Fatherland Read online

  ‘They were Jews,’ the crone in the attic had said as she closed the door in his face.

  Of course. The Jews had all been evacuated to the east during the war. Everyone knew that. What had happened to them since was not a question anyone asked in public – or in private either, if they had any sense, not even an SS-Sturmbannführer.

  And that, he could see now, was when his relationship with Pili had started to go bad; the time when he had started to wake up before it was light, and to volunteer for every case that came along.

  MARCH stood for a few minutes without switching on the lights, looking down at the traffic heading south to Wittenberg Platz. Then he went into the kitchen and poured himself a large whisky. Monday’s Berliner Tageblatt was lying by the sink. He carried it back with him into the sitting room.

  March had a routine for reading the paper. He started at the back, with the truth. If Leipzig was said to have beaten Cologne four-nil at football, the chances were it was true: even the Party had yet to devise a means of rewriting the sports results. The sports news was a different matter. COUNTDOWN TO TOKYO OLYMPICS. US MAY COMPETE FOR FIRST TIME IN 28 YEARS. GERMAN ATHLETES STILL LEAD WORLD. Then the advertisements. GERMAN FAMILIES! PLEASURE BECKONS IN GOTENLAND, RIVIERA OF THE REICH! French perfume, Italian silks, Scandinavian furs, Dutch cigars, Belgian coffee, Russian caviar, British televisions – the cornucopia of Empire spilled across the pages. Births, marriages and deaths: TEBBE, Ernst and Ingrid; a son for the Führer. WENZEL, Hans, aged 71; a true National Socialist, sadly missed.

  And the lonely hearts:

  FIFTY years old. Pure Aryan doctor, veteran of the Battle of Moscow, who intends to settle on the land, desires male progeny through marriage with healthy, Aryan, virginal, young, unassuming, thrifty woman, adapted to hard work; broad-hipped, flat-heeled and earring-less essential.

  WIDOWER aged sixty once again wishes to have Nordic mate prepared to present him with children so that old family should not die out in male line.

  Arts pages: Zarah Leander, still going strong, in Woman of Odessa, now showing at the Gloria-Palast: the epic story of the resettlement of the South Tyrolese. A piece by the music critic attacking the ‘pernicious, Negroid wailings’ of a group of young Englishmen from Liverpool, playing to packed audiences of German youth in Hamburg. Herbert von Karajan to conduct a special performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony – the European anthem – at the Royal Albert Hall in London on the Führer’s birthday.

  Editorial on the student anti-war demonstrations in Heidelberg: TRAITORS MUST BE SMASHED BY FORCE! The Tageblatt always took a firm line.

  Obituary: some old Bonze from the Ministry of the Interior. ‘A lifetime’s service to the Reich . . .’

  Reich news: SPRING THAW BRINGS FRESH FIGHTING ON SIBERIAN FRONT! GERMAN TROOPS SMASH IVAN TERROR GROUPS! In Rovno, capital of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, five terrorist leaders had been executed for organising the massacre of a family of German settlers. There was a photograph of the Reich’s latest nuclear submarine, the Grossadmiral Dönitz, at its new base in Trondheim.

  World news: In London it had been announced that King Edward and Queen Wallis were to pay a state visit to the Reich in July ‘further to strengthen the deep bonds of respect and affection between the peoples of Great Britain and the German Reich’. In Washington, it was believed that President Kennedy’s latest victory in the US primaries had strengthened his chances of winning a second term . . .

  The paper slipped from March’s fingers and on to the floor.

  Half an hour later, the telephone rang.

  ‘So sorry to wake you.’ Koth was sarcastic. ‘I had the impression this was supposed to be priority. Shall I call back tomorrow?’

  ‘No, no.’ March was wide awake.

  ‘This you will love. This is beautiful.’ For the first time in his life, March heard Koth chuckle. ‘Now, you are not playing a joke on me? This is not some little trick you and Jaeger have worked out between you?’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘The background first.’ Koth was enjoying himself too much to be hurried. ‘We had to go back a long way to get a match. A very long way. But we got one. Perfect. No mistake. Your man has a record all right. He was arrested just once in his life. By our colleagues in Munich, forty years ago. To be precise, on the ninth of November 1923.’

  There was a silence. Five, six, seven seconds elapsed.

  ‘Ah! I can tell that even you appreciate the significance of the date.’

  ‘An alter Kämpfer.’ March reached down beside his chair for his cigarettes. ‘His name?’

  ‘Indeed. An old comrade. Arrested with the Führer after the Bürgerbräukeller Putsch. You have fished out of the lake one of the glorious pioneers of the National Socialist Revolution.’ Koth laughed again. ‘A wiser man might have left him where he was.’

  ‘What is his name?’

  AFTER Koth had rung off, March paced around the apartment for five minutes, smoking furiously. Then he made three calls. The first was to Max Jaeger. The second was to the Duty Officer at Werderscher Markt. The third was to a Berlin number. A man’s voice, slurred with sleep, answered just as March was about to give up.

  ‘Rudi? It’s Xavier March.’

  ‘Zavi? Are you crazy? It’s midnight.’

  ‘Not quite.’ March patrolled the faded carpet, the body of the telephone in one hand, the receiver tucked beneath his chin. ‘I need your help.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’

  ‘What can you tell me about a man named Josef Buhler?’

  THAT night, March had a dream. He was at the lakeshore again in the rain and there was the body, face down in the mud. He pulled at the shoulder – pulled hard – but he could not move it. The body was grey-white lead. But when he turned to leave, it grabbed his leg, and began pulling him towards the surface of the lake. He scrabbled at the earth, trying to dig his fingers into the soft mud, but there was nothing to hold on to. The corpse’s grip was immensely strong. And as they went under, its face became Pili’s, contorted with rage, grotesque in its shame, screaming ‘I hate you . . . I hate you . . . I hate you . . .’

  PART TWO

  WEDNESDAY 15 APRIL

  détente, s.f. 1 (a) Relaxation, loosening, slackening (of something that is taut); relaxing (of muscles). (b) Easing (of political situation).

  ONE

  esterday’s rain was a bad memory, already half-faded from the streets. The sun – the miraculous, impartial sun – bounced and glittered on the shopfronts and apartment windows.

  In the bathroom, the rusted pipes clanked and groaned, the shower dangled a thread of cold water. March shaved with his father’s old cut-throat razor. Through the open bathroom window, he could hear the sounds of the city waking up: the whine and clatter of the first tram; the distant hum of the traffic on Tauentzien Strasse; the footsteps of the early risers hurrying to the big Wittenberg Platz U-bahn station; the rattle of shutters going up in the bakery across the street. It was not quite seven and Berlin was alive with possibilities the day had yet to dull.

  His uniform was laid out in the bedroom: the body-armour of authority.

  Brown shirt, with black leather buttons. Black tie. Black breeches. Black jackboots (the rich smell of polished leather).

  Black tunic: four silver buttons; three parallel silvered threads on the shoulder tabs; on the left sleeve, a red-white-and-black swastika armband; on the right, a diamond enclosing the gothic letter ‘K’, for Kriminalpolizei.

  Black Sam Browne belt. Black cap with silver death’s head and Party eagle. Black leather gloves.

  March stared at himself in the mirror, and a Sturmbannführer of the Waffen-SS stared back. He picked up his service pistol, a 9 mm Luger, from the dressing table, checked the action, and slotted it into his holster. Then he stepped out into the morning.

  ‘SURE you have enough?’

  Rudolf Halder grinned at March’s sarcasm and unloaded his tray: cheese, ham, salami, three hard-boiled eggs, a pile of blac
k bread, milk, a cup of steaming coffee. He arranged the dishes in a neat row on the white linen tablecloth.

  ‘I understand that breakfasts provided by the Reich Main Security Office are not normally so lavish.’

  They were in the dining room of the Prinz Friedrich Karl Hotel in Dorotheen Strasse, midway between Kripo headquarters and Halder’s office in the Reichsarchiv. March used it regularly. The Friedrich Karl was a cheap stopover for tourists and salesmen, but it did a good breakfast. Dangling limply from a pole over the entrance was a European flag – the twelve gold stars of the European Community nations, on a dark-blue background. March guessed that the manager, Herr Brecker, had bought it second-hand and hung it there in an effort to drum up some foreign custom. It did not appear to have worked. A glance around the restaurant’s shabby clientele and bored staff suggested little danger of being overheard.

  As usual, people gave March’s uniform a wide berth. Every few minutes, the walls shook as a train pulled into the Friedrich Strasse station.

  ‘Is that all you’re having?’ asked Halder. ‘Coffee?’ He shook his head. ‘Black coffee, cigarettes and whisky. As a diet: not good. Now I think of it, I haven’t seen you eat a decent meal since you and Klara split.’ He cracked one of his eggs and began removing pieces of shell.

  March thought: of all of us, Halder has changed the least. Beneath the layer of fat, behind the slackened muscle of incipient middle age, there lurked still the ghost of the gangling recruit, straight from university, who had joined the U-174 more than twenty years before. He had been a wireless operator – a bad one, rushed through training and into service at the start of 1942, when losses were at their height, and Dönitz was ransacking Germany for replacements. Then as now, he wore wire-framed glasses and had thin ginger hair which stuck out at the back in a duck’s tail. During a voyage, while the rest of the men grew beards, Halder sprouted orange tufts on his cheeks and chin, like a moulting cat. The fact that he was in the U-boat service at all was a ghastly mistake, a joke. He was clumsy, barely capable of changing a fuse. He had been designed by nature to be an academic, not a submariner, and he passed each voyage in a sweat of fear and seasickness.

  Yet he was popular. U-boat crews were superstitious, and somehow the word got around that Rudi Halder brought good luck. So they looked after him, covering his mistakes, letting him have an extra half-hour to groan and thrash around on his bunk. He became a sort of mascot. When peace came, astonished to find that he had survived, Haider resumed his studies at the history faculty of Berlin University. In 1958 he had joined the team of academics working at the Reichsarchiv on the official history of the war. He had come full circle, spending his days hunched in a subterranean chamber in Berlin, piecing together the same grand strategy of which he had once been a tiny, frightened component. The U-boat Service: Operations and Tactics, 1939–46 had been published in 1963. Now Halder was helping compile the third volume of the history of the German Army on the Eastern Front.

  ‘It’s like working at the Volkswagen works in Fallersleben,’ said Halder. He took a bite out of his egg and chewed for a while. ‘I do the wheels, Jaeckel does the doors, Schmidt drops in the engine.’

  ‘How long is it going to take?’

  ‘Oh, forever, I should think. Resources no object. This is the Arch of Triumph in words, remember? Every shot, every skirmish, every snowflake, every sneeze. Someone is even going to write the Official History of the Official Histories. Me, I’ll do another five years.’

  ‘And then?’

  Halder brushed egg crumbs from his tie. ‘A chair in a small university somewhere in the south. A house in the country with Ilse and the kids. A couple of books, respectfully reviewed. My ambitions are modest. If nothing else, this kind of work gives you a sense of perspective about your own mortality. Talking of which . . .’ From his inside pocket he pulled a sheet of paper. ‘With the compliments of the Reichsarchiv.’

  It was a photocopy of a page from an old Party directory. Four passport-sized portraits of uniformed officials, each accompanied by a brief biography, Brün, Brunner. Buch. And Buhler.

  Halder said: ‘Guide to the Personalities of the NSDAP. 1951 edition.’

  ‘I know it well.’

  ‘A pretty bunch, you’ll agree.’

  The body in the Havel was Buhler’s, no question of it. He stared up at March through his rimless spectacles, prim and humourless, his lips pursed. It was a bureaucrat’s face, a lawyer’s face; a face you might see a thousand times and never be able to describe; sharp in the flesh, fudged in memory; the face of a machine-man.

  ‘As you will see,’ resumed Halder, ‘a pillar of National Socialist respectability. Joined the Party in ʼ22 – that’s as respectable as they come. Worked as a lawyer with Hans Frank, the Führer’s own attorney. Deputy President of the Academy of German Law.’

  ‘“State Secretary, General Government, 1939,”’ read March. ‘“SS-Brigadeführer.”’ Brigadeführer, by God. He took out a notebook and began to write.

  ‘Honorary rank,’ said Halder, his mouth full of food. ‘I doubt if he ever fired a shot in anger. He was strictly a desk man. When Frank was sent out as Governor in ʼ39 to run what was left of Poland, he must have taken his old legal partner, Buhler, with him, to be chief bureaucrat. You should try some of this ham. Very good.’

  March was scribbling quickly. ‘How long was Buhler in the East?’

  ‘Twelve years, I guess. I checked the Guide for 1952. There’s no entry for Buhler. So ʼ51 must have been his last year.’

  March stopped writing and tapped his teeth with his pen. ‘Will you excuse me for a couple of minutes?’

  There was a telephone booth in the foyer. He rang the Kripo switchboard and asked for his own extension. A voice growled: ‘Jaeger.’

  ‘Listen, Max.’ March repeated what Halder had told him. ‘The Guide mentions a wife.’ He held up the sheet of paper to the booth’s dim electric light and squinted at it. ‘Edith Tulard. Can you find her? To get the body positively identified.’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She died more than ten years ago. I checked with the SS records bureau – even honorary ranks have to give next of kin. Buhler had no kids, but I’ve traced his sister. She’s a widow, seventy-two years old, named Elizabeth Trinkl. Lives in Fürstenwalde.’ March knew it: a small town about forty-five minutes’ drive south-east of Berlin. ‘The local cops are bringing her straight to the morgue.’

  ‘I’ll meet you there.’

  ‘Another thing. Buhler had a house on Schwanenwerder.’

  So that explained the location of the body. ‘Good work, Max.’ March rang off and made his way back to the dining room.

  Halder had finished his breakfast. He threw down his napkin as March returned and leaned back in his chair. ‘Excellent. Now I can almost tolerate the prospect of sorting through fifteen hundred signals from Kleist’s First Panzer Army.’ He began picking his teeth. ‘We should meet up more often. Ilse is always saying: When are you going to bring Zavi round?’ He leaned forward. ‘Listen: there’s a woman at the archives, working on the history of the Bund deutscher Mädel in Bavaria, 1935 to 1950. A stunner. Husband disappeared on the Eastern front last year, poor devil. Anyway: you and she. What about it? We could have you both round, say next week?’

  March smiled. ‘You’re very kind.’

  ‘That’s not an answer.’

  ‘True.’ He tapped the photocopy. ‘Can I keep this?’

  Halder shrugged. ‘Why not?’

  ‘One last thing.’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘State Secretary to the General Government. What would he have done, exactly?’

  Halder spread his hands. The backs were thick with freckles, wisps of reddish-gold hair curled from his cuffs. ‘He and Frank had absolute authority. They did whatever they liked. At that time, the main priority would have been resettlement.’

  March wrote ‘resettlement’ in his notebook, and ringed it. ‘H
ow did that happen?’

  ‘What is this? A seminar?’ Halder arranged a triangle of plates in front of him – two smaller ones to the left, a larger one to the right. He pushed them together so they touched. ‘All this is Poland before the war. After ʼ39, the western provinces’ – he tapped the small plates – ‘were brought into Germany. Reichsgau Danzig-West Prussia and Reichsgau Wartheland.’ He detached the large plate. ‘And this became the General Government. The rump state. The two western provinces were Germanised. It’s not my field, you understand, but I’ve seen some figures. In 1940, they set a target density of one hundred Germans per square kilometre. And they managed it in the first three years. An incredible operation, considering the war was still on.’

  ‘How many people were involved?’

  ‘One million. The SS eugenics bureau found Germans in places you’d never have dreamed of – Rumania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia. If your skull had the proper measurements and you came from the right village – you were just given a ticket.’

  ‘And Buhler?’

  ‘Ah. Well. To make room for a million Germans in the new Reichsgaue, they had to move out a million Poles.’

  ‘And they went to the General Government?’

  Halder turned his head and glanced around furtively, to make sure he was not overheard – ‘the German look’, people called it. ‘They also had to cope with the Jews being expelled from Germany and the western territories – France, Holland, Belgium.’