by John Lawton
‘Why would I be carryin’ bags for Jews – be sensible.’
‘They are old, Joe. Perhaps we could catch a tram to the river?’
‘Now that is askin’ to get nicked. We walk, just like I’d collared you lot. Now, just trust me, will you?’
They reached the railway line that ran along the banks of the Danube, ducked under it to the riverside, and emerged on a stone quay a few yards from the Reichsbrücke. Hummel stared unbelieving at the unbroken darkness of the other bank of the Danube, so dark he could almost believe it wasn’t there. He’d never been there. It wasn’t Vienna, at least not his Vienna. He’d heard it was still farms and fields, and Hummel had never been to the country and never felt the desire to go to the country. This was as far east as he’d ever been.
They descended by steps to the water’s edge, Frau Bemmelmann wheezing all the way, and ducked under the shadow of the bridge. Two more German soldiers waited for them, visible at first only by the glow of their cigarettes. No money changed hands. Hummel could only assume that Trager had taken care of all this beforehand.
Then he saw the boat. He grabbed Trager by the sleeve of his jacket. The look Trager gave him was enough to make him relax his grip and take a step backwards. There were ways to behave when they were alone and ways to behave when there were other Germans around. He’d just broken the cardinal rule. He’d touched a German. He thought for a moment that Trager might carry the pretence of protocol to the point of hitting him just to save face in front of the Germans. He didn’t, he snarled, ‘What?’
Hummel took a few steps closer to the river and pointed down.
‘The boat is not a boat. It’s a raft.’
Trager looked.
‘Nothin’ I can do about that.’
‘Herr Trager, it is a couple of dozen logs and planks and old car tyres lashed together, with a makeshift rudder at one end and a dog kennel for a cabin. Frau Bemmelmann is supposed to live in a dog kennel? On this they are supposed to reach the Black Sea?’
One of the Germans called out, ‘What’s the problem, Joe?’
Trager yelled back, ‘You know kikes. Nothing’s good enough for the chosen race!’
Bemmelmann said, ‘Joe, it doesn’t matter. It floats. We will go. Anything is better than staying. Now, I urge you one last time . . . come with us.’
A piece of his life, a piece of his childhood was breaking off in front of him.
‘I cannot.’
Bemmelmann hugged him silently.
Hummel watched as they drifted out into the flow. Herr Bemmelmann struggling with the rudder, Frau Bemmelmann sitting on the bags. Lost and awkward, miserable and terrified. Weeping. And the two Germans hooting with laughter. Hummel watched until they were lost in mist and darkness and all he could hear was the occasional splash, soon smothered by the night.
‘C’mon, Jew-boy. Back the way you came.’
Trager prodded him in the small of the back with the barrel of his rifle. Hummel went up the steps, turned, looked downstream one last time and could see nothing and hear nothing of the Bemmelmanns. The Germans’ laughter echoed in his mind, but not half so loud as the weeping of Frau Bemmelmann. Schuster was gone, Hirschel was dead. Now Bemmelmann had gone. There was only him and Beckermann left of the old street. Another piece of his childhood had broken off and drifted away – off into the night and the fog.
Out of sight of his comrades, Trager shouldered his rifle, said ‘Fuckem’ and strode out for Leopoldstadt.
§ 21
Walking back it seemed to Hummel that they must look an odd couple to anyone they passed, but it was as if they passed no one. Vienna had become a city in which everyone averted their eyes and made no contact. Trager and Hummel walking side by side, a miscegenous version of Laurel and Hardy. Hummel the lanky Jew, much the taller; Trager the brick shithouse of a soldier, dumpy in his grey uniform, his rifle slung from his shoulder as casually as a fishing rod. What they did not look like was captor and captive.
Neither spoke. Only when they reached Hummel’s shop did Trager have anything to say.
‘You should have gone with the old boy, Joe.’
§ 22
30 September 1938
Informed by his office that the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain – the first Prime Minister to fly to a foreign conference, and thus, arguably, the inventor of shuttle diplomacy – had arrived back from Munich, from a meeting with Hitler which had carved up Czechoslovakia without so much as a word from any Czech, as none had been invited to the meeting, and was now waving bits of paper in the air and bleating about peace and honour, Alex Troy decided to break the habit of many months and to hear the idiot in person. He had the chauffeur drop him in Horse Guards Parade, walked the back way into Downing Street, stood behind a crowd of hacks and listened.
‘We, the German Führer and Chancellor, and the British Prime Minister, have had a further meeting today and are agreed in recognising that the question of Anglo-German relations is of the first importance for our two countries and for Europe.’
The man looked, as an odd but fetching English phrase had it, ‘like death warmed up’.
‘We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German Naval Agreement as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.
We are resolved that the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries, and we are determined to continue our efforts to remove possible sources of difference, and thus to contribute to assure the peace of Europe.’
Alex thought this to be bollocks. We had just sold yet another small country up the river. But, Chamberlain was not finished.
‘My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time . . . Go home and get a nice quiet sleep.’
Alex walked out into Whitehall. His chauffeur pulled the Rolls up at the kerb and asked simply, ‘Where to, Boss, office or home?’
‘Home. I have been told to get a good night’s sleep.’
Sleep? Nice? Quiet? Alex would be up most of the night, and most of the next, writing his editorial for the following Sunday. ‘Peace for our Time’? How long did the man take our time to be? Peace until our time chanced and changed into the next entity? It was a slogan for the next five minutes and no more.
§ 23
The Sunday Post
2 October 1938
Like most of my readers I am an Englishman. Unlike most of my readers, I chose to be an Englishman. I doubt what little remains to me before I shuffle off this mortal coil will alter my accent one jot, but I have long since ceased to be incomprehensible to London cabbies, and when they ask ‘Where to Al?’, I do not flinch at the curt improbability of the abbreviation, I wear the badge of Englishness with pride. No doubt there are some among you who feel that I have not yet earned the right to lecture you on the matter of Englishness. Tough – I am about to do just that.
Patriotism, as Dr Johnson so famously observed, is the last refuge of a scoundrel. It can be evoked as excuse without apology, but this should not blind us to the possibility of virtue inherent in what a nation stands for. As simply as I can put it, Englishness has, since Magna Carta, meant the rule of law and the notion of constitutional law. In that document lie the foundations of democracy. We tinker with it at our peril – indeed we should no more tinker with it than America would tinker with the Bill of Rights – for much the same reason – it is the chief constraint on tyranny.
All too easily Germany has become a tyranny. Herr Hitler shows no respect for the rule of law, either domestic or international. What Germanness (if such a concept can be said to exist at all) stands for is the rule of the jackboot. Might is now right. Mr Churchill has been at pains to point this out to us for some time. I fear he has been a voice in the wilderness. But I say now, and I say it unequivocally, that Mr Churchill has been right about Hitl
er all along. Mr Chamberlain’s aerodrome diplomacy, his abject shuttling back and forth this summer between England and Germany, has given us the worst of compromises, it has given us – to steal from whichever German minister uttered the phrase at the start of the last war – another ‘scrap of paper’ (contempt all but oozes from the words, you will agree) for Hitler to tear up at some not-so-distant date.
The agreement at Munich is not peace with honour, it is not peace for our time – it is a post-dated cheque written in the blood of Europe’s young men. It cannot surely be long before the word Munich has the same ominous ring to it that Sarajevo has had these twenty-five years. It is time to pray for peace, gear for war and ignore all ideas that the former is rendered hypocritical by the latter. It is not. It is the key to our survival as a nation. Ask me what virtue of Englishness I admire most at the moment and
I would answer ‘our guarded optimism’ – and, dear reader, I mean the adjective as much as I mean the possessive plural.
Alexei Troy
Later that evening a telegramme arrived at Church Row addressed to Alex Troy. It read:
A HEARTY THANK YOU PROM AN OLD HAS–BEEN.
WINSTON SPENCER–HASBEEN.
As they sat down to dinner Alex showed both the leader and the telegramme to his son.
‘Fine,’ said Troy. ‘Do you want me to give you a list of all the tyrants England has thrown up since Magna Carta?’
Alex tucked a corner of his napkin between the buttons of his waistcoat and reached for the soup spoon.
‘Perhaps later,’ he said.
§ 24
One pleasant, sunny Monday morning in early November – the 7th to be precise, and this is a matter of precision – the moment, one of those moments, when small acts, in themselves of little significance, precipitate greater – a young German Jew, only seventeen years old, of Polish parentage, bought himself a five-shot hammerless revolver in a Parisian backstreet in the 10th arrondissement, caught the Metro to the Boulevard St Germain and walked the last few yards to the German Embassy in the Rue de Lille with the intention of shooting the Reich Ambassador Count Johannes von Welczeck. Welczeck passed the young man as he set off for his morning walk. Instead, Herschel Grynszpan shot one Ernst vom Rath, a third secretary at the embassy, not quite the nonentity Grynszpan was himself, but not much more. He fired all five bullets at vom Rath and hit him twice in the abdomen. On hearing the news, Hitler immediately promoted vom Rath to the rank of counsellor and dispatched two physicians to Paris. Vom Rath took almost three days to die, but by then Grynszpan, a boy thought by those who knew him to be an indolent non-achiever, had written both himself and his victim into history as surely as Gavrilo Princip had done almost a quarter of a century before. The motive? The Reich had just indulged in a pogrom, rounding up non-German Jews and forcibly repatriating them. Most of Grynszpan’s family had been dumped at the Polish border and told to walk home.
Hitler was celebrating the fifteenth anniversary of the failed putsch of 9 November 1923 in the Rathaussaal in Munich when the news that vom Rath had died reached him. It is unclear whether he said anything at all – but the most telling report is of him saying ‘Let the SA have their fling.’
Several hours later, closer to one in the morning, it fell, as so many things did, to Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Sicherheitsdienst, the Reich security service, to cross the Ts and dot the Is. The spontaneous nature of what was about to happen needed to be choreographed.
Heydrich was not to be found in any bierkeller, he was propping up the bar in the Four Seasons Hotel, a few streets away in Munich, sampling the bartender’s skills with the cocktail shaker, in the company of his deputy, Wolfgang Stahl. They had the place to themselves. It would be a brave bartender who told an SS General he was closing up. Neither Heydrich nor Stahl had been party members in 1923 – indeed, Stahl had been nothing more than a schoolboy in Vienna. Neither of them could quite share the street fighting, beer-swilling pleasures that seemed to have given such simple gratification to the pioneer brownshirts. Stahl had done this a thousand times. Heydrich sampled drinks in the same way he sampled women. Given the choice – and saying no was hardly possible – Stahl preferred the nights when they hit the bars and boozed to the nights when the Obergruppenführer wanted to lurch from one high-class brothel to the next. If they couldn’t share a taste in women, occasionally they shared a taste in music. Heydrich wasn’t a bad violinist, Stahl was even better on the piano. Together they played Mozart, which was to Stahl’s taste; and Haydn, which was very much to Heydrich’s. As Nazis went they might be considered sophisticates – each respected the other’s intelligence, talent and taste, and privately despised his foibles, fads and paranoias. They kept files on everyone – they had files on each other and, unknown to the man himself, they even had secret files on Hitler, although of what use they might be within the Reich Stahl could not imagine – their uses outside the Reich he considered limitless.
Stahl pushed his whisky sour to Heydrich. Heydrich pushed back a Manhattan in exchange.
‘As the English say not my cup of tea.’
Stahl opened his briefcase and slid a few sheets of paper across to Heydrich.
‘One of our men brought me this earlier today. He thinks it might be important.’
Heydrich fanned the papers out and looked at the first page.
After a minute or so he turned it over and looked less carefully at the second. His reading of the third and fourth was no more than cursory.
‘Do you think it’s important?’ he said at last.
‘If it’s real, if it’s authentic . . . yes. Just about.’
‘Where was it found?’
‘In the home of a retired Professor of Music. A man in his seventies. A critic of the Reich whose criticism finally came back to him today. We packed him off to review Dachau for us, from the inside. It appears that this was among his father’s papers when he died about thirty years ago. The good professor has had it ever since.’
‘I suppose things like this turn up from time to time.’
‘They do.’
‘Is it any good?’
‘That’s a different matter.’
Stahl pointed to the arcane symbols on the paper. Meaningless if you didn’t know the code, perhaps meaningless if you did.
‘Look at the left hand . . . all those turgid minims and semi-breves. It’s as though someone had doped Debussy with a horse tranquilliser and slowed him down to a crawl. It’s leaden stuff, plod, thump, plod.’
‘It’s better when the violin chips in.’
‘Perhaps. I think the only thing to be said for it is “historical importance” – you no more have to play it or listen to it than you’d pay attention to a war memorial in a suburban cemetery. It’s hand-written, untitled, but at least he signed it . . . F. Nietzsche, 9 May 1888. About a year before he went bonkers, I should think.’
‘Can I take it you don’t want to play it, then?’
Stahl burst out laughing, Heydrich joined in – an unpleasant, high-pitched nasal whine. Only the bartender setting a house phone in front of Heydrich stopped them degenerating into schoolboy giggles.
‘For you, Obergruppenführer.’
Heydrich spoke his name, listened for ten seconds, said ‘Ja.’
Then, to Stahl, ‘Find that useless sod Bruhns and get us a staff car. We’re wanted at Äussere Prinzregentenstrasse.’
§ 25
Stahl had never been to Hitler’s Munich flat. It seemed odd that he should have one at all – as though he were some sort of national deputy maintaining a home of political convenience in a remote provincial constituency rather than the absolute ruler of millions of Germans. Berchtesgaden he could understand – the Eagle’s Nest spoke of the self-aggrandisement, the colossal ego that was Hitler . . . from flophouse to Bauhaus – a flat in Munich didn’t.
He sat in an outer room while Heydrich talked to Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels. There were those at the same level as Stahl – that is, noticea
ble and acknowledged, without being ‘one of us’ – who took every opportunity to string along to meetings with the Führer. Stahl waited until he was invited. Something about Hitler, something he thought ought to be obvious to anyone who met him, made his flesh creep. And the thought of Hitler, Goebbels and Himmler all together was like a freak show – the club-footed, demented dwarf, the bespectacled, bourgeois owl and the Charlie Chaplin doppelgänger.
Heydrich emerged, tense and holding in his anger.
‘We’re here to structure chaos,’ he said softly. ‘The demented dwarf appears to have taken control of the public response to vom Rath’s death. And that amounts to no control at all. He’s turning the SA loose. Himmler’s nose is severely out of joint.’
‘There’ll be a bloodbath,’ Stahl said.
Heydrich said, ‘Let us then consider that prospect. Do you have pen and paper?’
Stahl took Nietzsche’s sheet music out of his briefcase, flipped the top off his fountain pen, and turned the music over. He could write almost as fast as Heydrich could speak, and to improvise aloud, fingers pressed to his high forehead, was one of the Obergruppenführer’s preferred ways to work. Twenty minutes later he was reading his notes back to Heydrich. Himmler emerged from the inner room, threw them a Heil Hitler to which neither responded, and left a strained silence in his wake.
‘What exactly are we saying?’ Heydrich asked.
‘Smash everything. Round up the rich, kill those who resist. But we must not seem to be involved, indeed we must appear to be the hand of restraint.’
‘Restrain the SA? We recruited the buggers to be thugs.’
‘If they go completely berserk, there are consequences . . . once they’ve sacked the synagogues and the department stores . . . we must stop them looting. I don’t care that they will want furs and jewellery and God knows what for themselves. I don’t give a damn how many Jews they rob. But if they are seen as looters . . . well, the world will judge us on that . . but we can gain valuable information, files, names, addresses . . . that alone is reason to stop them looting.’
