It was getting dark as the express from Kiel started to run into Hamburg. Already the lights twinkling across the broad silver expanse of the Alster, the port’s inner lake, were beginning to click off one by one as the blackout curtains started to be drawn, and the anti-aircraft crews based along the banks were busying themselves with their searchlights, readying them for the Tommy bombers they had been expecting – in vain – since September 1939.
It was a moody Otto, dressed in the cheap blue suit the supercilious embassy third secretary had bought him in Stockholm, who stared out of the window at the elegant white-stucco villas that lined the lake. His initial euphoria at having escaped from England had vanished to be replaced by worry and bewilderment at his sudden change of circumstances. He was back in his homeland, that was true, but what could he expect here? What were the authorities going to do with him? He frowned, his mood seemingly echoed by the dismal clatter of the train’s wheels over an iron bridge, as they now began to enter the inner city.
In Stockholm the day after the ship had somehow managed to dock – both the captain and the first mate were blind-drunk as usual, still running on the whisky bought by the case on Hull’s black market – Svenska, the crew, the happy sailors, Otto and the bewildered boobies, as Svenska insisted on calling the two dock policemen, had one final terrific binge.
Next morning they had all shaken hands a little sadly, very hungover, croaking, ‘See you after the war,’ and such hopeless pieces of wit as, ‘Give me regards to Mr Churchill,’ and ‘Tell old ’Itler not to bite any more holes in the Axminster, will yer,’ and trailed off to their respective embassies to arrange some sort of passage home.
‘This is gonna take a lot of ruddy explaining to the missus,’ one of the policemen had grumbled, retrieving his helmet from the blonde girl who was wearing it and precious little else, and doing up his flies. ‘By heck, and I bet she’s still got me breakfast in t’oven!’
And that had been the last Otto had seen of his shipboard companions.
The officials at the German embassy in the Swedish capital had received him frigidly. The elegant young secretary in the dark jacket and striped pants had looked at him through his monocle as if he might well have crawled out of the panelled woodwork. He had stood there on the parquet floor, carefully avoiding the Savonnerie and Aus-busson rugs with his clumsy hobnailed English Army boots. Indeed, he had felt very much out of place in those surroundings.
Even the Führer, dressed in his simple brown uniform on the big portrait, seemed awkward, hanging there among the Watteaus and Fragonards on the walls.
‘You say you actually escaped from an English prisoner-of-war camp, my man?’ the foppish young official had exclaimed and then tittered discreetly behind the cover of his limp-wristed white hand, as if he were afraid of showing his teeth. ‘How droll, how perfectly droll.’
‘I’ll perfectly droll you, you powdered-arsed pansy – ’ Otto had begun angrily, but already the young man in the striped pants had disappeared into some inner office, from which, in due course, came suppressed titters, as if he were relating the impossible tale to others of his kind.
He was interrogated for a full forty-eight hours by an old man who kept an unlit cigar in his mouth all the time he spoke, and wore a green ankle-length coat which creaked every time he moved, and had Gestapo written all over his leathery, old lecher’s face. The ordeal had finished rather abruptly, and he was suddenly on his way back to Germany with a fourth-class rail ticket, a packet of liver-sausage sandwiches his only luggage.
Things had changed dramatically at Flensburg on the German-Danish border. While the train halted for custom and pass formalities (at that time the Third Reich still kept up the pretence that Occupied Denmark was an independent state), his wooden-benched compartment had been invaded by a group of excited Army officers and Party officials, led by the local Kreisleiter, an enormously fat man, who bulged out of his chocolate-brown uniform, the upper of his double chins resting on the immense roll of fat below like a head pillowed on a cushion. He had clicked to attention in front of an astonished Otto, bellowed ‘Heil Hitler’ from a mouth filled with gold-teeth, and cried, ‘And the Führer is right after all. England is no longer an island.’
While Otto had tried to comprehend that enigmatic statement, he had found his hand being pumped heartily and his back slapped by the whole jovial, noisy bunch, who herded him to a first-class compartment, obviously emptied hurriedly for his benefit, with a bottle of French champagne resting in an ice-bucket and selection of cold cuts and sausages set on the little table, the like of which Otto had not seen since that day he had been so rudely kidnapped from France the year before.
What does it all mean? he asked himself then, and it was the same question he was asking himself now, as the long express train began to draw into Hamburg’s Hauptbahnhof, lit like a cavern in Hell in the darkening light.
With a final metallic clatter of its wheels, as if it wished to continue but was being forcibly restrained, the locomotive came to a halt. Otto stared out of the window and wondered what he should do. He knew no one in Hamburg, had five Reichmarks given to him by the embassy people, and was slightly befuddled on the French champagne. So while the other passengers fought their way out through the crowds of soldiers and civilians everywhere, he remained seated.
On all sides the enormous locomotives, painted with the slogan of the year, ‘Wheels Must Roll for Victory’, belched steam to the accompaniment of the loudspeakers blaring out military marches, interrupted at regular intervals by a flow of destinations.
‘Vienna, Paris, Warsaw, Rome…’ the very place names indicated the immensity of Hitler’s new Empire, while the constant ebb and tide of troops symbolized the means of establishing that Empire and maintaining it.
From his window, he could see paratroops in their camouflaged smocks, black-uniformed tankmen, SS infantry with their death’s-head badge and silver collar runes, elegant flyers from the Luftwaffe, men of the Kriegsmarine with their long beribboned caps: soldiers, sailors, airmen on all sides, who, together with the roar of the enormous locomotives, the blare of martial music, seemed to stand for the whole vulgar, powerful, vain world of the Third Reich. It was everything Otto had hated since his days at Stralsund. His mood of depression increased considerably. What in hell’s name am I going to do, he asked himself.
His decision was made for him one moment later. Before his suddenly wide-open eyes, a red carpet was being rolled the length of the platform right up to the door of his compartment. Hurriedly he got to his feet. Outside a military band, steel helmets gleaming in the lights, was beginning to file up to the train. Obviously someone very important was still to get off. They were going to give a big ‘civic welcome’ to somebody. He better get out of the way quickly.
Clutching his cap, he reached for the door, opened it – and staggered to an abrupt stop as if he had just run into a brick wall.
Immediately to his front at the other end of the length of red carpet, there was a small group of high Party officials and officers, heavy with medals, ornamental daggers, swords, and swastika armbands. To the right of the carpet there was a battery of microphones, to its left a crew of cameramen and press photographers, with, extending out in a line on both sides, shivering bare-kneed boys and girls in Hitler Youth uniform, holding little swastika flags at the ready.
‘Holy Strawsack!’ Otto gasped in sudden panic. ‘I’m in the Führer’s way!’
Wildly he looked to left and right for a means of escape, but officials were beaming at him to his left and right. He started wondering where those black-uniformed thugs were. He'd seen them accompanying Hitler back in Holland when he'd received his Iron Cross Second Class. Perhaps it was Goering they were expecting, all lipstick and rouge, his chest weighed down with innumerable medals; or even the club-footed Doctor Goebbels, surrounded by his female star mistresses, always a head taller than he was; even the gloomy miserable Hess peering out from beneath his thick bushy eyebrows like a bewildered, lost savage from some patch of primeval jungle.
And then a shiver passed over him. Maybe it was the dastardly Himmler, head of the SS – the man who wanted Otto's head on a platter for defiling that idiot Dirk van Dongeren's mistress. If Himmler was anywhere to be seen, Otto would be in for it! Out of one prison and straight into another.
But no, there was no one else here except – Otto did not complete the thought.
The immensely tall drum-major had raised his baton high, as if he were about to brain somebody with it. He brought it down sharply. The brass band clashed into a thunderous rendition of ‘Heil Dir im Siegeskranz!’ sending the pigeons flying up to the glass roof in protest.
The officers saluted. The Party officials thundered ‘Heil Hitler!’ and at the back of the waving children, a distinguished-looking middle-aged man took off his English-style bowler for some reason or other.
Otto stumbled forward onto the carpet, mesmerized. This reception... Everyone here... They were all looking straight at him. But why?
A hard-faced man with clever eyes stepped forward and seized Otto’s hand.
‘Kaufmann… Gauleiter… Hamburg…’ He barked out the words like bullets from a machine-gun suffering from a bad stoppage. ‘Welcome… Hero…’ He lowered his voice suddenly and spoke very rapidly, as if he didn’t want the others to hear. ‘Smile at the camera, look pale but heroic. The old poison-dwarf,’ he meant Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, ‘likes modest, pallid heroes.’ And with a quick wink, ‘There’ll be a very good French girl waiting for you at the hotel. I can personally vouch for her.’ He raised his voice again and continued in that staccato style of his, while Otto stared at him in complete bewilderment. Pallid heroes… girl in the hotel… What did it all mean?
‘Now,’ Kaufmann was assaulting the assembled crowds, ‘the perfidious English… know… their island… is no longer impregnable! Here… is the living proof… The first escapee… from their dreaded… concentration camps! The first of many, folk-comrades!’ He frowned meaningfully, thrusting out his heavy jaw dramatically, as the cameras whirred and clicked and the flash-bulbs popped. ‘I promise… you… that.’ He thrust out his hand and pumped Otto’s. ‘Otto Stahl… welcome to Hamburg!’ He beamed hugely at the bewildered young man, who blinked anew every time a flash-bulb exploded.
It all hit Otto in a flash. He was a national hero! He groaned inwardly. Now he really was back in the Third Reich.
A few minutes later the welcoming ceremony was over and to the accompaniment of the Badenweiler, the Führer’s own favourite march, he allowed himself to be guided to the Gauleiter’s own big black Mercedes like a dumb animal being led to the slaughter. The children waved as they walked into the night. The officials and officers hurried after them to the exit, and behind them on the platform, the gentleman in the English-style bowler frowned down with thoughtful contemplation at his impeccably rolled umbrella. It was unused, even though it had been raining hard in the wet northern port of Hamburg. Then, finally, he too departed into the night.