by Chris Petit
Goebbels clapped his hands in delight. ‘An extraordinary order for a battalion commander! For the moment you are superior to your superiors.’
The Major, utterly unimaginative and very relieved, played his part, leaving Goebbels to take command, pointing, sharing, shouting, restoring order.
‘We are living through a momentous day. Again the Führer has been spared by destiny. He will address the nation tonight. It’s the turn of those responsible for this miserable debacle to start crapping themselves. The Führer has promised no mercy.’ He turned to the Major. ‘Go and arrest some generals and let us get on with our job.’
The Major departed to perform his patriotic duty, leaving Goebbels to fume to his underlings at the very notion that he might be considered disloyal or even contemplate a coup.
Goebbels looked at Dunkelwert and asked, ‘What is the Gestapo’s line on this?’
‘Awaiting orders, sir.’
‘I suggest you go back and ask yourself why you weren’t forewarned. Secrecy or incompetence?’
The answer was obvious to Schlegel: the Gestapo was inept at counterintelligence. The moment he said it he knew he should have kept his trap shut.
Goebbel’s gaze swivelled in Schlegel’s direction.
‘How so?’ he asked. ‘Do go on.’
Schlegel had no choice but to answer. He couldn’t think of anything other than to say that if the coup was Army business it fell outside the Gestapo’s remit in terms of counterintelligence. This was strictly accurate but not what Goebbels wanted to hear.
‘Name?’ snapped Goebbels.
Schlegel told him.
‘As in our illustrious translator of Shakespeare?’
Schlegel was afraid of this immaculate little man. Heads would roll for having his afternoon so inconvenienced.
They were told to go away and start compiling lists.
‘A reign of terror,’ said Goebbels with relish. ‘To weed out the last of the naysayers, the recalcitrants and the traitors.’
6
Back at the Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, the slumbering beast started to rouse itself. A one-eyed, one-handed military attaché who had left the conference early was being sought. A wag asked if he was one-eyed and missing the hand as a result of the bomb blast.
Tight little teams put on hats and departed to make the first arrests.
The room grew more committed to being seen to do its job as news spread of an imminent, almost unheard-of appearance from their chief, Gestapo Müller, whose invisibility was such that it was said he could be in a room for five minutes before anyone noticed. Schlegel supposed the man suddenly moving among them was Müller. Neither handsome nor unhandsome, he was strangely unmemorable, which perhaps had less to do with his looks – he wasn’t that unmemorable – than a cultivated anonymity. His one disconcerting habit was a rapid eye movement, like flicking a switch. He departed as unobtrusively as he had come and moments later an underling announced an extraordinary general meeting, which Schlegel suspected would be the start of the dressing down. Failure of penetration would not be forgiven lightly and rival departments would be quick to advance themselves at the Gestapo’s expense.
By the time Schlegel got to the theatre it was packed. The room had filled up from the back, leaving seats only at the front. Schlegel found himself stuck in the second row, too close to the lectern.
Müller sidled in and addressed them in a monotone, giving thanks for the safe deliverance of the Führer. He didn’t sound that enthusiastic about it. Insurrectionists were cowering in a barracks, he informed them, surrounded by troops loyal to the Führer. Whatever was intended had turned into a phantom revolt that would be matched by hard, unstinting punishment. He sounded more enthusiastic about that.
The eye flicker continued from side to side and every time seemed to settle on Schlegel, who was stuck in direct line with the outer range of this extraordinary movement. Müller took on an even greater greyness as he droned on. ‘Questions must be asked about our own conduct. We knew of conspiratorial meetings, having penetrated a cell, made arrests, yet we failed to produce a correct evaluation.’
He fell silent. The room stirred. Was Müller suggesting an internal purge as a result of oversights?
He asked, ‘Can anyone tell me why this should be?’
Even Dunkelwert, always eager to push herself forward, remained silent. Müller’s eyes flickered again, coming to land on Schlegel, then away and back. Schlegel, realising he was about to be singled out, reckoned he had about ten seconds to prepare an answer.
‘You, there,’ said Müller. ‘What do you think? Stand up so we can see you.’
Schlegel took his time, trying to think of something.
‘A lack of comprehension,’ he finally volunteered.
Müller looked interested. ‘About what?’
Schlegel ploughed on. ‘A true National Socialist would have difficulty understanding internal political difference, since the person of the Führer cannot be the subject of discussion.’
In other words, the cult of leadership precluded all opinion or analysis.
Schlegel sat down, sweating. The meeting broke up soon after but Müller’s eyes continued to flick towards him, which resulted in his summons by one of Müller’s entourage immediately after the man had walked out.
Trouble, Schlegel supposed.
*
Müller’s office was on a floor Schlegel had never been to, and surprisingly modest, with a little anteroom and such a small space beyond that Schlegel wondered if the man had another office for formal business. Compared to Dr Goebbels’s monumental statements, Müller’s room was nothing.
Müller stayed standing. Closer to, he was even more insubstantial and inscrutable, but a glimmer of hard humour shone through, as though there was something funny about power.
Müller stared at Schlegel, the eyes temporarily still, boring into his. Schlegel supposed it was a trick, like a mesmerist’s. The amusement was quite gone.
‘What did you mean by your remarks to Dr Goebbels this afternoon?’
He’d known at the time he should have kept his trap shut. Müller’s method was to offer nothing, letting Schlegel dangle. After bending over backwards to say that he was not being detrimental about the Gestapo’s efforts, Schlegel realised he sounded pathetic and shut up. Twice that day and come to the attention of senior figures. It was unforgivable on his part: under no circumstances draw attention to yourself in the presence of any high ranking officer, and you couldn’t get more senior than Goebbels and Müller.
Müller said, ‘Your file makes for interesting reading.’
That morning Bletsch had complained it hadn’t been forwarded by CID. Schlegel wasn’t going to fall into the trap of opening his mouth again.
Müller repeated Bletsch’s question. ‘Why are you here?’
Should he lie, offer an approximation of the truth, or something more accurate that might leave him fatally exposed?
Müller stalled him, saying, ‘If you are going to lie then do it properly. I want to see that golden thread of truth that knits together the really superior lie.’
It was getting dangerous, thought Schlegel, if Müller was getting metaphysical.
He countered by making the truth sound boring. ‘Last year I was involved in a case of financial corruption in the SS,’ he said. ‘It backfired and I ended up being wrongly accused of the corruption I was investigating.’
‘Hoist with your own petard. Someone was clever.’
‘Yes, sir.’ There was no point in naming names.
‘Why aren’t you dead then? There was a court hearing. The verdict was unequivocal. Yet here you are.’
‘I was fortunate. A colleague knew of my innocence, arranged for my escape and kept it off my file.’
‘Yes, an interesting gap. Yet according the court record you were executed. Am I talking to a dead man?’
Müller was so close to being a ghost that Schlegel thought that the idea of con
versing with someone who was on record as being posthumous might appeal.
‘It was arranged for me to be taken out after it had looked like I had been shot.’
‘With one bound he was free,’ Müller said sceptically. ‘Is there a golden thread running through this story?’
‘It’s the truth, sir.’
More or less. The real cause of alarm was why Müller was taking such an interest in him and being appraised of facts omitted from his record.
‘So what are you doing here, to repeat the question?’
Schlegel said he’d felt vulnerable returning to his old job so he had put in for a transfer.
Müller looked bored by the answer, and asked, ‘This colleague of yours, who helped you escape, would that be Morgen?’
There was no point in denying it.
‘Where is Morgen now?’
This was suddenly very difficult. The answer was Budapest, which Müller probably knew already. And if the next question was where Schlegel had last seen Morgen he would be in trouble because the answer was Budapest. He hadn’t known Morgen would be there, but would Müller believe him?
‘I don’t know, sir.’ Brazen it out, Schlegel thought.
‘Budapest, I believe,’ said Müller, mildly. ‘Where he meets interesting people.’ He treated Schlegel to a sphinxlike gaze. ‘Have you been to Budapest?’
Every question a hurdle. A half-truth seemed best. Schlegel said he had been there once, not admitting it was only yesterday. He wondered if he had been watched all along, and Müller was letting him know as much in one of those destabilising acts the man no doubt specialised in.
Frankly, Schlegel was more puzzled by what Morgen – the last person he had expected to find in Budapest – had been doing there.
Müller said, ‘You worked with Morgen from March until October last year, investigating corruption.’
The inference was clear: that Schlegel had been placed in the Gestapo for the same reason and was reporting to someone outside.
Schlegel suspected Müller was relentless in pursuit. Most disconcerting was why he should bother with someone as junior as himself, on a day of national emergency, unless it was to persecute or cultivate him to some sinister end.
Müller looked as though he was about to dismiss him, only to give him the flickering eye.
‘Schlegel?’ Müller asked.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Anton Schlegel?’
Schlegel thought of the list in his pocket and his hands went clammy.
‘My father, sir.’
‘Could I have known him?’
Schlegel recognised a trick of Müller’s: always be the one asking the questions.
‘He went to South America in the 1920s.’
‘Not somewhere I have been.’
‘Where did you know this other Anton Schlegel, sir?’
Müller looked put out at being asked.
‘In Munich, in the twenties and thirties. He was around quite a long time.’
Schlegel was sure he had not asked innocently. The obvious question was whether Müller was in fact responsible for sending the list. Müller had Schlegel’s file and knew all about him. I am watching you, he seemed to be saying. Within twenty-four hours of receiving the list Schlegel had found himself being addressed by the Minister of Propaganda and the head of the Gestapo; and his father, whose name hadn’t come up in years, had now been mentioned twice in two days. What were the chances? Schlegel understood enough about subterfuge to know that if it was played half in the open then point and motive became even more impenetrable.
Schlegel left convinced that if you stood Müller in sunlight he would cast no shadow. Most puzzling was the man’s parting remark: ‘Soup is never eaten as hot as it is cooked.’
7
For the rest of the day, Dr Goebbels kept an open line to the Führer headquarters. Like everyone, he had spies there. He was told the Führer was slumped in an armchair sucking pastilles and doped up on sedatives, waiting for a radio truck to be sent from Konigsberg so he could speak to the nation. The recording was finally made at 11.30 pm. The speech, all five minutes of it, was broadcast ninety minutes later. A lacklustre effort, thought Goebbels, and clearly written by Bormann: ‘the warning finger of providence’. Never an easy cliché when a more leaden one would suffice. The sound quality was poor and the Führer had none of the old fizz. If only they had consulted him. Goebbels could have suggested ways of making the speech more rousing. The reading was variable and from the number of audible splicings sounded like it had been patched together from different takes. Goebbels supposed that for most just hearing the Führer would be enough but it fell short of his own professional standards.
He left his office and announced to his staff, ‘The putsch is over.’ He was buzzing now, his mood infectious. He ordered champagne and told them all in no uncertain terms that each and every one of them had been at the centre of history that day. No one else had been around to resist. Always on the lookout for the prettier secretaries, Goebbels swooped down on a group of them, brandishing his glass. ‘Well, my dears, what a day!’
He decided on the pert, plumper one, with an attractive wave in her hair, what he suspected was a becoming blush and merry, dancing eyes.
He amused himself with the thought of what a long and wasted last day it had been for the traitor Stauffenberg. Up first thing. Fly out of Berlin. Five hour countdown to the Führer being dead. Blow up conference room. Fuck up the explosion. Fly back unawares. Botch putsch. Executed by midnight. Long live Germany!
8
At Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse they worked through the night, the gleaming beast now in full action. The coup ringleaders had already been shot elsewhere and the first detainees were being taken downstairs in chains. Dunkelwert said everything was being prepared to make life as unpleasant as possible.
Truck and car doors slammed as the first prisoners were taken down.
‘More names will be forthcoming,’ Dunkelwert said, ‘and more cars dispatched to bring the next lot in, and so on.’
Schlegel supposed she would take up a position downstairs, showing herself to be as tough as any man. He feared she would ask him to accompany her and sidled off.
He used his ability for inconspicuousness – he’d had quite enough exposure for one day – to get assigned to Operation Second Wave, a compilation of also-rans, seen as an excuse to settle old scores.
The central file was like something out of science fiction – a tall, circular contraption so enormous it required an electric motor, with the operator able to produce any card at the push of a button. The latest punch-card technology logged each subject’s details, including where individual files were held, which apparently wasn’t that simple with everything grown so large that even local ones were held in several places.
To keep the system moving, no more than six names could be submitted by any agent at one time. Schlegel was reminded of a slow and cumbersome wheel of fortune.
He slipped in three names from the list in his pocket – Schlegel A. and the ones above and below – curious to see if any came up.
None did.
*
The names from the Second Wave operation had files in different parts of the building, involving more queues and forms to be filled. No files were allowed to be taken away.
By halfway through the night Schlegel had crossed eighteen names off his list, none of which seemed ever to have come to the attention of the Gestapo. He supposed there couldn’t be a file on everyone but the mere existence of his list presupposed authority.
His notes on Second Wave files read like shaggy-dog stories: a man or woman who may or may not have done this or that, or belonged to something they shouldn’t have. Schlegel had a railway official with former social democrat connections; a militant Christian female; a doctor suspected of performing illegal abortions; a dentist with unproved connections to a morphine racket; what was known as a ‘factory shirker’ with a history of illness as a cover fo
r absenteeism; a woman in the Ministry of Propaganda with ‘suspect relatives’. Schlegel asked himself if such relatives was what it came down to now.
In one of the filing rooms, the librarian, a middleaged woman with a mournful face, struck Schlegel as not unfriendly. He asked her what happened when a case was closed.
She said it was removed from the system, not straight away, and taken who knows where. Schlegel thought perhaps a whole parallel clerical universe existed devoted to a death index. Would Gestapo Müller know what happened to these departed files, or would they be designated to some middle-ranker barely aware of their existence? Everyone was muddled enough as it was by all the strange overlaps and divisions of authority. Maybe even Müller was confused by the lack of rigid outline to the hierarchy. The observation seemed important – willed confusion would become chaos and many were already in the process of being swept aside.
*
Schlegel’s shift left the office at 6 am due to be back at midday. A liverish sun hung in the sulphurous haze. The streets were full with those going to work, trudging, heads down. Newspaper posters of the first editions denounced the plot. No one Schlegel passed looked affected by the news. Careworn faces told their own stories.
Dog tired, he slept in his clothes and woke full of scrambled thoughts about his father. If Anton Schlegel’s life hadn’t involved going to South America it raised the question of why his mother had told him he had.
He couldn’t ask her because she was in a concentration camp. How the mighty were fallen. In her pomp she had shared a box at the opera with the Führer himself. Now he received post cards from time to time saying, ‘All well.’
*
Schlegel spent the first part of the afternoon assigned to arrests with a man he didn’t know, who drove. Knock, knock. Five minutes to pack and come with us. Schlegel made a point of not looking at those taken away, most of them elderly couples and a few younger women. They all seemed to live several floors up. His colleague complained about his aching feet; otherwise he was the silent type. Time passed. Schlegel took advantage of his role as passenger to try and think about nothing. Or, rather, he thought about a lot but nothing new, and it slid by as meaninglessly as the hot passing streets.