The pastry shop was empty and Shirer had only half listened to the conversation as he drank his coffee. Then he heard the phrase “Führer cake”, and paid attention. The young woman was dressed in the black and white dress of a maid. Outside, Shirer could see a large official car with a chauffeur at the wheel. The engine was running, but when the young woman went out and spoke to the driver, the engine was turned off.
The woman re-entered the shop, at which point Shirer rose from his table, introduced himself as an American tourist and offered her a coffee while she waited. The young woman accepted and said her name was Elizabeth.
“This is where it gets interesting – are you listening, Macrae?” said Shirer.
No one ever called him by his first name, and Macrae preferred it that way. And he was indeed listening.
Shirer and Elizabeth had talked for half an hour while the cake was being altered. Shirer learnt that she came daily to the pastry shop to collect the “Führer cake”, Hitler’s favourite apple cake. It was specially baked with extra quantities of sugar, but the raisins and nuts were a key ingredient, apparently because as a vegetarian the Führer liked to think it made the confection more healthy. The cake was collected every day, along with a selection of smaller pastries and chocolate treats.
Shirer had told the girl that, as a tourist, he had come to the Berghof hoping for a glimpse of the Führer and planned to ask him for an autograph, if there was a chance. Elizabeth had laughed at the naive optimism of the American and said that no one in the town ever saw the Führer when he was in residence. Even she, a maid who had worked in his household for two years, only saw him once a day at teatime. Her main task was to prepare and serve the afternoon tea and make sure the right amount of cake and biscuits were on the table. And how he loved his tea, she had said. It was served punctually at four o’clock and was the most important meal of the Führer’s day.
Shirer hardly had to ask a question. Elizabeth had happily talked of her master and his pleasure in the cakes that she served him every day. He was always joined on these occasions by his consort, Eva Braun, and old friends from the war or the days of struggle in Munich in the twenties. The big names of the Nazi Party were never present. The Führer did not like to talk business at teatime, she said.
Tea would last for an hour while cakes, biscuits and chocolate petits fours would vanish from the table. Hitler simply ate one after the other, reaching out over the cups and saucers and stuffing them into his mouth, so that the tablecloth and his jacket were soon covered in crumbs.
“But you know what the real story is?” Shirer said.
He could see the diplomat’s eyes had strayed to the bar, where the early-evening crowd were beginning to assemble.
“Hitler likes cakes?” offered Macrae.
“No, no. You’re missing the point. That special apple cake is never served at teatime. No one ever sees it. She told me it is put in a cupboard in the kitchen on Hitler’s orders and whenever he wakes up in the middle of the night, which he usually does apparently, he goes in and takes a piece like a guilty schoolboy stealing a cookie. Don’t you see? He sets the whole thing up so that he can steal his own cake in the middle of the night! How does that grab you?”
Macrae wondered what the War Office in London would say if he revealed in a confidential cable that sources in the Führer’s household had revealed that Hitler’s guilty secret was a fetish for stealing his own apple cake.
“Have you done anything with this story yet?” he asked.
“Nope, but I will. See, it will present Hitler as a real person, a midnight muncher, a cake-lover, a man who eats two pounds of chocolate a day.”
“Is that what she told you?”
“She told me everything. She just wanted to talk to someone, I guess. The guy lives on a sugar high. Don’t tell me that’s not interesting.”
“It’s fascinating,” said Macrae. “Let me buy you a drink.”
They took their drinks at the table rather than at the bar, to avoid the attention of the barman. Shirer talked of seeing Hitler close up for the first time during the talks on the Rhine and noting the dark rings under his eyes and the pronounced twitch of his left shoulder as he walked. The man was close to a breakdown, he suggested.
It was on the second martini that Shirer returned to the subject of Hitler and the cakes.
“What do you think of the story?” he asked.
“Interesting,” said Macrae cautiously.
“You Brits are dumb fuckers sometimes,” said Shirer. “It’s a good little human-interest story for me, but don’t you see what it is for you?”
The American was not laughing. He looked almost angry, the rounded cherubic features suddenly darkened into a scowl.
“Not exactly,” said Macrae, wondering whether he was being stupid or Shirer was simply being obtuse.
Shirer finished his drink and picked up his briefcase.
“I have been covering this shit for three years now. I see a train coming down the track real fast and I see no points ahead, no red lights and no buffers.”
Shirer looked across the table, waiting for a response.
“And we both know the destination – right?” said Macrae.
“You got it,” said Shirer, getting up. “Now, go bake the man a cake.”
“Bake a cake – what are you talking about?”
Shirer struck his forehead in a theatrical gesture of frustration.
“Infiltrate the pastry shop! Add a little ingredient to the cakes! Get it now?”
One of the privileges of his rank was that Bonner was picked up by a car every morning from his home in an outer suburb and driven to the office. His wife would always come to the garden gate, fussing over him, straightening his tie and pulling a triangle of white handkerchief from his breast pocket. If the children were not at school, they would be required to wave him off.
Bonner liked this routine because it began his day, as it would end, with the fixed certainty of domestic life. In the hours between, he would be required to enter the world of Reinhard Heydrich and his satanic plans to further the aims of the Führer and the Third Reich.
Bonner travelled with a full set of newspapers in the car but never bothered to read them, because Goebbels’s ministry circulated summaries of the main stories the evening before. He took care never to bring official documents home. Firstly, there was the question of security, and secondly because he valued the journey as a chance to think. He would close his eyes and tell the driver not to use his horn and to take his time. It was the only opportunity he had to reflect on the world outside that five-storey building on Prinz-Albrechtstrasse.
There were reports from Canaris’s intelligence agency that the British were trying to pull together a four-power conference to meet at Munich. They honestly thought they could cobble together some final deal to avoid a war over Czechoslovakia. Bonner pushed the thought to one side. There was going to be a war sooner rather than later, whatever the British and French did. The diplomacy was a charade, another of the Führer’s tricks to buy time for the generals to prepare. That was the trouble with the army. They always wanted more time.
Bonner thought of Franz and Tomas, beautiful sweet kids, all flaxen hair and shining eyes. He wanted the war to be a quick one: smash the Czechs, take Poland and then do the deal with the British. He wanted his boys to grow up tall and strong in a country at peace.
The Gestapo could keep the peace at home – it was the Nazis and their ambitions abroad that worried him. There was whispered talk of a Russian campaign. Bonner looked out of the window as the car drove up the avenue past the Siegessäule column. There was a lesson in history to be learnt from that memorial. Bismarck was a great man, a warrior leader, but look where it had all led – straight to the trenches in Flanders.
The car swept on towards the Brandenburg Gate. People were walking to work through the park, mostly young men enjoying the exercise and saving the U-Bahn or bus fare. Pretty women too, dressed in smart business c
lothes, long pencil skirts and well-fitting jackets, and with those clip-clop heels that had become fashionable. He thought of Sara siting there on the bed, bruised, bloodied and with that fluffy dressing gown half draped over her body. That had been a mistake. He was surprised at himself. He could have had any woman at the Salon if he wanted – why that girl?
He knew the answer, but again pushed the thought to the back of his mind, along with all those other things he didn’t want to think about – a diplomatic charade, a phony peace and then the war. Sara was trouble. She wasn’t doing her job. But he should not have beaten her.
As for the British military attaché, entrapment was pointless now. Events were moving too fast. Anyway, the Gestapo’s problem was too much information, not too little. They did not have enough people to filter and analyse the reports that came in from all over the Reich every day. The Blockwarte were the worst; those snoopers in every apartment block were usually women seeking to earn a little cash by turning in neighbours supposedly hostile to the Reich or the Führer. The reports were almost always baseless and caused more trouble than they were worth.
The real value in this flood-tide of daily reports lay not in the information it contained but in the fact that it showed the agency had broad public support. The Gestapo had not had to recruit this army of informants; they had almost all volunteered – and hardly for the payments, which were very small.
Most policemen expected to be unpopular with the people they try to serve, so it was gratifying to Bonner that the Gestapo functioned efficiently because it had public approval. The great majority of his countrymen felt safer because the secret police were doing their job. The Gestapo was not a top-down tyranny oppressing a terrified population, as the foreign press would have it. The organisation relied on solid public support.
Bonner smiled to think that all those well-intentioned democratic politicians abroad, especially idiots like Chamberlain, could not recognise that fact. The Nazis and their so-called machinery of terror had not appeared out of a clear blue sky as if summoned by a cloven-hoofed Mephistopheles. They were in power under their Führer because that was the will of the German people.
This was what made his job acceptable, thought Bonner; even if there were times when the citizenry of the Reich might collectively have raised their hands in horror at the Gestapo’s methods. But that was the lot of a secret policeman. You did the dirty work, you snouted out enemies of the regime like a pig after truffles and you neutralised them.
But someone had to do it, someone had to keep the peace for ordinary, decent people, hard-working families with kids like his own children, like Franz and Tomas.
The car pulled up outside the headquarters. Bonner got out and looked up at his office on the fourth floor. Hilde would be looking down, waiting for his arrival. By the time he entered his office, there would be fresh coffee and a stack of files on his desk. Another day would begin in the service of Reinhard Heydrich, his boss Heinrich Himmler, and higher still on the shrouded summit of the Nazi hierarchy, Adolf Hitler. But his real master was the German people. Bonner told himself he was a lucky man.
The peace that was declared after the Munich conference at the end of September 1938 brought joyous celebrations in most capitals of Europe, especially London and Berlin. The British prime minister returned to London hailed as a hero who had saved a generation from the horrors of war. Chamberlain had scarcely alighted from his aircraft at Heston aerodrome when he produced a piece of paper and waved it aloft to prove that peace was assured.
The one sheet of foolscap paper carried the scrawled signature “A. Hitler” and declared that the agreement reached between Italy, France and Germany in Munich was “symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war again”. Czechoslovakia was not party to the negotiations and was forced to give up the Sudetenland, her armaments industry and her border fortifications or face an immediate invasion. Britain and France sugared this poisonous settlement by promising to guarantee the Prague government against any further territorial demands by Germany.
To his astonishment, the Führer was held up in papers across the world as the arbiter of peaceful diplomacy. On his return to Berlin, a triumphant welcome confirmed the fact. As far as the German public was concerned, the Munich agreement meant an end to the threats of war that had pervaded German radio and press reports all month.
Hitler’s surprise at being hailed an angel of peace turned to irritation when he discovered that Neville Chamberlain was as popular as he was on the streets of Berlin. Posters praising the British prime minister appeared in shop windows, and the Union Jack fluttered alongside the swastika on street corners in the centre of the city.
It was not until the second week of October that the regular meeting of senior staff resumed at the British embassy. The stress of the negotiations leading to the Munich talks had taken its toll on the ambassador. Sir Nevile Henderson had been in bed for days under the care of a specialist flown in from London.
As he took his place at the head of the conference table, his staff could see the ambassador had not fully recovered. His skin was yellowish, the cheeks were sunken and he had clearly lost weight. There was a silence as everyone sat down. It was the first time he and Macrae had been in the same room together since their angry confrontation a few weeks earlier. Neither man looked at the other. Roger Halliday had returned without explanation or apology for his long absence. Macrae grabbed him in the corridor before the meeting.
“Where the hell have you been?” he hissed.
“Teaching the Czechs how to cut their own throats,” said Halliday, and walked past him into the meeting room.
Sir Nevile looked down at typewritten notes and read a statement summing up the world in which the allies, Britain and France, now found themselves.
It was a recitation of diplomatic triumph snatched from the jaws of disaster. The Munich agreement, which had won popular approval and political support across Europe, would finally check German aggression and bring about a new era of peace. The political compromise and territorial sacrifices had been painful, but they had been necessary to gain a written agreement from the German chancellor.
Sir Neville looked around the table and asked for comments.
Halliday raised his hand. The ambassador nodded. Without a word, Halliday slid a sheet of paper onto the table. Everyone craned their heads. It was a photostat of an official German document stamped with the word “Geheim” across the top. The paper was passed to Henderson, who adjusted his glasses and picked it up. He read slowly, then placed the document face down on the table. He closed his eyes and gave a deep sigh.
“Where did you get this?”
“It’s genuine, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“How do you know?”
“Does it look like a forgery? You know his signature. After all, he signed that ridiculous piece of paper that the prime minister waved around at the airport.”
The careworn face of the ambassador flushed, bringing colour to the pallid cheeks.
“I will ask you for the last time to show some respect when you address these meetings, Mr Halliday,” he said. “If this is not a forgery, we must cable London at once. And I have a right to know its provenance.”
“May we know what we are talking about?” It was David Buckland, the political attaché.
Halliday and Henderson exchanged glances. The ambassador nodded.
“This is a political directive from the office of the Führer to the supreme commander, General Keitel,” said Halliday. “It is dated 21 October and requires the general to prepare for, and I quote, ‘the liquidation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia’. The provenance is General Keitel’s office. Do you wish me to reveal the name of my informant?”
“I am not going to discuss this any further. Let London decide what to do,” said the ambassador. Those around the table half expected him to get up and walk wordlessly from the room as he normally did when humiliated in this fashion. Instead, he smiled wanly at
his staff and said, “I am afraid I will not be able to join you tonight, doctor’s orders, but do enjoy yourselves.”
The reception that night was one of the embassy’s occasional soirées designed to allow diplomats, consular staff and their families to relax, free from the attentions of the police and the Gestapo.
Within the embassy they felt safe and, as Sir Nevile said, it was good for people working under such stressful conditions to be able to let their hair down once in a while. His absence meant that a hundred and twenty embassy personnel, including wives, gathered in the embassy’s ballroom for drinks, a buffet supper and dancing to records played on a wind-up gramophone without the benefit of a host.
For much of the evening, Primrose and Macrae talked and danced with different people. It was not that she was avoiding him, he told himself; she was just being social. Finally, when the lights were dimmed and the last dance was announced close to midnight, he asked her to join him on the floor. He tried to hold her close, but she gently pushed back on the embrace. Around them, couples were clinging to each other, barely moving to the music. In the darkened recesses of the room, some junior staff were even kissing.
Macrae moved through the steps of a waltz, his hand on hers and his arm around her waist. Her body felt stiff and although she smiled at him in the low light he could see she was looking over his shoulder. The music finished but the couples around them continued dancing. Primrose stepped back and said she needed a cigarette. They went outside on the small balcony overlooking Wilhelmstrasse.
“Is anything wrong?” he said.
“Why?”
“No reason.” There was a silence as they gazed out at the night. Somewhere, midnight chimed from a church clock.
“Have you heard from Koenig?” he said.
She turned her head away and said nothing.
“He’s back?”
She nodded, her back to him.
He turned her towards him.
Midnight in Berlin Page 27
