Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

There was another grumbling of laughter. This time, even Hitler smiled.

Carrying his empty chart case, Hagemann left the room and made his way along the corridor, heading for the stairs which would bring him back up to the ground floor of the Chancellery building. Even though the meeting had been a success, he still had to stop himself from breaking into a run. All he could think about was breathing some clean air again.

‘Professor!’ a voice called to him.

Hagemann glanced back to see Fegelein, Himmler’s liaison officer, advancing down the corridor towards him, one hand raised as if hailing a taxi, and Hagemann’s schematics in the other. ‘A final question for you,’ he said.

‘What are you doing with the charts?’ stammered Hagemann. ‘Haven’t I made it clear enough that the information contained within those diagrams is extremely sensitive!’

Fegelein grinned. ‘Which is precisely why Reichsfuhrer Himmler will enjoy looking them over. With Hitler’s blessing, I am taking them to Himmler’s office now. You should join me! The Reichsfuhrer has some excellent wine at his disposal.’

‘I am very busy,’ said Hagemann. He had an instinctive mistrust of Fegelein. The soft round chin, full cheeks and shallow brow gave him an innocent and almost child-like face. But this appearance was an illusion.

That Fegelein had managed to advance so far in his career, and yet was so universally disliked, was a testament to the ruthlessness of his ambition. To Fegelein, the price of loyalty could always be negotiated, and friendship had no value at all.

He was not alone in making that equation.

In 1941, Fegelein had been arrested for the looting of money and luxury goods from a train, an offence which could have carried the death penalty – although his real mistake had not been the theft so much as the fact that these items had already been stolen from the safety deposit boxes of Polish banks by men who outranked Fegelein, and were, at the time, on their way back to a warehouse where the loot was scheduled to be divided among the thieves. The charges against him were dropped, on the orders of his master, Heinrich Himmler, which only added to rumours already circulating, that Fegelein led a charmed life. What had been only rumour before was transformed into fact when Himmler appointed him as his personal liaison officer. This, and his marriage to Gretl Braun, sister of Hitler’s mistress, Eva, had assured him an almost untouchable position in the Fuhrer’s closest circle. The marriage had been conducted hurriedly after Gretl discovered that she was pregnant. The fact that there was some question as to who might be the father of the unborn child, and Hitler’s outrage at the circumstances, had prompted Fegelein to come forward and offer his hand. In Hitler’s mind, this act of chivalry saved not only Gretl’s reputation, but also his own, as the consort of Eva Braun. The marriage had done nothing to temper Fegelein’s appetites and while Gretl remained, for the most part, far to the south in her home province of Bavaria, Fegelein had taken up residence with his mistress, Elsa Batz, in an apartment on the ironically named Bleibtreustrasse. Of this arrangement, Hitler was unaware or else he had chosen to look the other way and Fegelein had enough instincts for self-preservation not to ask which one was the truth.

‘I have one final question,’ repeated Fegelein, as he pursued Hagemann down the narrow corridor. ‘It won’t take a second, Professor.’

‘I was just leaving,’ Hagemann muttered.

Fegelein refused to take the hint. ‘Then I’ll walk up the stairs with you. I could do with a smoke,’ he laughed, ‘and they don’t allow that in the bunker.’

Side by side, the two men plodded up towards the Chancellery.

It was all Hagemann could do not to push Fegelein back down the stairs. He not only mistrusted this slippery emissary of the SS, he despised the whole organisation. Ever since the conception of the V-2, Himmler had repeatedly tried to take over the project. In an obvious attempt at blackmail, the SS had even gone so far as to arrest one of the programme’s chief scientists, Werner von Braun, on charges so trumped up that even Hitler, who normally deferred to the man he called ‘My Loyal Heinrich’, refused to accept them.

In spite of Himmler’s insatiable desire to control the future of the programme, Hagemann had managed to keep the SS at arm’s length.

But all that changed in July of 1944, when a bomb planted by the one-armed, one-eyed Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg in a briefing room of the Wolf’s Lair command centre failed to kill its intended target, Adolf Hitler.

Even as Stauffenberg and numerous other conspirators were rounded up and either shot or hanged, the SS, citing concerns for national security, finally received Hitler’s blessing to take over the V-2 programme.

Since then, the production and research facilities had been scattered all over Germany, slave labour had been employed to assemble the rockets, and virtually nothing could be accomplished without Himmler’s approval.

If it weren’t for that fact, Hagemann might well have told Fegelein exactly what he thought of him.

The two men reached the main floor of the Chancellery building, where their side arms were returned to them.

‘What did you want to know, Fegelein?’ Hagemann asked as he undid his belt and slid the Mauser holster back where it belonged.

Fegelein delayed giving an answer until they had passed beyond the earshot of the guards.

Out on the shrapnel-spattered stone steps of the Chancellery, Fegelein removed a silver cigarette case from his chest pocket, opened it and offered its neatly arrayed contents to Hagemann.

Hagemann shook his head. For now, he was more interested in filling his lungs with fresh air than with tobacco fumes.

Fegelein lit his cigarette, inhaled deeply and then whistled out a long grey jet of smoke. ‘What I wanted to know, Herr Professor,’ he said, ‘is how many of these rockets you have left. After all, what use is your guidance system if you have nothing left to guide?’

Even coming from this man, Hagemann could not deny that it was a reasonable question. ‘We have, at present, approximately eighty complete rockets. Once the guidance systems have been modified, they will be ready for immediate use.’

‘And how long will the modifications take?’

‘Only a matter of hours for each rocket.’

‘And after the eighty rockets have been fired, what then?’ asked Fegelein.

‘Our production facility in Nordhausen is still fully functional. At top capacity, we can produce over eight hundred rockets a month,’ and then General Hagemann paused, ‘provided there is no interference, either from you or from the Allies.’

Fegelein smiled. ‘My dear Professor,’ he said, ‘I am not here to obstruct, but rather to help you in any way I can.’

‘Is that so?’ asked Hagemann, unable to mask his nervousness.

Fegelein laughed at the general’s obvious discomfort. Playfully, he batted Hagemann on the shoulder with the rolled-up blueprints.

‘Those are not toys!’ snapped Hagemann. Angrily he shoved the leather cylinder into Fegelein’s hands. ‘If you’re going to carry them about, you might as well put them in this.’

‘I know what you think of me,’ said Fegelein, as he opened the chart case and slid the blueprints inside, ‘and aside from the fact that I couldn’t care less, surely you can see why I would want to support the development of a weapon that could be our only hope out of this mess.’ He waved the smouldering cigarette at the ruins of the buildings all around them. ‘I make no secret of the fact that it would benefit me to do so, over and above whatever good it does our country.’