Hitler's peace

The old tricks were still the best ones. In the early days of the war, Schellenberg had filled a whole prisoners’ block at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp with Jews from Germany’s criminal underworld and set them to work producing counterfeit British currency. (The?20,000 used to pay Cicero had come straight from the printing presses at Sachsenhausen.) Among these Jews were several expert “ ganefs ”-Jewish pickpockets, whom Schellenberg had used for a number of undercover operations. One of these ganefs, a Mrs. Brahms, who was considered the queen of Berlin’s underworld, had shown Schellenberg a good way of protecting himself from pickpockets. By pushing several needles down into the lining of the pocket, with the points toward the bottom, it was possible to slide a hand into the pocket without injury, but almost impossible to pull the hand out again without encountering the points of the needles. Mrs. Brahms called it her “rat-catcher,” because the principle was the same as was used in a certain kind of rodent trap.

“There’s nothing in this pocket,” said Hoffmann and, pulling his hand out again, screamed out loud as a dozen sharp surgical needles pierced his flesh.

Schellenberg was out of his seat in an instant, hauling the Loden coat, still attached to Hoffmann’s hand by the needle-filled pocket, over the man’s head and then punching him hard, several times, in the head. Hoffmann fell back into Himmler’s leather chair and swept the coat away from his face before leveling the silenced gun at Schellenberg and pulling the trigger. Schellenberg threw himself to the floor of the aircraft as the gun fired, the bullet shattering a glass in the liquor cabinet.

Still struggling with the coat and the pain in his right hand, Hoffmann wrestled himself around to take another shot at Schellenberg, who was lying immediately beside Himmler’s seat, partly protected by the huge leather armrest.

Schellenberg had little time to think. He reached for the red lever beside Himmler’s chair and pulled it hard. There was a loud hydraulic clanking noise, as if someone had struck the belly of the Condor with a large wrench, and then a rush of freezing-cold air, a scream, and the seat carrying Hoffmann disappeared through a large square hole in the floor. But for the strength of his grip on the red lever, Schellenberg might have fallen out of the plane, too. As half of his body dangled outside of the Condor’s fuselage, he had a brief vision of seat and man separating in the air, the parachute deploying, and Hoffmann falling into the Baltic Sea.

Shocked by the freezing air, his other hand too numb with cold to get much of a hold on the lip of the open escape hatch, Schellenberg called out for help, his voice hardly audible above the rushing air and the roar of the Condor’s four BMW engines. He felt himself slipping out of the aircraft as the hand clinging to the red lever grew weaker and increasingly numb by the second. His last thought was of his wife’s father, Herr Grosse-Schonepauck, an insurance executive, who was going to have to pay out on the policy Schellenberg had bought, and how he would love to have seen the expression on the old man’s face as he signed the check. The next moment he felt someone gripping him under the arms, hauling him back aboard the plane, and then rolling him away from the open escape hatch.

Exhausted, Schellenberg lay there for almost a minute before a blanket was laid on top of him, and one of the remaining crew, a huge fellow wearing a Luftwaffe radio/gunner’s badge, helped him to sit up, and then handed him a glass of cognac.

“Here,” he said, “get this down you.”

The man looked grimly out of the open hatch. “And then you can tell me what happened to Hoffmann.”

Schellenberg downed the brandy in one gulp and, leaning against the fuselage, glanced at his clothes, which were soaking wet and covered with grease and oil. He went into the lavatory to wash and then fetched his bag to change into the clothes that had been hiding the Fuhrer’s letters. At the same time, he gave the man, a flight sergeant, a slightly expurgated account of what had happened. When he had finished talking, the sergeant spoke.

“Hoffmann took a phone call, at Tempelhof, about thirty minutes before you arrived.”

“Did he say who it was that called him?”

“No, but he looked a bit strange. After that he said very little, which was strange, too, because he was always quite a talkative fellow.”

“So I noticed. Had you known him long?”

“No. He joined the Government Group only a couple of months ago, after a long stint on the Russian front. Someone pulled some strings for him, we figured. Well, we were pretty sure about that. His brother is in the Gestapo.”

Schellenberg nodded. “It figures.”

He drank another cognac, and took a seat at the back of the plane, as far away from the open hatch as possible; then, covering himself with as many blankets as were available, he closed his eyes.