The Invisible Victory

33

Greenparish was giving a party.

I had been in Wuppertal all autumn, and I had grown dreadfully bored. I had questioned over and over again all the scientists and technologists of the I G Farben works, most of whom I felt could be of no interest to the occupying powers, and little even to their friends.

SHAEF had been dissolved. FIAT was under the British Control Commission, co-operating with ASLOS, OSRD, CIOS, TIIC, OMGUS and JIDA. We were all concerned in Operation Overcast and Project Paperclip, to whisk five thousand top German scientists into the United States, by way of detention camps near Paris and Frankfurt, named somewhat savagely Backporch, Ashcan and Dustbin. The bodies behind these initials naturally quarrelled fiercely with each other, with the United States Army and with Washington. By the end of November, only three scientists had reached American soil, and they were sneaked out for their own use by the United States Air Force, which was thought most unsporting. Many I interrogated showed little zest for a new life across the Atlantic. So little, they got on their bicycles and disappeared from official view for ever.

I was comfortable and well fed. We lived isolated in an Anglo-American town near the Zoo, protected by sentries and road-blocks. We had our own shop, cinema, library and discussion group. Greenparish lectured the troops on the psychological background to Hitlerism, to their mystification and boredom, but at least it was warm and they were allowed to smoke and there was nothing else to do.

I saw something of David Mellors, who had become a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps, stationed at the British Hospital in Bad Godesberg, where Chamberlain once met Hitler beside the Rhine. On the far side of black, cold, ruined Wuppertal at Barmen, the Royal Artillery were blowing up the enemy's ammunition. The Grenadier Guards were up the hill, in a brand new German Army barracks. Greenparish and myself, and some uniformed nutritionists in UNRRA, shared the mess of an armoured regiment. His Majesty George VI filled almost exactly the outline left by Adolf Hitler over the fireplace. I had grown used to the clockwork of ping-pong, there were plenty of copies of Life and Look, and we got Bourbon from the Americans in exchange for British duffle-coats.

But I grew uncomfortable, playing a part in Hogarth's picture of Calais Gate, his fat friar fingering the immense raw joint of English beef while the ragged and skinny populace enviously sup their bowls of thin soup. I was forbidden to exchange a friendly word even with my German bat-woman, who cleaned my room, polished my shoes, laundered my clothes and neatly mended them.

She was a handsome blonde who reminded me of Gerda, and I discovered that she was a Luftwaffe general's daughter, glad enough to earn the wages of the conquerors. It must have been the first employment of her life-two and a quarter million British misses and madams put their hair in snoods and went to work making tanks and aircraft, but Hitler refused Albert Speer at his Ministry of War Production to let Nazi womanhood dirty her hands with machine oil. The Fьhrer's notion that woman's place is in the home helped lose Germany the war.

'I hear there is some fratting with the Germans,' Greenparish said to me in the mess. 'Among the other ranks.'

'They use the word to mean another very similar.'

He wrinkled his nose. 'At least the powers that be have taken my point sufficiently to relax the rules for my little conversazione. One's problem of re-educating the Nazis is of opening sufficient windows. Hitler was to them simply the idealized embodiment of their group-identification. Surely you agree? One must let them know that other standards prevailed outside Germany. Not, of course, that there seems a single Nazi left in Germany today,' he added resignedly. 'They would all seem to have vanished from the face of the earth, like the swastika flags and SS uniforms and those ghastly muscular neo-Classical statues of pagan dimwits.'

The party was for the Saturday evening of December 2. Greenparish had transported a don from his own Cambridge college to lecture on English Literature, to be followed by Greenparish explaining the relationship of man to society. The don was a short, jumpy, birdlike man with large round glasses, always shaking hands and smiling and apologizing for his presence. Our colonel recognized it all as the familiar politicians' lunacy, but allowed use of a room with crystal chandeliers and cream and gold moulded walls, now badly knocked about. Greenparish had invited about thirty guests from the re-emergent Elberfeld Literary Circle. They were mostly middle-aged and elderly, and uncertain whether to be submissive, arrogant or frightened. All arrived dressed in their best, though everyone's best right across Europe was growing threadbare after six years.

On a long table against the wall were set bully beef sandwiches, sausage rolls, bottles of hock and cigarettes in glasses. Greenparish meant refreshments to be taken during the discussion of points raised by the speakers, in the manner of those spirited, sly, chattering little parties of Grange Road, Boars Hill and Hampstead. But the guests fell on the food at once, slipping sandwiches into handbags and pockets for their families, helping themselves to the wine, baring the table in two or three minutes.

'This isn't what I intended at all,' muttered Greenparish crossly. 'I honestly felt that tonight would see an achievement of mind over stomach. Look how those cigarettes simply vanished!'_

I stood in the corner, neither eating nor drinking. In those disordered times in Germany, you developed a suspicious eye for anyone who looked out of place. I had observed aloof from the others a man with the double distinction of being young and having an air about him. He was fair, pallid, sharp faced, with pale blue eyes, in a green high-buttoned sportsman's jacket, check trousers and stylish brown and white shoes. He caught my eye. After a minute or two, he approached and said in English, 'Mr Elgar, I believe?'

'How did you know my name?'

'A lot of people in Wupertal know you, Mr Elgar.' He spoke with the singsong precision of a man who has learned a language in a lecture room. 'You were a visitor in an earlier age.'

I noticed the thin hand which held his cigarette had fair hairs on the back, and I thought his nails were manicured. As the surviving young were all prisoners of war I asked curtly, 'Why aren't you in the Army?'

'A question which obviously needed asking. I worked for the Ministry of Propaganda, which first afforded exemption from military conscription. Later, I was too valuable for cannon-fodder.'

I saw that he must have been at least thirty, though he had a boyish look which I suspected he cultivated. But I did not believe him. There were plenty of SS men in Germany who had thrown their uniforms into the nearest ditch. 'May I introduce myself,' he continued. 'Herr von Recklinghausen. It should be "Count", but I dropped it in boyhood, the Hitler Reich not being…well, shall we say, you never knew exactly where you stood with titles. It was most amusing, to see senior members of the Nazi Party exhausting themselves in a struggle between their natural envy and their natural respect for our aristocracy. You noticed perhaps that I did not click my heels when introducing myself? So Teutonic a gesture would, I'm sure, be frowned upon in the state of affairs we now live in. _Autres temps, autres moeurs._ I try to adapt. I'm generally called Rudi.'

I felt greatly offended by this self-assertive harangue. 'If you worked for the Reichspropagandaministerium, you must be a member of the Nazi Party,' I said accusingly.

'How could I deny it? My file and party number will be among the others discovered on some country roadside by the Americans. But I have convinced Dr Greenparish that I am harmless. What a charming fellow he is! Most cultured. When I learned I was to be interrogated, I expected to be confronted with a beef-faced man smoking a stinking pipe, with his riding-crop and revolver on the table, the sort who would shoot a dozen Indian natives before breakfast. These national stereotypes! Well, they're the fault of us propagandists, I admit. But propaganda as a weapon of war has at least the virtue that it has killed nobody yet.'

He offered me his own packet of Lucky Strike, a gesture in the circumstances of nonchalant ostentation. I have never been able to hate anybody for long, even Lamartine and Archie. I began to be amused by Rudi. He was probably a deserter, perhaps a crook, disguising himself in an elaborate but transparent garment of respectability. 'What are you doing in Wuppertal?' I asked in a less unfriendly tone.

'I escaped from under the very moustaches of Josef Stalin. My home is in Schцnebeck on the river Elbe, which unfortunately is in the Russian Zone. My family is extremely well known there.'

I noticed Greenparish talking animatedly in German to an elderly couple with a well-scrubbed looking, pink checked, plump daughter of thirty or so, blonde hair in long girlish plaits down her back. He was providing Wuppertal with its first evening party of completely unafraid conversation since the advent of Hitler. But the others were not chattering about the intellectual treat in store, rather about food, cold, queues, transport and poverty, like everyone else.

'Would you perform for me an act of mercy?' Rudi asked unexpectedly. I noticed he smelt of perfume. I supposed Germany was flooded with it after the fall of France. 'It is to save the life of a sick child.'

'Can't you get hold of a doctor? Things haven't broken down to that extent in Germany.'

The greatest doctor in the world could do nothing. She is the little daughter of an old friend of my family's, who lives out in Beyenberg.' That was the eastern district of Wuppertal, where Jeff had taken Gerda and myself in the Cord for cakes and cognac that bright Sunday afternoon.

'He is a good man, not a Nazi, who was congratulating himself on coming alive through both the war and the Hitler Reich. Though of course like all of us he is penniless. His daughter has the meningitis.' Rudi tapped his forehead. 'She is infected with the Staphylokokken. You will understand, I think, Mr Elgar? You were not sent to Wuppertal to interrogate Professor Dr Domagk for nothing.' I wondered how he had nosed out information about my duties. 'The disease cannot be touched with sulpha drugs. She must have some penicillin.'

'How did you get to hear about penicillin?'

'Everyone knows about penicillin, conversation buzzes about it in the food-queues. People have always grown excited over wonderful cures since the days of Christ and his miracles. But as you know, we Germans have no penicillin at all, no more than we have chocolates or new shoes,' he ended in a tone of self-pity.

I supposed this Anglo-American achievement had been paraded in the German newspapers before my arrival. It did not occur to me then that penicillin would become one of the most valuable goods in the German black market. I thought of it as a rare drug, with a rare use outside the battlefield. But I had the sagacity to reply, 'I have formed the opinion, mein Herr, that you are not wholly honest.'

He seemed to take no affront. 'Honesty in present conditions has become a little hard to define. So many day to day transactions necessary to remain alive are unlawful. Your soldiers don't mind going without a wash or a smoke to exchange soap and cigarettes for a bottle of brandy or half an hour with a pretty girl. The Woodbines so kindly provided by Dr Greenparish this evening will in the morning be bartered for turnips or sewing-needles or tooth-powder, or with luck a little butter. How bizarre our times, when cigarettes are far too valuable to smoke! But without the black market we should have no hope of the most meagre comforts and many essentials, and the problems of you people would be much greater.'

'I don't believe for one moment your sentimental story of the ill child.'

'I hardly expected you to,' he replied blandly. 'I wished to afford you an excuse for selling me some penicillin. I don't care for commercial affairs. I'm a writer, formerly an engineer. But _on doit travailler pour vivre._ I perform a useful function as middleman in various transactions. If you let me have some penicillin, I give you my word it would go only to the most deserving of sick persons. I shouldn't like to make a pfennig out of such a commodity.'

'I can obtain penicillin no more easily than you. But let me assure you that had I a kilo at my disposal, not a milligram of it would get into your hands. You can also take it from me that the rest of the British personnel would tell you exactly the same thing.'

'Are the Allies to continue their practice of killing German children into peacetime?'

I do not think Rudi calculated this as an insult. That would have been against his interest. But rather a way of shaming me somehow into scrounging some penicillin. I replied by turning my back. Undaunted, he said, 'In case you should change your mind, Mr Elgar

He thrust a slip of pasteboard into the neck of my battle-dress. It was an embossed visiting card with Count Rudolf Ernst von Recklinghausen in Gothic print, an address somewhere in Barmen, and in the corner Ьbersetzer, translator. I wondered how he had acquired it. Getting printing done in Germany was as difficult as getting a watch repaired or finding new bicycle tyres. Though for 100,000 marks a German could buy a new identity card, a new employment book and ration cards, an Army leave pass or even discharge papers, a Hungarian or Italian passport. In short, a new existence for a frightened Nazi. I suspected that Rudi knew his way to a forger's.

The don lectured apologetically about English Literature, ending by seeming to apologize for winning the war, and even for starting it. Afterwards, he sat with Greenparish and myself in the mess, apologizing for drinking our whisky.

'It went very well,' Greenparish said with self-satisfaction. 'I can even see this evening as the beginning of an entirely new phase in Anglo-German relations. Though next time I shall take care not to bring in the food before I've finished.'

I mentioned Rudi. 'Oh, yes. A most interesting young man. He was one of Goebbels' bright boys, you know. And however ruthless that mendacious propaganda machine, one must admit it was tremendously effective. Your German was still believing it while his roof was being blown off by advancing troops. And perhaps even his head.' Greenparish was amused at the joke. 'He's an interesting educational background. Before joining the Goebbels outfit, he took a degree in engineering at the University of Wittenberg.'

'Which is in the Russian Zone, like his home town of Schцnebeck. And so neither can be checked.'

'He's perfectly above board, I assure you. He's far too intelligent ever to have been a wholehearted Nazi.' I was aware of Greenparish looking uncomfortably at the don, who immediately apologized for keeping us up and went to bed. When the pair of us were alone, Greenparish took my sleeve and whispered, 'That Recklinghausen chap is hot stuff. You've heard of Operation Backfire?'

'These ridiculous names only confuse me.'

'That's the show at Cuxhaven with the V2 rocket engineers. You must have heard of a man called von Braun?'

'Never.'

'He was the top scientist at Peenemьnde, and was captured with about four hundred others on the launching site. He's been in the United States since summer, doing something important with their guided missile research at a place called Fort Bliss, which appears to be somewhere in the middle of Texas. Our Count was sent to Peenemьnde by Goebbels himself, to handle the propaganda side. He knows absolutely everything about the place. The Americans are very interested in the Count.'

'I suppose there's no chance the man's telling a pack of lies?'

Greenparish looked offended. 'Of course not. He has the fullest documentation to back him up.'

I decided to go to bed, letting Greenparrish make his own mistakes. At the door, I asked, 'But why should the Americans continue to be the slightest interested in missile research? They've won the war.'

'Dear boy,' Greenparish sighed. 'You don't imagine the Russians think they've won their war yet, do you?'