Len Deighton - XPD

‘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 frost-bite. 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 Batallion. 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 onto 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 out. 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.

‘I wanted to get back to my parents in Berlin. The railway was still working-it was just the heavy trains, transporting big guns and tanks, that could not get through Erfurt. Breslow said he wanted to find the nearest Waffen SS outfit and get back into the fighting. It was probably true, but at the time I suspected that he was merely looking for some way of changing his SS papers and uniform for those of an ordinary army officer before surrendering himself to the Americans, who were getting closer every hour. There was a railway transport officer at Merkers who agreed to give me top-priority orders to rejoin my unit in Berlin. Anything less than a top-priority movement order would expose me to the risk of being given a rifle and sent into action by any military police patrol that stopped me and asked for my papers. There was a delay while I got a photo for the movement order.’

‘But you had top-priority papers from Hitler,’ said Stuart. ‘What could be better than that?’