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The Company of Strangers
Robert Wilson
For Janeandin memory of my father
1922–1980
Author’s Note
Extract from ‘An Arundel Tomb’ from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
Epigraph
Book One Outlaws of the Mind
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Book Two The Secret Ministry of Frost
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Book Three The Walking Shadows
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Praise for The Company of Strangers
By the Same Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Book One Outlaws of the Mind
Chapter 1
30th October 1940, London. Night 54 of the Blitz.
She was running, running as she had done before in her dreams, except this wasn’t a dream, even though with the flares dropping, as slowly as petals, and the yellow light, and the dark streets with the orange glow on the skyline it could easily be a dream, a horror dream.
She flinched at a tremendous explosion in a nearby street, staggered at the shudder in the ground, nearly ploughed into the paving stones face-first, legs kicking back wildly. She pushed up off a low wall at the front of a house and her feet were slapping against the pavement again. She ran faster as she saw the Auxiliary Fire Service outside the house. New hoses uncoiled from the engines and joined the spaghetti in the black glass street as they trained more water on the back of the house, which was no longer a house but half a house. The whole of one side blown away and the grand piano with two legs over the startling new precipice, its lid hanging open like a tongue lapping up the flames, which set off a terrible twanging as the fire plucked at the piano strings and snapped them, peeled them back.
She stood there with her hands over her ears to the unbearable sound of destruction. Her eyes and mouth were wide open as the back of the house collapsed into the neighbour’s garden, leaving the kitchen in full view and oddly intact. A hissing noise of escaping gas from the ruptured mains suddenly thumped into flame and burst across the street, pushing the firemen back. There was a figure lying in the kitchen, not moving and with clothes alight.
She jumped up on to the low wall at the side of the house and screamed into the blistering heat of the burning house.
‘Daddy! Daddy!’
A fireman grabbed her and hauled her roughly back, almost threw her at a warden, who tried to hold her but she wrenched herself free just as the piano, the piano that she’d been playing to him only two hours before, fell from its precipice with a loud crack and a discord that reached into her chest and squeezed her lungs. Now she saw all the sheet music going up in flames and he was lying on the floor at the foot of the wall of fire, which the AFS where hosing down so that it hissed and sputtered, but didn’t go out.
Another crack and this time the roof dropped, spitting whole window frames into the street like broken teeth, and crashed down on to the floor below, shedding great sledges of tiles which shattered on the pavement. There was a momentary pause, then the roof smashed through to the next floor and, like a giant candle snuff, suffocated the flaming music, crushed his supine body and dropped him amongst shafts of flaming timber into the bay window of the ground floor.
The warden lunged at her again, got a hold of her collar, and she wheeled round and bit his wrist so that he flinched back his hand. She’s a wild one, this black-haired, gypsy-looking girl, thought the warden, but he had to get her away, poor thing, get her away from her daddy burning in the bay window in front of her. He went for her again, got her in a bear hug, her legs flailing, lashing out and then she went limp as a rag doll, bent in the middle over his arms.
A woman, white-faced, ran up to the warden and said that the girl was her daughter, which confused him because he’d seen the man who she’d been calling Daddy and the warden knew that the man’s wife was dead in the kitchen.
‘She’s been calling for her daddy in the house there.’
‘That’s not her daddy,’ said the woman. ‘Her father’s dead. That’s her piano teacher.’
‘What’s she doing out here, anyway?’ he asked, getting official. ‘The All Clear hasn’t sounded…’
The girl wrestled away from her mother and ran down the side of another house and into the garden, lit by the still falling flares. She ran across the yellow lawn and threw herself into the bushes growing against the back wall. Her mother followed. Bombs were still falling, the ack-ack was still pumping away on the Common, the searchlights swarming over the black velvet sky. Her mother was screaming at her, roaring over the noise, screeching with fright, savagely begging her to come out.
The girl sat with her hands over her ears, eyes closed. Only two hours before he’d held her hands, told her she was as nervous as a cat, stroked each of her fingers, squared her shoulders to that same piano and she’d played for him, played like a dream for him, so that he’d told her afterwards he’d closed his eyes and left London and the war and found a green meadow in the sunshine, somewhere where the trees were flashing with red and gold in the autumn wind.
The first wave of bombers moved off. The ack-ack fell silent. All that was left in the cold autumn air was the roar of the conflagration and the hiss of water on burning wood. She crawled out of the bushes. Her mother grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her backwards and forwards. The girl was calm, but her face was set, her teeth gritted and her eyes black and unseeing.
‘You’re a stupid girl, Andrea. A stupid, stupid girl,’ said her mother.
The girl took in her mother’s white raving face in the dark and yellow garden, her face hard and determined.
‘I hate Germans,’ she said. ‘And I hate you.’
Her mother slapped her hard across the face.
Chapter 2
7th February 1942, Wolfsschanze, Hitler’s East Front HQ, Rastenburg, East Prussia.
The aircraft, a Heinkel III bomber refitted for passenger use, began its descent over the vast blackness of the pine forests of East Prussia. The low moan of its two engines brought with it the bleakness of the vast, snow-covered Russian steppes, the emptiness of the gutted, burnt-out railway station at Dnepropetrovsk and the endlessness of the frozen Pripet marshes between Kiev and the start of Polish pine.
The plane landed and taxied in a miasma of snow thrashed up into the darkness by its propellers. A coated figure, huddled against the icy blast, slipped into this chill world from a neat hole which had opened up in the belly of the aircraft. A car from the Führer’s personal pool waited just off the wing tip and the chauffeur, collar up to his hat, held the door open. Fifteen minutes later the guard at the gate of Restricted Area I admitted Albert Speer, architect, into the military compound of Hitler’s Rastenburg headquarters for the first time. Speer went straight to the officers’ canteen and ate a large meal with appropriate wolfishness, which would have reminded his fellow diners, if they’d had room for empathy, just how difficult it was to keep the latest far-flung corner of the Third Reich supplied.
Two captains, Karl Voss and Hans Weber, intelligence officers in their mid twenties attached to the Army Chief of Staff, General Zeitzler, had been standing outside stamping their feet and smoking cigarettes when Speer arrived.
‘Who’s that?’ asked Voss.
‘I knew you’d ask that.’
‘You don’t think that’s a normal question when somebody you don’t know walks past?’
‘You forgot the word “important”. When somebody important walks past.’
‘Piss off, Weber.’
‘I’ve seen you.’
‘What?’
‘Let’s get back,’ said Weber, chucking his cigarette.
‘No, tell me.’
‘Your problem, Voss…is that you’re too intelligent. Heidelberg University and your fucking physics degree, you’re…’
‘Too intelligent to be an intelligence officer?’
‘You’re new, you don’t understand yet – the thing about intelligence is that it doesn’t do to be too inquisitive.’
‘Where does this rubbish come from, Weber?’ asked Voss, incredulous.
‘I tell you one thing,’ he said, ‘I know what powerful people see when they look at you and me…and it’s not two individuals with lives and families and all the rest.’
‘What then?’
‘They see opportunities,’ he said, and barged Voss through the door.
They went back to work in the situation room, up the silent corridor towards Hitler’s apartment where the Führer was still entertaining the Armaments Minister, Fritz Todt, whose arrival had terminated the situation meeting of that afternoon. As the young captains resumed their seats the two older men were still just about talking. Food had been served to them earlier by an orderly grown accustomed to glacial silences, split only by the odd cracking of a wooden chair.
Voss and Weber worked, or rather Voss did. Weber’s head started toppling again almost as soon as they sat down in the airless room. Only the snap of his neck muscles jerked him awake and prevented him from flattening his face on the desk. Voss told him to go to bed. Weber’s eyes ground in their sockets.
‘Go on,’ said Voss. ‘This is nearly finished anyway.’
‘Those,’ said Weber, standing and pointing at four boxes of files, ‘have to go out on the first flight in the morning…to Berlin.’
‘You mean unless the Moscow flight is open by then.’
Weber grunted. ‘You’ll learn,’ he said. ‘Back to the monk’s cell for me. It’s going to be hard tomorrow. He’s always bad after Todt’s given his report.’
‘Why’s that?’ asked Voss, still keen, still capable of doing an all-nighter for the East Front.
‘The first place you lose a battle is up here,’ said Weber, leaning over Voss and tapping his head, ‘and Todt lost that one last June. He’s a good man and he’s a genius and that’s a bad combination for this war. Good night.’
Voss knew Fritz Todt, as everyone knew him, as the inventor of the autobahnen, but he was much more than that now. Not only was he running all arms and munitions production for the Third Reich, but he and his Organization Todt were the builders of the West Wall and the U-boat pens that would protect Europe from invasion. He was also in charge of building and repairing all roads and railways in the Occupied Territories. Todt was the greatest construction engineer in German history and this was the greatest programme of all time.
Voss surveyed the situation map. The front line stretched from Lake Onega, 500 kilometres south-west of Archangel on the White Sea, through Leningrad, the Moscow suburbs and down to Taganrog on the Sea of Azov, off the Black Sea. From Arctic to Caucasus was under German control.
‘And he thinks we’re losing this war?’ asked Voss out loud, shaking his head.
He worked for another hour or more and then went out for another cigarette and to wake himself up in the freezing air. On his way back he saw the good-looking man who’d arrived earlier, sitting on his own in the dining room and then, coming towards him outside the situation room, another figure, shuffling along with sagging shoulders as if they were under some penitential weight. The face was grey, soft and slack, falling away from its substructure. The eyes saw nothing beyond the immense calculation in his mind. Voss moved to avoid the man but at the last moment they seemed to veer into each other and their shoulders clashed. The man’s face was reanimated in shock and Voss recognized him now.
‘Forgive me, Herr Reichsminister.’
‘No, no, my fault,’ said Todt. ‘I wasn’t looking.’
‘Thinking too hard, sir,’ said Voss, dog-like.
Todt studied the slim, blond young man more carefully now.
‘Working late, Captain?’
‘Just finishing the orders, sir,’ said Voss, nodding at the open door of the situation room.
Todt lingered on the threshold of the room, his eyes roved the map and the flags of the armies and their divisions.
‘Nearly there, sir,’ said Voss.
‘Russia,’ said Todt, his eye swivelling on to Voss, ‘is a very large place.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Voss, after a long pause in which nothing more was forthcoming.
‘Maps of Russia should be room-sized,’ said Todt. ‘So that army generals have to walk to move their divisions, with the knowledge that each step they take is 500 kilometres of snow and ice, or rain and mud, and in the few months of the year when it’s neither of those things they should know that the steppe is shimmering in silent, brutal, dust-choked heat.’
Voss shut up, mesmerized by the thunderous roll of the older man’s voice. Todt backed out of the room. Voss wanted him to stay, to continue, but no questions came to mind other than the banal.
‘Are you on the first flight out tomorrow, sir?’
‘Yes, why?’
‘To Berlin?’
‘We’ll stop in Berlin on the way to Munich.’
‘These files need to go to Berlin.’
‘In that case they’d better be on my plane before seven thirty. Talk to the flight captain. Good night, er…Captain…’
‘Captain Voss, sir.’
‘Have you seen Speer, Captain Voss? I was told he’d arrived.’
‘There’s someone in the dining room. He arrived earlier.’
Todt moved away, shuffling again down the corridor. Before he turned left to the dining room he turned on Voss.
‘Don’t imagine for one second, Captain, that the Russians are doing nothing about…about your situation in there,’ he said, and disappeared.
No wonder the Führer was bad after Todt’s visits.
Another half-hour passed and Voss went to fetch coffee from the dining room. Speer and Todt sat on either side of a single glass of wine, which the older man sipped. The structural differences between the two men were marked. The one slumped with definite subsidence under the right foundation, the nineteenth century, Wilhelmine façade lined and cracked, the paint and masonry crumbling to scurf. The other cantilevered over at an impossible angle, his lines clean and defined, the modern Bauhaus front, dark, handsome, uncluttered and bright.
‘Captain Voss,’ said Todt, turning to him, ‘did you speak to the flight captain yet?’
‘No, sir.’
‘When you do, tell him that Herr Speer will be joining me. He came in from Dnepropetrovsk tonight.’
Voss drank his coffee and on the way back to his work he had the strange and uncomfortable sense of silent machinery at work, out of his sight and beyond his knowledge. He turned into the situation room, just as SS Colonel Bruno Weiss came out of Hitler’s apartment. Weiss was head of the SS company at Rastenburg in charge of Hitler’s security and the only thing Voss knew about him was that he didn’t like anybody except Hitler, and he had a particular dislike of intelligence officers.
‘What are you doing, Captain?’ he shouted down the corridor.
‘Just finishing these orders, sir.’
Weiss bore down on him and inspected the situation room, the scar running from his left eye to below his cheekbone livid against his pale skin.
‘What are these?’
‘Army Chief of Staff files, sir, to go back to Berlin on the Reichsminister Todt’s flight this morning. I’m about to inform the flight captain.’
Weiss nodded at the phone. Voss called the flight captain and booked Speer on to the plane as well. Weiss wrote things down in his notebook and went back to Hitler’s apartment. Minutes later he was back.
‘These files…when are they going?’ he asked.
‘They have to be at the airstrip by 07.30 hours this morning, sir.’
‘Answer the question fully, Captain.’
‘I will be taking them personally, leaving here at 07.15 hours, sir.’
‘Good,’ said Weiss. ‘I have some security files to go back to the Reichsführer’s office. They will be delivered here. I will inform the flight captain.’
Weiss left. An adjutant strode past. Minutes later he came back followed by Speer.
Voss, like Hitler (not an unconscious imitation), enjoyed working at night. He worked with the door open to hear the voices, see the men, to gain a sense of the magnetic flow – those drawn to and favoured by the Führer and those he rejected and disgraced. In the short time he’d been in Rastenburg, Voss had seen men striding down the centre of that corridor, medals, pips and epaulets flashing, to return fifteen minutes later hugging the wall, shunned even by the carpet strip in the middle. There were others, of course, who came back evangelized, something in their eyes higher than the stars, greater than love. These were the men who had ‘gone’, left the decrepit shell of their own bodies to walk an Elysium with other demigods, their ambitions fulfilled, their greatness confirmed.
Weber saw it differently, and said it with a cruder voice: ‘These guys, they’re all married with wives and families of lovely children and yet they go up there and take it up the arse every night. It’s a disgrace.’ Weber had accused Voss of it, too. Of sitting with his tongue out in the corridor, waiting for a tummy rub. It needled Voss only because it was true. In his first week, as Voss had laid maps down in a situation meeting while Zeitzler said his piece, the Führer had suddenly gripped Voss by the bicep and the touch had shot something fast and pure into his veins like morphine, strong, addictive but weakening, too.
The Wolfsschanze stilled into the early hours. Corridor traffic halted. Voss filed the orders and prepared the maps and positions for the morning conference, taking his time because he liked the feeling of working while the world was asleep. At 3.00 a.m. there was a flurry of activity from Hitler’s apartment and moments later Speer appeared at the door looking like a matinée idol. He asked Voss if he wouldn’t mind cancelling him from the Reichsminister’s flight in the morning, he was too tired after his earlier flight and his meeting with the Führer. Voss assured him of his efficiency in the matter and Speer stepped into the room. He stood over the map and brushed a hand in a great swathe over Russia, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands and France. He became conscious of Voss studying him and put his hand in his pocket. He nodded, said good night and reminded him to tell the flight captain. He didn’t want to be disturbed in the morning.
Voss made the call and went to bed for three hours. He got up just before 7.00 a.m., called a car and he and the chauffeur loaded the box files, along with a black metal trunk which had appeared in the situation room addressed in white paint through a stencil to the SS Personalhauptamt, 98–9 Wilmersdorferstrasse, Berlin-Charlottenburg. They drove to the airstrip where, to their surprise, they found Todt’s Heinkel charging down the runway. Voss could already feel the lash of Weiss’s fury. He went to the flight captain who told him they were just testing the plane under orders from Hitler’s adjutant. The plane circled twice and relanded. A sergeant with a manifest cleared the files on to the aircraft and they loaded them. Voss and the chauffeur drank a coffee in the canteen and ate bread and eggs. At 7.50 a.m. the Reichsminister’s car pulled alongside and Fritz Todt boarded the Heinkel alone.
The plane immediately taxied to the end of the runway, paused, throttled up and set off down the snow-scabbed airstrip towards the black trees and low grey cloud of another grainy military morning. It should still have been dark at this hour but the Führer insisted on keeping Berlin time at his Rastenburg headquarters.
As he left the canteen Voss was arrested by the rare sight of SS Colonel Weiss outside the Restricted Area I compound. He was in the control tower, looking green through the glass, his thick arms folded across his chest, his pale face lit by some unseen light below him.
The continuous roar of the plane’s engines changed tone and the wings tipped as it banked over the pine forest. This was unusual, too. The plane should have continued west, piercing the soft gut of the grey cloud to break through into the brilliant, uncomplicated sunshine above, instead of which it had rolled north and appeared to be coming back in to re-land.
The pilot straightened the wings of the plane and settled the aircraft into its descent. It was just reaching the beginning of the runway, no more than a hundred feet off the ground, when a spear of flame shot up from the fuselage behind the cockpit. Voss, already gaping, flinched as the roar of the explosion reached him. His driver ducked as the plane tilted and a wing clipped the ground, shearing away from the body of the plane, which thundered into the snow-covered ground and exploded with hideous violence, twice, a fraction of a second between each full fuel tank igniting.
Black smoke belched, funnelling out into the grey sky. Only the tailplane had survived the impact. Two fire engines stormed pointlessly out of their hangar, slewing on the icy ground. SS Colonel Weiss dropped his arms, jutted his chest, stretched his shoulders back and left the observation platform.
Voss grew into the iron-hard ground, his feet drawing up the numbing cold, transporting it through to the bones and organs of his body.
Chapter 3
8th February 1942, Wolfsschanze HQ, Rastenburg, East Prussia.
Voss was driven back to Restricted Area I in silence, the dead hand of a full inquiry already on his shoulder. He pieced together the ugly fragments of information in his brain and felt his mind recoil in disgust. He began to see, for the first time, how a man could shoot himself. Until then it had been a mystery to him, on hearing of someone’s suicide, how a man could bring himself to such a disastrous conclusion. He smoked hard until he was quite faint and prickling. He staggered up the path to the main building and realized on entering that the horrific news had preceded him by some minutes.
The dining room was full, but rather than being morbid with the news of the death of the most important and capable engineer in the German Reich, it was rife with the rumour of a successor. The monochrome mass of braid and band, oak leaf cluster and iron cross seethed like the bullring of the Bourse. Only one man was silent, head up, hair swept back, dark eyes shining under the thick straight eyebrows – Albert Speer. Voss blinked, sure as a camera shutter, and captured the image – a man on the brink of his destiny.
Voss took a coffee, fed himself into the knots of conversation and soon realized that anybody with anything to do with construction and transportation was in the room.
‘Speer will take the Atlantic Wall, the U-boat pens and the Occupied West. It’s already been talked about.’
‘What about the Ukraine? The Ukraine is more important now.’
‘You didn’t forget that we declared war on the United States before Christmas.’
‘No, I didn’t, and nor did Todt.’
Silence. Heads swung to Speer’s table. People were putting things to him and he was managing vague replies to their questions, but he wasn’t listening. He was coming to terms with a price. Appalled at the animal troughing around him, unwilling to accept anything that they attempted to confer on him, he was trying to justify to himself not only his presence there (for the first time and on such a tragic occasion), but something else whose nature he couldn’t quite grasp. He seemed to be coping with a strong, unpleasant smell which had reached his nostrils only.
‘He won’t give it all to him…the Führer wouldn’t do that. No experience.’
‘He’ll split Armaments and Munitions away from Construction.’
‘You wait…the Reichsmarschall will be here any moment. Then we’ll see…’
‘Where is Goering?’
‘At Romiten. Hunting.’
‘That’s only a hundred kilometres away…has anybody called him?’
‘Goering will take Armaments and Munitions into his Commission for the Four Year Plan. He’s in charge of the war economy. It fits.’
‘The only thing that fits, if you ask me, is that one’s face over there.’
‘What’s Speer doing here, anyway?’
‘He was stuck in Dnepropetrovsk. He flew in with Captain Nein last night.’
‘He fetched him?’ asked a voice, aghast.
‘No, no Captain Nein flew in there with SS General Sepp Dietrich and offered Speer a lift.’
‘Did Speer and the general…talk?’
There was silence at that probability and Voss moved across to some air force officers who were picking over the details of the crash.
‘He must have pulled the self-destruct handle.’
‘Who? The pilot?’
‘No, Todt…by accident.’
‘Did it have a self-destruct mechanism on board?’
‘No, it was a new plane. It hadn’t been fitted.’
‘What was he doing in a two-engined plane in the first place? The Führer has expressly forbidden…’
‘That’s what Todt was told yesterday. He was furious. The Führer waived it.’
‘That’s why they took the plane up for a practice spin.’
‘And you’re sure there was no self-destruct mechanism?’
‘Positive.’
‘There were three explosions…that’s what the flight sergeant said.’
‘Three?’
‘There must have been a self-destruct…’
‘There was none!’
Voss went to the decoding room to pick up any positional changes in the field. He took the decodes to the situation room. The corridor was silent. Hitler rarely moved before eleven o’clock, but on a day such as this? Surely. The apartment door stayed closed, the SS guards silent.
Weber was already working on supply positions in the Ukraine. He didn’t look up. Voss leafed the decodes.
‘SS Colonel Weiss was looking for you,’ said Weber.
‘Did he say what he wanted?’ asked Voss, bowels loosening.
‘Something about those boxes of files…’
‘Have you heard, Weber?’
‘About the plane crash, you mean?’
‘The Reichsminister Todt is dead.’
‘Were those files on board?’
‘Yes,’ said Voss, stunned by Weber’s insouciance.
‘Shit. Zeitzler’s going to be mad.’
‘Weber,’ said Voss, amazed, ‘Todt is dead.’
‘Todt ist tot. Todt ist tot. What can I say, other than it will brighten the Führer’s day not to have that doom merchant on his shoulder.’
‘For God’s sake, Weber.’
‘Look, Voss, Todt never agreed with the Russian campaign and when the Führer declared war on America, well…poof!’
‘Poof!?’
‘Todt was a very cautious man, unlike our Führer who is…what shall we say…?’
‘Bold.’
‘Yes, bold. That’s a good, strong adjective. Let’s leave it at that.’
‘What are you saying, Weber?’
‘Keep your head down and your ears out of that corridor. Do your job, don’t blabber, this is all that matters,’ he said, and drew a circle around himself. ‘You haven’t been here long enough to know what these people are capable of.’
‘They’re already talking about Speer. Goering taking over…’
‘I don’t want to know, Voss,’ said Weber, closing his hands over his ears. ‘And nor do you. You’ve got to start thinking about those files, how they got on that plane and why SS Colonel Weiss wants to talk to you, because if he wanted to talk to me after such a morning I’d have been in the toilet an hour ago. Start thinking about yourself, Voss, because here in Rastenburg you’re the only one who will.’
The mention of the toilet sent Voss out of the room at a brisk pace. He sat in one of the stalls, face in hands, and passed a loose, hot motion which, rather than emptying him, left his guts writhing.
Colonel Weiss caught up with him while he washed his hands. They talked to each other via the mirror, Weiss’s face disturbingly wrong in reflection.
‘Those files…’ started Weiss.
‘General Zeitzler’s files, you mean?’
‘Did you check them, Captain Voss…before you took them into your care?’
‘Took them into my care?’ Voss asked himself, chest wall shuddering at the impact of this implication.
‘Did you, Captain? Did you?’ persisted Weiss.
‘They weren’t mine to check, and even if they were I wouldn’t know why I would have to check a large amount of documentation irrelevant to me.’
‘So who filled those boxes?’
‘I didn’t see them filled.’
‘You didn’t?’ roared Weiss, throwing Voss into free-fall fear. ‘You put boxes on to a Reichsminister’s plane without…’
‘Maybe you should ask Captain Weber,’ said Voss, desperate, lashing out at anything to save himself.
‘Captain Weber,’ said Weiss, writing him down in his book of the damned.
‘I was doing him a favour putting the files on the plane in the first place, as I was for…’He coughed at a garrotting look from Weiss and changed tack. ‘Is this part of the official inquiry, sir?’
‘This is the preliminary investigation prior to the official inquiry which will be conducted by the air force, as it is technically an air force matter,’ said Weiss, and then more threatening, ‘but as you know, I’m in charge of all security matters in and around this compound…and I notice things, Captain Voss.’
Weiss had turned away from the mirror to look at him for real. Voss stepped back and his boot heel hit the wall but he managed to look Weiss straight in his terrible eye, hoping that his own stress, from the G-force steepness of the learning curve, was not distorting his face.
‘I have a copy of the manifest,’ said Weiss. ‘Perhaps you should read it through now.’
Weiss handed him the paper. It started with a list of personnel on the flight. Speer’s name had been added and then crossed out. Underneath was the cargo. Voss ran his eyes down the list, which was short and consisted of four boxes of files for the Army Chief of Staff, delivery Berlin, and several pieces of luggage going with Todt to Munich. There was no mention of a metal trunk for delivery to the SS Personalhauptamt in Berlin-Charlottenburg.
Voss had control of his panic now, the horizon firm in his head as he came up to the moment, or was it the line? Yes, it was something to be crossed, a line with no grey area, without no man’s land, the moral line, which once stepped over joined him to Weiss’s morality. He also knew that to mention the nonexistent trunk would be a lifechanging decision, one that could change his life into death. It nearly amused him, that and the strange clarity of those turbulent thoughts.
‘Now you understand,’ said Weiss, ‘why it’s necessary for me to do a little probing on the question of these files.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Voss. ‘You’re absolutely right, sir.’
‘Good, we have an understanding then?’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Voss. ‘One thing…wasn’t there…?’
Weiss stiffened in his boots, the scar dragging down his eye seemed to pulsate.
‘…wasn’t there a self-destruct mechanism on the plane?’ finished Voss.
Weiss’s good eye widened and he nodded, confirming that and their new understanding into him. He left the toilets. Voss reverted to the sink and splashed his hot face over and over with cold water, not able to clean exactly, but able to revise and rework, justify and accommodate the necessity for the snap decision he’d been forced to make. He dried his face and looked at himself in the mirror and had one of his odd perceptions, that we never know what we look like to others, we only know our reflection and that now he knew he would be different and it might be all right because perhaps he would just look like one of them.
He went outside for a smoke and to pace out his new understanding, as if he was wearing different boots. Senior officers came and went with only one topic of conversation on their hungry lips and two names, Speer and Todt. But by the end of that cigarette Voss had made his first intelligence discovery in the field, because the officers still came and went and they still had those two names on their lips but this time they were shaking their heads and the words ‘self-destruct mechanism’ and the ‘incidence of failure’ had threaded their way amongst the names.
It comes out of here and goes in there, thought Voss. The inestimable power of the spoken word. The power of misinformation in a thunderstruck community.
Voss went back to work. No Weber. He replotted the latest movements from the decodes. Weber returned, took a seat, braced himself against the desk. Voss kept his head down, looked at Weber through the bone of his cranium.
‘At least I know you can listen now,’ said Weber. ‘You’ve passed the first Rastenburg test with an A and you don’t have to worry about me and those files. I didn’t fill them. I didn’t seal them. I didn’t even sign for them. Learn something from that, Voss. They’re saying now that somebody must have accidentally pulled the self-destruct handle in the plane. We’re all in the clear. Are you hearing me, Voss?’
‘I’m hearing you.’
Voss did hear him, but only through the reel of film in his head which was full of the black metal trunk with its white stencilled address. His hands lifting the trunk and taking it into the plane where he jams it between the seats so it won’t slide about – two of Zeitzler’s boxes of files on top and two on the seats by the trunk. Todt comes on to the plane, preceded by his luggage, impatient to be away from the scene of his disastrous politicking and up into the light of the sunshine and the clear air where everything is comprehensible. He straps himself into his seat, not next to the pilot but in the fuselage where he might be able to do some work. The hold darkens as the door closes. The pilot taxis to the end of the runway. The plane steadies itself, the wings rock and stabilize. The propellers thrash the icy air. The pressure kicks in behind the old man’s back and they surge down the runway flashing white, grey and black at the snow and ice patches on the strip. Then Todt sees the black trunk and some low animal instinct kicks in the paranoia and a terrible realization. He roars at the pilot to stop the plane but the pilot cannot stop. The velocity is already too great. He has to take off. The wheels defy gravity and Todt has a moment of weightlessness, a premonition of the lightness of being to follow. They bank in the steep curve, the trunk tight against the wall of the fuselage. Todt staring into the black Polish pine trees, or are they East Prussian pine trees now, Germanic Empire pine trees? Todt’s weight has come back to him and he’s in a panic now. He’s seen the trunk before. He’s seen it in his head and he knows what’s in it. He knew what would be in it the night before and he woke up with the knowledge this morning and it was further confirmed by the flight captain who told him that Speer would not be on the plane. What was Speer doing here anyway? Todt and Speer. Two men who knew their destiny and had no hesitation in obeying. The plane’s wings are still perpendicular to the ground. The black forest is still flashing past Todt’s care-worn eyes. The wings flatten. They’re going to make it after all. The pilot is hunched and roaring at the control tower. The altimeter winds its way down through three hundred to two hundred to one hundred and fifty and Todt is praying and the pilot is praying too, although he doesn’t know why and that is how they enter the biggest noise, the whitest light. Two men praying. One who didn’t like war enough and the other unlucky to be flying him.
And then silence. Not even the wind whistling through the shattered fuselage. Pure peace for the man who didn’t like war enough.
‘Everything all right in there, Voss?’
Voss looked up, dazed, Weber a blur in his eye.
‘There was something else…’
‘There was nothing else, Voss. Nothing that anybody wants to know. Nothing that I want to know. Those words stay in your head. In here we talk about military positions. All right?’
Voss went through the decodes. The black metal trunk slid into a dark recess, the murky horror corner of his mind, and soon the white stencilled address was barely readable.
At 1.00 p.m. Hitler sent an adjutant to bring in his first caller of the day. The adjutant returned with Speer in his wake. Fifteen minutes later the Reichsmarschall Goering appeared in the corridor smiling and resplendent in light blue, his smooth jowls, shiny perhaps from the patina of last night’s morphine sweat, juddered with each step. Half an hour later it was out. Speer had been appointed Todt’s successor in all his capacities and the Reichsmarschall Goering’s humour was reclassified as unstable.
Men from the Air Ministry sifted the wreckage for days and found nothing but seared metal and black dust. The black metal trunk with its white stencilling had ceased to exist. SS Colonel Weiss, under Hitler’s instructions, conducted an internal investigation into the airport personnel and ground crew. Voss was required to supply his initials to the manifest alongside the four box files – posterity for his perjury.
The ice began to thaw, tanks whose tracks had been welded to the steppes broke free and the war rolled on, even without the greatest construction engineer in German history.
Chapter 4
18th November 1942, Wolfsschanze HQ, Rastenburg, East Prussia.
Voss wanted to remove his eyeballs and swill them in saline, see the grit sink to the bottom. The bunker was silent with the Führer away at the Berghof in Obersalzberg. Voss’s work had been finished hours ago but he remained at the situation table, chin resting on his white, piled fists, staring into the map where a rough cratering existed at a point on the Volga river. Stalingrad had been poked and prodded, jabbed and reamed until it was a dirty, paperflaked hole. As Voss looked deeper into it he began to see the blackened, snow-covered city, the cadaverous apartment buildings, the gnarled and twisted beams of shelled factories, the poxed façades, the scree-filled streets littered with stiffened, deep-frozen bodies and, alongside it, growing to midnight black in the white landscape and becoming viscous with the cold, the Volga – the line of communication from the south to the north of Russia.
He was sitting in this position long after he could have gone to bed, contemplating the grey front line that was now stretched to the thinness of piano wire since the German Sixth Army had ballooned it over to Stalingrad, because of his brother. Julius Voss was a major in the 113th Infantry Division of the Sixth Army. This division was not one of those fighting like a pack of street dogs in the ruins of Stalingrad but was dug into the snow somewhere on the treeless steppe east of the point where the river Don had decided to turn south to the Sea of Azov.
Julius Voss was his father’s son. A brilliant sportsman, he’d collected a silver in the epée at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He rode a horse as if it was a part of him. On his first day’s hunting at the age of sixteen he’d tracked a deer for a whole day and shot it in the eye from 300 metres. He was a perfect and outstanding army officer, loved by his men and admired by his superiors. He was intelligent and, despite his life of brilliance, there wasn’t a shred of arrogance in the man. Karl thought about him a lot. He loved him. Julius had been his protector at school, sport not being one of Karl’s strengths and, having too many brains for everybody’s comfort, life could have been hell without a brother three years older and a golden boy, too. So Karl was taking his turn to watch over his brother.
The German position was not as strong as it might first appear. The Russians had trussed up ten divisions in and around the city in bloody and brutal street-to-street fighting since September and now, unless they could hammer home the death blow in the next month, it looked as if the rest of the German army would be condemned to spend another winter out in the open. More men would die and there would be little chance of the Sixth Army being reinforced until the spring. The situation was doomed to a four-month deep-frozen stalemate.
The door to the situation room crashed open, cannoned off the wall and slammed shut. It opened more slowly to reveal Weber standing in the frame.
‘That’s better,’ he said, trying to put some lick on to his lips, clearly drunk, steaming drunk, his forehead shining, his eyes bright, his skin blubber. ‘I knew I’d find you in here, boring the maps again.’
Weber swaggered into the room.
‘You can’t bore maps, Weber.’
‘You can. Look at them, poor bastards. Insensate with tedium. You don’t talk to them, Voss, that’s your problem.’
‘Piss off, Weber. You’re ten schnapps down the hole and not fit to talk to.’
‘And you? What are you doing? Is the brilliant, creative military mind of Captain Karl Voss going to solve the Stalingrad problem…tonight, or do we have to wait another twenty-four hours?’
‘I was just thinking…’
‘Don’t tell me. Let me guess. You were just thinking about what the Reichsminister Fritz Todt said to you before his plane crash…’
‘And why shouldn’t I?’
‘Because it’s morbid in a man of your age. You should be thinking about…about women…’ said Weber and, placing both hands on the table, he began some vigorous, graphic and improbable thrusting.
Voss looked away. Weber collapsed across the table. When Voss looked back, Weber’s face was right there, giving him the wife’s-eye view, head on the pillow, husband sweaty, lurid, tight, pink skin and wet-eyed.
‘You shouldn’t feel guilty just because Todt spoke to you,’ said Weber, licking his lips again, eyes closed now as if imagining a kiss coming to him.
‘That’s not why I feel guilty. I feel…’
‘Don’t tell me, I don’t want to know,’ said Weber, sitting up and shunning him with a hand. ‘Bore your maps, Voss. Go on. But I’ll tell you this,’ he came in close again, devil breath, ‘Paulus will take Stalingrad before Christmas and we’ll be in Persia by next spring, rolling in sherbet. The oil will be ours, and the grain. How long will Moscow last?’
‘The Romanians on the River Don front have reported huge troop concentrations in their north-west sector,’ said Voss, flat and heavy.
Weber sat up, dangled his legs and gave Voss the gab, gab, gab with his hand.
‘The fucking Romanians,’ he said. ‘Goulash for brains.’
‘That’s the Hungarians.’
‘What?’
‘Who eat goulash.’
‘What do Romanians eat?’
Voss shrugged.
‘Problem,’ said Weber. ‘We don’t know what the Romanian brain consists of, but if you ask me it’s yoghurt…no…it’s the whey from the top of the yoghurt.’
‘You’re boring me, Weber.’
‘Let’s have a drink.’
‘You’re stinking already.’
‘Come on,’ he said, grabbing Voss around the shoulders and barging him out of the door, their cheeks touching as they went through, horrid lovers.
Weber slashed the lights out. They put on their coats and went back to their quarters. Weber crashed about in his own room while Voss moved the chess game, which he was playing against his father by post, away from the bed. Weber appeared, triumphant, with schnapps. He crashed down on to the bed, hoicked a magazine out from under his buttocks.
‘What’s this?’
‘Die Naturwissenschafen.’
‘Fucking physics,’ said Weber, hurling the magazine. ‘You want to get into something…’
‘…physical, yes, I know, Weber. Give me the schnapps, I need to be braindead to continue.’
Weber handed over the bottle, bolstered his wet head with Voss’s pillow, whacking it into position with his stone cranium. Voss sipped the clear liquid which lit a trail down to his colon.
‘What’s physics going to do for me?’ burped Weber.
‘Win the war.’
‘Go on.’
‘Give us endless reusable energy.’
‘And?’
‘Explain life.’
‘I don’t want life explained, I just want to live it on my own terms.’
‘Nobody gets to do that, Weber…not even the Führer.’
‘Tell me how it’s going to win us the war.’
‘Perhaps you haven’t heard talk of the atom bomb.’
‘I heard Heisenberg nearly blew himself up with one in June.’
‘So you’ve heard of Heisenberg.’
‘Naturally,’ said Weber, brushing imaginary lint from his fly. ‘And the chemist Otto Hahn. You think I don’t stick my ear out in that corridor every now and again.’
‘I won’t bore you then.’
‘So what’s it all about? Atom bombs.’
‘Forget it, Weber.’
‘It goes in easier when I’m drunk.’
‘All right. You take some fissionable material…’
‘I’m lost.’
‘Remember Goethe.’
‘Goethe! Fuck. What did he say about “fissionable material”?’
‘He said: “What is the path? There is no path. On into the unknown.’”
‘Gloomy bastard,’ said Weber, snatching back the bottle. ‘Start again.’
‘There’s a certain type of material, a very rare material, which when brought together in a critical mass – shut up and listen – could create as many as eighty generations of fission – shut up, Weber, just let me get it out – before the phenomenal heat would blow the mass apart. That means…’
‘I’m glad you said that.’
‘…that, if you can imagine this, one fission releases two hundred million electron bolts of energy and that would double eighty times before the chain reaction would stop. What do you think that would produce, Weber?’
‘The biggest blast known to mankind. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘A whole city wiped out with one bomb.’
‘You said this fissionable material’s pretty rare.’
‘It comes from uranium.’
‘Aha!’ said Weber, sitting up. ‘Joachimstahl.’
‘What about it?’
‘Biggest uranium mine in Europe. And it’s in Czechoslo-vakia…which is ours,’ said Weber, cuddling the schnapps bottle.
‘There’s an even bigger one in the Belgian Congo.’
‘Aha! Which is ours, too, because…’
‘Yes, Weber, we know, but it’s still a very complicated chemical process to get the fissionable material out of the uranium. The stuff they’d found was called U 235 but they could only get traces and it decayed almost instantly. Then somebody called Weizsäcker began to think about what happened to all the excess neutrons released by the fission of U 235, some would be captured by U 238, which would then become U 239, which would then decay into a new element which he called Ekarhenium.’
‘Voss.’
‘Yes?’
‘You’re boring the shit out of me. Drink some more of this and try saying it all backwards. It might, you know, make more sense.’
‘I told you it was complicated,’ said Voss. ‘Anyway, they’ve found a way to make the “fissionable material” comparatively easily in an atomic pile, which uses graphite and some stuff called heavy water, which we used to be able to get from the Norsk Hydro plant in Norway – until the British sabotaged it.’
‘I remember something about that,’ said Weber. ‘So the British know we’re building this bomb.’
‘They know we have the science – it’s in all these magazines you’re throwing around my room – but do we have the capability? It’s a huge industrial undertaking, building an atomic pile is just the first step.’
‘How much of this Ekarhe—shit do you need to make a bomb?’
‘A kilo, maybe two.’
‘That’s not very much…to blow up an entire city.’
‘Blow up isn’t really the word, Weber,’ said Voss. ‘Vaporize is more like it.’
‘Give me that schnapps.’
‘It’s going to take years to build this thing.’
‘We’ll be rolling in sherbet by then.’
Weber finished the bottle and went to bed. Voss stayed up and read his mother’s part of the letter, which contained detailed descriptions of social occasions and was strangely comforting. His father, General Heinrich Voss, sitting out the war in enforced retirement, having made the mistake of voicing his opinions about the Commissar Order – where any Jews or partisans encountered in the Russian campaign were to be handed over to the SS for ‘treatment’ – would add an irascible note at the bottom and a chess move. This time his move was followed by the word ‘check’ and the line: ‘You don’t know it yet but I’ve got you on the run.’ Voss shook his head. He didn’t even have to think. He dragged the chair with the chessboard to him, made his father’s move and then his own, which he scribbled on to a note and put in an envelope to post in the morning.
At 10.00 a.m. 19th November the first conference of the day got underway with a discussion over an enlarged map of Stalingrad and its immediate vicinity. No attempt had been made to alter the map to show the true state of the city. All it indicated was neatly packaged sectors, red for Russian, grey for German, like peacetime postal districts.
At 10.30 a.m. the teleprinters shunted into life and the phones started ringing. General Zeitzler was called from the room, to return minutes later with the announcement that a Russian offensive had started at 05.20 a.m. He showed how a Russian tank force had broken through the Romanian sectors and was now heading south-east towards the river Don, and that activity had broken out along the whole front to hold German forces in their positions. A panzer corps had been sent to engage the advancing Russians. Everything was in hand. Voss made the necessary alterations to the map. They went back to the Stalingrad situation leaving Zeitzler fingering the small flag of the panzer corps and rasping a hand over his sandpaper chin.
By lunchtime the next day news reached Rastenburg of a second large Russian offensive starting south of Stalingrad, with such huge numbers of tanks and infantry it was inconceivable that they’d had no intelligence.
The Stalingrad map was rolled and stacked.
It was clear that full encirclement of the Sixth Army was the Russian intention. Voss felt sick and empty as Zeitzler dragged him and his inexhaustible memory around wherever he went. Voss stood over Zeitzler’s telephone conversations to the Führer, vomiting information which the Army Chief of Staff would use in a desperate bid to impress on Hitler the dire circumstances and the need to allow the Sixth Army to retreat. The Führer paced the great hall of the Berghof swearing at Slavs and hammering tables into submission.
Sunday, 22nd November was Totensonntag, the day of remembrance for the dead, and after a subdued service they heard that the two Russian forces were about to meet and that encirclement was a foregone conclusion. The Führer left the Berghof for Leipzig to fly on to Rastenburg.
As Voss began the monumental task of drafting orders for the phased withdrawal of the Sixth Army the Führer stopped his train en route to Leipzig and called Zeitzler expressly to forbid any retreat.
Zeitzler sent Voss back to his room and, to take his mind off the disaster, Voss pored over the chess game. In doing so he suddenly saw his error, or rather, he perceived his father’s strength of position. He searched for the letter he’d scribbled days ago and found that one of the orderlies had posted it for him. He took out another sheet of paper and wrote one word on it. Resigned.
The Führer arrived in Rastenburg on 23rd November and after the initial shock of the Russian success nerves steadied. In the days and weeks that followed the disaster, Voss witnessed the transformation of the Rastenburg HQ. It ceased to be a military installation and became instead the stuff of legend. Men would arrive, tear off their cloaks and capes and perform miracles in front of their glassyeyed leader. Vast and powerfully armoured divisions, miraculously supplied, would appear and drive up from the south to relieve the stricken army. When, as in some bizarre game of three-card monte, this force failed to materialize, another maestro would whisk away a silken sheet and show fleets of aircraft supplying and resupplying until, brought back up to full strength, the Sixth Army would take Stalingrad, break the Russian encirclement and assume their position in Germanic legend. Everything became possible. Rastenburg became a circus where the greatest illusionists of the time came to perform.
At this stage, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, a sickness settled itself in Voss’s gut. The news of men dying of starvation and cold, and the back to back shows from prestidigitators from all the forces, sealed off his stomach. His blue eyes sunk back into his head, his uniform hung off his ribs. He sipped water or schnapps and smoked upwards of fifty cigarettes a day.
In mid December an attempt was made to relieve the army from the south. The Russians stalled the attack and proceeded to smash the Italian army and decimate the air transport fleet. Still the Führer refused permission for the Sixth Army to retreat; his eyes seared the situation maps demanding deliverance.
Voss listened, first to the quality of the silence in the situation conferences, which were black, crushing and hideous, and then to the boot-licking apostles of the High Command who would pledge the impossible for one look of love from the Führer. He asked for a transfer to the front. Zeitzler refused him and, perhaps after seeing the bones appearing through the skin of Voss’s face, went on Stalingrad rations himself. They became known as ‘the cadavers’.
There had been no improvement in the German Sixth Army’s position by the beginning of January 1943 and Voss, pale with his facial skin drawn tightly over his skull, found himself on his bed in his room smoking and sipping some of Weber’s violent schnapps. He had two letters in front of him on the seat of a chair where he used to keep the chess games he played with his father. There’d been no chess since his resignation back in November. The two letters, both short, one from his father and the other from his brother, had presented him with a problem whose only solution involved calling on SS Colonel Bruno Weiss.
The Kessel, Stalingrad
1st January 1943
Dear Karl,
You know better than anyone our situation out here. I can only thank you for trying to send us the sausages and ham for Christmas but it was a lost cause. They probably never got off the airstrip. Real meat has not been seen for weeks. Krebs and Stahlschuss came up with some shreds of dried mule so that we managed to have some kind of celebration for the New Year. It wasn’t as good as Christmas which, whatever happens to me now, will have been one of the greatest military experiences of my short career. It’s difficult to believe in this unbearable environment that men can find (I’ve thought about this a long time to try to find the right word) such sweetness in themselves. They gave each other things which were their last and most important possessions and if they had nothing they made something from bits of metal or carved bone retrieved from the steppe. It was remarkable to find the human spirit so undaunted. Glaser has tried to have me taken to the hospital again (I’m yellow, and the legs are still badly swollen so that I can’t move about) but I’ve refused. I never want to see that vision of hell again. I won’t tell you. You must have heard by now.
I listen to the men and there’s been a change in their mood now. Before the New Year they would say that the Führer will rescue them. Now, if they still think that, they don’t say it. We are resigned to our fate and you might be surprised to hear that we are cheerful because, and I know this will sound absurd in the circumstances, we are free.
I think of you and am always your brother,
Julius
Karl read this letter over and over. His brother had never been one for the examination of the soul and his discovery of the nobility of man in these desperate circumstances was a revelation. Karl was sickened by the thought of playing on Weiss’s side of the fence to get what he wanted.
Berlin
2nd January 1943
Dear Karl,
We have had another letter from Julius. His are not censored like some of the junior officers’. Your mother cannot read them even though he makes light of the terrible things around him. He seems so inured to the desperate circumstances that he doesn’t see that what he considers normal is, to people in Berlin, unimaginable horror. I do not ask this of you lightly. I only ask this of you because I saw some of this pointlessness in the Great War. It goes against every military instinct I have but I would like you to do everything you can to get your brother out of that place. I know it is forbidden. I know it is impossible but I must ask this of you on behalf of your mother and for myself.
Your father
Voss lay back on the bed, his boots up on the metal bar at his feet, the two letters on his chest resting against his protruding ribs. He lit another cigarette from the one he’d been smoking. He knew that if anything happened to Julius it could potentially destroy his family. Since his father had been ‘retired’, he’d invested all his hopes and aspirations in his first-born son. He thought it possible that his father might be able to bear Julius’s death in glorious victory but not, definitely not, in miserable defeat.
Voss swung his feet off the bed and slapped a sheet of paper on to the chair. He would have preferred to ask this favour of General Zeitzler but knew that he could not possibly grant him the request. SS Colonel Weiss was the only man with whom he had any leverage, if that was a word he could use when it came to the SS.
He began writing in his horrible, cramped scrawl, handwriting that had developed because his brain always worked faster than his fingers. He balled his first attempt and tried again. He screwed that one up, too. He didn’t know what he wanted for his brother. He wanted to save him, of course, but on what terms? Julius, his state of mind heightened to rare acuity, would not be easily duped.
Rastenburg
5th January 1943
Dear Julius,
The officer who will give you this letter will be able to get you out of your predicament, fly you out of the Kessel and eventually into hospital back in Berlin. You have a stark and terrible decision to make. If you stay, our mother and, you know this to be true, more especially our father will be heartbroken. You, his eldest son, have always been his lodestone, the one to whom he is naturally drawn, from whom he derives his energy and now, since his retirement, in who he has invested all his hope. He would be a broken man without you in his life.
If you leave, your men will not despise you but you will despise yourself. You will bear the guilt of the survivor, the guilt of the chosen one. This is possibly, and only you can answer this question, reparable damage. Whatever happens in our father’s mind will not be.
I cannot believe I am having to deliver the burden of this choice to you in your desperate circumstances. In earlier attempts I tried to dress it up nicely, a temptation for Julius, but it refused to be pretty. It is an ugly choice. For my part, all I can say is that, whatever you decide, you are always my brother and I have never felt that there’s any better man living.
Karl
Voss buttoned his tunic, put on his coat and went out under the icicle fringes of his hut into the frozen air. His boots rang on the hard, snow-packed ground. He entered Restricted Area I and went straight to the Security Command post from where he knew SS Colonel Weiss would be running his brutal régime. The other soldiers looked at him as he entered. Nobody came willingly into the Security Command post. Nobody ever wanted to talk to SS Colonel Weiss. He was shown straight in. Weiss sat behind his desk in a state of livid surprise, his white skin even whiter against the deep black of his uniform, his crimson stepped scar from his eye to cheek redder. Voss’s nerve ricocheted around his stomach looking for a way out.
‘What can I do for you, Captain Voss?’
‘A personal matter, sir.’
‘Personal?’ Weiss asked himself; he didn’t normally deal with the personal.
‘I believe we reached a very special understanding between each other last February and that is why I have come to you with this personal matter.’
‘Sit,’ said Weiss, as if he was a dog. ‘You look ill, Captain.’
‘Lost my appetite, sir,’ said Voss, lowering himself into a chair on shaky thighs. ‘You know…the situation with the Sixth Army…is traumatic for everybody.’
‘The Führer will resolve the problem. We will win the day, Captain. You will see,’ said Weiss, giving him a wary look, already at work on the subtext of the words.
‘My brother is in the Kessel, sir. He is extremely sick.’
‘Haven’t his men taken him to the hospital for treatment?’
‘They have, but his condition did not respond to the treatment they have available in the field hospital there. He asked to be taken back to his division. I believe his condition is only treatable outside the Kessel.’
Weiss said nothing. The fingers he ran over his scarred cheek had well-cared for nails, glossy, packed with protein but tinged blue from underneath.
‘Where are you quartered, Captain?’ asked Weiss after a long pause.
It caught him off guard. He wasn’t sure where he was quartered any more. Numbers tinkered in his brain.
‘Area III, C4,’ he said.
‘Ah yes, you’re next to Captain Weber,’ said Weiss, so quickly that it was clear that his question hadn’t been necessary.
The chair back cut into Voss’s newly exposed ribs. You didn’t build up any credit in Weiss’s world, you always had to pay.
‘Captain Weber is not a careful individual, is he, Captain Voss?’
‘In what respect, sir?’
‘Drunken, loose-tongued, curious.’
‘Curious?’
‘Inquisitive,’ said Weiss. ‘And I notice you don’t disagree with my first two observations.’
‘Forgive me for saying so, sir, but in my opinion Weber is the least inquisitive man I know, very concentrated on his task,’ said Voss. ‘And as for drinking…who doesn’t?’
‘Loose-tongued?’ asked Weiss.
‘Who’s there to be loose-tongued with?’
‘Have you been with Captain Weber on any of his trips to town?’
Voss blinked. He didn’t know anything about Weber’s trips to town.
Weiss played the edge of his desk one-handed, a tremolo finished with a rapped flourish.
‘He has a very sensitive position right in the heart of the matter,’ said Weiss. ‘What do you two talk about when you’re drinking together?’
Voss shouldn’t have been shocked, but he was, at Weiss’s apparent omniscience. A squirt of adrenalin slithered through his veins, panic tightened his neck glands.
‘Nothing of importance.’
‘Tell me.’
‘He’s asked me to explain things to him.’
‘Like what? Chess?’
‘He hates chess.’
‘Then what?’
‘Physics. He knew I went to Heidelberg before I was called up.’
‘Physics?’ repeated Weiss, eyes glazing.
Voss thought he sensed a nonchalance that made him think that this was perhaps dangerous ground, mine-sown.
‘The evenings are long here in Rastenburg,’ said Voss to cover himself. ‘He teases me. He says I should be thinking of things more physical. You know, women.’
‘Women,’ said Weiss, laughing with so little mirth it became something else.
‘He’s more frustrated than he is inquisitive,’ said Voss, aware that Weiss wasn’t listening any more.
‘So you would like to get your brother out of the Kessel,’ said Weiss, opting for an alarming change of direction which left Voss thinking he’d said things he hadn’t. ‘Yes, in view of our earlier understanding I think that could be arranged. Do you have his details?’
Voss handed over his letter, wondering if the tiny morsel about Weber he’d offered was as good as a whole carcass to Weiss’s paranoia.
‘Rest assured,’ said Weiss, ‘we will get him out. I look forward to continuing our special understanding, Captain Voss.’
Voss heard nothing more from Weiss and he didn’t put himself in the man’s way. He wrote a note to his father saying that he’d put the process of getting Julius away from Stalingrad in motion, he was waiting for news and it might take a little time because of the shambolic state inside the Kessel. He avoided Weber and began to play against himself at chess without, curiously, ever being able to win.
A week later there was a conference in the situation room with all the senior officers in the Wolfsschanze present. It was a meeting that would change Karl Voss. A captain had flown in from the front and Voss had heard that he had been primed to deliver a speech on the real situation on the ground. Voss slipped into the meeting in time to hear the captain deliver his vision of horror. Lice-ridden men living off water and shreds of horse meat, others jaundiced with their limbs swollen to twice the size, hundreds of men a day dying of starvation in the brutal cold, the wounded at the airstrip left out in the open, their blood congealed to ice, the dead stacked on the impenetrable ground. The Führer took it, shoulders rounded, lids weighed down.
And then the moment.
The captain moved on to a complete rundown of the decimated fighting strength of every unit within the Kessel and without. Hitler nodded. Slowly he turned to the map and squeezed his chin. As the Führer’s slightly shaking hand moved out from his side the captain faltered. Hitler stood a flag up which had fallen over and began to talk about an SS panzer division, which was three weeks from the action. The captain’s words still came out as he’d no doubt rehearsed again and again, but they had no meaning. It was as if all the conjunctions and prepositions had been stripped out, all the verbs had become their opposites, all nouns incomprehensible.
Silence, as the captain’s boot squeak retreated. Hitler surveyed all his officers, his eyes beseeching, the terrible violence of red on the map below him flooding his face. Field Marshal Keitel, face trembling with emotion, stepped forward with a thunderous crack from his boot heel and roared over the deadly silence:
‘Mein Führer, we will hold Stalingrad.’
At breakfast the next day Voss ate properly for the first time in weeks. Afterwards, as he headed to the situation room, he was called to the Security Command post. He sat down in Weiss’s hard chair. Weiss leaned over and gave him an envelope. It contained his own letter to Julius unopened and with it a note.
The Kessel
12th January 1943
Dear Captain Voss,
An officer arrived today saying that he had come to pick up your brother. It is my sad duty to inform you that Major Julius Voss died on 10th January. We are his men and we would like you to know that he left this life with the same courage with which he endured it. His thoughts were never for himself but only ever for the men under his command…
Voss couldn’t read on. He put the note and letter back in their envelope, saluted SS Colonel Weiss and went back to the main building where he found the toilets and emptied his first solid breakfast in weeks into the bowl.
The news that afternoon, of the final assault on the abandoned Sixth Army, reached Voss from a strange distance, like words penetrating a sick child’s mind. Did it happen or not?
There was nothing to be done and he finished work early. The sense of doom in the situation room was unbearable. The generals crowded the maps as if coffin-side at a vigil. He went back to his quarters and knocked on Weber’s door. A strange person answered it. Voss asked after Weber. The man didn’t know him. He went to the next door, found another captain sitting on his bed smoking.
‘Where’s Weber?’ he asked.
The captain turned his mouth down, shook his head.
‘Security breach or something. He was taken away yesterday. I don’t know, don’t ask. Not in this…climate, anyway. If you know what I mean,’ said the captain, and Voss didn’t move, stared at him so that the man felt the need to say more. ‘Something about…well, it’s only rumour…don’t hold with it myself. You wouldn’t if you knew Weber.’
Voss still said nothing and the captain was sufficiently uncomfortable to get off his chair and come to the door.
‘I know Weber,’ said Voss, with the certainty of someone who was about to be proven wrong.
‘They found him in bed with a butcher’s delivery boy in town.’
Voss went to his room and wrote to his mother and father. It was a letter which left him exhausted, drained of everything so that his arms hung hopeless and unliftable at his sides. He went to bed early and slept, waking twice in the night to find tears on his face. In the morning he was woken up by an orderly and told to report to General Zeitzler’s office.
Zeitzler sat him down and didn’t stand behind his desk but leaned against the front of it. He looked avuncular, not his usual military self. He gave Voss permission to smoke.
‘I have some bad news,’ he said, his fingers pattering his thigh. ‘Your father died last night…’
Voss fixed his eyes on Zeitzler’s left epaulette. The only words to reach him were ‘compassionate leave’. By lunchtime he found himself in the half-dead light, standing away from the edge of the dark pine trees alongside the railway track, a grey sack of clothes on one side and a small brown suitcase on the other. The Berlin train left at 1.00 p.m. and although he was heading into his mother’s grief he could only feel that this was a new beginning and that greater possibilities existed away from this place, this hidden kingdom – the Wolfsschanze.
Chapter 5
17th January 1943, Voss family home, Berlin-Schlachtensee.
‘No, no, they sent somebody to see us,’ said Frau Voss. ‘They sent Colonel Linge, you remember him, an old friend of your father’s, retired, a good man, not too stiff like the rest of them, he has something, a sensitivity, he’s not a man that assumes everybody’s the same as himself, he can differentiate, a rare trait in military circles. Of course, as soon as your father saw him he knew what it was about. But you see…’ She blinked but the tears fattened too quickly and rolled down her cheeks before she could get the clutched, lace-edged handkerchief to her face.
Karl Voss leaned over and took his mother’s free hand, a hand that he remembered differently, not so bony, frail and blue-veined. How fast grief sucks out the marrow – some days off food, three nights without sleep, the mind spiralling its dark gyre, in and out, but always around and around the same terrible, hard point. It was a force more destructive than a ravaging illness where the body’s instinct is to fight. Grief provides all the symptoms but no fight. There’s nothing to fight for. It’s already gone. Stripped of purpose the mind turns on the body and reduces it. He squeezed her hand, trying to inject some of his youth into her, his sense of a future.
‘It was wrong,’ she said, careful not to say ‘he’. ‘He shouldn’t have placed so much hope in your letter. I didn’t to start with, but he infected me with his…Having him around the house all the time, he worked on me until we became these two candles in the window, waiting.’
She blew her nose, took a deep, trembling breath.
‘Still, Colonel Linge came. They went into his study. They talked for quite some time and then your father showed the colonel to the door. He came in here to see me and he was calm. He told me that Julius had died and all the wonderful things that Colonel Linge had said about him. And then he went back to his study and locked himself in. I was worried but not so worried, although now I see what his calmness was. His mind was made up. After some hours sitting alone here I went to bed, knocking on his door on the way. He told me to go up, he’d join me, which he did, hours later, maybe two or three o’clock in the morning. He slept, or maybe he didn’t, at least he lay on his side and didn’t move. He was up before I was awake. In the kitchen he said he was going to see Dr Schulz. I spoke to Dr Schulz afterwards and he did go to see him. He asked him for something to keep him calm and Dr Schulz, he’s very good, he gave him some herbal teas, took his blood pressure, which was high but to be expected. Dr Schulz even asked him, “You’re not thinking of doing anything stupid, are you, General?” and your father replied “What? Me? No, no, why do you think I’m here?” and he left. He drove to the Havel, into Wannsee and out again, parked the car, walked along the waterfront and shot himself.’
No tears this time. She just sat back and breathed evenly, looking at nothing beyond the short horizon of her own thoughts which were: he didn’t do it in his study, nor in the car, always a considerate man. He went out on the cold, hard ground and pointed the gun at the offending organ, his heart, not his head, and fired off two bullets into it. He froze out there. He was set solid by the time he was found, no walkers at this time of year, and short, bitter afternoons. She’d gone a little crazy that night he didn’t come home. She woke up in the morning to find all the gardening tools laid out in the kitchen. What had she been thinking? She came to, her son’s pulse thudding into her.
‘On his desk are the letters he wrote,’ she said. ‘There’s one there for you. Read it and we’ll talk again. And put some coal on the fire. I know it’s valuable but I’m just too cold today…you know how it gets into the marrow some days.’
Karl threw some pieces on the fire, put his hands in there for a second until the heat nipped them. He went to his father’s study, his boots loud on the wooden floor of the corridor the way his father’s were, so that Julius and he could hear them from the top of the house. Louder as he got heavier with the years.
He found the letter and sat in a leather armchair by the window, which still offered dim, late afternoon light.
Berlin-Schlachtensee
14th January 1943
Dear Karl,
This action I have taken is as a result of my unique perception of a series of events in my life. It has nothing to do with you. I know you did everything possible to get Julius out and it was typical of him to make light of the seriousness of his physical condition so that none of us could have known how close to death he was. Your mother, too, is blameless in this. She has given of her strength constantly and in the last two years I have been an even more difficult man to live with than I was before.
I have been overwhelmed by despair, not just because of the sudden termination of my career, but also because of my helplessness in the face of what I fear will be the direst consequences for Germany as a result of our aggression and the extent of our aggression over the past three years.
Don’t misunderstand me. I, as you know, approved of Hitler in those early years. He returned to the nation the belief in ourselves which we had lost in that first terrible war. I encouraged Julius into the Party as well as the army. I, like everybody else, was inspired. But the Commissar Order, which I vehemently opposed, was for a very important reason. Certain things have happened and will continue to happen in Germany and the rest of Europe while the National Socialists are in power. You have heard of these things. They are truly terrible. Too terrible, in so many ways, to believe. My stand against the Commissar Order was an attempt to prevent the army from acquiescing to these other, darker, politically motivated and utterly dishonourable actions. I failed and paid the penalty, a small one compared to the eternal damnation of the German Army for conspiring in these appalling deeds. If we lose this war, and it is possible, given the extent to which we have stretched ourselves over so many fronts, that the defeat of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad is the beginning, then our army officers will face the same retribution as the brutes and thugs in the SS. We have all been tarred by obeying the Commissar Order.
This was the beginning of my despair and my removal from the battlefield compounded it in helplessness. When this abandonment of principle was combined with the leadership’s utter failure to respond to the predicament of a far-flung army I realized that we were lost, that fundamental military logic no longer applied, that more than honour had been handed over with the acquiescence to the Commissar Order. Our generals have been emasculated, we will be run by the Corporal from now on. That this abysmal state of affairs should have resulted in the death of my first-born son was more than I could bear. I am no longer young. The future looks bleak amidst the wasteland of my shattered beliefs. Everything I stood for, believed in and cherished has fallen.
Two more things. At my funeral there will be a man called Major Manfred Giesler. He is an officer with the Abwehr. You will either talk to him if you believe in what I have said in the early part of this letter or you will not. That is your decision.
My body will be cremated and I would like you to scatter my ashes on a grave in the Wannsee church cemetery belonging to Rosemarie Hausser 1888–1905.
I wish you a happy and successful life and hope that you will once again be able to pursue your aptitude in physics in more peaceful times.
Your ever loving father
PS It is absolutely imperative that this letter be destroyed after you have read it. Failure to do so could result in danger for yourself, your mother and Major Giesler. If my predictions as to the course of this war prove to be correct you will see that letters containing such sentiments will carry heavy consequences.
Voss reread the letter and burnt it in the grate, watching the slow, greenish flames consume and blacken the paper. He sat by the window again in a state of shock at this, his first intimate sight of the workings of his father’s mind. He gathered himself for a few moments; the conflicting emotions needed to be reined in before he went to speak to his mother. Anger and grief didn’t seem to be able to sit in the same room for very long.
He went back to his mother who still sat in the same position, the light poorer but her scalp visible under her grey hair, which he’d never seen before.
‘So,’ she said before he had sat down, ‘he told you about the girl.’
‘He told me he wants his ashes cast on her grave.’ His mother nodded, and looked over her shoulder as if she’d heard something outside. The light caught her face, no sadness, only acceptance.
‘She was somebody he knew, an army officer’s daughter. He fell in love with her and she died. I think he knew her for all of one week.’
‘One week?’ said Voss. ‘He told you this?’ ‘He told me about the girl, he was a totally honourable man, your father, incapable even of omission. His sister filled in the details.’ ‘But you’re his wife and…I can’t do this.’ ‘You can, Karl. You will. If it’s his wish, it’s mine too. Just think of it as your father being in love with the idea, or rather an ideal, that was not complicated or tarnished by the grind of everyday life. That is the purest form of love you can find. Perfection,’ she said, shrugging. ‘I can think of no better thing after what your father went through, than for him to rest with his ideal. To him it was a vision of peace that he failed to attain in life.’
The funeral took place three days later. There were few people, most of his father’s friends were at one front or another. Frau Voss invited the few back to her house for some tea. Major Giesler was one who accepted. At the house Karl asked for a private word with him and they went into his father’s study.
Voss began to tell him the contents of his father’s letter. Giesler stopped him, went to the phone, followed the line to the wall and removed the pin from the socket. He sat back down in the leather chair by the window. Voss told him of his willingness to talk. Giesler said nothing. He had his hands clasped and was chewing on a knuckle, one of the few hairless regions of his body. He was very dark and his thick black eyebrows joined over his nose. He had a large, full-lipped, sensual mouth and his cheeks, razored that morning, already needed to be reshaved.
‘I would understand,’ said Voss, ‘if you needed to make some inquiries about me before we talk.’
‘We’ve already made our inquiries,’ said Giesler.
Voss thought for a moment.
‘In Rastenburg?’
‘We know, for instance, how you felt about the…the death of the Reichsminister Todt,’ said Giesler, ‘and your…disappointment with the way in which good soldiers died needlessly at Stalingrad and, of course, you have an impeccable pedigree.’
Voss frowned, replayed some reels in his mind.
‘Weber?’
Giesler opened his hands, reclasped them.
‘Weber disappeared,’ said Voss. ‘What happened to him?’
‘We didn’t know he was a homosexual. There are some things that even the deepest of inquiries will not unearth.’
‘But where is he?’
‘He is in very serious trouble, which he brought on himself,’ said Giesler. ‘He behaved recklessly in a climate where scapegoats were eagerly sought.’
‘He must have been under pressure…’
‘Drinking is one thing.’
‘How do you know I’m not homosexual?’
Giesler looked at him long and hard, that sensual mouth becoming unnerving.
‘Weber,’ he said after some time, as if perhaps that source hadn’t been as reliable as he’d have liked.
‘Well, he should know, although I’m not sure how. Women were not abundant in Rastenburg and those that were available…’ he drifted off, disheartened by the turn the conversation had taken; this dip into the ignoble was not what he’d had in mind. This was supposed to be a courageous act and here they were parting the dirt.
Giesler had his answer. He didn’t need to pursue this discussion further. He gave Voss an address of a villa in Gatow with a meeting time for the next day and stood. They shook hands and Giesler hung on, which at first Voss thought was another sexuality test but, no, it was a sincerity hold, a brotherhood clasp.
‘Weber won’t talk,’ he said. ‘It’s possible he will survive, although he will never get back into Rastenburg. But it is something for you to think about before you come to Gatow tomorrow. It’s not easy to be an enemy of the State – not, I hasten to add, an enemy of the nation, but this State. It is dangerous and lonely work. You will be lying to your colleagues every day for perhaps years. You will have no friends because friends are dangerous. Your work will require a mental fortitude, not intelligence necessarily, but strength and it is something you may feel you do not have. If you do not come to Gatow tomorrow nobody will think any the less of you. We will go our separate ways, praying for Germany.’
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