Fatherland

“Listen, Max.” March repeated what Halder had told him. “The Guide mentions a wife.” He held up the sheet of paper to the booth’s dim electric light and squinted at it. “Edith Tulard. Can you find her? To get the body positively identified.”

“She’s dead.”

“What?”

“She died more than ten years ago. I checked with the SS records bureau — even honorary ranks have to give next of kin. Buhler had no kids, but I’ve traced his sister. She’s a widow, seventy-two years old, named Elizabeth Trinkl. Lives in Furstenwalde.” March knew it: a small town about forty-five minutes” drive south-east of Berlin. “The local cops are bringing her straight to the morgue.”

“I’ll meet you there.”

“Another thing. Buhler had a house on Schwanen-werder.”

So that explained the location of the body. “Good work, Max.” March rang off and made his way back to the dining room.

Halder had finished his breakfast. He threw down his napkin as March returned and leaned back in his chair. “Excellent. Now I can almost tolerate the prospect of sorting through fifteen hundred signals from Kleist’s First Panzer Army.” He began picking his teeth. “We should meet up more often. Use is always saying: When are you going to bring Zavi round?” He leaned forward. “Listen: there’s a woman at the archives, working on the history of the Bund deutscher Madel in Bavaria, 1935 to 1950. A stunner. Husband disappeared on the Eastern front last year, poor devil. Anyway: you and she. What about it? We could have you both round, say next week?”

March smiled. “You’re very kind.”

“That’s not an answer.”

True.” He tapped the photocopy. “Can I keep this?”

Halder shrugged. “Why not?”

“One last thing.”

“Go ahead.”

“State Secretary to the General Government. What would he have done, exactly?”

Halder spread his hands. The backs were thick with freckles, wisps of reddish-gold hair curled from his cuffs. “He and Frank had absolute authority. They did whatever they liked. At that time, the main priority would have been resettlement.”

March wrote “resettlement” in his notebook, and ringed it. “How did that happen?”

“What is this? A seminar?” Halder arranged a triangle of plates in front of him — two smaller ones to the left, a larger one to the right. He pushed them together so they touched. “All this is Poland before the war. After “39, the western provinces” — he tapped the small plates — “were brought into Germany. Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia and Reichsgau Wartheland.” He detached the large plate. “And this became the General Government. The rump state. The two western provinces were Germanised. It’s not my field, you understand, but I’ve seen some figures. In 1940, they set a target density of one hundred Germans per square kilometre. And they managed it in the first three years. An incredible operation, considering the war was still on.”

“How many people were involved?”

“One million. The SS eugenics bureau found Germans in places you’d never have dreamed of — Rumania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia. If your skull had the proper measurements and you came from the right village — you were just given a ticket.”

“And Buhler?”

“Ah. Well. To make room for a million Germans in the new Reichsgaue, they had to move out a million Poles.”

“And they went to the General Government?”

Halder turned his head and glanced around furtively, to make sure he was not overheard — “the German look”, people called it. “They also had to cope with the Jews being expelled from Germany and the western territories -France, Holland, Belgium.”

“Jews?”

“Yes, yes. Keep your voice down.” Halder was speaking so quietly, March had to lean across the table to hear. “You can imagine — it was chaos. Overcrowding. Starvation. Disease. From what one can gather, the place is still a shit-hole, despite what they say.”

Every week the newspapers and television carried appeals from the East Ministry for settlers willing to move to the General Government. “Germans! Claim your birthright! A farmstead — free! Income guaranteed for the first five years.” The advertisements showed happy colonists living in luxury. But word of the real story had filtered back — an existence conditioned by poor soil, back-breaking work, and drab satellite towns to which the Germans had to return at dusk for fear of attack from local partisans. The General Government was worse than the Ukraine; worse than Ostland; worse, even, than Muscovy.

A waiter came over to offer more coffee. March waved him away. When the man was out of earshot, Halder continued in the same low tone: “Frank ran everything from Wawel Castle in Krakau. That would have been where Buhler was based. I have a friend who works in the official archives there. God, he has some stories… Apparently, the luxury was incredible. Like something out of the Roman Empire. Paintings, tapestries, looted treasures from the church, jewellery. Bribes in cash and bribes in kind, if you know what I mean.” Halder’s blue eyes shone at the thought, his eyebrows danced.

“And Buhler was involved in this?”