MUNICH, JUNE 1935
On the day they found the English girl’s body, Sebastian Wolff was otherwise engaged.
His problems began at lunchtime in one of his favourite beer joints, the Tirolkeller, around the corner from police HQ in the old town. His girlfriend Hexie was supposed to be meeting him there because it was his thirty-fifth birthday and they were going to head off to a secluded beach in woodland on the far bank of Lake Starnberger. Complete privacy there. No need for swimsuits or modesty. He checked his wristwatch. One thirty and he was still alone.
So where was she?
Hoffmann must have kept her at the shop, which was pretty typical of him. The pompous, drunken shit thought he was a cut above the rest of the world. And what did he do that made him think so highly of himself? Fawn over the boss, hold his little Leica and take snaps all day, hoping at least one might be in focus. Hardly a job for a man, in Seb’s book. A child can hold a box and press a button.
Across the echoing beer hall, half a dozen young men in leather shorts were becoming tiresome, baiting a little guy in spectacles and suit, telling him that Jews were not welcome and that he should fuck off back to Jewland, wherever that was. He was protesting that he wasn’t Jewish, but that just fed their scorn and aggression.
They were clearly country lads in town for the day. Farm boys with several litres of Augustiner brew inside them. They were spoiling for a fight, their mocking voices drowning out the house zither player’s vain efforts and everyone else’s conversation.
Seb wasn’t worried about the likelihood of a full-scale brawl. A year ago, in the weeks before the bloody events at Bad Wiessee and elsewhere, he would have expected it to kick off. But today? Not a chance. Nobody dared riot in Munich these days. Peace reigned in the utopia of Adolf’s golden dawn and everyone was happy. Even the Brownshirts had put away their clubs and knuckle-dusters.
‘You been stood up, Detective?’
He turned and smiled at the waitress, her ample bosom spilling out of her dirndl, her double armful of beer jugs perfectly balanced and spilling not a drop. ‘Looks like it, Gudrun.’
‘Silly girl, that Hexie. I’ll have you any day.’
‘Ah, you’re out of my league.’
‘Try me.’
He kissed her sweaty, rouge-free cheek. ‘Another time, Gudrun. I’m going to see if I can meet Hexie halfway. If I miss her and she turns up here, tell her to wait and I’ll be back in ten minutes, traffic permitting.’
‘Don’t go anywhere near Königsplatz, Seb. They’ve sealed it all off again for the big development. God knows what they’re doing this time.’
‘Thanks.’
‘And get those youngsters to settle down before you go, will you?’
‘For you, darling, almost anything.’
The inn’s black cat snaked sinuously through his legs. He handed Gudrun the empty, which she somehow managed to balance among the full steins, then he reached down and stroked the beast, before wandering over to the farm boys. They were all in their fanciest shorts, probably chamois and handed down from father to son through the generations. Were they ever washed? Hundreds of years of sweat, piss and other secretions.
They turned their attention to him, their bleary eyes suspicious. As one, they pushed out their chests and eyed him up like prizefighters, but he merely smiled. ‘Keep it down, boys.’
One of them, the biggest, grimmest one, pushed his face into Seb’s but he didn’t back off.
‘Who do you think you’re talking to, Mister?’
Seb drew his service pistol and shoved the muzzle into the young man’s ugly nose. The farm boy recoiled as though he’d actually been shot, which he hadn’t, and his gamsbart hat flew off. Seb gave them all another smile, took out his badge and flashed it at them.
‘Another peep out of you lot and there’s a nice cell waiting just around the corner in Ettstrasse.’
Suddenly they went quiet. The big lad bent down and picked up his hat.
You could hear the zither again. Such was the power of a badge denoting membership of the criminal police – the Kripo – or anything else vaguely official-looking in the third year of the Third Reich. With the big gangsters in charge of the country, the little villains had lost their confidence. A shame, though, thought Seb, the heaviest, loudest one could have done with a bloody nose and he would have been more than happy to oblige. Instead, he merely tapped his chest with the Walther. ‘Enjoy the rest of your day, boys. Quietly.’
As Seb left, the little man they had been tormenting approached him. ‘It’s a lie what they were saying, I am not a Jew.’
He looked at the man coldly. He was a weasel. Seb said nothing and continued out into the open air where he took a deep breath. He was thirty-five, it was a fine June day and it felt good to be alive.
Looking both ways down the street, his eyes rested momentarily on the fruit and vegetable stall where the old one-legged veteran who had been trading there for as long as anyone could recall was doing steady business, selling new potatoes to a couple of grandmothers and a stubby little Brownshirt.
In the other direction, a group of tourists – American by the cut of their clothes – were staring up at the high bulb-topped towers of Munich’s most famous church, the Frauenkirche. You could always tell the Americans; they were so well fed and so loud and they loved all the Nazi kitsch, eagerly buying up picture postcards of the Führer. They were here in Bavaria for ‘health and culture’, as advertised on the travel bureau posters and in the New York newspapers.
Gudrun was right. The traffic really did look heavy. Vehicles were crawling and the driver of an almost stationary brewery dray pulled by four weary horses was cracking his whip at the vans and cars and cursing them.
Seb’s own pride and joy – a Lancia Augusta cabriolet – was parked outside the inn. Three years ago, the little beauty would likely have been stolen or smashed up by one of the SA gangs that roamed the city, but these days, following the death of their leader, Roehm, in Stadelheim jail after the Wiessee raid last June, the Brownshirts had been castrated like the dogs they were, and the streets were mostly safe.
The Lancia was painted red and Seb loved it almost as much as Hexie, though she thought he loved the car even more. Not that he had ever told Hexie that he loved her. Didn’t want the fräulein getting ideas above her station. He left the car and set off at a brisk walk. Pointless trying to drive.
The cause of the snarl-up was Adolf’s grand plan for Königsplatz, turning it into yet another oversized parade ground and shrine to Nazidom, as if there wasn’t enough stamping and marching around the city in metal-heeled boots. On and off for months now, the building work had been having a knock-on effect throughout the city centre. Roads were dug up and two temples were being constructed to house the remains of the putsch martyrs of ’23.
White-gloved traffic cops were causing even more havoc with their frantic arm-waving as they tried to divert vans and cars in directions they didn’t want to go.
No matter. It was a pleasant day for a stroll and it was less than two kilometres to Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographic studio in Schwabing.
He made his way to Lenbachplatz, then across to Barer Strasse and strode north by way of Karolinenplatz, which was teeming with builders’ vehicles and SS guys. The road west, past the Brown House and on to Königsplatz, was completely cut off. There was noise and dust everywhere.
Hexie wasn’t at the Hoffmann studio. The other girl, the one who was filling in for Evie Braun and whose name escaped Seb, told him she had had to dash to the Osteria Bavaria with a package of prints for Hoffmann. Seb thanked her and wandered off along Schellingstrasse.
A crowd had gathered on the pavements and across the road outside the restaurant. That could mean only one thing: word had got out that Adolf was driving down from his mountain retreat at Obersalzberg to lunch there.
Even as the thought struck him, the leader’s cavalcade appeared; three large black Mercedes open-tops, bristling with SS and with Adolf himself in the rear of the middle car, sitting beside his chief bodyguard and adjutant, the enormous giraffe of a man Wilhelm Brückner.
Seb stopped and stared. The crowd began to scream and, as one, thrust their arms out in rigid salutes. Two young women – they couldn’t have been out of their teen years – tore open their blouses and thrust their pert breasts in the direction of their hero. Two grinning SS men immediately placed themselves in front of the girls to protect their modesty and their leader’s dignity.
If Hitler had seen the amateur strip show, he didn’t give any indication, merely flapping his hand at his worshippers in a rather languid version of his celebrated salute. The cars pulled to a halt and the crowd was held back by a squad of heavily armed SS men.
As the car door opened, the familiar figure of Hexie Schuler emerged from the front entrance of the osteria and, seeing the new arrival, shrank back into the wall. Seb caught her eye and she grimaced at him as if to say, what have I walked into?
After alighting from the Mercedes with his dog on a short lead held in his left hand, Adolf spent half a minute flapping his pasty right mitt at the crowd – rather like a performing sea lion – then turned sharply and ducked into the doorway of his favourite Italian restaurant, dragging his handsome Alsatian behind him and brushing past Hexie as though she didn’t exist.
*
Seb and Hexie had just embraced and she had just wished him a happy birthday when he felt his upper left arm being pulled and turned to find himself face to face with an expressionless man with thinning hair and pockmarked cheeks. He was about thirty and wore a grubby grey suit, soup-stained tie and battered fedora. Seb knew instantly that he was Bavarian Political Police – the sort of slimy drudge known in Berlin and other parts of Germany as Gestapo. He had seen him around the Police Presidium in Ettstrasse occasionally and he knew he wasn’t part of the regular non-political criminal corps.
Nearby, the crowd was being urged to disperse by SS men, but they were still milling around as though hoping that Adolf might re-emerge any moment to take a bow and perhaps give an arm-flapping encore. The girls who had exposed themselves were buttoning up their blouses and flirting with the SS men who had shielded them from the leader’s eyes. Something told Seb that the girls and the guys would be meeting up again later in the day to become better acquainted.
‘I hate that place,’ Hexie said, ignoring the political cop and nodding towards the Osteria Bavaria. ‘The awful Englishwoman was there with Hoffmann. You know, the tall blonde one with fingers like Munich white sausage.’
‘Her name’s Mitford. She’s always there.’
The man’s grip was tightening and Seb turned on him, right arm up with fist clenched to do some damage to his unpleasant face. ‘Yes?’ he said irritably. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Bavarian Political Police. You didn’t salute the Führer. Everyone else did, but not you.’
‘Forgive me, I was distracted by the girls’ tits.’
‘What did you say?’
‘You heard me, now take your hand off me.’
‘You disgust me. You don’t look like a filthy Jew, so what are you – a Bolshevik?’
‘I said remove your hand.’
‘You think you can talk to a BPP officer like that?’
‘I will talk to you exactly how I please. Now go away and annoy someone else before I draw blood.’
‘How dare you talk to me like that? You’re a damned Red, yes? A dangerous element.’
‘You’ll soon discover how dangerous I am.’
‘What is your name?’
Seb pulled out his badge. ‘Wolff. You can see it there. Inspector Sebastian Wolff. Murder team, Police Presidium, Ettstrasse 2. Criminals think I’m a dangerous element, but not law-abiding citizens. Are we done now?’
‘Ah, you’re a cop, eh? I thought I’d seen you before. Well, that won’t protect you. I’m taking you to BPP headquarters.’ The man dropped a cigarette stub to the ground and stamped on it.
Hexie pushed herself between Seb and the little greasebag. ‘This is ridiculous. Crawl back into your disgusting hole, you vile slug.’
Words that Seb couldn’t have said better, but they didn’t help. Herr BPP wasn’t going to back down now, not confronted with an irate woman. That would be humiliating. ‘Give me your name, too.’
‘My name is none of your business. Just know this: I am employed by the Führer’s best friend Heinrich Hoffmann and they are in the restaurant together at this very moment. If anything happens to me, you’ll be rat food. Capisce?’
And that really annoyed Herr BPP. Which is how Sebastian Wolff ended up in the Dachau concentration camp. Thanks, Hexie, he thought as Herr BPP summoned the assistance of uniformed SS officers and pushed him into the back of a car. You always did have a mouth on you.