Hitler Has Won Page 3

  “Sophkins, think of me when you turn on the radio, before you go off to the Institute. Especially when there’s exciting news from the Fuehrer’s High Command. I’m right in the center of it here.”

  “I’d rather think of you with your feet up here on the sitting-room sofa, with your nose glued to a book.” It was true; his sister was never particularly excited by the Wehrmacht’s fantastic triumphs.

  “It won’t be long now. Embrace Mother for me. And give Father my love.”

  He had decided to skip lunch in the Chancellery and accept Sturmbannfuehrer Kremer’s offer of an SS driver to help him move his two suitcases from the hotel where he had spent these last two nights in Berlin to the austere cubicle of a room allotted to him in the officers’ quarters. He had no appetite for food. His stomach was still fluttering from the meeting with Adolf Hitler, and a nagging ache had started up again in the stub of his amputated left arm. There was a problem bothering him and he wasn’t sure of the way to handle it. The Fuehrer had talked to him for a whole twenty minutes without throwing any light on the method by which they were to approach the structuring of Mein Sieg or what was expected of him as “literary assistant.” Werner Naumann, Undersecretary of State at the Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, had been no more helpful during yesterday’s interview, brushing aside Kurt’s tentative probes with the comment, “There’ll be time to go into that, Armbrecht, if and when the Fuehrer chooses you for the post.” Well, he had been chosen, and his work began the day after tomorrow. But what was the method to be? Was it permitted, even, for him to raise these matters with the Fuehrer at their next meeting?

  There was only one person, other than Hitler himself, who could give him the answers, and Kurt now had an excellent excuse for getting in touch with him again. He would try to call Reichsminister Goebbels from the Chancellery, immediately after lunchtime, and if the Ministry put him through he would thank the good Doctor for his patronage and tactfully solicit the further and inestimable favor of a personal briefing.

  He made his call from the telephone in the corridor connecting the officers’ sleeping quarters with the main guard room. From where he stood, he had an angled view through the open door of his room of a section of his iron-framed bed and the leather-framed photograph propped up on the bedside table. It was a picture of his father embracing Sophie at Munich airport on her return from Madrid in May 1941. The picture did no justice whatsoever to Professor Armbrecht, whose face was almost completely obscured behind a cascade of chestnut hair, but it was an enchanting snapshot of Sophie, golden-brown, laughing straight into the lens and looking much nearer seventeen than twenty-two. It had made a fine replacement for that other picture, soaked in his own blood when the stretcher-bearers had picked him up, the only survivor of an antitank unit with seven French tanks to its credit that morning of May 14, 1940, when the bridgehead over the Meuse at Sedan was held against everything the Frogs and the R.A.F. threw in. The picture had never been out of his possession since.

  “Captain Armbrecht?” It was another voice in the earpiece—male, this time, vibrant with invisible authority. “This is Karl Hanke.”

  Kurt stiffened. Hanke. Secretary of State to the Minister.

  “Herr Secretary!”

  “My congratulations, Captain. Now, as to a meeting with the Herr Doktor, this would be advisable before you take up your appointment, but quite impossible over the next twenty-four hours or so. However, the Herr Doktor proposes you attend on him at his official residence the day after tomorrow at eight a.m. There is no guarantee, you understand, that you will see him there, but he will do his best to have a few words with you, before leaving for the Ministry. Is that understood?”

  “Perfectly, Herr Secretary! I am greatly obliged to you.”

  There was a vase of flowers, next morning, on the top of the bookcase when he stopped in at his office to read the two daily papers supplied to Chancellery executives—Voelkischer Beobachter and Das Reich, the weightier journal of Reich and foreign affairs. Huge black headlines confirmed the news that had blared from the guard-room radio early that morning, when the orderly brought him his coffee (the real thing!) and the thin slices of bread, unbuttered.

  BALKANS INVADED

  WEHRMACHT STRIKES ACROSS FIVE FRONTIERS

  He was eagerly scanning the article when the door opened and Fräulein Gruyten strode in, pushing a small office cart ahead of her. Her face was aglow.

  “Good morning, Captain! Isn’t it tremendous, the news?”

  “Fantastic! Did you hear the radio this morning? Advance panzer columns already closing in on Belgrade! It’s going to be another blitzkrieg, Fräulein Gruyten. All over in a few weeks!”

  “Poor Fräulein Junge. She was on duty all night, right up to eight o’clock this morning, when the Fuehrer finally went up to bed. Here, Captain, I’ve brought you everything I could think of—notebooks, files, pencils, clips, writing paper. If there’s anything lacking, you have only to ask.” She started unloading the contents of the cart onto the table up against the wall.

  “The flowers,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Do they come from the office storeroom, too?”

  “Liberated from a friend’s garden. No luck with the Bavarian posters, I’m afraid, but I’ll keep trying.” She had emptied the trolley and was dusting off her hands. “Are you lunching in the restaurant today? They usually have Kasseler Rippenspeer on the Tuesday menu.”

  “If we could share the same table I might be tempted. Oh, yes, I know—what would Fräulein Eppler think! Anyway, I’m going to spend my last day of freedom walking around the city, gaping up at buildings like a country bumpkin.”

  She turned abruptly around to the table, picked up a pencil and scribbled something rapidly across the front of a notebook. “Here—” she tossed the notebook onto his desk without a smile and without looking at him—“if you get lost, and it’s after six p.m., you can call me at this number.” She was out of the room and had closed the door behind her before he had time to think of a reply.

  Kurt lunched on the Kurfuerstendamm at the officers’ club he had been frequenting during that long tense Saturday and Sunday in the capital, and was treated to some fine French cognac by the club secretary, a Junker colonel of the Kaiser’s army in World War I. Then he passed the afternoon strolling in the June sunshine and catching up on the places of interest he hadn’t yet got around to seeing: the Bendlerstrasse War Office, the University on the Unter den Linden, the Kaiserhof Hotel on the Reichs-kanzlerplatz, which the Fuehrer had made his headquarters during that final and dramatic political poker game, ten years ago, ending with the collapse of the Weimar Republic and Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor.

  On an impulse he walked north along the Wilhelmstrasse, and out through Brandenburg Gate into the Tiergarten, reversing the route taken by those endless marching columns of the Party’s Storm Troopers that had so stirred German newsreel audiences, Kurt included, in the days before the bloody purge of their leadership in 1934 and the subsequent fall from grace of the brown-shirted Sturmabteiling. But an hour and a half of walking on the pavements was already beginning to take its toll of a pair of legs still far from restored to their normal vigor. He would take one more long look at the massive portico of the new Reich Chancellery, with its grandiose row of towering Doric columns, and indulge once again the truly awesome reflection that this, the political center of the Greater Reich, was to be his work place for at least another two years—two years that would decide the whole future course of his professional life.

  In this administrative sector of the capital, every other man one passed on the street was wearing some kind of uniform, together with an expression of stem preoccupation with a pressing duty. And every glistening, speeding Mercedes sedan seemed to have an Army or SS driver up front and a Wehrmacht or Party pennant fluttering from its radiator. It had been a relief, his being assured by Bormann’s office that morning that civilian clothes were permissible during working hours, o
r on private excursions within the city limits. He had had enough saluting, and being saluted, to last him a while. He was now what he had always wanted to be, not a soldier but a Party intellectual, with a God-sent opportunity to prove to himself that the pen, if not mightier than the sword, could be a rewarding extension of his right hand.

  Strolling back westward, he headed for the café on the Bendlerstrasse, a few hundred yards from the Chancellery, where they had served him that delicious schlumperwerk of pastry stuffed with grated apples.

  An hour later as he signaled for another ersatz coffee, he thought again about Fräulein Gruyten’s invitation. He was killing time. In another quarter of an hour he could go to the telephone booth beside the cash desk, call the number she had jotted, tell her he was hopelessly lost and probably wind up in her bed for the night. The prospect at once excited and discomforted him. She would strip like an angel, that one, but there was also in those deep-set eyes the promise of a she-devil. He hadn’t had a woman these past two years, for the services rendered by those randy night nurses in charge of the amputees’ ward hardly qualified as “lays.” He had ducked every tacit offer that had come his way in Munich since his discharge—not, heaven knew, out of indifference but in the bitter awareness that he could only be a sexual novelty, a fillip to the prurient imagination and inventiveness of his bed partner. It was something he would sooner or later have to come to terms with. But the more he thought about it, the more uneasy he became about plunging into the deep, as it were, with Fräulein Gruyten. It wasn’t a question of keeping one’s nose clean with Fräulein Eppler and the rest of the Fuehrer’s staff. No one would frown, these days, at the thought of an unmarried German girl having sex with an Aryan war hero. Hadn’t Hitler himself had more than once broadly hinted at the positive desirability of such liaisons? And hadn’t the Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler gone even further by setting up the Lebensborn maternity homes, where women made pregnant by his own officers could enjoy a carefree confinement in the knowledge that their babies would be proudly fostered and educated by the state?

  It wasn’t that. It was more in the nature of an instinct that told him that Adolf Hitler counted on owning him, Kurt Armbrecht, body and soul, and that any evidence to the contrary, especially if generated under his own Chancellery roof, would be unfavorably regarded by the Fuehrer. Nothing on earth could be worth that risk.

  Finishing his coffee, he paid the bill and then spent a couple of hours in a cinema watching newsreel coverage of General Alfred Jodi’s preinvasion tour of the Balkan fronts, followed by the feature film Comrades on the High Seas. He was in bed by ten o’clock. Tomorrow was a big day.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I

  DURING the short walk from the Chancellery to the private Berlin residence of Doctor Goebbels on the Hermann Goering Strasse, Kurt passed the corpses of two Russian prisoners of war, limply sprawled in the gutter about twenty yards apart. An SS trooper with an Erma submachine gun crooked in his left arm stood on the broad pavement a few yards from the first body, yawning as he stared along the Wilhelmstrasse. There were a fair number of pedestrians, even at this early hour, but they were hurrying past without even a glance at the ragged shavenheaded corpses, and as the SS guard’s dull eyes swung lazily toward Kurt’s empty sleeve, Kurt found himself doing the same as the others, averting his eyes from the gutter and stepping up his pace.

  Curiosity goaded him to take a covert look at the second body as he hurried past; and his skin contracted with disgust. The man looked as if he had been dead for days rather than minutes. Hollow wide-open eyes fixed on the sky, sallow skin tightly stretched over bearded face, cracked lips parted in a grimace. In death, the man was ageless. There were no marks of violence on him. He was just one of the millions of Slav Untermenschen whose brief usefulness as slave labor to the Reich ended with their final collapse from starvation and exhaustion.

  As Kurt stopped at the curb a few yards farther on, waiting for a break in the traffic, a big garbage truck clattered to a halt beside the first corpse and two men in dirty white fatigues clambered down from the cabin. The SS guard took a few paces backward, ostentatiously pinching his nose. One of the scavengers called something out to him, and his mate let out a guffaw before turning to boot the corpse’s legs and arms into line. With the practiced economy of stevedores they swung the body up and tossed it over the tailboard of the truck, wiping their hands on their thighs as they sauntered back to the cab.

  It was a distasteful start to the day. One could wipe it out, however, by redirecting one’s thoughts to what lay ahead. Kurt had met Doctor Goebbels only once, when the Minister’s aide, Rudolf Stimmer, had collected him from his home in Munich a month ago and driven him to the airport for a five-minute interview while the Minister’s aircraft was being refueled. On that occasion Kurt had been too overawed for any appraisal of the man himself, as distinct from the legend. He had concentrated so intently on answering the rapid questions shot at him from the depths of the armchair in the airport’s V.I.P. lounge, he could remember only the beautiful timbre of the voice, the liquid brown eyes restlessly measuring him as he stood at attention, and the slender, almost feminine hands stroking the armchair’s leather hide. His answers and general demeanor obviously had pleased the Minister for Kurt to have made the short list of candidates for the job. Perhaps this morning, if in fact he got to see Doctor Goebbels, some light might be thrown on the practical qualities the Fuehrer himself had demanded.

  Joseph Goebbels . . . Reich Minister of Propaganda, Gauleiter of Berlin and comrade of Adolf Hitler since 1925. At forty-four, the most powerful and successful political propagandist in history. And, after Hitler, the Party’s greatest public orator. The mind boggled at the sway this dwarf of a man wielded, unchallenged, over every medium of communication throughout the Greater Reich. Not a newspaper, magazine, novel or textbook could come off the printing press without his approval, direct or judiciously anticipated. Lord of the nation’s radio through his direct control of the double-headed monopoly, Deutschlandsender and Reichssender. Dictator of the German film industry and the theater. With a headquarters staff in Berlin of a thousand specialists in propaganda and public relations and an annual budget of untold millions. And he still had time to write his brilliant weekly articles for Das Reich, laying down the guidelines from which a public official or Party leader might stray only at his direct peril . . .

  Then there was the other Goebbels, the envied object of good-natured gossip whenever Party members discussed their leaders’ personal frailties over mugs in the bierstuben. He had married the elegant Magda Quandt, divorced wife of the rich industrialist, in 1931 and she had presented him, by 1938, with four daughters and a son. What she had failed to do was keep him faithful to her. His appetite for aspiring young actresses was insatiable, and the power he wielded over the entertainment industry ensured that he never went hungry for fresh and nubile bodies.

  Kurt hadn’t succeeded in identifying Goebbels’s private residence during his walking tour of the Government district the previous afternoon. Now, as he approached his destination, he could understand why. The palace Goebbels had built on the site of the villa once occupied by a Weimar Minister of Food was screened from the road by a plantation of ancient trees and was visible only as one approached the open gates of the driveway. The armed guards on duty were drawn from the regular Berlin police force, and the sergeant who inspected his Chancellery card, with its inscription “In the personal service of the Fuehrer,” gave him a smart salute before leading the way toward the main entrance of the palace. A glittering black Mercedes sedan was parked in the forecourt. A liveried footman opened the door as the sergeant brought Kurt to the foot of the steps, and as he entered the spacious reception hall a young man in civilian clothes came forward to greet him with a “Heil Hitler!” salute before introducing himself as the Minister’s Press Secretary, Wilfred von Oven. Kurt thought it best to decline the offer of coffee, although his mouth had started to dry the moment he step
ped over the threshold. Leading him to a sofa, Oven invited him to “glance through” the daily papers neatly arranged on a beautiful Biedermeier table, then returned to the marble-topped side table, where he concentrated for a few minutes on sorting a deep stack of telegrams, before depositing them in a large red-leather briefcase. That done, he glanced at his wrist watch and reached for the telephone.

  “Captain Armbrecht!” He had hung up and was smiling at Kurt across the hall. “The Herr Doktor will see you now, upstairs.”

  After the noise and diesel fumes of the Wilhelmstrasse, the ascent of the deep-carpeted grand stairway and the soundless passage through sunlit salons to Goebbels’s private quarters was like being escorted through a modern museum outside of normal visiting hours; and the impression was heightened by the display, en route, of a pedestaled bust of Frederick the Great and several post-impressionist canvases, among which Kurt thought he recognized a Cezanne and a Monet. A door was opened, and Oven stepped forward, motioning to Kurt to follow suit.

  “Lieutenant Armbrecht, Herr Doktor.”

  “Lieutenant . . . ?” The mellifluous voice winged Kurt back to the private lounge in Munich airport. “I should have thought it would now be in order, my dear Oven, to recognize his promotion. Come and sit over here, Captain.”

  They were in what was obviously the Propaganda Minister’s dressing room, a long rectangular area walled by fitted wardrobes. Apart from the Minister, whose dark head was just visible over the back of a chrome-framed chair facing the one window, there were three other people in the room—an elderly fellow in a barber’s white smock, quietly fitting his tools into a square black case; a middle-aged valet standing at ease beside a breakfast cart; and a pretty manicurist with short red hair, briskly buffing the fingernails of the slender hand resting in hers. The scent of expensive eau de cologne hung on the air. There was an empty seat a few paces beyond where Goebbels was sitting and, after giving the Minister a smart heel-clicking “Heil Hitler!” Kurt lowered himself to its edge, facing his benefactor with what he hoped was the correct expression of mingled humility and awe.