The sound came again, and then Gretchen saw the outline of shoulders, a slim torso, long legs, a flowered housedress. Mama.
How had she known how to find them?
“Gretchen?” her mother said. She moved forward, into a patch of moonlight, and saw Gretchen and Daniel standing motionless. She ran to Gretchen, opening her arms for an embrace, then seemed to think better of it and stopped, her arms sliding to her sides. “Are you all right?”
Gretchen ignored the question. “Why have you come out here, Mama? Hoping to deliver us to Röhm yourself and weasel your way back into Uncle Dolf’s good favor?”
Her mother winced. Although her gaze flickered over Daniel, she said nothing to him. “Two SA men drove up to my parents’ door a few moments ago. Your grandfather snuck me out the back, and I came straight here, hoping to intercept you on the way. You mustn’t go there, Gretchen, because they’re waiting for you.”
Gretchen hesitated. She didn’t know what to do now.
She looked at her mother. The pain in Mama’s eyes was unmistakable. She wished she could despise her mother, or feel indifferent—anything but this endless back-and-forth between pity and anger. “Mama, Reinhard’s dead.”
Her mother let out a soft cry, like a newborn kitten. “I knew this day would come.” She spoke almost to herself. “How did it happen?”
Gretchen couldn’t tell her the truth. Misery was etched in every inch of her mother’s body, from the dejected slope of her shoulders to her hands knitted tightly together. She wanted to give her mother something, at least some tiny piece of solace to hang on to as the years went past. “He died protecting me,” she said, and it was almost the truth, for his death had prevented hers, giving her precious seconds to hide herself among the crowd. At her side, Daniel squeezed her hand. She saw the pride on his face, and relaxed a little. He understood what she had done.
Mama sighed. “Thank God. Thank God for that.” She reached into her pocket and withdrew a leather wallet. “This is for you. It’s all the money I possess in the world. I want you to have it.”
It must be the extra money from the household accounts, and whatever savings Mama had managed to squirrel away. Gretchen looked at the wallet, but didn’t move to take it. “How will you live?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Her mother pressed the wallet into Gretchen’s hand. “All I care about is that you do.” At last, her mother looked at Daniel. Something seemed to change in her face, a barely perceptible loosening of muscles as though she had unclamped her jaw.
“You love my daughter,” her mother said.
Daniel nodded. “Yes. With all of my soul.”
“I can’t pretend to understand it.” Her mother studied Daniel. “It isn’t natural. Just promise,” she said to Daniel, reaching out as if to touch him then shrinking back as if she’d suddenly remembered herself, “just promise you’ll treat my daughter well.”
Daniel looked solemn. “I will, Frau Müller.”
To Gretchen’s shock, her mother pulled her close in a hard embrace. “I love you, my little girl,” she murmured, then released her suddenly and strode away into the darkness. For an instant, she was a silver-edged figure in the shadows, then she was nothing more than the whispers of tall grasses and wind. Gretchen swallowed against the welling emotion in her throat.
“We must go,” Gretchen said, and they headed north, keeping close to the river as they skirted Dachau’s outer edges.
The nearest village with a decent-sized train station was nearly forty miles away, a few days’ hike, since they stopped frequently to forage for berries or drink from streams.
At Ingolstadt, they caught a train that carried them southwest. A few bills from her mother’s wallet convinced the conductor not to ask for their passports. Their good luck couldn’t hold out for long, and they would have to find a forger to make them false papers so that they could continue to England.
Dawn had lightened the sky to a pale pink when they reached Switzerland. The train curved around a hill and a small village lay beneath them, gray stone buildings tucked among the towering evergreens. It looked like Germany.
But it wasn’t, and Gretchen knew she might never again see the country of her childhood, the land that reminded her of fairy tales for its dark beauty and cunning cruelties, its crystalline lakes she had swum with Hitler, its pine forests she had walked with her father, its city of stone and stained glass where she had met Daniel.
“We may never go back,” Gretchen said.
Daniel looked at her. He had slept on and off throughout the night’s train ride, and though his face was still tight with pain and his arm still lay crumpled over his chest, he looked far better. His skin felt soft and warm to the touch; the danger had passed. Every time she looked at him, her heart seemed to burst out of her chest with gladness and gratitude.
“No,” Daniel agreed. He leaned closer, brushing her lips with his. “We may not. But I think we will, Gretchen. Somehow, someday, Hitler will fail. And we’ll have been part of the force that brought him to his knees.”
She hoped he was right. Her mother’s money would get them to England, and there they would tell everyone they could the truth about Hitler; they would shout about the danger in Munich to everyone who could hear. And somehow they would survive together—she would live the life she had chosen for herself. For now, that was what mattered. And it had to be enough.
She looked at Daniel—so solid and dependable and real, not like the figures of smoke and shadow she had known her whole life. “I’m ready,” she said. The train hesitated at the top of the hill, then slowly started sliding down, picking up speed until they were hurtling toward the village and whatever lay beyond.
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Author’s Note
ALTHOUGH PRISONER OF NIGHT AND FOG IS A WORK of fiction, much of it is rooted in fact. Please note that this section contains major plot spoilers, so read no further if you haven’t finished the book!
Gretchen, her family, Daniel, the boardinghouse residents, Kurt Jaeger, Gretchen’s classmate Erika, Lars and Stefan Dearstyne, and Cell G’s victim Dieter Adler are fictitious characters. Everyone else was a real person.
I wove a fictitious murder around two of the most devastating real events in Hitler’s life: Germany’s surrender while he was being treated for “hysterical blindness” and the “Beer Hall Putsch.”
During the final weeks of World War One, Hitler’s regiment suffered a poison gas attack. While other temporarily blinded soldiers recovered their eyesight fairly soon, Hitler didn’t and was labeled a “hysteric.” According to a Berlin War Ministry decree, all “hysterical soldiers” had to be quarantined because their nervous condition was thought to be contagious. Accordingly, Hitler was separated from his regiment and sent to a military hospital in Pasewalk, Pomerania. There he proved to be such a difficult patient that doctors called in a consulting specialist named Edmund Forster, who diagnosed Hitler as a “classic psychopath.”
Austrian-born Hitler was starting to see again when he received news of Germany’s surrender. The knowledge that his beloved adopted country had been defeated was more than he could bear, and he temporarily lost his sight again.
He recovered by the end of November. Without any job prospects, he decided to remain in the army, originally working as a guard at a prisoner-of-war camp. By spring 1919, he was a V-Mann, an informant designed to keep track of anti-German and anti-Bolshevik sentiments brewing within the army. In the autumn, he was ordered to attend a meeting of one of the countless new political parties that were sprouting up in Munich like mushrooms. The group was the German Workers’ Party, and although Hitler agreed with many of their patriotic principles, he discovered something even more important when he became involved with its members—he had a gift for public speaking.
This organization morphed into the National Sociali
st German Workers’ [Nazi] Party, and Hitler easily maneuvered himself to become its new leader. The real putsch went down as follows: Hitler decided the fledgling party was ready to overthrow Munich’s government, Nazis stormed the Bürgerbräukeller, and took the city’s top three leaders hostage. By the next morning, state police troops and National Defense soldiers had been mobilized, and the would-be putschists faced imminent arrest.
In an effort to go down swinging, they marched across the city to rescue Ernst Röhm and his men, who had taken control of the Reichswehr (National Defense) building during the night but were now surrounded. Unfortunately for the Nazis, they took a wrong turn down the Residenzstrasse and marched directly into a waiting cadre of state police troopers. To this day, no one knows who fired the first shot. A furious, thirty-second gun battle ensued, leaving four policemen and fourteen Nazis dead (sixteen in this book because of the fictional additions Klaus Müller and Lars Dearstyne).
Right before the shootout, Hitler had linked arms with his comrade Max Scheubner-Richter, who was one of the first to die. As Scheubner-Richter collapsed, he pulled Hitler down with him. Simultaneously, Hitler’s personal bodyguard, Ulrich Graf, flung his body in front of his leader’s, shielding him from the bullets, then yanked him down to a safer position on the ground, dislocating Hitler’s shoulder in the process. For the purposes of my story, Gretchen’s father appears to assume Graf’s lifesaving role. In real life, Graf was grievously wounded, but survived.
A couple of Nazis hustled Hitler into a getaway car, and they rushed to Ernst Hanfstaengl’s country house in nearby Uffing, where the future Führer was arrested a few days later. He was convicted of high treason and sentenced to serve five years in Landsberg Prison, where he wrote his autobiography/political manifesto Mein Kampf. After a mere nine months, a sympathetic judiciary let him out, although they banned him from public speaking for an additional three years. His political career should have been over.
But, as was often the case with Adolf Hitler, what should have been the end was only the start of a new chapter.
Although many historians have recounted his life in minute detail, there is little consensus on his personality. Some believe he was simply evil. Others think he was mentally ill, or a misguided monster who was convinced that wiping out the world’s Jewish population was right and just. Still others portray Hitler as a fraud, someone who had decided that creating an enemy was the best way to consolidate his power base and catapult himself into office. For readers who’d like to learn more about Hitler, I recommend the biographies by Alan Bullock, Joachim Fest, John Toland, and especially Ian Kershaw, whose three-volume biography of Hitler is nothing short of masterly.
The Munich Post was run by heroic journalists. Their experiences inspired me to create Daniel, who loves the truth and seeks it as aggressively and bravely as they did. These reporters—notably Edmund Goldschagg, Erhard Auer, Julius Zerfass, and editor Martin Gruber—spent the 1920s and early ’30s investigating Hitler and the Nazi Party. In their eyes, he was a gangster determined to seize power and destroy the Jewish population.
In 1931, the paper broke the stories about the Nazis’ death squad known as Cell G and their eventual plan for the Jews. Everything that Gretchen and Daniel overhear in a cigarette house was reported in a Munich Post article published in December 1931, including Hitler’s insistence on secrecy because he feared his plan would have a negative effect on Germany’s relations with other countries. If you’re interested in learning more about the Munich Post, anti-Nazi journalist Fritz Gerlich, or various theories about Hitler’s personality, read Ron Rosenbaum’s excellent and insightful Explaining Hitler (Random House, 1998; Harper Perennial, 1999).
For those who’d like to know about the real people who appeared in this book, here’s a brief roundup of their lives until 1933, when Hitler became chancellor and the forthcoming sequel to Prisoner of Night and Fog begins.
Angela “Geli” Raubal, Hitler’s half niece, is often referred to as the only love of his life.. Although her death was classified as a suicide, inconsistencies in the story have fueled dozens of conspiracy theories over the years. She was buried at the Central Cemetery in Vienna. Hitler kept her bedroom as a shrine, and on the anniversary of her death, he would sit in there alone for hours.
Eva Braun was a seventeen-year-old camera apprentice in Heinrich Hoffmann’s studio when she first met Hitler in 1929. Although they flirted and dated occasionally for two years, she didn’t become his mistress until a few months after Geli’s death.
Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl came from prominent German and American families. During the 1920s and early ’30s, he helped the Nazi Party in many ways, lending money and introducing Hitler to members of high society. Eventually, he became the Party’s foreign press chief.
Max Amann, also known as “Hitler’s business dwarf” and personal banker, benefited more financially from the Third Reich than any other person. Under his guidance, Eher Verlag, the Nazi publishing house, grew to gargantuan proportions, and Amann became a millionaire. After the war, he was arrested by the Allies and stripped of his personal fortune. He died in Munich in 1957.
Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s personal secretary, became the deputy Führer. During World War Two, he secretly flew his own airplane to England, intending to speak with Prime Minister Winston Churchill about the possibility of a truce. Instead he crash-landed in Scotland and was promptly captured. After the war, he was sentenced to life imprisonment and incarcerated in Spandau Prison, a facility reserved for Nazi war criminals. He died in 1987.
Ernst Röhm, the “machine gun king of Munich” and head of the SA, first met Hitler during World War One. He was executed on Hitler’s orders in July 1934 during the “Night of the Long Knives,” an attempt by Hitler and his top lieutenants to clean out the unruly and unpredictable SA troops.
Heinrich Hoffmann was a respected photographer who joined the Nazi Party in its early days. After the war, he was arrested by the Allies and served four years for war profiteering. His daughter Henriette, nicknamed “Henny,” was a particular favorite of Hitler’s; she married Nazi youth leader Baldur von Schirach in 1932.
For those wondering about the identities of the men who marched with Hitler in the front line before gunfire ended their disastrous putsch, they were Erich von Ludendorff, a famous general who later severed his ties with the Nazi Party; Hermann Göring, an ace World War One pilot who became the second-most-powerful leader in Nazi Germany; Hermann Kriebel, a retired lieutenant colonel, who remained in minor political posts under the Nazi regime; Ulrich Graf, Hitler’s bodyguard; and Max Scheubner-Richter, an early leading Nazi.
The unidentified men convened for a top-level meeting in Hitler’s apartment after the discovery of Geli’s body were Henny’s future husband, Baldur von Schirach, Nazi youth leader and later Reich governor of Vienna who spent twenty years in Spandau Prison for war crimes, and Gregor Strasser, a pharmacist and early prominent Nazi who frequently clashed with Hitler. Strasser was killed during the Night of the Long Knives, on Hitler’s orders. Hitler’s unnamed chauffeur was Julius Schreck, who died of meningitis in 1936.
Fritz Gerlich was a conservative journalist who often tangled with Hitler during the tumultuous 1920s. In 1932, he assumed leadership of a weekly newspaper he renamed Der Gerade Weg (The Straight Path), and wrote many articles condemning Nazism, anti-Semitism, and Communism.
Edmund Forster, the neurologist who treated and diagnosed Hitler at the end of World War One, later became chair of the Psychiatry Department and director of the Neurological Clinic at Greisfwald University. In 1933, about eight months after Hitler became chancellor, Forster was denounced by Nazi coworkers as a Communist, a criminal, and a “Jew lover.” He was forced to resign. A week later, he was found dead in his home, shot through the head. His death was ruled a suicide.
Dr. Eduard Bloch, who treated Hitler’s mother for breast cancer, remained at his medical practice in Austria until 1938. He emigrated to the United States, settlin
g in New York City, and later admitted that Hitler had granted him special favors because of their past relationship.
The ideas Hitler expresses in Prisoner of Night and Fog are based on things he said in real life, and the talk he gives in Osteria Bavaria touches upon themes he discussed in speeches early in his career. The idea for this book’s title came from the infamous “Night and Fog” decree of 1941, which permitted Nazis to arrest resistance agents in occupied countries and bring them immediately to special courts in Germany, circumventing due process and procedures for treatment of prisoners. In essence, Nazis could spirit away their enemies into “the night and the fog,” just as the supernatural being abducts the boy in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s famous literary ballad “Der Erlkönig.”
Now that you’re caught up, I’ll meet you again in 1933, five weeks after a certain Austrian politician has been named Germany’s newest chancellor. . . .
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Select Bibliography for
Prisoner of Night and Fog
“Adolf Hitler, Millionaire.” Ken. March 9, 1939: 28.
Bartoletti, Susan Campbell. Hitler Youth: Growing up in Hitler’s Shadow. New York: Scholastic, 2005.
Brown, Cyril. “Hitler Organization Declared Illegal.” New York Times: March 17, 1923: 2–3.
Bullock, Alan. Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
Bytwerk, Randall L. Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious Anti-Semitic Newspaper Der Stürme. New York: Cooper Square Press, 1983, 2001.
Evans, Richard J. The Coming of the Third Reich. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Fest, Joachim C. Hitler. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1974.