by Andy Marino
The siren of a Berlin fire brigade truck began to wail.
Max lowered his arm and let his father’s knife clatter to the ground. His only hope was that Gerta and Kat had managed to slip away. He felt strangely unafraid—almost reckless—as he turned to face the leader of the Midnight Hunters. It was as if he was watching himself from a short distance away.
Heinrich lowered his own weapon, just a little, so that the gun was pointed at Max’s chest rather than his head. “So sad to see one so young brainwashed by the enemies of the Fatherland.”
Over Heinrich’s shoulder, Max could see flames erupting from the broken windows of the hunting lodge. One of the Hitler Youth boys ran up to the building with a bucket and tossed water on the blaze. It did nothing to douse the fire. Gerta and Kat were nowhere to be seen.
“Hey,” Max said, “your clubhouse is on fire.”
Heinrich shrugged. “It’s just a building. The Hitler Youth is a movement that transcends—”
“Oh, shut up,” Max said.
Heinrich smiled. Then he smashed his pistol into the side of Max’s head, catching him squarely on the temple.
Heinrich’s face receded to a distant point of light. Then the world went dark.
JULY 20, 1944
Claus von Stauffenberg was soaked in sweat. His uniform shirt clung to his body. Wet strands of hair were plastered to his forehead. He was suffering through an interminable morning meeting with Field Marshal Keitel and two officers of the general staff.
Keitel had insisted on holding the meeting outside, under the same tall and vaguely hostile tree that Stauffenberg ate breakfast beneath on his last visit to the Wolf’s Lair. Keitel obviously enjoyed Stauffenberg’s discomfort. Not that it would be much cooler inside the visitors’ bunker. His conference with the Führer, immediately after this meeting, was going to be stifling.
Of course, if all went according to plan, Stauffenberg would be in the room for only a minute or two. But when had anything gone according to plan for the Valkyrie plotters? He prayed that someday they would look back on all their false starts and failures from a place of peace and prosperity. Then he would be able to raise a glass to their cursed luck, safe in the knowledge that it had all worked out fine in the end.
Stauffenberg admonished himself for indulging in this pleasant fantasy. He had to stay alert and focus on his task, despite the heat and the presence of the odious Keitel.
Since his last visit to the Wolf’s Lair, a friend at the Abwehr—the Wehrmacht’s military intelligence service—had informed him that rumors were swirling about a plot to blow up the Führer’s headquarters. To the SS, rumors were as good as fact. People had been executed based on flimsier evidence.
If the SS started rounding up the conspirators, it would be too late for any of them. All their hard work—along with the sacrifices of so many resistance fighters—would be in vain.
Today had to be the day.
“… and the butcher said, ‘But my dear fräulein, the eyes are for the stew!’ ” Keitel looked around the table. Stauffenberg blinked. Apparently, the man had just finished telling a joke. The officers of the general staff laughed politely. Stauffenberg managed a smile.
“Well,” Keitel said, standing up and placing his palms on the table, “I suppose I’ll see you gentlemen shortly.” He lowered his voice. “The Führer is in a bad mood today. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
Stauffenberg headed for the visitors’ bunker. It had only been five days since his last visit, but he could swear that the foliage camouflaging the concrete building had thickened considerably. It looked as if the forest were reclaiming the Wolf’s Lair for itself. On the way, he passed his aide-de-camp, Werner von Haeften, leaning against his staff car. He gave his friend a nod. Haeften picked up a briefcase from the back seat and fell in beside him.
At the entrance to the bunker, Stauffenberg spoke to the sergeant-major. “I’ll need a place to wash up and change my shirt before meeting with the Führer. I look like I’ve fallen into the Spree.”
Silently, he thanked Keitel for his pettiness. By taking such pleasure in seeing Stauffenberg sweat, he had given him the perfect excuse.
“Yes, Colonel,” the sergeant-major said. He hesitated, giving Haeften a quick appraisal.
Stauffenberg held up his empty sleeve. “The lieutenant will assist me. I don’t want my personal ministrations to make me late for the meeting.”
The sergeant-major averted his eyes. “Of course, sir. This way.”
Stauffenberg expected the man to lead them downstairs, into the cellar of the visitors’ bunker, to the small washroom that he used on his last visit. Instead, the sergeant-major stopped at a wooden door just down the hall from the entrance.
“Thank you,” Stauffenberg said. “I’ll meet the others downstairs when I’ve made myself presentable.”
“Oh,” the sergeant-major said, “I’m sorry—weren’t you informed? The Führer has moved the meeting to the map room next door.”
Stauffenberg cursed silently, struggling to keep his face composed. Why even bother to make plans, when God seemed so intent on thwarting them? Unlike the concrete briefing room in the basement of the visitors’ bunker—the perfect place to plant the bomb—the map room was airy and spacious. Worse, there were several windows.
“No one told me,” Stauffenberg said.
“The Führer insists that the windows help make the heat more bearable,” the sergeant-major said.
“I’m sure the Führer is correct,” Stauffenberg said. Haeften opened the door to the washroom and the two men stepped inside. Stauffenberg noticed that the sergeant-major was still standing just outside the door as Haeften closed it. He waited until he heard the man’s footsteps fade down the hall, then set his briefcase down on a bare wooden table. Haeften did the same with the briefcase he carried and began removing two linen-wrapped parcels.
Quickly and deftly, Stauffenberg used his three working fingers to take off his uniform jacket, unbutton the sodden dress shirt underneath, and peel it away from his body. He pulled a dry, neatly folded shirt from his briefcase and put it on while Haeften unwrapped the two bombs.
Over the past few days, Stauffenberg had refined the assassination plan. This afternoon he would plant two bombs instead of one, to multiply the power of the blast. It had proved to be a wise choice—perhaps the second bomb would make up for the map room’s less-than-ideal design.
Haeften was fishing for the fuses in the side pocket of his briefcase when the washroom door began to open and the sergeant-major’s voice interrupted their work.
“Excuse me, gentlemen, but—”
Haeften lunged for the door, slamming it shut in the sergeant-major’s face. “The colonel isn’t dressed!”
“I’m sorry,” the sergeant-major said through the door, “but the Führer has insisted that we begin the briefing.”
Stauffenberg put on his jacket. It would not do to leave Hitler waiting. The Führer, in his short-tempered wrath, could easily have Stauffenberg barred from attending, leaving him holding an armed bomb on the wrong side of a locked door.
“We’re coming!” Stauffenberg called. Haeften looked at him helplessly. Stauffenberg held up one finger.
Haeften went back to his briefcase, retrieved the fuse, and then promptly dropped the pair of pliers on the floor.
“Gentlemen, I must insist!” the sergeant-major said, pounding on the door. “The Führer has personally instructed me to—”
“One. Moment. Sergeant-Major,” Stauffenberg said firmly. Haeften recovered the pliers, crimped the fuse to break the vial of acid, and carefully inserted the fuse into the slot in the bomb’s casing. He handed the armed bomb to Stauffenberg, who slid it into his own briefcase and buckled it shut. Haeften packed the unarmed bomb, then turned down the collar of Stauffenberg’s jacket and quickly smoothed the front of his shirt.
The two men shook hands. Stauffenberg opened the washroom door. The sergeant-major looked very nervous.
; Stauffenberg remembered Keitel’s words: The Führer is in a bad mood today. The sergeant-major probably feared for his life.
Outside the visitors’ bunker, Haeften made his way to the staff car while Stauffenberg and the sergeant-major walked briskly to the map room. It was a wooden hut, much more inviting than the visitors’ bunker, with three large windows in the north wall.
At the door, the SS guard stepped aside and the sergeant-major accompanied Stauffenberg inside the room, no doubt to show the Führer that he had personally retrieved the colonel, as ordered. But the briefing had already begun and none of the two dozen officers and Nazi functionaries present paid the new arrivals any mind.
General Heusinger, Hitler’s assistant chief of staff, was speaking. The Führer and most of the men were leaning over the table to get a better look at an enormous map of the Eastern Front, upon which Heusinger was tapping a long wooden pointer.
“Third Panzer Army is engaged in a strategic retreat along the Lithuanian front,” he said, and then paused to let everyone consider the map.
As Stauffenberg made his way past Keitel, the field marshal broke the silence. “Perhaps when General Heusinger has finished, Colonel Stauffenberg might grace us with his report on the status of the Reserve Army. I don’t believe you’ve had a chance to hear that yet, my Führer.”
Hitler glanced up from the map. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in several days. His eyes wandered to Stauffenberg, then back to Keitel. He nodded and turned his attention back to the Eastern Front.
Stauffenberg found an empty space off to the Führer’s right. He set his briefcase on the floor and used the toe of his boot to slide it partially under the table.
How long did he have? Six minutes? Five?
General Heusinger cleared his throat and began to describe Third Panzer Army’s situation in more detail.
Stauffenberg turned to the Wehrmacht officer to his right, a man he had never met in his life. He spoke just loud enough for a few others to hear, but not loud enough to disrupt Heusinger’s briefing.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Stauffenberg said, “I have to make an urgent telephone call to Berlin.”
The officer nodded, his attention never wavering from the map of the Eastern Front.
Stauffenberg headed quickly for the door. When he moved past Keitel, the field marshal’s hand reached out to clutch his elbow.
Keitel didn’t speak—he simply frowned and looked Stauffenberg up and down. Stauffenberg felt connected by some unbreakable, invisible thread to the briefcase he’d left under the table. Keitel’s eyes bored into him.
“I’ll return at once,” Stauffenberg said, firmly breaking Keitel’s grip. Keitel opened his mouth to say something, then glanced over at Hitler, who was watching the exchange.
Stauffenberg walked to the door under Hitler’s dead-eyed, inscrutable gaze. Expecting to hear the Führer bark an order to remain at the table, Stauffenberg prepared himself to stand next to a live bomb ticking down the final minutes, and then the final seconds, of his life.
He vowed to look out the window and think of Nina and the children. He didn’t want the faces of these men to be the last he’d ever see.
At the door, he almost paused and glanced back over his shoulder, but he forced himself to push it open.
No one ordered him back inside. He shut the door behind him and tried to look vaguely irritated, like a man bustling about on some irksome errand. The SS guard made no move to stop him.
He felt the weight of the briefcase at his side like the phantom pain that often shot through his missing hand. He had rehearsed this moment in his head countless times, but as he hurried across the grounds of the Wolf’s Lair, all he could think about was Keitel calling a sudden halt to the briefing, rushing to Stauffenberg’s abandoned briefcase, shouting in alarm, evacuating the map room, calling for the SS guards to find the colonel …
Stauffenberg picked up his pace, rushing past the table beneath the oak tree. The Wolf’s Lair felt like the ruins of some abandoned fort, desolate and decayed, but he knew that there were plenty of SS men and loyal officers residing in the various huts and bunkers. Any one of them could be idly glancing out of a window at the strange sight of Colonel Stauffenberg crossing the grounds alone, looking like he was going to break into a dead sprint at any moment.
He reached the signals shelter, a small wooden hut that looked like a miniature version of the map room. Inside, General Erich Fellgiebel, chief of signals at the Wolf’s Lair, was hunched over his radio equipment. Fellgiebel’s unruly black hair and thick spectacles made him resemble a slightly mad professor. His brilliance with systems of codes and top-secret communications made him indispensable to the war effort, but he hated the Nazis as much as Stauffenberg did. As soon as the bomb exploded, he was to telephone the plotters in Berlin, give the order to begin the takeover, then cut the lines at the Wolf’s Lair, isolating the Führer’s headquarters from the rest of the Nazi high command.
Fellgiebel blinked. “Is it in place?”
“It’s in place,” Stauffenberg confirmed. He glanced at a small round clock on the wall. The time was 12:40. He shook his head. “It should have gone off by now.”
Both men stared out the window. The map room was at the other end of the compound, obscured by the forest.
“The mechanism is imprecise,” Fellgiebel reminded him. “Be thankful it didn’t decide to rush itself.”
Stauffenberg held up his three fingers. “I might have lost another one.”
His eyes darted from the window to the clock: 12:41. The silence in the signals shelter was unbearable.
“What will they say about us, I wonder?” Stauffenberg said.
“They will say that we did what we could, Claus.”
“I fear that what they will say is, we did not do nearly enough.”
A single sharp blast ripped through the stillness of the forest. Stauffenberg felt a dull percussive pop deep in his guts, and the walls of the signals shelter trembled. Both men went to the window. There, above the canopy of greenery, a plume of black smoke curled up into the sky.
“Dear God … ,” Fellgiebel said.
Stauffenberg knew that the plan called for him to spring into action. He had to clear the SS checkpoints before the guards locked down the compound. There was still the airfield, the plane to Berlin, the men across the Reich awaiting his commands …
But Stauffenberg felt like he’d stepped into a dream. So many years of planning, and now they had finally done it! Germany without Hitler—there was something completely unreal about that, so deeply had the Führer imprinted his twisted philosophy upon the country that Stauffenberg loved. As he watched the smoke rise and drift across the treetops, he thought of all the displaced souls who could soon return home from the meat grinder of this pointless war. He pictured the maps of France and the Eastern Front on the table in the map room, blasted into charred shreds, curling and burning to ash.
It was General Fellgiebel’s words that tore him from his reverie. Stauffenberg turned away from the window in time to see the general slam down one phone and pick up another.
“It’s done,” he said into the mouthpiece. “Activate Valkyrie.”
Max awakened in the dark. He was lying on a mattress. It felt like someone was driving an ice-cold needle into his brain. He kept his eyes closed. After a while, the pain dulled to a persistent, throbbing ache. He touched a finger to his face. There was a tender lump on his forehead, just above his left temple, crusted with dried blood.
Visions of firelight danced across the darkness behind his eyelids.
The smell of the ersatz fuel. The heat of the flames.
Boots on cobblestones.
A smirking boy, a silver pistol.
Eventually, he pieced the fragments together. He had been captured by the Hitler Youth. They were holding him somewhere dark.
“Gerta,” he croaked. “Kat.” There was no reply. He was alone in this place.
Hopefully that meant that the gi
rls had managed to get away.
He drifted in and out of a pained, feverish sleep until faint light crept in through a small window set high into the wall. The window had been painted black, but a thin band of clear glass remained at its base. He found that he was in a room about the size of his bedroom in the safe house. Besides the mattress on the floor, the furniture consisted of a bucket and a single wooden chair. The walls were cement. Every now and then, footsteps crossed the room above. He was definitely in a cellar. After a while, he became aware of the smell of real oven-baked bread. How strange that something so comforting could invade this awful place!
Then he recalled the bakery next door to the Midnight Hunters’ hunting lodge. That was probably “appropriated” from a Jewish shop owner, too, which meant that Heinrich and the Hitler Youth could use it for their purposes.
What those purposes were, Max had no idea. He sat up on the mattress, gritted his teeth against the pain in his skull, and pushed himself to his feet. He put out a hand to steady himself against the wall and waited for a wave of nausea to pass. Feeling his way along the wall in the near-darkness, he came to a door. It was locked, of course. He hadn’t expected to walk out of this place so easily.
It could be worse, he told himself. The fact that he was being held in a bakery cellar rather than an interrogation room at Gestapo headquarters was probably a good thing.
Still, his stomach was knotted with fear. He was completely helpless. He had lost his father’s knife and managed to get himself captured.
He sat on his mattress and thought of Claus von Stauffenberg.
Suddenly, the door burst open to reveal Heinrich and the two heavyset Hitler Youth boys silhouetted in light pouring down a rickety wooden staircase at their backs.
“Get him in the chair,” Heinrich commanded. The two boys yanked Max roughly to his feet and plunked him down in the wooden chair. There was no question of struggling or trying to make a run for it. Their grip was too strong, and he was still woozy from getting bashed in the head. As one of the boys held him by the shoulders, pressing him down on the seat, the other took a length of thin rope and bound his wrists to the back of the chair. Then he did the same with Max’s ankles, binding them to the chair’s front legs.