Midnight in Berlin

by James MacManus

  “Happy Christmas,” he said as she entered, and he presented her with the bottle.

  Her response surprised him. She carefully took off the wrapping paper and placed the bottle on the desk. She gave him a little bow and said, “Thank you, sir. Will you join me in a glass?”

  They drank schnapps and water for half an hour, talking of family, the weather and the surprisingly high quality of the food in the canteen. As the conversation petered out, Hilde smoothed her skirt, straightened her back against the chair, looked him in the eye and said, “I was wondering whether …”

  The words choked off in a spluttering cough.

  “You want to join your boyfriend in the interrogation section – is that it?” Bonner asked.

  “I am a quick learner,” she said. “I would be good.”

  The schnapps had beaded her face with sweat. Her dress seemed drawn more tightly than usual over her plump figure.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because the art of interrogation is knowing when to stop, knowing when they are going to talk. If you go too far, they either lose consciousness or they find some inner strength to resist you.”

  “Or they die,” he said.

  “Exactly. It’s all a question of timing.”

  She had learnt a lot from her new boyfriend. He would have to let her go.

  “Very well,” he said. “I will see what I can do after the holiday.”

  He watched her leave, that fat bottom of hers swaying through the door, as if beckoning him to follow. He wondered if she did that deliberately.

  They had drunk half the bottle, which meant that one more wouldn’t hurt. He poured himself a glass, mixed it with a generous splash of water, leant back and lit a cigarette. He heard Hilde leave the office next door.

  He had not given her much of a Christmas present; they had drunk half of it already. He would get her something else. He wondered if she would give him a present, indeed if anyone would. All he ever got from his wife and kids were silk handkerchiefs, aromatic candles and knitwear. No doubt his wife had knitted yet another cardigan for this Christmas.

  Bonner tried and failed to blow a smoke ring at the ceiling. He was fifty-one years old and had worked hard ever since he left school at fifteen. His first job had been as a butcher’s boy, back in Heidelberg. He had come a long way and done a lot for his country since then.

  This year, he would give himself a present. He deserved it. He had worked his team hard. The Jewish Problem was well on the way to solution; tens of thousands were crossing the borders seeking sanctuary in Europe or Palestine. The major organs of state in Czechoslovakia had been infiltrated, with a little help from Canaris’s military intelligence agency. Heydrich didn’t trust Canaris and neither did Bonner. When they wanted information from the Abwehr they paid their own informants in the agency. On the home front, all was quiet. The Mauthausen camp that had opened in the summer in Austria was full to overflowing already and the new extension to the Sachsenhausen camp outside Berlin was filling up nicely.

  At their last staff meeting, Heydrich had actually praised him in front of all senior members of the team. He had made a little joke about not wanting to formalise Bonner’s role as deputy, in case Himmler gave him the top job. Except it wasn’t really a joke, was it? Heydrich was always on the lookout for any threat to his authority.

  The Obergruppenführer was in a good mood that Christmas and had given six of his senior staff the new Walther P38 pistol. It was not in production yet, although the army had placed a large order.

  Heydrich had been very excited when he handed out the weapons and kept talking about the merits of the Walther against the older and heavier Luger. In fact, Bonner noticed at once that the P38 was too big for a shoulder holster and could only be worn on a belt holster beneath a jacket. Even then, it was bulky and uncomfortable, but Heydrich insisted his officers carry side weapons at all times – even at Christmas. The magazines were to be removed in official buildings. That was Heydrich all over: detail, detail, detail.

  Christmas, thought Bonner; yes, he deserved a treat, a real treat. He thought for a while. A new suit? He could certainly do with one. A lobster dinner at the Adlon? Nice idea, but there was no point taking his wife; she would just complain about the extravagance. So what, then?

  He knew what he really wanted, but was it worth the risk? Put it another way, who would ever know? Not Heydrich; he had gone south that morning for Christmas with that harridan of a wife and those ghastly kids with their scrubbed faces and brilliantined hair. No one would dare tell him, and even if they did, would he really care? That was the problem. He would.

  He made up his mind. A night with her would be his Christmas present to himself. She would whine on about her brother, of course, but so what? He had kept the miserable little bastard alive, hadn’t he? She should be grateful. Anyway, he would give her the beautiful hourglass as a present. She would like that. He would say it was a reward for her good work, and it was true. The Russian had praised her and talked of her elegant manners and demeanour, as if a brothel was a bloody modelling school.

  The man from Moscow had been very important and claimed to have enjoyed his time at the Salon, even though the tapes had showed he was asleep most of the night. There were strange dealings going on between Berlin and the Kremlin. Even Heydrich didn’t seem to know why the Russian was so important. Bonner thought it wise not to ask too much about that for the time being. Best to enjoy a night at the Salon – all night for once. He would call Kitty Schmidt and arrange it – tomorrow night. It was a Sunday, but the Salon would be open for business. The run-up to Christmas was the busiest time for Kitty Schmidt and her girls. Bonner drained his schnapps and picked up the phone.

  The embassy began to empty the week before Christmas as staff headed home to Britain for the holiday. Sir Nevile had left earlier in the month for treatment in a London clinic. The rumour was that he had cancer, but Halliday said it was a nervous breakdown as the man realised the extent of his misjudgement of those in power in Berlin.

  Primrose Macrae had wanted to go home and spend the time with her family, but her husband had persuaded her to stay. They would invite William Shirer and Theresa for lunch on Christmas Day, he said, and then they would all go for a walk in the Tiergarten afterwards, if it was not snowing. Maybe Halliday would join them. Primrose had put her foot down. She liked the man, but she would not have him as a lunch guest. It was not so much the way he dressed and the amount he drank, but that he never took a bath.

  “He also breaks wind regularly in a room full of people; have you noticed that?”

  Macrae had indeed noticed how Halliday would shift in his chair during meetings and lift his haunches in a usually unsuccessful effort to fart silently. People tried not to sit next to him. Sir Nevile Henderson was aware of the problem and had added it to the long list of reasons to lobby for his transfer.

  “Ask him round for drinks on Christmas Eve instead,” said Primrose. “He’ll be lonely, and anyway he’s great fun if you sit upwind.”

  As they made their Christmas plans, Macrae waited for the excuse that would cover his wife’s meeting with her lover. It would be a night out with the embassy wives or an afternoon shopping for family presents before the last post to England on the 19th. He didn’t mind; in fact, he welcomed the idea.

  It would allow him the same latitude. He had seen the gift he wished to give Sara, a bracelet made of small amethysts in the jeweller’s shop in the Adlon. He had bought it and left it there to be picked up the day he would drop in on the Salon. A quick Christmas visit. Her travel permit expired on the 22nd. He would have to meet her before then.

  Roger Halliday knew that Christmas in Berlin that year would be a busy time, but even he was surprised by all the intelligence requests descending on him from that discreet office in Broadway, London. Actually, Sir Stewart Menzies, the famed “C” of the Secret Intelligence Service, did most of his work from White’s Club in St James’s Street, which is wher
e Halliday had been recruited, fresh from Balliol College, Oxford, over a long lunch that had ended with coffee, brandy and the offer of “a job on the dark side of life, dear boy. Bloody good fun.”

  Menzies always said he did his best thinking in the calm of his club, far from teleprinters and telephones. Clearly, he had been spending a lot of time in the elegant morning room of White’s in the days before Christmas. The list of requests to his man in Berlin was a long one. The prime minister’s office wanted to know where and with whom the Nazi leadership was spending Christmas. The War Office passed on a request from the Royal Air Force about the new German Me 109 fighter plane that had been exhibited at the Paris Air Show the previous week. Someone had heard that the four machine guns on each wing had been of a smaller calibre than would actually be used in production. Was this a deliberate deception? Then there was the question from C himself. Was Hitler sleeping with Eva Braun, his purported mistress? If so, where and when did the two have sexual relations?

  Halliday knew the answer to that. He had already sent London the name of the pharmacy in Munich where Braun had purchased her diaphragm and to which she returned regularly to buy supplies of lubricant. He also knew why C wanted to know. Eva Braun’s sister was in a relationship in Munich with a man of Jewish descent. Hitler did not know and Eva Braun was desperate for her sister to break the relationship before he found out. There was a propaganda windfall for the British if they could expose that juicy scandal.

  But the big questions that came from the Foreign Office, and again from C himself, concerned the conspirators: General Beck and his successor as chief of staff, Franz Halder; Admiral Canaris, head of military intelligence; and Colonel Hans Oster, his deputy commander at the Abwehr. Then there was the former mayor of Leipzig, Carl Goerdeler, the most senior civil servant in the regime and the man who had reportedly, and at great risk, agreed to form a civil administration after a coup. What were they planning, what were they thinking, and were they still a coherent group?

  Halliday groaned at these questions. The truth was he did not know. In all likelihood, the conspirators were lying low, disgusted with the pusillanimous attitude of the British and French towards their monstrous leader and terrified that the Gestapo would hear of their treachery.

  He decided to drop in on the Salon one night to see if any of the big names were around. That would at least tell him that they still felt able to show their faces. The dark and dangerous side of the Salon rather appealed to Halliday. The women didn’t interest him but he liked watching the men drawn by lust and alcohol into those rooms at the back, struggling against temptation like flies in a web feeling the approach of the spider.

  Halliday had planned to spend Christmas Day, as he always did, in the luxury of his own company. He would rise late, breakfast on bacon and eggs, then attend a service at the nearest Protestant church. He would return for a glass of champagne at noon, light the coal fire that he had laid the night before and open a bottle of burgundy, which would be placed to breathe beside the fireplace. He would then sit down with a second glass and a bowl of olives, to read a Dickens novel. He knew them all almost by heart now, and that year he had decided to return to Great Expectations.

  At three o’clock he would stoke the fire, carve the cooked turkey that had been delivered the day before from the food hall in Wertheim’s department store and pour a glass of wine. He would then serve himself a plate of cold, thinly carved white meat, sliced tomatoes, rice and plenty of chutney. He would sleep after lunch and rise around six o’clock to finish the champagne while listening to one of the Beethoven symphonies, probably the ninth, on his wind-up gramophone. A perfect day, alone and at peace with the world.

  Except this Christmas he would not be at peace. The office had decided to send over a young man to assist him. He was a fluent German-speaker who had already served in the embassy in Vienna and was presently stationed in Moscow. He came recommended by Menzies himself. Undoubtedly, he could do with some help, but it was a damnable nuisance. He would have to entertain the man on Christmas Day.

  He usually refused all invitations on Christmas Eve but on this occasion he had accepted drinks with the Macraes. He liked Noel Macrae, although he thought him naive. He found Primrose arrogant and possessed of a social intolerance bred into English women of her class. But there was something different about her, a rebellious streak beneath the pale painted face, that appealed to him. She was edgy, a risk-taker, someone who indulged rather than suppressed her sexuality.

  Since William Shirer had joined CBS the previous spring as a radio journalist, his distinctive high-pitched voice had become famous in America. Ed Murrow, the network’s European manager, had hired him to bolster coverage of the continent and told him the audience would not worry about his voice as long as they got the news.

  Shirer was supposed to be based in Vienna, but the news unfolded from Germany that year in a rolling series of headline stories that kept him at the microphone in the Berlin studio almost every day. From the Austrian Anschluss to Kristallnacht, the CBS correspondent riveted his listeners with broadcasts detailing Hitler’s tightening grip on Germany and his threat to make war on his neighbours. He was careful to give only the news and present the facts rather than his own opinions. He told his listeners they could make up their own minds about the news he brought them.

  At Christmas that year, Shirer decided to relax this rule and give his audience a feel for how ordinary people were spending Christmas in Berlin. His producer liked the idea. Paint us a picture in words, he said, and Shirer did, describing a snowbound city with black swastikas edged in silver glittering on candlelit festive trees. Christmas Eve was the time Germans celebrated the festival, he told his listeners, rather than the following day. On 25 December, the big stores in all major cities in Germany would be open until lunchtime so that people could exchange presents, buy gifts for those they had overlooked and maybe even get a lastminute Christmas tree.

  He described Berlin as a city ablaze with lights, and at its centre was the Brandenburg Gate, where searchlights illuminated the great chariot drawn by four horses atop the monument – an observation that allowed Shirer to remind his audience that the charioteer was deemed by the National Socialist government to be Victoria, the Roman goddess of victory. When the triumphal archway had been completed in 1791, however, it was known as the Peace Gate and the charioteer was said to be Pax, the goddess of peace.

  Throughout the city, curtains had been drawn back in most homes so that other people could look in and admire their neighbours’ decorations. Seeking to show his audience the difference in the way the two countries celebrated the holiday, Shirer noted that Germans placed real candles on their trees rather than the electric ones favoured in America. They ate goose rather than turkey and did not leave stockings full of presents to be opened by children on Christmas morning.

  However, the broadcaster confessed to his audience that the real mystery of Christmas in Germany that year was one he was unable to resolve. In Washington, President Roosevelt, his wife, Eleanor, and their family would spend Christmas Day in the White House. A press release would describe their activities and the guests that joined them for a drinks party in the evening.

  In Berlin, the Propaganda Ministry refused to divulge any details of where, how and with whom Adolf Hitler would spend his Christmas. Shirer had enquired among his German contacts but no one knew where the Führer spent 25 December, or whether he celebrated it at all.

  His best guess, Shirer said, was that the German chancellor had gone to the Berghof, his mountain retreat in Bavaria, to plan for the year ahead. However he chose to celebrate Christmas, or whether he did at all, was not important. This was a man whose actions in the coming year were likely to determine the future of Europe. Would 1939 bring peace to the continent – or war?

  Shirer finished the address and returned to his rented apartment, happy that his wife Theresa had finally agreed to join him from Vienna. They would lunch with the Macraes on Christmas Day
.

  Gertrude Koenig could not interest her husband in the usual round of parties in the Mecklenburg district or even in the plans for Christmas Day itself at the hunting lodge. Large numbers of relatives from both of their families expected to be invited for the traditional Christmas Eve dinner and to stay on for a few days. Such invitations were highly desirable, and not just because Florian and Gertrude’s Christmas Eve party always ended with a dance.

  Many wealthy Berliners owned houses in the lakes around Mecklenburg and Christmas guests would find themselves in an uproarious cavalcade of lunches, dinners and dances as house parties exchanged visits. Romances among the young would bloom beneath the mistletoe, while the older generation drank too much, gossiped about the old days of the Kaiser before the war and made sly comments about the behaviour of the new generation.

  Koenig would usually arrange the family festivities with the skill of a staff officer. He had often told Gertrude that the military science required to plan the movement of armies of men and materiel to the front line was child’s play compared with the planning and diplomacy required to organise his family Christmas. He would immerse himself for weeks beforehand sorting out which relatives could comfortably be accommodated for the Christmas week and who should be politely put off with the promise of an invitation at Easter.

  This year, he told Gertrude, the happiest Christmas he could imagine would be one without friends or family. There was no reason for any celebration, and instead they should have a quiet Christmas on their own, with only their dogs for company.

  There had been a row. It was at the end of November, when Gertrude had walked into Koenig’s study one evening. She noted the half-empty whisky bottle on his desk. He was drunk again. She brandished the sheaf of letters from uncles, aunts, nephews, nieces, brothers and sisters virtually inviting themselves for Christmas. He had taken them and thrown them into the fire. She had burst into tears. He had finished his whisky, thrown the dregs into the fire so that the flames leaped over the burning letters and taken her into his arms. He told her she could have whatever Christmas she wanted, providing he had nothing to do with the arrangements.