A Man Without Breath

I smiled wryly and shook my head as I wondered what magic mountain top these two men were on. Perhaps you had to be a judge or an aristocrat to look down from the heights and see what was important here – important for Germany. Me, I had more pressing concerns – myself for example. And from where I was sitting the whole business of investigating the mass murder of some Poles looked a lot like one donkey calling another donkey long-ears.

‘Is there something wrong?’ asked Von Dohnanyi.

‘Only that it’s a little difficult for me to see how anyone might think Nazi Germany could ever occupy moral high ground on an issue like this.’

‘An investigation and then a white book could prove extremely useful in restoring our reputation for fair play and probity in the eyes of the world,’ said the judge. ‘When all this is over.’

So that was it. A white book. An evidentiary record that influential and honourable men like Judge Goldsche and Court Official von Dohnanyi could produce from a Foreign Office archive after the war was concluded to show other influential and honourable men from England and America that not all Germans had behaved as badly as the Nazis, or that the Russians had been just as bad as we were, or something similar. I had my doubts about that working out.

‘Mark my words,’ said Dohnanyi, ‘if this is what I think it is then it’s just a beginning. We have to start rebuilding our moral fabric somewhere.’

‘Tell that to the SS,’ I said.

CHAPTER 5

Wednesday, March 10th 1943

At six a.m. on a bitterly cold Berlin morning I arrived at Tegel airfield to board my flight to Russia. A long journey lay ahead, although only half of the other ten passengers climbing aboard the three-engined Ju52 were actually going as far as Smolensk. Most it seemed were getting off at the end of the first leg of the journey – Berlin to Rastenburg – which was a mere four hours. After that there was a second leg, to Minsk, which took another four hours, before the third leg – two hours – to Smolensk. With stops for refuelling and a pilot change in Minsk, the whole journey to Smolensk was scheduled to take eleven and a half hours, all of which helped explain why it was me being sent down there instead of some fat-arsed judge with a bad back from the Wehrmacht legal department. So I was surprised when I discovered that one of the other dozen or so other passengers arriving on the tarmac in a chauffeur-driven private Mercedes was none other than the fastidious court official from the Abwehr, Hans von Dohnanyi.

‘Is this a coincidence?’ I asked cheerfully. ‘Or did you come to see me off?’

‘I’m sorry?’ He frowned. ‘Oh, I didn’t recognize you. You’re flying to Smolensk, aren’t you, Captain Bernhard?’

‘Unless you know something different,’ I said. ‘And my name is Gunther, Captain Bernhard Gunther.’

‘Yes, of course. No, as it happens I’m travelling with you on the same plane. I was going to take the train and then changed my mind. But now I’m not so sure I made the right choice.’

‘I’m afraid you’re between the wall and a fierce dog with that one,’ I said.

We climbed aboard and took our seats along the corrugated fuselage: it was like sitting inside a workman’s hut.

‘Are you getting off at the Wolf’s Lair?’ I asked. ‘Or going all the way to Smolensk?’

‘No, I’m going all the way.’ Quickly he added: ‘I have some urgent and unexpected Abwehr business to attend to with Field Marshal von Kluge at his headquarters.’

‘Bring a packed lunch, did you?’

‘Hmm?’

I nodded at the parcel he was holding under his arm.

‘This? No, it’s not my lunch. It’s a gift for someone. Some Cointreau.’

‘Cointreau. Real coffee. Is there nothing beyond your great father’s talents?’

Von Dohnanyi smiled his thin smile, stretched his thinner neck over his tailored tunic collar. ‘Would you excuse me please, captain.’

He waved at two staff officers with red stripes on their trousers and then went to sit beside them at the opposite end of the aircraft, just behind the cockpit. Even on a Ju52, people like Von Dohnanyi and the staff officers managed somehow to make their own first class; it wasn’t that the seats were any better up front, just that none of these flamingos really wanted to talk with junior officers like me.

I lit a cigarette and tried to make myself comfortable. The engines started and the door closed. The co-pilot locked the door and put his hand on one of two beam-mounted machine guns that could be moved up and down the length of the aircraft.

‘We’re a crew member short, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘So does anyone know how to use one of these?’

I looked at my fellow passengers. No one spoke, and I wondered what the point was of transporting any of these men nearer the front; none of them looked as though they could have worked a door-lock, let alone an MG15.

‘I do,’ I said, raising my hand.

‘Good,’ said the co-pilot. ‘There’s a one-in-a-hundred chance we’ll run into an RAF Mosquito as we’re flying out of Berlin, so stay on the gun for the next fifteen minutes, eh?’