Jake jumped at the fusillade of frantic knocks. It had been a morning of mental crucifixion in the Islington flat, the minutes dragging out until they were convinced de Clerk had been taken. But there were three fast raps, two slow: the sign that all was well. Jake ran to the door, yelping as he bashed into a table in the hallway.
“It’s him,” he shouted to Jenny as he peered through the spy-hole. “He’s alone.”
De Clerk stumbled through the door. “I did it,” he breathed. “I actually did it.”
He collapsed onto a sofa and lay there panting, hairs plastered across his forehead. Jenny pressed a glass of milk on him – it was what de Clerk had fetched himself after the fight at The Oval. Only then did she ask to see the report.
“Oh, I don’t actually have the pages,” said de Clerk.
There was a moment of stunned silence.
“It’s a top secret archive, not a bloody lending library. They don’t even let you make notes there.”
Jake recovered first. “Well, what was the sodding point in that then?”
“It’s all in here.” De Clerk tapped his cranium. “I’m a genius, remember?”
She laughed. “Of course, I knew this. He’s only got a photographic memory. As do I, as it happens.”
Jake pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and index finger, glancing between the faces of the two spies. They were a different breed of human.
She fetched some paper and de Clerk transcribed the missing pages of the Dicks Report. Fifteen minutes later he passed them his handiwork.
And this is what they read:
Such was his psychological state that we were all prepared for some major deterioration. The one thing I had in my mind was that Hess would become homicidal or suicidal. I had considerable concerns he might turn on me, like many paranoiacs do when they are feeling cornered. It was on the 15th that this climax was reached. I had already given extra instructions for the guards on duty to be especially watchful. What I did not reckon with was that at four in the morning or thereabouts, Hess demanded to see me. The door of the cage behind which was his room on the landing had to be thrown open. Hess, fully dressed in his air force uniform including his flying boots, rushed towards me and hurled himself over the banisters. There was a thud on the floor below and groans from Hess. We rushed downstairs where Hess was lying fully conscious at the bottom of the oak staircase with an obviously broken leg. I tended to his injuries. It was then that, crisis reached, he began talking freely. It was as though some final barrier of reserve had been broached. The delusions he went on to outline were so extraordinary not only in their imagination, but in the vividness of detail, that I am bound to recount them at length. I feel sure they may be of use, not only in expanding upon our understanding of the patient, but also for what they might reveal about the Nazi psyche at large – and indeed for the wider discipline of psychiatry.
Hess began by outlining at length what he claimed were his ‘true’ reasons for fleeing the Reich. He first described how he had felt increasingly an outcast at what we might call the ‘court’ surrounding Hitler. Hess felt he had fallen down the ‘pecking order’. He no longer enjoyed the special favour of Hitler and he had relinquished the role of ‘gatekeeper’ to his Fuhrer. All this he couched in the kind of catastrophic language that might be employed by, for instance, an obsessive and spurned lover.
From our earlier conversations, it is easy to see why Hitler may have dispensed with the services of so limited an individual. It is also clear what psychological damage this must have caused, for Hess regarded – and I believes still regards – Hitler with a kind of fawning hero-worship for which there is no obvious equivalent among the British to their politicians.
Hess says he had also begun to have second thoughts about the general approach of the Nazi regime, particularly with regard to the Jews and other persecuted minorities. While his hatred – it is not too strong a word – for the Jews remains undimmed, he claims to have become disturbed by pronouncements made by Heinrich Himmler of the SS and his deputy, a man named Reinhard Heydrich, on the plan for dealing with what he describes as the ‘Jewish problem’. Hess intimates this may go far beyond their forcible resettlement in Palestine or Madagascar, though he remained vague on the specifics.
This may seem surprising, for Hess has been assumed as radical as Hitler himself on the subject. And yet we should perhaps not be wholly surprised by this apparent contradiction. Hess is, as I have already detailed, a conflicted individual – the sort of man who might within the duration of a single conversation swing between one conviction and its diametric opposite, between amiability and sullenness, between pride and a sense of crippling inadequacy. Moreover I sense there is a grain of good in the man, unlike some other members of that blasted coterie with which Hitler has surrounded himself. Hess said it was the combination of these two factors that brought about a nervous crisis which must have resembled closely that which we have observed here in Mytchett Place.
He then began to unfold a delusion quite unlike any I have yet encountered in paranoiacs, in both scope of ambition and richness of its tapestry. Indeed I began to wonder whether this man might not after all possess the capacity of intelligence in some distorted form. Hess described how senior members of Hitler’s inner circle had become secret adherents of a pagan religion first practised in ancient Italy, by the Etruscan civilization. Of course, rumours that Hitler and Himmler practise Satanism and the occult are nothing new (I take the evidence for this claim to be patchy). Nonetheless, I pressed him to continue and asked him to explain how this religion had come to their attention. Hess claimed Himmler had inducted many of Germany’s top scholars and archaeologists into a division of his organization named the ‘SS Ahnenerbe’. Its goal was to find archaeological evidence for the shadowy mixture of Teutonic myth and folklore on which the Nazi world outlook is founded (and in which Himmler is a fervent believer). Hess said that Himmler hoped to prove the Germans are in some way a ‘chosen people’ with a ‘divine destiny’. To this end, though it might seem fantastical, Hess says he has launched hunts for Atlantis and the Holy Grail. Himmler, Hess claims, believes he is living through the end of Christianity and ordered these archaeologists to prove the pagan origins of the German ‘Volk’. It must be said that in this at least, Hess’s account chimes with our own analysis of this exceedingly odd character and his foibles. The patient said that Himmler commandeered Wewelsburg Castle as his headquarters – his ‘Camelot’, Hess described it. This is the seat of the order of Teutonic Knights which Himmler is striving to found in the SS. There, if the patient can be believed, he hopes to collect under one roof the Grail, the artefacts of Atlantis, et cetera. I pressed Hess again: why was it the Etruscan religion that so enraptured the senior Nazis? Here the most astonishing element of his schizophrenic imaginings unfolded. At this point he became very highly agitated, and I became once again concerned at the possibility of further attempts to do himself harm.
The patient claimed that in 1933 the ‘SS Ahnenerbe’ were excavating a site in Italy when they came upon a most remarkable tomb. It belonged, Hess said, to a small child, and the archaeologists became extremely excited, convincing themselves they had found the resting place of the prophet of the Etruscan faith. Hess said that contained within the tomb, alongside evidence of human sacrifice and other ritual offerings, they uncovered the holy text of the Etruscan people inscribed on scrolls and sealed with beeswax into alabaster jugs. It had been believed lost, and after a few brief investigations of my own I can confirm the text is not currently known to historiography. Hess became quite wild by this point – like an animal, foaming at the mouth. I was worried for myself and my patient. However the revelations pouring forth were so extraordinary I let him continue in the hope they might allow me such an insight into the man’s mind that I may be better placed to help him recover his sanity. He went on to claim this text detailed the various means by which Etruscan soothsayers interpreted the will of their gods and thus predicted the future – namely: examining the flight of birds; studying the livers of sacrificial animals; interpreting celestial phenomena such as comets; and studying the shape and form of bolts of lightning. Hess went on to claim that each of these disciplines was studied with utmost scientific rigour by the ‘SS Ahnenerbe’. The first three methods were found to be quite useless. However Hess asserts that the final method proved effective and with it the SS were able to prophesise future events with astonishing accuracy. Hess insists Hitler, Himmler and the few senior figures privy to the discovery have since become reliant on the technique for decision making.
By the patient’s account, the tomb of this ‘wunderkind’ was respectfully sealed and the scrolls borne to Wewelsburg Castle. There they have purportedly been guarded these last seven years. Heinrich Himmler, so Hess says, had by this point convinced himself that the ‘mysterious Etruscans’ described by DH Lawrence in his recent work were none other than the long-lost ancestors of the German people, a claim he backs with the observation that their script bears a resemblance to Germanic runes. It should be said at this point that there is not the slightest evidence that the Etruscans are Germanic in origin or visa versa; reputable scholars agree they originated either from northern Turkey, which is the classical tradition, or northern Italy itself, an area preferred by modern anthropology.
It does indeed seem remarkable that the leaders of a highly-developed Western society might place their faith in superstition. Yet so detailed were Hess’s descriptions that I did not dismiss it out of hand, and indeed began to wonder whether there might not be an element of truth in some of what he was saying. Perchance, some of these senior figures think they have stumbled upon something of genuine efficacy. It is agreed that there is a tendency towards mysticism amongst some of its leading figures. Hitler himself is convinced he was been chosen by providence to lead the German people to greatness. I shall alert MI6 to these conclusions through the appropriate channels in case they can take advantage of this curious state of affairs.
Convinced the discussion may be instructive on the issue of how to ‘de-Nazify’ the German people in the event of British victory, I urged the patient to continue, even though many of his proclamations were the ravings of a lunatic. Hess went on to claim each of the German successes in foreign policy over the last seven years, and indeed they have been numerous, was enabled by the prior consultation of this Etruscan text. Hitler’s foreign policy has been characterized by brinkmanship. Yet in the reality constructed by the patient, it was not brinkmanship at all but foreknowledge. Hitler, he claims, knew he could remilitarize the Rhineland unopposed. He knew the western powers would not stand in the way of Germany’s unification with Austria, and he knew that Britain would not go to war to save Czechoslovakia. Each of Germany’s successes on the battlefield – the invasion of Poland, Norway, the Low Countries, France and the Balkans – was in Hess’s fantasy achieved not by Hitler’s brilliance but his reliance on augurs. It was even possible, Hess said, to summon down lightning bolts at will, and he claims personally to know how this could be done. He offered there and then to conjure up such a display so I would know him to be speaking the truth. Mindful of the potential psychological damage of his failure to achieve this feat and of my Hippocratic duty as a doctor, I declined this offer. What more proof then, Hess went on, than to compare the creation of the German Empire in Europe, conquered against such huge odds, with that of ancient Rome, the only people in history to have accumulated such a mass of European territory with comparable speed. For Hess believes Rome also manipulated this power to build its thousand-year Reich.
I asked the patient to return to the purpose of his flight. What then, in light of this new background, had he hoped to achieve by coming to Britain? This Hess was happy to relate, and he did so in great detail. It reminded me of the pride of small boys who have prepared something carefully and then done it. He told me he had determined to teach Hitler a lesson for rejecting him and ‘get one over’ on his rivals in the SS whom he saw as plotting ‘uncivilized’ and ‘un-German’ acts. He claimed that Hitler had forbidden a single copy of the scrolls to be made, because he was very paranoid about others laying their hands on it. Only the original scrolls could be inspected and these were stored at Wewelsburg Castle with access permitted only to very highest echelons of the Nazi regime, a group he listed as himself, Hitler, Goring, Goebbels, Himmler and his deputy Heydrich. So it was, at the height of what I take to be one of Hess’s periodic psychotic and nervous episodes, that he claims to have taken it upon himself to steal these scrolls and fly with them to Britain in the hope of bringing about a reverse in the war, a measure of revenge on his former comrades, and perhaps of securing for himself a leading position in British society. Where then, I asked him, were these scrolls? Again he had the answer: upon landing in Scotland he was seized by the conviction that they would be better off destroyed and that ‘no good may come of them’. Therefore upon landing he claims to have burned the text, hoping its mischief be ended once and for all. It is another example of the depth and intricacy of the delusion. Each query is met with an answer and without hesitation and I am certain the patient believes every word he says. Hess claims to have resolved never to breathe another word of this matter, hoping to forestall a British attempt to locate other copies of the text. But now he has reached, so he says, so desperate a strait – shunned and condemned to death in absentia by his former comrades, held prisoner by the country he fancied would welcome him – that he no longer cares what happens to the world and the people within it, nor indeed whether he lives or dies, and this explains last night’s suicide attempt. Having finished his tale the patient suddenly began to weep and he did so most grievously. He has since become catatonic and resists all subsequent attempts to be engaged on the ancient Etruscan matter once more.