Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright

by Justine Saracen

  Katja was appalled. Being forced to stand by the Führer at that late date was worse than being sent to a concentration camp. The camps were being liberated by the advancing armies, but those same armies would soon destroy Adolf Hitler, along with those defending him.

  She dropped her head on the table. The inevitable had happened. They had carried on, week after week, and had never talked about what to do when the apocalypse struck Berlin. Now Frederica was trapped. All Katja could do was remain where Frederica could find her if she could ever escape.

  She curled up on the bed with Frederica’s pillow but sleep would not come.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  April 19, 1945

  In the chancellery garden, Frederica halted before the concrete entrance to the bunker as the security detail checked her papers. Then she descended timidly, sweeping her eyes over the unpainted cinderblock walls and ceiling of the bunker. She fought back claustrophobia.

  “Follow me, please, Fräulein,” the SS man said. “I’ll show you your quarters in the forward bunker.” At the foot of the long flight of steps he swung open a heavy steel door and motioned her to go ahead of him. As soon as it closed, she became aware of a dull humming. “Ventilation,” he said. “You’ll get used to it.”

  They passed a guard station where an SS man sat with a typewriter. Two others loitered nearby, idle and apparently off duty. A second door opened to a corridor with a row of tables. Some dozen chairs were arranged along the opposite wall, as if for a party. “The dining room,” her guide said. “We have two meals a day. Cold breakfast between seven and nine, and supper at six. After that, you have to go ask the cook for something. That’s the pantry.” He pointed with his thumb toward a door on the left.

  “What’s in there?” Frederica asked, pointing to the door next to the pantry.

  “Toilets and bathroom.” He walked ahead of her past another barricade to a second corridor and knocked on a door to his right. When no one answered, he opened it and ushered her in. “This is the secretaries’ quarters. It looks like that bunk over there is still free.” He pointed to the upper bunk on the left side of the room where folded linen lay on top of a bare mattress.

  “I’m sure the Reichsminister will call on you at the appropriate time. Otherwise, supper will be served…” He looked at his watch. “In about half an hour.” With that, he let himself out of the room, leaving her standing with her suitcase.

  She turned in a circle, studying the gray concrete walls devoid of wardrobe or visible storage space. Suitcases were stowed beneath the two bunk-bed sets, and she guessed that they served as lockers. She slid hers underneath the lower bunk on her side and sat on the single chair in the room with a curious mixture of dread and fascination. The dread was stronger because she was well and truly trapped underground with the men she feared the most. Worse, when the enemies of the Third Reich descended on this stronghold—which they certainly would do—she would be in among the hopeless defenders. Unless something miraculous happened, she would die here, unaccounted for.

  For all that, she was intrigued. She had worked for years to reach the heart of the Nazi government in order to expose it but had never imagined she would come so far. Adolf Hitler himself was close by, somewhere in the lower bunker behind one of the steel doors. Would she ever meet him?

  The door suddenly opened and a girlish face showed surprise and then welcome. “Uh, hullo.”

  Frederica stood up and offered her hand. “Frederica Brandt. I work for Dr. Goebbels.”

  “Ah, yes. Of course. I’m Traudl Junge, the Führer’s secretary. One of them. Pleased to meet you.” Just then two other women came in behind her, and she continued the introductions. “This is Christa Schroeder, another secretary, and Erna Flegel, his nurse. Well, our nurse too, when we need one.” She giggled softly.

  Frederica shook hands with all three. “Have you been down here a long time?”

  Traudl shrugged. “A few days. It’s not so bad when you’re busy. But when you’re just sitting around waiting for orders, you can get a little stir-crazy.”

  “I don’t mind it,” the one called Christa said. “It’s a small sacrifice to make for the Führer, when you think of what the soldiers are enduring. And it’s not like you’re a prisoner. If you want to go upstairs for a smoke, you can usually find an SS man to take you up.”

  “You go up to smoke?” Frederica wondered if that might provide an escape route.

  “You can smoke in this bunker, but not in the lower one. The Führer hates smoking. But it’s an excuse to get out of the hole for a few minutes.” Christa glanced at herself in the mirror, and with a brief “tsk” she set about rearranging her hair. “Oh, look. It’s almost time to eat. The coffee is ersatz, but the wine is real. I tell you, they feed us so well here, we’re all going to get fat.”

  The supper was served buffet style, and Christa was right, the food was better, and in larger servings, than she had eaten in months. They had potatoes, of course, but also a large quantity of pork. And a few surprises.

  “Tomatoes? Wherever did they get tomatoes?” Frederica asked.

  “The chancellery has a greenhouse. I’m sure the glass is all shattered by now, but it’s spring anyhow, and these grew all winter. At least that’s what they told me,” Erna Flegel said. “Important to have vitamin C when you’re living down here,” she added.

  “To go with the champagne.” Christa chortled. “One needs to keep in good cheer, don’t you think?” Observing the quantity of champagne on the table, Frederica wondered if it was in fact the main source of everyone’s bravado.

  Joseph Goebbels appeared suddenly behind her. “Ah, Fräulein Brandt. I’m so glad the others have taken you under their wing. But when you’re finished, would you report to me, please? I have something to dictate. An address I hope to convince the Führer to deliver on the radio.”

  “Yes, certainly, Herr Reichsminister.” Absurd that he spoke so formally, after all he had done to her, but of course it kept up appearances.

  Goebbels moved on through the dining hall, acknowledging some, shaking hands with others, and Frederica returned to her supper. It seemed otherworldly to be eating, drinking, bantering, as if at a sort of underground picnic, while just over their heads, all of Berlin was being blasted to pieces.

  At the end of the meal, she reported to the reception room Dr. Goebbels had pointed out and where he was already reading through some reports. She sat down before a small table with a typewriter, rolled in a clean sheet of paper, and waited.

  He turned his chair around to face her and crossed his legs, drawing attention to his well-polished boots. He tilted his head and smiled, obviously wishing to engage her. “I think it’s critical at this late date for the Führer to make his voice heard to his people. It would do wonders to raise morale, don’t you agree, Frederica?” It had been a long while since they had “socialized” and he had called her by her first name.

  “Uh, yes. Yes, it definitely would.” Frederica saw no benefit in disagreement, though how he could possibly imagine that the situation could be saved was beyond ridiculous.

  The minister gazed ceilingward for a few moments, then began dictating. “Men and women of Germany, in this our bloodiest, but also our finest hour…” He stopped and tilted his head again, a new quirk. “That’s good, don’t you think? I mean ‘finest hour.’ A little Churchillian, but I can steal a bit from the old man.”

  The question was apparently rhetorical because he continued dictating. The speech was not long and he spoke slowly enough for her to type it correctly the first time. She could correct her few typos by pencil. She pulled out the sheet and handed it to him.

  As he was reading, someone knocked and then opened the door. An SS man announced, “Herr Reichsminister, your family is here.”

  Goebbels sprang to his feet. “That will be all for now, Fräulein Brandt,” he said, laying the address to one side of the table. He exited the room but left the door open so, peering through the doorway
, Frederica witnessed the arrival of the Goebbels family.

  Magda Goebbels was an attractive woman, or at least had been. Now she looked under a terrible strain. Immediately behind her came her six children, the adopted darlings of the Nazi party, all in their best dress. Frederica had visited them twice at their summer home and so knew all their names: Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda, Heidrun. She had also seen them occasionally at state events where they played the role of perfect Aryan family, both for the minister and for Hitler himself.

  After some discussion, Magda and the children moved into a room just across the corridor from the secretarial bunkroom. In the grim atmosphere of the bunker, it would be nice to be close to a family of bright children. Their chatter reminded Frederica of peacetime and normalcy. Then she remembered what they all were doing there, hiding in a hole until the Russians came to kill them.

  *

  April 20, 1945

  It was an act of desperation, for Katja couldn’t bear to do nothing. After the end of her hospital work shift, she flagged down one transport truck after another until she reached the chancellery. It was surrounded front and back by SS Leibwache guards, as she knew it would be. She approached one of them and simply asked if she could pass a message to a staff member of Dr. Goebbels. The guard barely deigned to look at her. “You have no business here, Fräulein. You can pass a message through the ministry.” She backed away.

  As an alternative, she circled around to the rear of the chancellery, approaching through its gardens. She was stopped immediately and forcefully. Two Leibwache guards held her roughly by the upper arms while a third pointed his rifle at her. “I am ordered to shoot anyone who steps foot onto these grounds without authorization,” he threatened her.

  She explained that she only wanted to send a simple message into the bunker. The guard was irate, obviously because people weren’t supposed to know there was a bunker.

  Then she realized how close she had in fact come to the bunker entrance. Just behind the guards interrogating her she could see two concrete structures, one square with a door and the other a silo with what appeared to be a ventilator at the top. No wonder the guards were angry.

  “Should we arrest her, Sturmbannführer?” one of the guards asked.

  “Yes, take her to the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. We’ll see what the Gestapo think of her,” the officer replied, but just then, the door at the center of the concrete block opened and three women stepped out.

  Katja called to them. “Ladies! Friends! Please help me! I have to contact Dr. Goebbels’ secretary. Do you know her?”

  While two of the women lit cigarettes—the apparent reason for their emergence—the third strolled toward the SS guards and their prisoner. Someone’s secretary, apparently. She had a rather bland, pleasantly girlish face and obviously blond-tinted hair.

  “Please, Fräulein,” Katja begged her. “I just need to send a very small note to my…sister. Frederica Brandt. She works for Dr. Goebbels. It’s just a scrap of paper. You can read it, of course, and show it to Dr. Goebbels. It’s about her fiancé.”

  The woman lit her cigarette expertly with a Zippo lighter, faintly interested in the stranger’s supplication.

  “Sure, why not?” She held out her hand, and Katja deposited a small piece of blue note paper, folded in quarters, into her palm. “Thank you, Fräulein. I’m very grateful,” Katja said, still in the grip of the two guards. The secretary’s acceptance of the note apparently overruled the irate Sturmbannführer’s command. As if he had intended it all along, he ordered his men to escort her to the far end of the chancellery grounds.

  Katja put up no resistance as the guards fast-walked her to the periphery of the gardens and let her go. She hurried away, wondering if the brief message would be her last words to her lover.

  *

  Frederica had dozed off again. With nothing to signal day and night, and the continuous lighting of the corridor, she had lost all sense of time. She was lethargic, and when she tried to read, she simply fell asleep. But a noise outside her room awakened her and, hungry for diversion, she went to the door.

  An SS man was just leading a handsome and obviously

  quite docile German shepherd on a leash. “Come on up, Fräulein,” he said. “There’s to be a ceremony, and it’s time for Blondi’s walk anyhow.”

  “What’s the occasion?” Frederica asked.

  “The Führer’s birthday. He’s meeting a contingent of the Volkssturm. I’m sure he’ll like having an audience.”

  She could see the other secretaries farther ahead and followed the line of people filing up the staircases, glad to have a reason to surface. She hoped they’d timed the ceremony to avoid the daily air raids. Or had the shelling from the Russians begun yet?

  The day was cold and overcast but at least the air was fresh, if you didn’t count the odor of ash and gunpowder that had been in the air now for a week. Frederica kept to the rear, close to the SS man and Blondi, occasionally stroking the well-groomed canine coat.

  She watched as some two-dozen Volkssturm fighters filed into the inner garden of the chancellery, old men interspersed with young boys. She was shocked at the age of the one and the youth of the other. They wore a motley collection of “uniforms”: gray camouflage, a Hitlerjugend kit, a postman’s outfit, old S.A. shirts tucked into mismatched pants. Several of the older men simply wore suits and overcoats with an armband that read Deutscher Volkssturm Wehrmacht.

  Then the bunker door opened again, and Hitler himself came out. He wore his high peaked uniform cap and appeared Führer-like, but his overcoat collar was drawn up around his neck, concealing most of his face. It was the first time she had seen him up close, and she was appalled at how pathetic he looked. As he passed her, she saw that he held his left arm tucked back behind him against his coat, but he could do nothing to conceal the extreme trembling of his left hand. This was the leader of Greater Germany?

  He paced with deliberation down the front line of Hitlerjugend, shaking each hand, pinning medals onto narrow boyish chests, occasionally patting a cheek or giving a paternal tap on the shoulder.

  When he got to the end of the line, Frederica blinked in disbelief. The man Hitler shook hands with was Marti Kraus, Leni Riefenstahl’s elderly cameraman for the documentary that seemed to have started it all. God, how he had aged in eleven years.

  Frederica was startled a second time when he laid his arm around the boy next to him. The young fighter that Hitler had just pinned a hero’s medal on was Marti’s son, Johannes Kraus. Johannes, who’d been a child at the film crew’s last supper in Nuremberg, was now a decorated soldier.

  Artillery fire sounded in the distance, then the detonation of a shell a few hundred meters away, so the organizers deemed the ceremony at an end. The Führer turned with trembling hand back to his bunker while his newly decorated home guard marched off to defend what was left of the Fatherland.

  Feeling suddenly old, Frederica followed Blondi and the other secretaries back down into the bunker. In the corridor dining room she sat down with the others to a tiny piece of cake to celebrate the Führer’s birthday. Someone had just handed her a cup of ersatz coffee when a woman approached the table—pretty in a bland sort of way, with artificially blond hair.

  “Are you Frederica Brandt?” the woman asked.

  Frederica nodded, and the woman dropped a note on the table in front of her. “It says ‘Rudi is alive—at the Charité. I love you.’ I hope it’s not code for something seditious, because I don’t want to get into trouble.”

  Frederica felt tears welling up and choked them back. “Thank you so much. This is very good news.”

  The stranger walked away, and Frederica turned to Traudl, who sat next to her. “Who’s that? Somebody’s secretary? Why haven’t I met her before?”

  “That’s not a secretary. That’s Eva Braun.”

  *

  April 25, 1945

  Blankenfelde, Germany

  By the time Lieutenant Yevgeny Khalde
i reached Germany, he was used to the squalor and ignominy of war. As an ambitious young TASS photographer, he had captured its horrors up close and far away.

  For over fourteen hundred days of the war with Germany, he had photographed the most somber images, conveying the bleakest of moods, of ghettos, concentration camps, cadaver-strewn streets, bombed-out camps with refugees dragging carts full of rags. But now, as the Red Army entered Berlin, he had something new to capture, something he was thematically not prepared for. Victory.

  An old image shot through his memory of sitting at a table in a Berlin bar, and then at an apartment admiring the photos of two new German friends. What were their names? Rudi something. Now, of course, they were his enemies. Would they be fighting in defense of Berlin? He brushed the thought from his mind; he had more important things to think about.

  “General Ivanov, how long do you suppose it will take? I mean under optimum conditions.”

  The general took a deep breath, expanding the chest of his field tunic, which, though no longer clean, was heavy with medals. Three distinguished-service medals were pinned across his left pectoral and another hung from the left pocket. Three silver soviet stars decorated his right side, and a Stalingrad medal hung from the pocket lid. He took off his dress cap—flatter and less clownish than that of his German counterpart—and ran a meaty hand through his gray-black hair. “Hard to say. We’ll be fighting in the city streets in just a few days. A week at the outside. But how long it will take to make them surrender is another question. It could go back and forth for a long while.”

  Lieutenant Khaldei pressed for more precision. “So, minimum five days, you think? Before we reach the center?”

  “Yes, I think they’ll hold out at least that long.”

  “Good, then there’s time. Major, can I get on the night transport back to Moscow?”