They Used Dark Forces (44 page)

On waking he had felt sick with disappointment that when everything had been set fair for him to get away over the Swiss frontier this misfortune should have befallen him. But he tried to console himself with the thought that his case would be infinitely worse had he fallen into the hands of the Gestapo instead of those of the Civil Police.

At nine o'clock he was taken in a prison van to the Potsdam Law Courts. In a cell there a dapper little man came and introduced himself as Herr Rechtsgelehrter Juttner and deferentially offered his services. Clearly he was eager to have the chance to act as Counsel for a
Hochwohlgeborener
and, knowing the profound respect with which the German middle classes still regarded the old nobility, this suddenly brought home to Gregory the advantages of temporarily being a Prince. Putting on the naughty manner expected of him, he accepted the lawyer's offer and for some while they discussed the case.

Herr Juttner could not disguise the fact that it was a bad one, because Gregory might well have killed the policeman who had tried to stop him. There would also, he said, be two cases: one, the Reich against Gregory for dangerous driving, and another, private action, brought by the injured girl, Fräulein Elfrida Trott, for damages.

Now that Gregory's mind was again working at full speed he at once realised that the second could be the more dangerous to him. The first would be settled that morning; but a private action might not come on for some weeks. For that he would be expected to call in his Insurance Company, and that he could not do. Almost certainly, too, the Prince's relatives in Munich would get to hear of it. He would then be exposed as an impostor and the wrecked car would be traced to Sabine. An investigation would follow which, as they would be unable to meet and concoct a story to explain their association, was certain to land them both up to their necks in trouble.

Although the Prince's wallet had been taken from Gregory, he knew that he still had at his disposal the considerable sum in it; and, as Fräulein Trott's injuries were not serious, it occurred to him that she might be willing to settle out of court. Seeing his prospects of a second case slipping away from him, Herr Juttner somewhat reluctantly agreed to this; but she was waiting in another room to give evidence, so Gregory sent the lawyer off to see her. Ten minutes later he returned to report that she had accepted five hundred RM. as compensation.

That fence over, Gregory took the next one: that of dealing with the wrecked car. If it were left at the garage to which it presumably had been towed, unless something was done about it at once the police would ask for instructions about its disposal. To forestall their doing so Gregory asked Herr Juttner to deal with the matter as soon as the court hearing was over.

He said that the car belonged to the Baroness Tuzolto and, knowing her to be absent from her home, he had taken it without her knowledge or permission. Out of the money held temporarily by the police he asked Herr Juttner to pay the garage for returning the car to the Baroness. He then swore the lawyer to secrecy about the transaction, on the grounds that he had used an illegal store of petrol that the Baroness had had in her garage and wished to prevent her getting into trouble should that come out. Herr Juttner also agreed to convey to the Baroness the Prince's sincere apologies for having taken and wrecked her car, and say that as soon as he could he would pay her any compensation she might ask.

Gregory then enquired the lawyer's fee for all that he was to do for him and when Herr Juttner tentatively suggested seven hundred and fifty RM., the lordly Prince secured his complete allegiance by telling him that he should have a thousand. After Fräulein Trott, the garage and the lawyer had been paid, Gregory reckoned that would leave him only about three hundred RM. out of the sum Sabine had given him. But Juttner had been quite definite that he would not be able to get him off with a fine, and he knew that any balance of his money would not be returned to him until he left prison; so, for what he had achieved, he felt that the sixteen hundred or so marks had been well spent.

Soon after midday he was taken into court. There he pleaded guilty, offering as an excuse only that he had been desperately anxious to get back to Munich as soon as possible because a relative of his was lying dangerously ill there. Fräulein Trott, the man who had chased her out of the block of flats and the policeman whom Gregory had nearly run down gave their evidence. In view of the prisoner's rank the magistrate treated him with some deference; but said that the case was a serious one and that people in his position should set an example instead of committing such a flagrant breach of the law; then sentenced him to six months' detention.

Knowing that in Germany, unlike Britain, the authorities had a stranglehold over the Press, Gregory then expressed his contrition and asked that in order to spare his family the disgrace of his being sent to prison no account of the case should appear in the papers. To his great relief the magistrate agreed and gave the necessary instruction.

From the court he was removed to a cell in the Potsdam police barracks; and there for the rest of the day he contemplated his unpromising future. As a convict he considered his prospects of escape as far less good than if he were being sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. But at least he would be safe from the Gestapo—provided that his imposture as Prince Hugo was not discovered. And to maintain it, he had taken all the steps he possibly could.

On the Tuesday morning he was driven some twenty miles in a prison van and, on being let out, learned to his consternation that he had been taken to Sachsenhausen. He had expected to have to serve his sentence in a prison among ordinary criminals, which would have been bad enough; but Sachsenhausen was well known to be a concentration camp and he at once envisaged all the horrors that being confined in one called up.

To his surprise and relief, after the formalities of booking him in had been completed, he found that not only were his fears groundless but that his lot, anyway for the time being, was to be far better than any he could have expected. The camp consisted of several square miles of hutments surrounded by an open zone between high, barbed-wire fences. Within it there
were many thousands of internees and, as a precaution against mass riots, it was divided into a great number of sections, one of which was known as the ‘Political Bunker'. The inmates of it numbered only a few hundred and were termed ‘
Prominente
', because they were all people of standing who had been placed under restraint for a variety of reasons.

Some were awaiting trial, some were held only on suspicion that they were anti-Nazi and some were serving sentences of detention for anti-social activities; and Gregory had failed to appreciate that the magistrate had sentenced him not to imprisonment but to detention. For that, and for having been sent to serve his sentence among the
Prominente
, he had to thank the status he had acquired with his title; and before he went to sleep that night he was calling down blessings on Paula of the letter-box mouth, whose misadventure had provided this status for him.

He was allowed to continue wearing his own clothes, the guards were quite friendly, the food passable, the hut into which he was put clean and the wire-net bed he was given comfortable. The only hardship imposed was a prohibition against talking, and to enforce this guards kept the prisoners under observation both day and night. This constant surveillance convinced Gregory that escape was next to impossible, but he soon found that when out on exercise or in the wash-house neighbours managed to exchange whispered sentences.

By these means he learned that among the prisoners in his hut were Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Professor Edouard Jessen and General von Rabenau; while in other huts were Baron Karl von Guttenberg, Judge Hans von Dohnanyi, the Christian Democrat Deputies Adolf Reichwein and Theodore Haubach, Prince Philip of Hesse, who before quarrelling with Hitler had been a prominent Nazi, the Socialist leaders Julius Leber and Wilhelm Leuschner, Generals Stieff and Lindemann, Counts Moltke and Matuscha and many other distinguished Germans.

At first, on finding himself among such people, several of whom might know Prince Hugo, Gregory was greatly alarmed that his imposture would be discovered. But on arrival at the camp two pieces of cloth, each bearing the letter P and a
number, had been sewn on to his coat and trousers, and after being for only a short time in the hut to which he was allotted he found that the guards always addressed the prisoners by their numbers. Thus, as Number 541, his identity was screened from his companions and he swiftly decided to keep it so by refusing to give them any information about himself. As most of them had something to hide and they all believed that stool-pigeons had been put in among them, when he replied to their whispered enquiries only by a shake of the head none of them showed any resentment; and soon he had made friends of several of them.

As is the case in all prisons a mysterious grapevine existed by which news of the outside world regularly trickled into the camp, and this was frequently augmented by new arrivals. A number of them, like many of the prisoners already there, had first been confined for some days in cells under the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. All of these had been subjected to a greater or lesser degree of torture in an attempt to force them to admit their guilt and incriminate others. But they all maintained that they had managed to stand up to it; and that, although in its early stages the pain had seemed to become unbearable, there came a point at which the human mind could not only accept it but ignore it until relieved by unconsciousness.

Towards the middle of August the fate of the Generals in the 20th July plot became known. Field Marshal Witzleben, Generals Hoeppner, Fellgiebel, Hase, Thomas, and several officers of less senior rank had been dragged before a ‘People's Court' and shamefully exhibited there, unshaven, in old clothes and without braces or belts, so that they had had to hold their trousers up. They had then been condemned to death. The manner of their death had been personally decreed in detail by the fiendish Hitler. They had been stripped naked, hanged, cut down and revived, then hung up again with butchers' meat hooks in their backs until they expired in agony.

General Fromm, too, had not escaped. In spite of his having endeavoured to save himself by ruining the conspiracy, he had shared the fate of the colleagues he had from cowardice refused to aid. Kaltenbrunner who, with the possible exception
of Grauber was Himmler's most brutal-minded Lieutenant, had seen to that, because he was furious that Fromm had had von Stauffenberg and the other most active conspirators shot, instead of simply arresting them and handing them over to be tortured.

War news was also coming through. After over two months on their Normandy beach-head without launching an offensive the Allies had at last broken out. Towards the end of July the Americans, under General Bradley, had driven through to St. Loo on the coast of Brittany and simultaneously the Canadians had made a determined assault up the Falaise road against Caen. The Russians, meanwhile, had arrived at the gates of Warsaw and, although they were the hereditary enemies of the Poles, many thousands of Poles had risen in rebellion at dawn on August 1st with the intention of annihilating the German garrison and so enabling the Russians to enter their city.

During this time, and particularly at night before going to sleep, Gregory frequently concentrated his thoughts on Erika and did his utmost to assure her that he was safe and well. At times he seemed to get through and see her clearly at Gwaine Meads; but she looked ill, and he knew that was from worrying about him.

Once, in the third week of August, he spontaneously contacted Malacou. The Jew was sitting in a prison cell. Whereabouts Gregory had no idea, but it was clear that the occultist had been caught. Yet he conveyed a strong impression that he was not in the least worried about his situation. Why that should be Gregory could not imagine, but he had no doubt at all that his old associate was perfectly content to be where he was.

At the end of the month there was an influx of new prisoners: Dr. Karl Goerdeler, Ambassadors von Hassell and von der Schulenburg, Admiral Canaris, General Hans Oster, the Police Chiefs Count Helldorf and Artur Nebe, the ex-Finance Minister Johannes Popitz and several others. All of them had been arrested in the last week in July or early in August, on suspicion of having been concerned in the plot to assassinate Hitler. They had since been confined in the Gestapo headquarters,
but no evidence against them being forthcoming they had now been sent to Sachsenhausen.

Gregory was particularly interested in Admiral Canaris, as he knew the little man to have been the pre-war head of the German Secret Service and to have continued in that capacity until the previous winter. Only then had Himmler's inordinate ambition to control everything he could lay his hands on enabled him to secure the Admiral's dismissal and absorb the old regular-officered Secret Service into the much greater Foreign Intelligence Department UA-1, that had been built up for him by his own man, Gruppenführer Grauber.

Rumour in the camp had it that Canaris had been anti-Hitler from the beginning, and had even deliberately withheld Intelligence because he wanted the Allies to win the war quickly so that Germany might escape the terrible punishment that was now being inflicted on her. It was said, too, that his second-in-command, General Oster, who had been kept on after the Admiral had been sacked, had stubbornly continued to thwart the Nazis whenever possible; so that either of them should still be alive was a miracle.

Early in September, further news of Germany's rapidly deteriorating situation percolated through the camp. In mid-August the Allies had made another landing in the South of France. Soon afterwards Bradley and Montgomery had succeeded in encircling and destroying a great part of the German Army in the West, in the neighbourhood of Falaise, while another American Army under General Patton had reached the Seine at Fontainebleau.