They Used Dark Forces (70 page)

Two of them heaved the chair upright. Then Gregory saw Grauber and an S.S. officer facing one another in the open doorway. The latter had his back turned, but Gregory heard him ask sharply, ‘What has been going on here?'

‘A private matter,' piped Grauber angrily. ‘A private matter. I have been interrogating an English spy.'

The officer turned and looked at Gregory. Instantly they recognised one another. He was S.S. Standartenführer Hoegl, the Chief of Hitler's personal bodyguard, and he exclaimed:

‘
Donnerwetter
! It is Major Protze! He is no spy!'

‘He is!' insisted Grauber. ‘He is a pig of an Englishman.'

‘You can tell that to the Führer,' retorted Hoegl. Then he added to his men, ‘Release the Herr Major.'

Half fainting from strain, shock and relief, Gregory was untied and stumbled to his feet. Meanwhile a furious altercation was taking place between Grauber and the Standartenführer.

‘How dare you address me in this way!' shrilled Grauber. ‘I demand that you treat me with the respect due to an Obergruppenführer.'

‘Not while you are in those clothes,' sneered Hoegl.

‘What I wear is my business. I am about to change back into uniform.'

‘Oh no you're not. You are coming with me as you are.'

‘I'll not take orders from you.'

‘Yes you will. The Führer asked for you this evening. You weren't to be found in any of the bunkers. He sent me to fetch you. Naturally, we expected to find you at the Albrecht Strasse. You weren't there but they said you might be at this underground apartment of yours. And here you are. What game you were about to play in civilian clothes and with that suitcase already packed that I see over there it is not for me to judge, but——'

‘My Chief, the Reichsführer, has sent for me to join him.'

‘Then he'll have to wait until you've seen the Führer and explained to him why you left the bunker without his permission. He will want to know, too, what you have been up to with Major Protze. Come along now.'

Two minutes later they had emerged from a deep basement and were all packed into a big S.S. car that had been waiting outside the ruined block. By the flashes of the ack-ack guns Gregory saw that they were driving along the north side of the Tiergarten, but his head was still splitting and he was so exhausted that he was hardly conscious during the journey.

When they arrived at the Chancellery he asked if the car might take him on to Goering's house. As it was not he for whom the Führer had sent and he was obviously near collapse, Hoegl agreed. With an S.S. man on either side of him Grauber, white and shaking, was hustled into the building to face the wrath of the Führer. The car drove off and within ten minutes Gregory, between gulps of brandy, was giving Erika an account of his ghastly experience.

But his trials that night were not yet over. At half past four in the morning there was a terrific detonation. Both he and Erika were blown out of bed. Picking themselves up they put on their coats and went through the wrecked doorway to find out the extent of the damage. A Russian shell had blown in a part of the back of the house. The kitchen quarters were wrecked and the Hofbecks, who slept in a room adjacent to them, had both been killed. Malacou, although sleeping in the room above them, the outer wall of which had collapsed, had, miraculously, come to no harm.

When they had helped him move his bedding downstairs to the small dining room he told Gregory that the previous day he had found Sabine still at Seeaussicht and handed him a letter from her. It read;

My dear
,

Poor old Kurt having been wounded explains why he never came for me. These past two days I've been in half a mind to set off with Trudi on our own, but everyone says there are now thousands of Russians to the south of here, so I haven't had the courage to risk it. I must have been out of my mind not to have gone weeks ago, when you tried to persuade me to. But I'm sure you can't mean to stay in Berlin to be captured, and you have always been so full of resource. When you leave, I implore you to come here first and take me with you
.

Always your devoted Sabine
.

Having shown the note to Erika, Gregory said, ‘I don't wonder that having left it so late she's scared to run the gauntlet on her own. But the Russians can't be very thick on the ground to the south of the city yet. And this can't go on much longer. If I find that Hitler is still set on doing himself in we'll leave this coming night and pick up Sabine on our way out.'

After another few hours' sleep, weary, haggard and with his head still aching, shortly before midday Gregory went to the bunker. There he learned that on the previous evening Goebbels had raised the question of the
Prominente
. Not the German
Prominente
, with whom Gregory had for a time been a prisoner. Of them Goerdeler, Popitz, Nebe and others had been executed several weeks earlier. The remainder had been transferred to Flossenbürg and, on orders given by Hitler on April 9th, Canaris, Bonhoeffer, Oster, Dohnanyi and the majority of the others had been butchered. Goebbels, thirsting for blood, had referred to the other group of
Prominente
, which consisted of the most distinguished British and American prisoners of war. The latter had been removed from Colditz and were now being held as hostages in Bavaria. At his mentioned them Hitler had gone purple in the face and, his whole body trembling, yelled:

‘Shoot them all! Shoot them all!'

It was to transmit orders for this massacre that Grauber had been sent for and, on learning that he had disappeared, the Führer, now ever ready to suspect treachery, had sent Hoegl to try to find him. When he had been brought in there had been another scene, but his wits had saved his life. He had said that his Führer's need of reliable troops was much greater than the Reichsführer's and that Himmler's personal bodyguard, consisting of a whole battalion of crack S.S. men, was at Hohenlychen doing nothing. His idea had been to go and fetch it and he was in civilian clothes because that would give him a better chance of getting through the Russian lines.

Hoegl had begun to report having found Gregory tied to a chair in Grauber's apartment. But by then Hitler had appeared so near collapse that Eva Braun had insisted that he should go to bed. Supported by her he had staggered off, but shouted over his shoulder that Grauber was to be deprived of his rank and placed under arrest until his questionable conduct could be gone into further. So the ex-Obergruppenführer was now a prisoner locked in a cell in one of the outer bunkers.

The news that came in continued to be as black as ever. The Allies were advancing rapidly on all fronts, Russian shells were now falling in the Chancellery garden and their troops were said to have captured Potsdam. Yet Hitler continued to cling to the idea that General Wenck's Army would rescue him.

Then in the evening he received his most terrible blow. Heinz Lorenz arrived from the ruins of the Propaganda Ministry. With him he brought a transcript of a broadcast that had just been put out by the B.B.C. It was a full report of Himmler's negotiations with Count Bernadotte.

When given the news by the eager Bormann, Hitler broke into agonising wails. ‘
Der treue Heinrich
,' of all people, had betrayed him. It was unthinkable, yet incontestable. Soon his distress gave place to fury. As he mouthed curses, his face became almost unrecognisable. He saw everything now. Steiner was one of Himmler's men. It was on Himmler's orders that the General had refrained from launching the attack that could have saved Berlin. It had been a deliberate plot to ruin him. Suddenly he remembered Grauber and gave orders that
Heinrich Mueller, the Chief of the Political Police, should interrogate him.

Hoegl told Gregory afterwards that when they went into Grauber's cell his sagging face had broken out in a sweat of terror, and that in twenty hours he had lost at least two stones of his surplus fat. They had carried out the usual drill of beating the calves of his legs with steel rods until he could no longer stand, pulling out his fingernails and so on, and had extracted a confession from him. He had admitted that for weeks past he had known of Himmler's negotiations with Count Bernadotte and in a desperate attempt to escape further torment he had even invented a story that in exchange for a guarantee that his own life should be spared Himmler had offered to hand Hitler's corpse over to the Allies.

On receiving Mueller's report Hitler flared, ‘So the fat swine was aware of all this yet did not tell us. Take him up to the garden and shoot him!'

Gregory was by then so drained of emotion that he could not even take pleasure in the thought that his incredibly brutal and malicious enemy was to die; so although he had intended to witness the execution he was not particularly sorry when, as he was watching Grauber, now a gibbering wreck, being dragged by the guards up the concrete stairs, he was sent for by the Führer.

After referring briefly to Gregory's having been kidnapped the previous night, Hitler said, ‘I am now taking the necessary steps to prepare for my end. No leader has ever been served as badly as myself or suffered so many betrayals. Yet I still have a few friends who have demonstrated their loyalty by expressing a wish to take their lives at the same time as I take mine. You,
Herr Major
, came into my life too late for me to bestow on you such honours and rewards as I would have liked to do; but you have been a great support to me in these past terrible weeks, and it has occurred to me that I may be able to show my gratitude to you later. I refer, of course, to your being reincarnated with me on Mars. To ensure there is no time lag and your being reborn there about the same time as myself, it has occurred to me that you may wish to join those who are about to leave this earth with me.'

Completely taken aback by this horrifying invitation, Gregory did his utmost to prevent his features from showing his true feelings. Hastily stammering out that it had been a great privilege to have been of service to his Führer, he rallied his tired wits to take a quick decision. It was that he dared not refuse to play the game out, and could only pray that he would escape this new threat to his life by Hitler giving an example to the rest and taking his own life first. In a steadier voice he added:

‘
Mein Führer
, I seek no reward. But it would be an honour to die in your company.'

‘Good! Good!' said Hitler cheerfully. ‘
I
expected no less of you.' Then he took from his pocket a poison capsule and pressed it into Gregory's hand.

By then it was a little after midnight and von Greim and Hannah Reitsch were about to leave the bunker. In anticipation of their departure everyone had been writing farewell letters to their relatives for Hannah to take with her; and now Hitler went into von Greim's room to give him his last instructions. Both the newly created Field Marshal and Hannah expressed the opinion that it was no longer possible to escape from Berlin by air and begged to be allowed to remain and die with their Führer. But he insisted on their going.

When they had left he was suddenly seized by a fit of renewed confidence. He announced that his intuition told him that von Greim would get through and carry out his orders. These had been to arrest the treacherous Himmler and use the whole of the Luftwaffe to support Wenck's Army. Von Greim, he said, was a very different man from that decadent traitor Goering. He would put new life into the Luftwaffe and it would now cover itself with glory. The bridges over the Havel were still being held. Under cover of the Luftwaffe Wenck would reach Berlin and save them all.

To Gregory's despair there was no more talk of suicide. Instead the Führer declared his intention of conferring the status she had long desired on his faithful friend of many years. He meant to marry Eva Braun. A minor official named Walter Wagner, whom nobody knew but who was competent to perform a civil marriage, was produced by Goebbels. The ceremony
took place in the narrow map room with Goebbels and Bormann as witnesses. So, at long last, Eva Braun became Frau Hitler.

Afterwards they came out into the conference passage and shook hands with everybody, then retired to their private rooms for the wedding breakfast to which Hitler invited the two witnesses, Frau Goebbels and his two women secretaries.

Gregory got away as soon as he could to find that Erika, having slept for a good part of the day, was sitting up waiting for him, and that she and Malacou were all ready to start, as had been agreed the previous morning.

As gently as he could, he broke it to her that he still could not leave. Having told her about Grauber's end, the marriage and the poison capsule, he stilled her new fears for him by saying that he meant to empty the capsule of its deadly contents and refill it with water then, if he were forced to swallow it, throw a fit and sham dead. As she sighed with relief, he went on:

‘The last thing I heard before leaving the bunker was that von Greim got away safely after all. He is a fanatic and he'll sacrifice every 'plane in the Luftwaffe in an attempt to save Hitler. If with von Greim's help Wenck succeeds in reaching Berlin the odds are that Hitler will be tempted to abandon his alternative plan of committing suicide. I've simply got to stay and persuade him that it is not in his own best interests to cling on to life for another few months. Maybe as many as a million lives depend on that.'

Erika sighed. ‘Of course you are right, darling. You are playing for such tremendous stakes that we mustn't even think of our own lives. All the same if I stay here for another twenty-four hours I may be dead next time you get back. The Russian shells have been coming over all day at the rate of one a minute. Half the roof of the house has gone and three fell in the garden. But don't think I'm suggesting leaving you. I'll never do that.'

After a moment's thought Gregory said, ‘Look, central Berlin is now the Russians' main target. The city is vast and they can't possibly have enough guns to bombard the suburbs with anything like the same intensity. Why shouldn't you and
Malacou take your van out to Sabine's villa? He knows how to find it and you would be much safer there.'