by Sam Eastland
Hitler turned back to Hagemann. ‘But where is the rocket now?’
Hagemann opened his mouth to reply. There could be no hiding of the truth. Not now. And he wondered if every measure of confidence he might have gained during these past few minutes would now be squandered by the simple declaration that he did not know.
But before he could speak, Hitler answered his own question. ‘It probably fell in the sea.’
‘In all likelihood,’ Hagemann assured him.
Hitler nodded, satisfied.
‘There is one more thing,’ said Hagemann, almost in a whisper.
Hitler held out one hand magnanimously towards the general. ‘Do continue, please.’
Hagemann did as he was told. ‘With the accuracy we can now obtain, we are capable of obliterating highly specific targets. By this, I mean we are no longer unleashing the force of the V-2 upon cities, but upon targets of our choosing which lie within those cities. A single house. A single monument. All you have to do is take the tip of your pencil, touch it against a location on the map and give the order. Within the hour, the place which lay beneath that pencil point will cease to exist.’
‘What about anti-aircraft fire?’ demanded Fegelein. ‘Can’t they bring it down with that?’
‘No,’ answered Hagemann. ‘By the time the V-2 finishes its journey, it will be travelling at supersonic speed. This means that those who stand in its circle of destruction will receive no warning. Even for those who survive, the sound of the rocket will reach their ears only after the explosion. Once the V-2 has been unleashed, nothing on this earth can stop it.’
‘Do you hear?’ Hitler shouted. ‘This will be our deliverance! Everything we have endured will now be cast into the light of everlasting triumph!’
Now Goebbels spoke. ‘As long as the professor is convinced that such results can be achieved with regularity.’
‘Not just regularity, Herr Reichsminister,’ Hagemann told him. ‘With infallibility.’
‘Ha!’ Hitler crashed his hands together. ‘You have your answer, Goebbels!’
‘I do indeed,’ the Reichsminister said as he fixed Hagemann with a stare, ‘provided his deeds match his words.’
‘You may leave us now, Professor,’ said Hitler. ‘We have other matters to discuss.’
Obediently, Hagemann began to gather up his blueprints.
‘Leave those,’ Hitler waved his hands over the documents. ‘I would like to study them.’
‘Of course,’ replied Hagemann, standing back from the table, ‘but I must ask that they be kept in a safe. I cannot overestimate . . .’
‘Thank you, Herr General,’ interrupted Speer. ‘We are well aware of safety protocols. We wrote them, after all.’
There was another grumbling of laughter. This time, even Hitler smiled.
Carrying his empty chart case, Hagemann left the room and made his way along the corridor, heading for the stairs which would bring him back up to the ground floor of the Chancellery building. Even though the meeting had been a success, he still had to stop himself from breaking into a run. All he could think about was breathing some clean air again.
‘Professor!’ a voice called to him.
Hagemann glanced back to see Fegelein, Himmler’s liaison officer, advancing down the corridor towards him, one hand raised as if hailing a taxi, and Hagemann’s schematics in the other. ‘A final question for you,’ he said.
‘What are you doing with the charts?’ stammered Hagemann. ‘Haven’t I made it clear enough that the information contained within those diagrams is extremely sensitive!’
Fegelein grinned. ‘Which is precisely why Reichsführer Himmler will enjoy looking them over. With Hitler’s blessing, I am taking them to Himmler’s office now. You should join me! The Reichsführer has some excellent wine at his disposal.’
‘I am very busy,’ said Hagemann. He had an instinctive mistrust of Fegelein. The soft round chin, full cheeks and shallow brow gave him an innocent and almost child-like face. But this appearance was an illusion.
That Fegelein had managed to advance so far in his career, and yet was so universally disliked, was a testament to the ruthlessness of his ambition. To Fegelein, the price of loyalty could always be negotiated, and friendship had no value at all.
He was not alone in making that equation.
In 1941, Fegelein had been arrested for the looting of money and luxury goods from a train, an offence which could have carried the death penalty – although his real mistake had not been the theft so much as the fact that these items had already been stolen from the safety deposit boxes of Polish banks by men who outranked Fegelein, and were, at the time, on their way back to a warehouse where the loot was scheduled to be divided among the thieves. The charges against him were dropped, on the orders of his master, Heinrich Himmler, which only added to rumours already circulating, that Fegelein led a charmed life. What had been only rumour before was transformed into fact when Himmler appointed him as his personal liaison officer. This, and his marriage to Gretl Braun, sister of Hitler’s mistress, Eva, had assured him an almost untouchable position in the Führer’s closest circle. The marriage had been conducted hurriedly after Gretl discovered that she was pregnant. The fact that there was some question as to who might be the father of the unborn child, and Hitler’s outrage at the circumstances, had prompted Fegelein to come forward and offer his hand. In Hitler’s mind, this act of chivalry saved not only Gretl’s reputation, but also his own, as the consort of Eva Braun. The marriage had done nothing to temper Fegelein’s appetites and while Gretl remained, for the most part, far to the south in her home province of Bavaria, Fegelein had taken up residence with his mistress, Elsa Batz, in an apartment on the ironically named Bleibtreustrasse. Of this arrangement, Hitler was unaware or else he had chosen to look the other way and Fegelein had enough instincts for self-preservation not to ask which one was the truth.
‘I have one final question,’ repeated Fegelein, as he pursued Hagemann down the narrow corridor. ‘It won’t take a second, Professor.’
‘I was just leaving,’ Hagemann muttered.
Fegelein refused to take the hint. ‘Then I’ll walk up the stairs with you. I could do with a smoke,’ he laughed, ‘and they don’t allow that in the bunker.’
Side by side, the two men plodded up towards the Chancellery.
It was all Hagemann could do not to push Fegelein back down the stairs. He not only mistrusted this slippery emissary of the SS, he despised the whole organisation. Ever since the conception of the V-2, Himmler had repeatedly tried to take over the project. In an obvious attempt at blackmail, the SS had even gone so far as to arrest one of the programme’s chief scientists, Werner von Braun, on charges so trumped up that even Hitler, who normally deferred to the man he called ‘My Loyal Heinrich’, refused to accept them.
In spite of Himmler’s insatiable desire to control the future of the programme, Hagemann had managed to keep the SS at arm’s length.
But all that changed in July of 1944, when a bomb planted by the one-armed, one-eyed Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg in a briefing room of the Wolf’s Lair command centre failed to kill its intended target, Adolf Hitler.
Even as Stauffenberg and numerous other conspirators were rounded up and either shot or hanged, the SS, citing concerns for national security, finally received Hitler’s blessing to take over the V-2 programme.
Since then, the production and research facilities had been scattered all over Germany, slave labour had been employed to assemble the rockets, and virtually nothing could be accomplished without Himmler’s approval.
If it weren’t for that fact, Hagemann might well have told Fegelein exactly what he thought of him.
The two men reached the main floor of the Chancellery building, where their side arms were returned to them.
‘What did you want to know, Fegelein?’ Hagemann asked as he undid his belt and slid the Mauser holster back where it belonged.
Fegelein delayed giving an answer until they ha
d passed beyond the earshot of the guards.
Out on the shrapnel-spattered stone steps of the Chancellery, Fegelein removed a silver cigarette case from his chest pocket, opened it and offered its neatly arrayed contents to Hagemann.
Hagemann shook his head. For now, he was more interested in filling his lungs with fresh air than with tobacco fumes.
Fegelein lit his cigarette, inhaled deeply and then whistled out a long grey jet of smoke. ‘What I wanted to know, Herr Professor,’ he said, ‘is how many of these rockets you have left. After all, what use is your guidance system if you have nothing left to guide?’
Even coming from this man, Hagemann could not deny that it was a reasonable question. ‘We have, at present, approximately eighty complete rockets. Once the guidance systems have been modified, they will be ready for immediate use.’
‘And how long will the modifications take?’
‘Only a matter of hours for each rocket.’
‘And after the eighty rockets have been fired, what then?’ asked Fegelein.
‘Our production facility in Nordhausen is still fully functional. At top capacity, we can produce over eight hundred rockets a month,’ and then General Hagemann paused, ‘provided there is no interference, either from you or from the Allies.’
Fegelein smiled. ‘My dear Professor,’ he said, ‘I am not here to obstruct, but rather to help you in any way I can.’
‘Is that so?’ asked Hagemann, unable to mask his nervousness.
Fegelein laughed at the general’s obvious discomfort. Playfully, he batted Hagemann on the shoulder with the rolled-up blueprints.
‘Those are not toys!’ snapped Hagemann. Angrily he shoved the leather cylinder into Fegelein’s hands. ‘If you’re going to carry them about, you might as well put them in this.’
‘I know what you think of me,’ said Fegelein, as he opened the chart case and slid the blueprints inside, ‘and aside from the fact that I couldn’t care less, surely you can see why I would want to support the development of a weapon that could be our only hope out of this mess.’ He waved the smouldering cigarette at the ruins of the buildings all around them. ‘I make no secret of the fact that it would benefit me to do so, over and above whatever good it does our country.’
You self-serving bastard, thought Hagemann.
‘You may loathe me for my reasoning,’ continued Fegelein, ‘but it does prove that my offer of assistance is genuine. If I didn’t think it would work, I promise you we would not be having this conversation.’
A black Mercedes rolled up to the kerb.
Hagemann noticed the SS number plates.
‘Ah! Here is my transport.’ He turned to Hagemann. ‘I must leave you now, Professor, but you should be aware that, once Himmler has seen these plans for himself, he will want to speak with you immediately. Face to face, you understand.’
Hagemann felt his bowels cramp.
‘There is nothing to be nervous about,’ Fegelein assured him, ‘unless of course he asks you to meet with his friends.’
‘What would be wrong with that?’ stammered Hagemann.
‘The Reichsführer has no friends,’ said Fegelein called back over his shoulder, as he made his way down towards the waiting car.
Hagemann was surprised to see a tall woman emerge from behind the wheel. She wore a short greenish-brown wool jacket with flapped pockets at the hip and braided leather buttons, like miniature soccer balls. Her blonde hair was cut to shoulder length, in a style which had grown popular that winter, as if to match the austerity that had worked its way into every facet of civilian life.
So, thought Hagemann, that is the famous chauffeur, known to the world only as ‘Fraülein S’. Who she was and where she came from, only Fegelein seemed to know. She was reputed to be the one woman Fegelein, who had a stable of concubines, had failed to bed. Hagemann had heard about this beautiful woman, but this was the first time he had ever set eyes upon her.
As the woman walked around the front of the car, she glanced up at the professor.
Hagemann was struck by the deep blue of her eyes and he realised that that the rumours of her beauty had not been exaggerated.
The woman opened the passenger’s side door and Fegelein climbed inside.
Now General Hagemann made his own way down the steps. In days past, he would simply have hailed a cab to take him back to the Gatow airport, but there didn’t appear to be any taxis any more. He wondered if the tram system was still functioning, or if that, too, had been put out of commission by the bombing. Hagemann set off in the direction of the airport. It would be a long walk, but the more distance he could put between himself and the confines of the bunker, the happier he knew he would feel.
As Fegelein’s Mercedes wove its way past heaps of rubble from the latest air raids, bound for Himmler’s headquarters in the village of Hohenlychen, north-west of Berlin, Fegelein scribbled down his report about that day’s conference in the bunker.
These days, it was usually bad news, and Fegelein was content to transmit any details from the briefings by secure telegraph from SS Headquarters on Prinz Albrechtstrasse. But good news, such as he’d heard today, required a more personal delivery, especially since he would be arriving with the gift of Hagemann’s own blueprints for the Diamond Stream device.
Besides, it gave him the chance to spend more time with Fraülein S.
Her real name was Lilya Simonova, although he rarely used it even when speaking to her directly. Although there were plenty of people around with Russian-sounding names, especially here in the east of the country, Fegelein felt safer not advertising the fact that his own chauffeur was one of them. Besides, it lent her an air of mystery which he was happy to exploit, since it helped to baffle those gossiping fishwives who were always whispering behind his back.
Having served briefly as Fegelein’s secretary, Lilya had taken on the role of chauffeur, after his original driver had got drunk and crashed the car into a lamp post on the way to pick him up. This driver’s name was Schmoekel and he, like Fegelein, had been a former cavalry man until being invalided home when he had ridden his horse over a mine. The incident had left Schmoekel with a grotesque scar across one side of his face. Unfortunately, it was the side which faced Fegelein when he was sitting on the passenger side of the two-seater car he had been given by the SS motor pool. Fegelein found it unpleasant to have to look at this deformed creature every day and he was more relieved than angry when Schmoekel finally smashed up the car, providing him with an excuse to reassign the mangled cavalryman to a desk job far away.
Replacing Schmoekel with Fraülein S had been a stroke of genius. As she took over the task of shuttling him back and forth from the Chancellery to the apartment of Elsa Batz on Bleibtreustrasse and to Himmler’s headquarters at Hohenlychen, north of Berlin, Fegelein had noticed that Fraülein S was a better driver than Schmoekel, as well as a good deal softer on the eyes.
Fegelein was well aware of the rumours, circulated by his jealous rivals in the high command, about his apparent failure to bed this particular woman. One particularly hurtful piece of gossip made out that Fraülein S was ‘too beautiful’ for him, as if the woman was simply too far out of his league for him to even contemplate what he had so easily achieved with numerous other secretaries before her.
But that, Fegelein protested in his imaginary conversations with these rumour fabricators, was precisely the point. There had been so many others, literally dozens by his count, and every single one of them had since moved on, either because he had fired them or because they had requested transfers which, under the circumstances, he was obliged to grant them.
It had reached the point where he actually required a good secretary, and one who was going to stick around for a while, more than he needed to satisfy his instincts.
Pretty though she was, Fegelein had been forced to forgo any dalliance with Fraülein Simonova in favour of running a competent liaison office. Humiliating as it might have been to hear his manhood criticised,
he could reassure himself that these gossip-mongers were simply envious of his marriage, of his standing with the Führer, of the trust Himmler had placed in him and yes, even of the woman who sat beside him now.
‘I’m not sure we have enough fuel to reach Hohenlychen,’ said Lilya. ‘I didn’t realise we would be leaving the city.’
‘There’s a fuel depot in Hennigsdorf,’ replied Fegelein. ‘We can stop there on the way.’
Lilya glanced at the rolled-up blueprint lying on the dashboard. ‘That must be important, for you to be delivering it in person.’
‘It’s the best pieces of news we’ve had in months,’ replied Fegelein. Then he turned his attention to the pad of paper on his lap, where he had written out the notes for his report to Himmler. ‘How does this sound?’ he asked. ‘The success of the guidance system known as Diamond Stream . . .’
And then he paused. ‘Should I call it a system? That doesn’t sound quite right to me.’
At first, she didn’t reply. The moment she heard the words ‘Diamond Stream’, the moisture had dried up in her mouth. ‘How about “the Diamond Stream technology”?’
‘Much better!’ Fegelein crossed out the old word and wrote in the new one. ‘The success of the guidance technology known as Diamond Stream has revitalised the V-2 programme to the extent that we can now deliver to the German people the reassurance of military superiority, while at the same time making it clear to our enemies that we are far from being defeated on the battlefield. No,’ he muttered. ‘Wait.’
‘Is it the word “defeated”?’ asked Lilya.
‘Exactly,’ answered Fegelein. ‘I can’t use that. I can’t even mention defeat.’
‘How about “Making it clear to our enemies that we are still masters of the battlefield”?’
‘Excellent!’ He glanced at Fraülein S and smiled. ‘Where would I be without you?’
One of the most valuable lessons that Lilya Simonova had learned during the frantic days as British Intelligence rushed her through her training at Beaulieu was that once she had convinced her sources of information that she could be trusted, the sources would repay this trust with loyalty of their own. After this, the sources would remain stubbornly faithful, not only because the bond between them had become a reality, but also because of how much they stood to lose if they were wrong. Not only the life of the agent, but also the lives of the sources depended on the appearance of truth.