by Peter Quinn
The conspirators agree Hitler is be taken alive. The people will be told that he is mentally ill and being manipulated toward war by the likes of Himmler and Göbbels, who will be formally charged with criminal conspiracy and treason. Oster knows Heinz’s intent is to revenge the murder of his friends in the SA and shoot Hitler on the spot. Let General Witzleben and the others come up with an explanation after the event. Oster is convinced it is better this way. Hitler is too dangerous alive.
The news of Mussolini’s last-minute attempt to convene a four-party conference and defuse the crisis seems doomed to fail. General Witzleben is convinced that Hitler won’t be swayed by the urgent pleas of his badly rattled friend. Oster, too, is sure that nothing can dissuade Hitler from his intent to attack the Czechs. He visits Heinz a last time on the afternoon of September 28. The captain’s nervousness is obvious; Oster shares it. One way or another, the end is only hours away.
When he returns to Abwehr headquarters, Oster is instantly summoned by Canaris, who is seated at his desk, with the radio on. “Listen,” he says, “a news flash from the BBC in London. Chamberlain has just announced to the House of Commons that Hitler has accepted Mussolini’s proposal for a four-party conference in Munich and, on behalf on His Majesty’s Government, so has he.”
The announcer solemnly quotes the prime minister’s words to parliament: “‘We are all patriots, and there can be no honourable Member of the House who does not feel his heart leap that the crisis has been once more postponed to give us the opportunity to try what reason and good will and discussion will do to settle a problem which is already within the sight of settlement.’”
Shortly afterwards, without a word of greeting, General Witzleben enters Canaris’s office, pours himself a glass of brandy and gulps it. Oster half-heartedly raises the possibility of still going forward with the coup. Witzleben dismisses the idea. “On what grounds?” he says. “That the Führer has brought Germany to the height of power without spilling a drop of German blood? It’s obvious that if we try to do something now, history, and not just German history, will remember us only as a cabal of disgruntled reactionaries who refused to serve the greatest German at the very moment the whole world recognized his greatness.”
Two days later, when Chamberlain returns to London waving the agreement he’s reached with Hitler and declares that it represents “peace for our time,” Canaris sits alone in silence and the dark. Outside, the noise of traffic, which had diminished during the crisis, is back to normal volume. A tram rings its bell continuously: a note not of warning, he realizes, but of celebration. A voice shouts, “Heil Hitler!” Other voices pick it up. The chorus echoes through the street.
“They’ll follow him over the cliff now,” Canaris said. “They’ll go wherever he wants them to go and take the rest of Europe with them.”
“That remains to be seen. Perhaps we’ll all have to pay for letting him get this far. Perhaps not. For the present, it’s wise to keep our own counsel and be patient. Come, Wilhelm, I’ll drop you home.” Oster had thought for an instant that perhaps Canaris had fallen prey to the same outbursts as the Führer, as though his madness were contagious. It was a mistaken impression, he decided. The momentary slip of Canaris’s mask, the glimpse of what lay behind his stoic, inexpressive demeanor revealed not rage, but fear, anticipation of the road ahead and where it led. The final destination. Oster went out and retrieved his coat and briefcase.
When he returned, Canaris was sitting at his desk with the lamp on. “I have work to do. I’ll summon a driver to take me home.”
“Suit yourself, but you won’t do your country any good by working yourself to death,” Oster said. As he turned to leave, he noticed the model of the Dresden on the mantel. It drew his mind to the sea, reminding him of a question he several times meant to ask but, in the confusion and despondency that followed the aborted coup, had forgotten. “Wilhelm,” he said, “that submarine Heydrich dispatched to America, what happened to it?” He left unmentioned how Piekenbrock had told him about his trip to Copenhagen and his happy sense it was intended to foil the U-boat’s mission.
Canaris put on his glasses and began to examine the stack of files on his desk. “There was a storm, a tremendous blow. The American weather service failed to detect that it was headed for the coast, but the captain of the U-boat was warned by a German merchant ship that had come through and barely survived. The captain asked permission to turn back, and it was granted.”
“And those it was supposed to pick up?”
“God only knows. Either they drowned or found another escape route. If the SS knows, it’s not telling.”
“Well, then,” Oster said, “there’s cause for hope. The weather turned against them. Perhaps that’s an omen of better days to come.”
“Or of more bad weather.”
“Always the pessimist.”
Canaris bowed his head, as if to concentrate on the document in front of him. “I’ve learned that one is rarely disappointed when he expects the worst.”
April 1945
EPILOGUE
After a man has experienced much and learned neither to hold fast, nor to go down, nor to die, but to stretch himself, to feel, not evade things, but to stand straight, with a steadfast soul, that is something.
—ALFRED DÖBLIN, Berlin Alexanderplatz
FLOSSENBÜRG CONCENTRATION CAMP
The sirens summon him from sleep. Instead of fleeing to the air-raid shelter beneath the building, he goes to the window and draws back the curtains. Searchlights move like clock hands across the darkness. In the distance, the flare of incendiary bombs lights up the horizon. The explosions draw nearer. The concussed ripples of the bombs rattle the window. He closes his eyes. The yellow flash penetrates his lids.
“Come quickly, Admiral!”
A flashlight shines directly in his eyes. He puts up his hand to shield them.
“You must come to the shelter! The sirens are sounding! We have only a few minutes!”
He finally makes out who its: Gresser.
“Go ahead, I’ll be down directly.” He swings his feet onto the floor, rubs his eyes, and lights a cigarette. He goes to the window and draws back the curtains. The incendiary bombs are falling closer.
Somewhere on the canal, an oil barge is hit. Its contents catch fire and spill into the water, covering it with flames. A horde of rats scurries up the embankment until the street is hidden beneath a demented, heaving cover of gray-brown vermin. Fire trucks rush by, crushing them like grapes in a wine press. Their maddened squeaks and squeals grow into a single ear-splitting shriek.
In these last minutes, he can’t separate what he dreamed from what really occurred. Certainly, the air raids were no dream. Gresser and thousands of others died in them. Most of the casualties were civilians. But the rats? Did he dream them? He’s not sure.
Canaris stares into the dark and waits to be summoned from his cell. Once the clock had been wound, its hands moved relentlessly and inexorably toward this moment.
The day the war begins, he knows where it will end. He tells a colleague, “This means the end of Germany.”
For the next four years, he balances himself on the wire, a master of the tightrope, loyal to his nation and to its armed forces but an opponent of the regime, believing it is possible to separate the former from the latter, to serve one as a patriot and, where possible, resist the other.
He protests the liquidation of Soviet POWs.
Keitel replies on behalf of the Führer: “These objections accord with soldierly conceptions of a chivalrous war! What matters now is the destruction of an ideology. I therefore approve and endorse these measures.”
The confirmation that Dr. Arnheim’s fears were real, that mental patients are being murdered in the thousands as part of Operation T-4, no sooner arrives than an even more monstrous crime unfolds: the utter totality and finality of the solution that has been devised for the Jewish Question and is already being carried out.
He ass
ists as many as he can to get away. He helps over five hundred escape from Holland at one time under the guise of being Abwehr agents en route to South America. At one point, Himmler’s remark to the Führer about the Admiral’s “strange regard for the Jews” results in a temporary suspension that leaves no doubt about the growing precariousness of his position.
He secretly meets with General Mengies of British Intelligence and General Donovan of the OSS in Santander, in Spain. They’re accompanied by an aide, whom Donovan says is absolutely trustworthy. “We served together in the last war,” he says. “He saved my life.” Mengies and Donovan implore Canaris to come over to the Allies. Germany is doomed and you know it, Donovan says.
Canaris proposes that if Hitler is removed, a cease-fire will be declared in the West and the new government of Germany, while dismantling the Nazi state, will be allowed to concentrate its resources on stopping the Soviet advance in the East.
The possibility of such deals died at Munich in 1938, Mengies says. Your choice, Admiral, is to come over to our side, to set an example for your countrymen, or to return and suffer the fate your nation has brought upon itself.
You must choose, Herr Admiral.
When the axe finally falls, when the SS raid the offices of the Abwehr and he’s relieved of his command and put under house arrest, it almost comes as a relief. With Heydrich dead—assassinated by Czech partisans—Himmler himself takes control of a reorganized and consolidated intelligence operation. The war against the Reich’s enemies, the Allies, the Jews, traitors, and spies, will be waged simultaneously on all fronts.
He tells himself that he will soon be forgotten, relegated to some lowly, humiliating assignment, allowed to exist in quiet, protective oblivion. Even as he tells himself this, he knows it isn’t true. In the old castle at Burg Lauenstein, where he is held under house arrest, there is a large Black Forest clock at the bottom of the stairway. He hears its ticking. In the middle of the night, at the quarter hour, its cuckoo emerges to sing a lyric especially for him: The more familiar we become with National Socialist ideas, the more we’ll discover they are truly soldierly ideas.
Soon after the Allies land in France, a group of officers finally carries out an assassination attempt on the Führer. They fail, as he could have told them they would. It’s too late to prevent what is in store for Germany. The crimes are too great. Fate will not allow it. Heaven demands it. The clock won’t stop until it strikes the final hour.
All those suspected of opposing the regime are rounded up. On a warm, still July afternoon, a car comes for him. He is driven to Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht Strasse, hustled from the car into an underground warren of stone corridors and steel doors.
He sees no visitors and is kept on a starvation diet. There is no light in the cell. He loses track of whether it is night or day. The screams and moans that filter in the hallway occur at all hours, around the clock. There seems to be no schedule.
Gruff and threatening as his interrogators are, they never touch him. Striking a superior officer is the last unnatural act left them. They grow exasperated with his insistent denials that he has ever betrayed his country—never—and with his name dropping and long, complex answers.
“Do you ever answer with a simple yes or no,” one of them asked.
“That depends,” he says.
He is six months in that dungeon before the roof caves in, and the dust and smoke choke jailers and prisoners alike. The Allied planes have made a special point of obliterating the Gestapo’s home.
The prisoners are gathered in a yard. Canaris recognizes it as the place where he met Heydrich years before. He supposes he and the others are about to be shot.
Instead, they are put on a truck and driven away. Despite the warning not to, he peeks through the canvas and is awestruck at the smoldering wreckage of steel and bricks. The entire city seems to have been blown apart. Handcuffed and shackled, they travel what feels an interminable distance. The roads are packed with refugees who often seem oblivious to the furious, impatient honks that insist they get out of the way. Finally, they end their journey near the border that once divided Germany and Czechoslovakia, to the outskirts of Flossenbürg.
They descended from the truck onto a dirt yard. Rows of shabby, indistinguishable huts stretch off in every direction. A work squad of emaciated prisoners in tattered rags stumbles past as the guards kick and push them.
Ahead is a squat, bunkerlike structure, the camp’s special detention center for prisoners to be kept in isolation. He is taken to a small cell and chained to the wall.
There is one last act: a mock trial that preserves the veneer of legality to which the SS continues to cling. There is no question of the outcome. The SS is now in possession of a secret trove of documents unearthed in the search of military headquarters. The treasonous conversation of 1938 and the plans for a coup are spelled out in them.
The nooses are made ready before the court convenes: verdict first, trial second.
He doesn’t grovel, as they expect. He argues that the documents are inconclusive. His involvement was directed at keeping track of the conspirators, not at assisting them.
Oster is brought in. He is told what Canaris said. Their friendship had ruptured years before, when Canaris discovered Oster had leaked the plans for the blitzkrieg in the West to Dutch intelligence. In so doing, he’d proven himself a traitor to the nation. At the time, Oster defended himself by raising the issue of the message Canaris had sent in order to scuttle the rescue of an SS agent in America. Canaris scoffed at the comparison. It was one thing to resist the illegal maneuverings of Himmler and Heydrich, another to put the existence of the entire German army at risk. “That is our tragedy,” Oster said. “There is no longer any difference.”
Though Canaris never turns in Oster, neither does he forgive him.
Told of Canaris’s denial of being an active member in the plot to overthrow the Führer, Oster says, “That’s not true. He knew and was involved in every activity of the resistance.”
The interrogators revel in the spectacle of the self-admitted traitor implicating the suspected one. The papers discovered in a raid on army headquarters is sufficient to convict both men of high treason. But they rephrase Oster’s reply so the Admiral can throw the blame back on Oster and continue the game: “The prisoner is lying, is he not?”
They wait patiently for an answer. They let their silence speak for them: Come, Admiral, grovel for your life. Listen to your fear, as you always have. It’s too late for bravery. Convict Oster for us and perhaps we won’t inflict on you the death you’ve so richly earned. Perhaps we’ll throw you back in your cell, into the dark recesses where your type breeds. We’ll let the Allies find you alive, shriveled, crawling on all fours away from the sunlight. But you’ll be alive, our little Admiral. Alive.
The only sound is the clock on the wall.
“No, he’s telling the truth,” Canaris says.
There is one final interrogation. They want more names. He won’t give them. They break his nose. And there is a last message from him. He taps it on the wall of his cell, in code to the prisoner next door: My time is up. Was not a traitor. Did my duty as a German. If you survive remember me to my wife.
“Out you come!” The door of the cell opens. He joins a file of four other men and is put at its head. Oster is behind him. Behind Oster is Dietrich Bonhöffer, the minister and theologian who’d been sheltered within the Abwehr. Bonhöffer’s father had been replaced in the chair of psychiatry at Berlin and Charite Hospital by Max de Crinis, who did his best to purge the profession of “Jewish influence.”
Bonhöffer is praying aloud and is ordered to be quiet.
“Get undressed!” They are pushed into the bath cubicles at the end of the hall. Bonhöffer is the first to undress. He kneels beside the neat pile of his clothes.
Canaris is ordered out into the concrete yard. In its center is a gallows. A rope hangs from a hook. A stepladder is beneath.
He
doesn’t pray or feel the urge to. These are the final things he feels: cold morning air against the feverish warmth of his naked skin; wet tingle of the concrete beneath his feet; urgent loosening in his bowels.
His hands are tied behind him. He mounts the stepladder. It is almost dawn. The last sky he will ever see: black, blue, hint of violet. The rope is put around his neck and adjusted so that his toes will dangle just one or two agonizing, tantalizing inches above the floor.
He waits for the ladder to be kicked away. His executioners stand around as if they have all day.
His whole body trembles. O Christ, don’t let me shit on myself!
He looks down: no rodent’s claws, or rat’s tail, just his ghost-white feet as the ladder sails away.
OBITS
1941-1967
Oh, it’s easy to say we’re all human beings. If there’s a God—not only do we differ before Him as regards our malevolence or kindness, we all have different natures and different lives, in kind, in origin, in future and destiny we are all different.
—ALFRED DÖBLIN, Berlin Alexanderplatz
Suicide of German Exile
(N.Y. Standard, June 25, 1941)
The body of Dr. Franz Ignatz, age 56, was discovered in his Yorkville apartment yesterday. He hanged himself in the bathroom. Dr. Ignatz’s wife passed away last year. Neighbors said the couple had fled Nazi Germany several years ago. They described Dr. Ignatz as distraught over his wife’s death and the unbroken string of German military successes.