The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, Volume 6

by Orlando Pearson

  My reader will recall that from 1940, Holmes and I lived in a small cottage in Fenny Stratford. Holmes was helping codebreakers at nearby Bletchley Park—something I only became aware of during our interrogation of Rudolph Hess of early May 1945, which I described in The Führer and his Deputies. When he was at home, the small garden of our cottage enabled Holmes to continue his chosen retirement activity of beekeeping, while our personal requirements were simple: plain food, tobacco, and newspapers.

  While the first Great War had been fought on foreign soil with only limited impact on life within these shores, the second war was felt in every corner of the land whether in the shape of the seemingly unending rationing, the sight of German ’planes overhead, or the presence of families evacuated from London.

  Our means of following the progress of events had changed too. In the 1914-1918 war it had been newspapers only, whereas by 1939 we could follow events via the wireless and news reels at the picture house. I would have expected such an increase in the number of sources from which we could obtain information to us might have led to the elimination of false rumours—I had been one of many fooled by the myth of a million Russians landing in Scotland to help the fight at the western front in 1914—but this did not appear to be the case.

  On the contrary there were constant rumours.

  In late 1939 we heard that the Americans were about to join us in the struggle although their entry to the war had to wait another two years. In the middle of the war we heard of the massacre of thousands of Polish soldiers, which was discovered by the Germans, and which they and the Soviets each claimed was the responsibility of the other. After D-Day, we heard of massacres of civilians in central France, and now at the, end of the war, we heard reports of the British, Americans, and Germans uniting against the Soviets.

  With the benefit of hindsight my reader will know that some of these rumours were true, some wholly without foundation, and some a mixture of the two. Holmes kept aloof from all rumours although in hindsight he had access to more confidential information than almost anyone from his work at Bletchley Park and, even at his advanced age, he possessed greater ability than any man alive to investigate matters and to form a picture of what was happening. I did wonder, when rumours circulated of war-crimes, whether my friend would become involved in the investigation of them, but that must wait for another day. It seemed that for now the most heinous crimes had either not happened or had no perpetrator; they were certainly not being investigated.

  On Wednesday the 28th of March 1945, there was a knock on the door. I answered it and standing on the step was the spare figure of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery whose face was well-known to me from newspapers and newsreels. I took him into the cottage’s small sitting room where Holmes and I had just concluded a meagre breakfast.

  The field marshal came straight to the point.

  “Last Friday saw the launch of Operation Plunder. We made landings on the eastern bank of the Rhine at Rees near Cleaves, and our bridgehead, along with that of the American forces at Remagen, is now secure. The war should now end in a matter of weeks.”

  “That is excellent news,” said Holmes, “but what do you want from me? I am ninety-one years old and, although I am in robust health, I cannot see how I might be of help to a field marshal in battle.”

  “For the further prosecution of the war, we have two contradictory objectives. For political reasons, we want to push our front line as far east as possible in the next few weeks so that as much of Germany as possible finishes the war in the hands of the western allies rather than in the hands of Soviets. But we also want to minimise British casualties. This is desirable in its own right, but doubly important with our troops. Our men are war-weary and see no merit in striving to gain strategic objectives when those objectives will in any case be achieved by our Soviet allies who have no compunction in incurring high casualty rates.”

  “Pray continue.”

  “Even though the German situation is hopeless, they continue to mount resistance characterised by skill, bravery, and a complete lack of means. They have no oil-refineries, so their soldiers carry rubber pipes round their necks to recover fuel from shot up vehicles. They have little artillery, so they use hand-fired, single-use devices called Panzerfausts to launch rocket attacks on our tanks. They have little air support and can offer no aerial defence against raids from our bombers and air-attacks from our fighters. Yet they continue to mount assaults on our lines that are measured, effective, and damaging.”

  “So what is it you wish me to do?”

  “You, Mr Holmes, are well-known to the Germans from the writings of Dr Watson here, and his works make clear you have a good command of the German language. We would like you to talk to German prisoners of war that we capture and establish why they carry on fighting even though their situation is hopeless. If we can find out what is causing them to fight, maybe we can find a way of causing them to surrender.”

  “Have you not already tried to make surrender as attractive as possible to the German?”

  “In the fog of war many evil things happen, and surrender is always a huge risk to a soldier who may be shot by his own side or shot out of hand by his captor. But we normally observe the Geneva Convention—as do the Germans—and we do what we can to make sure the Germans we capture are well-treated. We have conducted leaflet drops in which captured German soldiers make this clear, but this has had no effect so far.”

  Even deep in retirement Holmes was excited by new challenges, and he accepted Montgomery’s commission with alacrity. I was asked to provide a record of activities and thus it was that in early April 1945 we were flown from RAF Hendon to Antwerp and then transported eastwards by road into Germany.

  The journey was not an easy one. Hitler had issued his so-called Nero command under which everything which might be of use to an advancing army was to be destroyed. Thus, every bridge had been sprung, every road mined, and all open terrain flooded wherever the geography allowed. The town and cities we passed through had been reduced to rubble by our bombers while the villages showed the ravages of the bombardment which had preceded their capture. The roads were clogged with miserable-looking refugees from all parts of Germany. And everywhere hung a stench from the putrefying bodies of combatants and civilians.

  We had been assigned to the 11th Armoured Division which had made its field-headquarters in the city of Münster, sixty miles east of the Rhine. Even though the entire terrain between Antwerp and Münster was securely in British hands, it took us nearly three days to traverse the one hundred and eighty miles that lay between the two cities.

  We had to approach the city from the south. It had been the subject of a heavy air raid only two weeks before and its western approaches were still impassable. The commanding officer of the 11th Armoured was Major General Philip Roberts, a life-long soldier who had fought in North Africa. We were brought before him and his adjutant, Esmond, on arrival in Münster. He had made his HQ in the city’s Rathaus or town-hall, one of whose wings had chanced to remain undamaged.

  “It is good to have you here, Mr Holmes,” he said, “and you too Dr Watson. We have fought our way up from Juno Beach in Normandy. We have suffered casualties at every turn and continue to incur them. And yet, here we are, well over a hundred miles inside Germany with the Soviets poised outside Berlin. And still the Germans keep fighting even though their cause is obviously lost. The only problem will be the difficulty in supplying you with prisoners. At Normandy, the Germans fought until their position became hopeless, and then surrendered. Here they just fight.”

  “But do you have prisoners to whom I might speak?”

  “I do. We tend to capture the ones who are wounded and can’t get back to their lines.”

  “You mean that they still make incursions in front of their own lines.”

  “Oh yes. We face frequent counterattacks. They are a constant thre
at. The Germans are mainly on the defensive, but they are always capable of catching us on the hop with a raid.”

  “Will the prisoners talk to us?”

  “You will see. The town has a palace which used to belong to the local prince. The locals call it the Residenz. We use what has been left unscathed by bombing raids as a hospital and there are about eighty prisoners there. I will call for a truck to take you, and Esmond here will accompany you.”

  We left Roberts’s office and waited for the truck to pick us up.

  Holmes was about to strike a match to light his pipe but paused to survey the wilderness of destruction before us. The raids that preceded Münster’s capture had been heavy ones and before us was a sea of rubble—just as many British cities had been reduced to mounds of loose brick. He sniffed the air before saying, “I suppose the roads are dangerous; otherwise, we could walk to the hospital ourselves. It’s only six hundred yards north west of here.”

  I was about to ask him how he knew but he turned away from me to shelter his pipe from a small gust of wind.

  Esmond drew up in his truck and we headed off. As Holmes had anticipated, the journey we took was a highly circuitous one and Esmond talked to us over the roar of the motor. “We had four prisoners brought in yesterday who were captured making a sortie. We got them only because the amount of lead we stuck into them meant they couldn’t move. I’m hoping they’ll all still be alive when we get there.”

  My time as an army surgeon, albeit over half a century previously, made me able to bear the sight of men with grievous wounds whether they were recovering from them or dying from them, and even to endure the sound of screams from those in pain. But it was the reek of body fluids that smote our senses. With Holmes’s command of German and the limited English of the prisoners we saw, communication did not pose a problem and I set out for the record what they said.

  The first one we saw was called Kalb. To my horror, he was only sixteen and horribly mutilated.

  “I have not long left,” he whispered feebly, “but I know that we will have victory and my death will mean that Germany may live. We have weapons in development which you cannot even dream about Mr Holmes. The Vergeltungswaffen—”

  “—Vengeance weapons—he means the rocket bombs,” explained Holmes—

  “Are only a start. Now they devastate London. Soon they will hit New York.”

  But Kalb’s statement seemed to have cost most of the rest of his strength.

  His head tipped forward, and bile flecked with clotted blood issued from his mouth. He muttered something incoherent and then started whispering intently what I thought was the Rosary until Holmes translated, “I swear to God this sacred oath. That to the Leader of the German Empire and people, Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces I shall render unconditional obedience, and that as a brave soldier I shall at all times be prepared to give my life for this oath.”

  He started again, his whisper even fainter, “I swear to God”, but he broke off to breathe his last with a death rattle that would have shocked in any ambience other than this one.

  “Let’s try someone else,” said Holmes.

  Two beds down was a man in his early forties with a broken thigh. His name was Mittler. “We may be beaten but we will never capitulate. Didn’t Churchill in 1940 say that the fight would go on even if Britain were occupied. I fought at the end of the last war when we were betrayed by the generals, the politicians, and the Jews. We got a stab in the back from them and signed a treaty that no nation could accept with honour. I don’t care about my future or anyone else’s. I want to fight to the end even if that means that the Russians and the Americans meet somewhere in the middle of Germany. The fight will go on even if it is confined to terrorist action against occupying forces.”

  He paused and looked at each of us.

  “The Führer talked about werewolf actions. And that is how it will be for years to come. We will make what the Russians did to us behind our lines look like a tea party. The world will never be able to rest easy unless you kill all of us.”

  Holmes, Esmond, and I were silent, all of us, I think, unsure of how to respond. Mittler broke into song, and Holmes translated, “With German blood in our veins, there is no need to waver, To arms, my people, to arms! We’ll no more bow to our enslaver, To arms, my people, to arms!”

  The third man we spoke to was called Lemberger. Half his face had been shot off and brain tissue was visible through a hole in his skull. I could tell by his waxy colour he was not long for this world, and bubbles of sweat erupted on his skin at the effort of speaking. “I come from Silesia,” he gasped. “I have lost everything. My wife and children were killed in an air-raid. Under the terms of the Yalta Conference, Breslau, where my parents live, will become Polish even though it always been German, just so that Russia can expand its territory westwards. After my family was killed, I never wanted to survive the war.” Esmond had to help him take some water before he could continue. “I was wounded at Stalingrad and was on the last plane to make it out. My intent then was to commit a soldier’s suicide.”

  “What is that?” I found myself asking, the horror of what I was hearing having a mesmeric hold over me.

  Lemberger peered at me from his one remaining eye.

  “We come out from cover and shoot at anything we can before we are taken down by the enemy.”

  Esmond nodded in recognition.

  “We have seen quite a lot of that. We kill them when we can get a sufficient weight of fire on them but sometimes, we only disable them. And when an orderly attends to them, they will do everything they can to kill him. One pulled the needle on a grenade as an orderly was trying to get a splint on him. And the German survived for a while even after the grenade had gone off and the orderly was dead. But you can imagine no one wanted to treat….”

  “My only ambition,” continued Lemberger, cutting across Esmond, “was to take as many of the enemy with me before I was killed myself. My only regret is that I didn’t take any more before this happened.”

  The last soldier we saw was a captain named Ritter. He had lost a leg but was it was obvious that he would survive. He seemed pleased to have someone to talk to.

  “I am a professional soldier. My family has been in the Prussian and then in the German army for generations. I’ve always despised that Austrian corporal. It’s almost worth being captured to be able to say that without fear of retribution. This second great war was inevitable after the Treaty of Versailles. As a soldier I do what I am told by the politicians and it didn’t really matter after the last war who was in charge. We lost a seventh of our territory after 1918, and our eastern neighbours were all much smaller and weaker than we were. So of-course we were going to try and take back what we had lost as soon as we could.”

  He stared defiantly at us.

  “Where we went wrong was in over-reaching ourselves. We might have got away with getting back the Saarland, uniting with Austria, linking up with East Prussia by eliminating Poland, and taking western Czechoslovakia. Then we were mostly taking back land that had always belonged to us. But Hitler couldn’t stop—Yugoslavia, Greece, North Africa, Russia, and, and, and... Then he declared war on the United States. Sheer madness. Gentlemen, National Socialism was an intrinsically good idea that went too far. And we will lose more territory in the East in the final settlement and who knows what else will happen. It is worth continuing the fight to prevent that.”

  “But this is Germany’s western front and there is no suggestion of Germany losing any territory here. And even with what is proposed Germany will be second only to France in size among Western European nations. Yet you continue the fight,” objected Holmes.

  “I’m not sure anyone in Germany will believe you about Germany’s western borders,” replied Ritter with a shrug. “After the last war, the French wanted to expel all the Germans from west o
f the Rhine and take it for themselves. I am sure they are rubbing their hands together now at the prospect.”

  “Do you think territorial loss in the west is a real concern among Germans?”

  “It is one of many,” replied Ritter drily. “But at the moment our soldiers are more worried about being killed, and our women about being raped.”

  Esmond drove us back to the Rathaus and I subsequently saw Holmes in deep discussion with the divisional radio operator.

  It was evening before we were able to debrief Roberts.

  “And,” asked he, “did you hear anything today that gave you an idea of how to make the Germans ahead of us surrender?”

  “I take it you can get the BBC news here?”

  “Of-course,” said Roberts. “It’s five to seven here, and five to six in London.”

  After a few false starts with the reception, we were able to tune in just as Big Ben chimed.

  “This is the six o’clock news on the BBC broadcasting from London,” said a familiar voice. After announcing some American breakthroughs to the south of us, the newsreader turned to political developments.

  “In a communique issued in Paris today following a meeting between General de Gaulle and General Eisenhower, the French leader expressed renewed disappointment at the proposed border settlement in Europe. ‘We want the Germans permanently on the other side of the Rhine. It is hard to motivate our troops unless we can have improved security guarantees on the post-war frontiers.’” General Eisenhower noted the French general’s comments. He remarked that if German resistance continued, consideration might have to be given to awarding the whole of the west bank of the Rhine as far as the Dutch border to France in any future settlement to ensure the security of France’s eastern border.”

  The news moved onto other matters, but Roberts looked at Holmes with awe.

  “That’s a smart piece of work, Mr Holmes. We have struggled to give the Germans a positive reason to surrender in the west, but this might help us.”