following morning, he called in the Gestapo case officer, a shabbily dressed man called Manfred Lange with filthy shoes and a dirty raincoat that he kept on throughout their meeting. Frank realised Lange was out of his depth: as far as he could tell, he was really no more than a Gestapo ‘watcher’, someone whose job was to follow people. He’d no doubt been over-promoted as a result of being a particularly zealous Nazi. But Frank knew he needed to be careful. Whenever there was a conflict between a state body like the Kripo and the Nazi Party, the party always won. If he put a foot wrong, he’d be in trouble.
‘So no one thought to keep all the other diners in the restaurant so they could be questioned?’
‘Of course we did!’ As he spoke, Lange revealed a mouthful of misshapen teeth, all of them an unpleasant shade of dark yellow.
‘But you have none of their details.’
‘By the time we returned to the restaurant after the shooting, they’d all gone.’
‘How long did you leave it?’
‘Half an hour.’
‘What about the manager, this… Hoffmann?’
‘He’s a good party member, a loyal and—’
‘Maybe so, but was he able to give you any helpful information?’
The Gestapo man shook his head, aware that he wasn’t coming out of this well. ‘The only other person in the restaurant whose details we have is the waiter, a man called Hinkler. H-I-N—’
‘I can spell Hinkler, thank you.’
* * *
Following an unpromising start, Hans Hinkler turned out to be very helpful indeed. A tall, stooped man with a nervous tic and a distrusting air about him, he was monosyllabic for about five minutes, until Franks gave him a cigarette, told him to take off his coat and called him Hans. He wasn’t in trouble, he said, and the Kripo was most certainly not to be confused with the Gestapo, if he could see what he meant.
‘Are you in the party, Hans?’
‘No, sir, but I—’
‘Don’t worry, Hans, nor am I. So perhaps we can be honest with each other, eh?’
Hans Hinkler smoked most of his cigarette, staring at the Kripo officer as he did so, as if weighing up whether to trust him. ‘That evening, my boss, Herr Hoffmann, told me two Scandinavian gentlemen would be coming in. May I trouble you for another cigarette?’
He used the pause to think of what to say next. ‘He said I was to place them at a small table by the stairs and give them a menu. Then I was to inform him that they had arrived. I wasn’t to do any more than that. To be honest, I wouldn’t have thought any more of it but for the fact that Herr Hoffmann told me if all went well, he’d give me a bonus that evening. That was unusual, to say the least, because he’s tight with his money.’
‘Carry on, Hans.’
‘So that was what happened: the two men came in, I seated them and then Herr Hoffmann came over and said something to them about needing the table but there was a room upstairs where perhaps they’d be more comfortable, and they went up. After perhaps… I’m really not sure, maybe a bit over half an hour, I noticed a woman who’d been sitting by the window rush up the stairs. She came down a minute later and then hurried out, leaving payment for her meal on the table. Moments after she left, three or four men burst into the restaurant shouting, “Gestapo!” looked around and then ran upstairs. There was a commotion: one of them came down and ran out, and there was shouting and everything. All the customers left the restaurant as this was going on. There w
ere probably around a dozen of them and no one likes to hang around when the Gestapo are getting busy.
‘Herr Hoffmann seemed to be very nervous. He told me to lock the doors and tidy up. Soon after that we heard shooting further down Donhoff Strasse, but we didn’t look out. About thirty minutes later, the Gestapo came in and took our details. They asked if either of us knew the names of the people upstairs, and we said no. That was it. When they left, Herr Hoffmann gave me a very generous bonus and said I mustn’t say a word about what happened, but I’m sure he knew something… he must have known they were coming in.’
‘Just a few more questions, Hans. You mentioned the woman who rushed upstairs and then left the restaurant.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Do you know who she was?’
‘No, sir, I’d not seen her there before.’
‘Can you describe her?’
‘Not really: a very elegant lady, spoke with a good Berlin accent.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Ah, yes!’ Hinkler looked pleased with himself; he’d obviously thought of something helpful. ‘She wore a hat – with a feather in it!’
* * *
Rudolf Hoffmann struck Gunther Frank as a typical Bavarian: the accent of course and well-built, with a certain sense of arrogance, which he reckoned would not last too long.
‘I told the Gestapo I have no idea who these men were. It was busy downstairs so I moved them to the dining room upstairs, that’s all there is to it. If anyone else broke in using the back staircase, I know nothing about that. I never use that door myself.’
The interrogation continued, Frank probing the other man with a series of questions, all very similar, all intended to expose inconsistencies. After an hour, he told Hoffmann he was to wait in another room and they’d resume later.
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