David John - Flight from Berlin

‘He picked me on the Ku’damm, must have been June ’32. Invited me to Horchers, the best restaurant in Berlin. Got to know me over a bottle of Pfalzer. Military bearing, Prussian blue eyes, French manners. Forty-five years old and with a permanently amused expression. From an old family in Pomerania. Soon I was more or less living at his house in Zehlendorf. Much later, he told me about the network…’

Friedl turned his glass of whisky, watching the fire’s light through the crystal.

‘Kurt was a career army officer. Had been since the war. He’d paid little regard to Hitler throughout the ’20s. I mean, there was something just absurd about him, so odd after all, and his support came and went. But by the winter of 1930 the Depression was biting deep, and Kurt and his colleagues, officer friends, became seriously alarmed by the little corporal. Every time this man spoke the crowd was tens of thousands larger.

‘Who was he? The question no one seemed able to answer. Which is why Kurt and the officers began looking into the man’s past. The records of his war service, the missing years in Vienna, all that. Of course, they suspected something, and I can’t say I was surprised. Ask a warm boy in Berlin back then and chances were he’d say the Bohemian Herr Hitler wasn’t as cold as you’d think. The investigations turned up what you’ve now seen, and that’s only what they could find. More went missing or was destroyed. They tracked down Engelhardt of the List Regiment, found some of the Munich boys who gave those police statements…’

‘And Hans Mend?’ Denham said.

‘Him, too, the Arschloch. The idea was to show the dossier to President Hindenburg and so keep Hitler firmly out of power. But then in January ’33 a deal was done behind closed doors, and this great deceiver was handed the chancellorship of Germany before Kurt and his friends could act. That dossier suddenly became a very dangerous thing to possess. Kurt needed someone with contacts abroad whose sympathy was beyond any doubt.’

‘Jakob,’ said Eleanor

Friedl nodded. ‘Jakob Liebermann was invited to join what was becoming a small, highly placed resistance group. He used his banking network to spirit the dossier to safety.’

Friedl took a cigarette from a silver case that sparked in the light. Denham had seen it before. Those engraved initials KR, which had made him so suspicious when they’d first met at the Hotel Kurgarten.

‘But by the end of ’33 the group was biding its time. The dossier was left in its hiding place because they were convinced Hitler would soon overreach himself, take a step too far, at which point the army’s support for him would crumble. Or that was the hope.

‘But instead the monster’s power increased tenfold. It was as if the country was under a spell, as if it still is… We decided to use the dossier. The question was how.

‘The idea of us blackmailing the Fuhrer was crazy-we’d have been murdered in our beds before we knew what had hit us, along with anyone who’d ever met us. But a foreign government could do it, blackmail him. The British, for example…’

Friedl dropped his head back on the sofa.

‘For my safety I was not told everything. I was to meet a British reporter who would identify himself with an agreed password at the first meeting. The date for the meeting was the first of August, the day the Games opened in Berlin. With so many foreigners there it would seem less suspicious.

‘A week before the meeting, while I was in Friedrichshafen, something went badly wrong.’ Friedl sighed, looking tired, and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘One of the officers in the network was betrayed and arrested. Under interrogation he revealed the names of two or three others-and the dossier’s existence. On that day I believe Hitler himself learned of the dossier for the first time. Kurt got an urgent message to me…’

Friedl stopped. Fighting down the lump in his throat had the effect of making his eyes fill up.

‘… warning me not to go to the house. Then they got him, too. What happened to him after that, I never found out.’

The cat leapt in a silent arc onto the sofa, looking for company. Friedl lifted it onto his lap, and ran his fingers through the tabby fur for a while. The purring seemed to calm him down.

‘Who knew the dossier was hidden in London?’ Richard said.

‘Only Kurt, Jakob, and me. No one else.’

‘Go on.’

‘You could imagine-how I felt. Not knowing how much the SD had discovered through interrogation. The timing was the worst thing. Because in a matter of days I was due to meet the British reporter beneath the bell tower at the Olympic stadium. That was on the day you and I flew to Berlin on the Hindenburg. My task was to tell him where he would collect the key and to give him instructions for accessing the London bank.

‘But by then I feared a trap. What if it wasn’t a British reporter meeting me… but an agent of the SD.

‘I didn’t know what to do. Then I saw you in the bar of the Kurgarten. A British reporter by himself? I couldn’t believe it. I hoped, oh I hoped that you were the one I was meant to be meeting in the stadium-because I had this sense that I could trust you. And after we spoke for so long on the airship that sense was even stronger. Of course, you weren’t him; you didn’t know the password, but I had to do something. So I acted on instinct…’

‘You gave me the Hannah story, knowing it would lead me to Jakob

…’

‘Yes.’ Friedl seemed to shrink into his clothes. ‘And if Jakob trusted you, too…’

‘He would give me the key.’ Denham smiled thoughtfully at the fire.

‘If your damned group had given the key to the British embassy instead,’ Eleanor muttered, ‘you might have saved us all a lot of trouble.’

‘Kurt must have had his reasons,’ Friedl said, looking at the floor. After a long pause he said, ‘Richard, I am so sorry. For putting you in danger. Their investigation of Kurt led them to me. The moment I got back to Berlin I think they had shadows all over me, waiting to see where I led them. It was only a matter of time before they found out I had indeed met a British reporter-and it was you. I should have warned you at the Nollendorfplatz…’

Denham heard the soft, whirring chime of the grandfather clock in the drawing room. It now had for him the association of history turning, reconfiguring.

‘Well. It’s over now,’ Denham said. ‘Tonight I’ll finish that translation. And tomorrow we’ll hand the dossier to the SIS.’

‘Yes, thank God it’s over,’ Friedl said and knocked back his whisky. ‘Now please forgive me, but I’m exhausted.’ He got up, said good night, and went upstairs.

A log cracked and shifted in the grate. Eleanor was staring into the fire, the light dancing across her face.

‘Eleanor?’

Still looking into the flames, she said, ‘I’m thinking about Jakob-and Hannah and Ilse. What are we doing… just handing this thing to the Brits when we could use it to save our friends’ lives?’

The cat purred on the sofa.

She pulled her gaze away from the fire and faced Denham. ‘Who knows what the Brits will do with it? It could rot in another old safe for years while they decide-or worse, end up in the hands of one of those pro-German suckers. I say we go to the German embassy and make an offer they won’t refuse. The dossier in exchange for Jakob, Ilse, and Hannah.’

‘Eleanor,’ Denham said, ‘this is about more than three people.’

‘Do you really believe we can do this, Richard, that we can play power politics to control a head of state? Look, we’ve got our hands on something that could actually save the lives of three people we know. Are we going to throw that away on the off-chance of something greater?’