“General Fromm, still trying to save his own skin, promptly convened a summary court-martial, which promptly found von Stauffenberg, Olbricht, Mertz, Colonel-General Ludwig Beck, and Lieutenant Werner von Haeften guilty of high treason and ordered their execution.
“Shortly after midnight, they were led, one by one, before a stack of sandbags in the parking lot and executed by SS submachine-gun fire. Just before his executioners fired, von Stauffenberg shouted, ‘Long live our holy Germany.’”
“My God!” von Wachtstein said.
“In a sense, Graf von Wachtstein, they were fortunate,” Gehlen said.
Clete noticed that Gehlen had just called von Wachtstein “Graf” and then remembered he had done so before.
“Fortunate?” Delgano asked incredulously.
“The SS immediately began to arrest anyone suspected of being involved,” Gehlen went on. “The total was approximately seven thousand people. They missed some of the guilty—”
“Including General Reinhard Gehlen,” Mattingly interjected dryly.
“—and arrested many people who were completely innocent,” Gehlen went on as if he hadn’t heard Mattingly’s comment. “Accused officers were denied courts-martial and tried before the Volksgerichthof, whose chief judge was a man named Roland Freisler. Freisler permitted the accused no defense, and usually had the accused standing before the court in uniforms stripped of all insignia, buttons, belts, and braces. They had to try to hold their trousers up with their hands. When Freisler screamed at them to stand to attention, the trousers of course fell down and the accused faced the court in their underdrawers. Not a single person brought before the Volksgerichthof—there were two thousand—was acquitted.
“On August 10, 1944, three weeks or so after the bomb failed to eliminate Hitler, Graf von Stauffenberg’s brother, Berthold, Count von Schulenberg, and three others—including Generalleutnant Graf Karl-Friedrich von Wachtstein—were tried and convicted of high treason and hung with despicable cruelty that afternoon in the execution hut in Berlin-Ploetzensee.”
“What does that mean, General?” Delgano asked. “‘Despicable cruelty’?”
Clete thought: For God’s sake, Gehlen, don’t answer that!
He glanced at Mattingly, whose face showed he was thinking the same thing.
“They were taken to the execution hut in an inner courtyard of the building,” Gehlen went on matter-of-factly, “where they were stripped of the clothing they had been wearing since their arrest. Their hands and feet were bound. Wire—something like piano wire—was looped around their necks, then around hooks—something like the hooks one sees in a butcher’s shop—on the wall.
“They then were strangled by their own weight. They took two or three minutes to lose consciousness, whereupon they were revived and the strangulation process begun again. This was repeated four or five times until death finally occurred.”
Clete looked at Peter’s face. It was white and contorted.
You didn’t have to get into the fucking details, you sonofabitch!
“The hangings—strangulations?—were filmed by SS motion picture photographers at the request of Hitler, who wished to see them. I understand he has watched the films over and over.
“All properties of the conspirators and their relatives were confiscated. Just about everybody in the von Stauffenberg family was immediately arrested,” Gehlen went on. “Von Stauffenberg’s mother, Caroline, was in solitary confinement from July 23, 1944, until the end of the war. Claus von Stauffenberg’s widow, Nina, was held in the Alexanderplatz prison in Berlin. She gave birth there, a daughter named Konstanze, in January 1945—”
“Where is Nina—the countess—now?” von Wachtstein interrupted.
“May I suggest, Graf von Wachtstein, that you hold your questions until I finish?”
“Excuse me,” von Wachtstein said.
“The third brother, Alexander von Stauffenberg, was brought back from Athens to Berlin. Even when it became apparent that he was not involved in the conspiracy, he was nevertheless arrested and held in various concentration camps.
“Von Stauffenberg’s cousin Caesar von Hofacker was condemned to death on August thirtieth but kept alive for interrogation—which was unsuccessful—about Rommel’s and Speidel’s involvement in the conspiracy, after which, on December 20, 1944, he was executed in the manner I described.
“There are other details, but I think I have covered pretty much everything. You had questions, Herr Graf?”
“Where is the Countess von Stauffenberg now? Claus’s widow, Nina?” von Wachtstein asked.
“We know only that she escaped both the SS mass execution of the prisoners in Alexanderplatz prison as the Russians drew close and the arrest of the prisoners still living by the Russians when they took the prison. We can only presume—”
“The von Stauffenbergs have a house in Zehlendorf,” von Wachtstein said. “Perhaps she is trying to get there.”
“Had a house, Herr Graf,” Gehlen said. “As I said before, all von Stauffenberg property—all the property of all the conspirators, including that of your late father, Herr Graf, was seized by the Third Reich.”
He paused to let that sink in.
“The property of the late Admiral Canaris was also seized,” Gehlen went on. “His house in Zehlendorf has been requisitioned by General White for the use of the OSS.”
“General White, von Wachtstein,” Mattingly offered, “is doing what he can to locate Countess von Stauffenberg and the baby. If they can be found, White will find them. When that happens, she will be taken to the Canaris house and placed under the protection of the OSS.”
“How is the OSS going to protect her?” Frade asked. “We have people in Berlin?”
“Did you see Master Sergeant Dunwiddie when we arrived here?” Mattingly said. “That huge black man they call ‘Tiny’? He was posting the guard.”
Frade nodded.
“He and eight of his men, most of them at least as large as Tiny, will be on the C-54 with me tomorrow,” Mattingly said. “Tiny is a very interesting man. His great-grandfather charged up San Juan Hill in Cuba with the Tenth Cavalry. Given the slightest chance, Tiny will tell you the Tenth made it up the hill before Colonel Teddy Roosevelt’s First Volunteer Cavalry did.”
Gehlen’s face showed that he could have done without the history lesson.
“Is there anything else you’d like to know, Herr Graf?” Gehlen asked.
Von Wachtstein seemed to be struggling to find his voice.
Finally, he did, and asked calmly, “General, do you know what
happened to the remains? I’d like to take my father’s body to Schloss Wachtstein.”
“Weren’t you listening, Herr Graf, when I told you that the Schloss—all of your land, all your holdings—have been seized?” Gehlen said. “Let me carry that a little further: When the Soviets took the castle—I presume you know it was being used as a recovery hospital for amputees—”
“I knew that, General. I was there.”
“—they executed the patients who had not been in condition to leave their beds and flee. The nurses and the doctors who had remained behind to treat them were sent to Russia. After, of course, the nurses had been repeatedly raped.”
“With respect, Herr General, my question was regarding the location of my father’s remains.”
“If you had been in the castle when the Russians took it, Herr Graf, and they learned who you were, you would have been hung by your ankles and your epidermis would have been cut from your body. Your skinned remains would have been left hanging so that the people in the village would get the message that the regime of the aristocracy was over and that the Red Army was in charge.”