Flight from Berlin (29 page)

And then the final, fourth envelope.

It seemed to contain a series of arrest sheets, dating from 1920 and 1921. Mug shots. And pages and pages of witness depositions.

On 17 November, I, Jochen, nineteen years old, unemployed, met a gentleman of average height near the kiosk on the Marienplatz. He remarked that I was looking hungry and asked if I wanted a hot meal. As I had not eaten that day I accepted. He also paid for beer but he himself did not drink. Afterwards he asked me to accompany him to his home, and in return for five marks, to spend the night with him. I had been without employment for two months and there was no heating or food at home so I agreed to accompany the gentleman to his home. Signed: Jochen Krübel.

At the Alte Pinakothek museum in the Kunstareal district I, Heinz Peter, twenty-one years old, a bailiff’s clerk, was approached by a man wearing an old army greatcoat who spoke an Austrian dialect. I agreed to go to a café with him where he talked a great deal about a new order of German art that would represent the true virtues of the people. When he saw that I was interested in his remarks he wanted to show me paintings made by himself and books with plate photographs of the German masters which is why we went to his lodgings. Because it was late and the district trains had stopped running the man invited me to spend the night and I accepted. Signed: Heinz Peter Frank.

On a street near the university in the Schwabing district I, Michael, twenty-three years old, an apprentice sheet metal worker, met a man with whom I went for a walk in the English Garden and then for a meal in a small tavern. When I told him I had served as a private in the war and had hoped to become a sergeant he spoke for a long time about the need for Austria and Germany to unify. He urged me to join a new military-political force of ex-servicemen led by himself and asked if I was willing to agitate on its behalf, because Germany belonged to men such as myself and my comrades. After giving me cigarettes he invited me to his room but did not wish me to smoke there. The man wore a wide-brimmed felt hat and carried a short leather crop. One of his distinguishing features is a forelock falling over his forehead. Signed: Michael Schneider.

The mug shots, both face-on and profile, were glued to each charge sheet. A younger face, only thirty-one, but hard to mistake. The forelock and luminous stare. Arrested for soliciting, conveyed to the cells of the Munich vice squad on Ettstrasse, and charged under Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code.

‘What is all that?’ Eleanor said.

‘You won’t believe me if I tell you . . . I can’t believe it myself.’

Chapter Thirty-four

O
n the cab ride home they held hands in silence on the backseat. Rain came down in lead rods, hammering the roof of the car and turning the gutters into sluices. Shop awnings along the Farringdon Road fashioned small waterfalls. There seemed to be an unending supply of bad weather.

Denham wiped a gap in the misted window and saw black umbrellas clustering around the bus stops like barnacles. He let his forehead rest on the cool glass.

It was as if pieces from separate puzzles were joining, bumping together like ice floes, and carrying him along. And he himself had no power to stop the drift.

He’d been played.

So pleased with himself, that day on the
Hindenburg
, for coaxing and cajoling the Hannah story out of a reticent Friedl
.
The story that had set him on a trail that led to Jakob and ultimately the dossier. Surely, no coincidence. Friedl was an actor, after all. For the second time Denham had underestimated him and felt foolish.

But why had he chosen Denham? He hadn’t given the password.
He wasn’t Friedl’s intended contact
.

The more he mulled this over, the more he thought how it didn’t matter now. The group had to achieve its mission any way it could. The damning dossier was now in the hands of a journalist who could ferret it from its hiding place and exploit it. But this realisation gave him scant satisfaction. He felt angry. He could have been beaten to death, thinking the whole thing had been a dreadful misunderstanding.

T
he house was dim and cool. A dripping sound from somewhere in the eaves. Denham lit the fire in the sitting room and sat with Eleanor on the sofa, with the cat curled on her lap.

‘Where do we even start?’ she said.

‘With what I haven’t told you . . .’

For the next half hour he explained his unwitting role in the group’s mission. How his suffering at Rausch’s hands had nothing to do with interviewing Hannah. She had started to ask questions as he spoke but became sullen as the story went on, looking hurt and astonished in equal measure.

‘You couldn’t trust me with the truth?’ she said.

‘I couldn’t risk it. Telling you now is dangerous enough. British Secret Intelligence warned me that people with knowledge of this have a habit of dying—’

‘British Secret Intelligence?’

Denham looked away. He was on difficult ground now. ‘Our intelligence service is after it, too.’

They were silent for a long time, listening to the cat purring on Eleanor’s lap.

‘They want it to blackmail him,’ she said at last.

‘Yes . . . it’s almost too incredible, isn’t it? Diplomatic threats have no effect. But the dirt from Hitler’s past might actually contain him. Do what no army could. Assuming, that is, that the dossier’s genuine.’

‘You think it could be a forgery?’ she said.

Denham dropped his head onto the cushions and looked up at the old grandfather clock behind the sofa. Its hands had frozen at five past ten a lifetime ago. ‘It just seems too . . . too great a secret to keep hidden.’

‘Who says he hid it? Those guys in the drawings must have had a fair idea of his interest. His officers, too.’

He said, ‘If it wasn’t for those other documents in the folder, I wouldn’t have thought the drawings that significant. Conditions at the Front were so . . . extreme that close attachments were not uncommon . . . and of course, there wasn’t much else to draw . . .’

‘Come
on
,’ said Eleanor. ‘Think about it. Hitler’s a bachelor who interior-designs ballrooms. And he likes uniforms. And opera.’

Denham smiled. ‘I wouldn’t think that important either, if it wasn’t for the criminal records . . .’

‘Not
important
? What’s got into you today? If this gets out it’ll cause an international scandal, an outrage. A worldwide goddamned sensation.’

The wind picked up again, throwing rain against the window like shale.

‘So what’s the plan of action?’ she said, brushing the cat from her lap and standing.

Her hair was up today, revealing her slender golden nape, and she had on a form-fitting skirt that wrapped smoothly around her hips.

He breathed in deeply. ‘We’ll give it to the boys in intelligence,’ he said. ‘They’ll know how to use it. As soon as I’ve studied the documents in those envelopes . . .’

‘Would it ever penetrate into Germany? If this got out?’

‘In my experience of news embargoes, truth is like the rainwater up there. One way or another it gets into the house in the end . . .’

She sat back down next to him, kissed his hand, and pressed it to her cheek. A log split and hissed in the grate.

‘Until we hand it in,
we tell no one about this
,’ he whispered.

L
ater that day he opened up the old grandfather clock, adjusted its weights, wound the chain, and was not surprised to find that it worked. His father had loved tinkering with clocks. With the warm tick-tock setting the tempo, he sat at the old escritoire in the drawing room with the envelopes from the dossier spread before him.

The first item, Colonel Engelhardt’s affidavit, was significant because it attested to the drawings’ authenticity. It also answered, at least in part, a question that had intrigued the European press during Hitler’s rise. Why had he never made it above the lowly rank of lance corporal? To be awarded the iron cross for bravery—
twice—
without a simultaneous promotion was, well, unheard of.

Next was the so-called Mend Protocol, which made the most explicit allegations. It was a strange, compelling document, brimming with personal antagonism, which painted Hitler in the most unflattering light imaginable. Someone had interviewed Hans Mend at length—possibly the same man who had witnessed the document beneath Mend’s signature, a Captain Kurt Rogel. The date was 30 October 1932, three months before Hitler came to power. An army captain?

Did the army compile the dossier?

Mend stated that he was the author of a book called
Adolf Hitler im Felde,
published by Huber Verlag in 1931, an official account of the Führer’s selfless feats as a front-line soldier, by one who served with him. Denham knew the book. It couldn’t be missed. It was in every bookshop window in Berlin, and even on the German school curriculum. Yet Mend had given this damning evidence in secret the year after his book was first published. Why? To preserve a private record of the truth?

‘He struck me as a psychopath from the start’ was Mend’s considered view.

In the winter after the war, Hitler had turned up at Mend’s digs on Schleissheimer Strasse in Munich, hungry and down at heel, asking to spend the night because the flophouse on Lothstrasse was full. He was surviving, Mend said, with the help of his iron cross and his gift of the gab. On one occasion a year later, in January 1920, Hitler came again, asking to sleep on Mend’s floor because he could not go home. When Mend asked why, he made no answer.

There were plenty of reasons to doubt Mend—Hitler, of all people, wasn’t short of enemies, and Mend had clearly fallen out with him—but somehow Denham did not doubt the protocol. For all its animosity his testimony had the ring of truth.

Denham got up to pour himself a whisky.

Most who had known Hitler during the war would have been killed at the Front, but one or two, like Mend, survived and remembered who he was;
what
he was. Maybe Mend had been bought off. The book would have been a lucrative commission.

He turned to the next evidence.

The future Reich Chancellor had been arrested in Munich five times between January 1920 and the end of 1921. Twice at his rooming house on Thierschstrasse, once on the Marienplatz; twice in Schwabing.

Denham leafed through the pages again, the depositions of these young men collared by the vice squad, all pleading hard-luck stories in mitigation. With nothing but hunger and cold waiting for them at home they had accepted this man’s offer of money, a hot meal, and cigarettes, and listened to him for hours.

But what of the charges? It seemed impossible that Hitler could have avoided spells in custody. And this in the year 1920, when he was becoming the star speaker of the fledgling German Workers Party. Tucked away at the back of the depositions, Denham found the answer.

An undated note from Captain Ernst Röhm of the Bavarian Reichswehr Information Department told the chief of the Munich vice squad, in the bluntest terms, to drop his objections to the release of repeat offender AH. ‘Charges are dismissed pursuant to the intervention of Major General Ritter von Möhl’ was Röhm’s only explanation. ‘Have all files on this case ready for collection by my adjutant.’

So there it was. Hitler had already won friends in high places. Men who were impressed by this rough, difficult man with his iron cross and his talent for speaking and who had found in him a voice for the speechless fury of the masses.

Hitler. Denham was starting to get a loose sense of this misfit.

The Führer is not married.

Now all the innuendos burgeoned with significance. Was this an open secret among Berlin’s warm boys?

He recalled the Nazi Party being dogged by press scandals and lawsuits during its rise to power. In fact, the leadership of the Brownshirts—Röhm and those beer-hall bruisers close to Hitler in the early days—had all been warm boys and made no secret of it. They must have known. Röhm had helped make those police charges disappear.

But of course . . .

The hairs on the back of Denham’s neck stood on end. June ’34. The Night of the Long Knives
.
Hitler’d had them all shot.

He opened the final envelope.

This one contained the yellowed case notes from the Military Hospital at Pasewalk, in Pomerania, northern Germany. They were dated 1918. So, back to the war. The first clue to authorship was the note scribbled in a different hand on the front page:
Dr Edmund Forster dismissed University of Greifswald Feb ’33. Arrested September ’33. Died police custody.

Taking a notebook and pencil from the desk drawer Denham began an English translation as he untangled each word. The scrawl was dreadful—that of a tired doctor writing his notes late at night, his only peace after a heavy day’s caseload.

Chapter Thirty-five

19 OCTOBER ’18

This morning a requiem mass is held for Grubitz in the chapel. A depressing, meagre service. I must have heard tens of hours of his life story during our meetings and he never once mentioned he was a Catholic. The men look shaken. His ‘accident’ has appalled them. They know. Suicide is not a soldier’s death.

The cantor sings ‘Voca me cum benedictus’ and Captain Gutmann is whispering in my ear: ‘I’ve a gift for you,’ and I know at once it is anything but. A blindness case. Mustard gas. When I ask why this one cannot be treated on the appropriate ward, he gives me that thin smile.

Later in the mess I learn that the soldier in question refused to allow Gutmann to touch his eyes because Gutmann is a Jew! The man’s outburst on the subject (the Jews) being so emotional that Gutmann is pointing to neurasthenia as a pretext for getting rid of him. I am
not
pleased. I remind him that simply keeping my men from harming themselves and each other is a terrible strain on the orderlies, without throwing a racialist into the mix. Also that my ward NCO is a Jew. But Gutmann pulls rank: ‘Forster, he’s yours.’