Midnight in Berlin (16 page)

“The lady from the Adlon bar,” he said, catching up with her.

She turned, looked startled and then smiled.

“Hello. The businessman – import and export, wasn't it?”

Macrae had forgotten his clumsy subterfuge. “Er, yes … so where are you going?”

“I am going to sit here in the sun, enjoy the warmth and eat an apple.”

“May I join you?”

He sat down. She dug into her bag and produced a green and red apple. Immediately, several starlings appeared and began strutting back and forth in front of the seat.

“I think you told me a little fib when we met in the Adlon the other day,” she said, and bit into her apple.

“What makes you think that?”

He waited while she finished the first bite.

“Because you're a British diplomat, aren't you?” she said, taking another bite.

“Why on earth would you say that?”

She munched the apple, swallowed, laughed. “The trilby, that suit, those shoes. You all look the same, and there aren't many other British people in Berlin these days.”

“And you?”

“I've told you, I am a manager of a restaurant.”

“Perhaps we have both been fibbing.”

She suddenly looked serious and threw the apple core on the ground. By now the starlings had been joined by several others, who fought over the core. A larger bird than the others bore it away, with the rest of the flock in noisy pursuit. She leant forward, her elbows on her knees, and began talking, head down, in a low voice, very quickly.

“I would like a small favour. My brother is in a concentration camp. It's Buchenwald; you may have heard of it. He's my twin. I need to know if he is alive. That's all. Just if he is still alive.”

Macrae looked around, trying to see if they were being watched. Impossible to tell, given the lunchtime crowds. He shifted away.

“There are many such people, I am afraid. I have no means of finding out. Have you tried the Red Cross?”

“They are useless; no access. Please help me. It's not much to ask. You're a diplomat; you could find out.”

“They are arresting people all the time, holding them for interrogation and then releasing them. Unless he's done something, he'll be all right.”

“Not my brother. He's my twin. We're Jewish.” She scrabbled in her handbag, then thrust a piece of paper at him. There were tears in her eyes. “Please,” she said.

Macrae shifted back. This was an old trick. An agent provocateur, a document passed over in a public place and a hidden camera somewhere. He didn't know why he had followed her and joined her on the bench. It had definitely been a mistake. She had planned this meeting. He had been followed. He was being set up.

“Put the paper away,” he said, getting to his feet.

“Joseph. Joseph Sternschein. Buchenwald,” she said.

He turned and walked away. He did not look back, but he knew she was watching him. It had been a mistake to talk to her. Ruth, she had said her name was. Whoever she was, she wasn't a restaurant manager.

Bonner looked with dismay at his desk. Two fresh stacks of different-coloured folders had been placed there while he had been at what Heydrich chose to call his “planning-and-action” meeting. Heydrich loved planning, especially large-scale arrest operations. He would interest himself in every detail, questioning his subordinates about the number of trucks or cars to be used, the condition of their spare wheels, fuel consumption, back-up vehicles and so forth.

Sometimes there would be Nacht und Nebel operations when prominent people, occasionally police officers deemed disloyal or Jewish community leaders judged guilty of nothing at all except their racial identity, would be spirited away after a late-night knock on the door, never to be seen again.

Heydrich spent hours going over these cases before signing them off. More often, the operations were conducted in daylight, because Heydrich never ceased telling them that the violent arrest of one or two people and the physical abuse of their family, especially children, when witnessed by neighbours helped break the communal resolve to resist. To make people truly believe in us, you must first break them, he would say.

Bonner noticed that he always looked happier after such decisions had been taken. Then he would leave in an excellent mood for fencing lessons or to take his violin to play with his own quartet. In fact, he was always in a good mood on those afternoons when he left early to play the violin. He would bring the instrument to the office, place it on a table behind his desk and open the case. If he noticed you looking at it, he would allow you to inspect it, proudly announcing that it had been made by the Italian master craftsman Giovanni Battista Guadagnini in the eighteenth century. He would hold and stroke the instrument as if he had a baby in his arms. Then he would tell you he was playing this or that concerto, usually Mozart or Beethoven, with musicians who met at his home.

Heydrich clearly meant what he said when he demanded that his senior staff work without pause until the mission was complete. “Sleep in the office, don't leave the building, I want those files back here in twenty-four hours,” he had said at the close of the meeting. He did not shout. He spoke quietly, unlike Himmler, who occasionally conducted the senior staff meetings and ranted and raved at them, so that his spittle flew across the table, landing in shiny droplets on the polished mahogany.

There had been twelve people in the room and there was not a man among them who did not know that Heydrich would have them arrested if they questioned the logic or purpose of what they were told to do.

The mission lay in those files on his desk. There were more, no doubt, waiting for his attention in the secretary's office. Bonner picked one up. The name on the cover was “Case Green”, code name for the invasion of the Sudetenland province of Czechoslovakia in the summer. The files contained names of people who were to be arrested and
organisations that were to be eliminated once the German army had crossed the border. It would do so in overwhelming force, although combat was not expected.

The military planning for Case Green was based on the fact that there would be a spontaneous uprising in the majority German-speaking province to welcome the invading troops. And guess what, Bonner thought, who is going to organise that spontaneous uprising? We are, of course. Gestapo gold had already been paid and weapons secretly distributed to paramilitary groups in the Sudetenland.

Further information was required about those enemies of the German Reich in the Sudetenland that had already been identified. Their homes and work addresses had to be cross-checked and added to the file, along with addresses of relatives and close friends. The lists contained the obvious targets: communists, social democrats, Jews, political priests, saboteurs, known homosexuals and general antisocial scum.

There were many more suspects deemed possible enemies of the Reich. You didn't have to do much to fall into the grey area of suspicion. Those who had written to newspapers condemning paramilitary violence in Czechoslovakia or who had demanded international intervention to prevent precisely what was about to happen – they were on the list. People overheard by neighbours complaining about how national radio had been subverted to broadcast Nazi propaganda – they were very high on the list.

The SS, effectively the military arm of the Gestapo, and very much under Heydrich's control, would move in after the military and arrest them all. There would be initial interrogations. A few, very few, who were obviously innocent of harmful intent towards the Reich would be sent home. The rest would be put on trains to concentration camps in Germany, mostly to Dachau. Rough estimates placed the number
of those in the first wave of arrests at ten thousand. Dachau would be the clearing centre, Heydrich had told the morning conference. It had recently been enlarged for that very purpose. At the end of the meeting, he had looked around and asked quietly if there were any questions. There never were. Reinhard Heydrich always made his plans perfectly clear.

Bonner drank his coffee and took a savage bite from a sandwich. This is what his life had come to: lists and files of people and places, endless reams of paper produced with lethal intent. At least he would not be involved in the laborious cross-checking of information. That was clerical work. Down below, the machinery of the Gestapo had been working on those files all morning. Teams of mostly women had been checking telephone directories, police files, local government records and witness statements for days, collating information that would pluck a person from his house, office or the street and within twenty-four hours place him, bloody and bleeding, in a sealed railway truck on the way to Dachau. Heydrich always said that women did the cross-checking much better than men. They were more patient, more thorough. That was why the Gestapo had the highest proportion of female staff in the whole government.

Bonner's job was more delicate and, as Heydrich had put it, suitable only for someone of his talent and experience. Heydrich knew the power of flattery and praise. He never overlooked the opportunity to thank one of his senior staff for an operation well done or for an idea that he liked. He was good on birthdays too. His secretary made sure he knew when to offer a little cake and a greeting card to a senior colleague.

Bonner's job was to select those deemed sufficiently subversive to be spared the journey to Dachau. They would be brutally beaten for information, maybe for a day or two, and
then executed, usually in the basement of the building where they had been detained. These people were a real danger, mostly communists receiving pay from Moscow and bent on subversion and even assassination. Communists were the real enemy; they always had been. Ask anyone in the army and they would just shrug when you talked of the Jews. As Bonner well knew, many Jews had risen to rank in the last war and fought well. The army did not have a problem with them. Communists were different. They deserved everything that was coming to them.

At exactly the same time every morning, Sir Nevile Henderson walked from his residence to the embassy next door through a connecting corridor. This morning, however, he cancelled his early appointments and decided to spend the first hour of his day on a walk. It was when he did his best thinking, free from the distraction of his office and far from the household chatter around him in the residence. He was a bachelor, but there always seemed to be a relative or friend staying.

It was May and there was no better time for a long and thoughtful stroll in the Tiergarten. The park was in its spring beauty, with buds breaking into pink and white flowers on every branch and the freshly mown grass in the picnic areas looking like an emerald-green carpet.

He had a lot to think about. As a good Christian, he knew that doubt was an essential element of his faith. You had to doubt the existence of God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, because only by overcoming that doubt and accepting the truth of divinity could you find real belief in the god you served. And Sir Nevile Henderson believed he served his god, just as he served his country, with faith and humility.

The doubt that troubled him that morning had been forming in his mind for several weeks. It was like an uninvited guest at a party who would not leave when politely asked to do so. It approached him at inconvenient moments of the day, when shaving in the morning or during that quiet moment after lunch when he would do the
Times
crossword.

Try as he might, Sir Nevile could not dismiss the small cloud that had formed in an otherwise clear blue sky of rational policy and logical diplomacy. Was the British government right about Hitler? Was it sensible to treat the German leader as a sane and rational politician who wanted merely to redeem the national shame of an unjust peace treaty and create a nation embracing all German-speaking peoples in central Europe? Or was there a deeper and more menacing ambition hidden behind that cowlick hairstyle and silly moustache? Was the man bent on a return to war, of which he had had personal experience in the trenches of Flanders Fields?

Nevile Henderson disliked the term “appeasement”. It smacked too much of deference, even surrender. They were, after all, dealing with a man who had come to power through the tactical use of violence and intimidation. And it
was
tactical, was it not? The murderous coup against Röhm and the old SS had left hundreds dead and thousands more in prison camps. That had happened one blood-letting night back in 1934. But this was a young country finding its feet in a Europe hostile to its history and culture. Hitler had been forced to consolidate his power with brutal means that would have been familiar to the Tudors in England.

Sir Nevile took a seat in the sunshine and looked along the avenue to the Brandenburg Gate. Napoleon had walked through that triumphal arch as a hero, and he remained so in France to this day. Yet look at the record and one will find many a dark deed on his path to power. Was Hitler any different?

The Frenchman had launched his coup d'état against the ruling Directoire in Paris with a band of musketeers. Hitler had crept up on power like a tiger, flattening himself in the long grass while he stalked his prey, always waiting for the right moment to pounce. If anything, the new leader of Germany was the better tactician, using genuine anger over the Versailles treaty terms to mask his real ambitions. You had to admire that, thought Sir Nevile. Hitler had taken his party from two per cent of the national vote in the parliamentary election of 1928 to a majority and supreme power in 1933. That was little short of political genius.

A certain respect was due a leader of such calibre. There was a thuggish aspect to the Nazis' rise to power, of course; one had to admit that. Then there was the Jewish thing, which seemed to obsess Hitler and his inner circle, although Sir Nevile had been told that ordinary members of the Nazi Party, especially women, were not inclined to racial hatred, despite the propaganda of Goebbels and his crew.