Otto's Phoney War

by Leo Kessler

  …Count von der Weide’s heart leapt. It was him. There was no mistaking that figure who had suddenly appeared on the terrace outside the low-lying bunker, hopping about, as if he were doing some strange little polka. It was Hitler all right!

  Father Christmas and the other conspirators in the top ranks of the Abwehr and Wehrmacht had been attempting to ‘dispense with’ (the euphemism the aristocratic plotters preferred to use) the Führer for some twelve months now. But time and time again their carefully laid plans had gone askew.

  There had been the disgruntled SS-man, whom they had bribed to put a bomb under his Hitler’s rostrum at Hofbrauhaus just before the Führer was due to make his annual speech to the old guard of the Munich branch of the Party. But at the crucial moment when he should have planted the bomb and disappeared with his forged passport and wallet-full of Swiss francs over the border, he had been taken short by an attack of diarrhoea. Bolting for the pub’s toilet, he had been inadvertently locked in by a comrade, bomb still in his tunic pocket.

  There had been another bomb, complete with time fuse, concealed in a big bunch of red roses and thrust at the Führer’s car by what appeared to be a gushing enthusiastic fat lady (a young Abwehr lad in disguise). It was planned that the thing would explode once it was placed in a vase in the Führer’s sitting-room in the Berghof refuge, which he called home.

  It never reached that destination. Apparently the black-uniformed bodyguard who intercepted it from the fat lady placed it on the new grave of his mother-in-law in the local cemetery – obviously in an attempt to save money! – where it exploded, scattering bits of his unlamented mother-in-law all over the place. The affair caused some surprise in family circles, but it was generally agreed among the relatives that it was a fate the late, unlamented had richly deserved.

  And then there had been an attempt in the summer of 1939 to pump poison gas into the new Reichs-chanceliery’s air-conditioning system by a chimneysweep bribed to place the containers on the roof. But again their plan had failed. The attempt had backfired for some inexplicable reason and the gas had flooded into the Berlin sky. All that day blackbirds and sparrows had kept falling off the roofs of the government district to splatter on the streets below like black turds; and those of the officials who had enjoyed a classical education talked meaningfully of ‘evil omens’.

  But now, after so many failures, the Count, prone in the smelly drainage pipe, peering through the opening, partly covered by ferns, knew he couldn’t miss. This time Adolf Hitler, the hated tyrant, would not escape his fate!

  The Count tensed. That well-known, pudgy face with that ridiculous lock of hair hanging down across the narrow forehead, swung into the bright circle of calibrated glass. He brought the silenced carbine down. His sight wavered over Hitler’s Iron Cross and then up a little, to his breast pocket.

  The Count checked his breath. This was a historic moment. At last the world would know soon that he really was a man-of-destiny; he would go down in the history books as the noble hero who had slain that evil genius. He took first pressure and then almost immediately, second. The trigger clicked home.

  Nothing happened!

  No familiar slap against his shoulder, whiff of acrid burnt cordite, with eight hundred metres away, Hitler reeling against the wall, clutching at his shattered heart.

  He tried again.

  Again nothing!

  The sweat pouring down his forehead in thick opaque beads, legs twitching badly as he lay there, his heart racing furiously, he took careful aim. First pressure … Second pressure … Almost lovingly he eased the trigger the full length.

  Nothing!

  ‘Heaven, arse and cloudburst!’ he cursed with surprising, unusual profanity for him. He had a damned stoppage!

  Hurriedly he crawled out of his hiding-place and broke open the magazine. With shaking fingers he drew out the special cartridges and flung them in the general direction of the Führer, as if he were attempting to stone the tyrant to death. A damned bullet was jammed in the breech. That was why the Brandenburgers’ carbine wouldn’t fire!

  ‘Oh, this is just too much!’ he cried, exasperated beyond measure that after all this planning, his assassination attempt had failed too, and dashed the rifle against the pipe.

  The rifle exploded and gave him such a shock that he almost fell over. A bullet went winging across the valley towards the bunker and the lone figure standing on the terrace. The Count did not wait to see if he had hit its target. He fled, blundering wildly through the thick undergrowth, heading for the place where he had hidden his plane, leaving the tell-tale carbine behind him.

  Hitler, his face contorted with agony, raised his right knee level with his murderously rumbling, tormented stomach, and loosed off a tremendous fart that exploded like a clap of thunder and brought immediate relief.

  Right next to him, just where his chest had been a moment before, a hole appeared surprisingly enough in the concrete, spreading outwards in little ripples of cracked stucco.

  Hitler stared at it in wonder. ‘Gott in Himmel!’ he said to himself. ‘I really must order Doctor Morell to reduce the strength of those little pills of his.’ Then still sighing with relief that his stomach cramps seemed to be over for now, he passed inside the bunker once more to recommence the task of conquering the world.

  CHAPTER 10

  ‘Evacuate the school!’ Gertie cried to the startled staff crowding in on him. ‘To the front!’

  ‘What?’ Otto gasped. Like the others he had come here to find out what had happened to the Count; he had not expected this startling development. ‘What did you say, Major?’

  ‘Meadow has just brought us our new orders from Father Christmas. There has been an attempt on the Führer’s life. Obviously agents of perfidious Albion at work again. That devil with the umbrella is behind it all, I’ll be bound,’ the Commandant snorted in red faced anger. ‘But Providence has intervened yet once again. Gott mit uns!’

  ‘Santa Maria!’ Hirsch exclaimed solemnly and crossed himself, dark eyes turned upwards to heaven, burning with fervent piety. ‘Thank God!’

  There was a murmur of ‘thank Gods’ from all around.

  Angrily Otto pushed the pious idiots out of the way to confront Gertie, who for some reason was wearing a Red Cross nurse’s uniform, one salmon-pink bloomer-leg hanging down from beneath the white apron.

  ‘What’s the fact that there’s been an attempt on the Führer’s life got to do with our being sent to the front?’ he demanded.

  ‘I don’t know exactly. Meadow was too weak. But my guess is that the Führer’s plans have been betrayed and that we of the Abwehr are needed up there to save the offensive.’

  ‘But I'm a civilian,’ Otto objected. ‘I can’t fight … it’s illegal.’

  Gertie looked at Otto’s flushed face haughtily. ‘As of today, Sonderführer Stahl,’ he said with biting contempt, tugging up his bloomers as he did so, ‘there are no soldiers or civilians. The Fatherland is in great peril. As of today, there are just Germans!’ And with that he turned and stalked away, as if his contemptuous statement had solved everything, leaving Otto to stare at his fat, short-skirted bottom in absolute bewilderment.

  While the Brandenburgers ran to and fro outside, excitedly packing their special gear and crying at regular intervals, ‘To the front!,’ and in their rooms the staff busily arranged their private world, crazy as it was, the Count looked at himself in the mirror for a long time, adjusting and re-adjusting the bloodstained bandage around his head until it sat at a suitably heroic attitude.

  For a while he forgot the danger, as he fell yet again in love with his own face. His eyes were dark and enormous and seemed to him tragic, like those of a man bound to suffer some heroic fate. They were the eyes of a man who could not avoid his allotted destiny, however hard and bitter that destiny might be.

  The sound of the waiting Maps lighting his blowtorch returned him to the present and the need for urgent action.

  Of course Father Chr
istmas would disown him, he realised that and was not hurt by the realisation. The conspiracy must go on. If Canaris were questioned by the Gestapo, he would deny all knowledge of the affair. For the time being, therefore, he was on his own. Naturally the Gestapo would trace that damned special rifle to the Brandenburgers, and from their barracks in Düren, the trail would lead here to the spy-school. Hence all evidence that might incriminate him and the others had to be destroyed. But that wasn’t enough. They would have to indulge in a ‘flight to the front’, as they had once called it as young officers in another war.

  In the confusion of the new front in the West, especially that section of it allotted to the Brandenburgers, all traces could be eradicated. All of them would have to go, even Otto. No one could be left behind to be questioned by the Gestapo bloodhounds, in particular, the crazy staff. God only knew what would come out if they started blabbing!

  Once the offensive started up there in Holland, they would come back as heroes or they wouldn’t come back at all. And in the last resort, one could always desert to the enemy. One way or other, the immediate problem would be solved.

  He straightened up and stared at the waiting Maps. ‘Listen,’ he said, his voice filled with new hope and purpose, ‘you’re right. The whole place is infested with them.’

  Maps’s crazy eyes narrowed. ‘Little green swine,’ he whispered, tossing a hasty glance to left and right, as if they might be overheard, ‘With metallic ears like large antennae?’ He raised one hand, fingers outstretched and waggled it behind his ear.

  The Count swallowed. ‘Yes, that’s them.’

  ‘I knew you’d come to my way of thinking in the end, Meadow!’ Maps said triumphantly. ‘When do I start burning them?’ He lifted the hissing blow-torch and started to regulate the control.

  ‘No time for that,’ the Count snapped. ‘Besides there are too many of them. No friend, radical situations require radical solutions. Blow … ’

  ‘Yes,’ Maps hung open-mouthed on his every word. ‘Yes … yes?’

  ‘Blow the whole place up! Raze it to the ground! Leave no stone standing!’ the Count cried dramatically. ‘We must eradicate the evil green swine – once and for all!’ Spontaneously an exuberant Maps burst into ‘Deutschland uber alles!’

  Thus as that strange motley crowd of Brandenburgers and mad men from the Abwehr left their remote fastness for the last time, a singing Maps blew up building after building, crying after every fresh explosion, ‘How do you like that, you filthy green swine?’

  But in the trucks filing slowly down the narrow country roads northwards towards the Dutch frontier, there was no singing.

  Instead the men slumped in gloomy reverie, their eyes closed, all energy and enthusiasm sped as quickly as they had come, each man preoccupied with his own pessimistic thoughts, even the craziest of them. All were abruptly sobered by the terrible knowledge that Mars had summoned them at last.

  They were going to war. How many of them would escape?

  BOOK 3: OTTO BECOMES A HERO

  ‘He, the trained spy, had walked into the trap. For a bogus guide, seduced with the old tricks!’

  W. H. Auden

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘Gentlemen,’ the Count announced in that new sharp, clipped military style of his, ‘the situation is serious but not impossible.’

  There was a murmur of agreement from the assembled spy-school staff, grouped around him in the gloomy gothic hall of the border castle which the Count had high-handedly requisitioned the previous day ‘in the name of the Wehrmacht’.

  Now that they all knew ‘X-hour’ would take place on the night of 9-10 May, they wore uniforms complete with steel helmet. They were festooned with pistols, spare ammunition clips, smoke grenades and stick-bombs. Even Otto had decided it was safer to wear a helmet, for he reasoned that if he had to go into action with the idiots of the spy-school, it might save him from a bullet in the head from his own side.

  Octavio Hirsch was the only exception. His head bore what appeared to be a khaki solar topee, decorated with the feather-bush of the Bersaglieri that drooped down the side of his face and onto his skinny right shoulder so that it looked as if he had a multi-coloured, if somewhat scraggy, parrot roosting there.

  ‘It will not be easy, gentlemen,’ the Count continued, marching side-on to the assembled staff to let them appreciate his classic profile. ‘But then we of the Abwehr have never wanted it that way.’

  ‘Hear, hear,’ they agreed solemnly, and the Count gave them one of his new martial stares and tried to forget the tight corset which gave him the requisite narrow waist that went with the elegant cavalry officer’s uniform he now wore.

  ‘Our task?’ He answered his own question. ‘The capture of the bridges across the Meuse-Waal Canal at Gennep and Heuem … In addition, the three Maastricht bridges. Clear?’ he barked.

  ‘Klar, Herr Oberst,’ they replied dutifully.

  Otto shook his head in mock wonder. Overnight the spy-school cretins had taken to playing soldiers, as if it were all a great game. The great hall they stood in was covered with portraits of military commanders and epic battles from Germany's past. Those were real warriors, Otto thought. God knows what this lot will be like when the real firing starts!

  ‘Naturally, all five bridges are defended by Dutch infantry. There will be barbed wire and probably mines too. And we cannot expect the Dutch to stand by tamely while we capture their bridges, what?’ He beamed at them in a brisk military manner.

  There were several chuckles and Gertie said, ‘Not on, sir.’

  ‘Of course they will make an attempt to defend them, and failing that, they will blow them up. However,’ he tapped the side of his long nose and winked solemnly at them, ‘we of the Abwehr are not in intelligence for nothing. Brain has always triumphed over brute force, has it not, gentlemen?’

  There was a rumble of agreement but Brass Eggs, the homosexual unarmed combat expert, looked disappointed, as if he had half-expected to tackle the enemy bare-handed, grabbing from testicle to testicle to knock out the defenders.

  ‘You have all enjoyed a classical education, gentlemen,’ the Count continued, ‘and know the tale of the Trojan Horse.’

  ‘Isn’t that the name of a brand of Turkish fag?’ Otto said, trying to bring this bunch of fools and cretins back down to earth.

  The Count ignored him, as did the others. Now they were hanging on the aristocrat’s words and Otto could see that he and they were really enjoying themselves. ‘So we have created a little Trojan Horse of our own,’ the Count went on. He nodded to Gertie. ‘Major Haase, bitte.’

  Haase swung round smartly and marched to the big oaken door. He opened it with difficulty. There was the sudden sound of marching feet and Haase intoned the cadence solemnly in Dutch ‘een, twi, drier,’ as the South Africans stamped into the big hall, each man dressed in a green Dutch Army uniform, complete with puttees, and started to mark time noisily in front of the astonished staff with what looked like black ink dripping down from their helmets onto their martially set faces.

  ‘Dank u weir,’ the Count said in Dutch, his brow furrowed against the racket the heavy ammunition boots made on the stone floor, and then in German, ‘Please, would you stop it. My head!’ He touched his bandaged head under the rakishly tilted cavalry officer’s cap tenderly.

  The South Africans stumbled to a ragged halt and stood there at attention, obviously embarrassed by the black drops which dripped persistently from their helmets.

  ‘It’s the helmets,’ the Count explained. ‘Our agents stole the uniforms, the boots, even the puttees, everything. The only thing they forgot were the helmets. Our workshops had to make them of plywood, but obviously the dye isn’t what it should be. That rain outside has had its effect.’ He smiled winningly. ‘No matter. Our beloved Führer has promised us good weather, with sunshine, for X-hour – and our Führer is never wrong.’

  ‘Hear, hear!’ they cried.

  It dawned on Otto why he had been assigned to s
teal the Belgian uniforms the year before. The Abwehr had intended all along to capture the border in Holland and Belgium by subterfuge and not force. The Count’s next words confirmed his sudden realisation.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he announced, one hand outstretched towards the embarrassed South Africans with an expansive gesture like a clothes salesman displaying the latest fashions, ‘these pseudo-Dutchmen are going to be our Trojan Horse!’

  There was a burst of delighted clapping. Maps' mouth hung open in a docile happiness – but then it had been like that ever since he had blown up the spy school.

  Swiftly and confidently, his fear and frustration at the failure of the assassination attempt forgotten now, delighted in his new role as a leader of men, the Count outlined his plan, covering in some detail each of the officers’ present place in it. Crazy men that they were, they beamed when it came to each of their turns. They squared their shoulders martially and stared hard-eyed and fierce at some distant horizon, significantly further away than the painting-festooned ancient stone castle walls that surrounded them.

  Then it was the turn of Octavio Hirsch and Otto to hear their orders.

  For a few moments Otto was struck speechless by the sheer improbability of the Count’s intentions, then finally he found his voice and blurted out, ‘But I’m a shitting civilian, Meadow! And that little spaghetti-eater,’ he indicated a proud Hirsch with a shaking finger, ‘is so cracked in the upper storey, he doesn’t know enough to come out of the shitting rain!’

  ‘Corragio, Otto!’ Hirsch cried boldly. ‘We can only die once!’

  ‘Oh shut up, you stupid Italian fart!’ Otto cried, beside himself with rage and frustration.

  The Count strode forward and laid a fatherly hand on the younger man’s shaking shoulder. ‘Keep your nerve, my boy,’ he said, face set in its new heroic, leader-of-men mould. ‘I know well the strain of going over the top for the first time. My God, do I not! It is understandable. But it is a fear that we all have and we all overcome.’ There was a murmur of agreement from the rest and Brass Eggs started making fierce little milking movements with both hands, as if he could already visualise himself ripping off Dutch testicles.