by Michael Dean
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Michman, J The Controversial Stand of the Joodse Rad in the Netherlands: Lodewijk E Visser’s Struggle: Yad Vashem Studies
Presser, J Ashes in the Wind: The Destruction of Dutch Jewry (1968) Souvenir Press
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Rose, L The Tulips are Red A S Barnes & Company, 1978
Schellenberg, W The Labyrinth: Memoirs of Walther Schellenberg Da Capo Press, 2000
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Van der Zwan, A H.-M Hirschfeld: In de ban van de macht, Amsterdam 2004
Hour Zero
A Nazi Hunter thriller
Michael Dean
This story is respectfully dedicated to the real Major John Lindsay and the real Wilhelm Keil.
Chapter 1
Ludwigsburg, south Germany, August 1922
Hitler was more nervous about the meeting in Ludwigsburg than he let on. For one thing, it would be the first Party rally since his three months’ imprisonment in Stadelheim, back in Munich, for breach of the peace. He had got out at the end of July. It was now mid-August.
But even more importantly, it was the first Party rally outside Munich. Gone were the certainties of his base at the Munich Hofbrἂuhaus, and even the gigantic Circus Krone, where he had added further refinements in moulding the minds and managing the emotions of the masses.
He had so often told himself Munich was his home city that he had come to believe it. And in Munich, constantly at his side, he had the few acolytes he could trust: Dietrich Eckart, Hans Frank and the comforting bulk of Max Amann, his old sergeant from the army days.
It was Dietrich Eckart who had chosen Ludwigsburg for this expansion out of Bavaria. Ludwigsburg was in the familiar southern part of Germany, but in Swabia, just outside the state capital, Stuttgart. It was a small town; Eckart thought that was better than a big city for this first tentative step outside Munich. Also, Eckart had found a man in Ludwigsburg, Karl Wagner, who was not only a Party member but owned a venue, The Stern Inn.
*
Hitler, his acolytes and the SA Hall Guard marched from Ludwigsburg station, in the sultry Swabian heat – the area was not called ‘The Kettle’ for nothing. Their thick brown uniform shirts – ex-colonial stock – were soaked in sweat patches in less than ten minutes. They steamed their way north along Bahnhofstrasse, then Schillerstrasse, heading for Ludwigsburg’s famous palace.
In the tree-lined streets of the pretty baroque town, planned from scratch in grids and squares by King Eberhard Ludwig in the eighteenth-century, there were easily enough brown-shirted SA to hold back the sparse crowds, gawping at the strangely uniformed men in their sweaty shirts and scruffy brown boots.
The little army finally stopped at the Stern, which squatted heavily in Mompelgardstrasse, diagonally opposite the massive yellow-baroque palace. The host, Karl Wagner, in his blue innkeeper’s apron, respectfully showed them the room where Hitler was to speak.
It would hold about a hundred, which was perfect. The place had to be full, that was essential. But Max Amann’s military eye immediately took in the inadequacy of the fifty or so SA from Hitler’s Hall Guard fighters, which was all they had brought with them, to guard this venue.
They would be enough if there was no trouble, or just heckling, but far from enough if there was an organised attack. There were three entrances to be guarded, too many windows, and there was open ground outside.
They had listened to Dietrich Eckart, who had wanted to save money by bringing fewer fighters. Amann was cursing under his breath. Hitler looked scared already.
‘How likely is trouble?’ grunted Amann to their host.
Even the physically imposing Max Amann looked up when he talked to their host, Karl Wagner. Wagner was a colossus, just under seven feet tall and broad as the proverbial barn door, of which there many in rural Swabia. The sight of him was reassuring to Hitler’s inner cohort. But his words were not.
‘Trouble? More than likely.’
‘Sure?’ That was Eckart. The sickly pamphleteer and would-be intellectual was no fighter.
Karl Wagner nodded his round cannon ball of a head, furred with close-cropped brown hair as if he had wrapped it for protection. His features were blunt, homely, all of which conspired to give everything he said an air of authority, if not inevitability. Like many men of massive stature he spoke concisely, not needing words very much or very often.
‘There’s a KPD group – our local communists. They’re based at a factory near here, the Bleyle Textile factory on Schorndorferstrasse. They’ve torn down some of the notices about the rally.’
Wagner nodded his cannon ball head at the counter where they served the beer. There were a few torn-up and defaced red notices advertising the evening’s event, waiting to be cleared away. The bold black lettering was no longer legible on most of them.
‘That’s just from today,’ Wagner said. ‘As fast as we put them up, they tore them down. Or wrote on them.’
Max Amann and the much younger Hans Frank – still in his early twenties – looked at each other. Both ignored Eckart and Hitler, who they knew would be no help. Hitler was already licking his lips nervously, face starting to twitch.
The SA Hall Guard had spread themselves around the place. Some had helped themselves to beer, without paying for it. Others were checking the entrances, making judgements honed from nearly two years of pitched battles with the Social Democrats and the communists in Munich.
‘We’ll do what we can,’ Amann said. ‘We’d better hope it’s enough.’
But it wasn’t.
*
They got a full house, alright. Hitler made them all wait nearly fifteen minutes, and then made his grand entrance down the centre-aisle. They even had some bundles of wood in braziers mounted on the wall set on fire at the dramatic moment of Hitler’s entrance through the dimly lit beer hall.
Hitler, in his SA uniform with the red armband, then paused at the rickety desk Karl Wagner had borrowed from the nearest school. He made the audience wait again before he started. No fear in him now.
He was about to speak.
The uniform was too big for him at the shoulders, but he swelled into it in the half-light. He shouted, exhorted and harangued. What he said mattered less than how he said it. The audience knew what they were going to get, that was the whole point: there was the ‘scandal and humiliation’ of the Treaty of Versailles; there was Germany being sold down the river by the ‘politicians of the shit democracy in Berlin’, with ‘brains like sheep’; there were the ‘Jewish profiteers and racketeers’ – this long awaited and expected item getting the loudest cheers.
The speech would have lasted two hours, if a brick hadn’t smashed through one of the large sheet-glass windows after twenty minutes.
The Communist attack was well-organised, as they usually were, and as the Nazi attacks on Communist meetings were. As Amann had feared, their fighters – not uniformed but no less military for that – attacked all three entrances at once, running at the doors with momentum from the open ground.
For the first time ever, Hitler was brought to a halt, mid-rant. His eyes started streaming and his breath became laboured – his gassing from the war hit him again, as it did in moments of fear. He searched longingly for the best of his fighters to surround him; men like Amann, Emil Maurice, the tubby but tough Christian Weber, Hermann Esser and Graf and Rosenberg.
And surround him they did, at the beginning. But they were drawn further and further into the middle of the hall as the fighting grew more intense – with beer steins, wooden batons and chair legs as weapons. They were pulled even further away as the Nazis started to lose the fight. Many of the audience were now startin
g to run for it, making their way through the mayhem to the exits as best they could.
Emil Maurice, one of the handful who used the familiar Du to address Hitler, was pouring blood from a head wound. Amann was yelling to get Hitler out of there. Hitler himself was still motionless behind the table, mouthing but not speaking.
In front of him, their host, Karl Wagner, had been fighting with grey clay beer steins used as massive knuckle-dusters over each hand. He turned to Hitler.
‘Follow me,’ he yelled to Hitler above the din. ‘I’ll get you out of here.’
Hitler grew calmer, sensing salvation. He nodded, puffed himself up, then softly said, ‘Lead on.’
Karl Wagner took him by the shoulders and propelled him to the back of the hall, where the fighting was still thin. Breathing heavily, he reached under the now torn apron for a bunch of keys. Two communists rushed at him but some of Hitler’s supporters had seen what he was doing. Weber and Maurice dispatched the would-be attackers.
The key Wagner eventually found was of almost medieval size, a monstrous iron thing. He inserted it into a door which was painted to look like part of the rear wall. The iron door opened about a foot, and then stopped. Wagner pushed Hitler through then followed, slamming the door behind them and locking and bolting it from the inside.
He led the way down dank stone stairs into an underground passage hollowed out from the limestone rock Ludwigsburg was hewn from.
Hitler was recovering his composure. ‘Where does this come out?’
‘The palace. But there is a side-exit through a chamber to open-ground. We’ll take that.’
Wagner did not point out that the tunnel had been dug on the instructions of Joseph Sṻsskind Oppenheimer. It led from Oppenheimer’s own house, in Mompelgardstrasse, to the palace. Oppenheimer, who was Jewish, had been Regent to Duke Carl Alexander in the eighteenth century. He had laid the foundations of the town’s prosperity, massively boosting its exchequer, starting its most famous industry, porcelain.
Wagner knew all this perfectly well, as did any citizen of Ludwigsburg. There was the faintest of smiles playing round his thick lips as he led Hitler along the secret subterranean passage the Jewish regent was responsible for.
Hitler was looking around as he walked, fascinated now he sensed he was free of danger.
‘Look,’ he said, like a child. ‘Greco-Roman remains.’
The large sunken bath they were passing still had much of the low wall intact, around it.
As Wagner knew, it was a Mikvah – a Jewish ritual cleansing bath which Oppenheimer had ordered built down here at the height of his powers.
‘Indeed, yes, mein Fṻhrer,’ Wagner said, using the new term Hess and come up with for Hitler as ‘leader’. Hitler pouted, still not used to it.
Wagner smiled. ‘Not long to go now.’
When they finally emerged, through the secret chamber, out into the night air of the palace grounds, Hitler was exhilarated by his underground walk through the remains. He was also impressed by his loyal massive guide.
Hitler trusted few but trusted deeply, sensing his own considerable inner weakness. He was ready to add to the small treasury of his inner cohort. Breathing heavily in the damp August air, with the bulk of the palace a humped shadow behind him, Hitler beamed at the colossus and spoke.
‘I need a personal bodyguard,’ he said. ‘Someone who will be with me at all times. I want you to be that man.’
Wagner thought for a second of his inn, and decided his wife could run it. He did not really hesitate. ‘I would be honoured, mein Fṻhrer,’ he said.
Chapter 2
Ludwigsburg, April 1938
At the age of fifteen, Barbara Ketz was having a hard time in her last year in the Girls’ High School, in Mathildenstrasse, right in the centre of Ludwigsburg. For one thing, she was from outside the area. Born in the Ruhr, in Duisburg, she still spoke with a Kohlenpott accent which sounded guttural to the local girls and they laughed at it. Then there was her appearance. Some of the girls had decided her big nose made her look Jewish. So they gave her the nickname ‘Synagogue-nose’ and made a thumb-on-nose finger-wiggling gesture at her. The fact that she had no mother – her mother had died of flu back in the Ruhr when she was a baby – added to the list of differences which marked her out as a target.
But at the top of that list, the first item on the charge-sheet against her in the eyes of her schoolmates was her father. Fritz Ketz was actually a handsome man, fine-featured, tall with an elegant slim build. Some of Barbara’s tormentors secretly found him attractive when he appeared at the school for Harvest Festival or the Nativity Play at Christmas.
However, Fritz Ketz was an artist. It was art which had brought them to Ludwigsburg. Fritz had studied under the esteemed Alexander Eckener at the Academy of Art in Stuttgart. That was in 1932.
But after 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor, Ketz was seen as a ‘purveyor’, as it was called, of Entartete Kunst – art that was so deviant it was ‘outside the species’, the term ‘entartet’ having been borrowed from parasitology.
By 1938, the Ketz home at 83 Stuttgarterstrasse was subject to weekly visits from the Gestapo to make sure that no ‘Deviant Art’ was being produced on the premises. Fritz Ketz continued to paint, trying to make sure his output met the requirements of barmy Nazi art theory, but he did not know how much longer he could carry on under these conditions.
It was too nerve-wracking, he kept telling Barbara. If a painting was found deviant he could be led through the streets barefoot with a placard round his neck, as they were doing to the Jews – the Jewish horse dealers, butchers, doctors and dentists, whose families had lived in Ludwigsburg for centuries.
That day, that fateful day in 1938, had started well for Barbara. The young and lively Frau Lἂmmle, teacher of English and German, was adored by her pupils. The girls in Class 9 had wanted to make her something special for her birthday. Her star pupil at English, Barbara Ketz, had suggested a quilt, made up of patchwork tiles, each tile being a picture from Frau Lἂmmle’s life. The suggestion was well-received among Barbara’s classmates.
Then Barbara, with her artistic talent inherited from Papa Fritz, took the lead in designing and making the quilt. The gift was presented to Frau Lἂmmle, who was so genuinely pleased with it she cried. So ‘synagogue nose’ had a rare day in the sun – though they had not let her be one of those who presented the gift.
Even so, Barbara went home happy at the end of the school day, only to find her Papa in the blackest of despair. He had already lost so much weight his clothes were hanging off him. He was pacing their tiny front-room agitatedly.
‘It’s all got to go,’ he blurted out even before Barbara could tell him about her lovely day. ‘It’s got to go tonight. Every single painting.’ He stopped, nervously biting at his thumbnail. ‘No, not every one, we’ll keep a couple back in case they get suspicious. But most of it.’
‘Papa, don’t! You’re just…’ She stopped. Just what? Just driven to the point of despair?
‘Raschke will be here tomorrow,’ Fritz Ketz said.
This was Josef Raschke. They sent the same Gestapo man to inspect the pictures every Thursday afternoon, at exactly the same time. He exercised his power over them by joshing about how hungry he was, then eating them out of house and home. That was Raschke’s idea of a joke.
‘Barbara, I’ve got everything ready for you. I’ve got hold of a handcart. Look!’ Fritz waved an arm wildly. Barbara looked round behind her. There was indeed a handcart in the corner of the room, behind the table. The paintings had already been loaded onto it. ‘This evening, when it gets dark, take it to the woods and burn all the pictures. I’ve got some kerosene and matches.’
Tears came to Barbara’s eyes. She understood only too well that her father could not bear to destroy the paintings himself.
*
It was spring, a mild night. Darkness came at about seven. She was heading for a copse of oak, ash and fir trees near the grounds o
f the palace. The Hitler Youth often had camps there, so smoke would arouse no particular notice.
Barbara was shivering in her thin, pale yellow cotton dress with its lace at the neck and cuffs. She had thought the spring evening too warm for a coat, but now was not so sure. She took the paintings out of the handcart. Then she laid twigs and small branches, intending to start a fire.
As she moved about, she was once again conscious of her breasts. She hoped they did not become too big. She was uncomfortably aware that boys, and sometimes even grown men, had started staring at her. She did not like it very much.
‘What on earth are you doing?’
‘Oh!’ One hand went to her mouth as she screamed, though the voice was more curious than threatening. She spun round.
‘Sorry! I didn’t mean to frighten you.’
‘I…you…’
He was about the largest human being she had ever seen. Standing there in a hacking jacket and endless trousers he looked about the same height as the trees. The fuzz of brown hair made him look as if he was wearing a helmet. Then she remembered who he was. She did not go into beer halls, but she knew him as the landlord of the Stern, who was away a lot now doing some high-up job in Munich.
‘Herr Wagner, I…’ Her mouth went dry.
He was staring at her, looking her up and down. ‘Aren’t you that Ketz girl? The painter’s daughter?’
‘Yes, I …’
‘And you’re burning his paintings, right? Does he know you’re doing that?’
‘Yes! Of course he does! He …’
‘He told you to. Yes, I see. Deviant art, eh?’
‘Well …’ She felt herself blushing.
‘I wouldn’t worry about all that, if I were you. It will all blow over soon.’
‘Will it?’
‘Oh yes! Lot of fuss about nothing. Look, I tell you what. I’ve got some paintings stored at my place. Underground. We’ll take your father’s stuff down there. And we’ll keep it there ‘till the fuss dies down. Our secret, eh? Just you and me.’ Karl Wagner smiled at her.
