Midnight in Berlin (6 page)

After that, Macrae and Koenig had kept in touch discreetly. The information exchanged was always political rather than tactical. Koenig helped Macrae track the manoeuvring between the German High Command and the Nazi leadership. The extent to which the Nazis and their policies were despised at a senior level was surprising. Koenig never revealed such details as the development of new weaponry. That would transgress his oath of loyalty, he said. He was not a traitor. He was a Prussian officer and a German patriot. Yet he was prepared to take elaborate precautions to arrange a
meeting at the Berlin zoo that morning. He must have his reasons as well, thought Macrae.

“I don't really deserve my promotion,” said Koenig. “I am good at what I do and I like it, but it was my family background, the record of my brothers in the war, that really got me to full colonel.”

“I heard. Congratulations.”

“But you didn't get in touch.”

“I thought it best not to – anyway we have only just arrived.”

“And now?”

“I need your advice.”

Koenig smiled. “‘Advice'?”

“Blomberg has just got married, we hear.”

Koenig stopped smiling. He drained his coffee and poured more cognac into the cup.

“You're well informed. But what advice could you want about that?”

“Apparently the bride has a history.”

Koenig finished the cognac, coughed, patted his chest and stood up.

“Feeding time for the lions has finished, I think.”

Macrae got to his feet.

“I need to wake people up in London.”

Koenig picked up the bill, placed some coins on the table.

“Follow me,” he said.

They went back into the reptile house and walked through the first gallery into a second, a smaller room. This was the insectarium, and behind glassed windows an array of beetles, spiders, cockroaches, ants, millipedes, scorpions and other arthropods were to be seen, if you looked carefully enough. The two men peered through the glass windows as if really interested in the bug life on display. Finally, Koenig turned
and leant against a window. He took a zoo guide from his pocket and began to study it.

“Don't look round and don't try to take notes,” he said. “Do you have a guidebook?”

Macrae nodded and took the leaflet from his pocket.

“Read it.”

Macrae studied the leaflet.

“This is what he has been waiting for,” said Koenig. “There is going to be a purge. Blomberg and Fritsch will be fired. The Führer will take their positions and become supreme commander and war minister.”

“The army will stand for that?”

“He's going to remove a dozen or so generals and transfer all the senior field commanders to new posts.”

“A reverse coup?”

“Exactly. He's going to get them before they get him. He is going to set up a new armed forces high command, with Keitel as his deputy. Keitel is a loyalist and his younger brother Bodewin will be made head of army personnel. That means Hitler will control the appointment and promotion of all officers.”

“Surely he won't get away with that?”

“You're dealing with a man who wants to make history. He's clever and he has the devil's luck. Make sure your people in London understand what this means.”

Koenig flipped the leaflet back into his pocket, patted Macrae on the shoulder and walked away. From the next-door room Macrae heard a child's voice say, “Daddy, where have you been?”

Back at the embassy, Macrae found several messages from the ambassador asking for a meeting. He ignored them and took out the files on senior German military personnel.

The notes on Wilhelm Keitel were lengthy, well documented. He began reading and soon realised why Hitler trusted him so much.

There was a knock on his office door. Macrae looked at his watch. It was five thirty. He had been reading the file for forty minutes.

Daisy Wellesley peered round the door. “Sir Nevile wonders whether you have received his messages?”

“Please make my apologies and say that I would be happy to join him at six.”

Daisy made a face. “All right,” she said.

Sir Nevile Henderson was displeased. He had been waiting for his military attaché for almost two hours and had received what he felt were less-than-polite brush-offs. Now the man was coming to see him at a time of day when it would be difficult not to offer him a whisky. The trouble was military attachés reported to the War Office and not the Foreign Office. It was a damned nuisance.

The two men settled down with their whiskies – a blended Scotch, Macrae noted, not the twenty-year-old Glenlivet malt he knew the ambassador kept in his drinks cabinet.

Macrae talked quietly for ten minutes. Sir Nevile did not like what he heard.

“When is this going to happen?” he said.

“By the end of the month. The arrangements are under way.”

“And no one in the army knows?”

“Blomberg's misfortune to have married a woman who was once a prostitute is widely known. How Hitler plans to take advantage of this is not.”

“Is it not a little strange that you know something as important as this and they don't?”

“I trust my source.”

“Disinformation, perhaps?”

“What would be the point? It would quickly be disproved and burn the source as far as we were concerned.”

Sir Nevile moved from his chair and poured them both more whisky.

“Let me sum up. Hitler is going to remove his two most senior army officers and then unleash a purge of most of his generals. He is going to transfer field commanders and declare himself supreme commander and war minister. This man Wilhelm Keitel will be the number two, in day-to-day control of the army.”

“That's it.”

“What do we know about Keitel?”

“Loyalist, brilliant war record, which means a lot to Hitler, and heavily engaged in the secret rearmament programme.”

“Ah yes, that …,” murmured the ambassador.

There was a silence. This was not what the ambassador wanted to hear. The German question was the major diplomatic issue for the government in London. Reaction to the alarming speed of events in Berlin had been based on the carefully calibrated diplomacy of reason and persuasion. The one unalterable fact that coloured the thinking of every politician in Britain and France, and indeed elsewhere in Europe, was that a return to the carnage of 1914–18 must at all costs be avoided.

It was widely known that public opinion in Germany and that of the business community were of the same frame of mind. The wounds of the war were still fresh in a country that had suffered a disproportionate number of casualties. The German High Command was also known to be against any military adventures.

Given these facts, it was beyond belief or rational construction to suppose that the German Führer would actually want
a new war. He himself had served in the trenches and lost many friends there, whom he still publicly alluded to as heroes.

And yet now the ambassador's new military attaché, a man he hardly knew, was telling him that Hitler was about to unleash a sweeping purge of the army command and take control of the army himself, thus removing any threat from the one power base that could check his military ambition.

“If this happens,” said Sir Nevile, “and you will forgive me for saying that I have my doubts, but let's assume you are right, if this happens, what are we to make of it?”

“The army is being placed on a war footing. Hitler intends to go to war sooner rather than later. There will be nothing to stop him if he gets away with this.”

“We lost almost a million men in the last war. Germany and France lost over three million between them. Go onto the streets of London, Berlin or Paris and ask people whether they want another war.”

“Is that the point, Sir Nevile?”

The ambassador rotated his glass, staring at the swirl of peat-brown whisky. It was precisely the point, he thought.

“Thank you. I will consider this information,” he said.

Macrae leant forward. “I suggest we urge the foreign secretary to make the case in cabinet for the strongest possible message to be sent to the chancellor.”

“And what would that be?”

“The prime minister must agree to conscription and we must accelerate our rearmament programme. We must arrange joint manoeuvres with the French: show Hitler the mailed fist.”

Sir Nevile Henderson got to his feet, putting his glass down hard on the table.

“You arrived in this country a matter of days ago, Colonel. With respect, you know nothing of the psychology of the
man we are dealing with, nor the thinking of his inner circle. The German chancellor can be susceptible to reason and logic. He can also become irrational, over-excited and prone to lash out, if threatened. Trust me: the mailed fist will just make matters worse. I know the man.”

Joachim Bonner placed the cup of coffee on his desk, sat down, lit a cigarette, looked at his watch and picked up the top file from his in-tray. It was 8.38 a.m. His day always started like this. A stack of files, each with a small note attached. The notes were all signed in tiny script with just two initials and the date written in roman numerals. He squinted at the first file: “RH IX.I.VIII.” Typical arrogance from a man who had been brought up as a pious Catholic and educated at the finest private school in Bavaria. And Reinhard Heydrich never let his staff forget it, thought Joachim. Why couldn't he just write “09/01/1938” like everyone else?

He examined the file: William L. Shirer of the Columbia Broadcasting System. He glanced at the next one: Ian Colvin of the
News Chronicle,
London. He flipped through the others. All were new arrivals in the foreign press corps, mostly English-speaking, but there were Spanish, Portuguese and Italian journalists as well.

Bonner lit another cigarette. It was a complete waste of time using surveillance on the foreign press. They were always to be found at the Adlon bar; if not, there were one or two
restaurants where they gathered like sheep, ate, drank and then argued over who would pay what share of the bill. Their rooms were bugged anyway, so what was the point, except perhaps to marvel at how they managed to get up in the morning, given the money they spent at the bar the night before.

He was about to replace the pile when he caught sight of the final file: Colonel Noel Macrae, military attaché at the British embassy. A Christmas baby, thought Bonner, and he opened the file to check the date. That's right: born 25 December 1890, Inverkeithing, Scotland.

Macrae had just arrived in the Berlin diplomatic corps and would already be under the usual surveillance. That, thought Bonner, is what my job amounts to. At the age of forty-four, after twenty years' hard work in the police, he was in charge of surveillance, occasional bribery and, more rarely still, entrapment, of members of the foreign community in Berlin: bankers, arms dealers, the occasional church dignitary and, incredibly, tourists, who came to enjoy the dark allure of the Third Reich. Not much reward for a brilliant war service and the Iron Cross 1st Class that went with it. After the humiliation of Versailles, Bonner had been an early member of paramilitary groups such as the Freikorps, which sprouted like mushrooms from the dank earth of shame and betrayal. That was a lot more than you could say for Reinhard Heydrich.

He lit another cigarette and indulged in a favourite pastime, reminding himself of how the official account of his superior's career differed somewhat from the actual version. Reinhard Heydrich headed the Sicherheitspolizei and Sicherheitsdienst, two agencies combined to form the Gestapo. Heydrich, who had been too young to fight in the war and who had spurned the chance to join any of the revolutionary movements against an imposed peace deal and the corrupt Weimar Republic that followed. Heydrich, who hadn't been
able to hold down a job until he went into the navy, and guess what happened then.

Bonner smiled and lit another cigarette. He enjoyed recalling this moment in Heydrich's now sanitised past. The man who currently controlled the political, criminal and border police in Germany had been kicked out of the navy because of his betrayal of a woman to whom he had been engaged. And he would have got away with it if he had not been so arrogant at the court martial.

Then, through marriage to that ghastly woman Lina, Heydrich had somehow engineered an introduction to Himmler, who had given him the job of creating a security police force. That was six years ago, and now Heydrich was one of the most important and feared men in the Reich. And I, Joachim Bonner, work for him. Unofficially I am his number two, but Heydrich refuses to create such a title and instead demeans me with oversight of surveillance duties.

Bonner knew what the files meant. Entrapment was the method used to discredit those diplomats deemed to be irrationally hostile to the Reich. One did not expect foreigners to kneel down and embrace the creed of National Socialism, but one looked for respect and professionalism. Thus diplomats and members of the wider foreign community who were considered to be actively critical were given the special attention of his department.

He pressed the intercom buzzer and called his secretary, a broad-beamed lump of a girl from the farmland of Bavaria. She came in, leaving the door open as usual. Hilde may not have been much of a looker but she had the one attribute required of every man and woman who worked in the building. She was a true believer, loyal and trustworthy. Her family were all party members from a village outside Munich. Like everyone else in the building, her personal file carried the
names and addresses of her immediate family and those of her uncles, aunts and even cousins. Everyone knew why that information was so carefully recorded.

Hilde was not just loyal; she was ambitious. Behind those thick-lensed glasses lay a sharp mind. She wanted promotion into a real executive role. Joachim appreciated that.

“Yes, sir?”