by Leo Kessler
The officers saluted. The Party officials thundered ‘Heil Hitler!’ and at the back of the waving children, a distinguished-looking middle-aged man took off his English-style bowler for some reason or other.
Otto stumbled forward onto the carpet, mesmerized. This reception... Everyone here... They were all looking straight at him. But why?
A hard-faced man with clever eyes stepped forward and seized Otto’s hand.
‘Kaufmann… Gauleiter… Hamburg…’ He barked out the words like bullets from a machine-gun suffering from a bad stoppage. ‘Welcome… Hero…’ He lowered his voice suddenly and spoke very rapidly, as if he didn’t want the others to hear. ‘Smile at the camera, look pale but heroic. The old poison-dwarf,’ he meant Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, ‘likes modest, pallid heroes.’ And with a quick wink, ‘There’ll be a very good French girl waiting for you at the hotel. I can personally vouch for her.’ He raised his voice again and continued in that staccato style of his, while Otto stared at him in complete bewilderment. Pallid heroes… girl in the hotel… What did it all mean?
‘Now,’ Kaufmann was assaulting the assembled crowds, ‘the perfidious English… know… their island… is no longer impregnable! Here… is the living proof… The first escapee… from their dreaded… concentration camps! The first of many, folk-comrades!’ He frowned meaningfully, thrusting out his heavy jaw dramatically, as the cameras whirred and clicked and the flash-bulbs popped. ‘I promise… you… that.’ He thrust out his hand and pumped Otto’s. ‘Otto Stahl… welcome to Hamburg!’ He beamed hugely at the bewildered young man, who blinked anew every time a flash-bulb exploded.
It all hit Otto in a flash. He was a national hero! He groaned inwardly. Now he really was back in the Third Reich.
A few minutes later the welcoming ceremony was over and to the accompaniment of the Badenweiler, the Führer’s own favourite march, he allowed himself to be guided to the Gauleiter’s own big black Mercedes like a dumb animal being led to the slaughter. The children waved as they walked into the night. The officials and officers hurried after them to the exit, and behind them on the platform, the gentleman in the English-style bowler frowned down with thoughtful contemplation at his impeccably rolled umbrella. It was unused, even though it had been raining hard in the wet northern port of Hamburg. Then, finally, he too departed into the night.
CHAPTER 2
The French beauty Gauleiter Kaufmann had promised him had come and gone. She had stayed all night. Now he was alone again in the deluxe second-floor suite of Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, overlooking the Alster, shaving himself happily in the mirror.
‘Come and gone!’ he said to himself, scraping carefully down one side of his handsome face. ‘She’s gone and I’ve come!’ He laughed at his own humour. But there was something to it, he told himself.
The girl, a fragile blonde with a black parting, had been very business-like indeed, referring to herself as a ‘working prostitute who was forced to like the hard men of the Reich’, as she had unzipped her skirt without any encouragement from an overwhelmed and, by this time, slightly tipsy Otto (Kaufmann had kept him at the hotel’s magnificent bar for over an hour, introducing him as ‘Our Hero’ to the local worthies and newspapermen who promised to splash his story over the headlines the next day).
After she had called him Anna twice at a moment of real or supposed ecstasy, he realised that she probably didn’t like any hard men at all. All the same, after months of enforced celibacy it had been good, very good. Even the dreary raindrops running down the huge windows of his suite like sad tears could not dampen his good mood this particularly wet morning. Otto whistled ‘There'll Always be an England’ and concentrated on his chin.
A little while later, just as he was patting it dry, there was a soft knock on the door. Thinking it would be the waiter, who had promised him breakfast ‘with real bean coffee’, Otto called, ‘Come in.’ And then, ‘Put it down on the table, waiter,’ as he continued to dry himself. ‘I’ll get to it in a minute.’
‘Put what down, Herr Stahl?’ a woman’s voice queried. Otto spun round and dropped his towel hastily to cover his naked loins.
A young woman and a pretty child were standing there, the child staring at him with the kind of intensity one might expect from a little girl faced with a tall, naked man, trying to hold a small face towel over what was left of his dignity.
‘What… who…?’ Otto gasped.
‘Just your autograph, Herr Stahl,’ the young woman said sweetly. ‘For my little girl, you know. She’s making a collection of heroes. We’ve already got Herr Kapitan Lieutenant Priem’.
‘Priem… a hero?’ Otto stuttered. ‘What’s going on?’
Triumphantly, the woman held a copy of the local Hamburg paper to reveal the glaring headline complete with his photograph taken the night before.
HERO OF POW CAMP BREAKOUT. Otto Stahl first German POW to escape from English Concentration Camp. Führer sends congratulations.
‘I knew we’d be first, Herr Stahl,’ she said proudly. ‘We took the workman’s special from Bergedorf. Didn’t even have breakfast.’
Otto forced a smile.
‘I see,’ he said a little helplessly, though he didn't. ‘Your… er… book?’
‘Book!’ the woman rapped to the bemused child. Open-mouthed, still staring unabashedly at the tall naked man, the child produced the book, and the mother said, ‘Have you a pen Herr Stahl? We’ve forgotten ours.’
Otto gulped. It seemed the stupidest question he had ever heard. With considerable fumbling, manoeuvring his towel like a badly trained striptease dancer, he moved across the room to the antique writing desk, where there was a pen. With all the dexterity he could manage he signed the child’s autograph book, while the young mother beamed at him before saying, ‘Now give the uncle your hand, darling, because he has been so kind.’
‘Oh balls,’ Otto groaned and holding on to his towel with one hand proffered the child the other one.
‘Thank you very much,’ the mother said. Leaning forward, both hands clapped to the little girl’s ears so that she couldn’t hear the final words, she hissed. ‘What manhood you have, Herr Stahl… Any time you fancy some relaxation… telephone-book under Kroeger, Eli.’ She winked knowingly. ‘He works nights.’
‘Of course,’ Otto said weakly as the door closed behind her. He collapsed on the bed.
All that morning, Otto kept being disturbed by hushed-voice civilians who wished to shake his hand, wanted him to relate the details of his ‘tremendous escape from the perfidious English’, give them his autograph, or simply just touch him wordlessly, as if the mere contact, like in the case of kings of old, would solve all petty problems.
That damp morning, while anonymous well-wishers from below kept sending up bottle after bottle of German champagne, he placed his name on everything and anything from hotel menus, through identity cards, to human forearms – ‘Sorry, Herr Stahl, but I forgot to bring any paper.’
Twice young women of the town invited him home for ‘Coffee… and things’. Once a young lance-corporal in the Luftwaffe with marcelled hair and smelling of eau-de-cologne made a somewhat similar offer, though not quite.
Two hours later, Otto was heartily sick of being a hero.
At about 11.30am when he was staring moodily at yet another bottle of champagne sent up from the bar by yet another ‘admiring well-wisher’, his phone rang.
Marshalling his wits about him, he picked up the receiver. It was the front desk, he told himself, forwarding yet another starstruck Hamburger.
‘Not another bloody fan?’ he almost shouted into the thing.
‘I'm afraid not,’ replied a very polite voice. ‘Just a little business, if you could be so kind?’
The call came from Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda in Berlin. The official apologized for disturbing him, and took Otto’s apparently off-hand reply to his question at its face value. But it was a worried Otto that replaced the receiver. He knew instinctively t
hat his days as a hero might be short-numbered. The polite official had asked what particular branch of the service had he belonged to before he had been captured by the English. He had vaguely replied, ‘the infantry’, but he knew this wouldn't keep German officials happy for long.
Soon they would be enquiring the number of his battalion and that's when the trouble would start. How could he get away with explaining that a young, highly fit man, as he was, had been running a mobile brothel in France instead of serving ‘Folk, Fatherland and Führer’?
Some fifteen minutes after the disturbing enquiry, the phone rang again. Otto picked it up hesitantly. Was it perhaps the Ministry again, asking for more disturbing details that would ultimately end up putting him in prison?
But the voice that greeted him at the other end was fruity, full of aristocratic confidence – and very well-remembered.
‘Otto, my boy! Meadow here. Just in time. I need your help. The car will be waiting for you at the side entrance to the hotel in ten minutes’ time. Check if you’re being followed or anything, would you? Splendid. Till then!’
‘What?’ Otto stuttered. ‘Car… Followed? By whom?’
But the phone had already gone dead in his hand, leaving him to stare at it, as if it had just produced a kind of small miracle – a voice from the dead!
‘Good morning, sir,’ the tall chauffeur said politely, raising his uniform cap and with his other hand opening the door of the gleaming Horch limousine for a bewildered Otto to enter. ‘Rather a nasty one, I’m afraid.’
‘Yes, rather,’ Otto stuttered, too puzzled even to ask their destination.
The chauffeur got into his seat and picked up the speaking tube. ‘If there is anything you wish to eat or drink, sir,’ he said in that too refined voice typical of an upper-class servant, ‘you will find it in the box at your feet. I should imagine you would care for a little music, sir. Radio Hamburg is broadcasting a Furtwangler concert this lunchtime.’ Without waiting for Otto’s reply, he clicked on the radio and thus launched them into near-midday traffic to the accompaniment of Furtwangler conducting the Führer’s favourite work of Wagner, ‘Tannhauser’.
Twice, Otto tried to find some means of opening the glass partition between him and the high-class chauffeur and ask him just where they were going, but twice he failed. Concluding that it was locked, and unable to find the speaking tube at his end, he took a bottle of beer from the box and drank slowly as they sped across the Lombard Bridge, along the Esplanade, past the Bismarck memorial, by Dammtor station discharging its thousands of passengers like maggots out of a large green cheese, and then picking up even more speed into a newer district of the great port.
The shabby, red-brick nineteenth century houses disappeared to be replaced by modern white-stucco frontages, set back in large gardens, which Otto judged might well have been built in the 1920s. It was obvious that they were expensive, and the bemused young man in the back of the big Horch thought that if ‘Meadow’ lived out here, he was doing very well for himself once more. A lot seemed to have happened in half a year!
Five minutes later the chauffeur turned off from the Elbchaussee into a secluded, yet wealthy-looking side-street. He changed down and guided the big car carefully into a tight drive, the gravel crunching under the tyres in that impressive fashion of prosperous and quality entrances. He stopped, got out, and repeated the same dignified performance he had given at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten.
Almost as if he had been hiding behind the curtains waiting for this exact moment, a portly figure in the striped jacket, white gloves and bow tie of the German butler appeared, umbrella at the ready, calling, ‘Please don’t move, sir… I’m coming!’
Trying to remain dignified and at the same time prevent Otto getting wet, the fat man did a strange sort of quick shuffle towards the bewildered guest, not allowing himself the liberty of protecting his own balding pate with the umbrella from the raindrops, until he had Otto firmly covered by it. Together, they moved to the house.
‘The master is waiting for you in the study, sir,’ he announced, as if Otto frequented the big house every day and knew both who the ‘master’ was and the location of the ‘study’. Gently, he guided Otto round till he was facing an open door. The smoke of an expensive cigar drifted out into the hallway, as did strains of the same Wagner concert the chauffeur had decided he should hear in the car. The portly butler patted off the last drops of rain from his shoulders like a loving mother preparing a son to meet his new headmaster for the first time. In a daze Otto started to walk through the doorway, but was immediately pulled back by the portly gent, who, getting in front of Otto, announced, ‘The Hero of England, Escapist Extraordinaire, Celebrity of the Morning Paper, Herr Otto Stahl!’
A tweed-clad figure, smoking a cigar, was seated in front of a roaring fire, a glass of what looked like whisky standing next to him on a little table. At the man’s feet, on a great white furry rug that looked as if it must have come from the biggest polar bear there had ever been, a red Irish setter reclined, tongue hanging out like a piece of red leather. In the background, Wagner smashed on ruthlessly in brass-bound Teutonic fury.
The figure didn't move, seemingly transfixed by the music. Otto hesitated and then cleared his throat.
The seated figure still didn’t move. The smoke rose slowly from the expensive cigar, the dog continued to pant as on the other end of the radio, Furtwangler whipped his sweating musicians up to a frenzied climax.
Otto cleared his throat again, a look of slight desperation on his face now. ‘Excuse me, but – ’
Suddenly the tweed-clad figure sprang to his feet and rushed towards him with surprising speed.
‘Otto, my boy!’ that familiar upper-class voice exclaimed joyfully.
‘Meadow – I mean, Count. It’s you!’ Otto cried and then they were in each other’s arms, slapping one another on the back, babbling away excitedly like two silly schoolboys, while in the background Furtwangler’s musicians slammed the Wagnerian discords from one side of Hamburg Radio’s studio to the other with absolute, complete abandon.
CHAPTER 3
Otto stared at his old friend, whisky glass in one hand, big expensive cigar like a small flagpole in the other. He still couldn't believe it.
They had sat down either side of the fireplace. Graf von der Weide, whose old Abwehr code-name had been ‘Meadow,’ smiled back at him from the other chair, as if willing him to open his mouth and start asking the questions that were whirling through his head at that moment.
The Count looked ten years younger. Gone were his priest robes of their beachfront kerfuffle. The fat had also gone and now his face was lean and adorned by a trim grey moustache so that with the tweeds he was wearing, one could have taken him for a retired English officer, or perhaps a senior officer in civilian clothes. Everything around him seemed to fit into that particular framework, too. The dog, the roaring, open fire, a rarity in Hamburg, the whisky, even the cigars. Otto noted that they certainly weren’t the cheap German products. Otto would not have been surprised if the Count had opened his mouth and begun speaking to him in English.
Instead, the Count reached over and patted his knee affectionately, saying in German, (though somehow his new clipped intonation sounded slightly English), ‘Bet you were surprised to hear from me again, you young hero, what?’
‘That is the understatement of the year, Count,’ Otto said, taking a gulp of his whisky, while the dog snored softly at his feet. ‘But… how…?’ Still the question he wanted to ask refused to formulate itself correctly in his jumbled brain.
‘All in good time,’ the Count said gently. ‘But first of all, I’d just like to hear something on Radio Hamburg.’ He flashed a glance at his expensive gold wristwatch. ‘It’ll be on in a minute.’
‘The radio?’
The Count held his hand up for instant silence. Somehow or other, Otto told himself, he had regained his old confidence that had vanished during his enforced leave of absence from the Abwehr.
The warning gong sounded. It was one o’clock.
‘Hello, Germany calling… Germany calling,’ a harsh nasal voice snarled in English, a voice which though Otto did not know it then, was to become the best-known, after Churchill’s, for years to come in England – and also the most-hated. The voice continued in English:
‘Let me tell you, my listeners, the good news first. The Pope in Rome has launched yet another peace offensive with the full support of the Führer and the German Reich. Germany is satisfied with her victories. But what of Churchill, I ask you. Does he want peace? Can a bloated plutocrat like that who turned his guns on the workers back in 1926 tolerate – ’
Otto let the words, only half of which he understood, run on, staring in bewildered at the entranced Count, yet oddly impressed too by that harsh, bitter cynical voice.
Finally, the studio gong sounded again and the bitter venomous propaganda broadcast to England, full of boasts, threats and cruel jokes about the ‘corruption in the British ruling-class’, ended. The Count rose to his feet and switched off the radio, saying, ‘The treacherous swine, though I suppose one ought to be grateful for small mercies.’
‘Treacherous swine?’ Otto echoed, completely perplexed now. ‘But he’s working for Germany.’
The Count ignored the comment. ‘Do you know what they call that swine in England?’ he asked.
Otto shook his head.
‘Lord Haw-Haw. People in the know say that he gets as many listeners when he broadcasts that vile rubbish as does our beloved Mr Churchill.’
‘Beloved?’
At last the Count seemed to become aware of his guest’s bewilderment. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘let’s refill our glasses, Otto, before I start. It’s going to be a long story, and I need you bang up-to-date.’
‘Start – start what?’
