Mr. Calder & Mr. Behrens (32 page)

“And now he has written the
Life of Johnson?”

“It is not exactly a biography of Hitler. Rather a commentary on his command methods. Why he took certain decisions, and how he achieved his ends. You might call it the sequel to
Mein Kampf.
It is a document which will be of incalculable value to historians. To psychologists, too, no doubt. When I had read it, I came to two conclusions. The first was that it must be returned to the German Government. It belongs to them, not to us. The second was that I would have it photographed, which I have done. Both copies are in that file.”

“How on earth did we get it?”

“For that we have to thank the foresight and patience of John Corrie, our representative at the Bonn embassy. After the near debacle over the Bartz affair, I persuaded them to create the office of Assistant Trade Secretary as cover for one of our men. Corrie was my nomination. He proved an excellent choice. One of the things he did was to keep in discreet touch with Sperrle. In spite of the ridiculous stringency of our Intelligence budget, we were able to help him with money, from time to time. But it was more than money. It was sympathy. Corrie used to call on Sperrle in his puny roof-top apartment up in the Leopoldstrasse and drink coffee with him, and gossip about old times. About a fortnight ago, when he called on him, he saw quite clearly that Sperrle was dying. That was when he handed over the typescript. According to Corrie, he said, very solemnly, ‘I make this gift in the trust that no evil use will be made of it, and in the hope that our two great Anglo-Saxon nations will never again be in enmity.’”

“Not a bad epitaph,” said Mr. Behrens.

Mr. Calder, more practically, said, “You mentioned a job.”

“I want you, first of all, to read the last chapter. Sperrle, you will recall, was in the Bunker during the closing weeks of the war. Along with Goebbels and Martin Bormann, he was one of the witnesses at the macabre wedding of Hitler and Eva Braun. It was then that Hitler gave him this last assignment. Read it for yourselves. One of you can use the original, and one the photocopy.”

For half an hour there was silence in Mr. Fortescue’s dignified Victorian office where Millais’ ‘The Angel Child’, on one side of the chocolate-coloured porcelain overmantel smiled at Landseer’s ‘Tug of War’ on the other. At the end of it Mr. Calder said, “Jesus Christ,” an expression of feeling which drew a frown from Mr. Fortescue. “I mean, what an extraordinary story.”

Rudolf Sperrle, making his way through the sector of the ruined city which was still held by the Germans, had reached the appointed rendezvous where a battered staff car awaited him. He was carrying with him two sealed and padlocked canisters, a harness having been fixed to them so that he could carry one over each shoulder. They were very heavy. The staff car had taken him south, through the narrowing gap between the Allied advance on one side and the Russians on the other. Its objective had been the Austrian Alps, in the heart of which Hitler had planned his mountain fortress, a fortress which was half built and never manned. The unexpectedly fast progress of the Americans in the south had driven Sperrle eastward. Petrol and oil were difficult to get, and the car was on its last legs.

It had finally crawled into Straffelager Seven. It was clear that it could not go much further. There were reports that the Eighth Army, moving up from Italy, was already in Austria.

Straffelager Seven was a camp for British other ranks who had attempted to escape from the regular camps or had made nuisances of themselves to their captors in some way. It was the non-commissioned equivalent of Colditz; not a castle, but a quadrilateral of barbed wire at the foot of the Bohmerwald near the village of Abendreuth. To the commandant of the camp, but to no-one else, Sperrle had confided the details of his mission. He had been entrusted with a large collection of letters, records and memoranda in the Fuehrer’s own hand, photographs, and personal mementoes, and a number of actual messages which had been recorded, on the somewhat primitive apparatus of the time, in the form of wire spools. “When the great German nation rises again, as it will,” Hitler had said to Sperrle, “these relics will be the Ark of the Covenant. They must never, never, never come into the hands of our enemies.”

(As Mr. Behrens read the words he could hear the Fuehrer’s voice rising, as he had heard it once before, in a terrifying crescendo. “Never, never, never.”)

Sperrle and the commandant had discussed the matter late into that night, and all through the next day, to the accompaniment, growing menacingly closer, of the Russian guns in the east. On the second night, taking only the camp adjutant into their confidence, they had buried the canisters in a bed of concrete under the floor of the commandant’s own office.

“OK,” said Mr. Calder. “So we go and dig it up?”

“With German co-operation. Yes.”

“It doesn’t seem a very difficult assignment.”

“The difficulty,” said Mr. Fortescue, “is that nobody now knows exactly where SL Seven was. Corrie will explain it all to you. I’ve arranged for you to meet him at Munich Central station at eleven o’clock, two days from now. You’ll need a little time to get ready.”

Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens, who had grown used to being ordered to remote parts of the world at a moment’s notice, looked at each other in some surprise.

“I should have explained,” said Mr. Fortescue blandly, “that you will need to take camping equipment. Sleeping bags and—ah—groundsheets, and that sort of thing.”

This he said with all the relish of a man who had a comfortable bed of his own to return to.

“It’s like this,” said John Corrie, as they drove north and east from Munich in Mr. Calder’s roomy Ford Escort, packed with camping gear. “SL Seven was a temporary affair. It was run up, in a hurry, at the end of 1944 when the camps in Poland had to be evacuated. The usual prison camp style. A double barbed wire apron, a watch tower at each corner, wooden huts for the prisoners, and something a bit more permanent for the commandant and the guards, who were second line SS. It was a naughty boys camp, and the guards were fairly tough, but there don’t seem to have been any particular atrocities.”

“I expect it was too close to the end of the war,” said Mr. Behrens. “Most Germans had their chins on their shoulders by the end of 1944.”

“Could be,” said Corrie. “Anyway, it was the Russians who got there first. The commandant and the adjutant stuck to their posts. Much good it did them. They were taken off to Russia, and I’ve no doubt were put straight underground. The SS boys scarpered. The prisoners marched out after them, in a rather more orderly fashion, made for the American lines and were repatriated. Sperrle got away into Austria. SL Seven ceased to exist.”

“But, surely,” said Mr. Calder,”
someone
must know where it was?”

“When we get there, you’ll understand the difficulties better. The Russians drew back a little at this point, for some reason, and the Iron Curtain runs about three miles east of Abendreuth, which was deserted by its few aged inhabitants and is now a ghost village. All the useful roads in that area ran east-west, and since the Iron Curtain chopped them off, there was no point in keeping them up. The nearest place of any size is Plattling, thirty miles away on the Passau-Nurnberg road. It’s got quite a decent
gasthaus,
incidentally. I’ve booked rooms for us there tonight and we’re meeting our opposite numbers, Police Captain Bruckner and Lieutenant Brunz, there tomorrow morning.”

Mr. Behrens had been considering the curious problem of the vanishing prison camp. He said, “What about farmers? Someone must use the land.”

“It’s open heath. There are two farms. One of them is about ten miles west of Abendreuth. The other twelve miles northwest. The owners share the grazing rights, such as they are. Their horses and bullocks have the run of the heath. They round them up twice a year, in spring and autumn. Like Dartmoor ponies. They’re pretty wild specimens, I believe.”

“Wasn’t there some sort of road from the village to the camp?”

‘’I thought of that,” said Corrie. “But a lot of marram grass and heather grows in nearly forty years. When I tried to trace it, I was reminded of that poem of Kipling’s. Do you remember it? The one about the old lost road through the woods, ‘
It
is underneath the coppice and heath and the thin anemones.
’ Only in this case it isn’t thin anemones. It’s a particularly vicious sort of dwarf thorn bush. Discouraging to exploration on hands and knees.”

Captain Bruckner and Lieutenant Brunz arrived at Plattling punctually at nine o’clock on the following morning, each in his own car, with a police driver. They set out in convoy, with Bruckner leading. The mist of early morning had cleared away, and there was promise of a fine day.

Ten miles out of Plattling, the road they were on deteriorated into something not much better than a farm track. It crossed the open heath in a series of small dips and rises. Ahead of them the line of the Bohmerwald rose, blue and grey under the morning sun.

When they arrived at their destination Mr. Calder was surprised to see that a sizeable encampment was already springing up. There was a large transporter, from which its crew was unstripping two big Portacabins, ready-made wooden one-room buildings. The work was in charge of a police sergeant. Other men were setting up tents, and unloading posts and barbed wire. There were two caravans, and an old-fashioned field cooker. A modern gypsy encampment, thought Mr. Behrens.

The sergeant approached Captain Bruckner, saluted, and said, “Has any decision been made as to where the huts shall be placed?”

Bruckner said, “Find the best hard standing you can, and dump them there for the moment.”

Mr. Calder had been making a calculation. The huts would each, he guessed, house at least ten men. The tents and caravans would take twice as many. Yet, counting the drivers of the vehicles and the unloading team, who were all policemen, he made the total no more than fifteen.

“We seem to be allowing ourselves plenty of elbow room,” he said.

Captain Bruckner smiled at John Corrie, who pointed back the way they had come.

“Reinforcements,” he said.

Two large army trucks were approaching them up the track from Plattling. They, also, had police drivers, beside each of which a civilian was sitting. As the trucks came to a halt the civilian jumped down, went round to the back, and said, “All out, chaps.”

“Thank God for that,” said a voice from the back. “It’s nearly forty years since I’ve travelled in the back of one of these bastards, and I’d forgotten how bloody uncomfortable it was.”

“Not like your air-conditioned Cadillac, Philip,” said a second voice.

“You can keep your Cadillacs. Give me a good old English Humber every time.”

In front of Mr. Calder’s astonished eyes, there emerged from the back of the lorries a dozen civilians, all of late middle-age, and all dressed in the sort of clothes that a business man likes to wear on holiday. One had evidently been a fisherman. There was an assortment of flies in his tweed hat. Another might have been a yachtsman. A third had simply put on the clothes he would have worn for a little light gardening.

Corrie evidently knew the fisherman.

He said, “Come along, Sam. Meet two friends of mine.”

Introductions were effected all round. Mr. Behrens recognised the fisherman. He had been, until his retirement, the managing director of a company which ran a famous chain of food stores.

Corrie said, “We advertised for ex-inmates of SL Seven who had a little time on their hands and might enjoy an open-air holiday, at the joint expense of the German and British Governments. I thought we might have some difficulty in finding anyone. I was never more surprised in my life. Applications flowed in. We had to close the list.”

“We’re a picked bunch,” said the man called Sam with a grin.

“You’ve got a lot of ground to cover,” said Corrie. “You’d better spend the rest of the day getting organised. I’ve got to get back to Bonn.” And to Mr. Calder, before he left, he said, “Don’t forget. This is really a German show. We’re helping them. Bruckner’s in charge. He’s a decent fellow. I’m sure you’ll all get along splendidly. There’ll be a daily shuttle to Plattling, so you can keep me in the picture.”

For the next three days the weather remained fine, which was a blessing because they made no progress at all. One of the difficulties was that the prisoners had not been allowed into the village, which was out of sight of the camp, and their estimates of its distance and exact direction from the camp varied widely. It was agreed that it had been to the east, and more than a mile away, but that was all they could agree about. For long hours each day, they prodded with poles in the thick heather and undergrowth and found nothing but a few nose-caps from Russian shells and an unexploded mortar bomb which they buried cautiously.

There were excitements of another kind. On the second day, a Russian helicopter had floated across and looked at them. A herd of wild-haired bullocks watched their efforts with equal, or even greater suspicion. Finally, deciding that the time had come to assert themselves, they had charged. One of the policemen drew his police carbine, and shot the leading animal dead at point blank range. The herd withdrew. That evening the diggers had enjoyed an excellent meal of steak and chips.

Not that they were short of food. The German commissariat had produced sound if unimaginative supplies. As soon as he had examined them Sam sent a message back, through Plattling, to the German associates of his old firm. They must have moved fast, because on the next afternoon a truck arrived loaded with delicacies. One of the policemen turned out to have been a cook before he joined the police force.

“I haven’t eaten like this for years,” said Lester.

“That’s because you haven’t taken so much exercise for years,” said Sam.

Philip said, “He showed a nice turn of speed when that bullock came after him.”

During those long days in the sun and cheerful evenings in Hut A (into which they had moved after their personal tent had been trampled on by a wild horse), Mr. Calder and Mr. Behrens came to know and appreciate the ex-inmates of Straffelager Seven. All of them were men who had made their very different ways in the world since 1945.