Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke

  Back outside, they waited by the lane for the taxi that the butler had called for them, to take them to the train station so they could return to Oxford. Daniel’s smile slipped away. “I’m not asking you to come to London with me—I know you want to finish your schooling, and you deserve to live with a family that loves you. But . . . do you think . . . someday . . .” He trailed off, uncertain.

  She stepped closer to him. Their quick breathing and the far-off hum of bumblebees and braying goats filled her ears. But everything fell away when she put her hands on his shoulders, feeling the corded muscle of his right, the sharp ridge of his left, two of the many parts of him that she loved so much.

  “You’re worth waiting for,” she said. “London’s only sixty miles from Oxford. You can visit on your days off, and I’ll come on school holidays. It won’t be long before I graduate. London has loads of excellent universities, and I’m sure I’d like living there, too. I can’t stay with the Whitestones all my life,” she said when his eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Sooner or later, I have to make my own way. And I want it to be with you. Forever.”

  He traced her lips with his finger. “Forever,” he murmured, smiling. “You know I can’t give you that. But I promise I’ll love you for that long.”

  “Sounds perfect to me.”

  She stood in his arms under the shade of a poplar tree, letting her thoughts turn to her father and brother, becoming part of the earth. Her mother, alone in the marshlands; Eva, dead-eyed in the park; and Geli, lifeless on her bedroom floor. All of them lost because of Hitler. She would never stop mourning her family or wondering what sort of man her father truly had been. But she had made her own choices. She had wanted to love, and that had made all the difference.

  Daniel leaned down, pressing his lips lightly on hers. She kissed him back, tasting the warm honey of his mouth. Her Daniel, straightforward and passionate, as clear as sunlight on water, nothing like the misted corridors of Hitler’s mind. As they kissed, she couldn’t help but remember how much she had once wanted to hate him. The first time they’d met, he’d seen her defend a Jewish man from her brother and his comrade, and she had been terrified that word of her traitorous actions would reach Hitler. She had been so afraid that the loss of Hitler’s friendship would crush her; that it would end everything in her life that she had thought was good and true. Now, as she pulled back from Daniel and smiled at him, she knew it hadn’t been the end.

  It had only been the beginning.

  Author’s Note

  Conspiracy of Blood and Smoke is a blend of fact and fiction. Although Gretchen and Daniel, their families, the Whitestones, the Schultz brothers, Monika Junge, Iron Fist Friedrich, and the Ringverein members are fictitious, the other characters were real people and the story revolves around real events. Please note that this section contains several spoilers, so read no further if you haven’t finished the book!

  The Reichstag fire is one of the most mysterious events in Nazi history. For the next thirty years, many people believed it was the result of either a Nazi or a Communist conspiracy. It wasn’t until Fritz Tobias’s groundbreaking and meticulously researched book, The Reichstag Fire, came out in the early 1960s that opinions began to change. Today it is commonly believed that a single man was responsible for the terrorist attack.

  The bare facts are these: On February 27, 1933, a twenty-four-year-old half-blind Communist Dutchman named Marinus van der Lubbe set fire to the Reichstag. He was arrested on the scene and confessed. Hitler took advantage of the ensuing panic to convince President Hindenburg to suspend major civil liberties. On March 23, the Reichstag passed the Enabling Act, effectively voting itself out of existence. Dictatorial power now lay in Hitler’s grasp.

  In late 1933, van der Lubbe went on trial. Reporters from around the globe flocked to the highly publicized event. The Dutchman was found guilty of arson. Four other Communists who had later been arrested were all acquitted, fueling many people’s suspicions about the fire’s origins. Today the prevailing opinion is that the additional men were innocent and had been framed by the Nazis in an attempt to make the fire look like a Communist scheme. On January 10, 1934, van der Lubbe was executed by guillotine. As German tradition of the time demanded, his executioner wore a top hat, evening dress, and white gloves.

  The secret passages in this book really existed. The underground tunnel connecting Göring’s palace with the Reichstag became a source of embarrassment to the Nazis—for years afterward, the rumor persisted that Göring had sent a group of SA men through it to set the fire. The passageway running from the Chancellery’s attic to the Hotel Adlon was walled up when Hitler had his new home renovated in the mid-1930s.

  Hindenburg died during the summer of 1934. Hitler rolled the offices of president and chancellor into one and became known as the “Führer.” He never repealed the Enabling Act, so technically Germany operated under a state of emergency throughout the Nazi regime.

  The attack on Daniel’s cousin was inspired by real events. Those who failed to salute Nazi parades were often beaten in retaliation. Foreigners, unaware of the custom, were most at risk. In 1933 alone, more than a dozen Americans were attacked, and the US State Department considered issuing a travel advisory warning Americans not to visit Germany.

  One of the reasons for the Nazis’ electoral successes, which is largely unknown today, was their tough stance on organized crime. Since criminal rates had skyrocketed after the end of World War One, Hitler’s pledge to wipe out the Ringvereine was welcomed by many voters. In November 1933, Göring’s Prussian Ministry of the Interior enacted a decree for “the application of preventive police detention of professional criminals.” Scores of Ringverein men were arrested and placed in concentration camps. The Nazis rationalized the roundups by claiming that Ringverein men were Untermenschen, subhumans whose criminality was part of their very natures. Although there were occasional criminal cases involving Ringvereine throughout the 1930s, the organizations were mostly stamped out during the first years of Hitler’s rule. The fictional Schweigen Ringverein in this book is based on several real-life Rings, including the notorious gangs Immertreu (Ever Loyal) and Felsenfest (Rock Solid).

  The cellar where Daniel is held by the SA is based on the makeshift torture centers that brownshirts set up in the basements of recently captured train union offices. The abandoned powder factory, which Gretchen sees when hiking through the Dachau marshlands, later became the site of the Nazis’ first concentration camp. Approximately two hundred Communist, Reichsbanner, and Socialist leaders were the camp’s first inmates when it opened in late March 1933. The Reichsbanner was a paramilitary force composed of members of various political parties. Originally, the camp was overseen by a detachment of policemen from Munich. In April, however, Heinrich Himmler placed the camp under SS control. A sadistic reign of terror ensued. Dachau operated until the end of World War Two and was used primarily for political prisoners.

  The “toga boy” incident in Hitler’s childhood is true. In a rare moment of candor, Hitler himself told the story to Hanfstaengl’s wife. He really did eat swastika-stamped candies, called Lutschbonbons, like the ones Gretchen sees on his desk. He could shoot snowballs apart, too, an ability he once demonstrated in front of an astonished foreign correspondent. Because he kept thwarting death, he believed he was protected by divine providence, just as he tells Gretchen during the scene in his office. There were at least forty-six known attempts on his life, but it’s possible there were many more. The ideas he expresses in this book are based on his early speeches and his autobiography Mein Kampf.

  Eva Braun remained Hitler’s mistress until the end of her life. She attempted suicide at least three times, the first being the incident she describes in this book to Gretchen. Her final try was successful. On April 30, 1945, one day after Hitler and Eva were married, knowing Germany’s surrender was inevitable, they committed suicide together. He shot himself through the head and she took cyanide. Hitler had been terrified that his bod
y would be desecrated, as Benito Mussolini’s had been, and had ordered their corpses to be burned. His adjutants carried out his final request. Hitler’s and Eva’s bodies smoldered in the Reich Chancellery garden as Russian tanks rolled into Berlin.

  Hermann Göring, the Prussian Minister of the Interior, really did rewrite his assistant’s official report of the Reichstag fire and distribute his own version to news agencies. What Gretchen read in the paper hidden within the Reichstag—and the changes Göring had made in blue pencil—are based on the real-life initial press communiqué. For the purposes of my story, however, Göring berated his assistant, Martin Sommerfeldt, in the Session Chamber, not in his Prussian Ministry Office, where the dressing-down actually took place.

  Göring’s one-of-a-kind car, a gray Mercedes with scarlet seats, was given to him by Hitler during the spring of 1931. In 1935, Göring married an actress, Emmy Sonnemann, in a lavish ceremony. Hitler served as the best man. During World War Two, Göring commanded the Luftwaffe, or air force. Their initial successes were so stunning that Hitler rewarded Göring with the title of “Reich Marshal.” Göring eventually became the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany.

  After Germany’s surrender, he gave himself up to the Allies. He became “defendant number one” during the trials of major Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg. He was found guilty of the four indictments against him, including war crimes and crimes against humanity, and was scheduled to die by hanging. On October 15, 1946, hours before his execution, Göring committed suicide by taking cyanide. To this day, no one knows exactly how he got the poison capsule. Once the other defendants were executed, all eleven bodies were burned in a Munich crematorium in the presence of American, British, French, and Russian officers. The ashes were poured into the dirt of an unidentified country lane, to prevent the men’s graves from becoming shrines.

  Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, the Nazi Party’s foreign press chief, really was Göring’s palace guest during this story’s time frame. He eventually fell from favor. In 1937, Göring ordered Hanfstaengl parachuted into Spain, in an area where a civil war was taking place. Hanfstaengl believed Göring’s command was a death sentence, although Göring later maintained it was a practical joke. Hanfstaengl fled from Germany in disguise, settling in England until war broke out and he was interned as an enemy alien. In 1941, he was sent to a camp in Canada and offered his services to his old college friend from Harvard, American president Franklin Delano Roosevelt. For the rest of the war, Hanfstaengl was kept in secret in a country house in northern Virginia, where he wrote reports for the American government on the inner workings of the Nazi regime. After the war, he resettled in Germany. He died in 1975.

  Ernst Gennat, the Detective Chief Superintendent of Berlin’s Homicide Division, was one of the most famous detectives in German history. He revolutionized forensic science and created the world’s first crime car, Gennat’s Toboggan. In all, Gennat solved 298 murders and coined the phrase “serial murderer.” He regularly attended gangsters’ balls. He never joined the Nazi Party, and he died in 1939.

  Fritz Gerlich, a courageous anti-Nazi journalist, was personally arrested on March 9, 1933, by Max Amann, the head of the Nazi publishing business. For several months, Gerlich was kept in “protective custody” in a Munich jail. He was later sent to the concentration camp at Dachau, where he was murdered during the summer of 1934. The only notification his widow received of his death was his pair of trademark round spectacles, splattered with blood, in the mail.

  Many Munich Post reporters were also taken into custody during the mass arrests of March 9, including Edmund Goldschagg, a young reporter nicknamed the “Prussian Nightingale” for his elegant writing style. He was later drafted into the army and eventually saved the life of a Jewish woman during World War Two. Goldschagg and my father, who was a reporter when he was a young man, inspired me to create the character of Daniel Cohen.

  Sefton “Tom” Delmer, the foreign correspondent for a British newspaper, got into the burning Reichstag by walking in with Hitler’s retinue. He witnessed Hitler’s reaction to the fire, including overhearing Hitler’s fervent wish that the blaze was the work of a Communist conspiracy. During the war, Delmer relocated to England. There he engaged in a series of “black radio” programs meant as a form of psychological warfare against Germany. As a result, he earned a top spot on the Nazis’ list of people to be arrested and handed over to the Gestapo, if Germany invaded England.

  Winston Churchill, the “benchwarmer” politician and writer, was largely viewed as a has-been in 1933. In April, he delivered a speech before the House of Commons, warning of the possibility of Jewish persecution and pogroms in Germany. Few people wanted to listen to him. Convinced that Hitler was dangerous, Churchill assembled a group of experts who advised him on the shifting situation in Germany throughout the 1930s.

  In 1940, Churchill became Britain’s prime minister. He later said he felt an overwhelming sense of relief, because now he could finally begin to do the work that had to be done to defeat Hitler. The two men never met but despised each other. They came within yards of each other on a World War One battlefield, and in 1932, Hanfstaengl tried to arrange a meeting between them in Munich that never came off after Churchill questioned Hitler’s hatred for the Jews.

  Churchill served as prime minister for the majority of World War Two. His refusal of a truce with Germany enraged Hitler, who had wanted to avoid fighting a war on two fronts. Churchill’s brave, energetic, and optimistic leadership during the war has become legendary. In the 1950s, he served a second term as prime minister. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature and is the first person to have been made an honorary citizen of the United States. Upon his death in 1965, Queen Elizabeth II granted him the honor of a state funeral. The “has-been” who endured years of political exile is now widely regarded as one of the greatest leaders of the twentieth century.

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