The Gods of Atlantis jh-6

by David Gibbins

  Then Hoffman heard another sound, nearby on the platform this time, a groan of machinery followed by a whirring and rattling noise. He looked over towards the ammunition elevator and saw the first 128mm shell emerge, then watched three boys struggle to carry it to the nearest gun. As a tactic against the Soviet advance, it was a futile gesture. The tanks would be under the guns’ minimum elevation by the time they were ready to fire. But he and the battery commander had devised the plan to keep the Feldgendarmen convinced that they would fight to the end, and to provide a distraction. The gunners would fire ten rounds a minute until the ammunition was expended. The noise and vibration inside the tower would be horrendous.

  He saw the battery commander crawl out from the shaft, streaked in oil, his head wreathed in a blood-stained bandage. The man immediately hunched down and set to with a wrench unscrewing the fuses as each new shell appeared, surrounded by crouched boys. Hoffman knew that the remaining ammunition for the big guns had been time-fused for high-altitude airburst, and the fuses would all need to be reset. It was of no consequence now, as it was the noise of the guns that would create the distraction. But Hoffman saw that the gun crew were in their own world, locked into their drill in this final act. The commander looked up for a moment, gazed around frantically, not seeing him, and then hunched over again. Hoffman had a sudden cold realization. He was going to have to do this alone.

  Then he felt it, a strange brushing sensation, barely perceptible, an unsettling feeling that seemed to come from all directions at once. The soldiers who had been in battle called it the devil’s breath, the wind caused by the blast and suck of thousands of exploding shells. He looked towards the Reichstag, but the Tiergarten had disappeared in an eruption of dust and smoke. Soon the creeping barrage would reach the flak tower. He looked south, and saw the ripple of flame from the Soviet howitzers on the horizon, then the multiple fire-streaks of Katyusha rockets. In moments the sound would reach them, the pulverizing roar of artillery, the shriek of the rockets, sowing terror just as the siren in his own Stuka dive-bomber had once done.

  What he had seen in the street outside was just a probing attack. Now all hell would be unleashed. He felt his chest tighten. The whole earth seemed to be shaking. He watched men and boys scurrying around him, seeking shelter from the onslaught to come, in a blur.

  Another smell assailed his nostrils.

  It was the smell of fear.

  Hoffman ran back towards the entrance to the spiral staircase that led into the bowels of the tower. A cluster of shells burst in the grounds of the Zoo, sending shrapnel clattering like hail against the concrete below. From their new positions the Russian gunners were finding the range, aided now by forward artillery spotters in the ruined buildings in sight of the tower. Hoffman glanced at the flak gunners loading the breech of the nearest twin 128mm gun, its barrels aimed towards the street below. He prayed that they would have enough time to fire their salvo and give him the distraction he needed to get out with a white flag. He saw the boy in the lederhosen, helping to heave another shell towards the breech. Let him survive. The din suddenly became horrendous: the roar of tank engines, the rattle of tracks, the crack of tank gunfire, the rippling boom of howitzers, the screaming salvos of rockets, the noise echoing and rolling through the open doorway. He lurched inside and heaved the steel door shut, closing off the worst of it. The stench of seething humanity wafted up to him. He suddenly felt terribly claustrophobic. He had to get out of this place.

  As he turned to go down the spiral stairs, he heard the clatter of someone running up from below. A helmeted face appeared under the one bare bulb still lit on the upper stairway, and stopped, breathless. ‘Herr Oberstleutnant.’ It was his orderly, an elderly Volkssturm wearing a faded First World War tunic. The man leaned forward, panting, holding his stomach, looking half-dead. ‘You must come at once. To your room. Important visitors from the Reich Chancellery. A prisoner under escort.’

  The Reich Chancellery. Hoffman stopped on the stairs. What the hell did they want? He clenched his teeth. ‘Who is it?’

  The soldier’s skin was pasty, like porcelain, and there was a numbness in his eyes. ‘Herr Oberstleutnant, I don’t know. I really don’t know. One of the Feldgendarmen grabbed me and sent me up to find you.’

  ‘All right. How many?’

  ‘Five, I think. Two SS guards, two senior-looking officers and the prisoner, bound and hooded. They came through the cable tunnel from the L-Tower. That’s all I know.’ The soldier’s voice cracked, and he slumped against the wall.

  Hoffman took a deep breath, and swallowed hard. His throat was still burning from the acrid air outside. ‘All right. Go back to your duties. Don’t give the Feldgendarmen any reason to pick on you. There’s going to be a lot of killing soon. Get on.’

  The soldier gave a faltering salute and stumbled back down the stairs. Hoffman followed him, clattering down as fast as he could. The stench was indescribable. He passed the entrance to the hospital and glimpsed bloodstained operating tables inside. Part of the hospital was an emergency Sanitatsraum, a maternity ward. The vibration of the guns had pushed women into early labour, as if life were frantically regenerating in the face of extinction. He had heard the screams of women giving birth in the night and the wail of a baby, so at odds with this place of death.

  He thought about what his orderly had said. In his room. All he could think of was the crates with Schliemann’s artefacts from Troy. In the last hours of the Reich, had they come to claim their remaining loot? But with a prisoner? He reached the second-floor landing. He could see the throng of civilians below, in the emergency lighting now provided by the backup generator. The stairwell funnelled the noise upwards, a sound like the engine room of a ship, humming and pulsating. Above it he heard the occasional shriek, then a snatched voice of reason as someone tried to bargain for space, for food. Two days ago he had watched families arrive in their best clothes, carrying cardboard suitcases with thermos flasks and sandwiches. Now they surged up the stairs like a nightmare image, pressing against the line of Feldgendarmen who held them back. This was the truth of Goebbels’ Volksgenossenschaft, ‘patriotic comradeship’. These were the ordinary people of Berlin, the women who had waited in vain for their soldier husbands to return, the children, the elderly who thought they had endured the worst of war a generation ago. Two well-dressed women suddenly disintegrated into a vicious fight over a scrap, snarling and scratching until one of the Feldgendarmen slammed his elbow into them and they fell back into the melee, screaming. Hoffman remembered a line from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. First comes food, then morals. Only for so many of these people, morality had been sucked out of them by the Nazis long ago.

  He approached the door to his room. The two Feldgendarmen had gone, and had been replaced by two men wearing Waffen-SS camouflage smocks and forage caps and carrying Sturmgewehr-44 assault rifles. Their lapels carried the round Sonnenrad sun-disc symbol of the SS Nordland Division, the same symbol Hoffman had seen in the floor at Wewelsburg Castle. One of the men put up a hand, swathed in a bandage and missing a thumb, and Hoffman halted. He suddenly felt uneasy. Perhaps he had been wrong about the Schliemann treasure. Maybe they were here for him. Had he given them some excuse, failed in his duty somehow? He remembered what he had left on the crate. His diary. He had never imagined that anyone would return to that room before the Russians arrived. If a Feldgendarm or SS man still loyal to the Reich saw even one page of it, then it was all over for him. He felt a cold trickle of sweat run down his back. A voice barked inside, and the soldier missing the thumb beckoned him forward. At that moment a shudder rent the tower as one of the big flak guns fired. Hoffman knew that the worst vibration was a whiplash effect a second later, and he instinctively put his hands to his ears. As he did so, the soldier deftly undid his holster and took the Luger from him. Hoffman dropped his arms and walked into the room. His heart began to pound. So this was it.

  He saw two men inside, wearing army greatcoats and officers�
� peaked caps, their faces obscured in the gloom. They wore the shoulder insignia of SS generals, Obergruppenfuhrer, and they were streaked with mud. Then he saw a third man, the prisoner, shorter than the other two and wearing a civilian brown leather coat, a white hood over his head and his arms tied behind his back. The door shut behind Hoffman. The smaller man suddenly released his own hands without help and ripped off the hood, then walked towards Hoffman’s makeshift desk, where the bare bulb hanging over it was lit. One of the generals gestured for Hoffman to follow. He clicked his heels, touched his Knight’s Cross, pulled down his jacket lapels and straightened his cap, then walked over briskly and came to a halt, slamming his foot down and remaining at attention. He felt strangely calm. Why there had to be three of them he did not know. A single Feldgendarm, a single bullet, was all he had expected. At least he was not being guillotined in Gestapo headquarters, or strung up with piano wire like the Hitler plot conspirators the year before.

  The smaller man threw off his greatcoat and smoothed back his oily hair, then turned round under the light and stared at him.

  Hoffman froze. It was not possible. The man in front of him should by all rights have been dead. It was Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler.

  14

  Oberstleutnant Ernst Hoffman stood inside the entrance to the concrete room that had served as his office, the two Waffen-SS guards behind him and the shadowy figures of the two SS generals in greatcoats standing against the wall to the left. For a frightening moment he felt unable to breathe, as if the closed-down ventilation shafts had finally excluded all air from the flak tower, and the remainder had been sucked out by the pulverizing Soviet bombardment overhead. When he did take a breath, his nostrils filled with the same cloying smell that had sickened him in the Fuhrerbunker under the Chancellery a few days before, the reek of wet wool, stale sweat, nicotine and alcohol, the hint of incipient decay that had made the bunker already seem like a tomb.

  He stared at the man facing him in front of his desk. The man had been wearing an eye patch, now pulled off, and had shaved his moustache, but there was no doubting who he was. What was he doing here? Hoffman had been this close to Himmler many times over the last months of his posting in Berlin, and earlier when Himmler had taken an interest in his Luftwaffe career. The pasty complexion was there, the weak chin, the squirrelly jowls, the small, close-set eyes behind little round spectacles, looking at him with one eyebrow raised. Hoffman snapped to attention, clicked his heels and raised his right arm in the Nazi salute. ‘Herr Reichsfuhrer-SS. Heil Hitler.’

  Himmler waved dismissively. ‘You can dispense with the Heil Hitler . Adolf is dead.’ His voice was ice-cold, precise. Under the civilian overcoat Hoffman could see that he was wearing the field grey of a Wehrmacht officer, not the usual SS black. Then Hoffman remembered that Hitler, in one of his final acts of madness, had appointed Himmler commander of Army Group Vistula. Himmler had seemed inordinately proud of his role, but had never held a field command before in his life. Everyone knew he had failed to be selected for front-line service in 1918, and it grated on him. Army Group Vistula had disintegrated weeks ago, but Hoffman knew there was a reason why Himmler was still wearing the uniform: three days earlier, Himmler had gone on his own volition over the Elbe to the advancing American army, to try to negotiate a ceasefire. An SS uniform would not have made him many friends there. His proposal that the Allies join with the remnant Wehrmacht to fight against the Russians had been rejected, but when Hitler found out about his attempt to parley he was incandescent and had him branded a traitor. Hoffman himself had been next to Hitler in the bunker and had seen the rage. Himmler had expected to be the next Fuhrer, but instead Hitler had appointed Grand Admiral Donitz. Himmler had disappeared, and was presumed dead. But now the man himself was standing here, very much alive. And it was Hitler who was dead.

  Himmler waved again at Hoffman’s raised arm, then offered his gloved right hand. Hoffman watched his gaze, remembering how it roved disarmingly over a person’s countenance before fixing on one’s eyes, penetratingly. He remained ramrod straight, but lowered his arm, taking the proffered hand. He felt the pudgy fingers, soft and clammy, and the limp shake. Himmler was still looking at him questioningly, one eyebrow cocked. In that instant, Hoffman knew he was being tested. Of course. The Fuhrer is dead. Long live the Fuhrer. He snapped his right arm back up. ‘ Mein Fuhrer. Sieg Heil.’ Himmler gave him a lopsided, humourless smile, then took off his leather gloves and slapped them against his thigh. ‘I have always been impressed by your loyalty, Hoffman. You and your family. Dear little Hans. Have you heard from your wife? These are testing times.’

  ‘They are in Elsholz, mein Fuhrer. At my wife’s family home. The Russians are close.’

  ‘Then I have excellent news for you. Two days ago, my men took them to Plon, near the Baltic coast. They are safe from the Russians.’ He pulled a postcard with a seaside view out of his pocket and passed it to Hoffman, who glanced down at it. There were just a few lines, but it was enough. He recognized his wife’s writing. They were by the sea. Waiting for him. He felt weak with relief. Dr Unverzagt had been telling the truth about that, at least. He stared at Himmler, not betraying a flicker of emotion, and clicked his heels again. ‘I am most grateful.’

  Himmler waved his hand, then pulled a dagger out of his belt, unsheathed it, and ran one finger over the flat of the blade, flinching as he touched the edge. It was an SS officer’s dagger, black-handled and mirror-bright, with runes etched into the steel. Hoffman remained stock still. So this was to be it. Not a bullet, but a knife. He was surprised that Himmler had the stomach for it. Himmler stopped toying with the knife and looked at Hoffman. ‘As I said, I have always been impressed by your loyalty. Not like those snivelling swine at Army Group Headquarters, always undermining me. Not like those sycophants in the Fuhrerbunker. The only ones I have ever trusted are my beloved SS, and you, Hoffman. But now it is time to regenerate, to purify. The Nazi party is dead. The SS lives on. Kneel down.’

  Hoffman held his breath. Just get it over with. He sank to both knees, still ramrod straight, staring past Himmler. He closed his eyes, trying to imagine his son, holding him sleeping against his shoulder, standing on the lake shore at his father’s home in Bavaria, feeling the warmth of the infant’s breath on his neck. He felt a tap on his shoulder, then opened his eyes and saw Himmler resheathing the knife and looking down at him. ‘You know the SS oath?’

  Hoffman swallowed hard. ‘ Meine Ehre Heisst Treue. My honour is loyalty.’

  ‘Arise, SS-Brigadefuhrer.’

  Hoffman rose to his feet, stood to attention and clicked his heels. He felt physically sick. ‘ Mein Fuhrer. It is the greatest honour.’

  Himmler put the dagger on the desk, slapped down his gloves beside it and then went round to Hoffman’s chair. He sat down heavily and raised his legs on the desk, rattling the half-bottle of schnapps that Hoffman had left there. He took off the shoulder satchel he had been carrying and pulled out a swaddled package, putting it on the table beside the dagger. Hoffman followed every movement, his heart pounding, keeping his eyes from straying to the top of the crate where he had left his diary. He must not see that. Himmler took off his spectacles, blew on them and wiped them clean with a handkerchief, then replaced them and stared at Hoffman. ‘I am a practical man, SS-Brigadefuhrer. I have absolutely no wish to go down with the rats in the sinking ship. The Americans have disappointed me. But they will do my bidding, when the time comes. Of that I can assure you.’

  The light bulb above the desk trembled, and the dust in the air shimmered. There was a screeching groan, and then another. The electricity jolted off with each shuddering percussion, and the luminous paint on the ceiling flashed pastel blue as the bulb flickered on and off. Himmler dropped his feet back to the ground and leaned over, holding his ears and grimacing; the two SS generals in the shadows did the same, unused to the terrible noise. Hoffman clapped his hands to his ears. This would be it. The final barrage. The battery commander
would be firing the south-facing flak guns simultaneously in salvos, for maximum noise effect inside the tower. There would be twenty, maybe twenty-five rounds. He and Hoffman had planned the barrage to give them cover, to allow them to get out unnoticed by the Feldgendarmen and surrender the tower to the Russians before the final onslaught, to save the thousands of civilians crammed inside. It had been a desperate scheme, but now it appeared a forlorn hope. There seemed no chance that Hoffman could escape from this room – and whatever scheme Himmler had for him – in time to reach the Russians and call for a ceasefire.