Midnight in Berlin (38 page)

Military officers, mostly army but some from the Luftwaffe, were in there that night, along with plump party members wearing swastika armbands over their expensive French suits. They all seemed worried. The conversational hum in the room was muted. The girls too were having trouble finding business. The Pink Room was almost empty. People seemed to want to drink and talk, and then drink some more.

It was Kitty Schmidt who told Sara the full extent of the atrocities. As befitted a woman who was running a brothel
for the Gestapo, and who made sure that its senior officers were well entertained, Kitty was very well informed.

She took Sara aside and whispered terrible news: over the next week twenty thousand Jews would be arrested on charges of economic sabotage and sent to one of three camps – Dachau, Sachsenhausen or Buchenwald. The aim was to so traumatise the Jewish community that the remainder would abandon their homes and possessions and flee the country.

“You have family?” said Kitty.

She had never asked Sara about her family, her friends or her life outside the Salon. Kitty Schmidt was a professional madam just trying to survive, like everyone else caught in the Nazi net. She accepted a Jewish woman at the Salon because that is what Heydrich and Bonner wanted. She did not question their orders. She knew the reason and accepted it. A Jewish whore was the ultimate carnal pleasure for a drunken Nazi.

“My mother died last year, thank God. I have a brother in one of the camps.”

“I am sorry.”

Kitty laid a hand on her cheek and smoothed it.

“This will end one day,” she said. “Be patient.”

Sara nodded but thought, be patient for what? For a Jew in Germany, there was no future worth waiting for. The future had been cancelled.

That night, Sara entertained a client described as a special guest of Reinhard Heydrich. He was a well-dressed Russian in his middle fifties and told Sara he was a businessman, although Sara knew that was a lie. Businessmen had great folds of fat hanging over their waistline, the result of too much eating and drinking at other people's expense. This
man's body was lean, toned and muscular. He was military or intelligence, maybe both. It would not normally have bothered Sara, but she was curious that the Gestapo should send a Russian to the Salon at a time when Goebbels and his Propaganda Ministry were vilifying Moscow as the capital of a Bolshevik-Jewish global conspiracy.

The man was polite and said very little after she had taken him to the best room in the house. They walked down the corridor, past the numbered doors with their spyholes and up a short flight of stairs, to what Kitty laughingly called the honeymoon suite.

The room had mirrors on three of its four walls and a large mirror on the ceiling over the double bed. On the far side of the room, there was a bathroom behind a mirrored door. The colour scheme was crimson. A small fountain was playing in a corner and a cluster of flowering orchid plants had been placed on a table by the door. There was a bar, behind which two glass shelves were lined with bottles of vodka, whisky, rum and gin. Bottles of German champagne had been placed in ice buckets on the counter. A tray of plated cold meats, pâté, soused herrings and sliced fruit sat alongside dark rye bread and a slab of butter on a small candlelit table laid for two.

Sara had been told to stay with the Russian until the next morning, her first overnight booking at the Salon. She had protested, but Kitty Schmidt had insisted. The order came from the top, she said. The Russian was to be given the finest hospitality the Salon could provide. That was why the best room had been reserved for the night. A sign had been placed on the door saying “Do Not Disturb.”

The Russian had spoken not a word but had thrown his jacket on the bed and sat down to eat. Sara, who was feeling hungry herself, watched him devour every morsel of food on the table.

Then he had begun to drink – vodka, one shot glass after another. He spoke once, in good German, to ask her to take her clothes off, and continued drinking, looking at her reflected image in the mirrors while she sat on the bed. He drank an entire bottle, then stood up, stretched, belched and walked over to the bathroom.

When he returned, he began to undress but tripped while taking his trousers off, collapsed on the bed and fell asleep. The cameras and microphones recorded no more than the sight and sound of a snoring guest of the Third Reich and his very bored courtesan companion. Around midnight, Sara heard the faint click that told her the equipment had been turned off.

When she awoke the next morning, she thought at first that the Russian had died in the night. He was lying on his back, not making a sound. His face was grey and his limbs felt cold. She tried to shake him awake but there was no response.

She was suddenly frightened. Bonner was bound to blame her. After a few minutes of vigorous shaking, the man had coughed and opened his eyes. He sat up and began talking a language she assumed was Russian. She made him some coffee, kissed him sweetly on the cheek, whispered “
Heil Hitler
” in his ear and left.

When she walked out that autumn morning to return to her room, she knew she had found her future. The certainty of what she had to do almost made her skip with joy. It was as if she had been walking blindly through a thick fog, which had suddenly lifted to reveal the path ahead.

In Berlin that Christmas, the weather was colder and the festivities more extravagant than anyone could remember. The mercury at Tempelhof airport dipped to minus twenty in mid-December. Record-breaking snowfall swept in from the north and blanketed the city for days.

This did nothing to deter the citizens of Berlin from enjoying what many believed would be their last Christmas at peace for a long time. They whispered this thought among themselves at home, but never in bars or restaurants. They were going to enjoy the winter carnival of 1938, because it might be their last.

Military conscription had already taken most young men for a compulsory eighteen months' service, unless they could show they were employed in a reserved occupation. Throughout Germany, families desperately sought jobs for their sons in armaments factories or in the power and telephone companies. The number of young men applying to become medical students in major universities or hospitals rose dramatically.

All military conscripts and many regular soldiers and airmen were given ten days' leave to join their families for the
holiday. Those returning to Berlin from their units were amazed at the extravagance of the seasonal decorations and the lights on Christmas trees on all main streets and in the big department stores. The newspapers remarked that Berlin looked more than ever like a winter wonderland as the festive lights assumed strange shapes and colours in the swirling snow showers. On the streets, carol singers competed with the collectors for the Nazi Party winter-relief programme, an unsubtle method of extorting money in the name of the poor but actually for party funds. Everyone gave something, to avoid being reported for antisocial behaviour.

As he walked down Wilhelmstrasse on his way back to his office, Bonner counted fourteen Christmas trees in the windows of the British embassy, the Propaganda Ministry and the Reich Chancellery. Except for those at the embassy, all had swastikas instead of stars at the top. Bonner considered himself a good Nazi, but the party's attempt to take religion out of Christmas and turn the whole celebration into a pagan feast to mark the winter solstice was ridiculous. Germans had always loved their Weihnachten and, back in the Middle Ages, had been the first in Europe to invent Santa Claus, the Christmas tree and all that went with it.

Goebbels had been given the task of reinventing Christmas when the Nazis came to power back in 1933. A Christian celebration to mark the birth of a Jewish messiah was hardly going to chime with the ideology of the National Socialist Party. The mental gymnastics that followed had been the subject of much bar-room humour throughout the country, until it had become dangerous to make such jokes.

Saint Nicholas, better known to German children as Father Christmas, became the Norse God Odin, carols and hymns like “Silent Night” were rewritten to remove all reference to Christ the Saviour, and so it went on.

Most people simply ignored the ideological interference with their midwinter festival and carried on with their celebrations as usual. The Gestapo were well aware of popular feeling and chose to do nothing. Bonner despised Heydrich as an unbalanced fanatic, but in this case he was right. Tradition trumped ideology at Christmastime. The churches, on the other hand, were very much the business of the secret police, which is why no senior religious figure had spoken out against the Nazification of Christmas. Nor, indeed, had a single senior churchman condemned the atrocities of Kristallnacht. They were all frightened, which is just as it should be, thought Bonner.

As he trudged through the frozen slush on the steps of the Gestapo headquarters, Bonner noted that the festive season had left no mark on the building. The blinds were drawn tightly on all windows as usual, and hardly a glimmer of light escaped from the building.

Heydrich had permitted one tree in each of the two canteens, with the swastika at the top and black Iron Crosses hanging from the branches – nothing else. He had said that any office decorations would be inappropriate at a time when the country was facing enemies on all sides.

Bonner placed his shopping on the floor of his office and congratulated himself. It was 17 December and he had bought presents for all the family, including his elderly father and mother in Heidelberg. He had even bought something for Hilde. He was particularly proud of the gift. It showed real imagination. Even that ox of a Bavarian girl might just appreciate the thought that had gone into it.

He unwrapped the present and looked at it. An hourglass filled with coloured layers of sand that filtered through from top to bottom with such precision that in exactly sixty minutes the top layers lay in their separate colours in the lower chamber.

It was a fragile ornament made of fine blown glass that stood on its own base. Bonner had been fascinated while watching it in the shop, where an assistant had turned it upside down for him. Here was a metaphor for the ultimate absurdity of life, the shifting sands of time trickling to eternity before one's very eyes.

He wrapped the hourglass carefully and put it in his desk drawer. It was far too good for Hilde. She would just break it. He would give her a decent bottle of schnapps instead. She could swill that with the new boyfriend she had met in one of the interrogation teams. He got the bottle out of one of the shopping bags, placed it in its wrapping paper on his desk and pressed the buzzer. He heard her clumping across the floor in the office next door.

“Happy Christmas,” he said as she entered, and he presented her with the bottle.

Her response surprised him. She carefully took off the wrapping paper and placed the bottle on the desk. She gave him a little bow and said, “Thank you, sir. Will you join me in a glass?”

They drank schnapps and water for half an hour, talking of family, the weather and the surprisingly high quality of the food in the canteen. As the conversation petered out, Hilde smoothed her skirt, straightened her back against the chair, looked him in the eye and said, “I was wondering whether …”

The words choked off in a spluttering cough.

“You want to join your boyfriend in the interrogation section – is that it?” Bonner asked.

“I am a quick learner,” she said. “I would be good.”

The schnapps had beaded her face with sweat. Her dress seemed drawn more tightly than usual over her plump figure.

“What makes you say that?”

“Because the art of interrogation is knowing when to stop, knowing when they are going to talk. If you go too far, they either lose consciousness or they find some inner strength to resist you.”

“Or they die,” he said.

“Exactly. It's all a question of timing.”

She had learnt a lot from her new boyfriend. He would have to let her go.

“Very well,” he said. “I will see what I can do after the holiday.”

He watched her leave, that fat bottom of hers swaying through the door, as if beckoning him to follow. He wondered if she did that deliberately.

They had drunk half the bottle, which meant that one more wouldn't hurt. He poured himself a glass, mixed it with a generous splash of water, leant back and lit a cigarette. He heard Hilde leave the office next door.

He had not given her much of a Christmas present; they had drunk half of it already. He would get her something else. He wondered if she would give him a present, indeed if anyone would. All he ever got from his wife and kids were silk handkerchiefs, aromatic candles and knitwear. No doubt his wife had knitted yet another cardigan for this Christmas.

Bonner tried and failed to blow a smoke ring at the ceiling. He was fifty-one years old and had worked hard ever since he left school at fifteen. His first job had been as a butcher's boy, back in Heidelberg. He had come a long way and done a lot for his country since then.

This year, he would give himself a present. He deserved it. He had worked his team hard. The Jewish Problem was well on the way to solution; tens of thousands were crossing the borders seeking sanctuary in Europe or Palestine. The major
organs of state in Czechoslovakia had been infiltrated, with a little help from Canaris's military intelligence agency. Heydrich didn't trust Canaris and neither did Bonner. When they wanted information from the Abwehr they paid their own informants in the agency. On the home front, all was quiet. The Mauthausen camp that had opened in the summer in Austria was full to overflowing already and the new extension to the Sachsenhausen camp outside Berlin was filling up nicely.

At their last staff meeting, Heydrich had actually praised him in front of all senior members of the team. He had made a little joke about not wanting to formalise Bonner's role as deputy, in case Himmler gave him the top job. Except it wasn't really a joke, was it? Heydrich was always on the lookout for any threat to his authority.