Two Brothers

Paulus! I hadn’t thought! Where are we going?’

‘To the river obviously,’ Paulus replied, already beginning to push. ‘With such a heavy carpet tied around him he’ll sink like a stone. All we have to do is get it in without anyone seeing. Or at least anybody caring.’ Paulus turned once more to Silke. ‘Silks,’ he said, ‘you’ve been so incredible helping us like this, but really, you shouldn’t come now. There’s only two cart handles and there’s no point you risking your life too.’

‘I think you’ll do better with a girl along,’ she said quietly. ‘It’ll just look more innocent somehow. Two lads on their own are much more likely to attract trouble.’

Paulus just smiled and once more put his weight to the cart.

As they made their way along the streets, they attracted the odd glance but nothing more. For the previous twenty years Berlin’s cobbles had rung constantly to the sound of metal cartwheels as desperate people traded and bartered what little they had to survive. The boys’ main fear was that somebody might take it into their mind to try and rob them and for that reason Otto kept his hand on his knife.

Fortunately he had no occasion to use it and after an hour or so of heavy work they found themselves down amongst the wharfs where Paulus pointed the cart towards a lonely jetty.

‘We do it quick and we do it bold,’ Paulus said. ‘No creeping, no skulking. That’s the way to get away with stuff. In my experience if you front people up they tend to mind their own business.’

‘They’d fucking better,’ Otto said grimly.

‘Right. Let’s do it,’ Paulus said.

‘That drunk’s watching us,’ Silke whispered in panic.

‘It doesn’t matter. There’ll always be someone watching. What will they do? Call the cops? People down by the river at night don’t like cops. Now’s as good a time as it’s ever going to be.’

And so the three of them pushed the cart to the end of their chosen jetty and simply tipped its bloody burden into the river. Then, having put the other pillows and blankets back into the cart, they turned around and pushed it away.

‘Don’t look back,’ Paulus warned. ‘Walk steady. Don’t hesitate but don’t run either.’

Paulus was right in his cool analysis. Nobody bothered them. The tramp just shrugged and looked away. As did a drunken sailor smoking with a whore on the next jetty along.

Shadowy figures had been disposing of bodies in Berlin on a nightly basis since November 1918 and every morning the river disgorged its dead. It was not such an exceptional thing. If you knew what was good for you, you tended not to confront the people doing the dumping, no matter how young they looked.

Party Interrupted Bad Wiessee, 1934

ALL DAY AND all evening the quaint little spa town had resounded to the sound of raucous celebration. Bands played, beer flowed in rivers and vast quantities of food had either been consumed or thrown about in fun. Ernst Rohm and the senior leadership of the Nazi Sturmabteilung, along with a large supply of teenage storm troopers, were having a ‘conference’ and seldom had so little business been mixed with so much pleasure.

The only jarring notes in the general mood of excess and celebration came when conversation turned to how slowly the fruits of the National Socialist Revolution were being distributed amongst those who deserved them most. It had after all been the knuckle-dusters and steel-capped boots of the SA that had brought Hitler to power and now the Brown Army wanted its reward.

‘We are the police! We are the army!’ Rohm roared, pushing his face close to Helmut’s in order to make himself heard above the din. Beer foam around his mouth, pork grease on his chin. ‘Don’t talk to me about the Reichswehr, a hundred thousand snobbish little Junkers kissing that senile old fool Hindenburg’s arse. Let me assure you, my dear friend,’ Rohm went on, wiping the beer and spit from his mouth, ‘that if our fine Leader does not proceed sharply to place we SA at the very centre of the state, then there will be a second German revolution and at the end of it nobody will be in any doubt about who is running this country.’

‘Quite right too!’ Helmut replied, beckoning to a young trooper to come and squeeze in beside Rohm. ‘And, in the meantime, Ernst, you deserve a little relaxation!’

Even as Helmut spoke, even as Rohm took possession of the youth that Helmut was offering him, out on the country roads Nemesis was approaching.

A fleet of Mercedes was gliding through the night.

Jet black Mercedes. Black like the uniforms of the men who drove them. And the darkness that cloaked their grim purpose.

By the time the motorcade drew into the spa town, the SA leadership had all retired to pursue their various private pleasures. Only the cleaners and night porters were witness to the extraordinary sight of the dictator of all Germany getting out of the leading car and marching into the hotel with a revolver in his hand.

Hitler was accompanied by a chinless man with small wire glasses. He wore the black uniform with the skull and crossbones badge of the rest of the gang and he too was armed with a pistol. The soldiers that followed carried machine guns.

Helmut was lying in bed in a room on the first floor of the hotel, preoccupied with the attentions of a young SA Sturmmann whom he had picked up in Munich the day before.

But Helmut’s heart wasn’t really in it.

The evening had been such a dreadful bore, with nothing but the prospect of more of the same to come in the morning.

He’d never liked forced bonhomie; the idea of a boys’ camp filled him with loathing. Sing-alongs and ridiculous drinking games were no substitute for the joys of subtle seduction in his opinion. He really could see no point in drinking oneself stupid before attempting to make love and the ritual humiliation of newly initiated young recruits turned his stomach. At dinner a couple of downy-cheeked youths had been forced to stand naked to attention giving the Hitler salute while Rohm and his cohorts threw food at them.

Helmut, however, was destined never have to endure the second day of Rohm’s SA conference because there would be no second day. For once those survival instincts which had served him so well through Germany’s various insanities had failed him. He had backed the wrong horse. He should have been seeking out pliant starlets and society girls for Goebbels and Goering rather than lining up boys for Rohm. Because Rohm’s days as the second man in the Reich were about to end. The vast hooligan organization he had built was shortly to be tamed by a darker, even more sinister force. This was the night the world would come to know as the Night of the Long Knives.

It was all over so very quickly.

Perhaps Helmut and his lover heard some commotion outside but they would have ignored it. There was always some commotion when Rohm’s clique took a holiday. The corridors banged, shrieked and thudded all night as boys were chased from room to room. Had anyone told Helmut that Adolf Hitler himself was in the building, prowling the darkened corridors gun in hand, followed by a company of SS, he would not have believed them.

All Helmut ever knew was the door of his bedroom bursting open, the young SA Sturmmann raising his head from Helmut’s lap as black-clad figures rushed in and levelled their machine pistols.

The guttural snarled accusation of ‘Pervert’ and then…

Oblivion. Helmut’s brains exploded on his pillow. Those of his lover spread across his lap.

All that evening far away in Berlin Frieda had been dialling the number that Wolfgang had left her — as she had been for the previous twenty-four hours — but, as ever, it simply rang and rang. By the following morning when she tried again, the telephone had been disconnected.