‘My duties with AMT VI are most time-consuming.’
‘An excuse, a ridiculous excuse. Senior men are supposed to delegate their work. Are you saying that I have time to spare that you do not?’
‘No, I merely…’
‘I am trying to run this ludicrous country as well as commanding the entire fucking secret service. I am in charge of that, am I not? You do concede that at least, Walter, that I am still in charge?’ and Heydrich’s eyes widened with paranoid delusion at the perceived ambition of Schellenberg.
‘Of course I do.’ Walter spoke quietly, his voice free from challenge, desperate to avoid further debate on just who holds the true power.
‘So, if you accept that it is not time that is your enemy, you must concede it is your appetite for the task. And that is where you are hopelessly misguided. We are engaged in a battle, and it is a fight to the death. It will end either with the complete destruction of Jewry or the eventual annihilation of the Fatherland. There is no middle ground and only one choice. We do not want careerists who join the SS and the party just because everybody else does. We need committed men, warriors who are prepared to wipe the enemy from the face of the earth. It is time you made up your mind and chose your camp, Walter. Whose side are you on?’
Schellenberg began to resent this probing, for Heydrich had opened up a bitter wound and was attacking him where he was at his weakest. He had managed to avoid the worst excesses of Nazism and his role never brought him into direct contact with the Einsatzgruppen. Certainly, he had heard about the firing squads, the lynch parties and the orchestrated pogroms but they were nothing to do with him. He was a member of both the SS and the party but one had to be to progress. He could never have gone so far in his career if he had refused to join either group – the very idea had not even entered his head. So, he could accept the actions of other, less balanced individuals as part of the overall system in which he prospered and that was Heydrich’s point.
Schellenberg’s reply was careful, considered and expressed in a deliberately firm manner. ‘My loyalty has never been in doubt. I have been faithful to my country, obedient to my superiors and steadfastly loyal to the Führer. I have never flinched to carry out all that is necessary to sustain the Reich. There is really no reason to question me further.’
‘Are you an enemy of the Jews or not?’
But Schellenberg is developing a stubborn streak and now seems intent on silence.
‘Answer me, Walter.’ Heydrich locks his eyes on Schellenberg, who is attempting to deport himself with an officer’s solemnity in the face of this drunken verbal assault. When no reply is forthcoming, Heydrich makes up his mind. He leans forward until he is disconcertingly close to his subordinate’s face and hisses the words, ‘Jew lover,’ at the outraged Schellenberg.
‘General, you go too far!’ Schellenberg looks for a moment as if he wishes to strike his leader. Almost immediately he regains control of himself, rises unbidden by his superior, scraping his chair a little unsteadily along the ground as he steps away from the table, then says simply. ‘I really must excuse myself, gentlemen. It has been a long day and I have an early flight to Berlin in the morning. Good evening to you both,’ and Schellenberg walks from the table.
‘Walter! Walter, come back here. I haven’t finished. Walter!’
Schellenberg does not pause. Instead he walks through the front door of the restaurant leaving Heydrich to realise that, in some strange way, he has lost the argument but is too drunk to understand why.
Heydrich insisted they drink on. The evening continued through a slurred and rambling conversation covering their mutual hatred of the Jews and Frank’s deep loathing of all things Czech.
Drunkenness led to a complete suspension of discretion, so nervous waiters easily overheard Frank’s heartfelt opinion that the entire population of Prague should be exterminated to make way for more healthy Germanic folk. Moments later he leaned forward to summon a shocked maître d’ and ordered him to fetch more brandy.
Finally, neither man could take any more and they stumbled out into the street, the cold breeze fanning the flames of their drunkenness. The driver was not Heydrich’s usual man and he was glad of it. He did not want Klein, who had a day’s leave, to see him like this. Instead he was driven from the restaurant by a nervously formal young Rottenführer he had never seen before, probably seconded for the evening from a less senior man.
As Heydrich took his seat in the car, he could see Frank climbing unsteadily and with an exaggerated caution into the back of his own vehicle. The State Secretary had a newly delivered, armour plated Mercedes Benz 540K; a wholly unnecessary precaution in Heydrich’s view. He had been urged to follow suit but never quite found the time to allow his vehicle to be withdrawn for the necessary alterations. He supposed he would get around to it eventually.
Lina was visiting family back in Germany, so a quiet and solitary night could be taken. He spent the journey home in a sullen silence, brooding aggressively on the events of the evening, which compounded his belief that he was losing the faultless judgement for which he was rightly noted. His two closest subordinates had witnessed the debacle from near at hand and they would lose respect for him, if they had any to begin with. It seemed they no longer even feared him now. Schellenberg had simply walked away from the table without permission when it suited him. And Heydrich had let it happen; partly because he knew he had over-stepped the mark with his accusation of Jewish sympathies, but mainly because he was too drunk to stop him.
As the car made its slow, twisting way down the side streets of Resslova, Heydrich began to nurture a new and terrible thought. Perhaps Hitler had found out his most shameful secret, despite all his tireless efforts to wipe out the past. Yes, that was it. That had to be why the Führer had given him a look of such loathing in the Wolf’s Lair. Bormann had somehow found out then made Hitler aware of the one thing that could destroy Heydrich. The secret he had done everything within his immense power to suppress.
As he brooded on this new and awful possibility his overwrought mind recalled a different age. He was a child then, and the world was not the ordered place he had made it in later years. Oh, how they had taunted him in the playground at Halle, with the particularly malevolent relish only a child can summon; the memory of it so fresh, now that his self-pity has been coaxed unresistingly to the surface by brandy. Years would pass before he could leave the accusations and the terrible omissions from their clubs, their groups and their games, behind him.
Even at the naval academy the whispers had followed him, leading to fresh torments from his fellow cadets. By then it had reached the point where he was no longer sure if their allegations were true or not. His mother assured him he had no cause for concern, that his father’s name had occasionally been misrepresented, due to the inadvertent addition of Bruno’s own stepfather’s surname – Suss – in official correspondence, yet the nagging doubts remained.
As the years went by Heydrich tried everything to expunge the shame of his past. He had even had his mother’s middle name omitted from her gravestone, in case anyone made the connection, and the subsequent devastating conclusion. Elizabeth Sara Heydrich. Not a German name. Oh no.
‘Stop the car. Pull over,’ Heydrich commanded.
The corporal did as he was ordered and the general barely had time to open the car door before the streams of vomit spattered onto the pavement. Heydrich retched for what seemed like minutes. Finally, it was over and Heydrich pulled the door closed and slumped back in his seat, his eyes streaming from the effort.
The lateness of the hour ensured there were no onlookers at the Panenské Břežany. Corporal Frick walked around the car to open the door for Heydrich. He watched in horror as the general tripped and pitched forward, landing heavily on his face, bouncing on the gravel with the pliant indestructibility exhibited by only the truly drunk. Heydrich let out a gurgle of protest as he sprawled hel
plessly on his hands and knees.
‘Let me help you, Herr Reichsprotektor.’
The panicked driver, unused to the ways of this most powerful man, trotted forward, desperate to assist him. He took hold of Heydrich’s left arm, placing his other hand on the right side of the general’s torso, and began to haul him aloft.
‘Get your filthy hands off me!’
The driver let go of Heydrich with such haste the general was unceremoniously dropped back onto the ground. With supreme effort, Heydrich slowly hauled himself to his feet, swaying wildly in front of the terrified man.
‘Breathe a word of this to anyone and you will find yourself in the east, at the head of a punishment battalion,’ he hissed.
Frick’s eyes filled with fear and, in his panic, all he could think to do was come to attention and salute, with a parade-ground stiffness.
‘Get out of here.’
Heydrich turned his back on the man. He did not hear the car depart, drowned out as it was by a persistent ringing in his ears.
Heydrich dropped the key more than once before he was able to successfully open the door. He nudged it closed behind him with his shoulder, crossed the hall then clambered up the stairs, at times on all fours, gasping for air as he went. When he reached the final stair, he pulled himself upright then stopped suddenly at the sight that greeted him. What was this, some sort of taunting, spiteful joke at his expense? Who could have done it? Placed such a thing in his way when he was at his most wretched.
On the landing in front of him was a large mirror. Any visitor would be greeted by his own reflection as soon as he ascended the staircase. Heydrich had never even noticed it before. It was an irrelevance. Now, standing on his own at the top of the stairs, with illuminating moonlight shining brightly through a nearby window, he was confronted with a hideous apparition, a vile distortion of himself. Through a veil of drunkenness, there stood a man in the uniform of an SS General but, instead of a strong Nordic nose, he possessed the elongated beak of the Jew; where once a wholly noble Germanic face looked out at the world, now Heydrich was convinced he saw the inferior features of Judaism forcing their way to the surface. In his paranoia, he felt he was changing, right there in front of his own eyes, metamorphosing into the creature he despised most. Hitler was right, the Jews were a disease and they were taking control – not just of Europe but now of his own body, robbing him of his strength, clouding his judgement, slowly killing him.
Heydrich scrambled at the holster on his belt, taking two attempts before he was able to pull the Luger from its grasp. He raised the weapon and pointed it unsteadily out in front of him, where it veered violently between waist and shoulder height as he tried desperately to level it at the looking glass. With a supreme effort, he managed to hold it steady for an instant.
‘Filthy Jew!’ he screamed as two bullets astonishingly found their mark.
The glass shattered in its frame and the shards tumbled to the ground, turning end over end like a crystal waterfall.
Heydrich’s world rotated on its axis. What was happening? The solid frame of the wrecked mirror seemed somehow to be magically detaching itself from the wall, and it began to roll onto its side in front of him.
The Reichsprotektor was so drunk he did not feel the impact as his body crashed limply to the floor. He was completely unconscious even before his face found the soft welcoming fibres of the landing carpet, and he slept as he lay, splayed unnaturally on his side, his legs a comical scissor shape. Heydrich’s right arm was pinioned beneath his body, and the Luger lay on the ground behind him, pointing back the way he had come. As alarmed servants began to emerge, the general let out a solitary adenoidal snore before lapsing into a deep, impenetrable haze of brandy and self-loathing.
27
‘We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude to animals, will also assume a decent attitude to these human animals’
SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler,
on the population of Eastern Europe
A crowd had gathered to witness the President address his subjects. Old man Hácha stood in front of the Jan Hus monument, now covered up with Nazi banners, while he spoke to his people. As he stood on the podium it was clear he was reading from a crib sheet, as he reinforced the need for Czechs to back their German allies in the fight against Stalin. Hácha’s rambling monologue was delivered to a hard faced audience which merely stared back at him. Words are cheap, thought Gabčík, who stood to the rear of the crowd.
It was another half hour before Gabčík spotted Heydrich. Finally, the Reichsprotektor made his discreet entrance at the back of the monument, as Gabčík knew he would. With Kubiš he had already contemplated then dismissed a plan to attack the general here, while he delivered his scheduled Winterhilfe speech in front of today’s press-ganged crowd. In the end they had both concluded it was too risky. Now, the plan seemed worthy of a second look.
Gabčík tucked his hand into his coat pocket and wrapped it round the cold metal stock of the pistol. All he needed was a split second; a chance to fire a clean shot at the man while he stood on the podium addressing the crowd, and all this would be over. Then he could make a break for it in the confusion, losing himself amongst the panicked people. But he would need to be closer.
Heydrich’s high voice began to fill the square, distorted by the microphone. ‘I urge the good people of Prague to support their German brothers fighting the evil of communism,’ he droned in the unenthusiastic monologue of one exhibiting the symptoms of extreme tiredness.
Gabčík began to edge his way slowly forward, sliding carefully between the people in front of him, until he was halfway across the square. Never for a moment did he let his eyes divert from the pasty figure of Heydrich as he droned interminably on about German soldiers sacrificing themselves on behalf of the Czech people.
Finally, when Gabčík made it to within a dozen yards of the podium, he at last stopped moving, to take in the scene around him. Only then did he belatedly realise the magnitude of the act he was contemplating. From Gabčík’s new vantage point he could make out men from a detachment of the SS who had ringed the podium. More soldiers watched proceedings from opened windows in high buildings, overseeing the square. Closer to hand, plain-clothes members of the Gestapo made their presence all too obvious amongst the crowd.
Gabčík realised he would never make it to within pistol range before he was arrested or simply shot down. He was so near now, agonisingly close, almost enough to kill this man but certainly at the expense of his own life. And what if he missed?
Before long Gabčík became nervous he might be stopped randomly and the weapon found on his person. Sick with frustration, he slunk away from the gathering, returning sullenly home, without ever mentioning a word of the episode to Kubiš.
Novotný the watchmaker slowly eased the glass face free from the rest of the pocket watch. He was a skilled and experienced craftsmen but, as he carefully wrapped the fragile little circle in a soft piece of cloth, he could feel the moisture on his fingertips – his nervousness caused not by the routine nature of the repair but the proximity of the Reichsprotektor, who had already warned him to be particularly careful with his father’s timepiece.
‘You have twenty four hours to repair and return it in full working order,’ instructed the general. ‘It must be ready by tomorrow night.’
Neither felt the need to discuss further the disastrous consequences for the watchmaker if it were not. Novotný kept his ear close to the ground and he knew the reason for Heydrich’s deadline. The general wished to have this significant item with him as he attended a special concert at the Wallenstein Palace. Heydrich himself seemed to be taking an immense interest in final preparations for the event. Surely this could be the only reason for the imposing presence at Hradčany, that very afternoon, of the heavily pregnant Lina Heydrich.
Novotný had been installed at a
desk outside Heydrich’s office; the better to focus his mind on the job in hand. He was perfectly positioned to witness the fearsome whirlwind of the woman’s breathless demands while he gently coaxed the pieces of the ancient pocket watch apart. Servants and middle ranking German officers alike were dispatched on imperative errands with a similar degree of brusqueness and lack of social grace. From time to time Heydrich would appear for further earnest discussions with his wife on seating plans and floral arrangements, reminding Novotný of the level of preparation usually reserved for important state occasions.
There eventually came a point when there could surely be no matter left unaddressed by Frau Heydrich and she finally pronounced herself at least partially satisfied with proceedings. The whole castle seemed to sigh in relief.
Heydrich chose this moment to emerge from his office again and congratulate Lina on both her impeccable taste and the immense hard work required to organise so many servants. In response Lina pronounced herself quite overwhelmingly exhausted. Heydrich, by contrast, seemed in good cheer and playful mood.
‘I have just received word from the Führer, my dear. He wants to see me in Berlin the day after the concert.’
‘Really?’ asked his preoccupied spouse.
‘Yes, and the thing is…’ deadpanned Heydrich, pretending indifference, ‘…it is possible I may not return to Prague.’
‘What do you mean?’ She was listening to him now.
‘Yes, it seems, from what I have heard, that I am about to be reposted.’
‘Oh, Reinhard no, surely not.’ Her agitation was palpable.
‘I fear so, my darling.’
‘No, it would be a tragedy, after all of the work I have done on the estate.’
‘Oh, I’m sure we will be able to keep the house. You could stay here and fly out to see me whenever you like. Or, if you prefer, you could come and live with me at my new posting.’
‘And where might that be? Even further east?’ she exclaimed sourly.
Hunting the Hangman Page 17