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  For Martin Müller, and in memory of Peter Przygodda

  In the face of omnipotent terror, everything is fictional.

  (Hans Bernd Gisevius,

  To the Bitter End)

  Hitler for his part no longer read fiction.

  (Nerin E. Gun,

  Eva Braun: Hitler’s Mistress)

  Wouldn’t know the difference between a real blonde and a fake.

  (Bob Dylan,

  ‘My Heart’s in the Highlands’)

  PROLOGUE

  1

  Munich, Harlaching, Saturday, 1 July 1934

  The hunted animal thinks: blind instinct, like a repeat of a recurring dream, except played for real and not a dream, which does not detract from the nightmarish, unreal quality in that he half expects – prays – for it to end and he to wake, relieved and panting with fright, gradually aware of familiar surroundings, instead of running from and to his death. The inexorable. Charging on, lungs bursting, really not in shape, haring through woods, tinder dry, whipped by branches; the trees alive. He can’t remember the last time he had been in woods. The pursuers behind; the unseen trap ahead, waiting. Stumbling, legs give way, taking a tumble, rolling and staggering up, weaving now, no energy left to run straight, lungs rasping, like they were full of iron filings, the shooting stitch in his side anticipation of the pain to come.

  The hunters make a game of it, injecting a bit of fun for themselves, turning it into more than just another execution – face the wall and wait for the bullet to the back of the neck. With so much work on that weekend they have grown bored of straightforward killing. Spice it up a bit, throw in some suspense, stretch the fear.

  Having driven him there, they’d all got out and stood around on the lonely roadside, not even so far from the city. They smoked, saying nothing, then gestured that he should start the race. Perhaps they were amused by the idea of such a habitué of night clubs and cafés forced to take physical action. They pointed towards the trees and shooed him away as if giving him a chance.

  Three thugs; old-school. Holstered pistols and crowbars. Their leader Emil Maurice, going all the way back: henchman, bodyguard, hoodlum, handy with his fists; and, curiously, a Jew – the exception that proves the rule. The sun shone on Maurice until that business with the Führer’s niece. Ah, Geli. Were it not for her, none of this would be happening. Almost three years gone, and it was as if she had just tapped him on the shoulder to say, ‘Your turn now.’

  The legs stop running out of hopelessness as much as exhaustion. Why delay when it was as good as over; a few extra minutes or seconds make no difference. Now and at the hour of our death, he remembered. What a strange scene to anyone watching. Four gasping men, doubled over, hands on knees, struggling to catch their breath. None of them in great shape. The other two he didn’t know: blond beasts, body builders, dumb, all brawn, zero brains. Maurice was different. Maurice was personal. They had history together. Maurice possessed a crooked soul. Maurice, though fallen from grace, was still indulged, a reward for all those faithful, obedient years of service, let out to do what he did best: dirty work.

  For a moment, everyone seemed to find it funny, all this chasing around woods, out of condition. The cornered quarry: he had never seen himself dying out in the open, among trees. He feinted left and ducked right, going for the gap between Maurice and the man to Maurice’s left. Maurice half shrugged, as if to say they were letting him off this time. He ran on, glancing back to see if they were in pursuit. They were, but ambling, like they were on a stroll.

  A shot rang out from ahead and his legs went from under him. He lay there waiting for the end, trying to decide which was worse, the pain or the fear of what was to come, while dimly aware of Maurice and his thugs taking their time, the stickiness of blood on his smashed foot, seeing the men unholster their pistols, and tote their crowbars.

  ‘Just us now, Anton,’ said Emil Maurice.

  2

  Ten years later almost to the day, on 30 June 1944, two cars left the Führer’s Berghof mountain retreat and drove west. The first vehicle departing that evening was an ordinary unmarked saloon rather than the usual armour-plated Mercedes. In it sat the Führer, Party Secretary Martin Bormann and the Führer’s favourite German shepherd. Bormann drove fast and aggressively, as instructed. The following car, also unmarked, contained bodyguards.

  The Führer’s double-breasted civilian suit lacked even a Party badge. A surprisingly loud tie had what looked like a soup stain. A tuft of hair stuck up at the back of his head, untamed even by brilliantine. The hair looked darker and Bormann wondered if he was dyeing it. No sign of any loss, which was more than could be said for his own receding hairline. To compensate, he was growing a belly, not so big that he couldn’t still see his dick, which was more than could be said of some.

  There was no record in the Führer’s diary of that night’s appointment, only note of attendance the following day at a state funeral in Salzburg. They drove in silence and stopped once to let the dog do its duty. Bormann watched the Führer stretch his legs, thinking how stooped and vulnerable he looked outside the Berghof’s lofty surroundings, standing alone on the remote wooded roadside, watching the dog take its crap.

  *

  Their destination was an exclusive lakeside resort where the guest house Hanselbauer had last been visited by the Führer on 30 June 1934 to arrest his oldest friend. Seeing the placid waters in the soft twilight of their arrival, Bormann was struck by such tranquil romantic surroundings marking the start of a bloodbath. As for the timber folksiness of the Hanselbauer, he was rather reminded of a giant cuckoo clock. The purge had been executed as Operation Hummingbird. Only later, when Dr Goebbels and his propaganda boys insisted that such a shining example of political and historical intrigue needed a title with a more classical and theatrical edge did it become known as the Night of the Long Knives.

  The Führer paused outside the hotel, patting his pockets, seeming reluctant to enter. Bormann wondered if he had been the same on that morning a decade ago, dithering while winding himself up to launch himself as a force of nature. Bormann guided him towards a back entrance. The Führer had insisted their visit remain incognito. That night’s party was booked under the name of Wolf. ‘Nothing special,’ Bormann had warned the management, but guests needed to be moved for security men to take over the corridor to allow the Führer the sentimental gesture of staying in the same room as the man he had gone there to arrest in 1934.

  Bormann suspected that day had been a rare crisis of conscience for the Führer, despite evidence of betrayal by his great friend. Ernst Röhm was one of very few permitted to address him with the informal ‘du’. The legend now went that fury at such treachery had driven the Führer to arrest Röhm in person to witness his humiliation. A less gracious version had the Führer a reluctant participant in a publicity stunt organised for maximum effect by Dr Goebbels; reluctant because he suspected the case against Röhm was not as iron-cast as everyone made out.

  The waters of the lake glistened in the last of the balmy evening as Bormann and his master sat down to dine in a private room. Though warm enough for balcony windows to be open, theirs were not. The table was set back. Two guards stationed outside came in and stood over the waitress. She was a plump, motherly woman whose hands shook as she served them.

  They ate a simple meal of herb omelette, potatoes and peas. B
ormann took the precaution of tasting the Führer’s in case it was poisoned, and said it was good. The hotel offered Apollinaris mineral water, which the Führer didn’t drink. He looked thunderous upon being told no Fachinger, until Bormann produced a bottle, having brought their own supply just in case. His briefcase also contained a flask of schnapps for himself, for later.

  The Führer was unusually quiet and left half his meal. He showed a flash of his old charm as he sought to reassure the disappointed waitress as she cleared their plates that nothing was wrong with the food. In an unparalleled exception he told Bormann he could smoke. Bormann was about to protest when the Führer cut him short, knowing he did. Bormann fumbled for his cigarette case then decided not to after all.

  ‘That morning wasn’t the rowdy orgy Goebbels reported it being,’ said the Führer. ‘Ernst was here with, what, half a dozen others? Everyone was still in bed when we arrived. A beautiful morning, the lake like glass. Frau Hanselbauer made an excellent coffee, which I drank in this very room. I had some sent up to Ernst who had been ordered to get dressed.’

  It had been the Führer’s idea to return for the anniversary of the putsch. Bormann had been surprised by this unlikely rendezvous with the past and presumed the Führer was nostalgic for his role as man of action that day, a rare exception to his usual sedentariness: the bolt of lightning that heralds the storm. That same afternoon Bormann had watched the Führer back in Munich foam at the mouth as he accused Röhm and his traitors of being guilty of the greatest act of disloyalty in the history of the world.

  Bormann had always considered Röhm’s demise as inevitable as the sun going down. To the other plotters, falling over themselves to prove loyalty to the Führer, Röhm was eminently back-stabbable. Now they had power, they were all becoming assimilated, no longer outsiders, with wives and mistresses and second homes and interior decorators. Bachelor Ernst and his dissolute rabble army of brownshirt boys were not.

  Röhm had dug his own grave anyway, as the author of careless letters, written home while serving in Bolivia, bemoaning that backward country’s lack of understanding of manly love. The correspondence had ended up in a newspaper scandal, not that the letters’ recipient was around any more to explain how. Bormann exclaimed to himself: The number of indiscreet letters that fall into the wrong hands! The Führer had been no better in his day. Write the letter but don’t leave it lying around for others to pick up!

  *

  The Führer asked, ‘Do you ever think of Geli?’

  Bormann was immediately alert to the unmentionable subject of the Führer’s dead niece, unmentionable unless raised by him alone, then hardly ever. No mention of her in his table talk.

  Bormann knew how he was supposed to answer. ‘Such a sweet child. Such a tragic loss.’

  He wondered about the real point of the evening. It wasn’t as though anything was left to celebrate. Had they come there so the Führer could bring up the subject of Geli, which he would never do in front of Fräulein Braun? Or perhaps he was just nostalgic for the lost world of going out and eating like normal people. In the old Munich days his life had been public, with Geli on his arm. Twelve and more sat down to dinner of an evening in the Osteria or the Bratwurst Glöckl: hoots of merriment, tears of laughter, slapped thighs, with the Führer contributing one of his wicked impersonations of absent colleagues, and making up for lost time after years of poverty and social isolation.

  Outside, the sky blackened against the silhouette of blacker mountains. July tomorrow, yet the terrace showed little sign of any holiday season. A solitary man stood smoking at the end of a jetty, his cigarette tip a glowing pinprick. Bormann, not usually given to reflection, wondered whether it was the man or his cigarette he envied.

  Röhm had spent his last night of freedom downstairs in the bar getting smashed, or not, according to whose version you believed. At dawn the following morning, a long motorcade left Munich, with the Führer leading a gang of reliable thugs and brawlers from the old days, including his former driver, Emil Maurice. Goebbels, along for the ride, lied afterwards that Röhm was found in bed with a boy.

  Accounts varied. That before arresting Röhm, the Führer beat a man senseless with the iron end of his whip. That the Führer alone confronted and roundly abused a silent, chastened Röhm. That Röhm raged back and refused the pistol offered with which to shoot himself. Bormann had trouble picturing that. The Führer could get carried away but he was hardly going to hand Röhm a loaded gun.

  What the Führer still didn’t know, or preferred not to, was that the coup had been manipulated by using the old trick of feeding false information of impending insurrection to the man’s many enemies when Röhm and his boys had had no more in mind than drunken carousing and climbing into bed with each other while on a month’s furlough.

  Goebbels reported evidence of epic degeneracy in that unlikely setting, exceeding even the last days of Tiberius, with experts in deviant intercourse known as analists performing elaborate, mind-boggling copulations. In the room next to Röhm’s, two men were discovered together – Röhm’s deputy and a mincing bum boy. The Führer had them dragged off to be shot by Emil Maurice in a car. First dead of the day.

  *

  The death hunt commenced, cheered on in Berlin and Munich. Envelopes opened, lists read out. Weekend of terror! Shot while resisting arrest. Hacked to death in a swamp near Dachau. Gunned down in the woods of Harlaching. Numerous brownshirt thugs, pansies and street-corner boys were rounded up. Many, not the brightest buttons in the box, believed they were being executed as loyalists after a coup against the Führer. Clean sweep. A scorcher of a Saturday as ordinary people went about their business. Röhm’s Berlin chief off on honeymoon to Madeira was arrested on his way to the airport. He protested that the Führer had been at his wedding only the day before. Made no difference. Up against the wall. Short marriage; long widowhood.

  Röhm, seeing sense at last, declared, ‘All revolutions devour their children.’ You bet, thought Bormann, when he heard that. Bormann, being second generation and a desk man, was resented for not having been around for the old rough and tumble. He had them shafted now. See you later, boys!

  *

  By Sunday, the Führer was back at the Chancellery holding a garden party. He dithered over Röhm, who was finally offered the officer’s way out and left a pistol in his cell with a single bullet to do the job. He refused and it was down to Commandant Eicke of camp Dachau, a graduate of the school of hard knocks, with a taste for theatrical punishment. The official version was that he and another SS man gunned down Röhm in his cell and Röhm died protesting his loyalty to the Führer.

  The alternative, told to Bormann, had more of an air of flamboyant poetic justice. Such was Eicke’s hatred of homos, and disgust at Röhm for not shooting himself as befitted an officer, that he had him held down and took the pistol Röhm was to have used on himself, fucked him up the arse with it and, with Ernst screaming for his Führer, pulled the trigger. Tell that to the history books, thought Bormann.

  At the Chancellery garden party, everyone was champagne giddy over what they had pulled off. With internal power now secure, the Führer walked like a man reborn, resplendent in a cream jacket, smiling shyly and exchanging witticisms with the guests, most of whom remained oblivious of the slaughter. The others were crowing. Himmler’s smirk was plastered all over his face. Goebbels was bouncing with excitement. Göring was extravagantly drunk, his eyes still cruel. Bormann lined them all up in his sights and thought: I will have you all one by one, just as you had Röhm.

  *

  Apropos of nothing, the Führer said, ‘I am thinking of shaving off my moustache.’

  They were still in the Hanselbauer dining room, from which the Führer showed no sign of budging.

  ‘It’s your trademark!’ protested Bormann, in a rare uncensored moment. He was rewarded with the sight of the man laughing, lifting his hand to his mouth to hide rotten teeth. The Führer grew serious again and said, ‘I shan’t sleep
tonight.’

  One thing Bormann understood about the man he served was he was as much a mystery to himself as he was to others, or pretended to be. There remained an element of shape-shifting after all those years of touring and hogging the limelight. Bormann knew only too well how the gramophone record went: the actor who starts to believe the part he is playing; the author obliged to perform, who secretly yearns for a life of contemplation in his beloved mountains.The fact remained, the Jew was always the problem, so do away with him, and, while they were about it, the Roman Catholic Church too. Then you remove the schism that has bedevilled two thousand years of Christianity.

  ‘Why should life be cursed by the notion of fallen man?’

  Bormann couldn’t agree more as he watched the Führer run out of steam when once he had been able to go on and on, in full voice, just as iron will drove him to maintain the stiff-armed salute for hours whereas Göring could manage his for all of ten minutes. The Führer kept a chest-expander under his bed, according to the housekeeper (and no spunk was reported on the sheets, suggesting that the relationship with Fräulein Braun was unphysical, or very fastidious).

  Bormann was still puzzling over that when the Führer said, ‘There are some private drawings I did once, of my niece, quite personal to me.’

  Bormann must have clutched the table because the Führer asked what was wrong with him.

  The drawings were in his safe in the Brown House in Munich, the Führer went on.

  No, they weren’t.

  Bormann knew because he’d had them removed only the day before, thinking never in a million years would it cross the Führer’s mind to ask for them.

  *

  Two days later, Bormann was forced to drive from the Berghof to Munich to pretend to look for them. He was in a rare state of nerves as he reviewed his options. Telling the truth was out of the question. Doing nothing was a possibility, in the hope that the Führer would not mention the drawings again, brought up in a sentimental moment on an emotional evening. Or, he could admit they were not there, but this was not wise as rule number one was never be the bearer of bad news.