“You need someone to back you up though.” I stretched my hand from the chair I was sitting in and slightly brushed the hair of the man sitting on the carpet beside me. “Someone as powerful as Himmler, but who doesn’t want to see him as the new leader as well. Because if something does happen to the Führer, Himmler will never forgive you blackmailing him. He found the reason to put Canaris, the head of the former military intelligence in camp, and I don’t think he’ll treat you differently if given a chance.”
Ernst caught my hand and pressed it to his cheek without taking his eyes off the fire.
“You’re right. I’ve been thinking about it myself lately, but can’t really come up with the name. You see, the problem is that everybody hates me here.” Ernst found his own words very funny and laughed.
“Reichsmarschall Goering maybe? He hates Himmler.”
“He does, but he’s even more obsessed with himself and his own ‘greatness’ than Heydrich was, and will hardly make any coalitions with anybody. Especially with some Austrian.” Ernst smirked again. “Besides he’s too busy with transporting his possessions from all of his estates to a safe place. He wouldn’t trade his gold for Himmler.”
“Other army generals? Jodl? Keitel?” Otto suggested.
“No, no, they’re all military men, they only care about their troops and not about all those backstage intrigues. We need someone from the Reichstag.”
“What about Bormann?” I turned to Ernst again.
“Bormann?” He slightly frowned. “Bormann, hmm. I confess, his name never even occurred to me. He’s such a grey figure…”
“Grey cardinal even.” Otto joked.
“What did you say?” Ernst looked at him.
“What?”
“Grey cardinal?”
“Well, it’s the expression, you know… when someone governs the country without a title…”
“Yes, smartass, I know what it means! But do you even realize how close to the truth you are?”
“Am I? I just remembered something from Dumas, I don’t know what you’re talking about though…”
“I’m talking about Bormann being the one who might be interested in siding with us against Himmler. He’s always away from everybody’s eyes. The Führer listens to him. It can be our chance.” Ernst nodded several times as if agreeing to the thought. “Yes. Bormann it is.”
Chapter 8
Berlin, March 1945
The familiar road looked like an obstacle course, and Heinrich was trying to be as careful as possible while making way to Ingrid and Rudolf’s house. We weren’t talking this time, because every single time the conversation we’d been having for the past several days ended with nothing.
“Rudolf, I need to get my wife out of Berlin,” Heinrich started right away instead of a ‘hello.’ I just sighed and shook my head.
“I told you a million times already, I’m not going anywhere without you.”
“Yes, you are! I’ll put you on a plane myself if I have to!”
“I’d like to see you try.”
Ingrid looked at my belly and gestured us inside the living room, where the freshly made tea was waiting for us. “When are you due?”
“Sometime in May.” I shrugged.
“She can’t fly.” Ingrid turned back to Heinrich while I was making myself comfortable by the coffee table. The tea smelled too good, and I was freezing and hungry.
“Why the hell not?”
“She’s too far along. She’ll go into labor somewhere above the Atlantic, is that what you want?”
Heinrich looked at my belly too. Everybody was looking at it lately, and I already got used to it.
“Well, can we get her out some other way? To someplace far and safe?”
“And how are you going to do it? Through the front?” Ingrid skeptically raised her eyebrow.
“No, I can drive her to Switzerland maybe. You must have some apartment there, where one of the agents can look after her until it’s all over.”
“Heinrich, you aren’t serious, are you? All the agents are waiting to start a massive manhunt on all the Nazi leaders, who will start pouring out of Germany very soon through that very Switzerland. Do you think someone will devote their time to babysitting one pregnant girl? Of course not. She’s much better off here with you, where you can at least look after her.”
“I would agree with you just a month ago, Ingrid. But now, when both fronts are approaching with frightening speed, I don’t want my wife to be anywhere near Berlin when the allied forces will start closing on us. Hitler had already ordered to destroy every single more or less important object on all the territory of the Reich. It goes without saying that he’d rather level the capital to the ground than give it to the enemy. The fights will be going for every street and every house. Do you think it’s safe for my pregnant wife to stay here, under all the bombs, artillery and gunfire?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I repeated once again and took another sip of the hot chamomile tea.
“Heinrich, our forces are going to be here very soon, and it will all be over with.” Rudolf sat across from my husband and tried to convince him the best he could. “They will take care of both you and Annalise, she’ll have her baby, and you all will go to New York with your new passports. Don’t panic and give it a little time. Our army are not some kind of barbarians, they won’t hurt your wife.”
“What if the Red Army reaches Berlin first?” Heinrich asked gravely. “Then what?”
“They won’t. Hitler will never allow that.”
“Right. He was also saying that he would never allow a single bomb to fall on our land. And look at us now – half of our major cities are almost completely destroyed.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I repeated stubbornly even though I didn’t have to. Heinrich understood by now that he didn’t have much of a choice but to keep me by his side and hope for the best.
_______________
“Wish me luck.” Ernst put on his coat and held my face in both hands, kissing me goodbye as if we would never see each other again. I was kissing him back too, clinging onto his lapels and not wanting to ever let go. “If I don’t get shot by my own Gestapo or get under the allied air raid, I’ll be back in a few days.”
“Ernst, I love you.”
“I love you too, sweetheart. Take care!”
He headed to the door, but then quickly turned around and came back to kiss me once again. I was watching him leave with a very heavy heart; it was very dangerous what he was going to do, to start negotiations with the International Red Cross basically behind his immediate boss Himmler’s back. The truth was that Reichsführer had his own plans for those Jews, who Ernst wanted to hand to the Allies, all together and unharmed. Himmler and his faithful assistant Schellenberg were already selling those people to the Swiss Jewish community in exchange for money, gas, trucks and captured SS soldiers. Of course he would have a fit if he found out that the stubborn Austrian went behind his back again and started his own negotiations, in an attempt to return at least some faith in the possible humanity of his almost former government.
The end was near, the end of the Reich, the end of Germany the way we knew it, the end of the war… Heinrich and I, together with the rest of the RSHA staff, were spending almost every night in the bomb shelter downstairs. Nothing can be as sad and frightening as seeing all those influential people, who just recently had such absolute power in their hands, now sitting silently next to each other with their heads between their hands, frozen like marble statues on the cemetery with desperate gazes fixed on the floor.
The war was lost, and everybody knew it by now. The only thing on everybody’s mind was how to save themselves after the Allies reached Berlin, constantly smoking from the never-ending bombings. Now every single one of these decorated officers had to decide for themselves, what would be better: to fall in the hands of the enemy and hope for decent treatment, or take a chance and try to run while they still could, even though it me
ant that their own subordinates would have the right to hang them if they got caught.
Nothing can be more frightening than sharing a room with people thinking only of their own survival and ready to betray, kill or sell their former best friends if it meant to stay alive. Nobody could be trusted anymore. The temporary alliances were forming for a moment’s profit just so yesterday’s ally would get stabbed in the back when the new, more powerful leader would come in the picture and promise something better. I don’t think that the Gestapo ever executed so many people as during those bloody March days.
The worst part was that it was not just inside the RSHA, it was on the very top as well. Everybody was playing their own game: Himmler went to the front supposedly to encourage his SS soldiers for the counterattack, but in reality hoping for a meeting with one of the representatives of the Western powers to propose the signing of the peace treaty. The Chief of the Gestapo, Müller, understanding that the new alliance of Bormann-Kaltenbrunner could be more fruitful than the Himmler-Schellenberg alliance, decided to quickly switch sides and to swear unconditional loyalty to his new masters.
Reichsmarschall Goering was watching his former idol Hitler, together with whom they’d started building the new Thousand Year Reich, with the eyes of the hyena waiting for the injured wolf to finally collapse. Only Goebbels, the loyal Minister of the Propaganda, was following his Führer like a small limping shadow, still hoping for some miracle, when the rest of the top of the Reich were secretly packing suitcases with counterfeit money, hiding cyanide in their clothes and sending still loyal to them adjutants to find their look-alikes from amongst Jews, recently evacuated from different camps, to later dress them up in uniform and bury them together with the officer’s old passport.
Ernst, who thankfully came back from Switzerland safe and sound, was telling me about all that every time he’d come back from Hitler’s bunker. The Führer, who seemed almost twice smaller in size in his basement, compared to what an imposing figure he used to be back in the days of his glory, kept hiding his shaking hand behind his back and looking into his fellow Austrian’s eyes, hoping that he could do something for him, for his slowly dying Reich… But the Austrian would look away and only repeat the same thing, ‘I’m waiting for your further orders, my Führer.’
“It’s so amusing,” Ernst would murmur with a sad smile and light another cigarette. “When I had just arrived in Berlin to take up this position, all I heard was: ‘Kaltenbrunner, don’t do nothing. Just sit in your office and do the paperwork.’ And now, every single person is looking up to me as if I’m some sort of a prophet who will show them the way and save them all from hell. It’s too late now. When I still could do something for them, they were screaming in protest. Too late now, too late for all of us. Now we’re all going down. It’s the end. The game is up.”
_______________
Berlin, April 1945
I stepped outside the RSHA building to get some fresh air. I used to love spring so much, but this one didn’t even feel like one. Even the grass was afraid to show up from under the ground, and the sun was constantly hidden behind the curtain of smoke from the burning buildings.
My baby stretched inside, and I gently hugged my belly interlacing my fingers under it. This is the world I’m bringing my child into, I thought wandering further and further from my office building. A small group of Hitlerjugend, very young boys of thirteen or fourteen years old in uniforms hanging on them loosely because the size was too big, marched across the street singing something patriotic with their still high voices. Did they at least teach them how to shoot those rifles?
Women with small children in their arms, accompanied by the elderly, were looking expectantly at the soup kitchen truck, waiting to get their first and maybe only meal for today. We inside the RSHA weren’t starving at least, I noticed and right away felt ashamed of my own thoughts. That’s exactly how it was this whole time in the ‘great German Reich:’ the wealth of the top was built on the suffering of everybody else.
“You have to be grateful,” Ingrid said once. “You didn’t have to experience even a tenth of what your fellow Jews had to go through. And now your fellow Germans. So stop complaining that everyone is so unjust to you and think of how lucky you really are.”
I wasn’t complaining about myself, I very well understood and appreciated my relatively safe and comfortable position, compared to how others were existing; I was asking for Ernst, I was asking for him every day now, even though the answer was the same every single time.
“The OSS counterintelligence office had already assigned the agents to the special group, whose goal will be to find and bring Dr. Kaltenbrunner to justice, given that he decides to leave Germany,” Ingrid informed me just a day ago.
“What justice? He didn’t do anything…” I closed my eyes not to see her face anymore.
“He’s the head of the Gestapo.”
“Müller is the one really controlling it.”
“Concentration camps were under his supervision.”
“No, they were under Pohl’s supervision, it’s a completely separate branch!”
“Protective custody orders? The Bullet Decree? Einsatzgruppen?”
“All Himmler’s initiative and Himmler’s responsibility. All those orders are rubber stamped.”
“Well, if he’s as innocent as you say, he’ll have an opportunity to prove it in court. If he doesn’t disappear by then of course.”
I hope he does, I raised my eyes to the grey sky and inhaled a full chest of musky spring air, trying to get rid of the burning sensation in my chest. I sensed the inevitable, and the tears I had contained for so long, tears I had taught myself not to show to anyone anymore, were scratching my throat again.
No, I won’t cry, I promised myself again, I won’t. He knows how to survive, my Erni, he’d never let himself get caught. He's too smart for them, and he has his Otto following him like a dog, who’d die protecting his owner… He’ll never give himself up, he’ll go to his Austria and disappear together with his family and those loyal to him. He must have a plan, he always has a plan. And I’ll stay with Heinrich, I’ll go to New York and will be happy with the thought that he’s somewhere out there, on the same planet with me, breathing the same air and looking at the same sky. That will be enough for me.
“I’m the Commander-in-Chief of all the southern armies now,” Ernst greeted me with a laugh as soon as I came back from my little walk. “Can you imagine? Himmler has just appointed me. I wonder if I have at least several hundred people left to command!”
He dropped his head on his hands, and I couldn’t see if he was still laughing or already crying. He finished that second bottle of brandy after all, which I tried to hide since the morning. But how could I blame him for getting drunk these days? Everybody was, soldiers on both fronts, their commanders right on their working places, and even their superiors in Hitler’s bunker.
Only the Führer himself wasn’t drinking. He was trying to decide whether he should make a run to his newly constructed headquarters in the Austrian Alps or if he should stay in his capital with his people till the last moment. Otto kept throwing glances at his watch, as if the time before the Eastern and Western fronts would meet and cut the country in half, was physically running out minute by minute.
“Why do you look so surprised?” He’d shrug at Ernst, who was making fun of that habit of his. “Can’t you hear the artillery when the wind is blowing from the East? The Russians will be here within days now.”
Ernst started looking at his watch every now and then too. We were all waiting.
_______________
They were here. The Red Army officially entered Berlin, only a day after Himmler’s last attempt to surrender to the Western Allies, but not to the Soviet Union. The Russians were dying in thousands in the suburbs of the fortified capital, but wouldn’t make a single step back. Germany was on her last breath.
Heinrich had sent me home to pack two little suitcases with everythin
g we might need inside the RSHA building, which by Ernst’s order was made into a full blown fortress. We were going to stay inside until… the truth was that we had no idea what would happen to us there, whether the Russians would kill us all or take us prisoners, whether the Americans or the British would reach us first (what Heinrich and I were secretly hoping for), or whether we’d die under another allied bombing raid. The point was that whatever it was, we would be safer inside the Reich Main Security Office than in our house.
Later tonight Heinrich would pick me up together with our very few belongings, and we’d permanently move inside our former office. It was still very early, that’s why I was very surprised to hear the knock on the door, loud and insistent. Just in case I took out a gun, which I carried on me all the time now, and cautiously walked up to the door.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me, open the door.”
Erni! I unlocked the door and let him in, quickly putting the gun away back into my pocket.
“What are you doing here?” I smiled after he greeted me with a kiss.
“I came to get you. I’m leaving to Austria today, it’s getting too dangerous here, and the Führer is sending me away so I can take over the command in the Austrian region if it comes to that. But it won’t, so it doesn’t even matter.” He took my hands in his and smiled. “Come to Austria with me. Otto and I have millions of American dollars and British Pounds, we’ll pick them up and be gone forever, to South America, and no one will ever know where to find us!”
The Girl from Berlin: War Criminal's Widow Page 12
