The Grave of Truth (3 page)

It was a political assassination and the newspapers and other media were blaming the Baader-Meinhof because Walther was a West German politician.

Max had gone over the details with senior men from the Sûreté and then with a couple of investigators from SDECE. He had told them everything he could remember, every fleeting impression gained in those last few moments of panic and horror. Except for the dead man's last word.

He had washed and changed his bloodstained clothes for a suit sent round from his home. He had ignored the frantic messages from Ellie, who was assured by the police that he was quite unhurt. When he was told he could go home he asked to be driven to his office. His editor-in-chief was a Frenchman who had never forgiven him for being German but was too practical to let it influence his judgement. Steiner was one of his star correspondents; he cleared everyone out of Max's office and took the story down himself. ‘I'm going to write it,' Max said.

‘Eye witness,' Martin Jarre said briskly. ‘This is going to be your guideline. Tomorrow it mightn't be so clear. Go home and get your doctor to give you something for a night's sleep. You look clapped out.'

But Max hadn't gone home. He had switched off his telephone so Ellie couldn't get through to him, and sat on, playing the tape back once or twice.

It all looked very straightforward. Not the Baader-Meinhof but assassins from the right wing who didn't want
détente
with East Germany. Or the KGB, who didn't want it either.… The motives were there on that tape: reunification of Germany through a political understanding with the Communist regime in East Germany. A proposal that would make Walther many powerful enemies. But no more, on examination, than a political ideal to be promoted during an election, by a man who was aiming at power and popularity. Not sufficient threat to have him murdered in a Paris street, with all the attendant publicity and uproar. Walther had been killed for something else, and he had known it, and said so just before he died. ‘Janus.'

It was twenty-five years since Max Steiner had heard that word, and the man who spoke it then was just about to die. In the Bunker in Berlin on 25 April 1945, when Adolf Hitler shot himself and the Third Reich came to an end.

For twenty-six days and nights the city had been under bombardment from the air and the advancing Russians, their artillery ranged around the perimeter within fifteen kilometres of the Brandenburg Gate. Within the last seven days Berlin had become completely encircled, and already the first Russian patrols had penetrated the suburbs. All who could get out had taken to the roads and were fleeing to the West and the Allied armies. A massive pall of black smoke hung over Berlin, and through it the fires from bombed and burning buildings licked and spouted jagged flame. The air was thick with rubble dust and sweet with the stench of burst drains and corpses buried in the ruins. The air-raid sirens howled continuously and the thud of explosions from Allied air attacks was competing with the crash of high-velocity shells.

Berliners had forgotten how to sleep; they dozed between air attacks, risked a forage into the shattered streets for the meagre rations which were still being supplied, and huddled underground, waiting for the final assault upon the city. In the heart of Berlin the Führer stayed on in the Bunker below the Chancellory, directing a war which had been lost months before. Berlin, the centre of the Third Reich, its buildings designed by Albert Speer as a monument to the New Order which was to last a thousand years, burned and crumbled under the attacks of the enemies who had so nearly been defeated.

The city lived on rumours; nobody believed the lies broadcast by Goebbels' radio, or its hysterical admonitions to fight on to the last and victory could still be won. The war was lost: Himmler and Goering had left Berlin; only Hitler and his few fanatics—Bormann, Goebbels and his personal SS guards—remained to fight on and die with the people and the city. German troops, exhausted and hopeless, were entrenched in the ruins, with orders to fight the Russians street by street.

No surrender. Fight to the death. Those were Hitler's orders, and the veterans and old men of the Volksturm and schoolboys of the Hitler Jugend joined what was left of the army and prepared to defend Berlin and the Führer to the last man.

Max Steiner was sixteen; his platoon was due to take up position in the Pichelsdorf district, where savage fighting was holding the encircling Russian troops from driving through the centre. They had been issued with uniforms, ill-fitting olive green, with forage caps and belts, the insignia of the Hitler Jugend on their collars. Max, being the eldest, was the platoon commander; unlike the younger boys he carried a revolver. The others carried rifles and shoulder packs, with grenades. There were stories of children, even younger than the fourteens and fifteens in this group, who had thrown themselves and their grenades under Red Army tanks. Max's platoon had been ordered to the Bunker for the supreme honour accorded those who were about to die for the Fatherland.

Adolf Hitler himself was to review his boy soldiers; he would exhort them to hold back the invader. They had been waiting since dawn, crouching half asleep in little groups, the tumult of the bombardment muffled below ground. Max's mother was still in her house on the Albrechtstrasse; the adjoining buildings had been wrecked by a bomb but their house still stood and she and his grandmother lived in the cellars and refused to leave. There were no false heroics about Marthe Steiner or her mother-in-law who was seventy-eight years old. Only the quiet logic that countered Max's frantic pleas to join the refugees with the answer that he was all the two women had left, and they weren't leaving Berlin without him. There was no suggestion that he should run away. His father had been killed during an air raid on the Luftwaffe station at Brest, and his elder brothers shot down during the Battle of Britain.

It was his duty to fight for his country, and theirs to stay and give what help they could. His mother helped with the street kitchens and his grandmother sewed bandages for the Red Cross. None of them expected to survive the fall of their city. Max had kissed them good-bye when the order came to report for active duty; his mother was not a demonstrative woman but she had held out her arms and he had run into them, and they were both in tears.

He thought of her, and looked round anxiously in the dull light to make certain no one was awake and watching him cry. The others were silent, some sleeping, some with their eyes closed but awake. He was the platoon commander; he wiped his eyes with his sleeve and tried not to think of his family. Not of his father, or his two brothers who had seemed so splendid in their blue uniforms and were lost over the English Channel within a week of each other. It was his turn now, to prove himself as brave as they were, a German ready to die for the Führer and the Fatherland. He wished his mother and his grandmother had gone, when their friends the Schultzes packed up and left. He wasn't just afraid for himself, because he had been taught that fear was childish and unworthy in a Hitler Youth; he could contain the niggle in his stomach that was becoming a nervous pain at the idea of being shot or blown up. He couldn't bear the thought of his mother staying in that dank old cellar with his grandmother, their personal possessions heaped around them, and perhaps the house being hit by a shell or a bomb and the walls crashing down on top of them.…

He shifted, and eased his legs to stretch the muscles that were cramped from sitting. Albert Kramer was on the left of him, his back balanced against another boy who was crouching forward, his head on his knees. He and Albert had been at the same school and joined the Hitler Youth at the same time. A few months separated them in age, and Albert had expected to get the senior post in the platoon. They had spent a large part of their lives together, but they were never friends. Albert's father was in the Waffen SS; he had lost an eye and part of his left leg in an ambush in Poland during the retreat. Albert told them how every civilian in the area had been arrested and shot as a reprisal.

Obersturmbannführer Kramer was in an Eastern hospital; nobody knew what had happened to him when the Russians occupied the area, but Albert told everyone his father must have died fighting. The Waffen SS were the best soldiers in the Reich; Albert's eyes glowed when he talked about his father. He didn't seem to mind that he was dead. He only lost his temper when it was suggested that his father might be a prisoner. No SS officer surrendered to those Russian swine. Max could remember him shouting, and how he cried with rage. He had thought, secretly, that he would have been happy if
his
father were somehow alive.… But then Albert was a fanatical type. He believed in the Führer and the Third Reich the way some people-believed in God.

Albert had never had a doubt about the war or about victory. He should have been made platoon leader but Max was picked instead. He knew how Albert hated him because of it. He looked at his watch: it was nearly six o'clock. He was hungry; the boys had been given a bowl of potato soup when they had mustered earlier. They were all as thin as stray dogs; food was rationed just above starvation level; anyone found hoarding or using forged food cards was shot immediately, without a trial. Max yawned, and was ashamed to see his hand shake as he covered his mouth. He was afraid; he wondered how the other boys were feeling. Otto Stülpner was barely fourteen and small for his age. He was asleep on the ground, his face pinched and sallow in the emergency lighting. There were marks on his cheeks where he had been crying. The rifle lying beside him looked ridiculously big.

Children, Max thought suddenly, and couldn't stop the rush of indignation that followed it. Children sent out to fight against the Russian army, the crack troops specially chosen to reduce Berlin … Mongols from the East, if rumours were correct, savages with a licence to rape and slaughter without mercy. The stories from refugees fleeing their advance had filled the Berliners with terror and caused a mass flight of women and children from the city as the threat came closer. Little boys like Paul and Erwin Rapp and Fritz Kluge, who should have been sent to safety not told to go into battle with rifles as big as themselves and the children's oath of loyalty to the Führer as their reason for committing suicide. All right for boys like Albert and himself. Sixteen was old enough when men of seventy were fighting. It had to be; he accepted that, but for most of that little band of boys it was equivalent to murder. He found himself trembling with rage and near to tears. If Adolf Hitler saw them, surely he wouldn't expect them to go to fight in an area which was a hell of shelling and street fighting.… Surely if he loved his people, as he was supposed to, he wouldn't want a snivelling child like Otto Stülpner to get ripped to pieces by Russian bullets.…

‘I wonder how long it'll be before we see him?' Albert Kramer might almost have read his thoughts.

‘I don't know,' Max muttered. ‘Keep your voice down—don't wake the others.'

‘I can't wait,' Albert whispered. ‘I can't wait to see him face to face. Aren't you excited, Max? This'll be the biggest moment of our lives! I keep thinking what I'll say if he speaks to me. You don't even seem to care—what's the matter with you?' The boy's eyes had narrowed in suspicion; his jaw jutted aggressively. ‘Don't you want to die for the Führer?'

Max Steiner looked at him and said the unthinkable. ‘No,' he said. ‘If I get killed, it'll be for Germany.'

‘You dirty swine!' Kramer sprang up, shouting. ‘You traitor! I'll report you—'

‘Shut up! Come to attention, all of you! Quick!'

Max had seen the two SS officers come into the room; he stood up and saluted. Kramer froze into attention: his response to an order was instantaneous. The boys struggled up and formed themselves into a line. There were twenty of them. The senior SS officer, wearing the flashes of a Standartenführer on his lapels, walked towards Max and raised his right arm stiffly.

‘
Heil Hitler
.'

The children responded in unison; Albert's voice was louder than the rest.

‘
Heil Hitler
.'

The Standartenführer cleared his throat. He was a big man who had grown thin; the black uniforn hung loose on him and there were heavy pouches of fatigue and strain under his eyes.

‘I am the Standartenführer Otto Helms. The Führer sends you his greetings,' he said. ‘He regrets that he cannot speak to you in person today, but he reminds you of your oath of allegiance and your duty to him and to the Fatherland.' He paused and his eyes lingered for a moment on Max.

‘The Führer has chosen to stay with his people and to lay down his life with us,' he said, and emotion made the harsh voice quiver. ‘If we have lost the war it is because of the traitors inside Germany. One of those traitors has been discovered, here, at the Führer's side. It will be your privilege, as members of the Hitler Jugend, as German soldiers, to execute that traitor in the name of Adolf Hitler and the Reich!'

He spoke directly to Max. ‘You come with me.'

It was a long narrow passage deep underground; their steps echoed on the concrete floor. The SS officer came to a door, shot back a bolt and opened it. He stood aside so that Max could see in. It was some kind of storeroom because there were boxes stacked to ceiling height in one corner and a fluorescent bar blazed overhead.

A man lay on the bare floor, curled up in the foetal position, knees drawn up, his arms cradling his head. There were splotches of blood on the ground and a sour, sick smell. For a moment Max felt he was going to be sick.

‘That swine there,' the SS officer said, ‘was the Führer's trusted friend. He betrayed him. The Führer sentenced him to death himself. You're going to form a firing squad.'

Max tried to speak; his throat was constricted with terror and disgust. The man on the ground moved a little and gave a whimpering groan.