But she had another surprise as they checked in that had him questioning everything he thought he knew about women. He had booked them adjoining rooms, but she made a point of asking if they were connecting and the look she gave him made his stomach lurch. In the corridor there was a moment when he thought she was waiting to be invited inside, but it passed before he could take advantage.
‘We’ll split the bill, OK?’ she insisted. ‘I told you I’d pay my way. I’d like to freshen up; maybe we can meet downstairs in an hour and go into town for something to eat?’
‘Of course, but I thought you wanted to see the castle later?’
‘No point, it’s Monday and the castle’s not open on Mondays.’
He looked at her in surprise. ‘How do you know that?’
She grinned and waved a tourist brochure she’d picked up at reception. ‘You gotta be prepared, Jamie, isn’t that what you Boy Scouts say. Or maybe you weren’t in the Boy Scouts?’
When the door closed behind her he hesitated for a few seconds, struggling to break the invisible elastic cord that drew him towards it. He’d been in the Scouts for four years, but it seemed he hadn’t learned one damned thing that was worthwhile.
The food, at a back street restaurant off Friedrichstrasse, was surprisingly good, as was the light German beer that washed it down. Sarah seemed sombre, which was unusual for her, but she came to life when he remarked on the number of English voices at the tables around them. ‘Didn’t you know? This is an army town, kinda like Colchester in England. Your Twentieth Armoured brigade does its exercises on the plain just to the north. Ten thousand Brits live round here, five thousand of them just up the road in Sennelager. People from England come to visit all the time.’
‘You’ve done your research.’
‘That’s what I’m here for.’ She smiled. ‘We’d better get back, breakfast is at eight.’
They said goodnight in the corridor and she reached up and kissed him on the cheek. He could still feel the heat of her lips as he lay awake three hours later.
Next day, they parked in the village and walked up through the narrow streets to the castle. It was still only nine-thirty and the museum didn’t open until ten, so they used the time to inspect the building and its surroundings.
‘This was the centre of Himmler’s power.’ Up close, the castle was enormous and Jamie felt dwarfed by the sheer scale of it. ‘It was to be a shrine to the Aryan race. Under the cover of an SS-Führerschule, an officer’s school, the SS leadership would have gathered here to study mysticism and the occult and to enact ancient long-forgotten ceremonies.’
‘I hate the place already,’ Sarah said, and he was surprised by the passion in her voice.
‘The castle was built by some German aristocrat in the seventeenth century, but it was more or less a ruin until Himmler took an interest in the early nineteen thirties. What you see is just a fraction of the complex he wanted to build here,’ Jamie continued earnestly. ‘It would have extended for miles, with eighteen separate towers and a huge SS barracks, all connected by roads laid out in a precise geometric pattern. You can read conspiracy theories that suggest it was going to be a landing ground for UFOs or the doorway to Nilfheim, one of the nine worlds of Norse mythology. No claim is too wild where Wewelsburg Castle is concerned. The SS attempted to blow the whole place up at the end of the war, but even with every explosive they had they barely made a dent in it. Eventually, they tried to burn it down, but the Yanks – sorry Americans – arrived before the fire damaged the main buildings and—’
‘And no one knows exactly what they found when they got here,’ she interrupted, determined not to be outdone. ‘Himmler had ordered that the Death’s Head rings of every fallen SS man should be kept here. He had some crazy idea that they absorbed the strength and courage of the soldiers who’d worn them. Eleven and a half thousand rings were believed to be stored in the castle’s crypt and vanished without trace at the end of the war. Hey, I can read, too. Look, the gates are open.’
They paid for tickets to the memorial museum and were directed to what had once been the castle guardhouse. A statuesque blonde girl in a white blouse and knee-length black skirt met them at the door.
‘English?’
‘How could you tell?’ Jamie asked. The two women looked at each other a certain way, like strangers who’d come across an injured rabbit and were debating whether to take it to the vet or put it out of its misery.
‘Maybe we should get on,’ Sarah said, smiling at the German girl.
‘Would you like a guided tour? Normally we only take parties of ten and more, but as you can see it is quiet this morning. I’d be happy to show you round.’
‘How much would that be?’
‘We usually charge forty-five euros, but since there are only two of you I could do it for twenty?’ She saw Jamie’s grimace. ‘Including your entry fee?’
He opened his mouth to say no, but Sarah spoke first.
‘That would be lovely,’ she said, unhitching her rucksack and pulling out a wallet to hand over two ten-euro notes.
While their guide went to inform the ticket desk, she hissed at him, ‘If I’d known you were this cheap I’d have paid for my own schnitzel last night. I thought we were here to find out about the castle and the symbol and their relationship to Himmler? We won’t do that stumbling around on our own looking at the walls. This way we’ll discover more than is in any guidebook.’
Jamie soaked up the rebuke. ‘I thought, if we were on our own,’ he explained with exaggerated patience, ‘we might be able to spend a little time alone with the symbol and get a really close look at it. There was method in my meanness.’
Her lips made a perfect circle. ‘Oh!’
‘This is the former gymnasium and the room the officers used for fencing practice.’ The girl, whose name tag said Magda, spoke a clipped, very formal English. ‘In nineteen eighty-two work began to transform it into a permanent museum to highlight the ideology and terror of the SS. As you see, it is an exhibition which encompasses the experiences of both the perpetrators and the victims.’
The exhibits and photographs were displayed on clean whiteboards beneath strip lights that gave the museum the atmosphere of a hospital operating theatre. Magda led them through a labyrinth of cubes and corridors, talking continuously and stopping occasionally to ask if they had any questions. The Death’s Head and lightning-flash runes attacked them from every angle and Jamie noticed that Sarah seemed almost cowed by the constant bombardment of evil. In one picture Heinrich Himmler, looking like an office clerk in a soldier’s borrowed uniform, chuckled with the architect of his Wewelsburg vision, Hermann Bartels. In another, Jamie noticed Heydrich’s elegant figure among a group who had come to the castle to discuss the creation of the Einsatzgruppen, the killing squads who had murdered one and a half million Jews, partisans and Communists in Russia and Poland.
‘Here you see the plan formulated by Bartels for the expansion of Wewelsburg.’ Magda pointed to a framed architect’s drawing, which showed the castle as a small element in a much larger complex. Broad avenues radiated from a semicircular compound surrounding the northern and western sides of the hill and what appeared to be blockhouses and bunkers dominated every crossroads and approach road. From the east, a single roadway approached arrow-straight to meet the base of a huge triangular building complex of which the castle, enormous in its own right, was only the tip. The scale of the project was astonishing and all the more so when you realized it was to be funded not by Germany’s Nazi government, but by the SS alone. ‘You will notice the shape of a spearhead and the shaft, which was to be a tree-lined avenue two kilometres in length.’ The guide pointed to the roadway. ‘This is said to be a portrayal of the Spear of Destiny, the legendary weapon that was used to pierce the side of Jesus Christ and which Himmler went to extraordinary lengths to find. The spear would be precisely aligned from south to north. He intended Wewelsburg to be the final repository of the spear. Work began on th
e redevelopment in nineteen forty, but it was never completed. This was fortunate for the villagers, whose homes were to be destroyed and whose land was to be flooded to form an artificial lake. Of course, such a project would require many workers. To this end Wewelsburg had its own KZ or concentration camp, Niederhagen, which provided slave labour.’
Dispassionately, she reeled off a string of statistics, from which Jamie picked up a single fact: of the close to four thousand prisoners held at the camp, one third had died of sickness or starvation or were worked to death in the quest to create Himmler’s dream.
‘Niederhagen was also used as an execution site by the local Gestapo,’ Magda continued. ‘It is recorded that fifty-six people were shot to death here, but we suspect the true figure may be much higher. You have heard the expression nacht und nebel?’
‘Night and fog. Code for people who disappeared without trace.’ Sarah’s voice sounded strained. ‘How did the local people feel about this?’
Magda looked puzzled. ‘Of course, they knew. How could they not? But there was nothing they could do. This was Hitler’s Germany. To voice dissent was to join the victims.’
‘No, I meant about this.’ The American waved her hand at the pictures of hollow-eyed men in striped suits labouring under the castle walls. ‘This was their shame. They couldn’t have enjoyed having it shoved in their faces fifty years after the war ended.’
Magda’s smile was shut off as if by a switch. ‘There was opposition, yes?’ Her English lost its assurance, the words thickening on her tongue. ‘Many people protest against the plans for an exhibition. They wish to forget. To – how is it you say? – sweep under carpet.’
‘And you, Magda?’ Jamie put a hand on Sarah’s arm as a signal to back off, but she shook it away. ‘What do you feel?’
The German woman stared at Sarah. ‘I have my own reasons for believing it is important to remember. One of my great grandfathers carried a knife just like that,’ she pointed to an SS dagger in a glass case, ‘and wore the Death’s Head on his collar. He served with the Das Reich panzer division in the Soviet Union and in France. For the first fifteen years of my life I was brought up to think of him as a hero. But then I began to read and to understand what happened in my country, and the things that were done in my country’s name.’
‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have . . . I understand.’
‘No, you do not understand. I had another great grandfather, a pastor in the town, and one of the few who did protest at the treatment of the prisoners in the camp. He was not a brave man, but felt he had an obligation to help these people. He is one of the fifty-six shot by the Gestapo. They burned his body and ground his bones into the dust. Now do you understand?’
Sarah nodded wordlessly.
‘One a hero and the other to be forgotten. But I will not let them forget. To us, the people of my generation, this is not just history. It is a lesson that we must never allow anything like it to happen again. We will go to the castle now.’
She led the way over the drawbridge and into the triangular courtyard. Jamie could see the German girl was struggling to control her emotions.
‘What the hell was that all about?’ he whispered.
‘I just wanted to know.’
‘Know what? None of this is new. You must have heard stories like that a hundred times.’
‘Yes, but this isn’t stories. This is where it happened. People died to create this monstrosity for a megalomaniac. This place is evil. Can’t you feel it? It’s as if the spirits of the SS are still here in the walls all around us. They should have blown the whole damned thing to kingdom come.’
Jamie stared at her.
‘Look, I’m sorry. Maybe it’s something in the air. I’m over it now. Forgive me?’
‘OK,’ he said, and took her hand as they walked through the door of the north tower and into the heart of Himmler’s Camelot.
XXI
‘THIS WAS TO be the centre of the world.’
The phrase stirred something on the outer limits of Jamie’s memory, but he struggled to place it as Magda’s hypnotic voice echoed eerily around the walls. Inside the crypt the only light came from a series of small windows set in the domed ceiling. Out there in the sunlight, Himmler’s obsession with the occult might appear foolish, even comical, but here in the darkness it took on a frightening reality. The room was empty but a shallow basin five paces across and surrounded by a low concrete wall dominated the centre of the floor.
‘Above you, the hackenkreuz, the swastika symbol of the Nazi party.’ She pointed to an ornate carving in the centre of the ceiling. ‘It is physically linked to the famous Black Sun which is the centrepiece of the room above us.’ Jamie tensed at the mention of the sun symbol and his eyes met Sarah’s. The American girl’s face appeared unnaturally pale in the gloom. He was reminded of an image he had once seen of an avenging angel with a fiery sword; firm of purpose, grim and unyielding. Something had changed since they had left London. This had been his quest and she had tagged along more or less on a whim. Yet with every hour that passed it was clear her emotional commitment to the search increased. It was as if the only way she could combat the aura of evil around them was by creating a super-hardened shield of her own. He had felt her strength right from the first, but he began to understand that this new Sarah Grant had a core of steel.
‘Here were to be stored the Death’s Head honour rings of every SS officer who fell in battle. You see.’ Magda knelt by the basin and indicated a short piece of copper pipe just visible in the very centre. ‘An eternal flame would have burned to prove that the spirit of the SS warrior was unquenchable. The rings were the personal gift of Himmler and as well as the Totenkopf they were also engraved with rune symbols and the name of the bearer. It is said that the crypt was to be Himmler’s last resting place, but as you know, that was not to be.’
Jamie struggled to contain his simmering impatience. Sarah hovered by the doorway and he could see that she, too, was desperate to reach the sun symbol. Now that he was within feet of the symbol itself, he felt the chilly fingers of doubt close around his heart. Every inch of this vainglorious Nazi monument had some sordid story to tell of murder or madness, slavery or repression, but what was the secret behind Matthew Sinclair’s silk map? What if there was no message? What if the Black Sun was simply a decoration? No, his grandfather wouldn’t have left him the map unless it contained some kind of clue and the clue had to be visible in the original.
‘Now we will proceed to the Obergruppenführersaal, the Hall of the Generals.’
Magda led the way to the ground floor and through a doorway – where they were met by a barred metal grille. Behind it Jamie could see a large empty room encircled by stone pillars and windowed alcoves. He held his breath as he prepared to look upon the true Black Sun for the first time. The guide’s next words made him feel as if he’d been kicked in the stomach.
‘Unfortunately, the hall is closed for special cleaning, but if you move to the front you will be able to see everything and I will explain it for you.’
Jamie felt Sarah stiffen beside him. He turned on Magda and gave her his hundred-watt smile.
‘But we’ve come all the way from England to see this.’ He sighed. ‘The Hall of the Generals was always going to be the highlight of our trip. Surely you could let us in for a few minutes?’
‘Please?’ Sarah added. For a moment he thought that membership of the sisterhood would achieve what charm was patently incapable of doing. Magda retrieved her keys from her jacket and fiddled nervously with one that was large and silver. He saw the conflicting arguments race across her face. She was a nice girl who enjoyed helping people. Truly, she wanted to help them. But she was also a good German girl, and despite all her unease about the war and what had happened here, a good German girl still obeyed orders. If her manager said this gate stayed closed until Thursday, then that’s what would happen. She shook her head and returned her keys to her pocket.
‘I’m sorry
, I cannot.’ Her face mirrored the genuine regret in her voice. ‘But please, ask me anything you wish.’
They looked through the bars at the Black Sun twenty feet away in the centre of the marble floor and as available for close inspection as if it had been on the moon. Jamie was surprised when Sarah smiled and enquired what the room had been used for.
Magda smiled back, relieved the moment of confrontation was past.
‘The Obergruppenführersaal and the crypt below are the only two rooms in the north tower known to have been completed to Himmler’s satisfaction. This was to be the meeting hall of the twelve generals, the Obergruppenführer, who commanded the Allgemeine-SS.’ She saw Jamie’s puzzlement. ‘What one might call the civil SS, as opposed to the Waffen-SS, who were the military arm. You will count twelve alcoves and twelve pillars, perhaps the alcoves would have contained statues of these men, yes? Twelve generals, as there were twelve Knights of the Round Table. If you half close your eyes you will be able to imagine a round table in the centre of the room and beneath it the Black Sun, the centre of Himmler’s universe.’
‘Are you saying that Himmler really thought he was King Arthur?’ Jamie laughed.
Magda smiled again. ‘Perhaps that is more difficult to imagine, he was such a . . . a kümmerling.’ The word meant runt of the litter, but more besides. ‘But his interest in the occult was very real. It extended even to the search for a forgotten race of superhumans who were the forerunners of the Aryan people.’
Something puzzled Sarah. ‘What was it that made the Black Sun so important? If it was the centrepiece of Himmler’s world it must have been of enormous significance?’
Magda frowned. ‘It is one of the enigmas of Wewelsburg,’ she admitted. ‘No one knows for certain. This was to be the room of the great mysteries. The inner sanctum, like the cella of a Roman temple. To understand the significance of the Black Sun, you had to be one of the twelve men versed in the mysteries. It is certainly a form of sun wheel, perhaps of pagan origin. As the planets of the solar system revolve around the central figure of the sun, so Germany, and perhaps the rest of the world, must revolve around Himmler and his SS. At one time a gold disc formed the centre of the Black Sun. The sun is the giver of life, so the Black Sun could give life or take it away. But that is only my own theory.’
The Doomsday Testament Page 12
