Darkness into Light Box Set

by Michael Dean

  Eventually, the inspector mounted the Grand Staircase and climbed to the second floor. The double-doors of the Meeting Chamber were open. Forster peered inside. The domed cavern was done out in rich red, with red leather armchairs at the front, like a Doge’s Palace.

  He walked on, finding himself treading gingerly on the gleaming parquet floor, as he made his way along the apparently endless corridor. The heavy doors had brass nameplates engraved in Gothic script. The corner office was inscribed simply Adolf Hitler. Forster stopped, suddenly breathless. An ecstatic feeling came over him, like taking communion in Memmingen church, as an altar boy. He felt purified and safe, deeply content.

  *

  This call to the Brown House, Forster thought, must have something to do with the Raubal case. Ribald rumours about Hitler and the delectable Geli Raubal, his half-niece, half his age, had entertained Munich for years.

  On Saturday morning, a message had been delivered at Forster’s home, from Chief Inspector Sauer. Forster was to meet Sauer at Hitler’s apartment, immediately. Fräulein Raubal had been shot dead; it was supposed to be suicide. Forster’s smile broadened at the thought, as he was shown into Hess’s inner office, by his secretary.

  Behind his desk, Rudolf Hess was in full-dress SA uniform, under his portrait by Walter Einbeck, a present from Hitler himself. His right leg was curled awkwardly round the leg of his chair.

  ‘Sit down, Inspector,’ he said absently, frowning as the policeman walked the length of the office, an intentionally enormous distance, to the chair drawn up facing him.

  Forster sat. He waited.

  Hess looked thoughtful. ‘An opportunity has arisen, Inspector.’ Hess tailed off into a silence so long Forster was apprehensive by the time he resumed. ‘An opportunity to serve the Party.’

  Forster found himself feeling pleased by that. He cleared his throat, hoping to bring Hess to the point. ‘May I make notes?’

  ‘Of course not!’ Hess shouted. ‘Suppose the Münchener Post got hold of them?’ Hess’s eyes glowed. ‘Another sex scandal and we’re finished,’ he blurted out, with unusual directness and honesty, uncurling his leg from the chair, momentarily throwing his right arm to the back of his head, to regain balance.

  There was a long silence. Hess stared at Forster.

  ‘What would you like me to do?’ Forster asked.

  ‘Inspector, when your superior, Chief Inspector Sauer, was in the Führer’s apartment, investigating the suicide of Fräulein Raubal, certain items were removed.’

  Forster was amused, but not surprised. He smothered his smile.

  ‘We need someone to keep an eye on Sauer.’ Hess paused again. ‘We’ve put him on the payroll, but we must be sure he does not dispose of the items. It is vital we do not lose track of them. Do you understand?’

  ‘My task would be easier if I knew what these items were.’

  ‘They are drawings. That is all you need to know. If Sauer tries to sell them, you get in touch with one man and one man only.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You contact Georg Winter. He will contact me. You interviewed Herr Winter, did you not, over this unfortunate business with Fräulein Raubal?’

  Forster nodded. ‘Yes, indeed. I took a statement from him.’

  Forster had also questioned Winter’s wife, Anni, and one of the other servants. All three were obviously lying. Sauer, as the senior officer, had interviewed Hitler.

  ‘On no account,’ Hess continued, ‘are you to contact me, ever again. And you are not to mention this discussion to anyone. You hear me?’

  Forster nodded. ‘Please do not concern yourself, Herr Hess. I will be proud to serve. I will have Sauer watched. I will inform Herr Winter if he sells the drawings.’

  ‘Good.’

  The day after his talk with Hess, Karl-Heinz Forster joined the Nazi Party. Christa Forster was delighted. So were little Helga and little Erwin.

  Chapter Four

  Public Prosecutor Glaser, in the forty-third year of his life, sat puffing at his pipe at his desk. His tiny office was on the ground floor of the Ministry of Justice in Prielmayerstrasse. The windowless room, an old store cupboard, had been converted for him because of his artificial leg. All the other lawyers were on the third floor.

  Glaser always started investigations by summoning every file which could conceivably be relevant. In the Raubal case, there was not much. There were three files on his desk, two buff, one blue. There was also a copy of the Münchener Post.

  Glaser had put in a written request for another file – Hitler’s police record. This was a courageous, or possibly rash, thing to do. However, the request had been ignored.

  The thicker buff file was from Chief Inspector Sauer. It was labelled Investigation into the Suicide of Geli Raubal. In it were the witness statements, a Cause of Death Report by the police doctor, Dr Müller, and Sauer’s own report as head of Munich Police Area Two.

  According to Sauer’s report, Munich police were notified of Geli’s suicide on Saturday, September 19th. Sauer and Inspector Forster took statements from Hitler’s staff: the butler-cum-valet, Georg Winter; Anni Winter, the housekeeper; the assistant housekeeper, Maria Reichert, and the maid, Anna Kirmair. They all testified that Geli’s body was found in her bedroom at 10.15 a.m.

  Dr Müller’s report stated that Geli died of inner bleeding from a gunshot wound to the lung. She had been dead seventeen or eighteen hours, at the time of his examination. So she died in the late afternoon or early evening of Friday 18th, while Hitler was in Nuremberg. On his return to Munich, on the Saturday, Hitler was interviewed by Chief Inspector Sauer, alone, at 15.30. Hitler could offer no reason why Geli would wish to commit suicide.

  As ever, Glaser’s first step was to separate the facts from surmise and hearsay. The attested facts in the case were as follows:

  On Friday, September 18th, Adolf Hitler, the Party photographer Heinrich Hoffmann and the chauffeur Julius Schreck had spent the night at the hotel Deutscher Hof in Nuremberg. Next day, heading north, they were stopped by a car sent after them by the manager of the hotel, Herr Kramer. They were given the news that Hess had phoned the hotel because something had happened to Geli. Heading back to Munich to investigate, they were given a speeding ticket at Ebenhausen, near Ingolstadt, thereby completing a cast-iron alibi.

  Glaser turned back to the witness statements. Incredibly, there was no statement from the chauffeur Julius Schreck at all. Glaser tamped down the burnt tobacco in his pipe and relit it.

  He turned to Hoffmann’s statement: It was two pages long, voluble and rich with extraneous detail. Glaser had known Hoffmann for years. He could hear the photographer’s voice as he read. He was sure the statement was his own work.

  Hoffmann’s colourful description of events has the half-niece, very much alive, waving cheerily from the balcony as the party left: ‘Goodbye, Uncle Alf,’ she calls out. ‘Goodbye, Herr Hoffmann! Have a good trip!’

  As they drove away, according to Hoffmann, the Führer had a premonition that something bad was going to happen to Geli. Glaser laughed aloud. This was classic Hoffmann tosh – the Führer’s otherworldly, uncanny prescience. They did not come more loyal than Hoffmann. Or more disingenuous.

  Like Schreck, Hoffmann was far more important to the Party than his title implied – the title being Party Photographer. The Party’s rooms in Schellingstrasse were owned by Hoffmann. They were behind his photographic studio. Two years ago, Hoffmann had become one of what was now eight Nazi Party City Councillors on Munich Council.

  Glaser turned to Hitler’s statement, given to Sauer, which, like Hoffmann’s, did not mention what time he left the apartment. At one point Hider referred to ‘Friday afternoon’ but Sauer had not thought to ask him for the exact time.

  Glaser grunted, ran a hand over his neatly trimmed full beard and turned to the servants’ statements. They were so similar there had obviously been collusion. They were also by far the briefest witness statements he had seen in fifteen years as a
Public Prosecutor.

  He re-read Georg Winter’s statement – the longest of them – torn between rage and amusement: It was dated Saturday, September 19th, 1931.

  First thing this morning, at nine-thirty, my wife informed me that something must have happened to Raubal, because nobody could get into her room and Hider’s pistol, which was kept in an unlocked cupboard next door, was no longer there. So I knocked on the door of her room again and again but got no answer. It was looking suspicious to me, so I forced the locked double-doors, at ten o’clock, with a screwdriver. When I opened the door, my wife, Frau Reichert and Anna Kirmair were there. As soon as I had got the door open, I went into the room and found Raubal lying on the floor dead. She had shot herself. I can give no reason why she should have shot herself.

  Glaser turned to the blue file. According to his tax returns, Hitler had earned 1,232,335 marks in the last tax year from Mein Kampf. His industrialist friends, the von Hesserts, were paying the rent for Haus Wachenfeld, his country retreat in Bavaria, and for the Prinzregentenplatz apartment – the latter a massive 4,176 marks a year. More than twice, Glaser reflected, puffing at his pipe, what he paid for his pretty decent family apartment in Galeriestrasse. The NSDAP – the Nazi Party – paid for the Mercedes, 26,000 marks, and the salaries of the servants.

  On to the next file, the thinner buff one: the police record of Julius Schreck. In his prison photograph, the chauffeur bore a strong resemblance to Hitler. He had several convictions for theft, deception, assault and affray.

  A small-time crook, then, but he had co-founded Hitler’s Personal Protection Guard, the Stosstrupp-Hitler, and expanded it to form the SS, which is why the first SS-brigade was named after him – Standarte-I Julius Schreck. Like all Nazi top brass, the Party paid him in inflation-proof Swiss francs.

  Glaser turned to the report of Geli Raubal’s death in the Münchener Post. He read it slowly, again smoothing his beard with his left hand – a sure sign he was worried.

  As a lifelong social democrat, a card-carrying member of the SPD, Glaser knew all the Post’s journalists well. He had warned the editor, Erhard Auer, to be careful about the Geli story, but Auer, a big bear of a man and too brave for his own good, had gone his own way, as ever.

  The report on Geli’s death carried Julius Zerfass’s byline. Worse and worse, thought Glaser. He had known the cultured, elegant Zerfass for twenty years. He was the newspaper’s articles editor. He knew nothing about crime.

  Nevertheless, the Post’s coverage of Geli Raubal’s death had certainly struck home. Glaser knew Hitler had sent his personal lawyer, Hans Frank, round to the newspaper’s offices at Altheimer Eck with threats of a lawsuit. The nighttime telephone threats to Post journalists had started. Whether or not they sent the SA in again remained to be seen.

  The report was headlined ‘A Mysterious Affair: Suicide of Hitler’s Niece’. A wave of depression hit Glaser. He so much wanted the Post to be right, but he was more and more convinced they were not.

  There was an allegation in the Post article that Geli’s nose was broken and her body beaten. Glaser shrugged and shifted at his desk, easing his leg. He simply didn’t believe it. He thought Hitler capable of shooting Geli; indeed, all his instincts were that he had. But beating her? It just didn’t ring true.

  Glaser leaned back in his chair, his eyes twinkling as he puffed his pipe, because what he was going to do defied procedure. He would speak to the police pathologist Katherina Bandl. He would ask her what she really thought, before she wrote a report, which she would have to sanitise if it incriminated Hitler.

  And there was something else he would do: He was due to see his friend Ascher Weintraub this evening, at the gallery which bore the good old man’s name. They would discuss art, as they always did. Glaser would then ask Ascher Weintraub what he thought of the Münchener Post report. This was a most irregular act for a public prosecutor; but Ascher Weintraub knew as much about Hitler as any man alive.

  Glaser was looking forward to the discussion so much he pictured the old man in his mind and could almost taste the lemon tea they would drink together. But first there was Katherina Bandl.

  Chapter Five

  Katherina Bandl had agreed to Glaser’s request to examine Geli’s body, as he knew she would. There was no question of discussing the death of Hitler’s half-niece anywhere within the precincts of the Ministry of Justice. It would not have been safe. They arranged to meet for lunch at the Tiroler Bräu.

  The Tiroler Bräu was packed. Prosecutor Glaser peered through the fug of smoke. The place had been designed in the early 1920s. It had high wooden banquettes with plush red seats and seat backs forming walls round three sides of every table. Many tables were in niches or on a dais or set at an angle.

  He found Bandl in one of the many side-rooms. She was built to Bavarian proportions. Her cardigan stretched over bulging shoulders, her neck was thick, her round head large. She had managed to keep a table for six empty, except for herself.

  Behind her, on a hook on the wall, hung her green felt hat with its jaunty feather and her green Loden coat. On the wooden table in front of her was a huge shank of roast pork on the bone, a side dish of potato salad and a litre mug of beer. At her feet lay her dachshund, Mitzi, its leather lead loose in her tweed-skirted lap.

  ‘Mahlzeit, Frau Bandl,’ said Glaser, touching his trilby to her. The ‘Frau’ was a courtesy title. Bandl was not married. She was ageless – anything from thirty-five to fifty; sexless – Glaser had never heard her mention any emotional attachments; and, as far as Glaser knew, completely apolitical.

  ‘Servus,’ the pathologist replied, with the briefest of pauses in her chewing.

  Glaser hung his hat and coat up next to hers and sat opposite her, easing the artificial left leg in under the table first. She broke off a piece of pork shank, so dark the inside was purple, then held it under the table. Mitzi lapped at it. A waitress started toward Glaser, but a dinner-jacketed head waiter, taking in Glaser’s dark suit, wing collar and look of authority, waved her away and came himself.

  Glaser chose baked trout with boiled potatoes, a tomato salad, and a dry Müller-Thürgau to wash it down. His round face beamed at Katherina Bandl. He was relaxed, or relatively so.

  ‘I don’t know whether I have good news or bad for you, Herr Glaser,’ the pathologist began. ‘But I agree with you about the Münchener Post report. It’s wrong.’

  ‘He didn’t beat her up?’

  ‘No, no, no. There is damage to the nose, as the report says, but it’s more likely to be from a fall than a punch.’ She looked at him piercingly, with shrewd small eyes. ‘But as to the so-called bruising on the body, here, we can be one-hundred-per-cent sure.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It isn’t bruising. It’s hypostasis.’

  Glaser’s wine arrived. He took a sip, nodding in reluctant appreciation. He had been born and brought up in wine country, Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, in Swabia, and made no secret of his disgust at the typical wine-offerings at the temple to beer that was Munich.

  ‘Hypostasis,’ Bandl continued, ‘is also called post-mortem lividity. When the heart stops beating, the blood sinks to the lowest vessels in the body, causing livid patches on the surface. It looks like bruising, but it isn’t.’

  Glaser nodded. He knew all that, but excitement was pricking at him. ‘Can you use it to determine time of death, in this case?’

  Bandl smiled faintly, appreciating Glaser. She liked him and let it show. Mitzi snuffled in protest at the cessation of the food supply, forgotten during the account of hypostasis. A hunk of meat was dropped down to the dachshund. Frau Bandl was enjoying herself.

  ‘Up to a point,’ she said. ‘The discoloration starts soon after death. The small patches fuse together and become distinct after twelve hours or so.’

  ‘So had Geli been dead for more than twelve hours when Müller’s examination was carried out?’

  Glaser’s food was put down in front of him. He realised he wa
s hungry when he started eating. He hadn’t eaten up to then. He had forgotten to.

  ‘That is almost certain,’ Bandl said. ‘Rigor mortis takes from ten to twelve hours. The body loses eight degrees in the first four hours but only about one degree an hour after that. On occasion, that makes measurement tricky. But you are in luck.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘Yes. I took blood and urine samples.’

  Glaser looked at her, alarmed. This examination was off the record. Bandl had jumped the gun. He nearly said ‘be careful’ but realised it was a little late for that.

  ‘And?’ he said.

  ‘She had had a drink before she died. White wine, like yours.’ They both managed a grim smile.

  ‘And that helps?’ Glaser asked.

  ‘Certainly! When you drink, the alcohol content in the blood and in the urine stay about the same. Maybe one to one point three at the most. But alcohol in the blood diminishes by oxidation after death; in the bladder it remains constant. It’s a good indicator of time of death.’

  Glaser nodded. ‘And in Geli’s case?’

  ‘The deceased’s urine had nearly five times as much alcohol as in the blood. The time of death was much earlier than Müller recorded. She had certainly been dead for at least eighteen hours, more likely as much as twenty or even twenty-four hours. I would testify to that. If I were testifying, which I won’t be, of course.’

  Glaser nodded. So now he knew. Geli had been shot some time during the Friday afternoon, probably early on the Friday afternoon. She had been shot before Hitler left for Nuremberg. His so-called alibi was nothing of the sort.