‘Whom must we primarily serve?’
‘Our people and our Führer, Adolf Hitler.’
‘Why do we obey?’
‘From inner conviction, from belief in Germany, in the Führer, in the Movement and the SS, and from loyalty.’
‘Good!’ The instructor nodded. ‘Good. Reassemble in thirty-five minutes on the south sports field. Jost: stay behind. The rest of you: dismissed!’
With their cropped hair and their loose-fitting light-grey drill uniforms, the class of SS cadets looked like convicts. They filed out noisily, with a scraping of chairs and a stamping of boots on the rough wooden floor. A large portrait of the late Heinrich Himmler smiled down on them, benevolently. Jost looked forlorn, standing to attention, alone in the centre of the classroom. Some of the other cadets gave him curious glances as they left. It had to be Jost, you could see them thinking. Jost: the queer, the loner, always the odd one out. He might well be due another beating in the barracks tonight.
The instructor nodded towards the back of the classroom. ‘You have a visitor.’
March was leaning against a radiator, arms folded, watching. ‘Hello again, Jost,’ he said.
They walked across the vast parade ground. In one corner, a batch of new recruits was being harangued by an SS Hauptscharführer. In another, a hundred youths in black tracksuits stretched, twisted and touched their toes in perfect obedience to shouted commands. Meeting Jost here reminded March of visiting prisoners in jail. The same institutionalised smell, of polish and disinfectant and boiled food. The same ugly concrete blocks of buildings. The same high walls and patrols of guards. Like a KZ, the Sepp Dietrich Academy was both huge and claustrophobic; an entirely self-enclosed world.
‘Can we go somewhere private?’ asked March.
Jost gave him a contemptuous look. ‘There is no privacy here. That’s the point.’ They took a few more paces. ‘I suppose we could try the barracks. Everyone else is eating.’
They turned, and Jost led the way into a low, grey-painted building. Inside, it was gloomy, with a strong smell of male sweat. There must have been a hundred beds, laid out in four rows. Jost had guessed correctly: it was deserted. His bed was two-thirds of the way down, in the centre. March sat on the coarse brown blanket and offered Jost a cigarette.
‘It’s not allowed in here.’
March waved the packet at him. ‘Go ahead. Say I ordered you.’
Jost took it, gratefully. He knelt, opened the metal locker beside the bed, and began searching for something to use as an ashtray. As the door hung open, March could see inside: a pile of paperbacks, magazines, a framed photograph.
‘May I?’
Jost shrugged. ‘Sure.’
March picked up the photograph. A family group, it reminded him of the picture of the Weisses. Father in an SS uniform. Shy-looking mother in a hat. Daughter: a pretty girl with blonde plaits; fourteen, maybe. And Jost himself: fat-cheeked and smiling, barely recognisable as the harrowed, cropped figure now kneeling on the stone barracks floor.
Jost said: ‘Changed, haven’t I?’
March was shocked, and tried to hide it. ‘Your sister?’ he asked.
‘She’s still at school.’
‘And your father?’
‘He runs an engineering business in Dresden now. He was one of the first into Russia in ‘41. Hence the uniform.’
March peered closely at the stern figure. ‘Isn’t he wearing the Knight’s Cross?’ It was the highest decoration for bravery.
‘Oh yes,’ said Jost. ‘An authentic war hero.’ He took the photograph and replaced it in the locker. ‘What about your father?’
‘He was in the Imperial Navy,’ said March. ‘He was wounded in the First War. Never properly recovered.’
‘How old were you when he died?’
‘Seven.’
‘Do you still think about him?’
‘Every day.’
‘Did you go into the Navy?’
‘Almost. I was in the U-boat service.’
Jost shook his head slowly. His pale face had flushed pink. ‘We all follow our fathers, don’t we?’
‘Most of us, maybe. Not all.’
They smoked in silence for a while. Outside, March could hear the physical training session still in progress. ‘One, two, three . . . One, two, three . . .’
‘These people,’ said Jost, and shook his head. ‘There’s a poem by Erich Kästner – “Marschliedchen”.’ He closed his eyes and recited:
‘You love hatred and want to measure the world against it.
You throw food to the beast in man,
That it may grow, the beast deep within you!
Let the beast in man devour man.’
The young man’s sudden passion made March uncomfortable. ‘When was that written?’
‘1932.’
‘I don’t know it.’
‘You wouldn’t. It’s banned.’
There was a silence, then March said: ‘We now know the identity of the body you discovered. Doctor Josef Buhler. An official of the General Government. An SS-Brigadeführer.’
‘Oh God.’ Jost rested his head in his hands.
‘It has become a more serious matter, you see. Before coming to you, I checked with the sentries’ office at the main gate. They have a record that you left the barracks at five-thirty yesterday morning, as usual. So the times in your statement make no sense.’
Jost kept his face covered. The cigarette was burning down between his fingers. March leaned forward, took it, and stubbed it out. He stood.
‘Watch,’ he said. Jost looked up and March began jogging on the spot.
‘This is you, yesterday, right?’ March made a show of exhaustion, puffing out his cheeks, wiping his brow with his forearms. Despite himself, Jost smiled. ‘Good,’ said March. He continued jogging. ‘Now you’re thinking about some book, or how awful your life is, when you come through the woods and on to the path by the lake. It’s pissing with rain and the light’s not good, but off to your left you see something . . .’
March turned his head. Jost was watching him intently.
‘. . . Whatever it is, it’s not the body . . .’
‘But . . .’
March stopped and pointed at Jost. ‘Don’t dig yourself any deeper into the shit, is my advice. Two hours ago I went back and checked the place where the corpse was found – there’s no way you could have seen it from the road.’
He resumed jogging. ‘So: you see something, but you don’t stop. You run past. But being a conscientious fellow, five minutes up the road you decide you had better go back for a second look. And then you discover the body. And only then do you call the cops.’
He grasped Jost’s hands and pulled him to his feet. ‘Run with me,’ he commanded.
‘I can’t . . .’
‘Run!’
Jost broke into an unwilling shuffle. Their feet clattered on the flagstones.
‘Now describe what you can see. You’re coming out of the woods and you’re on the lake path . . .’
‘Please . . .’
‘Tell me!’
‘I . . . I see . . . a car . . .’ Jost’s eyes were closed. ‘. . . Then three men . . . It’s raining fast, they have coats, hoods – like monks . . . Their heads are down . . . Coming up the slope from the lake . . . I . . . I’m scared . . . I cross the road and run up into the trees so they don’t see me . . .’
‘Go on.’
‘They get into the car and drive off . . . I wait, and then I come out of the woods and I find the body . . .’
‘You’ve missed something.’
‘No, I swear . . .’
‘You see a face. When they get into the car, you see a face.’
‘No . . .’
‘Tell me whose face it is, Jost. You can see it. You know it. Tell me.’
‘Globus!’ shouted Jost. ‘I see Globus.’
FOUR
he package he had taken from Buhler’s mailbox lay unopened on the front seat
next to him. Perhaps it was a bomb, thought March, as he started the Volkswagen. There had been a blitz of parcel bombs over the past few months, blowing off the hands and faces of half a dozen government officials. He might just make page three of the Tageblatt: ‘Investigator Dies in Mysterious Blast Outside Barracks’.
He drove around Schlachtensee until he found a delicatessen, where he bought a loaf of black bread, some Westphalian ham and a quarter-bottle of Scotch whisky. The sun still shone; the air was fresh. He pointed the car westwards, back towards the lakes. He was going to do something he had not done for years. He was going to have a picnic.
After Göring had been made Chief Reich Huntsman in 1934, there had been some attempt to lighten the Grunewald. Chestnut and linden, beech, birch and oak had all been planted. But the heart of it – as it had been a thousand years ago, when the plains of northern Europe were still forest – the heart remained the hilly woods of melancholy pine. From these forests, five centuries before Christ, the warring German tribes had emerged; and to these forests, twenty-five centuries later, mostly at weekends, in their campers and their trailers, the victorious German tribes returned. The Germans were a race of forest-dwellers. Make a clearing in your mind, if you liked; the trees just waited to reclaim it.
March parked and took his provisions and Buhler’s mail bomb, or whatever it was, and walked carefully up a steep path into the forest. Five minutes’ climbing brought him to a spot which commanded a clear view of the Havel and of the smoky blue slopes of trees, receding into the distance. The pines smelled strong and sweet in the warmth. Above his head, a large jet rumbled across the sky, making its approach to Berlin Airport. As it disappeared, the noise died, until at last the only sound was birdsong.
March did not want to open the parcel yet. It made him uneasy. So he sat on a large stone – no doubt casually deposited here by the municipal authorities for this very purpose – took a swig of whisky, and began to eat.
Of Odilo Globocnik—Globus—March knew little, and that only by reputation. His fortunes had swung like a weathercock over the past thirty years. An Austrian by birth, a builder by profession, he had become Party leader in Carinthia in the mid-1930s, and ruler of Vienna. Then there had been a period of disgrace, connected with illegal currency speculation, followed by a restoration, as a police chief in the General Government when the war started – he must have known Buhler there, thought March. At the end of the war, there had been a second fall to – where was it? – Trieste, he seemed to remember. But with Himmler’s death Globus had come back to Berlin, and now he held some unspecified position within the Gestapo, working directly for Heydrich.
That smashed and brutal face was unmistakable, and, despite the rain and the poor light, Jost had recognised it at once. A portrait of Globus hung in the Academy’s Hall of Fame, and Globus himself had delivered a lecture to the awestruck cadets – on the police structures of the Reich – only a few weeks earlier. No wonder Jost had been so frightened. He should have called the Orpo anonymously, and cleared out before they arrived. Better still, from his point of view, he should not have called them at all.
March finished his ham. He took the remains of the bread, broke it into pieces, and scattered the crumbs across the forest floor. Two blackbirds, which had watched him eat, emerged cautiously from the undergrowth and began pecking at them.
He took out the pocket diary. Standard issue to Party members, available in any stationers. Useful information at the beginning. The names of the Party hierarchy: government ministers, kommissariat bosses, gauleiters.
Public holidays: Day of National Reawakening, 30 January; Potsdam Day, 21 March; Führer’s birthday, 20 April; National Festival of the German People, 1 May . . .
Map of the Empire with railway journey times: Berlin–Rovno, sixteen hours; Berlin–Tiflis, twenty-seven hours; Berlin–Ufa, four days . . .
The diary itself was a week to two pages, the entries so sparse that at first March thought it was blank. He went through it carefully. There was a tiny cross against 7 March. For 1 April, Buhler had written ‘My sister’s birthday’. There was another cross against 9 April. On 11 April, he had noted ‘Stuckart/Luther, morning – 10’. Finally, on 13 April, the day before his death, Buhler had drawn another small cross. That was all.
March wrote down the dates in his notebook. He began a new page. The death of Josef Buhler. Solutions. One: the death was accidental, the Gestapo had learned of it some hours before the Kripo were informed, and Globus was merely inspecting the body when Jost passed by. Absurd.
Very well. Two: Buhler had been murdered by the Gestapo, and Globus had carried out the execution. Absurd again. The ‘Night and Fog’ order of 1941 was still in force. Buhler could have been bundled away quite legally to some secret death in a Gestapo cell, his property confiscated by the state. Who would have mourned him? Or questioned his disappearance?
And so, three: Buhler had been murdered by Globus, who had covered his tracks by declaring the death a matter of state security, and by taking over the investigation himself. But why had the Kripo been allowed to get involved at all? What was Globus’s motive? Why was Buhler’s body left in a public place?
March leaned back against the stone and closed his eyes. The sun on his face made the darkness blood red. A warm haze of whisky enveloped him.
He could not have been asleep more than half an hour, when he heard a rustle in the undergrowth beside him and felt something touch his sleeve. He was awake in an instant, in time to see the white tail and the hindquarters of a deer darting into the trees. A rural idyll, ten kilometres from the heart of the Reich! Either that, or the whisky. He shook his head and picked up the package.
Thick brown paper, neatly wrapped and taped. Indeed, professionally wrapped and taped. Crisp lines and sharp creases, an economy of materials used and effort expended. A paradigm of a parcel. No man March had ever met could have produced such an object – it must have been wrapped by a woman. Next, the postmark. Three Swiss stamps, showing tiny yellow flowers on a green background. Posted in Zürich at 1600 hours on 13.4.64. That was the day before yesterday.
He felt his palms begin to sweat as he unwrapped it with exaggerated care, first peeling off the tape and then slowly, centimetre by centimetre, folding back the paper. He lifted it fractionally. Inside was a box of chocolates.
Its lid showed flaxen-haired girls in red check dresses dancing around a maypole in a flowery meadow. Behind them, white-peaked against a fluorescent blue sky, rose the Alps. Overprinted in black gothic script was the legend: ‘Birthday Greetings to Our Beloved Führer, 1964’. But there was something odd about it. The box was too heavy just to contain chocolates.
He took out a penknife and cut round the cellophane cover. He set the box gently on the log. With his face turned away and his arm fully extended, he lifted the lid with the point of the blade. Inside, a mechanism began to whirr. Then this:
Love unspoken
Faith unbroken
All life through
Strings are playing
Hear them saying
‘I love you’
Now the echo answers
‘Say you’ll want me too’
All the world’s in love with love
And I love you
Only the tune, of course, not the words; but he knew them well enough. Standing alone on a hill in the Grunewald Forest, March listened as the box played the waltz-duet from Act Three of The Merry Widow.
FIVE
he streets on the way back into central Berlin seemed unnaturally quiet and when March reached Werderscher Markt he discovered the reason. A large noticeboard in the foyer announced there would be a government statement at four-thirty. Personnel were to assemble in the staff canteen. Attendance: compulsory. He was just in time.
They had developed a new theory at the Propaganda Ministry, that the best time to make big announcements was at the end of the working day. News was thus received communally, in a comradely spirit: there was no opportunity
for private scepticism or defeatism. Also, the broadcasts were always timed so that the workers went home slightly early – at four-fifty, say, rather than five – fostering a sense of contentment, subliminally associating the regime with good feelings. That was how it was these days. The snow-white Propaganda palace on Wilhelm Strasse employed more psychologists than journalists.
The Werderscher Markt staff were filing into the canteen: officers and clerks and typists and drivers, shoulder to shoulder in a living embodiment of the National Socialist ideal. The four television screens, one in each corner, were showing a map of the Reich with a swastika superimposed, accompanied by selections from Beethoven. Occasionally, a male announcer would break in excitedly: ‘People of Germany, prepare yourselves for an important statement!’ In the old days, on the radio, you got only the music. Progress again.
How many of these events could March remember? They stretched away behind him, islands in time. In ’38, he had been called out of his classroom to hear that German troops were entering Vienna and that Austria had returned to the Fatherland. The headmaster, who had been gassed in the First War, had wept on the stage of the little gymnasium, watched by a gaggle of uncomprehending boys.
In ʼ39, he had been at home with his mother in Hamburg. A Friday morning, 11 o’clock, the Führer’s speech relayed live from the Reichstag: ‘I am from now on just the first soldier of the German Reich. I have once more put on that uniform that was most sacred and dear to me. I will not take it off until victory is secured, or I will not survive the outcome.’ A thunder of applause. This time his mother had wept – a hum of misery as her body rocked backwards and forwards. March, seventeen, had looked away in shame, sought out the photograph of his father – splendid in the uniform of the Imperial German Navy – and he had thought: Thank God. War at last. Maybe now I will be able to live up to what you wanted.
He had been at sea for the next few broadcasts. Victory over Russia in the spring of ʼ43 – a triumph for the Führer’s strategic genius! The Wehrmacht summer offensive of the year before had cut Moscow off from the Caucasus, separating the Red armies from the Baku oilfields. Stalin’s war machine had simply ground to a halt for want of fuel.