HHhH

He knows that such an affair is a matter for Canaris’s Abwehr, as it’s a military question. But, intoxicated by the sheer scale of his project, he manages to convince Himmler and Hitler to give him control of the operation. To carry it out, he calls on his best hired man, Alfred Naujocks, who specializes in dirty work. For three months, Naujocks will create a whole series of forgeries aimed at compromising the Russian marshal. He has no difficulty finding his signature: all he has to do is look through the archives of the Weimar Republic. Back then, when diplomatic relations between the two countries were more friendly, many official documents had been signed by Tukhachevsky.

When the dossier is ready, Heydrich assigns one of his men to sell it to the NKVD. This meeting gives rise to a wonderful spying double cross: the Russian buys the fake dossier from the German, whom he pays with fake rubles. Each thinks he’s fooling the other, each is fooled in turn.

Eventually, Stalin gets what he wants: evidence that his most serious rival is planning a coup d’etat. Historians disagree over how much importance should be given to Heydrich in this affair, but it should be noted that the dossier was sent in May 1937, and that Tukhachevsky was executed in June. For me, the closeness of the dates strongly suggests a link between cause and effect.

So, in the end, who fooled whom? I think Heydrich served Stalin’s interests, in allowing him to get rid of the only man capable of eclipsing him. But this man was also the most able to lead a war against Germany. The total disorganization of the Red Army, caught off guard by the German invasion of June ’41, would be the final aftermath of this murky story. But you can’t really say it was Heydrich’s masterstroke. Rather, Stalin shot himself in the foot. All the same, when Stalin begins a series of unprecedented purges, Heydrich is exultant. He is perfectly happy to take all the credit for this state of affairs.

45

I am thirty-three, considerably older than Tukhachevsky was in 1920. Today is the anniversary of the assassination attempt on Heydrich—May 27, 2006. Natacha’s sister is getting married, but I’m not invited to the wedding. Natacha called me a “little shit.” I don’t think she can bear me anymore. My life is in ruins. I wonder if Tukhachevsky felt this bad when he realized that he’d lost the battle, when he saw his army routed and understood that he had failed miserably. Did he believe he was finished, done for, washed up? Did he curse fortune, or adversity, or those who’d betrayed him? Or did he curse himself? Anyway, I know he bounced back. That’s encouraging, even if it was only to be crushed fifteen years later by his worst enemy. The wheel turns: that’s what I tell myself. Natacha doesn’t return my calls. I am in 1920, standing before the trembling walls of Warsaw, and at my feet, indifferent, flows the Vistula.

46

That night, I dreamed that I wrote the chapter about the assassination, and it began: “A black Mercedes slid along the road like a snake.” That’s when I understood that I had to start writing the rest of the story, because the rest of the story had to converge at this crucial episode. By pursuing the chain of causality back into infinity, I allowed myself to keep delaying the moment when I must face the novel’s bravura moment, its scene of scenes.

47

Imagine a map of the world, with concentric circles closing in around Germany. This afternoon, November 5, 1937, Hitler reveals his plans to the army high command—Blomberg, Fritsch, Raeder, Goring—and to his foreign minister, Neurath. The objective of German politics, he reminds them (although I think everyone’s understood by now), is to ensure the safety of Germany’s racial identity, to guarantee its existence, and to aid its development. It is therefore a question of living space (the famous Lebensraum) and it is here that we can begin to trace the circles of the map. Not from the narrowest to the widest, to take in at a single glance the Reich’s expansionist aims, but from the widest to the narrowest, focusing ruthlessly on the ogre’s first targets. For reasons he never bothers to explain, Hitler decrees that the Germans have the right to a bigger living space than other races. Germany’s future depends entirely on the solution to this problem. Where can this space be found? Not in some distant colony in Africa or Asia, but in the heart of Europe (he traces a circle around the Old Continent), in the immediate neighborhood of the Reich. So the circle encompasses only France, Belgium, Holland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Italy, and Switzerland—plus Lithuania, if we remember that the top of Germany at the time extended from Danzig to Memel and bordered the Baltic countries. So Hitler’s question was this: Where can Germany obtain the greatest profit for the lowest price? France was ruled out because of its presumed military power and its links to Great Britain—and Holland and Belgium, too, due to their strategic importance for the French. Mussolini’s Italy was naturally excluded straightaway. An eastward expansion toward Poland and the Baltic countries would create a premature conflict with the Soviet Union. Switzerland was saved as usual, less by its neutrality than by its role as the world’s piggy bank. The circle is therefore retraced and moved above a zone reduced to two countries: “Our first objective must be to overthrow Czechoslovakia and Austria simultaneously in order to remove the threat to our flank in any possible operation against the West.” As we see, no sooner has he targeted his “first objective” than Hitler is thinking of widening the circle.

Apart from Goring and Raeder, both of whom were genuine Nazis, Hitler’s audience is shocked by his plans —literally so in the case of Neurath, who suffers several heart attacks in the days that follow the unveiling of this brilliant scheme. Blomberg and Fritsch—respectively, the war minister and commander in chief of the armed services, and commander in chief of the army—protested with a vehemence wholly inappropriate in the Third Reich. In 1937, the old army still believed that it could sway the opinions of the dictator it had, imprudently, helped to seize power.

They didn’t understand Hitler at all. But they soon would. And Blomberg and Fritsch would pay dearly for their education.

Not long after this stormy conference, Blomberg married his (much younger) secretary. To his displeasure, and perhaps to his surprise, it was revealed that his wife was a former prostitute. And to make the scandal as great as possible, nude photos of her were passed around government circles. Though Blomberg bravely refused to divorce, he was forced to resign his post. Relieved of all military responsibility, he remained faithful to his wife till the end—that’s to say, until 1946 in Nuremberg, where he died in detention.

As for Fritsch, he was the victim of an even more indecent plot, skillfully conducted by Heydrich.

48

Like Sherlock Holmes, Heydrich plays the violin. (He plays it better than does the fictional detective, however.) Also like Sherlock Holmes, he conducts criminal inquiries. Except that where Holmes seeks the truth, Heydrich just makes it up.

His mission is to compromise General von Fritsch, the commander in chief of the army. Heydrich doesn’t need to be head of the SD to know that Fritsch has anti-Nazi feelings: he has never made any secret of them. At a military parade in Saarbrucken, in 1935, he was heard openly and sarcastically abusing the SS, the Party, and many of its most eminent members. It would probably be quite easy to implicate him in a plot.

But Heydrich has something more humiliating in mind for the old baron. Knowing how proud and touchy the Prussian aristocracy are when it comes to their moral rectitude, he decides to compromise Fritsch, as he did Blomberg, in a sex scandal.