Kurt thought as he went to the sideboard to get out the brandy glasses, At least he seems to have read the book, which is more than can be said of half the people who have it in their bookcases. He even got the quote right. I can understand why the old man hasn’t warmed to him, but that’s his problem, not mine.
“You’ll join us, Herr Krenkler?” he asked, handing a corkscrew to his father.
“With the greatest of pleasure!” Krenkler, who had perched himself on the edge of a chair, now settled himself back after first unbuttoning his jacket and shaking out his tie. The small circular Party badge gleamed from the lapel of his dark-brown suit. It was the gold version, worn only by the Old Guard. All of his attention was concentrated on Kurt.
“Tell me, Herr Captain,” he said, “how are you getting along in your exciting new post? Is the Fuehrer keeping you busy?”
“Oh, on and off,” Kurt laughed. “Tell you the truth, I spend most of my time reading and making notes and very little time with the Fuehrer in person.”
“But how privileged you are to be spending any time at all with him!” Krenkler took a sip of brandy, his pale eyes glowing at Kurt over the rim of the glass. “And to such a noble purpose!” He leaned forward a little, lowering his voice. “Tell me, my dear Armbrecht, how soon do you think we lesser mortals can hope to enjoy the fruits of the Fuehrer’s literary labors?”
“Certainly not for a couple of years, at the earliest. And then only if the Fuehrer is given a respite, meanwhile, from his military preoccupations.”
“Of course, of course! But our enemies’ days are already numbered, wouldn’t you say? There’s Stalin, hopelessly sandwiched between us and the Japanese. Britain, by all accounts, is slowly starving to death. The Australians and New Zealanders have scurried back home from the Middle East, panic-stricken by the rumors of a Japanese invasion of their homelands. Now, with Malta in our hands, the defeat of the British forces strung out between the Suez Canal and Persia can surely only be a matter of months?”
“Given certain contributory factors, yes.” Kurt was addressing Krenkler, but he was aware he was choosing his words—indeed, even allowing himself to be drawn out like this—to impress his father, slumped now in his favorite armchair, blandly studying the tip of his cigar. “Crete has still to be taken, but that’s a detail. The British and the Gaullist French will fight as fiercely to defend their Middle-East oil resources as the Russians did in the Caucasus. But, unlike the Russians, when they realize there will be no reprieve for them in Persia they will fall back on the Persian Gulf rather than stand and fight to the last man.
A great deal will depend at this stage on whether the Japanese have pushed on into India or have taken the Fuehrer’s advice, which is not to overindulge their appetites or overstretch their supply lines. Either way, of course, what is left of the democracies’ Middle-East forces will be evacuated to India to await events or to help stem the Japanese advance. Thus, Britain’s eventual role in the New Order will probably be determined by decisions being taken at this very moment in Tokyo.” He paused. Herr Krenkler was blinking and nodding, waiting for him to go on. And he now had his father’s attention. But he wanted more. And it came as he lowered his brandy glass to the coffee table.
Walter Armbrecht said, “Can you explain what that means— Britain’s role in the New Order?”
“I’ll try,” Kurt smiled. “But you mustn’t expect me to be as lucid as the Fuehrer is on the subject. Anyway, it boils down to this: The British will sooner or later have to face the fact that they made the gravest blunder in their history by not joining with us in the death struggle of civilization against Bolshevism. They will overthrow Churchill and sue for peace, and when that day comes the Fuehrer will welcome them like a father welcoming his prodigal son. They will have to pay, of course, for their lapse from sanity in 1939, just as the French are paying today. Their heavy industries will be dismantled and transferred to the Ruhr. They will have to live on what they themselves can produce, from the land and from cottage industries. In short, their status will be that of a Probationer State, such as France, Belgium, Denmark, Holland and Norway—”
“As distinct,” Professor Armbrecht broke in, “from the Slave States of European Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and now the Greeks and Yugoslavs?”
“If you insist, Father,” Kurt nodded, “though I can think of a better way—” He bit the words off, noticing that Krenkler’s attention had switched to Walter Armbrecht, whom he was now eyeing as if suddenly aware of an intruder. “However,” Kurt continued quickly, “the British will be given a very generous opportunity to redeem themselves. Their reward, eventually, will be to see the upgrading of their nation from probationer to associate status, similar to the Finns, Rumanians, Hungarians and now—since they have detached themselves from all commitments to the democracies—the Turks. There!” He smiled again at his father. “Does that answer your question?”
The Professor spoke wearily, as if commenting on a student’s slipshod paper. “It postulates two assumptions—one, that the British will throw in their hand; two, that they will then cooperate with the New Order. Leaving the first one aside, has either of you any conception of how odious the German New Order appears to the other side in this war?”
“An irrelevance, Herr Professor, if you will forgive me!” Krenkler was taking over, and looking far from conciliatory, with his popping pale eyes and reddening neck. “We don’t need their love. What we want—and by God we’ll get it—is their respect and obedience! Am I right, Herr Captain?”
“You are both right,” Kurt muttered. “They hate us but they’ll end up cooperating because—well, the alternative would be unthinkable.”
“The evidence,” Walter Armbrecht persisted, “is that they at least have thought about the alternative. They know what we’re doing in Russia, and to the Jews, and it is precisely this that makes the New Order an abomination in their minds.”
“God in heaven!” Krenkler was staring from father to son, and back again. “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear we were listening to some propagandist over the BBC!”
Thoroughly uneasy now, Kurt forced out a laugh as he reached for the brandy bottle. “My father is an incorrigible academic, Herr Krenkler. He just enjoys arguing both sides of a case. . . . A little more cognac?”
“Thank you.” Krenkler, still frowning, held out his glass. “It’s all very well, if I may say so, for the academics, but where would National Socialism be today if its leaders had indulged in such luxuries. For Germany, and especially for the younger generation now under the Professor’s tutelage, there can be no two sides to such questions as the morality of the New Order. Those who are not for it are against it.”
“As succinct a summing-up of what I’ve been saying,” Walter Armbrecht murmured, “as I could have wished for.”
Kurt got to his feet, smiling at Krenkler. “So we’re all agreed —there are in fact two sides to every issue. I’ve enjoyed meeting you, Herr Krenkler. Unfortunately, I’m on a very early flight to Berlin in the morning and I haven’t even packed yet. Perhaps, on my next trip to Munich, you and I can—”
“A pleasure I shall look forward to!” Krenkler drained his glass and stood up. “And—” the broad smile froze almost painfully as he turned to the professor—“to your father’s stimulating company. Heil Hitler, gentlemen!”
CHAPTER FOUR
I
HE HAD set his mind on being in Jerusalem for Christmas Day, 1942. He had even prepared his historic speech for the occasion and had spoken of it to Kurt Armbrecht during one of their mid-November sessions up in the Fuehrer’s private apartment in the Chancellery. It was to be a speech, he confided, in the course of which he would hold out an olive branch to the world. Hitler was considering delivering the speech from the Mount of Olives itself.
“Consider the geomilitary situation, Armbrecht, as it will undoubtedly apply at that time. Yes, yes, I want you to look at this map. . . . The Gaullist forces here in Syria ti
ed down by a massive uprising of the Grand Mufti’s Mujahidin, or holy warriors. No relief for them from the British, who by then will be in full retreat across the Transjordan desert here, and falling back through an equally hostile Iraq toward the Persian Gulf, where their navy, now expelled from the Mediterranean, will be standing by to evacuate what is left of them to India.
“No relief for the French from Persia, because by then the British forces of occupation in that country will be under orders from Churchill to save their skins by heading for the Gulf. And no relief from the Russian occupation troops in Persia, who at this moment are being moved up here, northward, in the futile hope of stiffening Red Army resistance to Rundstedt’s drive south through Georgia and Azerbaijan.”
Hitler turned away from the map table, motioning Kurt to return to his chair. “True genius in a national leader,” he went on, straightening his jacket, “consists in having the judgment to recognize the precise stage at which the political benefits of a dictated peace with one’s enemy will outweigh and outlast the glory of further military triumphs.
“From the Mount of Olives, I shall proclaim that my historic mission is now accomplished. My two archenemies will have been destroyed. The Boshevik armies will be floundering in the marshes and wastelands of Siberia. The insolent Zionist dream of a national home in Palestine, where they could lick their wounds for a new assault on Western civilization, will be lying in ruins. The Grand Mufti will be appointed Civil Governor, under a Reich Commission, of Palestine, Transjordan and Syria, with the responsibility of forging a United Arabia, of which Iraq will undoubtedly form part, as soon as we have reinstalled our friend Rashid Ali in power.
“Thanks to his shrewdness in hiding from the British when Rommel reached the gates of Cairo, King Farouk is now restored to the throne of Egypt, and as I and the Duce promised him in Cairo last week, Egypt will remain a monarchy under the protection of Italy, whose mandate will also embrace Saudi Arabia and the Sudan. In my Christmas Day speech I shall hold out the prospect of a Pax Germanica from the Atlantic to the Arabian Sea and from the Baltic to the Red Sea. Under this great canopy, Moslems and Christians will live together in peace and mutual respect for the first time in two thousand years, unexploited by Judaism and uninfected by the deadly virus of Communism.” Hitler paused in his pacing to fix Kurt with a challenging stare. “Can you think of a nobler text for a sermon from the Mount?”
“A truly breathtaking concept, my Fuehrer,” Kurt said, sitting bolt upright. “But what if—” He faltered, hardly daring to give voice to the question.
“What if the British reject my olive branch? Is that what you were going to ask?” Hitler seemed suddenly to grow several inches as he drew back his head and, raising one arm high, brought the clenched fist flashing down. “Total annihilation! Their armies will find no sanctuary in India or in their African colonies. Wherever they flee, I shall seek them out and destroy them! As for the British Isles, they will be reduced, as I’ve reduced Leningrad, to a desert of rubble and cannibalistic cave dwellers! I shall act against them, Armbrecht, as if the word ‘mercy’ had never existed!”
In the event, Hitler’s visit to Jerusalem was unavoidably postponed until early in March of the following year, and by then he had changed his mind about offering his olive branch to the British and was back into the Anglophobic mood that had seized him after the fierce but futile resistance of Gibraltar, in September 1942, to the combined German airborne and Spanish land forces.
It had been completely in character for Hitler to have recovered his grudging admiration for the British when, six weeks later, they abandoned Cairo, to prevent the city’s virtual destruction by the Luftwaffe and Rommel’s artillery; and once again in character when he stormed at them to his Chief of Staff, General Franz Halder, in the Map Room of the Chancellery ten days before Christmas 1942.
“What can that drunken blabbermouth Churchill hope to achieve by blocking the Suez Canal and defending the Sinai passes? Surely even he must realize he has now lost the Middle East!”
The most unemotional and thoughtful of Hitler’s military chieftains, Halder had little taste for the street-corner epithets used by the Supreme Commander. He said, “One must assume Churchill is motivated from this point by political rather than military considerations. He cannot be seen by America to abandon the Jewish population of Palestine, or by the Russians to have left open Rommel’s road to Persia. In my opinion, he is counting on an early American intervention to save the Palestinian Jews.”
“But that is arrant nonsense!” Hitler exploded. “There are almost half a million of those swine, penned up in Tel Aviv and Haifa. Can the Americans, or Churchill, transport them across nine hundred miles of desert to the Persian Gulf? And if they accomplished this Mosaic miracle, what then? What vast and mythical fleet exists to evacuate them, and to where? The Pope is at least being more realistic when he pleads with me to declare my intentions toward Palestine. I shall continue to ignore him, of course. But when that paralytic warmonger Roosevelt orders battleships of his Pacific Fleet into the Indian Ocean, as he has, all I can do is laugh in his face and say, ‘Come on then, Yanks: Try your luck with our submarine packs and the Japanese navy!’ ”
“In strategic terms, you are of course right, my Fuehrer. What I had in mind was a secret understanding between Roosevelt and Churchill, whereby if the British put up a valiant enough fight in defense of the Jews in Palestine, Roosevelt would at last be able to swing Congress into a declaration of war. That wouldn’t save the Jews and it wouldn’t save the Middle East. But it would make all the difference to Britain’s chances of survival.”
Hitler had calmed down while Halder was speaking. Now he stood beside his map table, arms folded, smiling the sour smile that usually preceded an admonishment to his Chief of Staff. “You’ve just proved my contention, Halder,” he snapped, “that generals make poor politicians. Consider the facts. Over these past two years we have been vigorously and ruthlessly purging European society of the Jewish poison without bringing America into the war. Bormann will give you the up-to-date figures over dinner tonight if you are interested, but suffice it to say that the fate of a half million Jews in Palestine is a paltry consideration compared with the sanitary operation we are already carrying out upon European Jewry. And bear in mind that, unlike the Palestinians, these are related by blood to the scum who have taken over American business and politics. Do you really imagine the United States Congress, having swallowed the camel of our Jewish policy in Europe, is going to strain at the gnat of Palestine? No, my friend. There is no secret understanding between Roosevelt and Churchill that could possibly justify this vainglorious defense of Sinai and the coastal road to Palestine. We must therefore assume that the British are buying time for major reinforcements to reach them from India, or else Stalin has somehow managed to convince Churchill that he can stem Rundstedt’s advance into Persia. Whatever the case, they are doomed.”
General Alfred Jodl, chief of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff, had been hanging onto every word uttered by Hitler, supplying affirmative nods or confirmatory shakes of the head whenever appropriate. He leaped in now. “There is no question of that, my Fuehrer.”
“Let us hope,” Hitler muttered, “you are right. And now let’s have the others in, so we can get on with the situation conference.”
II
THE SUBDUED murmur, like the sound from a packed ballet audience just before the conductor strides on for the overture, gave way to an almost complete silence as Prime Minister Winston Churchill trudged in January, 1943, into the debating chamber of the House of Commons and headed for the Treasury Bench. On both sides of the chamber members were crushed tight into the tiers of padded red-leather benches, with a spillover squatting on the gangway stairs. Bombed out of the Commons chamber, the 620 elected legislators now had to make do with the smaller Lords chamber, and even allowing for those members sick or away on government business it was a tight fit. Behind Churchill, as he turned to bow to the Speaker, se
nior members of the Coalition cabinet heaved against one another to provide buttocks space for the P.M.
Wedging himself in roughly, to the visible discomfort of his slightly built Deputy, Clement Attlee, now sandwiched between the massive bulks of the Prime Minister and Labor Minister Ernest Bevin, Churchill fumbled for his spectacles, put them on and peered along what in other times would have been the Opposition front bench. From the corner of his eye, Foreign Minister Anthony Eden observed the tightening of his chiefs mouth as the pale-blue eyes noted the presence of Aneurin Bevan, seated with folded arms on the front Opposition bench just below the gangway, gazing expressionlessly ahead.
In answer to a formal question from one of his backbenchers, Churchill rose to his feet, took the few paces to the dispatch box, laid his typewritten sheaf of notes upon it and began his speech to this secret session of the House of Commons.
As we meet in this place today, the war in the Middle East is drawing to its somber close. Our forces everywhere are in retreat—in good order, and using great tactical skill, but in retreat nonetheless. I wish I could tell Honorable Members that they are falling back to prepared lines of defense in Syria, Iraq and Persia, but this is no time for the euphemistic language of military communiqués. We have only one line of retreat, if the residue of the Eighth Army and our forces in Persia are not to perish or fall prisoner, and that is into the Persian Gulf and into the care of the Royal Navy, which must then run the gauntlet of the Japanese fleet, across the Arabian Sea to the sanctuary— if such it can be termed—of India. This House may rest assured that dispositions have already been made, to the limit of our resources, to ensure the success of this evacuation.
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