XPD (17 page)

‘Der Chef was wearing his usual plain grey, army-style jacket. But this day I noticed that there were stains on the lapel. You can’t imagine how amazing it was to see him in anything except carefully pressed, spotlessly clean clothes. I looked at his plain black trousers and civilian shoes but these were not up to his usual standard either.

‘The Führer was standing against a small table and I noticed that he put his weight against it, as if to steady himself. This confirmed the rumours I’d heard of a loss of balance and dizzy spells. Under his direction, Günsche was sorting the papers and documents into separate heaps. Against the wall there were half a dozen metal filing boxes painted dark green. FHQu was stencilled on each box, together with the word
persönlich
and a six-figure letter-number combination.’

Stuart almost shouted with excitement. What had looked like BBO on the box of Dr Morell’s papers was actually FHQu – Führerhauptquartier – and the shiny patch next to it was the place from which the word ‘personal’ had been removed.

‘The Führer smiled. I’m afraid my face must have registered my horror at his appearance. I stood transfixed, giving the
Heil Hitler
, arm upraised. But he did not respond to my salute.

‘“Captain Wever,” he said. Even in those last days he hadn’t lost his trick of remembering names. But he lowered his eyes, and that surprised me, for he usually fixed his visitors with an unyielding stare that was almost hypnotic. I lowered my arm. He motioned his head impatiently, to indicate that I should not stand at attention. “I have an important task for you, Captain Wever.” He looked up and stared me straight in the eyes again. “A very important task.” I knew him well enough to understand that I was not expected to reply until asked a direct question. I said nothing. “The enemy is now using his heaviest weapons against me in Berlin.” I noticed particularly that he said “against me” as if it were a personal vendetta. “There are certain personal documents that I have decided should not be risked. And, in the interests of history, must not be destroyed. I have therefore decided that these documents – which I have personally selected for this purpose …” Hitler indicated some piles of papers which were separated from the others, “should be put into safekeeping for future generations. It is a great trust that I place into your hands, Captain Wever.”

‘“Yes, my Führer.”

‘“Günsche will provide you with all the necessary paperwork that will ensure you co-operation from the Reichspost, the Reichsbahn, the armed forces and my SS. You will leave Berlin tonight, using my train.”

‘“The Führersonderzug, my Führer?”

‘Hitler nodded. “To Frankfurt am Main. There will be cars and an armed escort there to take you onwards. Your exact orders and subsequent destination will be given to you later; you will unseal them on the train. You will use the train’s communications to keep me informed of progress – the necessary codes and ciphers will be included in your orders – and if the train is stopped or delayed by enemy action you can call upon whatever resources you require from the appropriate authority. Is that clear, Captain Wever?”

‘“Yes, my Führer.”

‘And there it was,’ said Wever with a self-deprecatory smile. ‘That was my grand meeting with the twentieth-century Napoleon, and what had I contributed: “Yes, my Führer”, repeated over and over again. It was like that with all the people who met him: generals, admirals, inventors, U-boat captains, kings and presidents. He had you in the palm of his hand, and yet you came out of the study thinking that you’d just persuaded a highly intelligent man to do something you’d been planning all your life. That’s how it was with those damned papers.’

‘So you went back to the train as its sole passenger?’ Stuart asked.

‘You don’t understand the devious nature of the higher command,’ said Wever. ‘Hitler had instructed Günsche to prepare my movement orders and documentation. The SS Sturmbannführer did it in consultation with Kaltenbrunner, head of the RSHA, who ran the Gestapo, the Kripo and Sicherheitsdienst: one of the most powerful people in the Third Reich. Not the sort of man who would let an army captain take personal charge of top-secret papers, just because the Führer had decided that the mission required a highly experienced communications expert.’

‘He flouted Hitler’s orders?’

‘Not at all. He provided an SS officer to accompany me. The orders instructed the Reichsbahn and the Reichspost officials – “in the name of the Führer” rather than the more usual “in the name of the Reich” – to provide the SS officer with facilities required, so that Captain Wever and his “special baggage” could be transported. The wording of those orders ensured that my role was little more than a baggage porter. It was the SS that would call the tune.’

‘Who was the SS officer who went with you?’

‘Oh, don’t misunderstand me,’ said Wever. ‘This Leibstandarte officer was an old friend of mine. It wasn’t the rank and file who were wasting valuable time in these ridiculous power-plays and devious games; we knew the end was near … He was only a junior rank – Obersturmführer, like a first lieutenant – but he was an old-time regular. He’d been through the peacetime SS Junkerschule at Bad Tölz, and that was no picnic. I’d known Breslow since childhood, he was a decent man.’ Wever smiled at another recollection. ‘You can imagine that I wanted to visit my parents before we journeyed south. The way things were going with the Allies and the Russians so close, I had the feeling that I might never see the old people again. My home was near Tietz department store; I could be there in five minutes. I got out using my day pass but ran into the guard commander when I returned. He was a pig. He kept me in the guard room and phoned the military police. Luckily, Max Breslow came to my aid. He got one of the SS adjutants to straighten it out … but it was a narrow squeak for me, and I owe my thanks to Breslow. I could have been shot.’ Wever drummed his fingers on the table. ‘Did you ever try to give up smoking, Mr Stuart?’

‘Frequently.’

Wever pushed his hands deep into his pockets as if to punish them for drumming on the table. ‘Breslow was practical. When we departed he had brought two pistols – he knew I didn’t have one – and was wearing an MP 40 on his shoulder. He was right, of course – how could we have undertaken that sort of responsibility without guns? He had put a Führerhauptquartier cuff-band on his sleeve too. I was surprised – almost everyone had ceased wearing them long before – but Breslow said it would impress the country yokels. You see,’ Wever added, ‘Breslow was a Berliner.’ His tone of voice suggested that this accolade explained everything. Stuart had known many Berliners, and liked the distinctive sort of roguish wit –
Schalkheit
– that the city seemed to beget. But Berliners were not renowned for modesty or simplicity. How much of Wever’s story was window dressing, designed to hide something else? ‘The family lived in a big house in Pankow, his father was Georg Breslow, the actor, a famous man in Germany. He was the one who anglicized the family name. Breslow’s mother had been a soprano with the Berlin State Opera.’ Wever reached into his pocket for a tin, tapped it on the table and then put it back into his pocket again.

‘Yes,’ said Wever. ‘Breslow was wearing his Führerhauptquartier cuff-band. I was wearing a reversible winter camouflage jacket. It was a combat soldier’s garment. I’d never been anywhere near the front line, and that bothered me, so I wanted to wear that jacket and look like a fighting man. Even so, Breslow, in his battered leather overcoat, and an old peaked mountain cap crushed on his head, looked more like a fighting man than I ever could.’

‘Breslow had been a combat soldier?’

‘He was wounded at Kharkov in the winter of 1943. The Leibstandarte was part of the SS Panzer Corps. Breslow was badly shot up and lost some toes with frostbite. When he came out of hospital he was permanently assigned to the Chancellery guard. Breslow had a chestful of awards: Iron Cross first class, assault badge, wound badge and so on. Nothing grand, but he was a man who could take his overcoat off – as we said in the army about men who had awards on their jackets.’ Wever smiled. ‘So it’s Breslow you are interested in?’

‘Were there no other special passengers on the train that night?’

‘Just me and Breslow. He went aboard before the loading began. He sent for the train commander and all the officers. He received them in the Führerwagen – actually in the Führer’s sitting room: sitting in the best armchair, his hat thrown on the writing desk as if he owned the place. He had his overcoat wide open so that they could see that he was a fighting soldier. Until then the Führer’s sitting room had been a sanctum which very few of us had entered; now it was crammed with curious faces. There were the marks of muddy boots on the carpet, and tobacco smoke in the air for the first time. Tobacco smoke! We all knew that the Führer would never board his train again.

‘It was dark in Berlin that night. The air raids were bad enough to make the blackout regulations very strict. Even the railway men had to work with the merest glimmer of operating lights. I stayed with Breslow and we checked the manifest to be sure that the boxes were loaded safely. The Führer’s personal papers were not the only freight on the train that night. The Foreign Office building had been badly hit a few nights previously, and a railway wagon of Foreign Office documents was attached to the train.

‘Breslow said that we would send a signal when the train passed Halle. It was then that we would open the sealed orders. Since our message was going to be in cipher, we would have to halt. No top-secret –
Chefsache
– messages could be transmitted by radio for fear of interception by enemy monitoring services. I went and warned the communications officer that a signals mechanic must be ready to connect the teleprinters to the Reichspost landlines when we stopped the train at Halle. Then I told the senior railway official aboard of the intention to stop, and told the train’s military police commander that his men must be ready to provide the normal security screen round the halted train.’

‘You sent the message from Halle?’

‘No. There was only a single line working for ten miles north of Halle – it’s a big junction and the Allied bombers had hit it again and again – the train was rerouted through Leipzig. We opened the sealed orders there.’

‘And?’

‘Our orders were to take the Führer’s personal papers to a salt mine at Merkers in the Thüringer Wald. An infantry regiment stationed at Hersfeld, not far from the mine, would provide us with help and assistance. The sealed orders specified that the papers were to be referred to as “songs”, the military escort as “pianoforte”, the movement of the material to the mine was a
Lied mit Klavierbegleitung
, song with piano accompaniment.’

‘Curious code names,’ said Stuart.

‘You cannot call such words code,’ said Wever pedantically. ‘They give very little security to a message. Such words are intended only for convenience and brevity. The German word
Begleit
means escort as well as accompany – the FBB was the Führer Begleit Bataillon. It would not require a team of cryptographers to guess what we were doing, always providing they had an Enigma decoder.’

Wever reached into the pocket of his coat and got out a cigarette machine. He dumped a tin of dark tobacco on the table and then a packet of papers. ‘Even so, Breslow was most particular about the security of the messages to Berlin and to the army at Hersfeld.’ Wever pinched some tobacco and rolled it into the machine before feeding a paper into it, licking the gummed edge and rolling it some more. ‘You need two operators to work one of those old Enigmas, three to be really fast. It’s like a typewriter, but the letters light up instead of going on to paper. Breslow helped me with it. He called out the letters as they came up.’ Wever continued rolling the machine as if he had forgotten what he was doing. Then suddenly he clicked it open to release the newly made cigarette. He picked it up and carefully tucked a few loose strands of tobacco back into the open ends. Then he studied it, as if pleased with the result of his handiwork. He lit the cigarette and inhaled gratefully with that very deep breath which marks the tobacco addict. Then he blew smoke and smiled with satisfaction.

‘How far did you get with the train?’ Stuart asked.

‘We couldn’t get beyond Erfurt,’ said Wever. He smoked the cigarette with a furtiveness which suggested that his wife would not have approved of his weakness. ‘A railway bridge was damaged. The engineers said it could not bear the weight of the Führer’s train which was specially constructed with tons of lead in the bogies to give an extra-smooth ride. And there was the weight of all our special equipment and the Flakwagen at front and back. It would have been too much for the buckled girders. Moving it across piecemeal would have meant several hours’ delay. And there were hospital trains coming back up the line as well as troop trains going westwards. Erfurt was close to the autobahn, so we called Hersfeld – which was also on the autobahn – and asked them to come and get us. What a fiasco!’ Wever got up in order to tap his ash into the stove. ‘We couldn’t reach them by teleprinter, no operators on duty. The Americans were heading directly for Hersfeld and the regiment had moved on. Next we tried telephoning them. Eventually, after a long and acrimonious conversation with a half-witted major who refused to believe that we were engaged on a special mission for the Führer, they sent us two trucks and a platoon of infantry.’ He inhaled and looked at the cigarette again.

‘When they arrived they were more like walking wounded than infantry: old men, kids, cripples and rejects. Even the trucks the major sent us were in such poor mechanical condition that the drivers had to nurse them to keep them going.

‘When we got to the mine at Merkers there was no one ready to accept the papers. It is a bleak and dirty place, the yard was muddy and littered with broken boxes and rubbish. Some of the mess was the outer packing from other treasures which had been put into the mine. There was another truck there when we arrived. It contained Reichsbank Director Dr Frank and a Reichsbank procurist – the official who was in charge of all newly printed paper money. It was Dr Frank who signed for our consignment, and eventually let me go.