Five Past Midnight

by James Thayer

  Then Kahr heard the golden voice, the remarkable tones that had once lifted Germany. "And, Keitel, you tell him it must be done. He must wheel around. There can be no other course of action."

  The general half-turned, and answered, "Of course, my Führer."

  Kahr gave the conference room the swiftest of glances. The leader was bent over a map table. He was wearing the pearl-gray tunic with the olive shirt and black trousers that he always wore in the bunker. On his left breast were his golden Party badge and the Iron Cross won in the Great War. Then General Jodl stepped around the table, and Sergeant Kahr's view of the leader was blocked, and Kahr knew it best to quickly move on anyway.

  He walked straight ahead. Lockers were to one side, where Foreign Minister Ribbentrop was conferring with an SS general Kahr did not recognize, Ribbentrop fidgeted with a tunic pocket that contained a package of cigarettes, and he politely herded the general toward the door, apparently anxious to get outside for a cigarette. Smoking was forbidden in the bunker. Even matches were prohibited, some said for security purposes but most believed their banning was an extension of the Führer's loathing of cigarette smoke. Huddling at the rear of the corridor were the Luftwaffe's Chief of Staff General Koller, Major General Walter Buhle, and Hitler's adjutant, General Burgdorf. Aides to these officers— young men, eager and efficient, fairly panting—lined the wall opposite the lockers, waiting. The corridor was crowded.

  Kahr glanced at his watch, wondering if he had time to visit the galley, which was through the door at the far end of the hall, then up the stairs to a second group of rooms, which included the servants' rooms, the communal mess, the pantry and galley. One of the cooks was sweet on Kahr, and would slip him pastry or a plate of veal. She liked to pretend the extra rations were her surreptitious gift to Sergeant Kahr, and she would make a production of looking over her shoulders to insure no one was looking as she passed the food to him, but in truth no one be- lowground cared that Kahr often carried extra food from the kitchen to his post in the ventilation room. The SS guard at the door to the stairway would glance at the food and say nothing. Kahr's wristwatch indicated he had better forgo visiting the cook this day.

  The sergeant had noticed a stratification in the bunker's society. Those who spent most of their time belowground—the Führer's cooks and secretaries and waiter, his personal aide and bodyguard SS-Colonel Günsche, his valet Heinz Linge, Martin Bormann, the blond woman with the chirpy Bavarian accent Kahr had heard called Eva, the SS guards at the bunker's entrances, and a few others, including Kahr and the other technicians who ran the ventilation system and generators and telephone banks—were treated as family by the Führer. He listened to their problems and gave them advice, sometimes scolding, often encouraging. When one of his secretaries, Trudi Reymann, weepingly reported that her fiance hadjilted her, Hitler sat beside her for half an hour, patting her hand and cooing softly. When his waiter, Walter Gademann, broke his wrist in a fall, Hitler stood by the operating table in the bunker's surgery, chatting to Gademann to distract him from the pain as Dr. Morrel set the bone and applied a cast. And a month ago Kahr had been promoted from staff sergeant to master sergeant, and was astonished to find the Führer's signature, rather than the signature of Kahr's captain, on the order of promotion.

  The second level of bunker society were those who visited the complex often, both the military men whose duty brought them underground and the sycophants who had somehow gained both the Führer's favor and valid passes. The former included Keitel and Jodl, Generals Krebs and Guderian, Admiral Doenitz, and Ministers Goebbels and Speer. The latter included General Hermann Fegelein, the SS liaison who was married to Eva Braun's sister, and who did little more than gossip with anyone he could slow long enough to catch an ear. These visitors were not considered family by the Führer, and were handled with less patience and less solicitude.

  Battlefield commanders — Manteuffel and Busse and many others — arrived at irregular intervals, mud on their boots, uniforms often torn, faces haggard, anxious to report and get away from this place Often as not, they would be summarily promoted or transferred or dismissed, and they rarely knew their fate when they arrived In their demeanor and haste, these generals brought shocking reality into the bunker, where eight-foot-thick concrete walls muffled both bombs and unpleasant reality. The contempt felt for those safely ensconced below- ground was visible on every battlefield commander's face, and those in Führerbunker society were just as relieved to see them go as the commanders were to go. These front-liners were certainly not members of the underground family.

  This bunker had been built just the year before, but had not been completed. Construction was halted after the place had been made habitable but before it had been made comfortable. No one knew why construction had stopped, at least no one Sergeant Kahr had spoken with. He skirted the crowd, passing the first door on his left, which was to the telephone switchboard and guards' room. Here the overhead lights were for some reason orange, giving everyone's face a malarial hue. In other rooms the light was white, almost incandescent, a light that flattened perspective and revealed blue veins beneath skin. Older rooms were dusty with new concrete, while newer rooms were damp, the concrete not fully set Some walls seeped water and were discolored by mold. A few walls were carefully painted to match furniture, but others had been left as unpainted concrete. Some rooms were as warm and humid as a hothouse, others were dry and cool. Everywhere was the soprano hum of the ventilator fans, and in some rooms this sound was supplemented by the gurgle of the toilet plumbing or the rumble of the sump pumps or the clang of exterior doors. Each underground room had its own combination of scents and colors and sounds, and there seemed to be no reason to any of it. And Ulrich Kahr liked none of it, except the ventilator's hum.

  The sergeant thought of the Führerbunker as a concrete submarine, the walls always pressing in on him. As the end of each shift neared, the place became more and more oppressive, and Kahr always emerged from the bunker gasping, eternally grateful for the sky, whether it was clouds or sun or firestorm smoke or the darkness of night. He dreaded those days that called him to sleep at his post, on a Pullman cot in his generator-ventilator room.

  He rang the buzzer of the second door on the left with that day's signal; two rings, then one, then one more. The door was a solid steel plate with a dead bolt that could be opened only from the inside. Because of the room's critical equipment, the door was kept locked at all times. A Wehrmacht sergeant pulled open the door, and Kahr entered his domain, a cubicle filled with machinery. At the far end were two diesel generators, quiet for the moment because electricity had been patched through to the bunker. Many times a day the bunker would plunge into the absolute darkness of a coal shaft. The beating heart of the Reich would be utterly still until Ulrich Kahr came to its rescue. Helped by a flashlight, Kahr would pull the cord on a gasoline starter motor, then engage the diesel generators, and within a few moments the bunker would again have light and ventilation. The generators each produced sixty kilowatts, and supplied emergency electricity for the lights, heating system, water pump, and switchboard.

  The ventilator whine was loudest in this room. Kahr asked the Wehrmacht sergeant who had admitted him, and who was now standing in front of the control panel making the final entries of his shift into the log, "Anything new?"

  Sergeant Hans Fischer lowered the notebook. "Power was out four times for a total of ninety-three minutes. The generators were up and running within two minutes each time."

  It was a boast. The diesel generators were complicated to start, and it was a nervous business because the most important people in the Reich were a few feet away in thick blackness waiting for the return of light.

  "There is still a small oil leak at the base of starter one. No better, no worse. I telephoned Erwin and he said he was on his way, but he must have been detained."

  Erwin Gockel was a Wehrmacht mechanic, and he was scheduled to look for the reason for the oil leak. In any event, the room
had a second starter engine, the spare. The room also contained yellow canaries in a wicker birdcage.

  Fischer signed out on the roster, nodded good-bye to the canaries, and left the room, still stretching the aches out of his limbs. The job involved mostly sitting on a hard chair staring at dials.

  The generators and starter engines and the fan boxes occupied much of the room, and an instrument panel took up much of the remainder. The panel — gauges and toggles and warning lights — monitored the generators and the ventilating system, some of which Kahr had designed. He had caught the Führer's attention once, when Kahr had insisted to his captain that an air-intake grate behind a jumper bush in the Chancellery garden should be raised as protection against an attack with heavier-than-air gas. Due to his experience in the Great War, Hitler feared gas. The gracious captain had mentioned Kahr in the report that had resulted in the grate being raised. Later a note of appreciation from Hitler himself had been taped to the ventilator control panel. On stationery decorated with the national eagle and a swastika, the note had read, "Sgt Kahr I appreciate your work with the grate Hitler". Kahr had often wondered if the Führer had taped it to the panel himself, perhaps having had to first search for pen and paper, then the tape, finally entering the generator room to put up the note, wondering where just the right place was so Sergeant Kahr would be sure to see it. This little scene pleased Kahr greatly, and he had replayed it endlessly in his mind.

  Kahr looked at the oil- and water-pressure gauges, making notes in the machinery logbooks attached to the panel by cords. He lifted a rag from the wall hook behind his chair and checked six dipsticks, two for each of the diesel engines and one each for the starter motors. The room was dimly lit by a single overhead bulb, and Kahr had to bend close to his work, making sure the lines of oil were up to the marks on the sticks. Then he wiped away the few drops of oil that had leaked from the starter motor. Two jerry cans of gasoline were next to a box of gas masks. A diesel fuel tank was also squeezed into the room, and Kahr twisted off its cap and checked its level with a dipstick. The tank contained only two hundred liters of diesel, a small amount due to the possibility of fire. The two or three liters that were consumed by the engines each day during the blackouts were replaced daily, through a fuel pipe with its outlet in the garden above.

  Also squeezed into the room were two metal cots with mattresses. When more than one mechanic was on duty, there was no rule against one taking a nap. And in an emergency, the generator-ventilator mechanics would quarter in this room.

  Sergeant Kahr returned the rag to the hook, then lifted a pinch of birdseed from a cloth bag and dropped it into the wood cup at the side of the cage. The canaries sidled along the perch to look at the offering, then ignored it, returning to their preening. The birds were an alarm, as they would die from gas before humans, and thereby would allow people in the bunker time to find their gas masks. Frequently, Kahr and Fischer were on duty during the same shift, and after a week of hearing Fischer say in a falsetto voice "Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler, Heil Hitler" to the canaries, Kahr told him that it was parakeets that could talk, not canaries. Not appreciating having been revealed as a moron, Fischer had been cool toward him ever since.

  Kahr lowered himself to the chair. Exhaust from the engines was piped directly outside, but the room still reeked of fuel. The Daimler company had known where these two diesel power plants were destined, and so had covered them with ornamental twists of chrome and brass, and they more closely resembled tea samovars than engines. Air flowed into the room from a grate above the rag hook, but the place was always too warm. On the wall above the panel was a diagram of the ventilation system, showing routes of the piping and the locations of the fans, filters, belowground grates and aboveground outlets and inlets, even the locations of the four cages of canaries. Switches on the panel activated dampers and gates, allowing Kahr to direct the flow of air. In the event of a gas attack he had been trained to shut off the fresh-air intakes and allow only captured air to circulate. Many of the ventilation pipes passed through this cramped room, along the ceiling and the long wall opposite the control panels. These were ribbed pipes, eighteen of them that entered the room from the walls and connected to the fan boxes. Half the pipes were painted red and half were green because they made up two separate, redundant systems. If for some reason smoke or noxious gas were to breach the red set of pipes, that set could be closed off, and the fresh air and exhaust run through the green pipes. The fans were powered by outside electricity or the generators in the room next to them. Each air pipe in Kahr's room had a hatch that could be opened so the pipe could be pumped out in the event of flooding, which had never as yet occurred, or to insert poison to kill rats, which occurred frequently. The ventilation pipes were purposely too narrow to allow even the smallest of men to crawl through them. Near the fan boxes were two air purification systems, each in metal crates the size of a desk, and each with pipes running up the wall to join the other ventilation pipes. The air purification machinery was serviced daily by an outside technician, and Kahr knew little about them, other than how to switch them on should air in the bunker be fouled with smoke or gas.

  A large red button on the panel activated the Notbremse, the emergency brake, which was to be punched only in case of fire, explosion, or assassination attempt. This button sealed all the doors and activated the sprinkler system. An identical button was located at the guard captain's station. Also in Kahr's room were emergency controls for the fire-fighting system, large valves to shut off water pipes.

  With the dipsticks checked and the canaries fed, Kahr had completed his work for the shift, until the lights went out and he had to bring the generators to life. And with nothing to do, his thoughts invariably returned to his lost sons and his one hope, the return of his boy Max. Kahr had avoided religion all his life, until the death of his second son, and now had turned to it with fervor. Perhaps if he loaded God with prayers, much like loading artillery shells onto the bed of a transport truck, God would allow a small mercy. Kahr did not know theology, but suspected the sheer number of his prayers would not be overlooked. God would not overlook Ulrich Kahr's thousandth plea, or his ten-thousandth. Kahr closed his eyes and whispered a new prayer, softly, hardly audible under the sough coming from the air grate and the ventilator fans' whine. Even soft prayers were all right, Kahr figured, because God was not deaf.

  The signal came from the buzzer above his desk. Two rings, then one, then another. Kahr was puzzled. Few people visited the generator room, because of the noise. He threw the bolt and opened the heavy door.

  "Sergeant Kahr," the visitor said.

  The voice, the golden voice. Kahr stepped away from the door so quickly that his chair spilled backward against the gas-mask crate, and the startled canaries chirruped and frantically flitted around their cage.

  Kahr straightened his backbone, slapped his arms against his sides, thrust his chin up and sucked his belly in.

  "Sergeant Kahr, we are a family here belowground," Adolf Hitler said, entering the room slowly, more a shuffle than a walk.

  "Yes, my leader." Kahr fought for breath. Most Germans, even high-ranking officers, suffered an inability to breathe while being addressed by their leader, so powerful was his effect.

  "I have tried to take some of the burdens off my family, especially now that we must live down in this terrible place."

  "Yes, my leader."

  Even though Kahr worked within two dozen meters of the Führer almost every day, he seldom more than glimpsed the man, usually through a door or between several generals, sometimes partly hidden behind his dog as Hitler kneeled to pet it. So Kahr's image of Hitler had remained fixed, the glowing giant on the posters. Now Kahr was startled at Hitler's rapid decline. The Führer's pale blue eyes — his one distinctive feature — were bloodshot, the pupils filmy. Hitler's face was bloated and the skin was chalky and yellow. The bags under his eyes, which Hitler blamed on mustard gas in the trenches, were purple and puffy. Deep lines ran from his new
ly pulpy nose to the corners of his mouth. His hair had turned gray within just the past two months, not a dignified silver but a drab mouse gray. Hitler's left arm was palsied and useless, and he gripped it with his right hand to prevent it from shaking. The contrast between Hitler and his SS guards, chosen for their health and beauty, had become appalling.

  But, still and ever, the voice. "I cannot let my intimates suffer alone."

  On his nose were the nickel-rimmed spectacles that most Germans knew nothing about. He brought up a sheet of paper to his eyes, and then Ulrich Kahr knew the reason for the visit.

  The sergeant groaned lowly and swayed. Only by replanting a foot could he stay upright.

  Hitler said in a tender voice, "Your son, Max, has been lost near Stettin, on the Oder."

  "Lost?" Kahr said in a fogged voice. His face was suddenly flushed, and he was dizzy.

  "His commanding officer writes that Max did not come back from patrol. He is presumed dead. The Bolsheviks are not taking prisoners. I thought it better that I inform you, rather than you hearing this news from someone else."

  Kahr blindly reached for his desk. His legs were suddenly unable to support him. Hitler stepped into the small room to help the sergeant into the chair, not much help, with only one hand.

  Then Hitler put his good hand on Kahr's shoulder. "I am very sorry," he said, bending forward so as to gaze into the sergeant's watering eyes. "But at least you know that his loss was for the Fatherland."