“Tell me about this man, Harold Heinz Hebel. What else do you know about him?”
“He’s a rat who’s giving rats a bad name.”
“You already told me how he blackmailed that poor German captain, von Frisch, in nineteen thirty-eight. But you also said that you met him again, during the war.”
“That’s right. It was East Prussia. The winter of nineteen forty-four to forty-five. And that was the last time I spoke to him until this morning at the Grand Hôtel.”
“I think that before we go any further you’re going to have to tell me about that. In fact, you need to tell me all you know about our friend Harold Hebel. If I’m going to contact my friends in MI6 to ask for their help here, they will certainly need to know everything you know about this awful man.”
“He’s an opportunistic survivor who lives near humans and needs to be exterminated because he carries disease. He’s a rat. A rat that deserves to be drowned in a bucket. Now, let me explain why. Let me tell you about what happened in Königsberg.”
FIFTEEN
KÖNIGSBERG
1944–1945
I always loved Königsberg. The capital of East Prussia, it was a beautiful old city and, in many ways, very like Berlin. My mother was from Königsberg, and when I was a child, we used to go there to visit her parents, who ran a Viennese-style café and confectionery near the Kaiser Bridge, and occasionally, to take a beach holiday at the nearby seaside town of Cranz. But most of all I remember the Königsberger Zoo in the Tiergarten, which was one of the best in Europe and I can still recall, aged four, riding on the back of the elephant and seeing the bears. The bear pit at the zoo was even bigger and better than the one in Berlin. My grandfather owned a Mercedes-Benz—one of the first cars in Königsberg—and, to me, riding in the back of that car was almost as good as riding on the back of the elephant. Until they lost everything in the inflation of 1923 my grandparents were reasonably well off, I think. My grandmother was a good woman, always helping other people. There was a Jewish convalescent home in Luisenthal where she often took unsold cakes from the café and I used to wonder why it should have been this place that should receive her charity. Now I know why; she was herself half-Jewish. Much later, in 1919, my first wife and I went there on our honeymoon and we stayed in my grandparents’ villa on the Upper Pond, which seemed to us like the last word in gracious living. We must have visited every attraction the city had to offer, including the Amber Museum—Königsberg is famous for its German gold, as amber is sometimes called—the Prussia Museum, and the zoo, of course, but mostly we just sat in the front garden and stared out at the pond. It was a very happy time for me. The war was over and I was still alive, with all my limbs intact, and in love. My wife adored the place and for a while we even thought about living there. In retrospect, I wish we had. Maybe she would have been spared the influenza that killed her not long afterward. The flu wasn’t as bad in Königsberg as in Berlin. Fewer people to spread it, probably; there were only three hundred thousand people living there in the twenties, as opposed to the four million in Berlin.
My being sent to Königsberg in 1944 was supposed to be a punishment and feel like an exile from Berlin, but to me it felt like I was almost going home, especially as, until that summer, the city and most of East Prussia had been largely untouched by the war. As things turned out it was perhaps fortunate I was away from Berlin and out of anyone’s mind when Count von Stauffenberg made his failed attempt at a coup in July 1944, otherwise I might have been swept up in the wave of executions that followed. More than a hundred kilometers to the southeast of Königsberg, Hitler came on German radio and announced he was alive, and if anyone was there to witness a demonstration of loyalty and affection—but only if they were—people breathed a great sigh of relief.
I was a lowly lieutenant, an officer attached to the 132nd Infantry Division and the FHO—the branch of German military intelligence responsible for the Eastern Front—and it was my job to help make meaningful assessments of Soviet capabilities and intentions, and communicate these with the army commanders on Paradeplatz. Those assessments were very simple: The Red Army was poised to annihilate us.
As an officer I was entitled to a room at the Park Hotel, on Huntertragheim Street and close to the Lower Pond. Built in 1929, the Park was the last word in modern luxury; at least it was until almost two hundred RAF Lancaster bombers turned up on two consecutive nights at the end of August 1944 and bombed the city to bits. Almost every building to the south of Adolf-Hitler-Platz, including the famous castle and the cathedral where Kant was buried, were destroyed or damaged. Thirty-five hundred people were killed and tens of thousands made homeless—a foretaste of the terrible fate that was soon to befall Berlin. The upper floors of the Park Hotel and many of the men living on them disappeared in fire and smoke, but the second floor I lived on was spared and somehow the restaurant next door survived, too, which was just as well as it was one of the few places where German officers were allowed to take girls from the women’s auxiliary services who, even in 1944, were sometimes strictly chaperoned.
There was one girl in particular, Irmela Schaper, a signals officer with the German naval auxiliary, of whom I was very fond. I had recently remarried, but that didn’t make much difference to either Irmela or me since the city was more or less encircled by the Red Army and it was obvious to both of us that we were probably going to be killed. Irmela was a local girl. Her father worked for Raiffeisen Bank on Sträsemanstrasse not very far away from naval headquarters in the old seaport. I worked in the basement of what had been the post office close to Paradeplatz and we first met in a tobacconist’s on Steindamm a short way north of there. We’d both heard that the cigarette ration had arrived in the city and went there simultaneously, only I got there first and bought the last packet. Not that these were much of a smoke, just a roll of cardboard and a few centimeters of inferior tobacco. It’s hard to credit what we used to smoke back then. Anyway, she looked very smart in her double-breasted naval uniform, blond and buxom, which is just the way I like them, and as soon as I saw her I offered to share this last packet with her. I’m telling you all this because Irmela is the key to the whole story of what happened with Harold Heinz Hebel, or Captain Harold Hennig as he then called himself. But you’ll have to let me tell this story in my own way; I’m not a professional like you, Mr. Maugham; you’d probably tell me to start more fashionably in the middle instead of at the beginning. Well, maybe I can still do that.
—
Ten each,” I said to her, filling my cigarette case and then handing her the packet.
“That’s very gallant of you,” she said, and let me light one for her. She smoked it like a schoolgirl, hardly sucking the stuff in at all, and it made me smile, a little, but not so much that she might have thought I was laughing at her; that would have been impolite and foolish. Most women like to believe they’re sophisticated, even when you’re pleased that they’re not.
“Don’t be fooled. My armor is all rusted up and we had to eat my trusty white steed before he starved. If I tried to bow I’d probably fall flat on my face. Since the RAF left town my sense of balance isn’t so good. My ears still feel like there’s a brass band just around the corner.”
“You mean there isn’t? These days I don’t hear so well myself. In fact, I may never sleep through a thunderstorm again without thinking Thor is an English bomb aimer in a Lancaster.”
“As far as I’m concerned, ‘sleep’ is just a nice word in a fairy story. I’d like to believe in it, but experience and the Ivans have taught me different.”
“Maybe we should get together for a drink one night and see who yawns first.”
“It won’t be me. I’m wide awake. You’re the most interesting thing that’s happened to me since I arrived from Berlin.”
“Don’t you like Königsberg?”
“As a matter of fact, I love it.”
“It’s my hometo
wn. I used to live here.”
“And now?”
“You call this living?”
“It’s better than the alternative, perhaps. Well, now I know it’s your hometown I love it even more.”
“It was a nice place to live before the English decided to redecorate it.”
“Let’s not think about that now. What do you say we get a boat and you let me row you around Castle Pond?”
“Why would you want to do something so arduous on a warm day like this?”
“I don’t particularly, but I can hardly offer to show you around your own hometown.”
“Why not? Frankly, your guess about where anything is now is as good as mine. Yesterday I went for a walk along Copernicus Strasse before I realized it was Richard-Wagner-Strasse. I feel like a stranger here myself.”
“It doesn’t matter. The streets are all going to have Russian names soon. This time next year Richard-Wagner-Strasse will probably be Tchaikovsky Prospekt, or Borodin Street.”
“That’s a pleasant thought.”
“Sorry. I’m an intelligence officer, but sometimes you really wouldn’t think it.”
“I think it’s best to know the worst that can happen.”
“That seems to be my job description.”
“We could talk about it over dinner.”
“That’s the most pleasant thought I’ve heard in a long time. Where would you like to go? The safest place for dinner used to be the Blutgericht in the Castle courtyard basement.”
“I know. Until they bombed it.”
“Which leaves the Park Hotel.”
“There’s another place I know near the zoo on Erich-Koch-Platz.”
I shook my head. “It can’t be the Stadtkeller. That’s closed, too.”
“No, this is somewhere else.”
“Not the naval nunnery.”
Nunneries were what we called the dormitories where most of the women’s auxiliary services were housed.
“No, but it’s somewhere quiet, candlelit, with just the one exclusive table. Mine.”
“I like the place already.”
“After the bombing my parents left their apartment and went to live at their country house in Pillau. I stayed on. The auxiliary service commander thinks they’re still living there.”
“Which means that you don’t have to keep the service women’s curfew.”
“Exactly.”
“Nice.”
“So. You’re invited for dinner. It’s canned stuff, mostly. But my father did have quite a decent selection of Mosels.”
“Suddenly I seem to have quite an appetite.”
“Shall we say eight o’clock?”
I glanced at my watch. “That’s going to be the longest five hours of my life. What am I going to do with myself until then?”
“So go row a boat.”
And that was it. I went to her parents’ apartment in Hammerweg Strasse for dinner. She cooked me a meal, I drank a couple of bottles of nice cold Mosel, and within a couple hours of me arriving there, we were lovers. That’s how things were in those days. Implausibly fast. Uncomplicated. Nobody mentioned love or marriage or consequences. Nobody thought about the future because nobody thought they had a future. Really, you can’t beat how easy life can be when you think there isn’t going to be a tomorrow. Weeks passed like this and together, as winter arrived, we celebrated what we assumed might be our last few months on earth.
Irmela was tall and athletic. She was also highly intelligent, which was why she was working as a lightning maid in the naval signals section. She had to be intelligent to encrypt all communications using a special four-rotor code machine called the Scherbius Enigma before sending them. Before the war, she’d studied mathematics at Albertina University on Paradeplatz. The university was destroyed, like almost everything else in Königsberg, and while many people, including me, still took the risk of going into the remains of the university library in search of books—Gräfe und Unzer, the largest bookstore in Europe and opposite the university, had been completely consumed by flames after a napalm bomb fell through the glass roof—General Lasch, the military commander of Hitler’s northern army, had his army headquarters in a bunker deep under the ruins. For several weeks I was just happy to see a lot of Irmela, who was an enthusiastic and noisy on-the-top kind of lover with considerable experience of men, which I came to appreciate. She knew I was married and didn’t want anything from me except my company and my jokes, which in those days were a lot better than they are now. Experience has taught me that it’s better to be serious, and I should know; I’ve tried and failed to be serious on thousands of occasions.
After the British bombing, the Russians halted their attack on the city for the winter and regrouped. Somehow the Alhambra movie theater on Hufenallee managed to keep going despite having been hit by a bomb, and while plays were no longer performed we often went there to see a movie, even though that always meant having to sit through newsreels telling us how well the war was going for Germany, and how victory would be ours in the end. Sometimes, after the film, Irmela would ask me if things were really as good as the Ministry of Truth and Propaganda described, which was a safe and secure way of asking if they were as bad as everyone said they were. Mostly I said that reports of mass rape and atrocities that stemmed from East Prussian towns nearer the Russian front were always exaggerated. But she knew I was lying and not because she thought that I believed in the final victory; she knew I was trying not to scare her, that’s all. And one day toward the end of October 1944, she confronted my lies and evasions head on. Of course, she’d read some of the signals traffic about a place called Nemmersdorf, which was about a hundred kilometers east of Königsberg; she also knew that I’d been there to report on the situation for the FHO. We were in bed at her parents’ place in Hammerweg Strasse at the time, and had just finished a particularly noisy bout of lovemaking.
“Christ,” I said, “I hope the neighbors don’t complain. Anyone would think I was raping you, or something.”
That was the only time she hit me.
“Don’t make jokes about that kind of thing,” she said gravely. “I don’t know a single girl in the auxiliary service who isn’t petrified about what’s going to happen when the Ivans turn up. You hear things. Bad things. Terrible things. We’re all terrified.”
“It’s not as bad as people say.”
“Liar,” she said. “Liar. Look, Bernie, neither of us is a Nazi. The Gestapo aren’t listening. Just for once don’t spare my feelings. I know you’re trying to stop me from worrying, but I also know you were somewhere near Nemmersdorf. Your name is on the report. You don’t have to give me the details, only please tell me if anything of what I’ve heard about that place is true or not. If the Ivans really are as monstrous as people say they are. Or if the whole thing really is meant to deter us from surrendering. Which is the other rumor, of course. That the Ministry of Truth is trying to scare us out of surrender.”
I lit a cigarette and helped myself to some of her father’s brandy.
“Please,” she said. “I need to know. Every woman in Königsberg wants to know what to expect. Particularly the women in the auxiliary services. You see, none of us in the auxiliary is particularly sure of our status as noncombatants. We’re in uniform and are obliged to obey military orders but forbidden to use weapons and we’re subject to civilian law. So where does that leave us? Will we be treated like civilians or prisoners of war? And will it matter a damn which is which when the Russians turn up? I don’t mind dying. But I’d rather not be gang-raped before I die.”
I didn’t speak. How could I tell her what I knew? The things I’d heard from the few survivors of Nemmersdorf beggared description.
“Please, Bernie. Look, the word is that there were seventy-two women and girls in Nemmersdorf aged between eight and eighty-four. And that all of them were rape
d.”
I nodded. “As a matter of fact, it’s worse. Much worse than anything you’ve heard.”
“How is that possible?”
“Raped, mutilated, and murdered.” I paused. “All of them. Women crucified. Breasts cut off. Violated with vodka bottles. Your worst nightmare. What happened at Schulzenwalde was worse. There were ninety-five at Schulzenwalde. Dr. Goebbels is already organizing a team of Swiss and Swedish reporters and observers to go and see the place for themselves so he can tell the world’s press that this is what Germany has been fighting against all along. Frankly, I think you can expect the newsreels to start getting worse from now on. They’ll be telling the truth, in other words. As you say, their intention is now to deter us from surrendering. As if fighting on to the last is really going to make any damn difference.”
“Why are the Russians doing this? I thought there were supposed to be rules on how you treat people in war.”
“There are. It’s just that we’ve treated Soviet POWs and Jews so very badly that we can expect no better treatment ourselves. There’s a concentration camp to the west of here called Stutthof where more than a hundred thousand people—mostly Poles—are currently imprisoned. But we’ve been starving and murdering Jews there for a year.”
Irmela nodded. “Which would fit with what we’ve heard in the signals. Naval captains have been complaining to their superiors here and in Danzig. Ships from the German navy have been used by the SS to take Jews to Stutthof from a camp called Klooga in Estonia. Apparently those prisoners were in a pretty bad way.”
“Look,” I said, “I think there’s every chance we’ll get all of the women and children out of Königsberg before the Red Army finally gets here. But before that happens, things in this city are going to get an awful lot worse.”
One night, we were going to the Spätenbrau Restaurant on Kneiphöfsche Langgasse, near Cathedral Island. But en route we went to see the ruins of the cathedral and Immanuel Kant’s grave, which was largely undamaged, mostly to give ourselves an appetite for life. Irmela knew a lot about Kant but was always kind enough not to tell me too much at once since I was an intelligence officer more by default than by aptitude. What I knew about Kant you could write on a spinning gas nebula. The cathedral itself was like a huge, empty skull found in the embers of a fire after some medieval execution. It was hard to know exactly what the RAF had been aiming their bombs at, since the nearest military target was more than a kilometer away. Or was it that they figured the only way to beat Germany was to be as bad as Germany? If so, then it certainly looked as if they had a good chance of winning.