by Michael Dean
*
Kunde took the first sticks of dynamite the following Wednesday night, and worked on them in his room. The twenty-centimetre-long sticks, bound tight in layers of thick brown paper, stuck out of the kettle. But once heated on the hotplate, the water eventually softened the immersed end. The mix of nitroglycerine and kieselguhr in each stick skimmed out easily enough. Kunde poured the colourless oily goo into a ewer he had bought in town.
In a real stroke of luck, he discovered that a home-made hatch under the eave, by his bed, led all the way under the roof. He kept the ewer with the dynamite under the main roof joist, where it was cool and dark.
Once the sticks of dynamite had dried out, they showed no sign of having been tampered with. But to be on the safe side, Kunde placed them at the back of the stock in the shed the following Tuesday night. Fresh sticks were always removed from the front of the supply the next night, after the Nazi stock-check.
Erna Weitig came into his room to clean, so he made sure none of the nitroglycerine mixture adhered to the kettle, and kept the window open, to clear what little smell there was, after the boiling. At the end of his first week, after a vigorous bout of cleaning, Erna fell into bed with him. They made love every Saturday after that – just before Erna’s weekly bath. Kunde believed Herr Weitig knew.
The other regular occurrence in Kunde’s life was the arrival of letters from Ello. She wrote twice a week. To his own surprise, Kunde replied – not as often as she wrote, but whenever the mood took him. Slowly, he came to realise that this time in Königsbronn was the happiest of his life. The realisation puzzled him greatly.
Chapter Two
Rüdiger von Hessert and Anton Elsperger were in a comfortable three-room flat in the prosperous suburb of Bogenhausen. It belonged to an SS colleague of Elsperger’s, who let them use it for trysts. On this occasion, von Hessert was kneeling at Elsperger’s feet, naked, weeping and kissing his hands.
‘Please, Anton, please. I love you so much. Please don’t make me suffer any more.’
‘You say you love me, Rudi. But you don’t mean it. You just lie to me.’
Von Hessert screamed, redoubling his kisses of Elsperger’s hands. ‘No, no, no. I’ll do anything you want. I’ll tell you everything ...’
The fleshy-lipped SS-man kicked him in the face with the point of his boot. ‘Oh, don’t say it again. You say you will help me. You say you are my friend. And then you just lie and lie and lie.’ He took a morphine ampoule from out of his pocket. ‘You don’t deserve my help.’
‘Give me it,’ Rudi said. ‘I’ll tell you what you want to know.’
He was calmer. Elsperger sensed a breakthrough. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come and sit next to me on the sofa, baby-boy. There there. To live is to suffer, as Goethe said.’ He took von Hessert by the hand, pulled him up and led him to the sofa, where he put an arm round him. ‘Now tell me everything. And if you lie, or leave anything out, I will know. I will know.’ Elsperger tilted von Hessert’s chin up and looked into his eyes. ‘You have one chance and one chance only. If you try to deceive me, I walk out of that door, never to return. Speak now.’
Von Hessert nodded. He was thin and unshaven, spittle was running down his chin.
‘He is planning to kill Hitler.’
Elsperger was amazed, but didn’t show it. ‘Who is?’
‘Kunde.’
‘Just Kunde? Rudi, tell me everything. What about Glaser?’
‘Glaser doesn’t want anything to do with it.’
‘But he knows about it?’
‘Not the details. Only that Kunde wants to kill Hitler.’
‘What’s Kunde planning?’
‘I don’t know, Anton, and that’s the truth. Kunde told us at Dachau. He wants to use a bomb to kill Hitler, and he wants to do it in Munich. Maybe it’s a communist plot. Glaser told me he doesn’t want anything to do with it, because it’s murder. And that is all I know. I swear it. Why would Kunde tell me his plans?’
‘Because he wants your help?’
Von Hessert gave a yelping laugh. ‘What use would I be?’
‘Good point. Rudi, if I find you’ve withheld anything ...’
Von Hessert screamed. ‘I haven’t, Anton! I haven’t!’
He began to cry. Elsperger threw some morphine ampoules on the floor. Von Hessert flung himself down after them and scrambled around on all fours, picking them up.
‘When they are finished, come and see me,’ Elsperger said. ‘If you try and get a supply anywhere else, I’ll have you flogged, understand?’
‘Yes, Anton. Thank you.’
*
Neither Elsperger nor Heydrich wanted to pull Glaser in. They had been watching him anyway, and they believed he did not know where Kunde was. Glaser’s fervent anticommunism, they knew, was genuine. Forster, however, had developed a consuming hatred for Glaser, and again asked Heydrich to have him arrested and tortured, to find out what he knew.
‘No,’ Heydrich said. ‘We continue to keep tabs on Glaser. And we turn Munich upside down until we find Kunde.’
Himmler was notified, as was Hess, but news of a plot against the Führer’s life was not shared with the Gestapo or the SD – the Reich Security Service. Forster was put in charge of finding Kunde. He interviewed Kunde’s twin, August, in Stadelheim Prison. August cut a deal readily enough, but the names and addresses he gave were either hopelessly out of date or false. The Kunde farmhouse in Poppenweiler was raided by the local SS, but Sepp had not been there, or been in touch, for years.
The communist political apparatus in Munich, as well as their sports and gymnastics clubs and their charitable organisation, the Rote Hilfe, had been smashed between January and March. But local informal splinter groups had evolved to replace them. With the help of Max Troll and other informers, anybody in these groups who was known to the Political Police was arrested and tortured for information about Kunde. Nobody knew where he was, and those who died under torture died cursing his name. These included Paul Jahnke, the North German who had brought Glaser to his meeting with the communists.
When SS-soldiers, led by Elsperger, arrived at the house of Georg Limmer, the nineteen-year-old, code-named Hugo, he was not there. Limmer’s elderly parents, the old communists, were beaten up. They said their son had gone back to Austria. They also said, convincingly enough, that they had never heard of anybody called Sepp Kunde.
Chapter Three
With Ello walking slowly behind him, Hider took the stairs two at a time to the architect Troost’s atelier, in Theresienstrasse. Under his arm he carried rolled sketches of his latest design ideas for the House of German Art.
‘Herr Professor! I have some drawings to show to you.’
Troost appeared at the top of the stairs. Exceptionally tall, with a serious manner, he looked a lot older than his fifty-five years, and heavier and balder than Roloff’s portrait of him. Many in Munich shared Hider’s opinion that Troost was the best German architect since Schinkel. His style was as spare, as solid, as unfussy and unadorned as his speech. Hider gave him a firm handshake. Ello nodded in greeting.
Up in the atelier, there was a model of the House of German Art, on a long table down the middle of the room. As Hider began to unroll his architectural drawings, Troost spoke bluntly, with no trace of sycophancy. His clipped Westphalian accent always made him sound authoritative, but now he spoke as if stating a fact, not an opinion.
‘Herr Hider, the House of German Art cannot be ready for 15 October. Not even if we use labour from the Dachau camp. I am unwilling to compromise the standards expected of me by trying.’
Ello gasped at Troost’s audacity. But he was getting away with it; a sideways glance at Hider told her that. She understood the relationship: Here, in his atelier, Troost was the master builder. Hider had returned to what he had been in his youth – a skilful, though unoriginal draughtsman, hoping to realise his boyhood ambition of working in an architect’s office.
Ello willed Hitler to countermand Tr
oost, but he nodded, wordlessly accepting what the architect said. Plans for the building would be put on hold, perhaps for years. And that meant the end of the bomb plot. She would have to get a message to Sepp.
*
Ello escaped from Troost’s atelier as soon as she could, looking cow-eyed at Hitler, telling him she felt faint. She packed an overnight bag at her room at the university, and began the journey to Sepp. On the way – two train journeys and a taxi from Königsbronn Station – she felt elated at seeing him again.
It was dark by the time she reached his address. She rang the bell marked ‘Weitig’ and a handsome middle-aged woman came down in answer. Unable to keep the smile off her face, she asked for Kurt Engel. Frau Weitig gave her a sharp, appraising look and nodded in the direction of her lodger’s room.
Sepp opened the door – he had heard her coming. They fell into each other’s arms.
‘I’ve got news,’ she said breathlessly. Through his kisses she said, ‘It’s bad news.’
Sepp had already guessed why she was here, but would not be denied making love to her. Lying in bed, later, by the wan light of moonlight coming in the dormer window, she asked what he would do now.
‘Destroy the dynamite,’ he said. ‘Get to France, while I still can.’ His forged papers, as he knew perfectly well, would not pass the kind of check he would get at the border, where they would ask him to replicate the signature. ‘I can cross over at night. They can’t watch the whole border,’ he added.
‘Will you go tomorrow?’ she said.
He smiled, knowing the answer she wanted.
She kissed him on the nose and said, ‘There’s no hurry. Why don’t you show me your childhood home?’
‘Poppenweiler? There’s nothing there except cow-shit. And I’m not going back to my family’s place.’
‘OK, then show me Ludwigsburg. You went to school there, didn’t you?’
‘All right.’ He kissed her and they started to make love again.
She slipped out of his room early in the morning, holding her overnight case in front of her as she tiptoed down the stairs. He had given her directions to the local inn, the Linde. He told her to book a room there, and he would meet her later.
She beat at the door until the innkeeper came, took a room, then paid him an exorbitant amount to make her a breakfast of cheese, ham, black bread, butter and coffee. She ate it at a table downstairs. There was a telephone behind the bar. She booked a long-distance call to Rudi.
Her brother was deeply asleep, so early in the morning, but he was happy to hear her voice. She told him she would be away for a couple of days. She told him where she was, as she always did. As an afterthought, she gave him Sepp’s address at the Weitigs’, too, carefully spelling it out, in case there was a slip-up and he needed to contact her via Sepp.
‘Plans have changed,’ she said. ‘It’s all off. The building won’t be finished in time. The ...’ she hesitated, wanting to avoid the word ‘dynamite’ on the telephone. ‘The stuff will have to be destroyed.’
When she rang off, Rudi recalled something he had heard about the House of German Art. It was only a rumour, but it was worth checking. He telephoned Anton Elsperger and arranged to meet him for lunch.
Chapter Four
Anton Elsperger was delighted to get Rüdiger’s call, in his office at the Wittelsbach Palace. He nominated the Ratskeller for lunch – nice and central. He licked his thick lips as he replaced the receiver. Calling his adjutant, he rearranged his schedule, leaving himself free for the entire day.
‘Everything comes to he who waits,’ he quoted to himself. Von Hessert, bright boy though he was, had always been transparent. He, Elsperger, to vary the metaphor, could read him like a book.
The Ratskeller was an ancient, stone-walled catacomb beneath Munich’s Town Hall. Colourful armorial shields of medieval South German knights hung on iron brackets on the walls, at an angle over the diners. The place seated over three hundred for lunch and dinner, but still felt intimate, as it consisted largely of a maze of private rooms, anterooms, intimate corners, and even corridors with tables along them.
Elsperger, however, reserved something even more private: a Priokl. This booth carved in a niche in the thick stone walls had wooden shutter-doors, like a saloon in the Wild West. They close off the diners, once food has been brought. Ideal for lovers, Elsperger thought, as he slid onto the Priokl’s polished wooden bench seat. Ideal for spies. So doubly ideal for lovers who were also spies.
Rüdiger was late. When was the dear boy ever anything else? But this, Elsperger thought, would be worth waiting for. Knowing that a bomb was planned, somewhere in Munich, limited the possibilities to a few: There was the opening of the House of German Art, in October. There was the annual commemoration and re-enactment of the Beer Hall Putsch, in November. Plus, it was common knowledge that Hitler returned to his beloved adopted city as often as he could, and still drank with the Old Fighters. So known Munich haunts like the Heck, the Ostaria Bavaria, the Café Neumayr at the Viktualienmarkt, or the Sternackerbraü in Tal were also possible.
Elsperger accepted a menu and ordered his favourite beer – Augustiner Pils. When it arrived, he waved the waitress – in her low-cut Bavarian dirndl – away. She reappeared when von Hessert finally turned up.
Rüdiger, all smooth bonhomie, ordered seasonal asparagus with hollandaise sauce and a Viertl of Alsace wine. Elsperger himself ordered a more manly dish of braised steak with onions and a second Pils. When his beer came, he licked the foam off it with his tongue, smacking his thick lips: he felt a wave of lust for Rudi.
Rüdiger stroked Elsperger’s hand behind the closed Priokl doors. ‘I’ve missed you,’ he said.
‘I’ve missed you, too.’ Elsperger’s pale-blue eyes blinked hard. He meant it.
When the food arrived, and the doors were once more closed, Rüdiger got down to business, with what he fondly imagined was subtlety: ‘A little bird told me the plans for the new art gallery have been postponed, which would be sad. Another little bird told me they haven’t. Do you know what’s going on?’
Elsperger was delighted. The art gallery was the most likely site for the bomb. He had already worked out what he would tell Rudi. Everything.
‘Troost said it couldn’t be done in time,’ said the SS-Captain, his moist mouth full of the Austrian-style dumpling that accompanied the braised steak. ‘But I believe the Führer had anticipated that. He is usually two or three steps ahead. That is why he is the Führer.’
‘So what did he do?’ Rudi said.
‘According to Himmler, a contingency plan was already in place, involving Speer. The Führer simply contacted Speer, in Berlin, and activated it.’
‘Don’t tell me. Speer can’t stand Troost. He saw his opportunity; he’s taken it over. It’s all going ahead as planned.’ Rudi was smiling, delighted, already imagining himself telling Ello the good news. He realised he would have to contact her quickly, before she and Sepp destroyed the dynamite.
‘Not exactly. Actually, baby-boy, Speer has more respect for old Troost than many people think. But, leaving that aside, he is ever the pragmatist is Speer. His plan was to go ahead with the ceremony, and just lay the foundation-stone.’
Rudi dabbed at herb-filled butter on his chin with his napkin, unsure whether this was good or bad. ‘So ...’
Elsperger fought down a smile as he put him out of his misery. ‘Apparently, this foundation-stone is a block of white granite,’ he said, ‘about waist high.’ He watched, with some amusement, while Rudi registered that this was big enough to put a bomb in.
‘The top will be hollowed out,’ Elsperger added casually. ‘The Führer will place a scroll in it, commemorating it as the First Stone of the New Reich.’
Rudi nodded, simulating the mildest of interest. He asked about Bärbel and the kids. Elpserger said, truthfully, how much they had enjoyed their skittles evening with Rudi. While he was speaking, he touched the morphine ampoules in his pocket. He had originall
y intended to give Rudi some at the end of the meal, but changed his mind. Suppose Rudi went home and swallowed them now, rather than leading him to the rest of the plotters?
Pleading an appointment, Elsperger hurried their meal to an end, opened the Priokl doors and paid. They parted outside the Ratskeller, in the sunshine, making plans to meet up again soon. As Rudi strolled off, Elsperger watched as a plain-clothes follower tailed him. Then he turned off the square and radioed for his car. It was there in seconds. It drove him to the von Hessert villa in Karolinen Platz, where Elsperger jumped out and sat in the back of a souped-up BMW, with an SS driver in civilian clothes. Elsperger had ordered it parked there immediately after Rudi phoned.
He should let someone else follow von Hessert, Elsperger realised that. But frankly he couldn’t resist it. He slid down low in the back. His radio crackled. The man he had put to follow von Hessert from the Ratskeller reported that he was on his way home.
Rudi went into the von Hessert villa, but emerged minutes later driving a brown Horch. Ever one to look the part, he had put on a white silk scarf and a pair of motoring goggles. He set off in the Horch so fast the engine screamed. Elsperger nodded to his driver to follow. The plotters would be rounded up, that very afternoon, he thought. Glory beckoned. The first thing he would do, when he received his massive promotion, was sideline that moaning hayseed Forster.
He wondered what line would be taken with Rudi. One way or another, the young fool would be looked after. He rather hoped so. It was difficult not to ... Elsperger bit his lower lip hard, to make himself concentrate on the issue at hand.
The Horch was heading north out of Munich. Elsperger was puzzled.
‘Keep him in sight,’ the SS-Captain called to the driver, suddenly alarmed.
But it was too late. Ahead of them were three hired open trucks, full of prisoners heading towards Dachau. Rudi threw the Horch into the convoy, then out, accelerating suddenly. The souped-up BMW got stuck behind one of the trucks, the driver hooting furiously. Then it couldn’t catch the Horch. It was out of sight. Von Hessert could have been heading anywhere – Augsburg, Ulm, even Stuttgart.
