Winter, p.45
Winter, page 45
Alex Horner’s helmet was painted dark green, as it had been for autumn manoeuvres last year. All around him the soldiers of the corps had their helmets the same shade of brownish grey. ‘Yes, Herr General,’ said Alex, ‘I authorized it.’
‘From civilian gas pumps?’
‘There is no fuel convoy, Herr General.’
‘That’s theft!’
‘Yes, Herr General.’
‘Your name?’
‘Colonel Horner, Herr General.’
‘Who is your commander?’
‘I am attached from Berlin, Herr General, OKW Operations Office.’
‘Oh, you’re a tourist, Colonel? Just here to try the schnitzels, I suppose. Well, you confine your damned criminal activities to the Bendlerblock. Perhaps that’s the way they do things there. But meanwhile, when a court of inquiry starts asking for compensation for those civilians, I’ll make sure it’s your head that’s on the block. Is that clear, Colonel Horner?’
‘Yes, Herr General.’ Behind this truculent general, one of his sides stood smirking at Alex’s discomfort.
‘What are you waiting here for?’
‘The maintenance section. A track has broken and we’ve no spare links, Herr General.’
‘They won’t need you to help them fix it. Get into my car, I’ll take you up to Divisional HQ if we can find them. Have you got any kit?’
‘No, Herr General.’
‘Go, driver!’ Even before the doors slammed, the general’s driver had let in the clutch and the car roared away. In the mirror Alex glimpsed the second car chasing after them.
‘And your name, Captain?’ shouted the general as the car bumped and skidded along the narrow road.
‘Captain von Kleindorf, Herr General.’
‘Kleindorf? Is General von Kleindorf your father? We were together in 1918. Is he well?’
‘Yes, Herr General.’
‘You give him my respects next time you write.’
‘Yes, Herr General.’
‘Look at these damned fools. Stop, driver!’ The car skidded to a halt, and again the one behind narrowly avoided a collision. ‘Where’s your commander, Sergeant? Get him immediately. Why are you stopped? Out of fuel? Good God, man, why don’t you get fuel as you go? Get motor spirit from one of these civilian service stations. If they won’t let you have it on signature, take it at gun-point. Do you understand? Good. Go, driver!’ and the car leapt forward again.
‘Stop, driver! Come here, Sergeant. Don’t you know that all vehicles must be garlanded with flowers or flags or, failing that, leaves? Haven’t you been told that all units are to have a joyful appearance? Get greenery and have it done right away. Smile, Sergeant. You heard me, smile! That’s right. Now, you keep that smile on your face until you’re in Vienna. We want those damned dumpling-eaters to celebrate our arrival. It’s better than fighting them. Carry on, Sergeant. Go, driver!’
It was the same all along the road, with the general chivvying his columns into action. But many of the breakdowns had mechanical causes too grave to be got moving by the general’s sharp tongue. This day Alex Horner saw broken tanks and trucks all along the road to Vienna.
‘And who is that civilian, Captain? An Austrian mechanic fixing your truck? Why can’t you fix it yourself? You’re a damned disgrace to your uniform, Captain. No, don’t stop him. If your fool of a driver can’t mend it, then let the Austrian do it. But don’t count on that kind of help from the Polacks when we invade Poland, Captain.’
‘Poland, General?’
‘Don’t look so worried, Captain. It’s just a joke. At least it’s just a joke until the Führer decides it isn’t a joke. Go, driver!’
With his head lolling back against the leather seat the general put a question to his passenger. ‘So what do you think of our big new army of conscripts, now that you’ve seen them in action, Colonel Horner?’
‘There are problems, Herr General.’
‘So! Even a man from the Bendlerblock can see it! That’s reassuring anyway. Yes, there are problems, colonel. From what I can see, about fifty per cent of our motorized and armoured force has suffered breakdowns. The machinery is second-rate, the maintenance is poor, and the army have had to promote competent private soldiers to be incompetent NCOs, and competent young subalterns to be incompetent captains. That’s what conscription has done to the army. The average young officer hasn’t got enough initiative to blow his own nose.’
‘The general is perhaps too critical,’ ventured Alex bravely.
‘Rubbish! Look for yourself. Did you see that sergeant back there? He couldn’t have been much more than nineteen years old, and he’s in charge of thirty men. What can a boy like that know about commanding soldiers?’
‘He might have served in Hitler Youth, Herr General,’ said Alex.
‘Don’t talk to me about Hitler Youth,’ said the general. ‘I’m always getting complaints about the way the little swines report chance remarks by their NCOs, and their officers too. I stamp on that! I’ll tell you – and I don’t care if you’re a Nazi or not – I stamp on it. I won’t have these little freshly recruited bastards snooping on my trained men.’
‘Of course not, Herr General.’
‘Nor will I give the conceited little Nazi tykes quick promotions.’ ‘No, Herr General.’
‘Ah! You agree, Horner. So! Is that the official attitude of the Bendlerblock? Can I take that as being the official reaction of the OKW?’
‘No, Herr General. I have no idea what is the official attitude to such matters.’
‘Neither do I, Horner. That’s my dilemma, you see. You might say that’s the army’s dilemma. We wear these pretty little silver Nazi eagles and swastikas on our chests, and we are not our own men any more. Follow me, Horner?’
‘Yes, Herr General. I follow you.’
‘Don’t work too hard, Pauli Winter’
Damned German tourists: they were everywhere. They must have followed within hours of the soldiers crossing the border. Or perhaps the shrewder ones had contrived to be in Vienna already. Here they were: eating, eating, eating, as if they were starved. It’s true, the food was better than in the Reich, but only marginally so. Of course, the rate of exchange was good so the Reichsmark bought more. Even so, Pauli Winter disapproved of the way that the restaurants and shops were crowded with Germans. It was undignified and uncomfortably like the profiteers in Berlin in those awful days of 1919.
Nor did he like the way that so many of the German businessmen he knew wanted him to help them buy out Jewish businesses at knockdown prices. He’d upset some of them with his unequivocal refusals. He’d sent them packing with a few home truths ringing in their ears. He smiled to himself as he thought about it. No doubt those outbursts had made for him a few bitter enemies, but he was confident that they’d do nothing about it. That was one consolation about this rather dull job of his: no sane man wanted to get on the wrong side of a senior executive of the Gestapo.
Pauli Winter was enjoying this visit to the city of his birth. He remembered it well enough, even though he’d not been here for nearly five years. Past the Opera to the Ringstrasse. A bearded gypsy violinist was standing on the corner playing a sad melody. He should have been arrested as a vagrant, but Pauli put some coins into the tin. Though it was a chilly day, the sun was bright and there was a feeling of excitement in the air. Pauli’s enjoyment was somewhat marred by the sight of elderly Jews on their knees scrubbing the pavement, supervised by uniformed Austrian Nazis, while passers-by stopped to look and sometimes jeer.
The Jews were mostly harmless. They chose university professors and professional men to set to scrubbing the streets and cleaning out public toilets, because their respectable appearance made them look more ridiculous. Pauli knew they were harmless: anyone with a record of even the mildest anti-Nazi word or action had been rounded up and put under lock and key within hours of Pauli’s arrival.
Soon, when the new concentration camp at Mauthausen – on the Danube near Enns – was ready it would all be much easier. There would not be the long train journeys to take prisoners to camps in Germany. Furthermore, the prisoners would be able to work in the Mauthausen stone quarry. That could be said to be Pauli Winter’s idea. It was Pauli’s long analysis of the concentration-camp accounts that had ended with a suggestion that all the camps eventually become self-financing. In an appendix at the end he’d listed the sort of labour-intensive enterprises that the SS should obtain – perhaps by confiscation from Jewish owners – with a view to using free concentration-camp labour for increased profit. Quarries, any sort of quarries, and such firms as the Meissen porcelain works were especially desirable. The SS-Reichsführer had sent a letter of interest and appreciation, and Heydrich had suggested that Pauli resign his Gestapo post and work only for his Sicherheitsdienst. It was a great compliment, but Pauli had politely declined, pointing out that his job with the Gestapo (a state organization) carried the full state pension rights that were granted to such public employees, whereas the SD (a Nazi Party organization) had no such guaranteed longterm benefits. This was particularly unfair now that the concentration-camp guards – unemployable riffraff for the most part – were officially recognized as civil servants, with all the rights and privileges of that elite fraternity.
For Pauli the operation in Vienna had all gone smoothly. By this afternoon the men would have finished moving all the confiscated silver, paintings, furniture and carpets from the Rothschilds’ palace in Prinz-Eugen-Strasse so that the building could be used as offices for the Sipo and SD. Pauli wondered what would happen to all those priceless things he’d watched the SS men loading onto trucks. Judging by the care they’d taken, the antiques were already earmarked for some Nazi Party leader. Even more valuable plunder was going to Germans who knew the right people. The German company I. G. Farben was to be given Skodawerke Wetzler AG chemical work in exchange for a promise to replace all Jews in the management and bring this huge gunpowder works into the Nazi four-year plan. Rothschild’s steel rolling mills in Czechoslovakia had been promised to Field Marshal Göring. That would be the price for Baron de Rothschild’s freedom.
Now he had to stop and ask the way. Kärntnerstrasse. He knew it was near the boulevard, but it was a long time since he’d been in this part of the city. The woman who directed him there had a strong Viennese accent. She asked him if he was a German. ‘We are all Germans now,’ Pauli replied.
‘On the left,’ said the woman, ‘just fifty metres along the street.’
He went up to the fourth floor. The name tab on the bell had been peeled away. From the apartment upstairs he could hear American dance music – ‘Thanks for the Memory’. He pressed the bell, and after a long delay the door was opened by a youngish man in plain tie, white shirt and the sort of hard-wearing dark serge suit that employers furnish to domestic servants.
‘Yes?’
‘My name is Winter,’ said Pauli with careful politeness. He gave the man his visiting card. It bore only his name – Dr iur. Paul Winter – and his private Berlin address and phone number. His employer – the Gestapo – and office address were discreetly omitted.
‘Please wait,’ said the man.
‘Forgive me,’ said the woman who eventually emerged from behind the bead curtain at the end of the hall. In her middle fifties, she was very small, slim and still beautiful, even if she wore a little too much rouge and lipstick. Her hair was lustrous but it was too dark and too wavy and too tight against her head. She wore a wonderful old silk negligee patterned with fierce Chinese tigers. ‘I tell Boris he must always look through the peephole before answering the door.’ She’d never shed the Hungarian accent; for some it is difficult.
‘That’s sensible,’ said Pauli.
‘Come into the drawing room,’ she said. She looked down at Pauli’s card and fingered the name on it as if it were Braille. ‘We will have tea and we will talk.’ Then she looked at Pauli, trying to see his father in him.
Pauli was half prepared for the room. Once his father, in some uncharacteristic moment of revelation, had confided something of the wonderful things he’d bought when young. But he did not think it would be like this. ‘It’s magnificent!’
It was a museum, but far better than any museum could ever be: for this perfect example of Viennese Art Nouveau, complete with two small Klimt murals, some exquisite Schiele drawings, and Josef Hoffmann furniture, had never had to endure the ceaseless burden of uninvited visitors.
Soon Boris appeared with a silver tray and tea things. Pauli got a better look at him this time. Thirty-five, maybe younger. Dark hair. Not particularly handsome or attractive in any way. A boring sort of fellow. If he was her lover there was no sign of it. And yet there was no sign of anything. She hardly looked at the man. Was that because she was frightened of revealing their true relationship? Or had he worked for her so long that she no longer noticed his existence.
‘With lemon?’ Martha Somló fitted into the scheme perfectly. She sat in her favourite chair and poured tea, impaled slices of lemon on a silver fork and carefully positioned perfectly shaped pieces of cake upon the Art Nouveau plates.
‘Yes, lemon.’
‘Harry – your father – loved it, of course. Back in the old days we had dinner parties. Artists came. I met them all. The dining room is the finest example anywhere, Harry says. Mind you, people said he was crazy when he bought all this stuff. Me, too. I didn’t tell him, but I hated it at first. But after nearly forty years . . . Did he send you? Did Harry send you?’
‘He was worried.’
‘About me? That’s a surprise.’ She said it without rancour.
‘Does he still come?’
‘To see me? Sure. But not often. I love him, you see. Sometimes I even think that he loves me.’
Pauli picked up his tea and took his time squeezing lemon into it to avoid having to reply.
‘Does that offend you, Herr Pauli Winter?’
So she knew he was called Pauli. He wondered how much his father had told her about him. A lot, perhaps. He wondered if his father knew about the presence of the man servant. ‘No, it doesn’t. Of course not. Not at all.’
‘Did you ever see me before?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘I just wondered. You see, long ago, the year before you were born, your mother used to come and stand out there on the boulevard, looking up at the window. She was pregnant, I suppose. I felt sorry for her. I think she wanted to see what I looked like. One day I went down and crossed the road and passed near her. I looked at her and she looked at me. I didn’t see any hatred there. I suppose we both pitied each other in that insane way in which women are able to convince themselves that they have the best part of any deal. She never came again after that.’ She picked up her tea and stirred it and then let the tea leaves settle in the bottom of the cup. She looked down into the tea before drinking it. Pauli wondered if she was trying to read her fortune there.
‘I work for the German police,’ said Pauli tentatively.
‘Well, you’ll be kept busy,’ said Martha. She looked up at him evenly. There was no fear in her face, although Pauli knew somehow that she was frightened. He’d seen too many frightened people not to be able to recognize fear in all its guises.
‘My father asked me to give you my protection. I promised him that I would.’
‘What do you do for the German police that you can protect me?’
‘I am a Regierungsdirektor working in the Gestapo. I also hold SS-Standartenführer rank for my work with the SD.’
‘What a mouthful. It sounds very important.’
He was being mocked, but he didn’t mind that. He found her attractive, this little woman with her large eyes that challenged him and tried to see inside him. Until now he’d not realized that his father needed a woman like this, a strong, challenging personality who let you know she would fight back. And yet her assumed fearlessness was curiously disconcerting. ‘I might be useful, Frau Somló.’
‘I call myself Frau Winter.’
‘Frau Winter. Good. Yes, that is clear. It might be possible to find completely new papers for you.’
‘You are going to convert me from being a Jew?’
‘I will try. Do you see any difficulty?’
‘Difficulty?’
‘Yes,’ said Pauli. My God, but people could be stupid when it came to the important things in life. ‘Are you registered or listed anywhere as a Jew? Do you go to the synagogue? Jewish societies? Do your neighbours know you as a Jew?’
‘Synagogue: no. Societies: never. Neighbours . . . The Bergers upstairs know. We talked about it one evening. Years ago.’
Pauli brought out his notebook and crossed his legs to balance it on his knee. ‘Bergers? One floor up? Number eight? What is the first name of the father?’
For a moment Martha Somló stared at him with her big eyes. Calmly and softly she said, ‘No, no, no, Herr Regierungadirektor-working-in-the-Gestapo Pauli Winter. I don’t want anything unpleasant to happen to my friends upstairs.’
‘They will simply be moved,’ said Pauli. ‘No one will be harmed.’
She was fishing the lemon from her empty teacup, apparently giving it all her attention. ‘I said no.’
He laid his thin gold pencil upon the open notebook. ‘Frau Somló – Frau Winter, that is – I came here to help.’
She looked up at him again, and, in a small theatrical gesture, she touched the wedge of lemon to her mouth to taste its sourness. She smiled and said, ‘You came here because your father asked you to come.’
‘That is correct.’
‘So don’t make yourself into an altruistic benefactor.’
Pedantically he said, ‘I came here to help because my father asked me.’
‘Not at the price of my neighbours, Pauli Winter. Do you think I could sit here waiting for footsteps on the stairs? Knowing I sent them?’
‘Not to hurt them.’
‘No, I said. You just get out of here and leave me alone.’
Pauli felt humiliated. His face went pale and he stood up to take his leave. ‘You misunderstand me,’ he said.
