Siegfried

  He thought back to the Falks. What they had told him was undoubtedly true, but how could it be true? How could Eva, after Siggi’s murder had been ordered, still become Mrs. Hitler and die with him? What was the necessity of that marriage? What was behind it, and what could have happened afterward? It was just as Falk had said: the answer could not be found by reflection.

  Maria’s question occurred to him again: why Nothingness had chosen Braunau of all places for Hitler’s birthplace. That “brown” constantly recurred afterward: the party headquarters in Munich was called the “Brown House,” the SA troopers were known as “brownshirts,” and finally Eva’s name was Braun, too. Because her family stayed so often on the Obersalzberg, Göring called the Berghof the “Braun house.” Brown did not occur in the spectrum; it was a shit color that was created when you smeared all the colors of the spectrum together on a palette—and that thought reminded him of something that explained everything seamlessly. In Dr. Wille’s clinic, the duty doctor noted of Nietzsche in the month of Hitler’s birth, “Often smears feces.—Wraps feces in paper, and places them in drawer.—Once rubs feces on leg like ointment.—Eats feces.”

  Suddenly he feels something terrible grab him by the throat and drag him with it, into sleep, through sleep, beyond sleep. . . .

  EIGHTEEN

  16.IV.45

  Arrived here yesterday after a dreadful journey—just to be bored out of my mind, it seems. There’s nothing to read, and to kill the time have sent for some paper, on which I might as well make these notes.

  The whole of Germany is smashed to pieces. Munich, Nuremberg, Dresden . . . all those magnificent towns look like glowing embers fresh from the stove. What is the point of it all? I had the Mercedes painted in camouflage colors, but once the driver and I still had to roll head over heels into a ditch, when an English fighter came at us with rattling machine guns. I didn’t even have time to grab the dogs. Berlin is a sorry sight. Everywhere ruins, fire, and stench, windows boarded up, long lines outside the shops, even longer lines of bodies on the pavements, here and there a deserter strung up from a lamppost, old women being pushed along in baby carriages, people clambering over the smoldering ruins trying to find something of their family or their possessions. That wonderful city! It looks more like a natural disaster than the work of human beings, but perhaps it comes down to the same thing in the end. It will take more than a hundred years to put right. We picked our way through the chaos of fire engines and ambulances and people at their wits’ end to the Chancellery, which had also taken a battering.

  In the garden, at the dark entrance to the bunker, I was met by my brother-in-law Fegelein, who took me down an endless wrought-iron spiral staircase to the lowest floor, at least fifty steps underground. It seems that a few days ago the news of Roosevelt’s death revived hope of a successful outcome; but I felt my arrival meant the beginning of the end—that I had come to die together with the Führer. But not just that. Before it is all over, I must and shall find out exactly what happened to Siggi, and why.

  Adi was glad to see me but ordered me to return immediately to the mountain. When I refused, he seemed to be moved; he stared at me for a moment and left it at that. There was chocolate in the corner of his mouth, which I wiped away with my handkerchief.

  17.IV.45

  Did not manage to speak to him alone today either. In the last few months, he has aged years, his hair is almost completely gray, he has a stoop, the eyes in his sallow face are extinguished, his voice is broken, his left arm has a tremor, and he drags one leg. I can scarcely imagine that this is the same man that I knew just a few years ago—but no one can stand all those worries. He even has grease spots on his tie and his uniform; in the past that would have been unthinkable. All day long he is in meetings with his generals, at least if Dr. Morell is not filling him with injections and pills. My arrival marked the start of the great Russian offensive, as if I had a premonition. The bombing raids seem to be over; Goebbels says that the British and Americans are obviously leaving it to the Russians to finish the job. They themselves have swung southward in the direction of the Obersalzberg; they talk of the “alpine fortress” and appear to think that a huge army of ten thousand fanatical National Socialists is hidden there, but that is nonsense; there is only a guard battalion. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of Russkies are descending on us, like a stream of lava from Vesuvius. Afterward there will be no more left of Berlin than of Pompeii.

  I had everything that was still usable in my suite in the Chancellery brought down and have done my best to make my three stuffy rooms as cheerful as possible, for Stasi and Negus, too. That is not very easy, with all the concrete and no daylight, but it doesn’t matter; it can’t last much longer. I’m perfectly happy to be so close to my poor Adi. Everyone—Göring, Himmler, Ribbentrop, all of them—except Goebbels—is trying to persuade him to leave Berlin while it is still possible, to continue the fight at the Obersalzberg, or if need be escape to the Middle East; but they don’t know him. As far as he is concerned, everyone can go, but he is staying here. He is still the only one who stands firm and thinks of his place in history.

  In the afternoon went with Speer to the last concert of the Berlin Philharmonic. I wore my beautiful silver-fox coat, probably for the last time. Far away in the east, one could already hear the faint rumble of the approaching front. In the car he said that he had replaced the opening piece, Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, with the finale of Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods, the burning Valhalla in which the gods die. He also told me that he had had the files of the musicians removed from the recruiting offices of the Home Guard. Goebbels thought that they should go under, too. Since posterity had no right to that brilliant orchestra. And if the Führer found out? I asked. I should remind him, he said without looking at me, that in the past he had used the same ruse to exempt artists with whom he was friendly from military service. Speer is the only one who is not frightened of the Chief like everyone else, and the Chief has no answer to that. A little while ago, Adi seems to have issued his so-called Nero order, of scorched earth: everything necessary for the survival of the German people must be destroyed—all industries, harbors, railways, food supplies, population registers—everything necessary to live on even under the most primitive conditions, since it had proved inferior to the people from the east and hence forfeited its right to exist. I hear from the secretaries that Speer afterward traveled all around Germany countermanding the order and that he also told Hitler. Anyone else would have been shot immediately for even a fraction of such sabotage, but he was not even dismissed. It’s a miracle. He is a hero and without doubt the best of the whole bunch, which makes the Chief’s life a misery. I don’t know, in some way they are in love with each other, those two—perhaps that is the bond that I have with Speer: we are a kind of trinity. Sometimes I think Adi loves him even more than me. I considered whether I should tell Speer: that I had recently had experience of administrative fraud myself, but then Siggi would have to be mentioned, and I didn’t dare.

  With our coats on, the lamps on the music stands as the only illumination, we listened to the music in the packed Beethoven Hall, while we knew that doom was approaching closer minute by minute. I had the impression that Speer was enjoying himself in that macabre situation; all through the concert, a superior smile played around his mouth. At the end Hitler Youth cadets stood at the exit distributing free cyanide capsules.

  In bed thought for a long time of Siggi.

  18.IV.45

  Overwrought situation down here with increasingly desperate generals walking in and out who’ve lost their army and who pull themselves together completely when the Führer has promised them a new army, which of course does not even exist, although he would really only like to talk about food, his ailments, and the evil of the world in which everyone betrays him, except for Blondi and me. I have no idea what is really going on, and, to tell the truth, I couldn’t care less; but meanwhile I’m even more bored than in the sanatorium. So to p
ass the days I’m going to write down what has happened to me in the last few months and what I know. No one will ever read it, because I shall dispose of it in good time. Just imagine if the Russians got hold of it.

  That day in September, when I said good-bye to Siggi at the Berghof, I was not taken anywhere near Salzburg to fly to the Führer in the Wolf ’s Lair; we went in a completely different direction. When I asked the Gestapo man next to the driver the meaning of this, I was given no answer and realized that something ominous was going on. I was delivered to a kind of sanatorium in Bad Tölz behind high fences. It was clear to me that I must remain very calm now and not start shouting hysterically that I was the Führer’s girlfriend and that I was the mother of his child, since that would only strengthen people in their conviction that I was mad. I was allowed to keep the dogs with me, so clearly people were after all aware that I wasn’t just any patient. Of course I wanted to call Adi at once, but telephoning was forbidden.

  In order to guard me, the Gestapo officer also remained in the institution; he had obviously been ordered not to exchange a word with me. Because I was confined to my room, he took Stasi and Negus for a walk a couple of times a day. The staff were very friendly, the food was fine, but no one told me anything. Even though I knew that Siggi was in good hands with Julia and Ullrich, I still worried about him. It was as though I were dreaming for the month I was imprisoned there. I looked at old fashion magazines or listened to the radio, which broadcast one depressing item of news after another. After just a few days, I gave up trying to find out what I had done wrong; the only thing I could think of was that for some reason I must now pay the price for the fact that I had found my way into the sinister regions of absolute power.

  Then I was suddenly called to the phone in the office of the director, who left. Bormann on the line, and a little later the Chief’s voice:

  “Tschapperl! It’s all been a misunderstanding! You’ll be picked up this very afternoon and taken to the Berghof. But prepare yourself for some terrible news. There’s been an accident. Siggi is dead.”

  It was as if the sun had suddenly risen and immediately afterward night had fallen. Looking back, I think I lost consciousness for a few seconds. As I was about to say something, he immediately interrupted me:

  “Don’t ask any more questions. It’s terrible for me, too, but recently so many things have been terrible, and there are more to come. The world is a vale of tears. And remember not to behave at the Berghof like a mother who has lost her child.”

  A vale of tears, yes . . . but I could not cry. At the Berghof I was told about the so-called accident on the firing range, which I didn’t believe a word of; there was a lot more behind it, because why had I been arrested myself ? And that good-hearted Ullrich Falk, how could he have done that? Had he been paid? And had Julia accepted that? That was simply unthinkable! I couldn’t ask them; in the meantime they had been transferred. Mittlstrasser maintained that he did not know where. The same afternoon I asked him if he would show me Siggi’s grave, but in the cemetery of Berchtesgaden, his mouth fell open in astonishment. He pointed to the ground and said, “It was here, Miss Braun, right here, I’m sure of it. There was going to be a headstone.” Was he pretending? Had there ever been a grave? Was Siggi still alive, and was he with Ullrich and Julia? No, I could see that his astonishment was genuine. We went to the administrator of the cemetery, but there was no Siegfried Falk to be found in his card index either. I said nothing. Of course they had dug him up and burned him. He must never have existed.

  19.IV.45

  Gradually I am beginning to despair of ever talking through the drama of our Siggi with Adi. How long have we left to live? A week? Two weeks? Perhaps that’s precisely why there’s no point, and perhaps he’s avoiding it, but while we’re still alive, we’re not yet dead!

  When Sergeant Major Tornow, Adolf’s dog handler, went for a walk early this morning with Blondi and his own dachshund Schlumpi through the Tiergarten—that is, the bare expanse full of charred stumps that is left of it—I decided to join him with Stasi and Negus, even though Adi doesn’t want me to go outside anymore. But he was still asleep; at most he would hear about it afterward from Rattenhuber, who is responsible for his personal security. At first Blondi was reluctant, not wanting to abandon her litter of puppies. Because of the smoke and stench and the dust of the dying city, it was scarcely a relief after the stale atmosphere of the bunker. I was struck by the blueness of the light outside, after the dead, unmoving electric light down below. At the Brandenburg Gate, Hotel Adlon was on fire, but at last I could smoke a cigarette again. I had no need to be frightened, since no one knows me in Germany; one day that will be different. The pounding of the front had come closer still; it sounded like approaching thunder, or no, like the growling of a prehistoric beast crawling toward us destroying everything in its path. The excursion did not last long; grenades began to explode, and we had to retreat with the dogs.

  So now I’m fifteen yards underground again, and I must admit that I now feel more at home down here than outside. I’ll go on from where I got to yesterday.

  The evening of the same day, I phoned my parents and, despite the air-raid alarm, had myself driven to Munich. There I was finally put in the picture. They had been terrified when they had heard nothing from me for weeks and could not make contact with the Wolf ’s Lair. A few days after I had been taken to Bad Tölz, a Gestapo officer appeared and took my mother to headquarters. There she was told that she, Franziska Kronburger, had a Jewish grandmother and therefore was not 100 percent racially pure. That had emerged from the records of the Registry Office in Geiselhöring in Oberpfalz.

  My parents were astounded, but I could not tell them what I immediately thought: that it was of course a plot, designed to discredit me and hence Siggi. So I was not racially pure, and neither was Siggi. But all they knew was that Siggi was the son of the Falks, who had died in a tragic accident. Meanwhile the Führer’s son turned out to have Jewish blood! All hell had let loose! I know him, I know the rage he must have flown into when he received that news—

  (The gremlins are here again: suddenly the light went out. I thought the end had come; the darkness was as complete as in a womb. I stayed sitting motionless with the pen in my hand and listened to the commotion in the corridor and in Adi’s rooms next door. When Linge appeared with a pocket torch and a pack of candles, the light came back on.)

  Adolf Hitler the father of a child contaminated with Jewish blood! That was the worst thing that could have possibly happened to him, and he did not hesitate for a moment in taking action. Gretl and her Fegelein now threatened to be caught up in the tragedy. Poor Gretl, she was three months pregnant—also with a non-pure-Aryan child. But was it all true? Mama came from a strict Catholic country family, and I myself had been educated by nuns at a convent school; we knew nothing about any Jews in the family. Papa tried desperately to reach the Chief, but of course he was unable to. Thank goodness he remembered one day that at his wedding he had had official copies made of his particulars and those of Mama, in case he ever needed them for a job application or something. He found them in the attic in an old shoe box, so that the forgery was crystal clear.

  Only the Gestapo could be behind this. On whose orders? And why? Who had anything to fear from that little boy? But what makes me unhappiest of all is how Adi was capable of ordering the execution of his son, whom he adored. How on earth was it possible? I love him, but I don’t understand him. Does he understand himself ? Does he ever think about himself?

  20.IV.45

  Adi’s birthday: fifty-six. Anyone who didn’t know better would be more inclined to say seventy. Finally talked to him alone.

  He got up at eleven, and a little later they all appeared to wish him a happy birthday—Bormann, Göring, Goebbels, Himmler, Ribbentrop, Speer, Keitel, Jodl, the whole club. They came via the tunnels from the bunkers under their own ministries and headquarters—not an unnecessary luxury, since the Americans had reappeared after
all with a fleet of a thousand Flying Fortresses, which let their bombs rain down on the poor city for hours. Although we are under two yards of earth and five yards of concrete, on the lowest level there was constant pounding and cracking over our heads, the bunker shook, and here and there mortar dust fell. According to Goebbels it was intended as a birthday present, followed later in the day by a present from British bombers and a bombardment from the Russians, who can now reach the center of the city with their artillery. I cannot deny that I feel a little proud when I think that all those million-strong armies and huge fleets of planes and those countless victims are needed to defeat the Chief. What woman has such a lover? He himself seems to find it all perfectly natural.

  After the reception, despite the danger, he went up to the garden to present the Iron Cross to some members of the Hitler Youth drawn up on parade. I should have most liked to buttonhole Himmler to ask him if he knew anything about an operation by his Gestapo in the archives at Geiselhöring, but I didn’t dare. The rest of the day was again devoted to discussions, and in the evening all the bigwigs scuttled off to safer parts. By tomorrow the encirclement of the city will probably be complete. I could see that they were frightened to death now that their own lives were at stake. All those cowards tried one last time to persuade the Chief to flee to Bavaria and conduct the war from there, but he is determined to die in Berlin. Speer also suddenly disappeared without saying good-bye; he is the only one I’m sorry I shall never see again. Of the intimates only Goebbels has stayed and, unfortunately, Bormann, too.