The Gods of Atlantis jh-6

by David Gibbins

  Hiebermeyer cautiously followed Penn along the metal grid on the floor. On one side his headlamp caught the window of a small room, the glass covered with the yellow-brown layer and reflecting a strange unearthly glow. Further ahead a machine gun sat on its tripod on the floor, an old German MG-42, the receiver still closed over a cartridge belt that linked to an ammunition box below. Beyond that lay the opening to the main chamber of the bunker. He followed Penn through, their beams traversing the walls. Two headlamps bobbed at the far end of the chamber, evidently the sappers at the entrance to the laboratory. He saw a small jet of intense orange flame and a shower of sparks. ‘They’re using an oxyacetylene torch,’ Penn said. ‘Before now we’d only seen the laboratory door over the crates. We work methodically, inch by inch, and that’s as far as we’d got. We knew the door was slightly ajar, and we suspected it might be rusted on its hinges. Let’s hope they get through within fifteen minutes.’

  They walked further on. With only his single beam stabbing into the gloom, Hiebermeyer found it difficult to get a good sense of the dimensions, but he began to see how they fitted with the plan that Penn had shown him of a structure about the size of an underground railway station, as if a huge section of corrugated culvert pipe had been half buried in the ground. The interior seemed to be glowing yellow-green, and he realized that everything was covered with the same viscous layer he had encountered in the entranceway. He stumbled slightly, and the shadows of the crates loomed large on the wall, elongated on its concave surface. He saw Penn’s form in exaggerated silhouette as if it were advancing towards him, an unnerving image from a distant childhood nightmare, a story an older boy had told him of the trolls that lurked underground in these parts, waiting for boys like him. It had seemed frighteningly real, in the land where trolls and goblins had been invented and had then come hideously to life in the dark days of the Third Reich.

  His breathing quickened, rasping and sucking through the regulator, and he stopped to calm himself. Penn veered left between two rows of wooden crates of identical dimensions, each about a metre and a half high. They looked unopened and sealed up except for one at the back, its lid slightly ajar. Hiebermeyer followed, his heart pounding. It could be an absolute treasure trove. Penn had told him about a crate he had seen containing what looked like paintings, and now they both stood in front of one isolated from the rest and narrower, with no cover. Propped up on the back was a panel that looked as if it might have been the lid, but made up of a single board rather than joined planks. Penn pointed inside. ‘I saw this on the way out this morning. Looking at it now, they’re definitely paintings, their frames removed and the canvases encased in plywood.’ He jerked his thumb at the propped-up panel. ‘That one’s a portrait. Someone must have taken it out to have a look in 1945. You can just make out the image, though I think there’s been some kind of reaction between that mould and the oil from the paint, which has oozed out. It looks irrecoverable, I’m afraid.’

  Hiebermeyer could see what Penn meant. The colour definition had gone, as if someone had squeezed all the paints into one bowl and then applied the resulting mess without mixing it together properly, leaving streaks of individual colours through the layer of yellow-green. As he stood back and angled his beam, he could just make out a portrait, like a shallow relief carving, as if the form within were pressing through the panel. He looked hard, mentally checking the image against dozens of lost masterpieces that he had worked through in a catalogue before coming here, in preparation for a moment like this. He shook his head and turned away, then turned back. Still nothing. He tried again, closing his eyes this time.

  ‘Let’s move on,’ Penn said, pointing at the crate with the lid that was slightly ajar. ‘Whatever that painting was, it’s history now. And my guess is these bigger crates are what you’re going to want to see, more likely to contain antiquities.’

  Hiebermeyer stayed rooted to the spot. Suddenly it clicked. He recognized it. ‘ Mein Gott.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s the Portrait of a Young Man, 1516, stolen from the Czartoryski Museum, Krakow, Poland. It’s so famous that I hadn’t even bothered to look at it again when I was researching lost art before coming here. It’s ritratto di Raffaello, meaning either by Raphael or of Raphael, or both. Nobody knows for sure, because it’s been impossible to study the original using modern analytical techniques. It was one of the most exquisite portraits of the Renaissance and until now the most important painting still lost from the war.’

  ‘Well you can tick that off the list, in more ways than one. I don’t think there’s any chance of restoration. Another legacy of the Nazis. Come on.’

  Hiebermeyer stared at the panel, trying to see what he had remembered from those pre-war photographs of the painting: the sensitive face, the long hair and rakish beret, the languid, confident pose of the young man, the luxurious fur shawl draped over one shoulder. If those two Allied officers really had got inside the bunker – Major Mayne and Colonel Stein – he wondered whether they had stood where he was now, and had seen the painting in its original glory: whether it had given the American, Stein, an art historian at the Courtauld before the war, a thrill of recognition and a shaft of hope before they went on to whatever darkness lay ahead, or whether they too had seen an image forever tainted by the Nazi horror they must have witnessed in the death camp in the forest. Hiebermeyer suddenly lost the image of the young man in his mind’s eye and saw only a mess of colour streaked with red, rivulets of paint at the base of the panel where oil had oozed like blood. He remembered years before when he’d realized that resurrecting the artefacts collected by the Nazi Ahnenerbe would never be possible, that they were best left as part of the ghastly history that Himmler had created for them. The image he saw now seemed to vindicate that, but he had not expected it to be so visceral, as if what this painting had become was more than just a lesson from history; rather an excrescence that could never heal.

  Penn went forward to the unopened crates and knelt down, wiping a painted label on the side with the back of his glove and then doing the same to the next two crates. Hiebermeyer knelt down beside the first. One word stood out: Ahnenerbe. For a moment all he heard was his own breathing, as if it were disembodied. All those years he had dreamed of searching for these treasures, they had been here under his very nose, only a few kilometres from where he had grown up. He felt light-headed, as if the regulator were no longer giving him enough oxygen. He reached out to one of the crates to steady himself and then withdrew his hand at the last moment, remembering the awful smear of decomposition that had stained his glove when he had slipped at the entrance.

  Penn came back to him. ‘That’s it, all of the crates. They look like identical markings.’

  ‘It all makes sense,’ Hiebermeyer murmured. ‘ It all fits.’

  ‘You’d better explain.’

  Hiebermeyer remained squatting. His long conversation with Dillen and Jack the day before about the events of 1945 was still fresh in his mind. He peered at Penn. ‘Those two officers in 1945, Major Mayne and Colonel Stein, they’re the key. Stein was in the Monuments and Fine Arts section, a genuine art expert, but the MFA was really a cover for a unit searching for Nazi secrets. Major Mayne was in 30 Commando Assault Unit, a deliberately misleading name for another one of those outfits. These two men only came together in the last hours on the way to this place, after Captain Frazer had returned from his visit to the camp and tipped off his friend Mayne at British HQ that there was something worth investigating here. We pieced all this together after Jack and his daughter talked to Frazer last year. A Jewish girl in the camp had drawn Frazer a picture. She’d been tortured and raped in the forest, in this bunker, but had managed to escape in the final days and was back in the camp immediately after liberation under the care of British nurses. The picture showed something she’d seen in the bunker, a golden reverse swastika that Frazer recognized as a lost antiquity from Troy. He and Mayne had excavated together at Mycenae before the war
and had heard from an old Greek foreman the story of how the object had been found by Heinrich Schliemann and his wife Sophia in the Tomb of Agamemnon, and then secretly taken back to Germany. Frazer and Mayne were convinced it was the lost palladion, the sacred symbol of Troy taken by Agamemnon after he had defeated the Trojans. And now, knowing what is in these other crates, I understand,’ Hiebermeyer murmured. ‘It makes sense that the palladion should have ended up here. Absolute sense.’

  ‘Go on,’ Penn said. ‘These inscriptions?’

  ‘Look at the dates on these crates.’ Hiebermeyer pointed at the stencilled lettering and stamps where Penn had revealed them. ‘They’re all the same: 13 April 1945. That’s only two weeks before the Allies arrived here. Two weeks. We know that in the final months of the war Hitler ordered the treasures of the Berlin museums to be taken to secret storage outside the city. Franz Bormann went to the Zoo flak tower in Berlin and took away most of the crates stored there. A lot went to Austria, to the salt mines at Merkers, well away from Allied bombing and where the salt provided a good atmosphere for storage. So I ask myself the question: if there were still much better storage sites accessible, what on earth were the Nazis doing sending art and antiquities to this place, to a bunker in Lower Saxony, in early April 1945, right into the path of the Allied advance?’

  ‘Maybe into the eye of the storm,’ Penn suggested. ‘Maybe that was the calculation. Send them to the least likely place, and they might have the greatest chance of surviving undetected. When the Nazis built this bunker in 1942, they went to extraordinary lengths to conceal it. We think the entrance tunnel was rigged to self-destruct, but in the event, the British bomber raid on the night of 25 April did it for them. The self-destruct button may have been a final measure planned by someone who’d actually intended to remove this stuff beforehand and wanted all evidence destroyed. Take a look beyond the final crate. There’s a row of heavy-duty suitcases on the floor. I think someone may have been about to break down the contents of the crates into manageable packages, but events overtook them and the Allied front line moved faster than they’d expected.’

  ‘Or maybe whoever it was had expected a ceasefire, an armistice.’

  ‘Are we talking about Hitler? Surely by April 1945 a few crates of art would have been the least of his concerns?’

  Hiebermeyer shook his head. ‘There are other markings on the crates. They say Ahnenerbe, the Department of Cultural Heritage. And you can see the Sonnenrad sun symbol of the SS, and then the word Wewelsburg. You told me you’d studied the architectural plans for that place. The order castle of the SS, run by the man who signed the papers you found in this bunker. You see what I’m getting at?’

  Penn gasped. ‘Of course. Himmler. Heinrich Himmler.’

  ‘The second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, who maybe wanted to be the most powerful.’

  ‘ Himmler,’ Penn repeated. ‘Didn’t he try to negotiate with the Americans, and then got excommunicated by Hitler for it?’

  Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘If I’m right about this, then maybe that’s where his gamble went wrong. A truce would have allowed him to clear this place out. I’m certain that the crates contain the lost treasures of Wewelsburg Castle: antiquities brought by the Ahnenerbe in the 1930s from around the world, hijacked by Himmler to fuel his fantasy of an Aryan prehistory, of a master race including the kings of ancient Greece, Agamemnon himself, and even the rulers of a mythical Atlantis. I’ve spent half my lifetime yearning to know what happened to these artefacts.’

  Penn had moved along to the side of the crate with the lid ajar, and rubbed the side of it. ‘Look at this one. The lettering’s different.’

  Hiebermeyer followed him up the narrow space and squatted down again, his suit crinkling and bulging as he did so. He stared at the lettering and numbers, his mind racing. ‘That’s it. That clinches it.’

  ‘ Museum fur Vor- und Fruhgeschichte,’ Penn read out slowly. ‘ Troia.’

  Hiebermeyer’s heart pounded. ‘That’s the Museum of Pre- and Proto-History in Berlin. That’s where the treasures were displayed that Schliemann had taken from Troy and given to the German people in 1881. In 1941 they were moved from the museum and stored in the Zoo flak tower. I always knew there would be a third crate,’ he said excitedly. ‘A crate containing the secret treasures Schliemann never gave to the German people but concealed himself somewhere in his home town near the Baltic, where Ahnenerbe researchers under Himmler discovered them. Treasures that included the golden reverse swastika, the Trojan palladion, which Himmler made into his most potent symbol.’

  ‘A third crate?’ Penn said. ‘Where are the other two?’

  ‘When Bormann went to the flak tower to take the treasures to the salt mines, he left behind two crates, the ones containing the Troy artefacts from the museum. They were still there during the final Soviet onslaught and were taken to Moscow, where they resurfaced in the 1990s. When the Soviets arrived in the flak tower, the door to the storage room was guarded by a Dr Unverzagt, an Ahnenerbe Nazi who had been director of the museum. When the story of his role came out after the artefacts were revealed in Moscow, most archaeologists assumed that he had been guarding the greatest treasures of his museum to ensure that they weren’t looted by Soviet soldiers and were captured intact; that he was doing it for the sake of archaeology and science. But I think they were wrong.’

  ‘You think Himmler was personally involved in this?’ Penn straightened up, and leaned over the half-open lid of the crate.

  ‘Himmler was obsessed with the treasures of Troy,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘And he was Unverzagt’s boss. The Ahnenerbe worshipped Himmler, the man who had given so many failed and second-rate academics the job of a lifetime. Many of them were all too happy to go along with the racist poison, and plenty of them believed in it. Why did Himmler order Bormann to leave those two crates in the Zoo tower? Because he wanted them for himself. Why were they still there when the Russians arrived? Because Himmler’s gamble didn’t pay off, and he had no time to remove them. Why was Unverzagt still there guarding them fanatically? Not for the sake of archaeology, but in the vain hope that his god Himmler would return.’

  ‘You should take a look in here,’ Penn said. Hiebermeyer heaved himself up, wincing as he pressed his injured wrist against his knee, then aimed his headlamp over the side of the crate. He could see neatly stacked smaller wooden boxes inside, labelled with swastikas and the SS Sonnenrad, evidently from Wewelsburg. One of them had a line of symbols along the top of the label he recognized from Stone Age cave paintings. He followed Penn’s beam. There was an empty space at the end of the crate, half filled with a lumpy yellow substance covered with mould. He realized that it had been straw, cushioning material. Then his beam crossed Penn’s, and he froze.

  ‘Is that what you were looking for?’ Penn asked.

  Hiebermeyer was speechless. It was the shape of a swastika, indented in the straw, about fifteen centimetres across. It had clearly been a heavy object, metallic, judging by the depth of the indent. He scanned quickly around, looking inside the crate. The object that had made the indent was nowhere to be seen. ‘Is there any chance your people could have missed finding it?’ he said, his voice hoarse with emotion.

  ‘None of the other crates are open. I told them to leave this part of the room until you arrived and we could look at it together. Apart from this, every inch of the chamber has been inspected, up to the laboratory door. Nothing has been found. If this was that golden object you were talking about, the Trojan palladion, then it looks as if someone scarpered with it in 1945. Odd, though, that it doesn’t seem to have been carefully packaged away like this other stuff, instead of just lying here in the straw.’

  Hiebermeyer swallowed hard. He had desperately hoped to find it. He brought his beam back to the shape in the straw, and stared. ‘That’s because it was never in the museum collection in Berlin, and it can only have been here in the bunker for a short time. We believe that after the Ahnenerbe discovered the pall
adion in Schliemann’s hiding place in his home town, it was stored in great secrecy in Wewelsburg Castle. We believe that Himmler imbued it with holy significance, perhaps involving it in some kind of initiation rite for a select few. It became a sacred symbol of the new creed, of the god Himmler had made himself. We know that it became the symbol of something called the Agamemnon Code, an activation code somehow tied up with Himmler’s plans for a dark scheme in the final days of the Reich.’

  ‘The reverse swastika on the letterhead of those order papers, marked Top Secret,’ Penn said. ‘Was that it?’

  Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘Himmler clearly envisaged a future for himself, rather than the self-immolation that Hitler and his cronies saw as their only way out. But before then, when the palladion had become like the Holy Grail, Himmler had it sent from Wewelsburg to a place of even greater secrecy. I mentioned salt mines? Well, Jack visited one of them last year on his hunt for this object. The man we now believe knows the use to which the palladion was to be put had blackmailed him into going there to retrieve it, by kidnapping his daughter. It had been put deep in the Wieliczka salt mine, in a shaft now flooded under almost a hundred metres of water, near the death camp at Auschwitz. All Jack found was a box containing an impression like this where the palladion had been stored. As the Soviets advanced towards that part of Poland, we believe the palladion was removed from the box and taken by another of Himmler’s chosen few on the march with the last inmates from Auschwitz to the west, to Belsen and this place. Among them was the girl who drew that image for Captain Frazer.’