Munich

4

The civil servant in charge of the German Foreign Ministry, State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker, had announced that he wished to have a German translation of the Prime Minister’s speech in his hands within thirty minutes of its delivery. He had entrusted the responsibility to Paul von Hartmann.

High up in the Radio Monitoring Room in the eaves of the Wilhelmstrasse building, beneath the huge array of radio aerials that sprouted from the roof, Hartmann had duly assembled a three-woman team. First, a stenographer took down Chamberlain’s words in English (no easy task, since by the time the BBC’s signal reached Berlin it had lost much of its strength and the Prime Minister’s ethereal voice, fading in and out of the clouds of static, was often difficult to make out). As soon as each page of shorthand was filled, a second secretary typed up the notes in English, triple-spaced. Hartmann wrote down his translation beneath the lines of English text and passed the pages one by one to a third secretary, who typed up the finished German version.

Wie schrecklich, fantastisch, unglaublich ist es …

His pen moved rapidly over the cheap paper, the brown ink bleeding slightly into the coarse weave.

Ten minutes after Chamberlain had finished speaking the job was done.

The typist tore the last page from her machine. Hartmann grabbed it, slipped the speech into a cardboard folder, kissed the top of her head, and strode out of the room, pursued by relieved laughter. The instant he was in the corridor his smile disappeared. As he walked towards Weizsäcker’s office he flicked back and forth between the pages of the speech with increasing dismay. The tone was far too wary and conciliatory – thin stuff, mere audio-ectoplasm. Where was the threat, the ultimatum? Why hadn’t Chamberlain repeated in public that evening what his emissary had told Hitler in private that morning – that if France went to the aid of Czechoslovakia, Britain would support France?

He descended the stairs to the ground floor, knocked on the door of Weizsäcker’s outer office and went straight in without waiting for a reply. The room was large and high-ceilinged, overlooking the park that ran along the back of the Ministry. It was lit by a vast and elaborate chandelier. In the darkened windows, beyond the reflection of the electric light bulbs, it was still just possible to make out the shapes of the trees against the evening sky. The junior secretaries had all gone home, their typewriters shrouded for the night like the cages of sleeping birds. Seated alone in the office, at her desk beside the central window, was Weizsäcker’s senior secretary. She had a cigarette between her scarlet lips and a letter in either hand and was looking from one document to the other, frowning.

‘Good evening, my dear Frau Winter.’

‘Good evening, Herr von Hartmann.’ She bowed her head with equal formality, as if he had paid her a great compliment.

‘Is he in?’

‘He’s with the Minister in the Chancellery.’

‘Ah.’ Hartmann was taken aback. ‘In that case what should I do with Chamberlain’s speech?’

‘He said you were to take it round to him immediately. Wait,’ she called after him as he turned to go, ‘what is that on your face?’

He stood obediently under the chandelier as she inspected his cheek. Her hair and fingers smelled of perfume and cigarette smoke. He could see strands of grey in her dark curls. He wondered how old she was. Forty-five? Old enough, anyway, to have had a husband who had died in the war. ‘Ink!’ she murmured disapprovingly. ‘Brown ink. Really, Herr von Hartmann, you cannot enter the Chancellery looking like that. What if you bump into the Führer?’ She drew a white handkerchief from her sleeve, moistened the corner with her tongue and dabbed gently at his cheek. She stepped back to inspect the result. ‘Better. I’ll telephone to say that you’re on your way.’

Outside, the night was still warm. The pre-war street lamps along Wilhelmstrasse, set far apart, offered little isolated pools of illumination in the darkness. Hardly anyone was about. In the middle of the street a cleaner was shovelling up piles of horse shit left behind after the parade. The only noise was the scrape of his spade on the asphalt. Hartmann clutched the folder and walked quickly along the facade of the Ministry until it gave on to the railings of the Reich Chancellery. One of the big iron gates was open. A Mercedes was driving out. The policeman saluted. Hartmann couldn’t see who was in the back. As the car headed off in the direction of the Anhalter Bahnhof, he gave his name and department to the policeman and was waved through without a word.

Lights were on in the windows all around the courtyard: here, finally, was a sense of activity, crisis. Beneath the canopied main entrance one of the SS sentries carrying a machine gun asked to see his papers, then nodded him permission to enter the reception hall, where two more SS guards were standing, armed with pistols. Yet again he showed his pass and announced that he had come to see State Secretary von Weizsäcker. He was asked to wait. One of the sentries went over to a telephone on a table against the far wall. Hartmann made a mental note: two policemen on the gate, four SS-Schütze here, and at least another three he could see in the guardroom.

A minute passed. Suddenly the large double doors opened and a uniformed SS adjutant strode in. His heels clicked and his arm shot out in the Hitler salute, as precise and immaculate as a clockwork soldier. Hartmann returned the obligatory greeting. ‘Heil Hitler.’

‘Follow me, please.’

They passed through the double doors and across an endless tract of Persian carpet. The room smelled of the Kaiser’s time: sun-faded old fabric, dust and beeswax. One could imagine Bismarck stamping across it. Watched by another SS guard – what was that: the eighth? – Hartmann followed the adjutant up a marble staircase, past Gobelin tapestries, to the second-floor landing, through a pair of doors and into what he realised, with an accelerating pulse, must be the Führer’s private apartment.

The adjutant said, ‘May I have that? Wait, please.’ He took the folder, knocked quietly at the nearest door and slipped inside. For a moment before it closed Hartmann heard voices, then the murmured conversation was cut off. He glanced around. The room was surprisingly modern, tasteful even – decent paintings, small tables with lamps and bowls of freshly cut flowers, a rug on a polished wooden floor, simple chairs. He was not sure whether he should sit or not. He decided not.

Time went on. At one point a handsome woman in a starched white blouse carrying a pile of papers entered the meeting and left almost immediately, empty-handed. Eventually, after a quarter of an hour, the door opened again and a sleek silver-haired man in his mid-fifties emerged, a Nazi Party badge in his lapel. This was Baron Ernst von Weizsäcker, although in the spirit of these egalitarian days he had dispensed with his title at roughly the same time he had acquired the badge. He gave Hartmann an envelope. ‘Thank you for waiting, Hartmann. This is the Führer’s reply to Chamberlain. Please take it immediately to the British Embassy and give it to either Sir Nevile Henderson or Mr Kirkpatrick personally.’ He leaned forwards and added confidingly, ‘Draw their attention to the final sentence. Tell them it’s in direct response to tonight’s broadcast.’ And then, more quietly, ‘Tell them it wasn’t easy.’

‘Weizsäcker!’ Hartmann recognised Ribbentrop’s peremptory voice calling from the room. The barest hint of a grimace flicked across the State Secretary’s smooth features, and then he was gone.

The British Embassy was less than a five-minute walk away at the northern end of Wilhelmstrasse, just beyond the Foreign Ministry. As Hartmann waited for the police sentry to open the Chancellery gate he examined the envelope. It was addressed, in Weizsäcker’s hand, to His Excellency Sir Nevile Henderson, Ambassador of Great Britain; it was unsealed.

‘Goodnight, sir.’ The policeman saluted.

‘Goodnight.’

Hartmann walked a little way up the wide street, past the silent darkened windows of the Foreign Ministry, and then casually – so casually that if anyone had been watching him they would have thought his behaviour entirely natural – he turned into the main entrance. The night porter recognised him. He mounted the carpeted steps between the stone sphinxes, hesitated, then turned left into the deserted corridor. His footsteps echoed off the stone floor, the lime-green plastered walls, the vaulted ceiling. On either side the doors were closed. About halfway down was a lavatory. He let himself in and turned on the light. His reflection in the mirror above the washbasins appalled him – stooped, furtive: in every respect suspicious. He wasn’t really cut out for this sort of business. He went into one of the cubicles, locked the door, and sat on the edge of the toilet.

Dear Mr Chamberlain,

I have in the course of conversations once more informed Sir Horace Wilson of my final attitude …

There were perhaps seven paragraphs, some of them long. The gist of it was belligerent: that the Czechs were stalling for time, that their objections to immediate German occupation of the Sudetenland were contrived, and that Prague was working to achieve ‘a general warlike conflagration’. The final sentence, of which Weizsäcker was so proud, did not strike him as offering much hope for peace:

I must leave it to your judgement whether, in view of these facts, you consider that you should continue your efforts, for which I once more sincerely thank you, of bringing the government in Prague to reason at the very last hour.

The typed letter was signed with a scrawled Adolf Hitler.

He reached von Weizsäcker’s office just as Frau Winter was locking up to go home. She was wearing a fashionable wide-brimmed hat. She stared at him in surprise. ‘Herr Hartmann? The State Secretary is still at the Chancellery.’

‘I know. I hate to ask you this – I wouldn’t if it wasn’t important.’

‘What?’

‘Can you copy this, quickly?’

He showed her the letter with its signature. Her eyes widened. She glanced up and down the corridor, then turned and unlocked the door and switched on the light.

It took her fifteen minutes. He kept a lookout in the corridor. She didn’t say anything except towards the end. ‘He seems determined to have a war.’ She said it matter-of-factly, without looking round from her typewriter.

‘Yes – and the English are equally determined to avoid one, more’s the pity.’

‘There.’ She pulled the last page out of her typewriter. ‘Go.’

The corridor was still empty. He walked back briskly the way he had come and had just reached the top of the last flight of steps leading down to the lobby when he noticed a figure in a black SS uniform heading across the marble floor towards him. Sturmbannführer Sauer of Ribbentrop’s private office had his head down and for an instant Hartmann considered turning round but then Sauer glanced up and recognised him. He frowned in surprise.

‘Hartmann …?’ He was about the same age, with a blank face from which most of the colour seemed to have been drained – white-blond hair, pale skin, pale blue eyes.

For want of a better response, Hartmann flung out his arm. ‘Heil Hitler!’

Sauer responded automatically. ‘Heil Hitler!’ But then he peered at him. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at the British Embassy?’

‘I’m on my way now.’ Hartmann descended the last few steps and hurried towards the main entrance.

Sauer shouted after him, ‘For God’s sake, Hartmann, get a move on! The future of the Reich is at stake—’

Hartmann was already in the street and striding away from the building. He had a premonition of Sauer running up behind him – challenging him, drawing his pistol, ordering him to turn out his pockets, discovering his notebook. But then he told himself to calm down. He was a Third Secretary in the English Department, responsible among other duties for translation. For him to have a copy of an official letter to the British Prime Minister – a letter that would, in any case, be in London in less than an hour – was hardly treason. He could talk his way out of it. He could talk his way out of almost anything.

He climbed the five deeply worn stone steps to the entrance of the British Embassy. The interior of the large portico was lit by a single gloomy lamp. The iron doors were locked. He rang the bell and heard it chime somewhere in the building. The sound died away. Such silence! Across the road, even the Adlon, the most fashionable of all Berlin’s great hotels, was quiet. It was as if the entire city had gone to ground. Eventually he heard bolts being drawn back and a lock turning. A young man poked his head around the door.

Hartmann said, in English, ‘I have an urgent message from the Reich Chancellery which I must give either to the Ambassador or the First Secretary in person.’

‘Of course. We’ve been expecting you.’

Hartmann followed him inside and up a second flight of steps to an imposing reception hall, two storeys high, with an oval glass roof. It had been built in the last century by a famous railway tycoon who had gone bankrupt soon afterwards. The air of opulent bad taste was all-pervasive. Not one but two grand staircases with porcelain balustrades rose and curled around the opposing walls and met in the middle. Nimbly descending the left-hand flight, sideways-on, like Fred Astaire, was a tall, slim, dandyish figure in a dinner jacket with a red carnation in his buttonhole. He was smoking a cigarette in a jade holder.

‘Good evening – Herr Hartmann, is it?’

‘Good evening, Your Excellency. Yes, it is. I have the Führer’s reply to the Prime Minister.’

‘Wonderful.’

The British Ambassador took the envelope, quickly pulled out the three typewritten pages and started reading them where he stood. His eyes flickered rapidly back and forth. His elongated face with its drooping moustache, already melancholy in repose, seemed to grow even longer. He grunted under his breath. When he had finished he sighed, clamped his cigarette holder back between his teeth and gazed at the skylight. His cigarette smoke was fragrant, Turkish.

Hartmann said, ‘The State Secretary wanted you to take particular note of the last sentence, Sir Nevile. He said to tell you it hadn’t been easy.’

Henderson looked again at the last page. ‘Not much of a straw to clutch at, but I suppose it’s something.’ He gave the letter to his young aide. ‘Translate it and telegraph it to London immediately, will you, please? No need for cipher.’

He insisted on showing Hartmann to the door. His manners were as exquisite as his clothes. He was rumoured to be a lover of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia. He had once turned up at the Chancellery wearing a crimson pullover under his pale grey suit: Hitler was said to have gone on about it for days afterwards. What were the British thinking of, Hartmann wondered, sending such a man to deal with the Nazis?

At the door he shook Hartmann’s hand. ‘Tell Baron von Weizsäcker I appreciate his efforts.’ He stared along Wilhelmstrasse. ‘Extraordinary to think we may be out of here by the end of the week. I can’t say I shall be entirely sorry.’

He took a final draw of his cigarette, then pinched it delicately between his thumb and forefinger, extracted it from his holder and flicked it away to disintegrate on the pavement in a cascade of orange sparks.