Document Two. A photostat of a photostat, almost illegible in places, the words rubbed away like an ancient inscription on a tomb. Hermann Goering’s directive to Heydrich, dated 31 July 1941:
To supplement the task that was assigned to you on 24 January 1939, which dealt with the solution of the Jewish problem by emigration and evacuation in the most suitable way, I hereby charge you with making all necessary preparations with regard to organisational, technical and material matters for bringing about a complete solution of the Jewish question within the German sphere of influence in Europe.
Wherever other governmental agencies are involved, these are to co-operate with you.
I request you further to send me, in the near future, an overall plan covering the organisational, technical and material measures necessary for the accomplishment of the final solution of the Jewish question which we desire.
Document Three. A list of the fourteen people Heydrich had invited to the conference. Stuckart was third on the list; Buhler, sixth; Luther, seventh. March recognised a couple of the others.
He ripped a sheet from his notebook, wrote down eleven names and took it to the issuing desk. The two detectives had gone. The Registrar was nowhere to be seen. He rapped on the counter and shouted: “Shop!” From behind a row of filing cabinets came a guilty clink of glass on bottle. So that was her secret. She must have forgotten he was there. A moment later,.she waddled into view.
“What do we have on these eleven men?”
He tried to hand her the list. She folded a pair of plump arms across a greasy tunic. “No more than three files at any one time, without special authorisation”
“Never mind that.”
“It is not permitted.”
“It is not permitted to drink alcohol on duty, either, yet you stink of it. Now get me these files.”
To every man and woman, a number; to every number, a file. Not all files were held at Werderscher Markt. Only those whose lives had come into contact with the Reich Kriminalpolizei, for whatever reason, had left their spoor here. But by using the information bureau at Alexander Platz, and the obituaries of the Volkischer Beobachter (published annually as The Roll Call of the Fallen) March was able to fill in the gaps. He tracked down every name. It took him two hours.
The first man on the list was Doctor Alfred Meyer of the East Ministry. According to his Kripo file, Meyer had committed suicide in 1960 after undergoing treatment for various mental illnesses.
The second name: Doctor Georg Leibrandt, also of the East Ministry. He had died in an automobile accident in 1959, his car crushed by a truck on the autobahn between Stuttgart and Augsburg. The driver of the truck had never been found.
Erich Neumann, State Secretary in the Office of the Four Year Plan, had shot himself in 1957.
Doctor Roland Freisler, State Secretary from the Justice Ministry: hacked to death by a maniac with a knife on the steps of the Berlin People’s Court in the winter of 1954. An investigation into how his security guards had managed to let a criminal lunatic come so close had concluded that nobody was to blame. The assassin had been shot seconds after the attack on Freisler.
At this point, March had gone into the corridor for a cigarette. He drew the smoke deep into his lungs, tilted back his head and let it out slowly, as if taking a cure.
He returned to find a fresh heap of files on his desk.
SS-Oberfuhrer Gerhard Klopfer, deputy head of the Party Chancellery, had been reported missing by his wife in May 1963; his body had been found by building-site workers in southern Berlin, stuffed into a cement mixer.
Friedrich Kritzinger. That name was familiar. Of course. March remembered the scenes from the television news: the familiar taped-off street, the wrecked car, the widow supported by her sons. Kritzinger, the former Ministerialdirektor from the Reich Chancellery, had been blown up outside his home in Munich just over a month ago, on 7 March. No terrorist group had yet claimed responsibility.
Two men were recorded by the Volkischer Beobachter as having died of natural causes. SS- Standartenfuhrer Adolf Eichmann of the Reich Main Security Office had succumbed to a heart attack in 1961. SS- Sturmbannfuhrer Doctor Rudolf Lange of KdS Latvia had died of a brain tumour in 1955.
Heinrich Muller. Here was another name March knew. The Bavarian policeman Muller, the former head of the Gestapo, had been on board Himmler’s plane when it crashed in 1962, killing everyone on board.
SS-Oberfuhrer Doctor Karl Schongarth, representing the security services of the General Government, had fallen beneath the wheels of a U-bahn train pulling into Zoo Station on 9 April 1964 — barely more than a week ago. There were no witnesses.
SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Otto Hoffmann of the Reich Security Office had been found hanging from a length of clothesline in his Spandau apartment on Boxing Day 1963.
That was all. Of the fourteen men who had attended the conference at Heydrich’s invitation, thirteen were dead. The fourteenth — Luther — was missing.
As part of its campaign to raise public awareness about terrorism, the Propaganda Ministry had produced a series of children’s cartoons. Someone had pinned one up on the noticeboard on the second floor. A little girl receives a parcel and begins opening it. In each succeeding picture she removes more layers of wrapping paper, until she is left holding an alarm clock with two sticks of dynamite attached to it. The last picture is an explosion, with the caption: “Warning! Do not open a parcel unless you know its contents!”
A good joke. A maxim for every German policeman. Do not open a parcel unless you know its contents. Do not ask a question unless you know the answer.
Endlosung: final solution. Endlosung. Endlosung. The word tolled in March’s head as he half-walked, half- ran along the corridor and into his office.
Endlosung.
He wrenched open the drawers of Max Jaeger’s desk and searched through the clutter. Max was notoriously inefficient about administrative matters, had often been reprimanded for his laxity. March prayed he had not taken the warnings to heart.
He had not.
Bless you, Max, you dumbhead.
He slammed the drawers shut.
Only then did he notice it. Someone had attached a yellow message slip to March’s telephone: “Urgent. Contact the Duty Office immediately.”
FIVE
In the marshalling yards of the Gotenland railway station, they had set up arc lights around the body. From a distance the scene looked oddly glamorous, like a film set.
March stumbled towards it, up and down, across the wooden sleepers and metal tracks, over the diesel- soaked stone.
Before it had been renamed Gotenland, this had been the Anhalter Bahnhof: the Reich’s main eastern railway terminus. It was from here that the Fuhrer had set out in his armoured train, Amerika, for his wartime headquarters in East Prussia; from here, too, that Berlin’s Jews — the Weisses among them — must have embarked on their journey east.
“…from 10 October onwards the Jews have been evacuated from Reich territory to the East in a continuous series of transports…”
In the air behind him, growing fainter: the platform announcements; somewhere ahead, the clank of wheels and couplings, a bleak whistle. The yard was vast — a dreamscape in the orange sodium lighting — at its
