by Alex Gerlis
The young pilot remained there for what must have been two hours. The cell was pitch black, and the floor was as rough and uneven as that in the corridor outside. Its surface was wet, as were the walls.
His first thought was that the questioning at the Luftwaffe headquarters had been some kind of trick to make him think it was all routine. He began to worry he’d let something slip, some vital piece of information that had aroused the interest of what he could only assume was the Gestapo.
The pain in his ribs eased slightly and he worked out his surroundings. He made out a low bench-cum-bed and sat down, and only then did he realise how terrified he was. His whole body shook violently and he broke into a cold sweat. Try as he might, he could think of no rational reason why the Gestapo would be interested in him. In his confusion, he couldn’t work out exactly when he’d been shot down, but it was certainly more than a day ago. They’d probably be telling his parents around now.
Missing in action. Our deepest condolences.
Tears started to flow down his face. The thought of his parents being informed of his possible death was too much. He was still crying when the cell door swung open and two guards hauled him out, roughing him up in the corridor before tying his hands behind his back and blindfolding him.
As he was dragged along the corridor and down a flight of steps, he began to feel dizzy. When they’d beaten him up in the corridor he’d struck his head on the wall, and the blindfold was cutting into the wound. He tried to distract himself by counting the steps, but they were moving him along too fast. When they stopped, he could sense light around him, and he was pushed into a chair, the blindfold now removed.
The two men behind the table in front of him were the same ones who’d come for him at the Luftwaffe headquarters. What languages, they wanted to know, did he speak?
English.
‘Any others?’
He shook his head and muttered something about a few words of French. He didn’t think his ability to conjugate the verb ‘to love’ in Latin was what they had in mind. He was feeling overwhelmed now by nausea and his head felt as if it was gripped in a vice. He asked if he could have some water. They replied in German: would he like some water – some food perhaps? He could have a bed to lie on and they could bring a doctor. They wanted him to be well.
He remembered the advice he’d been given. We’ve found it’s better if prisoners don’t let on that they understand German: understanding what they say without them realising it can give you an advantage.
So he didn’t reply and stared blankly at them. More questions in English.
What was his name?
Ted Palmer.
His full name?
Edward Palmer – no middle name.
Spell it.
Where was he based?
Did he work in any other branch of the RAF?
Had he ever been in the British Army?
This went on for an hour, and at the end of it the two men muttered to each other in German, very little of which he could pick up, not least because he was being careful not to look at them. He did hear them both use the word Warheit – the truth – more than once, and one of them said zu jung – too young – while looking at him. Then they started to gather their papers, both sounding quite angry. One of them said Zeitverschwendung, which he remembered was a phrase his German teacher used when he wanted to tell the class they were wasting his time, and as they stood up, he clearly heard them say Berlin kann es sortieren.
As he was dragged back to his cell, he worked out what that meant.
Berlin can sort it.
* * *
Berlin arrived in Brussels the following morning. It came as a relief to Flying Officer Palmer, who’d spent a thoroughly miserable night assuming he was about to be sent to the German capital and wondering how on earth his parents would be coping.
He had no idea what time it was when he was dragged out of his cell. He was taken into a room that was more of an office than the interrogation room he’d been in the previous day. The two Gestapo men were there again, along with a man in what looked like his mid-forties who they appeared to be deferring to. Everything about the man looked expensive: from his tailored suit and silk tie to the complexion and haircut of someone who clearly took care over his appearance. Palmer could smell cologne.
‘Our colleague has come from Berlin to talk with you.’
Palmer blinked in amazement. Even with his limited experience of these matters he knew people didn’t travel from Berlin to question junior RAF officers. The man looked at him in equal amazement.
‘What happened to your head?’ His English was very good.
Palmer explained that he’d knocked it against the wall.
‘You look terrible. When did you last sleep – or eat?’
He replied that he couldn’t remember, but if he was being honest, he didn’t feel terribly well. He gave his name, rank and serial number because he couldn’t remember if the man had asked him for them yet.
The man from Berlin turned to the Gestapo officers. ‘This is ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous,’ he snapped in German. ‘If I’m to question this man he needs to be in a fit state. Take him away, let him have a shower, give him a meal and clean clothes and then bring him back here.’
When Palmer returned to the office, the man from Berlin was on his own. He’d removed his expensive-looking spectacles to read some notes and looked up as the RAF pilot sat down.
‘Your name, please.’
‘Edward Palmer.’
‘And that is your only name?’
‘I’m known as Ted, but… yes: I don’t have a middle name if that’s what you mean.’
‘And your age, please, Palmer.’
He hesitated, unsure as to whether this was information he was supposed to divulge.
‘I’m twenty.’
‘Date of birth?’
‘The sixth of April 1924.’
And so it went on for an hour: questions about where he’d worked before joining the RAF, asking for his date of birth at least half a dozen more times, an offer to be more lenient than he could imagine if he was honest about any other role he’d performed… but no questions about his mission. The man from Berlin had no interest in what he was flying, where he was shot down and how he’d made it to Brussels.
After an hour, there was a knock at the door and an elderly man came in. The man from Berlin said this was a doctor: there would be a brief examination. It was routine: please could Palmer remove his clothes.
All of them.
When the doctor had finished, he briefly addressed the other man in German.
‘It is impossible to say, of course, but I would be amazed if this man was over the age of twenty-five. If he was any older than that, there’d be some signs of early ageing, such as lines on the face and increased body fat. I would say in my professional opinion that he’s a sexually mature male aged between eighteen and twenty-five.’
‘You’d stake your life on that, would you, Doctor?’
‘In this building, Herr Rauter, that’s not a phrase I’d choose, but I’d certainly stake my professional reputation on it. That cut on his head needs dressing, though.’
* * *
Matters moved quickly after that. The man from Berlin said there’d be no more questions, and when Palmer asked what it had all been about, the German said it didn’t matter, there’d been a misunderstanding. His wound would be attended to and he would be taken to a prisoner-of-war camp.
The man from Berlin – whom Palmer was sure the doctor had addressed as Herr Rauter – nodded at him before shaking his head in disbelief and then leaving the room. Palmer caught a snatch of an angry conversation in the hall, apologetic tones from one of the Gestapo men, the raised voice of Herr Rauter.
‘A complete waste of my time… Anyone can see how old he is. In any case, why on earth did you treat him like that if you knew I was interested? Fools.’
When Flying Officer Ted Palmer arrived at Dulag L
uft that evening, he was taken to see the senior British officer, a group captain with a nervous twitch and an unlit pipe in his mouth.
He was almost apologetic as he recounted what had happened to him; he thought it was odd but perhaps not that important.
This was not a view shared by the group captain, nor by any of the other senior officers he’d called in to listen to the story.
They all said they’d never heard anything like it.
‘And that phrase you used, Palmer… when you finished giving me your account: what was it again?’
‘It was as if they thought I was someone else, sir. Heaven knows who, though.’
Chapter 6
Berlin, August 1944
‘You can assure us, can you, Rauter, that everything is in order and you’re ready to commence when we give you the order to do so?’
The man spoke with one of those complicated southern Austrian accents – Tyrol or Carinthia or somewhere like that – so Franz Rauter leaned forward hoping that would help him understand it better. He replied that he hoped everything was in order but he would need some time to prepare – and have the right people in place.
A summons to meet the three men facing him from the other side of a table in a dimly lit room with the curtains drawn had not, it had to be said, boded well. It had felt like a court of law, but now the three men nodded their heads and muttered, ‘Good,’ and he should have felt more relaxed.
Except he didn’t.
He actually felt a knot tighten in his stomach and his heart beat faster as he realised the enormity of what he was about to do.
A wait of five years was about to come to an end.
* * *
On most days Franz Rauter walked the mile and a half to work. It was a twenty-five-minute stroll northwards from his apartment on Speyerer Strasse in the Bayerisches Viertel, the Bavarian quarter of Schöneberg. He’d emerge from the side streets onto Potsdamer Strasse, crossing the Landwehrkanal before reaching his office on Tirpitzufer. When he’d first started to walk to and from work it had been quite a pleasant experience, but now he was aware of the city decaying around him and a general air of menace. He needed too to be alert to new bomb damage – it wasn’t uncommon for people to fall into newly formed craters.
On most days he’d leave enough time to stop at the run-down café on the corner of Ludendorff Strasse, though it had to be said there were few places in Berlin these days that didn’t have a run-down look about them. But this café had felt run-down even before the war and he felt a vague kind of loyalty to it. It was less crowded than most of the other nearby places, and the proprietor – a large one-armed man – was someone with whom he’d always exchanged knowing looks, though he wasn’t sure what it was they were meant to know. Possibly it just meant ‘Ah, you’re still around.’ There was a lot of that these days.
Although the Bayerischer Platz U-Bahn station was just a minute or so from where he lived, he avoided that mode of transport whenever possible. He couldn’t imagine a more unpleasant way of travelling, people pressed together as close as lovers, few of his fellow commuters smelling as if they’d washed in recent days. If it was raining or he was in a hurry he’d take the tram, though that too tended to be unfeasibly crowded.
But the main benefit of his twenty-five-minute walk in the morning – and usually the same in reverse in the evening – was that it gave him time to think. And these days he’d reflect with varying degrees of bemusement on the unpredictable way in which life had worked out for him.
For example, he was forty-four years of age and had assumed that by now he’d have been long married, no doubt with children, living in some comfort on the Wannsee or possibly in Charlottenburg. Since his late twenties and throughout his thirties this had been a disappointment to him, and had at times led to bouts of depression, which while not disabling had probably accounted for his being a solitary and reserved person.
It wasn’t as if he was an unattractive man. On the contrary, he took care over his appearance. His suits were hand-made by a master tailor on Behrenstrasse before the poor man had been deported. His silk ties and handkerchiefs were from Paris and he had his hair cut every week by the best barber on the Unter den Linden. His 4711 cologne was bought from the original shop in Cologne itself.
Despite this, he lived alone in an apartment in Schöneberg rather than a villa on the Wannsee or one of those fine houses in Charlottenburg. He hadn’t – as he reflected at times – even made it to the Kurfürstendamm.
But now he saw how not being married, not having children and living a more modest life had turned to his advantage. He didn’t have loved ones to worry about and provide for; concentrating on his own survival was not an act of selfishness, and living where he did meant he led a less conspicuous life.
It was the same with the Nazi Party. All his life he’d eschewed politics. He was from Hamburg, where his schoolteacher father had been a committed socialist and clashed bitterly with his mother’s family, who’d enthusiastically embraced far-right politics. He saw how politics caused rifts and decided to remain above it, though his instincts were more in line with liberal traditions. He’d joined the local police and risen through the ranks, eventually becoming a well-regarded detective. Few of his colleagues were surprised when, in 1932, he moved to Berlin to work for the Abwehr – the military intelligence service.
There’d been opportunities to join the Nazi Party; indeed he’d frequently been taken aside and advised that now might be the time. But he’d managed to avoid doing so, and he was by no means alone in that. Many others – even some very senior people – at the Abwehr headquarters on Tirpitzufer remained non-party members.
It was over Christmas in 1943 that he realised he couldn’t hold out any longer. The Abwehr was increasingly distrusted in Berlin: its loyalty was frequently questioned and it was beginning to be suspected of undermining Hitler. Franz Rauter spent the few days he had off that Christmas worrying that the Abwehr’s days were numbered. His big fear was being conscripted into the army and sent to fight on the Eastern Front, which was tantamount to a death sentence. He decided to reduce the chances of that by applying to join the party: it would be an insurance policy rather than an act of political commitment.
His resolve was strengthened when he was caught unawares by his cleaning lady, who turned up unexpectedly on Christmas Eve – he was sure he’d given her the day off. To his horror, he spotted her tidying his table and looking carefully at the books as she dusted them and placed them in a pile. It could have been his imagination, but he was sure she looked disapprovingly at works by Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. It wasn’t that he was trying to be subversive by reading books by these authors, but they challenged his imagination: they made him think. He wasn’t sure his cleaning lady would understand that.
That afternoon he bumped into Frau Oberg, the local Nazi Party Blockleiter – block leader – the person most likely to spot anything suspicious and report it. She was a tall, thin woman with piercing eyes, who dressed in widow’s black and had a habit of suddenly appearing where one least expected her. Rauter called her – only to himself, of course – die Hexe, the witch. And when die Hexe emerged in front of him as he turned a corner after his afternoon stroll, she wanted to talk.
How was Herr Rauter?
Had Herr Rauter perhaps heard how both her sons had been promoted?
Did Herr Rauter join her in being grateful every moment of every day for the wisdom with which Herr Hitler was leading Germany?
She moved close to him and peered up into his eyes, searching for any doubt on his part. He assured her he was as grateful as she was for the Führer’s… he’d hesitated, searching for a word better than ‘wisdom’… compassion, and then worried it might sound sarcastic.
‘In fact I was meaning to have a word with you, Frau Oberg. I have been intending to apply to join the party for a while now and have been remiss in not doing so. Perhaps you could help?’
She’d appeared at his apartment door l
ater that afternoon with the correct forms to hand and returned with his brand-new Nazi Party membership card – his Mitgliedskarte – on New Year’s Eve.
With 1944 just minutes away, Franz Rauter shifted his armchair close to his gramophone player and put on a Benny Goodman record, turning the volume down so even someone with their ear pressed to the apartment’s door wouldn’t hear it. As with his reading, it wasn’t that he was trying to be subversive: he knew jazz was banned, but he happened to like it. He leaned back with a large glass of cognac – courtesy of a colleague’s recent trip to Paris – in one hand and his Mitgliedskarte in the other.
He took some satisfaction from the fact that the records would show he’d joined in 1943.
As 1944 progressed, he realised that joining the party had been a smart move, just as remaining single had. By February, Admiral Canaris and other senior officers of the Abwehr had been replaced, and by July, it had been taken over entirely by the RSHA, the Reich Main Security Office, the organisation responsible for all police and internal security operations, including the Gestapo.
SS-Brigadeführer Walter Friedrich Schellenberg was now in charge, and dozens of Abwehr officers were purged from the organisation. Many of them were like Rauter: senior but still only middle-ranking intelligence officers, the professional heart of the operation.
Some of those who remained were even moved to the RSHA headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, the other side of Saarland Strasse.
If, like Franz Rauter, you remained in the organisation, it was for a good reason. Your loyalty to the regime had never been brought into question – it helped if you were a party member – and most importantly, you had a vital role to play in the Nazi intelligence operation. Perhaps you had an area of expertise or – as in Rauter’s case – you controlled a key agent, one who could not be run without your involvement.