Midnight in Berlin (29 page)

Then there was a change of mind. For the first time in their relationship, Heydrich had seen the Führer fretful and worried. Was he going too far, would such a speech drive the British and French to come to the aid of Czechoslovakia? He had posed the question to Heydrich directly because he knew the man he had promoted to head the Gestapo was a master of detail. Heydrich had taken care to inform himself
about the military progress of the armed forces since the rearmament programme had begun in 1935.

Hitler had sat drumming his fingers on the leather arm of the chair in his study at the Reich Chancellery, waiting for the reply. It was one of the difficulties of dealing with the chancellor that while his questions were usually framed with a long perambulation through recent European history, beginning and ending with the iniquities of the Versailles treaty, he expected short, decisive answers.

In this case, it was impossible to give a straight answer. Heydrich knew – they all knew – that the generals were not ready for war. The Czechs had a good army and modern equipment. Their border defences were strong. They were a tough people, and behind them stood Britain and France, and maybe even Russia. A war in the autumn of 1938 was unthinkable. Yet that was exactly what Hitler appeared intent on unleashing in his speech. He wanted to give his generals the signal to begin Case Green.

Heydrich answered the question respectfully, thanking the Führer for asking his opinion while desperately trying to think of an answer that would satisfy his leader's evident desire for an early war. He quoted an old German proverb: “You do not have to climb a tree to pluck the ripest apple.”

Hitler beamed. He understood this brilliant young man perfectly. He liked the way he had drawn such wisdom from somewhere deep in Germany's rich cultural past. He had watched with admiration as Heydrich had expanded the range and operations of the secret police. He ran the Gestapo without fear, without forgiveness and without mercy.

Heydrich was also smiling as he left the chancellor. On the spur of the moment he had simply made up the quotation. As he looked around the stadium that night, he caught Goebbels's eye a few seats away and smiled. The propaganda
chief would never have dreamt of fooling Hitler in such a fashion.

Bonner shifted in his chair and rather wished he too had bought a hip flask like Halliday. The Führer liked taking risks and he usually judged them well: the march in the Rhineland had been a masterstroke based on the correct assessment that the French were too weak politically to react to anything but a full-scale invasion. The Austrian Anschluss was based on a similar reading of the resolve of the major European powers. No one wanted another war – and after all, Austria was German in all but name, was it not? But Case Green was a move too far.

The Gestapo had reported mutinous talk at senior officer level, but Heydrich had dismissed it, saying soldiers and their officers always complained about everything – especially in peacetime. Bonner was not so sure. Beck had resigned, but Hitler had not dared announce the fact, fearful of reaction from his own party. Beck was popular, a regular career soldier who had won many military honours in the last war. He had agreed to keep quiet, but that might not last.

Above all, Bonner wished to get back to Berlin. There was work to do there, files to read, intelligence to evaluate, interrogation sessions to supervise. And there was that girl Sara. He needed to see her. She had not delivered of late; something was wrong. It was her brother, of course, but he was safe enough. He thought of his own wife and two sons, Franz and Tomas, safely tucked away in that two-storey suburban home with their mother. She was a good woman, Trudi, and an excellent cook. She had made a good home for him and the boys. How old was Franz now? Eleven, and football mad. He would do better at school if he didn't spend all his time reading
about Bayern Munich in the sporting magazines. And Tomas, just nine, the quiet one, very much his mother's pet. Bonner would be home from this political orgy – and that was how he thought of it – tomorrow night. He needed to see his boys; they kept him sane. And he needed Trudi too. But he wanted that woman in the Salon. That was the problem.

His thoughts were broken by a roar of
“Sieg Heil!”
as Hitler ascended the steps to the plinth only a few feet away from him and stood at the rostrum. The searchlights that had been beamed into the night now swung down. Some were trained on the plinth, illuminating the Nazi leadership in a glaring white light, while others held the giant swastika above them in a fierce spotlight.

Hitler's deputy, Rudolf Hess, stepped up to the rostrum three times to introduce Hitler, but on each occasion he was forced to step back by the cheers and chants that rose in waves from the stadium.

Finally he managed to bellow out:
“Und jetzt … Unser Führer!”

Hitler positioned himself at the rostrum, placed a sheaf of notes on the slanted lectern and waited for the noise to die down. The cheering and chanting continued until he raised his hands, commanding attention, and the crowd fell silent.

Then came the long pause. They all knew this was the way he began, with a moment of silence while he looked out into the starlit night above him and down at the torchlights bobbing amid an ocean of faces below. Goebbels had taught him this technique, drawing on the work of American specialists in the art of public speaking.

Goebbels had never been to America but had learnt from the work of the big advertising agencies on Madison Avenue in New York. The use of symbols and slogans, the techniques of projecting short messages on billboards that clicked with
the hopes and fears in the subconscious mind, these were skills that were constantly being improved in New York, Washington and Los Angeles. Goebbels had ordered all German diplomatic and consular officials in the US to report on the evolving techniques, especially those involving speech therapists used by politicians in Washington and the big stars in Hollywood.

He drummed into Hitler the key lesson: make them wait, make them want you, build the sense of anticipation until the audience almost begs you to begin. After that, Goebbels was fond of quoting the old Hollywood maxim that the way to grab an audience was to give them an earthquake in the first reel and then build to a climax. But Goebbels didn't attribute the quote to its originator, the studio boss Sam Goldwyn. Goldwyn was Jewish.

Hitler had learnt well; he knew that when he finally began it would be with words that would bind his audience and the nation to him and make them recognise what they all knew to be true, that he was their saviour. That night in Nuremberg in 1938, the German chancellor opened with lines that might have been taken from a love letter.

“That you have found me among so many millions is the miracle of our time, and that I have found you means that together we can be sure of Germany's future. You, the German people, can be happy that the chaos of the past is over. We now have a fixed star to guide us.”

Bonner could see Goebbels beaming with pleasure as the words echoed over the stadium, just as he knew they would echo throughout the capitals of Europe. The propaganda chief had written the speech and made sure that every major news organisation was in Nuremberg that night to hear it. The correspondents of all the great newspapers were at a long table below the plinth, taking notes and talking into telephones.
Newsreel cameras, whose footage would soon be shown in cinemas around the world, were filming the event from the front row of the crowd. They had come to hear a master orator make war on his enemies, and they were not disappointed.

Hitler quickly set aside the romantic sentiments with which he had opened the speech. He turned to the target for that night, the enemy he intended to crush first with his oratory and then with his army. Waving clenched fists at the crowd and raising his voice in rage at the injustice and humiliation heaped on his fellow Germans across the border, he bellowed his anger at Czechoslovakia and its leader, President Beneš.

The phrases thundered over the stadium, each building in a crescendo of hatred in which Beneš and his nation were pilloried as bloodthirsty tyrants persecuting a helpless German minority.

Hitler paused for dramatic effect every few minutes, allowing the crowd to match his rhetoric with roars of
“Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”

They would fall quiet again as the figure on the rostrum raised both hands, nodding his head in appreciation and looking down at his typewritten notes. Then the hoarse voice, magnified by dozens of speakers around the stadium, would fill the night again.

Bonner could see, as did Macrae a few rows behind him, that the effect on the crowd was hypnotic. Weary after two days of festive propaganda, people were now slipping into a state of narcosis. The torchlights around them, the fierce light on the speaker and above all the simple repeated slogans that were bellowed back and forth from the speaker to the crowd seemed to have left the entire arena in a trancelike state.

Macrae stared at Hitler's back, watching the arms rise and fall like those of a marionette, listening to the crash as clenched
fists slammed into the rostrum and seeing the silvery spray of spittle in the glare of the searchlights. He grasped an elemental truth at that moment that he had never heard mentioned before. The mass hypnosis was carefully planned, that was evident, but the man who most notably succumbed to the narcotic effect of the occasion, the man who was himself projected into a hypnotic trance, was Hitler himself. The leader of the Third German Reich had worked himself up into such a state of fury, and had so bewitched himself with his jumbled sloganeering, that he had left the real world and become a mindless creature of his own dark night.

Macrae looked across to Sir Nevile Henderson. The ambassador sat there with a broad smile, gazing at Hitler, it seemed to Macrae, with admiration. The rest of the visiting dignitaries and the Nazi leadership looked spellbound, like children at a Christmas party when Father Christmas has appeared. Only at the far end of the seating did the row after row of military officers look less than impressed. They had heard it all before. But this night they were waiting for the coded command to begin Case Green.

To their surprise and that of everyone present in Nuremberg that night, 12 September 1938, Hitler held back. The menace and the threats were there, as was the undisguised racial hatred of the Slavonic people, who were derided as the Jews of Europe. But as the diplomats, the army and the senior Nazis present noted, Hitler did not commit himself openly to war that night. He demanded justice for the German population in Sudetenland and left it at that.

Later that night, as Macrae joined the crowds streaming from the stadium, he felt two hands descending on his shoulder. He tried to twist around but could not turn against the grip.
He glimpsed an army uniform and heard a low hissed whisper.

“Where are your ships? Where is the British fleet?” The grip was released. Macrae turned to see Koenig walking away from him, pushing through the crowd.

“Friend of yours?” Halliday had fallen in beside him. Both were hoping for a lift to their hotel in Nuremberg with the ambassador, but this was an offer that Sir Nevile must have forgotten, because there was no sign of him.

“No,” said Macrae.

“He looked a worried man,” said Halliday.

Not for the first time, Macrae wondered just how much Halliday knew and who he was really working for.

“I think we're all worried, aren't we?” he said carefully.

“What worries me is not this lot here,” said Halliday, “it's the home team.”

“Home team?”

“Number 10. The PM and his merry men will be running around like rabbits after this. Something in my water tells me that they are going to do something really, really stupid.”

The news that the British prime minister had flown to Germany for a face-to-face meeting with Hitler broke like a bombshell around Europe. It was just three days after the Nuremberg speech and this was Britain's response. Headlines from Moscow to Madrid heralded the initiative as a new era of peace in Europe, while politicians and diplomats scrambled to identify the real significance of what was widely described in the press as a masterstroke of diplomacy.

As he flew to Munich, Chamberlain congratulated himself both on what
The Times
had called a diplomatic bolt of lightning and on the Machiavellian skill with which he had handled his cabinet.

The morning after the Führer's Nuremberg outburst, Chamberlain had summoned an informal meeting of his inner circle of ministers shortly before the full cabinet assembled. Headlines in every paper across the continent had reported Hitler's venomous attacks on Czechoslovakia. As Lord Halifax, Sir John Simon and Sir Samuel Hoare stepped into 10 Downing Street, the BBC was reporting an uprising of the German ethnic minority in Sudetenland. Martial law
was declared as the Czech government clamped an iron hand on the riots and demonstrations.

Across Germany, radio stations amplified reports in the morning press with detailed accounts of atrocities committed against German speakers across the border. The reports of rape and pillage were so colourful, and so similar in detail, that it was clear that they had been fabricated within the Propaganda Ministry on Wilhelmstrasse. But Joseph Goebbels, the street-sharp outsider who had been crippled by polio as a child and forced to conceal his disability during years of bullying at school, knew the value of an oft-told lie. The fiction of Czech brutality against helpless German women and children was repeated until it became fact.

Britain's official policy of appeasement lay in ruins; at least, that is the way it appeared to the press and most of the government. Chamberlain took an entirely different view. An untitled brown folder lay before ministers as they took their seats in the Cabinet Room. This was unusual, and Lord Halifax looked sharply at the prime minister. The foreign secretary didn't like changes to the official routine of government business, and he didn't like surprises. He suspected the folder contained both. He opened it, to see a typewritten agenda.