knee to wipe it dry with the sleeve of his jacket. Lindsay sat down and reached for his silver cigarette case: ‘Do you smoke?’
Lehmann pulled a face.
‘So, Herr Lehmann,’ and he bent to light his cigarette. ‘What do you want?’
‘Herr Lange was like a grandfather to me. He helped my father when he was too ill to work, helped me through school and paid for me to come to university here. He was a friend to the family. Excuse me.’
He stopped to blow his nose on a grubby handkerchief. Lindsay looked away until he was calm enough to continue. It was a friendship of more than forty years, that had begun at the end of the war when Lange had found Lehmann’s grandmother and her two children in a hostel for the homeless in Hamburg. Her husband had been killed in the British blitz of the city, her elder son lost on a U-boat, no money, no friends, no hope, two children to feed and care for, one of them Lehmann’s mother.
‘It was a small miracle. He spent weeks searching for my grandmother. He said he owed it to an old comrade, a friend from the U-boat service, my uncle.’
‘Your uncle?’
‘He served on one of the most successful U-boats of the war.’ Lehmann’s voice rang with a pride that would have been a cause of comment in his student hall.
‘The
‘Yes. Did you know…’
‘Yes. I did know him.’
‘Uncle August. He was only nineteen.’
Yes, they had the same eyes. He could see the little engineer rocking on the chair on the other side of the table, his eyes large and frightened and close to tears. Nineteen. God. So many years lost to him, a terrible waste, a terrible and pointless crime. Black and white and as sharp in his mind as it was fifty years ago, the picture of Heine dangling inches from the washroom floor. It brought a hard lump to his throat.
‘I found out recently that he took his own life in the camp,’ said Lehmann. ‘Do you remember him? Herr Lange said you would.’
‘I didn’t know him well.’
‘No one seems to know why he killed himself. I asked his commander, Admiral Mohr — he spoke of combat fatigue. He said my uncle’s death hit all the survivors of the
‘Yes. It was sad and senseless.’
And he thought of Gretschel tapping his finger against his temple. He was right, of course. Every hour, every day, guilt, fear, conflicting loyalties pulling first one way and then the other. Millions of small battles. Fought long after the parades and the bunting and the speeches. Scarred. Victor and vanquished the same. Lange, Mohr, Lindsay, he was sure they were the same. A secret history beyond the numbers and the dates and the shifting of borders. Someone had asked him to do an interview for a radio programme, just his memories of the war, but he declined. Some memories should be buried.
Lindsay leant down to extinguish his cigarette in a puddle, then got stiffly to his feet. A sharp wind was gusting powdery snow from the pines into the chapel porch where it swirled in a fine mist, dropping wet crystals on their clothes and in their hair. It felt colder — perhaps that was the memories — and the sky was a filthy Berlin grey.
‘I think we’d better go back. My wife will be waiting for me.’
They did not speak and the graveyard was silent but for the crunch of their shoes, figures in a monochrome landscape like something from a piece of forgotten archive film. Picking their way slowly between the stones, they found the main path and a few minutes later reached Lange’s grave. The cemetery workers were beating the hard ground between the pines flat with their spades, the rhythm like the ticking of a lazy clock. When it was level they loaded their tools into a handcart and left without a word, rattling down the gravel path to the gate. And Lindsay stood alone at the foot of the grave. He stood there until the raw earth was lost beneath the snow.
HISTORICAL NOTE ON CODES
In the autumn of 1945 Commander Tighe of the Admiralty Signals Division submitted a secret report on German code-breaking efforts during the Second World War to the Director of Naval Intelligence. The report was considered ‘so disturbing and important’ that only three copies were made. In it, Tighe detailed the success of German cryptographers in repeatedly breaking both Royal and Merchant Navy codes and suggested that their efforts were responsible for many of the U-boat’s greatest successes in the Battle of the Atlantic. The Royal Navy’s codes were changed a number of times but the German B-Dienst was able to break into them again and again, often within a few weeks. The Admiralty was slow to recognise and interpret evidence that its codes were compromised and carry out the necessary investigation.
After the war, the success of the cryptographers at Bletchley Park in breaking the German Enigma ciphers helped to shield the Royal Navy from critical scrutiny over the failure of its own codes. In his report, Commander Tighe concluded that British code security was so disastrously lax that it cost the country dearly in men and ships and ‘very nearly lost us the war’.
NOTE ON SOURCES
Many of the characters are based on real people although most of the events described are fictional.
Admiral John Godfrey was the Director of Naval Intelligence until 1942 and Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books, was his assistant. Fleming was instrumental in recruiting people to the Division and those who worked with him often remarked on his love of cloak-and-dagger operations. The man charged with responsibility for tracking German U-boat operations from the Citadel was Rodger Winn and while none of the duty officers in Room 41 were women, a Margaret Stewart held this position across the corridor in Room 30 where the movements of the enemy’s surface fleet were plotted. Her confidential memoir of life in the Citadel is in the National Archive in London (ADM 223/286).
For further details of the Citadel and the work of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre (CSDIC) I quarried written sources but also the memories of those who visited and worked there. I am particularly grateful to the late Colin McFadyean who served as a naval interrogator and at the end of the war became head of the section. Transcripts of the secret recordings (SR reports) made of German prisoners at CSDIC, notes on the detailed interrogation of U-boat crews, and intelligence assessments written by the interrogators exist in the National Archive (Record groups ADM 223 and WO 208). They provide an invaluable insight into the work of Section 11 and the views of U-boat prisoners. Occasionally I have quoted from these documents, for instance, the observation made in 1941 by the then head of Section 11 that it was a mistake to use Jewish interrogators or men of ‘Jewish appearance’ (ADM 223/475). I have also drawn on authentic pieces of special intelligence, including some of the Enigma decrypts from Bletchley Park that suggested British codes might be compromised in the spring and summer of 1941 (ADM 223/2). Evidence that prisoners let slip valuable intelligence on the work of the B-Dienst can be found in CSDIC secret recordings made in March 1941 (WO 208/4141).
Although there were three U-boat commanders with the name Mohr, none of them served on Admiral Donitz’s Staff or fell into British hands. One of Admiral Donitz’s most senior Staff officers was the distinguished U- boat commander Gunther Hessler, who sank fourteen ships off the coast of West Africa in May and June of 1941. The official history he wrote for the Ministry of Defence after the war was an important source for the German Staff perspective on the Battle of the Atlantic.
The most successful commander of the war, Otto Kretschmer of
