The Austrian: Book Two Page 15
Chapter 10
Vienna, December 1940
Heydrich had won, and I deserved it. I voluntarily locked myself in my office and buried myself in paperwork, which I took up even from my far lower ranking subordinates, much to everyone’s surprise. I busied myself with looking through and analyzing every single report from the Viennese SD-Ausland office, while the agents who were supposed to be doing it, scratched their heads at their unpredictable boss’s constant change of moods.
I used to be someone who would sit through his hours in the office by smoking a pack of cigarettes, while having a couple of drinks, flirting with pretty secretaries while floating from one department to another supposedly supervising their work but in reality doing anything possible and impossible not to lose my mind to boredom. Now I started coming earlier than everyone else and made my agents run errands all day, organizing their work myself instead of their immediate commanding officers. I would memorize the most insignificant details of the most unimportant cases to later drill the agents, which also astonished my subordinates – and some superiors – greatly. Not that I was interested in the slightest how fast the agent, working under the code name of R-12, was advancing in befriending a certain Spanish official, but anything was welcome so as to prevent myself from picturing my sworn enemy manhandling the woman who refused to leave my mind no matter how much I cursed her name daily, in his Berlin RSHA office. I didn’t know if there was any truth to Heydrich’s words when he hinted at that, but being the biggest manipulator in the whole of the Reich, he could have easily inclined her to that, by blackmailing, threatening, or by any other of his favorite means, just to get to me. I refused to even allow the thought to enter my mind that she might be attracted to him on her own.
Arthur Seyss-Inquart, my superior, paid a visit to my humble, paper-invaded and smoky office one gloomy December morning. He replied with a sigh to my official sharp salute and motioned with his scrawny hand to a stack of paperwork on my table.
“How are things with intelligence in the West, Gruppenführer?” he asked matter-of-factly, squinting shortsightedly from behind his thick, round glasses toward the documents I was currently working on.
I mentally congratulated myself with being in my most prepared state and immediately proceeded with my reports concerning the current situation with Spain, who still refused to sign the pact with us against England, France, and Portugal, and then I even went on to mention Japan and the success of our agents there. Seyss-Inquart only nodded without interrupting, sighed again and rubbed his temples.
“Do you have anything to drink, Gruppenführer?” he asked suddenly, interrupting my report.
I went to the little coffee table in the corner of my office and poured him a glass of water. The minister looked at the glass I held out for him, then at me, and smiled embarrassingly. “I meant alcohol, Gruppenführer.”
“I apologize, Herr Minister,” I quickly replied, wondering what extraordinary thing had happened to make him appear in my office himself instead of summoning me to his, and why this man, who never drank, asked me to pour him a glass. Nevertheless, I kept my musings to myself and reached into my bottom drawer, where I always kept a bottle of brandy.
“It’s good that you made such great advances with the West, Ernst.”
I frowned when he addressed me by my name and not my official title. From my experience with the highest ranking Reich officials I knew that it was never a sign of anything positive. Seyss-Inquart swirled the amber liquid in the glass I had given him, and made a big gulp, barely restraining himself from going into a coughing fit. I bit my lip to hide a smile; the man was not a drinker by any means.
“Only, you might as well burn all these papers, because no one is interested in them anymore.” He finished his thought bitterly with yet another deep sigh.
“I beg your pardon, Herr Minister?”
Seyss-Inquart eyed the glass in his hand, decided against taking another swig, and instead handed me the folder he had come in with. “The Führer signed the new order yesterday. The Barbarossa plan. Read it, please. I’m afraid I can’t leave it for you, but as a chief of the intelligence organ, you’re supposed to be acquainted with its contents.”
I carefully took the black leather folder from his white, bony hands and started reading the document. The closer to the end I got, the less sense it made.
“We’re actually…” I cleared my throat, trying to form the right words. “We’re actually going to invade the Soviet Union? But Molotov has just been received in Berlin… It’s madness, Herr Minister! What’s the meaning of this? Don’t we have a pact of non-aggression?”
“We do,” he answered quietly.
“Herr Minister, I’m afraid I don’t understand what this document means in this case… It opposes our official position concerning our alliance with the Soviet Union… It doesn’t make any sense…”
“What doesn’t make sense to you, Ernst? We’re going to invade the Soviet Union when they don’t expect it, in the late spring-early summer of next year, just like we did with Poland. The Führer has lost interest in courting the western countries in order to form a strong alliance against England, and now he shifted his interest towards the East. The Führer has decided that if… when we conquer the Soviet Union in the blitzkrieg you just learned about, the Western powers will join us more willingly. As for now, you may dispose of all these documents that you’ve been working on, and concentrate all your attention on the situation with the Russians. I believe you will soon receive more precise orders from Reichsführer Himmler and Gruppenführer Heydrich. I just wanted to inform you beforehand, so you wouldn’t be caught off guard.”
“I appreciate it, Herr Minister.” I nodded slightly, and returned the black folder back to Seyss-Inquart.
He outlined the leather with his fingertips and said barely audibly, “You’re right, Ernst. This is madness. We’re never going to…”
He quickly bit his tongue not to pronounce the words, for which he would be immediately stripped of all ranks and executed if he was overheard: we’re never going to win this war. I nodded several times, silently agreeing with his unspoken thought. Seyss-Inquart only shook his head and left, without even replying to my salute… or maybe I actually forgot to raise my hand for the first time in my life, doubting the sanity of my Führer.
“Otto, this is pure madness.” I was repeating the same thing to my best friend, who got his leave for Christmas, and had stopped by my office right after he jumped off the train. We squeezed each other in the tightest bear hug for a good minute, after he burst through my door in full front uniform, dropping his massive duffel bag on the floor and held his arms open grinning at me from ear to ear. I dropped whatever I was doing and rushed to hug the son of a bitch. We were slapping each other on the back for another good minute, after which I invited him to the nearest restaurant to celebrate our reunion, figuring that he was starving after his scarce army meals. God knows, the bastard always loved his food!
“I don’t care if it really is madness, as you say,” Otto said, while stuffing his mouth with duck – a true culinary masterpiece that he consumed without even noticing all the exquisite arrangements that the chief made on the plate. I chuckled unwillingly. “I’m a soldier, so if my commanders say ‘go fight,’ – I go and fight, without thinking too much. Thinking in the army can be lethal, Ernst. Imagine, if every private started pondering his superiors orders and calculating if he should go into battle or how good his chances are. No, thinking is not good.”
“That’s why it’s those commanders’ responsibility to think for their soldiers,” I replied quietly. “And if the commanders throw their soldiers into a war that can’t possibly be won… they’re not that good of a commander in my opinion.”
“Are you talking about the Führer?” He lifted his grey eyes from his plate and glanced at me with an unspoken warning in them.
“I’m just thinking out loud, that’s all,” I answered carefully. We were sitting very fa
r from anyone to overhear us, and Otto would never report my very unpatriotic thoughts to anyone, but I still smiled at my friend, who didn’t want me to accidentally blurt out something highly dangerous. After all, he was right: even here in Vienna we were still in the army, and thinking too much in the army, especially in the one that we had now, was indeed deadly. “If we couldn’t conquer England this whole time, that tiny little island, how can we possibly conquer the Soviet Union? You don’t need to be an army general, or a military analytic to understand one simple truth: they’re simply bigger than us. Stronger. Look at the map, look at that vast territory that we will have to cover. Our frontline will be so wide and thin, that it’ll be a piece of cake for the Russians to easily beat us. Yes, we have the advantage of an unannounced attack. Yes, our war machine is supposedly stronger than theirs, and we do have more tanks, and guns, and planes, which are more sophisticated than the ones of Soviet origin. But still, Otto, no matter how much stronger we are, they simply have more people to fight, and a bigger territory which they know well, unlike us. Now tell me, how can this war possibly be won?”
“What does the Führer think on this account?”
“The Führer thinks that we’re superior by origin, and therefore we’ll win. Because we’re Aryans, and they’re unworthy, Bolshevik sub-humans.”
“And what do you think?”
“I think that if the most superior Aryan comes against twenty Bolshevik sub-humans, he’ll still lose, no matter how blue his blood is. It’s simple math, Otto.”
“You don’t think you could take on twenty Russkies?” Otto chuckled.
“When they have twenty machine guns and I have only one – no. Do you?”
“See, that’s exactly why you sit in your office and I live in the army barracks. You analyze everything too much. I, when we start the operation, will just pick up my machine gun and see how it goes.” My best friend winked at me and downed his beer.
“Don’t get killed over there, with your ‘see how it goes’ attitude.”
“Why, would you cry for me?” Otto broke into another wide grin, forgetting about his duck for a moment.
“Of course I would,” I replied seriously. “You’re like a brother to me.”
He beamed again at my words, and in a few days left to go back to his Waffen SS, who were creeping closer and closer to the Russian border, waiting out in its deceiving ambience for the malicious signal to attack and exterminate a former ally.
That signal came on June 22 1941, following several months of preparation by both high military command and the RSHA office. However, if the former busied itself with preparing the three attacking army groups, which were to attack the Soviet Union from three fronts in the north, west and south, the latter – the RSHA – was in charge of forming and transporting the Einsatzgruppen to the soviet border; death squads, which were to mercilessly annihilate every hostile to the new invaders’ force.
According to the directive, passed through all the offices in charge, Einsatzgruppen were ordered to round up and exterminate every single Soviet Jew, let it be a man, a woman, or a child. The same fate awaited the members of the Soviet commissars, who were also refused the right to surrender and instead were lined against the walls together with their wives, children and other relatives that the Einsatzkommandos had a chance to get their hands on.
Appalled and disgusted, I threw away Heydrich’s orders right after reading them, silently thanking God that I was taking no part in their gruesome deeds after they again delegated me to the role of acquiring the long-forgotten western intelligence. No matter what the official propaganda said, killing women and children was far beyond my understanding and acceptance, Bolshevik or no Bolshevik. So, I would pour another glass of cognac down my throat, clench my teeth and pretend that nothing was happening, or at least it wasn’t my government that was doing that. The problem was that I didn’t believe my own lies anymore. And the most horrifying truth was that I didn’t believe in my own commanders’ intentions anymore. After I tried once again to persuade myself that I was only doing counterintelligence work, the words stuck in my throat.
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Nuremberg, August 1946
“When did you first think that Annalise might be a counterintelligence agent?”
He had finally come to see me again, my so dearly missed visitor, the American OSS agent who had become my guardian angel throughout the never-ending bleak days of my incarceration; days filled only with anguish and despair at the thought of my approaching end. Agent Foster held my hand in his longer than he should have according to protocol, and smiled warmly, apologizing for not visiting me sooner. He moved the shaky chair closer to my cot and sat right next to me, his elbows resting on his knees as he was telling me about Annalise, about my son and how talkative he’d grown to be. I blinked away the tears once again when he chuckled while telling me of how Ernie sometimes mixed German and English words, still too small to differentiate between the two languages.
“I want to see her. I want to see them both.” I pleaded with him once again, against my own better judgement. Wouldn’t it truly be easier to leave without saying last goodbyes? Wouldn’t it be easier for me to step on the gallows, carrying the old memories of her, from long ago, and not the new ones which would only open up old wounds? And wouldn’t it be easier for her, to say her farewells from afar, to whisper them to the warm American air and carry on with her life, without wrenching her heart during the last parting that most certainly would be devastating for the both of us? And still, I longed for her last touch so desperately that I couldn’t catch the words before they escaped my mouth: I want to see her.
“You know that it’s impossible now,” agent Foster started explaining, but I interrupted him.
“No, after the sentencing.” He looked at me with concern, and I only smiled back. “After they give their verdict. That will be my last wish. They have to respect my last wish, don’t they?”
My American friend swallowed uncomfortably and nodded. “Yes, most certainly.”
“Will you do it for me then? Will you bring her here, together with my son? I just want to hold him before I die. I don’t ask for much, I just want to hug them for the last time.”
I couldn’t help but notice how agent Foster clenched his jaw and rubbed his eye vigorously, as if he had a bad itch in it. I rubbed mine too, not even sure if it was from my own words or the fact that he was so emotional because of me.
“Tell me about her,” he uttered at last, after we both struggled to get a hold of our emotions. “Tell me… how did you come to be together? Didn’t you suspect that she might be working for the enemy?”
I was lost in my thoughts for quite a while, thinking over his question, until he rephrased it. “When did you first think that Annalise might be a counterintelligence agent?”
“When I first thought that?” I repeated pensively. “When we were still planning Heydrich’s assassination.”
I was studying the grey, concrete floor while he sat there, not interrupting me.
“I was actually thinking that he was her lover for quite some time.” I chuckled at my own naivety and how easily Heydrich led me to believe what he wanted me to believe. “To think of it now… I am still ashamed for just admitting such a thought. Really, no, she would never… Now I know that, but back then… back then I avoided meeting her every time I went to Berlin with my reports. And then, in early 1942 she found me herself, she came to my office in Vienna, all dressed in black, and asked me if I could kill him for her, can you believe it? She said it to me, right to my face, not afraid that I might arrest and execute her right there and then for her audacious request. She wasn’t in her right mind back then, because she had just buried her brother. She told me all about it when I took her to some park to talk in my car, because she was ready to scream her accusations out loud right in my office. No, she wasn’t thinking back then, of course she wasn’t. She’d lost her child too, but she only told me that later…”
“Why did she want Heydrich dead?” agent Foster inquired quietly, with obvious interest.
“She didn’t tell you the story?”
“No, she never did. I always thought that it was Czech resistance that was responsible for his death.”
“It was. Guided by my very hand.” A crooked smile played on my face again. “I couldn’t walk into his office and shoot him myself, no matter how big my desire to do so was. So I applied my connections in the intelligence sphere to something more productive than spying on the enemies of the Reich.”
I looked him straight in the eye. “Heydrich was the biggest manipulator I’ve ever known, agent Foster. The biggest manipulator, and a very cold and cruel man. He hired Annalise and managed to persuade me that they were together. He liked doing those sorts of things; playing with people’s feelings and hurting them just for the thrill of it. With me it was all different, of course. We hated each other, always did. Only, I never cared about anyone and anything enough for him to catch on it and use it against me like he always did with the rest of his circle and subordinates. So, after he saw us together, when he sensed that she actually meant something to me, he immediately decided to use my affection against me. I pretended that I didn’t care, but it didn’t matter in the end, because he started hating her as well, just because she made the mistake of once being friendly with me. Going back to your question, agent, Annalise wanted him dead so much, because he refused to help her brother. He was a guard in Auschwitz. Norbert his name was, such a handsome young fellow he was, and such a shame, really, what happened to him.”