“Right you are,” said Dohnanyi. “Very good liqueur. Cointreau.”
“A very special mistress,” Christel teased.
“Not a mistress. They’re for General von Tresckow.” He laid the package in the middle of the clothes. “And now, my dear, if you don’t mind, I should like to talk with Dietrich alone.”
She kissed his cheek and went out, closing the door behind her. Christel was used to being dismissed, not because Dohnanyi distrusted her but because he feared they both might be arrested and tortured as the Harnacks had been. For the sake of the children, they had agreed, she should know as little as possible so that one of their parents at least might have a chance to return to them.
When she had gone, Dohnanyi remained looking at the package. “Not Cointreau,” he said softly. “A bomb.”
Dietrich started and took a step back.
“Though I’m glad it fooled you,” Dohnanyi added. “It must pass as Cointreau.”
“My God!” Dietrich managed to say. “Here at the house? What if it goes off?”
“It’s supposed to be quite safe until I activate the fuse. Then it has thirty minutes.”
They stood side by side looking down at the suitcase.
“Did you mean what you said earlier?” Dohnanyi asked. “No more excuses?”
“Yes,” Dietrich said.
“Then I would appreciate it if you could drive me to the railway station with this. It’s not necessary, of course; Christel could take me. But I’d as soon not involve her, and your company would mean a great deal to me. To know that someone else is responsible as well. You see, we’re going to blow up Hitler’s plane. That means everyone on board will die.”
Dietrich imagined the plane exploding, plummeting to the earth in flaming bits. Perhaps the men on board would be caught in one last thought seconds after their bodies ceased to exist.
“Who?”
“Whichever of his aides he brings along. Several army officers not involved in the plot. The pilot and copilot. Men with families. Blood on my hands, and yours.”
Dietrich said, “There comes a time when it is a great relief to sin. At last, at last. But you must tell me what is going on.”
They talked while Dietrich drove. He maneuvered the automobile carefully through the gray streets quickly emptying of pedestrians. Soon it would be dark and a clear night, so the Allied bombers were expected. There was little traffic, since not even the trams could make regular runs now, but the pavement was so damaged that it was difficult to make more than thirty kilometers an hour without damaging a tire or breaking an axle. Dietrich glanced at his watch. He would just have time to drop off Dohnanyi and get back to the Marienburger Allee.
“Couldn’t you shoot him?” he asked. “To spare the others on the plane, I mean?”
“It’s very hard,” said Dohnanyi. “He’s become a virtual recluse, and very paranoid. He’s under heavy guard at all times. The sight of a gun would bring an instant response, probably before he could be shot. We have to strike now. Everything is ready at this moment for the coup. The troops we need within the Reich are in position. In a week something may change.”
Dietrich had already known something of this. Within the family they had continued to refer to the plot as “Uncle Rudi” after their Nazi relative. The word for the past several weeks had been that Uncle Rudi would soon be coming for a visit. But it was a shock to think of the means of accomplishing Hitler’s demise so close at hand. When Dietrich glanced in his rearview mirror he could see the brown leather suitcase perched on the backseat.
“This is not your first involvement with the explosive,” Dohnanyi was saying. “You recall the letter you gave Bishop Bell to post? That’s how we got the fuse. It’s something new the British have developed, and we used a German agent to steal one. Our own fuses make a hissing noise after the bomb is set to go off. Someone on the airplane might notice. But this fuse is absolutely silent.”
“But why are you going to East Prussia?”
“Because since Stalingrad, Hitler is very worried about the rest of the Eastern Front. So he’s going to Rastenburg for a high-level conference three days from now. I’m taking the bomb to General von Tresckow. He’s responsible for seeing the bomb is on board the return flight to Berlin. We thought it best to try for the return. That way Tresckow and his aides can use the visit to determine the exact situation in the rest of the army. As soon as word comes that the plane is on its way back, those units will move into a state of alert. They’ll be in position to surround Berlin and arrest Goering and Himmler and the top SS brass. Negotiations with the Allies will begin at once.”
Dohnanyi fell silent and twisted in his seat to look out the window, back toward Sacrow. An orange glow tinted the western sky.
“If this fails,” he said, “you and I only have a few more days to live.”
“Then,” Dietrich said, “we should make the most of them. When you return from East Prussia, we shall have a family celebration.”
Last Things
THE FAMILY gathered to celebrate the seventy-fifth birthday of Karl Bonhoeffer. Karl-Friedrich and his wife, Grete, came up from Leipzig, and Suse’s husband, Pastor Walter Dress, obtained a leave from his army chaplaincy in Italy. The cellar of the house in the Marienburger Allee held a number of smoked haunches carefully stored before the war and drawn upon for such special occasions. Cook retrieved a large ham, and Suse and Christel provided jars of homemade preserves, the last of the previous summer’s vegetable gardens.
After dinner a deputation consisting of the administrator and chief physician arrived from the Charité. They brought with them an official proclamation from the Führer himself, bestowing the Goethe Medal for Art and Science upon Dr. Karl Bonhoeffer in honor of his long and distinguished career. But they didn’t stay long. The gathering was a private, family affair, they sensed. So after an hour of good cognac—also taken from prewar stock—they bowed, shook hands with the good Dr. Bonhoeffer, and departed with stiff-armed Nazi salutes all round and Heil Hitlers shouted with good-natured exuberance. The family concert began. The Bonhoeffer children and in-laws presented a cantata by Walcha, one of Karl Bonhoeffer’s favorite composers, which they had been rehearsing for several days. Dietrich was at the piano, Karl-Friedrich played the violin, Christel the cello. Paula, Suse, Hans von Dohnanyi, and the children formed the chorus. Dohnanyi, the least musical of all the family, kept forgetting his cue—he was the only bass—and received a dig in the ribs from his youngest son. Outside the front door the Dohnanyi car waited with the keys in the ignition. When the phone call came, Dohnanyi planned to drive at once to the Abwehr office in the Tirpitz-Ufer.
Hans strained to listen, and missed another entrance. He lost his place and looked up from the music momentarily. Dietrich continued to play, his face placid. He was also listening for the telephone, but one would never know it, for he played with marvelous concentration. A good quality if we get into trouble, Dohnanyi thought, this ability to focus.
When the music was done the family gathered around Karl Bonhoeffer to offer their birthday kisses, the only kisses allowed for the year, a light brushing of lips against the dry cheek of the old man. Dietrich and Hans drifted over to the radio. Christel, who shared their secret, watched, her hands resting on the shoulders of her daughter. Almost reluctantly, Dohnanyi turned on the radio. They waited fifteen minutes for a Schumann Lied to finish playing, the rest of the family laughing and talking all around them, and then an announcer brought the news. The Führer’s plane has landed at Tempelhof after a successful trip to East Prussia for consultation with his top generals. Despite the setback at Stalingrad, the war effort progresses satisfactorily in other areas of the Eastern Front, according to the general staff of the Wehrmacht. The Führer will remain in Berlin for several days in anticipation of the ceremonies on Heroes’ Memorial Day….
Dohnanyi switched off the set and straightened slowly. He could not look at his wife or Dietrich.
“Back, is h
e?” said Karl-Friedrich.
He received no answer.
The bomb had simply not gone off. General von Tresckow had set the fuse himself and seen the package onto the plane, handing it over to one of Hitler’s aides with a promise to deliver the “Cointreau”—a birthday present—to a fellow officer in Berlin. That officer, a fellow plotter, had the unenviable task of receiving the package and defusing it while wondering if the bomb might decide to work at any moment.
“Too cold perhaps,” he suggested to Dohnanyi when he had regained his composure. “Some of these explosives are quite sensitive to temperature.”
“Would it be so cold on the plane?” Dohnanyi said.
“Perhaps they put it in the baggage compartment. Or perhaps Hitler likes it cold when he flies. He has some quirks, you know.”
Dohnanyi took a deep breath. “No matter,” he said. “It didn’t work. So. We try again. Immediately.”
Newly appointed SS Judge Advocate Alois Bauer sits in his bare office in the Prinz-Albrecht-Straße. The expensive furniture has been removed, the wall which once held the painting by Barthel Bruyn the Elder is bare. Because of the air raids, everything of value has been removed for safekeeping to a secure underground storage facility outside central Berlin. Bauer has been assured that once the war is over his possessions will be restored to him. He has some doubts about this. Though the war in the East is going well again and a great victory has been won at Kharkov, though the liquidation of the Polish ghettos is proceeding, the situation in Italy is unstable. Mussolini cannot last, it is rumored, and the Abwehr reports the Allies are preparing to mount an invasion of the peninsula.
The Abwehr. More than once Bauer has heard an SS colleague complain, “Can we believe anything that comes from the Abwehr?” Bauer tends to think the Italian reports are reliable, if only because it is the gloomiest Abwehr intelligence which seems to prove the most accurate. Bauer is loyal, but also practical. And a creative man. No one could speak openly about losing the war, but one could well imagine. So Bauer is cultivating contacts in Italy, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, making use of those intelligence officers he has found to be most congenial.
One of these officers, a station underling in Prague, appears in his office in mid-March unannounced.
“I have something for you,” the man says.
“Something worth a long train journey,” Bauer observes, and motions to a chair.
The man sits. He never takes his eyes from Bauer’s face. “Worth a reward,” he says. “A promotion.”
Bauer nods. “Then you will not mind if I ask a colleague to share in this conversation.”
The man looks startled but has no choice but to agree. Bauer has learned, as he has been drawn deeper and deeper into the world of agents and counteragents, that it is never wise to listen alone when sensitive information is passed on. He picks up his telephone and calls Hauptsturmführer Franz Xaver Sonderegger of the Gestapo.
The bomb, no longer disguised as a package of liqueur bottles, was refitted with a new fuse and was being worn by a young officer of the Wehrmacht, Rudolf Gersdorff, inside his uniform jacket. Gersdorff’s wife had recently died in childbirth and they had no other children. He decided he had the strength to join her. The ever-reclusive Hitler, at the invitation of the Abwehr, would visit an exhibit of captured Russian weapons at the Old Arsenal Museum for half an hour; Gersdorff would escort Hitler around the exhibit, stay as close as possible during the time the fuse was set to go off, and blow them both up.
(Gersdorff went to his elderly father for a last visit and told him of this plan. The old man looked away from his son and said, “Yes, you must do it.”)
When Gersdorff unbuttoned his uniform just before the arrival of Hitler’s entourage and activated the fuse, he saw his father’s face, lean and ancient and ready to offer a son to the god of death for the sake of honor. The face of a Roman nobleman prepared to open his veins and those of his family, of an Aztec baring his child’s chest beneath the blade of a priest. Gersdorff shuddered and tried to think instead of his wife, six months in the ground along with their stillborn child. As he shook hands with Hitler and followed him into the museum, he stroked once more the silken blond hair of his Beate, looked into her eyes, and said, I shall be there soon. Gersdorff checked his watch. As Hitler stood indecisively in the middle of the exhibition hall, Gersdorff motioned and said, “Over here, my Führer. There is something I would especially like you to see.”
Hitler looked around quizzically. Gersdorff, glimpsing the Führer’s face, had the momentary impression of pouches of decaying flesh ready to slip from the skull. Hitler glanced at his watch, then said, “There is nothing here to see except Russian junk,” turned on his heel, and stalked out of the hall trailing a gaggle of anxious SS security guards. Gersdorff stared after him, then realized with a start he must rid himself of the live bomb. He hurried to a toilet, praying no one else would enter, and defused the bomb. Afterward his hands shook so badly he could not undo his fly to urinate, and he wet his dress trousers.
Again Dohnanyi waited, this time at the Tirpitz-Ufer. When at last the phone rang, it was the hopeless voice of the supposed-to-be-dead Gersdorff.
Gersdorff steeled himself for one more attempt at getting close to Hitler but was wounded in an air raid and confined to hospital. In the meantime, a cache of SS uniforms Dohnanyi had squirreled away for possible use as disguises was destroyed in another fiery raid two days later.
“It is as though God protects him,” a distraught Dohnanyi said to Dietrich.
Dietrich had difficulty answering. “No,” he said after a time. “God must play some other part in the workings of this world.”
“Currency violations?” says Gestapo Hauptsturmführer Sonderegger with a puzzled look on his face.
Bauer nods and leans back in his chair with an air of satisfaction. The visitor from Prague has just taken his leave, and Sonderegger is struggling with the implications of his information. Bauer likes working with Sonderegger, who has no imagination and knows it, but compensates with tenacity and loyalty. The perfect subordinate.
“Wouldn’t you consider Prague a backwater?” Sonderegger says. “I mean, where our work is concerned?”
“It’s the Abwehr,” Bauer says. “No matter which office laundered the currency, it’s a violation. And I’ll guarantee, follow this up and the path will lead to Munich at least, and perhaps here to the Tirpitz-Ufer.”
“A minor violation,” Sonderegger says, “all things considered.”
“Yes,” says Bauer, “but one which will allow me to make arrests and interrogate at my leisure.”
“You think the Abwehr is harboring a Communist cell like the one at the Ministry of Economics?”
“I don’t know. But there’s something going on there.”
Sonderegger yawns, a bit disappointed that his colleague is so vague. “Like what?”
Bauer shakes his head. “I’ve been told by some of my informants in the Abwehr to keep an eye on Hans von Dohnanyi. And now this fellow from Prague mentions his name in connection with the exchange of large amounts of currency for some scheme to use Jews as intelligence agents. Doesn’t that seem odd to you?”
“Of course it does. Anyone who thinks Jews are useful to the Reich as intelligence agents has a screw loose, or is incompetent.”
“Not incompetent,” Bauer says. “Something else.”
“So he’s a Jew lover. How much is that worth?”
“It won’t take much time or effort for us to find out.”
So over the next few days Bauer begins to take a closer look at Hans von Dohnanyi. He soon turns up confirmation of massive currency exchanges related to the removal of a party of Jews to Switzerland, ostensibly as Abwehr agents, though there seems little evidence of their usefulness. He also learns of a number of trips to Rome and Poland in the company of an Abwehr agent in Munich named Josef Müller. Meetings at the Vatican. And trips to Switzerland and Sweden on behalf of army intelligence by a broth
er-in-law of Dohnanyi’s, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bauer dredges his memory for details of Pastor Bonhoeffer, digs through his files. An ecumenical conference before the war, an outspoken attack on the Führer and the Reich government. A late-night conversation in Bonhoeffer’s room. Bauer rubs his head as he reads the report. A handwritten note in the margin reminds him of the assault in Charlottenburg. A debt incurred and repaid long ago, Bauer thinks. And am I now supposed to believe that so outspoken a man should be trusted abroad with the best interests of the Reich?
Still, a little too close to Dohnanyi for a first move. He would rather strike a bit farther afield and watch the reaction. He telephones Sonderegger and says, “This Josef Müller in Munich. Have your men bring him in.”
April 5, 1943
THE WEATHER PROMISING TO HOLD FAIR and warm, Dietrich Bonhoeffer determined to take a day away from his writing and go cycling in the Grunewald with his nephew. But when he rang the Dohnanyi home in Sacrow, a strange man said, “Hello.”
Dietrich froze, then set the phone slowly back on its cradle. He stared straight ahead for a time, seeing nothing. A dull thud at the back of the house brought him back to himself. He went outside and found a robin lying on the veranda. It had crashed into the glass windows of the sunroom. Dietrich picked it up and its head fell limply across his finger. A broken neck. He laid it off on the grass and, on an impulse, covered it with dry leaves. Then he went inside and climbed the stairs.
His parents were taking their afternoon naps, so he tiptoed onto the landing outside their rooms and on up to his attic. He glanced out the window, then went to his desk and methodically checked the drawers for incriminating papers. Nothing. From the mattress on his bed he took a sheaf of papers, fakes all of them, pertaining to his trips abroad, and placed them in a drawer where they would be easily noticed by the Gestapo. Then he went back downstairs and ate a large meal.
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