“Something has sunk into me slowly,” he said. “We’ve been had. He’s in the SS!”
“Really?” Nebe asked in a soothing voice.
“It’s too perfect not to be true. The SS staged the whole thing so the Führer could have a miraculous escape and get rid of a few more of the Old Guard. Then hand us the case to discredit the police and the Gestapo and increase their own power at the same time.”
Nebe patted him on the shoulder. “Get some sleep. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
Nolte grabbed hold of his arm. “I’ll prove it to you. It’s a plot to undermine our authority.”
“Get some sleep,” Nebe insisted, wearily but without reproach. He waited for Nolte to let go of his arm, nodded politely to Brandt, then walked off and left them standing there.
Nolte called after him, “How about a beer?”
“Get some sleep!”
Nolte watched him stride off; there was nothing else to say.
FEBRUARY 19TH, 1940
IT WAS THE MORNING AFTER Georg’s last interrogation and the inspectors were back in Nebe’s office. They hadn’t been reassigned and there was basically nothing to do but shred documents and that could only take up so much time even if you shredded each document twice. It felt like Christmas dinner with your mother-in-law. Nolte was late. He had said that he was going to confession but any honest priest would have burnt him at the stake. Nebe was trying hard to look relaxed, doing mental exercises to unlock the tension in his shoulders. He had tried to adopt a bemused philosophical attitude, one he’d worn as a younger man, but could no longer fit himself into. “I got the report to Himmler. Hand delivered it early this morning. I was hoping to avoid him but he starts work at 06:30. Would you believe that? He was not entirely satisfied.”
Brandt met his glance and there was something frantic in his attentiveness. “He was… dissatisfied?”
Nebe rolled his head from side to side. “His exact words were: ‘Get this shit off my desk!’”
Brandt paled. “There goes my career.”
“I don’t know.” Nebe smiled philosophically. “We got off light. There’ll be no trial. A trial, now that would have been an embarrassment. The whole point of the exercise was to make him go away, so it won’t have been a total failure.”
Brandt checked his pistol, a Walther PPK. Point blank to the head, the weakly driven little 7.65 caliber bullet would be as deadly as anything else. He jacked a round into the chamber and tenderly lowered the hammer. “I’ll go get him,” he said in a pillow-talk whisper.
Nebe coughed up a laugh. “No. No. He can’t die and leave unanswered questions. He has to gradually disappear. The night-and-fog boys have him now. As I said, we got off light.”
Brandt sat down heavily, limp and uncoordinated. “This goes on our record.”
Nebe stood. “But, it will be forgotten. It didn’t happen. It couldn’t have happened therefore, it didn’t. He doesn’t exist.”
“You’re just trying to cheer me up,” said Brandt and smiled.
Nebe laughed. “Come on, let’s close it out.”
Brandt stood up in alarm. “I thought you said that Himmler gave him to the RuSHA.”
Nebe slapped him on the back. “That’s what we’re going to do right now.” They exited, arm in arm and laughing.
As they walked down the overly lit hall they spoke of whores as mature men do, without bitterness but with the exasperated affection of the exile who reports his trouble in dealing with the embassy of his own country in a strange land. Against all orders, a window was open. The sky was clear gray and very cold and pale. The air was tense as forming ice: perfect weather for an execution. The cold gave a cottony sound to the rap of their leather heels on the marble floor. Their voices seemed to grow higher in pitch as they receded. Then there was the buzzing clatter of hard shoes on the metal stairs.
In his cell Georg paused as he heard the footsteps. He gazed longingly out at the facing brick wall; the hole was now just large enough for him to slip through. He could do it, was dying to just slip away. As the footfalls faded he let out his breath. The light outside was growing in intensity, so to try it now would be as pointless as his failed border crossing. Sure he might make it down the wall unseen but his chances of slipping through the city unnoticed in broad daylight were less than minimal. He dutifully cleared the hole of debris stacking the dislodged bricks neatly in the gap to either side. He tenderly concealed the seams around his escape hatch with plaster dust as he had each previous morning. He washed up at the basin and placed the chair diligently in front of his little secret. Another nine hours…
Georg’s face was almost serene as he lay there gazing up through the ceiling at Switzerland. Nolte entered, flanked by Georg’s bearers. He smiled as they scooped him up from his bunk. They carried him out the door but instead of turning left as usual toward the interrogation room they carried him right toward the end of the corridor and the metal stairs. Georg was suddenly fully alert, “Where are you taking me now?”
Nolte regarded him in mild amusement. “How funny, you almost look as if you actually had other plans.”
At the street-level entrance to the police headquarters, Nebe and Brandt were waiting with all the necessary paperwork. Georg looked urgently from one to the other. His desperation could have passed for sentiment. Nebe gazed at him in almost paternal fondness, like one would a son going off to serve his country. He was feeling expansive; the case was officially no longer his problem. “Yes, Georg, we are going to miss you too.” Georg could only open and close his mouth like a fish out of water as they led him out the door.
At the curb a black car with tinted windows and no license plates awaited. The two guards from the Gestapo HQ emerged from the car. The one patted his custom pistol grip and smiled at Georg as he accepted the paperwork from Brandt while the other dutifully cuffed Georg’s hands in front of him. “Nothing personal, it’s just a formality.”
Georg let out a deep sigh and practically beamed at the guards. As the one guard opened the back door for him, Georg turned to look at Nebe before climbing in. “Thank you.”
Nebe was speechless and Nolte and Brandt’s heads swiveled in unison to look at him. The car pulled away with smooth efficiency.
Nolte looked from the car back to Nebe. “What was that?”
Nebe rubbed his hands together almost as if performing ablutions. “Honestly? I now officially no longer give a great God damn. Come along gentlemen, it’s time to clean house.”
Brandt was insistent. “But what will happen to him?”
Nebe was almost touched by Brandt’s concern. “Himmler has set up a charming little camp, just perfect for embarrassments like Georg. It’s the Führer’s holding tank for political prisoners he may have a use for later, show trials etc.”
Nolte was wary. “And what is our position?”
Nebe glared at him in disbelief. “You silly fotze, we have no position. The man doesn’t, didn’t, nor will ever exist. He has moved to the shadow lands, as will we if we do not successfully erase every bit of evidence that this unfortunate debacle ever took place! Clear?” Nolte and Brandt bowed respectfully, not unlike the manner in which Georg had bowed to Fritz.
MAY 1942
GEORG’S “PHONEY WAR” DID COME to an end, and Nebe’s hopes for any kind of French supremacy were not to be fulfilled. He found it truly extraordinary and bitterly disappointing that the French didn’t put up a fight. The French caving in gave new fuel to Hitler’s fire and meant that Nebe would have to find another way to be liberated. The next best choice would be the Americans; the big problem was how to approach them without seeming obvious. On the other hand it would actually be comforting to be arrested by them rather than have to face the collapsing German hierarchy, or the rage of the Russians. The question was how to make it happen without becoming a total whore.
The best possible approach would be the representatives of the British, if they were capable of putting their petty differences asid
e. Still, Nebe had no leverage, at that moment he had nothing meaningful to offer them as an incentive to hear him out, they certainly wouldn’t be moved by his rather pathetic desire to save his own hide. It would have been convenient to implement his errand boys, but they weren’t having any. Nolte, and even Brandt, had steadily and methodically distanced themselves from him and that should have been enough to toll the bell of doom, yet as previously stated that slut Pandora was an unscrupulous bitch. She never seemed to know when to let well enough alone. Or shall we say: she reveled in same … and shame.
For the Gestapo, setting Nebe up was probably a most pathetically easy assignment. For Nebe himself it was more or less the next inevitable step on a path of continuous contradiction. All of his futile attempts to make contact with the allies were at best predictable, an embarrassment to the Reich and to himself. A man of truly noble spirit would have simply taken his own life, quietly and neatly. Nebe had however finally embraced the fact that the meaning of life was survival, his survival.
The day they came, he was almost relieved. Even had he never met Georg Elser, he now found it nearly impossible to continue a charade he could no longer even pretend to believe in. He would be taken to a place where all the thinking would be done for him—Nirvana—someone else would have to explain what had happened … bliss. As far as his family was concerned he no longer existed, as such they were finally on even ground.
SEPTEMBER 1944
IN THE OFFICE OF THE Commandant a balding middle-aged man was putting the finishing touches on the massif mahogany desk when a young guard sporting a rifle with a custom carved butt came in looking concerned. “It’s confirmed, you are being transferred.”
The balding head turned and although considerably heavier there was no mistaking the smile and the comfortably innocuous gaze. Georg Elser looked up at the guard paternally. “Hardly a surprise now is it?”
The young man looked at him with apprehension. “Don’t you know what that means?”
Georg took a deep breath. “For them? Or for me?”
The young guard seemed baffled, Georg’s smile grew warmer. “For them it means that I can’t be explained away, so they have given up trying to make me something that I wasn’t. I’m pretty sure that is why I was brought here in the first place; they needed time to gradually erase the event, to diminish it to the banal and everyday and thus unworthy of further consideration. They needed time to generate appropriate pretexts for the destruction and or loss of previous accounts. … They may have gone so far as to print that I myself was killed in the blast, not as the perpetrator but rather just a poor schmuck carpenter who happened to be passing by outside on his way home from work when the bomb blew … I ceased to exist on the night of November 8th, 1939 one way or the other. Perhaps that sort of deed can only be carried out if there is an element of definitive finality to it. Perhaps that is why I never bothered to plan my escape—to do so would have meant foretelling a positive outcome, for me at least. For nearly five years I’ve been living on borrowed time and that is probably more than most people embroiled in a world war can possibly hope for.”
The young guard smiled at Georg, even though he wasn’t sure why. The only certainty was that something profound had been shared and that his limited experience had in no way prepared him to comprehend such things.
The following morning an unmarked truck was waiting and Georg dutifully took his place in the line. There weren’t many prisoners left at that small camp by that time and they all had one discomforting common denominator, they were persona non grata: the next best thing to being dead. Having been already dead would have been much more sensible, not to mention more humane and convenient to all concerned, but you can’t ask for everything. To think of all the resources wasted simply because in reality there was no longer any real chain of command and the country was swarming with eunuchs terrified of responsibility.
As Georg approached the truck he carefully observed the drill: each prisoner was shackled and then assisted into the truck. Eyes down, as docile as cattle, their spirits had passed on long before. Georg locked his wrists together and looked deeply into the young guard’s eyes with a most understated smile. The young guard smiled back and helped Georg step up into the truck. It really was after all a form of blindness, and that was, after all, a reason for hope. Georg was the eleventh and final man to be helped into the back of the truck.
And yet, when the truck reached its destination several hours later that afternoon only ten men stepped down.
MARCH 1945
WHEN NEBE RECEIVED THE NEWS that he was being sent to prison, he genuinely hadn’t known how to react. It was simply so unimaginable that it was entirely beyond his repertoire. He had managed so competently theretofore to be yet one more innocuous force in the status quo, a more pivotal role was totally unthinkable! On the other hand he had been secretly flattered that he still mustered enough importance to register on the scale at all, otherwise he would have been summarily executed with neither pomp nor circumstance.
Power is, at best, a poor substitute for life force. When you realize that you actually wield some sort of power, albeit in a shadow play, it can evoke a giddy feeling. On the other hand, that personal giddiness can often be mistaken for enthusiasm and thus be taken advantage of by idiots. Nebe had been far from giddy for at least a decade, yet he still felt taken advantage of. He could have had so much more to offer, and yet …
Nebe, Artur, SS-Gruppenführer of the Kriminalpolizei, assumed he was awaiting execution and as one does in such situations was finding it difficult to decide on the correct attitude to adopt. As dilemmas go it could be compared to choosing evening attire for an official Party event—as inane as it may seem to you, at that time the results of such a choice could have had equally irrevocable impact on one’s future. He would be executed by the Sicherheitsdienst, the security service of the SS. The fact that men of that rank were still technically his inferiors made the matter of adopting the correct attitude even more of a problem. He would attempt at least to hang on to his dignity.
“Dignity,” he said aloud to himself. “Dignity consists of keeping a straight face while someone is pissing in your ear.” The SS-Gruppenführer had a flair for aphorism, or at least he knew how to keep a straight face, which may actually have been the key to his survival throughout his career.
He thought abstractly of escape, but the sound of the artillery assured him that was a pointless fantasy. His cell had no windows and he suspected that it was underground, still the sound reached him: like thunder, but more organized, in five-minute continuous bursts. The artillery was less than ten miles away so the Russians themselves would be much closer. Possibly, he could reach American lines, but he put the thought down. He’d been trying to make a deal with them all along and their ultimately annoying self-righteousness had made it impossible. That was after all how his “patriotism” and “dedication to the Fatherland” had been called into question in the first place. Whatever his motive might have been, an out-of-shape middle-aged man on the run was pathetic and that was a feeling worth dying to avoid. Even though he had changed sides several times, becoming a fugitive would have been a betrayal of his entire life.
It was at this point that Artur Nebe realized that he was terrified. He deliberately remembered that he was a naturally courageous man. To prove it to himself he rifled through the files of his memory but apart from a few schoolyard fist fights there wasn’t much to prop that idea up. He quickly realized that the exercise was doing nothing to improve his demeanor so he put the question from his mind.
There was a sexually metallic sound, like machine guns being cocked. It was actually the bolts of the metal door being slammed back, followed by the clash and clang of the cell door being shoved open. Two children in SS uniforms stared at Nebe; they were wearing the dress gray with black piping that signified the engineering corps. The SD could wear any uniform they chose and, with the Russians this close, certainly all of the medical corps’ uniforms
would have already been taken by senior officers. The engineering corps would have seemed an unhealthy second best. They couldn’t have been more than 18 although their collars announced that they were Obersturmbannführer, lieutenants in the SS. Of course to Nebe anyone under forty looked like a child. Those kids had obviously assumed that officers would be treated better by the Russians, the kind of stupidity that comes from being raised in a classed society.
As Nebe stared them down he observed that the one was nondescript save for soulful eyes. The other bore a striking resemblance to Reinhard Heydrich: pure Aryan, handsome except for a nose like a potato grater and an extraordinarily feminine width of hip. The children didn’t know what to say. He saved them the trouble and walked out between them, up the stairs and down the long central corridor of the prison barracks. A naked man was being led between two other guards and the door slammed behind them with a screech of bolts that made him clench his teeth.
One of the boys ordered Nebe to strip. He took off his clothes, folded them neatly and kept a straight face. He took his place in front of the door between the two children in their engineer costumes and waited. And waited …
That was the military, thought Nebe, hurry up and wait; though that aphorism was hardly original. One of the children began checking his watch. Half an hour had passed, too long even for a hanging. Or was it? Thoughts of 1936 came pouring back. … If they were simply being hung on a hook without a drop to speed the process along, it could take up to an hour. The situation could get ugly. The child that resembled Heydrich held out a red pack of Russian cigarettes. “Smoke?”
Nebe accepted the offering. “Danke schön.” Thank you, dear. That should have been funny too, yet he maintained his straight face. After he had pulled a long, thin cigarette out of the pack the child held out a lit match. Nebe inhaled deeply.
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