He nodded. She seemed to offer a flicker of acknowledgment, or maybe he imagined it. There was no way to find out for sure, because now it was time to deliver the heart of his opening remarks, with what he hoped would be a stirring preview of what lay ahead. Students always grumbled if you used the full fifty minutes on the first day, so he wrapped things up at 8:35. He closed with these words:
“By presenting you the life of one rather venal and tormented man, I hope to show you the ways in which history is a living entity. Not just because of its survivors, and the stories they have to tell, but because of its enduring power to hurt and to heal, to create even as it destroys, to transform familiar old heroes and monuments into dust even as it raises fresh new icons from the ashes of the lost and the forgotten.”
Rather pleased with himself, Nat scanned the room as the students began packing to leave. Karen nodded approvingly. Viv wiped something from her eyes.
But Berta was gone.
She must have slipped out during his summation, another disappearance without warning. Still haunted, he supposed. And still very much a German, waltzing with her past even as it enticed her down a dark stairwell.
He wondered if she could use some company.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
HALF THE FUN of writing this book was the month I spent poring over declassified OSS records in the beautiful reading room of the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The staff were helpful and knowledgeable, the material was endlessly fascinating, and the setting was a treat for the eyes. Heck, even the cafeteria food was good, especially the ribs.As I followed the paper trail of Allen Dulles through, figuratively speaking, the streets and alleys of wartime Switzerland, I most often sought guidance from the incomparable Lawrence McDonald, a veteran archivist who knows every nook and cranny. Without him, I’d probably still be floundering through the first of those sixty boxes of documents.Among those documents, I am particularly indebted to two richly detailed field reports from OSS operatives: the April 1, 1945, report of Philip Keller, describing his arrest and interrogation during his infiltration of Bavaria, and the dramatic report of Gertrude LeGendre describing her capture by the Germans in occupied France in September 1944.I also owe a deep debt of gratitude to Neal H. Petersen’s seminal work, From Hitler’s Doorstep, an admirably indexed and annotated collection of Dulles’s wartime intelligence reports. It functioned as my road atlas in navigating the era’s baffling array of operatives and code names. Another helpful tool was American Intelligence and the German Resistance to Hitler, edited by Jürgen Heideking and Christof Mauch.In researching Dulles himself, I relied greatly on the fine biography Gentleman Spy, by Peter Grose, and also Autobiography of a Spy, the colourful memoirs of Mary Bancroft, who was a confidante and mistress of Dulles.On the subject of Nazi Germany and what it means to spend your life researching that era, I owe much to Professor Gerhard Weinberg, of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. Not only did he allow me into his living room to pick his brain for hours on end, but he also steered me toward other helpful historians and archivists.On the topic of the student resistance group known as the White Rose, three books were particularly helpfuclass="underline" Sophie Scholl and the White Rose, by Annette Dumbach and Jud Newborn; A Noble Treason, by Richard Hanser; and The White Rose: Munich, 1942-1943, by Inge Scholl. The Fall of Berlin, by Anthony Read and David Fisher, was invaluable for its details of daily life in wartime Berlin, and The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting was a vital reference for all matters pertaining to the infamous Wannsee Conference of January 1942. Thanks also to the caretakers of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer House in Berlin for allowing me to roam its rooms for a short but significant period one spring afternoon.On the subject of downed American airmen who spent much of the war in Switzerland, thanks to Captain Martin Andrews, who not only shared his own vivid memories but also his papers. For additional help on this topic I am indebted to Refuge from the Reich, by Stephen Tanner, and Masters of the Air, by Donald L. Miller.In Switzerland, thanks to Dr. Pierre Th. Braunschweig for his observations, and also for his informative book, Secret Channel to Berlin: The Masson-Schellenberg Connection and Swiss Intelligence in World War II.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAN FESPERMAN’s travels as a writer have taken him to thirty countries and three war zones. Lie in the Dark won the Crime Writers’ Association of Britain’s John Creasey Memorial Dagger Award for best first crime novel; The Small Boat of Great Sorrows won the association’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award for best thriller; and The Prisoner of Guantánamo won North America’s Dashiell Hammett Award.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2009 by Dan Fesperman
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Originally published in Great Britain by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, London.
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Harvard University Press and the Trustees of Amherst College for permission to reprint “Forbidden fruit a flavor has,” an excerpt from “He ate and drank the precious words,” “Mine enemy is grown old,” and “The past is such a curious creature” from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. Johnson, copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). Reprinted by permission of Harvard University Press and the Trustees of Amherst College.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fesperman, Dan, [date]
The arms maker of Berlin / by Dan Fesperman. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-27228-7
1. History teachers—Fiction. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Archival resources—
Fiction. 3. Weisse Rose (Resistance group)—Fiction. 4. Bonhoeffer, Dietrich,
1906–1945—Fiction. 5. Code and cipher stories. I. Title.
PS3556.E778A89 2009
813′.54—dc22 2009003802
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
v3.0
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books By This Author
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One