The Gods of Atlantis jh-6

by David Gibbins

  The two SS guards loomed out of the dust and fell in beside him. Then the voice spoke again. ‘ Halt.’ Hoffman felt his stomach lurch. The diary. Had Himmler found it? Perhaps he would die in this place after all. He braced himself and turned around. Himmler was walking towards him, the SS dagger in his hand, still sheathed. He fumbled with it, nearly dropping it, then offered Hoffman the hilt. Hoffman took it, feeling the clammy sweat on the grip, then stood to attention and clicked his heels. Himmler took something out of his pocket and pressed it into Hoffman’s other palm. Hoffman looked down and saw a silver ring with the Totenkopf design, the death’s-head insignia of the SS. Around the sides of the ring were three roundels with runic signs. Two of them he vaguely recognized from the symbols he had been shown at Wewelsburg Castle, but the third was unfamiliar, a curious construction of parallel and right-angle lines like two garden rakes set front to front. Himmler watched him staring at it, then closed Hoffman’s palm around the ring. ‘That symbol is an ancient rune my Ahnenerbe explorers discovered in the place that is now your final destination. I have made it the symbol of my new order. This ring is for you to give to Heidi. It is my token of assurance to her. Keep it safely.’ He reached up and adjusted Hoffman’s Knight’s Cross, patting him. Hoffman could smell his breath, just as he had smelled Hitler’s when the cross had been awarded. The crooked smile was on Himmler’s face again, his eyes roaming until they fixed on Hoffman’s. ‘That dagger is now your sacred symbol. Show it to others in the SS, and they will know you have my authority. And Heidi will have my greatest symbol of respect and honour. In your task ahead, think always of your family. We will be the new Ubermenschen, the new supermen, yes? The new gods of Atlantis.’

  Hoffman clicked his heels and turned away. His world had closed in, as if the noose tightening around Berlin were tightening around him as well. All that flashed before his eyes was the panic-stricken boy in the dishevelled lederhosen, as if that were the last image of light he had seen, imprinted on his retina. The jarring of the explosions made him see repeated images of the boy’s face, lining the edge of his vision, and then ahead of him a swirling image of the reverse swastika, drawing him into the underworld. He opened his eyes and breathed hard, thinking of what he had written in his diary. That was history, a terrible history of crime and horror. But what he knew now, the future that lay ahead if Himmler’s plan were to be carried out, was incalculably worse. He remembered the sheets of paper he had torn off and put in his pocket, the pencil. Somehow he must find a way of writing a message for posterity, in case the truth died with him and the deadly weapon remained intact. If he was unable to thwart Himmler, someone else might.

  He thrust the SS knife into his pocket, unsheathing it and grasping the exposed part of the blade as hard as he could, savagely, feeling the blood from his fingers ooze out. A rage coursed through him, the rage and adrenalin he had once felt as he held the stick in his Stuka dive-bomber, hurtling towards the target, the siren screaming. He knew why his family would not be joining him until he had completed Himmler’s task. His wife and boy were being held to ransom. But Himmler had forgotten what he did, what he was good at, how he had survived five years of war. He remembered Himmler’s pudgy hands fumbling with the knife. These people had created the worst killing machine in history. But for them the killing was remote, abstract. It was other people who did their dirty work for them, people like those boys on the roof, like the countless dead soldiers outside, like the thugs of the SS and Gestapo, people like Hoffman. That was Himmler’s biggest weakness. For him the SS knife was a symbol, not a weapon. He had lost sight of another aspect of humanity.

  What it was that made men kill.

  PART 3

  15

  Wewelsburg Castle, Germany

  Jack swung his legs out of the car and stood in the car park, stretching his arms and savouring the cool morning air. Even though he had not gone inside the Nazi bunker in the forest the day before, he still felt as if some of that horror were clinging to him, filling his lungs as it had filled the lungs of the first Allied soldiers who had entered the death camp beside the bunker almost seventy years before. He took another deep breath, then watched as Maurice Hiebermeyer clambered out of the car on the driver’s side, adjusting his trousers around his ample waist and pushing his little round glasses up his nose, then picking up a shoulder bag and coming round to stand beside him. For Maurice, the bunker experience had been far worse, not only for the sheer horror of what he had seen but also because of his German background, and Jack knew that his intense focus on planning their visit today had been a way of pushing away an experience that had unsettled him, something that Jack himself had found difficult to watch.

  Together the two men stared up at the great bulk of the castle in front of them, its off-white masonry stark against the blue sky. It looked unreal, as if it had just been completed, too good to be true. Jack had to remind himself that he was not in England, where so many castles were ruins; in Germany, castles like this had been continuously occupied through to modern times. He caught sight of the name at the entrance to the car park: Wewelsburg. This castle was a special case, reinvented in the twentieth century as the bastion of a new knightly order, an odious fantasy in one man’s mind and the centrepiece of his dream of world domination.

  ‘The castle’s early medieval originally,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘When Heinrich Himmler bought Wewelsburg in 1934, he set about transforming it into his fantasy SS order-castle. From 1939, the slave labour used in the reconstruction came from a concentration camp set up nearby at Niederhagen, eventually including Soviet prisoners of war as well as Jews. Over a thousand of them were worked to death. A thousand. It was everywhere, you know, everywhere in Nazi Germany, the taint of racism and slave labour. Since being in that bunker, I can’t look at anything from that period without feeling physically sick. I can’t believe that I never felt that before. I think the whole of Germany must have been in a state of shock after the war, for years afterwards, even my generation.’ He looked down, distraught for a moment, and then took a deep breath and shook himself, clearing his throat and pointing to the walls. ‘The most dramatic transformation of the castle was where we’re meeting my aunt Heidi, in the so-called Obergruppenfuhrersaal, the SS Generals’ Room in the North Tower. It’s a kind of perverse realization of King Arthur’s Camelot, where Himmler’s top SS generals would meet as if they were latter-day Knights of the Round Table.’

  ‘Have you been here before?’ Jack said.

  ‘Once, when I was a child.’ Hiebermeyer glanced at his watch, then leaned back against the car. ‘We’ve got twenty minutes until I said we would meet her. I wanted to fill you in on a few things before we go into the castle. You and I have known each other since we were boys, and we know pretty well everything in each other’s minds, but this is a chapter I’ve kept mostly to myself. We could go to the cafe?’

  ‘Here is good.’

  ‘Okay. Probably best not to be overheard. Do you remember at boarding school in England when I did a presentation on the Nazis and archaeology? A pretty edgy subject for a German boy in those days, but my parents’ estate was in Westphalia, near here, and I was determined to get to the bottom of it all.’

  ‘As I recall, the main excitement was a story you’d unearthed about a German expedition to Egypt to uncover a fabulous treasure of the pharaoh Akhenaten. Something you didn’t tell the class about in your presentation, but you did tell me in secret later that day.’

  ‘Still a big one on our to-do list, very big,’ Hiebermeyer said, the old glint in his eyes back for a moment. ‘But it wasn’t just about following up treasure stories. I also wanted to distil the true archaeology from the nonsense. Himmler was influenced by a mystic named Karl Maria Wiligut, who convinced him that Westphalia would be the site of an apocalyptic battle between East and West, one in which the West would triumph and the River Rhine would run red with blood. At the time, people made the mistake of dismissing Himmler’s fantasies as harmless nonsense,
even some fellow Nazis. But like his anti-Semitism, all his obsessions had a horrible fallout in real life. It was Himmler who pushed Hitler to launch Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia in 1941, and there’s no doubt he would have incited Hitler by regaling him with the story of that mythical showdown between East and West.’

  ‘And yet when it came to the Rhine running red with blood, it was the Western Allies who were the enemy, and this time the Germans were doomed to defeat.’

  Hiebermeyer pursed his lips. ‘Yet even that showdown may have been preordained by Himmler, and I don’t mean in mythology. The more I studied him, the more it seemed as if he were willing the Reich to self-destruction. He was Hitler’s right-hand man, in many ways the brains behind the Nazi ideology. It was he who engineered the Holocaust, with ruthless efficiency and attention to detail. He was capable of the kind of cold-headed and practical decision-making that mostly eluded Hitler. Yet it was Himmler who pushed Hitler to make some of his more catastrophic decisions, above all the invasion of Russia. That single decision doomed the Third Reich. I began to look again at Himmler’s obsession with the occult, with all the absurd symbolism and ritual, and to me it seemed more and more like a smokescreen. It was almost as if he had wanted the higher echelons of the Nazi party to treat him as something of a joke, in order to keep them from poisoning Hitler against him and to retain the ear of the Fuhrer, to make sure he was there to influence the most important decision-making. If he’d exposed too much of his rational side, others in the party might have warned Hitler that he was a threat, a possible Fuhrer-in-waiting.’

  ‘These are some pretty radical ideas for a boy archaeologist,’ Jack said.

  Hiebermeyer paused. ‘I felt a need to tackle my own past, my family’s, that of Germany. For me, it was not just a matter of acknowledgement, but of questioning.’ He gestured up at the castle again. ‘This place seemed to represent the dichotomy in my mind about Himmler. On the one hand, Wewelsburg is a Nazi fairy tale, a kind of perverse Disneyland. From that viewpoint, it’s easy to walk in there and dismiss all the occult symbolism as absurd. On the other hand, it was the stronghold of an empire Himmler had carved out for himself, the ideological headquarters of the SS and the focus of the Ahnenerbe, the Department of Cultural Heritage. In 1941, Himmler even declared that Wewelsburg would become the centre of the Third Reich. That might seem little more than a grandiose statement of his ambitions for his cult, but it could also be read at face value. When he said it, some must have known his mind, a hard core of followers, perhaps a secret cadre within the SS. His pronouncement may even have signalled the beginning of the process he had been building towards since acquiring this place years before the war even began. It came in 1941, just at the start of Operation Barbarossa, the beginning of the countdown to apocalypse.’

  Jack turned to Hiebermeyer. ‘Are you suggesting that Himmler engineered that? And that he was setting up a rival Reich?’

  Hiebermeyer paused. ‘A kind of shadow Reich. But not here, no longer at Wewelsburg. That was part of the smokescreen too. He would have known perfectly well that the castle would not survive the fall of Hitler, that it would be taken by the Allies. And the idea in those final days of April 1945, when he tried to negotiate with the Americans – that Himmler really saw the Third Reich as viable, with himself at the helm, fighting alongside the Western Allies against the Russians – has always seemed to me to be at odds with the man’s cunning intelligence. Nor do I believe that he was fuelled by the fantasy of some kind of miracle deliverance that sustained the remaining Nazis in Berlin in those final dark days. I began to think that he had another scheme, and that he had only been trying to buy time, perhaps for a plan of escape to some other secret base that required a few days more to pull off, with the hours suddenly running short as the Red Army closed in.’

  ‘And by April 1945, Wewelsburg was already in American hands.’

  Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘But Camelot’s a movable feast. With so much focus on the ideology and mystique, Himmler could persuade his followers that the bricks and mortar had become less important. A new order-castle could be built elsewhere. Gangsters always have more than one hideaway. I began to think that his vision for a future Wewelsburg lay beyond Germany, beyond Europe. But there I left it. When we were at school, in the 1970s, there was still a lot of speculation about top Nazis who might have escaped to places like Argentina and Brazil, men who for decades may have contemplated a resurgent Reich. There were dozens of novels and investigative books and films. For me to have speculated about Himmler in that way would just have added to the slush pile on some literary agent’s floor.’

  ‘Especially as Himmler had committed suicide in British custody in May 1945,’ Jack said.

  Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘Something didn’t go quite to plan for him in those final few days after Hitler’s own suicide, when Himmler was on the run. He’d been at Grand Admiral Donitz’s headquarters at Plon, close to the last surviving U-boat pens, and I can’t help feeling there was a connection. There have always been rumours about U-boats taking fleeing Nazis away.’

  ‘And that’s why you were so interested in those Ahnenerbe expeditions? Because you thought Himmler was really searching for a new Camelot?’

  ‘I came to believe that the expeditions weren’t just about finding evidence for Aryan roots, for anything that could be hijacked and slotted into the Nazi foundation myth. They were about shoring up the future. Specifically, about shoring up Himmler’s future. But this was not just about refounding Camelot. This was about something more grandiose, more audacious. Remember, this was a man who brazenly stated that Wewelsburg was to be the centre of the world. Wherever he was going, even if it involved no bricks and mortar, even if the archaeology he so yearned for was elusive, made up, he would preside over his new citadel of power, the one that had driven him to send out expeditions searching for evidence of the greatest lost civilization. Not Camelot, but Atlantis. Atlantis refounded.’ Hiebermeyer nodded at the edifice in front of them. ‘Because I believed that Himmler’s fantasies overlaid a ruthless practicality, I felt that he was looking for more than just a bolthole. There had to be some basis for continuing power, something that would allow him to pursue his dream of world domination. I began to think about the wonder-weapons in production at the end of the war. The German atomic research programme seems unlikely; by April 1945, Himmler would have known about the Manhattan Project – the Allied effort to produce the first atomic bomb – and realized that the threat of a single nuclear bomb, even if the Germans had one ready, would not have been enough to bring the world to its knees. Gas or chemical weapons would never have been practical, requiring aircraft or missiles or artillery for delivery. That left one possibility: a biological weapon.’

  Jack stared at Hiebermeyer. ‘Good God. The bunker. You think that wasn’t about some apocalyptic scheme of Hitler’s to take the world with him, but a plan for post-war global threat by Himmler.’

  ‘It fits the bill exactly. The Spanish flu virus would be the perfect weapon. A single phial would have been enough, a threat to release it in one large city. And it seems consistent with what we can make out of the secretive nature of the experiments at the bunker, the SS involvement, the Agamemnon Code, which seems to have activated a chain of agents. I believe that Himmler had been planning to take the virus with him to his secret destination, or to have an agent do it for him in advance, and that was what he had been trying to arrange in those final days.’

  ‘Your aunt Heidi,’ Jack murmured. ‘Wasn’t she a scientist?’

  Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘A toxicologist. She’d been a biochemistry student when the Nazis came to power, and then worked as a medical researcher in a hospital in Berlin until her son Hans was born. I know that she gave herself up to the British near Plon, where she was hiding with Hans. She was evidently seen as a good catch, and was given a succession of research positions in England, where she remained until retiring back to Germany in the 1970s.’

  ‘Her son
was the one who joined the Baader-Meinhof gang?’

  ‘He died in an explosion in 1972. He’d been a brilliant student, but had been seduced by the anarchists. Aunt Heidi once told me she saw it as part of the legacy of the Nazis, the damage wrought on the next generation. I don’t think she’s ever got over it, especially after losing her husband too, in the war.’

  ‘The Stuka pilot? I remember you talking about him.’

  Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘Ernst Hoffman. One of the top tank-busters of the war. Knight’s Grand Cross with oak leaves and swords. He was grounded after being wounded on the Russian front, and was posted as some kind of attache in Berlin. Aunt Heidi said he disappeared like so many others in the final Soviet onslaught, presumed killed.’

  ‘So why does Heidi want us to meet here now?’

  Hiebermeyer paused. ‘I’m not sure. But there was a connection with Himmler, something that dogged Ernst right to the end. Heidi told me that as a boy, he’d seen a newsreel of an Ahnenerbe expedition to Tibet showing biplanes flying over the Himalayas, and had written to Himmler to volunteer as a pilot. After that, Himmler took an undue interest in his Luftwaffe exploits, and arranged his final posting to Berlin, where Ernst was feted as a war hero. Several years before that, it was Himmler who had organized the party where Ernst had first met Heidi. Himmler brought his favourites to Wewelsburg, and maybe Ernst and Heidi came with him. There must be something here she wants us to see.’ He looked at his watch, and stood up. ‘It’s a quarter to eleven. We’d better be on time.’

  Fifteen minutes later Jack and Hiebermeyer stood at the entrance to the Obergruppenfuhrersaal, the SS Generals’ Hall, on the ground floor of the north tower of the castle. It was a stark room, devoid of furniture or wall hangings, focusing the eye entirely on the architecture and the pattern in the floor. Surrounding the open central space of the chamber were twelve columns joined by a groin vault, and between them lay deeply recessed apses with tall windows. The daylight coming through the windows illuminated the symbol in the centre of the floor, a green marble Sonnenrad sunwheel with a central axis of gold. Jack knew that this had been the epicentre of Himmler’s vision for Wewelsburg, the place where he had summoned his twelve top SS generals for ideological preparation before Operation Barbarossa in 1941. He heard a low electric hum, and a wheelchair appeared from one of the window niches. Sitting in it was an elegant woman wearing a flowery dress, her white hair done in the fashion of the 1930s. She had a striking face, with high cheekbones and startlingly blue eyes. She waved at Hiebermeyer, who bounded over and kissed her forehead. ‘Heidi,’ he said, holding her hand. ‘ Meine liebe Tante.’