‘Moscow?’ said Pauli
‘Well, I said we’d do it and we have,’ said Fritz Esser rubbing his big hands together in glee. Today he was wearing another of his seemingly endless supply of new, beautifully tailored suits, but his hair was thinning so that he was almost bald at the front.
Pauli Winter faced him across the huge desk in the Ministry of the Interior, and poured out two glasses of schnapps. He seldom drank nowadays, but this was a celebration. ‘To the next Minister of the Interior,’ toasted Pauli.
Fritz Esser held his drink high. The August sunshine caught the cut glass and made it sparkle. ‘To the next Minister of the Interior,’ he said, ‘as long as it’s me.’
Both men laughed and drank. It was a good big room in the Interior Ministry. A corner room in one of the best positions in the city. From one of these two big windows there was a view of the traffic along Unter den Linden, and through the other they could see Pariser Platz and the Brandenburg Gate. Since Hitler’s fiftieth birthday in April, when the remarkable ‘East-West boulevard’ had been opened by a military parade that took four hours to pass through that gate, this had been the centre of a new, vigorous Imperial Germany. But inside the Ministry it all looked as it must have looked for many generations, with panelled walls, rich carpets and comfortable chairs. Only the formal sepia photograph of Adolf Hitler on the wall looked new.
‘The minister won’t last long,’ said Pauli, ‘and the Führer wants you in the job.’
‘That’s what he said.’
‘Then the job is yours,’ said Pauli.
Esser looked round the room. ‘The Führer can’t always be relied on to say exactly what he means,’ said Esser cautiously. ‘He likes to play off one against the other. I can’t be sure he hasn’t promised the job to someone else . . . to Heini or Reini, for instance.’
‘They have enough on their plates,’ said Pauli. He’d got used to Fritz Esser’s calling people by their first names and knew that he meant SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and SS-Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich respectively. Sometimes Fritz Esser wanted everything formal: everyone addressed by rank and title. Some days, when visitors were present, Pauli was addressed as Dr Winter or just as Winter. On other days it was exactly the reverse, and Fritz would even refer to the Führer as Dolfo. ‘And now that we’re working together at last, we’ll show what we can do around here,’ said Pauli.
‘You’ll be back and forth to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, I’m afraid,’ said Esser. ‘They wanted you officially reassigned to Heydrich’s SD and given an office there in Wilhelmstrasse, but I said you’d prefer to remain as you were.’
‘I’ve been through all that with them,’ said Pauli. ‘The SD is still a party organization. Heydrich still depends on party funds. I wouldn’t like to have my future so unsure. I’ll stay with the Gestapo and get my state pension and medical insurance.’
‘Yes,’ said Esser.
‘I’m nearly forty, I have to be practical,’ said Pauli. And then, to change the subject, he said, ‘How did the meeting go?’
‘Shall I tell you something that always amazes me?’ said Esser, pouring another drink, and continuing without waiting for a reaction. ‘It’s the way everyone I meet has some secret desire to be a member of the army’s General Staff.’
‘Do they?’ said Pauli. Who, in his secret dreams, had that very notion.
‘Everyone bows and scrapes to the generals: it makes me sick.’
‘Not the SS-Reichsführer?’ said Pauli. Esser had just come from a meeting with Himmler.
‘He’s just as bad. They all treat the soldiers like little tin gods. And Heini’s latest obsession is to have his own soldier boys.’
‘He’s got them already.’
‘He wants a whole bloody army corps of his own. Then he says they’ll have to make him a member of the General Staff. “Why the hell do you want to be a member of the bloody General Staff?” I asked him.’ Esser pulled a mournful face and imitated Himmler’s high voice: ‘“You wouldn’t understand, Esser: you’re not an army man.”’ Esser laughed. ‘Silly old goat! I felt like saying he’d never been an army man, either, except for a few weeks of cadet school at the end of the war.’
‘He’s given them field-grey uniforms; the army is furious,’ said Pauli.
‘“Waffen SS”, he says he’ll call them. But that’s as far as it will get: a name. The army have already made sure that that stupid idea will come to nothing.’
‘Have they?’
‘Well, Heini can’t draft men, can he? Conscription has completely stifled any idea of an SS army. As Heini himself says, just as he gets his kids indoctrinated and trained, the army grabs them, and they’re lost to him.’
‘They can join the SS when they come out of the army,’ said Pauli.
Fritz Esser pulled a face at him. ‘When they get out of the army. If they get out of the army. Heini doesn’t want the army’s leftovers; he wants a proper army of his own. He’s quite crazy. You know how he gets these crackpot ideas, and then he can’t think of anything else.’
‘It shouldn’t be difficult to get round the problem,’ said Pauli.
‘How?’ Fritz Esser sniffed. ‘The army’s legal department keep screaming that they have the sole right to conscript men. And Heini’s been all through it with his best lawyers looking for loopholes.’
‘Best lawyers?’ said Pauli. ‘Those shysters in the SS legal department?’
‘But the army have the sole right to draft men,’ said Esser in that dogged way in which people say things they desperately hope will be contradicted.
‘Yes,’ said Pauli. ‘The army have the right to call fit men of military age into the army, but some men are exempt.’
‘Only the unfit,’ said Esser. ‘He’s been all through that.’
‘No, not only the unfit,’ insisted Pauli. ‘Policemen are exempt.’
‘You can’t run a country without a police force,’ said Esser.
Pauli smiled. ‘You’re right, but Himmler is the head of all German police forces. He could draft his policemen into this army he wants to set up, and then recruit more policemen to replace them.’
Fritz looked at him with a set expression on his face. ‘Would that be legal?’
‘More or less,’ said Pauli, his mind working on the possibilities. ‘And he could do the same thing with his concentration-camp guards. They sign up for twelve years, don’t they. He could make his five SS-Totenkopf regiments into the cadre, and form a division round that. Then he could recruit more guards for the camps.’
‘That would give him a large Totenkopf battalion plus a Polizeidivision?’ said Esser. ‘He’d almost have the SS corps he’s talking about.’ He was still doubtful. ‘You say it’s legal to do that?’
‘Yes,’ said Pauli.
‘Heini will kiss you if you’re right,’ said Esser.
‘Then tell him it’s your idea,’ said Pauli.
‘It would give him almost two divisions.’
‘Now that Czechoslovakia is no more, he could recruit in the new Reichsprotektorat and perhaps in the Slovak Republic, too. With the Volksdeutsche living there as well, he’d certainly get enough for two divisions.’
‘Volksdeutsche. That would be legal, wouldn’t it?’ Esser touched the top of his head, where his few remaining strands of hair were carefully arranged.
‘Yes, the army could hardly complain about that. The army is only permitted to recruit within the borders of Germany – they have no right to draft Germans who live in other countries.’
A sly smile had come over Fritz’s large moonlike face as he envisaged telling all this to the ambitious Himmler. ‘That’s wonderful, Pauli.’
‘Is it? I’m not sure we should be encouraging the SS-Reichsführer to encroach upon the army’s preserves.’
‘Nonsense!’ said Esser happily. ‘Let’s give him an army to organize; he needs something to do. Could you get these ideas of yours typed out into a short report, and have an appendix giving the necessary legal references. And seal it up and put it into my private safe? I don’t want some snooper reading it.’
‘If that’s what you want, Fritz, I’ll dictate it this afternoon.’
‘The end of the week will do. I’m going to the Obersalzberg for a meeting with the Führer and then, as soon as I return, I’m flying to Moscow with Ribbentrop and his gang.’
‘Moscow?’ said Pauli.
Fritz Esser winked.
Pauli smiled and decided that it was one of Fritz’s jokes, the sort of thing he said when he was going to disappear for a few days with a new girlfriend.
‘If I’m not back for Inge’s birthday, give her a big kiss and tell her that I won’t forget.’ It had always been something of a mystery to Pauli that Inge and Fritz always got along well together. She really seemed to like him, despite his rough accent, coarse manners and ribald jokes. I wish I’d seen you before Pauli here, he’d often say with a saucy wink, and give her a slap on the behind. ‘Tell her happy birthday.’
Pauli sometimes forgot the date of his wife’s birthday, so nowadays he arranged that the florist sent lots of flowers and a card every year on that date. Sometimes it proved inappropriate – for instance, the time when they went away to Italy and came back to a house filled with dead blooms. And there was another time when the flowers arrived while they were having a row.
But usually it worked well. This time he had arrived home to find carefully arranged flowers around the house and Inge in a particularly happy mood. They went to change to go out to dinner. Inge was sitting in front of the mirror in her petticoat applying make-up. She’d let her hair grow out so it was loosely curled over her ears and the nape of her neck, a more feminine style. It did need more visits to the hairdresser but they could afford such little luxuries.
Around the dressing-table mirror, birthday cards were arranged; birthday greetings from both sides of the family. The Winters always sent jewellery: this year a watch. Professor Wisliceny had sent a valuable antique vase filled with flowers. Pauli had paid the bill for her new dress, and Fritz had sent a kilo tin of Russian caviar. There were cards from everyone: even the Horners had remembered, and Peter and Lisl and Erich, too.
On the bed Inge had laid out her husband’s formal evening dress, complete with starched dress shirt and black silk socks. Pauli was searching through the chest of drawers to find all the necessary accessories: tie, pearl shirt studs, gold cuff links and the pocket watch that he’d bought after Inge told him that only waiters wore wristwatches with their evening clothes.
Inge was in her underwear – silk, black, lacy and expensive – sitting at her dressing table pencilling her eyebrows. She moved like a cat, sometimes Pauli wondered if she contrived these feline manners. On a hanger by the door was Inge’s new dress. Instead of the clinging bias-cut dresses she usually wore she had this latest fashion: double-tier full skirt with ruched bodice, low straight neckline and halter strap. Inge had spent two hours this afternoon trying on various jackets with it to see which she preferred. She was very happy. Pauli took advantage of her good will to ask a favour, ‘I’d like to invite my brother to dinner at the weekend, darling.’
‘Of course, Pauli, if that’s what you want.’
‘It might be the last time we’ll get the opportunity for some while. He’s got his cabin booked: he’s going to America.’
‘When?’
‘Next week. Grandfather sent the tickets. First class: promenade deck. The Bremen, I think it is.’
‘Is it something about Lottie?’ said Inge. It would have to be about Lottie. Peter had never adjusted to Lottie’s going to prison. Inge stood up and smoothed the petticoat over her hips while looking at her reflection. She was forty-two and regretted that her prayers about having a baby had not been answered, but at least she had a good figure, better than her younger sister Lisl, who was getting plump. ‘America. Yes, well, he’s pestered everyone in Germany about her.’ It was a cruel little jest, and she felt self-conscious as soon as she’d said it. But Inge had never really forgiven Peter for choosing Lottie in preference to her. Even though she’d got over her love for him, that feeling of injured pride and resentment remained.
Pauli said, ‘I talked with him about it last week. Grandfather will be eighty-nine this year. He still has all his faculties. He was a personal friend of Herbert Hoover. Peter is hoping that he can get the State Department to petition for Lottie’s release, on condition that she returns to live in America.’ He struggled into his stiffly starched dress shirt and started pushing the buttons through the buttonholes. It wasn’t easy.
‘Would Peter live there?’ Inge had never been able to cope with foreign languages, and the idea of living anywhere other than Germany was appalling to her.
‘If Lottie was there, yes. I encouraged him. He stands a better chance of doing things at diplomatic-corps level. Getting someone out of prison through regular channels is impossible. The Ministry of Justice will never cooperate with us. I told Peter even the SS-Reichsführer can’t get prisoners out of prison. I know, I’ve seen him try.’
‘Who did the Reichsführer want to release?’ said Inge always keen for the latest gossip.
Pauli had the shirt on and the cuff links done up. He began trying to get the stiff collar onto the back stud. The effort, with his arms twisted round his head, made him puff. He was terribly out of condition. He decided to take more exercise, starting next Monday. ‘Release? No one. I’m talking about when we’ve tried to get people out of prisons to send them to concentration camps. People the SS particularly dislike.’
Inge nodded gravely before lifting the dress above her head and letting it slide down over her, careful not to disarrange hair or make-up. ‘Is he taking Helena?’
‘Yes, I arranged the travel documents.’
Inge’s head emerged from the dress and she said, ‘She’s only twelve: thirteen in September.’
‘Lottie’s mother and everyone will want to see her. And the sea voyage will do her good. She’s not been too well, lately. She’s never really got over having her mother taken away.’
‘Poor child,’ said Inge. ‘How could Lottie have been so irresponsible. And the way Peter sits around moping all the time doesn’t help anyone.’
‘Peter works hard,’ said Pauli.
‘He’s in that apartment playing the piano half the night. He doesn’t eat properly, and his work is neglected. The other directors only keep him on the board because your Papa founded the company.’
Pauli corrected her. ‘They keep him on the board because Peter knows more about running those companies than all the others put together.’
‘He’s lucky they didn’t force him to resign when he married Lottie.’
Pauli laughed, sometimes his wife got carried away. ‘They’d hardly do that, darling. That’s years before Hitler came to power.’
‘Isn’t he frightened there might be a war?’ said Inge. ‘He’d be trapped in America.’
‘There’ll be no war,’ said Pauli. ‘Peter knows that: everyone knows that.’
‘The Poles will never give in about the corridor,’ said Inge. ‘I know what the Poles are like.’
‘Leave it to the Führer,’ said Pauli. ‘The Austrians gave way, the Czechs gave way. We occupied Memel. Who will help the Poles if they fight us?’
‘The British.’
For the fourth time he tried to do up the bow tie and again it was uneven. He tugged it undone again. ‘Don’t be silly, Inge. How can the British do anything? Look at the map and see for yourself.’
‘And France. France could attack the Western Front, as they did last time. Look at the map for yourself,’ she replied rudely, she hated to be treated as if a woman’s opinion was of no account.
‘Come here, Inge, and I’ll tell you a secret. A real secret this time.’ He went to the door and looked to make sure that the maid’s room was unoccupied. It was her evening off but you couldn’t be too careful. ‘Fritz just flew back from Moscow. He was a special plenipotentiary from the Führer, sent to keep an eye on that fool Ribbentrop. A pact will be signed: Stalin has agreed to everything. Poland will be split down the middle, one-half for Russia and one-half for us.’
‘A pact with Stalin?’ Inge almost dropped the earring she was holding.
‘You’re surprised, aren’t you. And think how surprised the French and the British will be. The Führer will announce it just before our troops move across the frontier. The Western powers will all be too terrified to do anything. They are worms! The Führer said that himself. “Our opponents are little worms,” he told the generals. “Close your hearts to pity. Proceed brutally.”’
‘What did he mean?’ said Inge.
‘I don’t know,’ said Pauli, ‘but he knows how to talk to the generals. Someone has to put some guts into them.’ He abandoned the bow tie and took the shoe horn to put his patent-leather shoes on. It was such a business dressing up, but Inge liked it.
‘With Stalin? A pact?’ said Inge. She simply couldn’t come to terms with the idea. Everyone knew that the Russians were bestial sub-humans and that Stalin was the devil incarnate.
‘Fritz said they were received in Moscow with open arms. Not just the usual diplomatic exchanges – such celebrations that he could hardly believe it. Drink, caviar, wonderful food. Parties going on until the morning, and the Russians embracing our people like long-lost brothers. Stalin toasted the Führer’s health. Fritz said the Russians were wonderful: it was just like being with old Nazi Party comrades.’
‘You didn’t tell Peter all this?’
‘Fritz only got back last night.’ He loosened the laces fully and slipped the shoes on.
‘Did you ask Fritz about time off in September?’
‘Our vacation on the Obersalzberg?’ He stood up and stamped, first one foot, then the other.
‘If we leave it too late, the Führer won’t be there. It’s so much more exciting when he’s there.’
She meant, of course, that she wanted another of those invitations to tea. Usually Bormann would arrange for the Winters to be included, but last year Bormann had taken Pauli aside and asked him about buying his house. He said the Führer wanted to acquire the whole hillside, which was now being referred to as the Führergebiet. The process had been going on since 1933. Bormann was ruthless: some of the houses had been obtained by threats, and others had been seized. Inge was appalled at the idea of losing their holiday home. She had decided to take the Führer aside and talk to him about it, and Pauli dreaded the thought of such a conversation. Inge sometimes went too far. And on the subject of their country house – and its proximity to the Führer’s Berghof – Inge felt passionate. How would she ever be able to tell Lisl that they no longer had that wonderful status symbol?
‘I can’t see how I’ll get my desk cleared, darling. The Führer has sent this damned note about euthanasia to Philip Bouhler – head of Chancellery – and it’s landed on my desk.’
‘Why your desk, darling?’ She lifted her skirt very high to adjust her suspender belt. Pauli watched her. She saw him looking at her and smiled.
‘Fritz was with Reichsführer Himmler. He offered to take it over. And when Fritz takes on some task, I do it.’
‘How tiresome.’ She stroked her silk stockings and straightened the seams.
‘There’s no one to help.’
‘It can’t take the whole month, Pauli. If we could get away by Saturday September 9 . . .’ She let the new dress fall properly, and it looked fine. She twisted her head to see the back in the mirror.
Speaking to Inge’s reflection, Pauli said, ‘Darling, be reasonable. The Führer’s ordered that all the chronically insane and incurables in Germany must be put to death. And it’s to be done by SS doctors. Can you imagine how much work that’s going to make for me?’
‘Not a whole month.’ She went to him and kissed him on the tip of his nose – or, rather, almost kissed him, so she didn’t leave her lipstick mark. Then she effortlessly did up his bow tie.
Pauli was indignant. His wife didn’t seem to understand how hard he worked. He reached for his jacket. ‘Just for a start: I’m going to have to draw up some sort of legal definition of what is incurable, and what is insane.’
‘Surely it should be obvious,’ said Inge petulantly.
‘It’s no good my telling the doctors that it should be obvious,’ said Pauli. He shook his cuffs out of his jacket and then straightened up to look at himself in the mirror. He could do with a new dinner suit: a bigger one. ‘They’ll want me to put a definition in writing. How do I do that? I’ve had no medical training.’
‘I didn’t think of that,’ said Inge.
‘No, exactly,’ said Pauli somewhat mollified. ‘People say these things without realizing what’s involved at the administration end. Incurable – what’s that mean? Someone might have a pain in the ass that’s incurable: does that mean I get Fritz to sign an order for the man to die, just because some doctor says he can’t cure it? And there is the task of setting up euthanasia centres. The first one will be at Schloss Hartheim, near Linz, but one won’t be enough. It will be a lot of work finding suitable buildings and equipping them. Someone will have to do a lot of travelling. I just hope it won’t be me. Then we’ll have to explain it carefully to the SS doctors, so they don’t start complaining. These damned doctors stick together. Suppose they all said they didn’t want to do it?’
‘Poor darling,’ said Inge, going to him to put an arm round his waist and hug him. ‘The doctors won’t mind doing it if it’s what the Führer wants.’ She could see he’d become agitated and decided to return to the subject of his annual leave after dinner. He would be in a better mood after dinner. Perhaps she’d wait till they were in bed.
Pauli grunted and studied himself in the mirror.
‘So how long will Peter be gone?’ she said to change the subject.
‘He’ll have to go to California and see Lottie’s mother. And Mama has made him promise to make the rounds of all the Rensselaer family. She feels guilty about not going back herself, I suppose. Papa insists that Peter take a good long rest, because he hasn’t had a break for so long. I doubt if he’ll be back much before Christmas.’
‘Do you think he’ll really get her out of prison?’
‘I didn’t think so at first. But you know what Peter is like: he’s been writing to Grandad and Uncle Glenn. Uncle Glenn has good contacts in the State Department. They both seemed quite hopeful, but they say they can’t do anything without more details. They insist he go in person. They say that a personal approach to the right people in Washington would make a lot of difference.’
‘And Peter speaks good English.’
‘Oh, yes, no problem there, completely fluent. Much better than mine.’ He smiled as he remembered something. ‘Grandad used to dislike Peter. I remember Peter kicking him when we were tiny. But now the old man has decided that Peter is the one he likes. I’m the bad Nazi.’ He chuckled at the thought of it. ‘Bad Nazi. He actually said “bad Nazi”.’
‘Peter told you that?’
‘Peter’s mail is intercepted, Inge darling. All of it is opened. Anyone with a wife in prison for crimes against the state can’t write letters to overseas addresses without our seeing what it’s about.’
‘Did you arrange that?’ She held up to herself first the earrings and then the gold necklace. One or the other, she decided, not both.
‘No, a wretch named Steiner, an old cop, arranged that I saw the interceptions. He’s the one who arrested Lottie. He does me a favour every now and again, but he makes sure that for every favour he does for me, I do two or three for him. I thought I’d got rid of him when I went into Fritz’s new department, but he still comes and finds me.’
She decided on the necklace. Gold always looked good: it was rich but discreetly so. ‘What sort of favours?’ She looked at Pauli. He seemed to be ready, too. For once they’d arrive at the restaurant on time. They were going to Medvedj, her favourite Russian restaurant; it seemed an appropriate choice after hearing Pauli’s amazing news.
‘Nothing that takes me more than a moment. I shouldn’t complain, I suppose. Signatures on protective-custody orders and that sort of thing. Usually things he couldn’t get past his own superior. He waits an opportunity and then brings them up to me.’ He shrugged. ‘They settle old scores that way. People they don’t like disappear.’
‘You should send him after Brand,’ said Inge flippantly. She twirled to let Pauli admire the lovely new dress he’d bought her.
‘Yes,’ said Pauli. ‘I should send him after Brand.’