by Michael Dean
Darkness into Light Omnibus
Before the Darkness
The Crooked Cross
The Enemy Within
Hour Zero
Magic City
Michael Dean
© Michael Dean 2018
Michael Dean has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
This edition first published in 2018 by Sharpe Books.
Table of Contents
Before the Darkness
The Crooked Cross
The Enemy Within
Hour Zero
Magic City
Before the Darkness
Michael Dean
The first victim of the Nazis. - Alfred Kerr on Walther Rathenau
PROLOGUE: Inspector Bernhard Weiss
One evening early in 1922, Walther Rathenau was dining alone in the Grunewald, a picturesque part of Berlin. This was just before he became Foreign Minister – the first and probably last Jew to hold that office in Germany.
There was a knock at the door, a peremptory knock. Rathenau sighed, thinking there would have to be some sort of emergency outside to warrant it.
Josef Prozeller, Rathenau’s only servant, was talking to someone outside. Rathenau tensed.
Prozeller came in, with that slithering manner of his, eyes to the floor. ‘There’s a caller, Dr Rathenau.’ He presented a card.
Rathenau looked at the name, frowned. ‘Show him in.’
It was obvious there had been another specific threat. What else would bring Bernhard Weiss, the (Jewish) head of political protection, out in the pouring rain at
supper time?
Prozeller was still standing there.
‘Show him in!’ Rathenau repeated with slight impatience.
Prozeller shrugged impudently and left.
After a moment, Weiss appeared in a soaked-through mackintosh, carrying a dripping brown trilby. He made his way toward the table, passing ranks of heavy furniture. The replacement copy of the Rodin statuette received a baleful glare.
‘Inspector Weiss, Berlin police.’
Even though he was standing and Rathenau sitting, Weiss still felt he was looking up at the giant bald figure, whose face looked as if it had been carved in granite.
‘Not the most pleasant of evenings for a visit, Inspector,’ said Rathenau, with a
touch of irony, nodding his huge head.
‘Indeed not, Dr Rathenau.’ The inspector was clearly exhausted but he came straight to the point. ‘There has been a threat.’
‘Has there, indeed?’ Rathenau sounded bored.
‘We would like you to accept police protection, Dr Rathenau. As of now, this minute. Two officers, day and night. And we would like you to carry a pistol.’
‘No. I get threats every day.’
‘This one is especially credible.’
‘Is it the Ehrhardt Brigade?’ They were the most obvious candidates, among the fascist groups.
‘A section within it. Organisation Consul. Somebody called Ernst von Salomon. We found some journals of his. He’s a writer, apparently.’
‘A writer? What has he written?
‘Novels, I believe,’ Weiss said.
‘God almighty! Do even writers want me dead now?’
‘It seems so, sir.’
‘I am not accepting protection,’ said Rathenau, ‘or a gun.’
Many have speculated about Rathenau’s motive for turning down police protection.
Bravery is often mentioned. Rather more ingeniously, it has been viewed as a complex suicide wish, assuming that the unparalleled hounding he was subject to had become too much for him. Rathenau had attempted suicide at the age of seventeen - a taboo subject with him, understandably.
But the reason for his refusal of protection was much more straightforward than that.
If a police guard were watching the house, Rathenau’s liaison with Bosie – what he insisted on calling Hartmut Plaas – could be kept secret no longer.
And he would rather risk assassination than give Bosie up.
*
Bernhard Weiss was the last Jewish policeman left working in Germany when the Nazis took over. Before he left, he removed the transcripts of certain telephone calls from the files at Police Headquarters at Berlin Alexanderplatz. Telephone calls had been tapped for years under the so-called Weimar Republic, and the transcripts were not difficult to obtain, at least not for a serving policeman, even a Jewish serving policeman about to flee the country.
Weiss took the transcripts with him to London, as well as the journal of Ernst von Salomon. These papers remained in a drawer until Weiss was killed in the Blitz in 1942. They were then lost sight of for years. Weiss’s son, Richard Weiss, unearthed them only recently and immediately realised their importance.
The journal establishes that von Salomon’s complicity in the assassination of Walther Rathenau is far greater than was previously thought. The transcripts prove conclusively that certain leading German politicians and industrialists were also deeply involved in the crime. These men are named for the first time here. They were: the industrialist Hugo Stinnes, the politician Karl Helfferich and the general and politician Erich Ludendorff. Their connection with Ernst von Salomon and the killers of Organisation Consul is now established beyond doubt.
Here are the transcripts:
June 24th 1922 at 1.28am. The Hotel Esplanade, Berlin:
Telephone call from Hugo Stinnes to Karl Helfferich:
STINNES: Karl? It’s me, Stinnes. Earlier this evening, I ran into Bemmelman at the
Reichstag. He…
HELFFERICH: Calm yourself, Hugo. Slow down. Who the hell is Bemmelman?
STINNES: He’s the Belgian representative on the Reparations Commission. He knows everything that’s going on.
HELFFERICH: Alright. And?
STINNES: Versailles has unravelled. At this next conference, at The Hague, there will be a fundamental renegotiation. Versailles is as good as dead. Rathenau and his shit Fulfilment Policy have won. I’ll be ruined. All the loans I’ve made, all the companies I’ve set up across Europe, everything, depends on reparations continuing as they are, as per Versailles.
HELFFERICH: Aaah! Yes … You are quite right. Quite right. We can’t allow the Jew another triumph like he had at Rapallo. But it’s not too late. His Fulfilment Policy is a one-man band. Get rid of him and you end it.
STINNES: So…you mean….The time has come...
HELFFERICH: Yes. Call Ludendorff. He’ll know what to do.
June 24th 1922 at 1.35am. Hotel Esplanade, Berlin.
Telephone call from Hugo Stinnes to Erich Ludendorff:
STINNES: Erich? Here Stinnes. Listen. I’ve just got off the phone to Helfferich. He tells me…
LUDENDORFF: The time has come? Yes? You mean …?
STINNES: Yes.
LUDENDORFF: The Jew?
STINNES: Yes.
LUDENDORFF: About time! Good!
June 24th 1922 at 2.00am. Ludendorff’s apartment in Berlin.
Telephone from Erich Ludendorff to Hermann Erhardt, Munich.
LUDENDORFF: Erhardt? You know who this is?
EHRHARDT: Yes.
LUDENDORFF: Do it.
EHRHARDT: The Jew?
LUDENDORFF: Yes.
EHRHARDT: When?
LUDENDORFF: Now. In the morning.
EHRHARDT: Order understood.
June 24th 1922 at 2.30am. Hermann Ehrhardt’s apartment, Munich
Telephone from Hermann Ehrhardt to Ernst von Salomon, Berlin.
EHRHARDT: von Salomon?
VON SALOMON: Yes, what do you want? It’s the middle of the bloody night.
&
nbsp; EHRHARDT: Are you drunk? Oh, leave it! We’ve had word. The time has come. Kill him.
VON SALOMON: I can’t. Not yet. The damn car has a problem. We…
EHRHARDT: I said do it. Do it now. In the morning. That’s an order.
VON SALOMON: At your command!
PART I: BITTERFELD 1893-1914
Chapter One
Walther’s first childhood memory: The Rathenau family firm, the mighty AEG conglomerate, was opening a power station in partnership with Siemens - or Siemens-Halske, as it was known back then. Emil Rathenau, Walther’s father, had put his licence for Mr Edison’s patent light-bulb to good use, AEG was lighting up the whole of Berlin.
The power station was in Friedrichstrasse. It powered an entire block of houses from a cellar next to the old Café Bauer. Emil Rathenau and his close associate from the finance side, Carl Fürstenberg, and from the industrial side, Felix Deutsch, both of whom were Jewish, treated the young Walther to as much ice-cream and cake as he could eat at this illustrious café.
Afterwards, Papa Emil made a gracious speech at the opening. All eyes were on him…
*
Jump forward fifteen years. On the threshold of adult life, Walther wanted to be an artist. His paintings were already of exhibition quality. He dreamed, he hankered after ‘the Buddenbrooks option’, as he thought of it – the scion of a trading family rather romantically choosing to become an artist, as in Thomas Mann’s epic novel. After all, his second cousin on his father’s side, Max Liebermann, was a world-renown artist.
But he never fulfilled the dream. He thought back to Papa Emil’s speech. It haunted
him, it inspired him. It became his ambition to make a speech like that oneday; the practical drive smothered the artistic dream.
After his studies, he went into the family firm, and came up with a new idea to make a whole new fortune for the Rathenau dynasty. He wanted to build his own world, here on earth.
The new AEG factory young Walther was to head, was situated on a lignite field.
The place was called Bitterfeld, which means exactly what you would expect it to mean – bitter field.
Geographically, AEG’s new Elektro-chemische Werke, Bitterfeld, was situated in
the Prussian province of Saxony, between Leipzig and Dessau. Topographically, Bitterfeld was a place of 11,000 souls – or at least citizens. Spiritually and artistically it barely existed. It squatted there, one hundred miles south of Berlin, ‘the city of parvenus’, as Walther called the Prussian capital in a book of aphorisms he wrote whilst there.
Walther sat at his Director’s desk on a glass-fronted balcony overlooking the factory. Below him, an electric current was led through baths of hydrochloric acid in order to synthesise the production of alkaline lye, or aluminium, or any of the various other metals thought amenable to the electrolytic process.
Workers in blue overalls scurried about below. They wore protective white face-masks against the fumes.
Always the most fidgety and impatient of men, Walther was not tranquil whilst watching from above: He he sketched the scene below, he sketched self-
portraits and landscapes too. He pencilled aphorisms in a black-bound book. He embarked simultaneously on technical essays, reflections on the soul under mechanization and an essay on what it was to be Jewish in Germany as the nineteenth century approached its close.
Martin Kiliani, the Chief Engineer, was the most attractive man in the plant. He had chestnut hair, unfortunately not blond as Walther preferred; but he was quite tall with broad shoulders, an attractive air of amused superiority and laughter lines in his cheeks. The near certainty that Kiliani was making secret reports to Papa Emil did not worry Walther particularly. He had nothing to hide.
Open supervision was provided by Carl Fürstenberg, Emil’s trusted colleague on the finance side, who by now was a baptised former Jew, that is to say fully Christianized. Or a ‘convinced Christian’ to use Walther’s own rather sarcastic term for them, coined when he encountered quite a few ‘convinced Christians’ in his student days in Munich.
With Carl, in the poky office behind the balcony, Walther would discuss the soaring price of lignite, the unexpectedly high cost of paid worker holidays and the fact that, in general, costs were soaring out of control.
Kiliani, Walther realised, would be sending in reports on the production process and practical application of electrolysis products, which Carl Fürstenberg did not pretend to understand.
Would there be savings in energy costs for potassium hydroxide produced by electrolysis? Later called lye, potassium hydroxide had a wide range of uses. Walther had blithely asserted that electrolysis would drive costs down, without actually having any evidence. But Papa Emil shrewdly ignored Walther’s dreamy judgement.
At that moment, Martin Kiliani bounded in with that spring-loaded walk of his.
Walther stopped writing, his face automatically rising to a smile, though his mouth ran dry.
‘Good day, Herr Kiliani.’
‘ Good day, Dr Rathenau.’ .
‘What can I do for you?’
‘I would like to increase the voltage of electricity.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s hardly working at the present force. We are not achieving anything.’
‘Would that be entirely safe?’
‘Not “entirely safe” no.’ Kiliani imitated Walther’s phrasing so closely that he came across as mocking Walther, as he had intended.
‘What could happen?’
Kiliani shrugged. ‘Too much corrosive steam.’
‘Not safe …’ Walther murmured.
Kiliani shrugged again. ‘The workers could get burned, even with the gloves and
protective clothing. The steam could build up and leak.’
‘What do you recommend?’
‘We need to do it. Try it late this afternoon, just before they get off. If it doesn’t work, I’ll stay behind and shut everything down myself. On my own.’
‘OK, but I’m staying with you.’
Kiliani’s eyes twinkled. Those creases, which Walther so loved, appeared in his cheeks.
‘Just you and me, eh?’
‘Precisely. And after that come home with me. I’ll make you some supper.’
Another twinkling smile. ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘Oh, do that!’ he replied. As Kiliani turned to go, he said ‘Please.’ After he had left, he muttered ‘Please, Martin.’
At four o’ clock on the afternoon of that same day, Kiliani was back. Walther had
stopped sketching at his desk, and was struggling with patent applications for electrolysis processes still in development – aluminium by electrolysis was one, magnesium by electrolysis another.
The secretary, Hugo Geitner, was also in the office, checking the accounts. Geitner was another of Emil’s appointments. He was a middle-aged self-made man, plucked from clerkly obscurity by Emil. He was loyal, he would have said, to the company, but his wages were paid by Emil, directly from Berlin. Walther referred to him as Emil’s representative on earth, an aphorism which had not yet found its way into his book of them.
Geitner looked up beadily as Martin Kiliani came in. The engineer was not exactly running but hurrying. He looked tense. His overalls and gloves were stained. There was sweat on his face, streaks of light red burn marks on his forehead.
‘Dr Rathenau, we are going to have to shut down.’
‘You sure?’
‘The voltage increase has resulted in fumes coming from one of the disintegrating
chambers. The one making lye. Here. See for yourself.’
Kiliani waved an arm at the glass boxing in the balcony. Walther stared out.
‘I’ve issued the men with sponges soaked in vinegar,’ Kiliani went on.
‘Yes, so I see. Do you need more…?’
‘They are coughing, Dr Rathenau. We have to get them out and shut down completely before they start fainting on us.’
‘But surely i
f you reduce the voltage again? Mind you, that low voltage wasn’t enough. Not nearly…’
‘It’s not like turning a tap on and off.’ Kiliani was beginning to shout. ‘Of course
I’ve decreased the voltage but a chemical process has started and it’s still building.’
‘What chemical …?’
‘I don’t know exactly. Nobody knows. This has never been done before. Now will you please give the order to shut down the plant. And evacuate.’
‘Yes, alright. I’m staying though. Get me a sponge and some vinegar. Try and find
some fans from somewhere. I’ll stay overnight and let’s see if we can get the fumes clear by morning. Otherwise we’re finished.’
Martin Kiliani supervised the orderly evacuation of Hugo Geitner, two more
administrative staff and thirty or so factory workers. He insisted on staying. So did
Rathenau. Both were on the factory floor with vinegar-soaked sponges pressed to their mouths. Walther was in shirtsleeves and his pinstriped trousers. By now the
hydrochloric acid in the disintegrating chamber was bubbling lightly.
‘Turn off the electricity to the machines,’ Walther said. ‘Open every door and window. Do we possess any fans?’
‘There are a couple of small fans in the offices, I think,’ Kiliani said. ‘And some of the cutting machines have fans. I could turn them on.’
‘Get me every breath of air you can,’ Rathenau said. He started coughing and swore softly into his vinegared sponge.
Rathenau and Kiliani between them created as much air and wind as possible. By now it was dark in the Bitterfeld fields surrounding the factory. If there was a moon, it had given up on Bitterfeld. Fortunately, though, the wind had not, obliging them by
blowing through the open doors of the factory floor.
‘There’s nothing more we can do down here,’ Walther said. ‘Let’s go back up to the office. I’ve got some brandy up there.’
