Germania: A Novel of Nazi Berlin

by Harald Gilbers

  This reply seemed to make Schröder freeze with shock. Then he started to laugh loudly. “This Oppenheimer fellow, priceless.” He wiped tears of laughter from his eyes. “No one has ever dared do that. We should almost let him go just for that. I would have liked to have been there.” Once his exhilaration had abated, Schröder put on his unreadable face again. “He seems to take his job very seriously?”

  “Oppenheimer is very conscientious.”

  “Well, nonetheless, make sure the order is carried out. It’s probably best if you take care of it yourself.”

  “Yes, sir!” Vogler replied without hesitation.

  As he strode through the garden to return to his car, accompanied by the rhythmic crunching of the pebbles beneath his shoes, Vogler understood the order he’d just been given. He was supposed to kill Oppenheimer.

  The entire time, he hadn’t wasted a thought of what was going to happen to Oppenheimer once the investigation was over. He had fooled himself into believing that he could simply return him to where he’d found him. But things were far complexer than they had seemed initially, and Gruppenführer Reithermann had made the decision for him.

  He glumly kicked a pebble onto the manicured lawn. He had to admit that he didn’t like this order. For a while now, he’d had this feeling toward Oppenheimer that he couldn’t really place.

  Vogler contemplated the essence of their relationship. Over the past few weeks, he’d always known that he could rely on Oppenheimer. After all, the man came from a completely different world and was a homicide inspector. Almost everyone else Vogler knew was SS and therefore potential competitors. Oppenheimer’s skills were equal to his, but there was never any danger of him challenging Vogler’s rank.

  Vogler got behind the wheel and caught himself trying to find an alternative. In actual fact, Reithermann was going against Goebbels’s personal orders. But no, the propaganda minister had only taken Oppenheimer under his wing for the duration of the investigation. He didn’t care what happened to him after that. Vogler pondered the matter for several minutes, but he could not find a way out of this dilemma and reluctantly concluded that it was pointless to think about it any further. After all, he was a member of the SS. Although it hit a sour note, by the time he started the engine, Vogler knew that he would carry out this order. Just like every other order.

  * * *

  No, it had been a false alarm. He listened carefully into the night, paying attention to every tiny detail. Oppenheimer pressed himself flat against the villa’s stone wall. But as hard as he tried, he couldn’t hear anyone. He was completely alone.

  This meant that everything had gone according to plan. Bauer had given him a leg up over the fence. Under the cover of darkness, Oppenheimer had run across the garden and around the building until he reached the back. Now all he could do was wait.

  The drive from Zehlendorf to the small villa that housed Vogler’s office had only taken a few minutes. They had gone a few kilometers westward and crossed the Wannsee Bridge. The lakeside was a very popular residential area. Many rich aristocrats had built palatial villas here around the turn of the century, with Mediterranean-style gardens. Berlin celebrities had always been drawn to the Wannsee. A wide variety of personalities, such as the world-famous surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch and the actor Heinz Rühmann, resided just a few hundred meters away from Vogler’s office. During the time of runaway inflation, scandal-ridden speculators had moved into the exclusive neighborhood, and eventually, so had the NSDAP bigwigs. In addition, various convalescent homes and schools had been requisitioned by such party organizations as the National Socialist Women’s League or the National Socialist Insurance Company.

  Wannsee was considered a quiet part of town and had largely been left untouched by bomb attacks. The neighborhood was therefore downright predestined to be used for carrying out discreet tasks. According to Lüttke, the SD and the Gestapo, too, had requisitioned several properties here or forcibly transferred them into Aryan ownership. To his astonishment, Oppenheimer had found out that besides several institutes, the SD even maintained a palatial guesthouse right on the banks of the lake. The villa that Oppenheimer was due to visit was not that big, but still large enough to house several SD offices. Bauer had insisted that only the front entrance was guarded. This was the reason why their inside contact was planning to smuggle Oppenheimer in through a window at ten o’clock sharp.

  Oppenheimer stretched. Morosely, he wondered whether he could trust the resistance people. The window directly above his head was supposed to be opened now. But their contact had not yet appeared. Oppenheimer looked at his pocket watch, but it was too dark to recognize anything. He’d left the car at five to ten and had climbed over the fence. Could five minutes really last that long? Or was his watch broken? He listened; it was ticking.

  Oppenheimer surveyed his surroundings and double-checked that he’d gotten the right window. It had to be the assigned place. It was exactly as Bauer had described it. This was the only place where Oppenheimer could climb in through the window without leaving tracks in the flower bed. But still nothing moved.

  Oppenheimer filled his lungs with cold night air and cursed quietly. Anything seemed possible in this dangerous situation. Maybe their contact had been discovered. Or they had gotten the wrong time. Or the SD had eliminated everyone a long time ago and had forgotten him.

  Suddenly, he heard a noise. The window above his head opened. Oppenheimer flinched when a rope landed on him. Someone was leaning out of the window. A whisper in the night. “Hello? Is that you, Schiller?”

  For a moment, Oppenheimer had almost forgotten that this was his cover name.

  “Here,” Oppenheimer whispered just in time before the rope was pulled back up. Unfortunately, he wasn’t practiced in climbing up house walls on a rope. Groaning, he progressed hand over hand. He only made slow progress. A hand grabbed him and pulled him up the last few inches into the inside of the building.

  He was in a corridor with many doors. A single ceiling light in the nearest hallway cast long shadows across the floor. A figure stared at him in the twilight. He stopped short when he recognized a middle-aged woman. “Are you the inside man?” he asked in surprise.

  “The resistance only has male terms for someone in my job,” she muttered while she rolled up the rope, released it from the radiator, and closed the window. “No idea why. There are no guards in here. If you encounter anyone, just behave normally. Don’t draw attention to yourself. There are some people who work nights, but come along; we don’t have time for lengthy explanations.”

  She pressed the rope into his hands and headed off down the corridor, Oppenheimer right behind her. As hard as he tried to be quiet, the sound of his steps seemed to be amplified a hundredfold. Luckily, it wasn’t far to Vogler’s office. The woman pulled out a metallic gleaming object and put it in the keyhole. The lock clicked, and his accomplice opened the door. Oppenheimer was about to enter the room when he froze.

  “What is it?” the woman whispered when she noticed him hesitate.

  Finally, she impatiently pushed him into the room. He barely noticed the door closing behind him. He stared intently at the pin board directly in front of him.

  During the investigation, he had always believed that no one was particularly interested in what he did, as long as he provided results. He had been followed, sure, but he had always presumed that this was the only surveillance activity. Now he realized that this assumption had been an illusion.

  Clearly, Vogler had tried to reconstruct every one of Oppenheimer’s moves here in his office. Oppenheimer was easily able to recognize the pieces of paper on the board that made sense only to him. Vogler or one of his staff had gone to the trouble of arranging them in exactly the same order as in the Zehlendorf house. The results from the last few weeks, the results from his work before they had caught Karl Ziegler, hung there before him.

  “What’s the matter?” his companion asked impatiently.

  Oppenheimer’s mouth
felt strangely dry.

  “Nothing,” he finally muttered.

  “Over there.” The woman pointed to the desk in the corner. “The files on the table are new.”

  Oppenheimer had to force himself to concentrate on his original mission after this surprise discovery. He tore his gaze from the board and turned toward the files lying on the desk.

  Hastily, he thumbed through the documents, but it was too dark to recognize anything. He dared to switch on only the desk lamp to examine the documents. An interrogation protocol was at the front of the file. Oppenheimer quickly flicked through it, searching for a name or an address, for hints as to who the second perpetrator might be and where the kidnapped women had been taken. He soon concluded that the confession was false. Ziegler admitted to having kidnapped and tortured the women alone. His motive was that he wanted to see how the human body worked. He had simply been curious. And in his, quote congenital ignorance, with regard to good and evil, he did what was most obvious to him—he cut the bodies up, in the same way as he tinkered about with an engine, to inspect the individual parts. But it wasn’t in his powers to rebuild the women afterward, which was why he simply got rid of the bodies at night.

  Oppenheimer’s gaze flew anxiously across the pages, word for word, line by line. The confession made no mention of the places the bodies had been found. The monuments for the fallen of the last world war were not mentioned. Of course, there was no way to make a connection between Ziegler and the First World War. It simply didn’t fit with the concept of a single perpetrator.

  Oppenheimer read on as quickly as possible. Ziegler’s work for Höcker & Sons was given as the connecting link between the murders. So far, so good. The fact that the murdered women were connected to the party was not mentioned at all. Nor was the hiding place where the mutilations had taken place. Disappointed, Oppenheimer flicked through to the final page. He saw that the confession was not signed. The dotted line for Ziegler’s signature was empty. Then his gaze fell upon the last sentence.

  The suspect died during the interrogation, it said matter-of-factly. So they’d made short shrift of Ziegler and had killed him.

  Oppenheimer shook his head. “They really went all out on this,” he mumbled to himself. He knew that they would have sent Ziegler to the gallows anyway. What made the situation all the more difficult was the fact that he couldn’t be questioned anymore. Ziegler could no longer reveal where the hiding place was.

  Disappointed, Oppenheimer put the protocol aside. For several seconds, he sat immobile and stared into space. He knew what that meant. The murderer would continue his gruesome game, hurting women, torturing and killing, when he’d had enough of them.

  “Are you finished?” Oppenheimer flinched. The woman shifted restlessly from one foot to the other.

  “Just a moment,” he mumbled absentmindedly and concentrated on the remaining documents. There were two files. The first one had Karl Ziegler’s name on it. He quickly scanned the pages. There was nothing much. His past addresses, his medical examination for military service, a certified copy of his birth certificate. When Oppenheimer looked at the second file, he froze. It was labeled Johannes Lutzow. Oppenheimer remembered: the storm trooper, the file that Lüttke and Bauer had not been able to find—it was right in front of him.

  This couldn’t be a coincidence.

  A spark of hope flickered up inside him. Had Billhardt’s information been right after all? Was Lutzow the actual brains behind the crimes?

  Hectically, he searched through the file. Police protocols, photographs of the union man’s wife he had attacked, doctors’ reports. As thin as Ziegler’s file had been, this one was voluminous. Oppenheimer turned page after page, searching through each document until he suddenly paused. Someone had included a section of a city map in the file. He recognized the outline of the Müggelsee and, right next to it, a cross drawn in ink.

  The mark was just under the spot marking the Bismarckwarte, a famous watchtower. There were blotches next to it. They were brown, probably dried blood. And at the edge of the section was a signature, Karl Ziegler’s signature, missing from the interrogation protocol. The blood rushed to Oppenheimer’s head. Before his death, Kalle had disclosed the hiding place to the investigators after all.

  “We have to go,” Oppenheimer said and took both the files.

  His escort looked at him in confusion and pointed to the files. “You can’t take those.”

  “Special orders,” Oppenheimer lied. “Let’s go.”

  Before he stepped out into the corridor, he hid the files beneath his coat. This way, he wouldn’t attract attention. Oppenheimer had walked just a couple of paces down the corridor when suddenly everything lit up.

  Someone had switched on the overhead lights.

  He quickly turned to slip back into the office, but the door was already locked. There was no sign of his companion.

  Steps echoed down the corridor, approaching. Finally, Oppenheimer resigned himself to the inevitable and looked at the approaching figure. He recognized the man immediately. It was the burly man that he’d seen in the Reich Security Main Office that afternoon, the man with the pristine white shirt. Recognition flickered in his eyes. He stopped in surprise and then headed straight toward Oppenheimer, approaching ominously. Escape was out of the question. It was over. He’d messed up.

  28

  SATURDAY, JUNE 24, 1944–SUNDAY, JUNE 25, 1944

  “Still here, this late?” the man asked. Then he added guilelessly, “Probably had a briefing meeting, right?” Oppenheimer stood lost in the corridor and watched the huge man absentmindedly rub his knuckles.

  Oppenheimer was surprised. The man spoke as if he thought he was a colleague. Could it really be that he didn’t smell a rat? Oppenheimer pulled himself together. He had to reply. “Yes, all this bloody paperwork,” he answered vaguely. He hoped the man wouldn’t notice that his voice was shaking. “All has to be done by the morning. No idea where the secretary is. I had to type it all up myself.”

  “Do you mean Iris? Fräulein Haferkamp? Right little corker, that one. Marvelously equipped too.” The man began to grin at the thought. “But careful. Married, unfortunately. And to make matters worse, happily. Someone should do us the favor of sending her old man to the front, right? Well, as you said, she’s not there. I think she’s gone to a funeral. Unavoidable these days. What a waste of human material.”

  Oppenheimer decided to make use of the situation. He frowned and glared at the man. “What are you trying to say? Are you criticizing the führer’s methods?” It seemed that in this case, attack was the best form of defense. The man’s eyes widened with fear for a second. It was extremely dangerous if someone questioned your adherence to party principles. Almost any good German national could be cornered this way. Pleased, Oppenheimer noticed that members of the SD were no exception. The man opposite him clumsily fumbled around for a handkerchief and wiped his brow.

  “What? No, no, my dear colleague, I—of course not,” he stammered. “Of course, I completely support our führer, 100 percent!” As if he couldn’t think of any other arguments, he suddenly shouted, “Heil Hitler!” and raised his arm in the German greeting.

  Oppenheimer imitated Vogler, clicked his heels together, ramrod straight, and reciprocated the greeting. To his horror, he realized that the files he’d hidden beneath his coat were slipping. The other man must not see this. If he guessed that Oppenheimer was smuggling files out of the building, the game would be up. He desperately pressed the files against his body. To distract from this, he slapped the man jovially on the shoulder.

  “Don’t get the wrong idea, my dear colleague. I didn’t mean to criticize. I understand some of your thinking. However, you have to be careful with such statements nowadays, they can easily be interpreted as undermining military morale. With all due respect, you do need to be a little more careful who you share these thoughts with.”

  The man breathed a sigh of relief. “Yes, I quite understand. Quite so. Quite s
o. My name is Holm, by the way, Peter Holm.”

  “Richard,” Oppenheimer replied. And after a brief pause, he added, “Richard … Opel.”

  When the man called Holm stopped short, Oppenheimer realized what a stupid choice he’d made.

  “Opel? Oh, like the car manufacturer? Related?”

  “Unfortunately, not.”

  While they shook hands, Oppenheimer had to be careful that the files didn’t slip. Holm put on his coat and headed off. Oppenheimer decided it would be less conspicuous if he accompanied him.

  “Ah, right. Are you also heading home?”

  Oppenheimer’s mind raced. He was standing here in his coat, so he couldn’t really say no.

  “Yes, I must make a move so that I can get at least a couple of hours’ sleep,” he lied.

  Holm stretched and reached for his shoulder. “I think I’m getting old. I had a difficult client today. I’m out of practice. It didn’t used to bother me. Could interrogate people for hours on end.”

  Oppenheimer’s companion was still nowhere to be seen. He joined Holm to turn right. They headed straight toward the large entranceway and approached the door. Oppenheimer could see a uniformed officer, a weapon over his shoulder, guarding the exit. He was painfully aware that he couldn’t simply leave Holm without some excuse. He had said he was going home, so his companion would assume that they were leaving together. Even a brief hesitation would immediately be conspicuous. But it was too risky to simply stride through the main entrance; no, it was absolute madness when one had furtively climbed into the building shortly beforehand. On the other hand, Oppenheimer had company now. He was with someone who seemed to be in the building a lot, who would not be suspected of smuggling an intruder out right in front of a guard.

  Mechanically, Oppenheimer carried on walking. He had no choice; he had to stake everything on one card. Either he would manage to escape in this way or not at all.

  He heard a voice. Someone at his side said something. It must have been Holm. Oppenheimer hadn’t heard what he’d said because he was concentrating on the guard. “Sorry?”