A small, dark-suited man clipped towards me with a slight limp, stopped and pulled his heels together in that automated way. This was no Aryan, but his face was often in the papers my father had pored over in the days before we became the disappeared. Joseph Goebbels – one of Hitler’s trusted inner circle, master of the truth twist, gilding lies and hoodwinking good, honest Germans. Wasn’t it Goebbels who had declared: ‘The mission of women is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world’? I remember my sister, Ilse, and I laughing at the words, but now that I looked at his wife, I understood why he imagined it possible.
‘Fräulein Hoff, pleased to meet you.’ He gave that half smile Third Reich officers clearly practised in training, designed to err on the edge of threat, his little spiny teeth just visible. He was rakishly thin, dark hair slicked back, cheeks sunken; if Himmler – Hitler’s right-hand man – was painted as the rat in the Reich’s higher circle, then Joseph Goebbels was the perfect weasel. For his wife, the attraction must have been more than skin deep. I felt an immediate shiver that he even knew my name.
He faced his wife. ‘The arrangements, they are all in order?’
‘Yes, Joseph,’ she replied with clear irritation.
‘Then I bid you good day. I hope you are well looked after, Fräulein Hoff.’
He walked out, his wife’s red lips thin and her gaze fixed on his back. She may have been beautiful and a copious breeder, but I had the feeling Frau Goebbels was more than a pretty face.
The interview over, Christa appeared in the doorway to lower me back to the servants’ quarters. The ‘getting ready’ consisted of making me presentable for my mystery client, something of a task in just one day. Christa was sent with carbolic, tackling the lice eggs embedded on the shafts of my thin hair. She worked cheerfully, talking affectionately about her family near Cologne, and although she skated over the hardships of war, it was evident that real, working German families were suffering too. Her brother was already a casualty, blinded and returned from the Eastern Front, leaving her father struggling on the family farm without a younger man’s muscle. She hinted only briefly at his disdain for the Reich.
She had been a nursing auxiliary before the conflict, in a home for elderly women. Part of the care, said Christa, was in teasing their thinning locks into something of a style, far better than any medicine. After the last of the lice were evicted from my own head, she worked miracles with her scissors and the hot iron, appearing to double the volume of my weakened strands, skilfully hiding my scabbed scalp. I barely recognised myself in the mirror, having not glimpsed my own face for what seemed like years. I had aged noticeably – lines around my eyes, gaunt cheeks, and tiny red veins pushing out in patches on my skull bones – but Christa’s efforts lessened the shock. Much like my body below, I chose not to dwell on the reflection.
Christa brought several suits and skirts, plain and practical, gleaned from the wardrobes of previous governesses or house managers; I mused only briefly on how many had left under a cloud of death. In the camp, we scavenged greedily on the corpses for useful clothes without a second thought. ‘The dead don’t shiver,’ we said, as justification for our guilt. It was accepted as survival. So that now, I didn’t flinch as I pulled on rough stockings, which morphed into silk, and buttoned a blouse that wouldn’t cause my skin to itch with renewed insect-life. They hung on me loosely, but Christa nipped and tucked, spiriting the clothes away and returning them within hours for a neater fit.
Towards the end of the day, an unexpected visitor appeared at my door. Christa noted me tensing at the sight of his small black carrying case, balding head and thick glasses. She spoke quickly, as if to reassure me he wasn’t a caricature of Dr Death: ‘Fräulein Hoff, this is Dr Simz. Madam has asked that he attend you before your trip tomorrow.’
Dr Simz had a dual role of both physician and dentist, checking over my body from top to toe, giving me balm for the most obvious of skin sores, pronouncing my lungs ‘a little wheezy’ but not infected, and my teeth in surprisingly good condition. He didn’t balk at the sight of my ribcage or sorry breasts, working methodically to check I was no threat to my proposed client. His positive mutterings told me I was ready. I would do.
I slept uneasily that night, despite the sumptuous bedding. I thought of Rosa, cold and vulnerable, of all the women in the maternity hut, my own hut too, and of Margot, eight months into pregnancy, barely recognisable as a mother-to-be. Her bulge was tiny, but it had sucked every particle of nutrition from her needy body nevertheless. On the day, she would be stripped of energy and life and baby in one fell swoop, and Rosa left to deal with the physical debris, as well as Margot’s deep, vacuous keening, rising above the hut as she grieved the life and loss of her baby. And here I was, sleeping in near luxury. ‘Unfair’ didn’t begin to describe the lottery by which we lived, died, or merely existed.
I took my last meal in that house with Christa, who had been almost my only real contact since arriving. In such a short time, we had struck up a small friendship; I recognised in her some spirit that was here simply to live, for her family, and yet she revealed in those young, green eyes that she wasn’t one of them. It was survival, of a different kind to my own, but survival nonetheless. Maybe there were more of us than we imagined, just doing our best.
But was it enough? Was it right?
4
Climbing
The large saloon engine gave off clouds in the crisp air as Christa waved me goodbye. ‘Be careful,’ she said, giving my hand a meaningful squeeze. ‘Look out for me – I’m sometimes sent up to the big house on errands.’
‘I will, and thank you, Christa. Thank you so much.’ I was genuinely sad to leave her, feeling we might have been better friends given time. We drove about a mile past large, lodge-style houses before the road started upwards, banked on either side by tall evergreens, climbing higher and higher up a stone coil of good road. The air changed, a tinge of blue clarity even inside the car, and it began to feel very mountainous. We passed through several checkpoints, and I had a distinct feeling that I would not be descending for some time to come.
After a quarter of an hour of slow climb, the car’s engines beginning to grumble like a troublesome uncle, the trees fanned out and the view became clear – we were, it seems, scaling a virtual mountain. Even with a light mist, it was spectacular, a feathery white collar to the rock mass, giving way below to a chequerboard of farmland, only dotted here and there with small clumps of dwellings. Like a child, I pressed my nose to the window – if we climbed any higher I felt we might be like Jack ascending the beanstalk, slipping through candy clouds.
In minutes, the top came into view, a concrete lip that looked as if it were teetering over the side of the granite peak, like the tree house my father had built in our garden, fun but always slightly tenuous. Just as I thought the road couldn’t get any steeper, it suddenly evened out and became a flat plain, and we drove through guarded black gates and onto a wide path. The view from below had been misleading; the mountain had a flattened area – by man or nature I couldn’t easily tell – and the house complex was large and sprawling, set into the side of the natural rock and not at the peak, as it first appeared. The main house was a mix of old stone and wood, chalet-style, two storeys but with an iceberg promise of more below. It was a tiny village on top of the world, small gardens and wide balconies surrounding the main house, with outbuildings here and there. Uniformed soldiers were dotted at various points, knights at the ready.
I was led upstairs onto the wide porch, breathing in air so dramatically different from the camp smog that I thought I must be on a different planet, my lungs wheezing on the purity. The light up here made me think there was life, after all; in all those dark days, this world had existed in parallel, outside of hell. It was almost too much to comprehend.
The door opened to a woman’s harsh, thin face, topped with a jet black cap of hair, bearing a reluctant smile.
‘Welcome Fräulein Hoff,’ she said. �
��I am Frau Grunders, the housekeeper.’ This last statement was said with reverence, but I managed only a ‘Hello’ and ‘Thank you.’ Her prickly greeting mirrored the cacti and spiked greenery dotted in the hallway, set in rows of colourful, ceramic pots. She bristled as her ebony, austere shoes clipped on the wooden flooring, leading me through a high, vaulted hallway, and down to the servants’ quarters. I was shown into a small parlour, which could have been called either cluttered or cosy.
‘Please take a seat and wait here,’ she said, and closed the door.
Minutes later an officer in grey SS uniform entered, stooping through the doorway to avoid his lofty height making contact with the gable.
‘Morning Fräulein, I am Captain Stenz.’ He clicked his heels and sat awkwardly, although his face was open. ‘I will be your official contact here. My information is that you have been told only a little of your duties.’ A deep well of blue irises looked at me directly.
‘I have, Captain, yes. I was only told that my skills as a midwife would be needed.’
He paused, eyes scanning the floor, as if revealing any more was physically painful. Silently, he peeled off black leather gloves, finger by finger.
‘The situation is delicate,’ he said finally. ‘We are relying not only on your practical skills but on your professional confidentiality … and integrity.’
I only nodded, eager for him to go on.
‘There is a lady residing in this house who is currently pregnant – four to five months we believe. For a number of reasons she cannot attend a hospital for care. She will be your sole charge.’
‘Am I allowed to know her name, if I am to be her constant carer?’
He sighed at the inevitability of opening a secret but dangerous box, and placed his leather gloves on the small table between us, as if he were really laying down a gauntlet.
5
New Beginning
‘Her name is Fräulein Eva Braun.’ With those words Captain Stenz sat back in his chair, aware that a volatile cat had been let out of the bag. I had never been a follower of the magazine gossip columns but my younger sister, Ilse, keenly crawled over the fashion pages, following the rounds of Berlin’s social parties. ‘Look at this, Anke,’ she’d often say. ‘Don’t you think she’s just gorgeous? Shall I have my hair like that?’ Thanks to Ilse, I had heard Eva Braun’s name – as the sister to one of Hitler’s inner circle, a wholesome German girl, from a good family, blonde and blue-eyed, someone Hitler could and would be associated with. It was never stated that they were close, or even romantically involved – the Führer was married to Germany, after all. In the propaganda newsreels engineered to show his human side – the Führer ‘at play’ – she was sometimes in the background, filming with a camera, alongside her sister, Gretl.
Now, my mind spiralled. Up until then, I thought I had been engaged to look after the wife of a Nazi dignitary, or even the illegitimate child of the Reich’s inner circle. But now, something far more sinister ran like electricity through my brain, so incredible it seemed beyond reason.
Could it be that Adolf Hitler, the Führer, the Commander of the Third Reich, and possibly all of Europe, in time, was the father of Eva Braun’s baby? And what would that mean to his standing as the Father of Germany – to be shared with a population who he claimed as his children? To those of us who had experienced Hitler’s version of cleansing, who had witnessed first-hand what he was capable of inflicting on human beings, any offspring with a semblance of his thinking was a frightening prospect. A son and heir to both name and genetics was too much to fathom.
I struggled to react, to absorb such news. Captain Stenz only looked at me with those deep blue eyes, as seconds ticked slowly by. Searching, enquiring.
‘Fräulein Hoff?’
‘Yes?’
‘Are you quite well?’ He said it with a note of true concern, and then a hint of a smile. ‘We can’t have you falling ill, not on your first day, can we?’
‘No, no,’ I said. ‘It’s just … the change of circumstance, so quickly. It’s hard to take in.’
I wanted to test his reactions by referring to my other life, to see if he masked them in the same automatic way as the others, empathy sucked from his psyche. His eyes dropped, and he moved to pick up his gloves.
‘Yes,’ he said flatly. So, a complete Nazi – one of them. Inevitable. But then, the quickest flick of his blond lashes towards me, a rich, blue spark. In that second I caught some doubt, some recognition. And he caught me catching it. Over the past two years I had barely looked at any man without feeling hatred or disgust, since most were guards infected with a profound disdain for humanity. Yet the man before me caused an unexpected reaction deep inside; a tweak low into my being. Did I recognise it as attraction? I rebuked myself for such shallow and immediate feelings.
He needed to leave soon – a car was waiting – so we covered my duties swiftly. I would remain at the Berghof for the duration of the pregnancy, and for at least four to six weeks afterwards, helping my charge to adjust to motherhood. The baby would be born at home, but transport and a doctor would be available at all times should I need them, and would reside in the complex for a month or so before the birth. A small room would be set aside for anaesthetics, ready to be transformed into an operating theatre if necessary.
It was elaborate and excessive, and clearly they were keen to avoid a trip to the hospital, however private, at all costs – the true nature of the Reich’s propaganda machine was laid bare. Appearances were a good portion of this war, and I was to be known as a companion to all but the inner circle. This baby must remain hidden until it was prudent to reveal to the world, under the Führer’s terms. I almost felt sorry for Eva Braun already.
‘I have arranged all the equipment necessary,’ Captain Stenz went on, in officer-speak. ‘Should you need anything else, please contact my office. While I am absent, you can refer to my under-secretary, Sergeant Meier. He will see to your day-to-day needs, and report to me directly. We expect you to keep regular and detailed notes of all care.’
‘I understand,’ I said. All too well. I would be reported on, scrutinised under a microscope, from now until the birth. Charged with bringing a live Aryan specimen into the world. The Aryan. The responsibility of life had never fazed me, in all my years working with mothers and babies, but this life … this poor, unsuspecting child might prove to be something different. No less, no more precious than any I’d seen, but with the potential to create unrelenting shock waves throughout Europe and the world. Throughout history. I almost craved to be back in the camps, among my own kind, where I could make a difference, save lives, instead of merely pandering to rich Nazi handmaidens. Then, hot with shame at even wishing such degradation on any living being, even myself, I reminded myself I’d been lucky to walk out.
The abrupt heels of Captain Stenz brought me back.
‘I will say good day then, Fräulein,’ he said, bowing his head briefly, then adding, ‘Um, Fräulein Braun, she knows nothing of your …’
‘History?’ I helped him.
‘Yes – history,’ he said with a mixture of embarrassment and relief, a slight curl to his lip.
He was one, I decided then, who had coveted his mother, climbed on her lap for bedtime hugs and kisses, been real, individual, accepted and returned love. I looked into his turquoise eyes and wondered what the Reich had done to him.
6
Adjustment
After the Captain left, I was alone for some time among the clutter of the housekeeper’s personal world, the room obviously doubling as her office and private sitting room, the obligatory Führer icon placed altar-like above an unlit fireplace. My stomach growled noisily, having soon become accustomed to food again, and I realised it was nearing lunchtime. I waited, since no one had issued any other instruction, and I realised how quickly I had fallen into a servile role. In the camp, it had become second nature to obey the guards as the basic rule of survival, but then to find methods of defiance in between
our ‘yes, sir; no, sir’ reactions. We, none of us, ever thought of ourselves as second-class citizens, merely captives of the weapons wielded against us. Each and every day it was a fight to remind ourselves of it, but we saw it as vital, a way to avoid sinking into the mire.
Eventually, Frau Grunders entered, bringing a tray of bread, cheese and meats with her, a small glass of beer on the side. I hadn’t seen or tasted ale in over two years, and the rays of midday light created a globe of nectar in her hands. I could hardly concentrate for wanting my lips to touch the chalice and breathe in the heady hops. I had never been a connoisseur of beer, but my father would have a glass at night while listening to the wireless, and he’d let me have a sip every evening as a child, to make me ‘grow big and strong’. He was that smell, was in that glass, ready and waiting.
The housekeeper crackled as she moved, irritation sparking from her thin limbs and her crown of plaited hair as she put the tray to one side. Her mouse-like features set in a wrinkle before she spoke.
‘You will reside in one of the small annexes next to the main house,’ she began, indicating I was neither servant nor equal. ‘Unless Fräulein Braun requests that you be nearer, in which case we can arrange a cot in her room. Your meals will be in the servants’ dining room, unless Fräulein Braun wishes you to eat with her. If you need anything else, please come to me.’
I was unperturbed by her attempt at ranking; servant or not, it was about staying alive, and maintaining my own personal measure of dignity. Still, I understood that for Frau Grunders, her own self-respect lay in creating order in this strange little planet on the crest of the world, a tidy top to the chaos. With one beady eye on that beer glass, I had no reaction except a ‘Thank you,’ and she turned to leave.
‘Fräulein Braun will see you for tea at three o’clock in the drawing room,’ she said on parting. The beer was the nectar it promised to be, sweet and bitter in unison, and I choked pitifully on the third mouthful, partly through greed, but largely because I couldn’t stop the tears cascading down my cheeks, or fighting their way noisily up and through my throat.
A Woman of War Page 4