Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

‘What birds are those?’ she had asked.

‘Cranes,’ he replied. ‘Soon they will begin their long migration south.’

‘How far will they go?’ she asked.

‘To Africa,’ he told her.

She had been stunned to think of such a vast journey and tried to imagine them, plodding with their chalk stick legs in the water of an oasis.

Later, when she got home, she had discovered the knife in the wicker basket which they had used to bring the food. When she went to return the knife, the man told her to keep it. ‘Remember the birds,’ he had said.

It was not until much later that she noticed a maker’s mark engraved upon the blade – of two cranes, their long and narrow beaks touching like two hypodermic needles – engraved into the tempered steel.

Of the possessions she had carried with her on that long journey out of Russia, this knife was the only thing she had left. The diamond and sapphire engagement ring, which she had been wearing when she arrived in England, was taken from her for safekeeping by the people who trained her for the tasks which had since taken over her life. She wondered where that ring was now, and also where the man was who had slipped it on her finger, on the island in the Lamskie pond at Tsarskoye Selo, already a lifetime ago.

Then the voice of Hermann Fegelein broke into her memory, like a rock thrown through a window pane. ‘I will not always be your commanding officer,’ he said. Reaching out, he brushed his hand across her knee.

‘I know,’ she replied gently, glancing down at his arm.

And if Fegelein could have known what images were going through her head just then, his heart would have clogged up with fear.

Radial artery – centre of the wrist. Quarter-inch cut. Loss of consciousness in thirty seconds. Death in two minutes.

Brachial artery – inside and just above the elbow. Cut half an inch deep. Loss of consciousness in fourteen seconds. Death in one and a half minutes.

Subclavian artery – behind the collarbone. Two-and-a-half-inch cut. Loss of consciousness in five seconds. Death in three and a half minutes.

Down in the bunker, the briefing had been concluded.

The generals, having delivered their usual, bleak assessment of the situation above ground, were now sitting down to lunch in the crowded bunker mess hall where, in spite of the spartan surroundings, the quality of food and wine was still among the finest in Berlin.

Hitler did not join them. He remained in the conference room, thinking back to the day, in July of 1943, when Hagemann and a group of his scientists, including Werner von Braun and Dr Steinhoff, had arrived at the East Prussia Army headquarters in Rastenburg, known as the Wolf’s Lair. Hagemann’s team had come equipped with rare colour footage of a successful V-2 launch, which had been carried out from Peenemunde in October of the previous year.

In a room specially converted to function as a cinema, Hitler had viewed the film, in the company of Field Marshal Keitel and Generals Jodl and Buhle.

Previously sceptical about the possibility of developing the V-2 as a weapon, watching this film transformed Hitler into a believer.

When the lights came up again, Hitler practically leaped from his chair and shook Hagemann’s hand with both of his. ‘Why was it’, he asked the startled general, ‘that I could not believe in the success of your work?’

The other generals in the room, who had previously expressed their own grave misgivings, especially about the proposed price tag of funding the rocket programme, were effectively muzzled by Hitler’s exuberance. Any protest from them now would only be seen as obstruction by Hitler, and the price tag of that, for those two men, was more than they were willing to pay.

‘If we’d had these rockets back in 1939,’ Hitler went on to say, ‘we would never have had this war.’

And then, for one of the only times in his life, Hitler apologised. ‘Forgive me’, he told General Hagemann, ‘for ever having doubted you.’

He immediately gave orders to begin mass-production of the V-2, regardless of the cost. As his imagination raced out of control, his demand for nine hundred rockets a month increased over the course of a few minutes to five thousand. Although even the lowest of these figures turned out to be impractical, since the amount of liquid oxygen required to power that many V-2s far exceeded Germany’s annual output, his belief in this miracle weapon seemed unshakeable.

Although there had been many times since then when Hitler had secretly harboured doubts about the professor’s judgement, now it seemed to him that his faith had been rewarded at last. Even if it had come too late to ensure a total victory over Europe and the Bolsheviks, the V-2’s improved performance, if the full measure and precision of its destructive power could be proven on the battlefield, would not go unnoticed by the enemy. And it might just be enough to stop the advance of the armies which, even now, were making their way steadily towards Berlin.

But only if he stopped this leak of information that had been trickling out of the bunker.

‘Fetch me General Rattenhuber!’ he shouted to no one in particular.

Fifteen minutes later, SS General Johann Rattenhuber, chief of the Reich’s Security Service, entered the briefing room.

He was a square-faced man with a heavy chin, grey hair combed straight back over his head, and permanently narrowed eyes. From the earliest days of the National Socialist party, Rattenhuber had been responsible for Hitler’s personal safety. He and his team were constantly on the move, travelling to whichever of Hitler’s thirteen special headquarters was in use at any given time.

Some of these, such as the Cliff Nest, hidden deep within the Eifel Mountains, or the Wolf’s Lair at Rastenburg in East Prussia, were complexes of underground tunnels and massive concrete block houses, built to withstand direct hits from the heaviest weapons in the Allied arsenal of weaponry. From these almost impenetrable fortifications, Hitler had conducted his campaigns in the east and west. Other hideouts, such as the Giant in Charlottenburg, the construction of which had required more concrete than the entire allotment supplied for civilian air-raid shelters in the year 1944, had never been put to use.

Rattenhuber was used to departing at short notice. He was seldom given more than a day’s warning when Hitler decamped from one headquarters to another and, increasingly over the past few months, he had grown accustomed to being summoned at all hours of the day or night, to answer Hitler’s growing suspicions about his safety.

In Rattenhuber’s mind, ever since the attempt on Hitler’s life back in July of 1944, the Fuhrer had been steadily losing his grip on reality. Having survived the bomb blast that tore through the meeting room in Rastenburg, Hitler had become convinced that providence itself had intervened. Although Rattenhuber did not believe in such lofty concepts, he was quietly forced to admit that it was no thanks to him, or to his hand-selected squad of Bavarian ex-policemen, that Hitler had emerged with nothing more than scratches and his clothing torn to shreds. Those were the physical results, but mentally, as Rattenhuber had seen for himself, Hitler’s wounds were much deeper. The sense of betrayal he felt, that his own generals would have conspired to murder him, would dog him for the rest of his days. Behind the anger at this betrayal lay a primal terror which no amount of concrete, or Schmeisser-toting guards or reassurance could ever put to rest.

But what consumed him now, was the story of this spy in the Chancellery.

Rattenhuber knew about Der Chef, whose jovial gossip had enlightened him to scandals which even he, in his role as guardian of all the bunker folk, had not known about before he heard it on the radio.