The Hour of the Cat (55 page)

He assists as many as he can to get away. He helps over five hundred escape from Holland at one time under the guise of being Abwehr agents en route to South America. At one point, Himmler's remark to the Führer about the Admiral's “strange regard for the Jews” results in a temporary suspension that leaves no doubt about the growing precariousness of his position.

He secretly meets with General Mengies of British Intelligence and General Donovan of the OSS in Santander, in Spain. They're accompanied by an aide, whom Donovan says is absolutely trustworthy. “We served together in the last war,” he says. “He saved my life.” Mengies and Donovan implore Canaris to come over to the Allies. Germany is doomed and you know it, Donovan says.

Canaris proposes that if Hitler is removed, a cease-fire will be declared in the West and the new government of Germany, while dismantling the Nazi state, will be allowed to concentrate its resources on stopping the Soviet advance in the East.

The possibility of such deals died at Munich in 1938, Mengies says. Your choice, Admiral, is to come over to our side, to set an example for your countrymen, or to return and suffer the fate your nation has brought upon itself.

You must choose, Herr Admiral.

When the axe finally falls, when the SS raid the offices of the Abwehr and he's relieved of his command and put under house arrest, it almost comes as a relief. With Heydrich dead—assassinated by Czech partisans—Himmler himself takes control of a reorganized and consolidated intelligence operation. The war against the Reich's enemies, the Allies, the Jews, traitors, and spies, will be waged simultaneously on all fronts.

He tells himself that he will soon be forgotten, relegated to some lowly, humiliating assignment, allowed to exist in quiet, protective oblivion. Even as he tells himself this, he knows it isn't true. In the old castle at Burg Lauenstein, where he is held under house arrest, there is a large Black Forest clock at the bottom of the stairway. He hears its ticking. In the middle of the night, at the quarter hour, its cuckoo emerges to sing a lyric especially for him:
The more familiar we become with National Socialist ideas, the more we'll discover they are truly soldierly ideas.

Soon after the Allies land in France, a group of officers finally carries out an assassination attempt on the Führer. They fail, as he could have told them they would. It's too late to prevent what is in store for Germany. The crimes are too great. Fate will not allow it. Heaven demands it. The clock won't stop until it strikes the final hour.

All those suspected of opposing the regime are rounded up. On a warm, still July afternoon, a car comes for him. He is driven to Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht Strasse, hustled from the car into an underground warren of stone corridors and steel doors.

He sees no visitors and is kept on a starvation diet. There is no light in the cell. He loses track of whether it is night or day. The screams and moans that filter in the hallway occur at all hours, around the clock. There seems to be no schedule.

Gruff and threatening as his interrogators are, they never touch him. Striking a superior officer is the last unnatural act left them. They grow exasperated with his insistent denials that he has ever betrayed his country—never—and with his name dropping and long, complex answers.

“Do you ever answer with a simple yes or no,” one of them asked.

“That depends,” he says.

He is six months in that dungeon before the roof caves in, and the dust and smoke choke jailers and prisoners alike. The Allied planes have made a special point of obliterating the Gestapo's home.

 

 

The prisoners are gathered in a yard. Canaris recognizes it as the place where he met Heydrich years before. He supposes he and the others are about to be shot.

Instead, they are put on a truck and driven away. Despite the warning not to, he peeks through the canvas and is awestruck at the smoldering wreckage of steel and bricks. The entire city seems to have been blown apart. Handcuffed and shackled, they travel what feels an interminable distance. The roads are packed with refugees who often seem oblivious to the furious, impatient honks that insist they get out of the way. Finally, they end their journey near the border that once divided Germany and Czechoslovakia, to the outskirts of Flossenbürg.

They descended from the truck onto a dirt yard. Rows of shabby, indistinguishable huts stretch off in every direction. A work squad of emaciated prisoners in tattered rags stumbles past as the guards kick and push them.

Ahead is a squat, bunkerlike structure, the camp's special detention center for prisoners to be kept in isolation. He is taken to a small cell and chained to the wall.

There is one last act: a mock trial that preserves the veneer of legality to which the SS continues to cling. There is no question of the outcome. The SS is now in possession of a secret trove of documents unearthed in the search of military headquarters. The treasonous conversation of 1938 and the plans for a coup are spelled out in them.

The nooses are made ready before the court convenes: verdict first, trial second.

He doesn't grovel, as they expect. He argues that the documents are inconclusive. His involvement was directed at keeping track of the conspirators, not at assisting them.

Oster is brought in. He is told what Canaris said. Their friendship had ruptured years before, when Canaris discovered Oster had leaked the plans for the blitzkrieg in the West to Dutch intelligence. In so doing, he'd proven himself a traitor to the nation. At the time, Oster defended himself by raising the issue of the message Canaris had sent in order to scuttle the rescue of an SS agent in America. Canaris scoffed at the comparison. It was one thing to resist the illegal maneuverings of Himmler and Heydrich, another to put the existence of the entire German army at risk. “That is our tragedy,” Oster said. “There is no longer any difference.”

Though Canaris never turns in Oster, neither does he forgive him.

Told of Canaris's denial of being an active member in the plot to overthrow the Führer, Oster says, “That's not true. He knew and was involved in every activity of the resistance.”

The interrogators revel in the spectacle of the self-admitted traitor implicating the suspected one. The papers discovered in a raid on army headquarters is sufficient to convict both men of high treason. But they rephrase Oster's reply so the Admiral can throw the blame back on Oster and continue the game: “The prisoner is lying, is he not?”

They wait patiently for an answer. They let their silence speak for them:
Come, Admiral, grovel for your life. Listen to your fear, as you always have. It's too late for bravery. Convict Oster for us and perhaps we won't inflict on you the death you've so richly earned. Perhaps we'll throw you back in your cell, into the dark recesses where your type breeds. We'll let the Allies find you alive, shriveled, crawling on all fours away from the sunlight. But you'll be alive, our little Admiral. Alive.

The only sound is the clock on the wall.

“No, he's telling the truth,” Canaris says.

There is one final interrogation. They want more names. He won't give them. They break his nose. And there is a last message from him. He taps it on the wall of his cell, in code to the prisoner next door:
My time is up. Was not a traitor. Did my duty as a German. If you survive remember me to my wife.

 

 

“Out you come!” The door of the cell opens. He joins a file of four other men and is put at its head. Oster is behind him. Behind Oster is Dietrich Bonhöffer, the minister and theologian who'd been sheltered within the Abwehr. Bonhöffer's father had been replaced in the chair of psychiatry at Berlin and Charite Hospital by Max de Crinis, who did his best to purge the profession of “Jewish influence.”

Bonhöffer is praying aloud and is ordered to be quiet.

“Get undressed!” They are pushed into the bath cubicles at the end of the hall. Bonhöffer is the first to undress. He kneels beside the neat pile of his clothes.

Canaris is ordered out into the concrete yard. In its center is a gallows. A rope hangs from a hook. A stepladder is beneath.

He doesn't pray or feel the urge to. These are the final things he feels: cold morning air against the feverish warmth of his naked skin; wet tingle of the concrete beneath his feet; urgent loosening in his bowels.

His hands are tied behind him. He mounts the stepladder. It is almost dawn. The last sky he will ever see: black, blue, hint of violet. The rope is put around his neck and adjusted so that his toes will dangle just one or two agonizing, tantalizing inches above the floor.

He waits for the ladder to be kicked away. His executioners stand around as if they have all day.

His whole body trembles.
O Christ, don't let me shit on myself!

He looks down: no rodent's claws, or rat's tail, just his ghost-white feet as the ladder sails away.

Oh, it's easy to say we're all human beings. If there's a God—not only do we differ before Him as regards our malevolence or kindness, we all have different natures and different lives, in kind, in origin, in future and destiny we are all different.

—ALFRED DÖBLIN,
Berlin Alexanderplatz

Suicide of German Exile
(
N.Y. Standard
, June 25, 1941)

The body of Dr. Franz Ignatz, age 56, was discovered in his Yorkville apartment yesterday. He hanged himself in the bathroom. Dr. Ignatz's wife passed away last year. Neighbors said the couple had fled Nazi Germany several years ago. They described Dr. Ignatz as distraught over his wife's death and the unbroken string of German military successes.

John Mayhew Taylor, Acclaimed Reporter, Killed in Plane
Crash While Covering Progress of Allied Invasion
(
N.Y. World-Telegram
, June 12, 1944)

John Lockwood, 83, Dean of City's Crime Reporters,
Dies/'End of an Era,' His Colleagues Say
(
Knickerbocker News
, August 26, 1951)

Wilfredo Grillo, patriota, exiliado e incansable luchador por
una Cuba democrática, falleció repentinamente en su casa
ayer por la manana de un paro cardiaco.
(Tampa,
El Libertador
, 21 de septiembre de 1958.)

[translation by Mia Carbonell: WILFREDO GRILLO, PATRIOT, EXILE AND TIRELESS ADVOCATE OF A DEMOCRATIC CUBA, died suddenly at home yesterday morning from a heart attack. A resident of the U.S. for most of the past 20 years, Grillo was at one time the center of a notorious murder case in New York, a crime for which he was unjustly convicted and subsequently exonerated. After a brief return to Cuba, he settled in Tampa yet traveled widely in support of the opposition to the Batista regime in his native land. A full obituary appears on p.8 of this newspaper. (Tampa,
The Liberator
, September 21, 1958)]