by Jane Thynne
Katerina knitted her brows and a slight breeze plucked at the snow-blonde hair.
‘Does Erich live with you?’
‘No. But I don’t expect you’ll be living with me for long either.’
‘Oh.’ The girl’s eyes dipped again.
‘Don’t look like that. I wanted to wait until we were here before I told you.’
‘Am I to be sent somewhere else?’
The way she said it, she might have been a parcel to be packaged, posted and dispatched to the distant reaches of the Reich. A piece of luggage to be delivered into the hands of people who would not care for her.
‘Your sister’s coming back.’
‘Sonja!’
‘She’ll be home very soon.’
The child turned towards her rapt, her face splintered by sun and shadow. Her look was everything Clara might have imagined and more. She thought of all the tendernesses she had seen, of Wallis Simpson and her exiled king, stroking his cheek in Estoril. The radiance of Hans Reuber when he talked of his wife, Cici. Of Erich, remembering his mother and how he had knocked a boy out for her. Of Ned, his quiet intensity, his hand feeling for hers, their bodies moving together in a dance they had yet to learn. And she held that tenderness close and cherished it, as though it might protect her from everything time and future had to bring.
Author’s Note
Operation Willi, the attempted kidnap of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in July 1940, had the valuable effect of delaying Hitler’s planned invasion of the UK, giving Britain longer to prepare for the Battle of Britain air campaign, which eventually began in August. The Duke and Duchess of Windsor saw out the war in the Bahamas, and returned to live in France. It was the German Ambassador to Portugal, Oswald, Baron von Hoyningen-Huene, who recorded the Duke’s conviction that ‘had he remained on the throne, war could have been avoided’. In a memo to Berlin, von Hoyningen-Huene wrote that the ex-King ‘describes himself as a firm supporter of a compromise peace with Germany. The Duke believes with certainty that continued heavy bombing will make England ready for peace.’
After Ian Fleming had assisted the evacuation of King Zog from Bordeaux in June 1940, he visited Lisbon, but his activities there are not recorded. He returned to Lisbon in 1941 as an intelligence officer in the Royal Navy to devise Operation Goldeneye, the Allied plan to monitor Spain and defend Gibraltar.
The Venlo Incident, a plot to capture two British SIS officers, Captain Sigismund Payne Best and Major Richard Stevens, at the Dutch border town of Venlo in November 1939, was a coup for Walter Schellenberg. The two British agents were sent to concentration camps and although they survived the war, the information revealed by one of them under interrogation severely compromised European SIS networks. This led Winston Churchill to initiate plans for a new network in Europe, the Special Operations Executive or SOE.
The SS Eindeutschung programme was a plan formulated by Heinrich Himmler in 1940 to kidnap thousands of ‘racially valuable’ children from conquered territory to make up for the loss of German lives. They were declared Volksdeutsche, ethnically Aryan children of the German diaspora, and were subjected to Germanization, which involved a period of re-education at Lebensborn centres, where they were forcibly encouraged to reject and forget their birth parents. They were then fostered out to German families. The programme was covert, partly because it was believed that German parents would not want a Polish or other race child in their family. Of the estimated two hundred thousand Polish children deported for Germanization purposes only fifteen to twenty per cent were recovered at war’s end. Those who did not pass the initial racial screening mostly perished in concentration camps.
Professor Max de Crinis took over as Director of Psychiatry at Berlin’s Charité hospital from Karl Bonhoeffer, the father of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. De Crinis was a medical expert for the secret Action T4 experiment, named after its headquarters at 4, Tiergartenstrasse, and established in spring 1940. Initially planned for the euthanasia of mentally ill adults, the scheme was widened to encompass children with mental and physical deformities, and claimed seventy thousand victims. De Crinis’ curious involvement in the Venlo operation came about because of his close friendship with Walter Schellenberg, who wrote that he regarded him as a father. De Crinis died on May 1st, 1945, after poisoning his family then himself with potassium cyanide.
Between 1940 and 1941 Berliners were gripped by the case of the man dubbed the S-Bahn murderer, a serial killer who stalked women on or near railways in the city. He proved highly elusive and exploited the blackout to his advantage. Male police officers in drag were placed on trains as bait. Confounding expectations that the murderer would be a Jew or a foreigner, it was twenty-nine-year-old assistant signalman Paul Ogorzow, a Nazi Party and SA member, who eventually confessed to eight murders, six attempted murders and thirty-one cases of sexual assault.
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to my publishers, Simon & Schuster, and in particular to Suzanne Baboneau and Clare Hey. Also to my agent, Caradoc King, for his generous support and incisive suggestions. In the course of writing and talking about the Clara Vine series I have encountered and befriended many wonderful people and amongst them I’m especially endebted to Jim Mitchell, whose enthusiasm and steady supply of research material has been gratefully received. Lastly, thanks go, as ever, to my children, William, Charlie and Naomi, for enhancing the solitary writing process with Youtube videos, cups of tea and endless teenage banter.
By the same author:
Faith and Beauty
A War of Flowers
The Winter Garden
Black Roses
The Weighing of the Heart
The Shell House
Patrimony
First published in Great Britain by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2016
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Copyright © Thynker Ltd, 2016
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