‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ she whispered. ‘I thought I couldn’t conceive. Even so I took precautions, but then it happened.’
Hiebermeyer stared at her. ‘When was this?’
‘March 1944. I know what you are going to ask. I conceived Hans three weeks before Himmler introduced me to Ernst at a party. I knew the meeting had been arranged by Himmler because he wanted Ernst to have a good Aryan wife, and I looked the part perfectly. It was a match made for the newsreels. I jumped at it. I truly fel in love with Ernst, but it was also my escape from the Lebensborn. I realized about a week later that I was pregnant. I had to make a decision. The timing was close enough to pass the child off as ours.’
‘Did Ernst know about your involvement with the Lebensborn programme?’
‘He thought I was one of the care workers, the nannies. Himmler even encouraged him to visit me, so that the cameramen who fol owed Ernst everywhere could capture images of the war hero with the little blond children, the next generation of Nazis.
Ernst told me he loved to see me with the orphans, that I was a natural mother. He was very tender with them, but he always looked troubled. The German people were never told that many of the so-cal ed Lebensborn children were snatched from Polish parents; they were told that those children were orphans of German parents living in Poland, innocents caught up in war when the Poles had foolishly resisted the Nazi invasion in 1939. But Ernst had been there, during his first deployment as a Stuka pilot, and he knew what had happened to so many of those Polish parents, taken away at night and executed as the Nazis tried to exterminate the entire Polish professional class. We in Germany al knew what was going on in that war, you know. For some it was just smal snippets in day-to-day life: seeing Jewish work parties, watching Jewish families disappear from your neighbourhood, working in factories alongside slave labour, or – if you were a soldier – watching the SS-Einsatzgruppen at work and seeing the bodies of women and old people hanging in every vil age. You didn’t have to know about Treblinka or Sobibor or Belsen to be aware of the evil that was going on. Don’t let any German who lived through those years tel you otherwise.’
Hiebermeyer sat down heavily on the chair opposite Heidi. ‘Did you tel Hans?’
‘Not for years. I left it too late, probably.’ She was weeping, and took out a tissue to wipe her eyes.
‘Ernst was dark-haired and brown-eyed, and Hans grew up blond-haired and blue-eyed. I could pass that off to him as my legacy, but as the years went by, he looked nothing like Ernst. Because of Ernst’s fame as a pilot, Hans became obsessed with him as a teenager and even learned to fly because he felt it must be in his genes. But then as a university student, he watched one of the old newsreels showing Ernst being feted fol owed by one showing a Lebensborn farm, with blonde young women surrounded by happy blond orphans. The film was shot about six months before Ernst and I met. Hans recognized me in the group.’
‘And that’s when you told him?’
Heidi nodded, sniffing. ‘He learned that he was the blond, blue-eyed son of a Hungarian thug who had volunteered to join the SS. It devastated him. Few of the Lebensborn children who discovered the truth lived happy lives. It put Hans on a path of self-destruction, to the anarchists and then the Baader–
Meinhof terrorists. He was final y shot by the police in a stand-off. He had been given the chance to surrender, but I knew it would never happen, that in his mind there was no life ahead for him. I watched it al on TV, as if I was watching one of those newsreels from the war.’ She bowed her head. ‘Do you know the Wilfred Owen poem, “Strange Meeting”? It was unfinished when he was kil ed in action in 1918. He wrote of escaping from battle down some profound dul tunnel, but then realizing it had only taken him to hel . Often I feel as if the war has never ended for me, as if I’m on an ice sheet on a lake trying to escape from the broken ice of the past, but every step I take just breaks more. I only hope that what I’ve been able to tel you now wil bring resolution to one awful legacy.’
Hiebermeyer gripped her hand. His face was drawn with emotion, and his voice was hoarse. ‘I remember Hans from when I was a boy. He used to lift me on his shoulders, and I remember his thick blond hair, feeling very safe as he carried me along the lake shore to where we went fishing. I wish I’d known. I could have told him it was al right.’
Heidi put her hand on Hiebermeyer’s head, and bowed her own, saying nothing for a moment. Then she looked up to Jack. ‘The last time I saw Ernst was just before dawn on the second of May 1945. I was in a farmhouse outside Plön, near the Baltic coast. Two nights previously a Gestapo team had taken Hans and me from our house in a vil age south of Berlin, just as it was about to be overrun by the Russians. I had no idea what was going on. Gestapo coming in the night was usual y bad news, but I was grateful. I thought there was no chance that I would have survived the Red Army. But then while Hans was stil asleep that night at Plön, Ernst arrived with an escort of two SS men, having just flown in from Berlin. We only had twenty minutes alone together. I told the SS
this might be our last chance for a while. I knew how to talk to these men, remember. I took them out of Ernst’s earshot while he was looking at Hans asleep and said that if they returned later, I would see that they were not disappointed. When we got into the bedroom, al Ernst did was talk. He told me he’d come from the Zoo flak tower, and had been visited by Himmler. To my horror, I realized that he had become part of Himmler’s plan. I also realized that Hans and I were being used as a bargaining chip.
Ernst told me he had secretly written a diary of everything he knew, al the secrets and subterfuge of those awful final months in Berlin, and that he had left it with some crates of artefacts in the Zoo tower for the KGB to discover. He was carrying a satchel with something heavy in it. I didn’t ask what it was, but he said he also had something he’d retrieved from a secret place under the Zoo tower. I knew instantly what it was, because that was where the refined product of our research in the laboratory was to be stored. I now knew that it was a weapon that Himmler had secretly created and planned for his own purpose. Ultimately, only a single sample had been saved, al others having been destroyed deliberately to ensure that Himmler had complete control.’
‘The Spanish flu virus,’ Jack said quietly.
She nodded. ‘Ernst showed me the smal metal tube. He said a U-boat was waiting, one of the latest types that could go stealthily for weeks without refuel ing. At the U-boat’s destination, he was to unlock a chamber and place the phial inside; once he had done that, word would be radioed back and Hans and I would fol ow in another U-boat, accompanied by Himmler himself.’
‘But you knew that plan was al a charade,’ Jack said softly.
‘Ernst held my hand. He said he would do everything in his power to send that phial to the deepest depths of the ocean. He said he knew there would be men in the submarine watching his every move, whose task was probably to eliminate him once the delivery had been made. But he said he’d spent hours in a Type-21 U-boat during a promotional visit to a shipyard, and had been fascinated by the machinery. That was Ernst for you. He could ignore al the horror around him as long as he had a good machine to play with. He said he’d worked out how to fire a torpedo, and he’d realized on the flight from Berlin how he could eject the phial from a torpedo tube. He said he would find a way of sealing himself in the torpedo room and doing it, even if it meant no chance of escape for him.’
‘Do you believe he did it?’
Heidi swal owed hard, suddenly looking very frail. ‘I knew I’d never see him again. Part of me wanted that.
If he’d found out the truth about Hans, about me, it would have destroyed him. You must remember, with the advance of the Red Army, we al thought we were going to die. But even if I were to live, I wanted that happiness we had experienced in the few days of his leave during our brief time as man and wife to stil be there, to be sealed in the past where I could go when I shut my eyes. I only wish I had been right about that. I yearn to see
it again, but I can’t.’
‘You wil , Tante Heidi,’ Hiebermeyer said, holding her hand. ‘You wil .’
She turned to Jack. ‘In answer to your question, yes. With al my heart I believe he would have done it. I have never doubted that the virus was destroyed, somewhere at the bottom of the ocean.’
‘We don’t want Saumerre knowing that,’ Jack murmured. ‘Our plan depends on him thinking that what his man Auxel e took from the bunker was a lesser toxic agent, far exceeded by the virus. If he thinks the virus is destroyed, he might be tempted to use what he has, the Alexander bacterium. That would be bad enough.’
‘What do we do now?’ Hiebermeyer said.
‘Two things.’ Heidi firmly put Hiebermeyer’s hand away and straightened herself up, drying her eyes. ‘I am going to organize you.’
‘That sounds like the Tante Heidi I remember,’
Hiebermeyer said. ‘First,’ she said, ‘you need to find out where the U-boat was heading. Al I know for certain is that it was the place where Himmler’s men discovered those symbols, the underwater cavern I saw in that slideshow at Wewelsburg. Here’s the only clue I can give you. The Ahnenerbe man who gave that lecture on Atlantis, Ernst’s old student acquaintance? He’s stil alive.’
‘How do you know?’ Jack said.
‘As I get older and so many of us die, historians more often come to me for interviews about my experiences in Nazi Germany. And there are always treasure-hunters who think they’re on the trail of Nazi loot. One researcher came to my home recently, a few weeks ago. He said he’d found a surviving Ahnenerbe man in Canada who knew I was alive because I’d been interviewed for a TV programme he’d seen, and he’d advised the researcher to find me.’
Jack cast Hiebermeyer a concerned glance, then looked back at Heidi. ‘What did he want?’
‘Real y he seemed to want me to talk much as I have to you. To reveal something he thought I knew, about Himmler and his plan. Once I knew who the Ahnenerbe man was, that didn’t surprise me.’
‘But you didn’t tel the researcher anything.’
‘Of course not. Al I told him was that I’d been a wil ing sex worker in the Lebensborn. That real y I’d just been a prostitute. I’m quite capable of putting that act on again, you know. That shut him up.’
‘So who was the Ahnenerbe man?’
She paused. ‘Ernst knew him from Heidelberg University before the war. He was much more of a scholar than Ernst, quite aloof. I got to know him because several times I had . . .’ she paused,
‘accommodated him at the Lebensborn farm. He was not at al the right Aryan type, tal and thin and Prussian, but Himmler often sent favourites down to us for entertainment, real y using us as little more than a whorehouse. As I said, you always find out things in the bedroom that shouldn’t be said. He told me he had denounced to the Gestapo his and Ernst’s old professor, a reluctant Ahnenerbe recruit who had become a drunk and talked too much. Later, after he saw me in the audience of his lecture at Wewelsburg with Ernst, he forced me to visit him in secret for sex, saying he would tel Ernst the truth about me otherwise. A true Prussian gentleman. I’d been fascinated by that slide showing the underwater cavern and asked him where it was, but he himself had not been on the expedition and he hadn’t been told. But if anyone has clues, it’s him. His name was von Schoenberg.’
Jack looked stunned. ‘Von Schoenberg? Professor von Schoenberg? The classical scholar?’
‘You know of him?’
Jack turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘While we were students at Cambridge, he came on sabbatical to work with James Dil en. Do you remember we went together to his seminar on Phoenician exploration in the Atlantic?’
‘ Mein Gott. Yes. I argued with him that it wasn’t the Phoenicians, it was the Egyptians who first circumnavigated Africa.’
‘It’s an extraordinary coincidence,’ Jack said.
‘Dil en cal ed me and said he returned from Troy to a barrage of emails and phone messages from Schoenberg saying he had something of great importance he wanted to tel . Dil en said that in the past, Schoenberg had always been trying to pin him down on matters of great importance, usual y some tiny contentious detail in a translation. But the odd thing this time was that he specifical y wanted to see me.’
‘Maybe not so odd after al ,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘If we know about him, Saumerre might too and could have got to him first, somehow persuaded him to draw you in and reveal what you know.’
Jack clicked on his iPhone, checking his directory.
‘Dil en’s sent me his address in British Columbia.’ He turned to Heidi. ‘Your second thing?’
She grasped her stick and leaned forward, speaking in a low voice. ‘I know how to create a vaccine against the bacterium, which wil make it far less dangerous as a potential weapon. We scientists knew that the bacterium would never be as deadly a threat as the virus.’
Jack gasped. ‘Go on.’
‘That was my job just before I left the laboratory to join the Lebensborn. They were al worried about themselves, the scientists and their SS handlers, about getting infected. They couldn’t find a treatment for the flu virus, but they set me to work on the bacterium. I’d been a top biochemistry student before the war, you know, and had spent a postgraduate year at Oxford. That’s where I acquired my English.
After the war for many years in England I carried out research for the Ministry of Defence, where my speciality was antidotes for biological weapons they thought the Russians might use. I never revealed anything about the Alexander bacterium, because I just wanted to forget al about that bunker and I was fearful that leading anyone to it would result in contamination and expose the world to a deadly plague. But I careful y recorded al of my research data so that I could resume the work some time in the future if necessary. There was only one component missing.’
‘Go on,’ Jack said.
‘The Alexander bacterium. One would need a fresh sample to prove that the vaccine works, and as far as I know only the one marker-sample was saved by Himmler’s people.’
Jack thought hard. ‘Could you stil do it now? Could you perfect it?’
‘I stil have very close col eagues working in high security government labs who would relish the task. I would gladly tel them al I know. My science became my life after the war, and it’s stil what keeps me going. And in answer to your next question, yes. I know where they found the bacterium. Schoenberg knows too, because he was there, part of the Ahnenerbe team who were supposedly looking for Atlantis but in reality were scouring the world for the bacterium mentioned in the ancient sources. They needed icy-cold freshwater places, where the water runs over limestone. They found it in Iceland.’
‘ Iceland,’ Jack exclaimed. ‘Do you know exactly where?’
She reached into her pocket and handed him a slip of paper. ‘This is what my Hungarian told me. He was very proud of being a trained diver and had been on that expedition. It was very dangerous for them, with their primitive equipment.’
Jack paused. There was one thing he needed to know, to be sure that al of this was true. ‘Your Hungarian,’ he said slowly. ‘When he woke up the next morning after tel ing you everything, he must have berated himself. He would have sworn secrecy to Himmler. If you’d told anyone else and he’d been fingered, that would have been the end for him. He was getting nothing out of you after you’d met Ernst.
Why didn’t he concoct some reason to have you dealt with by the Gestapo?’
Heidi gave Jack an unfathomable look. ‘Because I kept seeing him. I knew that if I didn’t, I was doomed.
Al the time I was with Ernst, the Hungarian was stil my lover. I saw him while Ernst was on the Russian front, and while he was in Berlin. The Hungarian knew that Hans was his son. The last time I saw him was in that house at Plön on the second of May 1945, only a few hours before Ernst arrived on his way to the U-boat. I never saw either man again. Within days, weeks at the most, both were dead.’
Jack glanced at the paper, reading the
details, then careful y folded it and put it in his pocket.
‘Okay.’ He stood up ‘I have to ring Costas. And set up a flight to British Columbia. But before that, Maurice, I need you to ring your friend Major Penn.
Heidi’s innocent act with that researcher may have put Saumerre off for the time being, but after Auxel e’s death, I suspect that everyone who knows anything about this wil be eliminated as soon as they cease to be useful. I know Penn was desperate to do something after his sergeant was murdered, and I got the impression that he was frustrated not to be the one to take care of Auxel e. But providing round-the-clock protection for Frau Hoffman is as important as it gets.’
‘I’m sure he’l be happy to oblige.’ Hiebermeyer took out his phone, then stood up, suddenly looking tired. ‘I’m going to take Tante Heidi home,’ he said.
‘Then I’ve got a pregnant wife to attend. Hope you don’t mind.’
Jack put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘You know what I think.’
‘Aysha,’ Heidi said, suddenly beaming. ‘I can’t wait to meet her.’
‘Sevety-two
hours,’
Jack
said,
looking
at
Hiebermeyer. ‘Then we’l be planning that expedition to find Akhenaten’s treasure in Egypt.’
‘Promise?’
Jack looked at his friend’s face, remembering what he had gone through in the bunker, something he had volunteered to do in Jack’s place. ‘You can count on it. But meanwhile, the clock’s ticking. I need to visit Professor Schoenberg. And I need to think about diving again.’
17
Near Tofino, Vancouver Island, British Columbia
Gods of Atlantis Page 33