Hitler Has Won

by Frederic Mullally

  “Ghastly.” Kurt grimaced. “Let’s talk about something pleasant. How’s your work going?”

  “Same old routine. Two classes in the morning, one in the evening. I was hoping to get a holiday this month, but the Director has just landed me with another half-dozen Todt Organization overseers, who expect me to teach them Spanish in four weeks!”

  “What on earth do they want with Spanish?”

  “Didn’t you know, big brother? There’s something like forty thousand Spanish Reds in German labor camps. The Todt Organization has been using some of them in their workshops and now they want to start another big factory in Bavaria. Somebody has to be able to give the Spaniards orders in their own language.”

  They had crossed the River Isar over the Prince Regent Bridge, just east of the city center, but instead of turning right after the Haus der Kunst, and heading north alongside the Englischer Garten, Sophie took the next main turn into the Ludwigstrasse so that they could pass the University building, four blocks up on the left. The rectangular forecourt was peopled this fine Saturday morning by only a thin straggle of students wending their way to and from the Library. Kurt, in a flash of memory, saw his father waiting beside one of the columns of the main entrance to greet him and his mother the day he arrived for the graduation ceremony.

  “And what,” he asked quietly, “does Father think of our victories in Yugoslavia and Greece?”

  Sophie gave a little shrug and concentrated harder on the road ahead. “I don’t know, Kurt. He never talks much about the war, as you know. Sometimes, I—” She shook her head and fell silent.

  “Sometimes you what?”

  “Nothing. Just a passing reflection.”

  “Well, don’t be so stingy,” he laughed. “Share it with your brother.”

  “Oh, I was just thinking—sometimes one gets the feeling Father has deliberately closed down a part of his mind. The war . . . what’s happening in Germany . . . the whole big debate about our future . . . It’s as if it had nothing to do with him. As if it were all happening on some wavelength he can’t plug into.”

  “He can plug in all right, any time he wants to.” The bitterness was there, and would probably always be there, embalmed in the memory of all those acrimonious, futile dialogues. It was the one anxiety clouding the prospect of these four days back home. But perhaps Sophie would prove to be right. Perhaps their father had in fact, and finally, thrown away the plug. Anyway, Kurt did not intend to find out. There would be no provocation from him, even if it meant mentally weighing every word before he spoke. And without provocation, there would surely be no lectures, none of the defunct liberal philosophizing that had so strained the love and respect he owed and had tried not to begrudge his father.

  Sophie’s hand fumbled for his and gave it a little squeeze. “Everything’s going to be lovely, these few days. I’ve even booked a smashing date for you on Monday evening.”

  “Well you can just go right ahead and unbook it. You’re my only date on this trip. Besides—” and it came out almost as nonchalantly as he had willed it—“I happen to be fully involved in that department, back in Berlin.”

  “Kurt! Now you tell me, when we’re almost home! Quick, who is it? What’s her name? How serious is it? Oh, Kurt!”

  He couldn’t help it. He was laughing out loud.

  “What’s funny? Kurt, if you’re—”

  “I’m not pulling your leg. There is someone. But you don’t have to sound so relieved about it!”

  A shade too quickly, she came back with, “Go to hell! I’m just glad I’m not going to be the only one to have to put up with your lousy dancing.”

  “What do you expect from a one-armed man—Fred Astaire?” They were both grinning broadly now, and out in the clear. By the time Sophie drew the car up in front of the old ivy-covered house in Nikolaistrasse, Kurt had told her as much as he wished her to know about Helga Gruyten. And Sophie had charmingly elected to make the Berlin girl a present, via Kurt, of her duplicate set of Spanish postal stamps.

  The low front door in the side of the house opened up before Kurt had unlatched the street gate, and his mother came hurrying to meet him halfway down the forecourt firing off her bright vocal squibs of joy and sealing the welcome with her soft flushed cheek clamped to his.

  “Dear Kurt! Let me take a good look at you! There—what did I tell you, Sophie? They’re starving him up there in Berlin!”

  “Rubbish!” He surrendered his canvas suitcase to Sophie and linked arms with his mother, leading her back along the side of the house. “I’ve never felt so fit in all my life. Looks as though it wouldn’t do you any harm to shed a few pounds, Mother dear!”

  He was joking. As long as anyone could remember, Margit Armbrecht had never noticeably lost or gained more than a few ounces in weight. At forty-six, she was something of a phenomenon for a Munich Hausfrau inasmuch as she could still wear one of her own daughter’s tailored skirts after letting out only an inch or two at the waist. The dark-red hair, inherited by Sophie, had lost much of its luster and had been cropped short these past few years, as if to conserve its substance; but her eyes retained their full emerald sparkle, and the faint crow’s-feet and the gossamer lines haunting her lips were about all there was to prevent her from passing as Sophie’s eldest sister. When asked how she managed to keep so young-looking, Margit Armbrecht would reply, “By walking a mile to Mass every morning and leaving my husband to do all the worrying for both of us.”

  Kurt paused in the hallway to delicately sniff the air. “Goulash and dumplings! I’ve been dreaming about them for nights.” Then he strode through the open door of the sitting-room, where his father was waiting to greet him.

  “Welcome home, Kurt! The women have been almost impossible to live with since we got your message. Sophie! Fetch one of those bottles of champagne for the Herr Captain, and let the festivities begin!”

  Walter Armbrecht would be fifty-two in November and, in his case, the years were stitched uncharitably into his face and physique. He had married Margit in 1914 before going off to fight the Kaiser’s war as an infantryman in a Bavarian regiment, and an oval-framed photograph of him as a handsome young man with a bold challenging expression in faded sepia halftones, complete with pickelhaube helmet and bushy blond mustache, had been among Kurt’s special treasures as a boy. Everyone remarked on the resemblance it bore to Kurt himself, as he approached the same age. But by then the portrait on the wall of Kurt’s bedroom had been replaced by a photograph of Adolf Hitler.

  The alienation had been gradual—a slow erosion of common ground between father and son until, with the completion of Kurt’s thesis on the significance of the leadership principle, only a yawning philosophical gulf was left between them. That had been three years ago, before Kurt went off to the war.

  Walter Armbrecht had not, of course, been one of the examining professors when Kurt sat for his degree, but he had read a copy of the thesis and had handed it back to his son with a defeated shake of his head.

  “What’s the matter, Father? Too strong for your ideological digestion?”

  “Strong?” Professor Armbrecht had pushed himself up from the desk in his Nikolaistrasse study and turned to stare out through the French windows. “Oh yes, it’s strong enough. It’ll get you your degree. It is also one of the most odious pieces of distorted logic and makeshift history that it has been my misfortune to read.”

  Shakily, struggling for control, Kurt had said, “One thing I’ve never understood about you, Father, is why you haven’t resigned from the faculty. If the National Socialist interpretation of history is so repugnant to you, what on earth are you doing at the University?”

  His father made no reply for a while. When he turned around to face Kurt, all the melancholy little defeats and squalid compromises of the seven academic years since Hitler had come to power were there in his dimmed eyes, in the listless droop of his shoulders.

  “I’m there, Kurt, because to resign in protest would have been to le
ave your mother without a breadwinner. And to resign for any other reason would have been dishonest. I’m there, if you like, because I’m the kind of person who rationalizes his moral cowardice by weighing the luxury of self-respect against the certainty of bringing disgrace and hardship upon his family. It’s conceivable, of course, that I’m there because there are still a few students who might need me. I only wish that could have included you.”

  Kurt had turned on his heel and left him.

  It had been too much to hope for—a four-day leave without a political flare-up within the Armbrecht household. And the irony of it was that the provocation, when it came, was from neither Kurt nor his father but from an outsider, and it came in the last hours of what had been, until then, the most pleasant short vacation Kurt could remember.

  The family luncheon that Saturday had been a merry affair with Kurt good-humoredly lobbing answers—mostly frivolous—to the interminable questions about his job volleyed at him by his mother and sister, while Walter Armbrecht presided amiably at the head of the table, keeping their glasses topped up and chuckling at Kurt’s running account of life in the Berlin Chancellery. The four of them dined elegantly that evening at Humplmayr’s and the day ended with a festive seal when the professor joined them during the car ride home in a tipsy chorus of “Brave Little Soldier’s Wife,” to irreverent applause and cries of “Encore!” from his two offspring. Next day, after a shamefully late start, and with the professor yawning over the wheel of the Adler, they managed to make Bad Wiessee for lunch and spent the afternoon strolling in the hills above the Tegernsee.

  On the way back to the city they made a detour through Bichl to call in on Margit Armbrecht’s youngest sister, Uta, who was keeping a largish pig farm going while her husband, Karl, a quartermaster in Rundstedt’s army, was in Georgia. Aunt Uta had been Kurt’s favorite relative since his earliest remembered childhood when he used to spend weeks of his summer on the farm “helping” his maternal grandfather, now dead, mix the pig feed and clean out the sties. It was Uta who, when he was only ten, had explained to him in simple matter-of-fact terms the physical mysteries of procreation and birth which his own devoutly Catholic mother had always shied from discussing, invariably alluding to some later unspecified date when his father would tell him “all about that sort of thing.” As it had turned out, Aunt Uta was no mere theoretician on the subject, for she had earlier that year been awarded the “Mother’s Cross” for giving birth to a fourth child, a fine boy, at the age of forty. Now she proudly displayed the decoration to Kurt while his mother and sister cooed over the award-winning infant’s pram, outside the kitchen door.

  “It’s so much prettier than your cross, don’t you agree?” she chaffed him, holding the bronze medal by its slender blue-and-white ribbon against her ample bosom.

  “As pretty as it should be,” he acknowledged solemnly. “But then all you had to do to earn it was lie on your back, right?”

  “Monster!” She poked him in the ribs and made a ferocious face. Then, turning to Walter Armbrecht, who was taking a light for his meerschaum from the kitchen stove, “To think I used to wipe this great hulk’s bottom for him when he was a brat! Pah! Just ask the Fuehrer when you go back to Berlin which of our medals he rates the highest!”

  “I can tell you that now—the Mutterkreuz in gold. He told me so himself. But you’ll never make that now, Aunt Uta. By the time Uncle Karl gets back you’ll be pushing fifty.”

  “And who says I have to wait till Karl gets back? It’s a mother’s cross, isn’t it. It says nothing about fathers.”

  “I don’t know,” Walter Armbrecht cut in dryly, “if I’m changing the subject, but I didn’t see either of your two Russian laborers around as we drove up. Are they still working here?”

  “Yes. But they’re taken back to camp early on Sundays.” She stifled a giggle. “They had to work so hard last week, I gave the poor devils a bottle of apricot Schnapps to take into the barn this afternoon and they were flat out and snoring when the guard arrived. So I had to give him half-a-dozen eggs to keep his mouth shut!”

  “I think that’s very rash of you, Uta,” Margit Armbrecht called through the open door. “There was a case only last week of a Ukrainian who went crazy after stealing some liquor and almost raped his employer’s wife.”

  “What do you mean—almost?” Kurt grinned. “He did or he didn’t.”

  “The dogs got him before he could do any harm. Then the woman shot him.” Frau Armbrecht shuddered. “What a thing to happen!”

  “More fool she, for not having her Russian castrated,” Aunt Uta said primly. “Karl made sure of that before he went away. As he said, you’ve sometimes got to be cruel to be kind.”

  The wisecrack on the tip of Kurt’s tongue died as he caught sight of his father’s face. Instead, he said loudly, “What about this countryfolk hospitality one’s always hearing about? We’ve been here ten minutes already and we haven’t even been offered a cup of ersatz coffee!”

  Kurt had planned, back in Berlin, to round up such of his Munich men friends as might be on leave or discharged from the Wehrmacht, for a Sunday-night carousal at the Buergerbraeukeller, where Hitler made his annual speech to the Nazi “Old Guard” every eighth of November. But he couldn’t have chosen a worse time, for none of his close friends who had survived the war was in the city. Erich and Peter were still on the eastern front. Klaus was stuck on—of all places—the Channel Islands, an adjutant to the military commander. Hugo was with his Luftwaffe squadron in North Africa. So, instead, he did what he had intended to leave until Monday afternoon and took Sophie with him on a walking tour to refresh his memory of the places where Adolf Hitler had made his quarters during the years of his struggle for power. They followed the strict chronological order of Hitler’s moves, parking the car on the Widenmayer bank of the River Isar and starting with Thierschstrasse, a short featureless street where, in 1921, Hitler had rented a small room at Number 41. From there, it was a short walk to the fashionable boulevard of Prinzregententrasse, where Hitler, on the strength of his royalties from Mein Kampf, had rented all nine rooms on the second floor of Number 16. Their final stop was in the Koenigsplatz, where in the early thirties, the Fuehrer had held court in the old mansion—formerly the Barlow Palace—which later was remodeled as a suitable Munich headquarters, the Fuehrer House, for a Chancellor of the Reich.

  “And you know something, Liebchen,” Kurt said, steering Sophie across the great square. “For all his love of neoclassicist grandeur in public buildings, the Fuehrer’s own living quarters in the Chancellery are surprisingly unpretentious. Almost austere, in fact. They say he sleeps in the same old iron-frame bed he slept in here in Munich.”

  “That must be pretty rough on Fräulein Braun, wouldn’t you say?”

  He glanced sideways at her. She wasn’t smiling, and there was a faint underlying note of asperity in her voice, enough to suggest to him that he had maybe overdrawn on her good will, traipsing her around the city to stare at buildings she must have seen hundreds of times. “I’m not yet in the lady’s confidence,” he said. And then, giving her hair a tug from behind, forcing her to smile up at him, “You’ve been a pal, keeping me company like this. We’re going to get drunk together and roll back home singing, ‘Poor Little Soldier’s Sister.’ ”

  On Tuesday morning, as Kurt was listening to the first flash radio reports of the airborne invasion of the island of Malta, his mother brought him a note that she had found in the letterbox from their neighbor, Herr Krenkler. It invited Kurt to do Krenkler the honor of calling on him that evening if he could find time to tear himself from the bosom of his family. Kurt scribbled a note in reply, begging Herr Krenkler to excuse him “on this occasion of a very short leave.”

  Kurt knew nothing about Krenkler except that he was an Ortsgruppenleiter, was employed on the staff of Paul Geisler, the Gauleiter of Bavaria, and that his wife maltreated foreign servants. The Krenklers had moved into the neighboring house the day after the German
invasion of Belgium, replacing the former owners, who, to the astonishment of the Armbrechts, were declared to be of Jewish stock and bundled off to the concentration camp at Dachau. Until the news of Kurt’s appointment to the Fuehrer’s staff appeared in the Munich newspapers, the Krenklers had made no social overtures to their next-door neighbors, which had suited the Armbrechts perfectly. Margit was sure she had no common ground with Frau Krenkler, not even children or the Catholic faith, and Walter—well, Walter had always tended to steer clear of social involvement with officials of the Party, especially those with the “Mit Uns” plaque ostentatiously exhibited on their automobiles and residential front doors.

  Now they had finished their evening meal, and Kurt and his father had lighted up cigars in the living room while the women cleaned up in the kitchen. The doorbell rang and, a few seconds later, Sophie’s head appeared in the doorway. Her voice remained cool and formal while her face registered dismay.

  “Herr Krenkler has very kindly ‘dropped in,’ Papa, with a bottle of cognac to wish Kurt bon voyage.”

  Father and son barely had time to exchange hunted looks when a stout pink-faced man with a completely bald cranium stepped into the room, clutching a bottle to his breast. His right arm flashed forward in the Nazi salute.

  “Heil Hitler, gentlemen! Do forgive this brief intrusion, Herr Professor. A small gift—” he raised the bottle aloft—“from one loyal servant of the Fuehrer to another!” The broad smile, exposing an excess of pink gums, was beamed on Kurt, who had risen to his feet, looking to his father for a formal introduction.

  “You haven’t met, of course.” Walter Armbrecht stood up to receive the bottle with a dignified bow. “Our neighbor Herr Krenkler—my son, Kurt.”

  “Whose literary and military fame has preceded him,” Krenkler supplied, kneading his hands and casting an eye around for somewhere to sit. “I have only recently got around to reading your excellent treatise on leadership, Herr Captain. The Gauleiter is a hard taskmaster, I can tell you. But then, as you yourself so rightly observe, ‘The language of leadership is the language of demands; its poetry lies in their fulfillment.’ May I sit down for a moment, Herr Professor?”