The Separation (42 page)

I am so busy during the day that I do not eat; everything is too much. Visitors call on me constantly. One of them was Speer, apparently wasting time because he has nothing to do while we are in Bulgaria. Speer is a snob and poseur who thinks he is the only one in whom the Führer confides. I remind him we are too busy now to be rebuilding Berlin.

Amongst other matters Speer mentions that the Führer bitterly regrets that we are fighting England. He describes England as our natural ally. I have heard it so often I am almost ready to believe it. I tell Speer what we are doing to keep our English friends awake every night, teaching them a lesson with our bombers and undermining the possible support of the Americans. Nothing frightens Roosevelt more than the idea that we will make up with the English, so we are simultaneously smashing the British and helping the Americans stay out of the fighting.

The British Ambassador in Moscow has had a meeting with Stalin. Our sources say that it was longer than usual and appeared to be serious. They must know by now what we are planning! I wrote a note to the Führer on the subject, and signed and dated it to be on the safe side, but I will not trouble him with it just yet.

April 7, 1941 (Monday)

Yesterday: Belgrade was completely destroyed as we moved in on them. Russia pleads with us for peace; that’s more like it! USA predictably grumbles at us. Forty thousand tons of shipping sunk. Another successful night over England - how long can they put up with being bombed out of their beds every night? No air incursions by the RAF. Italy not doing well in Abyssinia, but they are all brown-trousered cowards who can cook their own goose.

Hectic but enthralling day, writing the story of Belgrade for the newspapers. We are emphasizing that it’s not finished yet, hard times lie ahead, but the action will be swift and decisive. Message received from the Führer: he wants to know if we are ready for the big push next month. I take it he means to ask by this: will the English have come around to our point of view by then? I tell him that it is so. I have forbidden any more dancing in public places. Unsuitable activities in wartime have to be controlled. I called in the reporters from the American newspapers and told them that it was a public safety matter, because of the risk from the air incursions.

In the evening: Hess called in to see me. A rare visit. He is such a poof and a weakling! He is about to make another trip to Lisbon, says he has made up his mind on his own to do it, but what did I think? Of course what he means is that he is trying to find out from me what the Führer thinks. And that means he worries if the Führer will still let him go if he finds out. I gave Hess the assurances he wanted, but his stock has been lowered recently. If it goes wrong I will tell everyone he is mad, because most people think that anyway.

A glorious day for the Reich!

April 21, 1941 (Monday)

Yesterday: the Führer’s birthday. Hess came back a week ago from his trip to Lisbon without saying anything about it. So I put him up to delivering the radio tribute to the Führer, as there was no one else who would do it. I expected him to deviate from the script I wrote for him, but he read every word. No originality in the man.

No incursions here, but we sent 800 aircraft to London. The British are losing their morale. Even Churchill’s fine words cannot rally them after this. We shall follow it up with more. Good news on other fronts: Libya, Serbia, Greece, even the Italians have been holding their own in Abyssinia. The Führer told me last week that he does not want to have to send troops to help Mussolini again. Already our triumph in the Balkans has been delaying the main event. When we have cleared Greece of the English we can concentrate on the real war.

The public are not listening to the wireless often enough. It could be dangerous to morale. Who knows what they might do instead? I have issued new rules and incentives.

In the evening: another visit from ‘Fraulein’ Hess, visibly nervous because he thinks the Führer will find out what he’s doing. I reassure him that he need not worry, that the Führer is completely behind him. Hess is a toady! This is the first time he has tried to act without the Führer’s knowledge. A great lesson to be learned. He worries that we are hitting the British too hard, too successfully, that they won’t want to discuss peace. I convince him otherwise, because it is important that he makes his trip, if not for the reasons he thinks.

May 10, 1941 (Saturday)

Yesterday: A heavy raid on Mannheim, with much damage and many deaths. In revenge we send 200

aircraft to England, so they have nothing to laugh about. We hear of appalling damage done to the port of Hull, worse than anything they have done to us. Twenty thousand tons of shipping sent to the bottom by our U-boats.

Moscow has withdrawn recognition of some of the territories we have occupied. They sound as if they are worried about something. Stalin is planning to stay out of the war as long as possible, so that England and Germany exhaust themselves. Then the move to bolshevize Europe will begin. That’s what the Russians think, but by then it will be too late. Soon we will turn to the East. Two strokes at once will thwart them. Peace on one front and war on the other, both totally unexpected. It is dangerous to have so much depending on that lickspittle Hess.

This week’s newsreel is one of the best we have yet produced. I authorize it at once, and order that a copy be sent direct to the Führer at the Berghof. It has given me new confidence in our cause. Goering sought me out after dinner. He is even fatter now than before and is having trouble breathing; he did not remove his ridiculous cap the whole time he was with me. He wanted to know what information I had about Hess, so I told him some of it. He showed me a flight-plan Hess has drawn up and offered to let the Luftwaffe take care of him if the Führer ordered it. So tempting. I wonder if the Führer is behind this after all? Hess is his favourite but everyone thinks he is mad. How else would the Führer close the war with England if Hess were stopped?

May 11, 1941 (Sunday)

Yesterday: This was the day the Führer planned for the next great strike. May 10 was the first anniversary of the start of the offensive in the West and his sense of opera demanded that we balance it with our move in the East. Not to be! The generals who are expected to do our work are snivellers!

They say we have too many men in the Balkans, but the English have been kicked out of Greece so what do they have left to complain about? I have been trying to find out when the new date will be but no one seems to know when it is.

Huge raid on Hamburg in the early hours of this morning, but as always the British fliers were frightened away by our barrage of anti-aircraft fire. Most of their bombs fell in the river and few of the others went off. As if to make up for their failure, the English sent a paltry secondary force to scatter incendiaries on Berlin. Little damage but a great deal of pointless aggravation.

Meanwhile we sent more than seven hundred aircraft to deliver the
coup de grace
to London. It’s too early for confirmation, but the pilots report that London was ablaze from one end to the other. Our short-wave broadcasts to the USA need improving, so I shall be taking personal control. There is no point pussy-footing about. Roosevelt is a danger to our plans, because of his ignorance of the issues and receiving too much influence from Churchill. We will seize Roosevelt by the throat and shake him until he falls apart. Few Americans realize that Roosevelt is a cripple. I have forbidden all mention of Russia in our press. Just for the time being. If nothing else, it will rattle Stalin’s spies.

Hess disappeared as expected. He took off from the Messerschmitt factory in Augsburg on a supposed test flight, then headed off towards the north. He refuelled in Holland before flying out over the sea. To my amazement he followed the flight plan he showed me, so everyone knew exactly where he was. The man is mad, of course, and it has been the devil’s own job keeping him away from the American reporters. The Führer has been concerned about him for some time, it should be said and will now most certainly be said. With Hess gone it will be easier to convince everyone that he had become unstable. This is the line we take if everything goes wrong, as it surely must. Once I was certain Hess was on his way I alerted Reichsmarschall Goering at what I considered to be an appropriate time. The Luftwaffe will no doubt have dealt with the poor man, whose service to the Party has been without parallel. A great National Socialist hero! I shall be busy with this one as soon as we hear the reaction from the English. After that, we can get on with the war. I would like to see Roosevelt’s and Stalin’s faces when they hear about Hess.

If Goering fails to deal with Hess, I shall complain about him again to the Foreign Ministry. It won’t have any real effect, but Goering hates Ribbentrop as much as I do and it will distract them from other things if they engage in another squabble.

To Lanke in the evening, to be with Magda and my children, and to indulge for once in an early night. Everyone around me has been in wonderful high spirits. We all sense that at last the real war is about to begin.

17

Holograph notebooks of J. L. Sawyer

xvii

I told Birgit that I had been called in to work for the Red Cross again, that I would not be gone for long. She asked no questions, offered no complaint. I needed to get away from the house for a while and we both knew it.

I travelled across the country to Lincolnshire, a journey which in peacetime, by car, would take only a few hours. Now, when members of the public were in effect banned from using their cars, public transport was the only way.

The slow train journey, calling at every station and with many unexplained delays, took me the best part of a day and a half, including one night huddling in the dismal waiting-room in Nottingham station after I missed my connection. I was exhausted by the time I reached Barnham, the town closest to my brother’s RAF station, and I counted myself lucky to find a vacant bedroom over the bar in one of the High Street pubs and went straight to bed.

Because I was so tired I assumed I would sleep through the night without interruption, but I felt as if I had only just dropped off when I was woken by the sound of engines.

Aircraft were flying low over the centre of the town, their engines straining and roaring. I thought I was used to the noise of aero engines, near and far, hostile and friendly, but these were entirely different. Waves of deafening sound battered against the sleeping town.

Once the brief panic of being woken by a loud noise started to recede, I realized what was happening. The planes must be taking off from a local airfield. I was fully awake in seconds. I scrambled across the room, threw the window up, then leaned out and craned upwards.

The planes, powerful twin-engined bombers I recognized as Wellingtons, were travelling low above the roofs, swift, dark shapes outlined against the faint glow of moonlit clouds. The sound of the engines was more than a loud roar: it was a physical concussion of noise, beating not only against the walls and windows of the building but creating a perceptible rhythm against my head and chest. I was exhilarated by the endless reverberations, the shattering, thrilling commotion. I soaked up the sound like a man feeling a downpour of rain after a month in the desert. It was a terrifying but enthralling experience, something so powerful and engulfing that I felt it could not be understood until it was shared with others. Yet I realized, with a sudden jolt of surprise, that I seemed to be alone. There was no traffic in the blacked-out street below, there were no pedestrians walking home, no one else standing at a darkened window to stare up at the deafening sky.

Then I thought, then I realized: this is not real.

A sense of dread sank through me, a familiar sick-feeling anxiety that I could no longer trust my senses. Once again I had woken from what I thought was sleep to what I thought was reality: to a lucid imagining.

I could shrink away from it as I had done before, let the sinking feeling of dread course through me and take me with it, waking me up properly and pulling me out of the delusion. This time, though, I chose instead to remain, to experience the illusion to the full.

I stayed at that window while wave after wave of bombers took off across the town, sweeping low over the roofs. I tried to count the planes: fifty, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, more and more, roaring off into the vengeful night.

I rejoiced in the unreality, letting the magnificent crude cacophony of powerful engines flood around me, drowning me in their deluge of sound.

xviii

Barnham is a market town to the west of the Lincolnshire wolds, built of pale red brick and tiles, a windy place that morning, under a sky thick with low, leaden clouds. At the back of the town, beside the railway station, there were stockyards for the weekly livestock markets. In the narrow streets close to the centre of town, the houses were built in terraces, backing on to each other, but there were larger, more prosperous-looking houses where the town started to blend with the countryside. I walked past them, following the main road in the direction of Louth, but found myself in flat, uninteresting farmland, marked out with trees and hedges but with few other features to give ease to the eye. I looked in all directions as I walked, knowing that there were two RAF bases in the immediate vicinity of the town, but I could see no signs of anything that might signify the presence of an airfield: a water tower, hangars, a windsock. I turned back.

A short while later I was walking again down the High Street in the centre of the town, past the pub where I had spent the night. I glanced up at the window where I had imagined I was standing in the dark. It looked smaller from street level, as if even when fully open it would not be large enough for a man to stand by it and lean through. Familiar shops were open along both sides of the main street and people were going about their unexceptional chores of shopping and making deliveries around the town. It was a place rather like Macclesfield, without the interesting Pennine scenery. I knew my brother was based at RAF Tealby Moor, close to a village of that name, but the direction signs had been taken down all over Britain the previous year. I didn’t want to ask the way: ever since the war began in earnest most people were wary of strangers.