The War That Came Early: Coup d'Etat (13 page)

Not a word of that, of course, got into the local newspapers. Radio broadcasts kept quiet about it, too.
The regime controlled every official news source. It got around all the same. People who heard Bishop von Galen speak spread word of what he said. People who heard them spread it wider. Everyone in town knew the bishop and the Nazis were on a collision course.

“What will happen now?” Sarah asked.

“They’ll keep him in jail, or else they’ll kill him,” Father said. “I don’t think they’ll kill him
right away. They have other ways to put the screws to him. He has a brother—Franz, I think his name is. The
Gestapo
’s already grabbed other priests from the diocese.”

“Did they hope Bishop von Galen would take a hint?” Sarah inquired.

Samuel Goldman beamed at her. He might be tired, but he was also proud. “How did you get so grown-up when I wasn’t looking?” he said.
Sarah made a rude noise.
Her father laughed but went on, “Yes, I’m sure they did hope he’d do that. But if he were the kind of man who took those hints, he wouldn’t be the kind of man who preached those sermons.”

That made sense to Sarah. Father usually made sense to her, except for his hopeless, unrequited love affair with being a real German. She found the only question she could think of that really mattered: “What
happens next? Do people let the Nazis get away with it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone else does, either,” he said slowly. “But I’ll tell you this: we heard they’d arrested von Galen about an hour before quitting time, and the whole labor gang was furious. Not just Catholics. Everyone. The men were cussing out the
Gestapo
like you wouldn’t believe. When I was walking home”—Jews couldn’t
use buses or trams—“I heard more people up in arms about it, too.”

“What will they do? Rally in front of the
Rathaus
?” Sarah laughed at the idea. “That would just give the blackshirts the chance to arrest all of them at once.”

“You might be surprised,” her father said. “The Catholic Church still has some clout, and it’s always been more leery of the Nazis than most Protestant churches were.
No ‘German Christians’ among the Catholics, or not many, anyhow.” He screwed up his face.

So did Sarah. So-called German Christians believed Nazi ideals were compatible with those of Jesus. As far as she could see, that was well on the way toward being like the Red Queen in
Alice in Wonderland
, who made a habit of believing two impossible things every day before breakfast. But German Christians
dominated most Protestant denominations these days. Didn’t you also believe in impossibilities if you thought you could tell the Nazis no and get away with it?

“Where’s your mother?” Samuel Goldman asked. “Now I’ll have to tell the story twice.”

“She’s out shopping.” Sarah’s voice was sour. Jews could only do it at the very end of the day, when everyone else had already had the chance to pick
over the little in the stores. Sarah added, “I was peeling potatoes when I heard you come in.”

Her father sighed. “Bad food, and not enough of it.” He flipped his
hand up and down. “It’s not your fault. I know it’s not. You and mother do everything anyone could with what the
Reich
lets us have.”

“That’s not enough, either.”

“If it were, the
Reich
wouldn’t let us have it,” Father said.

He paused
then. Sarah could read his mind. He was looking for the best—or worst—way to make a pun about how the
Reich
really wanted to let them have it. He did things like that. But before he could this time, the front door opened behind him. He looked absurdly affronted as he half turned on his good leg, as if Mother had squashed his line on purpose.

Hanna Goldman hadn’t, of course. Her little two-wheeled
collapsible wire shopping cart was almost as empty as it had been when she set out. Some sorry turnips, some insect-nibbled greens … That kind of stuff might have done for fattening hogs. People just got thinner on it, as Sarah had sad reason to know.

But Mother’s jade-green eyes snapped with excitement. “They’ve arrested Bishop von Galen!” she exclaimed.

“We knew that.” By the deflationary
way Father said it, he
was
miffed he hadn’t got to make his horrible pun.

Mother refused to be deflated. “Did you know there’s a great big crowd out in front of the cathedral? Did you know they’re yelling at the police and the blackshirts, and throwing things at them, too?”

“Der Herr Gott im Himmel!”
Father burst out. Sarah felt the same way. Germans mostly didn’t do such things. She’d heard
that, when machine guns opened up on demonstrators in the mad Berlin of 1919, the crowd fled across a park to escape the deadly fire—but people obeyed the
KEEP OFF THE GRASS!
signs while they ran for their lives.

“It’s true. I saw the edges of it. I got away from there as fast as I could afterward,” Mother said. “I didn’t want to wait till the blackshirts started shooting—and I didn’t want to
give them any reason to arrest a Jew, either.”

“If each of us would have tried to take one of those pigdogs with him when they came for him …” For a moment, Father looked and sounded young and ferocious, the way he would have in the trenches in the last war. But then he sighed and shook his head and went back to his
familiar self. “The Nazis wouldn’t care. They’d thank us for handing them an
excuse to murder us all.”

“They can’t murder everyone out by the cathedral,” Mother said.

Distant gunfire seemed to give her the lie. Even more faintly, Sarah heard screams and shrieks and shouts. She supposed they’d been going on before, but she hadn’t been able to make them out. She could now. People made more noise when bullets snarled past—or when they struck home.

“They’ll blame the Communists
for this,” Father predicted.

“There aren’t many Catholic Communists,” Sarah pointed out.

“They won’t care,” Samuel Goldman said. “Outside agitators, they’ll call them, and they’ll say von Galen was working with them.” He spread his callused hands. “I mean, otherwise they’d have to blame themselves, and what are the odds of that?”

Chapter 6

C
oming back into port should have been a relief for Julius Lemp and the rest of the U-30’s crew. Most of the time, it was. Coming back meant they’d made it through another patrol. RAF bombs wouldn’t sink them. Russian shells wouldn’t tear through the U-boat’s thin steel hide and send it to the bottom. Slow-crawling
crabs wouldn’t pick out Lemp’s bulging dead eyes with their claws … this time.

The men could shave their beards. They could take proper showers. They could eat food that didn’t come out of tins. They could go into town and drink and pick up barmaids and brawl. They could walk off by themselves, without someone else always at their elbow. Or they could lie on real mattresses and sleep and sleep.

It was wonderful. Most of the time.

Every once in a while, politics got in the way. And politics, in the
Reich
, turned bloody in a hurry. They’d just come back in to Wilhelmshaven when the generals tried to topple the
Führer
. You didn’t want to hear machine-gun fire at the edge of the base, especially when you weren’t sure who was shooting at whom or why.

Now they were in Kiel—at the edge of
the Baltic rather than the
North Sea—and politics was rearing its ugly head again. Everyone should have been proud of them for sinking the destroyer and two Soviet freighters on their latest patrol. If Lemp’s superiors were, they had a gift for hiding their enthusiasm.

“
Ja, ja
. Well done, I am sure,” said the graying
Kapitän zur See
who heard Lemp’s first report. The bare bulb above the senior
officer’s desk gleamed off the four gold stripes on his cuffs. He scribbled a note or two, but only a note or two. “No doubt your log gives the full details.”

If he wasn’t a distracted man, Lemp had never seen one. “Yes, sir,” he said.

The captain looked up and seemed surprised to find him still there. “Do you require something else, uh, Lemp?” He had to remind himself who the squirt in front
of him was. Considering some of the things that had happened to Lemp, he didn’t know whether to be relieved or alarmed—for better and for worse, he hadn’t had the kind of career that lent itself to obscurity.

“Require? No, sir. Of course not, sir.” Lemp lied with great sincerity, as a junior sometimes had to do with a superior. “But if it’s not too much trouble, sir, I would like to have some
idea of what’s going on.”

He might have stuck the
Kapitän zur See
with a pin. “What makes you think anything out of the ordinary is going on?” the older man demanded. Lemp didn’t answer; he didn’t think that needed an answer. The four-striper’s sigh said he really didn’t, either. He lit a cigarette. It was only stalling, and he and Lemp both knew it. His sigh sent a stream of smoke up toward
the lightbulb. “Tell me, Lemp—what is your religion?”

“My religion, sir?” The U-boat skipper would have been more surprised had the captain asked him which position he most fancied in bed, but not much more surprised. “I’m a Lutheran, sir, but I haven’t been to church in a while.”

The senior officer blew out more smoke, this time in obvious relief. “Well, I could say the same thing. As a matter
of fact, I did say the same thing to my own superiors the other day.”

Lemp had to remind himself that even an exalted
Kapitän zur See
had men to whom he needed to answer. “Why on earth did they ask you, sir?” he said, in lieu of
Why on earth are you asking me?

A brief spark in the captain’s gray eyes said he also heard the question behind the question. “There are certain … advantages to being
away at sea, tending to the
Reich
’s business,” he replied. “You won’t have heard that the Catholics are, mm, well, some of them are, mm, unhappy about the way things are going.”

“Sir?” Lemp said, this time in lieu of
What the devil are you talking about?

“It’s the Bishop of Münster’s fault,” the four-striper said. He sounded like a man trying to convince himself. Or that could have been Lemp’s
imagination, but he didn’t think so. The answer also explained next to nothing. The
Kapitän zur See
must have realized as much. He stubbed out the cigarette with a quick, savage motion. “He spoke out against the
Führer
’s policy. From the pulpit. Repeatedly. And so the security services decided they had no choice but to take him into custody.”

“I … see,” Lemp said slowly. You needed nerve to do
something like that. You needed to have your head examined, was what you really needed.

“There are … demonstrations of unhappiness about this here and there in the
Vaterland
,” the
Kapitän zur See
said. “This is why I asked you, you understand.”

“Aber natürlich,”
Lemp said, which seemed safe enough. Demonstrations of unhappiness? What was going on in Germany? Was the whole country bubbling like
a pot of stew forgotten on the stove? He wouldn’t have been surprised. You couldn’t just go arresting bishops. These weren’t the Middle Ages, after all. But the blackshirts didn’t seem to care. They were Hitler’s hounds. Do something they didn’t like and they’d bite.

“So that’s where we are. That’s why passes into town are limited,” the
Kapitän zur See
said. Schleswig-Holstein had been Danish
till a lifetime before, and was solidly Lutheran. Even so … “The less trouble we stir up, the better for everyone.”

“The men won’t like being restricted to base, sir,” Lemp said. As the other officer had to know, that was an understatement.

“Yes? And so?” The
Kapitän zur See
sent him a hooded look. “They aren’t the only crew here, you know.”

“Jawohl, mein Herr.”
Lemp knew a losing fight when
he saw one. “I’ll
tell them what they need to understand.” He rose, saluted, and got out of the four-striper’s office as fast as he could.

By the time he returned to the barracks, the U-30’s crew had already found that next to none of them would be able to go into town. They weren’t happy about it, which was putting things mildly. “What, the shitheads don’t think we deserve to blow off steam?
They can blow it out their assholes, is what they can do.” That was Paul, the helmsman—a chief petty officer, and as steady a man as Lemp had ever known. If he was within shouting distance of mutiny, the rest of the submariners had to be even closer.

Lemp spread his hands in what looked like apology, even though U-boat skippers weren’t in the habit of apologizing to their men. “There’s nothing
I can do about it, friends,” he said. “It’s politics, is what it is.” He summarized what the
Kapitän zur See
had told him. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the senior officer didn’t want ratings to know such things. Well, too damn bad for him if he didn’t.

Some of the sailors, naturally, were Catholics. Some were convinced Nazis. The largest number cared little for religion or politics. “So
this bullshit is what’s keeping us confined to base?” one of them said. “That’s nothing but
Quatsch
. If we want to get into fights, we’ve got better things to brawl about than some stupid, loudmouthed bishop.”