The 34th Degree

74

T he SD report on von Berg was quite thick. On the black cover was a square of white paper with the title spelled out in jetblack letters: LUDWIG VON BERG, ss no. 96669. Too long to read here, Andros thought, but he had to open the report and at least skim the first page. He did and was hooked. Baron Ludwig von Berg was born in 1904, the son of a certain Maximilian von Berg, an undistinguished professor of music at the University of Munich. What did distinguish Maximilian was that he had been orphaned at birth when his mother, a recently widowed Baroness Teresa von Berg, died during complications in his delivery. Or so Maximilian-and later his son, Ludwig-believed. Maximilian never knew the fantastic truth that he was none other than the illegitimate child of King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Empress Elizabeth of Austria. Neither would his son, were it not for a series of extraordinary circumstances. It was no secret that Ludwig II adored and idealized his cousin Elizabeth. The two had grown up together on Lake Starnberg, Elizabeth in a beautiful home at Possenhofen and Ludwig across the waters in Berg Castle. Whenever the empress returned from Austria on holiday to her family at Possenhofen the lonely Ludwig was there, reveling in her company. The summer of 1871 found the cousins especially intimate. Both were disenchanted with the aristocratic life and had secluded themselves from society. For the 33-year-old Empress Elizabeth, that meant escaping the intrigues of the Austrian court. For the 25-year-old King Ludwig II, that meant retreating from the politics of a new, united Germany. William, king of Prussia, was now hailed as emperor, and for the first time, King Ludwig feared for the future of his beloved Bavaria. He was particularly troubled that by refusing to marry and have children, he had failed to secure the succession of the Wittelsbach family line. Elizabeth understood, and one night in a fit of passion, the two cousins cast aside their platonic pretensions. Max was born the next spring, while Elizabeth continued her seclusion in Merano with her sisters. By now she had been absent from Austria for almost two years, and the clamor of court gossip had reached such malicious levels that she was forced to return in May. But not before she left young “Max von Berg” in the charge of a childhood friend in Munich, a spiritualist named Countess Irene Paumgarten. The countess saw to Max von Berg’s care and education. As a baron, he enjoyed enough social advantage to escape poverty but remained far enough away from a life in the court that had so disappointed his parents. For the next 14 years, Elizabeth would often visit the countess on the pretext of spiritual guidance, but in reality to check up on young Max, who was being trained for a life of music in the grand tradition of Wagner, the one person King Ludwig II claimed understood him besides Elizabeth. Nobody else, however, could understand the enigma that was the Bavarian monarch. For it was during this time that Ludwig II retreated into a netherworld of fantasy, chasing grandiose dreams and building his fabled castles of Neuschwanstein, Herrenchiemsee, and Linderhof. The “mad monarch,” as he was widely known by that time, was finally declared insane and removed from government at the age of 40. In 1886 he drowned in Lake Starnberg under mysterious circumstances, and to this day there is debate as to whether he committed suicide or was assassinated. Because Ludwig left no known successor and because nobody knew about the illegitimate Max or whether he would be accepted with his dubious pedigree, Prince Luitpold became regent of Bavaria within the United Germany. After Ludwig’s death, a grief-stricken Elizabeth retreated to the Greek island of Corfu. She cited health reasons, but it was really to escape her pretentious and altogether miserable existence in the Hapsburg court once and for all. She lived to see Max enjoy a brilliant career as a composer of music and a fortunate marriage to Johanna Guber, the daughter of a prosperous German industrialist. Only Max’s occasional acts of eccentricity, which charmed society but alarmed his family with their increasing frequency, gave her cause for concern. Elizabeth’s last thrill in life was to attend Max’s first Wagnerian production, staged by the Berlin court opera to critical acclaim, on September 10, 1898. At the age of 60, she was assassinated by the Italian anarchist Luzzeni on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Max was 26. It was several years later, on June 2, 1903, that Max von Berg’s wife, Johanna, gave birth to their first and only child, a son whom they ironically chose to name Ludwig. When the child was christened in their local Catholic church in Munich, neither Max nor Johanna nor the priest nor any of the family friends attending had any idea that this was Ludwig III. From the beginning, Ludwig von Berg’s childhood was marred by tragedy. First there was his father’s descent into madness-a shocking and disturbing development to family and friends who knew nothing of Max’s heritage. Then came the outbreak of the Great War. To 11-year-old Ludwig, both seemed to occur simultaneously and with equal devastation. Even as he saw his father deteriorate into a state of insanity, he witnessed the power of the British blockade choking the life out of his country. By the time he was 15, his father had died in an insane asylum, and Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Reich had collapsed. At this point Ludwig von Berg himself started to show signs of mental imbalance, hearing loud voices and having hallucinations. The thought that the madness all around him could also be inside him so terrified Ludwig that he hurled himself into those athletics in which he could excel as an individual: fencing, hunting, horseback riding, swimming, sailing, and marksmanship. To assert himself, to dominate and conquer, was to somehow keep ahead of the encroaching darkness that could swallow his soul at any moment. Whenever he did this-pursued technical perfection in any endeavor for its own sake-the voices stopped. As a result, he could never be still but constantly had to keep moving forward, terrified the voices would return. In school he excelled in chemistry, physics, and mathematics, as well as classical and modern languages, but he found philosophy, morality, and his mother’s Catholicism to be rather worthless on the whole. They did little to answer his honest questions concerning a meaningless universe and offered little comfort for his isolation. Only Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger aroused any sort of interest; the result was an odd synthesis of existential thought that reached its nadir when Ludwig concluded that learning was futile and knowledge vanity. He dropped out of the university in 1922 and, at the age of 19, joined the navy for what he hoped would be a life of adventure. He rose quickly through the ranks of the officer corps. After a brief tour of duty aboard the admiral’s flagship, the cruiser Berlin, he was attached to naval intelligence. He was posted to the top-secret signals interception and code-breaking unit at Kiel. There he used his superior technical and language skills to crack enemy ciphers in defiance of the Versailles Treaty. He also qualified for the navy pentathlon team and taught fencing at the military sports school at Wunsdorf. But to Ludwig von Berg, these were all mere games. The excitement of naval intelligence faded sooner than he expected, and worse, the voices returned. In need of an immediate remedy, he had his grandfather Guber pull strings with Admiral Raeder at fleet headquarters to secure him command of his own submarine. Ever since the Great War, Ludwig von Berg had been spellbound by the submarine’s ability to submerge and become invisible to the enemy. Such stealth offered not only protection but the offensive advantage of surprise. He could go anywhere in the world, even those parts of the sea dominated by the enemy, and launch an underwater torpedo attack without warning. This power, this independence, gave him a sense of control over his destiny. But destiny caught up with Ludwig von Berg one day in 1936. That was when the 33-year-old baron received an urgent call from Wilhelm Canaris, his former first officer from the Berlin. Canaris, now an admiral, wanted to “talk about things.” It had been several years since the two had met, and much had happened in Germany in the meantime. Three years earlier the Reichstag had passed an enabling act that did away with parliamentary government and granted absolute power to Adolf Hitler. Since then the Nazi Party had dismissed the Bavarian state government in Munich, consolidated power throughout the rest of Germany, and crushed all opposition. Ludwig von Berg spent most of his time at sea, so these were events he read about in the newspapers and did not concern him. But Admiral Canaris, who was head of the Abwehr-the German military secret service-looked troubled when he arrived at the Guber estate in Munich where Ludwig resided. There was a transcript from recorded surveillance: “These Nazis, they are bent on ruining Germany,” he told von Berg in the parlor. “Now they want me to give them the noose to hang us all. You must help me.” Von Berg had heard similar grumbling among the officer corps. “How does this concern me?” “You undoubtedly are aware of the SS?” “Smart black uniforms, twin lightning flashes of silver on the collars. How could I miss them? Schutzstaffel-Hitler’s so-called protection squad. Headed by that old schoolmaster and chicken farmer, Himmler.” “Well, in addition to protecting the Fuhrer and the Nazi Party, the SS now concerns itself with protecting the security of the entire Reich. The Reich Security Main Office-or RSHA, as they now call themselves-is usurping every function of the state and armed forces. They even have their own secret intelligence service-the Security Service, or SD. Its chief is Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich.” “Heydrich?” said von Berg. “I know that name from somewhere. Wasn’t there a midshipman on the Berlin by that name?” “There was indeed.” “I saw him at the German officers’ fencing tournament at Dresden once,” von Berg recalled. “After he lost a match in the preliminary rounds, he smashed his saber to the floor and threw such a fit that the umpires had to restrain him.” Von Berg looked at Canaris. “I heard he was expelled from the navy altogether. Surely this can’t be the same man.” Canaris nodded. “Criminals, I tell you, from the top to the bottom. Now the military and political secret services are expected to ‘collaborate.’ I’m working with Heydrich to draw the lines of jurisdiction between his SD and my Abwehr.” “So again I ask you, Admiral, how does this concern me?” “To achieve a common platform, Heydrich is modeling his organization along Abwehr lines. The SD is looking for someone to head its industrial espionage section. Your background with the B-Dienst code-breaking unit at Kiel and your family’s connections with foreign industry make you ideal. I want you to join the SD and be Heydrich’s industrial intelligence chief.” “And spy for you?” “For Germany.” Von Berg raised an eyebrow and looked at Canaris. “Isn’t that what Heydrich is going to say to me when he asks me to start spying on you and your traitors on the General Staff? That would place me in a most impossible position.” “The SD is rounding up anybody they consider a threat to the Reich-Communists, Jews, certain aristocrats.” Canaris emphasized this last class as he looked at Baron von Berg. “Heydrich has secret dossiers on hundreds of thousands more locked in his personal safe, information that can be used against anyone. Let your conscience be your guide, von Berg.” “And if I have no conscience?” “Then listen to reason. Heydrich’s got a file on you, too.” Von Berg laughed. “On what, my politics? It must be a rather flimsy file. I have no politics, you know that. As for my family, my grandfather is the quintessential conservative German industrialist. He squandered I don’t know how much helping that Bormann fellow finance the restoration of the old Barlow Palace down on the Brunnenstrasse for their party headquarters.” “All I know is what I heard,” said Canaris. “That two years ago, after the bloody purge of the brownshirts by the SS, Heydrich seized all SA documents, including records of their interrogations at Stadelheim Prison here in Munich.” “Politics, politics, Admiral. I fail to see how this could possibly involve me.” “It seems that one of those interrogations extracted a rather extraordinary confession from a member of the Bavarian political police before the SA executed him. It concerned your father and the cause of his madness.” This instantly aroused von Berg’s interest. “You are sure of this?” “Of the file’s existence, yes. What’s inside, no.” Von Berg was silent. The thought that there could be an answer to the enigma that had been his father and a reason for his own signs of madness was something he had written off long ago. But now… “If what you are saying is true,” he said a moment later, “then why would Heydrich trust me to work for him?” “Precisely because he has a file on you. He understands that self-interest will secure your loyalty, because without the protection of the SS, your future is doubtful. His ranks are full of former enemies who serve him well. Heinrich Mueller, the head of the Gestapo, was himself once a member of the Bavarian political police.” “I’m no Nazi, Admiral. I’m not much of anything when it comes to articles of faith.” “Your ideology-or lack of one-is second to your usefulness. The SD needs your skills. Germany needs your loyalty.” And von Berg needed the secret that was locked inside Heydrich’s safe. Less than one month later, SS colonel Ludwig von Berg reported to SD headquarters on the Prinz Albrechtstrasse and Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. There he joined two hundred so-called specialists from every imaginable field-economics, physics, linguistics, arts, religion. Among them he also found arsonists, forgers, kidnappers, and murderers. All wore the black SS uniform with a red armband bearing a black swastika on a white background. Together they managed what had become a worldwide criminal organization with three thousand full-time agents and fifty thousand part-time agents. Von Berg’s industrial espionage section belonged to Department III of the RSHA and tracked the world’s vital industries in munitions, fuels, rockets, and nuclear fission. For Baron von Berg, this was a simple task. After his grandfather’s death, he had inherited more than a dozen seats on the boards of such major German industrial giants as Krupp, Zeiss, and I. G. Farben, not to mention the family’s equally prominent Guber Industries. To the outside world, Baron von Berg was a former naval officer and German industrialist who conducted business abroad. Where possible, von Berg would establish shell corporations in neutral countries such as Switzerland as fronts to purchase vital technology from foreign countries. He would also use legitimate German enterprises abroad to enter into an intricate economic web with American, British, and European corporations. As a result, he was able to break the Versailles Treaty by obtaining various parts for submarine, missile, and other research from a number of different companies around the world. These components would then be assembled in Germany. Inside the Third Reich, however, Standartenfuhrer von Berg of the SS remained under the watchful eye of his superior, Heydrich, who, at meetings with RSHA department heads, often referred to him as “our shady Baron from military intelligence.” To Heydrich, Baron von Berg would always personify the old Germany, the conservative establishment, and the naval officer corps that had rejected him and that his twisted mind sought to destroy.

Too many minutes later, utterly astounded, Andros reached the final page of the summary section of the report: Because Ludwig II left no known successor, Prince Luitpold assumed the office of regent of Bavaria within the united Germany from 1886 until he died in 1912. The next year his son assumed the kingship and declared himself Ludwig III, only to be dethroned in 1918 with the brief establishment of the Soviet republic that preceded the doomed Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich. By this time Ludwig II’s son and true heir by birthright, Maximilian von Berg, had died in an insane asylum. The line of succession now falls to Ludwig von Berg. As far as the world is concerned, only two of us are aware of Ludwig von Berg’s true identity. All members of the Bavarian political police aware of this rumor have been eliminated; Gestapo chief Heinrich Mueller knows nothing. As for others who might be aware of Maximilian’s legacy, it is doubtful that-if they are still alive-they would come forward to confirm the rumor, much less stake their lives on it. Nevertheless, the legend of Ludwig II’s son still fires a fierce monarchist movement in Bavaria, and the Wittelsbach family has worn the emperor’s crown three times before. Should the secret of Maximilian von Berg’s true identity be known, such sentiment could be strong enough to put Ludwig von Berg, the true Ludwig III, on the throne-if not by certain Germans, then by the Allies. Thus, in the final analysis, U-boat commander Ludwig von Berg of the Imperial Navy can only be considered an enemy of the Reich. Recommend special treatment. Heil Hitler!

Andros knew that “special treatment” was the SS euphemism for murder. The report was signed by the SS staff officer who had prepared it and was initialed by Heydrich. Heydrich, in turn, had the man executed the following day and added his own handwritten addendum to the bottom of the page: Now I am the only one who is aware of Ludwig von Berg’s true identity. Genetics dictate that the Baron should be completely mad by the time he is 40. That would be June 2, 1943. In the meantime, he can still be of use to the Reich. He shall be brought under my direct supervision, where I can personally observe the signs of his progressive mental decline and perhaps encourage them. If, at the age of 40, he is still psychologically sound, I shall see to it that he receives very special treatment indeed.