Germania: A Novel of Nazi Berlin Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  Thank you for buying this

  St. Martin’s Press ebook.

  To receive special offers, bonus content,

  and info on new releases and other great reads,

  sign up for our newsletters.

  Or visit us online at

  us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup

  For email updates on the author, click here.

  The author and publisher have provided this ebook to you for your personal use only. You may not make this ebook publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this ebook you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Prologue

  EARLY SUMMER, 1939

  The light was positioned to simulate ten in the morning. The urban canyons of the capital of the German Empire shimmered blindingly white. But nothing moved, everything seemed suspended, frozen solid in an eternal winter.

  It would be a while until the daily chaos of Berlin reached those corners. At this moment, the streets still radiated symmetry and order in their abandonment. There were no vehicles parked on the curb, nobody strolling along the tree-lined streets. The only disruption of this orderly impression was the remnants of dried glue that, despite the architect’s diligence, had welled out onto the street from under the building blocks.

  The wide road axis ran straight as a die toward a mighty dome that would be visible on the horizon from several kilometers at some point in the distant future. What now dominated the horizon in white splendor was one day to outshine the entire city in its green gown of copper patina. The Große Volkshalle, a hall providing seats for 180,000 people, was a site for unprecedented victory celebrations.

  A whisper sounded high above the roofs: “Magnificent, Speer.”

  The voice was not the distant rasp with the rolling R that every member of the German nation knew from the radio or the newsreel, nor was it the hoarse bark the dictator called forth from his repertoire when he needed to whip up the crowds. In front of the thirty-meter-long model of what would soon be the street of glory, the voice, utterly private in its natural baritone, seemed lost in thought, almost gentle. His backside poking out, a pose he usually avoided, the dictator bent forward to assume a near-ground perspective.

  It could not be denied that in Albert Speer he had found an architect who occasionally managed to surpass even his principal’s bold ideas in size and scale. Paradestraße, a road running at a length of more than five kilometers; the triumphal arch with its shady colonnades, which would be almost fifty times as large as the Arc de Triomphe in Paris; the vast Große Volkshalle, planned as the world’s largest building, whose dome arched to a height of more than 220 meters on the inside. The entire city planned to compete with other metropolises, a display set in stone of deeply hurt national pride that now wanted to show its superiority with all its might.

  The center of the Reich’s capital would be transformed into a huge stage for military deployments and parades. The question of whether anyone could actually live in this city only rarely occurred to the dictator. The surrounding housing blocks were little more than uniform quadrangles that could easily be divided up yet again if traffic planning required this.

  There was no room in this monumental vision for the old Berlin with its contradictions, for the brash, sometimes deeply provincial metropolis. For some time now, the dictator had been thinking about making this quite clear from the start. Berlin sounded too disdainful in his ears. A new name was required, one worthy of a capital of world renown. A name like Germania, perhaps.

  Time and again, the dictator’s gaze was drawn to the dome of the Große Volkshalle. Eventually, he cast a critical gaze across the structure on its spire, where the imperial eagle was enthroned on the swastika. Then, gripped by a sudden realization, he shook his head. “We have to change that, Speer. It’s better if the eagle doesn’t preside over the swastika anymore. The crowning glory of this building must be the eagle atop the globe.”

  When Hitler had left, Chief Architect Speer turned back in the doorway once more. Only the arrangement of lamps, which enabled him to give a realistic simulation of daylight atmosphere, lit up the academy’s exhibition room. The model of the city rested in the otherwise dark room, a bright mark in the black infinity, a promise for the future. A lot remained to be done until then. Speer switched off the light.

  Night descended upon Germania.

  1

  SUNDAY, MAY 7, 1944

  Oppenheimer had drowsily placed his arm around his wife when suddenly he felt Lisa’s body grow tense. But everything was quiet outside. Because of the blackout, not the slightest glimmer of light came in. No siren wailed through the night, no bomber droned in the air, no antiaircraft fire drummed in the distance. So it couldn’t be a bomb alarm that had frightened Lisa. At first, Oppenheimer had turned toward her, but then he, too, perceived the stranger standing very close by.

  They’ve come to fetch me, Oppenheimer thought. Instinctively, he pulled the covers around himself.

  The shadowy figure kept still, his breathing calm and regular. A spark danced in the darkness, moved upward, and transformed itself into a flaming point when the intruder inhaled. The smell of tobacco was blown toward Oppenheimer.

  The stranger had to be a Gestapo man. Through Oppenheimer’s knowledge of Berlin’s criminal community, he knew that no normal burglar would stray into a designated “Jewish House” only to then nonchalantly smoke a cigarette and wait for his victims to wake up and notice him. Oppenheimer knows his crowd, had been the much-quoted quip among his colleagues during his years with the police force. No burglar would risk getting on to the Gestapo’s radar for a few lousy coins, and the Gestapo men considered it their very own privilege to seek out and rob the Jewish residents of these houses. Even though there hadn’t been any more raids in the last few months, Oppenheimer could recall them all perfectly. On these occasions, the Gestapo arrived in bulk. It was considered normal for them to beat the residents around the head, spit at them, and call out obscenities. But this man had come alone, covertly. This was a particularly bad sign. When the Gestapo people rabbled, you knew where you stood. However, if they were silent, anything could happen.

  Oppenheimer and Lisa remained in their positions for a seemingly endless moment, him motionless in his bed, her next to him, and the stranger leaning against the doorway. Then the man’s voice rang out. “I know you’re awake, Oppenheimer. Sicherheitsdienst. Don’t you want to get dressed and come along?”

  This was posed as a question, but the tone was unmistakable. The speaker would not tolerate a refusal.

  Oppenheimer did not dare switch on the bedside lamp. Shaking inside, he got up and fished his clothes from the back of the chair. He didn’t have time to ask himself what a man from the National Socialists’ so-called Security Protection Service, the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, was doing here. Mechanically, he walked through the kitchen they shared with the other residents of the Jewish House. It always surprised Oppenheimer how readily he obeyed when he was scared, when he knew that his fate lay in someone else’s hands. He briefly thought of Lisa, whom he had to leave behind without protection. But as an attested Aryan, she would be better off anyway if they killed him. Afterward, she would be free and no longer excluded from the community of the German people because she had married a Jew. Although he acutely feared for his own life, this thought gave him a certain comfort.

  The light was on in the hallway, and Oppenheimer saw the stranger for the first time. It was a sobering sight
. The man wore glasses and was quite small. But the hand in the baggy coat pocket betrayed the fact that he was carrying a firearm. Oppenheimer was surprised that none of the other residents were up and about. Not even the Schlesingers were creeping down the corridor, curious to see what was going on. It seemed that he was the only target tonight.

  The SD man looked at the suitcase his prisoner was carrying and frowned. It had been a reflex. Oppenheimer had picked up his air raid suitcase on his way out. All his important belongings were stowed inside so he always had them with him when he had to go down into the cellar during an air raid. There were a lot of such suitcases in Berlin.

  “You won’t be needing that,” the SD man said and waved him back. Oppenheimer turned and placed the suitcase in the dark kitchen.

  Two SS men were waiting outside the building with guns in their hands. As soon as the SD man had pushed Oppenheimer out onto the pavement, they got moving. Clouds obscured the night sky. The moon behind them was nothing more than a diffused light that refracted dully off the SS men’s steel helmets. Anxious, Oppenheimer stared at the gray backs, moving in unison, and heard the metallic clatter of their carbines. What could he do? Was there any way to escape? Oppenheimer instantly discarded the thought. As long as the SD man’s gun was pointed at the back of his neck, there was nothing he could do.

  They reached a car discreetly parked in a nearby side street. The back door opened, and Oppenheimer was engulfed by darkness.

  * * *

  It had been uncommonly quiet in Berlin during the last few days, and there wasn’t an air raid alarm tonight either. But everyone knew the silence was deceptive. The airplanes would return at some point. Myriads of bombs had destroyed buildings and laid waste to the capital of the Reich. New gaps in the rows of houses testified to the latest attacks. The inhabitants had long gotten used to the constant change. Life in Berlin had always been hectic, but even by these standards, after Hitler seized power, the construction mania was remarkable. The scars could be seen everywhere. The National Socialist rulers had the most beautiful squares in the city center flattened into parade grounds, while fountains and statues were moved. They had even relocated the Victory Column from the Reichstag, the parliament building, to the star-shaped central square known as Großer Stern right in the middle of the municipal park called Tiergarten.

  As they drove along, Oppenheimer looked out of the window and started with fright. For a brief moment, he thought he saw a scared face staring at him. But when he looked more closely, it turned out that the moonlight had played a trick on him. The sunken cheeks and deep-set eyes were Oppenheimer’s own. The realization that he had been frightened of his own reflection made him feel stupid.

  Outside, the plinth of the Victory Column, in itself high as a house, slid past them. The SS man at the wheel turned left, heading straight for the city center on the east-west axis. After a while, they drove through the Brandenburg Gate. Despite the darkness, Oppenheimer had no trouble finding his bearings. He knew every corner here and didn’t need to look up to know that wings of stone swooped past them above their heads, reaching far into the night.

  The street they were driving along was called Unter den Linden, but Hitler’s architects had made a mockery of this description many years ago. For lack of anything better to do, they had chopped down all the old linden trees that gave this street its name to make space for countless marble pillars, which now served as thrones for a formation of imperial eagles and dwarfed the newly planted replacement trees.

  When areas controlled by the League of Nations were returned to the Reich, jubilant cheering filled the street. Even-greater euphoria roared when the first successes from the front line were announced and the German Wehrmacht rushed through all of Europe from victory to victory.

  But when the bombs fell, the resounding approval began to wane. Then came Stalingrad.

  The military debacle in the remote Russian steppe had marred the taste of success and had undermined the trust in Germany’s well-oiled war machinery.

  During the day, Hitler’s blindingly white marble pillars continued to outshine the city center, but night transformed them into a sinister forest of shadows in the midst of a gravel desert, through which the car now laboriously carved its way.

  The driver swerved around a barely repaired crater in the road. Startled by the headlights, gray shadows with gleaming red eyes hastened to find cover. Rats. Myriads of them housed in the ruins. Despite all the destruction, they regained their terrain, inch by inch, mile by mile.

  * * *

  The SD man opened the door for Oppenheimer as he became vaguely aware of another car parked nearby. Men holding flashlights stood farther back in the darkness.

  “Get out,” the SD man said. Oppenheimer hesitantly clambered out of the seat. The drive had taken unexpectedly long. At some point, he had finally lost his sense of direction in the darkness. The panic that had initially seized him had increasingly turned into astonishment. When they crossed the Spree River and he recognized the mighty AEG factory buildings, Oppenheimer knew that they were in the suburbs of Oberschöneweide. Every inhabitant of Berlin knew the imposing industrial buildings that lined the northern banks of the Spree, but he couldn’t fathom what had induced the SD to drive him here in the middle of the night.

  Oppenheimer’s escort pointed in the direction of the dancing light. He pulled his gun from his coat pocket and directed it toward Oppenheimer, who reluctantly started moving.

  Security led Oppenheimer to a green area with a block of stone, three to four meters high, with granite steps leading up to it. The stone did not seem to fulfill any recognizable purpose in its crudeness. It was probably the meager remains of a memorial. There were countless numbers of these in Berlin. Most of them were quite recent, reminders of the horrors of the last war. Now that the world wars had been numbered, it had become known as the First World War, but in common parlance, it was simply known as Anno Scheiße. Given that any sort of metal was scarce in these heroic times, these sizable reservoirs of metal pieces were being melted down as soon as the new, even bigger war had started. Where a sculpture once had towered, there was now nothing but a gaping void.

  But on this morning, something else disrupted the site of a memorial.

  Someone had laid a large square of cloth over something directly behind the stump. Oppenheimer immediately recognized its outline: a human body.

  In the dim glow of the flashlight, Oppenheimer also better recognized the faces of the two men. Both wore the gray battle dress of the SS. A large building that had to be a church loomed up behind them.

  Snippets of conversation drifted through the cold morning air.

  “Right bloody mess, this is,” one of them whispered to the other and stared grumpily at the covered body at his feet.

  “Do you really think it’s a good idea to consult a Jew, of all people?”

  “I’ve got my reasons, Graeter,” the second man said and lit a cigarette.

  “Say what you like, Vogler. I think it’s a mistake.” When the speaker realized that Oppenheimer was approaching with his escorts, he fell into an embarrassed silence.

  The other man turned to the new arrival. “There you are, Oppenheimer.”

  The SS man called Vogler pointed his flashlight toward them both. The beam of light rested briefly on Oppenheimer’s yellow Star of David. An expression of uncertainty flitted across Vogler’s face, but it quickly disappeared behind the forced self-confidence that was so typical of Hitler’s elite.

  “I’m Hauptsturmführer Vogler. This body was discovered two hours ago.”

  Vogler went over to the body. Although the expression of the other man in uniform—Graeter—was deliberately blank, he sighed meaningfully before the cloth was folded back.

  When Oppenheimer saw the dead woman, he felt the familiar stab in the pit of his stomach. He had dealt with numerous deaths during the run of his police career, but he was not so jaded that the sight of a murder victim left him completely cold. A
t the same time, he also felt the reflex of a homicide detective kick in. He felt his brain get into gear in the old familiar way and told his reluctant eyes to take a closer look.

  “Tell us what you see,” Hauptsturmführer Vogler commanded.

  There was no doubt that this woman’s body had been destroyed. When Oppenheimer noticed the steel marker posts that had been rammed into the ground alongside the body, he realized that the forensics team had arrived with the special vehicle they used in murder investigations to carry out the examination. Oppenheimer instinctively wanted to look for additional evidence that the specialists might have missed, but he paused.

  The question of what he was actually doing here occurred to him. He had been suspended for a long time now. Following Hitler’s rise to power, Oppenheimer had been removed from public service, like all Jews. Officially, he was not allowed to set foot in the crime squad offices, and yet here he was, standing before a new victim.

  He looked at those around him, panic creeping up inside him. Did they want to frame him for the murder? He wouldn’t have considered the SD to be that imaginative. A simple open grave and a bullet to his head would have sufficed to get rid of him. Why go to all this trouble?

  “Are you not able to give us any indications?” Vogler asked. “You disappoint me. I had placed a certain degree of hope in you.” He handed Oppenheimer his flashlight.

  Hesitating, he took it. So they wanted pointers from him. He had no choice but to go along with it.

  Thoughtfully, he turned to the corpse, beginning to speak, his voice raw.

  “I’d put her at around twenty-five. There are strangulation marks on her neck. That is probably the cause of death.”

  Was that what the men wanted to hear from him? Their gloomy expressions showed indifference. Only Hauptsturmführer Vogler tried to follow his deliberations. Oppenheimer wanted to touch the body, but he stopped and turned to the Hauptsturmführer.