Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine) (30 page)

Read Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine) Online

Authors: Douglas Niles,Michael Dobson

BOOK: Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine)
6.1Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
1 FEBRUARY–26 FEBRUARY 1945
The art of leadership … consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention … The leader of genius must have the ability to make different opponents appear as if they belonged to one category.
—Adolf Hitler
Mein Kampf
(1925)
The ritualistic display was intended to intimidate him, and on some levels, Günter von Reinhardt admitted to himself, it worked quite well. Marched within a square of goose-stepping SS-Totenkopf guards, he felt as if he were being escorted off to one of the infamous concentration camps—the
Totenkopfverbände,
or death’s-head units, had that as their primary responsibility. Himmler’s use of death’s-head guards for personal bodyguard and ceremonial escorts was a signal, and not a pleasant one to contemplate.
Guards flanking the double doors into Himmler’s inner sanctum snapped to attention at their approach, and opened the doors with military precision. Von Reinhardt always admired precision, even under these circumstances.
The room was dark, blackout curtains drawn tight, the only illumination a lamp on the desk of the Third Reich’s second führer, Heinrich Himmler. Two more guards flanked the führer, their faces shadowed, giving them the look of demons. Only the death’s-head insignia gleamed white on their collars. Von Reinhardt noticed that there were no chairs visible in the room other than the one occupied by Himmler. The man expected him to negotiate standing up. Well, the opening gambit in a negotiation was almost always an emotional one.
Von Reinhardt turned to one of the guards. “Fetch me a chair,” he commanded. The guard stood stony and silent, as well he should. This wasn’t his initiative.
After a moment, von Reinhardt turned to the man who had once been his führer. “I’m only recently out of my hospital bed,” he said in as cheerful a tone as he could muster. His voice echoed in the room—it was a space calling for whispers. “I’m afraid I need a chair. Have your guard fetch one.”
Himmler’s voice had a sibilant, almost snakelike quality to it. “And why should I provide a seat for a traitor standing before me?”
Von Reinhardt chuckled. “Is this how we are to negotiate? If so, I can go back and make my report without wasting either of our time further.” He turned to go. As he expected, the death’s-head guards barred his way.
“You won’t be leaving without my say-so,” Himmler snarled.
“Of course not,” von Reinhardt acknowledged. “But my failure to return will constitute a report all by itself, you know. I’m here because I’m expendable, barely out of the hospital bed Bücher put me in. Holding me, torturing me, or even killing me won’t have any effect—except on me, of course, and I
can’t say I find the prospects enthralling. If we’re here to do business, have your guards fetch me a chair, or have them drag me away. It’s your call.”
Himmler stood up, enraged, and pounded his fist on the table. “You damned insolent traitor! How dare you talk to your führer this way?”
“It’s premature to decide whether I’m a traitor, Herr Reichsführer. Treason, as the Englishman Sir John Harington put it, never prospers. ‘What’s the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.’” He smiled. This kind of verbal fencing actually relaxed him. He had called Himmler’s play. Now the führer could either negotiate or have him taken away, and the latter didn’t advance Himmler’s interests. He waited, calmly meeting the cold stare through the führer’s round glasses.
Suddenly, Himmler laughed. It was a thin, high-pitched cackle, very incon-grous for the position he held. “‘None dare call it treason’! Ha-ha-ha! It’s too bad our late führer couldn’t have heard that back in the old days. Of course, maybe he did. Welcome back to Berlin, Oberst von Reinhardt.” He walked around the desk to shake his hand. Suddenly a chair materialized out of the shadows, and a uniformed orderly was on hand to fetch coffee.
First the threat, and now the gracious hospitality. This negotiation would proceed along traditional lines. There would be time for discussion; then suddenly there would appear to be an unbridgeable impasse, and threats would return. He knew the pattern well. But here in the middle of the snake’s lair he realized something else: The pattern worked, even on the mind of someone coolly logical and well prepared. He took a sip of coffee and tried to smile, hoping the beads of sweat on his back and face were not apparent.
“Good evening, Mr. Philby,” the secretary said.
“Good evening. See you in the A.M.,” Philby replied. He fastened his overcoat, retrieved his umbrella from its stand, picked up his hat and briefcase, and walked down the hall to the elevator with measured stride. He pressed the Down button with the tip of his umbrella, nodded to two men from the documents section who were also leaving promptly at six o’clock, and entered the elevator with them. The elevator stopped on two intervening floors. On the first of the two stops, a female secretary joined them; on the second stop, a British army major entered. On the ground floor, Philby hung back as the lady exited first, followed by the two documents staffers. The major and Philby each gestured at the other, but Philby, having entered on the higher floor, prevailed, and the major exited, leaving Philby as the last off.
There was a small queue at the guard’s desk to exit the building, fed by a second elevator as well as by first-floor and basement offices. Philby took his turn in the queue and, when he reached the head of the queue, snapped open
his briefcase without waiting to be asked, showed the document-release authorizations inside, signed the exit log, replied to the guard’s pleasant “Good night, Mr. Philby,” and turned right onto Baker Street.
Philby’s measured stride took him back to Marylebone Road, across the divided street, then left four blocks to the intersection with Lisson Grove. There he paused for a moment, waiting for the light to change. As he waited, the tip of his umbrella probed the metal plate at the base of the streetlight. A wad of gum was stuck to the right edge of the plate. The light changed, and Philby stepped off the curb to cross Lisson Grove.
There was a message waiting for him. His cutouts left and picked up messages for him at a series of rotating drops, which he changed on a regular basis, and left notifications at other points, which also changed regularly. Philby rather enjoyed the methodical discipline of tradecraft, and practiced it with rigor.
He dined alone at a neighborhood curry house and took a stroll about the park after dinner, all part of his normal routine. In the process of his walk, however, he retrieved a small envelope from underneath a water fountain as he took a brief sip. He continued his walk, for the fresh air and exercise was good for him, and returned to his flat within a few minutes of eight-thirty.
He washed his hands, hung up his coat, removed his necktie, unlaced his shoes, and made himself a cup of hot cocoa, mostly milk, then turned on his desk lamp and sat down to decode his message, using a dog-eared schoolboy copy of Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
as the cipher key. Within a few minutes, he had a clean copy of his message ready to read.
WHEELCHAIR HAS WARNED URSA MAJOR THAT INTENDED HOLIDAY DESTINATION IS NOT AVAILABLE. REPORT SOONEST ON ALL WHEELCHAIR AND CIGAR PLANS FOR HOLIDAY RESORT ACTIVITIES. HIGHEST PRIORITY.
“Wheelchair” was FDR, “Ursa Major” Stalin, “Cigar” Churchill, and everybody’s favorite “holiday destination” was Berlin. So, FDR was warning Stalin to stay out of Berlin, was he? Pretty obviously, the forces on the ground were not enough to back up such strong language, but with so many secret weapons projects, there was always the possibility that not all the available forces were currently visible. A ground war between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union would favor the Soviet Union, but the strategic bombing and air superiority advantage of the United States in particular balanced the equation somewhat. Still, it did not seem to Philby that an intelligent man would find it wise to issue ultimatums to Stalin under the present circumstances.
He would begin to nose around a bit in the morning. In the meantime, he took the message, his worksheet, and three or four sheets of paper from the
pad on which he worked, and burned them in his ashtray, then flushed the ashes down the loo. He turned off the desk lamp, then sat down in his reading chair, turned on that lamp, unsnapped his briefcase, and began reading the various documents he’d brought home with him. Thirty or so more minutes of reading for pleasure while smoking his pipe, and then to bed. All in all, a normal and productive day. Kim Philby smiled.
The little village had been plastered by a dozen or more bombs at some point during the winter. Lukas Vogel assumed that the Allies had been simply trying to make another statement about their brutal mastery of the skies, and the landscape, of Germany.
“Ach, nein,
” suggested Hauptsturmführer Friedrich, waving his hand dismissively at the notion. “Probably a bomber was shot up, losing power … the terrorflieger bastard dumped his bombs to lighten the plane, and so what if there was a village below him?”
“But the whole town square—blown apart?” asked the young Nazi. “That’s more than just chance!”
His commander shrugged, his eyes narrowing as he squinted through the ruins. The two men were alone, standing in the narrow lane that led through this anonymous hamlet. “Not the whole square—look, that tavern escaped with only a few scratches!”
Friedrich’s pace picked up immediately as he strode across the cratered town square toward a corner of buildings that had escaped relatively unscathed. Suppressing a sigh, Lukas followed along. He had seen the inside of many taverns during the last few days, as he and the few surviving comrades of his division had been making their way, on foot, across Germany. Every town had a bar, of course, and he privately reflected that Friedrich seemed to have stopped in most of them.
Out of more than ten thousand troops in the division at the beginning of the Ardennes offensive—with Rommel’s treason, Lukas no longer thought of it as Operation Fuchs am Rhein—fewer than a thousand had survived through to the defense of Koblenz. None of Lukas’ panzergrenadiere had survived, a thought he kept pushed away from his mind, though it threatened to overtake his thoughts almost hourly.
Over the course of that bleak, frigid march, the other surviving men and boys had drifted away one by one, sometimes slipping off in the night, at other times simply collapsing and refusing to continue. Now, not even a week after they had crossed the Rhine in the midnight shuttle run of a small boat they had commandeered, only the captain and the loyal young lieutenant were left.
“Hallo!”
shouted Friedrich, pushing open the dark oaken door. Not surprisingly, there was no answer—to the best of Lukas’ guess, the entire village seemed to be abandoned.
“No one here,” Friedrich said, shaking his head in disgust. Then he brightened. “That means the drinks are on the house!”
This was no change from any other place, of course—the SS captain had refused to pay for any of the food or lodging the soldiers had claimed from their countrymen. This circumstance only seemed fair to Lukas, for men who had been risking their lives for years in the desperate defense of Germany. Still, he had been shocked several nights ago, when Friedrich had pulled his sidearm and shot dead a grandfatherly old innkeeper who had dared to ask for a few reichsmarks in exchange for a night of food, drink, and lodging.
The captain stalked behind the bar, loudly opening several cupboards and cursing in disgust before he pushed back into a storage room. Lukas clomped over to the fireplace, and found some kindling and logs. Quickly he stacked them into a fire, and had touched one of his last matches to the wood before the captain emerged, wiping the foam of a beer from his lips.
Friedrich threw his empty bottle across the room, where it shattered in the corner, but he had several more of the brown glass containers cradled in his left arm. He came over to the fire and sat next to Lukas on the bench that the young soldier had pulled up. “Here,” he said, offering one of the beers.
Lukas grasped the bottle and took a long pull. Beer was liquid, beer was food, and for occasional moments, beer was forgetfulness. It felt fine, washing his parched gullet and at least starting to fill his rumbling belly.
“What day is it?” the young soldier asked, suddenly thinking of something.
Friedrich squinted, draining his second beer; that bottle joined the first in the shards of the corner. “It’s the eighteenth, I think. Why?”
Lukas shrugged, reluctant to tell the truth. “No reason,” he said. “I just wondered.”
January 18, 1945 … it was his sixteenth birthday. But he would keep that news to himself. He felt a sense of satisfaction as he, too, emptied his bottle and threw it across the room.
Friedrich had already started on his third, and Lukas knew better than to ask him to share. Instead, he got up, reluctantly leaving the warmth that was starting to spread from the growing fire. He rummaged in the same storeroom the captain had searched, and finally came out with a whole crate, twelve large bottles, of beer.
“See if you can find us some food,” Friedrich said, after they had each finished another.
Lukas nodded. Next to the storeroom he located the small kitchen, which had mostly been emptied when the owners had departed. There was a loaf of bread, but mold had rendered it inedible even by his nearly starving standards.
But then he found a stairway, descended into the cellar, and—treasure!—found a ring of blutwurst hanging in the cold room. He came back up and found a frying pan, then cut the blood sausage into inch-long lengths. Soon the chunks of dark ground meat were sizzling and dancing in the cast-iron skillet. When they were fully blackened he pulled the pan out of the fire, and the two soldiers took turns spearing the links on their knives, enjoying the rich, crunchy taste of the well-crisped meat.
By this time they had finished half of the crate of beer, and Lukas felt a pleasant warmth and lethargy creeping over him. He silently toasted his birthday in the crackling flames.
Friedrich was staring into the fire, his head shaking sadly. He looked at his dirty hands, wrapped around the brown bottle, and suddenly he was weeping silently, fat tears rolling down his chapped, weathered face. Abruptly he straightened up, shifted so that he was staring at Lukas with a strangely intense expression.
“Tell me, Luka’—di’jou have a girl, back home, ’fore the war?” he asked, blinking as he tried to focus his eyes.
The young soldier shook his head. He had been only thirteen when he had gone off to join the army, and hadn’t thought much about girls one way or another.
“Me … I ’idn’t have a girl, either,” said Friedrich, almost sleepily. He leaned forward, out of balance, arresting himself by placing his left hand on the young officer’s knee. The older man squeezed so hard that it hurt, but Lukas did not dare to squirm away, certain that such a gesture would have caused the captain to fall right to the floor.
“No girls fer me … they just trouble,” said Friedrich, shaking his head. His beer bottle slipped from his right hand to shatter on the slate floor. “Need ’nother beer,” he said, suddenly pushing off of Lukas’ knee to sit up straight.
Relieved to be freed from the captain’s grip, Lukas rose and pulled two more bottles from the case. He finally pried them open, though he was having a great deal of difficulty with the caps. The room was spinning, and suddenly the rich sausage in his belly was not feeling as good as it had a short time before.
He sat down, aware that Friedrich had moved very close. The captain threw an arm around the young man’s shoulders, and once again he was crying. Lukas raised the bottle, took a drink, and knew immediately that he had made a mistake. He leaped to his feet and lunged for the door, barely making it outside. He leaned over the porch railing and puked in the snow. He felt Friedrich’s hands on his shoulder and heard a strange moaning sound from his lips.

Other books

Summer in February by Jonathan Smith
The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon by Alexander McCall Smith
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
A Girl Between by Marjorie Weismantel