A clean shot would spatter blood and brain over the lectern. Hitler would slump sideways, arms flailing instinctively for the lectern, and then fall to the floor. Death would be instant.
Macrae began to squeeze the trigger slowly, remembering the lesson that was drummed into every sniper: Rush your shot and lose your target. He felt the trigger stiffening against his forefinger. He shifted the aim slightly as Hitler moved a pace sideways, waving his arms, working himself into the paroxysm of oratorical triumphalism that characterised all his speeches.
The scream, the blow on his head and the whip-crack of the rifle shot came together with such force and shock that at first he thought he had somehow fallen from the balcony.
He was on his knees, the gun still in his hands, desperately scrambling to his feet. She was screaming obscenities at him. Primrose. She was standing over him, her red-lipsticked mouth opening like a bleeding wound, shouting terrible words he could not understand. She was kicking him, lashing out with her feet so furiously that her shoes flew off and over the balcony. She was swinging wild punches that pounded on his chest as he tried to get up. He felt dizzy and sick as he forced himself up, reached for the rifle and swung the butt into her face, hearing the thud as it connected.
She fell back and he saw the spurt of blood from her mouth. She was lying there, her hands reaching for her mouth, dabbing at the blood, looking at it and still shouting at him. Had he fired the shot? He pulled back the bolt and a spent cartridge case flew out.
He stepped back onto the balcony, raised the rifle and looked through the sights. Hitler was still there on the reviewing stand, his right arm rising and falling. The shot had gone wide or high. No one had heard it. Behind him, Primrose was clambering to her feet, blood on her dress and face. He swung round and pointed the rifle at her.
It would be easy. An accident while he was cleaning the weapon. No one had heard the first shot; why should anyone hear the second? She had stopped screaming. She was talking quickly, taking huge deep breaths. He had been the only one missing at the parade. People had asked where he was. Then she had suddenly realised why. She had known what he planned to do. And she had come back to stop him, stop an act of insanity that would have had them both hanging from hooks in a Gestapo cellar, their lives slowly tortured out of them with cattle prods.
“They would have killed us all, don’t you see? Every man, woman and child in the embassy.”
Fury robbed him of words. For a fraction of a moment, he wanted to tear her dress off and throw her body over the balcony. Blood was still coming from her mouth. She began to cry, sobbing violently. She walked unsteadily backwards, still looking at him, and collapsed on a sofa. He threw the rifle to one side and sat beside her, his arm around her, holding her tightly, seeing the blood seep into his shirt and trousers.
26
Hitler’s birthday parade and the speech he made that afternoon dominated the British papers the next day. The coverage led on the awesome display of firepower and new weaponry on show. There were colourful sidebar stories about the Nazi leadership gathered behind the Führer on the reviewing stand, each trying to outdo each other with medals, ribbons and other insignia.
There were also lengthy analyses of Hitler’s speech, which amounted to a brutal warning to the Western powers – meaning Britain, France and Holland – not to meddle in eastern Europe. Newsreels of the display that afternoon played in cinemas around the world, to emphasise the message.
Sara Sternschein cut out every story in The Times about the events in Germany and pasted them into a scrapbook, which she kept under her bed in her lodgings in a London suburb. She read the paper from cover to cover every day. It was part of her plan to understand the country that had offered her refuge, and to become English. One day she would show her son or daughter, whichever the baby was to be, the cowardice and complacency of civilised nations like Britain when faced with such barbarism.
The Times, which had been her guide and mentor since arriving in London four months earlier, almost seemed to sanction the Nazi land grab in Europe. Again and again, the leading articles in that newspaper argued that Hitler was no more than a nationalist leader with a legitimate desire to return Germany to its former status as a major power in central Europe. As for the Jews, The Times, like every other paper in Britain, scarcely mentioned their plight.
She didn’t mind; she had cause to be very grateful. When the long conversations in that room had ended and she had told them everything about the Salon and its customers, they had asked her what she wanted to do. She had said she would like to train as a teacher.
They suggested that she might work in a unit translating German documents and tape recordings of broadcasts. She thanked them but declined. Her mind was made up. She wanted to be a teacher, to make a life and a contribution to the country that had saved her life.
It was Halliday, flitting in and out of London from Berlin, who had helped her. He was always there when she needed him. It seemed that he had never stopped following her from that time he saw her at the Ostbahnhof.
He told her he had been to school in a leafy suburb of London, a famous place that had once produced the well-known writer P. G. Wodehouse. He had made enquiries and there was a position for an assistant helping the modern languages teacher. She would be required to hold conversational classes in German with the boys and help the marking of written work. He would find her a room in the area, he said; it was not far from central London.
She had told him then what she should have told him before. She would need more than one room. He had not understood at first, and then looked at her and became embarrassed. When, he had asked.
“I am due in five months,” she said.
She saw that he was trying to work it out. She could tell him the exact date. It was near midnight in the Tiergarten two weeks before Christmas. They had not even taken their clothes off, not properly anyway. Brandy and the warmth of lust had prompted what she thought would be a last meeting on a freezing night in the Tiergarten. Macrae had given her a Christmas present that night – the amethyst necklace. She had hardly had time to look at it before they parted but now she wore it all the time, the violet translucent stones a reminder of a time and place she could not forget.
It was at school one morning in the tea break that her usual cover-to-cover reading of The Times took her to a page listing the service appointments. This was tucked away behind the obituaries and before the weather news. The words made her sit back and grasp her cup of milky tea more tightly. Under “Recent Appointments” she read:
Colonel Noel Macrae has been appointed Defence Attaché representing His Majesty’s Government in Portuguese East Africa. Colonel and Mrs Macrae will take up their appointment in Lourenço Marques with immediate effect.
She looked out of the window of the common room. Halliday was walking across the gravelled car park, the same shambolic figure who had walked into her life in the station café that afternoon before Christmas.
In the months since, he had become a friend, the only friend she had in London really. The other teachers at the school were nice, kind people, but they led quiet family lives in small houses with washing lines in the back garden, a couple of kids and a dog or a cat. On Fridays they would invite each other to dinner parties and on Sundays there would be a family roast, with uncles and aunts invited for company. A young Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany did not fit into this suburban world.
She didn’t mind. Halliday came to Dulwich on the train almost every week “just to make sure you’re not missing Berlin”, which was his little joke. Strangely, she did miss Berlin. The excitement, the danger, the sense of a whole continent breaking up like an ice floe beneath her feet – these were unforgettable moments that had turned every minute of life into a razor-sharp memory.
At their weekly suppers at a local pub she would bombard him with questions. First and always there was Joseph. Each time the answer was the same. Her twin was almost certainly dead. There was no definite inf
ormation, but they would have killed him after her escape. She accepted that truth and was glad, because she instinctively knew now that it was true. His suffering was over.
She learnt that no mention had ever been made of Bonner’s murder. The Gestapo had removed all records of his service and told enquiring callers that he had gone abroad for health reasons. Everyone who worked in the Salon, including the cleaners and the kitchen staff, had been arrested and sent to the camps. Heydrich had ordered the Salon to be reopened and the place was back in business with new girls and a new madam. Kitty Schmidt had vanished and was rumoured to have gone to Portugal.
She had not asked him about Macrae, nor told him of their nights in the Tiergarten. Halliday probably knew anyway. He seemed to know everything. She thought one day he might come back, the man who had given her not just his love, but her life.
Halliday had almost reached the front door and waved to her through the window. She was crying now and waved back through her tears. She was going to have a boy, she was sure of that, a child made of love, close to the midnight hour, in Berlin.
Historical Note
This book is a work of fiction based closely on the events in Berlin during the crucial months of 1938–39. Several of the characters who shaped those events appear in the narrative very much as they did in history. After their stories end in this novel, I think it only fair to let the reader know what happened to them in real life. I should add that as I have researched that period in Berlin carefully, my fictional characters very much reflect the lives of those who lived and died in that traumatic time.
Reinhard Heydrich was badly wounded in an assassination attempt in Prague on 27 May 1942 and died of his wounds a week later. He was given a state funeral in Berlin. Hitler ordered reprisals for the killing. The entire population of the village of Lidice, which was close to the scene of the assassination attempt, was massacred by SS troops or murdered later in concentration camps. Approximately eight hundred men, women and children died in the atrocity. Many thousands more civilians in the area were killed in follow-up operations by SS death squads.
Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin, returned to England at the outbreak of war in 1939. His request for a further diplomatic posting was turned down. He wrote a book entitled Failure of a Mission and died of cancer in 1942, aged sixty.
Sir Neville Chamberlain resigned as prime minister in May 1940, to be replaced by Winston Churchill. He died of cancer in November that year.
Sir Stewart Menzies, who was chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service at the time of these events, remained as Winston Churchill’s spymaster during World War Two. He retired in 1952 and died in 1968.
Lord Hore-Belisha, who was secretary of state for war from 1937 to 1940, refused further office after being sacked by Neville Chamberlain. He died in 1957.
Kitty Schmidt, the madam of the Salon, survived the war and died in Germany in 1954.
William L. Shirer wrote an award-winning account of the Nazi period, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and became a well-known author and broadcast journalist after the war. He died in 1993.
Colonel (later General) Mason-Macfarlane was the British military attaché in Berlin from 1938 to 1939, and he did indeed plan the assassination of Hitler from the balcony of his apartment. In March 1939 he put the plan to Neville Chamberlain’s government in London, where it was turned down after consideration at a senior level. Shortly afterwards Mason-Macfarlane was ordered back from Berlin and “promoted” to brigadier at a Royal Artillery base. He spent the war as Governor of Gibraltar and to the surprise of his friends won a Labour seat in the general election in 1945. He died in 1953 aged sixty-three.
Acknowledgements
There is a vast library of works covering the drift to war in the 1930s and the failure of the Western democracies to appreciate the true nature of Hitler’s Third Reich. I list only those that were especially helpful to me: Failure of a Mission by Sir Nevile Henderson (Hodder and Stoughton, 1940); The Chamberlain Cabinet by Ian Colvin (Gollancz, 1971); Hitler, vols I and II, by Ian Kershaw (Penguin Press, 2000); The Third Reich in Power by Richard J. Evans (Penguin, 2006); This is Berlin by William L. Shirer (Hutchinson, 1999); Hitler by Norman Stone (Hodder and Stoughton, 1980); Evil Genius: The Story of Joseph Goebbels by Erich Ebermayer and Hans-Otto Meissner (Allan Wingate, 1953); The Drift to War by Richard Lamb (W. H. Allen, 1989); The Nemesis of Power by Sir John Wheeler-Bennett (Palgrave, 2005); A Social History of the Third Reich by Richard Grunberger (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971); Hitler’s Hangman by Robert Gerwarth (Yale, 2011); The History of the German Resistance 1933–45 by Peter Hoffmann, translated by Richard Barry (MIT Press, 1979); The Gestapo: Power and Terror in the Third Reich by Carsten Dams and Michael Stolle, translated by Charlotte Ryland (Oxford University Press, 2014).
I wish to thank first my publishers, Thomas Dunne in the US and Peter Mayer in the UK, for their support and faith in this book. In New York, Peter Joseph proved a fine editor and ally, as did Andrew Lockett in London. In New York I also benefited from the forensic attention to the text of Melanie Fried. In Berlin, I was greatly helped by the research into the geography of the city and the Mecklenburg district of Janet Anderson and Oliver Briese. Gavin Stamp was kind enough to unearth maps from the 1938 edition of Baedeker’s guide to Berlin. My brother, Stephen MacManus, helped find long-out-of-print books relating to the period in the London Library. My sister-in-law, Susanne MacManus, who was born and raised in Vienna, helped me understand what that city looked like in 1938.
To Mrs Deborah Keegan I owe thanks for helping me achieve some sort of balance between being an author and a part-time media executive. I am also grateful, as ever, to Sophie Hicks, my then agent, for steering this book into print, and to Mrs Kate Kee for her invaluable comments on the text.
ALSO BY JAMES MACMANUS
Ocean Devil
The Language of the Sea
Black Venus
Sleep In Peace Tonight
About the Author
JAMES MACMANUS is the managing director of the Times Literary Supplement. He is the author of Black Venus, The Language of the Sea and Ocean Devil, which was made into a film starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers. He lives in London. You can sign up for author updates here.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Map
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Historical Note
Acknowledgements
Also by James MacManus
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
MIDNIGHT IN BERLIN. Copyright © 2016 by James MacManus. All rights reser
ved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunnebooks.com
www.stmartins.com
Map by Roddy Murray, © James MacManus
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: MacManus, James, author.
Title: Midnight in Berlin : a novel / James MacManus.
Description: First edition. | New York : Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015045464 | eISBN 978-1-4668-9213-2 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: World War, 1939-1945—Germany—Fiction. | Man-woman relationships—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Historical fiction. | War stories. | Love stories.
Classification: LCC PR6113.A267 M53 2016 | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015045464
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First published in the United Kingdom by Duckworth Overlook
First U.S. Edition: April 2016
Midnight in Berlin Page 36