The Austrian: Book Two Read online

  I dropped my spoon and covered my face with my hands, hoping that it was all just a bad dream, a nightmare that would end any minute now, and I would wake up in my bed in my childhood home in Reid, with my mother baking an apple pie while the sun shone through the windows, and the whole family gathered at the big table; my parents, my brothers, Annalise and our son…

  I slowly removed my hands away from my eyes, and only saw the grey peeling wall of my cell. My brothers were both taken as prisoners of war, Annalise and our child were an ocean away from me, and both of my parents were long gone. Dead. Like I will be soon.

  “Are you all right?” Henry’s voice, full of genuine concern, distracted me from my brooding thoughts.

  I nodded several times, to convince myself more than him, and even managed to force a smile.

  Chapter 13

  Berlin, June 1943

  That bastard’s smile was everything I was longing to see, for so long. I stopped in my tracks as soon as I entered the anteroom, and almost dropped the folders I was holding. Otto got up from his chair and broke into the widest grin, a grin I had missed so dearly, and which at some point I was terrified to think that I would never see again.

  Untersturmführer Skorzeny was never a cool-blooded soldier. To be truthful, according to his immediate commanders in the Eastern front, he was everything but. Otto was a fearless beast, throwing himself headfirst at the enemy with a wild roar, even if the numbers favored the Soviet side. He never minded formalities, though. He petrified them with the sheer bestiality and fanatical look in his eyes, such as warriors have who go into battle without any fear to die.

  After several of my letters to him were without response in the past few months, I, assuming the worst, put all my powers into reaching out to the almost unreachable commanders in the front line, where the communication was often broken, and implored them to inquire about my best friend’s fate. I finally got a telegram after several days filled with gloom and fading hope, saying that Untersturmführer Skorzeny had sustained an injury in action and was being treated in the field hospital.

  I had breathed out in relief at such news and immediately reached for a bottle of champagne, always stored in the bottom drawer of my desk to celebrate such a remarkable occasion. After a few more days I got a letter written by him, describing in detail how he showed those Russkies what’s what, when, after being hit in the back of the head with a piece of the grenade exploded nearby, he merely asked a medic for a bandage and, driven solely by adrenaline and indignation, he had jumped out of the trench and charged at the enemy forces as if the whole German army was following behind him.

  His battalion managed to push the Russians back that day, and only in the evening, following the non-stop violent combat, did Otto collapse in his comrade’s arms, finally giving in to his severe injury. How he managed to stoically participate in the battle was beyond understanding, and his superiors were more than certain that his example and inhuman willpower was the driving force that moved his comrades forward. As soon as Otto regained consciousness, his commanding officer awarded him with an Iron Cross, saying that Untersturmführer deserved it like no one else.

  Otto, being Otto, had already told me in his letter how he couldn’t wait to get rid of the damn bandages and go back into action. I, however, couldn’t bring myself to run the risk of losing my best and most loyal friend, and, utilizing my new powers as the Chief of the RSHA, I ordered his transfer to Berlin under my immediate command. He was furious at first, of course, and even managed to get to the landline in his commanders’ headquarters to make a call to my office to let me know personally, and not in the most pleasing of expressions, about how irritable he was that I, pursuing my own self-serving goals, was going to make him into a useless office clerk just to keep myself company, and how unfair it was from my side, and how he never expected such a stab in the back from me. Only after I reassured him that I would make him the head of the sabotage unit – an idea that I had been entertaining for quite some time – did he agree to come to Berlin to serve under my command.

  “You son of a bitch!” I started laughing through happy tears, opening my embrace to my fellow Austrian, despite curious looks from both Georg and Annalise’s side.

  Otto crossed the anteroom in four huge steps and almost scooped me up in his huge arms, also laughing and wiping a tear.

  “I missed you, you bastard!” he replied in the same taunting manner, and we grabbed each other in a bear hug once again.

  After we were finally done with our emotional greeting, I invited him to my office and asked Annalise to bring us coffee.

  “I see you’ve done pretty well while I was crawling on my stomach in the trenches,” Otto noticed jestingly after we settled down by the desk in my office and he took a long look around. “Got yourself a new office… got yourself a girl, too.”

  I shook my head at his playful wink and his nod in the direction of the anteroom, where Annalise was making coffee.

  “I didn’t get myself a girl. She’s just working for me, that’s all.”

  “Really?” Otto seemed genuinely surprised. “Well, she certainly is very protective of you, though. Pushed me out of your office like some Bismarck would, as soon as I stepped through the doors to introduce myself.”

  “Frau Friedmann is… a force to be reckoned with,” I replied with a smile, feeling a little conceited at the thought of how faithfully Annalise protected the ‘sacred’ territory of my personal office from any possible intruders. “The Führer has Bormann, and I have her. I still can’t decide who’s tougher, his secretary or mine. Not a single soul will slip through my doors without her consent. Not even Bormann.”

  We both laughed.

  “What does Bormann think about it?”

  “What do you think he thinks?” I skeptically raised my eyebrow at my friend. “You know how he treats women. Even his own wife gets beaten for not getting his favorite shirt cleaned in time, and he boasts about his manhandling like it’s something to be proud of, the Bavarian pig. Annalise knows about it just like everyone else does, and of course it doesn’t add to his popularity in her eyes. She sometimes does things on purpose to make him look bad in the Führer’s eyes; made a couple of audacious mistakes in the reports that I sent to him through her, and after he got yelled at by the Führer for his complete incompetency, since he never confirmed the facts that he was presenting to the Führer, Bormann burst into my office infuriated and screaming bloody murder, saying that my ‘arrogant Prussian, who doesn’t seem to be able to do any work besides looking down her nose at her own superiors,’ – referring to himself of course – needs a dose of good old military administrative punishment with a belt across the back, to which I politely replied that if he speaks again in such manner about her, he and I will have a big problem.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He sneered and told me to better discipline my women, since he doesn’t want to have this conversation again.”

  “What a typical peasant swine!”

  “He is. To be truthful, I have encountered more swine here than in my native farm in Austria!”

  “Welcome to Berlin, my friend!” Otto spread his arms in a mock cheerful gesture, to which I replied with a certain glare.

  Frau Friedmann entered the office with a silver tray in her hands and started her standard routine of pouring steaming Arabica for me and my guest with her usual relaxed gracefulness, while Otto kept shifting his eyes from me to her and back, smiling wider and wider.

  “Would you like anything else, Herr Obergruppenführer?” she inquired, carefully placing a cup in front of me so as not to disturb any papers.

  “No, thank you very much, Frau Friedmann, that’ll be all for now,” I replied with a warm smile. She immediately beamed back. “Just, please, make sure no one interrupts us while we talk.”

  “Certainly, Herr Obergruppenführer.”

  Since my very recent promotion, some of my subordinates, out of habit, still addressed me as ‘Gru
ppenführer,’ quickly catching their slip of the tongue and apologizing, but Annalise had started addressing me as ‘Herr Obergruppenführer’ from day one as naturally as if it was the only title she knew me under.

  “Invite her to dinner already.” Otto chuckled as soon as Annalise left the room.

  “No, she won’t go,” I mumbled, stirring my coffee and thoroughly hiding my eyes.

  “Of course she will! You two are so attracted to each other that even Bormann, who is as sensitive as a brick, caught on that.”

  “I didn’t invite you to Berlin to discuss my personal life.”

  “First of all, you didn’t invite me, you summoned me to Berlin; and second of all, we were discussing not your personal life but the complete absence of it, from what I can conclude.”

  I leaned back in my chair, folding my arms with all the contempt I could possibly muster on my face. Otto barely suppressed his chuckling.

  “Are you done putting your superior down?”

  “Oh, so you’re my superior now. I see where this is going.” Otto sighed in mock offense.

  “Otto.” I finally dropped my mask and reached across the desk to pat his hand. “Be serious now, I really do need your help here.”

  “I’m at your full disposal.” With ease, Otto switched to working mode like he always did whenever I needed his advice.

  “Remember how right after the Anschluss you outlined a plan of creating special sabotage units to Heydrich?”

  “And how he laughed in my face haughtily and replied that there wouldn’t be any need to such units because the German army would sweep its enemies without any lowly partisan tactics? Yes, I remember it quite well.”

  “Well, as you probably know from your own experience in the Eastern front, his predictions didn’t ring true.”

  Otto sneered with a ‘you-don’t-say’ look on his face.

  “And that’s exactly why you’re here,” I concluded. “You think it’s not too late to start guerilla war deep behind the enemy lines?”

  Otto shifted in his seat, taking a deep breath as a thoughtful expression changed his always cheerful demeanor.

  “It depends on what you consider ‘late,’ Ernst. For the guerilla war it’s never too late, however if you mean the general situation in the front… I’m not a military specialist or army general, but from what I saw with my own eyes, those Russians, they have guts. There are a very, very underestimated enemy. I honestly can’t tell if a guerilla war would change anything in the general picture, but, hell, you never know until you try, don’t you agree?”

  “There is not a person in the Reich who I would trust with creating such sabotage units other than you, Otto,” I said with complete honesty.

  “Let’s not waste any time then. I’ll start right this instant.”

  Starting that very day Otto became my right hand and an advisor, when he wasn’t away participating in daring missions together with his thoroughly selected men that is. When he was absent, Höttl would take up his place, another man who had sworn his ultimate loyalty to me personally and who I could trust with any disclosed information. Only one more person was informed of all my secrets, to such an extent that I was probably fearful of taking her on my trips as I was worried that she might get kidnapped by British or Russian counterintelligence due to all the information she possessed – my loyal secretary Frau Friedmann.

  But Annalise wasn’t a simple assistant anymore; without giving it too much thought she agreed to become one of my active agents, who were now smuggling counterfeit money, that the RSHA started making as early as 1939 when Heydrich was still its chief, to Switzerland in exchange for very legitimate gold, which Otto and I used in quite a few operations: for bribing, buying out our agents and recruiting enemy agents, often offering twice the amount of money that their own government was paying them.

  I was actually quite surprised to find out that all national pride disappeared very fast at the prospect of becoming a rich man, even though it was in enemy territory. Even the stubborn, heavily indoctrinated Bolsheviks, or what we at first thought them to be, would shake our hand after the sealed deal of becoming a double agent, and start zealously feeding their own former NKVD with the false information we generously supplied, as if it wasn’t them who were just hours ago proudly thumping their chests and proclaiming that they would die under torture and would never betray ‘comrade Stalin.’

  Contrary to public opinion, widely spread after war by the allied propaganda, physical torture was rarely attributed to the Gestapo prisoners here, in the RSHA; of course, I can’t say the same about the other, local offices dotted throughout the occupied territories, where their own chiefs were able – and sometimes more than willing – to put their inventive minds to work on their prisoners. However, those prisoners were mostly partisans and resistance members, who themselves weren’t so innocent to be truthful, so it was quite understandable that in the heat of war and the burning hatred towards each other, both sides had few moral qualms about torture and execution.

  Gruppenführer Müller was also quite fond of the physical way to make people talk, since he had no patience, nor enough intelligence to find a different approach other than his two fists. One of the few matters, on which I agreed with Schellenberg, Heydrich’s former protégé and the current chief of SD-Ausland or the foreign intelligence office, was exactly this one – the abandonment of the physical methods when something else could be used, and much more successfully.

  Walther Schellenberg, that fragile little man, who looked quite amusing in his uniform as if he wore it from someone else’s shoulder – that’s how big the smallest size seemed on him – was also highly intelligent, no matter how much I hated to admit it, due to our personal animosity towards each other. He always spoke very rationally, in thought-out sentences, and he made reasonable suggestions. However, even while listening to him I couldn’t get rid of the thought that he was playing one of his games and treading his own line, probably using me in his own interests, or maybe even in the interests of his beloved Reichsführer, who he followed like a shadow.

  Our mutual mistrust didn’t hinge our agreement on the Gestapo methods though, when from the very first day Schellenberg made a probing remark by implying that monetary offers proved much more effective than Müller’s butchers’ methods. I shrugged nonchalantly and told him to simply bring me receipts for the amounts he needed to ‘convert’ the enemy agents into ours, and I would sign them gladly. His papers, filled with careful handwriting, were always on top of the others that Annalise handed me each morning, and which I would sign after actually reading them, unlike those other ones that I barely scribbled with ink avoiding even seeing their content. ‘Don’t want to know, don’t want to care, don’t want to be concerned with them’ was my typical attitude to all RSHA matters, which were not foreign intelligence. Not that hiding my head in sand and drinking all the horrors away helped me a few years later, in Nuremberg.

  _______________

  Nuremberg prison, September 1946

  It was so many years since we shared a genuinely honest conversation that I felt as if I was meeting a complete stranger, and not my own wife of twelve years. Through the glass, with two guards behind my back, this last physical separation between us following the years of the emotional one was evident. And yet, Elisabeth still came here to bid her goodbyes, even though the Military Tribunal verdict wasn’t given yet. We both knew perfectly well that I would never leave this jail with my neck intact.

  She wasn’t gloating, surprisingly, and she wasn’t saying how much I deserved everything that had happened to me due to neglecting her and the children from day one, to now leaving them to their uneasy fate. To my great astonishment, after just a few minutes, she started crying, trying to reach for my fingertips through the mesh and repeating how she forgave me for everything a long time ago, and how it all wasn’t my fault. What shook me to the core the most, was that she still loved me dearly.

  I felt even guiltier after her tearful
confession, because for the life of me I couldn’t understand how she could possibly love me after everything that I’d done to her. After all, the infidelities, the mistreatment, and negligence was almost all that she ever saw from me throughout the years we had been married. Elisabeth smiled sadly and shook her head.

  “No, you never understood it, Ernst. You by no means were a perfect husband, but on your good days, when you would take me and the children for a picnic in the mountains, or for a walk in the park, or for a weekend in Switzerland, you were the best father and husband I could wish for. Then I knew that you still cared about us, and I forgave you for everything instantly.”

  “I’m sorry for everything, Lisl.” I brushed her fingers through the mesh and found the courage to look her in the eye at last. “I mean it.”

  “I know you do, and I forgive you.”

  “You were a good wife, Lisl. I didn’t deserve you. You should have married someone else. You could have chosen a good, honorable man instead…”

  “Nonsense. I wouldn’t want anyone else as my husband besides you. Remember the day when you proposed to me? It was raining… I was stalling as much as I could in the office to delay meeting you, because I was certain that you would announce our break-up. And then you gave me that little box with the ring in it. I couldn’t believe my happiness then. It’s you, Erni, you could have chosen any woman you wanted, but you chose me. I was always so grateful to you for that.”