Midnight in Berlin (47 page)
Read Midnight in Berlin Online
Authors: James MacManus
Colonel Noel Macrae has been appointed Defence Attaché representing His Majesty's Government in Portuguese East Africa. Colonel and Mrs Macrae will take up their appointment in Lourenço Marques with immediate effect.
She looked out of the window of the common room. Halliday was walking across the gravelled car park, the same shambolic figure who had walked into her life in the station café that afternoon before Christmas.
In the months since, he had become a friend, the only friend she had in London really. The other teachers at the school were nice, kind people, but they led quiet family lives in small houses with washing lines in the back garden, a couple of kids and a dog or a cat. On Fridays they would invite each other to dinner parties and on Sundays there would be a family roast, with uncles and aunts invited for company. A young Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany did not fit into this suburban world.
She didn't mind. Halliday came to Dulwich on the train almost every week “just to make sure you're not missing Berlin”, which was his little joke. Strangely, she did miss Berlin. The excitement, the danger, the sense of a whole continent breaking up like an ice floe beneath her feet â these were unforgettable moments that had turned every minute of life into a razor-sharp memory.
At their weekly suppers at a local pub she would bombard him with questions. First and always there was Joseph. Each time the answer was the same. Her twin was almost certainly dead. There was no definite information, but they would have killed him after her escape. She accepted that truth and was glad, because she instinctively knew now that it was true. His suffering was over.
She learnt that no mention had ever been made of Bonner's murder. The Gestapo had removed all records of his service and told enquiring callers that he had gone abroad for health reasons. Everyone who worked in the Salon, including the cleaners and the kitchen staff, had been arrested and sent to the camps. Heydrich had ordered the Salon to be reopened and the place was back in business with new girls and a new madam. Kitty Schmidt had vanished and was rumoured to have gone to Portugal.
She had not asked him about Macrae, nor told him of their nights in the Tiergarten. Halliday probably knew anyway.
He seemed to know everything. She thought one day he might come back, the man who had given her not just his love, but her life.
Halliday had almost reached the front door and waved to her through the window. She was crying now and waved back through her tears. She was going to have a boy, she was sure of that, a child made of love, close to the midnight hour, in Berlin.
This book is a work of fiction based closely on the events in Berlin during the crucial months of 1938â39. Several of the characters who shaped those events appear in the narrative very much as they did in history. After their stories end in this novel, I think it only fair to let the reader know what happened to them in real life. I should add that as I have researched that period in Berlin carefully, my fictional characters very much reflect the lives of those who lived and died in that traumatic time.
Reinhard Heydrich was badly wounded in an assassination attempt in Prague on 27 May 1942 and died of his wounds a week later. He was given a state funeral in Berlin. Hitler ordered reprisals for the killing. The entire population of the village of Lidice, which was close to the scene of the assassination attempt, was massacred by SS troops or murdered later in concentration camps. Approximately eight hundred men, women and children died in the atrocity. Many thousands more civilians in the area were killed in follow-up operations by SS death squads.
Sir Nevile Henderson, the British ambassador in Berlin, returned to England at the outbreak of war in 1939. His
request for a further diplomatic posting was turned down. He wrote a book entitled
Failure of a Mission
and died of cancer in 1942, aged sixty.
Sir Neville Chamberlain resigned as prime minister in May 1940, to be replaced by Winston Churchill. He died of cancer in November that year.
Sir Stewart Menzies, who was chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service at the time of these events, remained as Winston Churchill's spymaster during World War Two. He retired in 1952 and died in 1968.
Lord Hore-Belisha, who was secretary of state for war from 1937 to 1940, refused further office after being sacked by Neville Chamberlain. He died in 1957.
Kitty Schmidt, the madam of the Salon, survived the war and died in Germany in 1954.
William L. Shirer wrote an award-winning account of the Nazi period,
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,
and became a well-known author and broadcast journalist after the war. He died in 1993.
Colonel (later General) Mason-Macfarlane was the British military attaché in Berlin from 1938 to 1939, and he did indeed plan the assassination of Hitler from the balcony of his apartment. In March 1939 he put the plan to Neville Chamberlain's government in London, where it was turned down after consideration at a senior level. Shortly afterwards Mason-Macfarlane was ordered back from Berlin and “promoted” to brigadier at a Royal Artillery base. He spent the war as Governor of Gibraltar and to the surprise of his friends won a Labour seat in the general election in 1945. He died in 1953 aged sixty-three.
There is a vast library of works covering the drift to war in the 1930s and the failure of the Western democracies to appreciate the true nature of Hitler's Third Reich. I list only those that were especially helpful to me:
Failure of a Mission
by Sir Nevile Henderson (Hodder and Stoughton, 1940);
The Chamberlain Cabinet
by Ian Colvin (Gollancz, 1971);
Hitler,
vols I and II, by Ian Kershaw (Penguin Press, 2000);
The Third Reich in Power
by Richard J. Evans (Penguin, 2006);
This is Berlin
by William L. Shirer (Hutchinson, 1999);
Hitler
by Norman Stone (Hodder and Stoughton, 1980);
Evil Genius: The Story of Joseph Goebbels
by Erich Ebermayer and Hans-Otto Meissner (Allan Wingate, 1953);
The Drift to War
by Richard Lamb (W. H. Allen, 1989);
The Nemesis of Power
by Sir John Wheeler-Bennett (Palgrave, 2005);
A Social History of the Third Reich
by Richard Grunberger (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971);
Hitler's Hangman
by Robert Gerwarth (Yale, 2011);
The History of the German Resistance 1933â45
by Peter Hoffmann, translated by Richard Barry (MIT Press, 1979);
The Gestapo: Power and Terror in the Third Reich
by Carsten Dams and Michael Stolle,
translated by Charlotte Ryland (Oxford University Press, 2014).
I wish to thank first my publishers, Thomas Dunne in the US and Peter Mayer in the UK, for their support and faith in this book. In New York, Peter Joseph proved a fine editor and ally, as did Andrew Lockett in London. In New York I also benefited from the forensic attention to the text of Melanie Fried. In Berlin, I was greatly helped by the research into the geography of the city and the Mecklenburg district of Janet Anderson and Oliver Briese. Gavin Stamp was kind enough to unearth maps from the 1938 edition of Baedeker's guide to Berlin. My brother, Stephen MacManus, helped find long-out-of-print books relating to the period in the London Library. My sister-in-law, Susanne MacManus, who was born and raised in Vienna, helped me understand what that city looked like in 1938.
To Mrs Deborah Keegan I owe thanks for helping me achieve some sort of balance between being an author and a part-time media executive. I am also grateful, as ever, to Sophie Hicks, my then agent, for steering this book into print, and to Mrs Kate Kee for her invaluable comments on the text.
Ocean Devil
Black Venus
JAMES MACMANUS
is the managing director of the
Times Literary Supplement
. He is the author of
Black Venus, The Language of the Sea
and
Ocean Devil
, which was made into a film starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers. He lives in London. You can sign up for author updates
here
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin's Press.