by C. J. Sansom
Suddenly, she was aware of a commotion. Four boys of about twenty, in raincoats and carrying satchels, were racing down the street towards her, weaving through the crowds and pulling leaflets from their satchels, thrusting them into the hands of surprised passers-by and tossing handfuls into the air. Someone shouted, ‘Hey!’ Sarah wondered if it was a student prank, but the boys’ faces were serious. They ran past, tossing a shower of leaflets at the costermonger’s stall. The newsvendor shouted, ‘Bastards!’ after them as they ran past the entrance to the tube station. A rush of hot air from inside sent the leaflets swirling like confetti. One blew against Sarah’s coat and she grasped it.
We have
NO FREE PARLIAMENT!
NO FREE PRESS!
NO FREE UNIONS!
The Germans occupy the Isle of Wight!
Strikers are executed!
The Germans make us persecute the Jews!
WHO WILL BE NEXT?
FIGHT GERMAN CONTROL!
JOIN THE RESISTANCE MOVEMENT!
W.S. Churchill
She looked up. The four boys were just turning the corner. Then, as though from nowhere, a dozen Auxiliary Police appeared, running at the boys and throwing them to the pavement. One fell into the gutter and a taxi swerved wildly, honking its horn. The policemen hauled the boys to their feet, thrusting them against the wall, heedlessly pushing several people aside. An old woman, carrying a shopping bag, was sent flying, packages in greaseproof paper spilling onto the street. A man with an umbrella and bowler hat was knocked over. Sarah watched as the bowler rolled under a bus, the wheels crushing it. The passengers inside turned to look at the scene, mouths open. Most looked quickly away again.
The police had pulled out their truncheons and were beating the boys mercilessly now. Sarah heard the crack of wood on a head, then heard a cry. The Auxiliaries, mostly young men themselves, laid in mercilessly. Sarah glimpsed a boy’s mouth shining red with blood. One of the policemen was repeatedly punching another boy, his face white with fury, punctuating the blows with insults. ‘Fucking – Yid-loving – Commie – bugger.’
Most people hurried by, faces averted, but a few stopped to look and someone in the crowd shouted out, ‘Shame!’ The policeman who had been punching the boy turned round, reaching to his hip. He pulled out a gun. The watchers gasped, stepped back. ‘Who said that?’ the Auxie yelled. ‘Who was it?’
Then, with a loud ringing of its klaxon, a police van pulled up to the kerb. Four more policemen ran out and opened the double doors at the back. The boys were thrown in like sacks, the door slammed and the van pulled away, klaxon shrieking again. The Auxies adjusted their uniforms, looking threateningly at the crowd as though daring anyone else to call out. Nobody did. The policemen shoved confidently through. Sarah looked at the pavement by the wall, now spotted with blood.
Next to her an old man in a cap and muffler stood trembling. Perhaps it was him who had shouted out. ‘The bastards,’ he muttered, ‘the bastards.’
Sarah said, ‘It was so sudden. Where will they take them?’
‘Scotland Yard, I expect.’ The old man looked Sarah in the face. ‘Down to the interrogation rooms. Poor little devils, they’re only kids. They’ll probably bring the black witches in from Senate House to them. They’ll tear them to pieces.’
‘Black witches?’
The old man gave her a look of contempt. ‘The Gestapo. The SS. Don’t you know who’s really in charge of everything now?’
Chapter Eight
GUNTHER HOTH ARRIVED IN London early on Friday afternoon. He had taken the daily Lufthansa shuttle from Berlin. A large black Mercedes with embassy plates was waiting for him at Croydon; the driver, a sharply dressed young man, greeted him. ‘Heil Hitler!’
‘Heil Hitler!’
‘Good flight, Herr Sturmbannführer?’
‘Fairly smooth.’
‘I am Ludwig. I will be assisting you today.’ The young man spoke formally, like a tour guide, but his eyes were keen. He was probably SS. Gunther sank gratefully into the comfortable upholstery of the car. He felt tired and the sore place in the middle of his back hurt. Last night he had gone straight from the meeting with Karlson to pack and get some sleep, then risen early to get the plane. He looked out of the window as the car drove smoothly through the grey London suburbs. England was just as he remembered it, cold and damp. Everyone looked pale, preoccupied, the clothes of working people worn and shabby. Many of the grimy buildings seemed in poor condition. There were lumps of dog dirt everywhere in the gutters; on the pavements too. Things had barely changed since he was last here seven years ago; in fact they looked much the same as when he first came to England as a student, back in 1929.
He was glad, though, for this assignment. He was weary of his Gestapo job, tired of interviewing informers whose eyes shone with malice or greed, tired of searching through the endless file cards. Even the payoff when, through one of his intuitive leaps, he found one of the few remaining hidden Jews, was less rewarding these days.
For over twenty years he had been full of anger at the Jews, at the terrible things they had done to Germany. He knew they were still a threat, with their power in America and what was left of Russia, but in recent years it was as though his rage, his strength, was wearing out as he got older – he would be forty-five soon. Yesterday he had arrived at a home in a prosperous Berlin suburb at daybreak with four policemen, banging on the door and shouting for entry. They had found a family of Jews, a mother and father and a boy of eleven, in a damp cellar. Bunks and armchairs and even a little sink had been installed there. They hauled the three upstairs, the mother yelling and screaming, and took them into the kitchen where their hosts, Mr and Mrs Muller, waited with their children, two little blonde girls in identical blue nightshirts, the younger one clutching a rag doll.
Gunther’s men shoved the three Jews against the kitchen wall. The woman stopped screaming and stood weeping quietly, head in hands. Then the little boy, crazily, attempted a run for it. One of Gunther’s men grabbed his arm, banged him back against the wall, and gave him a punch that sent blood trickling from his mouth. Gunther frowned. ‘That’s enough, Peter,’ he said. He turned to the German family. He knew Mr Muller was a railway official with no political record. ‘Why have you done this?’ he asked sadly. ‘You know it will be the end of you.’
Muller, a little balding stick of a man, inclined his head to a small wooden cross on the wall. Gunther nodded. ‘I see. Lutherans? Confessing Church?’
‘Yes,’ the man said. He looked at the captive Jews, and added, with sudden anger, ‘They have souls, just like us.’
Gunther had heard that stupid argument many times before. He sighed. ‘All you have done is bring trouble on yourselves.’ He nodded to the Jews. ‘Them too. They should have gone for resettlement like all the others. Instead they’ve probably spent years running from house to house.’ People like Mr and Mrs Muller were so stupid; they could have lived normal quiet lives but now they would suffer SS interrogation and then they would be hanged.
Mrs Muller took a deep breath. ‘Please do not hurt our little girls,’ she pleaded, her voice trembling.
‘Shouldn’t you have thought of them before you did this?’ Gunther sighed again. ‘It’s all right, your girls won’t be harmed, they’ll be sent for adoption by good German families – who’ve probably lost sons fighting in the East,’ he added bitterly, looking the woman in the eye.
Her husband said, ‘Do I have your word on that?’ Gunther nodded. The woman said, ‘Thank you,’ then lowered her head and began to cry. Gunther frowned; no-one he had arrested had ever thanked him before. He looked at the little cross on the wall. He had been brought up a Lutheran himself, and was aware the cross was supposed to be a symbol of sacrifice. Gunther knew about real sacrifice. Hans, his twin brother, had been killed eight years ago by partisans in the Ukraine. Sitting in the comfortable car crossing London he remembered his brother’s first leave, after the invasion of Russia in 1941. Ha
ns had gone into Russia as part of an SS Einsatzgruppe, liquidating Bolsheviks and Jews. Hans was thirty-three when he came back that December, but he looked older. He had sat in Gunther’s house, after Gunther’s wife had gone to bed, his face pale and drawn against the black of his SS uniform. He said, ‘I’ve killed hundreds of people, Gunther. Women and old people.’ Suddenly he was talking fast. ‘A whole Jewish village once, a shtetl, we got them to dig a huge pit, then kneel naked on the edge while we shot them. It was so cold, they began shivering as soon as we got them undressed; it was fear as well, of course.’ Hans took a deep, shuddering breath, then braced himself, squaring his shoulders. ‘But Himmler says we have to be utterly hard and ruthless. He addressed us before we went into Russia. He said we must do this for the future of the Reich. For the generations unborn.’ He looked at his brother, a desperate fierce stare. ‘No matter what it costs us.’
After the arrests Gunther had spent the rest of the day back at Gestapo headquarters in Prince Albrechtstrasse, dealing with the paperwork. He signed the documents transferring the Jewish family to Heydrich’s Jewish Evacuation Department, the Mullers to interrogation. Then he went wearily down the wide central staircase, past the busts of German heroes, and walked home to his flat. His route took him through the vast, endless works being carried out in the city centre to build Germania, Speer’s new Berlin, in time for the 1960 Olympics. The buildings they planned were so huge the sandy soil on which they would be built could never support them without concrete foundations hundreds of feet deep. A special railway line had been laid to take away the sand. On a cold, clear day like this the air was full of dust; sometimes the pall hung so heavy that Gunther, like other people susceptible to it, wore one of the new little white facemasks from America. Thousands of Polish and Russian forced labourers swarmed round the giant pits that made up the largest building site on earth. A few always died during the day and Gunther saw the hands and feet of corpses sticking out from underneath a tarpaulin to one side. Police patrolled with their rifles; they were vastly outnumbered by the labourers but one man with a gun can command many without.
He noticed that fewer passers-by wore their Nazi Party badges these days. The streets that weren’t being rebuilt looked increasingly shabby. Cheap imports from France and the occupied east had kept German living standards up until a couple of years ago, but they were falling now as the Russian war ground on; five million Germans dead and more announced each week. It was daily talk in Police Intelligence that morale was falling; many citizens didn’t even give the German greeting ‘Heil Hitler’ to each other any more.
Back home in his flat he ate his usual lonely dinner at the kitchen table, then sat and listened to the radio. He opened a beer and began thinking of his wife and son. Four years ago Klara had left him for a fellow police officer; they had taken his son, Michael, and gone to live as subsidized settlers in Krimea, the only part of Russia that had been completely cleared of the original population and, an easily defensible peninsula, it was deemed safe for Germans. Gunther knew, though, that the thousand-mile-long railway the Germans had built to it was under constant partisan attack.
He switched off the radio – Mozart was playing and he found his music effete and irritating – and put on Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. He liked the confident, crashing beat, even though Tchaikovsky was Russian and disapproved of. The music stirred him but when it was over the sad empty bleakness that came over him sometimes crept back. He told himself it was the times; those who believed in Germany had to pay a hard price for the future.
The telephone’s ring made him jump. The call was from Gestapo headquarters. He was to come in at once, to see Superintendent Karlson.
Karlson had a large office on the top floor of the building on Prince Albrechtstrasse. There were thick carpets and pictures of eighteenth-century Berlin on the walls, little figurines on the desk and tables. They had probably been taken from Jews; Karlson had been in the Party since the twenties and enjoyed all the privileges. He was one of the ‘golden peasants’. He was large, with an air of cheerful bonhomie, and like many old Party men he was coarse but clever. Another man sat beside the big desk, under the portraits of Himmler and the Führer. The stranger was tall and slim, in his forties, with black hair and sharp blue eyes, immaculate in his SS uniform, the swastika in its white circle on his armband standing out against the black uniform. Karlson, too, wore his uniform today, though usually he wore a suit; as did Gunther, whose work involved moving in the shadows, unnoticed. Gunther saw the stranger had a file open on the knees of his immaculately creased trousers.
Karlson greeted Gunther warmly and waved him to a chair in front of the desk. He said, ‘Thank you for coming at such short notice.’
‘I wasn’t doing anything particular, sir.’
Karlson then turned to the stranger, a deferential note in his voice. ‘Allow me to introduce Obersturmbannführer Renner, from Division E7.’ Gunther thought, an SS Brigadier from the section of the Reich Security Office responsible for Britain; they’re after someone important. Karlson continued, ‘Sturmbannführer Hoth is one of my most prized officers. He is in charge of ferreting out the Jews still left in Berlin. He caught three today.’
The dark-haired man nodded. ‘Congratulations. Are there many left, do you think?’
‘Not many in Berlin. We’re near the end now. Though I hear that Hamburg still has a few.’
‘Maybe more than we know,’ Karlson said. ‘They’re like rats; you think you’ve got rid of them, and then back they come, gnawing at your toes with their little sharp teeth, right?’ He’s playing to the gallery, Gunther thought.
‘No,’ Renner answered quietly. ‘I think Sturmbannführer Hoth is right, there are not many left here now.’ He looked at Gunther with interest. ‘I believe you have met Deputy Reichsführer Heydrich.’
‘A few times only. When I first joined the Hitler Youth.’
Renner nodded thoughtfully. He still seemed to be weighing Gunther up. He asked, ‘What do you think you will do, Sturmbannführer Hoth, when the Jews are all gone from Germany?’
‘I don’t know, sir. I’ve some years before I retire. I thought I might go to Poland, I hear there is still work to be done there.’ He had thought, maybe if he did that the spark of energy would return; if not, perhaps the partisans would get him, as they had Hans, and the family sacrifice would be complete.
Renner said, ‘You have an interesting history, Hoth. A university degree in English, a year spent living there, then when you returned Party membership and five years serving in the Criminal Police Department.’
‘Yes, sir. My father was a policeman, too.’
Renner nodded, the silver skull-and-crossbones badge on his black SS cap glinting as it caught the light. ‘I know. In 1936 you were recruited to Gestapo Counter-Intelligence, under Brigadeführer Schellenberg as he then was, and worked on intelligence matters involving England, including the blueprint for its occupation, although fortunately as it turned out that was not needed.’ He smiled coldly. ‘Then five years in England after 1940, working from our embassy with the British Special Branch, helping build up their counter-subversion programmes.’ As he spoke he glanced at the folder on his knees and Gunther realized he was referring to his own personnel file. Renner looked up at him with a puzzled expression. ‘And yet in 1945 you applied to return to Berlin, to join Department III. And here you have remained ever since, working on ethnic matters and, for the past few years, tracing hidden Jews. Never seeking promotion.’
Gunther said, ‘I had had enough of England, sir. My wife more so. And my current rank is enough for me.’
‘Your wife left you, I see.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Renner’s expression softened. ‘I am sorry, I sympathize. Your work record is exemplary, you have done a great deal for the Reich. It says here you have a great gift for analysis, for noticing patterns other officers miss.’ Renner looked at Gunther again for a long moment, weighing him up, then turned to Karlson
.
‘Yes,’ Karlson said. He sat back in his chair, examining Gunther with his large, red-veined eyes. ‘Obersturmbannführer Renner’s section has had a request from some very senior people at the London embassy. They need someone there for a –’ he smiled – ‘a task, of some importance. You speak English, you went to university there and you worked in Police Liaison at Senate House for five years. They would like you to go over for a week, perhaps two.’
Gunther hesitated, then said, ‘Of course. If I can be of use.’
‘Though you are not fond of England?’ Renner asked.
Gunther answered, ‘I know Britain is our ally but I don’t like or trust the British. I’ve always thought them – decadent.’ Renner nodded. ‘And Beaverbrook is a joke,’ Gunther added.
Renner nodded again. ‘I agree. But Mosley’s not strong enough to take over yet. Though being Home Secretary in England gives him great power. The English are Aryans, yet despite their achievements they do not really think racially. And yes, they are decadent, they cannot even keep control of their Empire any more. And Churchill’s people are making more and more trouble.’
‘So I have heard.’
‘Beaverbrook’s in France now, talking to Laval.’ Renner gave a wintry smile. ‘Then he comes to Berlin. He wants closer economic links with Germany and to recruit more troops for India. The British cannot make their Empire pay so now they seek crumbs from our table. They will have to pay a price for that.’ He looked at Karlson, who linked his pudgy hands together on the desk and leaned forward.
‘The operation we wish you to assist with is SS. We know you are loyal to us. You will work with our Intelligence man in London. You will say nothing to Ambassador Rommel’s staff, nor to any of the people you used to know, nor any of the army people the embassy is crawling with.’