Hitler's peace

The general was Walter Schellenberg, and he was no stranger to Posen. His second wife, Irene, had come from Posen, something he had discovered not from her but from his then boss and the former chief of the SD, Reinhard Heydrich. Six months after marrying Irene, in May 1940, Schellenberg had been given a file by Heydrich. It revealed that Irene’s aunt was married to a Jew. Heydrich’s meaning had been clear enough: Schellenberg now belonged to Heydrich, at least as long as he cared anything about his wife’s relations. But two years later Heydrich was dead, murdered by Czech partisans, and Department 6 (Amt VI) of the foreign intelligence section of the Reich Security Office, one of the key administrations formerly commanded by Heydrich, was given to Schellenberg.

In the castle’s Golden Hall there were perhaps only two notable absentees: Heydrich’s replacement as chief of the Reich Security Office (which included the SD and the Gestapo), Ernst Kaltenbrunner; and Himmler’s former adjutant, Karl Wolff, now the supreme SS representative in Italy. It had been given out that both men were too ill to attend Himmler’s conference in Posen, that Kaltenbrunner was suffering from phlebitis and Wolff was recovering from an operation to remove a kidney stone. But Schellenberg, a man as well informed as he was resourceful, knew the truth. On Himmler’s orders Kaltenbrunner, an alcoholic, was drying out in a Swiss sanatorium, while Wolff and his former boss were no longer on speaking terms after the Reichsfuhrer-SS had refused Wolff permission to divorce his wife, Frieda, in order to marry a tasty blonde named Grafin-a permission subsequently granted by Hitler himself when (quite unforgivably, in Himmler’s eyes) Wolff went over Himmler’s head.

There was, Schellenberg thought to himself as he sauntered into the hall, never a dull moment in the SS. Well, almost never. A speech by Himmler was not something he could view with anything other than dread, for the Reichsfuhrer had a tendency to longwindedness, and given the number of SS generals who were gathered in architect Franz Schwechten’s Golden Hall, Schellenberg expected a speech of Mahabharatan length and dullness. The Mahabharata was a book the young general had made himself read so that he might better understand Heinrich Himmler, who was its most passionate advocate; and having read it, Schellenberg had certainly found it easier to see where Himmler got some of his crazier ideas concerning duty, discipline, and, a favorite Himmler word, sacrifice. And Schellenberg did not think it too fanciful to view Himmler as someone who regarded himself as an avatar of the supreme god, Vishnu-or, at the very least, his high priest, descended to earth in human form to rescue Law, Good Deeds, Right, and Virtue. Schellenberg had also formed the impression that Himmler thought of Jews in the same way that the Mahabharata spoke of the one hundred Dhartarashtras -the grotesque human incarnations of demons who were the perpetual enemies of the gods. For all Schellenberg knew, Hitler held the same opinion, although he thought it much more likely that the Fuhrer simply hated Jews, which wasn’t exactly unusual in Germany and Austria. Schellenberg himself had nothing at all against the Jews; his own father had been a piano manufacturer in Saarbrucken and then in Luxembourg, and many of his best customers had been Jews. So it was fortunate that Schellenberg’s own department was obliged to pay little more than lip service to all the usual Aryanist claptrap about Jewish subhumans and vermin. Those anti-Semites who did work in Amt VI-and there were quite a few-knew better than to give vent to their hatred in the presence of Walter Schellenberg. The young Foreign Intelligence head was interested only in what a British secret agent, Captain Arthur Connolly, had once called “the Great Game”-the game in question being espionage, intrigue, and clandestine military adventure.

Schellenberg helped himself to coffee from an enormous refectory table, and, his eyes hardly noticing the enormous portrait of the Fuhrer hanging underneath one of three enormous arched windows, he fixed a smile on his clever schoolboy’s face and meandered toward a pair of officers he recognized.

Arthur Nebe, head of the Criminal Police, was a man much admired by Schellenberg. He hoped he might get a chance to warn Nebe of a whispered rumor making the rounds in Berlin. In 1941, according to the gossips, Nebe, in command of a Special Action Group in occupied Russia, had not only falsified his report of the slaughter of thousands of Jews, but also had allowed many to escape.