by Wilbur Smith
Konrad had never felt brotherly love toward Gerhard. He would have been happy to see him thrown into the newly opened Dachau concentration camp. In the end, however, Heydrich himself had concluded that, on balance, there was more to be lost than gained from imprisoning a scion of one of the Reich’s most prominent industrial dynasties. Instead he had imposed a more subtle punishment.
Gerhard, Heydrich declared, was to become a good citizen of the Reich. He was sent to work for Albert Speer, the Führer’s personal architect, helping to design the mighty buildings of Germania, the new city, that would be built on the site of Berlin that Adolf Hitler envisaged as the capital of his imperial Reich.
At work, and wherever he socialized, Gerhard was warned never to deviate from Nazi orthodoxy. If he expressed an opinion, it would be one of absolute conformity with the party line. When he threw out his arm and cried “Heil Hitler,” he would do so with sincere enthusiasm, for all the world to see.
“I want your soul,” Heydrich had said, and to ensure that he got it he had made the price of disobedience clear: “If you defy me in any way, you will be sent to Dachau. And what is more, all your friends, your fellow students, the women you have loved—everyone who has ever had anything to do with you—will find their lives examined in every detail by the Gestapo. They will be arrested and questioned. Their property will be searched. And if my men find anything, no matter how trivial, that suggests that they are undesirable, they will join you in the concentration camp.”
Gerhard would happily have risked his own life to save his principles, but he could not condemn so many other people too. He forced himself to play a role he detested. But all was not lost, for Heydrich had demanded one other visible sign of Gerhard’s “good Nazi” status. He ordered him to spend his summers training as a Luftwaffe reservist, so that when the time for war came, he would be ready to lay down his life for the Third Reich.
It was intended to be another form of servitude. But from the moment Gerhard took the controls of a training glider, he fell in love with the wonder of flight. High in the sky, alone in a cockpit, he felt free of all the shackles that bound him on earth. Down there he lived a lie. Up here he was truly himself. Heydrich had, unknowingly, handed Gerhard von Meerbach a gift that would change his life.
Gerhard was a natural flyer. All the years he spent as a pilot before the war prepared him for combat, when it came. He understood what he could extract from his aircraft. He barely needed instruments to fly with because he could feel how a plane was responding, how much more it had to give and where its limitations lay. And though he despised Nazism with every fiber of his being, and hated it even more each time he had to give the “Heil Hitler!” salute, he still loved his country, the Germany that had existed before Hitler ever drew breath and would still be there when the self-styled Führer was nothing but a note in the history books.
That was the Germany for which he fought, and as a fighter pilot it was possible to preserve the illusion that one was engaged in an honorable form of combat, one man against another in the last faint echo of the old tradition of military chivalry. The nature of air-to-air combat as a fighter pilot meant that one had to fight to the maximum of one’s abilities simply to survive. There was no hiding place, no walls to duck behind or trenches to jump into. Gerhard flew and he fought. And, above all, he survived. He came unscathed through the Polish campaign in 1939, the invasion of France and the Battle of Britain in 1940, the Balkan and Greek campaigns in the spring of 1941, and Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia that had followed.
When Gerhard and his comrades had been escorting the bomber fleets as they blasted the R.A.F. airfields of southern England, and then turned their attentions to London, they had come up against pilots who were their match, flying aircraft that were, in some respects, superior to their own Messerschmitt Bf109s. But everywhere else, they had enjoyed almost total air superiority. And in those first months in Russia, their missions had been less like combat against equals than shooting fish in a barrel.
The Ivans had terrible aircraft, worse tactics and, most shocking of all to the Luftwaffe men who faced them, many of their pilots were women. They used a heavy fighter called the Sturmovik to support their troops on the ground. It was known as “the flying tank” because it was so heavily armored and its 23mm cannons were as powerful as airborne artillery. This made the Sturmovik deadly to German soldiers on the ground, but the only weapon it possessed to defend itself from attack in the air was a single machine gun firing from the rear of the cockpit.
The Soviets massed their Sturmoviks in formations, like bombers, from which individual aircraft could not deviate. If attacked, they kept flying straight ahead, in orderly lines, no matter how close a Luftwaffe fighter came. To break through their armor, Gerhard and his fellow pilots had to fire from point-blank range. But there was almost no chance of being hit while one approached and the only danger was when you destroyed a Sturmovik, the resulting explosion hurled jagged fragments of riveted armor steel through the sky in all directions: that downed more German pilots and destroyed more Messerschmitts than any bullets ever did.
Gerhard lost one plane to shrapnel from a Sturmovik, but he bailed out unhurt and landed behind his own lines. That aside, he remained physically untouched as his total of kills increased, until he could count more than forty enemy aircraft downed in airborne combat, and as many again destroyed on the ground. He had long since ceased to care about any of that. He killed only so that he might live. He accepted one award after another, and promotions because they served to burnish his reputation.
And Gerhard cared about his reputation. He smiled for the war correspondents and allowed himself to be brought back to the fatherland for a series of public appearances, where he was feted like a movie star. The more he was seen as the perfect Nazi warrior, the easier it became to hide his true intention.
One day, he did not know how or when, he would find a way to end Hitler’s tyranny and destroy the Nazi Reich.
•••
And so, as Gerhard was smiling amiably at his fellow passenger, a more dangerous idea was running through his mind. State Secretary Hartmann, I want you to talk. I need you to pass on your secrets.
“Nervous?” Gerhard asked, seeing the white knuckles of Hartmann’s hand clasped to the armrest of his chair. “I understand. I spend my whole life in airplanes but even I sometimes wonder how a contraption containing thousands of kilos of metal and wood and aviation fuel can possibly fly. But it does.”
Hartmann gave a nod of acknowledgment. His fear was palpable. Gerhard watched him as the pilot opened the throttles, sent the plane hurtling down the runway and then took off into the Prussian sky. The screaming engines hauled the Junkers up into the air, but this craft was no fighter, it had to work to gain altitude, and there was always that moment when even experienced passengers wondered if the effort would be successful.
Hartmann waited until the pilot had eased the rate of ascent and cut back on the engines enough to make conversation possible.
“We’ll be going up to a cruising height of about four thousand meters, maybe a little more,” Gerhard told him, matter-of-factly, slowly turning the screw. “A long way down, eh? But planes don’t drop from the sky for no good reason.
“When I am flying a combat mission, some bastard Ivan might shoot me down. But I assure you, no one is going to shoot us down between Berlin and Rivne. We are flying over our own territory all the way. There is no possibility of encountering enemy aircraft. None.”
He looked quizzically at Hartmann. “You believe me, don’t you, Herr Doktor?”
Hartmann nodded.
“Excellent. This Junkers is a good, strong aircraft. It will withstand severe conditions. But it might get caught in a hurricane, or a thunderstorm, or cloud so thick that the pilot can’t see where he’s going and flies into the side of the mountain.
“But I have checked the weather forecast and we have clear skies, gentle winds and prefect visibility all
the way to Rivne. That’s reassuring, no?”
“I suppose so,” Hartmann replied. The manila file, with its Top Secret stamp, was clearly visible on the table.
“Maybe an engine might fail. This is extremely unlikely, especially if my family made it, but it might happen.”
Hartmann perked up. “Your family? You mean you are . . .”
“One of those von Meerbachs? Yes, my grandfather founded the company and my older brother Konrad Graf von Meerbach is still the president of the board, when not attending to his duties in the Schutzstaffel. You may have come across him in Berlin. He is one of Obergruppenfühhrer Heydrich’s most trusted subordinates.”
“No . . . no . . .” Hartmann bore the look of a man who suddenly realized that he was in the presence of a power greater than his own. “But I have heard of him, of course . . . and always in the most complimentary terms.”
“My brother is indeed a most admirable man, and as loyal a National Socialist as you will find in all the Reich. I’m sure that he, more than anyone, would want to assure you that this good, German aircraft can easily fly on two engines, instead of three. But what if two engines fail? Well, now it does not fly quite so easily, but still it could reach the nearest airfield. But what if three engines fail? In almost ten years of flying, I have never heard of three engines failing at once, for purely mechanical reasons, but have no fear, an aircraft at high altitude can glide a long way before it reaches the ground. I’m sure the pilot could find a stretch of road on which to put us down. And if he doesn’t feel up to the job, I would feel happy to oblige. I’ve been known to run out of fuel on a long mission and use a highway for a landing strip. I did it once in Greece. Came down in front of a column of Panzers, advancing on Athens. Their commanding officer was most upset that I was blocking the way. Tremendous fun!”
Hartmann gave a nervous laugh.
“Now, I know just the thing to make you feel much better,” Gerhard said. He beckoned the steward to come over. “Be a good fellow and make us both strong coffee, nice and sweet, with a healthy shot of schnapps in each cup.”
The steward grinned. “Certainly, sir!”
“Good man.”
Hartmann made an attempt to protest.
“This will help you, I promise,” Gerhard assured him. “I’ve flown almost three hundred combat missions and I should think at least half of them began with me downing a tin cup of coffee and schnapps. We all do it. Helps a man get started, first thing on a cold morning, and keeps him warm in the air. It’s damn cold work flying a 109 at high altitude.”
When the coffees arrived, Gerhard raised his cup, “A toast—to the Führer, and victory.”
Gerhard gestured to the steward to bring two more cups. Then he proposed another toast: “Death to the Jews, the Bolsheviks and all enemies of the Reich!”
Hartmann felt obliged to join in the toast and drank the coffee. Gerhard was not feeling the slightest effect from the alcohol. Like every other man on the Russian Front, he had drunk an ocean of vodka, smoked a forest of cigarettes and swallowed countless tablets of Pervitin, the methamphetamine drug they all craved for its ability to reduce fatigue, increase stamina and induce a sense of wild, reckless courage. His system was so accustomed to one narcotic or another circulating in his bloodstream that it took a massive dose to have much effect upon him. Hartmann, however, was a mousy civil servant. He was evidently not a drinking man. Two large shots of schnapps, first thing in the morning, would lower his defenses and loosen his tongue.
“So, what brings you to Reichskommissariat Ukraine?” asked Gerhard. “Clearly it is sensitive work, as I can see from your file. Let me guess: is your work related to the disposal of the Jews?”
Hartmann looked at Gerhard. His eyes narrowed. “What makes you say that?”
Gerhard grinned as he shrugged. “I too am obliged to keep some matters confidential . . . but I have connections, as you know, and move in certain circles, and one is privy to interesting conversations.”
The truth was more prosaic. Gerhard had returned to Germany to take some long-overdue leave at a time when there was little action on the battlefield. While he was there, he received his German Star and carried out some promotional activities for the propaganda boys in Berlin. Then he went south to Bavaria for a board meeting of the Meerbach Motor Works, of which he was still a shareholder and board member, albeit with a smaller stake and less influence than Konrad.
After the meeting, the two brothers had lunched together in the company’s private dining room. Konrad, who was more aggressive and spiteful when drunk, had downed a great deal of wine. Gerhard had provoked him further by telling the stories of some of the dogfights and ground-attack missions for which he had received his latest award for gallantry. He knew that Konrad would hate being reminded of the contrast between Gerhard’s frontline service and his own war work, which was mostly conducted from behind a desk.
“You think you fool them all, don’t you, with this flying-ace act of yours?” Konrad had sneered. “Well, you don’t fool me. I know you for a commie and a Jew-lover. That’s what you’ve always been, and you haven’t changed, I know it.”
“If I’m a communist, why have I killed so many of my Russian comrades? I don’t just have blood on my hands, I’m up to my damned elbows.”
“Pah! I don’t care how many Ivans you shoot down, you’re still a traitor and a filthy subversive in my eyes.”
“Tell that to Dr. Goebbels. He thinks I’m a hero. It says so in all the newsreels this week.”
“That’s not all I know, either . . .”
Gerhard knew what he meant. Almost a year had passed since he had received a letter through the usual channels. But instead of bearing a loving message from Saffron, it had informed him that she had been killed in an air raid. He had been devastated, robbed of the will to live until, by pure chance, he had found out, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that she was still alive.
It had not been difficult to work out what must have happened. Though Konrad was married to another woman, he had taken Francesca von Schöndorf as his mistress. It saddened Gerhard deeply to discover that he had filled Chessi with such hate that she had chosen to debase herself in that way. At heart, she was a much better woman than that. But if she was willing to give herself to Konrad as some perverted form of revenge, she would certainly have wanted to tell him that his brother had fallen in love with an Englishwoman. It was a piece of information that could do a great deal of damage. Gerhard was certain that Konrad had acted upon it and found a way of intercepting his letters to and from Saffron.
Since then, however, Gerhard had been careful never to give an indication that he was aware Saffron was alive. Konrad could not reveal that he was the author of the false reports of death (Gerhard assumed that Saffron had received one about him, too). They had been Konrad’s private act of revenge, hidden even from Heydrich, who had long since ceased to care about the subject of Gerhard von Meerbach, and did not want his subordinate thinking about anything except his official duties.
Gerhard did not rise to Konrad’s bait and silence descended upon their table. They were eating Wiener schnitzel made from veal calves raised and slaughtered on their own estate, with richly buttered mashed potatoes, sauerkraut and leeks all from their farms. In wartime Germany this was a feast beyond the wildest dreams of most of their fellow Reich citizens, who would have gazed on in drooling envy had they seen Konrad stuff his face with a forkful of meat and potato, and wash it down with a swig of 1929 La Tâche, one of the greatest red wines in the world.
Konrad picked up his fork and jabbed it in Gerhard’s direction. “You know nothing, nothing at all about what this Reich truly is and what it will become. While you’re out there, in the mud and snow and shit of Russia, I’m in Berlin, where the power is, creating destiny. And I have news for you, little brother. You won’t have to worry about all your Jewish friends in the future, you won’t have to spend any more of our family money on those hook-nosed vermin, and you kno
w why? Because there won’t be any!”
“What do you mean?” Gerhard had asked, although he feared he knew the answer.
“Because they will all be dead, every last one of them!” Konrad declared triumphantly. “Before this war is out, we are going to kill every single Jew in Europe, Russia and North Africa.”
“I thought you were going to transport them out of the Reich. Give them a home of their own.”
“That was the original plan, but it won’t work. Costs too much to move them and then where would we put them all? Do you know how many Yids we’re talking about?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“Go on, guess.”
Gerhard said nothing.
“Eleven million! That’s how many we’ve got to process. That’s the official term, by the way: ‘processing.’”
“Was that what they were doing at Babi Yar last year, ‘processing’?”
Konrad chewed with the exaggerated thoughtfulness of an inebriated man. “That’s a very interesting question, little brother, very interesting indeed. What makes you mention Babi Yar?”
“I flew over a ravine just outside Kiev last September, coming back from a mission. I thought I saw people being shot. When I landed, I looked on a map and saw the name of the place. Then I asked around and was told that Jews were being rounded up all over the city but no one knew why. I went for another flight and had a proper look. I saw them all being shot, Konrad. Naked men and women, lined up by a huge pit, men with guns behind them. They were being shot, falling in the pit, more lining up . . . That was Babi Yar.”
“Well, that was quite a performance you saw there. If I recall correctly . . . yes, I’m pretty sure the figure was around 35,000 killed in two days. Good work, done by fine, committed men . . .”