‘Is this a coincidence?’ I asked cheerfully. ‘Or did you come to see me off?’
‘I’m sorry?’ He frowned. ‘Oh, I didn’t recognize you. You’re flying to Smolensk, aren’t you, Captain Bernhard?’
‘Unless you know something different,’ I said. ‘And my name is Gunther, Captain Bernhard Gunther.’
‘Yes, of course. No, as it happens I’m travelling with you on the same plane. I was going to take the train and then changed my mind. But now I’m not so sure I made the right choice.’
‘I’m afraid you’re between the wall and a fierce dog with that one,’ I said.
We climbed aboard and took our seats along the corrugated fuselage: it was like sitting inside a workman’s hut.
‘Are you getting off at the Wolf’s Lair?’ I asked. ‘Or going all the way to Smolensk?’
‘No, I’m going all the way.’ Quickly he added: ‘I have some urgent and unexpected Abwehr business to attend to with Field Marshal von Kluge at his headquarters.’
‘Bring a packed lunch, did you?’
‘Hmm?’
I nodded at the parcel he was holding under his arm.
‘This? No, it’s not my lunch. It’s a gift for someone. Some Cointreau.’
‘Cointreau. Real coffee. Is there nothing beyond your great father’s talents?’
Von Dohnanyi smiled his thin smile, stretched his thinner neck over his tailored tunic collar. ‘Would you excuse me please, captain.’
He waved at two staff officers with red stripes on their trousers and then went to sit beside them at the opposite end of the aircraft, just behind the cockpit. Even on a Ju52, people like Von Dohnanyi and the staff officers managed somehow to make their own first class; it wasn’t that the seats were any better up front, just that none of these flamingos really wanted to talk with junior officers like me.
I lit a cigarette and tried to make myself comfortable. The engines started and the door closed. The co-pilot locked the door and put his hand on one of two beam-mounted machine guns that could be moved up and down the length of the aircraft.
‘We’re a crew member short, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘So does anyone know how to use one of these?’
I looked at my fellow passengers. No one spoke, and I wondered what the point was of transporting any of these men nearer the front; none of them looked as though they could have worked a door-lock, let alone an MG15.
‘I do,’ I said, raising my hand.
‘Good,’ said the co-pilot. ‘There’s a one-in-a-hundred chance we’ll run into an RAF Mosquito as we’re flying out of Berlin, so stay on the gun for the next fifteen minutes, eh?’
‘By all means,’ I said. ‘But what about in Smolensk?’
The co-pilot shook his head. ‘The front line is five hundred miles east of Smolensk. That’s too far for Russian fighters.’
‘Well, that’s a relief,’ said someone.
‘Don’t worry,’ grinned the co-pilot. ‘The cold’ll probably kill you long before then.’
We took off in the early morning light, and when we were airborne I stood up, slid the window open and poked the MG outside, expectantly. The saddle drum held seventy-five rounds, but my hands were soon so cold I didn’t much fancy our chances of hitting anything with it and was quite relieved when the co-pilot shouted back that I could stand down. I was even more relieved to close the window against the freezing air that was filling the aircraft.
I sat down, tucked my numb hands under my armpits and tried to go to sleep.
Four hours later, as we approached Rastenburg, in Eastern Prussia, people turned around in their seats and, looking out of the windows, eagerly tried to catch a glimpse of the leader’s headquarters, nicknamed the Wolf’s Lair.
‘You won’t see it,’ said some know-it-all who’d been there before. ‘All of the buildings are camouflaged. If you could see it then so could the fucking RAF.’
‘If they could get this far,’ said someone else.
‘They weren’t supposed to get as far as Berlin’ said another, ‘but somehow, against all predictions, they did.’
We landed a few miles west of the Wolf’s Lair, and I went to look for an early lunch or a late breakfast but, finding neither, I sat in a hut that was almost as cold as the plane and ate some meagre cheese sandwiches I had brought with me just in case. I didn’t see Von Dohnanyi again until we were back on the plane.
The air between Rastenburg and Minsk was rougher, and from time to time the Junkers would drop like a stone before hitting the bottom of the pocket like a water bucket in a well. It wasn’t long before Von Dohnanyi was starting to look very green.
‘Perhaps you should drink some of those spirits,’ I said, which was a crude way of telling him that I wouldn’t have minded a drop of it myself.
‘What?’
‘Your friend’s Cointreau. You should drink some to settle your stomach.’
He looked baffled for a minute and then shook his head, weakly.
One of the other passengers, an SS lieutenant who had boarded the plane at Rastenburg, produced a hip flask of peach schnapps and handed it around. I took a bite off it just as we hit another big air pocket, and this one seemed to jolt all the life out of Von Dohnanyi, who fell onto the fuselage floor in a dead faint. Overcoming my natural instinct, which was always to leave the people in the first class to look after themselves, I knelt down beside him, loosened the collar on his tunic and poured some of the lieutenant’s schnapps between his lips. That was when I saw the address on Von Dohnanyi’s parcel, which was still under his seat.
Colonel Helmuth Stieff, Wehrmacht Coordination Dept., Anger Castle, Wolf’s Lair, Rastenburg, Prussia.
Von Dohnanyi opened his eyes, sighed and then sat up.
‘You just fainted, that’s all,’ I said. ‘Might be best if you lay on the floor for a while.’
So he did, and actually managed to sleep for a couple of hours while from time to time I wondered if Von Dohnanyi had simply forgotten to deliver his bottle of Cointreau to his friend Colonel Stieff at the Wolf’s Lair, or if perhaps he had changed his mind about handing over such a generous present. If the booze was anything like the coffee it was certain to be high-quality stuff, much too good to give away. He could hardly have forgotten about the parcel, since I was certain he had taken it with him when we got off the plane in Rastenburg. So why hadn’t he given it to one of the many orderlies for delivery to Colonel Stieff, or even, if he didn’t trust them, to one of the other staff officers who were going straight to the Wolf’s Lair? Of course one of them might equally have told von Dohnanyi that Stieff was no longer at the Wolf’s Lair – that would have explained everything. But like an itch that kept on coming back, no amount of scratching I did seemed to take away from the fact that Von Dohnanyi’s failure to deliver his precious bottle just seemed strange.
There’s not an awful lot to do on a four-hour flight between Rastenburg and Minsk.
It was still light by the time we reached Smolensk several hours later, but only just. For almost an hour before that we’d been flying over an endless, thick green carpet of trees. It seemed there were more trees in Russia than anywhere else on earth. There were so many trees that at times the Junkers seemed almost immobile in the air and I felt as if we were drifting over a primordial landscape. I suppose Russia is as near as you can get to what the earth must have been like thousands of years ago – in more ways than one; probably it was an excellent place to be a squirrel, although perhaps not such an excellent place to be a man. If you were intent on hiding the bodies of thousands of Jews or Polish officers, this looked like a good place to do it. You could have hidden all manner of crimes in a landscape like the one below our aircraft, and the sight of it filled me with me dread not just for what I might find down there but also for what I might find myself faced with again. It was only a dark possibility, but I knew instinctively that in the winter of 1943 this was no place to be an SD officer with a guilty conscience.