by Sam Eastland
To forge that bond with her enemy, knowing all along that it was balanced on a lie, had triggered in her moments of what bordered on compassion even for the monster that was Fegelein.
This was the hardest thing she had ever done. It would have been easier to kill Fegelein than to cultivate his loyalty and trust, even as she was betraying it herself. Before it all began, she would never even have considered herself capable of such a thing. But the war had made her a stranger, even to herself, and now she wondered if it would even be possible to return to a place where she could look in the mirror and recognise the person she had been.
It had taken many months to earn Fegelein’s trust. During this time, she had passed every test, both official and unofficial, which Fegelein could think to throw at her. On the advice of her handlers back in Britain, she had made no attempt to gather information during the time when she was being vetted. No contact had been established with courier agents. No messages had been transmitted. This was because of the danger that false information might be fed to her, and carefully monitored to see if Allied intelligence acted upon it. As Lilya later discovered, Fegelein had employed this tactic several times.
Back in England, Lilya had been told that she should become active as an agent only when she was absolutely certain that her source’s confidence had been secured. Her life depended on that decision. That much she had known from the start. What Lilya had not known, at least in the beginning, was that you could never be certain. All you could do was guess, hope that you were right, and begin.
That day came when Fegelein appointed her as his new driver, replacing the grimly scarred man who had held the job up until then. Usually, after his midday meetings with Hitler, it was Fegelein’s habit to spend the remainder of his time at the apartment of his mistress, leaving Lilya Simonova outside in the car in which Fegelein would leave behind the briefcase containing any briefing notes to his master, the Lord of the SS.
Fegelein left the briefcase in the car because he thought it would be safer there than in the house of Elsa Batz, whom he cared for, up to a point, but whom he did not trust.
Alone in the car, Simonova would read through the contents of the briefcase and, later, would deliver the information, along with any gossip she had picked up from Fegelein that day, to a courier agent, who then forwarded the details to England.
Lilya knew very little about the courier, other than the fact that he worked at the Hungarian Embassy.
For the transfer, Lilya would deposit information in the hollowed-out leg of a bench in the Hasenheide park, just across the road from the Garde-Pioneer tram station. Occasionally, messages would be left for her there, indicating that she was to make contact with her control officer in England, whom she knew only as ‘Major Clarke’. For this purpose, she had been issued a radio, to be used only in such emergencies.
Her last contact with Major Clarke had been only the day before, when he had ordered her to find out all she could about this Diamond Stream device.
And now there it was, barely an arm’s length away, resting on the dashboard of the car as they roared across the German countryside, bound for the lair of Heinrich Himmler.
‘Wait!’ Fegelein said suddenly. ‘Pull over! There’s something I forgot.’
Lilya jammed on the brakes and the car skidded to a halt, kicking up dust at the side of the road. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘It’s Elsa’s birthday.’ Fegelein looked at her helplessly. ‘We’ll have to turn around.’
‘And keep Himmler waiting?’
‘Better him than Elsa,’ mumbled Fegelein.
As she wheeled the car about, the chart case tumbled into Fegelein’s lap.
‘I won’t be long, but I’ll need you to wait in the car. You can look after this while I’m gone,’ Fegelein told her, replacing the map case on the dashboard.
‘Of course,’ she said quietly.
‘Where would I be without you, Fraülein S?’ repeated Fegelein. As he caught sight of her luminously blue eyes, his gaze softened with affection. Those eyes were like nothing he had ever seen before, and their effect on him had never lessened since the first day he caught sight of her in Paris. She was sitting at a desk in a dreary, smoke-filled room crowded with secretaries typing out documents for translation by the city’s German occupation government. Pale, bleached light glimmered down through window panels in the roof, whose glass was stained with smears of dirty green moss. Whenever he thought about that moment, Fegelein would hear again the deafening clatter of typewriters, pecking away like the beaks of tiny birds against his skull, and he remembered the instant when she had glanced up from her work and he first saw her face. He had never recovered from that moment, nor did he ever wish to.
‘Where would you be?’ she asked. ‘In search of the perfect word for your reports to the Reichsführer. That is where you’d be.’
Her words were like a cup of cold water thrown into Fegelein’s face. ‘Exactly so,’ he replied brusquely, turning back to face the road. In that moment he realised that the reason he had not thrown himself at her long ago was because he had fallen in love with this woman, and he could not bring himself to treat her the way he had treated the others, and even his own dismally promiscuous wife.
‘Was that General Hagemann I saw with you on the steps of the Chancellery building?’ she asked.
‘He prefers to be called a professor,’ confirmed Fegelein, ‘but that was him all right, and since he has just misplaced a very valuable rocket, it may be the last time you see him.’
‘He lost a rocket?’
Fegelein explained what he had learned. ‘It’s probably at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, but I expect the old general would sleep a little better if he knew that for a fact. And I would sleep a little better, too, if you would take my advice and agree to carry a pistol. I’d be happy to provide you with one. These are dangerous times and they are likely to get more so in the days ahead. I gave one to Elsa, you know, and she seems happy with it!’
‘Perhaps because she needs it to defend herself against you.’
Fegelein laughed. ‘Even if that was the case, I’d have nothing to worry about! What Elsa needs more than anything is some lessons in target practice. Believe me, I tried to teach her, but it’s pretty much hopeless.’
‘Well, I don’t want a gun,’ said Lilya. ‘How many times have I told you that?’
‘I have lost count,’ admitted Fegelein, ‘but that doesn’t mean I’ll give up trying to make you see some sense.’
The truth was, Lilya did carry a weapon. It was a small folding knife with a stiletto point and a small device, like the head of a nail, fitted into the top of the blade which enabled the user to open the knife single-handedly and with only a flick of the thumb.
It had been a gift from a man she almost married long ago. One late summer day, they had gone on a picnic together to the banks of the Neva River outside St Petersburg and he had used the knife to peel the skin from an apple in a single long ribbon of juicy, green peel. Before them, white, long-legged birds moved with jerky and deliberate steps among the water lilies.
‘What birds are those?’ she had asked.
‘Cranes,’ he replied. ‘Soon they will begin their long migration south.’
‘How far will they go?’ she asked.
‘To Africa,’ he told her.
She had been stunned to think of such a vast journey and tried to imagine them, plodding with their chalk stick legs in the water of an oasis.
Later, when she got home, she had discovered the knife in the wicker basket which they had used to bring the food. When she went to return the knife, the man told her to keep it. ‘Remember the birds,’ he had said.
It was not until much later that she noticed a maker’s mark engraved upon the blade – of two cranes, their long and narrow beaks touching like two hypodermic needles – engraved into the tempered steel.
Of the possessions she had carried with her on that long journey out of Russia, this knife
was the only thing she had left. The diamond and sapphire engagement ring, which she had been wearing when she arrived in England, was taken from her for safekeeping by the people who trained her for the tasks which had since taken over her life. She wondered where that ring was now, and also where the man was who had slipped it on her finger, on the island in the Lamskie pond at Tsarskoye Selo, already a lifetime ago.
Then the voice of Hermann Fegelein broke into her memory, like a rock thrown through a window pane. ‘I will not always be your commanding officer,’ he said. Reaching out, he brushed his hand across her knee.
‘I know,’ she replied gently, glancing down at his arm.
And if Fegelein could have known what images were going through her head just then, his heart would have clogged up with fear.
Radial artery – centre of the wrist. Quarter-inch cut. Loss of consciousness in thirty seconds. Death in two minutes.
Brachial artery – inside and just above the elbow. Cut half an inch deep. Loss of consciousness in fourteen seconds. Death in one and a half minutes.
Subclavian artery – behind the collarbone. Two-and-a-half-inch cut. Loss of consciousness in five seconds. Death in three and a half minutes.
Down in the bunker, the briefing had been concluded.
The generals, having delivered their usual, bleak assessment of the situation above ground, were now sitting down to lunch in the crowded bunker mess hall where, in spite of the spartan surroundings, the quality of food and wine was still among the finest in Berlin.
Hitler did not join them. He remained in the conference room, thinking back to the day, in July of 1943, when Hagemann and a group of his scientists, including Werner von Braun and Dr Steinhoff, had arrived at the East Prussia Army headquarters in Rastenburg, known as the Wolf’s Lair. Hagemann’s team had come equipped with rare colour footage of a successful V-2 launch, which had been carried out from Peenemunde in October of the previous year.
In a room specially converted to function as a cinema, Hitler had viewed the film, in the company of Field Marshal Keitel and Generals Jodl and Buhle.
Previously sceptical about the possibility of developing the V-2 as a weapon, watching this film transformed Hitler into a believer.
When the lights came up again, Hitler practically leaped from his chair and shook Hagemann’s hand with both of his. ‘Why was it’, he asked the startled general, ‘that I could not believe in the success of your work?’
The other generals in the room, who had previously expressed their own grave misgivings, especially about the proposed price tag of funding the rocket programme, were effectively muzzled by Hitler’s exuberance. Any protest from them now would only be seen as obstruction by Hitler, and the price tag of that, for those two men, was more than they were willing to pay.
‘If we’d had these rockets back in 1939,’ Hitler went on to say, ‘we would never have had this war.’
And then, for one of the only times in his life, Hitler apologised. ‘Forgive me’, he told General Hagemann, ‘for ever having doubted you.’
He immediately gave orders to begin mass-production of the V-2, regardless of the cost. As his imagination raced out of control, his demand for nine hundred rockets a month increased over the course of a few minutes to five thousand. Although even the lowest of these figures turned out to be impractical, since the amount of liquid oxygen required to power that many V-2s far exceeded Germany’s annual output, his belief in this miracle weapon seemed unshakeable.
Although there had been many times since then when Hitler had secretly harboured doubts about the professor’s judgement, now it seemed to him that his faith had been rewarded at last. Even if it had come too late to ensure a total victory over Europe and the Bolsheviks, the V-2’s improved performance, if the full measure and precision of its destructive power could be proven on the battlefield, would not go unnoticed by the enemy. And it might just be enough to stop the advance of the armies which, even now, were making their way steadily towards Berlin.
But only if he stopped this leak of information that had been trickling out of the bunker.
‘Fetch me General Rattenhuber!’ he shouted to no one in particular.
Fifteen minutes later, SS General Johann Rattenhuber, chief of the Reich’s Security Service, entered the briefing room.
He was a square-faced man with a heavy chin, grey hair combed straight back over his head, and permanently narrowed eyes. From the earliest days of the National Socialist party, Rattenhuber had been responsible for Hitler’s personal safety. He and his team were constantly on the move, travelling to whichever of Hitler’s thirteen special headquarters was in use at any given time.
Some of these, such as the Cliff Nest, hidden deep within the Eifel Mountains, or the Wolf’s Lair at Rastenburg in East Prussia, were complexes of underground tunnels and massive concrete block houses, built to withstand direct hits from the heaviest weapons in the Allied arsenal of weaponry. From these almost impenetrable fortifications, Hitler had conducted his campaigns in the east and west. Other hideouts, such as the Giant in Charlottenburg, the construction of which had required more concrete than the entire allotment supplied for civilian air-raid shelters in the year 1944, had never been put to use.
Rattenhuber was used to departing at short notice. He was seldom given more than a day’s warning when Hitler decamped from one headquarters to another and, increasingly over the past few months, he had grown accustomed to being summoned at all hours of the day or night, to answer Hitler’s growing suspicions about his safety.
In Rattenhuber’s mind, ever since the attempt on Hitler’s life back in July of 1944, the Führer had been steadily losing his grip on reality. Having survived the bomb blast that tore through the meeting room in Rastenburg, Hitler had become convinced that providence itself had intervened. Although Rattenhuber did not believe in such lofty concepts, he was quietly forced to admit that it was no thanks to him, or to his hand-selected squad of Bavarian ex-policemen, that Hitler had emerged with nothing more than scratches and his clothing torn to shreds. Those were the physical results, but mentally, as Rattenhuber had seen for himself, Hitler’s wounds were much deeper. The sense of betrayal he felt, that his own generals would have conspired to murder him, would dog him for the rest of his days. Behind the anger at this betrayal lay a primal terror which no amount of concrete, or Schmeisser-toting guards or reassurance could ever put to rest.
But what consumed him now, was the story of this spy in the Chancellery.
Rattenhuber knew about Der Chef, whose jovial gossip had enlightened him to scandals which even he, in his role as guardian of all the bunker folk, had not known about before he heard it on the radio.
With his mind set on vengeance, Rattenhuber sifted through the list of Chancellery employees. For a while, he had fastened on a bad-tempered old janitor named Ziegler, who had worked at the Chancellery for years. Hauling him off to Gestapo headquarters, located in the crypt of the now-ruined Dreifaltigkeit church on Mauerstrasse, it was Rattenhuber himself who conducted the interrogation. But it quickly became apparent that Ziegler had nothing to hide. He was what he was – just a surly, ill-mannered floor-sweeper with a grudge against all of humanity.
After Ziegler, there were no more leads, and the stone-like face of Rattenhuber, the once-unshakeable Munich detective, was unable to conceal his helplessness.
Standing in the briefing room, Rattenhuber’s head almost touched the low concrete ceiling. Directly above him, an electric light dimmed and brightened with the fluctuating power of the generator.
Of all the fortresses which Hitler had put into use, Rattenhuber hated this bunker the most. Worst of all was the quality of the air. There were times when he had virtually staggered up the stairs to the main floor of the Chancellery building. Gasping, he would lean against the wall, two fingers hooked inside his collar to allow himself to breathe.
Hitler sat by himself. Except for a single sheet of paper, the table in front of him was bare.
/> Rattenhuber came to attention.
Hitler ignored the salute. Without even looking up, he slid the piece of paper across to Rattenhuber.
The general picked it up. It was a list of Knight’s Cross recipients. ‘Why am I looking at this?’ he asked, laying the page back on the table.
Hitler reached across and tapped one finger on the page. ‘It never left the bunker.’
‘Is that a problem?’
‘Indeed it is,’ Hitler confirmed, ‘because this morning, Der Chef broadcast it to the world.’
There was no need to explain any more. Rattenhuber knew exactly what this meant. The blood drained out of his face. ‘I will begin an investigation immediately,’ he said.
Slowly Hitler shook his head. ‘You had your chance,’ he muttered. ‘I am giving this job to Inspector Hunyadi.’
‘Hunyadi!’ exclaimed the general. ‘But he’s in prison! You put him there yourself. He is due to be executed any day now. For all I know, he might already be dead.’
‘Then you had better hope it’s not too late,’ said Hitler. ‘You have already failed me twice, Rattenhuber. First, you let them try to blow me to pieces. Then you stand around uselessly while this spy roams the bunker at will. Now I am ordering you to bring me Hunyadi. Fail me again, Rattenhuber, and you will take that man’s place at the gallows.’
Following the directions that Stalin had written down for him, Pekkala made his way to a narrow dreary street in the Lefortovo District of the city. He rattled the gate at 17 Rubzov Lane – a dirty yellow apartment building with mildew growing on the outer wall – until the caretaker, a small hunched man in a blue boiler suit with a brown corduroy patch sewn into the seat, finally emerged from his office to see what the fuss was about.