The Woman from Hamburg (5 page)

Every day we asked ourselves anew what we should do with all this, Richard von Weizsaecker said fifty years later. Axel gave us the answer. It did not shock or surprise me. We were at the front and every day might be our last. And since that was the case, why shouldn’t we decide for ourselves which would be our last day? The death of Axel, should he kill the Führer of the Reich, would have been much more meaningful than a death on the Eastern front.)

Therefore, Richard made out the pass and Axel von dem B. set off for Berlin.

He met up with Stauffenberg.

Claus Stauffenberg, wounded in Africa, had lost his right hand, and his left had only three fingers. His missing eye was covered with a black eye patch. He was decisive, by no means pathetic, and even-tempered.

He asked Axel von dem B. why he wanted to kill Adolf Hitler.

“Do you know what he is doing to the Jews?” Axel von dem B. answered with a question, and then corrected himself. “What WE are doing to the Jews?”

Stauffenberg knew. He then asked if Axel von dem B., as a Protestant, had moral scruples. Catholics understand that it is permitted to kill a tyrant, but Luther wrote in one of his essays … Obviously, he had prepared theological arguments for Axel von dem B. and, perhaps, for himself.

“Please think this over one more time,” he ended their conversation. “After dinner you will inform me of your decision.”

After dinner Axel von dem B. informed Claus Stauffenberg that his decision was final. They turned to discussing the details. The showing of uniforms for the Eastern front would take place at Wolfsschanze, Hitler’s quarters in East Prussia. The models would be soldiers who knew nothing. The explosives would be concealed in Axel von dem B.’s uniform. The blast would kill the leaders of the Reich, Axel, and everyone else present.

At the conclusion of this conversation Stauffenberg took a small envelope out of his briefcase.

“This is an order,” he said. “You will hand it over to Colonel L. at Central Headquarters. After Hitler’s assassination it will be passed on to the armed forces, to all Germans, and to the whole world. You may read it on your way.”

Axel von dem B. set about fulfilling his task.

He received the explosives from Colonel L.: three kilograms of mines, one kilogram of dynamite, and one English bomb. It all fit into a small, flat suitcase. The bomb was superb, noiseless. The explosion followed ten minutes
after the timing device was set in motion, and the minutes passed in ideal silence. Despite this, Axel von dem B. did not want the English bomb. First of all, he was unfamiliar with it. Second, ten minutes of waiting for his own and others’ death was too long. He returned the bomb (Stauffenberg himself used it later, in July 1944) and requested an ordinary hand grenade, which he was familiar with from the front. It exploded after four and a half seconds. True, it made a noise, but one could drown it out easily, if necessary, by coughing. Colonel L. had no grenade at hand, so Axel von dem B. went to Potsdam, to one of his military colleagues. The colleague was a German patriot and a Jewish-German
Mischling
. He had too much Jewish blood to defend the fatherland (this was one of the first Nazi laws:
Mischlings
were not allowed to fight at the front in defense of the fatherland), but he had too little of that blood to be sent to Auschwitz or Terezin. In despair at not fighting at the front in defense of his German fatherland, he begged to be assigned to service in the rear. He was serving in Potsdam. He had grenades. He asked no questions. Axel von dem B. could proceed to Hitler’s headquarters.

In the train he removed from his boot top the order that was to be passed on to Germans and the whole world after the assassination.

“The Führer is dead,” said the first sentence.

“Several ambitious officers of the SS have murdered him.

“In this situation the army has seized power.”

The military sleeping car was traveling east, and Axel von dem B. lay on his bunk, sunk in his reading.

So, Stauffenberg did not intend to tell the Germans the truth. The people still loved Adolf Hitler and it was necessary to pin responsibility for his murder on a “clique” of “ambitious SS.”

So we are that weak, Axel von dem B. thought. Even after Stalingrad we are unable to tell the truth. Even we have to begin with lies.

He arrived at the place.

He handed over the envelope with the order.

He headed for the guest barracks. He waited for word of the initiation of the order. The train with the uniforms was en route to Prussia.

He does not know exactly how many days he waited in the barracks, but he does know how many nights. Three nights. He did not sleep. He sat in an armchair and drew up a balance sheet.

When one is twenty-four years old, settling one’s accounts, even of one’s entire life, does not take long, so he fell asleep on the third night. Toward morning Colonel L. summoned him. The Allies had bombed the train with the freight car that contained the uniforms. The uniforms were burned, the order would not be given. Axel von dem B. was to return immediately to the front in Russia.

Collecting his things, he pondered what to do with the mines and the grenade. He couldn’t leave the suitcase in
the guest room, and he didn’t have time to bury it in the woods. He took it with him to Russia. There, he transferred everything to his soldier’s backpack—a canvas one, khaki-colored—and placed it in his officer’s locker.

Three months later he was wounded. The wound did not seem serious, but gangrene set in and his foot was amputated. Then his leg was amputated up to the calf. Then up to the knee. Then his entire leg was amputated.

The operation was performed in Berlin, in an SS hospital.

When he awoke from the anesthesia, he noticed a white hospital cabinet. On top of it was a khaki-colored canvas backpack. It was customary at the front to send a wounded officer’s belongings to the hospital, so the aforementioned backpack was sent after Axel von dem B. without anyone looking inside it.

On July 17 Friedrich Klausing, Stauffenberg’s adjutant, arrived. He said that IT would take place in the very near future.

Axel von dem B. listened attentively.

On the night of July 20 to 21, 1944, he heard Hitler’s voice on the radio: “I am addressing you for two reasons. First, so you should hear my voice and be assured that I am safe and well. Second, that you should know about a crime that has no equal in the history of Germany.”

Axel von dem B. thought it would be best to destroy his address book. He had no leg and was unable to go to the toilet, so he ate it all night long, page after page.

In the morning the Gestapo arrived. They interrogated him briefly. He had an alibi: he was lying without a leg in the SS hospital. The canvas backpack was on top of the cabinet above the heads of the Gestapo agents. Later, Karl Groeben, a colleague who had a paralyzed arm and had not gone to the front, took it away. He told him about the conspirators, who among them had been hanged, who was sent to concentration camps, and who committed suicide. Colonel L. had managed to escape. Apparently, he had reached the front and sought shelter with the Russians. His colleague finished his tale, took down the backpack with his healthy arm, checked to be sure that it was no longer needed, and promised to throw it into the nearest body of water.

“On the outskirts of Dubno there were bungalows with gardens, so there was a lot of greenery surrounding the town. In the spring, an intoxicating aroma of lilac, jasmine, acacia, and night-scented stock, the most alluring of all, wafted through the air. And the river that cut through Dubno was concealed by tall rushes, and was full of fish and water fowl.…

“One very cool morning, I don’t know if it was autumn or spring, I heard unusual sounds. People were rushing somewhere and I learned that a young Jewish woman and
her daughter were swimming in the Ikwa. They hid in the rushes when they noticed that people were gathering and that they could see them. The people were staring at this terrible tragedy and everyone was silent.… Someone notified the Germans, and they came and also looked. The woman and her daughter coudn’t sit there in the rushes forever; they had to move, because the water was frigid, so they would hide and swim out, hide and swim out, and when they noticed the Germans, they hid again. The Germans took a boat and set out to get them.… They were both wearing something white, probably blouses.” [From a letter from Antonina H., a former resident of Dubno.]

At first Axel von dem B. used a prosthesis, but he felt an unbearable pain in his artificial leg. This phenomenon of sensations in missing limbs is not unknown to medicine. It is called phantom pain. The doctor explained to Axel von dem B. that the source of phantom pain is located in the frontal lobes of the brain, and that it would be possible to perform an operation, called a frontal lobotomy, but the patient refused.

He walks with crutches. He is six foot four. A long leg protrudes from under his jacket. Next to it, between the floor and the jacket, is a long, empty space. The leg that doesn’t exist takes up a lot of space. A good deal more than
the protruding one, in a dark trouser leg and an elegant moccasin, polished to a shine.

He has ordinary, aluminum crutches that end in pieces of black rubber. Polish veterans, too, use just such crutches; old women in Warsaw, waiting for the tram to Stalowa and Brzeska, lean on similar ones.

He moves slowly. He eyes the surface, taking his time and carefully selecting places that are neither slippery nor steep. He rests his crutches on them and swings his leg. He stops and attentively surveys the surface …

He got a law degree. He was a diplomat, a publisher, and a director of exclusive schools.

He has eaten lunch with Theodor Adorno, Golo Mann, and Hannah Arendt.

He spent his vacations with his cousin Claus and Claus’s wife, Beatrix, the Dutch queen.

He married an Englishwoman and settled in Switzerland. He visits Germany infrequently. In the fifties he was subpoenaed by the office of the prosecutor. The SS from the airfield in Dubno had been found and the prosecutor asked if Axel von dem B. could identify their faces.

“I don’t recognize them,” he responded.

“How can that be?” The prosecutor expressed surprise. “Were you a witness to the killing of Jews in the town of Dubno?”

“Yes, I was.”

“Did you see the faces of those who did the killing?”

“I did.”

“Then why can’t you identify them?”

“Because they all had identical faces—like hound dogs,” Axel von dem B. explained. “Have you ever seen dogs when they are attacking their prey? Would you be able to distinguish one hound from another?”

Last year, Axel von dem B.’s wife died. He returned to Germany after thirty-five years’ absence.

He visited a few people he knew, among them Colonel L. The man who gave him three kilograms of mines and a kilogram of dynamite at Wolfsschanze. After Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt he had fled to the Russians. He spent a dozen or so years in an isolation cell in the Lubianka prison and in Siberian camps. After he returned to Germany he settled in Lower Saxony, in a small village house. He received Axel von dem B. politely. Only once did he get upset—when his guest called him Colonel.

“You are standing before a crowned prince,” he cried. “Don’t you know how one is supposed to address a monarch?”

It became clear that Colonel L. had come back from the Soviet camps as the crowned prince of Prussia. Other than that, he behaved normally.

Axel von dem B. went to live with his children in the old castle. The rooms are dark and cold. Mirrors and paintings in heavy gilded frames hang on the walls. The tapestries depict hunting scenes. The floors creak all night long. It’s the soul of an ancestor that makes the creaking noises; he defrauded the regimental treasury, was beheaded, and
now roams the hallways, holding his bloody head under his arm. The castle stairs are steep, so Axel von dem B. occupies a little room on the ground floor. It holds a bed, a small table with a coffee cup and an electric coffee pot, a few books, and two bullets.

From time to time a German or foreign historian who is writing yet another book about resistance in the Third Reich comes to see him.

From time to time Richard, the brother of Heinrich von Weizsaecker and former adjutant of their regiment, telephones. They talk about life. Or about Thomas Mann. Or about events that are no longer important or amusing for anyone but them.

Axel von dem B. finds it harder and harder to enter into conversation. He gets depressed. He has been losing weight for no apparent reason. He is bothered by pain that only opiates can relieve. He is not interested in a diagnosis, but he would prefer not to suffer. On the other hand, the thought that this whole joke will soon be over is comforting.