An Infinity of Mirrors

  Piocher’s textile business alone grossed tens of millions of francs. His meat-and-grocery supply, because of the regularity and speed of his deliveries to restaurants, made a daily profit of seven hundred thousand francs. Since business was on a cash basis, and there was no safe place to keep that much money, Piocher had to buy buildings, paintings, and real estate, in addition to adding weekly to a small burlap sack of diamonds.

  Communication between consumer and supplier was remarkable. There was no advertising nor telephoning; yet everyone seemed to know when and where and what could be bought, and at what price. Petrol would be exchanged for coffee, coffee for shoes, shoes for wine, and the wine barrels would go back to the vintner filled with bacon or potatoes. Tailors sold eggs; jewelers sold artichokes. Goods had to be carried in small pareels; a train full of people might bring three tons of corn into Paris.

  Approximately twenty-seven percent of everything bought or sold at the wholesale level was funneled through Piocher, and he operated his businesses as he had been ordered to do—like any British sergeant-major. His effectiveness and enormous success gave him an entree to the highest levels of the command of the German Army, and unwittingly the SS provided him with information almost daily which, together with other snippets of information, aided the Allied military command, sabotaged the economy of the occupied territories, and frustrated long-range German plans.

  Piocher punished short-weighters with relentless public beatings across the length of Les Halles, and disciplined and marked thieves by shredding their cheeks to ribbons with a knife. Openly he shot to death two men who had moved into his territory in Lille. He dominated all the black markets of Europe the way he had run armies, and he was as punitive with SS and Wehrmacht mistakes as he was with anyone else’s. He was a sergeant-major in His Majesty’s Army and there would be no nonsense from anyone.

  By December, 1942, Piocher had amassed twelve million seven hundred thousand francs in cash, plus jewels, real estate, paintings, and miscellaneous property—all to the embarrassment of the British government. If he tried to discuss the matter with The Old Firm he was silenced. No one was ready to talk about what should be done with money like that. Just the thought of future intra-Ministry arguments over the disposition of the money made many people ill. Certainly Piocher knew it wasn’t his money. His army base pay, twelve shillings a day, was piling up in London, and though his present scale of living was more that of an emperor than a sergeant-major, those shillings were more real to him than the bushels of thousand-franc notes in his bedroom.

  Piocher left a message at the drop in the rue des Bourdonnais to be transmitted by his radio operator to London sometime before dawn. Then he went home to Fräulein Nortnung, who threw off the blankets and wiggled her pink toes at him. Piocher’s women would no more have asked where he had been than a green recruit would have asked a lieutenant-general where he had slept the night before.

  “They are shipping too bloody much to Germany,” Piocher said in a brisk shout, “and it’s all coming out of my frigging pockets.”

  “Ja, Carlie,” Fräulein Nortnung said.

  “I want you up an hour early in the morning,” he said, undressing with despatch. “We’ve got to get things organized.”

  “Ja, Carlie.”

  Piocher stood naked beside the bed and smiled down at her. “You’ve got nipples on you tonight like a pair of thumbs,” he said affectionately. “Move over.”

  A Lysander aircraft brought the Drayst dossier and the handprints of Napoleon, Socrates, and St. Paul to a pasture near Fenton-Dormer on Tuesday night. The package was sent along to Paris at once in a bale of lettuce, and Piocher picked it up at Les Halles.

  On Saturday, Selahettin was able to astound Colonel Drayst as they went over his horoscope together. She told him that it was so remarkable that she would do for him what she had done for the Reichsfuehrer SS. The Colonel was deeply grateful, though he had no idea what she meant.

  Selahettin mounted the flutter light, with its spinning, gleaming aluminum disc, on the desk directly in front of Drayst and ordered him to stare into it and concentrate. She talked to him soothingly, and he went under in four minutes. When she brought him out of his trance she told him that the magnetic forces were unpropitious. They would try again in six months. They would see.

  Selahettin met Piocher that night.

  “He tried to rape her during the pogroms in Berlin in ’38. She shot him. He is literally and clinically insane about her—that is my opinion as a psychiatrist, Charles. He has raped many Jewish girls and he has strangled three, but she is the most beautiful and desirable Jew he has ever seen, and also she is the wife of an old-line army general. The army makes him feel inferior, he says; the army is always looking down on the SS. She is the compensator. He says that he must have her, and while he has her he must kill her.”

  Seven

  His superiors at the Bendlerstrasse were relieved when Veelee’s Jewish wife left him. His anxieties solved, he was now the model of a professional officer. Too driving perhaps, too silent, even dour, but the world was forcing Germany into war once again and a serious attitude was commendable.

  Hansel had written twice to Paule in Paris, but he got no reply. Gretel wrote her sister-in-law eleven letters and Gisele five, but Paule did not reply. Once Hansel had mentioned Paule’s name in Veelee’s presence, but the savagery of von Rhode’s response had silenced him instantly.

  After the political meetings with the British, French, and Mussolini in 1938, Guderian had been made Commander in Chief of all Wehrmacht Mobile Forces. When he offered Veelee the post as Chief of the General Staff of the Sixteenth Army Corps, formed by the First, Third, Fourth and Fifth Panzer divisions and the Eighth Panzer brigade at Sagan, under the command of General Hoepner, Veelee accepted like a shot. The Sixteenth Corps was the first of its kind in the Wehrmacht and, the embryo of the future, mighty Panzerarmee.

  In August, 1939, when war was declared, Veelee was transferred to the Tenth Army under the General Walther von Reichenau. Reichenau, a Nazi, was the most political of the generals, and he seemed to feel the need to compensate for this in the eyes of the Officer Corps. His military behavior so resembled Errol Flynn in mid-film that everyone was slightly dazed. He swashbuckled as though he were following the orders of a general staff of lady novelists, and while neither Veelee nor most of his fellow officers approved, they were impressed by Reichenau’s ability to become so operatically Italian just because war had been declared. Once the man had even swum a river at the head of his troops.

  During the Polish campaign—which made the eyes of all tank officers shine self-righteously after their nineteen-year fight with the mossbacks to employ mobile force—the Tenth attacked out of an area that reached from Kreuzberg to Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia. The Eighth was on its left flank and the Fourteenth on its right. Though the roads were bad, during the first days of the campaign they moved forward at an incredible rate of speed each day, and the hot summer dust lay around them in choking clouds. Then resistance stiffened momentarily. Veelee was awarded the Iron Cross, second and first class, for distinguished service in reinforcing and supplying an infantry battalion which had been cut off after capturing a village. The battalion had suffered heavy losses and was about to surrender when Veelee attacked with a rashly collected force of three tanks and one armored car after intercepting a radio message to the divisional staff. The division had replied that it would be impossible to send relief, but Veelee launched a cross-country raid and scattered the Polish force encircling the battalion. Of course Reichenau was pleased by this kind of initiative, and after awarding Veelee his decorations he sent him off to see the Fuehrer, who had stationed himself in the village of Praha to watch the siege of Warsaw.

  Veelee found his Commander in Chief in a church tower, the command post of an artillery battalion, an instant before noon on September 22nd. As Keitel introduced him to the Fuehrer with cold disapproval, and as the Fuehrer began to shake his hand, the huge bel
ls in the clocktower immediately overhead began to ring out the twelve strikes of the hour. Because speech was impossible, the two men were forced to freeze into a most unnatural tableau, each shaking the other’s hand, each standing awkwardly bent forward as though life had stopped the instant they had touched, each smiling so broadly and showing so many teeth that after the seventh bong they appeared to be snarling at each other in an uncannily skillful taxidermist’s display. At each new bong, each man would roll his eyes upward toward the bells imploringly, and the resounding boinnnnggg and BONGGG seemed to vibrate their bodies. At the moment of the last bong, just as the Fuehrer was about to greet and congratulate his brave officer, Keitel shoved between the two men a written message which announced that General von Fritsch had been killed in action at about ten o’clock that morning.

  The Fuehrer was very pleased. “Good riddance,” he said, and, diverted by the blessed silence and the refreshing news, he turned away from Veelee and walked to the railing of the tower to observe the progress of the siege once more. Veelee stared with horror at the back of the Fuehrer’s head. He could not believe what he had heard. Fritsch was the army.

  “Fritsch could never find the nerve to shoot himself,” the Fuehrer chuckled, “so he probably stepped in front of a bullet during the attack. What a fool he was!” Veelee turned away. He was ashamed. As he stumbled down the spiral staircase from the tower he at last understood Paule’s warnings. He had become the lickspittle of an Austrian canaille—he and the whole German Army.

  The next morning, at five minutes to six, Veelee pistolwhipped an SS Sturmbannfuehrer in the main square of a Polish village. In front of an SS company of men and the people of the town, he knocked the man backward over the hood of a car which carried a banner with the rhymed slogan: “Wir Ziehen Nach Polen Um Juden Zu Versolen!” Eleven men and women of the town lay face down on the street with the backs of their heads caved in. When the angry mumbling of the SS men behind him rose in volume Veelee turned and told the remaining officer to form them in a single rank. Then he walked slowly toward the line, standing at attention, eyes front, and as he came to them he took his glove off, picked up three stones and dropped them into the gauntlet. Working slowly and methodically, Colonel Wilhelm von Rhode, Junker auf Klein-Kusserow und Wusterwitz, slashed the face of each man in the line with forehand and backhand strikes of his loaded glove. When he reached the officer at the end of the line he shook the stones from his glove, put it on slowly and carefully, hawked from deep within his throat and spat into the officer’s face. The line of men remained at attention except for one who fell to his knees and then toppled forward on his face.

  In company with hundreds of other official army eyewitness reports on the conduct of the SS, Veelee filed a protest about this incident. Outrages ranged from rape to the official filming in color of the sacking and destruction of a Polish town and its people by gun, club, fire, and explosives—all presented with music and narration as the men of the town were told to lie down naked on top of one another, forming a huge pile of bodies while the women and the children of the village looked on and oil was poured over the pile and set on fire. Reports of such incidents came in from every sector to General Blaskowitz, the army commander and military governor at Krakow. Blaskowitz poured his distilled denunciations of the SS on Keitel, on the Reichsfuehrer SS, and upon the Fuehrer himself as mass murder succeeded hopeless disgrace, until, in March, 1940, the offended Fuehrer screamed at Keitel, “Make me rid of this reactionary!” The final, bitter protest from Blaskowitz concerned a minor Party official who, reeling drunk, had ordered a Polish prison to be opened and then had shot five whores to death and clubbed two others into fornicating with him in the open, mud-soft prison yard.

  In January, 1940, Veelee was promoted to Major General and put in command of the Fifth Panzer Division of the Sixteenth Army Corps, which was composed of two tank divisions and one mechanized infantry division ready for battle in the west.

  In the Belgian campaign Veelee was awarded a Knight’s Cross—one of only eight thousand two hundred and thirty awarded in the six years of war waged by a force of ten million one hundred and three thousand Germans.

  Parachutists had penetrated the upper galleries of the fort at Eben Emael but could make no further progress. On the morning of May 11, 1940, Veelee raced ahead of a vanguard of tanks and armored cars across the only two intact bridges to the north, surrounded the fortress, and led his men in hand-to-hand fighting through its underground tunnels until the twelve hundred Belgian defenders surrendered.

  On September 2, 1940, Veelee became Chief of the General Staff of Reichenau’s Sixth Army. His headquarters were in Normandy, ninety-one miles from Paris, and though he ordered a telephone installed in the apartment at Cours Albert I, he did not call. He had drawn within himself and he avoided other officers except in the line of duty. He corresponded with his sisters, with Hansel, and with his army sponsor, General Heinrich von Stuelpnagel. Once he dined with Miles-Meltzer in Bruges. Every week he wrote to Paul-Alain in German.

  17 November 1940

  My dear Son:

  The war continues. The excitement of our sweep has ended, and now we must pay attention to the thousand details of daily routine to secure what we have won. You have had a unique view of this war, being a German who lives in Paris temporarily and who finds himself occupied, as it were, by his own people. I hope the telephone which I had installed in your flat is a convenience for your mother. I thought that it could be useful in the event that you needed me urgently.

  I am well, and I always keep busy. I would like to be able to see you and to play with you and your boats in the park, which you tell me about. I know that park very well. It is a beautiful park and since I want very much to have a picture of you and your boats, I am going to request that someone in military headquarters in Paris telephone your mother and arrange to have some photographs taken. Please look directly into the camera and smile or not, as it pleases you. Please greet your mother for me.

  With love and devotion,

  Your Father

  Veelee’s news of home came mostly through Hansel, who could easily pass such information through army channels from general to general. A super-specialist, Hansel was still at the Bendlerstrasse, where he belonged if things were to continue to prosper.

  24 January 1941

  My dear Willi:

  This time he is all out to bring down the upper classes, the intellectuals, the educated, and the cultivated. I don’t understand how we could have fooled ourselves that he ever had any program beyond his hope for the destruction of the world. I heard him speak today—a bad carbon copy of his best work, I would say.

  We are groping onward here. We haven’t had a soldier worth a damn to run things since Beck resigned, indignant and unbending. Keitel is completely incapable of understanding things and I have long since ceased to look to him for help. He might have risen as high as major with any other government in power, but with these unmentionables he is now Chief of the High Command of all the armed services. If I hear Brauchitsch say once more, “I am a soldier and it is my duty to obey” I shall send for my father’s old dress sword and run him through.

  Dr. Professor Ernest Gold, the only man since Wagner whose music soothes Hitler, tells me that the Fuehrer now takes his shoes off during arguments with Jodl and Warlimont and continually hurls them at the walls until his point has been made. This calls for considerable running around the room by the Fuehrer and the generals, and Gold feels that if rubber shoes were used the rebounds might be better.

  Miles-Meltzer tells me that because one SS man was killed a week ago in the old city in Warsaw, five hundred Polish intellectuals were selected at random from lists of lawyers, teachers, doctors, writers, et cetera, and were murdered. The looting in Poland, judging by the Reichsmarschall alone, has been prodigious. Hans Frank and the SS do their level best to keep up with him, but of course it isn’t possible.

  Here is a joke: an indoctrination takes place
in a half-filled sewer in Dusseldorf. “Who have we to thank for the night fighters?” The crowd answers, “Hermann Goering!” Then: “For the whole air force?” “Hermann Goering!” Then: “Upon whose orders did Hermann Goering do all this?” “On the orders of the Fuehrer?” “And where would we be if it were not for Hermann Goering and the Fuehrer?” “IN OUR BEDS???”

  Gretel and Gisele are well. Gretel talks French in her sleep, and you may take it on good authority that very soon it will be even more dangerous to talk Russian.

  Keep warm and sleep well,

  Hansel

  Veelee refused home leave. He was transferred to North Africa in April, 1941, and put in command of the Fifth Light Mobile Division, one of the two German armored divisions which made up Rommel’s Afrika Korps.

  General von Rhode was wounded for the first time in Africa, with second-degree burns of the waist and legs, when his tank was hit by an anti-tank shell. He was out of action for forty-two days. In October, 1941, he was awarded the Order of St. Mauritius and St. Lazarus by the Italian government for preventing the capture of the entire staff of an Italian division by a British commando unit. Veelee shrugged the episode off as an accident. He had left the Italians’ perimeter to hunt gazelle, and on his way back he had nearly blundered into the British transport hiding in a wadi near the camp. He killed the two soldiers left in charge, then destroyed one of the British cars with the guns of the other, and thus raised the alarm for the Italians to defend themselves from the surprise attack.