Fatherland
by Robert Harris
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank the Librarian and staff of the Wiener Library in London for their help over several years.
I also wish to thank David Rosenthal and — especially — Robyn Sisman, without whom this book would never have been started, let alone finished.
The hundred million self-confident German masters were to be brutally installed in Europe, and secured in power by a monopoly of technical civilisation and the slave-labour of a dwindling native population of neglected, diseased, illiterate cretins, in order that they might have leisure to buzz along infinite Autobahnen, admire the Strength-Through-Joy Hostel, the Party headquarters, the Military Museum and the Planetarium which their Fuhrer would have built in Linz (his new Hitleropolis), trot round local picture-galleries, and listen over their cream buns to endless recordings of The Merry Widow. This was to be the German Millennium, from which even the imagination was to have no means of escape.
People sometimes say to me: “Be careful! You will have twenty years of guerilla warfare on your hands!” I am delighted at the prospect … Germany will remain in a state of perpetual alertness.
PART ONE
TUESDAY 14 APRIL 1964
I swear to Thee, Adolf Hitler,
As Fuhrer and Chancellor of the German Reich,
Loyalty and Bravery.
I vow to Thee and to the superiors
Whom Thou shalt appoint
Obedience unto Death,
So help me God.
ONE
Thick cloud had pressed down on Berlin all night, and now it was lingering into what passed for the morning. On the city’s western outskirts, plumes of rain drifted across the surface of Lake Havel, like smoke.
Sky and water merged into a sheet of grey, broken only by the dark line of the opposite bank. Nothing stirred there. No lights showed.
Xavier March, homicide investigator with the Berlin Kriminalpolizei — the Kripo — climbed out of his Volkswagen and tilted his face to the rain. He was a connoisseur of this particular rain. He knew the taste of it, the smell of it. It was Baltic rain, from the north, cold and sea-scented, tangy with salt. For an instant he was back twenty years, in the conning tower of a U-boat, slipping out of Wilhelmshaven, lights doused, into the darkness.
He looked at his watch. It was just after seven in the morning.
Drawn up on the roadside before him were three other cars. The occupants of two were asleep in the drivers” seats. The third was a patrol car of the Ordnungspolizei — the Orpo, as every German called them. It was empty. Through its open window, sharp in the damp air, came the crackle of static, punctuated by jabbering bursts of speech. The revolving light on its roof lit up the forest beside the road: blue-black, blue-black, blue-black.
March looked around for the Orpo patrolmen, and saw them sheltering by the lake under a dripping birch tree. Something gleamed pale in the mud at their feet. On a nearby log sat a young man in a black tracksuit, SS insignia on his breast pocket. He was hunched forward, elbows resting on his knees, hands pressed against the sides of his head — the image of misery.
March took a last draw on his cigarette and flicked it away. It fizzed and died on the wet road.
As he approached, one of the policemen raised his arm.
“Heil Hitler!”
March ignored him and slithered down the muddy bank to inspect the corpse.
It was an old man’s body — cold, fat, hairless and shockingly white. From a distance, it could have been an alabaster statue dumped in the mud. Smeared with dirt, the corpse sprawled on its back half out of the water, arms flung wide, head tilted back. One eye was screwed shut, the other squinted balefully at the filthy sky.
Tour name, Unterwachtmeister?” March had a soft voice. Without taking his eyes off the body, he addressed the Orpo man who had saluted.
“Ratka, Herr Sturmbannfuhrer.”
Sturmbannfuhrer was an SS title, equivalent in Wehrmacht rank to major, and Ratka — dog-tired and skin-soaked though he was -seemed eager to show respect. March knew his type without even looking round: three applications to transfer to the Kripo, all turned down; a dutiful wife who had produced a football team of children for the Fuhrer; an income of 200 Reichsmarks a month. A life lived in hope.
“Well, Ratka,’said March, in that soft voice again. “What time was he discovered?”
“Just over an hour ago, sir. We were at the end of our shift, patrolling in Nikolassee. We took the call. Priority One. We were here in five minutes.”
“Who found him?”
Ratka jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
The young man in the tracksuit rose to his feet. He could not have been more than eighteen. His hair was cropped so close the pink scalp showed through the dusting of light brown hair. March noticed how he avoided looking at the body.
“Your name?”
“SS-Schutze Hermann Jost, sir.” He spoke with a Saxon accent — nervous, uncertain, anxious to please. “From the Sepp Dietrich training academy at Schlachtensee.” March knew it: a monstrosity of concrete and asphalt built in the 1950s, just south of the Havel. “I run here most mornings. It was still dark. At first, I thought it was a swan,” he added, helplessly.
Ratka snorted, contempt on his face. An SS cadet scared of one dead old man! No wonder the war in the Urals was dragging on forever.
