A War of Flowers (2014)

by Thynne, Jane

  Clara had heard of Schaub. All the actresses knew him. He was in charge of visiting theatres and cabarets to hand-pick actresses and dancers for quiet evenings with Hitler.

  ‘And that’s Albert Bormann, Martin’s brother. And my husband Georg,’ she added, a trifle dismissively, pointing to a horse-faced man with broken veins spidering his cheeks. ‘Herr Brandt of course you know.’

  As Clara looked across, Brandt caught her eye and winked. He was a good actor. It was dreadful to think that this man, with his dark jokes and teasing smile, might be in Heydrich’s pay.

  At that moment the doors of the dining room were opened to reveal a phalanx of white-jacketed waiters carrying silver trays.

  ‘At last!’ Mimi exclaimed. ‘Lunch is here. I’m famished. Come on, sit next to me.’

  They seated themselves around a long table set with white linen tablecloth, crystal glasses and solid gold cutlery engraved with the initials AH. Despite the lavishness of the table settings, there was a distinct parsimony where alcohol came in. No cognac or champagne was in evidence – instead the men were served beer and the women made do with the Führer’s favourite Fachinger mineral water.

  The company applied themselves to their meal with relish but Clara had no appetite. The situation was so strange that she could scarcely believe it. She was at the Berghof and sitting at the Führer’s dinner table, though thankfully without the host, whose seat at the end of the table had been left conspicuously empty.

  ‘Bad luck that he should be away on your first visit,’ said Mimi, following her gaze. ‘He may come later this evening. Are you staying tonight?’

  ‘No,’ said Clara, a little too quickly.

  ‘That’s a shame. But even if you did, you might miss him. He doesn’t normally get up till noon.’ Mimi leaned closer with a smile. ‘Even then, the servants always have to let us know what mood he’s in. And there are some advantages to him not being here.’ She picked up her fork and turned towards the servant behind her bearing a tray of warm ham. ‘It means we can eat meat without it being called carrion. And we don’t have to listen to long descriptions of the insides of slaughterhouses. Ugh.’

  ‘What does the Führer like to eat then?’

  ‘Hardly anything!’ Her face mimed disgust. ‘His favourite dish is Hoppelpoppel – fried eggs with potatoes – but there’s so many things he won’t eat. Mushrooms, for example, because he’s frightened of being poisoned. Like a Roman emperor, you know? And of course, he drinks apple peel tea, never alcohol.’

  A stiff brandy was the only thing Clara wanted to consume just then, but Mimi carried on, seemingly oblivious of Clara’s silence.

  ‘Of course, him being away also means we don’t have to have any after-lunch entertainment. The Führer likes to get Blondi, his dog, to sing. It’s so funny, watching this dog howling away, but we have to keep straight faces. I’m laughing just thinking about it.’

  Even the picture of the Führer’s singing dog failed to relax Clara. Every moment she expected a call would come, bringing news of Eva’s suicide attempt. Yet there was nothing.

  The waiters were just clearing the first course when the conversation suddenly hushed and faces turned towards a door at the back of the room. A slender figure had entered and was surveying the company impassively. He was wearing grey woollen trousers hanging wide at the thigh and tucked into black jackboots, beneath a grey tunic with a wide black belt. On his collar three silver oak leaves glittered. He seemed, in his uniform, like a dark silence, a hole in the air drawing all the laughter and ease and energy from the room, as though his mere presence had physically lowered the temperature.

  Party member number two, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.

  It would be hard to find a more unlikely physical specimen of the Aryan race than Himmler, unless you counted Hitler himself. His blinking eyes behind round wire-rimmed glasses gave him the appearance of a malevolent owl and only a narrow outcrop of hair survived on top of his severely shaved skull. The pudgy face and weak, receding chin were in ironic contrast to the stiff silver death’s head gleaming from the cap of his uniform.

  Acknowledging the lunch guests with a curt nod, he sat down, calling over a servant who brought him a humidor shaped like a little hunting chest and decorated with stag horn tips. Taking advantage of the Führer’s absence he removed a Cuban cigar that he lit up with hands that were small, and strikingly delicate.

  Himmler’s arrival cast a chill over the lunch. Like a sinister, invisible toxin in the air, his presence poisoned the company and changed the tenor of the conversation. The men forewent the attentions of the women and competed with each other to entertain the SS-Reichsführer, while the women censored the gossip from their conversation, as if conscious that they must dwell on more serious matters.

  As soon as lunch was over, Clara escaped back to the Great Hall, secreting herself in one of the corners by the fireplace. Just as Mimi had said, the shadow of the mountain had fallen across the house, and the servants had lit a fire to combat the autumnal chill. Trays of coffee and cake were placed on small tables. Clara buried herself in an armchair and stared into the flames, wondering what the next few hours might hold. She felt paralysed by uncertainty, both about the intentions of Max Brandt and the suspicions he must harbour. She was more certain than ever that Brandt’s motivations were not romantic ones, but as to what game he was playing, and how she should respond, Clara was frighteningly unclear.

  A shadow fell across the fire and she looked up to see a figure gazing speculatively down at her. Clara sat upright and tensed. Heinrich Himmler stood with a cigar in one hand and the other hooked in his pocket, rocking back on his heels, regarding her quizzically.

  ‘Is it true, Fräulein Vine, that the English upper classes always eat porridge for breakfast?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a hard and fast rule, Herr Reichsführer.’

  ‘I understand that’s the reason for their good figures.’ He paused, perched on the arm of the chair opposite and crossed his legs. ‘I think it’s a good idea, actually. I have instructed porridge to be served at every one of my Lebensborn homes.’

  The Lebensborn homes were Himmler’s pet project. A series of homes where unmarried women who could prove Aryan descent through four generations could bear their babies. After birth, they could choose to donate them to the SS. They were generally places of female misery and desperation. Clara had seen inside one the previous year and found it hard to associate babies with a place of such joyless sterility.

  Himmler took a draw on his cigar and exhaled, allowing a miasma of smoke to coil around him. Other guests had gathered round and Clara felt their eyes on her, as if trying to divine how she had drawn Himmler’s attention. They balanced brandy glasses, conversations hushed as they tried to catch the SS-Reichsführer’s quiet rasp. It was a technique Himmler shared with many of the senior Nazis – starting out softly so that people had to strain to hear them.

  ‘Producing high-quality children is a science, like any other,’ he continued. ‘Nutrition is just one element in a precisely calibrated process. I know this from my own experience. Some years ago I used to breed chickens at my farm in Waldtrudering. It was an enlightening process, matching poultry, mating the correct blood-lines, improving the stock; it taught me a good deal. Sometimes, one needed to make firm judgements to attain the highest quality of birds. If one wants to create a pure new strain from a well-tried species that has been exhausted by crossbreeding, then one needs to be selective. Eradicate inferior material that could taint the flock. Pick out the unhealthy ones, the weaklings, those whose diseases render them incurable. Be ruthless in purging the flock of mutant elements. There’s no place for bleeding hearts. We can learn a lot from livestock.’

  He had a low, insidious voice, quite different from the Führer’s guttural tones or the harsh scrape of Goebbels’ address. Cruelty came off him in waves, like body heat.

  ‘Or examine, if you will, the actions of a nursery gardener. If he want
s to reproduce a strain of plants that has been corrupted he will weed out all those which are stunted or malformed. And we are grateful to him, because we will all enjoy finer flowers and fruit. It is my conviction that a well-conceived breeding plan must stand at the centre of every civilization. Unless one plans a population with scientific exactitude, then that population can never be truly, morally pure.’

  Clara’s silver locket, with its photograph of her Jewish mother, burned on her throat. Though Himmler was known to have forsaken Christianity in favour of his mystic blend of Nordic paganism, he had a Jesuitical air about him, as though he could never quite shake off the Catholic faith he was born into. She found herself gripping the arm of her chair with unnatural rigour and forced herself to relax. It took everything in her to meet that cold, penetrating gaze and hold it.

  ‘The biological laws that operate with animal and plant life also apply to humans. Animal breeding and plant cultivation can teach us much about racial hygiene. Nature is perfectly unsentimental. It expels the degenerate and the alien because it understands that they weaken the species.’ He blinked. There was a dreadful dissonance between his manner and the substance of his speech. The crackle of the fire sounded unnaturally loud in the silence of the room.

  ‘Sometimes, our human instincts get in the way. Our senses tell us that we should pity the weaklings. Empathize with them. So one of our greatest tasks will be to harden ourselves against the soft language of sentiment, and follow what we know to be right. The sentimentalists would argue for sparing the young, but nature knows that it is better to start with the young. The earlier that the degenerate young are eliminated, the more resources remain for the healthy stock. And once you have that healthy stock, it becomes imperative to increase it. Childbearing is a woman’s highest duty to her Fatherland. It is only when our childbearing is both scientific and sacred that the nation will flourish with eternal life.’

  He paused, ground out his cigar in a saucer, and placed the stub in his pocket. Outside, the shadow of the mountain crept further across the Berghof, casting the terrace into deeper shade, and inside, the glimmer of the fire enclosed the pair of them in its glow, whilst around them the other guests looked on.

  Himmler retrained his focus on Clara, eyes flickering over her breasts and legs as though assessing her sexual potential. Never, in all the time she had met or mingled with Nazi officers, had she seen a more clinical, sadistic gaze.

  ‘You have no children yourself, Fräulein Vine?’

  ‘I’m not married, Herr Reichsführer.’

  ‘That need not be an impediment in a woman of good blood.’

  For a second she was puzzled until she understood the implication and shuddered. Himmler was suggesting that it was her duty to Germany to bear a child. Husband optional.

  ‘What age are you?’

  ‘Thirty-one.’

  ‘It seems curious that a woman of your age is still single.’ He waved a hand in a slight gesture of concession. ‘On the other hand, perhaps you serve the Reich in other ways.’

  ‘Thoughts of the Reich are at the very heart of my work.’

  He gave a colourless smile. ‘Of course. You are one of Doktor Goebbels’ protégées, I understand. I’m sure he appreciates . . . well, everything you do for him.’

  The way his pince-nez glinted in the flames of the fire made him all the more inscrutable. Clara knew the only safe response was impassivity.

  ‘The Minister has been kind enough to ask me to voice a documentary about Gertrud Scholtz-Klink. There’s an announcement he wants to make concerning the birth rate and a reward for prolific mothers.’

  At this, a wince of irritation crossed Himmler’s face.

  ‘Does he indeed? That must be my new decoration for kinder-reich mothers. I didn’t know the Herr Doktor had taken it upon himself to publicize it already.’

  He turned crossly, knit his hands behind his back and stared out of the window where the distant mountain loomed purple and indigo in the lengthening shadows. After a few moments, in which he seemed to be collecting his thoughts, he said,

  ‘So what do you make of the Berghof, Fräulein Vine?’

  ‘It’s very beautiful.’

  ‘We made it that way. It was a mess before we took it in hand. Squalid little huts and chalets everywhere. Residents milling around interfering with the Führer’s privacy. It had to be cleared, but I must say, that was no easy task. One resident who had a photography shop on the mountain had the impertinence to approach the Führer himself and hand him a letter begging to be allowed to keep it.’

  ‘And was he allowed?’

  The ghost of a smile twitched his thin lips. ‘Let’s just say we found him alternative accommodation. Two years in a camp.’ A sniff. ‘But it was a lesson to us. After that, all approaches to the Führer were halted forthwith. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I forget who said that.’

  ‘An American, I think, Herr Reichsführer,’ said Max Brandt. He had come up to them and was watching Clara, assessing how well she was coping. Her eye caught his and she held it without a flicker.

  ‘Ah.’ Himmler turned. ‘It seems your Sturmbannführer Brandt is eager to leave.’

  ‘So soon?’ Clara managed.

  Brandt’s smile was as jocular as ever, but she noticed that beneath the black tunic, his shoulders were rigid.

  ‘Indeed. Again, my apologies, Herr Reichsführer.’ He bowed slightly, reached for Clara and gripped her arm, his fingers digging into the flesh. There was a grim light in his eyes. ‘You remember, my dear, I have a dinner engagement back in Munich.’

  He clicked heels to the assembled gathering, and Mimi Kubisch grasped Clara’s hand in farewell.

  The SS valet brought the Horch round to the front. Brandt ushered Clara in and drove sedately down the mountain, but once he had turned the corner out of sight of the Berghof, he accelerated along the winding road as if pursued by Valkyries.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The Berlin Police Headquarters in Alexanderplatz – known universally as the Alex – was an extensive blank-faced block of pale stone which occupied the entire length of the square. With its arched doorways and cupolas, surmounted by a dome, it was a building which exuded power and authority, and just like all the other buildings in his life which had done that – Winchester College and Christchurch College Oxford, and, for a brief while, the Palladian building off Trafalgar Square which housed his uncle’s merchant bank – it provoked in Rupert an urge for rebellious dissent. It was an urge he was obliged to quell that morning as he arrived for a meeting in the Police Museum with his only contact in the Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo, Kriminalinspektor Alfred Bremer.

  It was at a barber’s shop a few doors down from the Alex that Rupert had first encountered Bremer. The barber’s was a place where policemen went for a relaxing shave after a long night of beating people up and, being sleepless and vulnerable, the policemen were liable to treat the barber’s chair as a kind of confessional. The conversation Rupert had with Bremer that first morning had continued, off and on, for the past five years in a gruff acquaintance of mutual admiration which was never overtly expressed. Bremer was a sensitive, intelligent individual, and thus lacking in the basic job requirements for the Kripo, and he cherished a sentimental vision of England as a land of bowler hats and peasoupers that Rupert had no desire to disabuse. He had invited Rupert to dinner at his apartment in Kreuzberg, where his plump wife Grete made the best schnitzel Rupert had ever tasted and Bremer puffed away on an old-fashioned briarwood pipe. In the privacy of his home Bremer had felt free to moan about the horrors of the Kripo takeover by Himmler’s Gestapo. He was getting on for retirement now, and had a beer barrel gut and a face like a walnut from a lifetime of nicotine and frowning.

  The Police Museum was an echoey hall of glass cases showcasing an array of forensic detritus – jackets with bullet holes in, knives, guns and fragmented skulls – which had led Berlin’s finest to crack their historic crimes. Chill northern li
ght slanted in from the high windows onto the cases, where photographs of celebrated murder victims were accompanied by the implements responsible for their demise and a brief explanatory text, like a miniature crime story. The Kripo liked visitors here; no doubt because they preferred to focus on old-fashioned methods of detection rather than the kind now practised with rubber truncheons in their basement cells. Rupert peered at a ripped satin dress dappled brown with blood and displayed on a mannequin like something from the couture department of KaDeWe, which had belonged to one Sophie Kleist, a victim of the 1934 Cabaret Killer. Her case had apparently been solved after two years of painstaking police work. It seemed strange, he thought, to spend so long investigating a single crime at a time when Germany was planning a crime against an entire nation in the space of a weekend.

  The international situation was becoming daily more febrile. After his inconclusive meeting at the Berghof, Chamberlain had returned for a further session at Bad Godesberg, a resort on the west bank of the Rhine, but there was no sign that Hitler would back down. Rupert remembered his first glimpse of the Führer, years ago, shaking hands with Hindenburg, and he was still astonished at how that little figure bowing to the old Field Marshal like a head waiter receiving a tip had grown immense enough to terrify an entire continent. As far as avoiding war went, Rupert could see no hope. He tried to remember what he had felt last April, walking through Victoria with Leo, looking at the sunset over Green Park and hoping the sun wasn’t sinking on everything he held dear. At the time he had been annoyed at Leo’s suggestion that he leave the Chronicle, yet now he saw that Leo had been prescient. Every day Winstanley spiked more of Rupert’s stories, while never making clear what he wanted instead. Whatever it was, though, it wasn’t pieces about missing girls on transatlantic cruises.

  Rupert had only begun asking questions about the girl on the cruise ship as a favour to Clara, but his original instinct to dismiss Erich’s story as part of a young boy’s overactive imagination had changed when he met the secretary at the Führerin’s office. That grey-eyed, imploring stare she had given when he asked her about her trip on the Wilhelm Gustloff had lit some battered journalistic touch paper within him, with the result that he had met up with Bremer in a Kneipe beneath the arches of Friedrichstrasse S-Bahn and asked him to look through the Missing Persons file.