The Grave of Truth (12 page)

‘Why that name?' Max said. ‘Why did Hitler choose that as a code?'

‘Sigmund thought it represented himself and Eva,' Minna Walther said. ‘The god at the gate of the city, facing attack, defending his people at one and the same time.'

‘The child was never found,' Max said slowly. ‘That's why your husband was killed. He was searching for it, wasn't he?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘Sigmund knew that if Hitler had a son, he represented the greatest danger to world peace and to the future of Germany. He may not even know who he is, but there are others who do, and they're waiting for the right moment to produce him. Sigmund was convinced that he hadn't been found; Yusevsky was very close to the investigation after the fall of Berlin. He said they'd been unable to trace it.'

‘How do you know that? It doesn't say so in here—'

‘Heinrich Holler told us,' she said quietly. ‘He was trying to help Sigmund.'

‘Why should the head of our Intelligence need someone like your husband to do the work for him?' Max asked. ‘Surely finding the child was his job?'

‘You've been away from home a long time,' Minna answered. ‘There are men in positions of power in Germany who wouldn't want Holler to find that child. Men in his own service that he couldn't trust. He was helping Sigmund do what he couldn't do himself.'

‘It's twenty-five years,' Max Steiner said. ‘You're not telling me there are Nazi sympathizers running Germany today?'

‘Not running it,' she corrected. ‘But they're there. And memories begin to blur; people forget the horrors and remember the propaganda, the successes. Now we're divided, split down the middle with our capital cut in half by that disgusting Wall.… There are people who could look back to Adolf Hitler and think he wasn't all that bad. I know, Herr Steiner. I've heard those views expressed by sensible, decent people, who wouldn't hurt anyone. That's why my husband believed so passionately in Germany being one country again, whatever the compromise. If once we come together, we'll make ourselves independent and free!'

Max listened to her, and noted the colour in her cheeks and the intensity in her voice. Not so cool and composed now, the Prussian aristocrat had changed into a woman of passionate convictions. There was a lot of fire behind the ice.

‘Now that you know,' she said. ‘What are you going to do?'

He was sitting hunched forward, elbows on his knees, looking up at her. ‘I'm going to find Janus,' he said, ‘if you'll help me.' He hadn't expected her to do what she did. She moved quickly and came and sat beside him. She put her hand on his arm. Once again he could smell the scent she used, the one he had given Ellie for her birthday.

‘We'll work together,' she said. ‘I've got friends who can help. We'll find this child.'

‘It'll be a grown man,' Max reminded her. ‘And if we do find him, what happens then?' She turned away from him. ‘I don't know,' she said.

‘Supposing it was a girl?'

‘Sigmund was sure it was a boy,' Minna said. ‘It makes more sense. It
was
a boy. The Führer's son.'

‘It makes me shudder,' Max said, ‘just to imagine what could be done with a trump card like that to play.' He lit a cigarette and gave it to her. He noted that she took it and that she let their fingers touch. Sexual excitement rose in him; he fought it down. The time would come for that; he knew it would, just by sitting close to her. ‘I made a list of people,' he said. ‘I saw one of them in Berlin last night. SS Standartenführer Otto Helm. He was the officer who ordered the shooting in the garden. He told me who the man was. Herman Fegelein, Eva's brother-in-law. He knew about Janus, and that's why they killed him, because he was trying to escape. They couldn't risk the secret getting out. So if he knew about the child's existence, then his wife must have known a hell of a lot more. Her name is down in your husband's notes. But there's no record he ever went to see her.'

‘He tried, several times,' Minna said. ‘But she wouldn't agree. She wouldn't see or talk to anyone; she lives in a Catholic convent in Munich. She's a lay sister, and the Reverend Mother refused flatly to see Sigmund or discuss Gretl Fegelein.'

‘We'll have to try again,' Max said. ‘I've another call to make, at Berchtesgaden. Hitler's valet lives there; it's a bit of a long shot if the Russians let him out, but there might be some clue he could give us.… We can try and get to Gretl Fegelein on the same trip.'

‘We?' Minna Walther questioned. Max looked at her and nodded.

‘A woman has a much better chance of getting into a convent than a man,' he said.

They had dinner in the house; his suitcase was still in the boot of the Porsche. Max had gone back to the study and spent the afternoon reading through every item that Sigmund Walther had collected.… Then he processed the information, discarding the irrelevancies and the dead ends, set out the facts in Walther's file and the facts which he knew himself. The outline was finished by the evening; he gave it to Minna to read. Walther had been painstaking and imaginative in his investigation, helped by the guidance of Heinrich Holler, whose memory of the old Abwehr records was invaluable. Admiral Canaris had kept detailed files on the Führer and all his associates; so had the Intelligence Service of Reinhard Heydrich and Himmler. Both services, outwardly in truce, but in mortal rivalry for control of the internal and external security of the Reich, put their spies into every department and every private house.

Until the failure of the generals' bomb plot in July 1944, Canaris and his successor had compiled a report of the activities and routine of every person who stayed at Hitler's retreat in the mountains at Berchtesgaden. There Eva Braun lived in seclusion, with her two terriers for company, appearing in front of Hitler's intimates only on his command. It was a strange love affair; her role as mistress expanded with the years, until her dances and exhibitions of athletics, loyally filmed by her mentor Heinrich Hoffman, became part of the entertainment offered the favoured few who shared their leader's relaxation. There was no doubt that she loved Adolf Hitler with a mixture of naïveté and mysticism which submitted without question to a life of loneliness and restriction. She was a simple woman whose appeal lay in her natural prettiness and homely ways, regarding herself as divinely appointed to serve the Leader. The Abwehr spies at Berchtesgaden reported that she was in poor health during the early summer of 1943, and that she had gone to stay with her sister Gretl in Munich after Christmas, returning to Berlin in late February. The agents' report suggested that she might have fallen out of Hitler's favour, and this was the reason for her illness, which seemed to be neurotic in origin, and her return to her sister. If this was the case, then her position was even stronger after she and the Führer became reconciled.

Unfortunately for both the Abwehr agents and their former chief, Canaris, the bomb planted beside Hitler during the conference in July did not achieve its aim. He escaped with cuts and bruises, and thousands of people were executed in a purge that destroyed Admiral Canaris himself and delivered his records into the hands of his enemy the Gestapo. It had seemed to Sigmund Walther, as it did to Max, that the ‘illness' from which Eva Braun was suffering was pregnancy, and the stay with her sister had been to cover up the birth of the baby.

The execution of Fegelein and his knowledge of the codeword Janus reinforced this theory. With Holler's assistance, Walther had compiled a long report on Gretl Fegelein, the pre-1945 data taken from Gestapo files. In the early part of 1944 she had entertained her sister Eva; there was no record of anything unusual during their stay together. The sisters were friendly but not intimate. There were few visitors, Herman Fegelein was one of Reichsführer Himmler's most trusted assistants, and he was seldom able to leave Berlin. His wife was a retiring woman, who felt uneasy with the Führer's inner circle and refused to take part in the intrigues and power politics that surrounded him. She was a practising Catholic, and continued to attend Mass in spite of pressure from her husband, who feared Hitler's disapproval.

Walther's report on Fegelein's execution was the official one. He had been caught hiding in a flat in Berlin, having slipped away from the Bunker; Swiss money and his sister-in-law's diamonds were found on him. Hitler ordered his immediate return to the Bunker, where he was interrogated and shot. His body had been buried in a bomb crater and dug up by the Russians. Walther had tracked down the two surviving servants who had lived in the Fegelein household during Eva's stay. One was an old woman, a war widow, who lived on a pension and helped out with a Munich family's washing twice a week. She had seen very little of the famous Eva; what she did see was when she brought her breakfast in bed during the morning. She remembered being sent a message during the visit, that the ladies were going away for the weekend and she wouldn't be needed till the Monday.

The other survivor of the household was an ex-SS man, called by the unlikely name of Schubert, who acted as chauffeur and bodyguard. His story was the same as the maid's; nothing unusual occurred while Eva was staying there, except that he too had been dismissed for the same weekend.

There followed a long and fruitless series of inquiries at hospitals and doctors in the city, none of which yielded any information linking them with Eva Braun or with the delivery of a baby in suspicious circumstances. There had been a private clinic ten kilometres outside the city, but it had been closed down at the end of the war, and the building demolished. There was no trace of the doctor who ran it or of any of his staff. The evidence pointed to Eva having had the child induced over that weekend, the baby itself being taken away by a foster-mother.

Bombing, chaos and disruption followed by Allied occupation had made it impossible to track down anyone who knew anything about the clinic or its medical staff. And there the trail had ended for Sigmund Walther with the refusal of Gretl Fegelein to see him, and of the convent to accept letters or messages for her. He had made a note of Holler's suggestion that the Reverend Mother's reluctance to assist them might be on direct orders from her superiors in Rome. There was nothing to be done officially, since the investigation was a private one, and Gretl Fegelein had not committed any breach of the law.

‘We've got to see her,' Minna put the report down. ‘She helped to arrange the birth and she
must
know who took the child! Her husband knew, too. That's what he was trying to tell you—find Janus!'

‘It must have been kept secret from everyone else,' Max said. ‘Somebody would have given it away, at Nuremburg, or tried to do a deal to help themselves. Read the rest of it; there are one or two people left on my list who just might be able to lead somewhere.'

He watched her reading, a slight frown drawing the fine eyebrows together.

‘There are two in Hamburg,' she said. ‘Mühlhauser and Josef Franke. Why don't you see them first—then we can fly to Munich. She's not going to disappear out of the convent.'

‘I didn't know what Janus meant when I drew up that list,' Max said. ‘But Mühlhauser was a very important man, the last liaison between Himmler and Hitler in Berlin. The Russians got him, and what bothered me at the time is how he got released. It bothers me even more now. He and Fegelein were Himmler's men. And Himmler was trying to make peace behind Hitler's back. Fegelein knew about the child, and I'm beginning to think he told Himmler. And if Himmler knew, then Mühlhauser would have known too. Maybe we should see Mühlhauser first. Josef Franke was the guard who got me out; he can't tell us anything, but I'd like to see him again anyway. I owe him a drink, at least.'

He saw that she wasn't listening; she was looking at the list again and this time the frown deepened suddenly, and then disappeared.

‘Albert Kramer—why is he on this list?'

‘Do you know him—of course, you would do,' he said. ‘He's a powerful man in Germany today; he's got a finger in everything, including government policy.'

The coldness in her eyes surprised him. ‘He is one of our closest friends,' Minna Walther said. ‘What could he have to do with this?'

He felt suddenly angry; the last person he had expected to find ranked with Minna Walther and her husband was Albert Kramer. He wanted to shock her, to repay the snub with the truth about what her oldest friend had done in the Chancellory garden that day. But he didn't. Instinct stopped him, and he obeyed it.

Albert Kramer, and a patriotic idealist like Sigmund Walther, with a wife of Minna's integrity and devotion. Albert Kramer must have changed a lot from the boy who emptied his revolver into the dying Herman Fegelein. He would have another motive now for meeting him again.

‘I'd better go to my hotel,' he said, ‘it's getting late. Can I phone for a cab to take me there?'

‘Where are you staying?'

‘The Parkhotel.'

‘It's not a very comfortable hotel, I'm afraid,' she said. The eyes were innocent; there was no subtle invitation in them. ‘It
is
late; they'll be closed except for a night porter, it's that sort of hotel. Why don't you stay here tonight?'

‘That's very nice of you, Frau Walther. I don't want to be a nuisance,' he said.

She smiled, and the strain which had arisen between them was gone. ‘It's no trouble at all. I always have a room ready; we never knew when someone would call and need a bed. I left my car keys on the table in the hall; if you get your case, I'll take you upstairs.'

He followed her up to a room on the first floor. It was some distance from the bedroom he had seen that morning. She opened the door and switched on the lights; it was a warm and pleasant bedroom, impersonal as all guestrooms are.