Death and Honor

Compared to just about everybody else in the senior hierarchy of Nazi Germany but the Führer himself, both men were simply uniformed. Bormann was wearing a brown shirt and trousers, and he had on shoes rather than boots. His right sleeve bore a red Hakenkruez armband with the black swastika in the center of a white circle. Canaris was wearing a naval uniform, but without the flag officer’s silver belt to which he was entitled, and which almost every other admiral wore. Neither was either man wearing a holstered pistol, another item of fashion among most senior officers.

“I’m really sorry to have kept you waiting, Canaris, but you know how it gets in here sometimes,” Bormann greeted the vizeadmiral.

“It’s not a problem, Herr Reichsleiter,” Canaris replied.

He thought: I knew very well that you would keep me waiting. Not to do so would have been an admission that you were not working your fingers to the bone for the party. It is important to you that you appear important. That’s why I called you “Herr Reichsleiter.”

Bormann’s official title—he was second only to Hitler himself in the Nazi party—was Parteileiter, “party leader.” But on several occasions Hitler had referred to him as “Reichsleiter”—a leader of the Reich. Canaris was convinced Hitler had simply misspoke, but the sycophants around Hitler, who were convinced the Führer never made a mistake, had begun to call Bormann “Reichsleiter” and Bormann liked it.

“I’ll try to make amends with a good lunch,” Bormann said, waving Canaris into his office. “With your permission, of course, I thought we would eat here. Just the two of us. That way we won’t be interrupted.”

“That sounds wonderful. But I can’t believe we won’t be interrupted.”

“Trust me, we won’t be,” Bormann said.

Bormann took his arm and led him through another set of enormous doors into his private dining room, where a table large enough for twenty had two place settings on it.

A pair of waiters in white jackets, nice-looking young men in their late teens or early twenties, stood ready to serve them.

They were interns, Canaris knew, “studying the operations” of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei so that they would be able to later assume roles of responsibility in the Thousand-Year Reich. This was important enough for them to be given “temporary” exemption from military service.

There were more than two dozen of them working for Bormann. Every one of them, Canaris knew, was either the son or the nephew of a high-ranking Nazi Party official.

Which is corrupt and immoral, Canaris thought.

He believed that sort of favoritism was the basic flaw in the Nazi party and its leadership.

The SS, especially, is riddled through with thieves and sociopaths.

“May I offer you a glass of wine, Canaris? Or champagne, perhaps?” Bormann asked as he sat down and gestured for Canaris to take the chair at the side of the table.

“Thank you, no, Herr Reichsleiter. If there is any, I’ll have a glass of beer.”

Bormann snapped his fingers and one of the interns hurried to produce a bottle of beer, the proper glass for it, and to set it before Canaris.

Bormann lifted the silver covers on the plates on the tables, and nodded approvingly at what they had been keeping warm.

“That will be all, thank you,” he said to the waiters. “The admiral and I will serve ourselves.”

Both young men clicked their heels, bowed crisply, and walked out of the dining room, closing the door after themselves.

Canaris wondered if Bormann had his wire recorder running and was recording this meeting. It was an idle thought, as Canaris always acted as if he knew whatever he was saying was being recorded, and said nothing that could possibly be used against him.

Wordlessly, the two served themselves. First, a consommé, then roast pork with mashed potatoes, green beans, applesauce, and red sauerkraut.

“Very nice,” Canaris said.

“Truth to tell, Canaris,” Bormann said. “I suspected getting people out of the office and my desk clear was going to take more time than I would have liked, and that I would be forced to ask you to wait. So a special lunch was in order, by way of apology. And if I proved to be wrong, and I could have received you on time, you would have been impressed by both my efficiency and the lunch.”

Canaris smiled and chuckled dutifully.

“I wanted to talk to you about Argentina, about Operation Phoenix,” Bormann then said. “That’s becoming a problem, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I would.”

“And with everything else the Führer has to deal with, I really hate to bother him with it.”

“I understand,” Canaris said. “It hasn’t gone well, has it?”