'Both my parents were churchgoing folk,' I said. 'I don't see that you've got anything like that to throw at me.'
'Your maternal great-grandmother,' he said. 'There's a possibility she might have been Jewish.'
'Read your Bible, Gerhard,' I said. 'We're all Jewish if you want to go back far enough. But as it happens, you're wrong. She was a Roman Catholic. Quite a devout one, I believe.'
'And yet her name was Adler, was it not? Anna Adler?'
'It was Adler, yes, I believe that's correct. What of it?'
'Adler is a Jewish name. If she were alive today she would probably have to add Sarah to her name, so that we could recognize her for what she was. A Jewess.'
'Even if it was true, Gerhard. That Adler is a Jewish name? And, to be honest, I have no idea if it is or not. That would only make me one-eighth Jewish. And under section two, article five of the Nuremberg Laws, I am not, therefore, a Jew.' I grinned. 'Your whip lacks a proper sting, Gerhard.'
'An investigation often proves to be an expensive inconvenience,' said Flesch. 'Even for a truly German business. And mistakes are sometimes made. It might be months before things returned to normal.'
I nodded, recognizing the truth in what he had said. No one turned the Gestapo down. Not without some serious consequences. My only choice was between the disastrous and the unpalatable. A very German choice. We both knew I had little alternative but to agree to what they wanted. At the same time, it left me in an awkward position, to put it mildly. After all, I already had a very strong suspicion that Franz Six was lining his pockets with Paul Begelmann's shekels. But I had no wish to be caught up in the middle of a power struggle between the SD and the Gestapo. On the other hand, there was nothing to say that the two SD men I was accompanying to Palestine were dishonest. As a matter of course, they would surely suspect that I was a spy, and, accordingly, treat me with caution. The chances were strong that I would discover absolutely nothing. But would nothing satisfy the Gestapo? There was only one way to find out.
'All right,' I said. 'But I won't be a mouth for you people and say a lot of stuff that isn't true. I can't. I won't even try. If they're bent then I'll tell you they're bent and I'll tell myself that that's just what detectives do. Maybe I'll lose some sleep about it and maybe I won't. But if they are straight, that's an end of it, see? I won't frame someone just to give you and the other hammerheads at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse an edge. I won't do it, not even if you and your best brass knuckles tell me I have to. You can keep your sugarloaf, too. I wouldn't like to get a taste for it. I'll do your dirty little job, Gerhard. But we let the cards fall where they fall. No stacked decks. Clear?'
'Clear.' Flesch stood up, buttoned his coat, and put on his hat. 'Enjoy your trip, Gunther. I've never been to Palestine. But I'm told it's very beautiful.'
'Maybe you should go yourself,' I said brightly. 'I bet you'd love it down there. Fit right in, in no time. Everyone in Palestine has a Jewish Department.'
I left Berlin sometime during the last week of September and traveled by train through Poland to the port of Constanta, in Romania. It was there, boarding the steamer Romania, that I finally met the two SD men who were also traveling to Palestine. Both were noncommissioned officers--sergeants in the SD--and both were posing as journalists working for the Berliner Tageblatt, a newspaper that had been Jewish-owned until 1933, when the Nazis had confiscated it.
The sergeant in charge was Herbert Hagen. The other man was called Adolf Eichmann. Hagen was in his early twenties and a fresh-faced intellectual, a university graduate from an upper-class background. Eichmann was several years older and aspired to be something more than the Austrian petroleum salesman he had been before joining the Party and the SS. Both men were curious anti-Semites, being strangely fascinated with Judaism. Eichmann had the greater experience in the Jewish Department, spoke Yiddish, and spent most of the voyage reading Theodor Herzl's book about the Jewish State, which was called The Jewish State. The trip had been Eichmann's own idea and he seemed both surprised and excited that his superiors had agreed to it, having never been out of Germany and Austria before. Hagen was a more ideological Nazi who was an enthusiastic Zionist, believing, as he did, that there was 'no greater enemy for the Party than the Jew'--or some such nonsense--and that 'the solution of the Jewish question' could lie only in the 'total de-Jewing' of Germany. I hated listening to him talk. It all sounded mad to me. Like something found in the pages of some malignant Alice in Wonderland.
Both men regarded me with suspicion, as I had imagined they would, and not just because I had come from outside the SD and their peculiar department, but also because I was older than them--by almost twenty years in the case of Hagen. And jokingly they were soon referring to me as 'Papi,' which I bore with good grace--at least with a better grace than Hagen, who in retaliation, and much to Eichmann's amusement, I quickly dubbed Hiram Schwartz, after the juvenile diarist of the same name. Consequently, by the time we reached Jaffa on or about October 2, Eichmann had a greater liking for me than his younger, less experienced colleague.
Eichmann was not, however, an impressive man, and at the time, I thought he was probably the type who looked better in uniform. Indeed, I soon came to suspect that wearing a uniform had been the principal reason he had joined the SA and then the SS, for I rather doubted he would have been fit enough to have joined the regular army, if army there had been at that time. Of less than medium height, he was bow-legged and extremely thin. In his upper jaw he had two gold bridges, as well as many fillings in his long, widow's teeth. His head was like a skull, almost exactly like the death's head on an SS man's cap-badge, being extremely bony with particularly hollow temples. One thing that struck me was how Jewish he looked. And it occurred to me that his antipathy for the Jews might have had something to do with this.
From the moment the Romania docked at Jaffa, things did not go well for the two SD men. The British must have suspected that Hagen and Eichmann were from German intelligence and, after a great deal of argument, gave them leave to come ashore for just twenty-four hours. I myself encountered no such problems, and I was quickly issued a visa allowing me to remain in Palestine for thirty days. This was ironic as I had only intended staying for four or five days at most, and caused much chagrin to Eichmann, whose plans were now in complete disarray. He railed on about this change of plan in the horse-drawn carriage that carried the three of us and our luggage from the port to the Jerusalem Hotel, on the edge of the city's famous 'German colony.'
'Now what are we going to do?' he complained loudly. 'All of our most important meetings are the day after tomorrow. By which time we'll be back on the boat.'
I smiled to myself, enjoying his consternation. Any setback for the SD was fine by me. I was pleased if only because it relieved me of the burden of inventing some story for the Gestapo. I could hardly spy on men who had been refused visas. I even thought the Gestapo might find that amusing enough to forgive the lack of any more concrete information.
'Perhaps Papi could meet them,' said Hagen.
'Me?' I said. 'Forget it, Hiram.'
'I still don't understand how you got a visa and we didn't,' said Eichmann.
'Because he's helping that yid for Dr. Six, of course,' said Hagen. 'The Jew probably fixed it for him.'
'Could be,' I said. 'Or it could be that you boys just aren't very good at this line of work. If you were good at it then perhaps you wouldn't have chosen a cover story that involves you both working for a Nazi newspaper. Moreover, a Nazi newspaper that was stolen from its Jewish owners. You might have picked something a little less high profile than that, I think.' I smiled at Eichmann. 'Like being a petroleum salesman, perhaps.'
Hagen got it. But Eichmann was still too upset to realize he was being teased.
'Franz Reichert,' he said. 'From the German News Agency. I can telephone him in Jerusalem. I expect he will know how to get hold of Fievel Polkes. But I haven't a clue how we're going to get in touch with Haj Amin.' He sighed. 'What are we going to do?'
