African Sky

by Tony Park

  During university terms he had immersed himself in books of chemistry and biology and, in the holidays, after his father was released from gaol, he rode into the bushveld with him and hunted lion, buffalo, elephant and buck. His professors said he had the naturally analytical brain of a scientist, and his father took great pride in telling his old comrades from the war – those who had survived – that his boy had the eyes of an eagle, the stealth of a leopard, the strength of a buffalo and the courage of a lion.

  The lowly assistant researcher’s job in the agriculture department had been a fairly natural first step for a newly graduated chemist, but to Hendrick it had opened up a new and exciting world. He worked on the development of new pesticides to kill crop-eating bugs and cattle-crippling parasites. Soon outshining his career civil-servant colleagues, he was offered, before his thirtieth birthday a position as senior research scientist with the South African arm of a German chemical company, which was putting the government’s research work into commercial practice.

  Hendrick Reitz had become, in the space of a few years, an expert on killing. As a farm boy at heart he wanted to find new ways to poison the insect and mammalian pests that had made his father’s life, and the lives of other farmers, so hard. As a scientist, he wanted to make sure the business of killing was quick, economical and painless.

  In 1934 he had been offered a position with the chemical firm’s head office, in Berlin, and the opportunity to complete postgraduate studies in Germany while he worked. A senior German executive from the parent company, on a business trip to South Africa, had learned of Reitz’s intelligence, ability and background.

  Hendrick had been awestruck by the majesty of Berlin under Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party. At the urging of the partner who had recruited him, Hendrick had attended a couple of party meetings and then joined the Nazis. The move had been good for his career, too, as most of the senior people in the firm proudly wore the striking red, white and black swastika badge on their suit lapels. He soon became engrossed in the ground-breaking work German scientists were conducting in the development of new types of poisons.

  By now well established, both socially and in the company, Reitz seemed to have everything a young man could want. He had a nice apartment in a good Berlin neighbourhood, money to spend on a beautiful blonde-haired secretary and party member named Ursula Schultz, and a secure job with a promising career path.

  That was enough for Hendrick Reitz, the intelligent, handsome young scientist – all the things a long-dead mother would have wanted for her only son – but it did not satisfy his other needs. He was his father’s son – a man who gained as much satisfaction from hours of stalking through the bushveld, the kick of a rifle in the shoulder, and a well-placed shot that took the prey down clean. The novelty of winter snows, expensive cigars and tawdry nightclubs was slowly wearing off. He took some solace in the arms and bed of Ursula, but he was handsome and vain enough to realise he could find a woman virtually wherever and whenever he needed one. He wanted more, so he enlisted in a Wehrmacht militia battalion. He was selected for officer training by virtue of his education. His unusual background, Afrikaner accent, outstanding marksmanship and his party connections earned him the attention of senior commanders on more than one occasion.

  Keen to advance his standing in the military and to seek new challenges, he volunteered for a course in radio communications early in his commission. As a result of his new skills he was transferred from the infantry to a posting as a ground liaison officer stationed at a Luftwaffe aerodrome close to the research laboratory where he worked on weekdays. He was a link man between the army and air force, and worked with officers more senior than he from both services on improving ground-to-air communications and in the development of new doctrines for the tactical support of land forces by aircraft.

  When Spain erupted into civil war, Reitz immediately volunteered to serve with the German Condor Legion, dispatched by Hitler to assist General Franco’s nationalist forces against the left-wing republican government. The legion comprised artillery and aircraft, but it did need officers who could serve with nationalist units and provide radio communications between the Spaniards on the ground and the Luftwaffe aircraft supporting them. Reitz fit the bill on all counts.

  He had, as he had always expected, enjoyed the job of soldiering as much as the challenges of science, Reitz reflected as the fire beside his bushveld bed died to glowing coals.

  War, of course, was vastly different from hunting in the African bush, but the skills his father had taught him served him well. He was able to suffer the hardships of life in the field better than many of the men he fought alongside.

  He held his nerve under enemy fire, and time and again was able to save his comrades from defeat in battle and wreak havoc on their communist-backed enemies by calling in Luftwaffe airstrikes with pinpoint accuracy.

  Though he would never dare voice his concerns aloud, one thing that did unsettle him during his time in Spain was the deliberate aerial bombing of towns full of civilians. It seemed to Reitz that rather than cowering a civilian population, aerial bombing often seemed to increase their resolve and conviction in their cause.

  The exception came on 26 April 1937, when Reitz was serving with nationalist forces in the Basque region of northern Spain. Ten miles behind the republican lines was the small town of Guernica, crammed with retreating soldiers and refugees. Reitz spent the afternoon on his radio relaying the changing position of his Spanish unit to the Condor Legion’s command and passing on information about weather conditions and enemy positions as streams of German Heinkel He-111 and Junkers Ju-52 bombers roared overhead. Two days later, when the nationalists entered the town, Reitz saw the full effects of fifty tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs. More than sixteen hundred people had been killed and fires still raged in the town. It was not as big as raids he would later witness directed against Germany, but he was awed by the terrible, decisive might of massed air power against a civilian target. A little less than two years later the last of the republican resistance crumbled, and Franco’s Nacionales entered Madrid in triumph.

  After Spain he dealt with the boredom of service in a peacetime army by applying for more military courses that would challenge and interest him, and by throwing himself back into his civilian work. His firm had made impressive progress during his time away in the development of a new, extremely deadly family of pesticides called organophosphates.

  Reitz, like most of his comrades in and out of uniform, sensed a larger war was coming. Germany was about to reclaim its place in the world, and they all wanted to be part of the machine that would make that happen.

  In September 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, Reitz was mobilised back into full-time duty. Many of the regular air force and army officers he had served with in Spain were now in positions of greater power and he pulled enough strings to be transferred to the elite Luftwaffe Fallschimjager, the paratroopers. His wish to return to action was granted in 1940, when German airborne forces spearheaded the invasion of Holland. The following year, Reitz and the company of veteran soldiers he now commanded as a Hauptman jumped onto the Greek island of Crete, where they faced tenacious resistance from the British, Greek and Australian defenders.

  He smoked a final cigarette as the African night closed in around him, savouring the memory of the fierce fighting on the Mediterranean island. Some of his men had been shot and killed while still under their parachute canopies in the sky. Those who survived the landing took a bloody revenge on the Englishmen and their colonial lackeys. Reitz remembered the first Briton he had killed, a machine-gunner, at long range. Although as an officer he was entitled to a sub machine-gun or pistol, he chose instead to carry a Mauser rifle with telescopic sights. His men called their African-German leader der Jager, the hunter, in homage to his big-game hunting days. In the hours and days that followed his landing on the island his personal tally of dead enemy soldiers climbed steadily to twenty-one, while at t
he same time he commanded his company brilliantly.

  Shrapnel from a British mortar shell, just a day before the enemy’s surrender, took him out of the fight. He spent time in a field hospital in occupied Greece, where the worst of the metal fragments, dirt and scraps of his own uniform were removed from his left calf and thigh. Afterwards he was transferred back to Germany for convalescence leave.

  The Germans won the battle of Crete, but the fighting bled the cream of Hitler’s elite airborne units dry. Grimly, Reitz wondered what his future would hold as he hobbled around the verdant grounds of a Bavarian rehabilitation hospital. One thing the invasion had rekindled in him was a remembrance of a part of the world that was never really cold; at least, not as cold as Bavaria – Africa.

  Salvation came in the form of the silver-haired Doktor Strauss, the man who had recruited him to his firm from its South African outpost. The doctor visited him in hospital, having tracked him down through pretty Ursula, who still wrote letters to Reitz once a week, without fail.

  ‘You mightn’t think it to look at me, but I’m not without connections and, as a result, influence,’ the doctor told him after they had exchanged pleasantries.

  Reitz was exercising harder and harder each day. He had given up his walking stick, and the elderly doctor was breathing hard keeping up with him as they walked the perimeter of the hospital grounds. ‘I have a distant cousin, you know, who is quite high up in military intelligence. His name is Canaris.’

  ‘Not Admiral Wilhelm Canaris – the head of the Abwehr?’ Reitz asked, awestruck. Strauss’ relative was not just high up, he was the supremo.

  ‘The very same. We had dinner recently. He asked about how the war was affecting our business. I let slip that we’d suffered a steady drain of good people, starting with one of my best scientists, a South African who had fought in Spain, then left us again to become a paratrooper, and was currently recovering from wounds he had received in Crete. Well, you should have seen the old fox’s eyes light up. ‘South African, you say,’ he says to me.

  ‘I can’t imagine why, but he wants to meet you,’ Strauss said.

  The summons came a week later. Reitz was ready to leave the hospital anyway. He reported in full uniform to the headquarters of German military intelligence, the Abwehr, a dark maze of offices known as the Fuchsbau, or fox’s lair, on Berlin’s Tirpitzufer.

  Canaris was a legendary figure. The distinguished naval officer had overseen intelligence officers in Spain during the Great War. With his shock of white hair he was referred to by some as ‘old white head’. His big antique desk was cluttered with stacks of books. A dachshund sat on a bed in a corner of the office and whined. The short, elderly man turned and made a clucking noise to soothe the dog.

  He looked up from his desk at Reitz, standing stiffly to attention, and motioned for him to sit. ‘I’m a busy man, Hauptman, so I’ll come to the point. The Fuhrer himself is interested in Africa – southern Africa, to be precise. Rommel is rolling back the allies in the Western Desert and it is felt that creating dissent in the south of the continent would prove a helpful distraction.’ That first conversation, of course, had been before the Afrika Korps had been stopped at El Alamein, in 1942. ‘They think they’re safe there in South Africa and Rhodesia, away from the action, and I want them to think otherwise. You were in the Ossewa Brandwag, I understand.’

  ‘Jahwohl, Herr Admiral.’

  ‘How viable is this OB, Reitz? Will they take up arms against their government?’

  Reitz thought briefly about the question and how best to answer it. For every ten loudmouth drunkards in the organisation there might be one like him, a man who had the courage to fight for his beliefs, and not just rant around the braai. ‘The OB’s leader, Hans Van Rensburg, is a doctor of law, sir. Some, including myself, think he is too soft, as he does not sanction sabotage, but many of our Stormjaers are ready to take up arms.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m sure, Reitz,’ Canaris said dismissively. He scanned the captain’s file again, then looked up at him, and said: ‘Spare me the rhetoric. Would you kill your countrymen, those who are opposed to Germany and our ideals?’

  ‘The OB wants Germany to win the war. They see a victory by Germany and Italy as a prerequisite for the establishment of a racially pure Afrikaner nation, independent of England. There are enough of them who will fight – who will kill – starting with me.’

  ‘You’ll be medically discharged from the paratroopers – honourably, of course – and you will return to my cousin’s chemical firm. He, too, has need of your service.’

  ‘But, with respect, Herr Admiral, I thought that . . .’ Reitz panicked, fearing that he had said the wrong thing and would sit out the war in a laboratory in Berlin.

  ‘You don’t think from now on, Reitz. My people do your thinking for you, make your decisions for you. There are some things even I am not privy to. My cousin is working on something of great importance to the Reich. We have reached a gentleman’s agreement over your future. He will use your mind in the laboratory for the next few months, and when I am good and ready I will use your less cerebral talents, and your contacts, in South Africa.’

  Chemical warfare. That’s what his old firm was up to. How, when or where the fruits of their labours were to be used was never mentioned, and not speculated on in the corridors or laboratories. But the company Reitz had left experimenting with new ways to poison cockroaches, crop diseases and mice, had now set its sights on bigger prey – man.

  ‘Our aim,’ Doktor Strauss had told him on his first day back at work, ‘is to develop toxins that attack the central nervous system, quickly cleanly and efficiently. We are not so inhumane as to wish a return to the primitive days of the last war, where men were burned and blinded by the fumes from chlorine gas. We want something that does a better job, quicker – a substitute for a bullet, if you will.’

  It felt odd, being back in a suit and a white lab coat, but Reitz still felt himself at the cutting edge of Germany’s war effort. The idea of chemical warfare did not worry him. As the doctor had alluded to, both sides had used poison gas in the first war. What he hoped, however, was that a new form of toxin, if it could be developed, would be employed at the strategic level somehow, in order to shorten the war with fewer German casualties. The doctor had progressed a fair way. ‘It was some of your early work, Hendrick, that set us in the right direction. I recalled your papers on the poisons that the bushmen of southern Africa’s deserts use to immobilise and kill their prey. We are on the road to developing our own version of a nerve agent that will work along similar lines, but we still have work to do on methods of delivery.’

  As the firm’s labours intensified and they came closer to development of a final, lethal product, Admiral Canaris intervened. Reitz left Ursula and his expensive suits and lab coats, and vanished into the shadowy world of military intelligence. At a secret school at Quentzsee in Brandenburg he learned the arts of espionage and sabotage, and refreshed his already finely-honed skills in radio communications and killing.

  Canaris’ first assignment for him was intelligence gathering. He wanted a man who could infiltrate the white population of South Africa and quietly make contact with the senior figures and supporters of the Ossewa Brandwag. Reitz was not being tasked to assassinate anyone, nor blow up railway lines or power stations, but his mission was no less risky. If any of the men and women he were to contact had had a change of heart since the start of the war, or had been compromised by South African intelligence officers, then Reitz could be betrayed, captured and hanged as a spy.

  His heart had soared as he’d rowed himself ashore from the U-boat north of Cape Town, knowing he was home and, not only that, back to help make a better South Africa. He’d travelled the breadth of the country and even beyond its borders, in search of the leading lights, both overt and covert, of the OB. Some of them he knew, either personally or as people his father had met. All except one still hated the British but, disappointingly, only a handful gave a de
cisive and positive answer to the question of their willingness to engage in covert military action against the British Empire.

  The one who had made his peace with the British, who had mellowed in his old age, was a very real threat to Reitz, now that he had shown his hand as a Nazi sympathiser. He had to end the mission prematurely and flee South Africa via neutral Portuguese Mozambique, crossing on foot through the wilds of the Kruger National Park in the country’s north-east.

  Back in Germany, Reitz returned to his civilian job and was pleased to see great progress had been made. A fast-acting, lethal nerve agent had been developed for tactical use. ‘It is called sarin,’ Doktor Strauss told him over coffee on his first day back. ‘It was actually patented back in 1938. It’s named after the initials of the surnames of its founders – S-A-R from Schrader, Ambros, Rudriger, and I-N from Von der Linde. A tiny drop or a mist of vapour will kill a man.’

  Reitz nodded. He knew three of his former rivals on a first-name basis. ‘So what’s new about it?’

  Strauss smiled. ‘Sarin’s problem was that it wouldn’t keep more than a few weeks. We’ve worked on that, refined it. Our latest version of the agent will keep for up to a year. It can be transported anywhere in the world and kept stable and safe until it is time for its use. The weapons people at the army proving grounds at Raubkammer have conducted successful tests in launching sarin in artillery shells. They’re working on other means of delivery as we speak.’

  Canaris, meanwhile, was disappointed at the lukewarm reception Reitz reported from many of the former stalwarts of the OB. However, he was still wedded to the idea of causing mayhem in some form in southern Africa, in order to hurt the allies and siphon troops away from elsewhere on the continent. Hendrick Reitz had already formulated the germ of an idea, and he briefed the admiral on it, shortly after his return to work at the laboratory.