by Philip Kerr
All the time he talked to Schellenberg, Bormann clutched a small black leather notebook in which he took down all the Führer’s queries and orders. During meals with Hitler, Bormann was forever making notes that might result in a reprimand for one officer, or a death sentence for another. Not for nothing was Bormann regarded as the most powerful man in Germany, after Hitler. At the same time, the impression gained by Schellenberg on the few occasions he had been in the Führer’s presence was that, not infrequently, Bormann passed on as firm orders from Hitler what were really no more than casual dinner-table remarks, or, worse, Bormann’s own ideas to serve his personal ends.
“But,” said Bormann, “you wanted to talk about Himmler, didn’t you?” He opened the notebook to reveal a pencil that was as short and stubby as one of his own fingers: the impression of a butcher about to write down some housewife’s order might have made Schellenberg smile, but for the obvious dangers of what he was doing.
“Doubtless you are aware that it was me who took the Führer’s letters to Stockholm,” said Schellenberg.
Bormann nodded.
“And that I have a good idea of the nature of those letters.”
Bormann kept on nodding.
“What you are not aware of, perhaps, is that Reichsführer Himmler has also been feeling out the Allies with a view to a change of regime. Following a meeting in the Reich Ministry of the Interior on August twenty-sixth, an old acquaintance of Himmler’s, Carl Langbehn, traveled to Berne to meet Allen Dulles, the station head for the American intelligence service.”
At last, Bormann started writing.
“Is he the chiropractor?”
“No, that’s someone else. Langbehn is a lawyer. I believe his daughter goes to school with Himmler’s daughter, on the Walchensee. You may even remember that it was Langbehn who offered to defend the Communist leader, Ernst Torgler, at the time of the Reichstag fire. Now, I have a spy within the Free French in Switzerland, and thanks to him I am in possession of a copy of a telegram, sent to London, which says, and I quote, ‘Himmler’s lawyer confirms the hopelessness of Germany’s military and political situation and has arrived to put out peace feelers.’ Naturally I will furnish you with all the documentary evidence you need of the Reichsführer’s treason in this matter. I did not act until I was quite sure, you understand. You do not go up against Himmler unless you are sure.”
“You were just as sure when you went up against von Ribbentrop, weren’t you?” objected Bormann. “And yet you failed to deliver his head.”
“True. But it was Himmler who saved his neck. The only person who could save Himmler’s neck is Hitler.”
“Go on.”
“For a while now it has seemed to me that by offering to seize power from the Führer and negotiate a peace, and in exchange for their approval to continue the war against the Soviet Union, Himmler entertains hopes of some kind of personal absolution from Britain and America.”
“And what is you own opinion of that, Walter? Of continuing the war against the Soviet Union?”
“Insanity. At all costs we must make peace with the Russians. My own intelligence sources suggest that Stalin’s greatest fear is that the Red Army will mutiny because of the appalling casualties it is sustaining. If we make peace with the Russians before next spring, we will have nothing to fear from the Americans and the British. They would hardly risk a second front if Russia was out of the war. Himmler’s plan shows no understanding of the political practicalities here, Martin. Next year is an election year for Roosevelt. It would be suicide for him to go into an election while the United States Army incurs the kind of casualties now being received by the Red Army in order to liberate Europe. Which they would if Russia were no longer a belligerent.”
Martin Bormann was still nodding, but he had stopped writing, and his reaction had hardly been what Schellenberg had expected. Bormann hated Himmler, and Schellenberg thought he ought to have looked more obviously pleased at having just been handed the means of destroying his greatest enemy.
NO LESS PUZZLING to Schellenberg was Hitler’s own demeanor. Over dinner that night, Hitler seemed in such excellent spirits that Schellenberg was quite certain Bormann could not have told him of Himmler’s treachery. When Hitler left the table for coffee in his drawing room, Bormann slipped outside for a quick cigarette, and Schellenberg followed.
“Have you told him?”
“Yes,” said Bormann. “I told him.”
“Are you sure?”
“What kind of idiot do you take me for? Of course I’m sure.”
“Then I don’t understand. I still remember the Führer’s reaction six months ago, in Vinnica, when there was news about a heavy bombing raid in Nuremberg. How angry he was with Göring.”
Bormann laughed. “Yes, I remember that, too. It was great to watch, wasn’t it? The fat bastard’s been a bad smell around here ever since.”
“Then why isn’t Hitler angry? After twenty years of friendship. Why isn’t he furious with Himmler?”
Bormann shrugged.
“Unless.” Schellenberg threw his own cigarette onto the ground and stamped on it. “Of course. It’s the only possible explanation. The Führer has had a reply to at least one of those letters I took to Stockholm. That’s why Himmler’s not been arrested, isn’t it? Because the Führer doesn’t want anything to interfere with these secret peace negotiations. And because Himmler now has the perfect alibi for what he’s been doing all these months.”
Bormann looked up at the freezing black Prussian sky and blew out a long column of cigarette smoke, as if trying to blot out the moon. For a moment or two he said nothing; then, stamping his feet against the cold, he nodded.
“You’re a clever man, Walter. But there are things happening right now to which you can’t be a party. Secret things. On the diplomatic front. Himmler and von Ribbentrop are in the driver’s seat, for the moment at least. The time will inevitably come when Himmler will have to be dealt with. The Führer recognizes this. And until then, your loyalty has been noted.” Bormann took a last drag from his cigarette and flicked the butt into the trees. “Besides, you’re our ace in the hole, remember? You and your team of cutthroats and murderers in Iran. If Hitler’s peace comes to nothing, then we are going to have need of your Operation Long Jump after all.”
“I see,” said Schellenberg gloomily.
“I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you. If things work out, then the war will be over by Christmas. And if they don’t, well, that’s good, too. I mean, the Big Three, they’ll hardly be expecting us to try to kill them while we’re still exchanging love letters, will they?”
“No, I suppose not.”
They returned to the dinner table, where they found themselves jeered by Hitler.
“Here they are. The nicotine addicts. You know something?” Hitler had turned to address his other dinner guests, who included some of the General Staff and a couple of stenographers. “As soon as peace has returned I’m going to abolish the soldier’s tobacco ration. We can make better use of our foreign currency than squandering it on imports of poison. I’ve a good mind even to make smoking illegal in our public buildings. So many men I’ve known have died of excessive use of tobacco. My father, first of all. Eckhart. Troost. It will be your turn, Schellenberg, if you don’t quit soon. Not many people know it, but I’m ashamed to confess that I used to be a smoker myself. This was thirty years ago, mind you, when I was living in Vienna. I was living on milk, dry bread, and forty cigarettes a day. Can you imagine it? Forty. Well, one day I worked out that I was spending as much as thirty kreuzers a day on cigarettes, but that for just five kreuzers I could have some butter on my bread.” Hitler chuckled at the memory of his time in Vienna. “Well, as soon as I had worked that out I threw my cigarettes into the Danube, and ever since that day I’ve never smoked again.”
Schellenberg stifled a yawn and glanced, surreptitiously, at his watch as Hitler complained about all the cigarette burns he had found in the carpets an
d on the furniture at the Reich Chancellery. Then Hitler abruptly returned to the subject of peace, or at least his own peculiar idea of peace.
“As I see it, we have two goals from any peace that is negotiated,” he said. “First, we must avoid paying any war indemnities. Each country must bear its own costs. With this achieved, we can reduce our war debt from two trillion to a hundred billion marks a year. I want us to become the only belligerent of this war to be free of our war debts within ten years and to be in a position to concentrate on rebuilding our armed forces. Because, as a general principle, a peace that lasts more than twenty-five years is harmful to a nation. Peoples, like individuals, sometimes need regenerating by a little bloodletting.
“My second goal is that we leave our successors some problems to solve. If we don’t, then they’ll have nothing to do but sleep. That’s why we must resist disarmament at all costs. So we can leave our successors with the means to solve their problems. But peace can only result from a natural order. And the condition of this order is that there is a hierarchy among nations. Any peace that doesn’t recognize this is doomed to failure.
“Of course, it’s Jewry that always destroys this order. It’s the Jew who would try to destroy these negotiations, but for the fact that we still hold the fate of about three million Jews in our hands. Roosevelt, who is in thrall to the Jewish vote in America, will not risk the destruction of what remains of Europe’s Jewry. I tell you this: that race of criminals will be wiped out in Europe if the Allies don’t make a peace. They know it. And I know it. If for some reason they don’t make peace, it will only be because they recognize the truth of what I have always said: that the discovery of the Jewish virus is one of the greatest revelations that has taken place in the twentieth century. Yes, the world will only regain its strength and health by eliminating the Jew.
“If the Allies fail to make a peace with us, it will only be because they want to see the removal of this Jewish problem as much as we do. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens.”
XIX
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 1943,
CAIRO
THE HEADQUARTERS OF SOE—British military intelligence in Cairo—was a supposedly secret location on Rostom Street that every taxi driver and street waif in the city seemed to know as “the secret building,” much to the irritation of those who worked there. Since the battle of El Alamein, it was the most important military building in Cairo. It was located in a large and ornate block of apartments right next door to the American legation and only a stone’s throw from “Grey Pillars,” the British GHQ.
The area outside Rostom Buildings was surrounded with checkpoints, barbed wire, and dozens of soldiers. Inside, the atmosphere was of a busy department store. It was here that the whole military effort in the Balkans was centered, most of it related to finding safe places in Yugoslavia where the new missions could be deployed.
“Of course, they’re much more formal than we are,” explained General Donovan as he and I climbed the stairs behind a young lieutenant escorting us up to the office of the SOE’s operational commander. “But I think you’ll see some similarities. They’re mostly academics, like us. Not much regular army. Soldiers are probably not bright enough for this outfit. The fellow who’s nominally in charge, General Stawell, is a good example. He has absolutely no experience of running a secret organization. Which is why we’re seeing his number two, Lieutenant Colonel Powell. Quite an interesting fellow, this Powell. I think you’ll like him. Like you, he was a professor before the war. Of Greek, at the University of Sydney.”
“Is he Australian?”
“Good grief, no, he’s as English as they come. Stiff as a board to look at. But as bright as new paint.”
Carrying Donovan’s Louis Vuitton suitcase, I trudged up the steps like a man ascending the scaffold.
Colonel Enoch Powell was a curious man. Donovan and I looked like a pair of wilted wedding cakes in our white tropical suits, but unlike his two junior officers and in spite of the heat, Powell was wearing full service dress: a collar and tie, long trousers (not the more usual shorts), tunic, and Sam Browne belts.
Donovan made the introduction. Noting my quizzical look, Powell felt moved to explain his appearance in a reedy, almost musical voice that spoke sentences as precise as any Mozart concerto.
“It’s a curious fact but I find that wearing full uniform keeps up my morale,” Powell explained. “By temperament I am something of a Spartan, you see.” Powell lit a pipe and sat down. “I wonder. Are you the Willard Mayer who wrote On Being Empirical ?”
I said I was.
“In many ways it was an admirable philosophical work,” said Powell. “But quite wrong. I hope you will forgive me when I opine that your chapter on ethics was the most puerile piece of logic I have ever read. Sheer casuistry.”
“Well, Colonel,” I said, “I am an Athenian by temperament. I doubt that an Athenian and a Spartan are ever destined to agree about very much.”
“We shall see,” smiled Powell.
“Besides, I was describing not a first-order ethical theory but a theory of the logic of moral language.”
“Indeed so. I merely question your implied assertion that our moral and aesthetic convictions are separable from our empirical beliefs.”
Donovan cleared his throat, loudly, to stifle this philosophical debate before it could really get started. “Gentlemen,” he said. “If I could ask you to postpone this debate until another time.”
“By all means,” agreed Powell. “I should like a chance to debate you, Professor Mayer. Perhaps over dinner this evening? At the Gezira Sporting Club?”
“I’m sorry but I have a prior engagement. Another time, perhaps.”
“Then let us talk of your Russian transcripts,” said Powell. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but cipherenes are in rather short supply right now.”
“Cipherenes?” frowned Donovan.
“Cipherists, if you prefer,” allowed the colonel. “Or even decipherers. Either way, there is a huge backlog of important signals traffic that has yet to be decoded. German signals to which, per-force, a greater degree of urgency is due. They are our own bread and butter, General Donovan. Since we are not yet at war with the Soviet Union, but with Germany, I am afraid that I cannot grant your material a greater priority, with or without the facility of a Russian codebook. You do understand, gentlemen?”
I breathed a sigh of relief. “Yes, I understand, perfectly,” I told him.
“However,” added Colonel Powell, “our Major Deakin believes he may have a somewhat unorthodox solution to your problem.” Powell turned to one of the two majors who were sitting on either side of him. “Major Deakin taught history at Wadham College, Oxford,” added Powell, as if this were some kind of recommendation for the British major’s solution to our problem.
Major Deakin was a tall, genial man with a dark, clipped mustache and a wry sort of smile. He was handsome in a second-feature movie kind of way, except that he had a long scar over one eye. He picked a piece of tobacco off his tongue and smiled awkwardly. “Colonel Guy Tamplin would have been your best bet, of course,” he said. “He used to be a banker in the Baltic states and was an expert on all things Russian. Unfortunately, he’s dead. Heart attack, most probably, although there’s a lot of guff going around that he was poisoned. Poison was one of Guy’s pigeons, you see, for using on Jerry. It’s Guy’s death that has left us a bit shorthanded on the deciphering side of things.”
Donovan nodded patiently, hoping that Major Deakin was about to come to the point.
“Anyway, it’s my understanding that you, Professor Mayer, speak fluent German.”
“That’s right.”
“All right. A couple of days ago one of your B-24s with an antisubmarine squadron in Tunis shot down a long-range Focke Wulf over the Gulf of Hammamet and picked up a German officer swimming for it. It’s possibly because he’s so keen not to be taken for a spy that he’s actually being quite talkative. Claims that until r
ecently he was working for the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau in the Ukraine.”
At the mention of war crimes in the Ukraine I felt my ears prick up.
“I’m not sure how that helps us,” Donovan said stiffly.
“Before joining the Jerry War Crimes Bureau, this chap claims he was a signals and intelligence officer, on the Russian front. The chances are he might know something about Russian codes. Well, put simply, my idea is this. That we persuade the Jerry to see if he can shed some light on deciphering Bride.”
“What makes you think he’ll cooperate?” I said.
“As I said, he’s rather keen that we don’t think he’s a spy. In case we should decide to shoot him. He’s not a bad egg, really. Quite intelligent. Major Max Reichleitner’s his name. I reckon we could play him a little. What do you Americans call it? ‘Good cop, bad cop’?”
“I’ll scare him with talk of a firing squad, and you, Professor Mayer, you can do your friendly American thing. Sweeten him up with some cigarettes and chocolate and a promise to square me. I’m sure you know the kind of thing I’m talking about.”
“Where is he now?” asked Donovan.
“Sitting in a cell at number ten,” said Deakin.
“Can we meet him right away?” asked Donovan. “There’s not much time before we have to hand these onetime pads over to the Russians.”
“Yes, by all means,” said Powell. “See to it, will you, Deakin?” Donovan stood up and I followed, collecting the suitcase as I left the office.
Outside Rostom Buildings, Donovan said good-bye to me, much to my relief.
“You go on with Major Deakin,” he said. “I’ve got to get over to Mena House for a lunch with the president. Good luck with your kraut. And keep me posted on your progress. Remember, we’ve got just five days before we have to hand these onetime pads back to the Russians.”
