Christopher Priest - The Separation

A glorious day for the Reich!

April 21, 1941 (Monday)

Yesterday: the Führer’s birthday. Hess came back a week ago from his trip to Lisbon without saying anything about it. So I put him up to delivering the radio tribute to the Führer, as there was no one else who would do it. I expected him to deviate from the script I wrote for him, but he read every word. No originality in the man.

No incursions here, but we sent 800 aircraft to London. The British are losing their morale. Even Churchill’s fine words cannot rally them after this. We shall follow it up with more. Good news on other fronts: Libya, Serbia, Greece, even the Italians have been holding their own in Abyssinia. The Führer told me last week that he does not want to have to send troops to help Mussolini again. Already our triumph in the Balkans has been delaying the main event. When we have cleared Greece of the English we can concentrate on the real war.

The public are not listening to the wireless often enough. It could be dangerous to morale. Who knows what they might do instead? I have issued new rules and incentives.

In the evening: another visit from ‘Fraulein’ Hess, visibly nervous because he thinks the Führer will find out what he’s doing. I reassure him that he need not worry, that the Führer is completely behind him. Hess is a toady! This is the first time he has tried to act without the Führer’s knowledge. A great lesson to be learned. He worries that we are hitting the British too hard, too successfully, that they won’t want to discuss peace. I convince him otherwise, because it is important that he makes his trip, if not for the reasons he thinks.

May 10, 1941 (Saturday)

Yesterday: A heavy raid on Mannheim, with much damage and many deaths. In revenge we send 200 aircraft to England, so they have nothing to laugh about. We hear of appalling damage done to the port of Hull, worse than anything they have done to us. Twenty thousand tons of shipping sent to the bottom by our U-boats.

Moscow has withdrawn recognition of some of the territories we have occupied. They sound as if they are worried about something. Stalin is planning to stay out of the war as long as possible, so that England and Germany exhaust themselves. Then the move to bolshevize Europe will begin. That’s what the Russians think, but by then it will be too late. Soon we will turn to the East. Two strokes at once will thwart them. Peace on one front and war on the other, both totally unexpected.

It is dangerous to have so much depending on that lickspittle Hess.

This week’s newsreel is one of the best we have yet produced. I authorize it at once, and order that a copy be sent direct to the Führer at the Berghof. It has given me new confidence in our cause.

Goering sought me out after dinner. He is even fatter now than before and is having trouble breathing; he did not remove his ridiculous cap the whole time he was with me. He wanted to know what information I had about Hess, so I told him some of it. He showed me a flight-plan Hess has drawn up and offered to let the Luftwaffe take care of him if the Führer ordered it. So tempting. I wonder if the Führer is behind this after all? Hess is his favourite but everyone thinks he is mad. How else would the Führer close the war with England if Hess were stopped?

May 11, 1941 (Sunday)

Yesterday: This was the day the Führer planned for the next great strike. May 10 was the first anniversary of the start of the offensive in the West and his sense of opera demanded that we balance it with our move in the East. Not to be! The generals who are expected to do our work are snivellers! They say we have too many men in the Balkans, but the English have been kicked out of Greece so what do they have left to complain about? I have been trying to find out when the new date will be but no one seems to know when it is.

Huge raid on Hamburg in the early hours of this morning, but as always the British fliers were frightened away by our barrage of anti-aircraft fire. Most of their bombs fell in the river and few of the others went off. As if to make up for their failure, the English sent a paltry secondary force to scatter incendiaries on Berlin. Little damage but a great deal of pointless aggravation.

Meanwhile we sent more than seven hundred aircraft to deliver the coup de grace to London. It’s too early for confirmation, but the pilots report that London was ablaze from one end to the other.

Our short-wave broadcasts to the USA need improving, so I shall be taking personal control. There is no point pussy-footing about. Roosevelt is a danger to our plans, because of his ignorance of the issues and receiving too much influence from Churchill. We will seize Roosevelt by the throat and shake him until he falls apart. Few Americans realize that Roosevelt is a cripple.

I have forbidden all mention of Russia in our press. Just for the time being. If nothing else, it will rattle Stalin’s spies.

Hess disappeared as expected. He took off from the Messerschmitt factory in Augsburg on a supposed test flight, then headed off towards the north. He refuelled in Holland before flying out over the sea. To my amazement he followed the flight plan he showed me, so everyone knew exactly where he was. The man is mad, of course, and it has been the devil’s own job keeping him away from the American reporters. The Führer has been concerned about him for some time, it should be said and will now most certainly be said. With Hess gone it will be easier to convince everyone that he had become unstable. This is the line we take if everything goes wrong, as it surely must. Once I was certain Hess was on his way I alerted Reichsmarschall Goering at what I considered to be an appropriate time. The Luftwaffe will no doubt have dealt with the poor man, whose service to the Party has been without parallel. A great National Socialist hero! I shall be busy with this one as soon as we hear the reaction from the English. After that, we can get on with the war. I would like to see Roosevelt’s and Stalin’s faces when they hear about Hess.

If Goering fails to deal with Hess, I shall complain about him again to the Foreign Ministry. It won’t have any real effect, but Goering hates Ribbentrop as much as I do and it will distract them from other things if they engage in another squabble.

To Lanke in the evening, to be with Magda and my children, and to indulge for once in an early night. Everyone around me has been in wonderful high spirits. We all sense that at last the real war is about to begin.

I told Birgit that I had been called in to work for the Red Cross again, that I would not be gone for long. She asked no questions, offered no complaint. I needed to get away from the house for a while and we both knew it.

I travelled across the country to Lincolnshire, a journey which in peacetime, by car, would take only a few hours. Now, when members of the public were in effect banned from using their cars, public transport was the only way.

The slow train journey, calling at every station and with many unexplained delays, took me the best part of a day and a half, including one night huddling in the dismal waiting-room in Nottingham station after I missed my connection. I was exhausted by the time I reached Barnham, the town closest to my brother’s RAF station, and I counted myself lucky to find a vacant bedroom over the bar in one of the High Street pubs and went straight to bed.

Because I was so tired I assumed I would sleep through the night without interruption, but I felt as if I had only just dropped off when I was woken by the sound of engines.