“I call it the Beketovka File. Beketovka is a Soviet labor camp near Stalingrad, run by the NKVD. After the defeat of the Sixth Army in February, some quarter of a million German soldiers were taken prisoner by the Russians and held in camps like Beketovka, which was the largest.”
“Was?”
“The file was put together by one of Colonel Gehlen’s agents in the NKVD and has only just come into my hands. It’s a remarkable piece of work. Very thorough. Gehlen does recruit some very capable people. There are photographs, statistics, eyewitness accounts. According to the camp register, approximately fifty thousand German soldiers arrived at Beketovka last February. Today less than five thousand of them are still alive.”
Von Ribbentrop heard himself gasp. “You’re joking.”
“About such a thing as this? I think not. Go ahead, Joachim. Open it. You’ll find it quite edifying.”
As a rule, the minister tried to avoid the reports arriving at the Foreign Ministry’s Department Deutschland. These were filed by the SS and the SD and detailed the deaths of countless Jews in the extermination camps in the East. But he could hardly be indifferent to the fate of German soldiers, especially when his own son was a soldier, a lieutenant with the Leibstandarte-SS and, mercifully, still alive. What if it had been his son who had been taken prisoner at Stalingrad? He opened the file.
Von Ribbentrop found himself looking at a photograph of what at first glance resembled an illustration he had once seen by Gustave Dore, in Milton’s Paradise Lost. It was a second or two before he realized that these were the naked bodies not of angels, or even devils, but human beings, apparently frozen hard and stacked six or seven deep, one on top of the other, like beef carcasses in some hellish deep freeze. “My God,” he said, realizing that the line of carcasses was eighty or ninety meters long. “My God. These are German soldiers?”
Himmler nodded.
“How did they die? Were they shot?”
“Perhaps a lucky few were shot,” said Himmler. “Mostly they died of starvation, cold, sickness, exhaustion, and neglect. You really should read the account of one of the prisoners, a young lieutenant from the Seventy-sixth Infantry Division. It was smuggled out of the camp in the vain hope that the Luftwaffe might be able to mount some sort of bombing raid and put them out of their misery. It gives a pretty good picture of life at Beketovka. Yes, it’s a quite remarkable piece of reportage.”
Von Ribbentrop’s weak blue eyes passed quickly over the next photograph, a close-up shot of a pile of frozen corpses. “Perhaps later,” he said, removing his glasses.
“No, von Ribbentrop, read it now,” insisted Himmler. “Please. The man who wrote this account is, or was, just twenty-two, the same age as your own son. We owe it to all those who won’t ever come back to the Fatherland to understand their suffering and their sacrifice. To read such things, that is what will make us hard enough to do what must be done. There’s no room here for human weakness. Don’t you agree?”
Von Ribbentrop’s face stiffened as he replaced his reading glasses. He disliked being cornered, but could see no alternative to reading the document, as Himmler had bidden.
“Better still,” the Reichsfuhrer said, “read aloud to me what young Zahler has written.”
“Aloud?”
“Yes, aloud. The truth is, I have only read it once myself, as I could not bear to read it again. Read it to me now, Joachim, and then we will talk about what we must do.”
The foreign minister cleared his throat nervously, recalling the last occasion on which he had read a document aloud. He remembered the day exactly: June 22, 1941-the day when he had announced to the press that Germany had invaded the Soviet Union; and as von Ribbentrop proceeded to read, the sense of irony was not lost on him.
When he had finished reading, he removed his glasses, swallowing uncomfortably. Heinrich Zahler’s account of life and death at Beketovka seemed to have conspired with the motion of the train and the smell of Himmler’s cigar to leave him feeling a little off-color. He stood up unsteadily and, excusing himself for a moment, walked into the concertina gangway between the coaches to draw a breath of fresh air into his lungs.
When the minister returned to the Reichsfuhrer’s private car, Himmler seemed to read his thoughts.
“You were thinking of your own son, perhaps. A very brave young man. How many times has he been wounded?”
“Three times.”
“He does you great credit, Joachim. Let us pray that Rudolf is never captured by the Russians. Particularly as he is SS. Elsewhere the Beketovka File makes reference to the especially murderous treatment that the Russians have inflicted on SS POWs. They are taken to Wrangel Island. Shall I show you where that is?”
Himmler picked up his Brockhaus atlas and found the relevant map. “Look there,” he said, pointing with a well-manicured fingernail at a speck in a patch of pale-looking blue. “In the East Siberian Sea. There. Do you see? Three and a half thousand kilometers east of Moscow.” Himmler shook his head. “It’s the size of Russia that overwhelms, is it not?” He snapped the atlas shut. “No, I’m afraid we will not see those comrades again.”
“Has the Fuhrer seen this file?” asked von Ribbentrop.
“Good God, no,” said Himmler. “And he never will. If he knew about this file and the conditions in which German soldiers are kept in Russian POW camps, do you think he would ever contemplate making a peace with the Soviets?”
Von Ribbentrop shook his head. “No,” he said. “I suppose not.”
“But I was thinking that if the Americans saw it,” said Himmler. “Then…”
“Then it might help to drive a wedge between them and the Russians.”
“Precisely. Perhaps it might also help to authenticate evidence we have already provided of the Russians being to blame for the Katyn Forest massacre.”
“I assume,” said von Ribbentrop, “that Kaltenbrunner has already informed you of this man Cicero’s intelligence coup?”
“About the Big Three and their forthcoming conference in Teheran? Yes.”
“I’m thinking, Heinrich-before Churchill and Roosevelt see Stalin, they’re going to Cairo, to meet Chiang Kai- shek. That would be a good place for this Beketovka File to fall into their hands.”
“Yes, possibly.”
“It would give them something to think about. Perhaps it might even affect their subsequent relations with Stalin. Frankly, I don’t expect any of this material would surprise Churchill very much. He’s always hated the Bolsheviks. But Roosevelt is a very different saucer of milk. If the American newspapers are to be believed, he seems intent on charming Marshal Stalin.”
“Is such a thing possible?” grinned Himmler. “You’ve met the man. Could he ever be charmed?”
“Charmed? I sincerely doubt that Jesus Christ himself could charm Stalin. But that’s not to say Roosevelt doesn’t think he can succeed where Christ might fail. But then again, he might lose his will to charm if he were made aware of just what sort of monster he’s dealing with.”
“It’s worth a try.”
“But the file would have to come into their hands from the right quarter. And I fear that neither the SS nor the Reich Foreign Ministry could bring the appropriate degree of impartiality to such a sensitive matter.”
“I think I have just the man,” said Himmler. “There’s a Major Max Reichleitner. Of the Abwehr. He was part of the war crimes team that investigated the Katyn massacre. Of late he’s been doing some useful work for me in Turkey.”
“In Turkey?” Von Ribbentrop was tempted to ask what kind of work Major Reichleitner was doing for Himmler and the Abwehr in Turkey. He hadn’t forgotten that Ankara was where the SD’s agent Cicero was also operating. Was this just a coincidence, or was there perhaps something he wasn’t being told?
“Yes. In Turkey.”
Himmler did not elaborate. Major Reichleitner had been carrying the diplomatic correspondence on another secret peace initiative, this one conducted with the Americans by Franz von Papen, the former German chancellor, on behalf of a group of senior officers in the Wehrmacht. Von Papen was the German ambassador in Turkey and, as such, von Ribbentrop’s subordinate. Himmler considered von Ribbentrop useful in a number of ways; but the Reichsminister was acutely sensitive about his position and, as such, was sometimes something of a nuisance. The plain fact of the matter was that Himmler enjoyed reminding the foreign minister of how little he really knew and how much he now relied on the Reichsfuhrer, rather than Hitler, to remain close to the center of power.
“I believe there may be something else we might do to take advantage of this forthcoming conference,” the