Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

And he was right. When I finally understood that DIN's plan was to poison the water supply not only from the plant where I worked in Nuremberg but in four other German cities – Munich, Hamburg, Weimar and the Wannsee suburb of Berlin – I did not baulk. I understood that we were going to kill at the turn of a tap, making no distinction between active Nazi and ordinary German citizen, no distinction between direct war criminal and silent bystander, no distinction between adult male and young child, no distinction between the guilty and the innocent. We were, in other words, to do to them what they had done to us – killing them not one by one, but without discrimination and as systematically as we could. And even then our slaughter would only be a sixth of theirs.

For this was Plan A. It aimed to kill, in a single stroke, no less than one million Germans. And I did not question it for a moment.

He marvelled at his boss's ability to do this. He was on – what was it? – his fourth meeting of the morning, listening, nodding sagely, offering rounded little aphorisms for each occasion, leaving each person he met convinced that the great statesman had focused on his or her problem at the exclusion of all else. No one would have had a clue that the great man was, in fact, distracted beyond measure, that he was thinking throughout of a topic a world away from the one under discussion. His face could continue making all the right expressions, his mouth forming the right words, entirely on automatic. Meanwhile, like a computer programme running behind the screen, his brain was processing a different issue entirely. Compartmentalization, the business magazines called it, the psychological state required for high-powered, CEO multi-tasking. But that was far too mechanical a description for the magic this man was able to pull off. This was not compartmentalization. This was sorcery.

In the intervals between meetings – the ‘bilaterals’ that always took place in the margins of any international pow-wow, with UN General Assembly week no exception – the boss would turn to his aide, letting his rictus smile disappear and pick up the conversation they had been forced to abandon some twenty or forty minutes earlier. Always, the aide noticed, at the exact same point, as if there had been no interruption.

‘There's no point waiting for definitive proof,’ he said, pushing back to the junior official the exact phrase he had used before the half-hour discussion with the President of the World Health Organization.

‘Why not, sir?’

‘Because if you're able to get definitive proof it usually means you've left it too late. An example: if you're worried I'm going to kill you, then a bullet in your chest is definitive proof.’ He smiled a laughless smile. ‘But you wouldn't want to wait that long, would you?’

‘No, sir.’

‘No. So we don't wait. If we even suspect-’

Instinct made him stop even before he could have heard the light knock on the door of the suite. It opened a crack to reveal the pretty assistant who was handling logistics. ‘The Italian foreign minister is here, sir,’ she said.

He showed her the hand gesture, peculiar to his country, that indicated she would have to wait a moment. She closed the door, taking care to pull it to quietly.

‘If we even suspect they are getting close, then we will have to act. No point waiting.’

‘Act?’

The boss inspected his counsellor, his eyes scoping upward, starting with the younger man's shoes. His manner was less regimental colonel reviewing the troops than high school girl checking out a rival. His mouth curled in derision. Could now be the moment, the aide wondered. Would the double-fucking strike, apparently unprovoked and when it was least expected?

‘Try not to make your squeamishness quite so obvious. A man of your age should not reveal his fear quite so easily.’

‘It was just that I didn't-’

‘When I say act, I don't mean anything rash. Nothing hasty. I mean only that we should,’ he paused, the ostentatious searching for the right word that was part of his standard performance. ‘We should open up a dialogue. How's that?’

The aide knew better than to ask how he was meant to do such a thing. Perhaps the phrase was simply a euphemism deployed by the old guard to cover up heaven knows what ghastly practice from the early days. Interpreting it literally was bound to be a schoolboy error, for which he would receive another scalding reprimand. But he could not think about that now. He would get through the next meeting and find a way to ask after that was over, some form of words that would not expose his own uncertainty, one that would not reveal what he felt most intensely in the company of his boss: his sheer lack of worldliness.

So he got up, opened the door and gestured at the neatly moustached man waiting, with leather portfolio case on his lap and comely interpreter at his side, to come forward. He gestured him into the room where the boss, the elder statesman, was already standing, his arms outstretched in readiness for a politician's hug:

‘Signor Ministro degli Esteri!’

Nuremberg, Winter 1946

My job in the filtration plant should have been boring, but it never was: I had to concentrate too hard for that. I had to make sure my German did not let me down. I had to avoid letting slip a remark that would contradict my false life story. And, most of all, I had to watch my face, to be sure I did not betray what I truly felt about the German murderers who surrounded me.

I kept turning up each day, doing my shift, eating my sandwiches, listening to the jokes in the canteen – including the ones about the kikes and the yids. People imagine that everything changed the day Hitler shot himself in the bunker, the day Berlin fell, but it was not like that. They were still the same people, it was still the same Germany.

Each day I would return to the safe house and wait for my orders. But in the end it was other news that came.

First, a message arrived that the plan had changed. The DIN man in Berlin had failed to get inside the water plant there: he had gone for an interview but he hadn't got the job. No one knew why; he had as much training as I had. But that was that. We were down to four cities.

Three weeks later, more bad news, this time from Weimar. Our man there had got inside the plant but he had been shifted to a desk job that allowed no access to the filtration areas. To get near them would run a high risk of getting caught. The commanders discussed it and decided his exposure would jeopardize the entire mission. He was ordered to stand down.

Not long after came word from Hamburg. Our most qualified man, an engineer in his own right who had required only minimal training, had been sacked. The managers of the pumping station had checked his documents. Apparently, they discovered a discrepancy which convinced them the papers were forged – which they were. Luckily, they assumed he was a common criminal seeking to hide his past. They did not guess he was a Jew.

The plan of five cities was down to just two: Nuremberg and Munich. The commanders did their sums and calculated that a total of one million three hundred and eighty thousand people drank the water supplied by the plants in those two cities. The target of reaching – poisoning – one million Germans could still be achieved.

But when I was established in my post in Nuremberg, and Manik was installed in the water plant in Munich, the commanders hesitated. As they stood on the brink of a decision that they knew would reverberate around the world and change the history of nations, a decision for the ages, they paused. I look back on it now and realize what I could never see then: that they were only young men.