David Gibbins - The Gods of Atlantis

Hoffman clicked his heels and turned away. His world had closed in, as if the noose tightening around Berlin were tightening around him as well. All that flashed before his eyes was the panic-stricken boy in the dishevelled lederhosen, as if that were the last image of light he had seen, imprinted on his retina. The jarring of the explosions made him see repeated images of the boy’s face, lining the edge of his vision, and then ahead of him a swirling image of the reverse swastika, drawing him into the underworld. He opened his eyes and breathed hard, thinking of what he had written in his diary. That was history, a terrible history of crime and horror. But what he knew now, the future that lay ahead if Himmler’s plan were to be carried out, was incalculably worse. He remembered the sheets of paper he had torn off and put in his pocket, the pencil. Somehow he must find a way of writing a message for posterity, in case the truth died with him and the deadly weapon remained intact. If he was unable to thwart Himmler, someone else might.

He thrust the SS knife into his pocket, unsheathing it and grasping the exposed part of the blade as hard as he could, savagely, feeling the blood from his fingers ooze out. A rage coursed through him, the rage and adrenalin he had once felt as he held the stick in his Stuka dive-bomber, hurtling towards the target, the siren screaming. He knew why his family would not be joining him until he had completed Himmler’s task. His wife and boy were being held to ransom. But Himmler had forgotten what he did, what he was good at, how he had survived five years of war. He remembered Himmler’s pudgy hands fumbling with the knife. These people had created the worst killing machine in history. But for them the killing was remote, abstract. It was other people who did their dirty work for them, people like those boys on the roof, like the countless dead soldiers outside, like the thugs of the SS and Gestapo, people like Hoffman. That was Himmler’s biggest weakness. For him the SS knife was a symbol, not a weapon. He had lost sight of another aspect of humanity.

What it was that made men kill.

Wewelsburg Castle, Germany

Jack swung his legs out of the car and stood in the car park, stretching his arms and savouring the cool morning air. Even though he had not gone inside the Nazi bunker in the forest the day before, he still felt as if some of that horror were clinging to him, filling his lungs as it had filled the lungs of the first Allied soldiers who had entered the death camp beside the bunker almost seventy years before. He took another deep breath, then watched as Maurice Hiebermeyer clambered out of the car on the driver’s side, adjusting his trousers around his ample waist and pushing his little round glasses up his nose, then picking up a shoulder bag and coming round to stand beside him. For Maurice, the bunker experience had been far worse, not only for the sheer horror of what he had seen but also because of his German background, and Jack knew that his intense focus on planning their visit today had been a way of pushing away an experience that had unsettled him, something that Jack himself had found difficult to watch.

Together the two men stared up at the great bulk of the castle in front of them, its off-white masonry stark against the blue sky. It looked unreal, as if it had just been completed, too good to be true. Jack had to remind himself that he was not in England, where so many castles were ruins; in Germany, castles like this had been continuously occupied through to modern times. He caught sight of the name at the entrance to the car park: Wewelsburg. This castle was a special case, reinvented in the twentieth century as the bastion of a new knightly order, an odious fantasy in one man’s mind and the centrepiece of his dream of world domination.

‘The castle’s early medieval originally,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘When Heinrich Himmler bought Wewelsburg in 1934, he set about transforming it into his fantasy SS order-castle. From 1939, the slave labour used in the reconstruction came from a concentration camp set up nearby at Niederhagen, eventually including Soviet prisoners of war as well as Jews. Over a thousand of them were worked to death. A thousand. It was everywhere, you know, everywhere in Nazi Germany, the taint of racism and slave labour. Since being in that bunker, I can’t look at anything from that period without feeling physically sick. I can’t believe that I never felt that before. I think the whole of Germany must have been in a state of shock after the war, for years afterwards, even my generation.’ He looked down, distraught for a moment, and then took a deep breath and shook himself, clearing his throat and pointing to the walls. ‘The most dramatic transformation of the castle was where we’re meeting my aunt Heidi, in the so-called Obergruppenfuhrersaal, the SS Generals’ Room in the North Tower. It’s a kind of perverse realization of King Arthur’s Camelot, where Himmler’s top SS generals would meet as if they were latter-day Knights of the Round Table.’

‘Have you been here before?’ Jack said.

‘Once, when I was a child.’ Hiebermeyer glanced at his watch, then leaned back against the car. ‘We’ve got twenty minutes until I said we would meet her. I wanted to fill you in on a few things before we go into the castle. You and I have known each other since we were boys, and we know pretty well everything in each other’s minds, but this is a chapter I’ve kept mostly to myself. We could go to the cafe?’

‘Here is good.’

‘Okay. Probably best not to be overheard. Do you remember at boarding school in England when I did a presentation on the Nazis and archaeology? A pretty edgy subject for a German boy in those days, but my parents’ estate was in Westphalia, near here, and I was determined to get to the bottom of it all.’

‘As I recall, the main excitement was a story you’d unearthed about a German expedition to Egypt to uncover a fabulous treasure of the pharaoh Akhenaten. Something you didn’t tell the class about in your presentation, but you did tell me in secret later that day.’

‘Still a big one on our to-do list, very big,’ Hiebermeyer said, the old glint in his eyes back for a moment. ‘But it wasn’t just about following up treasure stories. I also wanted to distil the true archaeology from the nonsense. Himmler was influenced by a mystic named Karl Maria Wiligut, who convinced him that Westphalia would be the site of an apocalyptic battle between East and West, one in which the West would triumph and the River Rhine would run red with blood. At the time, people made the mistake of dismissing Himmler’s fantasies as harmless nonsense, even some fellow Nazis. But like his anti-Semitism, all his obsessions had a horrible fallout in real life. It was Himmler who pushed Hitler to launch Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia in 1941, and there’s no doubt he would have incited Hitler by regaling him with the story of that mythical showdown between East and West.’

‘And yet when it came to the Rhine running red with blood, it was the Western Allies who were the enemy, and this time the Germans were doomed to defeat.’

Hiebermeyer pursed his lips. ‘Yet even that showdown may have been preordained by Himmler, and I don’t mean in mythology. The more I studied him, the more it seemed as if he were willing the Reich to self-destruction. He was Hitler’s right-hand man, in many ways the brains behind the Nazi ideology. It was he who engineered the Holocaust, with ruthless efficiency and attention to detail. He was capable of the kind of cold-headed and practical decision-making that mostly eluded Hitler. Yet it was Himmler who pushed Hitler to make some of his more catastrophic decisions, above all the invasion of Russia. That single decision doomed the Third Reich. I began to look again at Himmler’s obsession with the occult, with all the absurd symbolism and ritual, and to me it seemed more and more like a smokescreen. It was almost as if he had wanted the higher echelons of the Nazi party to treat him as something of a joke, in order to keep them from poisoning Hitler against him and to retain the ear of the Fuhrer, to make sure he was there to influence the most important decision-making. If he’d exposed too much of his rational side, others in the party might have warned Hitler that he was a threat, a possible Fuhrer-in-waiting.’