A Man Without Breath

‘And what was that? Fix the brakes on Hitler’s car? Nobble the vegetarian option in the officer’s mess? Push him over in the snow? The trouble with these damned aristocrats is that they know everything about good manners and being a gentleman and absolutely nothing about cold-blooded murder. If you’re going to do this kind of thing you need a professional. Like the person who murdered those two telephonists. Now he knew what he was doing.’

‘I don’t know for sure what the plan was then.’

‘So what do you know? I mean how are they going to try it this time?’

‘Another bomb, I believe.’

I smiled. ‘You know your salesmanship stinks, Judge. You invite me along to a party and then tell me that a bomb is going to explode while we’re there. My enthusiasm for Sunday morning is diminishing all the time.’

‘A very brave officer from Army Group Centre in Smolensk, who has the duty of taking Hitler round an exhibition of captured Soviet weaponry, has agreed to carry a bomb in his jacket pocket. I believe it’s his plan to be as close to the leader as possible when it goes off.’

I wondered if this officer was the Abwehr colonel I’d seen on the plane back from Smolensk. I would have asked the judge, but I thought I’d probably unnerved him quite enough with my remarks about Von Dohnanyi. I certainly didn’t want Goldsche calling this officer and telling him to call off the assassination just because of what I’d guessed.

‘Then we’d better just hope for the best,’ I said. ‘Usually that’s the only option available in Nazi Germany.’

CHAPTER 11

Sunday, March 21st 1943

The Zeughaus or Arsenal was a baroque building of pinkish stone on Unter den Linden that housed a military museum. In the centre of the facade was a classical open pediment, and surrounding the roof was a spindle balustrade along which were arranged a series of twelve or fourteen suits of classical armour, made of stone and empty, as if ready to be claimed by a busload of Greek heroes. But I was inclined to think of these empty suits of armour as belonging to men who were already dead, and therefore more typical of Nazi Germany and the disastrous war we were now waging in Russia. This seemed especially true on the first Heroes Memorial Day that Berlin had witnessed since the surrender at Stalingrad, and there would have been many of the several hundred officers who paraded in front of the huge staircase on the north side of the inner courtyard to hear the leader’s ten-minute speech who had the same unpalatable thought as me: our true heroes were lying under several feet of Russian snow, and all the memorials in the world wouldn’t alter the fact that Hitler’s retreat from Moscow would not be long in following Napoleon’s, and with equally terminal effect upon his leadership.

It was however a more imminent termination to Hitler’s leadership that many of us were praying for on that particular Sunday morning. We stood there to attention, under the barrels of the 10-centimetre field guns Army Group Centre had taken from the Reds, and I for one could cheerfully have wished that someone would fire a fragmentation shell at our beloved leader: the 10-centimetre K353 delivered a 17-kilogram shell containing about six hundred bullets and was devastating to 50 per cent of targets in a 20- to 40-metre area. Which sounded just fine to me. I would probably have been killed as well, but that was all right just so long as the leader didn’t walk away from an explosion.

We listened to a sombre piece of Bruckner that did little to make anyone feel optimistic about anything; then, bare-headed and wearing a grey leather greatcoat, the leader walked to the lectern, and like a malevolent fisherman casting a long line into an infernal black lake, he sought to hook our lowered spirits with an announcement of a lifting of the ban on furlough for serving men because the front had been ‘stabilized’. Then he got to more standard fare about the Jews and the Bolsheviks, the warmonger Churchill, and how the enemies of the Reich meant to abduct and then to sterilize our male youth before eventually slaughtering us in our beds.

In that place of war and destruction, Hitler’s cold, hard voice seemed darker and more subdued than normal, which did nothing to encourage any feeling at all, let alone soldierly sentiment for fallen comrades. It was like listening to the sepulchral tones of Mephistopheles as, in some cavernous mountain hall, he threatened us all with hell. Only the threats were no good; hell was waiting just down the road and we all knew it. You could smell it in the air like hops from a local brewery.

In spite of all Judge Goldsche had told me, I didn’t really believe anything was going to happen to Hitler, but it certainly didn’t stop me hoping that Colonel von Gersdorff – for that was the Abwehr assassin’s name, and as I’d suspected he was indeed the officer who had been on the plane back from Smolensk – would prove me wrong.