“Has it ever occurred to you, Axel,” Princess Caroline once said, “that it isn’t absolutely clear whether you are a nice man? I mean, I love you very much—you know that, Axel—but you are very distracted. And your interest in people seems, somehow … abstract.” She searched his eyes. “But I am certain you are going to do great things in European politics. If you don’t mind, Axel, when you take over Europe could you please leave this little island to its own idolatrous pleasures? Don’t forget now, Axel. That can be your bread-and-butter present to me on leaving Stamford House.” Axel smiled—and then actually appeared to … think about it. (“I do believe,” Queen Caroline said, recalling the incident in 1952 when Axel Wintergrin announced the foundation of his political party, “I do believe,” she repeated, “that when I made that flippant—that ludicrous—‘request’ of Axel, back when he was a mere child [Axel had been a mere child of twenty-six], he hesitated precisely because he was trying to decide whether to grant it!”) Back home, after two months’ summer indolence in England, Axel drove himself in his studies, adjourning altogether that part of his romantic activity that could be said to be oriented toward a possible marriage. “All in due course, Mother,” he comforted the countess.
After submitting his thesis and taking his degree, he spent his time traveling throughout Germany. He would know, on arriving in a city or town he had never been to, just where to go: always he would find the man, or woman, who shared his obsession. And—always—in a matter of days he had made fast friends, who as often as not became disciples. As his movement grew it became easier for him because he would come to town, check in at a hotel, and there he would be reached by those who had word of his coming. They would seek him out, sometimes a single man or woman, more often two, three, or a half-dozen people, and talk with him. He would be asked to speak to a gathering, but always he stipulated that not more than a roomful should be there. He was not ready to address large audiences.
He spoke quietly about the genuine idealism of the German people who had become united less than a hundred years earlier, and now were sundered by a consortium of powers, one partner in which had designs on human liberty everywhere, while the other partner, fatigued by a war that had roused its people from a hemispheric torpor which they once thought of as a part of the American patrimony—an American right, so to speak—was confused now and disillusioned by the ambiguous results of so heroic an effort. The Americans saw a Europe largely enslaved by Allied victory—and unconcerned about Germany. No, never count on allies beyond a certain point, he said: only Germans can reshape their own destiny. Only Germans can come, would come, to the aid of their brothers in the East. Faced with such resolve, the Russians would necessarily yield; even as, eventually, the Nazis had yielded.
Always the questions were practical, always he gave the same answer: How, in the absence of armed help from the West, could he effect the liberation of East Germany? Always he answered: by spiritual mobilization.
Did he mean the satyagraha preached by Gandhi?
Spiritual mobilization, Axel said, means the mobilization of all one’s strength. Foremost is the will to live as free men. Any means appropriate to the realization of that end are licit—from peaceful resistance to ultimate weaponry.
Would he be more explicit?
In due course, he would say, and his smile was without smugness, without affectation, though he would then fasten or unfasten (his only mannerism) the two bottom buttons of his rusty-green tweed jacket, a perfect cut on his tall frame, and his light-brown hair would respond sluggishly as he shook his head to the right, his lightly chiseled, sensitive features, and sad eyes, struggling in coordination with his thoughts to frame the answer in a way so many of his followers sought.
All in good time, he answered, as if to say: Allow me to trouble myself, on your behalf, on these technical matters. I shall not let you down.
When he rose at his alma mater to announce that if the Occupation Forces would not deliver an ultimatum to the Russians to reopen the road to Berlin, the German people should do so, he was suddenly a conspicuous figure on the European scene, a man not yet thirty years old. Until then no national notice of him had been taken, only here and there a character piece in a local newspaper about the aristocratic curio who dreamed of irredentism and talked as if he would smash the Red Army with the might of his left fist, trained at the gymnasium at Heidelberg. These efforts at caricature failed when undertaken by reporters who went to hear him talk. They could no longer bring off conventional ideological denigration. (“Count Wintergrin seems to have forgotten the horrors of war …”) But after Heidelberg, all the major papers in Europe suddenly began to take notice of Axel Wintergrin and his—his what? they asked themselves. Here was someone who, biologically, could have been the grandson of Adenauer, the de facto leader of the country (with his Christian Democratic Union, serving as chancellor under the authority of the joint occupation command). And when direct elections came in November 1952, Adenauer would surely win—with the Social Democrats under Erich Ollenhauer taking perhaps one-third of the seats. Germany’s future would be a generation’s oscillation of power between these two parties, the analysts joined in predicting. There was no room for the so-called “Reunification “Party of this Wintergrin. Why so much fuss over a quixotic Heidelberg Manifesto? Why had groups in every major city in Germany suddenly invited the young count to address them: elated veterans’ organizations, cynical student associations, inquisitive business associations, wary labor unions—even, here and there, always discreetly, organizations of civil servants … why the fascination with him?
The disciplined left, and of course the papers in East Germany, had the ready answer. Wintergrin was this season’s Hitler!
In late December of 1949 Neues Deutschland ran a large feature section triumphantly announcing that a search in Sweden revealed that there was no record that Axel Wintergrin had been detained in a Swedish concentration camp. The article suggested he had feigned opposition to Hitler for the sole purpose of sparing himself the rigors of military life and the dangers of service on the eastern front, and had spent the war years in Swedish dissipation. The story, given wide circulation everywhere in Europe, and intensively circulated within West Germany, brought a tide of curiosity and evolved quickly into dismay in his camp. Wintergrin’s failure during that heavy week to answer questions about the sensational charges caused apprehension among even his closest followers, though those who knew him did their best to reassure everyone that he would be vindicated, as they firmly believed, somehow, he would be.
Finally he scheduled a press conference—and limited attendance to six journalists. What he had to say—he gave out in a general release—was not easily said in the hectic circumstances of a general press conference. (“Shee-yit!” the dumbstruck, excluded New York Times correspondent in Bonn reacted, on receiving the notice. “Who does this young kraut think he is? Immanuel Kant calling a press conference to explain his Critique of Pure Reason?”) But clearly there had been no political favoritism in making out the list—one was the correspondent of Der Spiegel, a journal whose hostility to Wintergrin was rancorous and sustained.
The meeting took place in a private dining room in the Rheinhotel Dreesen at Godesberg, where ten years earlier Hitler had talked Chamberlain out of hunks of Czechoslovakia. The reporters arrived on time, and there were a score of others outside the room, patiently but firmly denied entrance by Wintergrin’s friend Roland Himmelfarb. One reporter-photographer from L’Humanité pressed for admittance, and three burly figures, manifestly at his service, added their pressure to the reporter’s attempt at a forced entry. Surrounding photographers snapped pictures of the contest. Himmelfarb, holding the door, called out for the help of hotel personnel. Axel Wintergrin, disembarked from the small Mercedes driven by a student volunteer, entered the hotel lobby at the height of the commotion. An aide, rushing to relieve Himmelfarb, paused to brief Wintergrin in telegraphic bursts. “Communist bastard … L’Humanité … here
with thugs …” Wintergrin reached out, collared the French reporter, and lifted him whole up on his toes, his nose within a few inches of Wintergrin’s, holding him there silently until the noise abated. “Go back to your commissar in Paris. Or, better still, head that way”—Wintergrin pointed his nose to the east “to the Soviet Union, and tell them that force in Germany will be used only against tyranny, not to promote it.” He dropped the paunchy reporter, whose swagger had diminished as, one by one, his companions had been subdued by Wintergrin’s partisans, and he fell almost to the floor before salvaging what he could of his aplomb and, muttering something about how Nazis will always be Nazis, scurried out of the lobby, the most photographed photographer of the season. Wintergrin walked into the room and apologized to the press for detaining them.
Wordlessly he distributed a copy of the citation he had received from the King of Norway. He gave the names of three Norwegians with whom he had associated in the resistance. He would prefer, he said, to answer questions after the press had satisfied itself of the validity of his representation. The first questioner asked why had he not revealed his actual story, instead of saying that he had been detained in Sweden.
It was precisely because he had in fact been active in the anti-Nazi resistance, he said.
“What was there to hide then?”
“The German people know now that it was wrong to support Hitler. I did not want, in 1945, to lecture my countrymen, most of whom, after all, were Germans fighting under Nazism, not Nazis fighting under Hitler. Their punishment was heavy enough without adding to it the reproaches of a twenty-five-year old.”
“Are you then saying that Germany now, the Germany of 1949, is different from the Germany of 1945?”
“Even in 1945 the support for Hitler was largely inertial. If the war had ended, and Hitler had faced a free election, he would have lost. There is no significant nostalgia for Hitler today. Those unhappy Germans in the East who continue to live under tyranny do so because they have not—yet—been given another choice.”
The meeting ended. In a matter of hours, Norwegian reporters tracked down the former resistance fighters. Olin Justsen was now a naval architect, living in Kristiansand, and he said to the reporter, Yes, he had known “Alec”—he knew him by no other name, but recognized him on seeing his photograph in the paper—and had participated with him in two missions.
“What were they?”
“Well,” said Justsen, puffing on his pipe, his eyes glazed, his hand trembling slightly, “one of them required attaching an explosive to the hull of a freighter sent over by the Germans to take a load of heavy water to Germany. That mission was accomplished.”
“What was the other?”
“The other,” Justsen said, in measured accents—he had consulted his own conscience rigorously on this, anticipating the question—“involved the elimination of an individual.”
“Who?” the reporter asked.
“We do not give out his name.”
“What had he done?”
“We do not describe his crimes.”
“Was he a German?”
“We do not give out his nationality.”
Neither of the other two Norwegians questioned knew about the assassination. They had served with Wintergrin on other missions. Pooling their information, reporters counted two parachute jumps into German bases in Norway, three demolition jobs, two intelligence sorties into Nazi installations, plus the mysterious assassination. Rhino Heitger, the grand old man of the resistance, would not talk except to say that from the time Wintergrin presented himself in 1939, occupying a desk in routine intelligence work, through the occupation, until liberation, he had refused no assignment except one that might take him to his native country, betraying his identity, and imperiling his mother.
The information, consolidated in the major newsrooms of Europe, was sulkily reported by the hostile press and, dispiritedly, the newsmen gave up that line of attack on Axel Wintergrin, which would have taken care of so many problems, if only Neues Deutschland had been right. When next Wintergrin spoke, on Wenceslaus Day in Frankfurt, he was given a standing ovation before he uttered a word. He received this by fastening the two bottom buttons on his coat, and smiling his half-distracted smile. His speech was on the usual themes, and later, at the press conference, he spoke the words, in answer to a question, that caused the phone to ring at the home of Pyotr Ivanovich Ilyich in Moscow, even though it was almost midnight there; and, in the United States, where it was late afternoon, caused an aide to walk right into the office of Allen Dulles. What, the reporter at Frankfurt had asked, were Count Wintergrin’s plans? Why, he said, his plans were to organize his movement into a political party to compete in the elections in November, which elections he was certain of winning.
Having won them, he would proceed to liberate East Germany.
CHAPTER 3
After Blackford Oakes’s mission in England was completed—his maiden mission, he mused—it was thought wise by his superior to immerse him in his trade in order to fortify his cover. “You’ve been posing as an engineer, Black. Maybe it’s time to remind yourself that that’s actually what you got your degree in at Yale.” Black was listening at a safe house in London to his experienced, relaxed superior, Singer Callaway, the only American in England who knew that Blackford Oakes was a deep-cover agent of the CIA. “Figure out a convincing way to terminate your project here in the next couple of weeks—you can say the sponsoring foundation has run out of funds; or maybe that they’re satisfied with what you’ve already submitted—figure out exactly what to tell your mother and your friends. Go back to Washington. Tell your mother you have to report to New York on the work you did: hell, Black, you attend to the details, then let me know what the story is and I’ll get it coordinated with New York.”
Blackford did so, and it did not prove difficult. No one knew enough about his arcane work, researching historic projects, to question him.
His mother gave a little farewell dinner for him at her house on Portland Place, and his sartorially overstuffed stepfather, dressed in velvet smoking jacket and gold-braided evening slippers, delivered an affectionate and prolonged toast. Black loved the unabashed orotundity of it. A couple of glasses of port, and Sir Alec Sharkey sounded like Mr. Micawber. While managing to look exaggeratedly, impossibly British, he nevertheless looked proudly in the direction of his stepson, as though they were of one flesh and blood. Blackford, at twenty-six, six months a resident of London, was by then experienced in the celebrated amenities of upper-class British life. He rose to his feet, said soothing things about British engineering technology, and—as was always expected of him—made genial references to British ways and institutions. Ah, dear old England, Blackford thought, while his lips were going through the motions: But what can the rest of the world reasonably expect of you, after all you have been through? At least you have yourself a first rate queen, who cares …” And so, on my leave-taking, I wish to thank Sir Alec for all his patience and goodness during the past months, and to thank all his friends—and my friends—who have been so kind to me. And of course, to toast, with suppressed emotions on the subject of her expatriation from our native land, my beloved mother, Lady Sharkey.” His mother rose with tears in her eyes, and Blackford took his seat, the object of universal admiration: the ladies loved his stunning good looks, his fair hair and inquisitive blue eyes, and easy manner; the men were taken by his slouchy informality, which managed just the necessary ration of deference owed by the young to their elders, without any suggestion of sycophancy, or any presumptive commitment to the bizarre notion that because he was young, he was any less competent, in his own disciplines, than they in theirs. Blackford had the American republican’s innate aversion to servility. Even as a schoolboy at Greyburn he would say “sir” once, to confirm his understanding of an axiomatic hierarchy. But he would never repeat the word in the same conversation. At age sixteen he got into serious trouble for a libertine application of his code. At twenty-
six his amiable self-assurance set him slightly apart: the young man, bright, inquisitive, courteous … to whom, however, condescension would have been inconceivable.
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