Berlin Red (7 page)

Over the past few minutes, the focus in Hitler’s eyes had changed. He sat forward now and, when he spoke, his speech was no longer barbed with the executioner’s sarcasm on which he always relied to chip away at those who had displeased him. ‘Why did this rocket work so well’, he asked, ‘when all of the others had failed?’

This was the moment Hagemann had been praying for. From now on, this was a conversation between himself and Hitler. Everyone else in this room had just been relegated to the position of an unnecessary bystander.

‘The reason the others have failed’, said Hagemann, ‘is that all of our previous attempts to install guidance technology in the rockets were thwarted due to vibration from the engines. The result, as you know, has been the high percentage of our rockets not landing where they were supposed to, whether on our test sites or upon the battlefield. Although they created a significant amount of damage to the enemy, they were nevertheless off target when they landed. The control system in this particular rocket was fitted in a newly designed shock-proof housing. This allowed the guidance technology to minimise the fuel consumption, thus allowing it to travel further than had previously been the case. Our original calculations did not take this into account, with the result that we undercompensated the flight curve. Such a thing is easily corrected and, from this point on, the device will be able to perform as we had always intended.’

Hitler fanned his eyes across the others in the room. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘Easily corrected. Did you hear that, or are there more jokes to be made, Goebbels?’

The room became utterly silent. Goebbels’ eyes strained in their sockets as he peered into the corners of this concrete cell, as if searching for some means of escape.

Hitler turned back to Hagemann. ‘But where is the rocket now?’

Hagemann opened his mouth to reply. There could be no hiding of the truth. Not now. And he wondered if every measure of confidence he might have gained during these past few minutes would now be squandered by the simple declaration that he did not know.

But before he could speak, Hitler answered his own question. ‘It probably fell in the sea.’

‘In all likelihood,’ Hagemann assured him.

Hitler nodded, satisfied.

‘There is one more thing,’ said Hagemann, almost in a whisper.

Hitler held out one hand magnanimously towards the general. ‘Do continue, please.’

Hagemann did as he was told. ‘With the accuracy we can now obtain, we are capable of obliterating highly specific targets. By this, I mean we are no longer unleashing the force of the V-2 upon cities, but upon targets of our choosing which lie within those cities. A single house. A single monument. All you have to do is take the tip of your pencil, touch it against a location on the map and give the order. Within the hour, the place which lay beneath that pencil point will cease to exist.’

‘What about anti-aircraft fire?’ demanded Fegelein. ‘Can’t they bring it down with that?’

‘No,’ answered Hagemann. ‘By the time the V-2 finishes its journey, it will be travelling at supersonic speed. This means that those who stand in its circle of destruction will receive no warning. Even for those who survive, the sound of the rocket will reach their ears only after the explosion. Once the V-2 has been unleashed, nothing on this earth can stop it.’

‘Do you hear?’ Hitler shouted. ‘This will be our deliverance! Everything we have endured will now be cast into the light of everlasting triumph!’

Now Goebbels spoke. ‘As long as the professor is convinced that such results can be achieved with regularity.’

‘Not just regularity, Herr Reichsminister,’ Hagemann told him. ‘With infallibility.’

‘Ha!’ Hitler crashed his hands together. ‘You have your answer, Goebbels!’

‘I do indeed,’ the Reichsminister said as he fixed Hagemann with a stare, ‘provided his deeds match his words.’

‘You may leave us now, Professor,’ said Hitler. ‘We have other matters to discuss.’

Obediently, Hagemann began to gather up his blueprints.

‘Leave those,’ Hitler waved his hands over the documents. ‘I would like to study them.’

‘Of course,’ replied Hagemann, standing back from the table, ‘but I must ask that they be kept in a safe. I cannot overestimate . . .’

‘Thank you, Herr General,’ interrupted Speer. ‘We are well aware of safety protocols. We wrote them, after all.’

There was another grumbling of laughter. This time, even Hitler smiled.

Carrying his empty chart case, Hagemann left the room and made his way along the corridor, heading for the stairs which would bring him back up to the ground floor of the Chancellery building. Even though the meeting had been a success, he still had to stop himself from breaking into a run. All he could think about was breathing some clean air again.

‘Professor!’ a voice called to him.

Hagemann glanced back to see Fegelein, Himmler’s liaison officer, advancing down the corridor towards him, one hand raised as if hailing a taxi, and Hagemann’s schematics in the other. ‘A final question for you,’ he said.

‘What are you doing with the charts?’ stammered Hagemann. ‘Haven’t I made it clear enough that the information contained within those diagrams is extremely sensitive!’

Fegelein grinned. ‘Which is precisely why Reichsführer Himmler will enjoy looking them over. With Hitler’s blessing, I am taking them to Himmler’s office now. You should join me! The Reichsführer has some excellent wine at his disposal.’

‘I am very busy,’ said Hagemann. He had an instinctive mistrust of Fegelein. The soft round chin, full cheeks and shallow brow gave him an innocent and almost child-like face. But this appearance was an illusion.

That Fegelein had managed to advance so far in his career, and yet was so universally disliked, was a testament to the ruthlessness of his ambition. To Fegelein, the price of loyalty could always be negotiated, and friendship had no value at all.

He was not alone in making that equation.

In 1941, Fegelein had been arrested for the looting of money and luxury goods from a train, an offence which could have carried the death penalty – although his real mistake had not been the theft so much as the fact that these items had already been stolen from the safety deposit boxes of Polish banks by men who outranked Fegelein, and were, at the time, on their way back to a warehouse where the loot was scheduled to be divided among the thieves. The charges against him were dropped, on the orders of his master, Heinrich Himmler, which only added to rumours already circulating, that Fegelein led a charmed life. What had been only rumour before was transformed into fact when Himmler appointed him as his personal liaison officer. This, and his marriage to Gretl Braun, sister of Hitler’s mistress, Eva, had assured him an almost untouchable position in the Führer’s closest circle. The marriage had been conducted hurriedly after Gretl discovered that she was pregnant. The fact that there was some question as to who might be the father of the unborn child, and Hitler’s outrage at the circumstances, had prompted Fegelein to come forward and offer his hand. In Hitler’s mind, this act of chivalry saved not only Gretl’s reputation, but also his own, as the consort of Eva Braun. The marriage had done nothing to temper Fegelein’s appetites and while Gretl remained, for the most part, far to the south in her home province of Bavaria, Fegelein had taken up residence with his mistress, Elsa Batz, in an apartment on the ironically named Bleibtreustrasse. Of this arrangement, Hitler was unaware or else he had chosen to look the other way and Fegelein had enough instincts for self-preservation not to ask which one was the truth.

‘I have one final question,’ repeated Fegelein, as he pursued Hagemann down the narrow corridor. ‘It won’t take a second, Professor.’

‘I was just leaving,’ Hagemann muttered.

Fegelein refused to take the hint. ‘Then I’ll walk up the stairs with you. I could do with a smoke,’ he laughed, ‘and they don’t allow that in the bunker.’

Side by side, the two men plodded up towards the Chancellery.

It was all Hagemann could do not to push Fegelein back down the stairs. He not only mistrusted this slippery emissary of the SS, he despised the whole organisation. Ever since the conception of the V-2, Himmler had repeatedly tried to take over the project. In an obvious attempt at blackmail, the SS had even gone so far as to arrest one of the programme’s chief scientists, Werner von Braun, on charges so trumped up that even Hitler, who normally deferred to the man he called ‘My Loyal Heinrich’, refused to accept them.

In spite of Himmler’s insatiable desire to control the future of the programme, Hagemann had managed to keep the SS at arm’s length.

But all that changed in July of 1944, when a bomb planted by the one-armed, one-eyed Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg in a briefing room of the Wolf’s Lair command centre failed to kill its intended target, Adolf Hitler.

Even as Stauffenberg and numerous other conspirators were rounded up and either shot or hanged, the SS, citing concerns for national security, finally received Hitler’s blessing to take over the V-2 programme.

Since then, the production and research facilities had been scattered all over Germany, slave labour had been employed to assemble the rockets, and virtually nothing could be accomplished without Himmler’s approval.

If it weren’t for that fact, Hagemann might well have told Fegelein exactly what he thought of him.

The two men reached the main floor of the Chancellery building, where their side arms were returned to them.

‘What did you want to know, Fegelein?’ Hagemann asked as he undid his belt and slid the Mauser holster back where it belonged.

Fegelein delayed giving an answer until they had passed beyond the earshot of the guards.

Out on the shrapnel-spattered stone steps of the Chancellery, Fegelein removed a silver cigarette case from his chest pocket, opened it and offered its neatly arrayed contents to Hagemann.

Hagemann shook his head. For now, he was more interested in filling his lungs with fresh air than with tobacco fumes.

Fegelein lit his cigarette, inhaled deeply and then whistled out a long grey jet of smoke. ‘What I wanted to know, Herr Professor,’ he said, ‘is how many of these rockets you have left. After all, what use is your guidance system if you have nothing left to guide?’

Even coming from this man, Hagemann could not deny that it was a reasonable question. ‘We have, at present, approximately eighty complete rockets. Once the guidance systems have been modified, they will be ready for immediate use.’

‘And how long will the modifications take?’

‘Only a matter of hours for each rocket.’

‘And after the eighty rockets have been fired, what then?’ asked Fegelein.

‘Our production facility in Nordhausen is still fully functional. At top capacity, we can produce over eight hundred rockets a month,’ and then General Hagemann paused, ‘provided there is no interference, either from you or from the Allies.’

Fegelein smiled. ‘My dear Professor,’ he said, ‘I am not here to obstruct, but rather to help you in any way I can.’

‘Is that so?’ asked Hagemann, unable to mask his nervousness.

Fegelein laughed at the general’s obvious discomfort. Playfully, he batted Hagemann on the shoulder with the rolled-up blueprints.

‘Those are not toys!’ snapped Hagemann. Angrily he shoved the leather cylinder into Fegelein’s hands. ‘If you’re going to carry them about, you might as well put them in this.’

‘I know what you think of me,’ said Fegelein, as he opened the chart case and slid the blueprints inside, ‘and aside from the fact that I couldn’t care less, surely you can see why I would want to support the development of a weapon that could be our only hope out of this mess.’ He waved the smouldering cigarette at the ruins of the buildings all around them. ‘I make no secret of the fact that it would benefit me to do so, over and above whatever good it does our country.’

You self-serving bastard, thought Hagemann.

‘You may loathe me for my reasoning,’ continued Fegelein, ‘but it does prove that my offer of assistance is genuine. If I didn’t think it would work, I promise you we would not be having this conversation.’

A black Mercedes rolled up to the kerb.

Hagemann noticed the SS number plates.

‘Ah! Here is my transport.’ He turned to Hagemann. ‘I must leave you now, Professor, but you should be aware that, once Himmler has seen these plans for himself, he will want to speak with you immediately. Face to face, you understand.’

Hagemann felt his bowels cramp.

‘There is nothing to be nervous about,’ Fegelein assured him, ‘unless of course he asks you to meet with his friends.’

‘What would be wrong with that?’ stammered Hagemann.

‘The Reichsführer has no friends,’ said Fegelein called back over his shoulder, as he made his way down towards the waiting car.

Hagemann was surprised to see a tall woman emerge from behind the wheel. She wore a short greenish-brown wool jacket with flapped pockets at the hip and braided leather buttons, like miniature soccer balls. Her blonde hair was cut to shoulder length, in a style which had grown popular that winter, as if to match the austerity that had worked its way into every facet of civilian life.

So, thought Hagemann, that is the famous chauffeur, known to the world only as ‘Fraülein S’. Who she was and where she came from, only Fegelein seemed to know. She was reputed to be the one woman Fegelein, who had a stable of concubines, had failed to bed. Hagemann had heard about this beautiful woman, but this was the first time he had ever set eyes upon her.

As the woman walked around the front of the car, she glanced up at the professor.

Hagemann was struck by the deep blue of her eyes and he realised that that the rumours of her beauty had not been exaggerated.

The woman opened the passenger’s side door and Fegelein climbed inside.

Now General Hagemann made his own way down the steps. In days past, he would simply have hailed a cab to take him back to the Gatow airport, but there didn’t appear to be any taxis any more. He wondered if the tram system was still functioning, or if that, too, had been put out of commission by the bombing. Hagemann set off in the direction of the airport. It would be a long walk, but the more distance he could put between himself and the confines of the bunker, the happier he knew he would feel.