The Nazi's Wife

by Peter Watson

  “What are these?” I asked, looking across at Sammy. Still concentrating on his typing, he didn’t hear me at first. “Sammy! Do you know what these are?”

  He didn’t look up and he didn’t stop typing. “They came for you. A couple of days ago.”

  “They came for me? Do you know what they are? Who sent them?”

  He came to the end of his sentence before speaking. Then he looked up, pushing back his eyeglasses, which had fallen forward, over the bridge of his nose.

  “Well, they weren’t addressed to you personally. They were just sent to this office by Lieutenant Bloch, the last person to interrogate Mrs. von Zell. He was the man who threatened to deport her to the Russian zone.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “As soon as he had seen Mrs. von Zell, and she had failed to be intimidated by his threat to send her to Berlin, Bloch was recalled to the U.S. His wife was taken ill. In his scramble to leave he took a lot of documents with him that he should have left behind.” Sammy motioned to the bundle on my desk. “I had a letter from him two days ago—I helped him with some shares too.” Sammy smiled. “Those papers were included in the parcel. He finally got around to sorting his things out.”

  “Yes, but what are they?”

  “Letters mostly, I think. Bloch confiscated lots of things from the von Zells—he wasn’t exactly our best example of American tact, but he never read them; he never had time. No one has read them. I thought they might contain something useful, some reference to a location where von Zell might hide out. But I’m guessing; I don’t know what’s in the bundle. It might be a waste of time. Then again, it might prove very useful.”

  I looked at the bundle without undoing it or touching it. When I think back now, and remember that I came close to not untying that ribbon, I have to smile to myself.

  That bundle changed everything. It changed my life.

  The papers or documents, whatever they were, looked old and there seemed to be scores, if not hundreds, of them. That was daunting. In my interrogation work I had learned one thing at least: that important clues could turn up in the most unlikely places—like that ad, for instance, which I had found in the newspaper in the alpine hut where Allie and I spent the night. Which meant that I had learned to concentrate on even the most unprepossessing documentation. But that didn’t make the job of reading such things any more interesting or less daunting. On the contrary, I had also learned to dread the fact that, on the way to an important clue, one usually found oneself reading the dullest, most obscure or banal rubbish. So those documents on my desk were, at that point, just another chore for me and I wasn’t exactly overjoyed with Sammy or Lieutenant Bloch for their part in returning them. What’s more, it looked as though a good number of them were handwritten, which would make reading them even more difficult. I weighed, as I had done on similar occasions before, whether I could get away with not reading them. On balance I decided I could not. If Sammy was right, and some of them were letters, they might indeed tell me something about von Zell’s habits, something that might be a clue. I brushed my hand through my hair and stood up.

  Sammy had gone back to his work and I walked through into the little cubicle that adjoined our office, the small room with the window. I looked out onto the city. Salzburg really was pretty, its roofs all different colors—black, green, yellow and reddish clay. And, from where I was standing, I realized I could see the brand-new powdery-blue spring gentian on the Gaisberg.

  In my bones I had no real hope that Maurice’s men would come up with anything, but, even so, I had to wait for him to get back to me. I also had to wait for Hobel to come back before I could tell him what I had done and discuss the possibility, however unlikely, of sending a patrol into the mountains. Hamburg was a dead end and I had no more ideas where, if he wasn’t in the Wachau, von Zell might be. There was nothing for me to do that day but wait.

  Looking out over the glorious Salzburg roofs, blotched with gold from the sun, I turned and went back to my desk to examine the bundle of papers with the blue ribbon.

  Hartt was right about one thing—they were letters. Quite how useful they were was at first not easy to say. As I had feared, they were mostly handwritten and that made them difficult to decipher. I leafed through them, picking some out, leaving others on the desk. Some had been unfolded, others were tucked into their envelopes and still others were scrunched up, the pages stuck together with coffee or wine or something of that sort. The earliest ones were written on rather good paper in fountain-pen ink, rich and deep in color; later ones were scrawled in pencil on thin, discolored wartime sheets.

  There were perhaps two hundred letters in the bundle, in no order or sequence that I could discern. It was when I noticed that there were only three hands doing the writing, three signatures at the end of the letters, that I began to take more than a casual interest in them. One signature was Mrs. von Zell’s—her letters were clearly signed “Konstanze,” in an upright, round hand. Funny how, the world over, women seem to write in one style and men in another. One hand was her husband’s and those were signed either “Rudolf,” “Rudi” or just “R.” But the third hand belonged to someone who signed himself “Bruno.”

  Glancing briefly at a couple of the letters signed by Bruno, I kicked myself. Until then I had spent a great deal of energy in trying to find out if Rudolf von Zell had a mistress, in the hope that, if he did, she might lead us to him. For some reason, chauvinism, I suppose one would call it, it had simply never occurred to me that Mrs. von Zell might have a lover. Yet that is what Bruno seemed to be, if the few letters of his that I read that day were any guide.

  I considered the letters in front of me. There were an awful lot of them. But, I decided, if Mrs. von Zell did have a lover, if she was at the center of a triangle, then who knew what sorts of jealousies might have been unleashed, jealousies that I might be able to use, emotions that might induce Konstanze’s lover to betray his rival? I decided that the letters might just repay the effort it would take to read them.

  Easier said than done. The letters had been confiscated by Lieutenant Bloch against Mrs. von Zell’s wishes and certainly without her consent. So, as I say, they were not arranged in any sensible order and my first task was to shuffle them into chronological sequence. There were so many that the task took me most of the day. Quite a few bore only the day of the month and the month itself and I had to guess the year by matching the paper and the ink to surrounding letters.

  The ordering of the letters was helpful in showing me two things: first, Mrs. von Zell was not deceiving her husband, at least not with Bruno. All the letters to and from him predated the letters to and from Rudolf. Second, both sides of the correspondence were there. That intrigued me, the more so as it was immediately obvious that the letters were all love letters of the most intimate kind. I could understand Mrs. von Zell keeping the letters she had received, but it also seemed that she had been given back the letters she herself had written. That was unusual, to say the least.

  It was almost midnight as I finished putting the letters in order. Hartt had gone, leaving me with the news that Atlantic Insurance had dropped a point—I was now down to $868, and that Confederate Paper Mills was up two cents, making Maurice $168 dollars ahead of me at $1,036. The office was quiet around me, though still blazing with light. Hobel, apparently detained in Munich, had not appeared.

  In sorting the letters I lost my hope that they might provide me with a jealous lover. But, I have to say, I glimpsed enough of their contents to want to know more than I did. They were extremely intimate, and although Bruno did not appear to be in touch with Mrs. von Zell at that time, the mid-1940s, it occurred to me that the letters were personal enough and detailed enough to contain information which I might find invaluable if ever I decided to interrogate her.

  I shuffled the most recent letters into place at the bottom of the pile. The cathedral bell had clanged midnight about ten minutes before. I wrapped the dark blue ribbon back around the bundle
, which was far more neatly stacked now. I paused to consider whether I did, in fact, have the right to read the letters. There was probably nothing in the Geneva convention about it; and historians of the Second World War would probably not regard the reading of enemy correspondence as a major war crime. Nonetheless, a woman’s love letters were scarcely to be regarded as enemy intelligence.

  I walked back through the town. It was another clear, cold, very quiet night. I cannot say that I pondered very deeply over Mrs. von Zell’s correspondence. Curiosity, which is after all a quality you are supposed to have in abundance as an interrogator, would easily get the better of me.

  Across the Market Bridge, I turned left rather than right toward my hotel. I was not at all sleepy and had been told of a brasserie, tucked away behind the cathedral, which kept late hours and served hot, if primitive, food and good beer. Then I would go back to the hotel and, if I still felt as wide awake as I did now, start reading the letters properly.

  In later years I would look back upon the need to read the letters with mixed feelings. They were engrossing pieces of paper: enchanting, sad, funny, by turns passionate, moving, occasionally erotic, always intimate and never, never dull. But they took me where I had no right to go—and that, later, caused all the problems.

  At the brasserie I was given Middle-European stodge—sausage, cabbage and potatoes—spicy and served very quickly. Two beers and I was back at the Goldener Hirsch before one o’clock. I was still wide awake so I undid my tie, slipped off my shoes and lay across my bed with the bundle.

  2

  The first letters were the easiest to read, being written on the best quality paper and in fountain-pen ink. We don’t remember today what an effort people used to make when using a fountain pen; handwriting could be quite beautiful then. The letters started in 1933, in the late summer. These early ones had been read and reread so many times that the paper was almost worn through at the folds. Bruno had been just as conscientious a letter writer as Konstanze; each would write once a week, waiting for the other’s to arrive, then reply the next day.

  To begin with, I read the correspondence with a pencil and notebook handy, so that I might jot down anything that struck me as relevant or interesting and which, if I did interrogate Mrs. von Zell, I might need. But, as that first night wore on, I was very soon caught up in Konstanze’s story. It was, without a doubt, her story, rather than Bruno’s or her husband’s, that held my interest, and my note-taking fell by the wayside.

  I can remember the chain of events perfectly, even after all this time. But, of course, in the letters it emerged only gradually, eliptically, and not in the more straightforward way that I am now going to describe. In the early letters Konstanze and Bruno each assumed that the other would understand all their references to the past or the world around them, naturally, and, of course, they met between letters and wrote things down against the background of their conversations. This meant that I had to read quite a way into the correspondence before I understood fully what was going on. When I did, though, it only made Konstanze’s situation and character all the more intriguing.

  This is Konstanze’s story, for it is now that I begin to think of her as Konstanze and not as Mrs. von Zell. It started when she was eighteen and met Bruno, who was two, no, nearly three years older. She had a sister, Rosamunde, and came from quite an exotic background; her father was an actor from Munich who was well known in Bavaria in his day, and her mother, an Austrian, was a musician who played piano and organ. I learned that the most important effect Konstanze’s parents had on her was that she and her sister had grown up in an emotional household that was used to drama. No one, so I gathered from what she told Bruno, had been afraid to show their feelings. Her father played all the great tragedies on the stage—by Goethe, Schiller and Shakespeare, who was his favorite, to name a few. The father came across in the letters as somewhat lacking in a sense of humor but Konstanze seemed genuinely fond of him and more than once referred to him as a King Lear figure. She pictured him as a kind but misguided old man, too often taken advantage of by her elder sister.

  Her mother seemed to have been a somewhat more distant parent, not austere exactly but disciplined, perhaps as a result of being a musician and having to practice so rigorously. She was a good pianist, apparently, and played in a small but highly regarded orchestra, which meant that she had to travel—and therefore be away from home—a great deal. On Sundays she played the organ in one of Munich’s main churches. After her husband, her main loves, so it would seem from the letters, were Schubert, Mozart and the massive organ works of Bruckner, all of them, interestingly enough, Austrian, rather than German, composers. Konstanze and her sister were never neglected exactly and TB, which they both contracted, was not uncommon; but they definitely came second in the household, after art.

  To begin with, as you would expect, both sisters had rebelled against their parents, but Konstanze had been won around by the time she was twelve and started to learn the piano. Her sister went the other way, and eventually became a scientist. More significant perhaps, being raised in the family atmosphere that she was, Konstanze regarded all human relationships as passionate and inevitably tragic. I imagine that her father probably agreed with her, while her mother was too busy to disagree. Schubert, Mozart and Bruckner all had tragic aspects to their lives. Lear and Faust were her father’s favorite dramas and his quotations and misquotations, like Mephistopheles’ “Blood is a juice of quality most rare,” peppered Konstanze’s letters.

  Reading between the lines and, at this point, paying more heed to Bruno’s asides than to Konstanze’s, it seemed to me that she grew up into a melancholic young woman. Melancholic was a word still in use then, despite the existence of Dr. Freud, not far away in Vienna. So, in 1933, when Konstanze met Bruno in the—for her—highly charged surroundings of a concert, he immediately fell for her modesty, her reticence, her inner sadness or, as he put it, her desolate sense of doom, from which he was determined to rescue her.

  He was in uniform that night, the handsome gray-green of a Luftwaffe pilot, sharing a box with three others, all the same—laughing, dashing figures with the world, and not just the theater stalls, at their feet. It was a typically south German, or Austrian, concert, maudlin or moving depending on your point of view: a series of sad songs, all by Schubert, written in the last two years of his life and describing the pain and sorrow that he couldn’t shake off. In fact, precisely the kind of melancholic evening so suited to Konstanze’s character. In the first intermission Bruno and the other pilots in his box had been introduced to her by mutual friends. In the crush they had been jostled to one side and he had a chance to whisper, “The next songs are much too sad for someone as beautiful as you. May I console you afterward with some champagne?”

  Melodramatic perhaps, but an unusual approach nonetheless. Bruno, whoever he was, knew something about Schubert, and he was also sensitive enough to spot the melancholy in Konstanze. She agreed.

  They had spent the second intermission talking. He had been a pilot for two years now and was, he told her with an eager pride, highly regarded. She laughed at his immodesty, but also liked his confidence in himself, so different from her own. She found that, besides music and aircraft, he was mad about automobiles, trains, yachts, motorcycles, the faster the better. They had to part for the last songs, but arranged to meet again the following day. In the darkened hall the music swelled to the finale of “Rastlöse Liebe,” based on Goethe’s poem expressing the mysterious melancholy which always mingles with the joy when one heart is spontaneously attracted to another. It could not have been better suited to her mood and she closed her eyes and tried to imagine Bruno’s face.

  It was a short flirtation because it soon blossomed into something more; that was Konstanze’s way. They would meet twice a week in Munich. There was much for her to show him in the city, since he was from Berlin and therefore a relative stranger. She was happy being his guide and took him to the museums, where he admired t
he works of Dürer, Cranach and the other German masters. There was the library, the bridges across the river, with their medieval carvings, the churches—the Dreifaltigkeitskirche, with its frescoes by Asam, the church of St. John Nepomuk, built so that the congregation sits in shadow while the rest of the church is lit radiantly from above—and any number of music shops where they could inspect beautifully carved woodwind instruments and violins. There were restaurants with their terraces still open in the late summer where they would talk for hours over a single glass of white wine. As a pilot, Bruno would permit himself no more alcohol than this.

  When the two had exhausted the city they bicycled into the country, a real pleasure in those days. Cars were few, almost nonexistent and certainly rarer than horses. Country roads were clean, refreshing places, as strange as that may seem these days. Cycling was a joy because bicycles were so quiet, and the wildlife in the hedgerows often could not hear you coming. Hedges in the 1930s were cluttered with life: different varieties of birds, rabbits, field mice, hedgehogs, squirrels, occasionally a fox. Far busier than the roads.

  It had been a happy time for both of them, too happy for letter-writing—I had to piece much of this information together later. In the face of so much unadulterated pleasure—sunshine, countryside, affection—Konstanze had even begun to lose her melancholic bent. Bruno knew far more about wildlife than she did, surprising for someone who came from Berlin, and he was a patient teacher. What he knew about the habits of bees, foxes or elms amazed and seduced her.

  Three weeks passed without any shadow. September turned into October. The bees became less populous on their jaunts into the country, and the leaves of the elms began to change color.

  Then one day they sat by the river Isar, south of Munich, watching the white lock gates open to let a motor cruiser downstream. There was a bite in the air that had been absent before; they would not be able to sit out like this for much longer.