Darkness into Light Box Set

by Michael Dean

  The informal discussion with the Americans quickly switched from coal to the wider issue of the Versailles reparations. Stinnes held forth on the need to avoid the Bolshevisation of the workers. He saw inflation as a weapon to control the economy. The Americans saw the misery of inflation on the German people as more important than the dubious theoretical benefit ascribed to it by Stinnes.

  Rathenau supported the American position, taking as his starting point the measures necessary to help the poorest in German society.

  At the end of the discussion, in a momentous moment for Stinnes, the American officials confirmed what Bemmelman had said earlier in the evening. A ‘final decision’ on all matters would be taken at The Hague. Nothing was off the agenda. There was indeed to be a renegotiation of Versailles. The Americans were likely to participate – they had sent an observer only to Genoa.

  By now it was nearing midnight. The talks broke off with Rathenau and the American officials looking forward to renegotiating Versailles at The Hague, while Stinnes hid his implacable hatred at the turn of events and his even more visceral hatred of Rathenau

  Rathenau telephoned the Grunewald villa, waking a resentful Josef Prozeller to politely request the car at the American embassy forthwith. As Stinnes had no obvious means of getting back to his hotel, Rathenau offered him a lift.

  Stinnes, as usual when visiting Berlin from his Ruhr home, was staying at the Hotel Esplanade. On arrival, he invited Rathenau up for a drink. A silently furious Josef Prozeller was ordered to wait.

  Rathenau and Stinnes talked and drank in Stinnes’ hotel room in what Rathenau took for harmony until one o’ clock in the morning. In fact, it was no more genuinely harmonious than Rathenau’s private dinner with Helfferich, days earlier. Stinnes merely wanted to be sure that he had got as much information as possible out of Rathenau.

  Rathenau was deceived, as he was deceived all his life, by the sweet voices of his enemies and by the vain hope that they would one day love him. On the dark drive home Josef Prozeller refused to speak to him, which upset him somewhat.

  The following telephone calls were then made, as shown by telephone records of the Berlin Post Office.

  At 1.28am Hugo Stinnes telephoned Karl Helfferich

  At 1.35am Hugo Stinnes telephoned Erich Ludendorrff.

  At 2.00am Erich Ludendorff telephoned Hermann Ehrhardt, in Munich.

  At 2. 30am Hermann Ehrhardt telephoned Ernst von Salomon in Berlin.

  The subject of all the conversations was the same. The Circle of Hate had closed.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  On the morning of Saturday June 24th, Rathenau had had no more than two hours sleep, not unusual for him. After he had left Stinnes at the Hotel Esplanade, he had worked through the night on the changes needed to revise, or even formally revoke, the Treaty of Versailles at the next world conference at The Hague.

  He had an attaché case full of papers with him when he prepared to go into the Foreign Office, as he did on most Saturdays. He usually arrived between ten and eleven, but this morning he was running late, having left his usual meagre breakfast to continue working.

  It was nearly eleven before he walked out to the old, slow open car he insisted on using, a four-seater NAG-Convertible, even though Bernhard Weiss had warned him many times that it increased the risk to him, especially if he persisted in being driven with the roof down.

  As he reached the car, hand on the door handle, he gave a rather watery ingratiating smile to Josef Prozeller, feeling guilty that the factotum had missed so much sleep. As he did so often these days, Prozeller stared glacially ahead, ignoring his employer.

  ‘Wait a minute!’ Rathenau shouted.

  He spun round and went back into the villa to pick up a copy of yesterday evening’s newspaper, the Berliner Abendblatt, one of many which carried an account of Helfferich’s attack on him. Rather mysteriously, he then scribbled ‘This is not true!’ alongside one of Helfferich’s many fabrications, then left the newspaper on his desk in the study.

  By the time he got back to the car, a drizzling rain had started up, borne along by a light wind. Rathenau opened the car door, threw his attaché case onto the back seat of the car and sat down next to it. He shouted at the back of Josef Prozeller’s head. ‘Put the roof up, would you? It’s coming on to rain.’

  ‘The roof won’t go up,’ Prozeller shouted back, only half turning round. ‘It’s jammed. It needs oiling.’

  Rathenau made no reply. The car set off slowly along Königsallee at about 10.55am. Königsallee takes a double bend at the corner of Wallotstrasse, so traffic tended to slow there anyway, but von Salomon had instructed Prozeller to slow right down.

  This he did, driving at between thirty and forty kilometres an hour, giving the six-seater dark-grey Mercedes Touring car waiting for them at the corner of Wallotstrasse plenty of time to pull in behind them.

  Prozeller, turning, saw it behind him, as he expected, but Rathenau did not turn round. Prozeller kept the speed down, which was just as well from the OC men’s point as view as the oil leak still had not been repaired. They were leaving drips of oil behind them as the high-powered Mercedes Tourer began to catch the slower and smaller black NAG-Convertible.

  The Mercedes Tourer kept to the middle of the road, between the tram-lines and the row of lime trees on the pavement. Prozeller slowed the NAG-Convertible to twenty kilometres an hour, pulling it almost onto the tramlines as the Mercedes Tourer pulled level.

  When the Tourer was half a length ahead, Rathenau noticed the smart leather coats and caps of the two occupants. Kern leant forward, pulled out a long automatic pistol, rested the butt against his left arm and shot Rathenau in the face.

  Kern kept firing so quickly that the pistol shots sounded like machine-gun fire.

  Prozeller felt no fear, such was the hypnotic power the absent von Salomon had over him. He had total faith that he would be safe because von Salomon had said so. Even when Fischer took both hands off the wheel, pulled the pin of a grenade and lobbed it into the back of the car, Prozeller was sanguine. Von Salomon had said he would be alright. And he was.

  Rathenau had sunk down, lying on the back seat, on top of the attaché case, bleeding into the papers which could have rescinded the Treaty of Versailles. His jaw was all but blown away. He had also been hit in the spine.

  The Mercedes Tourer drove off down Wallotstrasse. Prozeller stopped the NAG-Convertible near the rubbish heap at the junction with Erdenerstrasse. He was shouting ‘Help, Help!’

  Several passers-by appeared round the car. Some of them were gathering cartridge cases – as it turned out there were nine in all. The fuse of the hand-grenade was lying on the road. There were splinters from the wood of the car all over the place.

  Walther opened his eyes, both uninjured above the bloodied red and white mess of his lower face. One of the passers-by, a young woman named Helen Kaiser, jumped into the back of the car. She cried out ‘I’m a nurse.’ She sat on the back seat and cradled Walther across her knees. The newspapers later reported that the scene was like a Pietà.

  Rathenau was bleeding hard. Prozeller had turned in his seat. For a moment they were all frozen in a tableau of shock and disbelief. There had been some building work going on at this point in the Königsallee, so many of the growing group of passers-by were labourers.

  Then, after that moment of frozen silence, when the only movement was the gushing bleeding from Walther’s body, suddenly there was movement again.

  ‘Get out of the car!’ Prozeller shouted at the nurse, Helen Kaiser.

  The nurse was bewildered, but she obeyed, laying Walther gently back down on the back seat. Then Prozeller drove away.

  Amazingly, Rathenau’s car was still driveable. Amazingly, its chauffeur, Prozeller, was unmarked. Off Prozeller drove, with Rathenau groaning in the back. But he drove not to the Charité hospital, which he could have reached in a couple of minutes, nor even to the police station, which was thirty metres away down Königsallee. Pr
ozeller drove Rathenau back to the Grunewald villa.

  In doing this, Prozeller was following instructions dinned into him by von Salomon. In his study of the art and science of assassination, von Salomon had learned two lessons, in particular.

  The first, much discussed among the OC, was to use heavy weapons - Kern’s automatic pistol was a 9-calibre.

  The second was to delay treatment to the victim.

  Rathenau was still alive when they reached the Grunewald villa again. Witnesses later described how he was lifted from the back seat of the car, still breathing, carried to the study and laid on the floor.

  ‘I tried to make him comfortable,’ Prozeller testified later. ‘He opened his eyes.’

  In fact, nothing could have been better calculated to finish Walther off. Naturally, they telephoned for a doctor, who arrived in ten minutes. And naturally he could do a lot less for Walther than could have been done at the hospital.

  This transparent manoeuvre of Prozeller’s went unremarked by the police. It has continued to go unremarked in every account of Walther’s death written since then.

  Walther Rathenau bled to death on the floor of his study within sight of the newspaper report of Helfferich’s calumnies across which he had written ‘This is not true.’

  EPILOGUE: Walther Rathenau

  At the next international conference of the family of nations, at The Hague, there was no renegotiation, let alone revocation, of the Treaty of Versailles. The Hague was downgraded to a trade conference. Germany was not even invited.

  Eleven years later, Hitler took power in Germany largely on the back of real and imagined grievances against the Treaty of Versailles, which was still very much in force.

  It is likely that if Walther Rathenau had not been assassinated and his Policy of Fulfilment had led to the revocation of the Treaty of Versailles, Adolf Hitler would be remembered, if at all, as a hysterical beer-hall agitator, a footnote in history. There would have been no World War II, because the conditions which caused it would have been eliminated.

  Author’s note

  All the people in this novel existed. There have been a few, mostly minor, changes to the order or setting of events – for example, Philipp Scheidemann had acid thrown his face in Kassel, not in Berlin. And nobody, including Rathenau, ever called Hartmut Plaas ‘Bosie’.

  But the more improbable and unbelievable events in the narrative really happened.

  Michael Dean, June 2015

  Acknowledgements

  Here, in no particular order, are some of the main books I read or consulted before and during the writing of this novel:

  Harry Kessler, Walther Rathenau and In the Twenties (Diaries); Ernst von Salomon, Freikorps; Martin Sabrow Die verdrängte Verschwörung; Wolfgang Brenner, Walther Rathenau; John G Williamson, Karl Helfferich; Essays zur Austellung; Hellige und Schulin (eds) ; Rathenau: Hauptwerke und Gespräche; Shulamit Volkov, Walther Rathenau, Weimar’s Fallen Statesman; Carl Reisner (ed); Walther Rathenau, Neue Briefe; Etta Federn Kohlhaas, Walther Rathenau; David Felix, Walther Rathenau and the Weimar Republic; David Clay Large, Berlin; B. Uwe Weller, Maximilian Harden und die Zukunft; Carole Fink, The Genoa Conference: European Diplomacy 1921-2; E Schulin, Walther Rathenau; Markus Josef Klein, Ernst von Salomon: Revolutionär ohne Utopie; Jost Hermand, Ernst von Salomon: Wandlungen eines Nationalrevolutionärs.

  The Crooked Cross

  Michael Dean

  Hoffmann’s colourful description of events has the half-niece, very much alive, waving cheerily from the balcony as the party left: ‘Goodbye, Uncle Alf,’ she calls out. ‘Goodbye, Herr Hoffmann! Have a good trip!’

  As they drove away, according to Hoffmann, the Führer had a premonition that something bad was going to happen to Geli. Glaser laughed aloud. This was classic Hoffmann tosh – the Führer’s otherworldly, uncanny prescience. They did not come more loyal than Hoffmann.

  Or more disingenuous.

  The course of history could have been altered in 1931 if Glaser had been able to insist on holding an inquest (on Geli Raubal)

  Ronald Hayman Hitler and Geli

  for Judith

  Part I - September 1931

  Chapter One

  There is no door between the cavernous dining room of Hitler’s apartment and the sepulchral lounge. Geli Raubal walked through with a glass of wine. She settled in one of the low, Gerdy Troost-designed armchairs near the fireplace. In the dingy light from a red-fringed lamp-standard, she stared at an art book, open on the occasional table in front of her – The History of Erotic Art, by Edouard Fuchs. She knew what it was the prelude to.

  On the wall, to her right, were two heavily varnished Romantic landscapes of the Bavarian Alps, by Loewith and Heinrich Zügel. To her left, was a brown Grüzner oil, showing monks tasting wine in a cellar.

  One monk, who looked like Falstaff, beamingly held out a glass of white wine to the viewer. Geli hated the false hospitality of the painting. It was a trap – like this apartment where she lived with her Uncle Alf. With an ironic smile, she raised her glass, toasting the painted monk who was toasting her. She sipped her wine.

  Hitler made his way toward her, along the massive oak table that dominated the dining room. Watching him draw nearer, she felt contempt for him – contempt laced with physical revulsion.

  ‘I want to draw you,’ he said, stopping in front of his half-niece. He had drawn her, naked, three times before. His eye dropped down to the History of Erotic Art.

  Geli looked up at him from the armchair. ‘I don’t want you to do that anymore.’

  ‘I want to draw you,’ he said again, in exactly the same tone.

  ‘No! I can’t.’

  ‘Get ready.’ He meant: ‘Get undressed.’ It was as if she hadn’t spoken.

  ‘I’m never going to let you draw me again. I’m leaving here.’ She was pleased it had come to a head; she could not have waited much longer.

  ‘Leaving? So you are leaving! You tell me just like that. Why didn’t I know about this?’

  ‘Because you would try to stop me.’

  ‘And where do you intend to go, pray?’

  She was silent, unmoving.

  *

  She had loved Emil from their first meeting in Landsberg Prison when she was a dewy sixteen. She was visiting her Uncle Adolf there, but her eyes had found those of Emil Maurice and never left them. They had expressed their love through music; she sang, he played guitar or accordion. They had written to each other every day.

  When Hitler, Emil Maurice and the others were released from prison, his job as her uncle’s chauffeur had been the perfect cover for their love. All the picnics he drove them to ...

  All was well until Emil had asked her uncle for her hand. It was at Hess’s wedding. Hitler had gone berserk. Next day, no calmer, he had chased Emil from this apartment she had to share with him. He had brandished a pistol, threatening to kill Emil. And of course threatening to kill himself, as he did all the time.

  Emil was Hitler’s friend. He was not really a ‘chauffeur’. He drove because Hitler couldn’t drive. He had known Hitler since the early days, commanding his first bodyguard. He was one of only three people Hitler was on du terms with. But still Hitler sacked him – no references. She had begged Emil not to sue Hitler for unfair dismissal; it was too dangerous. But he did. And he won.

  With the money he was awarded – a massive 800 marks – he had set himself up in a shop. He was a clock and watch maker and repairer – such sensitive hands, as well as a fighter’s tough body and a rather sweet bandleader moustache. He had audaciously chosen a shop round the corner from Hitler’s apartment, at the top of Schumannstrasse; number five it was. And there he plied his trade.

  By turns appalled and excited by the risks they were taking, they made love at the shop whenever they could. By now, Hitler was having her followed whenever she left the apartment, often following her himself. But as she used to say, giggling, to her best friend, Ello von Hessert, love finds a way. It had become h
er favourite phrase. Well, love must find a way now.

  *

  The armchair was cutting into her legs. She felt heavy, lumpen. She pulled her beige dress down, as she felt him looking at her.

  ‘You are in league with that deceiver,’ he shouted. ‘The one who betrayed me! The one you wanted to marry.’

  She stood and walked off. ‘I’m going to my room to pack,’ she called over her shoulder. Her voice faltered, belying the confident words. She had made no plans with Emil. How would he receive her? She shook her head impatiently and went ‘tsk, tsk’ out loud. How could she doubt Emil, even for a second? She hurried to her room and locked the door.

  Hitler followed her, his eyes fixed on her back all the way through the dining room. He went to his bedroom, separated from hers only by a bathroom and utility room. The pistol was on a shelf, above his bed. He picked it up, pausing with it in his hand. Facing him, on the wall, was a Dürer copper engraving: Knight, Death and Devil. It showed an armoured knight riding through a forest, with a dog jumping up at his horse. A devil, a grinning death figure, threatened to pull the knight off, but he did not deviate from his goal.

  With the pistol resting lightly in his hand, he walked out onto the balcony. The courtyard below was a blur in the wind and rain. Wind-driven spray hit him in the face. He made his way round to Geli’s room and in through the unlocked French windows. Her suitcase was open on the bed; she was folding a dress into it. She looked up, slightly startled but no more than that, before resuming her packing.