by Chris Petit
Morgen felt outmanoeuvred. It now looked like he was expected to provide some cooked-up story so Dr Goebbels’ press could go to town with another load of lies.
‘Isn’t the business of the girl best forgotten?’ Morgen ventured, curious to know the answer.
‘I agree. The case has been dead for years, except now it is being dug up again.’ Müller paused. ‘Given recent events, we have to presume a plot to destabilise, perhaps connected to the previous one.’
So that was what it was about, thought Morgen.
Müller counted off on his fingers. ‘One: a long-lost tell-all diary, supposedly written by the niece – political dynamite even if fake, which it probably is – apparently not so lost after all. Why now? Two: an old hack’s secret exposé of the case of the niece, pointing fingers, same rumour of it surfacing. Again why now? And third and most preposterous: a so-called confession – if we can credit that – signed by the Führer saying he killed his niece.’ Müller rolled his eyes.
Morgen thought the confession had to be a hoax. Why would the man admit to what he hadn’t done – and even if he had, why confess after getting away with it?
Müller concurred without being asked, saying, ‘It can only be the work of fifth columnists in the pay of foreign agents.’
Morgen wondered if Müller wanted the confession for himself. Authentic or not, such a document would be of inestimable value as leverage.
‘How might it be connected to the other plot?’ Morgen enquired innocently.
‘Say the Führer had been killed by that bomb. Phase two would have been strategic mud-slinging. Perhaps some of the conspirators are persisting in the vain hope some will stick.’
‘Why would anyone believe it?’
‘Indeed, but there is a long history of outrageous muckraking against the Führer.’
‘A political initiative then?’
‘Making it a time bomb that could be even more damaging than the recent one. Look how that caught everyone out. See it doesn’t happen again.’
‘Do I need to know anything about the circumstances of the girl’s death?’ Morgen asked.
‘One version you can discount was that it came about after talking to Reichsführer-SS Himmler.’ A glint of amusement let Morgen see this was probably Müller’s way of letting him know he could implicate Heini if he chose to. ‘He was meant to have browbeaten her into doing the decent thing after so compromising the Führer by her outrageous behaviour.’
Morgen could picture Heini’s creepy smiling manner, telling her it was the honourable way out, with lots of nonsense about the traditions of the Bushido.
‘Outrageous behaviour?’ asked Morgen going back to the niece.
Müller rolled his wrist. ‘A Jewish lover, or some such, perhaps even pregnant by him. Do you see what I am saying?’
Morgen could – whatever had gone on had had to be hushed up because the Führer’s niece had been consorting with a Jew.
‘And the confession and so forth?’ Morgen ventured.
‘He’s so tiny you might miss him, but try the Party archivist, a fellow by the name of Rehse, been around for years, deals on the side with a lot of dubious material. Fakes can do untold damage in the wrong hands. The text of this ridiculous confession in, say, a Swiss newspaper – there are an awful lot of gullible people out there who believe what they see printed in black and white. The foreign press would have a field day. Find it and bring it to me. As for the diary and and the hack’s exposé, bring them too if you find them. And what role is the Huber woman playing in this?’
Morgen was surprised and he tried not to show it. ‘She was Schlegel’s contact for getting in touch with me.’
‘Did he mention that she is the hack’s daughter?’
No, he hadn’t. Clearly Schlegel wasn’t telling him everything.
‘And are you aware that her brother works with Emil Maurice?’ Müller went on.
No, he wasn’t. More and more curious, Morgen thought.
‘I have arranged with her employer for her to take leave forthwith. Take her. She might be useful. Are you taking Schlegel?’ asked Müller.
‘I was thinking he is better off where he is.’
‘I keep hearing his stepfather is hiding in Munich. The boy has been questioned and I still think he is more connected than he makes out. Take him and see if he makes any moves. All clear?’
Müller looked at Morgen, again amused, knowing it was anything but. Morgen sighed inwardly at being lumbered with two extra lots of baggage. Still, if Huber had connections she might prove useful.
‘What is my authority?’ asked Morgen.
‘Checking Führer security in connection with various residences as a consequence of the recent breach of security. And tell him to dye his hair.’
‘Schlegel?’
‘Who else? I can’t vouch for his safety. He seems to have upset a lot of people. Dr Goebbels is incandescent.’ Müller looked at Morgen blandly. ‘Shall we say five days? If you’re not back by then, I will presume someone has set the dogs on you.’
*
As for the business of the bomb, Morgen was inclined to go along with Schlegel’s version that some sort of a Führer trick had been performed and the plot made most sense as a stage-managed event. In a location of such high security they could have lions and elephants living there and no one would be the wiser. If there had been any Führer swap, the man seemed to have been restored to himself by the time Schlegel was invited to see him with his own eyes as proof, thus closing the case from any other interpretation. Bormann now acted with impunity, having built the Party into a black Vatican and reduced the power of all rivals through controlled channels of information and access. But the trick would not be revealed because the last thing Bormann would say is, ‘Sit down and let me tell you how I did it.’
27
Agatha Christie, the English Queen of Crime, had a big following in the Chancellery. Her latest, Ten Little Niggers, had been published that year. Even the Führer, who claimed not to read fiction, was a secret fan. The mystery had given Bormann the solution to the puzzle he had been struggling to solve regarding the Stalin initiative and the removal of the Führer prior to any negotiation. Of course! The murderer fakes his own death. Bormann understood that to mean if the Führer could be shown to be dead the future became negotiable.
*
Sometimes, Bormann and the Führer referred to the others as FF, fake Führers. Bormann was always careful not to remind him of that stupid Charlie Chaplin film, which had revolved around a Führer swap. How the Führer had sat as stony-faced as Buster Keaton through that.
Realising such a big switch was possible came to Bormann while studying the esteemed Minister of Armaments and all-round toady Speer, so consumed by his own reflected glory that the man’s eyes could have been rotated towards the back of his skull for all he saw. After that the idea of such an intimate switch did not seem so impossible.
*
Bormann wondered if the Führer even knew how many doubles he had. They weren’t entertained. They didn’t put on Führer shows. They were kept apart and were as jealous as cats in terms of being the most authentic. Longdistance fake. Medium-range fake. Close-up double. You had to laugh.
Once, in the heady days of early power, Bormann brought an especially convincing one to the Berghof and the Führer fled in terror, declaring it bad luck to meet one’s double. It was the nearest Bormann had come to getting one of the Führer’s legendary rockets.
At the height of the Führer’s exposure, no political leader had ever been in such demand in terms of mass consumption. Führer substitutions came to be known as ‘working round’ the Führer, providing cover for the man’s helter-skelter schedule, the need to be several places at once, insatiable audience demand, crazed female fans worked to a pitch of sexual frenzy, and the man’s exhaustion and nervous collapse. Within the inner circle, the use of doubles was often prefaced by the man himself saying in a mock gruff voice, ‘A Führer for the
boring stuff.’
It was an old joke between them, the amount of overacting required to get his message across to the people.
‘Double ham with mustard tonight,’ the Führer would say to Bormann in easier, more cheerful days.
Sharing the role the Führer thought legitimate and modern. It appealed to his divided nature. Distancing himself from tough decisions, he had grown able to feel it was not really him making them but a doppelgänger.
In a recent late night confession he had confided to Bormann that he feared his willed destiny of victory followed by a withdrawal into a life of contemplation would elude him. Bormann sought to assure him that if victory was no longer realisable the dream of personal release still was.
*
Until the one-eyed hero of the hour made a total bollocks of the job.
*
In the week of 20 July, the Wolf’s Lair was on full military alert with the ‘Führer’ at last present after a long sojourn in the mountains.
For the dwindling few, the rigmarole of admission with its endless security checks amounted to a magician’s sleight of hand; as in, after all this and that, it’s not going to not be the Führer. The Führer was anyway controlled by Bormann’s appointments diary and who else could the man be sitting at his desk, wearing his clothes? The image was so firmly stamped on servile minds that no one was going to blurt out, ‘But this is not the Führer!’ Bormann thought that with all the surrounding protocol it would probably take a shaven-headed dwarf masquerading as the Führer before anyone noticed: you see what you expect to see. For those ushered in, warning of a possible Führer rocket was enough to reduce them to standing with eyes glued to the floor. ‘No, my Führer.’ ‘Yes, my Führer.’
Bormann the perfect acolyte was there to maintain his own faultless performance of deference. The head bowed. ‘My Führer,’ said with such utter conviction.
A good coaching job had been done, Bormann said it himself, with plastic surgery to enhance the resemblance. This top fake knew the leader’s record of greatest hits off by heart. The real reason Bormann had insisted on taperecording the Führer’s table talk wasn’t posterity. It was a vital tool for imitators: the mesmerising voice was most of the trick.
When resting, the lives of these surrogates were very like that of the Führer’s mistress: sidelined, cosseted, cloistered, endless waiting, ignored, semi-captive; insecure actors filling in days with study and rote, trying to make sense of their existence. Bormann suspected they lolled around slack and bored to tears, in the expectation of not being called, and anxious too, with redundancy being an unwritten part of the contract.
In Bormann’s down-on-his-luck version of life after the war he pictured himself as master of ceremonies for a travelling show of these Führer freaks.
*
During that critical week, the understudy was required for a vital period of a few days before getting blown up. His main duty was to attend the daily war conference where he could fall back on the Führer’s entitlement to silence and make a point of intense study of maps with a huge magnifying glass. Bormann told the man that he carried the country on his shoulders while the Führer recuperated from an essential operation at a time when he could not afford to be seen to be vulnerable through absence.
Bormann manipulated the Führer timetable even more ruthlessly than usual. The actor’s props included a large handkerchief held to the face to soothe a raging toothache. The detail Bormann was proudest of was the same voluptuously bad breath, to remind you that you are in the presence, lest you forget. He permitted himself a private joke, telling those about to be shown in that the Führer was not himself, so tread gently.
As for the secretaries, the man had the Führer’s courtesy to staff down to a tee, with Bormann cracking the whip so hard they were too scared silly to look up. To make sure, he made an example of a questioning adjutant with an immediate transfer to the Front.
As for the Führer’s valet, the man was there to serve, however sloppily. If he guessed, it was not for him to question. Bormann had him down anyway to be among the first to be shot, along with the blabbermouth quack Morell, who knew the Führer’s pin-cushion arm better than his own. Bormann got his message across by standing too close and ordering Morell to carry on as normal.
*
After the bomb failed to do its job, Bormann saw how the explosion had performed a miraculous act of transubstantiation, as though the shockwave had soldered the essence of the Führer onto the understudy, at the cost of only lacerations and perforated eardrums. The man didn’t break performance for a second and such was the chaos that no one would have noticed anyway. Bormann could only marvel – to the point of being tempted to applaud – at how the understudy swanned through the newsreel footage with a glazed stare, courtesy of Morell, in a more than passable imitation of a dazed and grateful Führer, spared by the hand of fate. Huge chutzpah – no other word for it – on Bormann’s part, but no one was going to question whether the survivor of an enormous explosion was not the real thing until foreign newsreels got snide about it. And Heini and Göring weren’t going to blow the whistle, being too compromised by their own positions.
It was the old lesson: foghorn the lie and they all still fall for it.
HERR WOLF
1931
28
Martin Bormann, 1931
Whether any story is true or not doesn’t matter beyond the fact of its existence. The Führer is a master of the lie, which when it comes to his personal life is his blind spot. Call yourself Herr Wolf and promote yourself as a man of alias and intrigue then others bound to speculate. The stories about Herr Wolf had been going on for years. The ones about him picking up boys. People swore they had seen the police reports. It was said that Emil Maurice, ex-bodyguard and ex-chauffeur, who had marched alongside him during the failed putsch of 1923 and gone to prison with him, was his bum boy and the two were involved in a complicated ménage à trois with the Führer’s niece. The murk and stew of the milieu made anything technically possible and, yes, something had been going on; the gossip – smut and giggles, most of it rank – said so. Drunken idleness and poor pay mean more or less anyone can be bought off.
Herr Wolf,’s trench coat, the whip and the holster and pistol were part of his Wild West image (well, not the Lederhosen); ‘risqué’ was part of the man’s bohemian act, though Bormann was willing to bet the sex trophy cupboard wasn’t nearly as full as Herr Wolf made out. As for Emil being his bum boy (and pimp, it was said, too), that was offered as the reason for Herr Wolf’s tolerance of Emil’s Jew grandmother. Bormann had no wish or desire to blackmail the Führer; he was there to serve and protect the man from his naivety. Emil he couldn’t care less about. Come the time, any story could be made to stick – Jew-schmew, take it up the arse like a man. The pederasts would have to go, and in the case of the fairer sex Herr Wolf needed to settle for something a little duller.
*
From Bormann’s side, Geli was a disaster. Gold-digger on the make, a classic good-time girl, ‘fun loving’ (and how!), leaving a soppy Führer making goo-goo eyes. Bormann personally found nothing complicated about sticking his dick between a woman’s legs. Not the Führer. All infatuation, playing hard to get, and never real women, more girls, then making them miserable because they couldn’t compete with a man wedded to his political destiny. Look at that shopgirl who tried to hang herself from a doorknob!
With Geli, the distraction was colossal. People sniggered as he escorted her around town; possessive uncle, idiot paramour – and the gossip! His niece! Regardless of what she was up to with her ‘Onk’, she was putting it about. Oversexed, a hormone fountain. The gossip wasn’t good. Jews. A Jew musician. Another Jew lover. The latest rumour: she had stopped menstruating . . . If the child were a little Wolf? Out of the question. Bormann had been told categorically: not on the cards. No reason was given but digging had been done: family in-breeding had produced a load of cretins. The relationship with his niece was incestuou
s: what would happen if another idiot were spawned? And if the Geli baby belonged to one of her Jew lovers? Even more out of the question.
Bormann couldn’t see it, how everyone said she lit up the room. He tended to agree with Putzi (great name, Bormann thought, but you’re not going to hear from him again), who thought her a slut. Geli had been slutty enough with Bormann in making clear her availability. Tempted as he was, he had declined, apart from putting his hand up her skirt between her hot little legs and working her until she was gasping. Both knew that didn’t count, technically, and left her in the role of guilty party. After that, they seemed to understand each other and Bormann made it clear that he saw himself as her protector if she ever wanted help or needed someone to confide in. He could see she didn’t trust him but after an arrest for public drunkenness Bormann made sure no record was kept. Tearful gratitude told him what he needed to know in terms of her debt.
What she didn’t tell him, he knew anyway, being on bidding terms with her father confessor (in some respects she remained the dutiful young woman). Father Peter was amenable to trading secrets of the confessional in exchange for charitable donations. She told him she had stopped menstruating and asked what she should do. Bormann supposed he could arrange a doctor if asked. He knew of three scrapers.
With Bormann, Geli was quite open on one subject: her frustration. She suspected the marriage she wanted more than anything was never going to happen. Was it possible to love too much? she asked. She was living in a gilded cage. She was trapped. Bormann thought that a little excessive. The girl put herself about as much as she liked, although he could see that her uncle was demanding and obsessive for little romance in return; and it must be creepy, if that wasn’t too strong a word, to be kept semi-prisoner by a man nearly twice her age. And of course he paid. The latest was singing lessons. No great talent; so another waste, to go with all the rest Bormann shelled out for from Party funds.