“‘How can you know?’ I said. ‘It might have been me. Maybe I took it.’ He gave me a pseudo-paternal look, like a middle school principal might give the class clown in a private moment.
“‘No. I understand your loyalty, but he’s already confessed to forging the requisition slips. And, that you called his attention to the shortages which he told you to ignore. It was his own son who denounced him.’
“‘But why?’ I then quickly corrected myself. ‘Why did he steal it?’
“Schulz raised his hands. ‘To sell it to the Communists, I suppose, or to Beppo Römer’s men. I assume they will find out. Now …’
“Schulz kept talking. I watched his lips without listening to the words. The gestures told it clearly enough. He was telling me to show Boltzmann his duties. I bowed as Schulz left and Boltzmann bowed deeper. Boltzmann said something, but I didn’t hear it, I just nodded mechanically and walked off. ‘We’ll start in the storeroom,’ I said over my shoulder. Boltzmann followed me neatly, one step to the right and two steps back, the right-hand man.
“Later I discovered that Fritz had left his briefcase, so I emptied it out. Fritz had carried a briefcase so I could too, right? I could steal explosives a box at a time. I thought of Fritz, but didn’t feel guilty, just a little sick to my stomach. I knew what would happen to him and that there was no way to avoid it.
“Have any of you ever attended a German civil execution?” Georg gazed from one to the other but there was no response. He elaborated,
“They are done by decapitation, but with a local flavor. My father had taken me to one as a boy, said it would do me good even though my mother screamed and cried. In Fritz’s case the beheading was done by a large butcher with a large meat cleaver who was wearing a silk top hat, white tie, and tails. The executioner was an enormously fat and powerful man with the curling mustache of an Old West bad man. A number of guards were standing around to make the thing look orderly and two bored men in rubber boots, aprons, and wearing derbies were standing by with mops and buckets.
“There was also the usual audience of reporters and police, Nazi bureaucrats and Gestapo men watching faces and people who just happened to like that sort of thing. Fritz didn’t have anything to say, men rarely do in that circumstance. Schulz had insisted that we go to witness, that it would be inspirational. He turned to me and smiled then we both looked on as Fritz was led up onto the block and fastened.
“The fat butcher in the top hat picked up the cleaver and tested its weight and then beheaded Fritz with one soggy crunch. Fritz’s head tumbled into the basket, bounced up and almost out, only clinging to the rim of the basket by its teeth, the eyes rolling and blinking. There was an enormous whoop of laughter and applause and then the head fell back into the basket. I was not able to think of anything, my mind just sort of temporarily shut off.
“Schultz and I took the train back to Heidenheim and though I can’t remember the trip back, I do remember that while walking home from the station I saw a church and went in. It was a Catholic church so I knelt. I recited the Lord’s Prayer; recited it several times.
“‘I have never prayed to God in a personal way, that is, freely and in my own words. And I have never made my action—I mean the wish that it succeed—the object of my prayer. When I was a child, my parents took me to church; later I went alone a few times, but less often as the years went by. Only in the past year have I visited churches more often, even on work days, even Catholic churches when there wasn’t a Lutheran close by. I don’t really think the denomination matters. I admit that my prayers were connected with what I was going to do but in an abstract way, I couldn’t think of anything else and I’m sure I wouldn’t have prayed so much if I hadn’t been planning this. It’s not that I thought that what I was planning to do was sinful. I was trying to prevent even worse bloodshed.”
“You were trying to PREVENT bloodshed? Bet you love dogs too. All murderers love dogs,” said Brandt, ever the sentimentalist.
“Yeah,” said Nolte. “Yea though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death, I can always blame Fritz for it. Your best friend gets his head cut off and you’re giving us a song and dance about being an altruist.”
“Fritz wasn’t my friend.” Georg looked from one to the other as if this fact should have been clear to all.
“Maybe you weren’t his friend,” said Nebe, “but he was probably your only true friend, except maybe Ulrich but you very likely got him killed too.”
“You’re a monster,” Nolte explained.
“I don’t feel like a monster.” Georg tried to feel guilty, but couldn’t manage it. He just felt hollow.
“Monsters never think they’re monsters. They think they’re just stronger or cleverer than everyone else. Or, worse, they think that whatever they do isn’t for them it’s for their art, which entitles them do anything they want to anyone.” Nolte was having an almost fatal moment of insight into himself, but he survived it.
“Enough.” Nebe pointed to the typewriter and drew a finger across his throat. The noise of the typing died away. He turned back to Georg. “You are saying we killed the wrong man.”
“Yes, sir.” Elser’s earnest expression was infuriating.
Nebe turned back to Brandt, who had his fingers in midair over the typewriter. “Strike that, all of it.” Brandt looked puzzled. He was often puzzled. He was a good man in a gunfight, always followed order, and he didn’t mind typing. “Take it all. All of it! Run it through the shredder, twice! Put it all in the wastebasket then swallow the wastebasket.”
Brandt pulled the sheet out of the typewriter. He stared at it. He picked up the rest of the pages and wandered off looking humiliated yet not surprised about it. Nebe followed him out the door and shouted in his father’s, the Sergeant Major’s, voice. Before he could walk back to his desk, two uniformed Anwarters had double-timed up the stairs and run into the room. They turned their ponderously attentive faces to Nebe and waited for instructions. “Get him out of here!” he said. “Put him in the cage in the squad room and don’t let anyone talk to him.” Georg stood up and the Anwarters grabbed him by the elbows and wheeled him around so fast that Nebe felt a spurt of wind against his face. They heel and toed their way out and closed the door with slow motion delicacy.
There was the sound of someone falling down in the squad room. Nebe contemplated the ceiling and waited for another crash. Nolte gave him a look that said: Who are you trying to impress with this shit? It’s fucking embarrassing. Nebe shrugged. “Well,” he said, “we’re supposed to be upset that we killed the wrong man, it gives it a moral tone.”
“There is no conspiracy …,” said Nolte, very quiet and very scared. “How can we be expected to handle this? The case itself is a time bomb.”
“We’ll get the truth out of him.” Nebe fussed with some folders on his desk and tried to look professional.
Nolte was having yet another epiphany. “Obviously, he is telling the truth. So, if you want a conspiracy, we’ll have to invent one. Pick some suspects at random and make them say they were in on it with him.”
Nebe looked at him unhappily. “We’ve been all through that! Any thorough internal affairs investigation would make it appear to be a cover-up. Stop grasping at easy answers.”
Nolte was not to be dissuaded. “Since it wasn’t a conspiracy then it has to be something personal. A Brown Shirt kicked his dog, the SS raped his sister, he hated to brush his teeth as a child and the Führer’s mustache reminds him of a toothbrush.”
“There are probably at least 20 million men out there with something personal against the Führer, but Elser is the only one who acted on it. To reduce it to someone having kicked his dog trivializes the man without explaining anything. It says it didn’t really happen or, if it did, it doesn’t really matter. But we have to have a conspiracy, the party line demands it. The Führer has the unwavering support of every German worker; therefore, a German worker cannot have possibly plotted to kill the Führer, full stop
!” The need to continually repeat the obvious was beginning to wear on Nebe’s patience.
“The Gestapo arrested his brother, Manfred, put him in Dachau.”
Nebe would have asked how Nolte knew that, but he would have an answer and it would give him a chance to go on talking even longer. “Manfred was a Communist, not a sympathizer like Georg. He was a marching, shouting Communist. He got taken off in ’36 in the roundup before the Olympics. It isn’t in the file but at least 300,000 were arrested and surely most of them had brothers.”
“But few of them were Aryan Germans. Manfred was. There would have been a routine check to see if he had any relatives in sensitive jobs. Even the most casual check would have found that Elser had spent seven years making cuckoo clocks.” Nolte suddenly seemed driven, like his life depended on making the square peg fit in the round hole.
“Seven years off and on and making cuckoo clocks would not have been considered a sensitive job.” Nebe resigned himself to playing the straight man until Nolte got whatever this was out of his system.
“What about inventory at the munitions plant?” Nolte was almost pleading.
“That was after the purge, and he had started out sand blasting. By then he was no longer a person of interest anyway.”
Nebe was just short of smug when Nolte suddenly had another revelation. “Heydrich is the only party leader who wasn’t at the beer hall. It was a celebration for the old fighters, the veterans of the putsch of ’23. Heydrich didn’t join until 1930. He wasn’t invited. He wouldn’t have been welcome. He had the perfect excuse for not being there.”
“So Heydrich made Elser a deal on the life of his brother who he hadn’t spoken to in 22 years? Two decades of silence implies a certain amount of hard feeling.”
Nolte would not be put off easily. “The Gestapo having him put in Dachau made it personal.”
Nebe realized shooting him might be misunderstood so he tried to be gentle. “So, then get me the file on his brother.”
“It’s missing. The folder is there, but it’s empty. The file was borrowed in ’37 and not returned. ‘By the Highest Authority,’ but no names.”
Nebe closed his eyes. “The intermediaries?”
“They’re dead, they have to be. Heydrich wouldn’t have left them alive.”
Throughout this exchange Brandt looked on, head swiveling back and forth dumbfounded, like a child watching the Wimbledon finals: he was certain that it was important, but clueless as to why. Nebe was about to serve an ace.
“Then there’s no evidence. We can’t uncover a conspiracy, we can’t invent one, and we can’t deny that there is one. What do you suggest?”
“Shooting myself in the foot?” Nolte was actually serious.
Nebe considered the idea. “Hmm, we could crash the car and cripple ourselves just slightly. 70 km/hr, that’s like falling off a three-story building. That could do it, except that I doubt we’re competent to do that either. We’d either be killed or completely uninjured. You can get out of this anytime. Just walk out the door, take the train to Switzerland, and lose your pension.”
That should have shut Nolte up. It didn’t. “Why is he the only one? Where are the others?”
Nebe smiled and nodded. It was nice that Nolte had now found something else to worry about, even if he were exchanging one insoluble problem for another.
Nolte went on, “Other men could have had his skills. They could have learned to make explosive devices. Not all of them would have blown themselves up trying. But where are they?”
Nebe blinked and composed his features to mean patience. “The amateur assassin never goes back to school to learn how it’s done. It’s never happened. If they even practice with a pistol for an hour, that’s more training than most of them ever put themselves through. For the amateur practice creates a crisis in confidence; they become overwhelmed by the practical difficulties of their mission and immediately give up.”
“Maybe bombers are different than shooters?” Brandt’s question was genuine, and got the attention of both Nebe and Nolte. “There aren’t any ranges where they can go to practice. You can’t just go into the woods and start letting off explosives without causing alarm, so it’s all theory until the day that it either works, or it doesn’t.”
Nolte suddenly perked up a bit, “Perhaps in Elser’s case the term amateur applies as the French use it, for those who lack professional expertise yet are nonetheless passionate about their art?”
Nebe pondered that a moment but then shook his head. “Ever the romantic, Nolte … Gentlemen, I appreciate your insights, the naked truth however is that it doesn’t really matter whether Elser was passionate about what he did or not. The unthinkable has happened, an Aryan Lutheran German worker made an attempt on the life of the Führer, and we cannot plausibly explain it away.” That was a mistake; he shouldn’t have said that, the statement led to a dead end that led mystically and despairingly back to the first question.
“What’s going to happen to us?” Nolte’s lower lip was almost but not quite trembling.
Nebe was feeling romantic himself. He felt a rush of something he couldn’t name, but it felt like being nineteen and awake at 3:00 a.m. “That doesn’t depend on us,” he said. He wanted desperately to see a movie, a gangster flick like Public Enemy. The detectives were always untouchable and in total control. It was more than that, a movie offered you refuge in a perfect world where the snow never turned black and the lovers never had to get up to piss and no one ever had trouble hailing a cab; where all motives were clear and all consequences were logical the way they never are in real life. And above all, everything was foreshadowed; everything was anticipated so that, in fact, there were no surprises. That was the best part because after forty, there were no good surprises.
It was pointless to argue that this was unrealistic, that kind sedative reassurance is what movies are about and, like any government-sanctioned use of narcotics, had to be considered a political act. When the Führer had conquered Poland he had made sure that alcohol and pornography were cheap and readily available. Nebe could do with some heavy-weight sedation himself, but he’d have to make do with schnapps. The detective with a bottle of schnapps in his bottom drawer was a cliché, but like most people he had made himself a caricature. Why did Georg do it? Ever ask a master craftsman why he does his thing? He won’t know what the hell you’re talking about.
NOVEMBER 13TH, 1939
ONCE AGAIN, GEORG WAS CARRIED into the interrogation room. He gazed from one to the other of his bearers and smiled up at them with what could almost be gratitude. Brandt flexed his fingers like a concert pianist before taking his seat at the typewriter, while Nolte made a face like someone had just passed a rotten herring under his nose. He glowered at Nebe with an expression that screamed “How much more of this will we be expected to endure?”
Nebe, ever the stalwart professional, said, “Sooner or later he has to talk about the one thing on his mind. Right, Georg? What do you have to tell us today?”
George continued from where he had left off the previous day, almost as if had been repeating it to himself so he wouldn’t forget where he was.
“I took Hannah to a Konditorei with table cloths so white they looked like they glowed in the dark, with waitresses in white uniforms that looked like silk and with glass cases of cakes in bright comic-strip colors. There was nothing to celebrate but it was an occasion, or at least I knew it would be before it was over. Hannah was eating something with almonds and pink frosting. The smell of rum carried across the table. She ate with twittering little bites, rolling her eyes and washing down a pellet of cake with a mouthful of coffee. It didn’t take much to make her happy. I started spooning my way through a slab of Schwarzwalder Kirschtorte. I couldn’t taste it. I stopped and told her about my promotion, then about Fritz. She listened patiently.
“‘You liked him a lot.’ She had said it like she knew what she was talking about.
I couldn’t help but object that I didn�
�t like him at all. That he was just another vulgar mediocrity exploiting his little wand of authority. I could have hated him but actually I didn’t. Even if I had … I was doing what I knew to be right. It was a surprise that I was going to get a lot of people killed. But of course I couldn’t tell her about that.
“‘He brought it on himself.’ Her confident tone was so natural.
“I nodded. I was grateful she had completed the sentence. She stuck her tongue out at me, childlike and conspiratorial. ‘He came in once to have his teeth cleaned.’
“My eyebrows shot up. ‘Fritz?’ I hadn’t expected that.
“‘Yes. He pinched my ass and I stabbed him through the gums with the dental pick. Then I giggled and said I didn’t mean it, I was just startled.’
“I smiled in spite of myself. ‘Alright, so you’re an accomplice.’ Of course she had no idea what I was talking about.
“‘An accomplice to what? You didn’t do anything.’
“I laughed. ‘Maybe not, but I got a promotion out of it, so I feel guilty.’
“‘That’s silly.’
“We chewed in silence for a few moments, each a captive of our own musings. Hannah looked across at me from under her spider-leg lashes. ‘Now that you have your promotion, we can get married.’ Even though I had been expecting it, I still gulped; indelicate I know.
“‘I still make only twenty four marks a week.’ The rest is still going to reimburse that woman for having had my illegitimate child.
“‘Well, I make fifty-five, I can work too. I always expected to.’ She was such a sensible girl, always infuriatingly hard not to like, but I was old-fashioned.
“‘I don’t want that.’
“‘I don’t mind,’ she went on, determinedly. ‘Times change and we have to go with it. The Führer isn’t wrong about everything. And then when we’re married, we can get your son from that bitch and you won’t have to pay child support.’ It was an argument, a good one. ‘What’s his name?’ she asked. ‘You’ve never told me.’
The Führer Must Die Page 8
