by Chris Petit
He suspected Adolf was privately tiring of the farce, leaving him sulky and insecure, hence the plan to steer him in the direction of the photographer Hoffmann’s undemanding little assistant. No tits, Fritz, but you can’t have everything. Young Eva was eager to please and aware of her place; as was Bormann, who was as invisible as a top waiter, leaving him to operate the levers behind the scenes.
He was the factotum, the one who did the boring desk work when the rest couldn’t be bothered, being too busy swanking. He kept the books, ensuring everything was organised, restaurant tables arranged, theatre tickets sorted. When the Führer bought his apartment it was Bormann who arranged for a top law yer to negotiate the contract. It was Bormann who recommended he put a second home in the mountains in the name of his half-sister to avoid tax complications. It was Bormann who handled the Führer’s financial affairs, at which the Führer was deliberately hopeless as it they interfered with his artistic image of himself; Bormann who dealt with the disputatious Munich tax office; Bormann who did everything for the man short of wipe his arse. The Führer was disorganised. A dreamer. A seer. He needed a desk jockey. ‘Table for twelve, nine o’clock.’ And Bormann was good. He didn’t forget. He distilled information into what the Führer wanted to hear and gave it in spoon-sized bites. He made a point of being deferential, standing one step back, attentive, head inclined in a show of thoughtful enquiry. It was an act but one that suited, and Bormann made sure there was never cause for dissatisfaction or disagreement. The Führer approved of Bormann’s aggressive womanising: no mistaking their master-servant relationship. The Führer could be effeminate, so it wouldn’t do to have a secretary who was in anyway swishy. Bormann wasn’t even technically the Führer’s secretary. He was secretary to deputy Hess, who probably was a fairy, despite having a little wife tucked away. Hess was no more interested in his desk than the Führer, always being off somewhere or consulting with astrological quacks. Bormann and the Führer could joke about such things, and when the Führer was in a good mood he addressed Bormann as Bubi, a pet name between Munich homos; a joke, of course.
Workload didn’t matter to him. He left his wife at home, banged up with another child. The only sacrifice was not being able to smoke around the man. Bormann not only managed the Führer’s money, his control of Party funds meant that many were forced to come to him for discretionary loans, being in hock and desperate for cash. Bormann had told the Führer that the cost of his new apartment was paid for out of his publishing royalties. The Führer was vain in liking to think his own efforts were responsible for what was a huge hike in lifestyle – nine rooms in the smartest part of town. Royalties were fair but nothing like enough for the current outlay.
With better quality investors financing the movement came the tricks of the trade, locating funds beyond the prying eyes of the tax office. Thanks to Anton Schlegel, tidy piles were building up in Swiss accounts, money that only Bormann and Anton knew the exact whereabouts of. Yet anyone looking at him would have thought him nothing more than his master’s dogsbody. He made a point of gooddog behaviour when seen with the Führer and appeared friendly in his dealings with others. He knew what they said about him. Unctuous. Arse-licker. A pig when the rest were so aspirational now the Führer was climbing the social ladder.
*
Bormann the desk man knew he counted for nothing in the eyes of Ernst Röhm and his brownshirt shit. Nevertheless, Röhm condescended to drink with Bormann. He drank with anyone, and the favoured bars weren’t that many. He preferred cheap standing ones, with beer shoved through a hatch. The Führer opted for seated dining areas, along with the rest of the head honchos.
The small room was noisy and heaving. Others had spilled out to drink in the street. Children came in with flagons to be filled to take home. Bormann spotted Anton Schlegel outside with a brownshirt lad. They didn’t acknowledge each other. Bormann thought it wouldn’t hurt if Schlegel thought he was Röhm’s informer. Keep everyone on their toes. In fact Bormann was spying on Röhm for the Party.
He came to look back on that encounter with Röhm as defining the internal struggle. Straight versus homo. Political infiltration versus revolutionary violence. One in the ascendant, the other too blind to read the writing on the wall, leading three years later to the big clear out.
They pissed together, spraying copious amounts into the urinal trench. Röhm, shameless, leaned over with exaggerated amusement to inspect Bormann’s cock.
Back outside, more drinks. Bormann watched the pansies strut. How he despised them. They thugged it up but none put in a shift. If Bormann had his way he would cut off the lot of their dicks.
Röhm tried to convince Bormann of his persuasion. ‘It’s not about handholding or any of that nonsense. It’s based less on mutual attraction than the power of cock.’ He gripped Bormann’s knee. ‘A beast like yours is wasted on women.’
Bormann held Röhm’s eye. ‘Cunt over arse any day.’
Röhm laughed loud and said, ‘I hear your wife is a babymaking machine.’
‘That’s what they are there for.’
‘Play away for a while.’
Bormann switched to the one subject that would see the hand removed – Röhm’s beloved Führer – knowing that Röhm believed he was the only one tough enough to extract his master from the mire into which he had let himself fall.
‘Female dalliance, social blandishments. He needs me back to reinstall some of the old revolutionary zeal. Everything has grown too bourgeois.’
Bormann tended to agree but Röhm had failed to grasp that social infiltration was integral to political advance.
‘Hitler in love!’ protested Röhm. ‘And not just any old “in love”. His fucking niece!’
Bormann had first become aware of this unlikely pair at his wedding, two years earlier. Marriage marked a big hike up the ladder after years of snubs. Fisticuffs counted; Bormann, who was running the Party pension and insurance fund at the time, did not. Plan B – target a daughter of good political standing. A big cold shoulder from the potential in-laws. Persistence. Peasant cunning and dick the girl couldn’t get enough of. Nineteen. Pliable. In love and banged up before the wedding. Sour-faced in-laws make the best of a bad job, calling in the Führer to witness, with a view to him godfathering the firstborn. On the Führer’s recommendation, Geli was a bridesmaid and the mother made the wedding cake.
The girl was a daredevil, Bormann could tell from her saucy air upon setting eyes on her at the party after the ceremony, where she did everything other than stick her tongue down his throat to steal the limelight from his bride.
On an occasion of visiting his godson, two years later, dandling the baby awkwardly, the Führer said to Bormann unsolicited, ‘It is an idyllic interlude I know must end – and she will go off and marry and have children and become like everyone else. How can we save her from that?’
*
Bormann’s involvement with the shadier side of the Führer’s private affairs had begun in the spring of 1929, two years before the business of the dirty drawings: what happens repeats. Looking back, he wondered if his success in dealing with the case of the potentially compromising letter had been his audition for admission into the inner circle, marked by the occasion of his marriage six months later. The bride’s parents were what was known as ‘Party people’.
The story of the letter had been passed on to Bormann by Party Treasurer Schwarz – an old fart with a leaky gut – for the simple reason that Schwarz didn’t want to get embroiled in such a dubious business, so he delegated it to his ambitious junior, hoping that Bormann would make a mess of the job and damage his rising star.
At the time the Führer still lodged in his old bedsit, presenting himself to the world as the poor, have-not revolutionary. He had apparently written an indiscreet letter to his niece, containing ‘some pretty dark stuff ’ according to Schwarz. The letter wasn’t sent and had been taken from the Führer’s desk. Bormann knew such thefts were not untypical, with a lot of sou
venir hunters around by then. While the Führer was fiercely protected in public, he was negligent about domestic security, claiming he had nothing to steal.
That was less true than it had been. The Führer’s tax return for 1925 claimed his only property was a desk and two bookcases, along with the books. The difference now was the man was a public commodity. The most dedicated collectors let it be known that even the contents of the Führer’s wastepaper basket were of potential value. Draft speeches, musings, doodles – everything counted.
No one took such scavenging seriously – apart from the collectors – until the letter in question. Bormann’s first move was to contact a couple of creeps who called themselves Party archivists and traded in such material: Father Bernhard Stempfle, Roman Catholic priest and antisemitic scribbler of dubious repute, lurking behind the manner of a plausible academic, and his teeny sidekick Rehse.
Stempfle’s claim to fame was that he had rewritten and edited large chunks of the Führer’s Mein Kampf, whereas the Führer considered it all his own work, so was not well disposed, leaving Stempfle with a grudge about not getting a cut of the royalties. The gnomelike Rehse was a mad collector and self-appointed curator of Party memorabilia, which amounted to the sum of his personal collection of posters, bulletins, scraps and tat going back years, which now took up so much space in his apartment that the floor was buckling. Rehse had kept every possible souvenir, anticipating that his investment would one day pay off, but if he had no money the Party didn’t either, or said it hadn’t, and the so-called archive received no financial support, despite his repeated requests. The Führer was not inclined, dismissing Rehse as little more than a tramp. Bormann witnessed an embarrassing confrontation in the Park Café beer garden, with Rehse twisting a greasy cap in his hands as he stood before the Führer begging for money while the rest of the table, including Bormann, laughed. Bormann knew Rehse as one of those toadies who made himself indispensable by volunteering for everything; he was uncomfortably aware of their similarities.
Bormann arranged to meet Stemple and Rehse in the same beer garden that had witnessed Rehse’s humiliation. It was the first of the good spring weather. They sat under dusty trees coming into leaf.
Stempfle assumed a knowing air, claiming to have seen the letter and saying it was being offered for sale.
Bormann argued that with the Führer’s reputation at risk discretion was essential. Stempfle must buy back the letter to stop it falling into the wrong hands.
‘Of course,’ said Stempfle. ‘Exactly what I had in mind.’ He looked at Rehse, who said, ‘But we’re strapped for cash.’
‘We have no budget,’ Stempfle added meaningfully. ‘The point is we are discreet. Others might not be.’ He pursed fleshy lips.
‘How compromising is this wretched letter?’ Bormann asked.
‘Depraved.’
Bormann asked, ‘What’s the worst of it?’
Stempfle leaned forward and whispered, ‘The writer expresses a desire to be defecated on.’ He recoiled in horror.
Bormann shrugged that off. ‘I spend my whole time being shat on.’
He noted Rehse’s canniness, making out he hadn’t actually seen the letter, and letting Stempfle make the running.
‘Gentlemen,’ Bormann told them in conclusion, ‘if it is a matter of buying it back then that is what you must do. I leave it to you to sort out. The money will be found.’
Seeing their exchange of looks, Bormann wondered if Stempfle and Rehse were not quite the innocent gobetweens and the letter was veiled blackmail to raise some cash for themselves.
Bormann considered the matter settled and told Schwarz so. It wasn’t. Stempfle came straight back to report what he called a ‘complication’. The letter wasn’t the problem. Party assets were at risk. The very future of the archive was in jeopardy.
‘What has that to do with the letter?’ Bormann demanded. ‘I said the money would be forthcoming.’
He had expected Stempfle to haggle over his fee but had not expected any further wrangling. He was even more inclined to believe Stempfle and Rehse had cooked up the whole thing.
‘I thought you should be aware of the wider picture,’ said Stempfle. ‘Others are expressing interest in buying the archive, including Moscow.’
‘Moscow!’
‘Clearly, they appreciate its value. There is more than one offer on the table.’
‘How long has this been going on?’
‘I have only just heard. I merely pass on what I know.’
‘Is it Rehse?’
‘Apparently he is just as much in the dark as I am. But serious sums are being talked about, offering a degree of financial security. We have dedicated ourselves to the Party for years, for nothing in return, even after others started being looked after.’
‘Just buy back the bloody letter,’ said Bormann, losing patience.
Stempfle pointed out that if the Party had the money to retrieve the letter it should also take financial responsibility for the archive.
Bormann suspected that these higher stakes were what Stempfle had had in mind all along and the letter itself was little more than a gambit.
Bormann told Stempfle not to do anything. He would make enquiries and get straight back to him. He cursed to himself. He had underestimated Stempfle’s reputation for haggling and intrigue.
His first reaction was to have Emil Maurice and his gang drop Stempfle from a high building.
But Anton Schlegel had other ideas.
By then he and Bormann conferred regularly. Although Anton was not a Party member, they had a shared interest in hiding money. Anton had taught Bormann how to build up secret funds, away from the prying eyes of the tax office and the Party.
That evening Bormann and Anton Schlegel happened to run across each other, not so unusual in Munich where regular haunts were no more than a handful, and Bormann complained how Stempfle was making a fool of him.
Anton Schlegel listened and said he should see it more as an opportunity than a hindrance.
‘Whether these potential buyers exist, Stempfle is right,’ he went on. ‘Any thought of the Party losing its historical record is out of the question. In exchange for their fixing for the letter to be taken off the table, tell Stempfle that the Party accepts that the archive needs to be preserved and run properly.’
‘But everyone knows the archive is a joke.’
‘Not in the long run. I am sure Herr Wolf can be persuaded of its potential value. Funds could be made available and these would be tax-deductible.’
Bormann came to accept the sense of the idea, especially the tax break.
‘Are you saying leave them to sort out the business of the letter in exchange for the larger reward?’
Anton nodded. ‘Give them a budget for cataloguing, storage and fees for themselves as curators. Tell Rehse and Stempfle they are visionaries who have shown how order and organisation of assets will become the backbone of the Party. That way they will be beholden to you and the archive will come under your virtual control.’
Bormann saw that Anton was right.
‘Besides,’ Anton continued, ‘documentation is power and an archive is memory and a useful deposit for all kinds of information. What, for instance, shall you do with the letter in question?’
‘Have it, destroyed, I suppose, so it can do no damage.’
‘It’s of importance as a historical document.’
Bormann snorted. ‘It’s probably a cheap fake written by Stempfle, if it exists. We only have his word.’
‘The point is, all such documentation has a value and should be protected.’
Considered by others a dark, labyrinthine force, Anton saw himself as quite easy, in that he sat above. Later, Bormann heard stories that it was Anton who was behind the whole business of the letter, having identified the archive as somewhere into which he could insert himself. Others even attributed the letter’s authorship to Anton. Some form of quid pro quo seemed to have occurred because soon after
Anton became responsible for acquiring books for the Herr Wolf’s library. A lot of shelves to fill in the man’s dreary new apartment.
His accommodation was discussed on the occasion of that evening’s meeting, saved for last when Anton Schlegel gave Bormann a meaningful look and said, ‘You need a plan B for Herr Wolf.’
‘In what way?’
‘He should start to be seen making his way in the world. Decent accommodation is now essential; no more bedsits. He needs proper security and a household staff that can be relied on to report to you. We both know Herr Wolf needs looking after.’
As for Stempfle, Bormann thought: I will have you yet. He did too, a patient three years later, in the purge of the Night of the Long Knives. Emil Maurice broke the man’s spine before finishing him off, after Bormann had told him not to make it quick.
MUNICH
1944
29
Schlegel and Morgen arrived at Munich station on the night train, mysteriously without Anna Huber, who had failed to show up, leaving them guessing. Schlegel worried she had been detained.
The shabby tourist office in the station told them everywhere was booked and with almost no rooms to be had. All the woman on the desk could offer was sharing a double in a cheap hotel behind the station. Schlegel supposed some kind of refugee crisis. Were the bombed-out being put up in four star hotels?
The hotel – more of a dive really – came in shades of dirty brown. A girl who looked about twelve sat behind a tiny reception counter under a turn of the stairs, and being an efficient little Nazi was bossy about them filling out their registration forms.
The room, more shades of brown, consisted of two single beds with lumpy mattresses and faded covers, a table in between, grimy linoleum, and curtains so threadbare they were transparent. The window overlooked a cul-de-sac off a main street. Schlegel could hear distant traffic. Whatever his love–hate relationship with Berlin, it was at least a known quantity.