Oh, those marvelous, dazzling winter days of 1941 and 1942 in the deep, deep snow, at the windows the transparent fangs of the icicles, and those jolly New Year’s Eves with the “lead casting,” which Dr. Goebbels once attended. Did they have that tradition in Holland?
“No,” said Herter, “but in my home we did.”
There was a hunt in the attic for some piece of lead piping, which was put on the gas in an old saucepan. He could still see the gray skin on the molten lead and his father handing him the tin spoon with which he must scoop up some of it and let it slip into a dish of water. The shape that then emerged with much hissing was fished out and commented upon by everyone, because it foretold the future. Falk half turned around and rummaged a bit in a drawer. He took out a shiny rectangular object, no larger than a little finger, which he handed to Herter.
“This is Hitler’s. I kept it. What do you think? I still remember that he was unhappy about it.”
Herter looked in fascination at the odd shape. Of course he knew that it had been created by the laws of chance—that is, determined by the height of the spoon above the water and the speed at which the lead had been poured in, and that it could just as well have been someone else’s. But at the same time he knew that it was no one else’s but Hitler’s. He had made it and he had not made it. It reminded him vaguely of a basilisk, like the one Thomas Mann had written about—but he was not sure that he would not also have thought this if he had heard that the thing derived from Gandhi. For some reason the look of the metal reminded him of Hitler’s deathly pale forehead.
As he was about to give it back without comment, Falk said, “I’m giving it to you as a present.”
Herter nodded and put it silently into the breast pocket of his shirt. Something prevented him from thanking Falk.
And then those long summer afternoons on the big terrace above the garage or in the swimming pool at Göring’s villa . . . There were also occasional trips by Miss Braun to her family in Munich or to see a girlfriend in Italy, on which she could not go without Julia, who in turn could not leave her son alone; in the front seat sat the driver and a Gestapo man, while in the back the three of them played games. Siggi grew into a hyperactive little boy, who could not hold his tongue or sit still for a second. He gabbled on nonstop, even to Blondi and Miss Braun’s dogs. If he did something, he would announce that he was doing it, at the same time letting himself fall back into an armchair, thumping the cushions, performing somersaults, standing on his head, and crawling along the floor like a little monster, all the while calling out to “Auntie Effi” or “Uncle Wolf ” to make sure they could see what he was getting up to.
Uncle Wolf, repeated Herter in his thoughts. What was it with Hitler and wolves? Just the fact that they were beasts of prey, too? In the 1920s “Wolf” was his cover name; his later headquarters in East Prussia, Russia, and northern France were called “Wolf’s Lair,” “Wehrwolf,” and “Wolf’s Gorge.” Blondi, too, looked like a wolf; he called one of the pups she produced toward the end of the war, and which he wanted to rear himself, “Wolfie.” Homo homini lupus—man is a wolf to other men. Was there self-knowledge behind it?
In the summer of 1941, Operation Barbarossa had begun—but, said Falk, as far as he was concerned, it actually passed him by. He, too, had once begun at the very bottom as a political activist, with a revolver in his hand, but since big politics had been acted out before his eyes while he served coffee and cakes, he could no longer grasp it and lost his interest in it. Only after the war had he realized all that the Chief had been up to in those days—for example, what he talked to Himmler about on their long walks to the teahouse, with climbing sticks and sunglasses on, out of earshot of the entourage. Even Fegelein was never there.
“Fegelein?” repeated Herter. “Who was Fegelein?”
“SS General Hermann Fegelein,” said Falk. “A charming young senior officer, Himmler’s personal representative with Hitler. ‘Himmler’s eyes,’ he was called. At Hitler’s insistence he had married Miss Braun’s sister Gretl. That was of course to give Miss Braun more prestige at court, as the sister-in-law of General Fegelein. Hitler gave a great party on their wedding, but Fegelein cared very little for Gretl.”
“He went on chasing women,” said Julia, with an expression that indicated that there were degrees of badness. “There were terrible scenes every time.”
Behind the eastern front, Falk continued, thousands were already being murdered, and in the summer of 1942, the first trains started rolling through Europe to the extermination camps. He shook his head for a moment, as if he still could not believe what he was saying.
“Everything progressed as he had determined from the start. From day to day, his life’s goal came closer: the complete destruction of Jewry, without any of us suspecting a thing. Miss Braun included.”
“Looking back,” said Julia, “we think that he was intoxicated with what he was doing. He was convinced that he would be considered for all eternity as the savior of mankind and the greatest figure in world history. As a result his relationship to his young son also changed.”
It struck everyone that Hitler began to pay more attention to him, at least when there were no uninitiated people around. Falk had once seen him with Siggi on his arm in his study, telling him something and pointing outside, to the Untersberg. Or he had Siggi on his lap and drew a rustic Viennese cityscape for him, which he could do very well, since he had talent and a photographic memory; he would have his reading glasses on, the existence of which Germany must not know about. Another time—shortly after the devastating bombing of Hamburg in July 1943—he was kneeling on the ground and they were playing together with a Schuco that Hitler had given him: a toy car that you had to wind up and that could be steered via a wire from the roof. In order not to awaken suspicion, he could of course give him only very simple presents. And Julia once heard him say to Bormann on the terrace when Miss Braun was there, “Maybe I’ll found a dynasty. Then I’ll adopt Siegfried, just as Julius Caesar did with the later emperor Augustus.”
He said it laughingly, but perhaps it was more than a joke after all. You could expect anything of him.
THIRTEEN
More and more frequently, Hitler withdrew for weeks or months on end to his headquarters in East Prussia. On the Russian front, the Jewish-Bolshevik subhumans had been advancing alarmingly since the Battle of Stalingrad, and in North Africa as well things were no longer going according to plan, so that Jerusalem, the Jewish objective of the campaign, unfortunately had to be written off; meanwhile Germany’s cities were being turned to ruins one after another under the Anglo-American terror bombing, but no one on the staff wanted to face the situation, not even after the invasion of June 1944: as long as the Führer believed immutably in final victory, people need not worry about their august positions at court. The secret weapon, which according to Goebbels was being developed, would soon instantly change the odds in the war. In reality it was being forged in America, like the Wagnerian magic sword Nothung, under the direction of Jewish scientists exiled from Germany. Meanwhile, Herter was told, the system, under Bormann’s management, was already beginning to burrow underground. For the past year, hundreds of foreign slave laborers had been working day and night to construct labyrinthine passages and bunkers under the whole Berghof site, which linked all the buildings. They were fully equipped, from the quarters of the Chief and Lady Chief with their paneling in precious wood to a kennel for Blondi, as well as kitchens, storerooms, nurseries, offices, archives, a headquarters, telex rooms, and a Gestapo control room, with machine-gun nests at strategic points and crowned aboveground by pillboxes with rapid-firing cannon.
Miss Braun, too, shut herself off from the reality of the war, which on the Obersalzberg manifested itself only in the form of muffled underground explosions. Occasionally there were air-raid warnings, which were obviously immediately reported to the Chief, because he invariably called a few minutes later to insist that Miss Braun go to the air-raid she
lter.
She was sad when her Adi was away from home, but now she had her son, and Julia no longer had to put her lover’s portrait by her plate. Still, it cannot have escaped even her that the oppressive feeling immediately lifted from the Berghof when the column of black Mercedeses with motorcycle escort had disappeared around the corner—taking everyone and everything with it—Bormann, Morell, Brückner’s successor Schaub, Heinz Linge, the secretaries, the cook, Blondi, and twenty large trunks containing the Chief’s luggage. Cigarettes were lit up, and suddenly there was occasional laughter to be heard, even from the quarters of the SS companies; from somewhere there even came the sound of an American jazz record on a portable gramophone, degenerate black music, that is, like the waters of a flooding river starting to seep through the dike. The other bigwigs also left the mountain, which overnight had become redundant. Julia could still remember Mrs. Speer once commenting to her as she said good-bye that Siggi was looking more and more like her. Miss Braun couldn’t help laughing a little and pouting at the same time.
“In mid-July 1944—” said Falk, “Siggi was almost six by then—the Chief again left for his Wolf’s Lair. Saying good-bye to Miss Braun and Siggi took a long time, as if he knew that he would never see the Berghof again. He had already turned into a stooping old man.” Falk sat up a little and stared hard at Herter. After a brief hesitation, he said, “The following week Count Stauffenberg made his assassination attempt. Miss Braun was desperate because she could not support her lover and only had telephone contact with him, since he wanted her to stay with Siggi. He did, though, send her his torn and bloodstained uniform. And then, two months later, the catastrophe began for us.”
Herter saw that Falk had suddenly made his decision, like someone who does not dare jump from a burning house into a safety net and then suddenly does so after all. Next to him he heard a suppressed sob from Julia but forced himself not to look to the side.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Herter, but what I am about to tell you is completely incomprehensible—not only for you but still for us, too. The Chief had not rung for a few days, and when Miss Braun tried to reach him, she was constantly told that he was too busy to come to the phone. This worried her, but what could she do? On Friday, September 22, a radiant autumn day—I shall never forget it—toward midday, Bormann suddenly appeared by the great steps, in a closed car, with a small entourage in a second vehicle. I found that strange in itself: in summer the gentlemen always drove with the hood down. And come to that, what could be the matter that made him willing to lose sight of his master for a few days? I had hung out the uniforms and suits of the Chief to air on the balcony, and I was polishing his boots and shoes—of course I did not know that he would never wear any of them again; he had an extensive wardrobe in Berlin and in his field headquarters, too. It had all been made to measure, and I knew how particular he was about his clothes. His uniforms, his jackets, his caps—he designed everything himself, just like his buildings, his flags, his standards, and his mass events. If there were so much as a small crease somewhere that he didn’t like, he would send for Mr. Hugo, his tailor.”
It was obvious that Falk was still trying to put off saying what he had to say. Herter nodded. “He was a perfectionist.”
“Ullrich came immediately to tell us what was happening,” said Julia. “I was in the library with Mrs. Köppe. That was also on the upper floor. We were dusting books at the open window, Miss Braun was reading aloud from the children’s book Shock-Headed Peter, while Siggi was constantly standing on his head and letting himself fall full length on the divan. The library was the only place in the Berghof that was at all inviting. Now and then you could hear the dynamite thundering deep in the mountain.”
Falk glanced at the smile that had appeared on Herter’s face and which he of course did not understand—it was because Herter suddenly imagined what books were being knocked together at the window that day: Schopenhauer against Gobineau, Nietzsche against Karl May, Houston Stewart Chamberlain against Wagner . . .
“We looked at each other in alarm,” said Falk, and it was as if that alarm seemed to appear in his eyes again after fifty years. “A little later, probably after he had spoken to Mittlstrasser, Bormann came upstairs. I don’t know . . . from the stamping of his boots on the stairs I sensed that something was wrong. It was just a little too loud, as if he were trying to give himself courage. Stasi and Negus smelled a rat, too, and started barking.
“‘My God,’ said Mrs. Köppe, ‘what can that mean?’
“When he came in, he clicked his heels, gave the German salute, and said formally ‘Heil Hitler.’ That was not the custom at the Berghof, and we simply mumbled something. Only Siggi looked at him wide-eyed. Bormann did not take off his cap and fixed his gaze on Mrs. Köppe, who took the hint and left the room. Then he said to Miss Braun that the Führer had expressed the wish to have her with him in these difficult days.”
“A great weight fell from us,” Julia added. “Mrs. Braun’s face brightened completely. She asked when she was to go. Right away, said Bormann; the car was waiting outside to take her to the airport at Salzburg, where a plane was on the run-way. ‘And what about Siggi?’ I can still hear her asking—of course Siggi was going, too, like Ullrich and me? No, said Bormann, the Führer had decided that he should stay at the Berghof with his legal parents. The Wolf’s Lair was no environment for a child; apart from that it was too dangerous, so close to the front.”
“Of course that put her in a quandary,” said Falk, “but she also knew that there was no arguing with a decision of Hitler’s. Bormann still had not moved. He said that she must immediately go and pack; he informed me curtly that we would be speaking shortly. Then he turned on his heel and marched out of the room.”
The cases, which had already left the Berghof empty once, were now packed to capacity—mainly by Julia. She said that Miss Braun mostly sat on the edge of the bed with her arm around the shoulders of Siggi, who was meanwhile playing with a little compass. She had tears in her eyes and said that she would come and visit him very often. He had no idea why Auntie Effi was so terribly sad, since wasn’t she going to see Uncle Wolf, who was waging war? He had once told the Chief that when he was grown up, he wanted to wage war, too. The Chief had laughed till he cried.
Miss Braun phoned her family in Munich, since in the Wolf’s Lair they would not be able to reach her. A little later everyone was lined up in the hall—including Mrs. Bormann and her children, whom Bormann always left at the Obersalzberg, so that he could chase the girls at headquarters unhindered. The farewells were formal. She shook hands with Julia and Ullrich, gave Siggi a kiss on the forehead and the terriers a kiss, too, and got into the second car, which had a Gestapo man sitting next to the driver.
“An hour later,” said Falk, “an adjutant of Bormann’s appeared and said that the head of Chancellery was expecting me in his chalet.”
“I don’t know why,” said Julia, “but for some reason I felt at once that there was something else in the air. I took Siggi to his room, where the floor was covered with his toy soldiers, who were positioned as if carrying out an offensive. I remember he said that it was a nuisance that he had only German soldiers; you ought to have Russian soldiers, too, so that you could win, but you couldn’t buy them. Like this, without an enemy, you couldn’t even lose.”
Herter was reminded of Marnix. Marnix, too, could have said something like that, but he no longer played with stationary soldiers; he played computer games in which a visible enemy could be destroyed. Herter himself, eleven years older than Siegfried Falk, alias Braun, alias Hitler, had played with toy soldiers before the war, also in German uniforms, without ever having missed an opposing army. Obviously he had been concerned not with depicting the battle but with creating impressive tableaux, not as a general but as a director. Perhaps Hitler, the man of the theater who regarded himself as the greatest commander of all time, had only played theatrically with toy soldiers, albeit of flesh and blood.
It was
five minutes’ walk to Bormann’s chalet, which was somewhat smaller than the Berghof but larger than Göring’s. The sun shone on the slope that Falk climbed up, gardeners were mowing the grass, birds were singing in the trees—-everything would have been idyllic but for the muffled thud of pneumatic hammers everywhere under the ground. He, too, was not wholly at ease, but what could be up? No one had done anything wrong. When his colleague let him in, he heard somewhere in the depths of the house the laughter and twittering of Bormann’s children. The head of Chancellery received him standing in his study, feet slightly apart, hands on hips. “Falk,” he had said, “we can be brief. Prepare yourself.”
For a moment Falk was unable to continue. He seemed to become even smaller; he bent his head, rubbed his face with both hands, and said in a choking voice, “He said, ‘On the Führer’s orders, you are to kill Siegfried.’”
FOURTEEN
Herter’s mouth fell open. Where was he? This could not be true! Beside him he could hear Julia sobbing into her handkerchief. So had it happened after all? It just wasn’t thinkable! And why, why did it have to happen? When he saw Falk looking at Julia, he got up and with a gesture suggested changing places. On the sofa Falk put his hand on Julia’s, and, sitting opposite, he felt Falk’s warmth in the small armchair.
“I can’t believe my ears,” Herter said. “You had to kill Siegfried? Hitler’s son, Siggi, whom he doted on? Why, in heaven’s name?”
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