A Prince and a Spy

by Rory Clements

  ‘I thought you were dead. Torpedoed.’

  ‘Aye, that we were. But we were lucky.’

  ‘Well, thank God, thank God you’re safe. You don’t know how good this day is, Jimmy. I got married today and you’ve just given me the best present I could have hoped for.’

  ‘Is that so? A married man? Oh, congratulations, feller, and my best wishes to the bride. Jeanie will be pleased as punch.’

  ‘What happened with the attack? Did you lose the trawler?’

  ‘Aye, that we did, but we had an ounce of good fortune. The first torpedo bounced off the hull and failed to explode. It gave us just enough time to get into the lifeboat before the second one hit. All we could do was sit and watch our beautiful trawler sink to the depths. We had no power in the lifeboat, and no oars, and so we drifted for days. But we’re all safe home now, picked up by a Royal Navy frigate. Our rations were all gone, so they found us just in time.’

  ‘You’ve been through a nightmare.’

  ‘Maybe, but others fare a lot worse, so I won’t be complaining. I have to say, though, there was something rum about it . . .’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I don’t like to say it. You’ll think I’m crazy.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Well, you see, Tom, I know a bit about subs. My dad served in one in the Great War and I’ve always been interested in the things – even wanted to join the navy this time and volunteer for the submarine fleet, but I was deemed to be in a reserved occupation.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, the one that sank us – it had no markings and no flag. Just sitting there on the surface. Visibility was poor but it looked like a T-class boat to me. Couldn’t swear to it, though, so I said nothing.’

  ‘T-class? That’s a type of U-boat, I take it?’

  ‘No. The T-class is a Royal Navy model. Quite distinctive curve to the prow. In which case, I suppose they must have mistaken us for a German vessel. But it was dusk and, as I said, I couldn’t see clearly.’

  Wilde went cold. ‘Have you said anything to anyone else?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well don’t, Jimmy. I’ll call you in a day or two.’ He was about to put down the phone.

  There was a click on the line.

  He looked across the hallway to Lydia, standing there in her wedding finery, cradling their sleeping son.

  He smiled at her, but he realised it was unconvincing. She knew him too well. He had experienced great happiness before, and it had been snatched away from him. Lydia carried the sleeping child towards him and he took them in his arms.

  Historical Note

  The story of Rudi Coburg is inspired by two men who did their best to alert the world to the horrors of the death camps as early as 1942. They are an SS officer named Kurt Gerstein and a Polish resistance fighter called Jan Karski.

  Gerstein, the thirty-seven-year-old son of a judge from Münster, was both a Christian and a Nazi, having joined the party in 1933. But his relationship with the party was difficult. He was once beaten up by a group of Nazis for protesting against their anti-religious policies and was imprisoned twice – once in a concentration camp – for possessing anti-Nazi literature.

  Despite this, he had powerful connections and managed to join the Waffen SS in 1941, later testifying that he had wanted to witness their actions from the inside.

  In August 1942, when part of the hygiene section of the SS’s medical department, he visited several concentration camps. At Belzec in Poland he witnessed the slaughter of a trainload of Jews by carbon monoxide. His recollection of the event is harrowing:

  ‘Forty-five carriages arrived from Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) carrying more than 6,000 people. Two hundred Ukrainians opened the doors and drove the Jews out with whips. A loudspeaker gave instructions: “Strip, even artificial limbs and glasses. Hand all money and jewellery in at the Valuables Window. Women and girls are to have their hair cut in the barber’s hut.”

  Then the march began. Barbed wire on both sides, followed by two dozen Ukrainians with rifles. Christian Wirth (the camp commandant) and I found ourselves in front of the death chambers. Stark naked men, women, children and cripples passed by. A tall SS man in the corner called to the unfortunates in a loud voice: “Nothing is going to hurt you. Just breathe deep and it will strengthen your lungs. It’s a way to prevent contagious diseases. It’s a good disinfectant.” They asked him what was going to happen and he answered: “The men will have to work, build houses and streets. The women won’t have to do that. They will be busy with the housework and the kitchen.”

  The majority knew what was going to really happen; the smell betrayed it. They climbed a little wooden stair and entered the death chamber, most of them silently, pushed by those behind them. A woman of forty with eyes like fire cursed the murderers. She disappeared into the chamber after being struck by Wirth’s whip. Many prayed. SS men pushed the men into the chamber. “Fill it up,” Wirth ordered. Seven to eight hundred people in ninety-three square metres. The door closed. Heckenholt, the driver of the diesel whose exhaust was to kill these poor unfortunates, tried to start the motor. It wouldn’t start. Wirth came up and whipped the Ukrainian who helped Heckenholt. My watch clocked it all. Fifty minutes, seventy minutes and the diesel would not start. You could hear them weeping in the chamber. The diesel engine started after two hours and forty-nine minutes. Twenty-five minutes passed. You could see through the window that many were already dead. All were dead after thirty-two minutes.

  Jewish workers on the other side opened the wooden doors. They had been promised their lives for doing this horrible work. The people in the chamber were standing like columns of stone with no room to fall. Even in death you could tell the families, all holding hands. The bodies were tossed out. Two dozen workers were busy checking mouths which they opened with iron hooks. Dentists knocked out gold teeth with hammers. Captain Wirth was in the middle of them, in his element, showing me a big box filled with teeth. “See the weight in gold. Just from yesterday and the day before. You can’t imagine what we find every day – dollars, diamonds, gold.” Then the bodies were tossed into a big pit.’

  The next day, Gerstein travelled on to Treblinka where he saw more gassings. Then on 22 August, he went by train back to Berlin. In the same compartment was a Swedish diplomat named Baron Göran von Otter. Gerstein, deeply distressed and weeping, told von Otter what he had witnessed at Belzec and Treblinka and begged him to alert the Allies so that they might act to stop the killings.

  Von Otter had no doubt about the truth of what he had been told and later testified that he passed the story on to the Swedish government. But that was as far as it went. The Allies were not informed. It has since been suggested that this was because the Swedish government did not want to harm trade relations with Germany.

  Gerstein spent the rest of the war trying to tell members of the Church in Germany and the Vatican what he had seen, but with little effect. In 1945, he gave himself up to the French but was treated as a Nazi war criminal. He committed suicide in his cell using a strip of blanket to hang himself.

  Jan Karski’s story is very different. He was a man of immense courage who survived torture by the Gestapo and the deaths of many friends and fellow Polish resistance fighters.

  Born in Lodz, he was the youngest son of eight and was extremely gifted, with ambitions to become a diplomat. While at university, he enlisted in the reserve cadets of the Polish Horse Artillery and won the Sword of Honour. He began working in the foreign office but was called up to defend Poland when the Germans invaded in 1939. After the occupation, he was taken prisoner by the Soviet army and narrowly escaped the Katyn Forest massacre of 30,000 Polish officers by Stalin’s NKVD.

  Returning home by a circuitous route, he became a vital courier for the Polish underground.

  Captured by the Gestapo, his arms and legs were broken by iron bars. Again he survived and escaped and resumed his work for the resistance.

  Aged twenty-eight, in the summer of 1942, he accepted a
n offer from Jewish leaders to witness the terrible conditions in the Warsaw ghetto at a time when the Nazis were taking daily transports of thousands of people from there to the death camps. The Jewish leaders made it clear they were certain that those being ‘relocated to the East’ were all, in fact, being murdered.

  With ridiculous courage, Karski entered Belzec (or perhaps a sub-camp; this is uncertain) disguised as a guard and witnessed the horrors for himself. He then made an incredible journey across Nazi-occupied Europe, via Spain and Gibraltar to London, arriving in November 1942.

  Among others, he met Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, several important MPs and exiled Polish leaders. Eden was disgusted by the Nazi outrages, but lack of photographic or documentary evidence weakened Karski’s case. In December, he contributed to a testament on behalf of the Polish government in exile, headed: THE MASS EXTERMINATION OF THE JEWS IN GERMAN OCCUPIED POLAND. This was sent to the twenty-six signatories of the United Nations. Later in the month, the BBC broadcast a speech by Edward Raczynski, Polish foreign minister in exile, in which he referred to the Nazis’ ‘final solution’, based on Karski’s testimony.

  The BBC broadcast Karski’s story again in May 1943, this time read on his behalf by the author Arthur Koestler (because Karski’s accent was too strong for a British audience). Part of it said:

  ‘From the ghettos the Jews are “taken East” as the official term goes, that is, to the extermination camps of Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor. In these camps they are killed in batches of 1,000 to 6,000 by various methods, including gas. In the course of my investigation I succeeded in witnessing a mass-execution in the camp of Belzec. With the help of our underground organisation, I gained access to that camp in the disguise of a Latvian special policeman. I was in fact one of the executioners but I believe that my course of action was justified.’

  Sadly, these broadcasts made little impact in the wider world.

  From London, Karski went to America where he met President Roosevelt. Like Anthony Eden, the President was appalled, but for him too the lack of photographs was crucial. Also, there were powerful voices in America who did not believe the tales of atrocity, thinking them merely Polish propaganda to gain support in the West.

  When Karski asked the President what message he could send back to Poland, Roosevelt said: ‘Tell them that we are going to win the war and tell them that they have a friend in the White House.’ It wasn’t much. Karski then went to the United Nations where he placed his testimony on record before the War Crimes Commission.

  Unlike Gerstein, Karski survived and thrived, staying in America and becoming a professor at Georgetown University. He gives extensive testimony in the nine-hour holocaust documentary film Shoah. Karski died aged eighty-six in 2000.

  What Happened to Them?

  Flight Sergeant Andrew Jack

  Rear gunner and survivor of Short Sunderland 4026

  He never spoke publicly about the actual crash – either because he had no recollection of it, or because he had been silenced by the two officers who visited him in hospital with papers to sign. In his statement to the court of inquiry he recalled being in thick cloud and thought the pilot was trying to get under it. ‘I do not remember anything after this,’ he said. He added that he did not know who was navigating or who was in the second pilot’s seat. He later met the Duke of Kent’s widow Princess Marina several times and remained in the RAF after the war, eventually leaving the service and becoming a telephone engineer. He died aged fifty-seven in the 1970s. However, in 2003 his niece Margaret Harris told the BBC that Jack had confided to his family that the Duke himself was piloting the Sunderland and that there was a mysterious extra person aboard the plane.

  Prince Philipp von Hessen

  Kaiser Wilhelm II’s nephew and friend of Adolf Hitler

  Philipp survived the war, but when he first fell from grace his future looked bleak. He later recalled his dismay at being interned at Flossenbürg in Bavaria: ‘I had always believed that nobody could be put in a concentration camp without good reason, yet I was locked up without any grounds being given.’ He was treated better than most prisoners, however, being allowed to remain in civilian clothes and eat the same rations as his SS guards. He had had many enemies in the Nazi hierarchy, including Himmler and Goebbels, and his bisexuality (he had a long affair with the British poet Siegfried Sassoon in the 1920s) did not endear him to the party. In April 1945 he was transferred to Dachau, but on liberation he was held by the Allies, having been ranked in the top hundred on the most-wanted Nazis list. He was tried and in 1947 sentenced to two years’ forced labour and loss of thirty per cent of his property, later reduced on appeal. As a free man, he split his time between Germany and Italy, building up his art collection. He died aged eighty-three in 1980 in Rome. His wife Mafalda was the daughter of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy. She was interned in Buchenwald concentration camp and died in 1944 following an Allied bombing raid on the adjacaent munitions factory.

  Heinrich Müller

  SS general and chief of the Gestapo

  The Gestapo chief was one of the most senior Nazis whose fate was never known. Born in Munich in 1900, his father was a policeman and Müller himself became a police officer in the 1920s. Later, as chief of the Gestapo, he was not only deeply involved in police work but also took a leading role in organising the Holocaust. In the last weeks of the war, he was with Hitler in the bunker in Berlin, only leaving on 1 May 1945 after the Führer’s suicide the previous day. Despite an extensive search by both British and American intelligence officers, Müller was never found. In 2013, a German historian, Professor Johannes Tuchel, claimed Müller died in Berlin at the end of the war and was buried in a mass grave, but his only evidence was the testimony of an East German gravedigger who said he recalled burying a man in general’s uniform bearing the insignia that Müller would have had.

  Acknowledgements

  My heartfelt thanks to: Jane Cadman for telling me about the delights and horrors of the Stockholm Archipelago; Callum and Marianne McKenzie of Caithness for taking the time to walk with me on the moors and point out the site of the Duke of Kent’s fatal air crash; my agent Teresa Chris for her wonderful efforts on my behalf; my brilliant new editor Ben Willis for being a joy to work with; Kate Parkin, managing director of Adult Trade at Bonnier Books UK, for her constant encouragement; my wife Naomi for her love and support; and all my other family members and friends simply for being there.

  Hello!

  Thank you for picking up A Prince and a Spy. It is a thriller that addresses difficult subjects, including the attempted annihilation of Europe’s Jews. But it also looks at the theme of class in Hitler’s tyranny. One of the alarming things I discovered while researching the book was the way in which the German aristocracy embraced Hitler and Nazism.

  I knew that Prince Philipp von Hessen (related to both Kaiser Wilhelm II and the British royal family) was one of Hitler’s few close friends until he fell from grace in the middle of the war. But I hadn’t realised quite how many other members of the German nobility were paid-up Nazis. Records in the German Federal Archives show that 270 counts, dukes, and princes (and their female counterparts) belonged to the Party, at least two of them joining as early as 1928 – five years before Hitler came to power.

  Nor were they the only members of the German elite who decided Hitler was the man for them. More than 40 per cent of medical doctors became Party members – the highest percentage membership of any profession. It is also well known that many top industrialists supported Hitler, including the giant Krupp and I. G. Farben industrial concerns.

  Much of this information is to be found in Royals and the Reich by the historian Jonathan Petropoulos. It is a book that greatly assisted me in my research.

  So, what was it about the Nazis that attracted these privileged people? The obvious answer is that they feared communism and the Soviet Union more than the thugs of the National Socialist Party. Perhaps they thought they could control Hitler and his henc
hmen and preserve their status, their bank balances and their estates. In the end, of course, they merely assisted in the destruction of their own country and the deaths of millions.

  If you would like to hear more about my books, you can visit my website www.roryclements.co.uk where you can join the Rory Clements Readers’ Club (www.bit.ly/RoryClementsClub). It only takes a few moments to sign up, there are no catches or costs.

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  Thank you again for reading A Prince and a Spy.

  All the best,

  Rory Clements

  About the Author

  Rory Clements was born on the edge of England in Dover. After a career in national newspapers, he now writes full time in a quiet corner of Norfolk, where he lives with his wife, the artist Naomi Clements Wright, and their family. He won the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Award in 2010 for his second novel, Revenger, and the CWA Historical Dagger in 2018 for Nucleus. Three of his other novels – Martyr, Prince and The Heretics – have been shortlisted for awards.

  To receive exclusive news about Rory’s writing, join his Readers’ Club at www.bit.ly/RoryClementsClub and to find out more go to www.roryclements.co.uk.

  Also by Rory Clements

  Martyr

  Revenger

  Prince

  Traitor

  The Heretics