“Right,” said Buchholz. He stood up. As before, he poured a generous double for us both, with only the smallest splash of soda. “And it certainly sounds a bit more like the man who—reputedly—wouldn’t spare himself in trying to stop Reinhard Heydrich’s brutality in Russia. Not every rumour needs to be malicious, you perceive.”
“Oh, Heydrich!” I said, in deep disgust. “Reinhard Heydrich and his Einsatzgruppen forces!”
“Yes. Even I would have no wish to whitewash Heydrich.”
This actually surprised a laugh out of me which was genuine.
“You mean—as you’ve been trying your hardest to whitewash the admiral?”
Buchholz himself laughed. “No, no … how can you compare them? With Heydrich we’re talking war crimes. Genocide. No one has ever accused the admiral of genocide. Nor even of war crimes. Not that kind of war crime, anyway. Against the Führer, maybe, but not against the peasants or the unprotected. I have never said—no one I know has ever said—that Canaris isn’t essentially a very decent human being…”
I muttered slowly: “I thought you were having trouble in remembering him.”
It was now his turn to sigh. “Oh, my good friend, do you really have to be so argumentative? Hasn’t it occurred to you that for the moment we seem to be in perfect harmony?”
“No, I’m not certain that it has. You’ve allowed him to be a very decent human being—I give you that—but only after you’ve appeared to be suggesting, non-stop, that he’s some kind of a liability to us, some kind of a … My God, yes. When all is said and done, you’ve been suggesting that he’s a … That he’s a…” I couldn’t even bring myself to use the word.
“But, Erich, I stress—only maybe. Maybe. There isn’t any actual proof. Merely a mass of circumstantial evidence. Yet the weight of that evidence is coming increasingly to alarm a number of very highly placed and influential people.”
“A number which clearly doesn’t include the Führer.”
“No, not so far. But how long can it be before it does?”
I raised my previous point. “Well, if the admiral was really implicated in the coup attempt of 1938 and the Führer hasn’t even tumbled to that yet…?”
But Buchholz responded neither to the sweet forbearance of my tone nor to the validity of my implication. Instead he suggested:
“Shall I tell you the nickname already being conferred on him by some of those who say these things?”
“No, I’d much rather you didn’t. Please don’t. I’m just not very interested.”
“Young prig!” he said—but amiably and with indulgence. “You know you’d now find it quite tantalizing not to hear. He’s being spoken of as the Hidden Hand of the Wehrmacht Resistance.”
“What!”
For the second time in about two minutes—and again whilst least expecting it—I was obliged to laugh. The Hidden Hand of the Wehrmacht Resistance! It sounded like a title splashed across the cover of some penny-dreadful boys’ adventure. Or like next week’s cliffhanging instalment at the Saturday morning picture show. It was absurd; it was ludicrous. It was very nearly appealing.
Shades of Buster Crabbe?
No, it was not appealing—and, damn it, the instant stab which that stupid, ridiculous name could now deliver! (Only twenty-four hours ago…! Had we yet arrived at Daphne’s twenty-four hours ago, or were we still having hysterics in Evelyn Woods Road? Either way, I didn’t want to think about it.) Suddenly I felt confused.
Confused—or maybe just plain tipsy? I’d had nothing but a cup of tea since breakfast-time.
Or quarter of a cup of tea. If that.
Simply, it was all beginning to be too much. On top of everything else that had happened to me today … dear God, it was all beginning to be too much.
And what did I mean—beginning?
Not that, in fact, I was tipsy. And not that, in fact, the whisky wasn’t helping. I thought that the gnawing ache, the emptiness, the sense of desolation … by this time they’d all have been unbearable without it. (You could only stave things off for a limited period.) Now I knew it was bedtime I really had to fear. Continually, I had to push away the thought of that: the long, long night: the theft of further chance to drive away your misery. The sleeplessness, the silence.
The silence…
“Heinrich? The Hidden Hand of the Wehrmacht Resistance! Surely you don’t subscribe to any of that rubbish?”
“No, my young friend. I have no business subscribing to it. Or, indeed, not subscribing to it. I’m only here to put the case.”
“Why?”
“That, you will find out in a moment. One last thing you need to know and then you’re in full possession of the facts. Or else in full possession of the rumours. Could you ever have wished for someone more impartial than myself?”
I remained quiet. One last thing? I knew I wasn’t going to like it.
“Although, actually,” he said, “this ‘one last thing’ has to be divided into two parts. The first part of the allegation is this: that over the years our friend has allowed certain secrets concerning Hitler’s war strategy—going back as far as his offensives against the Low Countries and France and even including his plan to invade Great Britain itself—has allowed these, as if by accident, to filter through to Whitehall. And the second … that he’s several times misled Hitler into believing that the Allies either will or will not do something which—”
But he got no further. I had hurled my tumbler to the floor. Indeed, had only just prevented myself from hurling it at him.
The glass shattered.
There then followed the sort of stillness that little else might ever have produced. I became aware of the astonishing hush downstairs. I imagined everyone with faces turned upwards, totally rigid and aghast, as if Medusa herself had come crashing through the ceiling.
It was a silence ended by a drawl. (That was, the silence pertaining upstairs.)
“My dear fellow, if I wasn’t so damnably lazy, I’d jump to my feet and sponge that up. What a waste of good whisky—lamentable! But when I’m sure you can be trusted I may even offer you another.”
The sheer ferocity of my act had siphoned off all aggression. I left my chair and squatted to retrieve the fragments of glass from the lino and the rug. Carried them to the wastepaper basket; wrapped them in several sheets of an old News Chronicle, conveniently discarded.
“I’m sorry. I must pay you for the damage.”
“Nonsense!”
“Where can I find a floor cloth?”
“My dear good man, it’s simply not important. Now please sit down; you’re blocking out the view.”
I looked quickly at my watch but—still in chastened mood—ceased fussing and did as he bade me.
“I mustn’t stay long. I have an appointment to keep.”
“What time and where?”
“At half past four. Corner House in the Strand.”
“Business or pleasure?”
“Oh, business! Most definitely business!”
But I was uncomfortably aware I hadn’t yet made any bid to explain myself—far less receive absolution. (Afterwards, it occurred to me Heinrich would surely have understood; but, there in his bedroom, I only knew I had behaved abominably and couldn’t merely walk away.)
I said again: “I’m sorry. What I did was childish. It’s just that you were passing on lies which made out the admiral was a traitor; not simply a double agent but an out-and-out traitor.” (Was this a form of progress? I now found I could say it.) “And you’ve told me yourself he’s a very decent human being. Why would he want Germany to lose the war?”
Buchholz gave me a slow and unexpected smile.
“Tell me something,” he said, softly.
“Yes?”
“Why wouldn’t he?”
“Why wouldn’t he what?”
“Want Germany to lose the war.”
28
What a question!
And yet suddenly … suddenly it seemed a
lmost sensible. I had naturally heard gossip before—well, as thousands must have heard it—about Hitler’s being subject to fits, or at any rate to tantrums. And if this were indeed even partly true (and what had Buchholz now twice suggested: no smoke without fire?) then we Germans were being led by—at best—a man who was unstable, a man who had plunged us into war, war with roughly half the world, whilst reiterating over and over his intention of making us the most superior beings in the universe (no, we already were that, he said … his standard, laughing reassurance), of making us, then, the rulers of the universe, with himself, of course, remaining our dearly beloved and godlike inspiration. Therefore, at best, unstable. At worst, delusional?
So—in view of such a question—this was the worst possible moment to remember Kristallnacht.
But Kristallnacht was what it unfailingly came back to. Every time. Every single time.
Every single time that I allowed myself to doubt.
Unfailingly? There were certainly those who’d add ‘simplistically’. All I knew was this. It had almost literally evolved into a nightmare; a constantly recurring nightmare.
My English grandparents had compiled a folder of newspaper cuttings (or, rather, my grandmother had) which they had wanted me to read in 1939, the last time I had stayed with them. I had read only the first of these cuttings—yes, yes, the one to do with Kristallnacht. I had obviously known it would unearth all the emotions buried several months before, and afterwards I couldn’t think why I had ever allowed it to occur—this painful exhumation. Probably it had been a mixture of my hoping to appear reasonable before my grandparents and of my subconsciously wanting, and needing, to put myself to the test. Bravado, cussedness and a genuine desire to work out how the thing had happened, really to come to grips with its underlying logic—all these must assuredly have played their part.
The account had covered two entire pages of newsprint: reporting that—in marked contrast to past anti-Jewish outbreaks—on Kristallnacht Hitler’s storm-troopers were no longer the most prominent demonstrators. Throughout Germany the militia had now been joined not only by the proletariat but by thousands of the middle classes. In Berlin itself, fashionably dressed women had clapped, screamed with laughter, and even held aloft their babies to watch the Jews being beaten senseless by youths who used lead piping. The paper had stated that this night of brutality and arson bore all the hallmarks of an officially organized pogrom. Over seven thousand Jewish shops had been looted. Hundreds of synagogues were burned down. An unknown number of Jews had died. The report said insurance companies were being authorized not to indemnify the victims; and that all these grimly unparalleled hours of mayhem—without precedent in modern times in any civilized country—were already being grotesquely prettified as Crystal Night, since the broken windows alone accounted for millions of marks-worth of damage. Supposedly Goering was enraged when he heard that most of the replacement glass would have to be imported and paid for in scarce foreign currency.
“They should have killed more Jews and broken less glass,” he had fumed … according to the paper.
The lengthiness of the account owed much to repetition.
However, spurred on by a nearly hypnotic fascination, I had read the full report: the whole centre spread of the Express. Some of the details, whether or not they were authentic, had been new to me. During that previous November—or during the relevant part of it—I had been with my father and stepmother in Innsbruck celebrating the golden wedding of my other set of grandparents, and on our return it seemed that no one had wanted to talk about the atrocity—only about the most probable cause of it: the assassination in Paris, immediately beforehand, of a German diplomat.
People had even implied (in an apologetic sort of way) that the reaction could be understandable—not forgivable, of course, but almost understandable—since the assassin himself had been a Jew. And, however regrettably (they had suggested), there was always one small section of the community all too easy to inflame.
Which was, in fact, the exact line of reasoning supported by my father … starting at suppertime on the day following our return. By no means all the evidence on the streets had so far been obliterated and I had found myself incapable of letting the subject drop. But up until then I hadn’t even begun to realize how anti-Semitic he was (for when news of the barbarity had broken in Austria its truth had been so massively soft-pedalled that it had scarcely affected us). Yet back in Berlin, over the dinner table and much to the growing consternation of my stepmother, growing but ineffectual, our discussion had rapidly disintegrated. My father had become impatient, lost his temper, accused the Jews of crimes he couldn’t substantiate … things which afterwards he may have wished he hadn’t said but which I simply couldn’t forget he had said. If he’d climbed down and apologized—or even climbed down and omitted the apology—it might have made a difference. But, as it was, I couldn’t refrain from repeatedly mulling over the main points of our argument. Indeed from mulling them over for the next few days, or even week, practically without cease.
And undoubtedly because of this I had been cast into a dangerous mood on reading that first horrific clipping of my grandmother’s; had nearly left for home that very afternoon, truncating my holiday by more than half. Yet somehow—and this had struck me later as being something close to a miracle—both I and my grandmother had eventually managed to calm down; thanks in no small measure to the gentle patience of my grandfather, who was invariably the peacemaker.
But afterwards they had clearly given up any hope of persuading me to stay at home with them—well, if not actually at home with them, at least in some internment camp, in whose locality, for the Duration, they would willingly have taken up residence.
Our parting, too, had been more than usually upsetting; the letters which we wrote—until inevitably there came a suspension to the postal services between Germany and Britain—more than usually affecting.
In Berlin, of course, I had re-investigated the whole issue of Kristallnacht as thoroughly as circumstances would by then permit me to.
So perhaps the question that had now been put to me by Buchholz—“Why wouldn’t he want Germany to lose the war?”—was not, in some ways, such a wholly unreasonable one.
29
“Because plainly,” he went on, “no patriotic German would ever wish to see the Fatherland defeated. But, on the other hand, thousands might sympathize with a decent human being who was cracking up under pressure and who saw only the scum and the sadists rising to the top; who saw none of the good men: the heroes and the idealists. How many of us, do you think, would truly applaud the likes of Reinhard Heydrich?”
He was still speaking softly, although the noise downstairs now appeared to have returned almost to full strength. But I had no trouble in catching what he said.
“And one thing’s undeniable, my friend. That after we’ve won this hateful war, the first step we must take is to clip the wings of all the overly ambitious. Even—and obviously I only whisper this—the wings of the great Führer himself! Not necessarily Adolf; I mean any Führer. For as some blessed Englishman once put it, all power tends to corrupt. And absolute power, of course…”
He broke off and gave me a grin bordering on the impish.
“But it doesn’t follow—just because the English sometimes get things right—that they still don’t thoroughly deserve to lose. I trust I have your full agreement there?”
“Well, naturally you have.”
“Your own heart being unreservedly committed to the Fatherland?”
“Heinrich, for heaven’s sake! I resent such a question! I’m sure that you would as well. Why do you find it necessary even to ask?”
He gave a shrug.
“But just don’t break another glass, there’s a good fellow. They’re Waterford. Not easily replaceable right now.”
This had the humbling effect he had obviously hoped to renew. Buchholz got up, left the room, returned with a second tumbler. At my own request the amount
he poured into it was smaller than before.
“And anyway,” he said, “you’ll have to dispose of it fairly fast, if you mean to be at Charing Cross by half past four.”
He replenished his own glass.
“Therefore—to sum up what I’ve said. It all comes down to only one thing.”
For a moment he fixed me with his hard blue eyes, in the evident hope of adding emphasis.
“Erich, disclose your findings to as many people as you can, not simply to the admiral. He’ll doubtless try to swear you to secrecy, but remember that no pledge given unwillingly need ever be binding. So tell your section head; tell every high-ranking officer with whom you come into contact. Fuck it, my dear, put it in writing and send it off to the Führer himself. Put it in writing again, that is, if you can’t walk out of Willy’s office bearing a copy of your own report. I think that by now you probably get my drift?”
“I think that by now I probably do. I’m still not happy with its basic premise.”
“You don’t have to be happy with it … only aware of it! Canaris may be quite the sweetest fellow on earth—present company excepted—yet all you need remember is the crucial importance of whatever you’ve been checking on and whether you want to see its substance treacherously perverted. You may worship old Willy like your own dad,” (it was odd that he should say that) “but is he really a friend to you?”
He smiled and tapped his bedside clock.
“Is Willy a friend or is he a foe? It’s after four—so off you go!”
A cheery couplet to send me on my way. Cheery and, again, coincidental. The ampersand experience: cherchons, cherchons. (Though had it, after all, really been such a coincidence: the curious case of those ubiquitous ampersands?)
Anyway, I made my farewells fast and without fuss, both to Heinrich and his mother; and the impression I carried away of the son, maybe partly on account of that concluding couplet and of the consideration he’d shown in remaining mindful of the time—these, I mean, on top of his generally forgiving attitude—this impression was more agreeable, by far, than previously I would ever have thought likely.
Letters for a Spy Page 18