Midnight in Berlin

by James MacManus

  A mighty roar erupted from the crowd as Hitler walked onto the podium, raising his right arm in salute to the crowd and then turning to face the dignitaries behind him, arm still raised. It was the first time Macrae had seen him in the flesh. He was smaller than he expected, but the moustache, the plump cheeks and the weak chin were true to every portrait and photograph.

  He was wearing his usual military uniform, with the Iron Cross 2nd Class pinned to the jacket. The noise rose as the first planes of the fly-past came into sight. Every head turned skywards as, four abreast, the Dorniers and Focke-Wulf bombers flew low over the stadium. Then came the tanks, towed artillery and armoured cars, rumbling immediately in front of the tiered seating.

  Macrae noted the long-barrelled 88 mm artillery weapons, which had been improved since the early version had gone into action in Spain. The British army had nothing with the range and firepower of such weapons. He squinted against the lowering sun, trying to identify the various types of tanks in the parade. The German High Command held nothing back on these occasions. Every new weapon was on display, designed to impress and intimidate foreign observers and send a message to the many enemies that Hitler had already damned in speech after speech: Czechoslovakia, Poland and the communist-Jewish conspiracy that called itself Russia.

  Around him, everyone was standing, craning to see the weaponry and openly cheering every new display of military might.

  Macrae felt faint. He reached for the hip flask that Daisy Wellesley had placed in his pocket. Daisy had also wrapped sandwiches in greaseproof paper and put them in his briefcase. He noticed other guests were similarly supplied. He didn’t feel hungry. He felt as if he had stumbled into an alternate universe, a nightmare that had slipped its moorings in the quiet waters of his unconscious mind and sailed into the real world.

  Goebbels had called the annual Nuremberg rally the High Mass of the party, and this was exactly what Macrae was witnessing: a pseudo-religious event at which worshippers were prostrating themselves before their messiah.

  It reminded him of the occasion at school when his sixth-form class, boys aged about seventeen, had been taken to see the sun rise at dawn over the Stonehenge ruins in Wiltshire. It had been the summer solstice, when the first light crept over those ancient stones at four thirty in the morning. The boys had stood shivering among a small group of people, including druids in white gowns and other eccentrics, as the first rays of the sun gently brought the stones to life.

  Their teacher told them it had been a temple raised by ancient men to their sun god, and it was for this reason that the stones were arranged in such a way as to catch the first light of the longest day. Archaeologists had established from excavations that human sacrifices were made there. In reverence to the sun, he said. And it was reasonable to assume, was it not, that such sacrifices were made on this very day of the year? The boys had drunk tea from thermos flasks and stamped cold feet round the stones, concerned less by the majesty of such early architecture and long-ago human sacrifices than by the cold, and the prospect of a bacon sandwich at a nearby roadside café.

  And here he was again at the heart of a temple raised to a new sun god, a small man, rather plumper than his photographs, who was now raising the blood flag of the Nazi Party, so called because it was said to have been dipped in the blood of those party stalwarts who had been killed in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.

  The Führer had taken this sacred relic and brushed it against other flags around him, thus sanctifying the swastika emblem with the blood of slain martyrs. The thievish mind of Goebbels had invented this ritual, stealing the idea from the Catholic Mass.

  Macrae looked across to where the military High Command were sitting. The one senior figure missing was General Beck. Macrae hoped he knew why he was not there. The Gestapo would have noted his absence but would not have been surprised. They would have known he had resigned and would not expect him to attend.

  Koenig would be there somewhere, along with the leaders of the conspiracy. They believed that Hitler would make a fatal mistake that night, propelling Germany into conflict with her eastern neighbour and pointing the way to a wider war in Europe. They believed that the Royal Navy was off the German coast in response, validating the ruthless action they would take.

  They were ready to move in the hours after Hitler had spoken, signalling the start of Case Green. The planning for the coup had been completed and the conspirators had even agreed that green was to be the new national colour, replacing the blood-red swastika flags of the Third Reich.

  The party congress reached its climax that night, eclipsing the grandeur of the daytime parades with a display of light, fire and the thunderous baying of political slogans rapturously chanted by the massed multitude. An ocean of faces gazed up in adoration at the stone plinth on which their leader would speak. The effect seemed to suck the oxygen out of the stadium, so that the vast crowd would occasionally fall silent, dazed and breathless, before people recovered themselves and returned to chanting “Ein Volk! Ein Führer!” and “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”

  Macrae had been invited to join the ambassador for the grand finale of the rally and, to his surprise, Halliday had also taken his place beside them.

  Powerful searchlights were now beamed into the night sky, eclipsing the stars and creating a cocoon of light around the stadium that was said to be visible eighty miles away. On either side of the podium, flames glittered and flickered from fire bowls, while in the stadium itself the thousands of flag-carriers now also held flaming torches, which moved in the darkness like the eyes of a vast assembly of wild creatures.

  Sir Nevile Henderson leant over and said to them both, “I spent six years in St Petersburg before the war and saw Russian ballet at its finest, but for sheer grandeur I have never seen anything to match this.”

  Macrae muttered his interest in this remark, while Halliday grunted, produced a hip flask and took a long swig by way of reply.

  Sir Nevile resumed his upright stance. That was the problem with the Secret Service, he thought. They didn’t teach their agents how to behave properly on occasions like this. In fact, it was a mystery to Sir Nevile and to most of his peers exactly what such agents were taught to do. Halliday rarely told him anything of interest.

  Several rows ahead of the diplomatic guests, Joachim Bonner turned and watched the ambassador. He saw Halliday taking his whisky direct from the flask and smiled. The Gestapo knew all about Halliday. They had watched him for two years. The man might look like a shambolic wreck, and his drinking surprised even those Gestapo agents who spent nights in the bars of Berlin watching him, but he was clever.

  They had never identified the agents he ran, men and women prepared to betray their country for English gold; nor had they broken the code by which he communicated with London. Halliday had the ability to vanish on crowded streets and lose his trackers. He was a professional, and Bonner rather admired that. He turned his attention to the man next to Halliday, a thin-lipped Englishman with a long nose. The face was familiar. He flicked through images in his mind and then remembered the file on Colonel Noel Macrae and the smudged photo that went with it.

  So that was the British military attaché. Bonner tried to remember why they held a file on him. Macrae’s service in the embassy in Vienna had been noted, as had his unguarded comments about the National Socialist government in Berlin. He had been overheard expressing his loathing for everything about the party and its leaders. Bonner remembered that the girl in the Salon, Sara, had been told to get to work on him. Had anything happened; indeed, had the girl even tried? He frowned, drew out his pocket notebook and scribbled something. He looked around.

  Heydrich was sitting bolt upright a few feet away, gazing intently at the stand where Hitler would soon make his speech. He had been asked to give his views on a draft of the Führer’s message to the world that night. This was a privilege granted to only a few of the inner circle, and the honour was all the greater because it came from the Führer himself and no
t that clubfooted buffoon Goebbels. Hitler wanted to use barely coded rhetoric to signal the strike against the eastern neighbour. Goebbels had drafted a speech accordingly.

  Then there was a change of mind. For the first time in their relationship, Heydrich had seen the Führer fretful and worried. Was he going too far, would such a speech drive the British and French to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia? He had posed the question to Heydrich directly because he knew the man he had promoted to head the Gestapo was a master of detail. Heydrich had taken care to inform himself about the military progress of the armed forces since the rearmament programme had begun in 1935.

  Hitler had sat drumming his fingers on the leather arm of the chair in his study at the Reich Chancellery, waiting for the reply. It was one of the difficulties of dealing with the chancellor that while his questions were usually framed with a long perambulation through recent European history, beginning and ending with the iniquities of the Versailles treaty, he expected short, decisive answers.

  In this case, it was impossible to give a straight answer. Heydrich knew – they all knew – that the generals were not ready for war. The Czechs had a good army and modern equipment. Their border defences were strong. They were a tough people, and behind them stood Britain and France, and maybe even Russia. A war in the autumn of 1938 was unthinkable. Yet that was exactly what Hitler appeared intent on unleashing in his speech. He wanted to give his generals the signal to begin Case Green.

  Heydrich answered the question respectfully, thanking the Führer for asking his opinion while desperately trying to think of an answer that would satisfy his leader’s evident desire for an early war. He quoted an old German proverb: “You do not have to climb a tree to pluck the ripest apple.”

  Hitler beamed. He understood this brilliant young man perfectly. He liked the way he had drawn such wisdom from somewhere deep in Germany’s rich cultural past. He had watched with admiration as Heydrich had expanded the range and operations of the secret police. He ran the Gestapo without fear, without forgiveness and without mercy.

  Heydrich was also smiling as he left the chancellor. On the spur of the moment he had simply made up the quotation. As he looked around the stadium that night, he caught Goebbels’s eye a few seats away and smiled. The propaganda chief would never have dreamt of fooling Hitler in such a fashion.

  Bonner shifted in his chair and rather wished he too had bought a hip flask like Halliday. The Führer liked taking risks and he usually judged them well: the march in the Rhineland had been a masterstroke based on the correct assessment that the French were too weak politically to react to anything but a full-scale invasion. The Austrian Anschluss was based on a similar reading of the resolve of the major European powers. No one wanted another war – and after all, Austria was German in all but name, was it not? But Case Green was a move too far.

  The Gestapo had reported mutinous talk at senior officer level, but Heydrich had dismissed it, saying soldiers and their officers always complained about everything – especially in peacetime. Bonner was not so sure. Beck had resigned, but Hitler had not dared announce the fact, fearful of reaction from his own party. Beck was popular, a regular career soldier who had won many military honours in the last war. He had agreed to keep quiet, but that might not last.

  Above all, Bonner wished to get back to Berlin. There was work to do there, files to read, intelligence to evaluate, interrogation sessions to supervise. And there was that girl Sara. He needed to see her. She had not delivered of late; something was wrong. It was her brother, of course, but he was safe enough. He thought of his own wife and two sons, Franz and Tomas, safely tucked away in that two-storey suburban home with their mother. She was a good woman, Trudi, and an excellent cook. She had made a good home for him and the boys. How old was Franz now? Eleven, and football mad. He would do better at school if he didn’t spend all his time reading about Bayern Munich in the sporting magazines. And Tomas, just nine, the quiet one, very much his mother’s pet. Bonner would be home from this political orgy – and that was how he thought of it – tomorrow night. He needed to see his boys; they kept him sane. And he needed Trudi too. But he wanted that woman in the Salon. That was the problem.

  His thoughts were broken by a roar of “Sieg Heil!” as Hitler ascended the steps to the plinth only a few feet away from him and stood at the rostrum. The searchlights that had been beamed into the night now swung down. Some were trained on the plinth, illuminating the Nazi leadership in a glaring white light, while others held the giant swastika above them in a fierce spotlight.

  Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, stepped up to the rostrum three times to introduce Hitler, but on each occasion he was forced to step back by the cheers and chants that rose in waves from the stadium.

  Finally he managed to bellow out: “Und jetzt … Unser Führer!”

  Hitler positioned himself at the rostrum, placed a sheaf of notes on the slanted lectern and waited for the noise to die down. The cheering and chanting continued until he raised his hands, commanding attention, and the crowd fell silent.

  Then came the long pause. They all knew this was the way he began, with a moment of silence while he looked out into the starlit night above him and down at the torchlights bobbing amid an ocean of faces below. Goebbels had taught him this technique, drawing on the work of American specialists in the art of public speaking.

  Goebbels had never been to America but had learnt from the work of the big advertising agencies on Madison Avenue in New York. The use of symbols and slogans, the techniques of projecting short messages on billboards that clicked with the hopes and fears in the subconscious mind, these were skills that were constantly being improved in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. Goebbels had ordered all German diplomatic and consular officials in the US to report on the evolving techniques, especially those involving speech therapists used by politicians in Washington and the big stars in Hollywood.

  He drummed into Hitler the key lesson: make them wait, make them want you, build the sense of anticipation until the audience almost begs you to begin. After that, Goebbels was fond of quoting the old Hollywood maxim that the way to grab an audience was to give them an earthquake in the first reel and then build to a climax. But Goebbels didn’t attribute the quote to its originator, the studio boss Sam Goldwyn. Goldwyn was Jewish.

  Hitler had learnt well; he knew that when he finally began it would be with words that would bind his audience and the nation to him and make them recognise what they all knew to be true, that he was their saviour. That night in Nuremberg in 1938, the German chancellor opened with lines that might have been taken from a love letter.

  “That you have found me among so many millions is the miracle of our time, and that I have found you means that together we can be sure of Germany’s future. You, the German people, can be happy that the chaos of the past is over. We now have a fixed star to guide us.”

  Bonner could see Goebbels beaming with pleasure as the words echoed over the stadium, just as he knew they would echo throughout the capitals of Europe. The propaganda chief had written the speech and made sure that every major news organisation was in Nuremberg that night to hear it. The correspondents of all the great newspapers were at a long table below the plinth, taking notes and talking into telephones. Newsreel cameras, whose footage would soon be shown in cinemas around the world, were filming the event from the front row of the crowd. They had come to hear a master orator make war on his enemies, and they were not disappointed.

  Hitler quickly set aside the romantic sentiments with which he had opened the speech. He turned to the target for that night, the enemy he intended to crush first with his oratory and then with his army. Waving clenched fists at the crowd and raising his voice in rage at the injustice and humiliation heaped on his fellow Germans across the border, he bellowed his anger at Czechoslovakia and its leader, President Beneš.

  The phrases thundered over the stadium, each building in a crescendo of hatred in which Beneš and his nation we
re pilloried as bloodthirsty tyrants persecuting a helpless German minority.

  Hitler paused for dramatic effect every few minutes, allowing the crowd to match his rhetoric with roars of “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”

  They would fall quiet again as the figure on the rostrum raised both hands, nodding his head in appreciation and looking down at his typewritten notes. Then the hoarse voice, magnified by dozens of speakers around the stadium, would fill the night again.

  Bonner could see, as did Macrae a few rows behind him, that the effect on the crowd was hypnotic. Weary after two days of festive propaganda, people were now slipping into a state of narcosis. The torchlights around them, the fierce light on the speaker and above all the simple repeated slogans that were bellowed back and forth from the speaker to the crowd seemed to have left the entire arena in a trancelike state.

  Macrae stared at Hitler’s back, watching the arms rise and fall like those of a marionette, listening to the crash as clenched fists slammed into the rostrum and seeing the silvery spray of spittle in the glare of the searchlights. He grasped an elemental truth at that moment that he had never heard mentioned before. The mass hypnosis was carefully planned, that was evident, but the man who most notably succumbed to the narcotic effect of the occasion, the man who was himself projected into a hypnotic trance, was Hitler himself. The leader of the Third German Reich had worked himself up into such a state of fury, and had so bewitched himself with his jumbled sloganeering, that he had left the real world and become a mindless creature of his own dark night.

  Macrae looked across to Sir Nevile Henderson. The ambassador sat there with a broad smile, gazing at Hitler, it seemed to Macrae, with admiration. The rest of the visiting dignitaries and the Nazi leadership looked spellbound, like children at a Christmas party when Father Christmas has appeared. Only at the far end of the seating did the row after row of military officers look less than impressed. They had heard it all before. But this night they were waiting for the coded command to begin Case Green.