He said, “I have bad news for you, Captain Armbrecht. Your father has been arrested by the Gestapo and is now in the concentration camp of Dachau.”
CHAPTER NINE
I
MARTIN BORMANN was staring at Kurt across the desk in the Royal Palace library as if the younger man had taken leave of his senses.
“You are asking me to interrupt the Fuehrer at this moment over a purely personal matter involving your father? What’s the matter with you, Armbrecht? Have you been overindulging in this filthy Spanish wine?”
Kurt swallowed hard. If there was one person he couldn’t afford to antagonize at this stage it was the dour, bull-necked watchdog of Adolf Hitler’s waking hours. He said, “Please forgive me, Herr Reichsleiter. The fact is, I’ve only just heard that my father has been arrested and sent to Dachau. I’m naturally upset. Obviously there’s been some mistake, somewhere.”
“Obviously?” Bormann snapped. “How do we know that?” He snatched up a sheet of paper and tossed it to one side in a gesture of irritation and impatience. “Look, Armbrecht, you know perfectly well I can’t allow the Fuehrer to be bothered with such trivia—”
“My father—”
“Trivia, Armbrecht, to one with the Fuehrer’s responsibilities! From midday today he has been engaged in the most profound theological discussion with Monsignor Donati, and they’re still talking! The whole future of our relations with the Vatican might be hanging on the outcome. At the same time I’m being pestered by Ribbentrop to get the Fuehrer’s approval of the draft text for a final joint communiqué. The Chief won’t even talk to him on the telephone! And you come in here, with this tale about your—!”
“It’s no tale, Herr Reichsleiter,” Kurt cut in quietly. “My father is a professor at Munich University—”
“I know that! Look here, Armbrecht—”
“—and at this moment,” Kurt persisted, “is behind barbed wire with a bunch of criminals, in conditions I’ve seen for myself—”
“Armbrecht!” The deputy leader of the Party was up on his feet, glowering. Kurt sprang swiftly to attention.
“Herr Reichsleiter!”
“Don’t try my patience! The interview is over. The best I can do for you is have a word with Gruppenfuehrer Mueller. Try calling him at our Embassy in about half an hour.”
Half an hour seemed an eternity. He decided to take a taxi across the city to Number 4 on La Castellana and try to see Mueller in person.
The taxi took him through the heart of Madrid, the Puerta del Sol, but the young German officer staring fixedly out of the side window saw nothing of the crowded pavements, the crippled lottery-ticket sellers, the dawdling putas and the street vendors, still hawking their little paper Nazi flags. All he could see—and he couldn’t blot out the image—was a naked elderly village schoolmaster hanging by the thumbs from a gibbet.
He was saluted by the policia armada guarding the front gates of the German Embassy but had to produce his Chancellery card before being allowed to pass under the two huge stone eagles dominating the entrance to the building. The taxi ride had taken less than a quarter of an hour, and he was kept waiting another twenty minutes in an entrance hall alive with the comings-and-goings of bureaucrats and messengers before a burly civilian marched over to him, gave him the “German salute” and invited him up to the first floor.
Kurt knew “Gestapo” Mueller only by repute, which was how the vast majority of Germans ardently hoped they would ever know the chief of the Secret State Police. He had never even set eyes on him and was at first somewhat disarmed by the pleasant-featured little man who greeted him politely from behind an orderly, almost document-free desk.
“My apologies for keeping you waiting, Captain, so much traffic at this time over the teleprinter and telephones to the Reich. Please sit down.” Carefully adjusting the trouser creases of his well-tailored gray suit, Mueller resettled himself in his chair and studied Kurt for a few minutes in silence, his bright-blue eyes seeming to flicker over his visitor rather than bore into him. His expression had become solemn, even touched with concern.
“It is a fact, I’m afraid,” he began slowly, “that your father, Professor Armbrecht, has been taken into protective custody on suspicion of activities inimical to the state.” It was a well-worn formula covering arbitrary arrest and imprisonment without trial, but Mueller made it sound almost innocuous, a rather tiresome formality—until the image of the village schoolmaster flashed in again. Kurt remained silent, sitting stiffly upright on the edge of his chair.
“I must confess, Armbrecht,” Mueller went on, “that I am not totally surprised by this turn of events. You will be aware that our people looked very thoroughly into your parents’ background before you were recommended for your present post. We found, then, that your father had never been more than . . . lukewarm, shall we say? in his attitude to National Socialism. In point of fact, if it had not been for the acute shortage of faculty staff at Munich University, the Senate would probably have dispensed with his services by now. Your own background was of course unexceptionable. We had ample proof of your loyalty to the regime and of the political friction between yourself and the Herr Professor. In such circumstances”—Mueller indulged a gentle smile—“we try to avoid visiting the sins of the father upon the son.”
“Sins, Herr Gruppenfuehrer?” Kurt asked, shakily. “What sins is he supposed to have committed?”
“The case comes under Section IV A of the R.S.H.A., subsection lb, concerned with liberalism, rumors, undermining of morale, defeatism, et cetera. I understand our Munich people have taken some very damaging depositions from the faculty, the Students’ Association and one or two Party officials. It’s all very distressing for me, Armbrecht, as I’m sure you will appreciate. I haven’t even been able to bring myself to send the Chief a memo about it. In fact, Bormann says he would hold it up, anyway, to avoid upsetting him at this time.” He spread his hands, giving Kurt a sad smile.
“Herr Gruppenfuehrer—” Kurt swallowed hard—“my father is not a criminal, and I don’t believe he’s been disloyal to Germany. I ask, as a personal favor, that he be released from Dachau and put under house arrest, at least until your investigations are complete.”
“Armbrecht, you must be reasonable. This kind of investigation takes time, maybe months. We just haven’t the men to spare to keep a run-of-the-mill academic-—if you’ll forgive me —under constant surveillance.”
“A civilian prison, then. Anywhere but—”
“With common criminals?” Mueller waggled his head. “The concentration camps were established precisely to accommodate cases like your father’s. He won’t be ill-treated. Dachau is the best-run camp in the whole of the Reich.”
“I was in the place, only four weeks ago, Herr Gruppenfuehrer. I can’t bear the thought of my father being there now.”
Mueller’s long upper lip seemed to freeze solid. He was looking over Kurt’s shoulder, all amiability sapped from his pale compact features. “We all of us have to put up with certain unpleasantnesses these days, Captain Armbrecht,” he muttered. “I would suggest you don’t press the matter at this stage.”
The communiqué released at midday on Sunday, May 21, 1944, was an arabesque of diplomatic noncommunication. It spoke of the “fruitful and fraternal discussions between the heads of state of Germany, Spain and Portugal and of the “spirit of ideological harmony informing the talks.”
Stripped of its euphemistic verbiage, the communique spelled out the almost complete failure of Hitler’s initiatives in Madrid. As Otto Dietrich put it to Kurt while the Fuehrer’s train sped northward from Hendaye, “We’re coming away with nothing we wouldn’t have anyway, if our enemies ever decide to have a go at Spain and Portugal. What have we got for the extra wheat and gas that that little so-and-so Franco squeezed out of us? A pair of bloody bull’s ears, given to the Reichsmarschall by Manolete at yesterday’s corrida!” The Fuehrer’s press spokesman let out a harsh laugh. “Did you hear what the
Chief said when Bormann told him about it?”
Kurt shook his head.
“He said, ‘If Goering comes anywhere near me with those obscenities I’ll have his own ears sent to Franco, with his fat head still holding them apart.’” Dietrich put out his cigarette and stared past Kurt toward the distant Atlantic horizon. “Incredible, the calm way the Chief is taking this whole Madrid fiasco. After the first day’s talks last Monday he kept Ribbentrop, Bormann and me up till about three o’clock, screaming his head off about Franco’s ingratitude. On Tuesday he damn near walked out, when Salazar started to hem and haw about the defense pact. It took Munoz Grandes the whole of lunchtime to coax the Chief into going back into the conference room. And then— presto!—he meets Donati at the Retiro reception that night and he’s been a changed man ever since. ‘Let’s settle for what we can get,’ he tells Ribbentrop, ‘I can’t waste any more time on these little tin Caesars.’ I don’t know what you make of it, Armbrecht, but something very peculiar’s going on.”
Kurt’s thoughts were a thousand miles away, but the uttering of his name and the sudden pause in Dietrich’s chatter interrupted his brooding. He blinked inquiringly at the press chief.
“Donati—” Dietrich stared back at him, irritably. “What do you think he’s been up to in these private sessions with the Chief?”
“I’ve really no idea. Trying to sweet-talk him into laying off the Church, presumably.”
“Brilliant!” Dietrich snorted. “Our Fuehrer goes into virtual seclusion with an Italian archbishop in Madrid for the sole purpose of being lectured about his feud with the Catholics. You can do better than that, my dear fellow.”
“To be perfectly frank—”
“I know, I know,” Dietrich cut in. “You’re not particularly interested. Well, all I can say is you’d better be! I’ve been with the Chief for eighteen years now, and I’ve never known anything like this happen before.”
“Like what, in fact?”
“Like the Chief taking to an absolute stranger—and a Vatican diplomat, at that—as if he had found a long-lost brother. There’s something extremely odd about it, Armbrecht, and I don’t mind admitting it’s got me worried.”
Kurt was not an eyewitness to Doctor Otto Dietrich’s reactions, a week later, when Bormann requested the press chief to prepare a “guidance” memorandum to the Party press concerning an impending announcement in the Osservatore Romano and over the Vatican Radio. This would state that Monsignor Giovanni Donati was being relieved of his duties as Apostolic Nuncio in Madrid to take up, with immediate effect, the office of Special Papal Legate to the Obersalzberg headquarters of Adolf Hitler.
“We don’t want any editorial comment or speculation on this,” Bormann grunted, averting his eyes from Dietrich’s flabbergasted face. “We want no photographs of Donati, but they are to run a brief biography, emphasizing the Archbishop’s peasant background. Oh yes—and get them to recall that a similar appointment was made by the Vatican to Kaiser Wilhelm’s headquarters at Kreuznach during the war of 1914-18. The special Papal Legate then was the present Pope, Eugenio Pacelli.”
II
FRÄULEIN EPPLER had seen no reason why Kurt should not leave the Fuehrer’s train at Munich and spend the night at his parents' home, provided that he would be back.in the Berghof by noon next day. She gave no hint whatsoever that she knew about his father's arrest, and in the light of Bormann’s apparent concern not to “upset” Hitler it was conceivable that no mention had yet been made of the matter to any of the staff in daily contact with the Fuehrer. Certainly, no reference to the professor’s arrest had yet appeared in the German press, copies of which had been freely available to Kurt during his week in Madrid.
His mother answered the doorbell at No. 17 Nikolaistrasse and fell against him at once, weeping her relief.
I've been praying for you to come! Oh Kurt—promise me you’ll get him out of that terrible place!”
“There, Mother, there! Of course we’re going to get him out.” He eased her away, closing the front door behind him. “You and I are going to sit down quietly and you’re going to tell me all about it.” He guided her toward the sitting-room. “Where’s Sophie?”
“I don’t know!” His mother collapsed into the nearest armchair and buried her face in her hands. “She’s disappeared and I haven’t had a word from her! I’m going out of my mind with worry, Kurt! What’s happening to us?!”
“Now, try to calm down, Mother—please. I want to know everything, about Father and about Sophie. Start from the beginning, and try to leave nothing out.”
The story emerged, haltingly, between sobs. And as it unfolded it began to make its own hideous logic to the tense young officer sitting facing his mother, to confirm all the fears he had been assailed by during these past three days. There had been a telephone call for Sophie from Obersturmbannfuehrer Voegler two days after the Fuehrer’s train left for Madrid. It had left her upset, but she had volunteered nothing to her mother, and Margit Armbrecht hadn’t tried to press her about it. The loud banging on- the-front door at about three o’clock next morning had aroused them, and when Sophie and her mother came hurrying downstairs after Walter Armbrecht they found him arguing heatedly with four uniformed SS men, all wearing the SD insignia on their left sleeves. The leader, a Hauptsturmfuehrer, had cut the argument short by pulling a revolver, pointing it at the professor and giving him “exactly five minutes” to get dressed and pack a small “overnight bag.” Kurt’s mother and sister had been ordered into the kitchen but, before leaving, the professor had shouldered their’ guard aside and embraced them both. “It’s all a ridiculous mistake,” he had told them. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be back in time for breakfast.” Two more men, these in civilian clothes, had entered the house while the professor was being taken out to one of the waiting cars and, with the two women still confined to the kitchen, had searched the house— “God knows for what!”—from basement to roof, concentrating for over an hour on Walter Armbrecht’s study and eventually making off with two cardboard cartons full of papers and books.
When 9 a.m. came around and there was still no sign of their father, Sophie had left her mother in a state of nervous collapse and hurried to the Munich headquarters of the Sicherheitsdienst. After being kept waiting for nearly two hours, she was curtly informed that her father had been taken into protective custody under Article 1 of the Decree of February 28, 1933, for the Protection of People and State, and would be transferred to Dachau later that day, when his present interrogation was completed. He would be allowed no visitors, no food parcels or correspondence. Further requests for information should be put in writing, through the appropriate channels. For a while after Sophie’s return home the two women had sat in stunned, impotent dismay. Then Margit Armbrecht had proposed putting a call through to the Berghof, to find out how they could contact Kurt in Madrid. But Sophie had stopped her, arguing that they should not involve him until she had tried another channel, which she seemed quite optimistic about.
“Poor Sophie—” Margit Armbrecht shook her head distractedly—“I wasn’t much help to her, the state I was in by then. She said if I didn’t get some sleep I’d be no use to anyone, so I let her give me one of her tranquilizers and put me to bed. But it didn’t work very well, and I was still awake when the doorbell rang—I don’t know how long afterward—and I went to the bedroom window and saw a car outside in the street and an SS driver standing in the forecourt. Then Sophie came out, and got into the back of the car, and off it went.” His mother found a handkerchief and gave her nose a hard blow.
“And that was the last you saw of her?”
She nodded. “But she telephoned me the next day, which was Thursday. She refused to tell me where she was, but she said she was all right and I wasn’t to worry about her, because what she was doing might take a little more time, but it was all to do with getting Father released. Then she gave me the name and telephone number of this Señor Federico Jiménez in Madrid and said
I was to try to contact him if I didn’t hear from her by noon the next day and to ask him to get in touch with you, very discreetly, and give you the news of Father’s arrest. Well, she didn’t call me back and it took me all day Friday and most of Saturday to get through to Señor Jiménez. I gave him Sophie’s message and—oh, Kurt, there’s been no word from poor Sophie since, and nothing from your father!”
He got up, walked over to sit on the arm of her chair, and held her tight to him. “I’m back now, Mother, and I’m going to take care of everything. The first thing is to find Sophie, and I’ve an idea where to go. But I haven’t much time, so I want you to stay here until I call you. Will you be all right?”
She blew her nose again. “I’d better get you something to eat, if you’re going out.”
“I’m not hungry. No, honestly, Mother,” he insisted over her protestations. “I had lunch on the train. Just try to be brave and stay quietly here and I’ll telephone you very soon.”
He took his suitcase up to his room, tidied himself up in the bathroom across the landing and, after another few reassuring words to his mother, set off for the Briennerstrasse, a brisk twenty minutes’ walk southward along the broad Leopold and Ludwig Strassen.
The house Voegler had stopped off at after their visit to Dachau was an imposing old four-story mansion at the Tuerkenstrasse end of Briennerstrasse, lying back from what obviously had been a railed-off concrete courtyard before the scrap-iron collection squads had gone to work. A broad flight of stone steps led up into a lofty entrance hall, where half a dozen private mailboxes showed that the house had been converted into separate apartments. Kurt studied the nameplates fixed to the boxes. No “Voegler” on any of them, but the one on the box marked Stock 4 was blank. He started to climb the carpeted steps toward the top floor.
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