T he house was dim and cool. A dripping sound from somewhere in the eaves. Denham lit the fire in the sitting room and sat with Eleanor on the sofa, with the cat curled on her lap.
‘Where do we even start?’ she said.
‘With what I haven’t told you…’
For the next half hour he explained his unwitting role in the group’s mission. How his suffering at Rausch’s hands had nothing to do with interviewing Hannah. She had started to ask questions as he spoke but became sullen as the story went on, looking hurt and astonished in equal measure.
‘You couldn’t trust me with the truth?’ she said.
‘I couldn’t risk it. Telling you now is dangerous enough. British Secret Intelligence warned me that people with knowledge of this have a habit of dying-’
‘British Secret Intelligence?’
Denham looked away. He was on difficult ground now. ‘Our intelligence service is after it, too.’
They were silent for a long time, listening to the cat purring on Eleanor’s lap.
‘They want it to blackmail him,’ she said at last.
‘Yes… it’s almost too incredible, isn’t it? Diplomatic threats have no effect. But the dirt from Hitler’s past might actually contain him. Do what no army could. Assuming, that is, that the dossier’s genuine.’
‘You think it could be a forgery?’ she said.
Denham dropped his head onto the cushions and looked up at the old grandfather clock behind the sofa. Its hands had frozen at five past ten a lifetime ago. ‘It just seems too… too great a secret to keep hidden.’
‘Who says he hid it? Those guys in the drawings must have had a fair idea of his interest. His officers, too.’
He said, ‘If it wasn’t for those other documents in the folder, I wouldn’t have thought the drawings that significant. Conditions at the Front were so… extreme that close attachments were not uncommon
… and of course, there wasn’t much else to draw…’
‘Come on,’ said Eleanor. ‘Think about it. Hitler’s a bachelor who interior-designs ballrooms. And he likes uniforms. And opera.’
Denham smiled. ‘I wouldn’t think that important either, if it wasn’t for the criminal records…’
‘Not important? What’s got into you today? If this gets out it’ll cause an international scandal, an outrage. A worldwide goddamned sensation.’
The wind picked up again, throwing rain against the window like shale.
‘So what’s the plan of action?’ she said, brushing the cat from her lap and standing.
Her hair was up today, revealing her slender golden nape, and she had on a form-fitting skirt that wrapped smoothly around her hips.
He breathed in deeply. ‘We’ll give it to the boys in intelligence,’ he said. ‘They’ll know how to use it. As soon as I’ve studied the documents in those envelopes…’
‘Would it ever penetrate into Germany? If this got out?’
‘In my experience of news embargoes, truth is like the rainwater up there. One way or another it gets into the house in the end…’
She sat back down next to him, kissed his hand, and pressed it to her cheek. A log split and hissed in the grate.
‘Until we hand it in, we tell no one about this,’ he whispered.
L ater that day he opened up the old grandfather clock, adjusted its weights, wound the chain, and was not surprised to find that it worked. His father had loved tinkering with clocks. With the warm tick-tock setting the tempo, he sat at the old escritoire in the drawing room with the envelopes from the dossier spread before him.
The first item, Colonel Engelhardt’s affidavit, was significant because it attested to the drawings’ authenticity. It also answered, at least in part, a question that had intrigued the European press during Hitler’s rise. Why had he never made it above the lowly rank of lance corporal? To be awarded the iron cross for bravery- twice- without a simultaneous promotion was, well, unheard of.
Next was the so-called Mend Protocol, which made the most explicit allegations. It was a strange, compelling document, brimming with personal antagonism, which painted Hitler in the most unflattering light imaginable. Someone had interviewed Hans Mend at length-possibly the same man who had witnessed the document beneath Mend’s signature, a Captain Kurt Rogel. The date was 30 October 1932, three months before Hitler came to power. An army captain?
Did the army compile the dossier?
Mend stated that he was the author of a book called Adolf Hitler im Felde, published by Huber Verlag in 1931, an official account of the Fuhrer’s selfless feats as a front-line soldier, by one who served with him. Denham knew the book. It couldn’t be missed. It was in every bookshop window in Berlin, and even on the German school curriculum. Yet Mend had given this damning evidence in secret the year after his book was first published. Why? To preserve a private record of the truth?
‘He struck me as a psychopath from the start’ was Mend’s considered view.
In the winter after the war, Hitler had turned up at Mend’s digs on Schleissheimer Strasse in Munich, hungry and down at heel, asking to spend the night because the flophouse on Lothstrasse was full. He was surviving, Mend said, with the help of his iron cross and his gift of the gab. On one occasion a year later, in January 1920, Hitler came again, asking to sleep on Mend’s floor because he could not go home. When Mend asked why, he made no answer.
There were plenty of reasons to doubt Mend-Hitler, of all people, wasn’t short of enemies, and Mend had clearly fallen out with him-but somehow Denham did not doubt the protocol. For all its animosity his testimony had the ring of truth.
Denham got up to pour himself a whisky.
Most who had known Hitler during the war would have been killed at the Front, but one or two, like Mend, survived and remembered who he was; what he was. Maybe Mend had been bought off. The book would have been a lucrative commission.
He turned to the next evidence.
The future Reich Chancellor had been arrested in Munich five times between January 1920 and the end of 1921. Twice at his rooming house on Thierschstrasse, once on the Marienplatz; twice in Schwabing.
Denham leafed through the pages again, the depositions of these young men collared by the vice squad, all pleading hard-luck stories in mitigation. With nothing but hunger and cold waiting for them at home they had accepted this man’s offer of money, a hot meal, and cigarettes, and listened to him for hours.
But what of the charges? It seemed impossible that Hitler could have avoided spells in custody. And this in the year 1920, when he was becoming the star speaker of the fledgling German Workers Party. Tucked away at the back of the depositions, Denham found the answer.
An undated note from Captain Ernst Rohm of the Bavarian Reichswehr Information Department told the chief of the Munich vice squad, in the bluntest terms, to drop his objections to the release of repeat offender AH. ‘Charges are dismissed pursuant to the intervention of Major General Ritter von Mohl’ was Rohm’s only explanation. ‘Have all files on this case ready for collection by my adjutant.’
So there it was. Hitler had already won friends in high places. Men who were impressed by this rough, difficult man with his iron cross and his talent for speaking and who had found in him a voice for the speechless fury of the masses.
Hitler. Denham was starting to get a loose sense of this misfit.
The Fuhrer is not married.
Now all the innuendos burgeoned with significance. Was this an open secret among Berlin’s warm boys?
He recalled the Nazi Party being dogged by press scandals and lawsuits during its rise to power. In fact, the leadership of the Brownshirts-Rohm and those beer-hall bruisers close to Hitler in the early days-had all been warm boys and made no secret of it. They must have known. Rohm had helped make those police charges disappear.
But of course…
The hairs on the back of Denham’s neck stood on end. June ’34. The Night of the Long Knives. Hitler’d had them all shot.
He opened the final envelope.
