Could you tell? He turned in profile, wondering if he had become so inured to all the propaganda that he was now imagining things about the set of his eyes, the shape of his nose. Perhaps later tonight there would be a knock at the door, and his family would be transported to one of the resettlement camps that no one ever discussed. Board a train at Grunewald station, one of those long ones that always left full and returned empty. A one-way ticket east.
And what had he been doing up to now to stop such diabolical measures? Hardly anything, really. Risking his neck to steal paper, or to cast votes on the wording of a pamphlet. What good was a pamphlet in times like these? Once again, he had fallen back on the relative safety of mere words. “Easy grace,” as Bonhoeffer had put it. There must be some stronger action he could take, not just for his family but for Liesl and him as well. He recalled her words from an hour ago: “We must all do everything in our power.”
Then an idea occurred to him, striking in its simplicity: a one-man job, a bold operation with no need to rely on weak vessels like Dieter or unstable temperaments like Hannelore’s. Lots of planning would be necessary, of course. But surely he could manage.
Then the doubts began leaking in. Costly sacrifices and trade-offs would be required, and none of them would come easily. Blood might even be spilled, perhaps by people he admired and respected. The price was too high. His conscience would never be able to bear the burden. He sighed, temporarily defeated.
Then he considered the consequences of doing nothing, and realized that the cost was even greater. This was what war demanded of people, he supposed. It thrust upon you unclean decisions with unclean results. The best you could hope for was to minimize the damage, to act before others decided matters for you.
So, with a dizzying sense of destiny buzzing in his temples, Kurt resolved to act while he still could, if only because this new idea offered the one possibility that most heartened and excited him: guaranteed survival for Liesl and him, as well as for his family and its business empire. Not only for the duration of the war but on into peacetime. Surely that would be enough to justify almost anything, especially when the alternative was doom for them all.
Fifteen days, he told himself. That would be his deadline. Fifteen days to either carry out this bold plan or come up with another course of action. Either way he was now grimly certain that the coming weeks would define him as a man from that point onward.
Kurt stared defiantly into the mirror, as if daring himself to raise an objection.
TWENTY-TWO
Berlin — March 5, 1943
Just before 10 A.M. on a blustery Friday in late winter, Kurt Bauer strolled nervously into the shadow of the city’s most dreaded building. The structure itself wasn’t imposing. Five stories of stone with a mansard roof, it had once been a hotel, then an art school. Its elegant rows of high windows suggested a place of light and enlightenment. Its current name suggested otherwise: the Reich Main Security Office, home to the Gestapo and the SS.
Kurt had already approached the entrance once, only to have his nerve fail him. On his second try he again veered away, heading north toward the Brandenburg Gate while taking deep breaths of the chill morning air. After fifteen days of thought and planning, he had finally settled on a risky course of action, and by day’s end he hoped to have secured a safe future for his family and, more important, for Liesl and him.
But first he had to go through with it.
He had set out from Charlottenburg at sunrise, hoping to steel his resolve by making the four-mile journey on foot. It was bitterly cold, and even with gloves on he kept his hands shoved deep in his pockets. The sights along the way did little to put him in the right mood. Half the shops on the Ku-Damm were shuttered. Charlottenburger Chaussee, normally a grand, sun-washed promenade, was cast in eternal twilight by a canopy of camouflage netting, a ruse to hide the street grid from daylight bomber attacks. Even the Tiergarten was a mess. Its trees had been hacked away for firewood, and its expansive lawns were cross-stitched by trenches, dug as emergency shelter from bombs. Two soldiers stood begging on a street corner, their greatcoats still muddy from the eastern front. A third, missing a leg, slept on a park bench. Had the poor man even survived the night? Kurt didn’t have the heart to check.
The most depressing sight of all, at least to Kurt, was the brooding Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. Normally its high steeple and Romanesque towers evoked stateliness and strength, but this morning they only reminded him of the aborted rendezvous that should have occurred there a week earlier.
It was to have been a pivotal moment for the Berlin chapter of the White Rose. Hans Scholl, one of the White Rose founders in Munich, had been due to meet Falk Harnack, the young soldier who had been present for the Berlin chapter’s formative meeting. Harnack was then supposed to escort Scholl to Bonhoeffer’s house for a meeting that would connect the White Rose movement to the heart of the German resistance.
News of this scary but welcome development had made Kurt rethink his plan of action. Considering the predicament his family was in, he hadn’t felt like risking his life for mere pamphlets anymore. But if bolder action was in the offing, maybe he would hold off on his one-man operation. His father had even mentioned rumors of an assassination plot against Hitler, with help coming from high inside the German officer corps. With the war going so badly, it was the one act that might spare the country further destruction, and in turn spare his family.
But Scholl never showed up. Harnack nervously smoked a few cigarettes in the dark, passed word of the aborted rendezvous to Bonhoeffer and to the other White Rose members, and then returned empty-handed to his army unit in Chemnitz.
By the following afternoon the reason became painfully clear. News spread that the Scholls had been arrested a week earlier. They had been taken to Munich Gestapo headquarters for questioning, and four days later they were executed by guillotine.
Further details were sketchy, but apparently the roundup of White Rose members in Munich was continuing. Some of the arrested members had ties to Harnack, and to Helmut Hartert, who had organized the Berlin cell. If they talked, then every Berlin member would soon be at risk.
The cell met hastily to discuss what to do. One member, Renate Fensel, had already dropped out after their earlier near escape. That left eight of them, not counting Harnack, who was still serving in the army. Everyone agreed that it would be best to lay low for a while-everyone, that is, except Hannelore, who urged immediate action.
“They’ll have us all in the net soon anyway,” she said. “We might as well fight back.”
She proposed that they do something to grab the public’s attention. Throw a firebomb at Goebbels’s headquarters, or toss one at his Wannsee villa. The others looked at her like she was crazy, even Liesl, and every morning since then Kurt had opened the morning newspaper expecting to see Hannelore’s name splashed across the front. If they were lucky, maybe she would be shot in the act and never have a chance to reveal their names.
At his family’s home in Charlottenburg, meanwhile, things were even worse than before. His brother, Manfred, had been reported missing during the retreat from Stalingrad. His mother barely ate, and his sister wouldn’t leave the house. She moped around with a copy of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the novel that had once inspired thousands of lovesick German boys to leap to their deaths.
The only bright spot was that his father had somehow wangled a travel permit for another trip to Switzerland. But even that turned out badly when he failed to secure a second meeting with Dulles. The Americans seemed to be losing interest.
So, on the day after the most recent White Rose meeting, Kurt decided to carry out his one-man plan after all. Now he just had to steel up the nerve to go through with it.
He circled the Brandenburg Gate and set course once again for the Reich Main Security Office. Glancing toward Pariser Platz, he spotted the hulking antiaircraft battery atop I. G Farben headquarters. It reminded him of his father, who had boasted just the other day of government plans to put a similar battery atop the Bauer offices in Spandau. Amazing that the old man could still play the role of proud patriot after everything that had happened. Perhaps that was all his father had left. Unless Kurt acted now.
