She looked up. The four boys were just turning the corner. Then, as though from nowhere, a dozen Auxiliary Police appeared, running at the boys and throwing them to the pavement. One fell into the gutter and a taxi swerved wildly, honking its horn. The policemen hauled the boys to their feet, thrusting them against the wall, heedlessly pushing several people aside. An old woman, carrying a shopping bag, was sent flying, packages in greaseproof paper spilling onto the street. A man with an umbrella and bowler hat was knocked over. Sarah watched as the bowler rolled under a bus, the wheels crushing it. The passengers inside turned to look at the scene, mouths open. Most looked quickly away again.
The police had pulled out their truncheons and were beating the boys mercilessly now. Sarah heard the crack of wood on a head, then heard a cry. The Auxiliaries, mostly young men themselves, laid in mercilessly. Sarah glimpsed a boy’s mouth shining red with blood. One of the policemen was repeatedly punching another boy, his face white with fury, punctuating the blows with insults. ‘Fucking – Yid-loving – Commie – bugger.’
Most people hurried by, faces averted, but a few stopped to look and someone in the crowd shouted out, ‘Shame!’ The policeman who had been punching the boy turned round, reaching to his hip. He pulled out a gun. The watchers gasped, stepped back. ‘Who said that?’ the Auxie yelled. ‘Who was it?’
Then, with a loud ringing of its klaxon, a police van pulled up to the kerb. Four more policemen ran out and opened the double doors at the back. The boys were thrown in like sacks, the door slammed and the van pulled away, klaxon shrieking again. The Auxies adjusted their uniforms, looking threateningly at the crowd as though daring anyone else to call out. Nobody did. The policemen shoved confidently through. Sarah looked at the pavement by the wall, now spotted with blood.
Next to her an old man in a cap and muffler stood trembling. Perhaps it was him who had shouted out. ‘The bastards,’ he muttered, ‘the bastards.’
Sarah said, ‘It was so sudden. Where will they take them?’
‘Scotland Yard, I expect.’ The old man looked Sarah in the face. ‘Down to the interrogation rooms. Poor little devils, they’re only kids. They’ll probably bring the black witches in from Senate House to them. They’ll tear them to pieces.’
‘Black witches?’
The old man gave her a look of contempt. ‘The Gestapo. The SS. Don’t you know who’s really in charge of everything now?’
GUNTHER HOTH ARRIVED IN London early on Friday afternoon. He had taken the daily Lufthansa shuttle from Berlin. A large black Mercedes with embassy plates was waiting for him at Croydon; the driver, a sharply dressed young man, greeted him. ‘
‘
‘Good flight, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer?’
‘Fairly smooth.’
‘I am Ludwig. I will be assisting you today.’ The young man spoke formally, like a tour guide, but his eyes were keen. He was probably SS. Gunther sank gratefully into the comfortable upholstery of the car. He felt tired and the sore place in the middle of his back hurt. Last night he had gone straight from the meeting with Karlson to pack and get some sleep, then risen early to get the plane. He looked out of the window as the car drove smoothly through the grey London suburbs. England was just as he remembered it, cold and damp. Everyone looked pale, preoccupied, the clothes of working people worn and shabby. Many of the grimy buildings seemed in poor condition. There were lumps of dog dirt everywhere in the gutters; on the pavements too. Things had barely changed since he was last here seven years ago; in fact they looked much the same as when he first came to England as a student, back in 1929.
He was glad, though, for this assignment. He was weary of his Gestapo job, tired of interviewing informers whose eyes shone with malice or greed, tired of searching through the endless file cards. Even the payoff when, through one of his intuitive leaps, he found one of the few remaining hidden Jews, was less rewarding these days.
For over twenty years he had been full of anger at the Jews, at the terrible things they had done to Germany. He knew they were still a threat, with their power in America and what was left of Russia, but in recent years it was as though his rage, his strength, was wearing out as he got older – he would be forty-five soon. Yesterday he had arrived at a home in a prosperous Berlin suburb at daybreak with four policemen, banging on the door and shouting for entry. They had found a family of Jews, a mother and father and a boy of eleven, in a damp cellar. Bunks and armchairs and even a little sink had been installed there. They hauled the three upstairs, the mother yelling and screaming, and took them into the kitchen where their hosts, Mr and Mrs Muller, waited with their children, two little blonde girls in identical blue nightshirts, the younger one clutching a rag doll.
Gunther’s men shoved the three Jews against the kitchen wall. The woman stopped screaming and stood weeping quietly, head in hands. Then the little boy, crazily, attempted a run for it. One of Gunther’s men grabbed his arm, banged him back against the wall, and gave him a punch that sent blood trickling from his mouth. Gunther frowned. ‘That’s enough, Peter,’ he said. He turned to the German family. He knew Mr Muller was a railway official with no political record. ‘Why have you done this?’ he asked sadly. ‘You know it will be the end of you.’
Muller, a little balding stick of a man, inclined his head to a small wooden cross on the wall. Gunther nodded. ‘I see. Lutherans? Confessing Church?’
‘Yes,’ the man said. He looked at the captive Jews, and added, with sudden anger, ‘They have souls, just like us.’
Gunther had heard that stupid argument many times before. He sighed. ‘All you have done is bring trouble on yourselves.’ He nodded to the Jews. ‘Them too. They should have gone for resettlement like all the others. Instead they’ve probably spent years running from house to house.’ People like Mr and Mrs Muller were so stupid; they could have lived normal quiet lives but now they would suffer SS interrogation and then they would be hanged.
Mrs Muller took a deep breath. ‘Please do not hurt our little girls,’ she pleaded, her voice trembling.
‘Shouldn’t you have thought of them before you did this?’ Gunther sighed again. ‘It’s all right, your girls won’t be harmed, they’ll be sent for adoption by good German families – who’ve probably lost sons fighting in the East,’ he added bitterly, looking the woman in the eye.
Her husband said, ‘Do I have your word on that?’ Gunther nodded. The woman said, ‘Thank you,’ then lowered her head and began to cry. Gunther frowned; no-one he had arrested had ever thanked him before. He looked at the little cross on the wall. He had been brought up a Lutheran himself, and was aware the cross was supposed to be a symbol of sacrifice. Gunther knew about real sacrifice. Hans, his twin brother, had been killed eight years ago by partisans in the Ukraine. Sitting in the comfortable car crossing London he remembered his brother’s first leave, after the invasion of Russia in 1941. Hans had gone into Russia as part of an SS Einsatzgruppe, liquidating Bolsheviks and Jews. Hans was thirty-three when he came back that December, but he looked older. He had sat in Gunther’s house, after Gunther’s wife had gone to bed, his face pale and drawn against the black of his SS uniform. He said, ‘I’ve killed hundreds of people, Gunther. Women and old people.’ Suddenly he was talking fast. ‘A whole Jewish village once, a
After the arrests Gunther had spent the rest of the day back at Gestapo headquarters in Prince Albrechtstrasse, dealing with the paperwork. He signed the documents transferring the Jewish family to Heydrich’s Jewish Evacuation Department, the Mullers to interrogation. Then he went wearily down the wide central staircase, past the busts of German heroes, and walked home to his flat. His route took him through the vast, endless works being carried out in the city centre to build Germania, Speer’s new Berlin, in time for the 1960 Olympics. The buildings they planned were so huge the sandy soil on which they would be built could never support them without concrete foundations hundreds of feet deep. A special railway line had been laid to take away the sand. On a cold, clear day like this the air was full of dust; sometimes the pall hung so heavy that Gunther, like other people susceptible to it, wore one of the new little white facemasks from America. Thousands of Polish and Russian forced
