The Seventh Secret (12 page)

"Well, don't let Vogel discourage you with his firsthand stuff. Just listen to him. When you've heard him out, go after your reluctant informant even harder. Use the eyewitness stuff you learn from Vogel to bait the other man. That tactic often works. If you get lucky, go ahead with the bunker search." At the door, hand on the knob, Nitz halted, and appraised her. "Please heed one piece of advice I'm going to give you. If you are going ahead, if you do decide to dig, don't announce it publicly as your father did. Don't take any chances. Hit-and-run accidents in Berlin are not uncommon occurrences. Find the truth. But also stay alive."

E
mily had waited restlessly in her suite for the telephone to ring.

Forty-five minutes later, true to his word, Peter Nitz had called her upon returning to his office at the
Berliner Morgenpost
. He had Ernst Vogel's telephone number and his apartment house address.

Emily had begun to thank him, when the reporter interrupted her. "Before speaking to Vogel, I think you should know something about the man," Nitz had said. "I pulled out my interview notes from two years ago, just to refresh my memory. Ernst Vogel was twenty-four on the day he claims Hitler died. That would make him sixty-four today. Vogel was an SS sergeant and honor guard on a twelve-hour shift. Very proud of the black sleeve band with 'Adolf Hitler' stitched in silver on it. On duty, he was armed with a machine gun and hand grenade. He was at the entrance to the
Führerbunker
during the last ten days Hitler was down there, the ten days between Hitler's fifty-sixth birthday and his announced suicide. Vogel must have been well trusted, because he got down into the bunker at several crucial moments toward the end. On the final day he was one of those who witnessed the cremation of Hitler and Braun. He'll tell you the whole story. He's a garrulous fellow with a good memory. Those ten days were the high spot in his life. If he's still around, you should find him at home. He's always worked out of his apartment."

"Doing what?"

"He runs a mail-order business. Rare books. German, of course. Oh, one more thing. You'll have to speak up when you're with him. He has a hearing defect. Both ears. From an injury suffered when he was at the
Führerbunker
due to the constant Russian bombardment of the Chancellery area. Anyway, try him. If he's there, I'm sure he'll see you. You can mention my name."

"I don't know how to thank you enough, Mr. Nitz."

"Never mind. Call Vogel for the standard version."

She had hung up, then dialed Ernst Vogel's number. After a few rings, a loud male voice had answered. With his impediment in mind, Emily had raised her own voice. Was this Ernst Vogel? It was. Emily had introduced herself and said that Peter Nitz, a reporter on the
Berliner Morgenpost
, had once interviewed him about Adolf Hitler's death and had thought he might be a reliable witness for her to contact. She hastily added that she had come to Berlin to wind up research on a definitive history of Hitler. She then had given Vogel her academic credentials.

"A book?" Vogel had shouted. "You are writing a book about Hitler's death?"

"Actually about his entire life, but it will include his death. I want it to be accurate. I hope you can help me."

There had been a pause. "Yes, I can help you. You've come to the right person." Another pause. "I suppose I owe it to posterity. Very well, I will see you. Do you have my address?"

Emily had read it to him.

"Exact," he had said. "Be here at-four o'clock."

After that, with time to spare, she had considered also calling Dr. Max Thiel, the dentist whose doubts about Hitler's death had brought first her father and then Emily herself to Berlin. Eager to do so, she had hesitated, recalling Nitz's advice that she use whatever Vogel told her as bait to gain a meeting with Dr. Thiel.

Instead of calling, she had gone to the suitcase filled with her research files, taken out the files, sorted them. Finally, she had reviewed lists of Germans who had known Hitler or been in the Führer bunker during Hitler's final days, those people her father had already interviewed during his visits to Berlin. Ernst Vogel had not been among them. Curious, Emily had thought. Anyway, she would soon make up for the oversight.

She had taken a taxi for an eight-minute ride to what proved to be a five-story apartment building on Dahlmannstrasse, about a block and a half north off the Ku'damm. A mailbox in the small lobby had told her Ernst Vogel could be found on the floor above the street floor. Climbing the flight of stairs between scarred mahogany banisters and sickly green walls in need of fresh paint, she had arrived at Vogel's apartment.

To her surprise, the person who greeted her turned out to be a small man with sparse gray hair, a hearing aid set into one ear, an emaciated Goebbels-like face. She had imagined that all the Führer bunker SS guards had been giants.

Now, seated next to Ernst Vogel, she in an old fashioned armchair, he in a rocker, Emily intended to find out why her father had not interviewed this former SS guard.

"Another book on Hitler?" Vogel asked her once they were seated. "There have been so many. It has become an industry."

"True," said Emily calmly. "But most were written in the forties and early fifties when some of the members of Hitler's inner circle were not available to be inter-viewed. You may remember that they were taken to the Soviet Union for interrogation and confinement. The Soviets would not allow outsiders to see them. They were available only after they were gradually re-leased and allowed to come back to Germany. My father thought it was time for a more complete and up-to-date biography of Hitler."

"I suppose so," said Vogel.

Emily brought her briefcase to her lap and took out one of her paperclipped lists. "These are the persons my father interviewed." She handed it to Vogel. "I could not find your name on it."

Vogel's eyes ran down the names. Handing the sheets back, he asked, "When did he interview these people?"

"He started ten years ago. He and I began writing the biography five years ago. But my father died recently, so I'm concluding the work alone."

Vogel had been leaning forward to hear her better. "Ten years ago, five years ago, I was not seeing interviewers. He probably wrote me and I did not reply. In those times, I thought I would write about my experience myself. So I would give my story to no one.

Eventually I learned, despite all my notes, I am not a writer. I am a reader and a bookseller. But I wanted the story told, so I began to see interviewers. The young man on the
Morgenpost
. . ." He tried to recall the name.

"Peter Nitz."

"Yes, Nitz, he was one of the first I met with a few years ago. So you are writing a book on Hitler? I have never given an interview for a book. I suppose it will be printed in German also, and I will have copies?" He waved behind him toward the dining room area. The walls were lined with shelves of books, and the floor was littered with unopened crates. "Some are popular recently published books, but my main business is mail order of older books, rare ones. I inherited the business from my parents. They were killed in an American aerial bombing of Berlin, while I was in the army. Books are my life, but I also have a hobby. Hunting. I am a crack marksman. Have always been an expert shot since I was in kneepants. That's why I did well in the SS.''

And that's how he came to be an SS guard at the
Führerbunker
, Emily thought. They wanted not only giants, but crack marksmen, too.

"Can we talk about Hitler?" Emily asked.

"About Hitler, I must say this. He was, in his way, a great man, no question. I had only two things against him. I did not agree with his anti-Semitism. Some of my parents' best customers were Jews. They were always decent and honest people. The other thing I held against Hitler was his trying to conquer Russia. Hitler and all his army and air force couldn't conquer Russia. That was the beginning of Hitler's downfall. But before that, he was a great man. So you want to know more about his death?"

"About the last day or two of his life. I have considerable material on what happened in the bunker. But material on his death is very contradictory."

"Everyone sees what he wants to see," said Vogel. "I can only tell you precisely what I saw and heard."

"That's exactly what I want you to do."

Vogel gently bobbed in the rocking chair as he adjusted his hearing aid. "I'm sorry, what did you say?" he asked.

"I said whatever you're prepared to tell me is exactly what I want to know," she said more slowly and distinctly. She pushed the lists back into her briefcase and withdrew a yellow pad and pen.

Vogel was fiddling with his hearing aid again. "This impairment—happened the last day—the Soviet bombardment of our Chancellery area was fierce—one explosion, the concussion from it, knocked me over—a rocket-firing Katyusha truck was nearby, I think. I had a ringing in my ears for months after that until I could get to a doctor." Satisfied with his adjustment of the hearing aid, he faced her directly. "Hitler knew it was the end five days before it happened. We knew that the Russians had encircled Berlin and were beginning to penetrate its perimeters. That's when he told Linge— Heinz Linge, the SS colonel who was his valet and head of his personal bodyguard—that he did not intend to be taken alive. 'I will shoot myself. When I do, carry my body into the Chancellery garden. After my death, no one must see me and recognize me. After I am cremated, go to my private rooms in the bunker, collect all my papers, and burn them also.' Hitler reaffirmed this decision to Otto Giinsche, his SS adjutant and chauffeur. 'I want my body burned,' he said. 'After my death I don't want to be put on exhibition in a Russian zoo.'"

Emily was making her notes. Vogel waited. She looked up. "Those were his words?"

"So I heard. You know most of the events in the bunker, you say. What you want are details of the last day."

"Well, the last two days."

"All right. Let us begin with the evening of April 28, in 1945. Hitler announced that he was going to marry Eva Braun. To legitimize their long love affair and to repay her loyalty after she vowed she was going to die in the bunker with him. Anyway, Josef Goebbels found a justice of the peace, the very one who had married him and Magda. The justice was pulled out of a Volkssturm detachment fighting along the Friedrichstrasse. The marriage certificate was prepared, and signed by two witnesses, Goebbels and Martin Bormann. The wedding ceremony was held after midnight. About twelve-thirty in the morning on April 29. There were eight guests. They all celebrated with a small banquet after. Eva became slightly drunk on champagne. Hitler drank some, too, and tried to join the mood of gaiety. But once he was heard to mutter, 'It is all finished. Death will be a relief for me. I have been betrayed and deceived by everyone.' He meant Göring and Himmler, who—without authority—had tried to sue for peace and save their own necks, and some of his generals, who had lied to him."

Vogel watched Emily making her notes.

He resumed. From the smoothness of his telling, Emily realized that he had recounted the same story many times and was comfortable with it.

"In that underground bunker there was no day or night," said Vogel. "Hitler usually worked through the night and slept all morning. Before the wedding he called in his favorite secretary, Traudl Junge, and dictated two wills to her—a short testament in which he explained why he was marrying Eva Braun, and a longer political testament explaining the same nonsense about how the war had been forced on him by international Jewry. He waited up until Frau Junge had typed his three-page personal testament, and his ten-page political one, then he signed them and had his signatures witnessed, and then he was ready for sleep. But you know all that, don't you, Fräulein
 
Ashcroft?"

"Most of it. What came next is what is most important to me. I hope you will omit nothing, Herr Vogel."

Vogel went back and forth in his rocking chair. "That morning, and between four-thirty and five-thirty A. M. on April 30, were the only times Hitler and Eva slept together as man and wife. At eleven in the morning on April 29, they were awake. By noon Hitler had held his last war conference, by rote, pointless. Next he sent off couriers with his testaments to get them out of Berlin. Then he began to get ready for death."

"Tell me how."

"He was worried about the efficiency of the potassium cyanide that Himmler had once given him. He wondered whether the capsules still had their potency and whether Himmler had given him the right ones. He wanted to be sure."

"That was when Hitler tried out a poison capsule on his dog."

"Ah, you know," said Vogel.

She could not tell if he was pleased with her knowledge or irked at being preempted. She decided not to show off her knowledge, but to let him tell as much as possible in his own words.