by Alex Gerlis
Markham commanded a platoon of the 89th Reconnaissance Squadron, which meant they were one of the first units to approach Remagen. At one o’clock, his armoured car came to a halt on a hill just south of Mehlem, overlooking the town. Determined to lead from the front, he was first out of the vehicle; within moments, the other two armoured cars had pulled up. He ordered the drivers to turn the cars round and remain in them with their engines running, and placed other men to guard the perimeter. Then he took his radio operator and a sergeant and crawled to the brow of the hill, the wet grass soaking his tunic. As he reached the edge, he lay low and put his binoculars to his eyes.
In those first few seconds he knew his life was about to change for ever.
His radio operator was an Italian American from Pittsburgh who must have sensed something, because he asked if everything was all right and put his hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder when he didn’t reply. When Markham took the binoculars away, his hands were shaking. ‘Paul, give me the map.’
‘Here, sir: what’s the problem. What does the town look like?’
‘The same as any other fucking German town.’
‘You appeared shocked.’
‘There’s a fucking bridge down there, Paul. Sergeant, take these – over there, see it?’
‘Not the first bridge we’ve seen, sir, with respect.’
‘This bridge,’ said a breathless Lieutenant Markham, ‘is called the Ludendorff Bridge.’
‘I’m glad to know that sir.’
‘The Germans are meant to have blown up all their fucking bridges. But the Ludendorff Bridge is intact. Paul, get me headquarters, now!’
* * *
It wasn’t until the Friday morning that Franz Rauter was summoned to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. He was astonished he’d not been called there sooner. The rumours about the Rhine being crossed had reached Berlin the previous morning, and by lunchtime it was all anyone was talking about at Tirpitzufer, the usual whispered conversations with people you could trust, with everyone looking over each other’s shoulder.
A bridge just south of Bonn – intact! Of course they were meant to blow it up!
Someone must have forgotten to press the button… or something went wrong.
They’ve crossed the Rhine now… they’ll be here soon.
Brigadeführer Schellenberg’s aide Hauptsturmführer Böhme had summoned Rauter in person, marching into his office without so much as a knock on the door and speaking in a loud, high-pitched voice so everyone else on the corridor would hear.
‘The Brigadeführer wants to see you, now!’
He’d struggled to keep up with the younger man as they hurried over to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Schellenberg was standing with his back to a map when Rauter entered. Without turning round, he told him to come and stand next to him.
‘I assume that as a competent intelligence officer you’ve heard the news, Rauter.’
‘About the bridge you mean, sir?’
Schellenberg nodded his head. Rauter was relieved the general was calm, but doubted that would remain the case for long.
‘The American 9th Armored Division found the bridge here – at Remagen – intact and crossed it on Wednesday afternoon. They are now streaming over in their thousands and with all their equipment too. It’s a disaster!’
The word ‘disaster’ had been shouted and Schellenberg swung round to face him. ‘So my question is, Rauter: your agent Milton, why didn’t he tell us about this?’
Rauter hesitated. It was such a ridiculous question, it could only be a trap.
‘I’m sorry, sir, but I’m not sure I understand.’
‘This Milton – the agent so well placed you waited years before using him – surely he should have known about this?’ Schellenberg had shouted the word ‘years’.
‘With respect, sir, I’m not sure Agent Milton would have known that the bridge at Remagen would be left intact. He wasn’t to know it wouldn’t be blown up. Was it not rigged with explosives, sir?’
Schellenberg looked at Rauter in a manner suggesting he was trying to detect even a small hint of sarcasm. He took a deep breath before replying. ‘I’m not a fool, Rauter, of course I wouldn’t have expected Milton to know the bridge was intact, and of course it was rigged with explosives, enough to blow out the few remaining windows in Cologne, I understand. What I meant was that the intelligence – though that’s clearly not the right word – we’ve been receiving from Milton on the Allies’ plans to cross the Rhine has been poor: sparse and poor. Even Field Marshal Keitel has remarked on it.’
‘But I—’
‘He didn’t tell us about the 9th Armored Division being in the area, did he? What has he told us in recent days? First of all we heard nothing from him for weeks, and then the messages we’ve received have been vague and largely inaccurate. Is it possible he’s been compromised?’
‘According to Agents Byron and Donne, no, he hasn’t. I can assume he didn’t have the same degree of fortune as he had with Arnhem, sir, and to a lesser extent with the Ardennes.’
‘You’re defending him, Rauter.’
‘It’s my job to defend my agents, sir. They operate under extraordinary pressure and can’t always deliver what we want them to. Maybe the British have tightened up their security in London, who knows? I agree that we’ve heard very little from Milton recently.’
‘Why do you think that is?’
Rauter shrugged. ‘Who knows, sir? It’s possible he hasn’t come across much intelligence, maybe as the war…’ He paused, searching for a form of words that wouldn’t incriminate him. ‘What I’m trying to say, sir, is that as the Allied campaign moves to a new phase, it is possible procedures have changed in London that make it harder for Milton to access intelligence. Nor should we rule out the possibility that after Arnhem and the Ardennes they tightened things up: I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he needed to be more careful. This could account for why we’ve not heard from him in a while.’
Schellenberg walked towards the door and it was clear he was seeing Rauter out. ‘There will be questions as to whether he has been turned. You can redeem yourself and him by seeing if he can come up with something of the calibre of what he provided over Arnhem. Understand?’
Rauter said he did.
‘Do understand, Rauter, that I’m defending you here – for the time being at least.’
Franz Rauter was so shaken by the encounter at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse that he decided to go straight back to Schöneberg. One block from his apartment on Speyerer Strasse, he noticed that a small basement bar on Luther Strasse was open. It had been closed for weeks, like so many other places in the city; he’d assumed the elderly owner had been conscripted.
But he was there and nodded at Rauter as he entered and took his usual place at the end of the bar. It was as if he’d never closed and Herr Rauter had been in most days. Without saying a word, he pushed a glass of schnapps in front of him. Rauter noticed that the glass was filthy and the counter dusty but said nothing.
It hardly mattered.
I’m defending you here – for the time being at least.
The problem as Rauter saw it was that the war was as good as over. It had been lost for months, but with the Allies crossing the Rhine and the Red Army closing in on Berlin, it was now just a matter of time. He thought of poor Helmut Krüger being moved into the side room at the Charité knowing his life had reached its final phase. That was how it felt in Berlin now, and he imagined Milton would be feeling the same too. He couldn’t conceive of any intelligence the agent could get that would stop Germany losing the war.
The one thing the Nazis were getting better at was finding scapegoats, and Rauter was sure he was in danger of becoming one. He allowed himself just one more schnapps before heading back to his apartment. Tomorrow he’d start to gradually remove evidence of his existence at Tirpitzufer.
Once back in his apartment, he pushed his bed away from the wall and carefully prised away the skirting board. His papers were stil
l safely in place. They weren’t complete yet, but it was reassuring to know they were there.
Chapter 22
Germany and London, February–March 1945
She hadn’t intended to escape.
She hadn’t intended not to escape either; it was just that having been in the concentration camp for more than three years, she’d become resigned to her fate and doubted whether she would have either the physical or mental energy to escape – or the opportunity.
When they’d heard the news of the D-Day landings, the prisoners had assumed the war would be over in a matter of weeks – certainly by the end of the year. Her closest friend in the camp was a Danish woman, Hanne Jakobsen, who’d been in there far longer than her and who had no doubt as a result adopted a far more pessimistic view of the world. Hanne would insist she was realistic rather than pessimistic and warned her that despite the Allies’ successes in northern France the end of the war was still a long way off. ‘Not this year, certainly,’ she said, and told her and the other French prisoners in particular not to build up their hopes too much. In any case, she pointed out, Ravensbrück was in the middle of Europe; the last they’d heard, the Allies were some three hundred miles to the west, and that was the direction she’d need to go.
In recent days, the atmosphere at the camp had been especially grim. At the beginning of the week the Nazis had executed three British SOE agents: Violette Szabo, Denise Bloch and Lilian Rolfe. The rumour was that they’d been shot in the back of the neck in the presence of the camp commandant.
But she’d forgotten that life had a habit of presenting you with opportunities in the most unexpected manner, and this was what happened to her on a bitterly cold Friday morning in February. The day had begun in the usual manner: a foul-tasting lukewarm soup and a hunk of stale bread followed by roll-call in the assembly area between their huts. No one was missing or had died overnight – the first time she could remember that happening for a while – and everything seemed to be in order. Soon they’d shuffle along to the Texled workshops and another day of sewing buttons onto uniforms.
But just as she was about to set off, the row she was in was stopped by one of the guards, a foul-smelling Austrian woman with bad teeth who’d recently tried – without much success – to be more friendly with the prisoners. Eventually an officer came over and ordered eight of them to follow him. As they were led away, she spotted Hanne walking in the opposite direction, about to start work. Her Danish friend looked shocked and mouthed something at her, but she couldn’t make out what she was saying.
They were marched to a lorry. Normally she’d have worried about where they were being taken, but the officer seemed to be in a good mood and amused himself by flicking cigarette butts onto the floor and watching the prisoners fight for them.
It was a short journey, and when the lorry stopped, the officer told them they were in Rheinsberg. She’d heard of it before, a small town a few miles west of the camp, where prisoners were sometimes sent to work. They were led to a building at the rear of the town hall and taken into a large room, where they were set to work painting the walls. As far as forced labour went, this could have been a lot worse. Sure, it was damp in the room and they’d be covered in paint, but at least it was indoors and not too physically demanding.
Late in the morning she was sent out to get some more paint from a hut behind the building. And that was when she saw it: a van waiting in the entrance, its engine running. She realised the driver had stopped to open the gates to the road. She didn’t pause to think, to weigh up the pros and cons, the risks involved in the escape. She didn’t think what Hanne would do but ran over to the van, opened the rear door and climbed in, closing it just before the driver climbed back into the cab. As far as she could tell, the load was mainly boxes of documents.
‘Stop – pull over!’ The driver had released the brakes and edged forward, but now she could hear someone shouting from behind the van before banging on its side to attract his attention. Someone must have spotted her climbing in. She thought about jumping out, but knew it would be hopeless. Tears started running down her face as she realised how impetuous she’d been. It was one of her faults. Hadn’t Hanne always advised her to be more patient? The driver wound down his window.
‘Yes, what is it?’
‘This form, you’ve not initialled the first two pages.’
‘Really, my initials are that important? Here you are then.’
For the next hour she was too busy concentrating on keeping still and quiet to think about the consequences of what she’d done. She knew the van had been positioned to turn left at the gates so assumed they’d been heading west. She had no idea how long they’d been driving for, but it must have been close to two hours when the van stopped.
She waited until the driver got out, then carefully opened the rear door. They were in the middle of countryside, and peering round the side of the van, she saw the driver relieving himself against a hedge. She ran to the other side of the road and hid in a ditch until he drove off again.
The next month was a blur: nights and days spent out in the open, a barn where she found shelter and food, and more importantly, a set of clothes she was able to steal from a washing line and some money she found in a man’s jacket that got her on a bus to Magdeburg and from there an overnight train to Kassel. The city had been badly bombed, which meant she was just another homeless person picking their way through the ruins. For a few days she worked on a gang helping to clear the rubble of bombed buildings, and there she found a purse and an identity card. From Kassel she continued to move west.
She had an enormous stroke of luck, if that was the right word, on the outskirts of Marburg. She’d run out of money and lost her identity card but found a young Wehrmacht officer on his way to Bonn who said he’d take her with no questions asked if she’d spend the night with him.
As soon as they arrived in Bonn, she disappeared into the ruins of the city, which was quickly being abandoned by what remained of its population as the Allies closed in. She found a cellar to hide in until she woke one morning to hear English voices. When she emerged from the rubble, she collapsed at the feet of a group of American soldiers, tears staining her face, which was caked with thick dust. Her only thought was Hanne and how she had to do the right thing by her.
‘I must speak with a British officer.’
* * *
‘I presume if there was any news I’d have heard it by now, Prince?’
Hugh Harper appeared on edge, his upper-class relaxed confidence not as evident as it usually was. It was a Thursday morning – 15 March – and he had attempted to break the ice with a laboured joke about the Ides of March and Milton. Richard Prince smiled politely, unable to work out the joke’s punchline, or even if it had one.
‘Lance tells me progress is slow.’
‘I think that’s a polite way of saying we’re not making any progress, sir.’
‘Sir Roland was taking an awful lot of flak over the withdrawal of the Rhine maps, but of course since we actually crossed the bloody river so unexpectedly last week, all that has changed and it’s certainly taken the pressure off us. I read in a memo this morning that nearly twenty thousand troops and an awful lot of vehicles have already crossed the bridge.’
‘Let’s hope it stays up, sir.’
‘Indeed, but who’d have thought the Germans of all people would fail to blow it up? A catalogue of errors on their part, I understand. Between you and me, I heard on the grapevine that to blow the bridge up they needed the written permission of the officer in charge, but he’d been replaced the very morning the Americans came across it and no one knew the name of his replacement so couldn’t ask him. Such is the hand of fate, eh?’
Prince agreed and both men nodded, momentarily lost in thought as they considered this miracle of bureaucracy.
‘Can I just make it very clear.’ Hugh Harper coughed and paused, perhaps conscious that he sounded like a schoolmaster. ‘What I want to say is, the fact
that we’ve now crossed the Rhine shouldn’t mean we relax in our hunt for Milton and the other two agents. Even though the finishing line may be in sight, a traitor can still do untold damage. A delay of just a few days or giving the enemy vital information about an operation can cost hundreds if not thousands of lives. Breaking this spy ring is as important as ever and will remain so until we find the bastards.’
Prince nodded in agreement.
‘And in any case, it’s a question of doing the right thing. He simply can’t be allowed to get away with treason just because the war’s nearly over. So let’s redouble our efforts. Now, I understand there’ve been no intercepts from Agent Byron for a few days now. Do we know if anyone put in a written request for the maps?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Any luck with cross-checking the names of those other attendees at the hotel in Pimlico – what was it called again?’
‘The Abbey Hotel, sir, and cross-checking the names of the attendees has turned out to be a much more complicated job than we’d anticipated. There are seven names on our list, as you know: checking the MI5 and Special Branch files is one thing, but then we have to apply to every police force in the country to see if they have a record of people with those surnames having been involved with the fascist movement. I looked after that for a while in Lincolnshire, sir, and I can tell you it’s a long job, but hopefully we’ll get something.’
‘Just a matter of when; ideally before the end of the war. There is something else, by the way, Prince.’ Harper shifted uncomfortably in his seat and fiddled with the cap of his fountain pen. ‘The agent with whom you worked in Denmark… the one arrested by the Gestapo…’