They had no mishap on the trip, however. No flat tire that might have made them vulnerable to a deadly assault by the Gestapo camouflaged in the bushes. No unannounced roadblock or unplanned detour off onto an isolated side road. No farmer’s wife on foot by the side of the road hailing them for a ride to market in town, then once inside the vehicle, pulling out a handgun and killing them both. Forty-five uneventful minutes after departing Hartzwalde, Kersten stepped out of the car in front of the Chancellery on Prinz Albrecht Strasse.
Meanwhile, in a small wood along the highway outside Oranienburg, twenty Gestapo foot soldiers armed with submachine guns had been dispatched by Kaltenbrunner. The men split into two groups. One group hid in the ditch on either side of the road. They lay in wait for Kersten’s familiar gray Mercedes. Their orders were to stop the car and ask to check the identity papers of the occupants. They were then to step away from the vehicle. The car would then be turned into a sieve by bullets from almost two dozen submachine guns from the ditches.
As soon as the men were sure that Kersten and the driver were dead, the squad leader was to report to Berlin that the car would not stop when ordered, and that he had been forced therefore to order his men to fire. All that would remain for Kaltenbrunner to do was to inform Himmler and express his most sincere regrets at the unfortunate incident in which the driver and a passenger had perished.
“The passenger,” Kaltenbrunner would report in his gravest voice, “I regret to say, Herr Reichsführer, was identified as your Finnish doctor.”
Kersten heard on the radio later that evening that a local businessman and his teenage daughter had been gunned down viciously by multiple machine guns as their car was heading toward Oranienburg. As was characteristic of Göbbels’ propaganda broadcasts, blame for the killing of two innocent civilians was laid at the feet of Jewish partisans supplied by the Allies.
~~~
Kersten was too unmoored emotionally to go directly to Himmler’s office. Instead, he asked Markus to take him back directly to Hartzwalde. He would wait until the next morning to see Himmler.
The next morning, he found Himmler stretched out on the divan, contorted with spasms.
“It’s about time, Kersten,” was all Himmler said as Kersten rolled up his sleeves and dove into the familiar treatment procedure.
“How lucky I am,” Himmler said later during a pause in the treatment, “to be able to see you when I need you…even if it is a little later than I had hoped.”
“You might not have been able to see me at all.”
“What are you talking about, Kersten?”
“I’m about 99% certain that I escaped being murdered yesterday afternoon on my drive to Berlin.”
Himmler looked at Kersten shocked and bewildered. “You’re joking, right?”
Kersten raised his voice, trembling with feelings he could not master. “I have good reason to believe that Kaltenbrunner planned to have me killed.”
Himmler exclaimed equally loudly, “Come on. Nothing like that happens in Germany without my knowing about it.”
“This was at least one time you did not know.”
Himmler shot up into a sitting position on the edge of the divan. Without being aware of it, he was pulling feverishly at the buttons of his one-piece undergarment.
“What don’t I know about? Tell me,” he asked Kersten angrily.
Kersten went over to his suit jacket on the back of a chair and from the breast pocket pulled out Schellenberg’s letter and note. “Here, read these.”
Himmler fumbled to put on his steel-rimmed glasses and read the letter. He was confused by the initial paragraphs of official-sounding mumbo-jumbo, which someone had composed out of his imagination and which made no sense to him. But his eyes widened as he got to the paragraph inserted into the middle of the letter with the explicit warning to Kersten about Kaltenbrunner’s plot.
“My God!” Himmler declared in disbelief. Kersten couldn’t tell whether it was disbelief at the notion of a plot against his personal masseur or at the implausibility that someone under his own command could be plotting something like this without his knowledge. More likely the latter.
Himmler reached for the bell on the head of his bed. Brandt was in the office in less than an instant.
Still sitting in his underwear on the side of the divan, Himmler’s head was bowed in bitter disappointment. He spoke softly to Brandt, but loud enough that Kersten could overhear. “I want you to read this piece of obscenity, and then proceed to find out if it is true. No one is to know what you’re up to, least of all Kaltenbrunner.”
~~~
Brandt accompanied Kersten into Himmler’s office the next day when he arrived for the daily treatment.
“Well?” Himmler asked Brandt.
Brandt did not explain how he had found out. It wasn’t necessary. Like the jungle, Kersten knew, the Nazi secret services had laws of their own. Kaltenbrunner had his undercover agents within Schellenberg’s office, and Schellenberg had them planted in Kaltenbrunner’s. Wearing the same uniform and reciting the same vows of loyalty to the Führer evidently did not guarantee mutual trust between principals. Brandt had procured agents for Himmler in both Kaltenbrunner’s and Schellenberg’s offices, although undoubtedly both suspected or were even aware of it.
“Schellenberg told the truth,” Brandt reported. “Kaltenbrunner had indeed prepared an ambush for Kersten, and would have succeeded without a doubt if the doctor had not been warned.”
“Then, damn, it is true,” Himmler shouted, slamming his one fist into the other. “My chosen head of the Gestapo? I can’t believe it’s true.” He was alternating taking off his glasses and then putting them back on.
Kersten spoke haltingly. “Then if Schellenberg had not…” The remaining words of the sentence stuck in his throat. This was the first time since the murder attempt that he felt shock.
“Exactly, Doctor,” Brandt said. “We are fortunate that one of Kaltenbrunner’s personal aides is in Schellenberg’s employ as well. He warned Schellenberg about the plot.”
“It was just in time,” Kersten said, shaking his head contemplatively. “Had that motorcycle arrived at Hartzwalde a minute later, we would have been on our way on the Oranienburg route.”
Suddenly, briskly, Himmler rose to his feet and started dressing with haste. He looked at his watch. It was almost two o’clock.
He announced abruptly to Brandt and Kersten, “I’m hungry. We’re going to eat. Brandt, call the chief of the Gestapo and tell him—no, command him— to join us in my private dining room.”
~~~
Kersten and Himmler took seats on one side of the table for four. Brandt took the seat beside Kaltenbrunner and directly opposite Himmler. Except for the huge red and black Swastika flag hanging from the ceiling, the room was starkly white. Looming on the wall over the head table at which they were seated was an oversized portrait of Hitler. Judging by the appearance of the subject in the photo, it must have been taken back in ’33 or ’34 when his face was still virginal and hair purely black. A more recent portrait would have revealed the thinning, graying hair and deep etches and lines on his less confident face.
The meal began with silence except for each person’s giving their lunch order to the obsequious waiter who was accustomed to his boss, Himmler, having guests for lunch from among the higher ranks of the SS or Gestapo.
Himmler and Kersten were too tense to start the conversation. Kersten was more than curious about where and how this spontaneous confrontational tête-à-tête was going to proceed, or even begin.
Evidently, Kaltenbrunner was anxious as well. The silence was excruciating to him, the delay, unbearable. Why was this sudden, unexpected invitation to lunch? He spoke first to relieve his tension. He addressed Kersten with exaggerated courtesy, which Kersten had learned to recognize as the Nazi way of paving a smooth path for a kill.
“Well, Doctor, how are things going for you in your dear Sweden where you seem to be spending a lot of t
ime lately?”
The question and Kaltenbrunner’s tone of voice confirmed to Kersten how much he detested this vile, odious man. It was clear the feeling was mutual. Everything about the Gestapo chief exuded a mellifluous hatred for Himmler’s masseur that he did little to conceal. When Kersten hesitated in answering the question, Kaltenbrunner provoked him rudely.
“You must be doing very well in Stockholm. I hear that you have found very ample accommodations.”
“No, that’s not correct,” Kersten said straightforwardly. “Not at all well. I have no work there.”
Kaltenbrunner was surprised. He put down his glass of water and leaned back in his chair.
“How could that be? A doctor with your expertise and references, and no work?”
The waiter delivered the lunch orders. Conversation halted for the time being.
Once the waiter had returned to the kitchen, Kersten continued. “You ask me as if you didn’t know, General. With your expertise in what you do and with all the resources at your fingertips, I cannot believe that you do not know what I really do. Have you not learned that for five years I have been an agent of the British MI6?”
Kersten paused to make sure everyone at the table heard him. Kaltenbrunner’s eyes were wide open, his eyebrows arched in the shape of pyramids.
“Yes, the M16 has been paying me to infiltrate the SS and kill the Reichsführer. I succeeded in the former, as you know and which irks you to no end. But so far, I have failed in the latter. This is not good enough for them. So I have lost my job.”
Himmler had been sitting silently and moving his food about on his plate without having taken a bite. He looked up suddenly at Brandt in absolute astonishment. Brandt looked calm, and Kersten saw out of the corner of his eye that Brandt shook his head calmly at Himmler almost imperceptibly. Himmler looked back down at his plate no better informed, but seemingly satisfied for the moment that perhaps Brandt and Kersten had concocted a surreptitious strategy that he didn’t know about.
In point of fact, Kersten himself was astonished at what he had said. This wasn’t a premeditated speech or a pre-planned strategy at all. Neither was it a conspiratorial ploy dreamed up with Brandt. He wasn’t completely certain of what the aim of this artifice was. He only knew he wanted so profoundly to humiliate the Gestapo chief for his own vengeful satisfaction.
Kaltenbrunner looked across the table at Himmler, and seemed as surprised by Himmler’s apparent lack of reaction to Kersten’s remark as by the confounding remark itself. He was utterly speechless, his mouth agape in disbelief and bewilderment.
Himmler looked up from his plate and began fingering the frame of his spectacles. Each man recognized this idiosyncratic practice of the Reichsführer as the prelude to a statement of some importance. Kaltenbrunner braced himself. He was totally flummoxed by the direction of this conversation. For their part, Kersten and Brandt looked at Himmler expectantly.
“Listen to me, you Austrian thug. What’s worse, Ernst, is that because of your uninvited intervention, the doctor almost lost his job here with me.” He raised the volume of his voice several notches. “In fact, he almost lost his life entirely. And it was all done behind my back.”
Kaltenbrunner’s color turned almost as white as the walls of the dining room. He remained silent, and averted Himmler’s angry stare.
“Something like this shall not happen again! You are not to take any actions regarding the Gestapo without my signing off on the action! Have I made myself clear, Lieutenant-General?” Himmler was almost shouting.
Whenever Himmler acted in this way, Kersten marveled that such vituperative volume could emerge from such a short, frail man, and that it could elicit such fear as it did in Kaltenbrunner now.
Kaltenbrunner became uncharacteristically sheepish. “Yes, Herr Reichsführer, perfectly clear,” he said, utterly cut down.
“I surely hope it is, for my sake and yours,” Himmler continued in the same authoritative voice. “I thought I had made myself perfectly clear after Heydrich’s assassination in ’41 when I named you Gestapo Chief. This is not a novel condition for your work under my command, is it…Is it?”
Nothing had been said about his being relieved of his post. Kaltenbrunner must have been sensing that the punishment he was dreading just minutes earlier was not going to be as harsh or final as he’d feared. He seemed eager to keep it that way.
“No, Sir, it is not. I shall do better from now on, Herr Reichsführer, I assure you.”
“I can’t hear you, Obergruppenführer. Speak up so that I can hear you.”
“I shall do better from now on. I shall consult you on every decision.”
“That’s better,” Himmler said.
Kersten was surprised, too, and a little disappointed at Kaltenbrunner’s relatively light sentence. But he was taking great inner delight in seeing the bastard knocked down a few notches from his haughty throne.
“One more thing,” Himmler said, continuing to look sternly at his Gestapo director. “There shall not be any more ‘accidents.’ You are both too important for me to tolerate any more monkey business. Ernst, you are ruthlessly ambitious, too much so for the good of the Reich. Honestly, I have never liked or trusted you completely. This is not news to you, I suspect. I am sure, in fact, that you feel exactly the same way.”
Himmler had adopted the stern schoolmaster’s tone he had used many times undoubtedly in his brief teaching career in München.
“Be that as it may. The Führer and I have spoken about this many times. We agree that we have a dilemma. Your selfish ambition makes you a danger to the Reich where we must each transcend and deny our private, personal ambitions. Yet, neither he nor I can come up with the name of an officer more suited and with the desired requisite experience and frankly, sheer brutishness, for the post of chief of the Gestapo.”
Himmler was still exasperated. He calmed down for a moment to say, “So this is what we have. We have to try to make the best of it.”
Kaltenbrunner now looked like the contrite, anxious schoolboy summoned to the schoolmaster’s office for disciplining and hoping for mercy. The schoolmaster wasn’t done, however.
“Get this, Kaltenbrunner, and get it straight: If anything untoward should happen to my personal doctor here, I won’t bother to investigate whether the instigator of the plot was you or not. I will simply assume that it is you. If Kersten is injured or killed, you won’t last twenty-four hours, believe me. I will have you shot…No, let me correct that. In your case, I will make an exception. I will not merely give the order to have you shot. I will take the rifle and press the trigger myself. ‘An eye for an eye…’ Is that understood?”
The meal ended as it had begun, in an awkward, stone-like silence. No one had eaten much, not even Himmler who had claimed hunger in the first place. Sitting across the table from the man who had almost succeeded in killing him, Kersten didn’t even have the stomach for a cup of coffee. He excused himself and promptly exited the Chancellery.
He waited by the front entrance for Markus to pick him up and drive him back to Hartzwalde to take a new inventory of his life.
CHAPTER THIRTY-0NE
Theresienstadt: February 5, 1945
Roll call had been finished for about half an hour on the dark, freezing Platz of the Theresienstadt camp. Hannah Hirtschel was not yet twenty-two years of age—the best she could remember at least—since in the camp she had lost track of the months and years. She and the other women in her barrack were too exhausted from the day’s work to say more than a few indifferent words to one another that evening, just the familiar mundane goodnight greetings that they had continued to recite almost mechanically. The women had pledged to continue this ritual in order to maintain some semblance of normalcy and sane routine.
Hannah and the women in her barrack considered themselves among the fortunate inmates, at least in comparison to others. They were within what was called “the main fortress,” a walled ghetto, really, as opposed to the “old fortress,
” the former town citadel across the Ohře River in Bohemia. The elderly and more frail inmates were warehoused there until, Hannah had learned, they were virtually shoveled onto trains headed for extermination at the Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps. The main fortress had been reconfigured as an industrial camp utilizing Jewish slave labor. Most of Hannah’s fellow inmates in the main fortress were young, like her, although she was among the youngest of those considered to be adults.
Hannah had been apprehended by the SS at the home of her great-aunt in the small village of Bautzen near the Polish border a few weeks before Christmas in 1938. After her train had arrived from Berlin, she had walked nervously from the train station along the unlit street to her great-aunt’s home, looking over her shoulder the whole time. She was sure she heard sharp footsteps clicking against the concrete surface perhaps twenty or so meters behind her. She hadn’t had a very long reunion at all with her great-aunt before their hearts leapt in unison at the sound of loud banging on the front door and a harsh voice shouting, “SS, Őffnen Sie die Tür schnell!”
Later that same night they were put onto a train to Czechoslovakia.
Hannah’s great-aunt was assigned to the old fortress, and Hannah never heard from or about her again. When she first arrived at the main fortress, Hannah had been assigned to the dusty mill to slit ore from mica for making tungsten to be used in the manufacture of shell heads. More than one SS officer took note of her feminine physical attributes, and before long she was the favorite sex slave for officers in the camp. Her lusty clients wanted her whole, uninjured by the fire of the ore smelters, and not too overtired, so they arranged with their superiors for her reassignment to the clothing workshop. For five of the almost six years at Theresienstadt, she had sorted apparel confiscated from the arriving Jews, and found skirts, blouses, dresses and underwear in suitable condition to be redistributed to the wives and girlfriends, and Hannah suspected, mistresses as well, of SS guards and officers back home in Germany where supplies were beginning to run short.
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