by Chris Petit
Goebbels was resplendent in a white sharkskin jacket, his skull-like grin a lot more fixed than Bormann remembered it being ten years before. On that occasion – Sunday, 1 July 1934 – when Bormann and the Führer had landed at Berlin Tempelhof, the welcoming party had fumed at the sight of Bormann’s unexpected presence by his master’s side. Complaints were already flying about the underling’s apparent indispensability. These the Führer ignored, telling Bormann that in the political equivalent of rock, paper and scissors, paper wins every time.
Himmler and Göring were waiting on the runway that blistering afternoon, as excited as two schoolboys. Himmler had a lo ng and tattered list in his hand, which the Führer went through while Himmler and Göring poured honeyed poison in his ear.
*
When, ten years later, Bormann suggested a similar party in the Chancellery to celebrate the Führer’s safe passage, the Führer jumped at the idea as it would allow him to reassert himself. The weather was just as kind on the second occasion; not a cloud in the sky.
Whereas the mood in 1934 had been euphoric, it was now marked by the eclipse of many of those present, allowing Bormann the satisfaction of assessing his decade’s advance at the expense of faltering rivals.
Göring was conspicuous by his absence, ‘retired sick’, doped on morphine, the reputation of his airforce in tatters. Goebbels was sucking up to Bormann because there were only so many ways to paper over bad news, which reduced him to even more towering displays of sycophancy. Bormann watched him perform his usual seamless volte face after the Führer dismissed his suggestion of the soft pedal and insisted on a clean sweep. Goebbels was out of the traps in no time. Show trials! Everything to be recorded! Hang them with piano wire! Film that, too!
‘Trouserless!’ The crowing doctor was unstoppable. ‘See how their pathetic cocks like that!’
How dearly Bormann would like to see the wire bite into the blubber of Göring’s neck, watch scrawny Goebbels flap like a chicken, and hear Himmler squeak and squeal as he hung suspended.
Heini Himmler was swanning around, forever pleased with himself. Touch and go, but he had done well out of the failed coup. His pathetic military ambitions were being encouraged by Bormann because they were out of all proportion to his expertise, which was about up to running a scout troop. Bormann knew Heini was feeling out the future, which might yet see him drop through the same traitor’s trapdoor as the rest.
Himmler was hard to like, despite making a point of appearing amenable and terrifyingly normal – good father, kind to animals, gentle, hesitant, soft-spoken, absorbed . . . a total crackpot. For all his modern bureaucratic know-how and worship at the altar of technology, the man was crippled by superstition. Bormann suspected he was a secret God lover. Himmler had modelled his elite on the Jesuits. In the first instance, given his preoccupation with racial purity, Bormann had watched him fill the SS with a remarkable collection of fair-haired morons who would have fared better as ships’ cabin stewards. For Himmler the world was occulted and magical. He could bore for the nation on the subject of the hidden secrets of Nordic runes, which, if they could be deciphered, would reveal a close affinity with the characters of the Japanese alphabet, and that the Japanese, despite their alien appearance, were in fact Aryans. Thus did Heini make sense of the world. When relaying this, Bormann always got a laugh at Heini’s expense, making slitty eyes with his fingers when it came to the bit about the Japanese.
Hermann Fegelein, Himmler’s liaison officer to the Chancellery, was snaking around, being a charmer to the women. Fegelein fancied himself as a political player, which he wasn’t; not really. He was putting it about that he and Himmler had been on to the conspiracy and their agents had penetrated a group of disaffected officers. Bormann was certain that this feint was a shoddy attempt to disguise the fact that Heini and Fegelein had been playing both sides.
Even as they celebrated in the garden and spoke in witty asides while their women trilled, people were being shot. Himmler reckoned it might be as high as six thousand in the end.
Bormann at the appropriate moment respectfully took the Führer aside and asked if he was tired. The effect of his booster shot would soon wear off, which could lead to sulks and petulance, but the Führer announced he was in tip-top form and said they should do it more often as it was good to get out. He gripped Bormann’s sleeve and said, ‘Do you really think none of them noticed?’
‘Even if they did, no one dare say.’
To which the Führer added, ‘To question the image of the Führer is treason.’
Plan B, Bormann thought, as he watched the Führer mingle again with his guests; always a plan B.
*
Even during a reign of terror there are days off. Go to the lakes on a hot sunny weekend and you still see women sunbathing, soft water lapping against the jetty, bottled fizzy drinks for sale from carts and something calling itself an ice cream cone that never was. Scorched grass, dog turd and litter, just like in summer peacetime. Warm tanned flesh. The white disc of the sun high in the lazy blue sky.
Gerda sunbathed in her underwear, with the strap of her brassiere undone. Schlegel wore an unprepossessing pair of woollen swimming trunks from before the war.
The day passed as ordinary for the first time in as long as Schlegel could remember. He recited to himself: We got up late and spent our Sunday by the lake, lying in the sun and dozing.
They rubbed suncream on each other and still got burned. Gerda could look stern in repose but a beguiling smile lit up her face, enough for Schlegel to wonder if what she had been raised to believe really mattered. He lay on his front, comfortably tumescent, resting his hand on the small of her hot back. All around lay loving couples made more poignant for the majority of men being home on brief leave. Gerda’s gestures and movement suggested certainty about everything; yet, Schlegel sometimes thought he saw a shadow pass over her before deciding he was reading too much into her. He longed to be unimaginative and accepting, with a woman to come home to. He liked the idea of sex becoming more mysterious and elusive as they started to discover each other.
Impossible, he thought; lusting after this Nazi girl.
They did their share of laughing. They stuck to safe questions. Favourite colour. Film. Actors liked. Popular songs. Favourite leader after the Führer; her question. What could he say? She settled on Speer as he was good looking and seemed competent and sensible.
They were behaving like normal people, Schlegel told himself, and it was quite nice, realising he was qualifying a lot with the word ‘quite’.
He pictured them sitting next to each other on the train home. He would put his arm around her waist and kiss her ear, making her shiver and squirm. They would look back at a moment of helpless laughter and wonder at themselves. It was a pleasant fantasy, going through the motions of falling in love. In a gallant gesture, down on one knee, Schlegel tied her shoelaces before they left, and on the way back, hanging around in the shadows of the railway station, they passed the blind and limbless, begging where they weren’t supposed to.
On impulse they went to the cinema and arrived in the middle of some rubbish about love lost and found, full of overstated emotions. They held hands and laughed at the nonsense on the screen – it really was terrible – and kissed in the dark.
The film was followed by a newsreel reporting the Führer’s miraculous escape. They were shown footage of the bomb-blasted room. From this devastation the Führer had walked out of alive, the commentator trumpeted, before reporting the resumption of business as usual with the steadfast Führer well enough to carry on with that afternoon’s duties. Film was shown of him keeping an appointment with the Il Duce, meeting the Italian leader’s train.
Schlegel found it strange seeing the Führer, who had become less and less of a recorded presence over the years. He looked much older. After the ordinariness of the day the newsreel appeared a bit unreal and Schlegel even found himself wondering if the bomb had ever in fact taken place. They were only be
ing told on the newsreel’s authority that Il Duce’s visit came after the explosion when it could have been filmed on quite another occasion. The Führer was not shown inspecting the damage, either alone or with Il Duce, and those shots could have been dropped-in ones of any old blown-up room. By contrast, the torched clinic, the falling man and the dead staff appeared a far more comprehensive plot than what they were being shown, and nobody was broadcasting that. Schlegel thought: What if the newsreel was to distract from the awful state of everything else, and was as made up as the melodramatic nonsense they had just sat through?
Gerda was outraged that anyone could even think of killing the Führer.
11
The terror accelerated on the Monday morning with hundreds of arrests, but in Schlegel’s office of more immediate concern was the disconcerting sight of Dunkelwert, blurred in the fog of her smoke, ensconced in Bletsch’s glass hutch.
Bletsch was ‘gone’, as though he had never existed.
‘Holy cow!’ someone exclaimed, expressing what they all felt at a woman now in charge.
Dunkelwert spelled out their new terms: extra shifts and unpaid overtime; then, to stunned silence, she announced the arrest of von Helldorf, head of the Berlin police.
‘A reckless man,’ she declared. ‘A compulsive gambler, with spiralling debts. Lack of moral fibre led him to throw in his hand with the conspirators.’
Von Helldorf had inveigled half the police department into his weekly poker sessions, which masqueraded as a social club, whose purpose Dunkelwert now questioned. Schlegel spotted at least six men looking nervous.
No doubt Gestapo Müller would make sure everyone knew von Helldorf had backed the wrong horse and anyone else at the races had better watch out.
The next plotter named was Nebe, head of Berlin CID. This was a huge shock in itself, but more worrying for Schlegel as it was Nebe, along with Schlegel’s stepfather, who had sent him to Budapest. He feared it only was a matter of time before questions were asked about that.
Dunkelwert went on to declare the Führer’s survival a blessing, marked by a resurgence of faith. Schlegel pictured blank, entranced faces parroting how they believed more than ever that after the hard upward slog, the sun-filled uplands and soft valleys of the high plateau would be revealed in their magnificence.
He suspected something psychologically complex and traumatic was going on underneath it all, rehearsals of guilt over being unworthy of the leader, making denunciation a matter of course, to divert from a process of mourning already underway because of a deep, secret feeling that the Führer had already abandoned them.
Terror and superstition go hand in hand.
*
Schlegel was summoned into Dunkelwert’s smoky cage. His spirits sank when he saw his report on the clinic fire on her desk. It lay next to another folder, to which she pointed.
‘The stuff crawling out of the woodwork. Mad correspondence about the Führer.’
She picked out a letter and read, ‘ “The Führer hasn’t been with us since 1943 and now works in the Vatican library and is unrecognisable.” Signed, “A Friend.” ’
She read out another: ‘ “The Führer has been abducted by aliens.” ’ And another: “‘This one says the Führer is a disciple of the English occultist, Aleister Crowley, which makes him a stooge of British intelligence.’”
Schlegel said, ‘Enemy propaganda,’ implying that chasing any of it was a waste of time. The enemy was full of such tricks. It had even issued fake Himmler stamps to suggest a takeover was imminent. The joke was no one had noticed.
Silence filled the room until Schlegel eventually asked, ‘What has this to do with my report?’
Dunkelwert produced a fourth letter and held it out.
‘ “In a Berlin clinic,” it says.’
Everything about the letter was cheap, written in thick pencil, in ill-formed capitals on paper so coarse Schlegel could see the pulp in it. He wondered if the hand was pretending to be less educated than it appeared. The message itself was succinct enough.
‘The Führer can’t be in two places at once,’ read the message, ‘in a Berlin clinic, since burned down, and being blown up.’
‘An anonymous letter,’ he said. Sometimes it helped to point out the obvious. ‘A crank.’
He felt far from sure of that.
‘Get to the bottom of it,’ Dunkelwert ordered.
He supposed there must be known suspects, one of whom could be ‘persuaded’ to own up. They lived in a cynical world where even the victims were becoming cynical in their resignation.
He said, ‘I shall need men for door-to-door interviews.’
‘None to spare,’ said Dunkelwert briskly.
Schlegel wondered how seriously she was taking the case. She answered for him. ‘The Führer’s authority is being questioned.’
Schlegel couldn’t see how. It wasn’t as if the Führer had ever claimed he could be in two places at once.
Schlegel cursed his report, which had decided to bite back, unless the letter was a ploy to open up an unofficial investigation into the fire, and someone above Dunkelwert wished to know what lay behind it.
He felt almost sorry for her squatting behind her new desk. He suspected her zealousness did not stretch to intrigue, especially if political tectonic plates were shifting.
Schlegel asked, ‘Was the letter addressed to anyone?’
‘ “To whom it may concern.” That’s you now. It’s someone who works at the clinic, that’s obvious! Round them up and find out who. No more hiding! Enough slacking! What’s the matter?’
He couldn’t say they were dead, having failed to mention that in his report. He drew scant consolation from seeing Dunkelwert, with no obvious Party directives to interpret, out of her depth.
She asked how with all clinic records destroyed in the fire he proposed to come up with a list of staff.
By picking up the telephone and getting on to the welfare, labour and tax offices, he said. ‘As well as the doctors and nurses, there’ll be cleaning and domestic staff, probably guest workers.’
Dunkelwert looked sulky. He was being patronising. Schlegel thought she must realise how unpopular she was. She told him he wasn’t excused the rest of his workload.
*
Schlegel arranged with local police for the three boys whose addresses he had asked for to be held. He would enjoy watching them squirm, thinking they might be blamed for the letter.
With all the bureaucracy, inefficient switchboards and referrals it took Schlegel an age to obtain the names of the two male doctors and six female nurses. There was also an administrator, female, plus two drivers, elderly German males who performed other general duties. Six domestic staff covered cooking and cleaning, five Polish guest workers and a Lithuanian, allocated by the Labour Front, all transferred to other employment the week before.
He spoke to Missing Persons.
None of the staff had been reported absent.
Really? After several days? Didn’t they have people who cared about them? Then he realised. With mass arrests going on all over, the whereabouts of hundreds if not thousands were unknown.
Schlegel rang off and said to himself: I am not Homicide. Stick to facts.
He was hauled into Dunkelwert’s smoked-filled cage again.
‘Why report the fire in the first place?’ she asked slyly.
He put on his most diligent face. ‘It would have been irresponsible not to.’
‘I have found out some things too.’
Schlegel sighed inwardly.
‘The senior doctor was a famous cosmetic surgeon who ran a successful and fashionable practice dating back to the 1920s. A lot of rich Jewish nose jobs, for all the good that did them.’
Dunkelwert sniggered and said the employment office had given her the name of the hotel where one of the clinic’s cleaners now worked.
Schlegel expected to be given it to call but Dunkelwert had done that already.
‘Lithua
nian, female, with some German,’ she said. ‘She and the rest were told the clinic was closing for vacation and they would transfer.’
‘Was she given any reason?’
Dunkelwert shook her head emphatically. ‘Sub-workers don’t warrant explanations.’
That didn’t mean they didn’t have eyes, thought Schlegel.
*
He managed to speak to one of the clinic’s drivers, who had been transferred overnight to a military hospital. The same with one of the cooks, a female Polish labourer, now working in a school. There was nothing unusual about people being reassigned at short notice, but not usually all at once. Schlegel asked them to describe the clinic. Both said it was exclusive and discreet, specialising in surgery and burns, and wasn’t for the regular sick. The driver obviously hadn’t liked the owner and readily passed on that the man still did civilian cosmetic surgery for film stars and the rich.
Schlegel asked both the driver and the cook, ‘Was the Führer ever a guest of the clinic?’
It was a difficult question for them as it was being asked by the Gestapo, but at the same time it was impossible that they question the Führer.
Schlegel was sure the driver’s incomprehension was genuine. With the cook he wasn’t so sure, so he asked if she had ever prepared meals for the Führer. She eventually answered, ‘They never would have allowed me.’
If the Führer had been in the clinic on the Thursday then the woman would have already transferred. Did that mean there had been other visits?
She needed a lot of threatening before admitting that sometimes when important visitors came they brought their own people and the regular staff were farmed out.
‘For how long?’
Usually a few days, she said, starting to sound frightened. She said there was never any mention of names.
*
As it was a only a short ride, Schlegel went to the hotel where the Lithuanian cleaner now worked. She was perhaps only eighteen or nineteen and easily bullied, with enough to lose, being relatively safe rather than in a camp. He offered her the choice of deportation if she didn’t tell him what he wanted to know.