‘Not merely insane, surely? Monstrous.’
‘Yes, I suppose it was.’
The first launch they laid on for Himmler the next morning was yet another disaster. The rocket failed to tilt properly and flew at a height of two hundred metres westwards right across the island to the airfield, where it blew up on impact, destroying three planes. The second, in the afternoon, launched perfectly. Himmler promoted von Braun to Sturmbannführer.
Two months later, the RAF bombed Peenemünde, and a week after that, while they were still trying to clear up the worst of the damage, von Braun called Graf into his office. He was haggard from lack of sleep, too exhausted even to rise from his desk. He waved Graf into a chair. ‘I just had a call from Dornberger in Berlin. Himmler has spoken to the Führer, and it seems we are to abandon plans to manufacture the rockets on the island, in view of our vulnerability to air attack.’
‘So that’s it? It’s over?’
‘Not at all. Production is to be moved underground. The SS have a mountain site in Thuringia that Himmler says is perfect for our needs. Their chief of construction will be in overall charge of building the factory.’ He studied his notepad. ‘Brigadeführer Dr Hans Kammler.’
* * *
—
Graf turned on the ignition. The Kübelwagen sprang forward and stalled. He put his foot down on the clutch and tried again. This time he moved off slowly, but when he tried to change up to second, he couldn’t find it. The grinding of the gearbox was loud enough to draw the attention of an SS soldier, who emerged from the shadows at the back of the hotel and waved him to a halt.
‘Nobody is permitted to leave.’
‘I am Dr Graf of the army’s Special Weapons Department.’ He took out his identity card and held it up. ‘I have to get over to Wassenaar immediately. There’s an emergency.’
‘All personnel must remain in place until the security action is completed.’
‘A rocket is on fire! Do you want to be held responsible for a disaster?’ Graf leaned out of the window and peered up and down the promenade. On the corner, a group of SS men were watching them. ‘Where is Obersturmbannführer Drexler?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘We need to find him. What’s your name?’
The man looked uncertain. ‘Schumacher.’
‘Right.’ Graf leaned across and opened the passenger door. ‘Get in, Schumacher.’
‘Why?’
‘I want you to tell your comrades that this is an emergency. Hurry up.’
The man obediently climbed into the front seat.
Graf told himself not to drive too fast. The group of SS men stepped in front of the car and waved him down.
‘Tell them quickly, Schumacher.’
One of the men bent to talk to his comrade. ‘Who’s this?’
‘He says he’s one of the rocket engineers. He needs to get to Wassenaar. There’s a fire.’
‘All right.’ The man stepped back and waved them through. The same thing happened a hundred metres down the street: ‘He needs to get through: it’s an emergency.’ The SS man seemed to be enjoying his sense of importance. Graf drove past the railway station. After that, the road ahead looked clear. He pulled over. ‘You can get out here, Schumacher. Thank you. I’ll be sure to mention you to the Obersturmbannführer.’
He pulled away. When he looked in his mirror, the soldier was standing by the roadside staring after him. He turned left, towards Wassenaar.
* * *
—
Graf flew with von Braun and a couple of engineers to visit the proposed rocket factory at the end of August 1943. Von Braun piloted the plane himself, descending over the forests and mountains of the Harz and landing, with delicate precision, on a grass runway next to the pretty town of Nordhausen, with its roofscape of high church towers. Bluish in the distance rose the swell of the Kohnstein – not so much a mountain, it turned out, as a gently elongated wooded hill. Kammler had thoughtfully sent a car to pick them up.
It was late summer; harvest time. They drove in the back of an open-topped Mercedes, swatting away the thunderflies rising from the fields, through a haze of heat towards the square mouth of an enormous tunnel. A shadow fell across the car. The temperature dropped. After the dazzling golden light of the afternoon, it took a minute for their eyes to adjust to the gloom of the electric bulbs.
Brigadeführer Dr Hans Kammler – his doctorate, they discovered later, was in civil engineering – was waiting for them with his staff officers. He was in his early forties, good-looking to the point of prettiness, taut, trim, immaculate – a clockwork-toy SS figure with an extraordinary rapidity of movement and expression. He led them on foot along the tunnel, dashing off facts and statistics with the proud air of a country landowner showing off his estate.
The roof was high enough for a rocket to stand upright, or to lie horizontally across it and not touch either wall. This vast gallery extended as far as they could see – more than a kilometre, Kammler assured them, right the way through to the other side of the mountain. This was Tunnel B. Tunnel A, which ran parallel to it, was almost completed. Cross-tunnels linked the two galleries. The place had been a gypsum mine before the war, and after that a storage site for fuel and poison gas. The first task would be to clear it thoroughly, and that phase was already under way. In the semi-darkness, phantom figures in striped uniforms staggered under the weight of cement sacks, steel girders, wooden prop supports, metal drums. The showering white sparks of the oxyacetylene cutters, dismantling the gasoline storage tanks, spurted at intervals in the gloom. Next, continued Kammler, they would dig and blast out further cross-tunnels and lay a rail line, build a railway station. Eventually the components for the missiles would be brought in by locomotive at one end of the complex, and finished rockets would be taken away on flatbed trucks at the other. The production capacity would be nine hundred missiles per month, the entire process to be undertaken three hundred metres beneath the mountain, invisible to the enemy’s reconnaissance flights and impervious to his bombers. Production would be the responsibility of General Degenkolb, the railway tsar, who had made his reputation mass-manufacturing locomotives.
‘And when will production begin?’
‘January.’
One of the engineers whistled. Von Braun said, ‘The rocket is an extremely complicated mechanism, Brigadeführer. The machine tools require high precision and skilled machinists. Tomorrow is the first day of September. How can a factory be completed at such speed?’
‘By the utilisation of the one resource in which Germany possesses an undoubted surplus capacity.’
‘Which is what?’
‘Manpower.’ Kammler clapped his hands and laughed at their dumbfounded expressions. ‘Come now, gentlemen! If the pharaohs could build their pyramids two and a half thousand years before the birth of Christ, I can assure you the SS is capable of constructing a factory in the middle of the twentieth century and having it fully operational within four months.’
‘How much manpower are you contemplating?’
‘For the construction of the factory and the eventual production?’ Kammler’s hand circled the air. ‘Twenty thousand men. Thirty thousand.’ He shrugged. ‘However many it takes. The reservoir is inexhaustible.’
As they walked back towards the tunnel mouth, Graf asked him if he had ever built anything else of similar size under such pressure of time. ‘Oh yes. In the East. The reception centres for the Jews.’
That had been his first encounter with Kammler.
His second came six weeks later, towards the middle of October. He had not wanted to go back to Nordhausen. ‘Must I?’ he complained to von Braun. ‘There is so much to be done here.’ After the death of Dr Thiel, he had taken over most of his responsibilities in the propulsion department, where they were still trying to solve the problems with the turbo pump stea
m generator system that had driven the excitable Thiel to the edge of a nervous breakdown.
‘You have to come,’ von Braun told him. ‘We have to get the rocket ready for mass production.’
Once again von Braun flew the plane himself, and this time as they descended towards the airfield he took them directly over the Kohnstein hill. Amid the dark green forests of pine, the abandoned gypsum quarries stood out like vivid white scar tissue. In the flat area to the south-west of the hill a big prison camp was under construction. Graf stared down at it uneasily. None of the barrack blocks had roofs, he noticed. If Kammler had brought in all these thousands of foreign labourers, where were they housed?
The answer was obvious as soon as they drove into Tunnel B. They lived underground, along the walls of the cross-tunnels, in tiers of rickety wooden bunk beds stacked four high like rabbit hutches. Half-barrels with wooden planks laid across the rim served as latrines. In some of the hutches men lay prone, skeletal; one with his eyes wide open was plainly dead. The stench of it. And the noise of it – the rumble of cement mixers, the ring of pickaxes, the muffled boom of explosions as further tunnels were excavated, the roar of the generators, the clank of railway trucks moving up and down the line, the barking of the guard dogs, the shouts of the SS overseers. And the sight of it, wherever one looked in the eerie dim yellow light: the moving sea of striped uniforms, an undifferentiated mass unless one made an effort to fix one’s eyes on one of the pale, emaciated figures that were hurrying everywhere – always hurrying, never moving at a normal pace. And amid it all, the immaculate figure of Kammler, attended by his black-capped officers, striding along the middle of the newly completed Tunnel A, pointing out this or that achievement. In a month and a half, it had to be granted, he had worked a dark miracle. The lineaments of a giant production line were already beginning to appear: cranes, workshops, assembly areas, test stands, repair shops. He conducted the engineers right the way through the mountain and out the other side into the clear autumn afternoon light.
‘Well, gentlemen, what do you think?’
Graf lit a cigarette.
Arthur Rudolph, the only one of them who had been a Nazi right from the start – even from before Hitler came to power – said immediately, ‘It’s fantastic.’
Klaus Riedel, the liberal utopian who had learned to keep his political opinions to himself, stared at the ground and muttered something about being overwhelmed.
Von Braun said, ‘I wouldn’t have believed it possible.’
‘Dr Graf?’ Kammler looked at him expectantly.
‘I’m speechless.’
‘I shall take that as a compliment! Now, let us go to my office in Nordhausen and have some refreshments, and we can discuss the production plans in more detail.’
As they walked towards the waiting cars, Graf fell into step beside von Braun. ‘I should go back to Peenemünde. I’ll be of more use there.’
‘No. We have come a long way to reach this point. None of us is turning back now.’
He strode ahead. Graf stopped and looked back at the mouth of the tunnel, then up at the sky. He felt himself to be like one of the rockets – a human machine, launched on a fixed trajectory, impossible to recall, hurtling to a point that was preordained. He finished his cigarette and flicked it away, and walked on to join the others.
* * *
—
The night was clear. There was no traffic. Low above the black mass of trees, seemingly far out over the North Sea, a bright crescent moon lit the road ahead. Now that he was out of Scheveningen, Graf put his foot down. The moon seemed to keep pace with him. Frau im Mond. They had kept the movie company’s cheerfully erotic symbol painted on the fuselage of the rockets all the way through the tests at Peenemünde. Only when the missiles went into mass production did such whimsy become impossible.
He reached the outskirts of Wassenaar and slowed down, looking out for the turning. He spotted it, braked and swung left. He was stopped at once by the barrier. The inevitable SS guards emerged from their hut.
He showed his identity card and pass. ‘I need to get through to the launch site.’
‘No one is allowed beyond this point.’
‘This is an emergency.’
One of the SS men laughed. ‘I’m sure it is! If you’re trying to get to the brothel, forget it.’
The other said, more sympathetically, ‘Leave it, Doctor. There’s nothing you can do.’
From somewhere in the woods came a long burst of machine-gun fire – fifteen or twenty seconds. The SS men turned to look. For half a minute there was silence. Then came another, shorter burst, followed by half a dozen single shots.
Graf rested his forehead on the rim of the steering wheel. The guards went back to their hut. He stayed like that for a while, feeling the ticking-over of the engine vibrating through his skull, before wearily reversing onto the main road and returning the way he had come.
16
KAY WOKE, TURNED OFF THE alarm, rolled over and glanced at the other side of the bed. It was too dark to make out whether he was still there. She reached under the blanket and put out an exploring hand. The mattress was cold. He must have left a while ago. She couldn’t remember him going.
She slipped naked from beneath the covers and felt her way along the wall to the light switch. The room was in a mess that told its own story. Her shoes, coat and jacket were in a heap next to the door; her shirt and skirt at the foot of the bed; her underwear and stockings strewn across the bedspread along with her tie, which he had struggled to unknot and which had been the last thing to go. She went around gathering it all up. In the bathroom she dashed her face and neck with freezing water and considered herself in the mirror.
He had been tender, passionate, anxious. Once, when she made a noise, he had put his hand over her mouth and stopped to look at the ceiling, listening. The floorboards creaked above their heads. It had given her a fit of the giggles. ‘Poor Arnaud,’ she whispered, ‘aren’t you allowed to have a girl in the house?’
‘My parents are very old-fashioned,’ he whispered back, ‘very religious. They would be appalled.’
She smiled as she brushed her hair. The more nervous he was, the bolder she had become. What a game it had been.
Once she was dressed, she inspected the bed for any telltale traces, smoothed the sheet and tucked in the blankets. If there was one skill she had learned in the WAAF, it was how to make a bed perfectly. She turned off the light and let herself out of the room. In the darkness she moved cautiously to the end of the passage. On the landing, she paused. The doors were all closed. She wondered which room was Arnaud’s. Was it on this floor or the one above? The deep, chilly silence was disturbed only by the ticking of the long-case clock in the hall.
It was hard not to make a noise descending the old wooden staircase. When she reached the ground floor, she saw the familiar faint light shining from the kitchen, but when she went in, it was deserted. A kettle was boiling on the stove. She lifted it off the hob and looked around. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink. A chair was pulled back from the table. A cupboard hung open, its shelves bare. She couldn’t see any sign of the food she had brought. The key was in the back door, but she didn’t need to turn it: the door was unlocked.
As she stepped outside, she thought she could smell cigarette smoke. She stopped and called out quietly, ‘Arnaud?’ She glanced over her shoulder, then continued down the path along the side of the house. In the middle of the garden she stopped again, and repeated, more urgently, ‘Arnaud?’ She was sure she could sense him watching her. She picked her way across the rough grass to the gate in the wall and out into the street. The pre-dawn sky cast a greyish light over the empty cobbles. He was not here either, she realised with dismay. It was as if he was embarrassed by what had happened and was trying to avoid her. She would have to find her own way across town.
The bell
of the cathedral chimed seven, and that at least gave her something to aim for. She moved off down the street and into the twisting side roads. The town was slowly waking up. Lights were coming on in some of the houses. A dog barked as she passed. Occasionally she stopped and checked behind her, but it didn’t seem that she was being followed. She told herself not to be so melodramatic. But then she remembered that Arnaud had followed them the previous day – he had admitted as much – so why shouldn’t he be doing the same now? And as he knew where she was going, he didn’t need to keep behind her: he could get ahead of her and wait for her to pass. The idea, however illogical, that she might be the object of some cat-and-mouse game unsettled her, and she set off again, quicker now.
She entered the echoing empty space of the food market and strode across it, out into a winding lane of little ancient houses. At the end of that, she recognised where she was: the shopping street with the closed café, the bridge over the river where Arnaud had left her the previous morning, the Brusselpoort, and the wide boulevard of Koningin Astridlaan. As she approached the British headquarters, she imagined herself to be a pilot at the end of a hazardous mission glimpsing his home airfield.
The officers’ mess was already busy. The two lieutenants from the Survey Regiment – Sandy, the good-looking one, and the gloomy Yorkshireman (what was his name? Bill, that was it) – were already seated at the same table as before. Sandy waved to her as she came in. He said cheerfully, ‘Did you hear we managed to get a couple of the blighters yesterday?’
‘So I gather. Well done you.’
‘And you too! My God, the speed of those things! Blink and you miss them.’
‘Did we stick at two, or were there more in the afternoon?’
‘No, that was it. They didn’t launch again. Maybe they’ve decided to pack up and go home.’ He glanced at her more closely. ‘Are you all right?’
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