children’s hospice in Poland near the Auschwitz camp. It made me feel worse about what I had done, not better, but at least I was helping children and not causing them dreadful unhappiness any more.’ She seemed to slump forward, and Hiebermeyer handed her the glass of water again.
‘Tante Heidi, this is too much. You must rest.’
She waved him away, and straightened up. ‘Let me get it over with. In answer to Jack’s question, his name doesn’t matter. He was Hungarian, a volunteer for the Waffen-SS who had risen through the ranks to become an officer, a hardened veteran of fighting the Canadians in Italy and then the Russians. He was one of the core of real soldiers that formed Himmler’s innermost circle. When I was sent back to the cattle farm in Germany after working in Poland, I was given a new lease of life there as a medical assistant because of my background. But even those of us who weren’t being used to make babies were still expected to perform. The best arrangement was to find a man who would frighten others away, and stick with him. My Hungarian visited me for five months, until Himmler spotted me on one of his many visits and thought I would be a suitable partner for Ernst. One night when we heard the terror bombers overhead on yet another attack on Berlin, my Hungarian said it didn’t matter if we lost the war because Himmler had a secret weapon that would see the world cower in front of him. Before the war he’d even been with the Ahnenerbe on expeditions as a student, and later helped to acquire samples of one of the deadly components of the weapon. He told me that now he had the most important job: to go to the bunker in the forest – the same one where I had worked – when Himmler gave the signal and retrieve the weapon, then take it to Berlin. He told me about the Agamemnon Code, the secret signal that would be passed among the chosen few when the time was right. He told me how the palladion had a special purpose as a key to unlock the chambers with the phials. He told me everything I’ve told you.’
Jack remembered the image Hiebermeyer had described of the body of the SS man entangled with Major Mayne in the entrance to the bunker laboratory. If that was Heidi’s Hungarian, if Mayne had died preventing him from getting inside the laboratory and retrieving the phial, then he truly had prevented the terrible catastrophe that would have ensued had the biological weapon somehow been deployed. Jack remembered Hugh Frazer, Mayne’s friend who just recently passed away, and it sent a judder of emotion through him. He wished he’d been able to tell Hugh that Mayne had not died a meaningless death. He took a deep breath, and turned to Heidi. ‘So then you met Ernst. And you must have quickly become pregnant.’
‘It wasn’t quite like that,’ she whispered. ‘I thought I couldn’t conceive. Even so I took precautions, but then it happened.’
Hiebermeyer stared at her. ‘When was this?’
‘March 1944. I know what you are going to ask. I conceived Hans three weeks before Himmler introduced me to Ernst at a party. I knew the meeting had been arranged by Himmler because he wanted Ernst to have a good Aryan wife, and I looked the part perfectly. It was a match made for the newsreels. I jumped at it. I truly fell in love with Ernst, but it was also my escape from the Lebensborn. I realized about a week later that I was pregnant. I had to make a decision. The timing was close enough to pass the child off as ours.’
‘Did Ernst know about your involvement with the Lebensborn programme?’
‘He thought I was one of the care workers, the nannies. Himmler even encouraged him to visit me, so that the cameramen who followed Ernst everywhere could capture images of the war hero with the little blond children, the next generation of Nazis. Ernst told me he loved to see me with the orphans, that I was a natural mother. He was very tender with them, but he always looked troubled. The German people were never told that many of the so-called Lebensborn children were snatched from Polish parents; they were told that those children were orphans of German parents living in Poland, innocents caught up in war when the Poles had foolishly resisted the Nazi invasion in 1939. But Ernst had been there, during his first deployment as a Stuka pilot, and he knew what had happened to so many of those Polish parents, taken away at night and executed as the Nazis tried to exterminate the entire Polish professional class. We in Germany all knew what was going on in that war, you know. For some it was just small snippets in day-to-day life: seeing Jewish work parties, watching Jewish families disappear from your neighbourhood, working in factories alongside slave labour, or – if you were a soldier – watching the SS- Einsatzgruppen at work and seeing the bodies of women and old people hanging in every village. You didn’t have to know about Treblinka or Sobibor or Belsen to be aware of the evil that was going on. Don’t let any German who lived through those years tell you otherwise.’
Hiebermeyer sat down heavily on the chair opposite Heidi. ‘Did you tell Hans?’
‘Not for years. I left it too late, probably.’ She was weeping, and took out a tissue to wipe her eyes. ‘Ernst was dark-haired and brown-eyed, and Hans grew up blond-haired and blue-eyed. I could pass that off to him as my legacy, but as the years went by, he looked nothing like Ernst. Because of Ernst’s fame as a pilot, Hans became obsessed with him as a teenager and even learned to fly because he felt it must be in his genes. But then as a university student, he watched one of the old newsreels showing Ernst being feted followed by one showing a Lebensborn farm, with blonde young women surrounded by happy blond orphans. The film was shot about six months before Ernst and I met. Hans recognized me in the group.’
‘And that’s when you told him?’
Heidi nodded, sniffing. ‘He learned that he was the blond, blue-eyed son of a Hungarian thug who had volunteered to join the SS. It devastated him. Few of the Lebensborn children who discovered the truth lived happy lives. It put Hans on a path of self-destruction, to the anarchists and then the Baader-Meinhof terrorists. He was finally shot by the police in a stand-off. He had been given the chance to surrender, but I knew it would never happen, that in his mind there was no life ahead for him. I watched it all on TV, as if I was watching one of those newsreels from the war.’ She bowed her head. ‘Do you know the Wilfred Owen poem, “Strange Meeting”? It was unfinished when he was killed in action in 1918. He wrote of escaping from battle down some profound dull tunnel, but then realizing it had only taken him to hell. Often I feel as if the war has never ended for me, as if I’m on an ice sheet on a lake trying to escape from the broken ice of the past, but every step I take just breaks more. I only hope that what I’ve been able to tell you now will bring resolution to one awful legacy.’
Hiebermeyer gripped her hand. His face was drawn with emotion, and his voice was hoarse. ‘I remember Hans from when I was a boy. He used to lift me on his shoulders, and I remember his thick blond hair, feeling very safe as he carried me along the lake shore to where we went fishing. I wish I’d known. I could have told him it was all right.’
Heidi put her hand on Hiebermeyer’s head, and bowed her own, saying nothing for a moment. Then she looked up to Jack. ‘The last time I saw Ernst was just before dawn on the second of May 1945. I was in a farmhouse outside Plon, near the Baltic coast. Two nights previously a Gestapo team had taken Hans and me from our house in a village south of Berlin, just as it was about to be overrun by the Russians. I had no idea what was going on. Gestapo coming in the night was usually bad news, but I was grateful. I thought there was no chance that I would have survived the Red Army. But then while Hans was still asleep that night at Plon, Ernst arrived with an escort of two SS men, having just flown in from Berlin. We only had twenty minutes alone together. I told the SS this might be our last chance for a while. I knew how to talk to these men, remember. I took them out of Ernst’s earshot while he was looking at Hans asleep and said that if they returned later, I would see that they were not disappointed. When we got into the bedroom, all Ernst did was talk. He told me he’d come from the Zoo flak tower, and had been visited by Himmler. To my horror, I realized that he had become part of Himmler’s plan. I also realized that Hans and I were being used as a bargaining chip. Ernst told me he had secretly written a diary of everything he knew, all the secrets and subterfuge of those awful final months in Berlin, and that he had left it with some crates of artefacts in the Zoo tower for the KGB to discover. He was carrying a satchel with something heavy in it. I didn’t ask what it was, but he said he also had something he’d retrieved from a secret place under the Zoo tower. I knew instantly what it was, because that was where the refined product of our research in the laboratory was to be stored. I now knew that it was a weapon that Himmler had secretly created and planned for his own purpose. Ultimately, only a single sample had been saved, all others having been destroyed deliberately to ensure that Himmler had complete control.’
‘The Spanish flu virus,’ Jack said quietly.
She nodded. ‘Ernst showed me the small metal tube. He said a U-boat was waiting, one of the latest types that could go stealthily for weeks without refuelling. At the U-boat’s destination, he was to unlock a chamber and place the phial inside; once he had done that, word would be radioed back and Hans and I would follow in another U-boat, accompanied by Himmler himself.’
‘But you knew that plan was all a charade,’ Jack said softly.
‘Ernst held my hand. He said he would do everything in his power to send that phial to the deepest depths of
