Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

One of the company directors, Max Wolf, met me at the train and drove me straight to the factory. He was in his late fifties — one of those very stiff, mustachioed Prussian Lutherans from Schwiebus, in Poland — and a man for whom the Daimler-Benz company was a way of life. The little gold Party badge glittering like a tiny satrap’s diadem on the lapel of his tailor-made suit seemed to indicate that his particular way of life had worked out well for him so far. He couldn’t have seemed more smug if he’d been a bull walrus at the end of a successful mating season.

“The director of the factory, Herr Karl Mueller, is a personal friend of General Schellenberg,” he informed me. “Herr Mueller has instructed me to provide you with all the cooperation you need in the completion of your orders, Captain.”

“That’s awfully kind of him, and you, Herr Wolf.”

“As you probably know, we’re mainly aircraft engines here at Genshagen,” he explained in the car. “The Mercedes-Benz automobile is made at Sindelfingen, near Stuttgart. That’s where General Schellenberg’s car is now. I’m to give you the export paperwork for that vehicle and then lend you another vehicle that you can drive south to Sindelfingen, where you can collect the new one, to drive to Switzerland.”

I winced a little; whenever people use the word “vehicle” it always reminds me of pompous traffic policemen, which, I now realized, was what Wolf most reminded me of.

We drove into a factory compound that was as big as a decent-sized town and surrounded with the very latest 88-millimeter antiaircraft guns. These were obviously effective as there wasn’t a lot of bomb damage to be seen. I also noticed the presence of several female SS troopers. Wolf saw me paying them attention.

“Given the makeup of the workforce, the SS guards are an unfortunate necessity, I’m afraid. Half of our twelve thousand car workers are foreign, many of them slave laborers — Jews, mostly, and all of them women — from the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück nearby. But they’re well fed and quite happy with the conditions here, I think.”

“I suppose that’s why the guards are carrying whips,” I said. “To keep them smiling through the day.”

“We don’t tolerate any ill treatment of our slave laborers,” said Wolf without a trace of embarrassment. “Our German workers wouldn’t stand for it. Well, you can guess what these fellows are like. Most of them are beefsteak Nazis — you know, brown on the outside and red in the middle. Our Jews work hard, and I’ve no complaints about any of them. Frankly, they’re the best workers anyone could wish for. Sure, sometimes we catch our German workers giving the Jews extra bread and sharing their coffee but that’s not so easy to stop in a factory this size.”

“Easy enough, I’d have thought. You could give the Jewish workers more to eat at dinnertime.”

Wolf smiled uncomfortably and shook his head. “Oh no. That’s really not for me to say. The policy on slave labor is set in Berlin by Reich Minister Speer and enforced by the SS. I just do what I’m told. It’s as much as I can do to supply enough interpreters to make sure the assembly line continues to move efficiently. We have Poles, Russians, French, Hungarians, Norwegians, Czechs, and Dutch working here — even a few English, I’m told. They’re the laziest, you know, along with the French. Your best worker is a Russian Jewess. She’ll work all day and half the night if you tell her. We’re producing nearly four thousand aircraft engines a year at this plant alone. So we must be getting something right.”

“You must feel very proud,” I observed.

“Oh, we are. We are. If you’d care to, you’re very welcome to join us for lunch in the executive dining room. You’ll find we have all sorts. Labor officials, officers like yourself—”

I thought about that for about a millisecond: I was hungry, all right, but after Jasenovac I couldn’t have thought of anything worse than eating lunch with men like Max Wolf, especially when German workers were sneaking bread to Jewish slave laborers. The food would have stuck in my throat.

“It’s kind of you, sir, but I’d best get on my way as quickly as possible. I’ve a long drive ahead of me.”

“That you have,” he said.

He drove me straight to where my car was parked. It was a 190, with a camouflaged paint job, exactly the same as the one I’d driven in Croatia. He handed me the keys and the paperwork. I expect he was keen to be rid of me. But not as keen as I was to be rid of him.

“You’ll want to take the road to Munich, of course,” said Wolf. “From there you can pick up the road to Stuttgart. It looks longer on the map to do it that way, but of course it isn’t. Thanks to the leader we have autobahns — the best roads in the world. In a Mercedes-Benz you can be in Munich in less than six hours from Berlin, with another two hours to Stuttgart. If you try to drive straight to Stuttgart from here it will take you at least eleven or twelve hours. Believe me, I’ve done it both ways and I know what I’m talking about.”

“Thanks. I appreciate the advice.”

And I did. I made good time on the autobahn. It just goes to show that even the most loathsome sort of pen-pushing nine-till-five Nazi can sometimes put you on the right road to exactly where you want to go.

After the roads in Croatia this one was a dream to drive on. I was almost enjoying the journey. All advertising was banned on the autobahn, which made the roads a pleasant escape from the seemingly endless propaganda posters that were such a blight in the cities. My only concern was that driving at high speed on a uniformly straight road with little to look at I might succumb to the highway-hypnosis that Fritz Todt — before Speer, Germany’s leading engineer, and the man who had done most to build these autobahns — had warned about, although frankly the speed limit was much lower than of old; to save on fuel it was just eighty kilometers an hour. But with two lanes on either side of an oak-planted median strip, the autobahn still ran as straight as an aircraft runway; and this was why, here and there, sections of these medians had been converted to auxiliary airstrips, with the aircraft that sometimes used them hidden in nearby woodlands. The other traffic was mostly trucks carrying tank parts and motorboats, although once I drove past a whole U-boat, which struck me as a little surreal.

On Schellenberg’s instructions I wasn’t wearing a uniform and, because all nonmilitary traffic was allowed on the autobahns only in exceptional circumstances, the Orpo pulled me over a couple of times to check my papers, which at least broke the monotony of the journey. About halfway to Munich I stopped at an Alpine-style filling station to fill up, get some coffee, and stretch my legs. But then I was straight back on the road, as I was hoping to reach the Swiss border before dark.

Somewhere on the journey south I thought about my new bride and our unconsummated marriage, although that particular fact had seemed of lesser importance. After the ceremony, it had felt to me as if I would have been taking advantage of Kirsten in those circumstances, especially since these circumstances certainly included a strong intention on my part to sleep with the lady from Zagreb again, either at my hotel in Zurich or at her matrimonial home in Küsnacht. But mostly I just felt glad to have kept Kirsten out of the Gestapo’s hands. Goebbels had given me his word that she wouldn’t be bothered by the SD again, and while I was reluctant to trust him, I had little alternative. Of course, being alone in a car like that for hours on end means you’re inside your own skull a lot and after a while you’re seeing marks on a white wall that maybe aren’t really there; I had the crazy idea that maybe Goebbels knew I’d slept with Dalia and that my being forced to marry Kirsten was his way of paying me back — twice over if he chose not to keep his word after all.