Philip Kerr - Hitler's peace

There was, Schellenberg thought to himself as he sauntered into the hall, never a dull moment in the SS. Well, almost never. A speech by Himmler was not something he could view with anything other than dread, for the Reichsfuhrer had a tendency to longwindedness, and given the number of SS generals who were gathered in architect Franz Schwechten’s Golden Hall, Schellenberg expected a speech of Mahabharatan length and dullness. The Mahabharata was a book the young general had made himself read so that he might better understand Heinrich Himmler, who was its most passionate advocate; and having read it, Schellenberg had certainly found it easier to see where Himmler got some of his crazier ideas concerning duty, discipline, and, a favorite Himmler word, sacrifice. And Schellenberg did not think it too fanciful to view Himmler as someone who regarded himself as an avatar of the supreme god, Vishnu-or, at the very least, his high priest, descended to earth in human form to rescue Law, Good Deeds, Right, and Virtue. Schellenberg had also formed the impression that Himmler thought of Jews in the same way that the Mahabharata spoke of the one hundred Dhartarashtras — the grotesque human incarnations of demons who were the perpetual enemies of the gods. For all Schellenberg knew, Hitler held the same opinion, although he thought it much more likely that the Fuhrer simply hated Jews, which wasn’t exactly unusual in Germany and Austria. Schellenberg himself had nothing at all against the Jews; his own father had been a piano manufacturer in Saarbrucken and then in Luxembourg, and many of his best customers had been Jews. So it was fortunate that Schellenberg’s own department was obliged to pay little more than lip service to all the usual Aryanist claptrap about Jewish subhumans and vermin. Those anti-Semites who did work in Amt VI-and there were quite a few-knew better than to give vent to their hatred in the presence of Walter Schellenberg. The young Foreign Intelligence head was interested only in what a British secret agent, Captain Arthur Connolly, had once called “the Great Game”-the game in question being espionage, intrigue, and clandestine military adventure.

Schellenberg helped himself to coffee from an enormous refectory table, and, his eyes hardly noticing the enormous portrait of the Fuhrer hanging underneath one of three enormous arched windows, he fixed a smile on his clever schoolboy’s face and meandered toward a pair of officers he recognized.

Arthur Nebe, head of the Criminal Police, was a man much admired by Schellenberg. He hoped he might get a chance to warn Nebe of a whispered rumor making the rounds in Berlin. In 1941, according to the gossips, Nebe, in command of a Special Action Group in occupied Russia, had not only falsified his report of the slaughter of thousands of Jews, but also had allowed many to escape.

No such rumors attended the record of the second officer, Otto Ohlendorf, now chief of the SD’s Domestic Intelligence Department and responsible for, among other things, compiling reports regarding German public opinion. The Einsatzgruppe commanded by Ohlendorf in the Crimea had been regarded as one of the most successful, slaughtering more than a hundred thousand Jews.

“So here he is,” said Nebe, “our youngest brother, Benjamin.” Nebe was repeating a remark made by Himmler about Schellenberg being the youngest general in the SS.

“I expect to grow older and wiser this morning,” said Schellenberg.

“I can guarantee you’ll grow older,” said Ohlendorf. “Last time I went to one of these affairs it was in Wewelsburg. I think Himmler got all of it straight out of a Richard Wagner libretto. ‘Never forget we are a knightly order from which one cannot withdraw and to which one is recruited by blood.’ Or words to that effect.” Ohlendorf shook his head, wearily. “Anyway, it was all very inspiring. And long. Very, very long. Like a rather slow performance of Parsifal. ”

“It wasn’t blood that got me into this knightly order,” said Nebe. “But that’s certainly been the end result.”

“All that ‘knightly’ order stuff makes me sick,” said Ohlendorf. “Dreamed up by that lunatic Hildebrandt.” He nodded at another SS-Gruppenfuhrer who was engaged in earnest-looking conversation with Oswald Pohl. Hildebrandt’s own department, the Race and Resettlement Office, was subordinate to the Administration Office of the SS, of which Pohl was the head. “My God, I detest that bastard.”

“Me, too,” murmured Nebe.

“Doesn’t everyone?” remarked Schellenberg, who had an extra reason to hate and fear Hildebrandt: one of Hildebrandt’s principal functions was to investigate the racial purity of SS men’s families. Schellenberg lived with the fear that just such an investigation might discover that there was more than one Jew in his family.

“There’s Muller,” said Ohlendorf. “I had better go and make my peace with him and the Gestapo.” And putting down his coffee cup, he went to speak to the diminutive Gestapo chief, leaving Nebe and Schellenberg to their own conversation.

Nebe was a small, tough-looking man with gray, almost silver hair, a thin slit of a mouth, and a policeman’s inquiring nose. He spoke in a thick Berlin accent.

“Listen carefully,” said Nebe. “Don’t ask questions, just listen. I know what I know because I used to be in the Gestapo, when Diels was still in charge. And I still have a few friends there who tell me things. Such as the fact that the Gestapo have you under surveillance. No, don’t ask me why because I don’t know. Here-” Nebe took out a cigarette case shaped like a coffin and opened it to reveal the little flat cigarettes he smoked. “Have a nail.”

“And here I was thinking that I might have to warn you about something.”

“Like what, for instance?”

“There’s a rumor going around the SD that you falsified the figures for your Einsatzgruppe in Byelorussia.”

“Everyone did,” said Nebe. “What of it?”

“But for different reasons. It’s said that you actually tried to put a brake on the slaughter.”

“What can you do about such slanders? Himmler himself inspected my theater of operations, in Minsk. So, as you can see, accusing me of going easy on some Russian Jews is the same thing as saying that Himmler wasn’t clever enough to spot anything wrong. And we can’t have that, can we?” Nebe smiled coolly and lit their cigarettes. “No, I’m in the clear about that one, old boy, whatever the rumors say. But thanks. I appreciate it.” He sucked hard at his cigarette and nodded warmly at Schellenberg.

Schellenberg’s mind was already racing out of the castle and back to his hometown of Saarbrucken. Not long before he died, Heydrich had given Schellenberg the file about his wife’s Jewish uncle. But had Heydrich kept a copy that was now in the possession of the Gestapo? And was it possible that the Gestapo might now suspect that he himself was Jewish? Berg was a German surname, but it could hardly be denied that there were more than a few Jews who had used the name as a prefix or suffix in an attempt to Germanize their own Hebraic names. Could that be what they were out to prove? To destroy him with the insinuation that he himself was Jewish? After all, the Gestapo had tried to destroy Heydrich with the suggestion that the “blond Moses” was also a Jew. Except that, in Heydrich’s case, this was a suggestion that turned out to be partly true.

After Heydrich’s murder, Himmler had shown Schellenberg a file that proved Heydrich’s father, Bruno, a piano teacher from Halle, had been Jewish. (His nickname in Halle had been Isidor Suess.) Schellenberg had thought it was a strange thing for Himmler to have done so soon after Heydrich’s death until he realized that this was the Reichsfuhrer’s way of persuading Schellenberg that he should forget about his former boss, that his loyalty now lay with the Reichsfuhrer himself. But with Schellenberg’s own father, a piano maker, Schellenberg did not think it so very far-fetched that someone in the Gestapo, jealous of his precocious success-at thirty-three he was the youngest general in the SS-should have considered it worth the Gestapo’s time to investigate the possibility of his being Jewish, too.