Traitor's Gate

by Michael Ridpath

  And now they were standing by and watching their country imprison, torture and kill their neighbours, their friends, even their children.

  But what could they do? What could Conrad do? He had come to Germany to observe and to write, but now he wanted to do something, to show that he at least thought that Joachim’s death was wrong, that it shouldn’t go unnoticed, unpunished.

  He thought about his cousin’s last days. He was beginning to wonder whether Joachim’s gossip had been entirely innocent. Joachim had sought out Theo, a man he scarcely knew, to tell him a rumour. Why Theo? Then there were Joachim’s friends who were willing to help Theo. What friends? And help him do what?

  Perhaps this mysterious Johnnie von Herwarth was one of these friends. And perhaps there was more to the plot to remove Hitler than Theo made out.

  Theo clearly knew more than he had been prepared to tell Conrad. Also, Theo’s contacts within the Gestapo seemed to be remarkably good. Conrad supposed that anyone in Germany could have a ‘friend’ in the Gestapo, but a friend who was willing to contact Theo at three o’clock in the morning?

  It didn’t make sense. Not Theo. If anyone could be trusted to keep his head in modern Germany, to keep a healthy distance from Nazism and all its vile ideas, it was Theo.

  And how the hell had the Gestapo found out about Joachim’s indiscretions in the first place?

  It was the implication of that last question that bothered Conrad the most.

  Klaus Schalke stepped out of the door of 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and walked the few metres around the corner to the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais on Wilhelmstrasse. This opulent building, which had served as the Berlin home of members of the Prussian royal family, was now the headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst, or the SD, and housed the office of Reinhard Heydrich, who was head of both the SD and the Gestapo.

  Klaus was apprehensive. Although he knew that he was one of Heydrich’s favourites, he also knew he wasn’t safe. Like most people, there were stretches of his past life that might appear unsound in the wrong light. No one in Nazi Germany was safe, not even members of the Gestapo.

  It had been a bad week. Klaus was worried about his mother, usually so energetic, who had fallen ill yet again and hadn’t been able to shake a general lassitude for a couple of months now. The doctor said there was nothing wrong with her but Klaus was sure there was. He didn’t know what he would do if anything happened to her, anything... well... final. He knew he wouldn’t be able to bear it.

  Klaus hated his father: a small man, meticulous and nasty, who had resented his son’s size and sloppiness, and had beaten him regularly. But his mother, bigger than his father, warm and loving, had always been there to comfort him. He couldn’t imagine life without her.

  He still had not received a reply to the carefully crafted letter he had sent the week before to his angel, the only other woman in his life, and he was beginning to fear that it would remain unanswered like all the others. He had really hoped that this time... but he was being foolish. As always.

  And now this.

  Klaus was sent straight into Heydrich’s office. Heydrich was sitting at his desk studying a file Klaus recognized. ‘Heil Hitler!’

  ‘Sit down, Schalke,’ Heydrich snapped.

  Klaus’s fears were justified: his boss was not happy. As he did as he was bid, he somehow managed to trip over the edge of the rug in front of Heydrich’s desk and lurched into the chair with a thump and an ominous sharp crack. Clumsy at the best of times, he seemed to find it impossible to control his limbs when he was nervous. He pushed his glasses back on to his nose and Heydrich’s glare slipped into focus.

  For someone in such a powerful position Heydrich was young: he had become head of the Gestapo at thirty and was still only thirty-four. He was tall with a high forehead, small restless eyes and full lascivious lips. He had long slender hands: he was an excellent violinist. Like Klaus, he had a disturbingly high voice. He exuded a unique aura of delicate violence. Unlike Klaus, women found him handsome, or at least those who liked their men with a hint of danger did.

  There were several good reasons why Heydrich liked Klaus. Klaus understood the importance of information: of gathering it, of sifting it and of using it. And he was capable of finding ingenious solutions to difficult problems. In fact it was this skill that had brought Klaus to Heydrich’s attention when Klaus was a junior lawyer in the Berlin prosecutor’s department working on some of the Gestapo’s cases.

  Heydrich suffered from persistent rumours about his ancestry; his grandmother’s name was Süss, which sounded Jewish. One of Heydrich’s henchmen who knew Klaus’s abilities also knew he had been to university in Halle, Heydrich’s home town, and so asked him to help. At that time, when most of the professional classes had to show documentary evidence of their Aryan ancestry if they wanted to keep their jobs, forged documents were easy to procure. The Gestapo’s plan was simply to forge the Süss grandmother out of existence. But Klaus advised against this: people who knew the Heydrich family in Halle knew about Frau Süss; denying her existence would simply leave the head of the Gestapo vulnerable to more rumour. Klaus’s suggestion was to make an already complicated family situation more complicated. Of course Frau Süss existed, of course she was Heydrich’s grandmother, but she had only taken the name Süss as a result of a second marriage to a locksmith, who anyway wasn’t really Jewish. A couple of subtle alterations to documents were required, an ancient birth certificate was mislaid – nothing too blatant. The trickiest bit had been changing a date on a tombstone.

  Heydrich was impressed. Not just with the idea, but with the mind that had produced it. So he offered Klaus a job in the Gestapo. It was an offer Klaus could not very well refuse. Since then he had done all kinds of awkward jobs for Heydrich, including accompanying him for nights of debauchery on the town, nights which his boss relished but Klaus found embarrassing and frankly disgusting.

  ‘How could you have let this happen, Schalke? Didn’t you know that this man had a weak heart?’

  ‘I am very sorry, Herr Gruppenführer. We had no way of knowing. There was nothing on file.’ At least there wasn’t now. Klaus had located the reference to Joachim’s heart condition in the army medical report which had denied him entry to the reserves. This he had swiftly removed.

  ‘I have had von Ribbentrop on the telephone to me. And worse than that, Göring.’

  ‘I can understand the Foreign Minister,’ Klaus said. ‘But why Göring?’

  ‘Mühlendorf’s father owns a shipping line in Hamburg. His ships transport most of the Reich’s iron ore down from Sweden. He goes hunting with Göring – they are best friends. And he is kicking up a fuss.’

  ‘That is unfortunate.’ Von Ribbentrop was of no real consequence, but Göring was not someone you wanted to cross. Although the Gestapo was universally feared in Germany, it was by no means universally powerful. In the Third Reich power was disseminated among many institutions. Heydrich’s Gestapo was only one of these. There was the Party, the Wehrmacht, Göring’s Luftwaffe, Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry, the Finance Ministry, the industrialists and businessmen. The civil service, including the Foreign Office, and the judiciary retained some influence. Even Himmler and the SS, the Gestapo’s parent organization, were not all-powerful. No single individual was in Nazi Germany, except perhaps the Führer himself. And he liked to keep things that way.

  ‘Unfortunate? It’s not unfortunate. It’s the inevitable result of your bungling! Why couldn’t you have been more careful with Mühlendorf? You knew he was a diplomat.’

  ‘I should have been, Herr Gruppenführer. But I am convinced that he was hiding something.’

  ‘What about the Englishman, de Lancey? Is he a spy?’

  ‘I don’t know. We have let him go. But we will keep an eye on him.’

  Heydrich examined the file on his desk, which was open at Klaus’s report on Mühlendorf. ‘So what do you think he was hiding? Do you believe there really is a plan to overthrow the Führer?’
>
  ‘There might be.’

  ‘From where? Within the Foreign Office?’ Heydrich snorted. ‘What can they do? Send a cable to the Führer humbly requesting his resignation?’

  ‘Possibly within the Foreign Office. Possibly the army. You know how unhappy they are about von Fritsch.’

  ‘Do you have any proof?’

  ‘Not yet. But I can look for it.’

  ‘The generals believe they are responsible to no one but themselves; they haven’t yet understood that it is their duty to serve the National Socialist state.’ Heydrich looked at Klaus sharply. ‘We have to be very careful about the army. I don’t want you going around arresting soldiers: there will be no end of trouble.’

  ‘I understand, Herr Gruppenführer!’

  Conrad was determined to register his own protest at Joachim’s death. But what could he do, a lone foreigner in a country where the whole might of the state was focused on the suppression of protest? He had seriously considered marching into 8 Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse and yelling at that big Gestapo oaf. Even if he was arrested in the process, it would make him feel better and his detention might get some publicity. But he knew that would be at best pointless, at worst dangerous. So he went to the British Embassy, just a little further up Wilhelmstrasse from the Gestapo headquarters.

  There his demands to see the Ambassador were deflected by a charming Third Secretary of about his own age. Conrad’s plan was to complain about his own treatment with the hope of drawing Joachim’s death into the resulting outcry. But the Third Secretary explained that there was to be no outcry. Although Conrad’s arrest did indeed sound unwarranted, he had been treated well, he hadn’t even been interrogated let alone physically harmed, and he had been released as soon as the Gestapo had recognized their mistake. As for Joachim Mühlendorf, he was a German citizen and it was not British policy to interfere in the treatment of German citizens by the German authorities.

  The Third Secretary maintained his calm no matter how hard Conrad pressed him. In the end Conrad gave up, frustrated, defeated.

  Back at his hotel, he pulled out his typewriter and bashed out an account of his arrest. For an hour he thumped the keys until his fingers hurt. He read through the result: powerful, passionate, shocking. It lacked the dryly observed insights that the editor of Mercury liked in his magazine, but Conrad would force him to publish it anyway. And if Theo didn’t like it, to hell with him.

  To hell with him? As Conrad stared at the article he knew that its publication could get Theo into serious trouble. He had promised Theo not to write about what had happened; he had to keep that promise. He tore up the sheets of typescript and went to bed.

  5

  The next day Conrad spent in the ‘Stabi’, as the Staatsbibliothek on Unter den Linden was called, armed with a new exercise book and notebooks he had scribbled in during his time at the prep school. He had spent three weeks in the library in 1933 researching his thesis on the Danish war. He was fond of the old place; it seemed one of the few institutions left in Berlin still free of Nazi influence. True, the Friedrich-Wilhelm University next door had been purged of non-Aryan and otherwise unsound professors and twenty thousand books had been burned in front of the opera house over the road, but the Stabi itself still contained tens of thousands of volumes written before National Socialism had ever been conceived.

  He found himself a quiet desk, opened the exercise book and began writing. He had decided to write in longhand and type his work up later. He had been mulling over the first chapter for weeks, and he was pleased how easily it flowed.

  The idea of writing a novel in Berlin had come to him during the Easter holidays, which he had spent in Suffolk. His plan was to write about a young Englishman who had married a German woman and lived in Berlin in 1914. One of the major characters would be a Prussian friend, an army officer. The novel would be about how a family could be blown apart by the prospect of war, and the difficulties that the Englishman and the Prussian faced as they realized they would soon be fighting each other.

  Conrad was aware of the parallels with his own life: his father in Hamburg in 1914, and his own friendship with Theo. But that was the point. He hoped that by writing the book he would begin to sort things out in his mind.

  In Spain he had seen how war corrupted the good and the bad, the socialists and the Fascists. Yet although Spain had given him a hatred of war, it had also given him a taste for action. He couldn’t stay in Suffolk any more. In Berlin he would be able to see for himself how the world was tearing itself apart. And by writing his novel here, perhaps he would understand it a bit better, or at least understand himself.

  Although none of that would help Joachim.

  At about half past three he called it a day, his head buzzing with what he had written. He strolled out into the courtyard of the Stabi and paused by the fountain, enjoying the June sunshine and the crisp Berlin air. Creepers criss-crossed the old grey façade like a thick beard on an old grandfather’s face. The splashing of water from the fountain drowned out the hum of the traffic outside.

  ‘Lovely building, don’t you think?’

  Conrad turned in surprise at hearing English spoken. Next to him was a short, middle-aged man with owl-like glasses resting on a pointed nose and a friendly smile. He looked very English.

  ‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ Conrad replied.

  ‘De Lancey, isn’t it?’ The little man held out his hand. ‘My name’s Foley. Captain Foley.’

  Conrad shook the hand, feeling slightly bemused. ‘I’m with the embassy here,’ Foley said. ‘I heard you had arrived in Berlin, so when I saw you here I thought I would introduce myself. Do you fancy a stroll? I’m just going back across the Tiergarten to my office.’

  ‘All right,’ said Conrad, curious about what the little man might have to say. Perhaps the embassy was going to do something about Joachim after all.

  They set off along Unter den Linden, a bustle of cars, trams, buses and bicycles and the overladen brightly coloured wheelbarrows of street vendors selling everything from sausages to books. To Conrad’s eyes the street looked bare without its linden, although skinny saplings popped up at regular intervals, replacements planted a couple of years before, after the original trees had been ripped up to dig the new S-Bahn line. This end of the street was graced with grand buildings: the library, the opera, the university, and a veritable army of statues, with Frederick the Great rising massively on his horse in the middle of the road. A band of Hitler Youth streamed past; boys of nine or ten wearing swastika armbands and brown shirts and shorts. Conrad was glad to see that their marching step was pretty ragged, and they still acted more like a bunch of chattering schoolboys than the fanatical automatons they were being groomed to become.

  ‘Do you know Berlin?’ Foley asked.

  ‘I came here for a few months to research my thesis,’ Conrad said. ‘My mother is from Hamburg; I was actually born there. We left when war broke out.’

  ‘I was studying philosophy in Hamburg in 1914,’ said Foley. ‘It’s a wonderful place. But I was slow to leave: damned nearly didn’t get out. Your father is Lord Oakford, isn’t he? Arthur de Lancey as he was then.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘I came across him during the war. Not in the trenches, although I did my stint there. Like him, I caught a bullet and ended up working for the general staff. Unlike him, I didn’t earn a VC catching it.’

  ‘That was military intelligence, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That’s a rather grand name for what we were doing,’ Foley said. He glanced up, his mild eyes meeting Conrad’s through his spectacles.

  For a moment Conrad wondered whether the man was trying to tell him that he was still in intelligence. It seemed highly unlikely. Foley looked to be in his fifties, a nondescript pen-pusher if ever there was one. Conrad shook himself; he was imagining it. His own father had left the Intelligence Corps in 1919, never to go near it again. Foley must have done the same.

  They passed the junction with
Wilhelmstrasse, a few yards down which stood the British Embassy. ‘I thought you said you worked in there?’ Conrad asked.

  ‘That’s a simplification,’ Foley said. ‘I’m actually the Passport Control Officer. My job is to grant visas to anyone wishing to visit Britain. Or anywhere else in the Empire, including Palestine. Our office is on Tiergartenstrasse. It’s another lovely building; my predecessor bought it for a song in 1920.’

  They walked through the tall columns of the Brandenburg Gate and entered a construction site. In front of the Reichstag building, still empty since the fire in 1933, stood the Siegessäule, a two-hundred-foot-high monument built in the 1860s to commemorate Prussia’s victories over Denmark, Conrad’s very own war, and Austria. It was known by irreverent Berliners as the ‘Siegesspargel’ or ‘Victory Asparagus’. Now the whole edifice was clad in scaffolding. And the road through the Tiergarten had been transformed into a straight, ugly scar, bordered on either side by the stumps of recently felled trees.

  ‘This is Hitler’s latest grand plan,’ said Foley. ‘He’s going to move the Siegessäule to the middle of the park and create a broad avenue from there to the Brandenburg Gate for his army to march along. In the meantime all this work is an infernal nuisance; it really fouls up the traffic.’

  They crossed the road into the park, weaving through the stationary cars whose engines growled with impatience. ‘You must be quite busy at the moment,’ Conrad said. ‘I imagine there’s plenty of demand for visas.’