by Sam Eastland
Even back in Moscow, Pekkala had heard of these roving bands of soldiers, who rounded up anyone whom they suspected of desertion, or failure to place themselves in harm’s way. The execution of these stragglers was summary and swift. Their bodies, sometimes bearing placards on which their supposed crimes were listed, dangled from piano-wire nooses all across the shrinking territory of the Reich.
‘My son,’ said the hanged man, when he was finally able to talk. He gestured at the boy.
Pekkala wondered what charges had been laid against the man, who was not wearing military uniform, and by what stroke of fortune his son had been around to save him from the improvised gallows of the Feldgendarmerie. ‘Where are they now?’ he asked. ‘These Field Police?’
The man shook his head. He did not know. He brushed his hand towards the north to show in which direction they had gone.
‘And to Berlin?’ asked Pekkala.
With one trembling hand, the wrist rubbed raw by the wire with which it had been bound, the man reached out and pointed down the tracks. ‘But do not go,’ he told them. ‘In Berlin there is nothing but death and, when the Russians arrive, even death will not be enough to describe it.’
‘We must go there,’ replied Pekkala. He wished he could explain what must have seemed an act of total madness. Instead, he only muttered, ‘I’m afraid we have no choice.’
Neither the man nor his son asked any questions, but both seemed anxious to repay them for their kindness. Motioning for the two men to follow, they pointed across the field towards a grove of sycamore trees, on which the reddening buds glowed like a haze in the morning sunlight. Almost hidden in amongst the branches was a small brick chimney rising from a roof of grey slates patched with luminous green moss.
‘That is where we live,’ explained the boy.
‘We are grateful,’ said Pekkala, ‘but we must be moving on.’
‘If you want to reach your destination,’ warned the father, ‘then you should wait until the danger has passed. The Field Police barracks is on the outskirts of the city and they usually head back well before sunset. By mid-afternoon, it should be safe to travel. Then you can enter Berlin after dark.’
Pekkala hesitated, knowing he should take the man’s advice but so anxious to press on towards Berlin that his instincts faltered as they balanced the need against the risk.
‘We have food,’ said the boy. Knowing that only one of the men could understand what he was saying, he motioned with his hand to his mouth.
Kirov had been trying without success to follow the conversation between Pekkala and the half-hanged man. But he understood the gesture perfectly. He touched Pekkala on the arm and raised his eyebrows in a question, knowing that he could not speak without giving away the fact that he was Russian.
Feeling the touch against his arm, Pekkala glanced at the major. The reminder that he was responsible, not only for what might happen to himself but to them both, returned him abruptly to his senses. Pekkala gestured towards the house in the distance. ‘Thank you,’ he said quietly.
Without another word, the four of them set off across the field.
At the edge of the woods, the ground sloped away sharply, revealing a small farmstead tucked away in a hollow.
A dog was sprawled dead outside the farmhouse door. It had been shot several times and its blood had leaked out into the mud on which it lay.
Ringing the small farmyard were racks of small cages, the doors of which were open.
‘Fasane,’ said the father, gesturing at the cages. Pheasants.
The father fluttered his fingers, to show they had all flown away. ‘I let them go,’ he explained. His voice was still hoarse and the chafing of the noose had rubbed a bloody groove beneath his chin.
‘But why?’ asked Pekkala.
The father shrugged, as if he wasn’t even sure himself. ‘So that they would have a chance,’ he said. And then he went on to describe how the band of military police had spotted the birds as they took to the air and had come to investigate. The first thing they did was shoot the farmer’s dog after it growled at them. Then, finding that the farmer had released the birds, which might otherwise have fed the hungry soldiers, they accused him of treason and immediately condemned him to death. At gunpoint they had marched him out across the field until they came to the telegraph poles. When they brought out the rope, he asked them why they had not hanged him from a tree by his own house. They told him it was so that people passing on the tracks could see his body, and think twice before they, too, betrayed their country. They tied a noose and hauled him up to hang him slowly, rather than breaking his neck with a drop.
Unknown to the military police, the boy had followed them.
As soon as the soldiers had departed, the boy rushed in and set his shoulders underneath the father’s feet. And they stood there through the night, waiting for someone to help.
The boy fetched a shovel from the back of the house in order to bury the dog. Kirov went with him, to share in the burden of digging, while the father brought Pekkala into the barn. There, he opened up a horse stall, in which something had been hidden underneath an old grey tarpaulin. The man pulled back the oil-stained canvas, revealing two bicycles.
Their chains were rusted, the brake pads crumbling and the leather seats sagged like the backs of broken mules. But the tyres still held air and, as the father pointed out, this way was better than walking.
When the dog had been buried, they sat down to a meal of smoked pheasant served on slices of gritty bread which had sawdust mixed into the flour. Meagre as it was, this seemed to be the only food they had left.
By two o’clock that afternoon, the father announced that it was safe for them to travel.
They walked out to the narrow road that ran beside the farm.
‘Stick to the back roads,’ advised the father. ‘Just keep heading west and you’ll be there in less than a day.’
‘Good luck to you both,’ said Pekkala, and he shook hands with the man and his son.
‘Udachi,’ replied the father, wishing them good luck in Russian.
Kirov gasped to hear the sound of his own language.
But Pekkala only smiled.
The man had known all along where they came from.
Wobbling unsteadily upon the bicycles, Kirov and Pekkala set off towards Berlin.
At that precise moment, Inspector Hunyadi was sitting alone in a conference room in the Reichschancellery building, waiting to begin the first of several interviews of members of the German High Command about the leak of information from the bunker.
In choosing a location for these interviews, Hunyadi had been given little choice, since this was one of the few places left in the Chancellery with its roof remaining intact.
This had, until not too long ago, been the location of Hitler’s meetings with his High Command; one at midday and the other at midnight. It was a grand, high-ceilinged room, with white pillars in each corner and paintings of different German landscapes – the Drachenfels Castle overlooking the Rhine, a street scene in Munich, a farmer ploughing his field at sunrise on the flat, almost featureless plains along the Baltic coast. In between these paintings, windows taller than a man looked out on to the Chancellery garden. In the centre of the room stood a long, oak table, on which the maps of battlefields would be unfurled and gestured at by field marshals waving ceremonial batons. Along the back wall, comfortable chairs with padded red leather seats had welcomed those whose presence was not immediately required.
At least, that’s how it used to look.
One night in late October of 1944, a 250-pound bomb dropped by an American B-17 landed in the Chancellery garden, barely fifty feet from the outside entrance to the briefing room. The explosion blew out the windows, spraying the back walls with glass, shrapnel and mud. The upholstered chairs were hurled into the air, along with the briefing-room table, in spite of the fact that it normally took ten men to lift it. In a matter of seconds, every piece of furniture in the room was
wrenched into pieces, some of which became embedded in the ceiling.
At first, Hitler had insisted that the briefings continue in their usual location. The windows’ holes were sealed up with plywood. The wreckage of the table was removed and those in attendance did their best not to stare at the gashes in the walls, from which shards of window glass still protruded like the teeth of sharks.
Maps were spread out upon the floor and men crouched down to trace their fingers along routes of advance and retreat.
Forty-eight hours after the explosion, just as the midnight meeting was about to commence, a twisted dagger of metal from the bomb’s tail fin fell from its resting place in the ceiling and stuck into the floor, right in the middle of a map of the Schnee Eifel mountains.
That was too much, even for Hitler, and before he left the city for another of his fortresses, he ordered a new location to be found. By the time he returned, in January of the following year, the only place left was the bunker.
Since the power was out and the windows were blocked up with plywood, Hunyadi had resorted to a paraffin lamp to light the room. The yellow flame, tipped with greasy black smoke, writhed behind the dirty glass shroud. Most of the furniture had been removed. But the conference table was still here, along with a couple of chairs. It was enough to serve Hunyadi’s purposes, but little more. In addition, the paintings had all been removed. Now Hunyadi surveyed the dreary expanses of yellowy-brown paint on the empty walls, studded with the hooks from which the portraits had once been suspended.
Hunyadi had considered summoning everyone on his list to the police station, where he could have questioned them in one of the holding cells, but he wanted to play down the appearance of a formal interrogation. In addition, German military law usually required that any interrogation of a military official be carried out by someone of equal rank. Not only did Hunyadi lack the pay scale of the officers who would soon be marching through that door, but he wasn’t even a soldier.
No matter what location he chose, the reception was likely to be chilly, especially since most, if not all of them, would already know why they were being summoned. Even to be questioned meant that their loyalty had fallen under suspicion.
As the minutes passed, Hunyadi felt the quiet of the room settling like dust upon his shoulders. Even though his rational mind assured him that he was not back in a cell, he still felt trapped in this windowless space and it was all he could do not to bolt into the street. He thought about all the people he had sent to prison over the years. Rarely had he ever felt pity for the people he’d helped to convict, but now he grasped the full measure of their suffering. It was strange that this had come to him only after his release from Flossenburg. In the weeks he had spent in that cell so much of his mind had shut down that every emotion, no matter how extreme, had been dulled to the point where he felt almost nothing at all. Maybe that was the true punishment of prison – not the loss of time but rather the inability to feel its passing.
A few minutes later, the door burst open and there stood Field Marshal Keitel, with cheeks almost as red as the crimson facing on his greatcoat. Without waited to be welcomed, he stamped into the room, removed his hat and tossed it on to the table. Then, resting his gloved knuckles on the polished surface, he leaned across until the two men’s faces almost touched. ‘You miserable little man!’ he spat. ‘Did you ever stop to think that I have a war to run?’
Keitel, in his early sixties, had greying hair, a high forehead and fleshy ears. When he closed his mouth, his teeth clacked together like a mousetrap, causing the flesh around his jowly chin to quiver momentarily.
‘I just have a few questions,’ said Hunyadi, removing a notebook from his chest pocket, along with the stub of a pencil. ‘Please sit,’ he told the field marshal, gesturing at a chair on the other side of the table.
‘I won’t be here long enough!’ roared Keitel. ‘Just hurry up and ask me whatever it is you need to ask, so you can report back to the Führer that I am not the source of any information leak.’
‘So you are aware of the leak?’
‘Of course! For months, there have been rumours.’
‘What kind of rumours?’
Keitel breathed in sharply through his nose. ‘Things finding their way on to the Allied radio network.’
‘What things?’
Keitel shrugged angrily. ‘Useless gossip, mostly. The sordid details of people’s lives.’
‘The Führer seems to think it is more serious than that.’
Slowly, Keitel leaned away from Hunyadi. He pulled himself up to his full height, fingers twitching inside grey-green leather gloves. ‘He has no proof of that, at least none that I have seen or heard about. If you ask me, he’s chasing a ghost, and we have other, more important things to occupy our minds. It is simply a distraction, which is exactly what the Allies had in mind.’
‘So you will admit the leak exists?’
The field marshal shrugged. ‘Possibly.’
‘And where, if you had to guess, would you say the leak is coming from?’
‘If you ask me, they are the kind of details one hears talked about among the secretaries, of which there are several working in the bunker.’
‘So you think it is one of them?’
‘I’m not accusing anyone,’ snapped Keitel. ‘It’s just a hunch, but one that carries weight if you can see this from the Allies’ point of view.’
‘And how is that?’
‘Whoever they are using for this, if there is anyone at all, is someone they consider expendable.’
‘How so?’ asked Hunyadi.
‘How long did the Allies think they could go on telling bunker secrets before Hitler sent a man like you to find the source? Now have you asked enough questions or are you going to keep me here all day?’
‘No, Field Marshal,’ said Hunyadi, closing his notebook. ‘You are free to go.’
The next man through the door was Hitler’s adjutant, SS Major Otto Guensche. He had come straight from his duties at the bunker and wore a brown, double-breasted knee-length leather coat over his dress uniform. He was very tall, with sad and patient eyes; a man who looked like he was used to keeping his mouth shut.
Hunyadi realised at once that he would get little out of Guensche. After a few, perfunctory questions about life in the bunker, all of which Guensche answered in a slow and quiet voice, as if he was certain that others were listening, Hunyadi sent him away.
There followed a line of secretaries – Johanna Wolf, Christa Schroeder, Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge. If anything, these women were tougher than the field marshal. They gave almost nothing away, but from the upward darting of their gazes and the twitching of the muscles in their jaws, it was clear to Hunyadi, from his years of questioning suspects in the dingy, glaringly lit interrogation cells of the Spandau prison, that these women had plenty they could tell. The question was whether they had, and Hunyadi did not think so. Their loyalty ran so deep that it was oblivious to the kinds of political manoeuvrings that other, more highly placed members of the Führer’s entourage might have found tempting.
After the secretaries, Hunyadi interviewed Hitler’s chauffeur Erich Kempka, a rough, sarcastic man, who was himself a victim of the rumour leak. The story of his infidelities had been described more than once by ‘Der Chef’.
Then came Heinz Linge, one of Hitler’s valets, so nervous that he might have uttered some inconsequential detail in his sleep and thereby brought about the downfall of the Reich; his right eye began to twitch uncontrollably and Hunyadi dismissed him earlier than he had planned to out of fear that the man might be about to suffer a heart attack.
After Linge’s departure, Hunyadi glanced at his watch and realised that the day was almost over.
His final visitor was Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s emissary to the Führer’s court and, judging from the reputation that preceded him, someone universally disliked.
Unlike all the others, Fegelein appeared completely at ease, and it was this
which made Hunyadi suspicious.
‘Why am I here?’ demanded Fegelein.
‘The Führer believes that there is a leak of classified information from his Berlin Headquarters. Some of it is finding its way to the Allies, who are broadcasting it from their radio stations.’
‘You mean “Der Chef”?’
‘You have heard of him?’
‘Everybody has, but if that’s why you’ve brought me in I can tell you right now you are wasting your time.’
‘You may be right,’ answered Hunyadi, ‘but I must speak with everyone who has access to classified information in the bunker. And that would include you, Gruppenführer, since you attend the Führer’s briefings every day.’
‘That’s my job,’ he replied.
‘Nevertheless,’ said Hunyadi, ‘we must satisfy the Führer’s curiosity.’
Fegelein slumped down into the chair on the other side of the table. He breathed in deeply and then sighed. ‘So ask away.’
‘I only have one question,’ said Hunyadi.
Fegelein blinked in confusion. ‘That’s all?’
‘If there was a leak,’ asked Hunyadi, ‘then where, in your opinion, would it come from?’
Fegelein thought for a moment before he replied. ‘Somewhere down the line,’ he said.
‘Down the line?’
‘Someone who has learned to slip between the cracks,’ explained Fegelein. ‘A person you see all the time but never notice. But you are wasting your time looking at me, and others like me. My kind of people do not risk our lives on spreading gossip. We have far too much to lose for that.’
‘Thank you,’ said Hunyadi. ‘You may go.’
Fegelein stood up and turned to leave. But then he turned back. ‘Why only one question?’
Hunyadi smiled, almost sympathetically. ‘If you were indeed the source of the leak, would you have admitted that to me?’
Fegelein snorted. ‘Of course not!’
‘Precisely,’ said Fegelein.
‘So why bring us in here at all?’
‘Firstly, because that is what Hitler wants. And secondly, so that there can be no doubt, in the mind of whomever is divulging this information, that they are being hunted now.’