Then We Take Berlin (23 page)

“What are you trying to tell me? That Germans aren’t like us?”

“Yes. Exactly that. Not all Germans and not all Germans forever, but the Germans of now. The post-1945 German isn’t like you or me, and I don’t want you to think he is. That would be a great mistake. Germany and the Germans . . . right now . . . they’re a moral vacuum. And you’re going to be working with them. Millions of them.”

“What?”

Wilderness stopped in his tracks. It suited Burne-Jones that they should stop. Another of his illustrations. A chain gang of women—women of all ages from teenage girls to grandmothers—wrapped in rags against the cold, they were passing bricks from person to person. The first one picked a brick out of the rubble, the last, seven or eight pairs of hands later, stacked it on a pallet.

“
Trümmerfrauen
,” Burne-Jones said too simply. “Rubble women. They’ve been picking over the bones of Germany’s cities practically since the day the Führer put a bullet through his brain. They get extra rations, and bit by bit we get the streets cleared. And one day Hamburg will get rebuilt. Wasn’t much to look at in the first place, so who knows . . . perhaps they’ll build a better Hamburg. Meanwhile you get an object lesson in the German character.”

“Obedience?”

“Determination.”

Wilderness wondered if Burne-Jones had chosen the turnaround point at which they headed back in the centre or whether it was due to time and chance.

They had ground to a halt—Burne-Jones had stopped talking, they had both stopped walking—in front of a blitzed terrace. It would not, with a slight shift of style, have looked out of place in London, in Stepney or in Deptford. The whole terrace was roofless and windowless, but as they reached the middle, any assumption that these houses were deserted was swept away. A door creaked open, miraculously still attached to its hinges, and a housewife swept dust and dirt out into the street. And when she had done that she reached behind her for a bucket, got to her knees and began to scrub the step. He’d seen this a thousand times in childhood. Houses that were damp, with flaking plaster and cracked windows, with buddleias sprouting from fractures in the brickwork, with leaking gutters, with . . . with scrubbed, whitened thresholds, the face presented to the world that boldly declared “this is not a slum, this is my home.”

§70

They’d crossed the Lombard Bridge between the two Alster Lakes, into Neustadt. Burne-Jones had talked all the way. His potted history of life and death amidst the ruins. Wilderness had listened. In between the spacious paragraphs of Burne-Jones’s narrative he was listening out for the sound of the city. London did not sound like Cambridge, Cambridge did not sound like London, although removed from both he could not have articulated the difference. Hamburg sounded like neither. Hamburg rattled. No, not precise enough. Hamburg clinked. Clinked to the sound or brick hitting brick, stone falling on stone, as the
Trümmerfrauen
sifted the city. It was the ever-present sound, softer than bells, louder than trickling water. In a couple of hours Wilderness had come to regard it as a musical abstraction. Burne-Jones seemed not to hear it at all, but then Burne-Jones seemed not to see the writing on the walls.

After seeing it half a dozen times, Wilderness pointedly stopped by one painted inscription.

Nell. I’m alive! Where are you? Joe.

There’d been dozens, perhaps hundreds, adorning every wall they’d passed. A public noticeboard for the missing and the dead. The
Times
personal column for the homeless and desperate. There’d been plenty appealing to Nell—whoever she was.

“You are paying attention, aren’t you Joe?”

“Of course. I can repeat your last sentence if you wish. But don’t you wonder who Nell is?”

Burne-Jones stared at the message. Double-Dutch not German as far as he was concerned.

“Now you come to mention it, no. I don’t. Now . . . what was I saying?”

“You were telling me about Germany being in denial. Not a phrase I’d heard before. But while we’re here. Eighty-eight.”

“What?”

“The number 88. I see that more often than I see ‘Where’s Nell’ or ‘Find me Hilde.’”

“Oh. That’s old. They were painting that on the walls about nine months ago. Once they realised that liberation didn’t mean instant transformation into a land of milk and honey and that they might just have to clean up the mess themselves, they started wishing they had Adolf back. Eight is H, the eighth letter of the alphabet. Ergo . . . HH is Heil Hitler. But as I said, they’ve passed that. They now want to pretend he never existed. If you were to believe every German who claimed to have been part of the July 20 conspiracy, then you’d marvel the Reich made it to the twenty-first—the conspirators seem to have had more regiments than Joe Stalin, more divisions than the Pope.”

They’d reached the Dammtor Bahnhof as big as any in London and suffering from the same glass and iron Paxton pretensions to being a cathedral. The war, the British, had somehow left it intact. Like the Atlantic, frayed and ragged, but intact.

Opposite was a clean, unmarked, vast, eight-storey building. Not a scratch on it. A sign curving around the front read, “Victory Club NAAFI—Other Ranks.”

“I know what you’re thinking,” said Burne-Jones. “It didn’t survive the raids. It wasn’t there. We built this from scratch last year. Ballroom, gym, shop . . . you name it.”

Wilderness stared.

“Ballroom? A bloody ballroom?”

The building all but shone. In a city where people shuffled around in rags, half-starved, picking over the contents of dustbins—a city in which that which was not grey with ash was yellow with vitamin deficiency—where people lived in holes in the ground . . . we had built this?

He said as much to Burne-Jones, and Burne-Jones replied, “
Siegerrecht
. To the victor the spoils.”

§71

In the middle of the day, the club was largely empty. They took deep bucket chairs and a low table in a bar that would not have looked out of place on the Queen Mary. In fact, everything about the Victory Club reminded Wilderness of an ocean liner. He’d never seen one, inside or out, but just the same . . .

Never one to rush anything, Burne-Jones continued his lecture while they were served coffee, but with the first sip said, “How many Germans were Nazis, would you say?”

“All of them,” said Wilderness knowing that Burne-Jones was inviting the obviously wrong answer.

“We reckon about twelve million.”

“Why so sure?”

“Because party records survived the war intact. They were at a paper mill in Munich waiting to be pulped when the Americans arrived.”

“That’s . . . incredible.”

“Nonetheless it happened. So now almost every German has had to fill in one of these.”

Burne-Jones slid a thin sheaf of papers across the table to him, four pages bound by red string with shiny metal tags through punched holes at the top left-hand corner.

Wilderness leafed through it. Four pages, two columns, questions in two languages.

“We call it the Personnel Questionnaire. The Germans just call it
Fragebogen
—‘Questions.’ One hundred and thirty-one in all, and how they answer determines what category they get bunged into and whether they get one of these.”

Another sheet of paper slid across the table. Small and yellowing, the sort of thing you’d fold up in your wallet next to your identity card, a smudged blue number stamped into one corner, an unreadable signature in another.

“This is an
Entlastungsschein
. They call it a ‘
Persilschein
.’”

“What, like the washing powder?”

“Exactly. It washes whiter than white. It’s official exoneration. You have one of these and you can prove to any employer, any copper, or any nosy parker that you’re not considered an enemy or a threat. I’d go so far as to say it’s the most valuable document in Germany . . . until we find Adolf’s will or Eva’s love letters.”

Wilderness flicked through the questions.

“Were you a member of the
Korps der Politischen Leiter
? Were you a
Jugendwalter
? What the fuck is a
Jugendwalter
?”

“Hitler youth leader. In all likelihood a teenager good at ordering smaller teenagers around.”

“All sources of income since 1933? . . . and they answer this lot?”

“Indeed they do. They all want their
Persilschein
. As you might expect there’s a fair trade in fake
Persilschein
, but that’s not our problem. Our problem lies with the ones we’ve been asked to re-examine.”

At last, the rat Wilderness had been sniffing since breakfast.

“That’s why you got me here?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“One million three hundred thousand, give or take.”

“You couldn’t just send me back to square-bashing and jankers?”

“Very funny, Holderness. Stop sneering and let me put you in the not-so-pretty picture. In the first few weeks after the war, things got a bit gung ho. The French wanted vengeance. There were a few, shall I say,
incidents
that won’t ever make the papers. The Americans, strangely, also seemed to hate the Germans more than we ever did. The result was chaotic . . . and answers to this form, matched against party records, led to a hell of a lot of minor Nazis—
Muss-Nazis
—being dismissed from public life, kicked out of their jobs, denied their
Persilschein.
Madness. After all we knew full well that some jobs under the Reich couldn’t be held down without joining the damn party and every boy and every girl in Germany were, theoretically, enrolled in the various branches of Hitler Youth with neither consent nor responsibility. Interpreted too rigorously the
Fragebogen
became a rubber stamp for the joke you cracked a few minutes ago. Everyone, absolutely everyone, was a Nazi. I say again, chaos. To give you just one example: eighty per cent of all schoolteachers in the American Zone got the sack. Extrapolate that to public life as a whole and you can guess what happened, the civic structure just caved in. Nothing got organised because there was no one there to organise it. Germans were starving, most lived off rations not much better than a prisoner got in Belsen. Now, odds are, Germany was going to starve anyway. But it’s undeniable that the mess we created made it worse. So what happened next? Uncle Sam puts the machine into reverse. Revises its classification system and starts actively hiring ex-Nazis. But, there’s more to it than that . . . for years, perhaps since the first doodlebug landed on London, they . . . I think I mean we . . . the Allies . . . have wanted to get our hands on the blokes who designed V-1s and V-2s. Mostly this was done in the American Zone at Peenemünde, Nordhausen, and Dora. And no one really gave a toss whether these blokes were Nazis or not. Personally, I think that’s a mistake. If they weren’t party members, they still had a lot to answer for. Dora was a concentration camp manned by slave labour, they worked people to death. But it was pretty obvious no one was going to ask Werner von Braun about dead slaves. We collared our share. Shipped a dozen boffins back to Cambridge. The Russians indulged in an unholy scramble that included kidnapping people off the streets . . . but above all the Americans wanted their rocket boys. They have most now, but not all.”

Burne-Jones looked around for something, reached for a roneoed, smudgy menu off the next table—egg and chips, saveloy and chips, peas and chips, chips with everything—and turned it over. A rough map of Europe sprang from the tip of his pencil. A shapeless blob for Ireland, a blob with proboscises for England, a square for Spain, a boot for Italy.

“We know that a lot of Nazis have escaped Germany in the last eighteen months.”

He scribbled arrows down through Italy, across the South of France and into Spain and Portugal.

“There are fairly obvious escape routes. Most, we reckon went south. Most ended up in Lisbon, a city where nobody asks too many questions, and from there to Brazil or Argentina. A five-bob postal order and a Mars bar to the man who spots Martin Bormann or Adolf Eichmann. But, supposing some clever bastard went north?”

A long, thick black arrow was scribbled in, like an imaginary, unswerving autobahn from Stuttgart to Hamburg.

“You could lose yourself in the British Zone, but getting a ship out to anywhere would not be easy.”

“So you think some of these boffins are hiding out in Hamburg.”

“I don’t know. But the Americans are insistent that we look.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who? Who are we looking for?”

“Don’t know that either.”

“So we’re searching for people who might not exist, might not be here, and we don’t know what they look like?”

“That about sums it up. But if they’re here . . .” He picked up the
Fragebogen
. “They’ve filled in one of these, and they’ve lied. That’s where you come in. Read them through, look for the loopholes that tell you they’re lying.”