Laurent Binet - HHhH

Within a few days, the situation has been turned on its head: not only has the army discovered the truth, but it has managed to pull the two key witnesses—the blackmailer and the retired cavalry officer—from the claws of the Gestapo. Heydrich’s plan fizzles out completely. His fate is now hanging by a thread: if Hitler agrees to the trial, his trickery will be exposed in broad daylight, which will lead at the very least to Heydrich’s dismissal—and the end of all his ambitions. He will find himself more or less where he was in 1931, after his discharge from the navy.

Heydrich is not very happy at this prospect. The icy killer is now the terror-stricken prey. His right-hand man Schellenberg recalls how one day in the office, during this crisis, Heydrich asks for a gun. The head of the SD has his back to the wall.

But he is wrong to doubt Hitler. In the end, Fritsch is put on sick leave: no resignation, no trial. It’s simpler this way, and his problems are solved. All the same, Heydrich did have a trump card up his sleeve: his interests were the same as Hitler’s, because the latter had decided to take control of the army himself. In other words, Fritsch would have had to be eliminated, come what may—it was the Führer’s unshakable will.

February 5, 1938—a prominent headline in the Völkischer Beobachter :

“All power concentrated in the hands of the Führer.”

Heydrich needn’t have worried.

The trial does finally take place, but, in the meantime, the balance of power has shifted irrevocably: after the incredible euphoria provoked by the Anschluss, the army bows down before the genius of the Führer, and stops making trouble. Fritsch is acquitted, the blackmailer is executed, and the whole affair is forgotten.

Hitler never joked about morals. Since the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, it is officially forbidden for a Jew to have sexual relations with an Aryan. The crime is punishable by a prison sentence.

But, amazingly, only the man can be prosecuted. It was evidently Hitler’s wish that the woman, whether Jewish or Aryan, should not be at the mercy of the law.

Heydrich, more Catholic than the pope, doesn’t see it that way. This discrimination between men and women offends his sense of equity (although only when the woman is a Jew, of course). So in 1937 he gives secret instructions to the Kripo (criminal police) and the Gestapo that, in the event of any German man being found guilty of sleeping with a Jew, the woman would automatically be arrested and sent discreetly to a concentration camp.

In other words, when the Nazi leaders are—for once—ordered to show a degree of moderation, they are unafraid to thwart the Führer’s will. This is interesting when you consider that obedience to orders, in the name of military honor and sworn oaths, was the only argument put forward after the war to justify these men’s crimes.

A bombshell rocks Europe: it’s the Anschluss. Austria has finally “decided” to be “reunited” with Germany. It’s the first step in the birth of the Third Reich. It is also Hitler’s first conjuring trick, soon to be repeated: conquering a country without meeting any resistance.

The news spreads like wildfire across the continent. In London, Colonel Moravec wishes to return urgently to Prague, but it’s impossible to find a flight. He manages to take off for France but ends up in The Hague, from where he decides to complete his journey by train. The train is a fine way to travel, of course, but there is a slight problem. To reach Prague, he must cross Germany.

Unbelievably, Moravec decides to risk it.

So for several hours on March 13, 1938, the head of the Czechoslovak secret services is traveling through Nazi Germany by train.

I try to imagine the journey. Naturally, Moravec attempts to be as discreet as possible. He speaks German, admittedly, but I’m not sure that his accent is beyond suspicion. Then again, Germany is not yet at war, and the German people—though heated up by the Führer’s speeches about the Jewish international conspiracy and the enemy within—are not yet as alert as they will later become. But, taking no chances, when Moravec buys his ticket he doubtless chooses the friendliest-looking clerk. Or better still, the most half-witted.

Once he was on the train, I suppose he sought out an empty compartment, and that he sat down either:

next to the window, so he could discourage anyone who attempted to begin a conversation by turning his back and pretending to admire the countryside, all the while watching the compartment’s reflection in the glass

or

next to the door, so that he could watch all the comings and goings in the corridor.

Let’s put him next to the door.

What I do know is that he believed—aware, and perhaps quite proud, of his own importance—that the Gestapo would pay a great deal of money to know who the German railway was transporting that day.

Each movement in the carriage must have been a test of nerves.

Each time the train halted in a station.

Eventually, a man boarded the train and sat down in his compartment. Soon, it was full of suspicious-looking people. Poor men, families—those wouldn’t have worried him too much. But also some better-dressed men.

A man without a hat, perhaps, passes in the corridor, and this detail intrigues Moravec. He remembers from his journeys as a student in the USSR that they had told him how, in that country, any man in a hat must be either a member of the NKVD or a foreigner. In which case, what does it mean in Germany to be hatless?

I suppose there were changes of train, connections to be made, hours of waiting, and all the added stress they bring. Moravec hears newspaper vendors yelling out their headlines in hysterical, triumphant voices. He must surely buy several more tickets, if only to conceal for as long as possible his final destination.

And then… the customs barrier. I presume that Moravec had a fake passport, but I don’t know what nationality it was. And, in fact, he might not have had a fake passport, because he’d been in London on a mission conducted with the agreement of the British authorities. Before London, he’d spent a few days in the Baltic countries, where I believe he went to see his local counterparts. So he didn’t need a false identity, and perhaps hadn’t prepared one.

Perhaps, after all, his passport being in order, the customs officer—having conscientiously examined it, during those special seconds in a life when time seems to stop—had simply given it back to him.

Anyway, he made it through.

When, at last, he got off the train and stood upon his native soil, free from danger, he surrendered himself to an immense wave of relief.

Much later, he would say that this was the last pleasant feeling he would experience for a long time.

Austria is the Reich’s first acquisition. The next day, the country becomes a German province and 150,000 Austrian Jews suddenly find themselves at Hitler’s mercy.

In 1938, no one is really thinking about exterminating them. The idea is to encourage them to emigrate.

In order to organize this emigration of Austrian Jews, a young SS sublieutenant, appointed by the SD, is sent to Vienna. He quickly gets to grips with the situation and he’s full of ideas. The one he’s most proud of—if we trust what he would later say at his trial, twenty-two years later—is the idea of the conveyor belt: in order to be allowed to emigrate, the Jews must put together a thick dossier made up of many different documents. Once the dossier is complete, they report to the Jewish Emigration Office, where they place their documents on a conveyor belt. The real aim of this process is to strip them of all their possessions as quickly as possible, so that they do not leave the country before having legally transferred everything they own. At the end of the conveyor belt, they retrieve their passport from a basket.