Diary of a Dead Man on Leave

by David Downing

  I handed over my papers and offered the Kriminalsekretär a friendly smile while his superior looked through them. The smile wasn’t exactly returned, but perhaps a lip twitched ever so slightly.

  The Kriminalinspektor repeated what he’d read—that my name was Josef Hofmann, that I’d recently returned to Germany from Argentina, where I’d worked on the railways.

  I nodded.

  He noted that I’d left Germany in 1923, the year that many Communists had fled the Reich following the collapse of their criminal uprising.

  I said I’d never been a Communist, that I’d left Germany because my Ruhr homeland was occupied by foreigners and because the Great Inflation had destroyed half the local jobs. Having no family, I’d decided to try my luck abroad, in a country where Germans were known to be welcome. And why had I come back? Because thanks to the party, there were jobs to be had once more, and Germany’s future looked bright.

  He gave me a look. “We will be investigating your past,” he said, as if offering me one last chance to get my story straight.

  I told him I had nothing to hide.

  His almost imperceptible shrug conceded that might be the case. He assumed I was aware that inflammatory slogans had been discovered in several different toilets, in several parts of the yard.

  I said I assumed they must be inflammatory but had not seen any myself and had no idea what they said.

  “Mostly the usual Communist nonsense,” he said, by which I presumed he meant hammers and sickles and pleas to shoot Hitler. “But this is the one we are interested in,” he went on, handing over a sheet of paper. This slogan, he added, had been found in a number of locations.

  “Hitler and Stalin—brothers under the skin!” was the message in question. One I was cautioned not to repeat.

  “Of course,” I said, as if shocked by the thought.

  He asked me what I thought the slogan meant.

  I was wondering that myself, and also wondering—a separate question—what to say if I was asked.

  Looking suitably perplexed, I said it could mean several things. That our Führer and the Soviet leader, though clearly worlds apart in most respects, did share certain attributes—strength in leadership, perhaps. But I had to admit it was strange—you would expect a Communist to love his leader and hate ours, while we of course would feel the opposite.

  A Trotskyist would consider both men equally murderous, but my fictional self wouldn’t know that. The Kriminalinspektor patiently waited, apparently hoping I’d say something more, so I settled for simply looking bewildered and was duly rewarded with a curt dismissal.

  The questioning continued for most of the day. I could see the Gestapo cars through the window opposite my desk, and when they eventually drove away, one of the young apprentices was with them. He looked around sixteen, and as if he might burst into tears at any moment. He didn’t seem like an author of ambiguous political slogans.

  No one in our office knew anything more than his first name, which is Gregor, but Jakob, with whom I shared the walk home, had further information. Since his hiring a few weeks ago, the boy has performed menial tasks at the shed—mostly shoveling coal, ash, and sand. His father, who has an administrative post elsewhere in the yard, is one of Hitler’s most fervent supporters and—that rarest of things—a friend of Herr Ruchay’s.

  Not surprisingly, the topic came up over supper. Ruchay claimed he was sure of the boy’s innocence, but could hardly contain his outrage at the crime. For him, the thought of Hitler and Stalin sharing anything was truly appalling, and as I listened to him rant, I began to appreciate why the Gestapo was taking the business so seriously.

  Later, up here in my room, I admitted to myself that part of me shared the man’s outrage, albeit from a different perspective. The sloganeer, whoever he is, has hit a nerve, and I spent some time in my chair trying to work out why. Any fool can see similarities in the means Stalin and Hitler use, but the ends—socialism and a slave state built on eugenic nonsense—are just as obviously worlds apart. So why does the comparison upset me? We have told ourselves for twenty years that harshness is the price we pay for breaking the status quo and its tenacious supporters, that the end justifies the means. Am I beginning to doubt it? To fear that the means employed might contaminate the end?

  As I sat here, I recalled a story someone told me years ago, of how Lenin once asked his writer friend Maxim Gorky to turn off some beautiful music because, with the revolution still in the balance, Lenin couldn’t afford the sort of human feelings the music evoked. And I remember thinking, when I heard this, that it made perfect sense. As of course it does in terms of realpolitik. But realpolitik has its limits, and now I wonder if Lenin was wrong and whether a revolution that puts aside such feelings can ever get them back. A sobering thought for a Comintern rep.

  But one good thing has come out of my reflections. The sloganeer, I realize, has given me a tool. If I am disturbed by his words, then so will other comrades be, and their reactions could provide me with an indication of where their loyalties currently lie. With the slogan the talk of the works, no one will consider it strange if I ask his opinion, and I may learn much from people’s answers.

  Tuesday, July 5

  A single Gestapo car arrived at the works soon after our shift started and left again ten minutes later after somehow squeezing four apprentices into the back seat. Two of the latter were returned after a couple of hours, looking more than a little relieved. Over lunch Barufka passed on the news that the first apprentice arrested had owned up to an unflattering picture of Göring in the repair shop toilet, but had denied drawing anything else or writing a single slogan. According to one colleague, the boy’s portrait of the Reichsmarschall is both witty and well executed and, for reasons best known to the Gestapo, has not yet been painted over. Does anyone in Germany like Göring?

  Barufka and I agreed that the Hitler-Stalin slogan was written by someone a good deal older than the young apprentices the Gestapo had taken away. I was pretty sure the author was or had been a Communist, and over his doubtless superior lunch, Kriminalinspektor Jagusch apparently came to the same conclusion. He was back in midafternoon to requestion five of the men he’d already seen, all of them on Moscow’s list. But this time no one was taken away.

  Wednesday, July 6

  At lunch today I was able to try out my brain wave. Spotting Horst Franke with Fritz Angermund, the youngest of my fellow dispatchers, I took my tray over to join them, hoping to bring up the slogan. I needn’t have worried—they were already discussing it.

  “They both say they’re in it for the ordinary guy,” Angermund was saying, taking care not to speak too loudly. “They both believe in state planning, and they both insist on political unity. They both even have mustaches.” He grinned. “But seriously, what are the differences?”

  Horst was already shaking his head. That was crap, he said. How could Fascism and Communism be the same when one was on the right and the other on the left?

  That was just what they called themselves, Angermund argued. They could still behave in similar ways.

  Horst’s head hadn’t stopped shaking. Like me he wanted to talk about ends but knew that that would be a step too far, even among friends. And I wasn’t one. “We shall see” was all he said. “Where Germany is in ten years and where Russia is. We shall see the difference then.”

  He’s a Communist all right, at least in his mind. Why else would the slogan upset him so? But being a Communist isn’t enough. He has to be willing to risk his life for that belief.

  There was a Working Group meeting this evening, and I wasn’t the only one keen to hear others’ opinions of the slogan. The others are not yet sure of me, so it came as no surprise when I was the first one offered the chance to give myself away. Being among fellow socialists would have made things easer, if I hadn’t been half-convinced that one or more of the others was an informer.


  I claimed ignorance. There were obviously similarities between Hitler and Stalin, but I wasn’t sure how deep these were. Stalin was authoritarian, but possibly out of necessity, whereas Hitler believed that dictatorship was the natural order of things. At this stage, I concluded pathetically, it was impossible to know which system would do the most for the workingman.

  I could tell from the faces that nobody much liked my answer, but then no one seemed enraged by it either. Others were keener to point out the differences—the new Soviet constitution, the rights of Soviet women, and the wonders of free health care were all brought up. No one shouted or got overly emotional, but it was clear to me how much the slogan had offended these men’s sense of what was right. And then I realized why. They were all talking about the Soviet Union of five years ago, the one that still existed when the Nazi takeover cut off their links with Moscow, before Kirov’s death and the terror that followed, before you really could make a case for Hitler and Stalin being brothers under the skin.

  Paul Giesemann seemed the most offended of all, railing against the notion of any equivalence between Nazis and Communists. Hadn’t they shed enough of each other’s blood in recent years? Weren’t the KZs still full of comrades?

  I would be certain the young man is an informer if not for the fact that the group is still meeting. Are the Gestapo playing a long game, letting us chat as long as that’s all we do, hoping that more and more flies will stick to Elise’s flypaper?

  Thursday, July 7

  Most weekday evenings we four lodgers still gather in the living room downstairs to listen to the nine o’clock news broadcast. Barufka looks bored most of the time and, I suspect, just turns up for the company, but Ruchay and Gerritzen see it almost as a duty, as if their keeping abreast of the Third Reich’s relentless advances is somehow part of the process. They treat the whole thing like a football match, the various announcements like goals scored by their side. You would think that some of the stuff the regime puts out would test anyone’s credulity, but these two lap it all up, and I’m sure they’re far from unusual.

  A few days ago we were given the news that the German and Polish education authorities have reached agreement on the impartial teaching of history in their respective schools. Past conflicts between the two nations are to be covered objectively, without passion, and each side has offered to remove from its textbooks anything the other finds offensive. More astonishing still, they have promised to extend this agreement to subjects other than history. Which? I wonder. Are there different German and Polish laws of physics? Disagreement on where the world’s coalfields are? Even Jakob raised an eyebrow at this, and the whole idea is clearly ludicrous, but Ruchay and Gerritzen just sat there nodding and smiling, as if it all made perfect sense.

  This evening we learned that a new Reich Institute for Colonial Administration will soon be offering courses in how to run colonies. Germany currently has none—a cost of losing the war—but Hitler clearly has hopes. When the “day of justice” arrives, and Germany either gets the old ones back or conquers new ones, there will be a corps of administrators ready and waiting to run them on the Führer’s behalf. The courses, we were told, will combine lessons from Germany’s prewar experience with new ideas from the National Socialist canon, thereby combining the best of past and future. By which I suspect they mean that yesterday’s traditional thuggery will be infused with modern sadism. Racial theory will obviously play a big part, and when the Nazis say that they intend to “balance the interests of homeland and colony,” I assume they mean Germans at home and Germans abroad. I can’t see how the natives—whoever they happen to be—could be anything other than virtual slaves in a National Socialist colony.

  According to the announcement, the new administrators will all be married men, presumably to avoid the perils of miscegenation. Though why anyone would think that being married would keep these chosen ones on the straight and narrow eludes me. Perhaps castration seems too severe, or a deterrent to recruitment.

  Ruchay appeared riveted by this item, and after the news was over, we learned why. His father was involved in the building of the Central Line railway in German East Africa before the war, so the Reich’s colonial future is something Ruchay feels he has a personal stake in. But that wasn’t all. Answering a question from Gerritzen, he revealed that his father had never come home. Taken prisoner by the British soon after the outbreak of war, he had ended up in an internment camp, where he eventually fell ill and died.

  Ruchay would have been a teenager at the time, and this new information about his past certainly helps to explain—if not to excuse—the grown man’s rabid nationalism. It also confirms my hitherto baseless opinion of him as something of a mother’s boy.

  Friday, July 8

  An international conference opened a couple of days ago to discuss the Jewish refugee problem. It is taking place in Évian-les-Bains, a small French town on the shore of Lake Geneva, close to the Swiss border. A nice place to visit no doubt, and I’m sure the lucky diplomats involved will enjoy the food and the scenery.

  If the German press is to be believed—I have access to no other—the conference is Roosevelt’s brainchild, though what he hopes to gain from it is anybody’s guess. An optimist might hope he was seeking to persuade his countrymen that they should welcome more Jewish immigrants; a cynic might think he was out to shame others, and so deflect attention from America’s niggardly response. Either way, thirty-one other nations have sent delegates. As the primary source of the current problem, Germany has not been invited, and neither it seems have most of the eastern European countries, which have a much longer history of virulent anti-Semitism than Germany does. I hope to be proved wrong, but I can’t see anyone rushing to open their borders.

  In the meantime, our government shows no sign of relaxing its campaign to drive out the Jews. Ruchay’s Der Stürmer arrived today—a special edition on Austria’s Jews—and over dinner we were treated to a feast of supposedly damning statistics. Eighty percent of Austria’s lawyers, 75 percent of its bankers, were Jews. I can’t remember all the figures, but there were similar proportions of doctors, dentists, and newspaper magnates. Ruchay read out the lengthy list, then sat there with a nasty smirk on his face, one that said, “Not anymore!”

  Saturday, July 9

  I have been stupid. Unusually so, I hope. I had assumed that Otto Tikalsky’s obvious distress over the homosexual’s death was what he said it was, a natural reaction to the violent loss of someone he knew and liked. I don’t know why it never occurred to me that they could have been a lot closer.

  Until this afternoon, that is. Catching sight of Otto in town, I followed him down an unfamiliar side street and watched him vanish into a narrow alley. Intrigued, I found shelter in a very convenient café and waited for him to reappear. He didn’t for quite some time, but there was a steady procession of men—and only men—into and out of the alley entrance, and it didn’t take a genius to work out what sort of establishment was hidden away down there. In the early twenties, when I was last in Germany, warme Brüder bars were far from uncommon, and it’s clear that one at least has survived into the Nazi era.

  With, it seems more than likely, considerable Nazi support. I wasn’t shocked by the number of youths and men coming in and out, but I was quite taken aback by their obvious political promiscuity. Half those involved were wearing brown shirts or Nazi badges, and for all I knew, the other half were plainclothes Communists like Otto. I have nothing against the man indulging his sexual inclinations, but the company he’s keeping has to rule him out.

  Monday, July 11

  The mystery sloganeer remains at large, but there was further news on the three apprentices still in custody. They have allegedly confessed to several of the writings and drawings that still adorn our toilet doors and walls and will face some sort of punishment, but it is not expected to be severe. They’re all very young, and all their fathers are party m
embers.

  Tuesday, July 12

  There was a knock on the front door while we were eating supper, and a few moments later we all caught a glimpse of Anna ushering a tall young man through to her part of the house. He left after staying around twenty minutes, and when Ruchay rudely asked who he was, Anna paused as if weighing her answer, and then said, “A friend of a friend.”

  Walter was more forthcoming an hour or so later when he came to my room with his history homework. The young man’s name is Eugen Klodt, and he has just been released from Erich’s camp. The two of them had met there and discovered they both came from Hamm, and Erich had asked his new friend to let the family know he was fine.

  Questioned about the conditions, Eugen had claimed they were not that bad. The hours might have been long, but the work wasn’t that hard; the food was awful, but there was usually enough. He wasn’t supposed to say what they were doing, but it didn’t feel like divulging a state secret to say they were working on the nation’s defenses. The camp was close to the Belgian border, and early each morning they were driven to one of several sites to work on various jobs—clearing trees, laying roads, building watchtowers. Erich was in good spirits and doing what his mother had urged him to do—keeping his head down and counting the days.

  I suggested to Walter that maybe his brother really had seen the error of his ways.

  “Maybe,” Walter conceded.

  It was good news, though, and Anna must be feeling a little happier.

  The history homework posed no problems. An account of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 had been requested, and Walter had provided a good one, sandwiching a record of the actual fighting between the longer-term causes and consequences. I did fairly well in school, but at Walter’s age I would have struggled to write something half as coherent.