LAST
FLIGHT TO
STALINGRAD
DI Joe Faraday Investigations
Turnstone
The Take
Angels Passing
Deadlight
Cut to Black
Blood and Honey
One Under
The Price of Darkness
No Lovelier Death
Beyond Reach
Borrowed Light
Happy Days
DS Jimmy Suttle Investigations
Western Approaches
Touching Distance
Sins of the Father
The Order of Things
Spoils of War
Finisterre
Aurore
Estocada
Raid 42
Last Flight to Stalingrad
FICTION
Rules of Engagement
Reaper
The Devil’s Breath
Thunder in the Blood
Sabbathman
The Perfect Soldier
Heaven’s Light
Nocturne
Permissible Limits
The Chop
The Ghosts of 2012
Strictly No Flowers
Enora Andressen thrillers
Curtain Call
Sight Unseen
Off Script
NON-FICTION
Lucky Break
Airshow
Estuary
Backstory
GRAHAM
HURLEY
Last
Flight to
Stalingrad
First published in the UK in 2021 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Graham Hurley, 2020
The moral right of Graham Hurley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB) 9781788547543
ISBN (XTPB) 9781788547550
ISBN (E) 9781788547536
Author photo © Laura Muños
Head of Zeus Ltd
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To Jenny and Pete with love
‘The wildest life is the most beautiful’
Joseph Goebbels, Diaries, 1937
By the Same Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
PRELUDE: BERLIN, 6 JULY 1940
1. GRAMMATIKOVO, KERCH PENINSULA, CRIMEA, 20 MAY 1942
2. BERLIN, 21 MAY 1942
3. SCHÖNWALDE, BERLIN, 22 MAY 1942
4. BERLIN, 22 MAY 1942
5. BERLIN, SATURDAY 18 JULY 1942
6. VENICE, 9 AUGUST 1942
7. MARIUPOL, UKRAINE, 9 AUGUST 1942
8. VENICE, 10 AUGUST 1942
9. KALACH, 10 AUGUST 1942
10. ROME, 10 AUGUST 1942
11. MOUNT ELBRUS, 21 AUGUST 1942
12. BERLIN, 22 AUGUST 1942
13. KALACH, 22 AUGUST 1942
14. BERLIN, 23 AUGUST 1942
15. TATSINSKAYA AIRFIELD, RUSSIA, 23 AUGUST 1942
16. KYIV, UKRAINE, 23 AUGUST 1942
17. TATSINSKAYA, RUSSIA, 24 AUGUST 1942
18. TATSINSKAYA AIRFIELD, 24 AUGUST 1942
19. TATSINSKAYA AIRFIELD, 24 AUGUST 1942
20. TATSINSKAYA AIRFIELD, 2 SEPTEMBER 1942
21. STALINGRAD, 17 SEPTEMBER 1942
22. STALINGRAD, 18 SEPTEMBER 1942
23. STALINGRAD, 18 SEPTEMBER 1942
24. TATSINSKAYA AIRFIELD, 27 SEPTEMBER 1942
25. BERLIN, 28 SEPTEMBER 1942
26. BERLIN SPORTPALAST, WEDNESDAY 30 SEPTEMBER 1942
27. STALINGRAD, OCTOBER 1942
28. STALINGRAD, NOVEMBER 1942
29. STALINGRAD, 28 NOVEMBER 1942
30. TATSINSKAYA AIRFIELD, 23 DECEMBER 1942
31. BODENSEE, BERLIN, 25 DECEMBER 1942
32. STALINGRAD, 12 JANUARY 1943
33. STALINGRAD, 16 JANUARY 1943
34. STALINGRAD, 17 JANUARY 1943
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
Levitation. Werner Nehmann told her he’d first seen it in a circus ring erected in a meadow outside Svengati. He’d been a kid, immune from disbelief, and later he swore he’d experienced it himself, a kind of magic, his soul leaving his body, everything you took for granted viewed from a different angle. He also said that Hitler understood it, practised it, had fallen half in love with it. Obvious, really.
She’d spent the night with Nehmann, here in this apartment in the Wilhelmstrasse. The apartment belonged to Guramishvili, a fellow Georgian who’d made a fortune importing wine. Nehmann said Guram, as he called him, was out of town just now and had left him the keys. Hedvika had never met Guram but knew that, unlike Nehmann, he’d never bothered to disguise himself behind an adopted German name. Too proud, he said. Too Georgian. And very rich.
The apartment was on the first floor. The tall window in the bedroom offered a fine view of the Wilhelmstrasse, the broad boulevard pointing at the heart of the Reich. The Chancellor’s train was due at the Anhalter station at three o’clock. According to Goebbels, whom Nehmann had seen last night, every allotment in Berlin had been ordered to supply a tribute of flowers to brighten the route from the station to the Chancellery. As a result, the boulevard was ablaze with colour.
After waking late, Hedvika had got up and stationed herself at the window, offering Nehmann a running commentary on the hundreds of busy hands unloading the carts and barrows below. Trays of crimson begonias and delicate gladioli. Handsome stands of lilies, nodding in the breeze. Even the Führer’s name, prefaced with the obligatory Heil, picked out in yellow roses on a first-floor balcony across the street. Minutes later, with the city’s trains cancelled and swimming pools closed, long queues of workers began to appear, marching from their workplaces to swell the crowds along the Wilhelmstrasse.
Senzacni, Hedvika had murmured in her native Czech. Wonderful.
Nehmann agreed. In a handful of weeks, Hitler had crushed every Western European country that mattered except Italy and Great Britain. In the case of the Italians, Nehmann told her there’d be no need because Mussolini was simply Hitler with a bigger chin and a fancier wardrobe. And as far as the British were concerned, he added, it was simply a matter of time. In a month or two, once Goering had dealt with the RAF, there’d doubtless be an even noisier homecoming. Maybe they’d lock Churchill in a cage and parade him through Berlin. Assuming, of course, they hadn’t already put a gun to his head.
Now Nehmann emerged from the kitchen, fully dressed, with a bottle of champagne and two glasses. Ever since they’d first met on set in the Ufa studios, he’d called Hedvika Coquette. The scene she was shooting had required her presence on a tiger-skin rug in the palatial setting of a rich man’s weekend retreat. She’d been naked under a mink coat the colour of virgin snow and Nehmann, assigned to do an interview, had afterwards spent an hour or so in her dressing room. The woman who attended to her make-up, a Czech cousin, called her Koketa. Nehmann liked the sensation of the word on his tongue but thought it sounded even better in French. And so Coquette she became. It meant ‘temptress’, with undertones of ‘tease’.
‘What time is it?’ Naked but for a silk blouse, Hedvika was still at the window, her back to the bedroom, her elbows on the windowsill, looking down at the street.
Nehmann put the two glasses on the windowsill, moved his precious pots of chilli plants into the sunshine, and then knelt on the carpet and nuzzled the soft cleft between her buttocks. He was a small man, slight, nimble. After a while, gazing out at the street, she began to move under his tongue. Over the past few months, whenever he was in Berlin, Nehmann had become more than familiar with the repertoire of tiny grunts and sighs that signalled pleasure. The Georgian had a gipsy talent for lovemaking. It went with his origins, and his rumpled face, and the mischief in his eyes, and his reputation for a certain reckless charm that had opened countless doors across this wonderful city, but as far as women were concerned he’d never met anyone so responsive, so eager and so candid in her many demands. Remarkably for an actress, in bed or otherwise, she never faked it.
‘Time?’ she asked again.
Nehmann was on his feet by now, unbuttoned, moving sweetly inside her.
‘Two minutes,’ he said. ‘The man is never late.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘I am. It’s what I do.’
‘Ja… ich kenne… so why am I not surprised?’ She looked to the right, towards the station, and reached for one of the glasses. ‘Any ideas?’
She glanced backwards, over her shoulder. Nehmann smiled at her and then shrugged. She knows I lie. Everyone lies. That’s the currency you use in this place. Spend your lies wisely and you might end up as rich as Guram. In Prague that might count as a sin. Here, it keeps a head on your shoulders and buys you champagne.
Outside the window, the gigantic crowd was beginning to stir. Over Hedvika’s shoulder, across the street, Nehmann could see balcony after balcony crowded with faces and flags, children fighting their way through a forest of legs to get a better view, heads turning towards the oncoming growl of the motorcade.
Nehmann paused for a moment, reaching for the other glass, then began to quicken. A moment like this, he’d decided, deserved every kind of tribute.
‘Don’t,’ she murmured. ‘Not yet.’
The crowd was cheering now, thousands of voices, Berlin at full volume. Nehmann began to move again, deep, slow, taking his time, then he murmured an apology and withdrew for a second or two. Hedvika, he suspected, had barely registered his absence. At a moment like this, like every other spectator, she was in the hands of a quite different experience, no less overwhelming.
Nehmann was right. The blouse she’d thrown on earlier had become unbuttoned, but she didn’t care. She leaned forward over the windowsill, her slender arms outstretched in welcome. Hitler’s open Mercedes was barely metres away, at the head of the huge motorcade. He was standing at the front, beside the driver, both hands gripping the top of the windscreen, looking neither to left nor to right, grim, implacable, victorious.
Other women might have wanted him to smile for once, to risk one of those natural moments of warmth the newsreel cameras sometimes caught at the Berghof when he was playing with somebody’s children, but not Hedvika. Berlin had been a good swap for Prague. Her heart was bursting for this man-God who’d shown the rest of Europe just who was in charge. Berlin, indeed the whole of Germany, was getting no less than it deserved. Thanks to the unbending figure below her window.
‘Heil!’ she screamed. ‘Mein Führer!’
The Mercedes moved on towards the Chancellery and the Brandenburger Tor and in its wake came the long procession of equally sleek limousines, each one laden with more of the faces that Hedvika had come to know from their lingering visits to the studios. But these men she regarded as mere walk-ons, riffraff, nobodies, bit-part players in the unfolding triumphs of the Reich. Hitler, to his great credit, never stooped to studio visits.
She peered to the left and offered a last wave to her departing Führer, and then – as the crowd began to thin – she looked down towards the pavement. Hitler gone, there was an emptiness deep inside her and she knew exactly how to fill it.
‘Faster,’ she murmured.
Nehmann obliged as he always did. She pushed back against him, finding the rhythm, then a single face among the crowds below caught her attention. Everyone was still on tiptoe, looking at the last of the cars, but this single face had no interest in the motorcade. Instead, it was looking up. At her.
For a moment, she couldn’t believe it. The curly hair he deliberately wore long. The suntan he worked so effortlessly to maintain. The simplicity of the open white shirt. The lumpy peasant contours of his face. The broadness of his grin. Even the champagne glass, nearly empty, lifted in salute. Werner Nehmann.
But wasn’t he behind her? Making love to her? Perfectly à deux?
Still moving sweetly, she looked over her shoulder. It was Guram, Nehmann’s friend, his fellow countryman. She’d met him twice before, once here in Berlin, and once in Munich, both times when she was with the little Georgian. He was a large man, with a belly to match, and he had Nehmann’s talent for making her laugh. In Munich, an evening in one of the city’s bierkellers had ended with all three of them in bed, a night she remembered with great affection. Generous people, she thought. In all kinds of ways.
Now, Guram’s perfectly manicured hands had settled on the tops of her hips. Two rings, one featuring a showy bloodstone.
‘Guten Tag.’ Georgian accent. Pleasant smile. ‘Wie geht es dir?’
‘I’m fine. Why aren’t you in Paris? Making lots of money?’
‘Business called me back.’ He smiled. ‘Faster?’
She held his gaze for a moment, then nodded.
‘Ja,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you when.’
She turned back to the street, trying to work out how a thing like this could ever happen, trying to catch the rhythm again. Nehmann, she knew, loved practical jokes, pranks, any kind of mischief, but this had to be in a league of its own. Nehmann’s friend owns the flat, she thought. He has every right to be here. The two men grew up together. Brothers-in-arms. He may have been expecting something like this. Nehmann may even have planned it. Who knows?
She shook her head, enjoying the ride, knowing she was seconds away. She closed her eyes for a moment, letting it happen, exulting in the long spasm of orgasm and then she arched her back and gasped one final time before her gaze fell on Nehmann again and she held her limp hands wide in a gesture than needed no translation. You fooled me. I give up. But thank you all the same.
Nehmann was laughing now. He handed his glass to a man beside him and then cupped his own hands.
‘Levitation,’ he shouted, before asking the stranger for his glass back.
Oberstleutnant Georg Messner occasionally wondered whether he’d fallen in love with his boss.
Generaloberst Wolfram von Richthofen was the legendary chief of Fliegerkorps VIII. In half a decade he’d routed the Reich’s enemies in Spain, Poland, France and the Balkans. His Stuka dive bombers, with the terrifying siren he’d invented himself, had become a battlefield code for instant annihilation, and even the vastness of the Soviet Union hadn’t daunted him. On the day German armour poured into Russia, Fliegerkorps VIII had destroyed no less than 1,800 enemy aircraft for the loss of just two planes. Even hardened Luftwaffe veterans couldn’t believe it.
Now, Messner – who served as an aide to Generaloberst Richthofen – was sitting in a draughty tent on a scruffy airfield on the Kerch Peninsula. The meeting had started barely half an hour ago. Messner had flown in last night, anticipating a celebration at the end of Operation Trappenjagd. General Manstein was rumoured to be arriving in time for lunch.
In ten exhausting days of incessant bombing, Richthofen’s Fliegerkorps VIII, working hand in hand with General Manstein’s 11th Army, had kicked open the back door to the priceless Caucasian oilfields. One hundred and seventy thousand Russian soldiers stumbled off into captivity. Two full Soviet armies, plus the greater part of a third, were destroyed. In raid after raid, the Heinkels had seeded the Soviet formations below with the new SD2 fragmentation bombs, tiny eggs that exploded feet above the pale earth and tore men to pieces. Coupled with bigger ordnance, Richthofen called it ‘giant fire magic’.
On the first Sunday of the campaign, most bomber pilots had flown nearly a dozen sorties. A handful had gone three better. Fifteen take-offs. Fifteen landings. All in one day. Unbelievable. This was the way Richthofen organised his campaigns: violence without end, ceaseless pressure, an unrelenting urge to grind the enemy to dust.
The results had been obvious from the air. Towards the end of the first week, personally supervising the carnage from two thousand metres, Richthofen had emerged from his tiny Fieseler Storch to tell Messner that the jaws of Manstein’s trap were about to close around the hapless Slavs. ‘Unless the weather stops us,’ he growled, ‘no Russian will leave the Crimea alive.’
And so it went. By the third week in May, after a difficult winter, the road to the Crimean fortress at Sevastopol lay open to Manstein’s tanks and Richthofen’s marauding bomber crews. After a victory of this magnitude, Germany was once again on course to advance deep into the Russian heartlands. Messner himself was a Berliner and it wasn’t difficult to imagine the relief and rejoicing in his home city. Moscow and Leningrad were still under siege, but the real key surely lay here on the southern flank. The seizure of the oil wells would keep the Panzers rolling east. Grain from Ukraine would fill bellies back home. Yet none of the euphoria Messner had expected was evident around this makeshift table.
Messner had first served under Richthofen half a decade ago in the Condor Legion, fighting the Republican armies in the mountains of northern Spain. He knew how difficult, how outspoken this man could be. He treated superiors and underlings alike with a rough impatience which brooked no excuse when things went wrong. His men feared him, of that there was no doubt, but he brought them comfort as well because he was – more often than not – right.
The story of war, as Messner knew all too well, was the story of things going wrong, but Richthofen had an implacable belief in willpower and the merits of meticulous organisation. In his view there was no such thing as defeat. There’d always be setbacks, certainly, occasions when plans threatened to fall apart, but the men under his command were expected to be masters of both themselves and the battlefield below. For Richthofen, the undisputed Meister of close air support, there was no sweeter word than Schwerpunkt, that carefully plotted moment when irresistible wrath descended on the heads of the enemy and put him on his knees.
Messner knew the faces around this table. Like him, they’d expected – at the very least – a word or two of appreciation for their collective efforts over the last ten exhausting days. Fliegerkorps VIII were rumoured to be Hitler’s favourite Luftwaffe formation, a tribute no doubt to the sternness and brilliance of Richthofen’s leadership, and as a result Richthofen had been awarded Oak Leaves to go with his Ritterkreuz. But now, in the aftermath of yet another triumph, he seemed anything but satisfied. How many medals did a man need, Messner wondered. Just what kind of acknowledgement would slake his thirst to crush everything around him?
They were discussing the shape of the campaign over the coming days. No one doubted for a moment that the Soviets manning the fortress at Sevastopol would be the next to receive the attentions of Fliegerkorps VIII. This, the key to the Soviet position in the Crimea, was rumoured to be impregnable, a phrase for which Richthofen had no time at all. A priceless naval base. Cliffs falling sheer to the Black Sea. One hundred and six thousand Soviet front-line troops. Reinforced concrete fortifications. Strongpoints dug dozens of metres into the bedrock limestone. Artillery protected by twenty-five centimetres of armour plate. One by one, Richthofen tallied the Soviet boasts. Then, for the first time, he smiled.
‘Operation Storfang,’ he murmured. ‘Remember what we did to Warsaw? Storfang will be all of that and more. No quarter, no letting up. We’ll hit the Slavs until they beg for mercy. Think opera. Trappenjagd is just the overture. Storfang will have the audience on its feet.’
Trappenjagd meant ‘Bustard Hunt’. Storfang, ‘Sturgeon Catch’. There was an exchange of nods around the table. The war in Russia was still in its infancy. Nothing excited these men more than the prospect of another slaughter. From two thousand metres, regardless of what the Russian air force could muster, it would be a fresh chance to play God.
Richthofen briefly consulted a file that lay open in front of him. Six bomber groups flying in formations of twenty to thirty aircraft. Close support from Ju-87 Stukas dive-bombing Soviet formations. Rolling attacks, one following another. A torrent of high explosive falling on the luckless Ivans below.
A raised hand caught Richthofen’s attention. The Major in charge of intelligence wanted to know about artillery support on the ground. The question sparked a brief frown from Richthofen.
‘They’re bringing up a Gustav Dora. It’s showing off, of course, and completely unnecessary because we can finish the job ourselves, but it might give our Russian friends a fright or two.’
The image sparked a ripple of laughter around the table. The Gustav Dora was a monstrous piece of railway-mounted artillery. From a siding forty-seven kilometres away it could bombard a distant target with surprising accuracy and the thought of sharing a subterranean bunker with the thunderous arrival of a seven-tonne shell would do nothing for the Ivans’ peace of mind.
‘Questions?’
The Bavarian engineer responsible for maintenance wanted to know about the spares situation. After Trappenjagd, engines on the Heinkels badly needed servicing before an operation of this magnitude. Another officer at the table had concerns about supplies of aviation fuel. To both questions Richthofen grunted monosyllabic replies, scribbling notes to himself on the pad at his elbow. He seemed indifferent to the smaller courtesies of a meeting such as this but by now these men knew that both matters would be resolved. That was the way Richthofen liked to operate. Decisions taken in a matter of seconds. Action guaranteed.
He glanced up from his pad as a figure appeared at the mouth of the tent. Messner recognised the adjutant who’d been with Richthofen since the early days in Spain. He paused beside the table and handed over a single sheet of paper torn from a message form. Richthofen scanned it quickly, nodded. Then he looked up again and brought the meeting to a close before beckoning Messner to accompany him to the nearby hut he was using as his makeshift headquarters.
Messner settled himself in the only other chair with intact legs, doing his best to avoid the draught through the ill-fitting door, and waited while Richthofen attended to a number of telephone calls.
He’d first caught the Generaloberst’s eye back in the days when he was assigned to the Führer’s special squadron. Messner’s task was to ferry Nazi chieftains around the Reich and from time to time the passenger manifest had included the flyer who’d turned Fliegerkorps VIII into a legend. Richthofen, cousin of the great Red Baron, knew a good pilot when he saw one and had – as it turned out – made a note of Messner’s name. Aside from his skills in the air, he liked the way Messner handled himself: unshowy, highly organised, with little time for small talk. In short, Richthofen’s sort of man.
Then had come the accident, and the weeks of surgery, and the months of slow recovery, and Messner’s days in the Führer’s cockpit were over. With his mutilated face and a deep chill where his heart had once been, he’d emerged from convalescence a different man. His wife had left him for his best friend. His only daughter had become a stranger. He had no one he could truly call close.
But none of this meant anything as far as Richthofen was concerned. Messner was still a fine pilot. Richthofen demanded an aide’s undivided loyalty – total dedication – and in this respect he was never disappointed. Over the last year or so, he’d become Richthofen’s eyes and ears as Fliegerkorps VIII pushed east, and his growing reputation as the Generaloberst’s snitch barely registered. Recently, in a gruff gesture of thanks for all his work, Richthofen had secured his tireless aide a promotion. Oberstleutnant Messner had yet to spare the time to celebrate.
The last phone call had come to an end. Richthofen produced the sheet of paper and put it carefully to one side.
‘Your days in the Reichsregierung,’ he said. ‘You flew our Leader on countless occasions. What did you make of him?’
Messner frowned. Questions like these were rare. Richthofen rarely troubled himself with other people’s opinions.
‘Well?’ Richthofen never bothered to hide his impatience.
‘The Führer is a man you’d treat with a great deal of respect.’
‘You think he’s clever?’
‘Very.’
‘Ruthless?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you ever trust him?’
‘Of course not. But that didn’t matter.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I was the one at the controls.’
Messner’s answer drew a nod of approval. Then Richthofen glanced at the message on the desk.
‘Read it.’
Messner picked it up. It appeared to be confirmation that the Generaloberst’s personal Storch would be readied for take-off by first light tomorrow. He always flew it alone, shuttling from one forward airfield to another, urging his commanders to yet greater efforts. On this occasion, an extra fuel tank had been fitted.
Messner looked up. ‘Somewhere special?’
‘Berlin.’
‘Am I allowed to ask why?’
‘Of course. Our Leader wants a conversation tomorrow night. It’s a long way to go for a shit meal but let’s hope he makes it worthwhile. Something else, Herr Oberstleutnant.’
‘Sir?’
‘Goebbels’ film people are still at work. I’d take the latest footage to Berlin myself but they say they need an extra day. These pictures will do us nothing but good. Can you sort this out, Messner? Make sure the film is in the right hands as soon as possible?’
Werner Nehmann was summoned to 20 Hermann Goering Strasse in an early evening phone call from the Ministry of Propaganda. The call came from one of the secretaries in Goebbels’ private office, an old-stager in the Promi called Birgit.
‘Why the invitation?’ he asked on the phone.
‘I’ve no idea. The Minister said ten o’clock. He’s still on the way back from München. I’m sending a car to Tempelhof.’
Nehmann was still living at Guram’s apartment on the Wilhelmstrasse. His Georgian friend’s business empire had lately expanded to France and he was currently occupying a handsome three-storey house in Tours while he cornered the market for quality vintages from the Loire Valley.
Nehmann hung up and glanced at his watch. Still early, barely seven o’clock. For the next couple of hours or so, over a glass or two of Sekt from Guram’s personal cellar, he worked on a couple of articles he owed Das Reich, Goebbels’ weekly offering to neutral countries abroad. Then, as darkness fell, and the city centre’s Blockwarten began to police the nightly blackout, he checked his own curtains and headed for the street.
Goebbels’ official Berlin residence was a ten-minute stroll away. With no raids anticipated, the late evening traffic was slightly heavier than usual and staff, uniformed or otherwise, were still emerging from the Reich ministries at the upper end of the Wilhelmstrasse. Hermann Goering Strasse was on the left, two streets from Hitler’s Chancellery.
Number 20 lay behind a high wall, a three-storey building with the faux-classical features favoured in the upper levels of the Reich. Nehmann paused a moment to light a cheroot, acknowledging the nod of recognition from the sentry who stood guard at the iron gate. After a multimillion Reichsmark renovation, the Minister of Propaganda had been living here since the beginning of the war. Add three more properties outside the city – two on Schwanenwerder, an idyllic island on the River Havel, and another at Bogensee – and Nehmann began to wonder how Goebbels ever made up his mind where to sleep at night.
Recently, out of curiosity as well as a sense of mischief, Nehmann had acquired a copy of the Minister’s first and only published novel, penned when he was twenty-five. It featured a troubled hero called Michael Voorman and it was, everyone quietly agreed, a pile of Scheisse, but what had caught Nehmann’s eye was Voorman’s principled rejection of materialism. What really mattered to the apprentice novelist was faith, and justice, and the pathway to a better future. What the author sought to avoid were the showy baubles of contemporary German life.
Nehmann ground the remains of his cheroot underfoot and stepped towards the gate. An early fantasy, he thought, amused as ever by where this level of deceit might lead a man.
A member of Goebbels’ staff, alerted by the sentry, was already waiting at the mansion’s open door. Another familiar face.
‘He’s back, Hildegard?’
‘Ten minutes ago. He’s in his study. You know the way.’
She stood aside and let him into the house before closing the door behind them. The ground floor offered a banqueting hall, reception rooms and the overpowering scent of furniture polish. Nehmann, who had no taste for public events, had successfully resisted a number of invitations in the early days of the war without damaging his access to the master of the house. He knew that Goebbels had assigned him the role of court jester, as well as maverick journalist, and he was more than content to keep the grind of official business at arm’s length. He also knew from contacts deep in the Promi that Goebbels regarded his take on the world as scurrilous, subversive and frequently brilliant, three reasons – he suspected – to explain the immunity he appeared to have won for himself. Recently, the Minister had given him a nickname, der Über. It was shorthand for der Überlebende. The survivor.
The grand staircase, the signature boast of so many Berlin renovations up and down the Wilhelmstrasse, was hung with fine art looted from galleries in France. Nehmann, as ever, paused beside a canvas by Courbet. He’d first seen this masterpiece a decade ago. It was hanging in a gallery on the Île Saint-Louis in Paris, and even then – barely able to eat on his meagre earnings from satirical scribblings – he’d regarded it as sublime. The fall of light on the white bones of the cliff face at Étretat. The seemingly artless brushstrokes that gave the rearing breakers both depth and menace. The scurry of clouds on the far horizon. You could taste the wind, smell the ocean, and every time he took another look it seemed to offer a fresh message. Tonight, he thought, it carries a warning. Never take anything for granted.
Goebbels was working in a small study on the second floor, a private space he regarded as sacrosanct. Nehmann knocked and announced himself.
‘Come…’
Goebbels was sitting in a leather armchair beside a desk, leafing through a sheaf of notes. He was wearing a suit but he’d discarded the jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He glanced briefly up, then waved Nehmann into the other chair. No words of welcome; nothing to break his concentration.
Nehmann knew better than to interrupt his master. With his senior staff at the Promi, the Minister had never been less than imperious, and recently he’d been insisting on regular 11 a.m. meetings to tighten his grip on every full stop and comma that emerged from the Ministry. Nehmann was mercifully spared this daily inquisition but word around the building suggested that the pressure on Goebbels was beginning to show, and, looking at him now, Nehmann knew that the rumours were true.
Although they’d spoken on the phone a number of times over the past weeks, he hadn’t seen Goebbels in the flesh since mid-April. The Minister had a face and a slightly skeletal physical presence you wouldn’t forget: high forehead, thin lips, coal-black eyes. For a small man, his voice was surprisingly deep and at his many public appearances he used it to some effect. With his repertoire of gestures – the pointing index finger, the clenched fist, the hammering on the lectern, the planting of arms akimbo – he had the ability to transcend the confines of both his body and his trademark leather jacket. For Werner Nehmann this was yet further proof of the powers of levitation, but here and now, watching Goebbels’ pencil race from line to line, he sensed the Reich’s favourite dwarf was in serious trouble.
He looked even thinner than usual and scarlet shell bursts of eczema had appeared on the bareness of his forearms. There was another sign of stress, too: one highly polished shoe tap-tapping on the looted Gobelin carpet.
‘You’re lucky, Nehmann.’ The Minister didn’t look up.
‘Tell me why?’
‘I like it that you don’t dress for dinner.’
‘I’m here to eat?’
‘You’re here to listen. And to drink. And as it happens I brought back some fine Weisswurst from München.’ He glanced up at last. ‘You think that might be acceptable?’
Nehmann nodded. Weisswurst was a Bavarian sausage, an irresistible marriage of minced veal and pork back bacon. Goebbels knew that Nehmann adored it.
Goebbels lifted a telephone on the table by his chair and muttered an order. Then he gestured at the notes on his lap.
‘We’re running out of grain seed. Can you believe that? I can explain anything within reason. I can turn defeat into victory, I can make angels dance on the head of a pin. Offer me enough money and I can even raise a thin cheer for that snout-wipe Ribbentrop. But a loaf that turns out to be half-barley? In a country like this?’
Nehmann mentioned potatoes as a substitute for grain seed. At short notice it was the only suggestion he could muster. Kartoffelbrot. Kartoffelomelett. A Spanish tortilla on every man’s table.
‘Nein?’
‘Nein. This swinish weather has done for the potatoes, too. So far we’ve had the measure of every single enemy. And now we surrender to the fucking rain?’
Nehmann could only agree. Lately, the weather had been evil. Even back home in Svengati, where the mountains made for serious weather, he’d never seen so much water.
One of the kitchen staff appeared at the door with a tray. As well as a pile of fat Weisswurst, Goebbels had ordered a bottle of champagne. He gave it to Nehmann to pop the cork and then watched him pour.
‘A toast, my friend.’ Goebbels reached for a glass.
‘To what?’
‘To Trappenjagd.’ He frowned. ‘The Kerch Peninsula? Key to the Crimea? You haven’t heard? Manstein cleaned out what’s left of the Soviets yesterday afternoon. The Führer’s planning a major speech. I may even say something myself.’
The two men clinked glasses. Then Goebbels sat back.
‘You don’t listen to the radio any more?’
‘Not today.’
‘But I thought your Coquette’ – a thin smile – ‘has been otherwise engaged?’
Goebbels, who lived for gossip, obviously knew that Hedvika had started an affair with an Italian film director but Nehmann didn’t rise to the bait.
‘She’s shooting in Franconia.’ Nehmann nodded at a pile of scripts on Goebbels’ desk. ‘I have my life to myself.’
Goebbels held his gaze, said nothing. Every night, to Nehmann’s certain knowledge, the Minister devoted time he couldn’t afford to going through pre-production movie scripts. The sight of the ministerial green ink in the margins of scene after scene in these scripts had driven a whole generation of film directors crazy yet in this corner of his empire, as in the others, the little man insisted on total control. A disease, Nehmann thought. And at this rate, probably terminal.
Goebbels was talking about his unhappiness with the Propaganda Companies, yet another innovation for which he claimed sole credit. Nehmann had accompanied one of these outfits during last year’s lightning descent on the luckless French. Goebbels, who treated everything in life as a lamp post, wanted to cock his leg and put his personal scent on the probability of a quick German victory. The Propaganda Companies – film crews and journalists – bounced along in the wake of the Panzer columns, raiding the battlefield for images and interviews to send home. Thus, within days, cinema audiences across the Reich would be treated to victory after victory, an epic movie told onscreen in real time, and all of it thanks to the little genius at the head of the Promi. Given the cannibalism within the upper reaches of the Reich, rival warlords were quick to spot the countless benefits of sharing these spoils of Hitler’s war, and now, it seemed, Goebbels was facing a serious turf battle with Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop.
‘The man’s a fool, an impostor,’ he said, reaching for a sausage. ‘He has the ear of Hitler because he bought off the Russians for a couple of years, but tell me this: what on earth does the man know about propaganda?’
‘He lies,’ Nehmann pointed out. ‘All the time.’
‘Yes, but what lies. Paper lies. The thinnest of lies. The most obvious of lies. Ribbentrop is an impostor. He married his fortune. He stole his title. He has a dentist’s smile. Even his staff say so.’
Nehmann nodded and emptied his glass. He hadn’t been summoned here to listen to Goebbels beating up his many enemies. There had to be another reason.
‘So what happens next, Herr Minister?’
‘What happens next, my friend, we owe to General Manstein. The Führer believes that Trappenjagd is just an hors d’oeuvre. The main course is yet to come. He’s as sensitive to the grain crisis as I am, and he believes the people deserve a little glimpse of what awaits us. The news footage from the Crimea arrives tomorrow. Ribbentrop is trying to get his hands on it. He won’t succeed. He thinks it’s due at Tempelhof just before noon and that’s because we’ve planted all the clues. In reality, it’ll arrive at Schönwalde around nine in the morning and you, my friend, will be on hand to collect it. I’ll be supervising the edit myself. The music is already written, and the earlier battle footage is already cut. Half a day’s hard work and we can start sending out the prints. Radio is fine. Radio is a godsend. But in the end, it’s pictures that count. You agree?’
‘I’m a writer.’
‘I know. Tact was never part of my job. I speak the truth as I see it. Not a particle more, not a particle less. Pictures, Werner.’ He made an oblong frame with his long fingers. ‘Pictures. Ja? You agree?’
Nehmann spent that night with a woman called Maria. He’d met her a couple of weeks ago in a Moabit nightclub where she played the piano. She said she was Austrian, from a village near Villach. Her orphan looks were, to be frank, Jewish – sallow complexion, a fall of jet-black curls, perfect mouth, enormous eyes – but Nehmann had met a lot of Italian girls and when she said that her grandparents had lived in Bolzano before heading north to Austria he was very happy to believe her.
To date, unusually for Nehmann, they’d yet to make love. She’d asked him to be patient, to wait until circumstances were right for both of them. She’d made the suggestion the first time she’d stayed with him in Guram’s apartment and to his own slight surprise, Nehmann had agreed. He was transfixed by her face, most of all by her eyes. They had a depth and a candour that he found close to hypnotic and, in no time at all, she’d become an important presence in his life.
They talked a great deal late into the small hours after her return from Moabit. They were both outsiders in this teeming city. They compared notes, and drank Guram’s wine, and agreed that much of Nazi Germany was an essay in swagger and bad taste. Complicity in this small conversational act of treason was drawing them ever closer, and Nehmann liked that. In truth, though he’d never admit it to Goebbels, his Czech coquette had begun to bore him and, now that she’d taken her favours elsewhere, he felt nothing but relief. Hedvika was too loud, too easy, too coarse, too suggestible. On the keyboard, and in real life, Maria had an altogether lighter touch.
Daylight came early at this time of year. Maria was still asleep and Nehmann got up and dressed without a sound. The rain had cleared at last and when he descended to the street to meet the car despatched from the Promi, the city was bathed in sunshine. At this hour in the morning there was still the faintest chill in the air but, among the secretaries spilling off the trolley buses, Nehmann saw a couple of older folk carrying rolled-up towels. They’re off to the Lido to make friends with summer again, he thought with a pang of jealousy. He swam there himself whenever he got the chance.
The journey out to Schönwalde took no time at all. At the sandbagged airfield checkpoint, Nehmann wound down the window and offered his Promi pass. The officer in charge consulted a list of names on a typed list.
‘You’re here to meet Oberstleutnant Messner?’
‘I am.’
‘Met him before?’
‘Never.’
‘You’re in for a treat. He’s due in about half an hour. He’s blaming headwinds over Poland so I expect God will be paying the bill.’ He stepped back to wave him through. ‘Good luck, Herr Nehmann.’
Nehmann exchanged looks with the driver as the car began to move.
‘God?’ he queried.
‘Messner has a reputation for never being wrong. If there’s no one else available, he gives God a mouthful.’
Nehmann nodded, none the wiser. The airfield lay before them, littered with heavy plant. Between the bulldozers and the trucks was a wilderness of puddles.
‘I thought this belonged to the Luftwaffe?’
‘It does. They’re laying a hard runway for the day the Regierung move in.’
‘So where’s Messner supposed to land?’
‘God only knows. Which is why the bloody man needs to watch his tongue.’
‘You know him?’
‘I’ve met him.’
‘And?’
‘Wait and see.’
They parked beside a barely finished single-storey building that seemed to serve as a rallying point for the army of labourers assigned to the new runway. The driver thought there was a chance of decent coffee inside and left the car to find out. After a while, bored, Nehmann got out to stretch his legs. A frieze of pine trees edged the flatness of the airfield on three sides and he was watching a distant gaggle of tiny stick figures pouring concrete when he heard the faintest mutter of aero engines, throttled back in anticipation of a landing.
Away to the east, below a scatter of fluffy white clouds, he could see the Me-110 dropping a wing and then settling gently on the final descent. From where he was standing it was difficult to be sure but Nehmann had the impression that some of the workmen out there would be wise to get out of the way. Seconds later came the blast of a whistle and the men began to scatter in all directions.
By now, the Me-110 was barely feet from touchdown. Messner lifted the nose, gunned the engines one final time to avoid three men running into his path, and then let the aircraft settle among the puddles. Spray from the main undercarriage sparkled briefly in the brightness of the sunshine, confirming Nehmann’s conviction that he’d just witnessed something remarkable. A big aquatic bird, he thought, totally at home in this sodden stretch of Brandenburg turf.
The Me-110 had come to a halt. Another burst of throttle brought the nose round before the plane began to taxi towards him, weaving its way without hesitation through the thicket of heavy construction vehicles. Cautiously, the workmen were returning to their tasks. One was shaking his fist in Messner’s direction.
‘Here—’
It was the driver. Nehmann took the proffered mug. Coffee with sugar. Better still.
The Me-110 was only metres away, the roar of the engines drowning any longer conversation. Up in the cockpit, Nehmann could see a white disc of face behind a large pair of aviator glasses. Two ground crew in overalls had appeared from nowhere, each pulling a big wooden chock for the main wheels. The taller of the two men glanced up and drew a finger across his throat and the propellers began to windmill before coming to a halt.
In the sudden silence, Nehmann was aware of the aircraft rocking slightly as the pilot released the canopy and clambered onto the wing. From the rear cockpit, he extracted two canvas mail sacks and handed them down to the ground crew.
He was tall, much taller than Nehmann. He climbed down onto the wet grass, and one hand swept the glasses from his face as if to get a proper look at this modest welcoming committee.
‘Oberstleutnant Messner,’ he introduced himself. ‘And you are…?’
‘Nehmann. From the Ministry.’
‘Guten Tag, Nehmann.’ He extended a gloved hand. ‘Do you mind?’
He wanted Nehmann’s coffee. A man could die of thirst flying out of the zoo that was Russia. Once, under different circumstances, he said he could rely on flasks of the stuff, the real thing, Turkish or Arabian, and perhaps a cake or two to keep his spirits up. But those days had gone.
Nehmann gave him the coffee. He’d never seen a face like this before. Once he must have been good-looking, even handsome, but someone – certainly not a friend – seemed to have rearranged all the constituent parts without keeping the original in mind. The sunken eyes sat oddly in the tightness of the flesh. A scar looped down from one corner of his mouth, while more scar tissue, raised welts of the stuff, latticed his forehead.
Messner, who must have been all too familiar with the curiosity of strangers, paid no attention. He bent for the bigger of the two sacks and gave it to Nehmann.
‘Compliments of Generaloberst Richthofen,’ he said. ‘Fuck it up and he’ll have your arse.’
‘These are the film cans?’
‘Ja.’
‘And the other sack?’
‘A Russian chicken for my lovely ex-wife. And a Ukrainian rabbit with the compliments of Kyiv. You know Kyiv? Been there ever? No? I thought not. Fine rabbits, my friend. You have a car here by any chance?’
‘Of course.’
‘Excellent. In which case, the rabbit might well be yours.’
Nehmann passed the sack containing the cans of undeveloped film to the driver. The other one appeared to be moving.
‘The rabbit’s still alive?’
‘Ja.’ Messner nodded at the aircraft. ‘Alas, I have no refrigeration.’
‘And the chicken?’
‘Dead, I’m afraid. But yet to be plucked.’ Messner checked his watch and then gestured at the Promi car. ‘I need to get to Wannsee. Do we have a deal?’
*
They did. The driver returned to the Promi, where Nehmann handed over the cans of film from the Crimea. On the Minister’s personal instructions, the undeveloped footage was rushed to a processing plant elsewhere in the city. 16mm prints, he was assured, would be ready for the editing suite by early afternoon. Nehmann was expected to attend the edit, where Minister Goebbels – familiar with the footage already cut – would supervise the final version.
The Promi car was still parked outside in the Wilhelmstrasse. Messner, in the front passenger seat, appeared to be asleep. Nehmann opened the rear door to check on the rabbit and then slipped behind the wheel.
‘Still alive?’ Messner had been watching him in the rear-view mirror.
‘Very. Where are we going?’
‘Wannsee. I thought I told you. Get me to the waterfront and we’ll take it from there.’
They set off. Nehmann’s driving skills were rudimentary. He didn’t possess a licence and strictly speaking he should have returned the car to the underground garage, but Birgit said that everything would be fine as long as he was back in time for the edit.
‘We’ve got three hours,’ he told Messner. ‘You want me to drop you off at Wannsee or take you back to the airfield afterwards?’
‘The airfield. Beata was a wife to be proud of, but a man runs out of credit if he doesn’t watch his step.’
‘So what happened?’
‘I didn’t watch my step.’
Nehmann glanced across at him, surprised by this small moment of intimacy. Then, from nowhere, a truck appeared, Wehrmacht-grey, two lines of soldiers squatting on benches in the back. Heads turned to look down as Nehmann braked hard and swerved to the right. One of the soldiers was laughing.
‘Pull in, for fuck’s sake.’ Messner’s muttered oath had the force of an order.
Nehmann came to a halt beside the pavement. Messner waited for a cyclist to pass and then opened the passenger door and stepped out into the road. For a moment, Nehmann thought he’d baled out for good but then the tall figure in the leather flying jacket was pulling his own door open.
‘Move over, Nehmann. You drive like a Russian, my friend, and that’s not a compliment.’
Chastened, Nehmann did as he was told. Messner adjusted the rear-view mirror and rejoined the traffic. From the back of the car came a series of snuffles and then a brief mew. The rabbit, Nehmann thought, didn’t like his driving either.
They drove in silence for a while, following the trolley bus wires out towards Charlottenburg. For no apparent reason Messner slowed at a major intersection. Beyond, on the right, was a branch of the Dresdner Bank.
‘Just here…’ he said ‘…if I’m to believe all the stories.’
‘Just here what?’ Nehmann hadn’t a clue what he was talking about.
‘The accident. Me and the windscreen.’ One gloved hand touched his face. ‘This.’
He’d been driving his wife’s car, he explained. He’d had the devil of a toothache for three whole days and she’d managed to find a dentist. It was a winter evening, blackout, and a raid was expected. There was a deadline for the dentist, and he must have taken a chance or two.
‘You don’t remember any of this?’
‘I remember nothing. I’d been flying Goering and a couple of his people that day. Next thing, I’m in the Charité hospital. You know anything about hospitals, Nehmann?’
‘No.’
‘Just as well, especially these days. Put a woman in a uniform and she thinks she owns the world.’
‘You’re supposed to feel grateful. They probably saved your life.’
‘I know. And that only makes it worse. I was months in that place. Pilots and confinement don’t mix. As soon as I was mobile again, I tried to escape. After that they locked me up and threatened me with Himmler.’
‘You flew him, too?’
Ja?