Hitler’s mind was so obsessed by the thought of treachery that he immediately accepted Bormann’s vicious interpretation of the telegram. He began to rave that it was Goering’s mishandling of the Luftwaffe that had lost him the war; that Goering was corrupt, a drug-addict, a drunkard, a liar. Working himself up into a fury he came out into the passage and, striding up and down, shouted to everyone that Goering had betrayed him.
Bormann demanded the Reichmarschall’s death; Grauber loudly supported him. But Speer was again in the bunker, and when Hitler had exhausted his first outburst of rage he intervened. Von Below and Gregory followed his lead and the three of them urged Hitler to remember the immense services Goering had rendered to the Nazi movement in its early years.
Their efforts saved Goering from the worst. Hitler at length agreed that telegrams should be sent to the two senior S.S. officers at Berchtesgaden stating that Goering was deprived of his right of succession, his rank and all his decorations; that he was to be arrested for high treason and that all his staff were also to be placed under arrest. The telegram ended: You will answer for this with your lives.
So ended another late-night session in the bunker that for the past month had become a madhouse.
After a few hours’ sleep Gregory discussed the situation with Erika. Bormann having stabbed Goering in the back had shattered their hopes of a quick finish. There would now be no immediate surrender in the West, no British troops streaming into Berlin that evening, and the city was already partially surrounded by the Russians. But at least it seemed certain that Hitler really meant to commit suicide. The strain of the past six weeks had told terribly on Gregory and he was so desperately anxious to get Erika out of Berlin that at length he agreed that should Hitler show no signs of changing his mind that day they would leave in her van the following morning.
Despite his weariness and preoccupations Gregory had several times thought of Sabine and wondered if she had left for the south. Now he felt that before leaving himself he must find out. When he mentioned this to Erika she said at once:
‘If Sabine is still at her villa why shouldn’t we take her with us? There is plenty of room in my van, and after the way she and her servant hid you in July the least we can do is to save them from the Russians.’
In consequence Gregory wrote a brief letter to Sabine, telling her that he could not be certain but hoped to leave Berlin the following morning and if he did he would take her with him; then he gave it to Malacou with careful directions how to find the Villa Seeaussicht and sent him off with it.
Down in the bunker that day things were much quieter, but towards evening there arose a development which was most disquieting for Gregory. A telegram came in from Field Marshal Schöerner. His headquarters were in Prague; the Army Group which he commanded numbered many Divisions and was still in good shape. He reported that he was capable of holding out for months in the mountains of Bohemia, and begged Hitler to join him there.
Although Berlin was now being shelled as well as bombed Gatow airport was still operative, so Hitler could have set off in an aircraft for Prague with a fair chance of arriving there safely. In spite of Bormann’s pleading he refused to go; but the telegram had the unfortunate effect of re-arousing his interest in battles. Sending for maps, the latest situation reports and General Weidling, the Commandant of the Berlin area, he again assumed the role he had said, two nights earlier, that he meant to abandon for good, and began to issue orders right and left for the employment of both existent and nonexistent units. In addition he had a telegram sent off to Colonel-General Ritter von Greim of the Luftwaffe to join him in Berlin immediately.
That night Gregory went back with a heavy heart to Erika. He told her what had happened and said that now that Hitler had changed his mind about no longer taking any part in directing the war he might also change it about remaining in Berlin; so it was imperative that he should stay on and do everything possible to keep him to his decision to die among the ruins of his capital.
Malacou had safely accomplished his journey to and from the Villa Seeaussicht. He had found Sabine still there and brought from her for Gregory a hastily scrawled letter, that read:
My dear,
In these frightful times it was good of you to think of me. You know the reason why I’ve stayed on here for so long, but thank God I’m completely cured now and you have no need to worry about me. Kurt has been to see me several times and has persuaded me to go with him to his family place, Schloss Niederfels, not far from the Bodensee. As he has not had the money to keep the old castle up, life there will be pretty grim; but at least I’ll be safe from the Russians. His own departure has been delayed for a few days while he has been hiding his scientific paraphernalia, so that it should not fall into the hands of the enemy. He expects to be able to report to Speer by midday that he has finished the job, and as soon as he gets back from the Ministry he’ll join me here, so Trudi and I are packing like mad to be ready to leave with him. Blessings on you, darling. I pray that we may meet again in happier times. Sabine.
That was one worry off Gregory’s mind, although it did little to ease it because he was so terribly concerned for Erika. But she cut short his pleas that she should leave without him by saying, ‘It’s not very complimentary of you, darling, to suggest that I haven’t got as much guts as a woman like Eva Braun.’
Next day, the 25th, ‘Corporal’ Hitler was up to the ears in a wildly impractical new plan by which, not Berlin, but he, personally, was to be saved. Artur Axmann’s battalions of Hitler Youth were to hold the bridges to the west of the city, over the Havel, while the Twelfth Army under General Wenck, which was fighting on the Elbe, was to disengage itself, fight its way round towards Potsdam, cross the bridges, rescue the Führer, then turn south and fight its way out of the city again.
Keitel, true to form to the last, declared it to be a Napoleonic conception and set off to take Wenck his orders personally. Jodl returned to the new OKW headquarters which had been moved further out to Fürstenburg, while Krebs remained in the bunker as, theoretically, the Führer’s military adviser.
When Gregory arrived there on the morning of the 26th he found his friend von Below sitting gloomily at the table in the dining passage with a bottle of brandy and a half-empty glass in front of him. There was no lack of good liquor in the bunker and everyone who frequented it habitually drank heavily, in an attempt to keep up his spirits. Jokingly Gregory remarked, ‘The morning’s news must be worse than worse for you to start tippling so early in the day.’
Von Below looked at him with lacklustre eyes and said heavily, ‘No, I’ve just come from a hospital where I watched my nephew die. He was a boy of only fifteen and such a fine, happy lad; but, of course, he’d been called up and a Russian bullet got him.’
Gregory stammered such words of sympathy as he could find; then von Below went on, ‘There’s no damned justice in it. That’s what one resents. In the next bed there was a middle-aged man I used to know. He was mixed up in the July Putsch, but had the luck to escape being executed. When they came to arrest him he tried to commit suicide, but only wounded himself. Two days ago a lump of ack-ack came down on his head, but not on the part of it that was vulnerable from his previous wound. So he’s still alive, and unless the hospital is bombed he’ll be out of it inside a week. Yet my young nephew is dead.’
Even as Gregory asked the man’s name, his sixth sense told him what the reply would be. It was, ‘Graf Kurt von Osterberg.’
So unless Sabine had set off on her own she was still at the villa. And the advance elements of the Russian Armies had now surrounded Berlin. From all quarters reports were coming in of Russian tanks and armoured cars ravaging the outer suburbs. But for the time being Gregory could do nothing about her, for it was imperative that he should remain in the bunker.
All through the afternoon the Führer continued to issue new orders, to battalions and even companies. Then in the evening Ritter von Greim arrived. He was carried down to the bunker wo
unded and in considerable pain. While the giant Dr. Stumpfegger, who had remained there out of loyalty to Hitler, attended to the General’s wound, Hannah Reitsch, who had accompanied him, gave a graphic account of the hair-raising journey they had made at the Führer’s command.
Fräulein Reitsch was a famous test pilot and no-one could deny her courage; but in all other respects she was an odious woman with a neurotic mentality that led her to regard people either with vitriolic hatred or passionate devotion and dramatise herself to them accordingly. She was, of course, a fanatical Nazi and regarded Hitler as her god.
Early that morning they had landed at Rechlin. From there von Greim intended to go on by helicopter to Gatow. Only one had been available and that was damaged, but its sergeant pilot had made the trip before so von Greim ordered him to take it up. The aircraft was intended for only two, but Hannah, determined to be in at the death, had squeezed herself into its tail.
Forty Luftwaffe fighter ‘planes were ordered into the air to act as escort and most of them were shot down, but the helicopter reached Gatow with only a few bullet holes in it. There von Greim found a training aircraft. Boarding it, he took the controls himself. By a miracle he escaped being shot down by the Russian ‘planes overhead, but as he hedgehopped over the ruins of outer Berlin, where desperate street fighting was in progress, a shell-burst had wrecked the belly of the aircraft and a splinter from it had torn open his right foot. Hannah had then leant over his shoulders, zig-zagged the ’plane wildly and performed the extraordinary feat of landing it safely on the broad East-West Axis near the Brandenburg Gate.
And this desperate venture, involving the death of a score or more of German pilots, had been undertaken solely that Hitler, instead of sending von Greim a telegram, might tell him personally about Goering’s treachery and that he was to succeed him as a Field Marshal in supreme command of the Luftwaffe.
On the morning of the 27th Russian shells were falling in all parts of the city and their troops had completely encircled it, so it seemed that the end could not now be long postponed. But the suburbs and built-up area to be occupied consisted of more than a hundred square miles. To the south the Russians were still thin on the ground and many people were managing to escape by dodging their flying columns.
Worried that Sabine might not know that von Osterberg had been wounded and still be waiting for him to pick her up, Gregory decided to send Malacou out to the villa again. By him he sent a note, telling her about the Count and urging her not to lose another moment in getting away before the Russian ring became too thick for there to be any chance left of getting through it. Still armoured in his belief that his time had not yet come to die, Malacou accepted the mission placidly and set off to dodge his way through the ruined and burning city. Gregory then went over to the bunker.
That day, for some unaccountable reason, Hitler was in high spirits, and such was still his extraordinary dominance over those about him that everyone else was too. Old Koller, Gregory learned, had been released from arrest at Berchtesgaden and, horrified at what had resulted from his repeating to Goering the Führer’s remark to Jodl, had attempted to fly to Berlin in order to exonerate his Chief. But he could get no further than the OKW headquarters. From there he telephoned von Greim who, lying in bed on account of his wounded foot, simply said that Goering was a good riddance anyway; and that he was not to worry. ‘Don’t despair!’ he cried. ‘Everything will be well. The presence of the Führer and his confidence have completely inspired me and victory is assured.’ In the evening Bormann got drunk and danced a two-step with Burgdorf.
Utterly sickened by the sight of this mass insanity, Gregory left the bunker soon after midnight. Outside in the street the crashing of shells, the explosion of bombs and the roar from burning buildings was deafening. He had covered not much more than a hundred yards when he was hit a terrific blow on the back of his head. Stars and circles wheeled before his eyes then, his mind engulfed in blackness, he crashed forward on to the pavement.
He was brought to by cold water being sloshed into his face. His bleary eyes took in the fact that he was in a low-ceilinged room and that opposite him, with an empty glass in his hand, stood a big man dressed in a grey lounge suit. As he made to move it suddenly came home to him that he was trussed like a chicken to the chair in which he was sitting. His bemused brain sought an explanation and found one.
For weeks past, owing to terror of death and acute privation, Berlin had become completely lawless. The Police could not possibly control the thousands of deserters and desperate foreign workers who hid by day in the vast acreage of ruins. By night they came out in gangs, broke into the food shops and held people up in the streets for their ration cards and money. Unheard by him owing to the deafening din, one of these thugs had come up behind and coshed him.
But why had the man not just taken his wallet and left him lying on the pavement? Why had he been brought here and tied up?
His sight cleared a little and he had the answer. The man in the grey lounge suit was Herr Obergruppenführer Grauber.
28
In the Hands of a Fiend
Slowly the water dripped from Gregory’s eyebrows, nose, lips and chin. His sight was still blurred and the back of his head was throbbing violently. Instinctively he looked from side to side for any possibility of help or escape. As he made the movement his brain seemed to roll inside his skull, causing him exquisite agony.
The room was about fifteen feet square and it had no window. That suggested that it was in a basement; but it was obviously not one of the cells or torture chambers below the Gestapo headquarters in the Albrecht Strasse, because it was comfortably furnished. The only evidence of pain-infliction in it was a collection of whips hanging from a rack above a backless leather couch on which there was an open suitcase crammed full of clothes. But those slim, springy, silver-mounted strips of birch, hide and whalebone were not, Gregory knew, for flicking the skin from the backs of prisoners. Grauber was not only a homosexual but also a sadist. In the old days he had always travelled with a specially selected S.S. bodyguard of blond young giants who painted their faces and addressed one another with endearments. Those whips had been used on them and, probably, by them on Grauber himself.
Suddenly Grauber spoke. ‘Our last round, Mr. Sallust. And I win it hands down. You are a slippery customer, if ever there was one. But your extraordinary feat of getting yourself into the Führer’s bunker gave you a swollen head. At last you have made the fatal mistake of underrating your opponent.’
It was true. Had Gregory been less preoccupied with his endeavours to keep Hitler in Berlin and his anxieties about Erika and Sabine, he would have given more serious thought to Grauber and the possibility that his old enemy would devise some subtle way of bringing him to grief. But the terror Hitler inspired among his followers was so universal that, once under his protection, Gregory had thought the risk of Grauber taking any action against him to be negligible.
He had been further lulled into a false sense of security during the past five days by Grauber’s attitude. Their respective duties had entailed being at the same time for long spells in the passage outside the conference room and taking meals together in the mess passage. Naturally, neither of them had been more than barely civil to the other, but Grauber had treated Gregory with a certain deference, which Gregory had put down to his having become one of the Führer’s intimates, and that had strengthened his conviction that his old enemy fully accepted the situation.
Too late, he realised that, outside the bunker, Grauber still possessed almost limitless powers and could on any night have him kidnapped by Gestapo men while making his way home through the blackout.
Pain made it difficult for him to work his jaw, but now that his wits were coming back to him he managed to croak out, ‘Yes, you’ve got me … but you’d better watch your step. You seem to have forgotten that … the Führer is my friend. He … he warned you not to lay a finger on me at the peril of your life. At any time he may ask
for me … to talk about the future. If I’m not to be found he’ll guess that you are at … at the bottom of my disappearance …. Then you’ll be for the high jump.’
‘That maniac!’ Grauber suddenly spat. ‘Do you think I any longer give a damn for him? He has brought Germany to ruin, and himself. He is now through. Finished!’
‘Not yet. You and the others still quail every time he opens his mouth … And he has a memory like an … encyclopædia. He won’t have forgotten that we are enemies. Just wait until you get back to the bunker. The moment he sees you he … he’ll hand you over to his private police. He’ll have them take you to pieces on … on the assumption that you’ll be able to tell him what has become of me.’
Grauber gave a high-pitched laugh. ‘You poor fool. What do you think I am doing out of uniform and in these clothes? I’m not going back to the bunker. I’m leaving Berlin tonight. Tomorrow it may be too late.’
That contemptuous statement hit Gregory as though it were the last nail being hammered into his coffin. The moment he had grasped the situation he was in he had realised that his chances of getting out of that room a free man were about as good as those of a man surviving who puts the barrel of a loaded pistol to the roof of his mouth and pulls the trigger. But there had been just the slender hope that he might use Hitler’s knowledge of his feud with Grauber to frighten him.
Now that, too, was gone. But he felt sure that his end would be no more horrible if he twisted Grauber’s tail a little; and, his words coming more easily, he said, ‘I see. Another rat leaving the sinking ship. You’re off to join the king rat, eh? But don’t flatter yourself that Himmler will succeed in making a deal with the Allies. He’ll not be able to save your skin, or his own. Count Bernadotte’s intentions are of the best, but——’
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