The Empire of Time

by David Wingrove

  ‘There will be a coup,’ Seydlitz said. ‘In Belgrade. On the twenty-seventh of March. Ten days later you will strike hard to avenge this outrage. The operation will be named Retribution. You will crush the Yugoslavs. Then you will turn and face Russia. But only then.’

  Hitler laughed scornfully, but met his eyes again. He had calmed down, but his eyes were dangerous, incensed even by the sight of Seydlitz. ‘A coup? In Belgrade? They wouldn’t dare.’ He shook his head exaggeratedly. ‘And yet you see all this as if it has happened.’

  Seydlitz nodded. ‘As though it were all in the past.’

  For a moment longer Hitler stared at him, then he waved him away impatiently. ‘Put him under house arrest.’

  Guards came to his summons, took Seydlitz by the arms.

  ‘You are a fool, Herr Seydlitz. But I will humour Joseph here. I will look at your evidence. And when I know it for the garbage that it is, I will have you killed. Understand?’

  Unsmiling, like the soldier that he was, Seydlitz bowed his head silently. Hitler’s threat meant nothing now. He had won. Day by day the evidence would mount, until, when they met again at Wolfensschanze, Hitler would be his.

  24

  Seydlitz was in his rooms in Friedrichsfelde when the summons came. It was 6.15 a.m. on the morning of 21 June 1941. More than one hundred and fifty German, Romanian and Finnish divisions were waiting on the Russian borders, complete with nineteen armoured divisions, twelve motorised divisions and air cover of 2,700 planes. Three great armies under Generals Leeb, Bock and Rundstedt. Great but fragile, for none of them was equipped for a winter campaign.

  He had an hour to get his things together before they came to take him to the aerodrome for the flight east. This in itself was different. Historically, Hitler had been in the Chancellery in Berlin on the night of the invasion, Goebbels entertaining some Italian guests at the Schwanenwerder. But not this time.

  25

  ‘Otto, come …’

  I follow Hecht out, along the broad, central corridor that leads directly to the platform. There, in that great, domed circle, surrounded by the buzz of our technicians, we wait. The women look up from their screens expectantly. It is not often that Hecht comes to greet an agent at the platform, but everyone here knows how important this is.

  Seydlitz will appear any moment now, returning for the first time since he boarded ship in Sweden.

  There is to be a meeting – one final consultation before he goes back. Hecht looks at me and smiles. He does not need to tell me to say nothing. That goes without saying. Things are more complex than normal. While we know what has happened, Seydlitz does not. In his time-line he has yet to meet Hitler; has yet to have that fateful meeting in the Wolfensschanze. In his own personal time-line, Seydlitz has yet to send his report back. And that could prove dangerous. To prevent the possibility of time paradoxes, he must go to that meeting without prior knowledge of its outcome.

  Oh yes, it happens sometimes. From our viewpoint, here on the very edge of Time, our knowledge of the Past is not always sequential. Yet we must deal with it as though it was. Harsh experience has taught us so. Play games with Time and Time can play wicked games on you. Ask Hans Gehlen. Or what’s left of him.

  There is a sudden pulse in the platform, a crackling in the air as ions spark and tiny flashes of electricity pass across its surface. Then, with a sudden surge of power, Seydlitz begins to appear. I put my hand up, shielding my eyes, as a tiny circle of intense light – the focus – jumps into being, and in a fraction of a second, Seydlitz himself takes solid form, ribcage and arms only visible at first, then pelvis and head and legs, the whole thing sprouting, fleshing out from that single, brilliant point, blood vessels and nerves, muscle, bone and inner organs visible for the briefest instant as the focus bleeds light into the living body, slowly fading with a dying flicker.

  As Seydlitz blinks and looks about him, I realise that this could well be the last time it will be like this. This is not just some pawn’s move in the Great Game but a bid to take their queen, maybe even to checkmate the king itself. As the repercussions of his scheme begin to take effect, so this all would change. I shiver at the thought of it. If all goes well, the circle will be broken and Berlin – our Berlin – will cease to exist. And we with it. But that would be a small price to pay for such a victory. Neu Berlin might die, but Europe would live, the Volk be saved.

  As the force shield comes down, Seydlitz looks across at us and smiles. From the thirty-two long, low desks about the great circle of the platform comes a murmur of greeting. Seated at those desks, the Volk’s technicians – all of them women, many of them heavily pregnant – smile back at him, pleased to see him safely home.

  Objectively he has been gone less than a day; subjectively it has been close on eleven months.

  Someone throws a cloak about him, another hands him a drink. One of the women gives him a hand and helps him down.

  ‘How goes it?’ Hecht asks, as if he didn’t know.

  For a moment Seydlitz finds it hard to understand what Hecht has said. His ear has grown too accustomed to the old tongue. The Anglicised ergot we speak is very different, more American than German, the bastardised product of a thousand years of change. Hecht repeats the question.

  Seydlitz smiles. ‘I’ve met him. Got him to listen to me. And I am to see him again tomorrow. At Wolfensschanze. I think he’ll listen.’

  Hecht nods. There is sadness as well as hope in his face. For Berlin there are possibly only a few, small hours remaining, whatever happens. If Seydlitz’s scheme succeeds it will wink out of existence – or exist only in the memories of those who have gone back.

  Seydlitz is clearly disoriented. After the open skies and freedom of the Past this place is acutely claustrophobic. I know from experience what he is thinking: how had he stood this? How could any of us survive like this, cooped up like prisoners in this air-tight hell?

  Walls are everywhere. Four-Oh is the last bunker, the last gallant outcrop, fighting against the Russian enemy that surrounds it on every side and in every dimension. Each day, each hour, almost every second, quantum missiles hammer into our defences, homing in on the platform’s carrier signal, slowly weakening our force fields bit by tiny bit, breaking down our mighty resistance. Clever, subtle missiles, like the probability worms, which burrow into the very fabric of the Nichtraum itself, destroying the bonds between moments.

  Things we don’t feel or hear, but which are there all the same.

  We have bought time – each tiny change has guaranteed our survival and extended it – but all about us lies the darkness, and a map drawn red from Atlantic to Pacific.

  Maybe that is why Hecht has decided on this final cast. Nothing small this time. Instead a major change, for whatever results can surely be no worse than this slow attrition, this gradual wearing down.

  Seydlitz looks about him once more, noting the brave, familiar faces that surround him. These are his people, his Volk. For them he has gone back. For them he has striven to change the destiny of the Reich. For if the Reich fails a second time then there is nothing.

  Yet it is hard, standing there, not to feel doubt. In spite of all we have done – both here and in the Past – it all seems so very fragile. One wrong decision, one moment’s tiredness, and it would all be gone. As if it had never been. History would forget us.

  Seydlitz stays an hour. Friends come and wish him ‘Stärke’ – ‘strength’. Not ‘luck’ or ‘love’ but ‘strength’. Such is our world – the world he now goes back to change.

  26

  On the morning of the twenty second – the first day of Barbarossa – Seydlitz held a conference. There were six of them: Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Bormann and himself. The projector was set up in the Map Room and a screen hung in front of the Graf portrait of Frederick the Great. Elite members of the Shutzstaffel, Himmler’s SS, stood outside, alongside Hitler’s personal bodyguard, Ratenhuber, guarding the doors, ensuring no one entered. Inside, four of t
hem sat in a staggered line facing the screen. Seydlitz at the projector just behind them. At his signal, Goebbels dimmed the lights and returned to his seat. A moment later the beam from the projector cut into the darkness. The screen lit up, forming flickering images.

  And so he began showing them, for the first time, the future he would now set out to change.

  Seydlitz kept his comments brief and to the point. Several times, at Hitler’s order, he froze the image and wound it back. He could sense that Hitler was still reluctant – that part of him refused, even now, to believe in what he was seeing. It was hard for him – harder than for any of them – for it struck at the very core of what he thought of himself, the Man of Destiny. This was the outcome of his vision, his failure. But Seydlitz could not present it as that. He knew Hitler too well. This is betrayal, he had to say. This is what will be unless we act. He had ready a list of traitors and their crimes.

  The images were simple but effective. The Russian snows. Transport and soldiers floundering in the mud of the sudden thaw. Zhukov’s Siberian regiments driving the Wehrmacht back. Then on in time – to General Paulus surrendering at Stalingrad. Burning tanks in the Tunisian desert. The British liberating Athens. The failure of the U-boat campaign. The sky dark with American bombers, Dresden a single burning pyre. The landings in Normandy, the gallant Rommel thrown back. Then, shocking in its juxtaposition, the Map Room where they sat, devastated after Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt on the Führer. Black American troops sitting in an amphibian vehicle, crossing the Rhine, grinning into the camera. Berlin in ruins, the Chancellery a pile, Hitler Youth detachments fighting a last-ditch battle against the Russians. Then Mussolini, bloodless, hanging from a meat hook in the Piazzale Loreto between Gelormini and Petacci, his mistress. Goebbels’ body, charred but still recognisable, beside those of his wife and six children. Goering, sat in the dock at Nuremberg, Judge Robert Jackson pointing across at him.

  And nowhere a single sign of hope. These were images of annihilation – of a Dream reduced to nightmare. When the lights came up again Seydlitz went to the front and looked at them. Goebbels, beside the light switch, was ashen. Bormann looked down at his feet. Goering was tugging at his collar as if it was too tight and staring away distractedly. Himmler, however, was looking to the Führer, waiting to be told what he should do. There was a kind of hopeless trust in him, a deficiency of character. Seydlitz had kept back his death.

  Hitler was silent for a time. Then he stood and turned his head towards Seydlitz. His eyes, at that moment, were filled with a bitter hatred.

  ‘You were betrayed,’ Seydlitz said calmly. ‘The Jews, your generals, even some of those you trusted best – they betrayed you. What you have seen is the chronicle of their betrayal.’

  Hitler narrowed his eyes, but said nothing. Seydlitz took the list from his pocket and handed it across. It was detailed. Names, dates, arrangements. More than five hundred names in all. Not all the traitors – not Himmler, Goering, Rommel – but many who would surprise him. Hitler took the list and opened it, watching Seydlitz all the while. Then he looked down, studying it.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘A list, Führer. Of traitors.’

  Hitler looked up sharply, then back at the list, flicking through the pages, stopping now and then, his eyebrows going up, his face registering unfeigned surprise, even pain. Many of the leading figures of the Reich were listed. Abruptly he folded the sheaf. His hand was trembling now and his face was red with anger. His arm shot out to his left, holding the list.

  ‘Heinrich! Take this and copy it! Then act on it! At once!’

  Himmler took it, then bowed in salute and clicked his heels. In an instant he was gone from the room. The repercussions would begin at once.

  Seydlitz had been careful in selecting that list. None of those who would lead the Wehrmacht to the gates of Moscow were named. Nor were those whose treachery lay more in Hitler’s failings than their own. But in one single swoop he had rid the Reich of most of its major doubters and schemers. It was a beginning. But there was much more to be done. It was not enough to prune the tree of state, they had to stimulate new growth, and do what no one before Seydlitz had ever managed: to change the mind of Hitler.

  Seydlitz faced him again.

  ‘Though I was born in another land, I am, before all, a German. And as a German I recognise that the destiny of my people is bound inextricably with the destiny of the Führer. My machine has seen much that is ill. But the illness lies not with destiny but with a betrayal of that destiny, in the poverty of others’ little lives.’

  Seydlitz let that sink in a moment; saw how they all watched him, waiting to hear what he would say next.

  ‘How can a leader lead if those whom he must trust – must, because he is but one man, however great, and mortal in spite of all – how can he lead if they are false, if the information they provide him with is false, if their advice is false? How, in the face of such overwhelming falsity, can a leader lead?’

  Hitler was nodding. The trembling in his left arm had almost gone. Seydlitz could see that his words were working, the spell drawing him in.

  ‘The policy of legality served us well in gaining power in Germany. It was a tactic born of genius. To use against our enemies that which they valued most. To see through the democratic sham and grab the reality of power.’ Hitler was nodding more strongly now, smiling at Seydlitz; his eyes, which only moments earlier had burned with anger, were now filled with fervour. Seydlitz had studied him well. Now his long hours of study reaped their dividend. He played him as Hitler had once played others, as indeed Seydlitz had played him once before, after the opera that time, weaving a spell of words about him, binding him fast to the Dream.

  ‘What was legality if not the pacification of our enemies until we were strong enough to strike at them? An exploitation of their intrinsic rottenness? What was legality if not the means to our necessary destiny?’

  Hitler laughed. ‘Indeed, it was so!’

  At his side the others joined his laughter. The mood had changed. It was time to strike.

  ‘What then will it be in the years to come, but a means by which the Führer will unite the continent of Europe in a single Reich, from the Atlantic to the Urals, from the Arctic circle to the Mediterranean!’

  Goering spoke. ‘What then of Mussolini? What of the Italians, the Spaniards?’

  Seydlitz looked directly at Hitler as he answered. ‘Are not the meetings at Hendaye, Montoire and Brenner eloquent enough? These southern Europeans are rotten through and through. There is something weak, something corrupt in their very nature. But while we need them we can use them. In time, however, our use will have ended and then we shall pay them for their rottenness.’

  Seydlitz knew that Hitler would not be quite so pleased with this little speech, even as he nodded. Seydlitz knew that Franco had bested the Führer in the discussions at Hendaye and kept Spain out of the war. At Montoire, the Vichy-French had wriggled out of any real commitment to the Reich. And at Brenner Hitler had confronted Mussolini with his duplicity in attacking Greece without consultation. It was no secret that this trilogy of failings had irked Hitler all winter. Seydlitz’s reminder was the opening of an old wound, cruel but necessary.

  ‘You said you knew ways,’ Hitler said. ‘Ways of changing the future …’

  There was suspicion in those vividly blue eyes. Suspicion and an element of pure dislike. He was a man who would have no rivals, and in all he did Seydlitz seemed to set himself up as rival to him. In this, as in so much, he needed to be devious. He needed to make these schemes – like Manstein’s for the invasion of France – seem Hitler’s own.

  ‘My role is simple, Führer. My task easy. I must help the leader lead. I must clear away the falsity in those surrounding him. I must pave the way for victory. For destiny.’

  Hitler laughed, amused at Seydlitz despite his suspicion. ‘By killing traitors? Is that all of your mighty scheme?’

  Seydlitz shook h
is head. ‘You have already shown us the path. It is already written, in Mein Kampf. Our enemy is Russia. We must crush the Russians at any cost. But to do so we must avoid a war on two fronts.’

  Seydlitz took a breath, then said it. ‘We must pacify the Americans.’

  27

  He began a new routine. Each morning at six he would leave his chalet and walk the forty metres to the Wolfensschanze, past the armed SS guards and into the Map Room. There, Hitler and he would go through orders and consider the reports from the front. At first he suggested few strategic changes. Then slowly, taking care to make each change seem as though it had sprung from Hitler’s mind, he began to manipulate the war.

  At first Hitler was loath to take up Seydlitz’s suggestion regarding America. Despite all the evidence, he continued to see them as a weak, divided nation.

  ‘So they are,’ Seydlitz would say. ‘But when Japan attacks, something will happen to them. Their pride will be hurt and they’ll respond. The challenge will make them strong.’

  It was this argument, much more than the ‘fact’ – documented and presented long before – that eventually persuaded him. Ribbentrop was sacked as Foreign Minister and Admiral Raeder, a less abrasive, more honourable man, was sent to Washington to ensure the peace. Raeder’s appointment was a temporary move, but effective. He would be needed later, when the U-boat offensive began in earnest, but in July and August of 1941, as German troops drove the Russians back relentlessly, he successfully wooed the right-wing elements of American public opinion. The Tripartite Pact, less than a year old, was dramatically dropped. Without a word of explanation, Japan ceased to be an ally. The effect in Washington was considerable. Roosevelt summoned Raeder. Through an interpreter Raeder explained that Hitler did not want war with either the United States or Britain. Russia alone was his enemy. There were many Germans in America, he went on to say. It would be a tragedy if German should have to fight German. Roosevelt remained sceptical, but his certainty had been shaken. Hitler called off his U-boats and cut all derogatory references to Roosevelt from his speeches. It was an old game and he enjoyed it.