Midnight in Berlin

by James MacManus

  There was a murmur from the observers and they began pressing forward, jostling for a better look. A thin pole had appeared at the top of the cage, from which dangled a rat on a short length of twine. The rat was alive and it struggled as it was slowly lowered into the cage. It was fastened to the pole with a loop. Both snakes began to raise themselves, their hoods opening. With a shake of the pole, the rat was released and dropped onto the vegetation below. The crowd gave a loud “Ahhh!”

  The rat vanished from view towards the back of the enclosure. As if by agreement, one snake remained still while the other moved fast, its silvery skin slithering swiftly through the undergrowth. The snake reappeared within seconds. The rat was struggling in its jaws. Mothers began to move their children away but they tugged back, determined to witness the final scene in the drama.

  “Feeding time at the zoo is very popular,” said a voice.

  Macrae turned to see Koenig behind him, smiling. They shook hands. It was the first time he had seen the German out of military uniform. He was dressed smartly in country clothes: a brown herringbone overcoat on top of a tweed jacket, thick corduroy trousers and boots.

  “I didn’t know you were allowed to feed live animals to these snakes.”

  “Not quite the same as the London zoo, I am sure,” said Koenig. “But this is Berlin. Shall we have coffee, and maybe something with it?”

  He reached into his pocket and drew out the top half of a silver hip flask.

  “Where are your children?”

  “They have gone off to see the lions. It’s their feeding time, too. Very efficient. If you have them at the same time, you halve the crowds.”

  They sat in a corner of the cafeteria with two cups of coffee liberally laced with cognac.

  “You wanted to see me?” said Koenig.

  “It’s been a couple of years and I thought it might be good to renew our friendship.”

  Koenig laughed. “Of course. I knew you were here, but it is difficult to get in touch. These are, how shall I say this …?”

  “Interesting times?”

  “Let’s just say times when it pays to be cautious. Anyway, good to see you. How is Primrose?”

  They talked for a while of Primrose, his children and his new job. Koenig had risen to be a full colonel on the general staff. He was proud of the promotion and it reminded Macrae of the time they had first met in Vienna four years earlier.

  It was Macrae’s first week in post in the Austrian capital as military attaché. His predecessor had left him a list of English-speaking German officers of sufficient rank and prospects to merit a good dinner at Maxim’s. The restaurant was one of the oldest in Vienna, frequented by those rich enough to afford the extravagant cost of a meal or lucky enough to work for an organisation that conferred a liberal expense account upon its executives.

  His predecessor’s list included senior officers of known conservative views in infantry or armoured regiments who were excelling at the staff college in Berlin. Such officers regularly visited the Austrian capital for staff talks. And in Vienna it was easier to approach them than in Berlin. In turn, they were more free with their views. Lieutenant Florian Koenig’s name had been top of the list. He had accepted the invitation by return post.

  It had been a memorable evening for all the wrong reasons. They had drunk cocktails at the bar and sat down at a table on which stood a bottle of Krug champagne in an ice bucket. It was a gesture of friendship, Koenig said, a gift from one fellow officer to another.

  Two tables away a scion of Austrian nobility, with monocle and scar and wearing evening dress, sat with a woman in a black low-cut dress who looked remarkably like Marlene Dietrich. Macrae found himself casting long sideways glances at her, trying to work out if she really was the famous film star.

  “You find her attractive?” said Koenig.

  “No, not my type.”

  “Yes you do, you were staring at her.”

  “Half the room’s staring at her. She looks like Marlene Dietrich, that’s why.”

  “You English are all the same, you never tell the truth. Admit it, you’d take her to bed if you could.”

  Macrae noticed that the champagne bottle was already half empty. Lieutenant Koenig was drunk.

  “But I can’t. I’m married. Let’s order.”

  “See what I mean? Hypocrisy. You know the trouble with the English? Corrupted by class and empire. You lord it over all those dusky peasants around the world and think you’re better than everybody else.”

  “Unlike the Germans, of course? Anyway, I’m not English; I’m Scottish. Shall we order?”

  It was not a good start to the evening.

  Koenig had close-cut iron-grey hair, making him look older than his thirty-nine years. He had been too young to serve in the Great War. As the only surviving son of an old Prussian family with a long tradition of military service, he had joined the shattered remnants of the German army in 1920 out of family duty and as a tribute to his two brothers who had been killed in the trenches. He regarded the army less as a career than as an obligation.

  A family estate in Mecklenburg in the north of the country provided the comforts of home life with his wife and three children while he moved from his infantry brigade based in Bavaria to the staff college in Berlin to pursue promotion. Family connections and a series of impressive exam results enabled him to attend an exchange training course at the military college of Sandhurst in England, where he learnt excellent English.

  They were on the second bottle of champagne and the main course had not arrived. The German lieutenant had become morose and Macrae wondered whether he could find an excuse to leave early.

  “You know both my brothers died in the trenches?” Koenig said this casually, as if remarking on the passing of a long-forgotten relative.

  “Yes, I did know that. I’m sorry.”

  “Second battle of the Somme. I blame the English entirely for the war.”

  “Really? I thought you Germans started it.”

  “We did. But you should have stopped us.”

  “Easier said than done.”

  “Not if you consider the power of your navy, the fact that the royal families of both countries were all kissing cousins and that the French were fast asleep as usual. If you had woken them up and made a joint diplomatic démarche there would have been no war.”

  “That would have been asking a lot.”

  “What, waking the French up?”

  They both laughed. They got drunk over dinner and afterwards Macrae allowed himself to be taken to a nightclub, where the entertainment was provided by young women who paraded around in diaphanous knickers with silver hearts on the front and the words Küss Mich stitched to the back.

  “You can touch them, you know,” said Koenig. “It’s part of the show.” He slapped a passing waitress on the backside and ordered more drinks.

  “I think it’s time for me to go home,” said Macrae, yawning.

  Koenig was too drunk to reply. He was slumped over the table, seemingly asleep, a handsome young man who would probably do well in the army but was of no use now or later to Macrae. He left.

  The next day a handwritten letter of apology was delivered to the embassy.

  Dear Colonel Macrae,

  My behaviour last night was unforgiveable. I hope you will accept my deepest apologies. I assure you that in vino there was no veritas last night. It produced rude and unacceptable remarks that were totally out of character from someone who should have known better. I trust you will allow me to take you to dinner when you are next in Berlin or I am next in Vienna.

  And that it was how it had started. Macrae tried to remember exactly when it was: eight, nine years ago? It didn’t matter. A few months later they dined again, this time in Budapest. Koenig had changed. He was quiet, reserved and very careful with his drink. He was endlessly curious about the military preparations in Britain, or rather the lack of them.

  “It is strange to me – indeed to my colleague
s – that at a time like this you appear to be disarming. Is that true, or is Perfidious Albion playing one of its tricks?”

  He had laughed. It was 1935 and the government of Stanley Baldwin in London had announced a cut in the defence budget and once again refused to countenance conscription. Meanwhile, Hitler had defied the advice of his own generals and sent three divisions into the demilitarised Rhineland, breaking the terms of the Versailles treaty.

  “You know you could have stopped us? All the French had to do was move a brigade near the border while the British sent a naval task force into the North Sea with the threat of a blockade. Hitler would have backed down.”

  “You think we made a mistake?”

  Koenig laughed. They were in a café by the river. Koenig said he preferred meeting in Budapest rather than Vienna. There were too many spies in Austria and they were all Nazis, he said.

  “Ah, you English and your sense of humour. Mistake? The mistake is that you think you know Hitler. You don’t. We do. That is our problem.”

  “We’re not alone, you know. The French have the biggest army in Europe.”

  “The French!” Koenig had almost fallen off his chair laughing.

  Primrose wanted to meet the man she called “your debauched German lieutenant”. Having heard about their first evening, she was curious to meet someone who could behave so badly and apologise so sweetly. Primrose thought she understood something of Koenig’s behaviour. He had lost two brothers in the war, just as she had lost her Richard. Grief did strange things to a person, she said.

  When Koenig was next in Vienna it was arranged they would lunch at a new fish restaurant called Esterhazy several miles out of town on the Danube. The lunch began promptly at one o’clock, but it was not until early evening, as the waiters were laying tables for dinner, that they finally left.

  Macrae had sat back and watched and listened as his wife and the German officer explored the deaths of their siblings, talking as if they were part of the same family. He had never heard Primrose talk in that way. The millions of dead in the Great War had created a bond between those who had lost loved ones in the slaughter that transcended all barriers. Denied the intimacy of shared grief, Macrae felt like a stranger at the table. At one stage, Koenig had comforted Primrose as she was recalling the last time she had seen her brother.

  “I never said goodbye properly – that’s the awful part. I never told him good luck or that I loved him or anything,” she said.

  She had begun to cry, which is when Koenig had put his arms around her. They were drinking a light Austrian wine and Macrae noticed that by four clock they had each had a bottle.

  As the lunch stretched into early evening, Macrae felt more and more like an intruder on private grief. Primrose and Koenig shared memory after memory of their lost siblings. Macrae knew that if he were to get up and silently walk away, they would hardly notice. Their conversation flowed like a river emerging from dark subterranean caves where guilt and grief were etched in crude images on rock walls. Alcohol, memories of the dead and the thin thread of desire were creating a catharsis for these two people, his wife and the German lieutenant.

  Macrae got to his feet. “I think it’s time to go home, darling,” he said.

  They were both drunk when they got back. Primrose poured more drinks, threw her arms around him and danced a slow waltz in the drawing room. He tried gently to break away but she would not let him go. She pressed herself against him. For the first time in months she wanted him to make love to her and flung herself naked on the bed, arms and legs spread wide, urging him to take her with a string of profanities that shocked and excited him. He came quickly, then fell asleep, waking later to hear her deep gasping breaths from the far side of the bed, and then silence.

  After that, Macrae and Koenig had kept in touch discreetly. The information exchanged was always political rather than tactical. Koenig helped Macrae track the manoeuvring between the German High Command and the Nazi leadership. The extent to which the Nazis and their policies were despised at a senior level was surprising. Koenig never revealed such details as the development of new weaponry. That would transgress his oath of loyalty, he said. He was not a traitor. He was a Prussian officer and a German patriot. Yet he was prepared to take elaborate precautions to arrange a meeting at the Berlin zoo that morning. He must have his reasons as well, thought Macrae.

  “I don’t really deserve my promotion,” said Koenig. “I am good at what I do and I like it, but it was my family background, the record of my brothers in the war, that really got me to full colonel.”

  “I heard. Congratulations.”

  “But you didn’t get in touch.”

  “I thought it best not to – anyway we have only just arrived.”

  “And now?”

  “I need your advice.”

  Koenig smiled. “‘Advice’?”

  “Blomberg has just got married, we hear.”

  Koenig stopped smiling. He drained his coffee and poured more cognac into the cup.

  “You’re well informed. But what advice could you want about that?”

  “Apparently the bride has a history.”

  Koenig finished the cognac, coughed, patted his chest and stood up.

  “Feeding time for the lions has finished, I think.”

  Macrae got to his feet.

  “I need to wake people up in London.”

  Koenig picked up the bill, placed some coins on the table.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  They went back into the reptile house and walked through the first gallery into a second, a smaller room. This was the insectarium, and behind glassed windows an array of beetles, spiders, cockroaches, ants, millipedes, scorpions and other arthropods were to be seen, if you looked carefully enough. The two men peered through the glass windows as if really interested in the bug life on display. Finally, Koenig turned and leant against a window. He took a zoo guide from his pocket and began to study it.

  “Don’t look round and don’t try to take notes,” he said. “Do you have a guidebook?”

  Macrae nodded and took the leaflet from his pocket.

  “Read it.”

  Macrae studied the leaflet.

  “This is what he has been waiting for,” said Koenig. “There is going to be a purge. Blomberg and Fritsch will be fired. The Führer will take their positions and become supreme commander and war minister.”

  “The army will stand for that?”

  “He’s going to remove a dozen or so generals and transfer all the senior field commanders to new posts.”

  “A reverse coup?”

  “Exactly. He’s going to get them before they get him. He is going to set up a new armed forces high command, with Keitel as his deputy. Keitel is a loyalist and his younger brother Bodewin will be made head of army personnel. That means Hitler will control the appointment and promotion of all officers.”

  “Surely he won’t get away with that?”

  “You’re dealing with a man who wants to make history. He’s clever and he has the devil’s luck. Make sure your people in London understand what this means.”

  Koenig flipped the leaflet back into his pocket, patted Macrae on the shoulder and walked away. From the next-door room Macrae heard a child’s voice say, “Daddy, where have you been?”

  Back at the embassy, Macrae found several messages from the ambassador asking for a meeting. He ignored them and took out the files on senior German military personnel.

  The notes on Wilhelm Keitel were lengthy, well documented. He began reading and soon realised why Hitler trusted him so much.

  There was a knock on his office door. Macrae looked at his watch. It was five thirty. He had been reading the file for forty minutes.

  Daisy Wellesley peered round the door. “Sir Nevile wonders whether you have received his messages?”

  “Please make my apologies and say that I would be happy to join him at six.”

  Daisy made a face. “All right,” she said. />
  Sir Nevile Henderson was displeased. He had been waiting for his military attaché for almost two hours and had received what he felt were less-than-polite brush-offs. Now the man was coming to see him at a time of day when it would be difficult not to offer him a whisky. The trouble was military attachés reported to the War Office and not the Foreign Office. It was a damned nuisance.

  The two men settled down with their whiskies – a blended Scotch, Macrae noted, not the twenty-year-old Glenlivet malt he knew the ambassador kept in his drinks cabinet.

  Macrae talked quietly for ten minutes. Sir Nevile did not like what he heard.

  “When is this going to happen?” he said.

  “By the end of the month. The arrangements are under way.”

  “And no one in the army knows?”

  “Blomberg’s misfortune to have married a woman who was once a prostitute is widely known. How Hitler plans to take advantage of this is not.”

  “Is it not a little strange that you know something as important as this and they don’t?”

  “I trust my source.”

  “Disinformation, perhaps?”

  “What would be the point? It would quickly be disproved and burn the source as far as we were concerned.”

  Sir Nevile moved from his chair and poured them both more whisky.

  “Let me sum up. Hitler is going to remove his two most senior army officers and then unleash a purge of most of his generals. He is going to transfer field commanders and declare himself supreme commander and war minister. This man Wilhelm Keitel will be the number two, in day-to-day control of the army.”

  “That’s it.”

  “What do we know about Keitel?”

  “Loyalist, brilliant war record, which means a lot to Hitler, and heavily engaged in the secret rearmament programme.”

  “Ah yes, that …,” murmured the ambassador.