Deaths on the Nile

by Scott Palter

“So it’s true?”

  “True enough. We’ve had word. Through New York and Poland. Could be lies we are being fed, but why? We simply aren’t important enough.”

  “I’ve got to pass this up the chain.”

  “I know. Not with my name. ‘Highly placed source from the old patrols.’ Partition, and they expect to be in Jerusalem in a few months. I was never here. There’s no paper says I was.”

  “Were any of you ever going to tell us?”

  “Colonial Office wouldn’t believe a word we say. Neither would Cairo or London. Yet here I am, looking for Lieutenant Colonel Wingate. No papers. Just a social visit. We remember our friends, and you’ve been friends. You are losing this war – now – but Britain has come back from worse … ”

  “Your people send you?”

  “It’s complicated. Some think I’m a traitor, turned by you some time back. There’s a lot of factionalism, and this turn of events isn’t helping. They sent me to Egypt and guessed what I would do, is probably the best way to put it. If the Italians find out, I’m a traitor acting on his own in violation of orders. Probably hang me. Yet here I am. That should count for something, even if we do a Quisling when the Fascists arrive. Thousands of years, our people have survived. Means keeping a foot in many camps.”

  “What’s the exact attack date?”

  “We don’t have it. But less than a month, is what we were led to believe. Jerusalem and Tel Aviv for New Year’s Eve. How did you people mess this war up so badly?”

  The British officer just wearily shook his head. He’d make up papers to get the line-crosser back to Palestine. He’d give his general a verbal briefing. Wingate was an old friend of Wavell. Maybe he’d get through the forest of official lies and convenient part-truths. Maybe the general would. Poor Britain.

  1700 hours CET

  11 October 1940

  Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, Berlin

  The Reichsführer hated surprises. Yet here was a surprise in three leading Berlin papers, concerning his little Klaus Steiner project. Schellenberg having failed to explain how this interview had not been passed through this headquarters for pre-approval, both were now interviewing a very frightened Hauptsturmführer. The man was a recent returnee from Hausser’s Division in Africa, rotated back and on light duty from some strange regional disease. The officer was on limited duty, and shaking from trying to stand at attention without using his walking stick.

  “Use the stick. Still better, sit down. I need you coherent while I decide whether to have you executed for incompetence. Why was this approved without involving either of us?” The Hauptsturmführer shakily took the indicated seat. “My predecessor briefed me that I was to keep these things off your desks. That you were too busy. I have two folders of such … ”

  Oberführer Schellenberg cut in. “Too busy? Since when?”

  “Since you brushed off the correspondence between the Major and his parents.”

  “I said I was too busy that day.” Schellenberg caught himself. The former aide had saluted and left, but had not returned the next day, or indeed any day. There were SO many balls to juggle. “My apologies, Reichsführer. It seems the fault is mine.”

  Heydrich wearily shook his head. There was so much to do, and however much more he managed, all it got him was still more work. The job of really being in charge was man-killing. “Correspondence?”

  “His letters to his parents. Theirs to him. Other letters from his mayor, HJ leader, relatives, his sister … ”

  Heydrich wanted to scream. He didn’t. It didn’t fit his image which he had worked so long to develop. “Where are these letters?”

  “In folders in my file cabinet. We have been sitting on all this since Romania. He’s stopped writing. His last letter said that he saw no reason to write when they wouldn’t bother to answer. His parents send monthly requests to what they call NL Headquarters asking if he’s still alive … ”

  “Find yourself a BDM who can type and take dictation. Boil these down to harmless pleasantries and forward them marked ‘simplified by military censors’. If a specific fact is in doubt, delete it and forward a memo to my office. Is this clear?”

  “Zu Befehl, Reichsführer. So what do I do with today’s request for him to be enrolled in the Party?”

  “Party? Now? Why?”

  The Hauptsturmführer was now on firm ground. “Leutnant Schmidt explained that in a separate message. It’s part of the betrothal. His new in-laws will make him commercial director of their firm, but feel a Party member will be better received … ”

  “Firm? In-laws?” Heydrich was aware the girl was a Jewess he had made an Aryan by a wave of his hand. He must have been told who her people were, but all he remembered was that her parents and siblings had been liquidated for some reason. “What do they do?”

  “Oil-field specialists of some sort. Two uncles, two male cousins in Africa, a third in Italy. There’s also an aunt and four female cousins back at the Bari cantonment, along with most of the people from their firm and the similar ones.”

  Heydrich was almost afraid to ask. This diseased combat veteran seemed to be the only one who actually knew anything. Which meant his predecessor, now en route to Hausser’s replacement battalion, had known these things all along. “How many oil-field specialists do we have at Bari?”

  “My figures are probably out of date, Reichsführer. More keep being sent from Romania all the time. Standartenführer Ohlendorf keeps purging more undesirables from his work force. Slavs, Jews, Roma, foreigners of all sorts. We have several thousand at least. Then there are the ones from Hungary, where … ”

  “Hungary?”

  “This Brigadier Strauss had an encounter with the Arrow Cross, and left a garrison which keeps accumulating refugees fleeing the chaos. A few were oil-field workers. One wrote back from Bari and now they are appearing in mass lots, begging transport to Bari so they can work in the new oil fields.”

  “The new oil fields? Didn’t anyone tell these people that Iraq was a state secret?” Heydrich answered his own question as he asked it. He turned his attention back to Schellenberg. “Standartenführer Ohlendorf is still making excuses for the falloff in production at Ploiesti?” The Oberführer nodded. “And all that time, he is purging his work force of non-Aryans who sit eating rations in Italy instead of getting oil out of the ground? Send a plane for the man. He is on my schedule for tomorrow.” Heydrich turned back to the by-now totally terrified Hauptsturmführer. “From now on, ANYTHING concerning that unit is to be presented in writing to the Oberführer’s secretary, preferably on the day it is received. Start numbering and dating these. Keep a log book and get signed receipts. You are not in trouble. You seem to be the only person in this building actually doing his job. Your predecessor will get some interesting annotations to his personnel file for failing to do his. Dismissed!”

  The sick officer was out of his chair almost instantly. He saluted both superiors, and fled as fast as he could hobble. Heydrich turned on the desk voicebox and alerted his aide at the desk right outside his office, “Close the door. Hold all calls unless it’s the Führer or Soviet ambassador.”

  “Soviet ambassador?” Schellenberg needed to be in the loop on whatever concerned his patron.

  “They will declare war, and it will be at an inconvenient moment. Now back to fixing this mess. Ohlendorf is out for the oil fields. Find one of Speer’s technocrats. Get with the transport office. The cousin-in-law back in Italy is to lead a special train of technicians back to Romania. Give him blanket authority to recruit. Jews, blacks, baboons, it doesn’t matter. The oil flows. Have Eichmann canvas his camps for technicians. This is a national priority. Now these in-laws are hereby real Aryans. Your shop up at Ravensbrück. You get every one of them full certificates back to the 15th century. Make it all from towns in Poland and Romania, behind Soviet lines. That way no one can do a trip to the records office and embarrass us. Final question: did anyone prime this boy with his answers? He seems very polished for an 1
8-year-old.”

  Schellenberg thought quickly. “I’m sure Strauss held his hand and prettied it up, but my man Schmidt says the boy was taught polite adult speech as part of his school course. He wanted to be a ministry or cartel clerk. Being well-spoken is necessary in such situations. He cannot do fancy rhetoric, but his everyday speech is a bit above his age and class.”

  Heydrich was ignoring Schellenberg, staring out the window. He was thinking of months of lost oil production, and Stalin’s show trials against Wreckers. Perhaps he would ask Beria for details of how to organize such. It was a most pleasant set of thoughts.

  1100 hours CET

  12 October 1940

  Villa Mineux, Am Grossen Wannsee, Greater Berlin

  The SS-owned villa was packed with representatives of the various ministries, Reich protectorates, and party organs. The conference on the Jewish Question was supposed to have been at the level of deputies and assistants. At the proverbial last minute, the two Army generals had announced they would attend themselves. This forced Reichsführer Heydrich to do the same. Normally Führer Göring avoided such visible displays of his formal powers. Which of his two females had persuaded him otherwise was unknown. But he had just arrived to the event.

  As the invitation had clearly said 0700 hours, he was late. He had missed Eichmann’s multi-hour presentation followed by round-robin bickering and turf defenses from the other bureaucracies. The Führer ambled in, thereby momentarily stopping a pissing match between the Finance Ministry and the General Government on the allocation of funds for barge repairs on the Vistula. The ‘highest leader’ was visibly hung over from a diplomatic gala the previous evening. He was surrounded by an entourage of fawning flunkies. When he motioned for the discussion to resume, both officials tried to talk at once. Embarrassed, they both stopped, thereby giving the man from the Transportation Ministry a chance to assert his organization’s point of view. This in turn prompted near simultaneous objections from Organization Todt and the Party’s Labor Front.

  Göring’s flunkies were too busy laughing at some witticism of his to notice. Generaloberst and War Minister Beck was not. He had had enough. “Quiet! All lesser minions out! The four of us will have a meeting, and then you staff people can go back to your children’s playground antics.”

  Beck was mortified that the assembled officials all looking to Heydrich for their cues. The Reichsführer just nodded and waved them out. Without a word, they gathered binders, briefing papers, and aides, filing out in a disorganized gaggle. Göring’s flunkies remained with him. Beck glared at the useless fools. Göring gave him a withering look and laughed at him. “I am still Führer. I’ll keep who I wish here. If you don’t like that you can leave, and we’ll inform you of what was decided.”

  “You rule by our leave.”

  “That was June. This is now. Order the Berlin garrison to arrest us all, and see where it leads. You have a plan to upgrade the Gross Deutschland Regiment into a division. So far it’s a four-battalion regiment out in the suburbs with a fifth battalion doing honorary guard duty downtown. When was the last time you went to the officer’s mess and did a dinner? Had drinks with them?”

  “I am Generaloberst! The Army obeys commands!”

  “Issue the order and find out. I dare you.” Göring no longer looked bored. This contest brought out his fighting spirit. He had spent four months building personal loyalties. He was the monarch the power holders knew. Heydrich had been a genius with this. Göring was prepared to admit this to himself.

  Generaloberst Halder saw this heading places he did not wish to go. “Gentlemen. Please. Manners. Our committee rules the Reich. We are here to discuss Jewish policy. Reichsführer, why are we bombarded with trivia?”

  Heydrich’s smile was sardonic. “Because this was supposed to be a working meeting of lower-echelon people to coordinate action across vast competing bureaucracies – most of whom have some connection with Jewish policy, but none of whom really understand it.”

  “So what is that policy they don’t understand?”

  “The one I negotiated with you two the night of the coup. Yes, coup. It’s just the four of us here. Let us call things what they really are.” Heydrich ignored Göring’s pets. They didn’t matter. If necessary he could liquidate them all. “You two were squeamish about the Party’s policy towards the Jews. Which is funny, because we really didn’t have one. We didn’t have a firm policy towards anything. We had a self-contradictory electoral program, which we abolished when we shot Röhm at the Army’s insistence and gave up on the Second Revolution. Everything after that was bureaucratic gamesmanship and a push for rearmament.” He looked around the table to see if anyone was following him. No. Heydrich had a didactic side. He worked on controlling it, but apparently his colleagues needed him to state the obvious. “We are ruling Germany today because our late Führer had an obsession with faddish vegetarian diets. Couldn’t digest the stuff. Endless problems with flatulence and intestinal pain. That led to quack doctors, drugs of dubious provenance, and various homeopathic poisons. Some combination of which killed him. Exit Adolph and enter us.” They were nodding a bit. Just needed to be led along. “Now Adolph hated the Jews. So did enough Germans for it be electorally useful. No firm policy. Expel them from society. Beatings for some, a little time in camps for others. Steal their money and property, then get miffed when no other nation would take in impoverished Jews. Even with that, we’d dumped a good many of our original ones. Except the victories kept giving us more, especially in Poland. These didn’t need to be made impoverished. They mostly already were. We could just have shot them all. The Army objected, and the killings stopped after a few months.”

  Beck exploded again. “The German state is not a bunch of gangsters! Mass murder ruins discipline.”

  “As you will. So we have millions of them. Whom you don’t want machine-gunned. I got their rich American kinsmen to feed them. Think of the food as a tax on Hollywood movie tickets, on Wall Street plunderings. Our state is making a profit on the ghettoes and camps. However, why should we let these millions sit there eating when we can work them?”

  Halder was frankly curious. “Why work them there? We have factories in the Reich that need labor.”

  “Think it through. Our people never liked Jews. Even the ones who tolerated assimilated German Jews, despised the Yiddish-speaking Eastern Jews. What will the social and political effect be if we push masses of these Yids into German cities? We will estrange our Party members and the masses. So I did it in reverse. We have enough German labor, if it’s all forced into war production. The Gauleiters fought closing down German civilian production. Standard of living. Connections. Enough small businessmen being Party members. So those small operators now move their production of table lamps and ten thousand other civilian soft goods to Eichmann’s Palestine workshops. The SS earns a profit on the labor. The German workers who no longer make children’s stockings and lip gloss, can be the second shift at Krupp or the third at Porsche. The very religious Jews, the elders, the orphans, the recalcitrant we dump on the Italians. They are more socialist, less racist than we are. They seem to get some work out of enough of them. For the rest of them … think of the surplus Jews, clergy, and gypsies they take as Italy’s price of Empire. The last war cost them endless casualties fighting Austria. Over a million dead, however you do the math. Compared to those oceans of blood, taking in a few million useless mouths who can be harvest labor is cheaper. Everyone wins.”

  Beck returned to the issue that had enraged him. “Why shoot an officer over ‘command authority’? IT WAS MURDER!”

  “It was murder because command authority was usurped. What if we change our minds and give an order to liquidate a ghetto? All the ghettoes? How does a field officer respond to those orders, once we have treated this time as murder? They raise questions. They insist on courts, on verification. No. We want them to obey. If the order is to transport Jews, follow the order. If the order is to slaughter a thousand Jews and t
hen butcher the bodies as food for hogs to feed Germany, obey.”

  “That is gross! Hideous! No decent man could obey that order!” Beck was near beside himself.

  “No decent Army officer. My SS will obey. They will not question. We are a revolutionary regime in a war of national survival. There are no limits. The stakes are victory or death. When Stalin attacks, we either win or we all go to the wall. So do our families down to third cousins twice removed. Are you really that unworldly? When YOUR KIND sent Lenin by that sealed train, you unleashed Hell on Earth. You did that for a transitory tactical advantage. Russia collapsed a few months earlier than otherwise, and you gentlemen still managed to lose the war anyway by dragging in the Americans. Which we will not do this time. There is no possible American provocation such that I will rise to their bait. You have all stated conditions on this committee. Meet one of mine. No war with America, unless they motivate themselves to declare it on us.”

  Beck started screaming about how Heydrich worked for them, not with them. Göring shouted him down. “Shut up! I’m calling for a vote. All those in favor of Heydrich’s Jewish policy.” Three hands went up. “All in favor of Heydrich’s American policy.” Three hands went up. “Meeting adjourned!” Göring got up without shaking hands, and walked out to his stretch-limousine, trailed by his silent, pensive flunkies. They had seen more than was safe, and worried about their life expectancy.

  2300 hours CET

  12 October, 1940

  Heydrich’s Office, Prinz-Albrecht-Straße, Berlin

  Standartenführer Ohlendorf had known he was in trouble when the plane arrived with the peremptory summons back to Berlin. He had spent the flight and the long hours after arrival marshaling his defense. It centered on one key instruction, which he was now about to repeat back to his judges, Reichsführer Heydrich and Oberführer Schellenberg. This was not a formal court. It was a trial. Ohlendorf was on trial for his life. “Sirs, when I was sent to the oil fields, my prime directive was their security. I take over from that overpromoted SA idiot Strauss, and he tries to downplay his incompetence. He passes off an attack on the facilities as a demonstration by otherwise friendly local elements, the Iron Guard. That was obviously absurd on its face. Leutnant Steiner doesn’t get the Iron Cross for stopping a riot and preventing a lynching. So anyone connected to Strauss was suspect in my eyes. This is confirmed a few days later when the real story is broadcast from Berlin. It was a major Red partisan assault. Everyone working there who denies this must be in league with hostile elements. Even those of nominal German blood must have acquired foreign loyalties. The Soviets are only a few days march away. The partisan remnants are likely hiding in the immediate vicinity of my facilities, awaiting the order to strike. So I’ve brought in fresh personnel. Broken any possible ties to the saboteurs and Communists. I know this has led to some production falloff, but it’s transitory. Give me another three or four months, and my new people will be exceeding quotas.” There. He’d gotten it all out. Why were they looking at him this way? Was he the designated goat in some larger internal SS power play?