The Lady from Zagreb Read online

  It seemed appropriate.

  That night I arranged to meet Kirsten at Kempinski’s on the Kurfürstendamm. Unusually, in spite of being Aryanized and there being little on the menu, the place still managed to feel like a decent restaurant. I’d decided to ask her to marry me without mentioning anything of what Goebbels had told me; she was a nice girl and I figured she deserved to think that I was asking her for all the right reasons, instead of a desire to keep her out of the hands of the Gestapo. I was just about to put the question to her when the rise and fall of air-raid warning sirens sent us running to the nearest shelter; and it was down there I finally got around to proposing marriage.

  “I know I’m not exactly a catch,” I said as the walls vibrated around us and dust fell off the ceiling into our hair. “You could almost certainly find someone younger. With better prospects. But I’m honest. As far as that goes, these days. And it’s just possible that I’ll make you a good husband. Because I love you, Kirsten. I love you very much.”

  I threw that bit about love in because, generally speaking, it’s what a girl wants to hear when a man asks her to marry him. But it wasn’t true and we both knew it. I’m a much better liar than I am an actor.

  “I assume that your proposal has something to do with this,” she said.

  She opened her handbag and showed me a buff-colored envelope she’d received that very morning. It had no stamp, just a postmark, and was quite obviously from the Gestapo.

  I took the letter out of the envelope, noted the address on Burgstrasse, and nodded. I knew the address, of course. It was part of the old Berlin stock exchange. And the official letter was a formal summons to explain her “antisocial” comments to a commissar Hartmut Zander. My only worry now was that she might think I’d engineered the whole thing in order to persuade her to marry me. It was the kind of dirty trick that many Gestapo men were wont to pull, just to get a peek at a nice girl’s underwear.

  “It’s very sweet of you, Bernie,” she said, “but you don’t have to do this. I couldn’t let you.”

  “Listen, you have to trust me on this, angel, I knew nothing about that letter. But now that I’ve seen it, here’s what I think. You’re in a tight spot. There’s no doubt about it. I’d come with you but I’m not allowed. You’re not even allowed a lawyer present at the interview. But marry me and I think I can make all this go away. In fact I’m certain of it. After that you don’t ever have to see me again if you don’t want to. I’ll forget about the ring I have in my pocket and the loud evening I had planned after we got married. We’ll just call it a marriage of convenience and leave it at that. It’ll be like a business arrangement. We’ll meet for a coffee in a year’s time and have a good laugh about it. You can divorce me quietly and everything will be like it was before.”

  “Why are you doing this, Bernie?”

  “Let’s say that lately my own lack of nobility has begun to get me down. Yes, let’s say that. I have an urgent need to do something good for someone else. In recent weeks I’ve seen one too many bad things, and the plain fact of the matter is I like you a lot, Kirsten, and I don’t want to see anything bad happen to you. It’s as simple as that, really.”

  “Could something bad happen to me?”

  “If what you told me is true, then they’ll give you a rough ride. Oh, not that rough. Just a verbal battering. And you even might talk your way out of it. Some do. Maybe you’re the type to give as good as you get. Don’t admit anything. That’s the best way to handle these Gestapo commissars. Then again it’s equally possible you’ll go to pieces, in which case you might end up in prison for a short spell. Say, six months. Ordinarily that’s not so bad. But lately things have got much tougher in the cement. Even on the outside food is short. In Brandenburg it’s several hundred calories less than that. Skinny little thing like you might find that hard going. At the very least you might lose your job. And jobs are difficult to get when you lose them on account of the Gestapo. It might be awkward getting another.”

  She nodded quietly. “The ring, Bernie. Could I see it, please?”

  “Sure.” I felt inside my vest pocket, polished it on my trouser leg, and then handed it over.

  She looked at it for a moment, smiled a charming sort of smile, and then put it carefully on the finger of her left hand.

  The next day we were married and, during the simple ceremony, Kirsten moved the ring onto the finger of her right hand, as if she really meant it, like a proper German wife. It was a small but important gesture and one that did not go unnoticed by me.

  Twenty-seven

  The S-Bahn train to Genshagen, about an hour south of Berlin, was packed with car workers and factory managers returning there from visiting relations, and officials from the German Labor Front, the SS, and the Luftwaffe. Eavesdropping on their cozy conversations, it was impossible to tell them apart, and this caused me to reflect on the long and close relationship the Nazis had enjoyed with Daimler-Benz AG. Jakob Werlin, one of the company’s directors, had been a personal friend of Hitler’s since before the 1923 putsch and, according to the Munich Post, on the leader’s release from Landsberg Prison in 1924, it was Werlin who collected him from the gates and drove him away in a new Mercedes-Benz that he subsequently gave to Hitler. So perhaps it was Daimler-Benz’s support for Hitler that had helped persuade the Nazis to eliminate taxes on German automobiles soon after they formed a government—a nice payback for all their support. But it wasn’t just cars that Daimler-Benz supplied to the Nazis. There was a huge number of airplane engines for Germany’s fighters and bombers, as well; the company was crucial to the country’s war effort. One day I hoped some thoughtful historian would point out the close connection between the Mercedes-Benz motor car and Germany’s favorite dictator and that the Lord would find a way to pay these bastards back for their help in bringing the Nazis to power and keeping them there.

  One of the company directors, Max Wolf, met me at the train and drove me straight to the factory. He was in his late fifties—one of those very stiff, mustachioed Prussian Lutherans from Schwiebus, in Poland—and a man for whom the Daimler-Benz company was a way of life. The little gold Party badge glittering like a tiny satrap’s diadem on the lapel of his tailor-made suit seemed to indicate that his particular way of life had worked out well for him so far. He couldn’t have seemed more smug if he’d been a bull walrus at the end of a successful mating season.

  “The director of the factory, Herr Karl Mueller, is a personal friend of General Schellenberg,” he informed me. “Herr Mueller has instructed me to provide you with all the cooperation you need in the completion of your orders, Captain.”

  “That’s awfully kind of him, and you, Herr Wolf.”

  “As you probably know, we’re mainly aircraft engines here at Genshagen,” he explained in the car. “The Mercedes-Benz automobile is made at Sindelfingen, near Stuttgart. That’s where General Schellenberg’s car is now. I’m to give you the export paperwork for that vehicle and then lend you another vehicle that you can drive south to Sindelfingen, where you can collect the new one, to drive to Switzerland.”

  I winced a little; whenever people use the word “vehicle” it always reminds me of pompous traffic policemen, which, I now realized, was what Wolf most reminded me of.

  We drove into a factory compound that was as big as a decent-sized town and surrounded with the very latest 88-millimeter antiaircraft guns. These were obviously effective as there wasn’t a lot of bomb damage to be seen. I also noticed the presence of several female SS troopers. Wolf saw me paying them attention.

  “Given the makeup of the workforce, the SS guards are an unfortunate necessity, I’m afraid. Half of our twelve thousand car workers are foreign, many of them slave laborers—Jews, mostly, and all of them women—from the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück nearby. But they’re well fed and quite happy with the conditions here, I think.”

  “I
suppose that’s why the guards are carrying whips,” I said. “To keep them smiling through the day.”

  “We don’t tolerate any ill treatment of our slave laborers,” said Wolf without a trace of embarrassment. “Our German workers wouldn’t stand for it. Well, you can guess what these fellows are like. Most of them are beefsteak Nazis—you know, brown on the outside and red in the middle. Our Jews work hard, and I’ve no complaints about any of them. Frankly, they’re the best workers anyone could wish for. Sure, sometimes we catch our German workers giving the Jews extra bread and sharing their coffee but that’s not so easy to stop in a factory this size.”

  “Easy enough, I’d have thought. You could give the Jewish workers more to eat at dinnertime.”

  Wolf smiled uncomfortably and shook his head. “Oh no. That’s really not for me to say. The policy on slave labor is set in Berlin by Reich Minister Speer and enforced by the SS. I just do what I’m told. It’s as much as I can do to supply enough interpreters to make sure the assembly line continues to move efficiently. We have Poles, Russians, French, Hungarians, Norwegians, Czechs, and Dutch working here—even a few English, I’m told. They’re the laziest, you know, along with the French. Your best worker is a Russian Jewess. She’ll work all day and half the night if you tell her. We’re producing nearly four thousand aircraft engines a year at this plant alone. So we must be getting something right.”

  “You must feel very proud,” I observed.

  “Oh, we are. We are. If you’d care to, you’re very welcome to join us for lunch in the executive dining room. You’ll find we have all sorts. Labor officials, officers like yourself—”

  I thought about that for about a millisecond: I was hungry, all right, but after Jasenovac I couldn’t have thought of anything worse than eating lunch with men like Max Wolf, especially when German workers were sneaking bread to Jewish slave laborers. The food would have stuck in my throat.

  “It’s kind of you, sir, but I’d best get on my way as quickly as possible. I’ve a long drive ahead of me.”

  “That you have,” he said.

  He drove me straight to where my car was parked. It was a 190, with a camouflaged paint job, exactly the same as the one I’d driven in Croatia. He handed me the keys and the paperwork. I expect he was keen to be rid of me. But not as keen as I was to be rid of him.

  “You’ll want to take the road to Munich, of course,” said Wolf. “From there you can pick up the road to Stuttgart. It looks longer on the map to do it that way, but of course it isn’t. Thanks to the leader we have autobahns—the best roads in the world. In a Mercedes-Benz you can be in Munich in less than six hours from Berlin, with another two hours to Stuttgart. If you try to drive straight to Stuttgart from here it will take you at least eleven or twelve hours. Believe me, I’ve done it both ways and I know what I’m talking about.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate the advice.”

  And I did. I made good time on the autobahn. It just goes to show that even the most loathsome sort of pen-pushing nine-till-five Nazi can sometimes put you on the right road to exactly where you want to go.

  After the roads in Croatia this one was a dream to drive on. I was almost enjoying the journey. All advertising was banned on the autobahn, which made the roads a pleasant escape from the seemingly endless propaganda posters that were such a blight in the cities. My only concern was that driving at high speed on a uniformly straight road with little to look at I might succumb to the highway-hypnosis that Fritz Todt—before Speer, Germany’s leading engineer, and the man who had done most to build these autobahns—had warned about, although frankly the speed limit was much lower than of old; to save on fuel it was just eighty kilometers an hour. But with two lanes on either side of an oak-planted median strip, the autobahn still ran as straight as an aircraft runway; and this was why, here and there, sections of these medians had been converted to auxiliary airstrips, with the aircraft that sometimes used them hidden in nearby woodlands. The other traffic was mostly trucks carrying tank parts and motorboats, although once I drove past a whole U-boat, which struck me as a little surreal.

  On Schellenberg’s instructions I wasn’t wearing a uniform and, because all nonmilitary traffic was allowed on the autobahns only in exceptional circumstances, the Orpo pulled me over a couple of times to check my papers, which at least broke the monotony of the journey. About halfway to Munich I stopped at an Alpine-style filling station to fill up, get some coffee, and stretch my legs. But then I was straight back on the road, as I was hoping to reach the Swiss border before dark.

  Somewhere on the journey south I thought about my new bride and our unconsummated marriage, although that particular fact had seemed of lesser importance. After the ceremony, it had felt to me as if I would have been taking advantage of Kirsten in those circumstances, especially since these circumstances certainly included a strong intention on my part to sleep with the lady from Zagreb again, either at my hotel in Zurich or at her matrimonial home in Küsnacht. But mostly I just felt glad to have kept Kirsten out of the Gestapo’s hands. Goebbels had given me his word that she wouldn’t be bothered by the SD again, and while I was reluctant to trust him, I had little alternative. Of course, being alone in a car like that for hours on end means you’re inside your own skull a lot and after a while you’re seeing marks on a white wall that maybe aren’t really there; I had the crazy idea that maybe Goebbels knew I’d slept with Dalia and that my being forced to marry Kirsten was his way of paying me back—twice over if he chose not to keep his word after all.

  Another crazy idea I had was that I was followed all the way from Genshagen. Except that it wasn’t crazy at all. With so little automobile traffic, it’s not easy following someone unnoticed on the autobahn. Another Mercedes 190 in your rearview mirror, matching your speed for six or seven hundred kilometers, is hard to miss. Schellenberg had warned me I might get followed by the Gestapo in Switzerland. I suppose I wasn’t very surprised that they decided to follow me in Germany, too.

  I arrived at the factory in Sindelfingen just before six in the evening. My replacement car—another 190, with a civilian paint job, black—was awaiting collection and I was soon on my way again, although with less pleasure than before. I was running the engine in, of course, but that shouldn’t have made the new car seem heavier and more sluggish than its predecessor. And soon after leaving Sindelfingen I stopped the car and opened the trunk just to make sure I wasn’t carrying anything illegal. I found nothing, but this still worried me all the way until Fort Reuenthal on the southern side of the river Rhine, where Swiss customs searched the car more thoroughly and, much to my relief, they found nothing illegal, either.

  The fort wasn’t called that lightly. There were bunkers, tank barricades, infantry barracks, and artillery emplacements, including two 75-millimeter rapid-firing antitank guns. Seeing all of this for the first time, I realized just how seriously the Swiss took the matter of defending their borders against any foreign potential aggressor, namely Germany.

  Sergeant Bleiker, a detective from the Zurich City Police, met me with my visa and some Swiss money, which I bought with the gold reichsmarks that Eggen had given me: the Swiss didn’t like taking our paper money and, even with Hitler’s head on them, preferred the hundred-mark coins. Gold has a jingle when you count your money, I suppose. The Swiss detective was in his forties, a tall quiet man with a small mustache. He wore a brown flannel suit and a brown felt hat with a wide brim. He had a firm handshake and looked a sporty type. But gregarious he was not. I’ve had longer conversations with a parrot.

  “That’s quite a fortress you’ve got back there,” I said when at last we were on the road.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said. “Tell your Nazi friends in Germany.”

  “When was it built? It looks modern.”

  “Nineteen thirty-nine. Just in time for the beginning of the war. Otherwise, who knows what might have happened?”

&nbs
p; “Right. And by the way, for the record, now that I’m in Switzerland, I don’t have any Nazi friends in Germany.”

  “I certainly hope that doesn’t mean you’re going to claim asylum here, Captain Gunther. Because the boat is full. And I’d hate you to waste your time trying to stay and then get into trouble with your own people when we had to send you home again.”

  “No, no. I just got married. So I have to go back. In fact, they insisted on it. The marriage, that is. You’ve heard of a shotgun wedding. Mine involved the threat of a falling ax.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “So you can relax, Sergeant. Our leader, Adolf Hitler, doesn’t like it when his citizens choose not to come home.”

  Sergeant Bleiker sniffed. “I couldn’t even tell you the name of our leader. Or anything about him.”

  He didn’t talk much after that except to issue directions from the passenger seat, and this happened all the way to Zurich, for which I was grateful, as most of the roads were small and windy.

  We drove through the Talstrasse entrance of the Hotel Baur au Lac after dark. Bleiker oversaw my check-in, bowed gravely, and told me that Inspector Weisendanger would come to the hotel and meet me for breakfast first thing in the morning.

  Exhausted after my long drive, I ate some supper and went to bed. But not before I had telephoned the lady from Zagreb.

  Twenty-eight

  In the morning I got up very early and took a short walk along the shore of Lake Zurich and watched a passenger ferry landing bespectacled, quiet men wearing even quieter suits as they disembarked and headed to work in banks and offices. I wasn’t sure I envied them their steady lives but there was a pleasing predictability about Swiss life in general. The water tasted sweet and the air tasted fresh, although that might only have been because Berlin’s air and water were always full of bomb dust and a permanent smell of cordite. Sometimes, after a heavy night from the RAF, Berlin’s famous air smelled like a sulfur mine.