When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain (15 page)

Now, in January 1859, her life was about to take an entirely new twist. She was to be sold at auction, with her future in the hands of the highest bidder.

In the days before the auction, Florenz was prepared for the market. She was given new clothes that accentuated her comely figure and an advertisement about her forthcoming sale was placed in local newspapers.

As a virgin, she almost certainly had a certificate of virginity signed by a certified midwife: proof of virginity greatly enhanced the value of female slaves.

Astonishingly, Florenz did not know she was being sold until the day of the auction. Only when she saw the potential buyers gathered in the opulent public salon of the Finjanjian mansion did she realize what was taking place.

Most of the slave buyers were wealthy Ottoman Turks. But as Florenz scanned the room, she saw one face that was clearly not Turkish. Samuel Baker had curly russet hair, thick sideburns and wore a wool tweed suit. He was instant recognizable as being English. His companion was equally recognizable as being Indian.

Baker was not attending the slave sale with the intention of buying anyone: he had a moral abhorrence of slavery that was to endure throughout his life. He was attending solely because he thought it would be an entertaining diversion for the maharajah.

But he was deeply affected when the young Florenz was brought out for public display. She was beautiful, vulnerable and seemingly terrified of being sold to a Turkish master. Baker found himself shaken to the core. His own wife had died four years earlier, now, desperate to save the young girl, he placed a bid for her.

It was unfortunate that there was another would-be buyer in the room. The powerful pasha of Vidin had sent his representative to the auction and was determined to buy Florenz, even if it meant paying an inflated price.

The bidding increased in increments, with both would-be buyers determined to gain their prize. But the pasha of Vidin had a limitless budget, whereas Baker's was extremely modest. When the bidding reached seventy thousand
kurus
– some eight hundred pounds – he had no option but to withdraw from the sale.

Angered by his failure, Baker took a personal vow to leave Vidin with Florenz in tow, even if it meant resorting to bribery. He secretly approached Ali, the black eunuch who controlled the Finjanjian harem, and struck a deal. In return for a large wad of notes, which he stuffed into Ali's hands, he was allowed to smuggle Florenz out of the compound and into his custody.

It all happened in seconds. Florenz was bundled out of an arched window at the rear of the Finjanjian mansion and helped into Samuel's waiting carriage. Bewildered by what had happened – but happy to have escaped the pasha's clutches – she now made the acquaintance of the English stranger who had tried to buy her.

She spoke at length about her turbulent childhood, unaware that she was about to embark on further adventures. For she was destined to become one of the great Victorian explorers of central Africa, accompanying Baker on his most arduous voyages into the tropical unknown. She proved an invaluable companion since she spoke fluent Arabic (which she had learned in the harem) as well as Hungarian and German.

The two of them made a deeply unconventional couple. Unmarried until 1865, they headed first to Cairo and together explored the Sudan and Abyssinia. Later from Khartoum, they embarked on a dangerous voyage up the Nile.

At one point they encountered the explorer John Hanning Speke who was returning from Lake Victoria, which he had correctly identified as the source of the Nile.

In conditions of terrible hardship, Samuel and Florence (her name was by now anglicized) pressed on into uncharted territory, exploring the lake regions of Africa and discovering and naming the Murchison Falls and Lake Albert.

After a brief stint in England – where they finally married – they were off again, this time to equatorial Africa. Together they led a bloody military expedition against slave traders, a fight that must have given Florence considerable personal satisfaction. It ended in a victorious battle in Masindi, in today's Uganda.

The Bakers finally returned to England in 1874 and bought an estate in the West Country. Samuel died in 1893, a much feted explorer. Florence outlived her husband by twenty-three years but never received the recognition she deserved for her extraordinary journeys across the Dark Continent. Nor was she presented at court, as might have been expected for someone who had achieved so much.

Queen Victoria adamantly denied her a royal audience on the grounds that her husband had been ‘intimate with his wife before marriage'.

Florence finally died in 1916, by which time the world of her childhood had changed beyond all recognition. The age of harems and eunuchs was in its last twilight, and even the Ottoman Empire, in which she had been sold into slavery, was on the point of permanent collapse.

 

PART IV

Mein Führer

To sum it all up, I must say that I regret nothing.

ADOLF EICHMANN, 1960

 

10

Hitler's Final Hours

For the occupants of Hitler's private bunker, the news could scarcely have been bleaker. The Soviet army was advancing so rapidly that it was now within a few hundred yards of the bunker's perimeter fence.

The nearby Schlesischer railway station had already been captured. The Tiergarten was also in Soviet hands and the tunnel in the Voss Strasse was in the process of being occupied. Soon the bunker itself would also be overrun and the Führer would be taken prisoner. Hitler knew all too well that the Third Reich was in its final death throes.

In the small hours of 28–29 April 1945, he summoned a loyal official named Walter Wagner into his private conference room. Wagner's position as city administrator gave him the right to officiate at a wedding ceremony. Hitler announced that he and his long-term mistress, Eva Braun, were to be married without further ado.

The formalities were kept brief for there was no time to lose. The couple declared themselves to be of pure Aryan descent and free from hereditary disease. Then, having given their assent by simple word of mouth, they were declared to be man and wife.

The newlyweds walked out into the corridor to be congratulated by Hitler's faithful secretaries, Gerda Christian and Traudl Junge. They then sat together for several hours, drinking champagne and talking of happier times. The conversation took a rather more depressing turn as Hitler spoke of his impending suicide. National Socialism, he said, was dead. It would never be revived.

His resolve to kill himself was given fresh impetus by the shocking news that he received early in the morning of 29 April. He was told that Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacci, had been executed by partisans and strung up by their feet in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan.

‘I will not fall into the hands of an enemy who requires a new spectacle to divert his hysterical masses!' he shouted.

In the afternoon of that same day, he had his favourite Alsatian dog Blondi destroyed with poison. His two other dogs were shot by their keeper. Hitler then distributed cyanide capsules to his secretaries for use in extremity. He expressed his regret at not giving them a better parting gift, adding that he wished his generals fighting against Stalin had been as faithful and reliable as they were.

At 2.30 a.m., some twenty faithful servants assembled to greet Hitler as he emerged from his private quarters. He offered them his final farewells and then returned to his private quarters. Everyone was sure that his suicide was imminent.

Yet he was still alive as dawn broke the sky on the following morning and he continued to receive military reports on the situation across Berlin. At 2 p.m., he even sat down to eat lunch with his two secretaries. His SS adjutant, Sturmbannführer Günsche, was meanwhile fulfilling the Führer's orders to acquire 200 litres of petrol.

When Hitler had finished eating, he emerged from his private quarters accompanied by his new wife. Another farewell ceremony took place, this time with Martin Bormann, Joseph Goebbels and others. Eva embraced Traudl Junge and said: ‘Take my fur coat as a memory. I always like well-dressed women.'

Hitler then turned to address the little group for a final time. ‘It is finished,' he said. ‘Goodbye.'

He led Eva back into his private room. Soon afterwards, a single shot was heard.

The group who had gathered to say their farewells to Hitler lingered for a few minutes in the corridor before entering his private room. Hitler himself was lying on the sofa, drenched in blood. He had shot himself through the mouth.

Eva Braun was also sprawled on the sofa. A revolver was by her side but she had not used it. She had swallowed poison instead.

Two SS men were summoned to the room, among them Hitler's faithful servant, Heinz Linge. The two of them wrapped the Führer's body in a blanket and carried it into the courtyard outside.

Eva Braun's body, too, was taken outside. One of the men who helped to carry her body noted she was wearing a blue summer dress made of real silk and that her hair was artificially blonde.

The two corpses were doused in petrol and then set alight. A small group of mourners stood to attention, gave the Nazi salute and then withdrew back inside the bunker. Just beyond the bunker walls, the deep boom of the Soviet artillery lent a theatrical eeriness to the scene.

More petrol had to be poured on the corpses because they would not burn properly. Even after many hours, when most of the flesh had burned away, Hitler's blackened shinbones were still visible.

Shortly before midnight, as the Soviet troops neared the perimeter of the bunker, the two charred corpses were tipped into a bomb crater and covered with soil.

According to Russian reports, the bodies were later exhumed by the Soviet troops who captured the bunker. They were then transferred to Magdeburg in East Germany. It was in Magdeburg – it is claimed – that Hitler's body was finally destroyed by KGB officers in spring 1970.

Yet even that was not quite the end of the story. Two fragments of bone, his jawbone and skull, were preserved as grisly relics. They were last displayed in an exhibition at the Russian Federal Archives in Moscow in April 2000.

 

11

Seizing Eichmann

He was walking down the street clutching a large bouquet of flowers, a smiling family man by the name of Ricardo Klement. He was looking forward to celebrating his silver wedding anniversary that evening.

When he reached his house on Garibaldi Street in Buenos Aires, the front door was opened by his wife, Vera. Ricardo pushed the flowers into her hands and gave her a kiss. From inside came the sound of happy laughter: the children were already dressed in their party clothes.

Ricardo Klement had no idea that he was being tracked by Mossad secret agents. Nor did he know that those Israeli agents had been on his trail for more than a year.

They were convinced that Klement was not his real name. They had received a tip-off that he was actually Adolf Eichmann, the most senior Nazi still on the run. As Hitler's right-hand man, Eichmann had been responsible for organising the mass deportation of millions of Jews to death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka. When the war came to an end, and the Third Reich collapsed, he had escaped capture by vanishing into thin air. For almost fifteen years he had evaded Mossad.

But in 1959, a German prosecutor named Fritz Bauer received a sensational tip-off. The daughter of one of his Argentina-based friends had been dating a lad named Eichmann (unlike his father, he had retained the old family name). Ignorant of the fact that the girl was Jewish, the young Eichmann bragged of his father's role in exterminating millions of Jews.

Fritz Bauer contacted Mossad, who immediately set to work on the operation to capture Eichmann. Absolute secrecy was paramount: if Eichmann got any hint of Mossad being on his trail, he would disappear again.

The undercover operation was led by Isser Harel, the brilliant head of Mossad. He was determined to bring Eichmann to justice. ‘At all the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals this man was pointed to as the head butcher,' he wrote. ‘His were the hands that pulled the strings controlling manhunt and massacre.'

As Mossad began to research Eichmann's past, it transpired that he had remained incognito in Europe until 1950, when he was helped to escape to Argentina. He and his family moved several times before settling in Buenos Aires, where he was said to have changed his name to Ricardo Klement.

But Mossad's agents needed to be absolutely certain they were tracking the right man. It was the silver wedding anniversary flowers that provided them with the clinching evidence. They knew that Eichmann's twenty-fifth wedding anniversary was on 21 March 1960. When they saw ‘Ricardo Klement' hand the flowers to his wife on the evening of that day, they had confirmation that Klement and Eichmann were one and the same person.

The Mossad operation to capture Eichmann coincided with Argentina celebrating 150 years of independence. This provided Isser Harel with the perfect cover to smuggle thirty special agents into the country.

Nothing was left to chance. Mossad set up a bogus travel agency in Europe to ensure that there would be no problems with visas or plane connections.

Harel was acutely aware that Mossad was violating Argentinian sovereignty by kidnapping Eichmann: secrecy was therefore of the utmost importance. By 11 May, the Mossad team was ready to swoop.

Harel knew that Eichmann usually returned home from work at around 7.40 p.m. He stationed his agents in the street shortly before this time. Two of them pretended to be repairing the engine of their car. A second Mossad vehicle was parked thirty yards behind the first one.

Two buses arrived but Eichmann was not on them. Harel was about to call off the operation when a third bus pulled up and a middle-aged man alighted. It was Eichmann.