“Thank you, Heinrich.”
“Don’t mention it, my dear fellow. We will have your diplomatic effort and my Beketovka File. Either way, we must not fail. Unless we can make some sort of a peace, or successfully detach the Soviet Union from her Western allies, I fear Germany is finished.”
Since the purpose of the speech Himmler was to make at Posen the next day was the subject of defeatism, Ribbentrop proceeded cautiously.
“You are being frank,” he said carefully. “So let me also be frank with you, Heinrich.”
“Of course.”
Von Ribbentrop could hardly forget he was speaking to the most powerful man in Germany. Himmler could easily order the train stopped and Ribbentrop shot summarily by the side of the railway track. The foreign minister had no doubt that the Reichsfuhrer could justify such an action to the Fuhrer at a later date, and, aware of the secrecy of the subject he was about to broach, Ribbentrop found himself struggling for the words that might still leave him at arm’s length from being complicit in Germany’s crusade against the Jews.
In late 1941, he had become aware of mass executions of Jews by Einsatzgruppen-SS special action groups in Eastern Europe-and since then had tried his best to avoid reading all SS and SD reports that were filed, as a matter of routine, with Department III of the Foreign Ministry. These Special Action Groups were no longer shooting thousands of Jews but organizing their deportation to special camps in Poland and the Ukraine. Von Ribbentrop knew the purpose of these camps-he could hardly fail to know it, having visited Belzec in secret-but it bothered him a great deal that the Allies might also know their purpose.
“Is it possible,” he asked Himmler, “that the Allies are aware of the purpose behind the evacuation of Jews to Eastern Europe? That this is the true reason they have ignored evidence of Russian atrocities?”
“We agreed that we are speaking frankly, Joachim,” said Himmler, “so let us do just that. You are referring to the systematic extirpation of the Jews, are you not?”
Von Ribbentrop nodded uncomfortably.
“Look,” continued Himmler. “We have the moral right to protect ourselves. A duty to our own people to destroy all saboteurs, agitators, and slander-mongers who want to destroy us. But to answer your question specifically, I will say this. I think it’s possible that they do know of the existence of our grand solution to the Jewish problem, yes. But I would suggest that currently they imagine that accounts of what goes on in Eastern Europe have been dramatically exaggerated.
“If I might be allowed to pat myself on the back, it is incredible just what has been achieved. You have no idea. Nevertheless, none of us forgets that this is a chapter in German history that can never be written. But rest assured, Joachim, as soon as a peace has been negotiated, all the camps will be destroyed and all evidence that they ever existed erased. People will say Jews were murdered. Thousands of Jews, hundreds of thousands of Jews-yes, they will say that, too. But this is war. ‘Total war,’ Goebbels calls it, and for once I agree with him. People get killed in wartime. That is an unfortunate fact of life. Who knows how many the RAF will kill tonight in Munich? Old men, women and children?” Himmler shook his head. “So, Joachim, I give you my word that people will not believe it was possible so many Jews died. Faced with the menace of European Bolshevism, they will not want to believe it. No, they could never believe it. No one could.”
III
Named after the leading poet of Polish romanticism, the Adam Mickiewicz Square in Posen was one of the old city’s most attractive sights. On the eastern side of the square was a castle built for Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1910, when Posen had been part of the Prussian empire. In truth, it hardly looked like a castle, more like a town hall or a city museum, with a facade that was fronted not by a moat but by a large wrought-iron railing protecting a neatly kept lawn and an open graveled area that resembled a parade ground. On this particular day, that spot had been given up to at least a dozen SS staff cars. Parked in front of the railing were several Hannomag troop carriers, each containing fifteen Waffen-SS Panzergrenadiers, and there were almost as many patrolling the castle’s perimeter. The Polish passengers riding on a tram along the eastern side of Adam Mickiewicz Square glanced in at the castle and shuddered, for this was the headquarters of the SS in Poland, and even as they looked, still more SS staff cars could be seen going through the heavily guarded gates and dropping SS officers at the tree-lined entrance.
The inhabitants of Posen, formerly known as Poznan, had endured the SS in their city since September 1939, but no one on the tram could remember ever seeing so many SS at the Konigliches Residenzschloss; it was almost as if the SS were holding some sort of rally at the castle. If the people on the tram had dared to look more closely, they would have noticed that every one of the SS officers arriving at the castle that morning was a general.
One such general was a handsome, dapper-looking man of medium height in his early thirties. Unlike most of his brother senior officers, this particular SS general stopped for a moment to smoke a cigarette and look with a critical eye at the exterior of the castle, with its ignoble, suburban clock tower and high mansard roof from which were hung a number of long swastika banners. Then, looking one last time across Adam Mickiewicz Square, he ground the cigarette under the heel of his well-polished boot and went inside.
The general was Walter Schellenberg, and he was no stranger to Posen. His second wife, Irene, had come from Posen, something he had discovered not from her but from his then boss and the former chief of the SD, Reinhard Heydrich. Six months after marrying Irene, in May 1940, Schellenberg had been given a file by Heydrich. It revealed that Irene’s aunt was married to a Jew. Heydrich’s meaning had been clear enough: Schellenberg now belonged to Heydrich, at least as long as he cared anything about his wife’s relations. But two years later Heydrich was dead, murdered by Czech partisans, and Department 6 (Amt VI) of the foreign intelligence section of the Reich Security Office, one of the key administrations formerly commanded by Heydrich, was given to Schellenberg.
In the castle’s Golden Hall there were perhaps only two notable absentees: Heydrich’s replacement as chief of the Reich Security Office (which included the SD and the Gestapo), Ernst Kaltenbrunner; and Himmler’s former adjutant, Karl Wolff, now the supreme SS representative in Italy. It had been given out that both men were too ill to attend Himmler’s conference in Posen, that Kaltenbrunner was suffering from phlebitis and Wolff was recovering from an operation to remove a kidney stone. But Schellenberg, a man as well informed as he was resourceful, knew the truth. On Himmler’s orders Kaltenbrunner, an alcoholic, was drying out in a Swiss sanatorium, while Wolff and his former boss were no longer on speaking terms after the Reichsfuhrer-SS had refused Wolff permission to divorce his wife, Frieda, in order to marry a tasty blonde named Grafin-a permission subsequently granted by Hitler himself when (quite unforgivably, in Himmler’s eyes) Wolff went over Himmler’s head.
There was, Schellenberg thought to himself as he sauntered into the hall, never a dull moment in the SS. Well, almost never. A speech by Himmler was not something he could view with anything other than dread, for the Reichsfuhrer had a tendency to longwindedness, and given the number of SS generals who were gathered in architect Franz Schwechten’s Golden Hall, Schellenberg expected a speech of Mahabharatan length and dullness. The Mahabharata was a book the young general had made himself read so that he might better understand Heinrich Himmler, who was its most passionate advocate; and having read it, Schellenberg had certainly found it easier to see where Himmler got some of his crazier ideas concerning duty, discipline, and, a favorite Himmler word, sacrifice. And Schellenberg did not think it too fanciful to view Himmler as someone who regarded himself as an avatar of the supreme god, Vishnu-or, at the very least, his high priest, descended to earth in human form to rescue Law, Good Deeds, Right, and Virtue. Schellenberg had also formed the impression that Himmler thought of Jews in the same way that the Mahabharata spoke of the one hundred Dhartarashtras -the grotesque human incarnations of demons who were the perpetual enemies of the gods. For all Schellenberg knew, Hitler held the same opinion, although he thought it much more likely that the Fuhrer simply hated Jews, which wasn’t exactly unusual in Germany and Austria. Schellenberg himself had nothing at all against the Jews; his own father had been a piano manufacturer in Saarbrucken and then in Luxembourg, and many of his best customers had been Jews. So it was fortunate that Schellenberg’s own department was obliged to pay little more than lip service to all the usual Aryanist claptrap about Jewish subhumans and vermin. Those anti-Semites who did work in Amt VI-and there were quite a few-knew better than to give vent to their hatred in the presence of Walter Schellenberg. The young Foreign Intelligence head was interested only in what a British secret agent, Captain Arthur Connolly, had once called “the Great Game”-the game in question being espionage, intrigue, and clandestine military adventure.