He ran over the fal en cyclist, popping and squeezing the body like a toothpaste tube, leaving a bloody clot on one track that reappeared with each turn as the tank lunged forward. Another glorious death in battle, another wreathed photograph on a mother’s mantelpiece. Hoffman watched the infantry come up behind, picking their way through the rubble. He heard the distinctive echoing rip of a German Spandau machine gun, and three of them fel . Then the tank gun traversed and cracked and a tottering pile of masonry disintegrated, silencing the Spandau. In minutes the Soviets would be under the elevation of the flak guns, and the tanks would be firing point-blank at the steel covers over the windows of the Zoo tower, trying to punch a hole large enough for a flamethrower to spurt fire into the thousands of people crammed in the darkness below. Unless they surrendered it soon, the tower would become a giant crematorium.
Then Hoffman heard another sound, nearby on the platform this time, a groan of machinery fol owed by a whirring and rattling noise. He looked over towards the ammunition elevator and saw the first 128mm shel emerge, then watched three boys struggle to carry it to the nearest gun. As a tactic against the Soviet advance, it was a futile gesture. The tanks would be under the guns’ minimum elevation by the time they were ready to fire. But he and the battery commander had devised the plan to keep the Feldgendarmen convinced that they would fight to the end, and to provide a distraction. The gunners would fire ten rounds a minute until the ammunition was expended. The noise and vibration inside the tower would be horrendous.
He saw the battery commander crawl out from the shaft, streaked in oil, his head wreathed in a bloodstained bandage. The man immediately hunched down and set to with a wrench unscrewing the fuses as each new shel appeared, surrounded by crouched boys. Hoffman knew that the remaining ammunition for the big guns had been time-fused for high-altitude airburst, and the fuses would al need to be reset. It was of no consequence now, as it was the noise of the guns that would create the distraction. But Hoffman saw that the gun crew were in their own world, locked into their dril in this final act. The commander looked up for a moment, gazed around frantical y, not seeing him, and then hunched over again. Hoffman had a sudden cold realization. He was going to have to do this alone.
Then he felt it, a strange brushing sensation, barely perceptible, an unsettling feeling that seemed to come from al directions at once. The soldiers who had been in battle cal ed it the devil’s breath, the wind caused by the blast and suck of thousands of exploding shel s. He looked towards the Reichstag, but the Tiergarten had disappeared in an eruption of dust and smoke. Soon the creeping barrage would reach the flak tower. He looked south, and saw the ripple of flame from the Soviet howitzers on the horizon, then the multiple fire-streaks of Katyusha rockets. In moments the sound would reach them, the pulverizing roar of artil ery, the shriek of the rockets, sowing terror just as the siren in his own Stuka dive-bomber had once done.
What he had seen in the street outside was just a probing attack. Now al hel would be unleashed. He felt his chest tighten. The whole earth seemed to be shaking. He watched men and boys scurrying around him, seeking shelter from the onslaught to come, in a blur.
Another smel assailed his nostrils.
It was the smell of fear.
Hoffman ran back towards the entrance to the spiral staircase that led into the bowels of the tower. A cluster of shel s burst in the grounds of the Zoo, sending shrapnel clattering like hail against the concrete below. From their new positions the Russian gunners were finding the range, aided now by forward artil ery spotters in the ruined buildings in sight of the tower. Hoffman glanced at the flak gunners loading the breech of the nearest twin 128mm gun, its barrels aimed towards the street below. He prayed that they would have enough time to fire their salvo and give him the distraction he needed to get out with a white flag. He saw the boy in the lederhosen, helping to heave another shel towards the breech. Let him survive. The din suddenly became horrendous: the roar of tank engines, the rattle of tracks, the crack of tank gunfire, the rippling boom of howitzers, the screaming salvos of rockets, the noise echoing and rol ing through the open doorway. He lurched inside and heaved the steel door shut, closing off the worst of it. The stench of seething humanity wafted up to him. He suddenly felt terribly claustrophobic. He had to get out of this place.
As he turned to go down the spiral stairs, he heard the clatter of someone running up from below. A helmeted face appeared under the one bare bulb stil lit on the upper stairway, and stopped, breathless.
‘Herr Oberstleutnant.’ It was his orderly, an elderly Volkssturm wearing a faded First World War tunic.
The man leaned forward, panting, holding his stomach, looking half-dead. ‘You must come at once.
To your room. Important visitors from the Reich Chancel ery. A prisoner under escort.’
The Reich Chancellery. Hoffman stopped on the stairs. What the hel did they want? He clenched his teeth. ‘Who is it?’
The soldier’s skin was pasty, like porcelain, and there was a numbness in his eyes. ‘Herr Oberstleutnant, I don’t know. I real y don’t know. One of the Feldgendarmen grabbed me and sent me up to find you.’
‘Al right. How many?’
‘Five, I think. Two SS guards, two senior-looking officers and the prisoner, bound and hooded. They came through the cable tunnel from the L-Tower.
That’s al I know.’ The soldier’s voice cracked, and he slumped against the wal .
Hoffman took a deep breath, and swal owed hard.
His throat was stil burning from the acrid air outside.
‘Al right. Go back to your duties. Don’t give the Feldgendarmen any reason to pick on you. There’s going to be a lot of kil ing soon. Get on.’
The soldier gave a faltering salute and stumbled back down the stairs. Hoffman fol owed him, clattering down as fast as he could. The stench was indescribable. He passed the entrance to the hospital and glimpsed bloodstained operating tables inside.
Part of the hospital was an emergency Sanitätsraum, a maternity ward. The vibration of the guns had pushed women into early labour, as if life were frantical y regenerating in the face of extinction. He had heard the screams of women giving birth in the night and the wail of a baby, so at odds with this place of death.
He thought about what his orderly had said. In his room. Al he could think of was the crates with Schliemann’s artefacts from Troy. In the last hours of the Reich, had they come to claim their remaining loot? But with a prisoner? He reached the second-floor landing. He could see the throng of civilians below, in the emergency lighting now provided by the backup generator. The stairwel funnel ed the noise upwards, a sound like the engine room of a ship, humming and pulsating. Above it he heard the occasional shriek, then a snatched voice of reason as someone tried to bargain for space, for food. Two days ago he had watched families arrive in their best clothes, carrying cardboard suitcases with thermos flasks and sandwiches. Now they surged up the stairs like a nightmare image, pressing against the line of Feldgendarmen who held them back. This was the truth of Goebbels’ Volksgenossenschaft, ‘patriotic comradeship’. These were the ordinary people of Berlin, the women who had waited in vain for their soldier husbands to return, the children, the elderly who thought they had endured the worst of war a generation ago. Two wel -dressed women suddenly disintegrated into a vicious fight over a scrap, snarling and scratching until one of the Feldgendarmen slammed his elbow into them and they fel back into the melee, screaming. Hoffman remembered a line from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. First comes food, then morals. Only for so many of these people, morality had been sucked out of them by the Nazis long ago.
He approached the door to his room. The two Feldgendarmen had gone, and had been replaced by two men wearing Waffen-SS camouflage smocks and forage caps and carrying Sturmgewehr-44
assault rifles. Their lapels carried the round Sonnenrad sun-disc symbol of the SS Nordland Division, the same symbol Hoffman had seen in the floor at Wewelsburg Castle. One of the m
en put up a hand, swathed in a bandage and missing a thumb, and Hoffman halted. He suddenly felt uneasy.
Perhaps he had been wrong about the Schliemann treasure. Maybe they were here for him. Had he given them some excuse, failed in his duty somehow?
He remembered what he had left on the crate. His diary. He had never imagined that anyone would return to that room before the Russians arrived. If a Feldgendarm or SS man stil loyal to the Reich saw even one page of it, then it was al over for him. He felt a cold trickle of sweat run down his back. A voice barked inside, and the soldier missing the thumb beckoned him forward. At that moment a shudder rent the tower as one of the big flak guns fired. Hoffman knew that the worst vibration was a whiplash effect a second later, and he instinctively put his hands to his ears. As he did so, the soldier deftly undid his holster and took the Luger from him. Hoffman dropped his arms and walked into the room. His heart began to pound. So this was it.
He saw two men inside, wearing army greatcoats and officers’ peaked caps, their faces obscured in the gloom. They wore the shoulder insignia of SS
g e ne r a ls , Obergruppenführer, and
they
were
streaked with mud. Then he saw a third man, the prisoner, shorter than the other two and wearing a civilian brown leather coat, a white hood over his head and his arms tied behind his back. The door shut behind Hoffman. The smal er man suddenly released his own hands without help and ripped off the hood, then walked towards Hoffman’s makeshift desk, where the bare bulb hanging over it was lit. One of the generals gestured for Hoffman to fol ow. He clicked his heels, touched his Knight’s Cross, pul ed down his jacket lapels and straightened his cap, then walked over briskly and came to a halt, slamming his foot down and remaining at attention. He felt strangely calm. Why there had to be three of them he did not know. A single Feldgendarm, a single bul et, was al he had expected. At least he was not being guil otined in Gestapo headquarters, or strung up with piano wire like the Hitler plot conspirators the year before.
The smal er man threw off his greatcoat and smoothed back his oily hair, then turned round under the light and stared at him.
Hoffman froze. It was not possible. The man in front of him should by al rights have been dead. It was Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.
14
Oberstleutnant Ernst Hoffman stood inside the entrance to the concrete room that had served as his office, the two Waffen-SS guards behind him and the shadowy figures of the two SS generals in greatcoats standing against the wal to the left. For a frightening moment he felt unable to breathe, as if the closed-down ventilation shafts had final y excluded al air from the flak tower, and the remainder had been sucked out by the pulverizing Soviet bombardment overhead.
When he did take a breath, his nostrils fil ed with the same cloying smel that had sickened him in the Führerbunker under the Chancel ery a few days before, the reek of wet wool, stale sweat, nicotine and alcohol, the hint of incipient decay that had made the bunker already seem like a tomb.
He stared at the man facing him in front of his desk.
The man had been wearing an eye patch, now pul ed off, and had shaved his moustache, but there was no doubting who he was. What was he doing here?
Hoffman had been this close to Himmler many times over the last months of his posting in Berlin, and earlier when Himmler had taken an interest in his Luftwaffe career. The pasty complexion was there, the weak chin, the squirrel y jowls, the smal , close-set eyes behind little round spectacles, looking at him with one eyebrow raised. Hoffman snapped to attention, clicked his heels and raised his right arm in the Nazi salute. ‘Herr Reichsführer-SS. Heil Hitler.’
Himmler waved dismissively. ‘You can dispense with the Heil Hitler. Adolf is dead.’ His voice was ice-cold, precise. Under the civilian overcoat Hoffman could see that he was wearing the field grey of a Wehrmacht officer, not the usual SS black. Then Hoffman remembered that Hitler, in one of his final acts
of
madness,
had
appointed
Himmler
commander of Army Group Vistula. Himmler had seemed inordinately proud of his role, but had never held a field command before in his life. Everyone knew he had failed to be selected for front-line service in 1918, and it grated on him. Army Group Vistula had disintegrated weeks ago, but Hoffman knew there was a reason why Himmler was stil wearing the uniform: three days earlier, Himmler had gone on his own volition over the Elbe to the advancing American army, to try to negotiate a ceasefire. An SS uniform would not have made him many friends there. His proposal that the Al ies join with the remnant Wehrmacht to fight against the Russians had been rejected, but when Hitler found out about his attempt to parley he was incandescent and had him branded a traitor. Hoffman himself had been next to Hitler in the bunker and had seen the rage. Himmler had expected to be the next Führer, but instead Hitler had appointed Grand Admiral Dönitz. Himmler had disappeared, and was presumed dead. But now the man himself was standing here, very much alive. And it was Hitler who was dead.
Himmler waved again at Hoffman’s raised arm, then offered his gloved right hand. Hoffman watched his gaze, remembering how it roved disarmingly over a person’s countenance before fixing on one’s eyes, penetratingly. He remained ramrod straight, but lowered his arm, taking the proffered hand. He felt the pudgy fingers, soft and clammy, and the limp shake.
Himmler was stil looking at him questioningly, one eyebrow cocked. In that instant, Hoffman knew he was being tested. Of course. The Führer is dead. Long live the Führer. He snapped his right arm back up.
‘ Mein Führer. Sieg Heil.’ Himmler gave him a lopsided, humourless smile, then took off his leather gloves and slapped them against his thigh. ‘I have always been impressed by your loyalty, Hoffman. You and your family. Dear little Hans. Have you heard from your wife? These are testing times.’
‘They are in Elsholz, mein Führer. At my wife’s family home. The Russians are close.’
‘Then I have excel ent news for you. Two days ago, my men took them to Plön, near the Baltic coast. They are safe from the Russians.’ He pul ed a postcard with a seaside view out of his pocket and passed it to Hoffman, who glanced down at it. There were just a few lines, but it was enough. He recognized his wife’s writing. They were by the sea. Waiting for him. He felt weak with relief. Dr Unverzagt had been tel ing the truth about that, at least. He stared at Himmler, not betraying a flicker of emotion, and clicked his heels again. ‘I am most grateful.’
Himmler waved his hand, then pul ed a dagger out of his belt, unsheathed it, and ran one finger over the flat of the blade, flinching as he touched the edge. It was an SS officer’s dagger, black-handled and mirror-bright, with runes etched into the steel. Hoffman remained stock stil . So this was to be it. Not a bul et, but a knife. He was surprised that Himmler had the stomach for it. Himmler stopped toying with the knife and looked at Hoffman. ‘As I said, I have always been impressed by your loyalty. Not like those snivel ing swine at Army Group Headquarters, always undermining me. Not like those sycophants in the Führerbunker. The only ones I have ever trusted are my beloved SS, and you, Hoffman. But now it is time to regenerate, to purify. The Nazi party is dead. The SS lives on. Kneel down.’
Hoffman held his breath. Just get it over with. He sank to both knees, stil ramrod straight, staring past Himmler. He closed his eyes, trying to imagine his son, holding him sleeping against his shoulder, standing on the lake shore at his father’s home in Bavaria, feeling the warmth of the infant’s breath on his neck. He felt a tap on his shoulder, then opened his eyes and saw Himmler resheathing the knife and looking down at him. ‘You know the SS oath?’
Hoffman swal owed hard. ‘ Meine Ehre Heisst Treue. My honour is loyalty.’
‘Arise, SS-Brigadeführer.’
Hoffman rose to his feet, stood to attention and clicked his heels. He felt physical y sick. ‘ Mein Führer. It is the greatest honour.’
Himmler put the dagger on th
e desk, slapped down his gloves beside it and then went round to Hoffman’s chair. He sat down heavily and raised his legs on the desk, rattling the half-bottle of schnapps that Hoffman had left there. He took off the shoulder satchel he had been carrying and pul ed out a swaddled package, putting it on the table beside the dagger. Hoffman fol owed every movement, his heart pounding, keeping his eyes from straying to the top of the crate where he had left his diary. He must not see that.
Himmler took off his spectacles, blew on them and wiped them clean with a handkerchief, then replaced them and stared at Hoffman. ‘I am a practical man, SS-Brigadeführer. I have absolutely no wish to go down with the rats in the sinking ship. The Americans have disappointed me. But they wil do my bidding, when the time comes. Of that I can assure you.’
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