Midnight in Berlin (28 page)

Halliday stretched and yawned.

“There is one more thing,” said Macrae quickly. “General Beck is to lead the coup. I think Canaris is involved as well.”

Halliday walked to the drinks trolley, picked up the empty whisky bottle, put it down again and bent down to peer at the lower shelf.

“Exactly how do you know that?” he said, pulling out another bottle, unscrewing the top and placing it on the trolley.

Macrae had been thinking of how to explain the source of this information since leaving the Salon. He thought of telling Halliday that he had gone to meet William Shirer for a drink there but the American had not turned up; then the information about Beck had surfaced in conversation with
the girls. He knew a professional like Halliday was not going to believe that.

“I can't tell you. Trust me, it's true.”

“I like you, Macrae,” said Halliday, “but it's late, I'm tired and trust is not something I have a lot of time for right now. See you tomorrow.”

He looked at his watch and screwed the top back on the whisky bottle.

“Oh, it is tomorrow. Dear God.”

“Suppose I told you my source confirmed that Professor Karl Bonhoeffer has looked over the Pasewalk records and is prepared to declare Hitler insane after his arrest?”

Macrae had him now. Halliday stood quite still for a moment, clasped his hands, looked at the ceiling.

Macrae went on: “And suppose I tell you that General Beck resigned as chief of the General Staff on 18 August, but accepted Hitler's request that the news should not be made public for two months to avoid disaffection within the army?”

“Suppose we have another drink,” said Halliday.

Macrae folded the newspaper clipping back into his wallet. That was a description of the rally the previous year by the correspondent of the
Manchester Guardian.
This year, 1938, the Nazis promised an even more grandiose spectacle. He had seen newsreel footage of previous rallies, but nothing had prepared him for the scale and ingenuity of the theatrical effects by which Goebbels and Albert Speer projected Hitler to his audience in Nuremberg, to the German people across the nation and to the wider world beyond; here was the messiah, the leader of a Third Reich that would last one thousand years.

The closing rally of the party congress took place as usual that year on a Monday after a weekend of festivities and speeches in and around Nuremberg attended by almost one million people.

On the old airfield built for the Zeppelin airships just outside Nuremberg, Albert Speer had constructed a stadium whose centrepiece was two tiers of white marble seating which rose to the long pillared arcade of the old war memorial honouring the nine thousand soldiers from Nuremberg who had died in the Great War.

A huge white swastika within an alabaster wreath of oak leaves stood atop the arcade, glowing in the sunlight of a late summer afternoon. Traditional Nazi flags, black swastika on a white circle against a red background, had been placed in their hundreds in the recesses of the arcade and at vantage points around the arena.

Macrae had arrived in the city by train on the Monday afternoon and had taken his seat along with senior members of the diplomatic corps in Berlin and a host of German and visiting dignitaries. Unlike the precision with which the various speeches and march-pasts had been organised, the seating for the guests lacked formal arrangement.

Macrae found himself sitting among a group of Italian members of Mussolini's Fascist Party. Several rows in front he could see Sir Nevile Henderson with the other ambassadors. There was no sign of Halliday or anyone else from the British mission in Berlin.

The most senior members of the Nazi Party were seated on a platform that had been built out from the tiered seating and from which speeches were already being made. Macrae could see them all, Göring, Himmler, Goebbels, Speer, Heydrich and Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess. Lesser party functionaries occupied privileged seating immediately behind the platform. Gathered at one end of the upper tier were the senior officers in the three services, army, navy and air force, an arrangement designed to remind the military that they were servants of the Nazi Party and not vice versa.

The most astonishing sight of all was the sea of people in the stadium, massed ranks of humanity reaching back to the circle of seating that enclosed the whole arena. They stood there in the sun in their hundreds of thousands, divided into orderly groups identified by flags. Each flag rose above a brass sign denoting the name of a regional Nazi Party or SS unit. Groups of women stood to attention in white short-sleeved blouses and long grey skirts. SS men stood stripped to the waist, strong muscular bodies gleaming with sweat.

It was four in the afternoon and the march-past was about to begin. Macrae knew Hitler would take the salute, make a short speech to the crowd and then retire, before re-emerging for the highlight of the whole weekend extravaganza, his main address in the torch-lit darkness. Then the fate of Czechoslovakia would be announced, a mailed fist would be raised to crush the racially inferior Slavonic peoples who had dared to defy the Reich; the German tanks would roll in the next morning. Macrae knew the armoured units were in position, along with six divisions of infantry within a few miles of the frontier.

Hitler arrived in his custom-built open Mercedes, standing at the front, grasping the windscreen with one arm while raising and lowering the other in repeated salutes to the forest of raised arms around him. Four bodyguards stood on running boards behind him as the car was driven slowly around the stadium, giving the maximum number of people a chance to glimpse their Führer.

A mighty roar erupted from the crowd as Hitler walked onto the podium, raising his right arm in salute to the crowd and then turning to face the dignitaries behind him, arm still raised. It was the first time Macrae had seen him in the flesh. He was smaller than he expected, but the moustache, the plump cheeks and the weak chin were true to every portrait and photograph.

He was wearing his usual military uniform, with the Iron Cross 2nd Class pinned to the jacket. The noise rose as the first planes of the fly-past came into sight. Every head turned skywards as, four abreast, the Dorniers and Focke-Wulf bombers flew low over the stadium. Then came the tanks, towed artillery and armoured cars, rumbling immediately in front of the tiered seating.

Macrae noted the long-barrelled 88 mm artillery weapons, which had been improved since the early version had gone into action in Spain. The British army had nothing with the range and firepower of such weapons. He squinted against the lowering sun, trying to identify the various types of tanks in the parade. The German High Command held nothing back on these occasions. Every new weapon was on display, designed to impress and intimidate foreign observers and send a message to the many enemies that Hitler had already damned in speech after speech: Czechoslovakia, Poland and the communist-Jewish conspiracy that called itself Russia.

Around him, everyone was standing, craning to see the weaponry and openly cheering every new display of military might.

Macrae felt faint. He reached for the hip flask that Daisy Wellesley had placed in his pocket. Daisy had also wrapped sandwiches in greaseproof paper and put them in his briefcase. He noticed other guests were similarly supplied. He didn't feel hungry. He felt as if he had stumbled into an alternate universe, a nightmare that had slipped its moorings in the quiet waters of his unconscious mind and sailed into the real world.

Goebbels had called the annual Nuremberg rally the High Mass of the party, and this was exactly what Macrae was witnessing: a pseudo-religious event at which worshippers were prostrating themselves before their messiah.

It reminded him of the occasion at school when his sixth-form class, boys aged about seventeen, had been taken to see the sun rise at dawn over the Stonehenge ruins in Wiltshire. It had been the summer solstice, when the first light crept over those ancient stones at four thirty in the morning. The boys had stood shivering among a small group of people, including druids in white gowns and other eccentrics, as the first rays of the sun gently brought the stones to life.

Their teacher told them it had been a temple raised by ancient men to their sun god, and it was for this reason that the stones were arranged in such a way as to catch the first light of the longest day. Archaeologists had established from excavations that human sacrifices were made there. In reverence to the sun, he said. And it was reasonable to assume, was it not, that such sacrifices were made on this very day of the year? The boys had drunk tea from thermos flasks and stamped cold feet round the stones, concerned less by the majesty of such early architecture and long-ago human sacrifices than by the cold, and the prospect of a bacon sandwich at a nearby roadside café.

And here he was again at the heart of a temple raised to a new sun god, a small man, rather plumper than his photographs, who was now raising the blood flag of the Nazi Party, so called because it was said to have been dipped in the blood of those party stalwarts who had been killed in the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923.

The Führer had taken this sacred relic and brushed it against other flags around him, thus sanctifying the swastika emblem with the blood of slain martyrs. The thievish mind of Goebbels had invented this ritual, stealing the idea from the Catholic Mass.

Macrae looked across to where the military High Command were sitting. The one senior figure missing was General
Beck. Macrae hoped he knew why he was not there. The Gestapo would have noted his absence but would not have been surprised. They would have known he had resigned and would not expect him to attend.

Koenig would be there somewhere, along with the leaders of the conspiracy. They believed that Hitler would make a fatal mistake that night, propelling Germany into conflict with her eastern neighbour and pointing the way to a wider war in Europe. They believed that the Royal Navy was off the German coast in response, validating the ruthless action they would take.

They were ready to move in the hours after Hitler had spoken, signalling the start of Case Green. The planning for the coup had been completed and the conspirators had even agreed that green was to be the new national colour, replacing the blood-red swastika flags of the Third Reich.

The party congress reached its climax that night, eclipsing the grandeur of the daytime parades with a display of light, fire and the thunderous baying of political slogans rapturously chanted by the massed multitude. An ocean of faces gazed up in adoration at the stone plinth on which their leader would speak. The effect seemed to suck the oxygen out of the stadium, so that the vast crowd would occasionally fall silent, dazed and breathless, before people recovered themselves and returned to chanting
“Ein Volk! Ein Führer!”
and
“Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”

Macrae had been invited to join the ambassador for the grand finale of the rally and, to his surprise, Halliday had also taken his place beside them.

Powerful searchlights were now beamed into the night sky, eclipsing the stars and creating a cocoon of light around
the stadium that was said to be visible eighty miles away. On either side of the podium, flames glittered and flickered from fire bowls, while in the stadium itself the thousands of flag-carriers now also held flaming torches, which moved in the darkness like the eyes of a vast assembly of wild creatures.

Sir Nevile Henderson leant over and said to them both, “I spent six years in St Petersburg before the war and saw Russian ballet at its finest, but for sheer grandeur I have never seen anything to match this.”

Macrae muttered his interest in this remark, while Halliday grunted, produced a hip flask and took a long swig by way of reply.

Sir Nevile resumed his upright stance. That was the problem with the Secret Service, he thought. They didn't teach their agents how to behave properly on occasions like this. In fact, it was a mystery to Sir Nevile and to most of his peers exactly what such agents were taught to do. Halliday rarely told him anything of interest.

Several rows ahead of the diplomatic guests, Joachim Bonner turned and watched the ambassador. He saw Halliday taking his whisky direct from the flask and smiled. The Gestapo knew all about Halliday. They had watched him for two years. The man might look like a shambolic wreck, and his drinking surprised even those Gestapo agents who spent nights in the bars of Berlin watching him, but he was clever.

They had never identified the agents he ran, men and women prepared to betray their country for English gold; nor had they broken the code by which he communicated with London. Halliday had the ability to vanish on crowded streets and lose his trackers. He was a professional, and Bonner
rather admired that. He turned his attention to the man next to Halliday, a thin-lipped Englishman with a long nose. The face was familiar. He flicked through images in his mind and then remembered the file on Colonel Noel Macrae and the smudged photo that went with it.

So that was the British military attaché. Bonner tried to remember why they held a file on him. Macrae's service in the embassy in Vienna had been noted, as had his unguarded comments about the National Socialist government in Berlin. He had been overheard expressing his loathing for everything about the party and its leaders. Bonner remembered that the girl in the Salon, Sara, had been told to get to work on him. Had anything happened; indeed, had the girl even tried? He frowned, drew out his pocket notebook and scribbled something. He looked around.

Heydrich was sitting bolt upright a few feet away, gazing intently at the stand where Hitler would soon make his speech. He had been asked to give his views on a draft of the Führer's message to the world that night. This was a privilege granted to only a few of the inner circle, and the honour was all the greater because it came from the Führer himself and not that clubfooted buffoon Goebbels. Hitler wanted to use barely coded rhetoric to signal the strike against the eastern neighbour. Goebbels had drafted a speech accordingly.