He passed down three flights of stairs and opened a door into a basement with a low ceiling. There was no lobby; rather, he found himself among rows of makeshift desks staffed by women who blinked at him in the low light. Smoke hung around him like cirrus clouds. The telex and telephone operators eyed him warily, unused to seeing a senior SS officer in the bowels of the building. There was the chatter of machines and the voices of those passing messages on and connecting telephone lines.
“I need to send an urgent telegram,” he said to the nearest girl. She was in her early twenties with brown hair tied back in a net. Johann could see that her clothes were threadbare—the elbows and cuffs had clearly been repaired time and again. She extended a bony hand toward him.
“Of course, Sturmbannführer,” she said. She examined the document and did a double take before removing her glasses and looking up at Johann. One of the switchboard operators nearby realized something unusual was happening. She continued to connect calls through a large exchange in front of her, but was watching Johann. The telegram operator caught the eye of the girl on the switchboard. Johann needed to override their misgivings.
“Well?” he said impatiently. “Is there any reason for delay? This order comes from Oberst Reinhard himself and must be implemented with immediate effect.”
The switchboard operator looked away.
“Yes, Sturmbannführer,” the telex operator said. She put her glasses back on and began to tap a machine that looked like a typewriter that had been built into a rolltop desk. Johann watched the girl’s fingers press down on the gray keys, each of which was stuck on the top of a lever. The message was recorded on a roll of paper that scrolled, with jittery movements, in a panel higher up the desk. Johann folded his arms, trying to appear in charge of the situation, a figure of authority having his will followed. In truth, his insides were tied in a thick knot. They would be looking for him now. He had to hope that they had been diverted by his having left the window open. The building was big enough for it to take more than thirty minutes to conduct a thorough search. If the girl sent the telegram quickly, there was a chance that he would be able to slip from the building, his mission complete.
He looked at the telex as it made its way through the machine.
“My present decrees and directives concerning the crippling of industrial installations of all kinds and public utilities (electric power, gas, water, food, economic enterprises of all kinds, transport) shall not continue to apply as before. All preparations for crippling which have been ordered are to be halted immediately.”
And then there was his last, handwritten note that would make it harder for Reinhard to overturn what had been done.
“All subsequent orders on this matter are to be ignored. This decree must be prioritized over all others no matter the consequences. The penalty for enacting the Demolitions on Reich Territory will be severe.”
At that moment the enormity of what he was witnessing hit Johann: He had undermined the Führer himself.
To undo this telegram, Reinhard would have to find his way up a chain of command that was increasingly fractured and agitated. Johann thought that, at the very least, it would delay the Nero Decree being restored by two or three days, perhaps more. He felt a momentary flush of satisfaction and relief—he had saved lives as he had set out to do.
The girl’s hands came to rest on her lap momentarily before she handed the paperwork back to Johann. He knew now that the order was traveling throughout the Reich communications system. It was like a virus. Nothing could stop it. The order would be received and passed among senior officers and down through the ranks. He had revoked the Nero Decree. Even if it was only for a short time, he had done all he could.
Now he must think about himself and his family.
“Thank you,” he said to the girl, who nodded in his direction without making eye contact. She just wanted the SS man to leave.
Johann walked across the communications center; the eyes of the women workers stalked him. He opened the door to the main staircase and found himself in the stairwell. He started up the two flights of stairs to the central lobby with the briefcase in his left hand in the event that he needed to reach for his weapon with his right. He had traveled a couple of steps when he heard the clatter of boots above. They might not have anything to do with him, but he couldn’t afford to find out. He hurried back through the door and looked around for other means of escape. He cast his eyes around desperately; the emergency exit would have to do. He rushed back to where he had first entered the room and opened the door.
He ran up the stairs and opened a door at one end of the main lobby. There were two guards—old men drafted in for the final stand—waiting, peering up the staircase. He was out of sight, but they would notice him as soon as he headed for the door. He could try to make a run for it but they would almost certainly see him, and the chances were that he would be shot before he reached the street. He decided that he would fight fire with fire: He unsheathed his pistol and walked toward the men. One of them noticed the movement and looked around to see Johann. He turned and leveled his weapon. His fellow guard saw what was happening and turned and did the same thing. Johann was staring down the barrels of two rifles.
This is it, Johann thought.
“He’s on the roof at the back, you idiots,” he barked at the men. “Quick! Follow me!”
The men paused and glanced at each other. Johann didn’t wait for a response—he ran from the building with the two soldiers in pursuit. Since they had yet to shoot him he assumed that his uniform had done its work. They may well have been told that they were looking for an SS-Sturmbannführer, but the power of the uniform was such that even those with suspicions came to be powerless when they encountered it.
Once on Wilhelmstraße he turned to face the guards.
“The fastest way to the back of the building?” he asked urgently.
“It’s the same distance whichever way we go,” one of them answered.
Johann momentarily pretended to consider the best way to proceed.
“Okay,” he said, raising his pistol so it was pointing at the sky. “He has to come round one way. We’ll need to cut him off. I’ll head south and you head north. We’ll meet at the back.”
He started to move down the road. The two men headed in the other direction. Once the guards were out of sight, he wandered into the street and stepped onto the running board of the first vehicle that came down the street—a truck transporting sand. He crouched low with the vehicle shielding him, and watched as the two guards ran up the street in the direction they had last seen him walking, closely followed by three other soldiers and an apoplectic-looking Reinhard.
18
The records offices in the central government districts had been moved outside the city, mainly to small towns that were unlikely to face sustained aerial bombardment. As his driver ferried them across Berlin, making detours as the streets dictated—a stalled streetcar, a collapsed building, pipes and cables sprouting from the ground as if the very guts of the city had been ruptured—Dieter considered Johann’s actions. There would be danger if it was discovered that it was his half brother who was responsible for stealing the microfilm. Dieter settled back in the car and moved his head slightly—the collar of his greatcoat was rubbing on the wounds on his neck. The bandages were making his body unbearably itchy.
Everything indicated that Johann was heading to Berlin with the microfilm. He could even be in the city. Dieter had to find out where. The bombings meant that hundreds of thousands of people were displaced. While the welfare organization attempted to keep track of where they ended up, it was an almost impossible task, especially in the past two years when the attacks had become more frequent and formidable.
Such was the chaos in the city that many fugitives were turning up at overworked offices of the NSV, claiming that their papers had been lost in a raid when their home was flattened. The offices generally issued new documents and ration cards without too many
questions being asked and arranged temporary accommodation. Dieter passed a jerry-rigged soup kitchen that had been set up in the shell of an old cinema. Bizarrely, it was possible to see the rows of seats—many of them occupied by exhausted people—while the entire façade of the building had been demolished.
The car passed through the Tiergarten and the Zoo. The trees were gnarled lumps of charcoal. Those that hadn’t been destroyed by the bombing had been cut down during the winter for fuel. Dieter ran through what they knew. Johann had last been seen leaving the farmhouse with the briefcase. The testimony from the SS soldiers Johann had duped at the farmhouse seemed to suggest that he was motivated by more than simply fleeing from the killings at the hospital. Dieter tried to coax some connections between what he knew and what he feared—Johann would hold on to the microfilm until he could hand the information over to the Allies or the Soviets. Dieter reasoned that, to hunt Johann down, he needed to know more about what had happened to him in the eleven years since they last had seen each other. The state, scrupulous in its gathering of information, would surely offer clues.
Many of the birth and marriage certificates for central Berlin were being stored in the basement of a bombed-out waterworks. His car pulled up at a ruined hulk of a building. It reminded him of a wooden ship that had been washed up on the shore and had slowly deteriorated so that only the timber frames remained.
There was a small white sign next to a metal staircase that ran down to a basement. Someone had carefully painted the words “Records Office” and an arrow pointing down the stairs.
“Wait here,” Dieter said to his driver, who had come around to open the door. The man had offered his hand to help Dieter from the car, but he had refused it. His boots crunched over glass and debris before ringing on the metal stairs as he walked to the basement. The smell of a cigarette wafted up from below. He entered through a red brick archway and entered a vast open space that contained dozens of rows of metal shelves. On each shelf were large boxes.
Dieter heard the shuffling of footsteps, and an old man with spectacles perched on top of a balding head approached him. He wore a battered black suit, his tie was askew, and the collar of his shirt was filthy. He licked the palm of his hand and flattened the wisps of hair that remained on his head when he saw Dieter.
“Good day…,” he said. He peered at Dieter’s uniform, attempting to decipher the wearer’s rank. “Sturmbannführer,” he said.
The man straightened his tie a little and leaned forward as if he was hard of hearing.
“We have no SS records here,” he said. “I’m not sure where the Ministry has secured those.…”
“I want civilian records,” Dieter said. “Specifically births in Charlottenburg in the first two decades of the century.”
Dieter would start at the beginning—his own and his half brother’s.
“Ah, well,” the man said. He seemed pleased to be able to deliver good news. “You’re in the right place.” He shuffled over to a large box that was resting on a table near where Dieter had entered.
“Normally,” he said, “I would ask you to fill in a form and then I would ensure that your documents are ready for examination within forty-eight hours of the request. However, as you can see, things are fairly quiet today, so I’ll be happy to facilitate any request you might have.”
Dieter was momentarily stunned by the notion that the clerk wouldn’t do what he asked immediately.
“And I need to see the wedding registry for the past decade,” he said, removing his leather gloves and putting them in his pocket.
“There will be several volumes,” the man told him.
“Don’t you have them cross-referenced?” Dieter asked irritably.
“In some instances, yes,” the man replied, scratching the side of his face anxiously. “It depends on the church and the district.”
“Bring me everything,” Dieter said.
“Of course,” the man said. He pulled a flint from his waistcoat pocket, lit a lantern, and scurried off. Elsewhere in the archive, skylights above the shelves had somehow, miraculously, remained intact. Large swathes of light broke through occasionally when the clouds moved away from the sun.
The man returned within minutes with three large volumes. Each was two feet wide and a foot long.
Dieter snatched at the register of weddings. Before his own and his half brother’s birthdays, he would discover more about his marriage.
“It will be in here somewhere,” the man said, as if reading his mind. Dieter opened the book and examined it. The weddings were in chronological order starting in 1919. As he turned the pages looking for 1934, the year he had last seen Johann, it crossed Dieter’s mind that many of the people in these pages were dead. There were comparatively few weddings immediately after the Great War, but they picked up toward the end of the 1920s. These husbands and fathers were now lying in the frozen wastes of Silesia, the deserts of Libya, the mountains of Italy.
“You’re lucky you came when you did,” the librarian said. “We received word that everything is being transported to Bavaria for safekeeping. The trucks were supposed to come two days ago, but there has been a delay.”
Dieter didn’t even hear him. As drained as he was, he remained focused on the task at hand: discovering what had happened to his half brother. How had Johann reinvented himself? What kind of man had he become? How had he managed to evade Dieter for so long? And he tried to calm his fantasies about the great trophy he knew now Johann had stolen from him: the security box. The thought of the key around his half brother’s neck—he had seen it at the hospital—was never far from his mind, but a further concern preyed upon him: Who knew if whatever it was that Nicolas had secured was still even there?
As he thumbed rapidly through the pages of the records, probing the black ink for any familiar name, Dieter couldn’t help fantasizing about the box’s contents. Surely it would offer him a shield from the inevitable grinding Soviet retribution to come. His belief in the Party and the Führer was absolute, but he knew that he must start to plan for his own survival. He understood that the war was over. He must prepare for what was to come afterward. There were plenty of fanatics, the true believers who would rather die under the wheels of a T-34 or in a bunker that would double as a mass grave. Dieter would fight, but he planned on living a long and prosperous life. Dieter had always been a survivor.
What kind of a life could a disfigured former SS-Sturmbannführer look forward to? His record would mean that he ended up in a gulag, or a POW camp at best. Whatever was in the box was his opportunity to escape an unknown but unquestionably grim future. Finding Johann would give him a life beyond the horror of imprisonment.
The librarian stood awkwardly waiting on Dieter to give him direction.
“Is there anything else I can get you?” he asked.
“No,” Dieter replied, thumbing through the books, his eyes scanning the pages.
“Perhaps I could help with your search?” the librarian offered.
Dieter looked up from the ledger.
“Perhaps you can,” he said eventually. “I am looking for a man called Schultz. Doctor Johann Schultz. I believe that he was married after 1934.”
“Ah, well, there is only one book then,” the man said. “And you have it. Plenty of weddings back then. I suppose people were feeling, you know, optimistic.”
Dieter knew that it was his duty, as an SS officer, to question why the man wasn’t feeling optimistic now. Defeatism was, after all, a crime. But, looking around the ruined, gloomy basement, he realized the question was not a plausible one. Even this place was soon to be evacuated. He continued to run his index finger down the page, looking for the telltale curve of an S, the letter itself shaped like a snake, the creature that best described his half brother.
And then there it was. “Schultz, Johann. Married to Welge, Anja, on June 20, 1938.” They were married in Mannheim, but registered the union in Berlin. His half brother doing what all liars do—compounding
the lies. Did his bride—as she stood there at the altar wearing a dress she had dreamed of stepping into her entire life—did she know that the man standing next to her was not who he said he was? Dieter was suddenly thrilled at the prospect of interrogating her. These kinds of devastating revelations didn’t come along too often. Pull someone from a cell and shock them with news like that and chances were you wouldn’t be able to shut them up.
Dieter pulled out a notebook and recorded the details. With this he would be able to discover where she lived.
“Found what you’re looking for?” the man asked.
Dieter closed the ledger with a thump.
“I need the register of births from 1915 onward,” he said to the librarian, straightening his back. The librarian nodded, then picked up the large volume and shuffled back toward the shelves. Dieter was left in semidarkness. If he moved quickly, he thought, he would be able to compare the housing records with those of the state at the Standesamt. He would have Johann’s wife in custody within twenty-four hours.
The old man shuffled back with a box. He held the lantern before him. It cast the shadow of a giant across the basement.
“Here,” he said, placing the book on the table. “Births from 1915 onward. Anything else?”
Dieter turned and looked at the man. He could tell that the archivist wanted to help: The war had taken his role from him, and any opportunity he had to demonstrate his knowledge and to rummage around the records was something that he was eager to grasp.
“No,” Dieter said. “I would like to examine these documents in private.”
“Of course,” the man said. “If you need anything else I will be outside.” He made to walk off before turning. “I need some air every now and again.”
Dieter didn’t acknowledge the man. He had already opened the box. Inside there were several hundred four-by-six-inch cards. On each was a name of a child, the date and place of his or her birth, and the names of the parents. Each was typed. The way the letters fell on the cards—the placing, spacing, and organization—was slightly different on each card, as if typewriters had the same idiosyncrasies as handwriting. The box he had was organized alphabetically, and Dieter quickly flipped through.…
The Nero Decree Page 19
