Fatherland

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Many of the characters whose names are used in this novel actually existed. Their biographical details are correct up to 1942. Their subsequent fates, of course, were different.

Josef Buhler, State Secretary in the General Government, was condemned to death in Poland and executed in 1948.

Wilhelm Stuckart was arrested at the end of the war and spent four years in detention. He was released in 1949 and lived in West Berlin. In December 1953 he was killed in a car “accident” near Hanover: the “accident” was probably arranged by a vengeance squad hunting down those Nazi war criminals still at large.

Martin Luther attempted to oust the German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, in a power struggle in 1943. He failed and was sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he attempted suicide. He was released in 1945, shortly before the end of the war, and died in a local hospital of heart failure in May 1945.

Odilo Globocnik was captured by a British patrol at Weissensee, Carinthia, on 31 May 1945. He committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule.

Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in Prague by Czech agents in the summer of 1942.

Artur Nebe’s fate, typically, is more mysterious. He is believed to have been involved in the July 1944 plot against Hitler, to have gone into hiding on an island in the Wannsee, and to have been betrayed by a rejected mistress. Officially, he was executed in Berlin on 21 March 1945. However, he is said subsequently to have been sighted in Italy and Ireland.

Those named as having attended the Wannsee Conference all did so. Alfred Meyer committed suicide in 1945. Roland Freisler was killed in an air raid in 1945. Friedrich Kritzinger died at liberty after a severe illness. Adolf Eichmann was executed by the Israelis in 1962. Karl Schongarth was condemned to death by a British court in 1946. Otto Hoffmann was sentenced to 15 years” imprisonment by a US military court. Heinrich Muller went missing at the end of the war. The others continued to live, either in Germany or South America.

The following documents quoted in the text are authentic: Heydrich’s invitation to the Wannsee Conference; Goering’s order to Heydrich of 31 July 1941; the dispatches of the German Ambassador describing the comments of Joseph P. Kennedy; the order from the Auschwitz Central Construction Office; the railway timetable (abridged); the extracts from the Wannsee Conference Minutes; the memorandum on the use of prisoners” hair.

Where I have created documents, I have tried to do so on the basis of fact — for example, the Wannsee Conference was postponed, its minutes were written up in a much fuller form by Eichmann and subsequently edited by Heydrich; Hitler did — notoriously — avoid putting his name to anything like a direct order for the Final Solution, but almost certainly issued a verbal instruction in the summer of 1941.

The Berlin of this book is the Berlin that Albert Speer planned to build.

Leonardo da Vinci’s portrait of Cecilia Gallerani was recovered from Germany at the end of the war and returned to Poland.