by David John
‘Mr Rosen here will take you down to the vault,’ Mr Landau said, getting up.
‘Shouldn’t we give you our names?’ Denham said.
The old man shook his head. ‘The key holder’s other privilege is anonymity. Good afternoon.’
Without offering his hand he moved to leave, but then stopped and turned slowly. In a softer voice he said, ‘If you do hear from Mr Liebermann again, please wish him well from me . . .’
Mr Rosen led them through another door. ‘Mind the steps on your way down,’ he said as they descended a spiral iron staircase. At its base, set into a brick cellar wall, was a massive door of polished steel, which he unlocked with two keys and pulled, using all his weight. Lights flicked on inside, and the gleaming vault appeared before them. They stepped over the wide rim of the door. Two walls were made up almost entirely of large steel safe boxes, about a hundred of them, each with a square lock of the same silver nickel as their key. Some type of ventilation machine resonated through the floor out of sight.
The man wheeled a low trolley from a corner and followed the box numbers along the opposite wall. ‘Here we are,’ he said, crouching to one knee. ‘Box one-four-five-one.’ He slid it out, deeper than Denham expected, from the bottom tier—‘Not too heavy this one; some of them weigh a ton, literally’—heaved it onto the trolley and pushed it through to a small, brick side room with a low vaulted ceiling. It was furnished with a table, a desk lamp, and two chairs.
‘Ring this bell when you’re finished,’ he said, pointing to a button on the wall.
After he’d gone, Eleanor put the key into the lock and turned it, glancing up nervously at Denham. ‘Well. Here goes.’
Air colder than the surrounding room seemed to breathe from the box.
She reached inside and removed a large, dark blue oilskin folder, grimacing as she touched it. It was filthy, stained with grime, and charred black in one corner, as if someone had once tried to destroy it in haste. She placed the folder on the table, beneath the yellow light of the lamp, and opened it.
Chapter Thirty-three
A young man stared up at them, cold, clear-eyed, and fair, wearing a military tunic undone at the collar. It was a charcoal line drawing, made with some care, with the details shaded and filled and the rest a loose impression. He looked about twenty, with unkempt hair, a wispy moustache, and an impudent smile at the edges of his lips. Freckles dotted the bridge of his nose and under his eyes. In the eyes, the artist had captured sadness and vulnerability.
When Eleanor turned it over to reveal the next picture beneath, Denham gasped. The drawing was made on the back of some official headed letter paper, yellowed and spotted with age. Along the top, in a heavy Gothic font, were the words List Regiment Hauptquartier.
Eleanor turned the sheets of paper, the same headed letter paper. All were drawings of young men, German soldiers of the Great War from the look of their tunics and caps, perhaps sketched in barracks or the wooden billets behind the line, or in the trenches themselves.
In some drawings the lads looked at the artist with a guileless expression, young faces worn down by premature wisdom, ravaged by the horrors they’d witnessed; others looked away and into the light, smiling with a slight frown, suggesting mild embarrassment. There must have been more than a hundred drawings in all, some made on small scraps of notepaper, but most on the letter paper of the List Regiment. Towards the end of the collection the tone of the pictures changed, becoming more naturalistic in style. In one, a lad lay convalescing from an injury; bandaged heavily around his upper chest and shoulder, he looked impassively at the viewer, a cigarette held in the tips of his fingers. The drawing dwelt on the smooth torso, the heavy arms, and the large, powerful hands. There were several more in this vein. None, as far as Denham could tell, were of officers. In one startling drawing, a crop-haired young man with a smooth face stared fiercely at the viewer, holding wide open the left side of his tunic to reveal a shrapnel wound healed above his nipple; on the right side his iron cross was pinned below the breast pocket. Like a Teutonic Saint Sebastian, Denham thought. Heroic, but also something else, somehow . . . A small white terrier dog featured in some drawings, sitting at the subject’s feet or being held by him.
Only the final drawing confirmed what the others seemed to be hinting at. It was another young soldier, but this one had on his army boots and felt cap, with a full cartridge belt slung over his shoulder, and nothing else, save for a bottle of beer swinging in his right hand.
‘My God, he’s—’ Eleanor said.
The descending seismographic scribble in the bottom left-hand corner of each sheet would have been indecipherable to a police graphologist, but Denham recognised it. He’d seen it before. On the watercolour hanging in Herr Liebermann’s parlour.
‘These drawings,’ he said, ‘are the work of Adolf Hitler.’
Eleanor dropped the final, nude drawing from her hand.
‘They must have been made during the war.’
She looked up, not focusing on anything, before turning to him. ‘You’re kidding me.’
The ventilation machine thrumming through the floor sent a shudder up Denham’s spine. He remained silent.
‘Hitler drew naked men?’ Eleanor said in an astonished whisper. There was the tremor of a laugh in her voice.
‘He does brawn better than buildings.’
‘What are they doing in Jakob’s safe?’
The final, nude drawing was the most skilled in terms of its draughtsmanship. Denham picked it up and underneath found some large, sealed buff envelopes, cleaner than the shabby letter paper. There were four of them. He opened the first while Eleanor leafed back through the drawings.
It contained the two-page sworn affidavit of one Fritz Engelhardt, a former colonel of the List Regiment of the 6th Bavarian Reserve Army, notarised in Geneva and dated January 1930. The central passage read:
Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler served under my command as a dispatch rider stationed in the List Regimental Headquarters at Fromelles and Fournes from 1914 to 1918. The artistic drawings hereto attached were confiscated by Lieutenant Karl Lippert from Lance Corporal Hitler upon the latter’s return from furlough in January 1918. Subsequently, the drawings were submitted to me privately by Lt. Lippert pursuant to an application for promotion from Lance Corporal Hitler. I was unable to ignore the evidence of the drawings and as a result promotion was refused, despite Lance Corporal Hitler holding the Iron Cross 2nd Class.
Denham read it again. It took several seconds to sink in.
The next envelope contained a dense, typewritten statement, five pages long, titled Mend Protocol. As far as he could tell, it was a transcription of the evidence of one Hans Mend, also known as ‘Ghost Rider,’ a dispatch runner serving on the staff of the List Regiment, who had known Hitler between 1914 and 1920. On the third page someone had circled one paragraph with blue ink:
We noticed that he never looked at a woman. In 1915 we were billeted in the Le Fèbre brewery near Fournes. We slept on hay bales. At night Hitler lay down with Schmidl, his male whore. We heard a rustling in the hay. Someone flicked on his electric torch and muttered, ‘Look at those two fairy brothers.’ I myself took no further interest in the matter.
He was aware of Eleanor talking about the drawings, but he wasn’t hearing her. He opened the third envelope.
Inside it were around fifteen pages of yellowed notes, written on paper headed Pasewalk Military Hospital. Some sort of case notes by the look of them, but the crabbed, obsolete style of handwriting was almost illegible. This one would take some time to decipher. One thing stood out, however. Across the top of the first page another hand had written in ink: Dr Edmund Forster dismissed University of Greifswald Feb ’33. Arrested September ’33. Died police custody. Denham returned it to the envelope.
And then the final, fourth envelope.
It seemed to contain a series of arrest sheets, dating from 1920 and 1921. Mug shots. And pages and pages of witness depositions.
>
On 17 November, I, Jochen, nineteen years old, unemployed, met a gentleman of average height near the kiosk on the Marienplatz. He remarked that I was looking hungry and asked if I wanted a hot meal. As I had not eaten that day I accepted. He also paid for beer but he himself did not drink. Afterwards he asked me to accompany him to his home, and in return for five marks, to spend the night with him. I had been without employment for two months and there was no heating or food at home so I agreed to accompany the gentleman to his home. Signed: Jochen Krübel.
At the Alte Pinakothek museum in the Kunstareal district I, Heinz Peter, twenty-one years old, a bailiff’s clerk, was approached by a man wearing an old army greatcoat who spoke an Austrian dialect. I agreed to go to a café with him where he talked a great deal about a new order of German art that would represent the true virtues of the people. When he saw that I was interested in his remarks he wanted to show me paintings made by himself and books with plate photographs of the German masters which is why we went to his lodgings. Because it was late and the district trains had stopped running the man invited me to spend the night and I accepted. Signed: Heinz Peter Frank.
On a street near the university in the Schwabing district I, Michael, twenty-three years old, an apprentice sheet metal worker, met a man with whom I went for a walk in the English Garden and then for a meal in a small tavern. When I told him I had served as a private in the war and had hoped to become a sergeant he spoke for a long time about the need for Austria and Germany to unify. He urged me to join a new military-political force of ex-servicemen led by himself and asked if I was willing to agitate on its behalf, because Germany belonged to men such as myself and my comrades. After giving me cigarettes he invited me to his room but did not wish me to smoke there. The man wore a wide-brimmed felt hat and carried a short leather crop. One of his distinguishing features is a forelock falling over his forehead. Signed: Michael Schneider.
The mug shots, both face-on and profile, were glued to each charge sheet. A younger face, only thirty-one, but hard to mistake. The forelock and luminous stare. Arrested for soliciting, conveyed to the cells of the Munich vice squad on Ettstrasse, and charged under Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code.
‘What is all that?’ Eleanor said.
‘You won’t believe me if I tell you . . . I can’t believe it myself.’
Chapter Thirty-four
On the cab ride home they held hands in silence on the backseat. Rain came down in lead rods, hammering the roof of the car and turning the gutters into sluices. Shop awnings along the Farringdon Road fashioned small waterfalls. There seemed to be an unending supply of bad weather.
Denham wiped a gap in the misted window and saw black umbrellas clustering around the bus stops like barnacles. He let his forehead rest on the cool glass.
It was as if pieces from separate puzzles were joining, bumping together like ice floes, and carrying him along. And he himself had no power to stop the drift.
He’d been played.
So pleased with himself, that day on the Hindenburg, for coaxing and cajoling the Hannah story out of a reticent Friedl. The story that had set him on a trail that led to Jakob and ultimately the dossier. Surely, no coincidence. Friedl was an actor, after all. For the second time Denham had underestimated him and felt foolish.
But why had he chosen Denham? He hadn’t given the password. He wasn’t Friedl’s intended contact.
The more he mulled this over, the more he thought how it didn’t matter now. The group had to achieve its mission any way it could. The damning dossier was now in the hands of a journalist who could ferret it from its hiding place and exploit it. But this realisation gave him scant satisfaction. He felt angry. He could have been beaten to death, thinking the whole thing had been a dreadful misunderstanding.
The house was dim and cool. A dripping sound from somewhere in the eaves. Denham lit the fire in the sitting room and sat with Eleanor on the sofa, with the cat curled on her lap.
‘Where do we even start?’ she said.
‘With what I haven’t told you . . .’
For the next half hour he explained his unwitting role in the group’s mission. How his suffering at Rausch’s hands had nothing to do with interviewing Hannah. She had started to ask questions as he spoke but became sullen as the story went on, looking hurt and astonished in equal measure.
‘You couldn’t trust me with the truth?’ she said.
‘I couldn’t risk it. Telling you now is dangerous enough. British Secret Intelligence warned me that people with knowledge of this have a habit of dying—’
‘British Secret Intelligence?’
Denham looked away. He was on difficult ground now. ‘Our intelligence service is after it, too.’
They were silent for a long time, listening to the cat purring on Eleanor’s lap.
‘They want it to blackmail him,’ she said at last.
‘Yes . . . it’s almost too incredible, isn’t it? Diplomatic threats have no effect. But the dirt from Hitler’s past might actually contain him. Do what no army could. Assuming, that is, that the dossier’s genuine.’
‘You think it could be a forgery?’ she said.
Denham dropped his head onto the cushions and looked up at the old grandfather clock behind the sofa. Its hands had frozen at five past ten a lifetime ago. ‘It just seems too . . . too great a secret to keep hidden.’
‘Who says he hid it? Those guys in the drawings must have had a fair idea of his interest. His officers, too.’
He said, ‘If it wasn’t for those other documents in the folder, I wouldn’t have thought the drawings that significant. Conditions at the Front were so . . . extreme that close attachments were not uncommon . . . and of course, there wasn’t much else to draw . . .’
‘Come on,’ said Eleanor. ‘Think about it. Hitler’s a bachelor who interior-designs ballrooms. And he likes uniforms. And opera.’
Denham smiled. ‘I wouldn’t think that important either, if it wasn’t for the criminal records . . .’
‘Not important? What’s got into you today? If this gets out it’ll cause an international scandal, an outrage. A worldwide goddamned sensation.’
The wind picked up again, throwing rain against the window like shale.
‘So what’s the plan of action?’ she said, brushing the cat from her lap and standing.
Her hair was up today, revealing her slender golden nape, and she had on a form-fitting skirt that wrapped smoothly around her hips.
He breathed in deeply. ‘We’ll give it to the boys in intelligence,’ he said. ‘They’ll know how to use it. As soon as I’ve studied the documents in those envelopes . . .’
‘Would it ever penetrate into Germany? If this got out?’
‘In my experience of news embargoes, truth is like the rainwater up there. One way or another it gets into the house in the end . . .’
She sat back down next to him, kissed his hand, and pressed it to her cheek. A log split and hissed in the grate.
‘Until we hand it in, we tell no one about this,’ he whispered.
Later that day he opened up the old grandfather clock, adjusted its weights, wound the chain, and was not surprised to find that it worked. His father had loved tinkering with clocks. With the warm tick-tock setting the tempo, he sat at the old escritoire in the drawing room with the envelopes from the dossier spread before him.
The first item, Colonel Engelhardt’s affidavit, was significant because it attested to the drawings’ authenticity. It also answered, at least in part, a question that had intrigued the European press during Hitler’s rise. Why had he never made it above the lowly rank of lance corporal? To be awarded the iron cross for bravery—twice—without a simultaneous promotion was, well, unheard of.
Next was the so-called Mend Protocol, which made the most explicit allegations. It was a strange, compelling document, brimming with personal antagonism, which painted Hitler in the most unflattering light imaginable. Someone had interviewed Hans Mend at
length—possibly the same man who had witnessed the document beneath Mend’s signature, a Captain Kurt Rogel. The date was 30 October 1932, three months before Hitler came to power. An army captain?
Did the army compile the dossier?
Mend stated that he was the author of a book called Adolf Hitler im Felde, published by Huber Verlag in 1931, an official account of the Führer’s selfless feats as a front-line soldier, by one who served with him. Denham knew the book. It couldn’t be missed. It was in every bookshop window in Berlin, and even on the German school curriculum. Yet Mend had given this damning evidence in secret the year after his book was first published. Why? To preserve a private record of the truth?
‘He struck me as a psychopath from the start’ was Mend’s considered view.
In the winter after the war, Hitler had turned up at Mend’s digs on Schleissheimer Strasse in Munich, hungry and down at heel, asking to spend the night because the flophouse on Lothstrasse was full. He was surviving, Mend said, with the help of his iron cross and his gift of the gab. On one occasion a year later, in January 1920, Hitler came again, asking to sleep on Mend’s floor because he could not go home. When Mend asked why, he made no answer.
There were plenty of reasons to doubt Mend—Hitler, of all people, wasn’t short of enemies, and Mend had clearly fallen out with him—but somehow Denham did not doubt the protocol. For all its animosity his testimony had the ring of truth.
Denham got up to pour himself a whisky.
Most who had known Hitler during the war would have been killed at the Front, but one or two, like Mend, survived and remembered who he was; what he was. Maybe Mend had been bought off. The book would have been a lucrative commission.
