‘Or maybe whoever it was had expected a ceasefire, an armistice.’
‘Are we talking about Hitler? Surely by April 1945 a few crates of art would have been the least of his concerns?’
Hiebermeyer shook his head. ‘There are other markings on the crates. They say Ahnenerbe, the Department of Cultural Heritage. And you can see the Sonnenrad sun symbol of the SS, and then the word Wewelsburg. You told me you’d studied the architectural plans for that place. The order castle of the SS, run by the man who signed the papers you found in this bunker. You see what I’m getting at?’
Penn gasped. ‘Of course. Himmler. Heinrich Himmler.’
‘The second most powerful man in Nazi Germany, who maybe wanted to be the most powerful.’
‘ Himmler,’ Penn repeated. ‘Didn’t he try to negotiate with the Americans, and then got excommunicated by Hitler for it?’
Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘If I’m right about this, then maybe that’s where his gamble went wrong. A truce would have allowed him to clear this place out. I’m certain that the crates contain the lost treasures of Wewelsburg Castle: antiquities brought by the Ahnenerbe in the 1930s from around the world, hijacked by Himmler to fuel his fantasy of an Aryan prehistory, of a master race including the kings of ancient Greece, Agamemnon himself, and even the rulers of a mythical Atlantis. I’ve spent half my lifetime yearning to know what happened to these artefacts.’
Penn had moved along to the side of the crate with the lid ajar, and rubbed the side of it. ‘Look at this one. The lettering’s different.’
Hiebermeyer followed him up the narrow space and squatted down again, his suit crinkling and bulging as he did so. He stared at the lettering and numbers, his mind racing. ‘That’s it. That clinches it.’
‘ Museum fur Vor- und Fruhgeschichte,’ Penn read out slowly. ‘ Troia.’
Hiebermeyer’s heart pounded. ‘That’s the Museum of Pre- and Proto-History in Berlin. That’s where the treasures were displayed that Schliemann had taken from Troy and given to the German people in 1881. In 1941 they were moved from the museum and stored in the Zoo flak tower. I always knew there would be a third crate,’ he said excitedly. ‘A crate containing the secret treasures Schliemann never gave to the German people but concealed himself somewhere in his home town near the Baltic, where Ahnenerbe researchers under Himmler discovered them. Treasures that included the golden reverse swastika, the Trojan palladion, which Himmler made into his most potent symbol.’
‘A third crate?’ Penn said. ‘Where are the other two?’
‘When Bormann went to the flak tower to take the treasures to the salt mines, he left behind two crates, the ones containing the Troy artefacts from the museum. They were still there during the final Soviet onslaught and were taken to Moscow, where they resurfaced in the 1990s. When the Soviets arrived in the flak tower, the door to the storage room was guarded by a Dr Unverzagt, an Ahnenerbe Nazi who had been director of the museum. When the story of his role came out after the artefacts were revealed in Moscow, most archaeologists assumed that he had been guarding the greatest treasures of his museum to ensure that they weren’t looted by Soviet soldiers and were captured intact; that he was doing it for the sake of archaeology and science. But I think they were wrong.’
‘You think Himmler was personally involved in this?’ Penn straightened up, and leaned over the half-open lid of the crate.
‘Himmler was obsessed with the treasures of Troy,’ Hiebermeyer replied. ‘And he was Unverzagt’s boss. The Ahnenerbe worshipped Himmler, the man who had given so many failed and second-rate academics the job of a lifetime. Many of them were all too happy to go along with the racist poison, and plenty of them believed in it. Why did Himmler order Bormann to leave those two crates in the Zoo tower? Because he wanted them for himself. Why were they still there when the Russians arrived? Because Himmler’s gamble didn’t pay off, and he had no time to remove them. Why was Unverzagt still there guarding them fanatically? Not for the sake of archaeology, but in the vain hope that his god Himmler would return.’
‘You should take a look in here,’ Penn said. Hiebermeyer heaved himself up, wincing as he pressed his injured wrist against his knee, then aimed his headlamp over the side of the crate. He could see neatly stacked smaller wooden boxes inside, labelled with swastikas and the SS Sonnenrad, evidently from Wewelsburg. One of them had a line of symbols along the top of the label he recognized from Stone Age cave paintings. He followed Penn’s beam. There was an empty space at the end of the crate, half filled with a lumpy yellow substance covered with mould. He realized that it had been straw, cushioning material. Then his beam crossed Penn’s, and he froze.
‘Is that what you were looking for?’ Penn asked.
Hiebermeyer was speechless. It was the shape of a swastika, indented in the straw, about fifteen centimetres across. It had clearly been a heavy object, metallic, judging by the depth of the indent. He scanned quickly around, looking inside the crate. The object that had made the indent was nowhere to be seen. ‘Is there any chance your people could have missed finding it?’ he said, his voice hoarse with emotion.
‘None of the other crates are open. I told them to leave this part of the room until you arrived and we could look at it together. Apart from this, every inch of the chamber has been inspected, up to the laboratory door. Nothing has been found. If this was that golden object you were talking about, the Trojan palladion, then it looks as if someone scarpered with it in 1945. Odd, though, that it doesn’t seem to have been carefully packaged away like this other stuff, instead of just lying here in the straw.’
Hiebermeyer swallowed hard. He had desperately hoped to find it. He brought his beam back to the shape in the straw, and stared. ‘That’s because it was never in the museum collection in Berlin, and it can only have been here in the bunker for a short time. We believe that after the Ahnenerbe discovered the palladion in Schliemann’s hiding place in his home town, it was stored in great secrecy in Wewelsburg Castle. We believe that Himmler imbued it with holy significance, perhaps involving it in some kind of initiation rite for a select few. It became a sacred symbol of the new creed, of the god Himmler had made himself. We know that it became the symbol of something called the Agamemnon Code, an activation code somehow tied up with Himmler’s plans for a dark scheme in the final days of the Reich.’
‘The reverse swastika on the letterhead of those order papers, marked Top Secret,’ Penn said. ‘Was that it?’
Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘Himmler clearly envisaged a future for himself, rather than the self-immolation that Hitler and his cronies saw as their only way out. But before then, when the palladion had become like the Holy Grail, Himmler had it sent from Wewelsburg to a place of even greater secrecy. I mentioned salt mines? Well, Jack visited one of them last year on his hunt for this object. The man we now believe knows the use to which the palladion was to be put had blackmailed him into going there to retrieve it, by kidnapping his daughter. It had been put deep in the Wieliczka salt mine, in a shaft now flooded under almost a hundred metres of water, near the death camp at Auschwitz. All Jack found was a box containing an impression like this where the palladion had been stored. As the Soviets advanced towards that part of Poland, we believe the palladion was removed from the box and taken by another of Himmler’s chosen few on the march with the last inmates from Auschwitz to the west, to Belsen and this place. Among them was the girl who drew that image for Captain Frazer.’