by Jan Needle
‘Pretty much the same. We’re fighting in the air but we don’t see it in the cities. They bomb the airfields and we shoot down their bombers, lots of young men die but we expect to win. You know England. No one’s too hungry and we think we’re charmed, the holocaust won’t come.’
‘England is charmed,’ said Hannele, ‘but the holocaust will come. Germany is dying, but she will take the rest of the world with her when she goes.’
‘Dying? What, starving?’
She shook her head.
‘Not starving, yet. Although the food is deteriorating, and only the powerful eat well. No, dying morally, dying inside. The land is just as beautiful, and their heroes strut across the world, but only the stupid still feel proud. Too many people know what is happening to the Polish and the Slavs and to the Jews and the dissenters. It is only that I live in Dresden and that I fight like this that keeps me sane. I have an apartment that overlooks the Elbe. It is a lovely city, the war seems very far away, as if it can never reach me there.’
They had unwound their arms from round each other, and they sat on either side of the small table, held by brackets to the bulkhead. Each thought of home.
Edward said: ‘My flat’s still just as peaceful. It’s hard to imagine war coming there, either. Still no gas, still no bombs, we were so panic-stricken in those early days. Oh, there is one thing less peaceful. I have a sharer now. In fact, my landlady, she owns the place. She’s loud, like an American. I think she sees herself as American, actually. She acts like one.’
‘And do you sleep with her?’
There was a faint light of amusement in her eyes, but faint, as if she already regretted asking him.
‘I’m stupid,’ she said, quickly. ‘We should not talk of things like that. We both have to do things that are necessary. I would like to sleep with you, Edward. I am a changed woman, I’m afraid. I’m very staid. I would like to sleep with you, however. Also, to make love.’
He moved his lips.
‘Fourth time lucky. It will be sad if we never make it. Why not here? Now?’
‘No. Perhaps one day in Sweden, students have holidays, you know! Perhaps I’ll break, go back for good. No. I will not break. Edward, enough of us, we are being irresponsible. I must get to the station, go south again. I must tell you about Hess. There is a chance that he will dare to leave. To break with Hitler, defect. It would be the greatest thing.’
‘But why?’ said Carrington. He was aware that it was trite, but the alternative was to express the scepticism that had grown inside him in the intervening days. ‘Hannele, I must be frank. It sounds incredible.’
For the first time, her eyes sparkled. She nodded vigorously.
‘Yes, doesn’t it? The unlikeliest of men! He’s been with Hitler since the street-fighting days, he was in the famous putsch in twenty-three. But we believe him, Edward. We believe the worm has turned.’ She sobered. ‘We believe there are others with him, too, shadows, but we don’t know who they are. If he does it, Edward, it could mean collapse. It seemed beyond belief to start with, we approached it as a trick, a lure, but now we’re confident. It would be an appalling blow to Hitler, a crippling blow.’
‘OK,’ said Edward. It was a stand-off, he was picking up the Yankee jargon. ‘Hannele, I don’t know much about these men, I must admit. What I do know’s probably distorted, as you told me once in London. But there are people at my end who will take a great deal of persuading, you understand that? Rudolf Hess, to me and most of us, is a strutting Nazi, the one with the eyebrows. Wasn’t he behind the crackdown on the Jews?’
She nodded.
‘In a way. He helped to frame the Nuremberg Laws. But in Germany, everything is complicated. His mentor, the man who taught him at university, is married to a woman who is half-Jewish, and their son has worked for Hess for years as his adviser. Hess has protected them, although in theory they are people he should not even know. In fact the father, Karl Haushofer, is godfather to his little boy, Wolf Rüdiger. The other godfather is Hitler. Everything is complicated.’
Hannele reached across the table and touched his hand.
‘They are funny men these people, listen. Hess did not have a normal christening for Wolf, the Führer does not think them good enough for Nazis. Instead the leaders of every Gau in Germany sent a sample of the soil from their district to go underneath the cradle at the naming ceremony. Joseph Goebbels is Gauleiter of Berlin. He sent a piece of dogshit. A touching gesture, don’t you think? He said it was the soil of his city. The Nazi sense of humour.’
‘Did anybody laugh?’
‘It is not on record, but I doubt it. Joseph Goebbels is the most hated man they have, other than their most beloved leader. But they all hate each other, this is not understood in England. Goering and Ribbentrop keep bodyguards to protect them from each other. Goering almost destroyed Goebbels in a scandal over his mistress, who was a film star. Himmler is a nonentity who thinks he should be Führer in Hitler’s place, and Himmler’s deputy is Reinhard Heydrich, who is brilliant and daring and handsome and will kill Himmler first and then the Führer, if they don’t pre-empt him. Compared with most of them, Hess is a decent man, a sane man. We have seen documents, secret orders under his signature trying to protect the Jews from Stormtroop lunatics. After Kristallnacht he forbade further attacks on Jews and tried to have the worst ringleaders punished by the courts. Since then, of course, things have got much worse. As I said, we think that even some of the less sane of the lunatics would like to leave the madhouse if they could. Or at least have the superintendent put into a straitjacket.’
She sighed. Her face was sad.
‘You look dubious. You are right to be so. It would not be easy, nothing any more is easy. But it is worth a try, believe me. We do truly believe that Hess wants to go to Britain. If he could get there, surely there would be a hope?’
A shaft of sunlight blazed through the cabin scuttle, then as quickly faded.
Edward said: ‘Is there a plan, or do we have to work one up? Assuming that our government agrees, how would Hess hope to get to us? How big is your group? Dresden is a long way from Stettin. You were not chosen for this trip just to see an old flame, were you?’
‘No. I was chosen because it was safest for me. I’m a neutral student and I’m allowed to travel without too much explanation. Also, my uncle owns this ship! You know some of the network, the names have not changed. My contact in Berlin is Suzanne, and her family connections cross with mine in Sweden. There is a plan, the start of one, but we need co-operation, guidance. That is also why I was chosen. You know and trust me. The core of it, in Germany, is Rudolf Hess’s adviser, Albrecht Haushofer. He has friends in Britain, important people, aristocrats.’
There were alarm bells ringing in Edward’s skull. Aristocrats. He had been conditioned.
‘Who? Which aristocrats?’
‘Well, one in particular. A young man, an aviator, called the Duke of Hamilton. Hess met him in 1936, at the Olympics in Berlin, but he was called Lord Clydesdale then, your system is confusing. Albrecht Haushofer became a friend, a very close friend, they corresponded up until the war, Haushofer visited him in Scotland.’
‘So what is the hope? To renew the connection?’
Precisely, Hannele agreed. Haushofer wished to contact Hamilton and have him prepare the ground among the company he kept. Hess would probably fly as well – there seemed no other way so well-known a figure could leave the country, and he was a skilled aviator – and Albrecht Haushofer understood that the Duke was now a high-ranking officer in the RAF, which would surely aid the details of the flight and landing? When she had finished, they sat in silence. Outside the cranes clattered on.
‘There is a fear,’ Edward said, ‘that some so-called noble people wish to sell Britain’s interests out. There is a fear of treachery. Why this duke? Why not approach us through the proper services, through an agent, me for instance? Would Hess not fly under our aegis? I only ask, it is a confusion. Why this duk
e?’
‘In the first instance, Haushofer and Hess raised the idea. Logical, surely? Now I am approaching you, Edward. It will not be done behind anybody’s back, if you should veto it it falls, quite clearly – I mean your masters, naturally. But we have fear, also. There is a fear here that some of your people don’t want peace, at any price. And how do we know whom the secret channels would enlist? Herr Hess might be arrested out of hand and shot. Or blown out of the sky. We have our fears to match yours.’
Edward did not believe that such a thing could happen, or would. But Hannele lived in Germany. He did not contradict.
‘In any case,’ she said, ‘this Hamilton is no traitor. He is a friend of Winston Churchill, that is another reason. He is a friend of Winston Churchill and also of your royal family.’
‘The Duke of Windsor?’ asked Edward, sharply.
‘No, the King.’ Hannele was surprised. ‘What is wrong, Edward? Surely the King is not a traitor? Nor Mr Churchill?’
Slowly, something was igniting in Edward. Excitement. He stared at Hannele’s pale, drawn, serious face and he knew that she was genuine and convinced. She was offering him the deputy to Hitler, through an intermediary who was a friend of George VI and Winston Churchill. Slowly, a grin spread across his face. She responded, her facial muscles relaxing, the furrows in her brow fading visibly.
‘Oh, Carruthers! Do you understand at last? Do you understand what we might have here? This could mean peace.’
They kissed each other then, leaning across the cold steel table, but only gently. They were very chaste, their lives felt very fragile at the moment. Not long afterwards she left the cabin, and Edward returned to his bunk to wait for the ship to sail, to take him back to Sweden.
After that, London, as quickly as was possible. Hitler’s deputy was willing to defect…
Fourteen
If Edward had assumed the process would be quick or easy, he was quickly disabused. He returned to London to find the chaos in the secret services growing, with talk among the younger and more foolish elements of resignation, betrayal, even suicide. His instinct was to take the news to Foley, but Foley, for the moment, had disappeared. As Menzies, Vivian and Dansey were locked in bitter combat with one another and the SOE, he inevitably fell prey to the predatory curiosity of Desmond Morton. But even Morton, installed now in luxury at the Ministry of Economic Warfare, refused to show much interest. Great things were afoot, he hinted, and the secret services had bigger fish to fry than propaganda nonsenses dreamed up by Joseph Goebbels. In view of the weight he had given to the idea of an aristocratic plot, Edward found his flat reaction to the name of Hamilton quite puzzling. A week later, of his own volition, he provided him with proof that Albrecht Haushofer had written to Douglas, Duke of Hamilton, before the war, and that Hamilton had shown the letter to Churchill at his Morpeth Mansions flat. Morton had become immediately more thoughtful, and had ordered him to keep the matter firmly underneath his hat. Fearing that he might end up excluded, whatever steps were taken next, Edward managed next morning to get a memo through to ‘C’’s personal assistant, with a promise that it would end up on his desk.
It was a long game, and despite his dogged determination not to be shuffled to the sidelines, Edward was not privy to all the machinations. There were months of planning, false trails were laid, tests and traps set up and sprung. Albrecht Haushofer was contacted, certainly, and communication lines were established in Portugal and Switzerland. In November, Edward was given sight of a letter from Haushofer – he signed it ‘A’ – written to the duke. ‘My dear Douglo,’ it began, and referred, significantly in Morton’s view, to ‘your friends in high places’. Hamilton, presumably to fool the Abwehr if they had wind of it, was told not to reply to the suggestion of a meeting outside England until the day after Hess had flown.
The endgame started suddenly, with final confirmation of the flight coming from a source that Carrington, at least, found totally unexpected. The Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, received a message which was decoded for him in a Leeds hotel by Albert Heal, a trade union leader who had run a pre-war escape route for German socialists that still had watertight communications. Bevin rang London from the hotel room, and Edward was rung at home half an hour later. It was late on Friday evening, Friday, May 9, 1941, and he was ordered to present himself at the office at ten past seven in the morning. An hour after that, provided with rail tickets and a reservation, money, petrol coupons and instructions, he was at Euston. When he arrived at Glasgow, there would be a car to pick him up, with a driver who knew the Scottish lowlands ‘like the inside of his sporran’. The train pulled out to the minute.
During the interminable journey, Edward turned what he knew of the affair over and over in his mind, and wondered if it could possibly, really, happen. Throughout the months since he had brought the word from Hannele, he had sometimes had the impression that the British viewed the escapade with distaste, embarrassment, that sat ill with its potential. On the very narrowest level, it seemed to him, Rudolf Hess must be a gold mine of strategic information, although the experts at SIS had said his position in the Nazi hierarchy was not perhaps all it had been, or appeared to be. He was Number Two in name, they said, but Number Three in power, and possibly fading. Hermann Goering was the man behind the throne, and Hess had become increasingly of the margins. On the other hand, the selfsame experts named Hess as one of Hitler’s very few close friends, a loyal sidekick from the early days. That struck Edward as suspect, as if they wanted to have their cake and eat it too. If they got their hands on Hess he was important, but if they failed, he was a nobody.
It was the attitude to peace which nagged him most, however. The last few weeks, indeed the last year, had been appalling for Britain, and as Churchill said, ad nauseam in Erica’s view, Britain stood alone. West Europe had gone, North Africa and the Balkans. London and other cities were slowly dying underneath the Blitz, and intelligence on U-boat building (top secret) was terrifying to those who knew. But despite the Hess initiative, despite feelers via Switzerland and Spain as well as Scandinavia, even to talk of seeking peace was treated in secret service circles as defeatism, almost treachery. MI5 had reported the possibility of peace demonstrations in several major cities (and censored any hint of them by press and broadcasting) and almost all the Cabinet’s home and office numbers were being tapped on Churchill’s orders. Erica, although knowing none of this, had grown more scathing. She had been appalled by Churchill’s decision to shoot down German aircraft – marked with the red cross – picking up ditched fliers in the Channel, and she argued passionately that the saturation bombing of Britain’s cities – bombing that Hitler had promised would never happen – had been forced on him by Churchill’s repeated refusal to stop the air-raids on Berlin that had set the whole thing off.
‘But they were small,’ yelled Edward. ‘Germany’s too far away, we’ve got to fly across the occupied territories. Hitler killed fourteen thousand Londoners in fifty-seven days!’
‘Precisely! Are you stupid? Churchill knows he’ll never win this war, but he can’t give it up! Resistance makes him great! He’s a V-sign and a fat cigar! I truly don’t believe if Hitler offered peace on any terms he would accept, he couldn’t! So he needs America, doesn’t he? He’s had their arms, he’s got their sympathy, but he needs more. One day, God and FDR willing, America will join in with him. And the more poor little Britain takes a battering, the more bombs that are called down on the wreck of London, the sooner it will be. Truth!’
They had had many rows like this, and it was a measure of how far their relationship had come that Edward, while sometimes scorched by the depth of Erica’s cynicism, fought his corner without descending into rage, and came back for more. They were lovers now, and he preferred today to dwell on that than on the knottier problems. Even in peacetime the London-Scotland journey had been a long one, but in wartime it was dreadful. This train, like every other one, was packed to the doors, and when it was left in sidings peri
odically to allow trains of troops, and ammunition, and essential war materials to plod by, the hum of conversation hung about the carriages almost tangibly. There was no chance to stretch one’s legs, as even the first-class corridors were packed, while getting to the reeking lavatories was an assault course, and using them much worse. As often as he could, Edward dozed in and out of sleep and thought of sex. It was not perfect with Erica but they were honest with each other, and she was forgiving. Sometimes they made love brilliantly, and for the rest they acknowledged a pleasure in each other, and a deep need for the comfort that each brought, in bed or out of it. And they argued.
It was late afternoon when the train pulled into Glasgow, and he was grubby and exhausted. The station concourse was a seething mass of people, civilian and uniformed, with a fair spattering of the drunks that had always been part of the city’s landscape when he had ridden up from Galloway on weekends free from school. Mussolini, he reflected, was reputed to have made the trains run on time if nothing else, and he wondered if it might not be a good idea to offer him a job controlling Britain’s network. He was just over three hours late to meet his guide, locating him at last on the edge of a ruck of Army drivers, forlorn in Air Force blue. When Carrington spoke to him he jumped, and a powerful aura of beer hung round. But he was not drunk, he insisted, no sir! He had stayed away from the whisky.
As long as he could drive, Edward did not really care about his condition, and the man, Corporal Miller from Dundee, was perfectly capable behind the wheel of the Austin Ten. He did not try to talk, indeed he was a morose type even half-cut, and he manoeuvred out of Glasgow’s traffic and onto the Edinburgh road with only the occasional muttered swearword. The first stop was RAF Turnhouse, where Carrington would dine with Hamilton, he hoped, or at least have a good wash and sandwiches before their briefing session and the antics of the night began. Miller dropped him at the main administration then drove on to the vehicle pool and, he said, some food and shut-eye. He opened pale, hurt eyes when Carrington told him not to take more drink excepting tea, and swore it had not entered his head.