Midnight in Berlin (23 page)

That night, Primrose had sent the cook home and made him supper, lamb shanks with peas and carrots. She had found a bottle of very good burgundy from somewhere, which was unusual, because she didn't care for red wine. She had become flirtatious and very funny as the dinner progressed, teasing him about how he would lecture the cabinet on the error of their ways, Superman in a Savile Row suit flying in to save the world from war, she said.

There stirred in Macrae the memory of the wife he had once known; the outrageous young woman deep in mourning for her lost brother who had been mad enough to take him into the darkened garden within minutes of their first meeting and bad enough to pleasure him briefly before spitting him out into the bushes.

She was that sort of woman, wild, shocking, bewitching, and with a rich throaty laugh that made everyone who heard it want to laugh too.

After dinner that night she had tried to make love to him, but he was tired, a little drunk and not looking forward to the early departure the next morning. It had not worked.

The plane landed with a thump on the grass landing strip and rolled to a stop before an impressive collection of whitewashed terminal buildings. Croydon was London's second airport, and a longer drive from the centre of town than Heston in the west, so it was not until mid-morning that the car drew up before the War Office in Whitehall.

Macrae was taken in a creaky lift to the top floor and shown into a corner office. Large windows in two walls overlooked the Thames Embankment and the river in one direction and the Gothic architecture of the New Scotland Yard police headquarters in another. Sir Leslie Hore-Belisha sat behind a desk, smoking a cigarette, looking through documents presented by an elderly woman secretary.

Macrae had only seen newspaper photographs of the minister, and there had been plenty of those in recent years. He had stamped his mark on the nation's streets with his orange flashing beacons at pedestrian crossings and a number of other measures designed to cut the death toll on the roads. Needless to say, the motoring lobby had risen in fury at this
intrusion on an Englishman's liberty. In person, the minister was smaller than his photographs suggested and with a dark, almost Levantine countenance.

The appointment of a secretary of state for war who had no military background, and was a Jew as well, had angered military commanders. The army, especially, saw this as the prime minister's move to make further cuts in manpower and investment, in line with the official policy of appeasement towards Germany.

As Neville Chamberlain repeatedly told colleagues, nothing would persuade Hitler more of Britain's sincerity in its dealings with the German Reich than a continuing reduction in the defence budget. And Hore-Belisha was just the man to do this, a proven administrator with a track record of good fiscal management in the various government departments he had run.

After a few months, to the delight of the armed services, it was clear that the prime minister had misjudged his man. The new minister for war argued in cabinet forcefully not just for increased defence expenditure but also for the introduction of conscription. Privately, Chamberlain and his colleagues felt that such arguments were motivated by the sympathy that one eminent Jew naturally felt for the plight of his co-religionists in Germany, but they dared not say so.

Macrae was ushered to one of several chairs around a low coffee table, which had been laid for tea. The minister immediately joined him, shook his hand, enquired briefly about the flight and then said, “Tell me everything about this conspiracy within the German army.”

Macrae relayed almost the exact words that Koenig had told him a few days earlier. Hore-Belisha listened carefully while his secretary took notes.

“You say they will arrest Hitler and put him on trial?”

“Yes.”

“Wouldn't that be risky? The man is the legally recognised head of state and quite popular, is he not?”

“The army will make it clear that they are acting to prevent another European war. That will trump any feeling of loyalty to the Führer. People are worried sick about a new war. Every Sunday, the cemeteries of all major German cities are full of people laying flowers on the graves of relatives fallen in the last war. They do not want another one – and neither does the army. On this issue, the Nazis are isolated, and people like Göring and Goebbels know it.”

“You think there will be a trial?”

“No. They'll have to kill him. It'll be the usual story – shot while resisting arrest, something like that. They know his powers of oratory. They will never give him a public platform.”

The minister looked at Macrae and smiled. “It might be wiser to omit that last point from your briefing to the cabinet. An army coup that removes a dictator and places him on trial is one thing; assassination is a rather different matter.”

“Thank you,” said Macrae.

The minister looked at his watch and nodded to his secretary. A waitress came in with a tray of tea and biscuits.

“You are certain of your sources?”

“Absolutely.”

“And they won't act unless we do?”

“No. They want to see Britain and France take a firm stand, backed with the threat of military action.”

“That is going to be very difficult for the prime minister to swallow. He simply won't believe you.”

“I know, but I'd appreciate the chance to try.”

“You haven't heard this from me, but he didn't want to see you. You've got a reputation as a troublemaker – did you know that?”

“The ambassador and I have had our differences.”

Hore-Belisha gave such a broad smile at this remark that Macrae thought he was about to break into laughter. He got up, indicating the interview was over.

“There is one thing,” said Macrae.

The minister looked at him and waited.

“I have a good contact there, a young German woman I believe to be in danger. I would like to get travel documents for her, if possible.”

“Doesn't she have a passport?”

“The Gestapo has it.”

The minister looked directly at Macrae for the first time.

“This woman is …?”

“Jewish? Yes.”

“And you say she is a contact.”

“Yes.”

“Can't the embassy do something?”

“There is no quota as such, but the embassy doesn't make it easy for … certain people to get the necessary visa.”

“You mean Jews?”

“Yes. We are not alone. No one wants them. Even the Australians have turned them down, and God knows they have enough room.”

Hore-Belisha sat down and spoke softly.

“I have tried to bring this home to the cabinet. How I've tried. But they are terrified of upsetting Hitler, and then, of course …”

The minister walked to the window and gazed out over the Thames. He held his hands behind his back and Macrae could see the nails digging into the flesh of the palms. When he spoke, it was with a voice that seemed to come from elsewhere in the room, as if an invisible presence had suddenly joined their conversation.

“The truth is, Colonel Macrae, that large-scale immigration of Jews into this country from Germany presents the government with political difficulties, if you know what I mean. We, that is the government, do not wish to encourage emigration to Palestine because that creates problems in the region, but at the same time, and unofficially of course, His Majesty's Government is not encouraging Jews from Germany to find refuge in large numbers here.”

Hore-Belisha swung round. His face had coloured but his voice was calm. He must have had this conversation many times over with Jewish leaders in Britain.

“And that is a disgrace, a craven attitude born of cowardice and prejudice,” he said. He walked over to Macrae and shook his hand. “I hope the prime minister and my colleagues in cabinet listen as carefully as I have to your information. I will be in cabinet, but we may not meet again. I wish you a safe journey back to Berlin.”

The minister walked back to his desk, pressed a buzzer on a console and picked up a set of papers. His secretary walked in and held the door open for Macrae.

“Oh,” said Hore-Belisha. “Leave the details of that woman with my secretary, would you?”

The first meeting of Neville Chamberlain's day at 10 Downing Street was always with his diary secretary. The prime minister encouraged his staff to arrange an orderly series of meetings that had a certain logic in their progression through the day.

There was no point, he remarked, in having a discussion about agricultural subsidies for Welsh hill farmers sandwiched between a confidential brief from the chief whip about the sexual transgression of a junior minister and a plea from the head of the Secret Service for unbudgeted exceptional
expenditure. It was also particularity important that the prime minister should have fifteen minutes before the weekly cabinet meeting every Tuesday at eleven, to examine the agenda and consider the required tactics to achieve a consensus on the increasingly difficult issues of foreign policy.

Thus it was with irritation that Neville Chamberlain found on the Tuesday in that first week of exceptionally hot weather in August that a meeting with the British military attaché in Berlin had been inserted in the diary immediately before the cabinet session.

When he queried the diary entry, his secretary told him that the minister for war had personally requested the meeting but would not be attending himself. Furthermore, the secretary said the minister had arranged for the attaché to address the full cabinet.

“I don't have time for this,” said Chamberlain. “When was it agreed?”

“When you were in Birmingham last week, sir. The foreign secretary approved.”

Chamberlain at once saw the trap. If Hore-Belisha and Lord Halifax both wanted him to see this man, he would have to go along with it. And he would have to agree to the fellow addressing cabinet. He did not wish to be accused of refusing to listen to voices and views that disagreed with his own. And from what he had heard of this attaché, that is exactly what he was going to do.

“Very well,” he said, “but all these military men smoke like chimneys. Make sure he knows that it is not permitted in my office or cabinet.”

The prime minister was seated at his desk when Macrae was ushered into his office about an hour later, and he rose to
greet his visitor with a handshake. Neville Chamberlain looked older than his photographs, with short grey hair fading to white at the sides, a neat moustache and steel-rimmed spectacles. He was wearing a dark suit with a stiff wing collar and a gold watch chain across his waistcoat. Macrae felt like an errant customer who had come to see his bank manager to explain an unapproved overdraft.

A stenographer took her seat at the back of the room while the cabinet secretary, who had been introduced as Sir Maurice Hankey, sat on a chair positioned to the left of the prime minister's desk. Macrae took a chair facing the desk. He noticed that Hankey had folded his arms and was looking at the ceiling. Macrae now felt less like a bank customer and more like a schoolboy facing his headmaster. Chamberlain pulled his watch from a waistcoat pocket, looked at it and said, “Don't think me impolite, Colonel, but we have only fifteen minutes, so may I suggest that you begin.”

The prime minister grasped his chin between forefinger and thumb and gazed at his blotting pad while the attaché repeated what he had told the minister for war that morning.

“What exactly do you mean by ‘stand with Czechoslovakia'?” said the prime minister.

“We must threaten hostilities. Hitler won't fight. Call his bluff.”

“No democratic state can make a threat of war unless it is ready and prepared to carry it out. Wouldn't you agree, Maurice?”

The cabinet secretary lowered his gaze from the ceiling and nodded his agreement.

“Then, Prime Minister, with respect, I think we should be ready to follow up our threat. The whole point is that if the Nazi regime truly believes we will act, Hitler will be forced
into a humiliating climb-down or a reckless act of folly, either of which will trigger the military coup.”

The prime minister leant forward on the desk, clasped his hands and said, “Surely this talk of a coup is just that, is it not? Talk, rumours. Walk around the pubs of Westminster and you will find plenty of people who want to get rid of me, but it's all talk, isn't it? What do you say, Maurice?”

“I don't think you are in any danger of a coup, Prime Minister.”

The two men laughed at their little joke, nodding to each other.

“I think it would be useful to hear more about Colonel Macrae's sources,” said the cabinet secretary. Chamberlain raised an expectant eyebrow at his visitor.

Macrae told them in greater detail than he had vouchsafed to the ambassador that, well beyond the army, there were cells in the Abwehr whose military intelligence operations were controlled by Admiral Canaris, all of whom were prepared to cooperate in the high-risk venture of a coup. Furthermore, the Catholic Church would give moral support, with announcements from pulpits across the country, once the operation had begun. The plan was to arrest Hitler in Berlin by …

The prime minister raised a hand to halt the briefing. The door had opened and a uniformed messenger entered and without a word handed a note to Sir Maurice Hankey. The cabinet secretary read the note and silently left the room. A whispered conversation was heard outside, then Hankey returned and whispered something in the prime minister's ear.

“We have just received an urgent cable from the embassy in Berlin. I had better study it before cabinet, so if you will excuse me.”

Chamberlain rose and extended his hand. Macrae shook hands and turned to the door.

“Oh, Colonel,” said Chamberlain. “That was most interesting. I hear what you say.”

Macrae knew exactly what those words meant. His journey had been wasted.