There was a small queue at the guard’s desk to exit the building, fed by a second elevator as well as by first-floor and basement offices. Philby took his turn in the queue and, when he reached the head of the queue, snapped open his briefcase without waiting to be asked, showed the document-release authorizations inside, signed the exit log, replied to the guard’s pleasant “Good night, Mr. Philby,” and turned right onto Baker Street.
Philby’s measured stride took him back to Marylebone Road, across the divided street, then left four blocks to the intersection with Lisson Grove. There he paused for a moment, waiting for the light to change. As he waited, the tip of his umbrella probed the metal plate at the base of the streetlight. A wad of gum was stuck to the right edge of the plate. The light changed, and Philby stepped off the curb to cross Lisson Grove.
There was a message waiting for him. His cutouts left and picked up messages for him at a series of rotating drops, which he changed on a regular basis, and left notifications at other points, which also changed regularly. Philby rather enjoyed the methodical discipline of tradecraft, and practiced it with rigor.
He dined alone at a neighborhood curry house and took a stroll about the park after dinner, all part of his normal routine. In the process of his walk, however, he retrieved a small envelope from underneath a water fountain as he took a brief sip. He continued his walk, for the fresh air and exercise was good for him, and returned to his flat within a few minutes of eight-thirty.
He washed his hands, hung up his coat, removed his necktie, unlaced his shoes, and made himself a cup of hot cocoa, mostly milk, then turned on his desk lamp and sat down to decode his message, using a dog-eared schoolboy copy of Caesar’s Gallic Wars as the cipher key. Within a few minutes, he had a clean copy of his message ready to read.
WHEELCHAIR HAS WARNED URSA MAJOR THAT INTENDED HOLIDAY DESTINATION IS NOT AVAILABLE. REPORT SOONEST ON ALL WHEELCHAIR AND CIGAR PLANS FOR HOLIDAY RESORT ACTIVITIES. HIGHEST PRIORITY.
“Wheelchair” was FDR, “Ursa Major” Stalin, “Cigar” Churchill, and everybody’s favorite “holiday destination” was Berlin. So, FDR was warning Stalin to stay out of Berlin, was he? Pretty obviously, the forces on the ground were not enough to back up such strong language, but with so many secret weapons projects, there was always the possibility that not all the available forces were currently visible. A ground war between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union would favor the Soviet Union, but the strategic bombing and air superiority advantage of the United States in particular balanced the equation somewhat. Still, it did not seem to Philby that an intelligent man would find it wise to issue ultimatums to Stalin under the present circumstances.
He would begin to nose around a bit in the morning. In the meantime, he took the message, his worksheet, and three or four sheets of paper from the pad on which he worked, and burned them in his ashtray, then flushed the ashes down the loo. He turned off the desk lamp, then sat down in his reading chair, turned on that lamp, unsnapped his briefcase, and began reading the various documents he’d brought home with him. Thirty or so more minutes of reading for pleasure while smoking his pipe, and then to bed. All in all, a normal and productive day. Kim Philby smiled.
REMNANT OF HITLERJUGEND PANZER DIVISION, APPROACHING TANGERMUNDE, GERMANY, 1954 HOURS GMT
The little village had been plastered by a dozen or more bombs at some point during the winter. Lukas Vogel assumed that the Allies had been simply trying to make another statement about their brutal mastery of the skies, and the landscape, of Germany.
“Ach, nein,” suggested Hauptsturmführer Friedrich, waving his hand dismissively at the notion. “Probably a bomber was shot up, losing power … the terrorflieger bastard dumped his bombs to lighten the plane, and so what if there was a village below him?”
“But the whole town square—blown apart?” asked the young Nazi. “That’s more than just chance!”
His commander shrugged, his eyes narrowing as he squinted through the ruins. The two men were alone, standing in the narrow lane that led through this anonymous hamlet. “Not the whole square—look, that tavern escaped with only a few scratches!”
Friedrich’s pace picked up immediately as he strode across the cratered town square toward a corner of buildings that had escaped relatively unscathed. Suppressing a sigh, Lukas followed along. He had seen the inside of many taverns during the last few days, as he and the few surviving comrades of his division had been making their way, on foot, across Germany. Every town had a bar, of course, and he privately reflected that Friedrich seemed to have stopped in most of them.
Out of more than ten thousand troops in the division at the beginning of the Ardennes offensive—with Rommel’s treason, Lukas no longer thought of it as Operation Fuchs am Rhein—fewer than a thousand had survived through to the defense of Koblenz. None of Lukas’ panzergrenadiere had survived, a thought he kept pushed away from his mind, though it threatened to overtake his thoughts almost hourly.
Over the course of that bleak, frigid march, the other surviving men and boys had drifted away one by one, sometimes slipping off in the night, at other times simply collapsing and refusing to continue. Now, not even a week after they had crossed the Rhine in the midnight shuttle run of a small boat they had commandeered, only the captain and the loyal young lieutenant were left.
“Hallo!” shouted Friedrich, pushing open the dark oaken door. Not surprisingly, there was no answer—to the best of Lukas’ guess, the entire village seemed to be abandoned.
“No one here,” Friedrich said, shaking his head in disgust. Then he brightened. “That means the drinks are on the house!”
This was no change from any other place, of course—the SS captain had refused to pay for any of the food or lodging the soldiers had claimed from their countrymen. This circumstance only seemed fair to Lukas, for men who had been risking their lives for years in the desperate defense of Germany. Still, he had been shocked several nights ago, when Friedrich had pulled his sidearm and shot dead a grandfatherly old innkeeper who had dared to ask for a few reichsmarks in exchange for a night of food, drink, and lodging.
The captain stalked behind the bar, loudly opening several cupboards and cursing in disgust before he pushed back into a storage room. Lukas clomped over to the fireplace, and found some kindling and logs. Quickly he stacked them into a fire, and had touched one of his last matches to the wood before the captain emerged, wiping the foam of a beer from his lips.
Friedrich threw his empty bottle across the room, where it shattered in the corner, but he had several more of the brown glass containers cradled in his left arm. He came over to the fire and sat next to Lukas on the bench that the young soldier had pulled up. “Here,” he said, offering one of the beers.
Lukas grasped the bottle and took a long pull. Beer was liquid, beer was food, and for occasional moments, beer was forgetfulness. It felt fine, washing his parched gullet and at least starting to fill his rumbling belly.
“What day is it?” the young soldier asked, suddenly thinking of something.
Friedrich squinted, draining his second beer; that bottle joined the first in the shards of the corner. “It’s the eighteenth, I think. Why?”
Lukas shrugged, reluctant to tell the truth. “No reason,” he said. “I just wondered.”
January 18, 1945 … it was his sixteenth birthday. But he would keep that news to himself. He felt a sense of satisfaction as he, too, emptied his bottle and threw it across the room.
Friedrich had already started on his third, and Lukas knew better than to ask him to share. Instead, he got up, reluctantly leaving the warmth that was starting to spread from the growing fire. He rummaged in the same storeroom the captain had searched, and finally came out with a whole crate, twelve large bottles, of beer.
“See if you can find us some food,” Friedrich said, after they had each finished another.
Lukas nodded. Next to the storeroom he located the small kitchen, which had mostly been emptied when th
e owners had departed. There was a loaf of bread, but mold had rendered it inedible even by his nearly starving standards. But then he found a stairway, descended into the cellar, and—treasure!—found a ring of blutwurst hanging in the cold room. He came back up and found a frying pan, then cut the blood sausage into inch-long lengths. Soon the chunks of dark ground meat were sizzling and dancing in the cast-iron skillet. When they were fully blackened he pulled the pan out of the fire, and the two soldiers took turns spearing the links on their knives, enjoying the rich, crunchy taste of the well-crisped meat.
By this time they had finished half of the crate of beer, and Lukas felt a pleasant warmth and lethargy creeping over him. He silently toasted his birthday in the crackling flames.
Friedrich was staring into the fire, his head shaking sadly. He looked at his dirty hands, wrapped around the brown bottle, and suddenly he was weeping silently, fat tears rolling down his chapped, weathered face. Abruptly he straightened up, shifted so that he was staring at Lukas with a strangely intense expression.
“Tell me, Luka’—di’jou have a girl, back home, ’fore the war?” he asked, blinking as he tried to focus his eyes.
The young soldier shook his head. He had been only thirteen when he had gone off to join the army, and hadn’t thought much about girls one way or another.
“Me … I ’idn’t have a girl, either,” said Friedrich, almost sleepily. He leaned forward, out of balance, arresting himself by placing his left hand on the young officer’s knee. The older man squeezed so hard that it hurt, but Lukas did not dare to squirm away, certain that such a gesture would have caused the captain to fall right to the floor.
“No girls fer me … they just trouble,” said Friedrich, shaking his head. His beer bottle slipped from his right hand to shatter on the slate floor. “Need ’nother beer,” he said, suddenly pushing off of Lukas’ knee to sit up straight.
Relieved to be freed from the captain’s grip, Lukas rose and pulled two more bottles from the case. He finally pried them open, though he was having a great deal of difficulty with the caps. The room was spinning, and suddenly the rich sausage in his belly was not feeling as good as it had a short time before.
He sat down, aware that Friedrich had moved very close. The captain threw an arm around the young man’s shoulders, and once again he was crying. Lukas raised the bottle, took a drink, and knew immediately that he had made a mistake. He leaped to his feet and lunged for the door, barely making it outside. He leaned over the porch railing and puked in the snow. He felt Friedrich’s hands on his shoulder and heard a strange moaning sound from his lips.
3 FEBRUARY 1945
KÖNIGSPLATZ, BERLIN, GERMANY, 2134 HOURS GMT
“Stop the car, right here,” ordered Jochen Peiper.
“Ja, Herr Obersturmbannführer,” said his driver, pulling the armored car over to the side of the wide, yet empty, boulevard. The SS officer pushed open the door and heaved himself out of the vehicle, finally drawing a breath of air in this once grand, now ravaged city. His destination lay just across the square, but he wasn’t yet ready to enter the forbidding building, to go through the inevitably unpleasant interview awaiting him.
“Turn the engine off—but wait for me here,” said Peiper. The driver nodded and obeyed. Peiper took a few steps away, and when the thrumming motor ceased running he was stunned at the overwhelming silence surrounding him, right in the middle of Berlin. The Tiergarten, to the south, was silent and dark, missing all of the frivolity and activity of peacetime, even lacking the purposeful congregations of citizens that had gathered there during the early, successful, years of war. It was like a ghost forest now, grim and oppressive.
He found himself strolling under the canopy of trees, shivering in the cold night. He saw the armored car, steaming but silent, across the street; except for that, he might have convinced himself that he was all alone, in some supernatural expanse of a Grimm Brothers’ forest.
Now he was here, in Berlin, and this had been his objective for a very long time. But the reality was anticlimactic, disappointing, even depressing. He knew that he had to shake this feeling away before he went to see Himmler.
It had been a harrowing trip across the nation. He recalled the details of war, of flight, and survival as if it were a story that had happened to someone else, a long time ago—though he had lived the journey, and it had taken less than a week. After the Americans had punched through to the Rhine at Koblenz, Peiper and the few remaining men of his kampfgruppe had made their way across the Rhine by boat. Two days later, after an interval of frigid eastward trekking, they had come upon a Wehrmacht patrol that had been using the squat, ugly armored car. When the sergeant in charge had refused to hand over the car, Peiper shot him between the eyes. The rest of the detachment had vanished into the woods, and the SS survivors claimed the vehicle as their due.
There was room for only four, so he selected three of his men to come with him, and left the rest with orders to reach Berlin any way they could. Making their way northeast across the country, they had driven at night, traveling more like bandits than officers of the national military. Every day they pillaged fuel and food from the citizenry or from small units of the home defense forces or Wehrmacht, often at gunpoint. One of his men had been killed when a company of stubborn volksgrenadierie had refused to part with their precious cans of fuel. The rest of those fools, old men and beardless boys armed with World War I vintage rifles, had been slaughtered by the ruthless SS veterans in revenge.
Peiper snorted with contempt at the memory, the steam of his breath bursting from his nostrils as if in reassurance that he was still alive. They had been weaklings and cowards, those so-called Germans—unfit to call this great country their fatherland. Why couldn’t they see? The Third Reich needed resolute heroes, now more than ever, if the nation was not to be plunged into a nearly inconceivable era of slavery and subjugation.
He looked up at the Reichstag, dark and forbidding, yet solid and grandiose as well. There pulsed the heartbeat of the nation. He refused to wonder about the strength of that pulse, about the life expectancy of the Nazi government—for that pulse, and that life span, were his own, as well.
For a long time, as the night got colder and darker, Jochen Peiper sat on the bench in the Tiergarten, staring at the nerve center of the Third Reich barely a hundred meters away. His master was in there, and it was Peiper’s duty to report to Himmler, to tell him of the valiant but ultimately failed attempt to hold at the Rhine. He must seek new orders, new duties, tasks that would give Germany—and himself—some chance of survival as a true Teutonic state, not the puppet of Russian and American masters.
But for now, he couldn’t make himself move. Instead, he simply stared, not seeing, not feeling, not caring.
Only when the air-raid sirens started to wail did he get up and shamble toward the Reichstag. He would find Himmler, and get his orders, and the war would go on.
The Neue Reichstag showed damage, but had not been destroyed. Its many windows were mostly broken or boarded up; blackout curtains covered all the openings. He wandered around its periphery for a while before encountering guards who could let him inside, and he had to make the inevitable stops at lower levels of command before being admitted to the inner sanctum. Fortunately, he was quite familiar with the routine and with many of its players, and was able to get coffee and a cot to doss on, as well as an orderly to wake him up with enough time to wash and straighten up before being ushered into the führer’s presence.
When he was awakened, he had no idea what time it was. In the world behind the blackout curtains, there was no external cue. Day or night, it was all the same. He washed in a small bathroom, straightened his uniform as best he could, shaved with difficulty over his scar tissue, and then allowed himself to be escorted. It would be the first time he’d seen Himmler as führer; he had been aide-de-camp to Himmler as Reichsführer-SS from 1938 until 1941, then had spent the rest of his military career with the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler�
�a division that now no longer existed.
“Jochen—how good to see you, my boy,” Heinrich Himmler said, getting up from behind his desk and coming around to greet him.
Peiper saluted in his most formal manner, then shook the führer’s proffered hand. “It is good to see you, too, sir. It’s been a long time.”
“Too long. This terrible war has so many consequences, but one is that there is no time to keep up with dear friends. I am delighted that you survived the terrible events of the past month. What a horrible shock this treason has been! And without my trusted Peiper at the front, how much worse could have happened! Here, sit down, sit down. Have you been well taken care of?”
“Very well, mein Führer, thank you.”
“Good. Now, Jochen, tell me what happened.”
For an hour, Peiper gave his report as Himmler asked questions. Heinrich Himmler was not primarily a great soldier, but he was enormously insightful about people and politics, and Peiper provided as much detail as possible on the personalities and situations he had encountered. Finally, he hit the part he most dreaded sharing.
“As we approached Koblenz, we found that the Allies had managed to get across first. We could not cross the Rhine, and therefore destroyed our vehicles, and the remaining forces of my kampfgruppe and other kampfgruppe of the LSSAH slipped across the river as best we could. Our division no longer exists as a fighting unit. This fills me with utter shame, mein Führer.”
Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine) Page 30
