The Hour of the Cat

by Peter Quinn

  Heydrich stepped into the vestibule. He spoke of how he missed playing the violin and the effect music had on his soul, the peace and comfort it brought. Erika mentioned the musical ensemble to which she belonged. They played every Sunday afternoon here, in their house. “Would you be interested?” she asked. He bowed to her. “Imagine, I came to pay my respects to an officer whom I admire and whose passions for the navy I share and find that my passion for music is shared as well!”

  He surprised everyone with his musical skill. His long slender fingers moved the bow with authority and virtuosity. Although it was obviously untrue, he insisted Erika was the better musician. He lauded Canaris’s abilities as an officer and offered heated support to the role he’d played in crushing the Red uprising at the end of the war. Gradually, his unctuous style began to grate on Canaris.

  It was Erika who called a halt to his visits. There was no formal break. When they returned from the next cruise, the Sunday performances weren’t resumed. Heydrich remained cordial and solicitous. Not long after he was commissioned, Heydrich became involved in an affair of honor and was dismissed from the navy for behaving in “a reprehensible manner.”

  Canaris lost touch with Heydrich until he re-emerged as a rising star in the new leadership. Captain Patzig invoked his name during this conference at the War Ministry, when he formally turned over the job of military intelligence chief to Canaris. “I have no skill for diplomacy,” Patzig said. “It’s hard enough keeping track of military developments in France or Russia without being tripped up by the clumsy zealotry of these Party types.”

  “Military intelligence is a difficult job under the best of circumstances,” Canaris said.

  “Thanks to God and the General Staff, it’s yours now.” Patzig smacked his lips as he drew on an empty pipe. “The higher-ups were mighty impressed to hear that Heydrich is an admirer of yours. What is it he sees in you?”

  Annoyed by Patzig’s cynical demeanor, mechanical smile, long silences interspersed with the draining noise of his vacant pipe, Canaris ignored the question.

  Patzig burped and tapped his chest with his fist. “Pardon me,” he said, “I should never have cabbage for lunch.”

  Canaris stood. “On taking over, I feel well disposed toward these youngsters. The more familiar we become with National Socialist ideas, the more, I’m convinced, we’ll discover they are truly soldierly ideas.”

  “I suppose.” Patzig shifted in his chair, leaned to the side, lifted his rear, and broke wind. “Pardon me again,” he said.

  A short while after, a lieutenant from the cryptography section, a highly competent naval officer, thin and very blonde, handsome in an adolescent, almost androgynous way, reported that he’d been visited at home by the Gestapo. He requested to see Canaris.

  “They asked if I knew someone named Otto Kerstein.” The lieutenant fidgeted in the chair, seemingly unable to find a comfortable position.

  Canaris offered him a cigarette, which he declined. “Kerstein’s a mate of yours?”

  “No. He was the director of a theater company I belonged to as a student. It was only for a single summer. Some time afterwards, he became a leader in the Workers’ Theater League. I’d lost touch with him by then. The agents informed me he’d been arrested and sent to Dachau.”

  “How’d they know of your association?”

  “They said they’d found some old letters among his papers.”

  “Did they make any accusations against you?”

  “They said Kerstein was a communist. I told them the truth. We’d never talked politics, only the theater. I didn’t know what he was. ‘Were you also unaware,’ they asked, ‘that he’s a yid and a fag?’” The lieutenant sat still and looked down at his hands.

  “Were you threatened with arrest?”

  “They said I would be summoned for a formal interrogation. Either that or perhaps we could have an ‘understanding’ and the matter be dropped.”

  “They wanted you to spy?”

  “Yes, Herr Admiral.”

  “On me?”

  “On the whole operation.”

  Canaris took out a sheet of official stationary, scratched down a paragraph and handed it to the Lieutenant. “You’ve done admirable work, and I commend you for your loyalty. An officer of such caliber should be at sea, not behind a desk. I’m reassigning you to the North Sea Squadron. Your transfer is immediate.”

  In the wake of Hitler’s decision to put Himmler in charge of the Reich’s internal security forces, Himmler elevated Reinhard Heydrich to head of the SS Security Service and Gestapo. Following a brief chance meeting with Heydrich while strolling on the Dölle-Strasse, an invitation came from him to visit his new Berlin headquarters, in the Prinz Albert Palace, around the corner from Gestapo headquarters. Canaris followed a burly SS trooper through the freshly painted barrel-vaulted halls into a large, elegant, ballroom-sized space. At one end was an immense altarlike desk; at the other, a towering gilt-edged painting of Adolf Hitler. Heydrich appeared through a door behind the desk, his boots striking the uncarpeted floor with a hard, martial click as he approached.

  “Wilhelm, welcome!” Heydrich extended his hand. His broad smile exposed his large, bone-white teeth. “Tell me, how is your dear wife?”

  “Erika is well.”

  “Tell her SS General—no, Cadet—Heydrich sends his compliments to the handsomest wife of the finest officer in the German navy!”

  “Your exaggerations are excessively generous, at least in my case.”

  Heydrich watched amusedly as Canaris gazed about. “You must think I’ve let my position go to my head. But don’t worry, this is only for ceremony. Come, see where my real work is done.”

  Canaris remembered the plan of this security complex secretly obtained by Colonel Piekenbrock indicated a honeycomb of basement cells designed so no prisoner’s screams could escape. Heydrich led the way, back through the door from which he emerged.

  The room was far smaller than the one they’d just left. The bookshelves that lined the walls were filled with handsome leather-bound volumes. Heydrich ran his fingers over the spines. “I think it’s fair to say that what you find here is a representative selection of the top scientific and legal texts on racial hygiene to be found in Germany.” He picked out a book and held it so Canaris could see the title. “Here we have Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century. Though turgid and dull in places—and the same, I suppose could be said of its author—it is overall a useful text.” He gave the cover a hard pat, which Canaris interpreted as a small symbolic blow against one of the many Nazi higher-ups contesting for the Führer’s favor, and replaced the book.

  Heydrich perched on the edge of an elegant oak writing table and gestured to a shelf almost directly at Canaris’s eye level. “There, in front of you, are translations of American classics, such as Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race and Stoddard’s Revolt Against Civilization. Next to them are specially bound volumes of Volk und Rasse, and Dr. Shulz’s treatise on the unique disease-bearing capacities of the Jew. Beneath are the official commentaries on the Sterilization Laws and farther down the original drafts of the Nuremberg Laws, along with a book of essays describing the ways in which this prophylactic legislation has halted the spread of the Jewish viremia.”

  Heydrich handed a slim volume to Canaris. The title was tooled in gold letters on the leather cover: Biology and the Survival of the Volk, by Professor Hans Luxemburger. “Look at the pictures on the back,” Heydrich said. Canaris flipped through pages of infants with swollen heads, Mongoloid children, old drooling men in smocks, mouths agape, women with shaved heads and blank, expressionless eyes.

  “There’s the future, Wilhelm,” Heydrich said. “Unless we have the intelligence and will to do something about it. The Führer has stated that if Germany were to have a million children a year and do away with the weakest 700,000, we would finally be assured of permanent racial superiority. Perhaps that sounds harsh. But does one show pity to the s
mallpox bacillus? Believe me, the day will come when we must face our moral duty to exterminate whatever threatens the future of our people.”

  He put the book back on the shelf, took another from his desk and stuck it beneath his arm. “I’ve ordered tea served in the garden. It’s too lovely a day to stay cooped up inside.” They crossed the ceremonial office and went out into the Palace gardens, an exquisitely tended courtyard filled with flowers and shrubs. A table was set with tea and cakes. Heydrich sat beside a bush of dark-red roses. An SS orderly brought a chair for Canaris, placing it directly in the sun.

  The orderly poured their tea. Heydrich put the book on the table, patted Canaris’s knee, and leaned back. “I so much look forward to our working closely.”

  Canaris took a gulp of tea. “We are in charge of different jurisdictions. Mine is foreign intelligence, yours domestic security.”

  “Of course. But we’ve common concerns.”

  “Some of your underlings seem to have trouble grasping that fact. They’ve attempted to spy on my operations, as though we were the enemy.”

  “The young man in the cryptography section wasn’t exactly a wise choice for such a sensitive position. I think you’d be shocked if I showed you the file we have on him.”

  “His position and fate are a matter of concern for my office, not yours.”

  “I suppose you’re aware, then, that he’s resigned his commission and gone ashore in Copenhagen?” Heydrich bit into a cake.

  “I’m sure the news will reach me through the proper channels.” The sun beat down hard. Canaris raised a hand to shield his eyes.

  Heydrich finished his cake. Right leg crossed on the fulcrum of the other knee, he sat back and rocked a perfectly polished boot back and forth. “You know the admiration I’ve always had for you. That’s why I invited you here. Two old shipmates like ourselves should be able to act together in the best interests of the Führer and the Reich.” The boot slowed into a steady to-and-fro, as if to the beat of a march.

  “The interests of the nation must come first, of course.” The sunlight was so intense Canaris found it hard to make out Heydrich’s face. “Would you mind if I moved my chair?” he asked.

  Heydrich indicated to the orderly to place the chair next to his, out of the sun. He unfolded his legs and leaned toward Canaris. “We’re in the twilight struggle for the survival of our race. What we require are those willing to rid Germany of everything that threatens its future. We must not only march in the same step, but our hearts must beat to the same rhythm. Do you agree?”

  The intensity of the inquisitor’s stare made Canaris uneasy. Heydrich was searching his eyes. For what? Heydrich took the book from the table beside him and put it in his lap. “When you arrived earlier I was reading Die Rassenhygiene. It is a classic in the field of eugenics, summarizing the work of giants like Ernst Haeckel, Eugene Fischer, August Weismann, Alfred Plötz, and Karl Binding. It was written in 1921 by Josef von Funke, a young doctor who marched with the Führer in Munich in ’23, and is more relevant now than when written. It has proved to be a work of prophecy. Here, listen to one small passage and see if you don’t infer the same urgency and realism as in Mein Kampf.”

  He opened the book and held it at arms length, adjusting the distance until he could read it without the glasses he so obviously needed: “‘Unless we are willing to cleanse ourselves of everything weak, crippled, infected, and alien, that is, to remove the crushing burdens of hereditary and racial degeneracy which threaten to overwhelm us, the destruction of our race is assured. What we must enter upon is a struggle more medical than political, directed not just at a change in government but at a transformation of sentiment. This is not work for the faint of heart or the weak of will. As always in nature, strength is the highest wisdom. Kindness to the weak is subversion of the fit. Compassion toward the unfit is treason to the race. Victory belongs to the merciless.’”

  Snapping the book shut, Heydrich put it back on the table. His fingers played on the cover. The fingers of a virtuoso. “The words of a medical doctor, but a doctor with the heart of a German poet.”

  “Medicine has never held much interest for me.”

  “Come, my friend, why do you think our Führer ended the thuggery of the Brown Shirts, if not so that the principles of racial therapy could be carried out in an orderly fashion? Today, we have a eugenic dossier on every single member of the SS tracing his ancestry back to 1800, 1750 in the case of officers. We are the first organization in Germany to achieve racial purity, to be utterly and demonstrably Jew free. This is the reason we’ve gone from a band of bodyguards into the vanguard of the nation’s destiny!

  “You must know how important this is to the Führer and to SS Reichsführer Himmler!”

  “I suppose I must.” A file locked away in Canaris’s desk contained confidential reports on Himmler’s strange ceremonies at Wewelsburg Castle, he and his SS acolytes walking around with wreaths of oak leaves around their heads, muttering mystic incantations to ancient Nordic gods. Oster had glanced through the file. “They have created something entirely new,” he laughed, “Teutonic voodoo!” He threw it aside. Of more interest to him were the other, thicker files containing the data on the steady increase in armaments and combat training for the SS, a multiplication of resources that was turning Hitler’s bodyguard into the nucleus of a new army.

  “Wilhelm, we must put aside old rules, old notions of hierarchy and divisional jurisdictions, old moralities, in the service of our new Germany. Sometimes, as you know, our old navy comrades can be particularly stubborn. I’m sure I can count on you to intervene where necessary?”

  “That depends.”

  “Depends?” Heydrich’s question was laced with a harsh, skeptical tone. “On what?”

  “On the specifics of each case. Admiral Dönitz, for example, has been adamant about not using his U-boats for anything but purely military purposes, especially since we are at peace and could risk embarrassment as well as the loss of advanced equipment. He makes a convincing argument.”

  “Specifics!” Heydrich rose from his chair. The orderly came to his side. He handed him the book. “As long as we agree on the destiny of the Reich and the German Volk, the specifics, as you call them, will take care of themselves.” He bowed slightly and offered Canaris his hand. “Meanwhile, we mustn’t spend all afternoon chatting and eating cake. There’s much work to be done.”

  Tired but unable to sleep, Canaris went to the window and pushed back the curtains. Oster was already acting as if a conspiracy were in motion. But getting members of the officer corps to move from murmured disgruntlement to outright treason went against its tradition, training, and history.

  He wasn’t long at skimming through the weekly naval surveillance survey of the British fleet when Oster returned, a folder beneath his arm which he plopped on Canaris’s desk. “For your reading pleasure, the latest outrage by the SS.”

  “I’ll read it later. Right now, I’m busy.” Canaris placed the folder on top of a pile of intelligence reports and went back to reading the survey.

  “They’ve sent their own agent to the United States.” He lit a cigarette with Canaris’s lighter. “They have no business meddling in foreign intelligence. It’s an affront to your authority and the role of the Abwehr.”

  Canaris slowly turned a page of the survey, as though absorbed in what he was reading. “Perhaps it’s an internal matter that pertains only to the SS.”

  “Perhaps the Atlantic Ocean is really beer.” Oster leaned his tensile, elegant form across the desk, retrieved the folder and placed it open in front of Canaris.

  “How was he sent?”

  “He traveled by commercial liner to Mexico, then headed to New York.”

  “As soon as I finish my present business, I’ll give it a look.” Canaris kept his head buried in the survey.

  “His name is Gregor Hausser, a graduate of the SS Officers Academy at Bad Tolz. He served in the Death’s Head battalion at Dachau. An odd choice
, wouldn’t you say, for a secret agent?”

  Aware he’d get no peace until he paid attention to the folder Oster put before him, Canaris laid aside the survey and picked it up. The single sheet inside contained little more than the information Oster had already recounted. “There’s not much here.”

  “Perhaps the SS is interested in using the German-American Bund. There seems to be quite a few National Socialist sympathizers in America, both in the immigrant community and outside it.”

  “Germany seemed to have a lot of sympathizers in America before the war, but once the U.S. entered on the side of the British, they disappeared. As for the Bund, I wouldn’t expect much from that collection of clowns, at least if they’re at all like their Bundesführer.”

  “Fritz Klein?”

  “Fritz Kuhn. A sorrier specimen of the Volk would be hard to imagine.”

  Canaris had shaken Kuhn’s hand during a visit by officials of the Amerikadeutscher Volksbund to the Berlin Olympics. A chemical engineer and veteran, Kuhn had left Germany after stealing 2,000 marks from a Jewish acquaintance and eventually landed a job at the Ford Motor Company, in Detroit, an employer he admired on account of its founder’s outspoken anti-Semitism.

  Walther Darré, the regime’s expert on the mystic ties of “Blood and Soil” among Germans at home and abroad, prevailed on the Führer to accept an impromptu drop-in by the Bundesführer, an interview made more awkward when Kuhn, already utterly flustered and almost unable to speak, handed Hitler a check for 3,000 dollars, which was intended for the Nazi relief fund but whose purpose Kuhn forgot to explain. Canaris conjectured that the Bundesführer’s perplexity was a joint result of nervousness and the distraction of trying to keep his bulging gut sucked in while in the Führer’s presence. Kuhn’s room at the Hotel Hollstein was bugged by the Gestapo, who found the recordings of Kuhn’s nightly sexual antics with two prostitutes, and particularly his pornographic exclamations, so amusing they circulated copies.