monster had been. And he had all he needed here: a couple of crates and a few planks to make a desk, a box of candles, ledger books to write in, a folding army cot against the wall, a bucket in the far corner with a makeshift wooden cover over it.
The breakdown in sanitation had been frightful. Diehard Nazis had used the lavatories as places to commit suicide, barricading themselves inside and blowing their brains out amidst the squalor, their bloated corpses still there. And the food supply had dwindled to virtually nothing. Hoffman’s orderly had brought him his last meal the night before: a bowl of Wassersuppe made from potato peelings and beetroot, along with half a bottle of schnapps. He looked at the bottle on his desk, still untouched. He needed a clear head for what was to come. And alcohol had been part of the scourge of Nazism. They were all drunk, the architects of this monstrosity, the gods of National Socialism, cowering in the Fuhrerbunker. Alcohol had fuelled the self-pity, the rage, the fantasies of victory that had brought Hitler’s dream of a thousand-year Reich to this frenzied climax of self-destruction and horror.
He heard the dull thud of a pistol shot through the wall, then another. He closed his eyes for a moment, steeling himself. He knew what was happening. Half an hour before, on his way down the stairs from the gun platform, he had stood back as two Feldgendarmen had appeared, the hated military police. They were dragging a man between them, his jacket painted crudely with the letter H for Hungary. The man was one of the foreign labourers who had been used to clear refuse from the tower, before that job became futile. The Feldgendarm colonel called them the wily Greeks, the warriors of the Trojan Horse, a concealed enemy who would reveal themselves as the Russians moved in. Some of the labourers had removed the clothing with the painted letters and disappeared into the mass of people below, but others had kept their identity, imagining that the liberating Russians would treat them as heroes. Now they were paying the price for letting the Feldgendarmen see that too. The door to Goebbels’ office complex had been open, and Hoffman had seen the drawn pistols. He wanted to go in and scream at them: The Fuhrer is dead. Why more killing? It is over. But to intervene would have been suicidal. And in truth it was not over, not yet. He had to keep his nerve for what lay ahead.
Another pulverizing shudder coursed through the tower. Hoffman pressed his elbows against the planks that formed his desk, trying to stop the vibrations from shaking them off the crates at either end. He peered again at the crate to his left, where he had seen his reflection in the metal. It was covered with stamps and inspection marks, with an inventory of the contents, all the usual evidence of Reich bureaucracy. He knew that this had been an official storage room for works of art, waiting for the time when Hitler’s grand scheme for a Fuhrermuseum in his home town of Linz in Austria would be realized. The room had been used since 1941 to house treasures from the Berlin museums, in one of the few places thought to be impregnable to Allied bombing. Several months ago, Reichsleiter Bormann and his henchmen had removed most of the treasures to a salt mine in Austria. Hoffman had snorted when he heard that. During his posting in Berlin over the last few months, he had got to know these people close-up. Bormann knew that Hitler’s days were numbered and was undoubtedly securing his own loot. The three crates that remained had apparently been left on the express instructions of Reichsfuhrer Himmler, who had ordered a museum official, a Dr Unverzagt, to watch over them. Hoffman had found the man camped out here with the crates when he had arrived forty-eight hours before. Unverzagt had been one of Himmler’s stooges, a member of the Ahnenerbe – Himmler’s absurd ‘Department of Cultural Heritage’ – and Hoffman had instantly disliked him. But the man had left with no protest and had disappeared into the throng of desperate civilians below. Hoffman could not imagine any treasure valuable enough to induce someone to linger in that hellhole, and he was sure that Unverzagt would have bolted from the tower while there was still a chance before the Russians closed in.
Hoffman had inspected the markings on the crates when he first entered the room. They contained the treasures from ancient Troy given by Heinrich Schliemann to the people of Berlin more than sixty years before. Hoffman himself had seen them as a schoolboy, in the Museum of Pre- and Proto-History. Exactly why these crates should have remained here was unclear. But Hoffman knew Himmler personally, and he knew enough of Himmler’s psychology to guess at the reason. Himmler was obsessed with ancient artefacts, with mythical kings and heroes, with Ubermenschen – supposed races of supermen – and with those he identified as Aryan forebears, and above all with lost civilizations. Perhaps these artefacts had some kind of mystical power for him. Perhaps they were meant to stay in Berlin in her hour of greatest need. Hoffman shook his head derisively. The artefacts had not saved Troy, and they would not save Berlin. It was irrelevant now; within a day, the Zoo tower and those crates would be in Soviet hands. Meanwhile they served as good bench-ends to rest the planks of his desk against the incessant vibrations.
Hoffman realized that the flak guns had stopped firing, and he took his hands from his ears. Another sound was missing, the screech and rattle of the electric ammunition winch that brought shells up from the magazine. The generators must have failed yet again. The electricity had worked in fits and starts all night, and he had relied on candles for his writing. He watched the last one now, the flame still flickering and shuddering from the vibrations, barely casting enough light for him to read the open pages of his diary. Candles had served another purpose in the tower. Since the Soviet artillery had come within range, the thick metal shutters on the windows had been closed and the ventilation tubes sealed. Down below, the people crammed together in the stairwells used candles like underground miners to tell how much oxygen was left. When the candles on the floor went out, they lit them at waist level. When those went out, they held their children on their shoulders for as long as they could, hoping that someone above would take them. Already the bodies were piling up, and the hospital orderlies could no longer go outside to use the makeshift cemetery in the Tiergarten. The stench of decay was beginning to permeate the tower, along with the putrid odour from the hospital on the third floor above him, a charnel house where the wounded lay among piles of amputated limbs and shrouded corpses.
Hoffman closed his eyes, and rehearsed the plan he had devised with the flak-battery commander. At least he would not have to endure another night in this place, even if this day were to be his last. He glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes to go. At ten o’clock he would leave to find the battery commander. The evening before, two German soldiers captured by the Russians had arrived at the tower under a white flag with a peace offer from the commander of the Soviet division confronting them. The garrison commander had vacillated, terrified of the Feldgendarmerie, who had orders to shoot anyone who showed the slightest sign of surrendering, even the commanding officer. Hoffman and the battery commander had secretly decided to act on their own volition if the garrison commander still had not delivered his surrender to the Russians by this morning. They would muster men in the battery loyal to them, kill the Feldgendarmen and go out under a white flag. It was a desperate scheme, almost guaranteeing civilian deaths, but not on the scale there would be if no surrender were forthcoming. The Feldgendarmen knew they would be shown no mercy by the Russians, so would never surrender. Hoffman and the battery commander had decided to wait overnight for the garrison commander to change his mind, but the man had been intractable, shut in his room and probably drunk, and now the Feldgendarmen were preventing anyone from getting near him.
There were two guards outside Hoffman’s door now, there to ensure that he did his duty as well. He clenched his fists and took a deep breath, almost choking on the acrid air. His duty. He was the newly appointed commander of the 9th Luftwaffe Parachute Division Lebelstar. The division was a phantasm dreamed up by the drunkards and madmen in the Chancellery, another gloriously named spearhead unit that would save the Reich, another ragtag band of old men, boys, the walking wounded and shell-shocked veterans who had somehow survived the carnage on the Eastern Front to die in this theatre of the absurd. When Hoffman shut his eyes in this place he sometimes glimpsed stark images from the plays he had seen in Paris before the war, existentialist dramas by Beckett and Brecht that had so fascinated and disturbed him, on the border between theatre and reality. It was as if he had been seeing a premonition of his own final act, here where the stage setting also seemed surreal, on another level of consciousness, yet awash with real blood and real anguish and horror.
He undid the leather flap of the holster on his waist, took out his Luger, ejected the magazine and checked that it was full, then pushed the magazine in again and cocked the pistol, shoving it back in the holster but leaving the flap open. He thought for a moment, then snapped the flap shut. The Feldgendarmen must see no hint of his intentions. He felt for the two extra magazines in the pouch on his belt, then straightened his jacket and peaked cap, passing his hand over the Luftwaffe badges on his tunic and the Knight’s Cross at his neck. He prayed that he and the battery commander had got the timing right. All radio communication with the Chancellery had ceased the day before. There had been rumours that the Fuhrer had killed himself, and then a Chancellery secretary who had fled across the Tiergarten had confirmed it. A Soviet red banner had been seen flying over the Reichstag, glimpsed in the light of a flare during the night, and the barrage of shells and rockets had diminished. There had clearly been some kind of ceasefire, but Hoffman knew it could not last. The Chancellery and Gestapo headquarters were defended by battle-hardened remnants of the SS-Nordland and SS-Charlemagne divisions, fascist sympathizers from
