Berlin, in April 1939, was partying like there was no tomorrow.
The Führer was fifty and the whole of Germany was in a frenzy. The 20th itself had been declared a National Holiday and the largest military parade ever held – five hours’ worth of stormtroopers, hurricane troopers, tornado troopers and every other type of trooper – was proceeding along the new East-West axis, the great triumphal boulevard that ran all the way from Unter den Linden to the Olympic stadium. Guns and tanks glittered in the morning air as the boots of fifty thousand soldiers thudded rhythmically into the ground. Heinkel bombers, Messerschmitt fighters and Stuka dive bombers performed fly pasts at five-minute intervals, leaving lightning flashes of vapour in the sky. Deputations of the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls had arrived from all over Germany. There were armoured cars, cannons, Howitzers and anti-aircraft guns. And more than a million spectators, most of them carrying black bread sandwiches, bottles of beer and swastika flags.
Clara Vine shuffled her feet and looked down at her glossy Ferragamo leather pumps. They were hand-stitched in Florence, had cost the earth and they hurt like hell.
Why on earth had she not worn comfortable shoes?
She was hungry and thirsty and longing to sit down. She had been there since nine that morning, but had only managed to secure a place three deep opposite the Führer’s saluting podium on the Charlottenburger Chaussee. The view to her right was obscured by a large woman with a squashed felt hat, accompanied by two boys of around six and seven. To begin with Clara had pitied the children, doomed to spend the morning fenced in by a forest of legs, but after hours of their relentless wails, enquiring when exactly the Führer was coming and how much longer would he be, her sympathy was wearing thin. To her left was a war veteran, medals pinned proudly to his chest, saluting frenetically like someone with uncontrollable muscle spasms. He had come all the way from Saxony and he was not the only one. Thousands of visitors had poured into the city. The stations were teeming and every hotel from the Adlon down was block-booked. People who couldn’t afford anywhere else had pitched their tents in the parks.
Like all birthdays, Hitler’s special day had begun with presents, but that was where the ordinariness ended. Vast marble tables had been assembled in the Reich Chancellery to display Meissen porcelain, silver candlesticks and Titian paintings, alongside rather more modest gifts from ordinary people, largely made up of swastika cakes and cushions. The Pope, the King of England and Henry Ford had sent telegrams. The engineer Ferdinand Porsche had presented Hitler with a shiny black convertible VW beetle. Rudolf Hess had acquired a collection of priceless letters written by the Führer’s hero, Frederick the Great, and Albert Speer had given him an entire scale model of the Welthauptstadt, the new world capital, with buildings made out of balsa wood and glass and a thirteen-foot model of the proposed triumphal arch. This was, without doubt, Hitler’s favourite present and he pored over it like a boy with a train set until he could be persuaded to tear himself away.
On the face of it, Berlin was putting on a magnificent show. Gigantic white pillars had sprouted all the way along major thoroughfares. The newsstands groaned with souvenir birthday issues. Swastikas waved from every conceivable surface. Spring was a riot of colour in Berlin, so long as the colours were red and black.
Beneath the birthday bunting, however, everything was a little shabbier in Germany’s capital. The tablecloths in the restaurants were spotted because there was no detergent, the bread was sawdust and the Ersatz coffee undrinkable. People looked the other way on the trams because there was no toothpaste, precious few razor blades or shaving foam, and the sour odour of humanity and unwashed clothes hung in the U-Bahn. Even high-class nightclubs like Ciro’s stank of low-grade cigarettes and taxis home were non-existent because of the petrol shortage.
After the previous year’s Anschluss, when Germany annexed Austria, followed by the bloodless seizure of Czechoslovakia that March, most of Europe guessed a war was on the way. When it happened, it would be Poland’s fault, according to the Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment, which ensured that newspapers were black with seventy-two-point headlines screaming belligerent revenge on the Poles for their atrocities against Germans in the disputed ‘Polish corridor’. Poland, Look Out! There had been murderous attacks on Germans in Danzig. God help any country that stood in Germany’s way.
Looking around her, Clara guessed that despite the marching and the machines, no one in this great big birthday pageant really wanted war. The ghost of the last war was still behind their eyes and the thought of what another would do haunted all but the very young. Only the little boys beside her, who now had squeezed between the legs of the stormtroopers guarding the route, saw anything thrilling in the inexorable wall of men and tanks rolling past. Everyone else was getting by on an edgy cocktail of hope and denial. Everywhere you went, nerves flashed and shorted, like violet sparks above the tramlines. Tempers frayed. The whole city was as pumped and jittery as a dog being forced to fight.
Above their heads, loudspeakers strung along the street barked out radio broadcasts of Joseph Goebbels between bursts of military music. Goebbels was cheerleading the nation as though the Führer’s birthday was synonymous with facing up to the Poles. Enthusiasm for both was compulsory.
‘No German at home or anywhere else in the world can fail to take the deepest and heartiest pleasure in participation.’
Clara winced. The voice of the short, club-footed Minister for Propaganda and Enlightenment still got under her skin like shards of glass. Even now, after six years in Germany, hearing it daily on the radio and at the Babelsberg film studios where she worked, Joseph Goebbels’ wheedling tones could make her flinch like chalk on a blackboard.
Clara was only there because of a solemn promise she had made to her godson Erich Schmidt, who at sixteen had been chosen to lead his battalion of Hitler Youth in the parade. It was a great honour, Erich had impressed on her several times. Only from where she was standing there seemed little chance of even glimpsing Erich, let alone of him registering her loyal presence.
It didn’t have to be that way. As an actress contracted to the Ufa studios, Clara had qualified for a place in the VIP enclosure, alongside prominent personalities in their finery and portly Party dignitaries trussed up in field grey. The viewing stand, garlanded with golden laurels and tented drapes like a marquee at a country wedding, offered a far better view and a gilt chair to sit on. That was why she had risked the Ferragamo shoes, as well as the skirt suit and the tip-tilted hat, which now looked far too smart amid the stolid burghers of the Berlin crowd. Only, when she reached the gates of the VIP enclosure, she realized she couldn’t face it. She spent enough of her life in close confines with Nazi officials, without wanting to join them behind a velvet rope with no chance of escape.
A frisson of excitement ran through the crowd. A posse of steel-helmeted, black-jacketed SS officers had appeared and were elbowing their way through, glancing from left to right. Joseph Goebbels, who was filming this extravaganza for posterity, was controlling every aspect down to the last detail. No one was allowed to take their own photographs and police were deputed to arrest anyone in the crowd who wielded a camera or failed to perform the Nazi salute. As the SS men barged past, Clara saw an elderly couple at the back of the crowd, the man a teacher or a pastor perhaps, and his grey-haired wife beside him, being hustled off to a side street and lined up against a wall to await the police wagon.
Mirror periscopes swivelled like reeds in the wind and the screams around her intensified, rising into a wall of sound. Shouts swelled and clashed in the air like brass. The cordon of SA and SS officers linked arms to prevent the surge of sightseers spilling into the road.
‘He’s coming!’
The excitement of the moment caused the stolid woman beside Clara to burst into a cry of joy.
First came a fleet of motorcycle outriders, then Hitler himself, upright at the helm of his seven-litre Mercedes Tourer with his arm raised in the trademark salute he could apparently hold for two hours straight. His peculiar, impersonal stare travelled like a searchlight across the crowds as his head swivelled intermittently right and left, seemingly seeking out individual faces. Flowers were hurled through the air, hitting the sides of the Mercedes with soft thuds. Surprisingly, only two members of the Adolf Hitler Leibstandarte bodyguard were at his side. The usual car of followers was absent.
How vulnerable he was. All it would take was a single shot and the leader of all Germany, the object of all this adulation, would be extinguished like a light bulb, along with the fears of an entire continent. Clara wondered if she was the only person in the crowd who had such a thought. German civilians were never told about attempts on the Führer’s life but Clara had heard that in Munich several years ago, during a parade like this, a pistol had been found in a newsreel camera mounted on the roof of a car, the barrel of the gun pointed down the lens. A couple of other attempts had been averted at the last minute. Each lucky escape only served to convince Hitler more firmly of his deepest belief: Destiny was on his side.
As he came parallel a shaft of sun lanced through a rent in the clouds, and a finger of light pointed down towards his car. Hitler’s bright blue gaze swivelled in Clara’s direction and seemed to penetrate right to where she was standing.
Clara ducked her head, turned sharply and pushed her way back through the crowd. She had a long day ahead of her and a party to attend that evening. And today of all days she had chosen to move house.