Kitabı oku: «The Company of Strangers»

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.