Dead of Night Simon Scarrow

Visit to download the full and correct content document:

https://ebookmeta.com/product/dead-of-night-simon-scarrow/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Dead of Night Erin Hunter

https://ebookmeta.com/product/dead-of-night-erin-hunter/

Cold Dead Night 1st Edition Lisa Phillips

https://ebookmeta.com/product/cold-dead-night-1st-edition-lisa-
phillips/

The Restless Dead 1st Edition Simon Beckett

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-restless-dead-1st-edition-
simon-beckett/

The Archive 1st Edition Alex Scarrow

https://ebookmeta.com/product/the-archive-1st-edition-alex-
scarrow/
Science and the Dead Destructive sampling of
archaeological human remains for scientific analysis
2nd Edition Simon Mays

https://ebookmeta.com/product/science-and-the-dead-destructive-
sampling-of-archaeological-human-remains-for-scientific-
analysis-2nd-edition-simon-mays/

Forger of Worlds 1st Edition Simon Archer Archer Simon

https://ebookmeta.com/product/forger-of-worlds-1st-edition-simon-
archer-archer-simon/

Book of Night Holly Black

https://ebookmeta.com/product/book-of-night-holly-black/

Book of the Dead Foy Scalf

https://ebookmeta.com/product/book-of-the-dead-foy-scalf/

Book of Night 1st Edition Holly Black

https://ebookmeta.com/product/book-of-night-1st-edition-holly-
black/
 Copyright © 2023 Simon Scarrow

The right of Simon Scarrow to be identified as the Author of the

Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this

publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any
form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the
publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance
with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

First published in Great Britain in 2023

by HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

First published as an Ebook in 2023

by HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

All characters in this publication – other than the obvious historical

figures – are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or
dead, is purely coincidental.

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

Jacket design by Patrick Insole.

Jacket images © Dmitry Modestov/Shutterstock (castle),
fran_kie/Shutterstock (figure), Separation51/Shutterstock (gates)
and a_v_d/Shutterstock (car)

eISBN: 978 1 4722 5857 1

Map and artwork by Tim Peters

HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

An Hachette UK Company
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ

www.headline.co.uk
www.hachette.co.uk
 Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
About the Author
Also by Simon Scarrow
Praise
About the Book
Dedication
Map of Central Berlin
Nazi Chain of Command
Author Note

Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine

Historical Note
 About the Author

SIMON SCARROW is the bestselling author of Blackout, which

introduced Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke, and of the Eagles of
the Empire novels, most recently Death to the Emperor, the
Wellington and Napoleon Quartet, and many other acclaimed works
of fiction. Simon shared his passion for history as a teacher for many
years before becoming a full-time writer.

Simon lives in Norfolk with his wife.

Find out more at www.simonscarrow.co.uk and on Facebook

/officialsimonscarrow and Twitter @SimonScarrow
By Simon Scarrow and available from Headline
The Berlin Wartime Thrillers
Blackout
Dead of Night

The Eagles of the Empire Series

The Britannia Campaign
Under the Eagle (AD 42-43, Britannia)
The Eagle’s Conquest (AD 43, Britannia)
When the Eagle Hunts (AD 44, Britannia)
The Eagle and the Wolves (AD 44, Britannia)
The Eagle’s Prey (AD 44, Britannia)

Rome and the Eastern Provinces

The Eagle’s Prophecy (AD 45, Rome)
The Eagle in the Sand (AD 46, Judaea)
Centurion (AD 46, Syria)

The Mediterranean
The Gladiator (AD 48-49, Crete)
The Legion (AD 49, Egypt)
Praetorian (AD 51, Rome)

The Return to Britannia

The Blood Crows (AD 51, Britannia)
Brothers in Blood (AD 51, Britannia)
Britannia (AD 52, Britannia)

Hispania
Invictus (AD 54, Hispania)

The Return to Rome

Day of the Caesars (AD 54, Rome)
 The Eastern Campaign
The Blood of Rome (AD 55, Armenia)
Traitors of Rome (AD 56, Syria)
The Emperor’s Exile (AD 57, Sardinia)

Britannia: Troubled Province

The Honour of Rome (AD 59, Britannia)
Death to the Emperor (AD 60, Britannia)

The Wellington and Napoleon Quartet

Young Bloods
The Generals
Fire and Sword
The Fields of Death

Sword and Scimitar (Great Siege of Malta)

Hearts of Stone (Second World War)

The Gladiator Series

Gladiator: Fight for Freedom
Gladiator: Street Fighter
Gladiator: Son of Spartacus
Gladiator: Vengeance

Writing with T.J. Andrews

Arena (AD 41, Rome)
Invader (AD 44, Britannia)
Pirata (AD 25, Adriatic)

Writing with Lee Francis

Playing With Death
 Praise for Simon Scarrow’s novels:
‘Taut and chilling – I was completely gripped’ Anthony Horowitz

‘A great read’ Bernard Cornwell

‘What an amazing roller-coaster of a ride’ Manda Scott

‘Scarrow’s rank with the best’ Independent

‘Gripping’ Sunday Times

‘Tremendous’ Daily Express

‘An engrossing read’ Financial Times

 About the Book

BERLIN. JANUARY 1941. Evil cannot bring about good . . .

After Germany’s invasion of Poland, the world is holding its breath

and hoping for peace. At home, the Nazi Party’s hold on power is
absolute.

One freezing night, an SS doctor and his wife return from an evening
mingling with their fellow Nazis at the concert hall. By the time the
sun rises, the doctor will be lying lifeless in a pool of blood.

Was it murder or suicide? Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke is told

that under no circumstances should he investigate. The doctor’s
widow, however, is convinced her husband was the target of a hit.
But why would anyone murder an apparently obscure doctor?
Compelled to dig deeper, Schenke learns of the mysterious death of
a child. The cases seem unconnected, but soon chilling links begin to
emerge that point to a terrifying secret.
 Even in times of war, under a ruthless regime, there are places in
hell no man should ever enter. And Schenke fears he may not return
alive . . .
 For my friend Bharat Goswami,
who taught me how to think about thinking
 Author note

Writing about life in Germany during the Third Reich inevitably

brings an author face to face with some of the darkest aspects of
human nature. It’s impossible to write honestly about the time
without referring to some of the attitudes of and terminology used
by those in the regime. I hope that I have handled this aspect of the
novel with sensitivity.
 Prologue

Berlin, 28 January 1940

The choir and orchestra reached the end of the reprise of ‘Fortuna
Imperatrix Mundi’, and with a final sweep of his baton the conductor
brought the performance to an end, bowing his head as if in
exhaustion. At once the audience at the Philharmonie let out a cheer
and applause thundered through the hall. As the conductor turned,
some of the audience rose to offer a standing ovation and the rest
began to follow.
Dr Manfred Schmesler sighed as he stood stiffly. Like those around
him, he was wearing his overcoat and gloves but no hat, so that he
might hear the music more easily despite the cold. Because of the
shortage of coal in the city, the heating had not been turned on, and
even after an hour and a half of the audience crowding into the hall,
the air was frigid. Schmesler wondered how the performers had
been able to carry on in such conditions. Perhaps the need to
concentrate had distracted them from the icy atmosphere.
He felt a light pressure on his arm and turned to his wife, Brigitte.
She said something inaudible, then cleared her throat and spoke
loudly as he dipped his ear towards her.
‘I said, they did wonderfully.’
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Under the circumstances.’
The applause continued as Wilhelm Furtwängler gestured to his
orchestra to take a bow, and then the choir. The clapping subsided
and there was the usual bustle as the crowd edged towards the
aisles and made for the exits. Schmesler guided his wife out, along
with the couple who had accompanied them to the performance,
Hans Eberman, a lawyer, and his wife, Eva. The Schmeslers had met
the Ebermans at a party a few months earlier, and had shared a
number of social events since then.
 Eberman caught his eye and commented just loudly enough to be
heard, ‘How fortunate that the tickets were free.’
Schmesler knew his companion well enough to sense the irony,
and smiled back briefly. Since the Nazi Party had taken power, they
had driven a host of musicians and composers into exile and limited
the repertoire of those that remained to mainly German music,
which meant the capital’s concerts were becoming repetitive. At
least they had been spared an evening of Wagner, thought
Schmesler.
As the crowd edged forward, people fumbled for scarves and
mufflers and put on their hats in preparation for the cold out in the
street. Berlin was in the grip of the bitterest winter in living memory:
the canals and the River Spree were frozen over, and snow covered
the city. And the nation was at war again. Schmesler was old enough
to have served in the previous conflict, and his memory was scarred
by the terrible suffering he had witnessed on the Western Front. The
war to end all wars, they had called it, and yet scarcely twenty years
later, war had returned to Germany. And with it had come food
rationing and the nightly blackout that smothered Berlin with
darkness once the sun set.
The increasing scarcity of coal meant that heating was a luxury for
the few, mostly senior members of the Nazi Party or their cronies.
Although Schmesler was a member, he had joined as part of the
wave of professionals who had seen the way things were going and
realised that membership would become the sine qua non of any
successful career, as well as serving a more private purpose. And so
it had proved for doctors and for lawyers like his new friend
Eberman. Those who had joined the party in the days of the Weimar
Republic looked down on the newcomers with contempt for their
new-found enthusiasm for the cause. More importantly, they were
not inclined to share their supply of coal.
It was strange, Schmesler reflected, that a resource once so
commonplace was now a rare and valuable commodity. Even the
coal that did turn up in the capital tended to be the degassed
variety, lacking the greasy sheen of the better-quality type that
generated more heat. He and Brigitte were obliged to burn wood in
the stoves of their house in Pankow to stay warm and heat enough
water to wash with. The boiler that supplied the building was only
fired up at weekends and on Tuesday and Thursday evenings, when
coal supplies allowed. Even wood was becoming scarce, and
Schmesler prayed for the prolonged spell of freezing weather to end.
As they approached the exit into the foyer, he heard a harsh voice
cut through the hubbub of conversation.
‘Winter Aid! Winter Aid collection!’
He saw four men in greatcoats with the brown caps of the party
paramilitaries. One had raised a tin and rattled it loudly before he
repeated his cry.
‘Damn them,’ Eberman muttered. ‘Don’t they fleece us enough
already with their bloody collections?’
Schmesler reached into his coat pocket and took out a handful of
badges. Poking through them, he found the special Winter Aid
badges he had earned through previous donations. He handed one
to Eberman before fixing his own to his lapel, where it would be
seen. His companion smiled at the thought of getting one over on
the party’s henchmen clustered about the exits, where they
intimidated those passing into handing over money for the cause. A
visitor to Berlin might think this was charity, whereas the inhabitants
recognised it for what it was – one step short of being mugged.
A man blocked the way of the group ahead of Schmesler and his
lips curled in amusement. ‘Spare some change to help those in need,
friend.’
There was no trace of a polite request, merely an instruction, and
the concert-leavers without donor badges paid up and hurried away.
An SA man stepped in front of Schmesler and held up his tin.
‘Winter Aid.’
Schmesler angled his shoulder slightly to display the badge, and
the SA man waved the two couples past before confronting those
behind them. Schmesler took his wife’s arm and increased their pace
as they passed through the foyer and out of the revolving door onto
the pavement. At once the freezing night air bit at their exposed
skin, and they hunched their heads into their collars and breathed
swirls of steam.
 Eberman made to return his badge, but Schmesler shook his
head. ‘Keep it. Who knows how many more SA parties are on the
streets tonight.’
‘Thanks.’
Despite the blackout, there was enough illumination from the
narrow beams of masked car headlights and the loom of mounds of
snow for them to see their way, and Schmesler led them along the
street towards the U-Bahn station. Once he was clear of the crowd
emerging from the theatre, he slowed so that the other couple could
fall into step beside him and Brigitte. The trampled snow had
compacted into ice, and she clung to his arm to avoid slipping. The
conditions discouraged any further conversation until they reached
the steps to the station, where they would part company; Schmesler
and his wife catching a train to Pankow while the Ebermans walked
the remaining distance to their apartment on the next street.
‘Shall we go to the Richard Strauss event next Friday?’ asked Eva.
Her husband sniffed. ‘Not that there’s much of a choice these
days.’
She swatted his shoulder. ‘Strauss may not be the kind of first-
class composer you are so fond of, but at least he’s a first-rate
second-class composer.’
All four laughed knowingly before Eberman continued, ‘It seems
that no piece of German music should be so sophisticated that it
could not be belted out at a Nazi Party rally, eh?’
‘Come now,’ said Schmesler. ‘It’s music all the same, and it’s a
pleasant distraction from the war. It’ll be good for us.’
‘I suppose . . .’
‘Then it’s settled. And it’s your turn to get the tickets, my friend.’
Schmesler glanced towards the station entrance at the sound of
an approaching train. ‘We have to go.’ He turned back to his
companion. ‘Are we still meeting for lunch next Monday? About that
matter you wanted to discuss?’
Eberman shook his head. ‘It’s not important any more. Another
time perhaps.’
There were handshakes and farewells as the couples parted, the
Schmeslers hurrying down the stairs into the station. They reached
the platform just as the northbound train pulled in. Doors clattered
open and shut as passengers alighted or boarded; the guard blew
his whistle. The train jolted into motion and Schmesler and his wife
nearly lost their balance as they made for an empty space on one of
the benches. It reminded them both of an evening when Schmesler
had invited Brigitte out after they’d first met. The motion of the train
had thrown them against each other and he had instinctively put his
arm around her to stop her from falling. It had broken the ice and
they had laughed nervously. Now they smiled at each other in
delight at the unbidden memory of that night.
Conversation was difficult on the U-Bahn trains, and in recent
years people tended to be careful of what they said in case an
inadvertent comment attracted the attention of an informer. The two
of them held hands and sat in silence, counting off the stops until
the train pulled into their station in the Pankow district. Stepping out
of the carriage, they walked quickly through the cold, dark streets of
the smart residential neighbourhood until they reached their home.
It was a modest two-storey building dating from the middle of the
last century. Schmesler had acquired it three years earlier from its
Jewish owners, the Frankels. He had studied at Berlin University with
Josef Frankel, and they had once been close friends. After the Nazis
had come to power, the friendship was no longer advisable and they
had kept their distance, socialising in secret. With Frankel no longer
able to operate his business, he had left Germany with his family as
restrictions tightened around the country’s Jewish community. He
had sold his house to his good friend Schmesler for a bargain price,
and taken what little capital he had in order to make a new life in
New York. However, the family had been forced to leave behind a
younger daughter, Ruth, when they had failed to find her birth
certificate, and now that war had broken out, she was trapped in
Berlin.
The couple climbed the steps from the street and scraped the
snow from their shoes on the iron bar next to the covered porch.
Schmesler unlocked the front door, and they stepped inside and
closed it before turning on the lights, so as not to provide an excuse
for the local block warden to fine them for breaching blackout
regulations.
It was cold enough indoors to require them to keep their coats
and gloves on, and only their hats were hung on the stand beside
the door. Schmesler kissed his wife on the forehead.
‘You go on up to bed. I’ll be along a bit later.’
‘Work?’ She sighed.
He nodded. ‘We’re short-handed at the centre, thanks to
conscription.’
‘Did they have to take all your assistants?’
‘In time of war, the army needs all the doctors it can find, my
love.’
Brigitte shook her head. ‘War . . . So much for the Führer’s claim
of being a man of peace.’
Schmesler instinctively glanced round before he could catch
himself, and smiled guiltily as he responded. ‘Make sure such words
stay at home. Be careful who you share your doubts with.’
‘I would hope I’d be safe speaking my mind to my husband of
twenty years.’
He winked at her. ‘You never know . . .’
‘Oh, you!’ She pinched his cheek.
‘Give the Führer a chance, Brigitte. Now that Poland is obliterated,
there is no reason for France or Britain to continue the war. We may
have peace by the time spring comes. Hold on to that hope, eh?
Now, to bed with you, before I tell the Gestapo you are sharing un-
German propaganda.’
He watched as she climbed the stairs to the galleried landing,
turned on the light and disappeared from view. Then, making his
way to the parlour, he sat in the chair in front of the stove and
opened the hatch. The heavy iron was still warm, even through the
thickness of his gloves, and he saw a dim glow within. When he
opened the vent, the heat intensified and smoke curled up. Taking
some kindling, he arranged it over the first small flames to flicker
into life. He waited until there was a healthy blaze before he added
some split logs and shut the hatch. Already he could feel the warmth
radiating from the ironwork, and he let it seep into his body, smiling
with contentment.
He glanced at the desk beneath the blackout curtains. There was
a briefcase sitting there that contained a folder of reports awaiting
his attention. He had been putting off the moment all day at the
office, and now again at home. It could be delayed no longer. He
eased himself to his feet and crossed to the small side table where
he kept a decanter of brandy and some glasses, and poured himself
a generous measure. Then, settling in the leather desk chair with
the warmth of the fire at his back, he opened the case and took out
the file. Reaching for a pen, he flicked open the cover and glanced
over the first report, considering the hand-written recommendation
at the bottom. His right hand moved, and the nib hovered over the
report. He hesitated, then knocked the brandy back, feeling the fiery
liquid surge down his throat. Setting the glass down with a rap, he
marked the final box on the page with a ‘+’, moved the sheet to the
side and considered the next document.
The clock on the mantelpiece marked the passage of time with a
steady tick tock. Every so often, Schmesler stirred to place another
log in the stove as he worked late into the night processing the
documents into two piles: one for those marked in the same way
that the first report had been, and a smaller pile where he had left
the box empty and merely signed the report instead.
Upstairs, his wife slept alone in her thick nightdress beneath
several layers of covers. She lay on her side, breathing deeply,
sleeping in a dreamless and untroubled state until the early hours of
the morning, when a sharp crack sounded from downstairs and
jolted her awake. For a few heartbeats she was not sure if she had
imagined the sound. She reached under the covers to where her
husband usually lay, but he was not there, and the bedding was cold
and clammy. She waited for several minutes, listening for further
sounds before she stirred. Turning on the bedside lamp, she
squinted at the sudden brightness as she looked at the alarm clock.
Just past three o’clock. An absurd hour for her husband to still be
working.
 She swung her legs from under the covers and slid her feet into
her slippers before making for the top of the stairs.
‘Manfred,’ she called out. ‘Manfred . . .’
She waited for a response, but there was silence, and she tutted
irritably as she descended the stairs and made for his study. As she
opened the door, warm air washed over her, and with it came the
acrid odour of gun smoke.
‘Manfred . . . ?’
She did not see her husband immediately. There were papers
scattered across the desk and on the floor nearby. The chair lay on
its side, and an outstretched arm projected from behind it. A short
distance from the curled fingers of the hand lay the dark shape of a
pistol.
 Chapter One

31 January

It was shortly after midday when the door to the Kripo section office
opened. Sergeant Hauser looked up as a man in a dark coat hung
his hat on the stand inside the entrance. He crossed to the stove in
the centre of the room and turned to warm his back before nodding
a greeting. The sergeant was doing his best to write up some notes
while recovering from a gunshot wound to his shoulder. Although it
had been a flesh wound, he still wore a sling from time to time when
he needed to ease what remained of the pain. Now he set his pen
down.
‘How did it go, sir?’
His superior, Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke, had attended a
funeral that morning. Count Anton Harstein and his wife, an elderly
couple who had been family friends, had been murdered shortly
before Christmas. Thanks to the paperwork associated with the
investigation and the delay caused by frozen soil, it had taken five
weeks before the bodies could be buried. Count Harstein had once
managed the Silver Arrows motor racing team that Schenke had
driven for before a crash had ended his racing career and left him
with a limp. After the accident, Schenke had needed a new direction
in life and had joined the police.
He took a deep breath. ‘As well as such things can.’
Despite the Harsteins being aristocratic and well connected, few
mourners had turned up to the funeral. Apart from Schenke and his
girlfriend, Karin, there had been no more than ten others, including
the Harsteins’ son, an army officer who had been given
compassionate leave to attend. The bitter winter had kept away
most of those who might otherwise have been there, and the priest
had stumbled through the service with chattering teeth, somewhat
faster than was decent. The murders had cast a pall over what little
Christmas cheer there had been, and Schenke was still grieving for
them in his private moments. He did not want to give his feelings
away.
‘How’s the wound healing?’ he asked Hauser.
‘Slowly enough to save me from household chores.’ Hauser
grinned. ‘Helga’s starting to get suspicious, though, so I’m having to
show some signs of recovery.’
‘You live dangerously, my friend.’ Schenke had only met Hauser’s
wife on a handful of occasions, but that was more than enough to
realise that she was formidable. ‘Even without being shot at.’
Both men were quiet for a moment as they recalled the incident at
the Abwehr headquarters where Hauser had taken a bullet, then the
sergeant turned to a thin man in his mid-twenties sitting at another
desk. He had fine white hair over a gaunt, bespectacled face, and
unlike the others he wore no coat but sat in a simple dark suit and
tie, apparently oblivious to the cold. He was reading the front page
of the Völkischer Beobachter newspaper. The headline story
concerned the gallant resistance of the Finnish army as it held back
the Russian invasion and defied the ill-equipped and incompetent
legions of Stalin. Even though a pact had been signed with Russia
the previous August, the article was clearly sympathetic to the Finns.
Russia put in its place, the headline ran. Schenke wondered how
long such a treaty could endure between two nations with such
diametrically opposed ideologies? It was odd, Schenke thought, that
a very real war was taking place with high numbers of casualties –
at least on the Russian side – while the land war Germany was
involved in seemed to be little more than an occasional exchange of
shots and the dropping of propaganda leaflets since the fall of
Poland. Although, like many people, he still hoped for a peaceful
resolution, he was beginning to fear that worse was to come.
‘Liebwitz, go and see if the man from the lab has finished
examining those ration coupons that came in this morning.’
‘Yes, Sergeant.’ Liebwitz rose quickly and gave a nod before he
strode out of the office.
Schenke felt a stab of guilt. Liebwitz had been sent to the Kripo
section to assist with the investigation into the killings before
Christmas. Recruited into the Gestapo, his stiffly formal attitude had
not endeared him to his colleagues, and Schenke suspected that he
had been assigned to the Kripo to get him out of the way. Now he
was waiting for official confirmation that his transfer was permanent.
The wheels of bureaucracy were turning at their usual glacial pace,
so for the moment, Liebwitz was still officially Gestapo, and that
made him a target for Hauser, who treated him as the office
dogsbody.
‘You could go easy on him,’ Schenke said.
‘He has to pay his dues, like any member of the team.’
‘He has nothing to prove. He’s done a good job.’
‘So far . . .’
Schenke could see that he was not going to shift the sergeant’s
feelings towards the new man and looked round the office at the
empty desks. ‘Where are the rest of the team this morning?’
‘Frieda and Rosa are interviewing a woman about a domestic
assault. Persinger and Hofer are out rounding up a few of the known
forgers and fences for interrogation about the fake ration coupons.
One of them must know something about it.’
Schenke nodded. Persinger and Hofer were veterans of the police
force. Both were big men who had a talent for getting information
out of suspects, even without having to resort to violence. There
was a no-nonsense demeanour about them that was usefully
intimidating. Frieda Echs was in her forties, solid and efficient, with
enough lived experience to handle situations sensitively. The
section’s other woman, Rosa Mayer, was slim, blonde and striking,
and was good at her job and at fending off attempts to flirt with her.
‘Schmidt and Baumer are down at the Alex attending a political
education seminar.’
‘I’m sure that will broaden their minds,’ Schenke responded quietly
as he considered the political training sessions held at the
Alexanderplatz police headquarters. Schmidt and Baumer had joined
the force since the Nazis had seized power, and were therefore
deemed more likely to be responsive to the regime’s propaganda.
Hence their summons to the seminar. Even so, Schenke had
sufficient faith in their intelligence and detective training that he was
confident they would privately question what they were told. Even
though Hauser was a party member, the sergeant similarly had little
time for some of the activities of the Nazi Party. The notion that
there was an ‘Aryan way’ of conducting criminal investigations struck
both men as a ridiculous waste of time.
‘I dare say we’ll be sent for political training at some point.’
Hauser shrugged. ‘No doubt. In the meantime, let’s just do the
job, eh, sir?’
There was a subtle warning in the retort to remind Schenke that
the occasional critical comment about the party was acceptable, but
not to push the issue.
The door opened, and both men turned to see Liebwitz holding it
ajar to admit an overweight man with a sour expression. He wore an
unbuttoned coat over his suit and swept the folds aside to stuff his
hands in his pockets. While Liebwitz hurried past him to his desk,
the visitor glanced at the two Kripo men by the stove and fixed his
eyes on Hauser.
‘Inspector?’
The sergeant pointed at his superior. ‘Try him.’
The man shifted his gaze. ‘Doctor Albert Widmann, from
Chemistry Analysis at the Werdescher Labs.’ He didn’t offer a
handshake.
‘Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke. You’ve had a good look at the
latest batch of coupons we seized. What do you make of them?’
Widmann collected his thoughts. ‘They’re good. Easy to take for
the real thing, to the unpractised eye. For an expert like myself, of
course, the forgeries are obvious to detect.’
‘Oh?’ Hauser arched an eyebrow. ‘How so? From an expert’s point
of view, of course.’
Widmann puffed his chest out slightly. ‘Certain irregularities on the
perforations, for example. You wouldn’t notice if you were presented
with a single coupon, but it’s clear to see when you have a sheet of
them in front of you.’
‘How do they compare with the others we already have?’ asked
Schenke. ‘Do they come from the same source?’
 ‘From first inspection, I’d say so, but I’ll have to take them back to
the lab to test the composition of the dyes and the paper before I
can confirm that. Do you suspect they are the work of one man, or
one crime ring?’
‘We don’t know. It’s a possibility.’
‘If so, it should make them easier to track down.’
Schenke shared an amused glance with Hauser, and Widmann
frowned.
‘What?’
‘If it’s the work of one crime ring, then we’re dealing with a
sizeable organisation. One that’s managed not only to avoid the
previous round-ups but is sufficiently well hidden from police eyes
that we haven’t encountered them yet. If it’s more than one ring,
there’s a chance we’ll already know about some of them and we can
use our informers to uncover the links between them.’
Widmann nodded. ‘I see. Very good. Makes sense.’
Hauser cleared his throat. ‘Perhaps you should spend some time
with us. Be good for you to see how Kripo does its work out on the
streets.’
‘In this weather?’ Widmann said. ‘Fuck that. I’ll stick to my nice
warm lab, thank you.’
All three shared a brief laugh before Widmann buttoned his coat.
‘I’ll fetch those samples and be on my way.’
‘Let us know the results as soon as you can,’ said Schenke.
‘You’re not the only investigators calling on my time. I’ve a few
other jobs to do first.’
Schenke stepped between Widmann and the door. ‘If we don’t put
a stop to these forgers, many people will have to go without food
this winter. I’m not sure how sympathetic starving people are going
to be about your priorities. And if the people are unhappy and that
gets back to Heydrich’s office, I doubt he’ll be sympathetic either.
What do you say, Liebwitz? You’re a Gestapo man. You’re better
placed to know how the Gruppenführer will react.’
Liebwitz looked up from his paperwork with his usual deadpan
expression. ‘I think he would be displeased to hear of any
dissatisfaction amongst the people, sir.’
 At the mention of the name of the director of the Reich Security
Main Office, Widmann’s eyes widened. He swallowed nervously.
‘I’ll see what I can do.’
Schenke smiled. ‘I’m sure you will. Thanks.’
Once the scientist had closed the door behind him, Schenke
turned to Liebwitz with a grin. ‘Couldn’t have done a better job
myself of putting the shits up him.’
‘I merely expressed the truth, sir. Heydrich pays close attention to
the social intelligence reports. I have seen his response to those he
does not like at first hand.’
Schenke was not yet certain how much the new team member’s
attitude was down to dedicated professionalism and how much was
due to defective social skills.
‘Of course you have,’ he responded, and then glanced at his
watch. ‘I’m going out for some lunch. If Persinger and Hofer get
back before I do, tell them to start the interrogations without me.’
Hauser nodded, and the inspector turned to leave, pulling up his
collar in readiness for the bitter cold of the street.

Even though the snowfall had been fitful since New Year, the streets
had not yet been cleared. Stained mounds lined the pavements,
shoulder-high in places, with gaps left at crossing points. Grit had
been laid on the paths and gave the icy surface a dirty speckled
appearance. Despite the cold, there were plenty of people out,
moving quickly, chins down as they left trails of breath in their wake.
Those buildings lucky enough to have regular heating were betrayed
by the absence of snow on their roof tiles, and Schenke noted the
bare roof of the local party office. An SA man was outside, pasting a
replacement over a blackout poster that had been defaced by a
brush moustache and a lick of dark hair over the forehead of the
skeletal head of death as it rode a bomb dropped by a British plane.
The SA man glanced round, and for a moment Schenke feared he
would raise his arm in the ‘German greeting’, which would oblige
Schenke to remove his hand from his pocket to do the same. But the
man glanced at the pasting brush in his right hand and rolled his
eyes instead, and Schenke smiled as he strode by.
 At the end of the street, he turned left into a working-class
neighbourhood where there were a number of traditional beer cellars
and cafés. He crossed the street and made for the entrance of
Wehler’s, where it was still possible to buy coffee. The bell above the
door clanged as he entered and closed it quickly behind him. A warm
fug of smoky air filled a large space packed with tables and chairs. A
counter ran the length of the rear of the café, and the mirrors
mounted on the wall behind it made the place feel twice as large.
Wehler’s was popular with those taking a midday meal, but
Schenke was able to find himself a seat in a cosy booth beside a
window overlooking the street. He unbuttoned his coat and loosened
his scarf as he waited for one of the waiters to come over. The
condensation on the inside of the window made it impossible to see
out clearly, and those passing by were only visible as dark blurs. So
it was that he missed the figure who had followed him from the
precinct and now stood hesitantly on the far side of the street.
His mind played over Widmann’s comments about the forged
ration coupons. If it was the case that they were dealing with a
previously unknown crime ring, then their prey was going to be
difficult to track down. One thing the Nazi regime had achieved was
the rounding-up of most of Berlin’s criminal organisations and the
execution or imprisonment of their members. In the frequent
absence of legal niceties such as evidence and due process, such
measures had succeeded in reducing organised crime, though the
crimes of individuals continued: theft, fraud, assault, mugging, rape
and murder. Whatever regime was in power, such crimes would
always live alongside humanity. He forced his mind away from work
and thought about Karin instead. They had arranged to watch the
latest film starring Heinrich George at the local Ufa cinema that
night. He was looking forward to seeing her.
A woman lowered herself onto the bench on the other side of the
booth. Schenke glanced up with a polite smile, ready to welcome
any companion for lunch. Then his smile froze as he saw her face,
and he felt an icy prickle of anxiety grip the back of his neck.
 Chapter Two

Ruth Frankel was slight and wore a threadbare brown coat. The
seam on one of her gloves was pulling apart and her face looked
pale, even for a Berliner in the middle of winter. Her dark eyes
regarded him nervously beneath fine eyebrows and a widow’s peak
of dark curly hair that fell beneath the brim of her felt hat.
‘Hello, Horst.’ She forced a smile. ‘How are you?’
Schenke glanced round the café, but no one seemed to be looking
in their direction or paying them attention. He spoke quietly. ‘What
are you doing here?’
‘I need to speak to you. There’s no one else who can help me.’
He leaned forward. ‘What do you want? Money?’
She frowned slightly and shook her head. ‘That’s not why I’m
here. Why would you think that, I wonder? Wouldn’t have anything
to do with all those posters and newspaper smears about money-
grabbing Jews the party is so fond of printing? You think I’d risk
trying to blackmail you? Is that it?’
Schenke inhaled deeply to calm himself. ‘I’m sorry, Ruth. But you
know the danger we both face if anyone realises what you are and
informs on us.’
Her expression became frigid. ‘You make me sound like a thing
rather than a person. Is that what I am to you?’
Schenke was stung by her comment, then felt guilty. Ruth had
been instrumental in catching the killer who had been using the
blackout to murder women in the last months of the previous year.
She had nearly been a victim herself, and had she not fought off her
attacker and provided crucial information to Schenke and his team,
the killer would still be at large. In the brief time he had known her,
he had felt pity, and guilt, for her predicament. If they had lived in
another Germany, she would be someone he would be keen to know
better.
‘I didn’t think I’d see you again.’
 She smiled sadly. ‘I had no intention of seeing you either. I wanted
to disappear into the shadows and stay out of sight as much as
possible, long enough for people to forget my face in the
newspapers. That was your doing, remember.’
‘I had no choice. The orders came from the head of the Gestapo.’
‘So you say.’
A waiter was heading towards them, and Schenke beckoned to
him while Ruth sat back and pretended to rummage in her handbag
as if looking for something.
He nodded a greeting to the man. ‘I’ll have the soup of the day
and coffee.’
‘No coffee, sir. We have a substitute, if that will do?’
Schenke recoiled at the thought of the bitter ersatz coffee. ‘Tea,
then.’
‘Very good, sir. And what will the lady have?’
Schenke was taken aback by the question. He had not intended to
share a meal with Ruth and had hoped that she might be persuaded
to speak her piece and leave him alone as swiftly as possible. Every
moment he spent in her company endangered them, her most of all.
Any Jew caught consorting with an Aryan in a public place was likely
to be sent to a work camp, from where she would not return.
Schenke would be kicked out of the police and imprisoned for
several months before being released to scratch a living on the
margins of society. They must bluff it out now and act as if this was
a normal, and lawful, lunch date.
‘I’ll have the same,’ said Ruth.
‘Very good.’ The waiter turned to make his way back through the
café. They would be left alone for a while, and Schenke folded his
arms to make it clear to anyone watching that they were not a
couple. Even so, he saw from her pinched, pale face that Ruth could
use a decent meal, and he felt an urge to help her.
‘What is this about?’ he asked in a gentle tone. ‘You said you
needed my help. Why me particularly?’
‘Because you’re a policeman.’
‘I’d have thought that was the very last kind of person you’d turn
to.’
 ‘In any other circumstances, yes. But I know you, Horst. I know
you are a good man who wants to do what is right.’
‘I want to uphold the law and bring to justice those who break it.
That’s all.’
She gave him a knowing look. ‘That’s what you might tell others.
You don’t have to spin me that line. I know you have more integrity
than most. And compassion.’
It was pointless to refute her observation and pretend that a hard
heart dwelled beneath the professional veneer he tried to cultivate.
He had treated her with some kindness and consideration during the
murder investigation; at the very least he had shown her sympathy.
He was tempted to feel more for her, and quickly stifled the impulse.
‘All right. I will hear you out, but I can’t promise to do more than
that. Even if I want to.’
‘I understand.’ Ruth paused and looked down at her gloved hands
as she collected her thoughts. ‘I’m here on behalf of a family friend.
A good friend. She lost her husband a few days back. You may have
heard about it. His name was Manfred Schmesler.’
‘Schmesler?’ Schenke searched his memory and recalled a brief
obituary in the Völkischer Beobachter. ‘Yes, I saw the report. A
doctor, as I recall. He lived in Pankow.’
‘An SS Reich doctor,’ said Ruth, and he saw the flicker of distaste
on her face. ‘But he was a family friend long before he joined the SS,
and the party. He was close friends with my father when they were
at university, and they remained close until that was no longer
possible. But they stayed in contact, being careful that it was done in
secret. Schmesler and his wife supplied us with extra rations and
money from time to time.’ She paused. ‘Needless to say, I trust you
not to repeat any of this. I would not want his widow to get into
trouble. She already has enough to cope with without falling foul of
the police or the Gestapo.’
‘I understand. Go on.’
‘Although the newspapers do not give the details of his death, the
official version is that Manfred Schmesler committed suicide. That’s
what the police concluded after they were called to the scene. His
widow is adamant that he would never have killed himself. He was
under pressure at work, but he enjoyed life and loved his wife.’
There was something in the tone of her voice when she said ‘wife’
that struck Schenke as odd.
‘That’s how it appears sometimes,’ he said, ‘but people can hide
their true feelings well enough for their family to be unaware. Did he
leave a note?’
‘Yes,’ Ruth conceded.
‘So?’
‘His wife says she can’t believe that it can be true.’
‘What does it say?’
Ruth shook her head. ‘I don’t know. She was too upset to tell me.
Only that he had never given any indication that he was ashamed of
his work and did not deserve to live. She is certain that he did not
die by his own hand.’
‘Murder?’ Schenke frowned. ‘How did it happen?’
‘He was shot through the head. She discovered him in his study
with a gun close to his hand.’
‘His own gun?’
Ruth nodded.
‘And the note was where?’
‘On the desk.’
‘Written in his hand?’
Ruth thought a moment and nodded. ‘That’s what Brigitte, his
wife . . . widow says.’
‘I have to say that on the face of it, the death could well be a
suicide.’
They were interrupted by the return of the waiter carrying a tray
bearing two steaming bowls, two teacups on saucers and a teapot.
He set them on the table, along with spoons, and withdrew. Schenke
made sure the man was out of earshot before he spoke.
‘Where do I feature in this situation?’
‘Brigitte Schmesler wants you to look into her husband’s death
and say whether you think it was really suicide. She knows that I
helped you find the man responsible for killing those women last
year. I told her you were a good man. She thought her request
would be better coming from someone you know personally. So I
agreed to approach you.’
Schenke nodded slowly as he stared across the table. ‘You’re
taking a big risk on behalf of someone you say is a family friend,’ he
prompted, but her expression remained fixed, so he continued. ‘If
the police have concluded it was suicide, they must have their
reasons.’
‘Brigitte is convinced they are wrong.’
Schenke realised that it would look strange if they neglected their
meal, so he picked up his spoon and sipped his soup cautiously. Ruth
did the same. Both were silent for a while as he thought over what
she had told him. If there had been any doubt about Schmesler’s
death, the matter would have been referred to Schenke’s section at
the Pankow precinct. Clearly the regular police, the Orpo, were
content that it was a suicide. That was a rush to judgement that
struck him as unusual, given Brigitte Schmesler’s conviction that her
husband had not taken his own life. Even with all the disruption
caused by the war and the shortage of men due to conscription,
someone should have referred the case to the Kripo. The fact that
the Orpo had decided that no further inquiry into the death was
required made it difficult for him to raise the matter without giving
an explanation for his interest. All the same, he hoped it would not
ruffle too many feathers if he merely asked a few questions. Enough
to persuade Brigitte that it was suicide after all.
But what if she was right? Or at least, what if the answers were
not sufficiently convincing? What then? With the investigation into
the forged ration coupons taking up nearly all Schenke’s time, any
new investigation would be an extra burden. However, if it hadn’t
been for Ruth, it was likely that the police would still be hunting for
the killer stalking the capital’s railway system before Christmas. He
owed her a favour.
‘What are you thinking?’ She was staring at him. ‘Will you look
into it?’
‘And what if I think it is suicide? Will you let the matter go?’
She nodded. ‘I’ve risked enough just to approach you. If you tell
me you think the official decision is correct, I’ll inform Brigitte and
leave you alone. But I can’t answer for what she may do.’
‘Fair enough. I’ll see what I can find out. Give me two days.’
‘Shall I meet you here?’
‘I’d rather not. It’s not safe for you. There’s a newspaper kiosk
outside the U-Bahn station. We’ll meet there at noon. It won’t take
long, either way.’
She glanced down at her soup hungrily, and Schenke realised she
had been counting on another meal. ‘All right, we’ll meet here. Just
make sure you aren’t being watched. If I see anyone following you,
we’ll meet at the kiosk the next day. Agreed?’
Ruth nodded. ‘Thank you.’
They ate in silence and mopped up the dregs of their soup with
the dark bread before Schenke sat back and regarded her
sympathetically. ‘How are you coping? Still living with the old woman
who took you in?’
‘She kicked me out as soon as she heard I’d been involved with
the police.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘A friend let me stay with her for a few days,’ she replied with a
guarded expression.
‘You have nothing to fear from me,’ said Schenke. ‘I have no
interest in the comings and goings of you or your people. I have
bigger fish to fry.’
She picked up her cup and drank some tea. ‘And what happens
when the Jews become the bigger fish?’
‘Hopefully that won’t be my problem.’
‘But it will be mine. And if your superiors make it yours? Would
you hunt me down if you were ordered to?’
Schenke considered the question briefly. ‘Only if you had
committed the kind of crime that falls within the usual remit of the
Kripo. Otherwise, no. I’d find a way to leave you be.’
‘I hope I never have to hold you to that, Horst. But with the way
things are going, the outlook for the Jews is bleak. From the
rumours I hear, the Polish are being treated like animals by your
masters. If that is the case, what hope have my people got?’
‘What will you do?’
 ‘If the time comes when the party decides to remove the Jews, I
have a plan.’
‘You won’t be able to hide for ever.’
‘I may not have to.’ She dropped her voice to a whisper. ‘Just long
enough to survive until Germany is defeated and the Führer and his
scum are swept away.’
Schenke shook his head. ‘That’s insane. The war may already be
over. Poland has been conquered and Britain and France have no
reason to fight. Even Britain’s colonies are starting to see the light.
General Hertzog and his Boer party are pushing the South African
parliament to declare a separate peace with Germany. If they
succeed and other parts of the empire follow suit, Britain will not be
able to fight. I believe there’s still a chance we’ll be at peace in a few
months’ time.’
‘You think so? You think the Führer is the kind of man who
believes in peace? He doesn’t. He thrives on war. One day he will
pick a fight with a more powerful nation and Germany will be
crushed.’
Whatever he might think of the present regime, Schenke was a
patriot, and he was offended by her words. ‘You saw how easily our
armed forces swept through Poland. Other nations will have seen
that and been warned of the consequences of waging war with us.
Germany will not be defeated, and it is treason to wish it.’
Ruth regarded him thoughtfully. ‘I always thought that the lesson
of history was that treason is measured in the damage done to a
nation by certain people. It is often the case that those who most
vociferously claim to be patriots turn out to cause the most harm. I
think that’s true of the Führer, his party and those who blindly follow
him . . . don’t you?’
Schenke did not reply, feeling his anger rise, and at the same
time, a spark of fear that her words might turn out to be true. Just
as had been the case in the war that had taken place earlier that
century.
Ruth finished her tea. ‘I’d better go. I have an evening shift at
Siemens.’
 ‘I’ll see you in two days’ time.’ He reached across the table
impulsively and took her hand. ‘Be careful, Ruth.’
They exchanged a look for a beat before Schenke withdrew his
hand and cleared his throat awkwardly.
‘I’ll be fine.’ She forced a smile, then stood and left, making sure
not to hurry and draw attention to herself.
Once she had stepped out into the street, Schenke gave a deep
sigh, finished his tea and indicated to the waiter that he was ready
to pay. As he emerged from the café, he saw that the grey sky had
become darker and an icy breeze had picked up, swirling the first
small flakes of snow that had begun to fall. He pulled up his collar,
shoved his hands into his pockets and strode back towards the
precinct.
 Chapter Three

The Kripo section office occupied one end of the precinct building, a
former barracks built during the Bismarck era, when the Prussian
army had seemed invincible after crushing their Austrian and French
foes. The stables at the rear had been converted into garages and
storerooms, while some of the original accommodation was
preserved for the use of police units whenever officers were called in
from other forces to provide additional security for parades. The
days when they might be required to put down communist
demonstrations or to limit the transgressions of far-right
paramilitaries during the troublesome years of the Republic had long
since passed. The uniformed police took up most of the main
building, and Schenke went to find the officer in charge of the
district where the Schmesler residence was located. Hauptmann
Sperlemann had been recently transferred to Pankow, Schenke knew
through the precinct’s ‘mouth wireless’, but their paths had not yet
crossed.
Sperlemann’s office was at the end of a corridor on the third floor
of the building. A polished brass plate outside had his name and
rank engraved on it in the old-fashioned block type that the party
liked to use to promote the distinctiveness of German culture.
Schenke rapped on the varnished wood. There was no reply, and he
knocked again and waited before trying the knob. The office was
unlocked, and he eased the door open before stepping over the
threshold.
The interior was panelled, and two windows on the far side
overlooked the courtyard behind the precinct. A lit stove to one side
provided a comfortable warmth throughout the room. A large desk
stood opposite, with two wooden trays placed neatly side by side to
the right and a penholder and inkpot to the left. A telephone sat in
the middle. Behind the desk was a leather chair above which hung a
portrait of the Führer in a three-quarter pose as he stared, as if deep
in thought, in the direction of the ice-rimed windows.
Schenke was considering whether to leave a note for Sperlemann
when he heard footsteps and turned to look down the corridor. An
officer in a double-breasted greatcoat was approaching, a frown on
his face. ‘You’re letting the heat out of the bloody room. Get inside.’
Schenke did as he was told, and a moment later the other man
closed the door and pulled off his leather gloves as he regarded his
visitor.
‘You’re from the Kripo section, aren’t you?’ His voice was clipped,
and he removed his hat and scarf to expose fleshy jowls and a scar
on his left cheek. It was small enough to indicate a carefully
supervised duel, or it could have been the result of an accident.
Sperlemann’s eyes were brown, like his hair, which had been cut
short at the sides, combed back from the forehead and held in place
with sugar water. His head was potato-shaped and his complexion
was poor. He appeared to be in his mid forties, so it was unlikely
that he would be promoted much further.
Schenke cleared his throat. ‘Criminal Inspector Horst Schenke.
Section head.’
Sperlemann looked him over. ‘I’d have expected an older, more
experienced man. More to the point, I’d have thought someone your
age would have been called up by now.’
‘I was excused conscription on account of an old leg injury, sir,’
Schenke explained.
‘Leg injury, eh?’ There was a hint of scepticism in the man’s voice
that caused Schenke’s pulse to quicken with anger. Sperlemann was
old enough to have fought in the previous war, and might well be
the kind to harbour resentment at those unable to serve in the
armed forces. Schenke himself felt a degree of shame that he
couldn’t fight for his country, but there was nothing he could do
about it.
‘What kind of leg injury?’ Sperlemann pressed.
‘A motor-racing accident.’
‘Motor racing?’ He cocked an eyebrow, and then his eyes widened
as he made the link. ‘Schenke! Silver Arrow Schenke.’
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 After making several inquiries, we eventually located a small
house on the edge of town. In response to our insistent hammering,
the door of the house was finally opened by a pallid young man
probably in his late twenties. If he was the object of the captain’s
search he had certainly undergone a remarkable metamorphosis, for
he bore little resemblance to the dapper officer of whom Captain
Vassalle carried a photograph for identification. The captain seemed
satisfied that he was the man. So leaving them in conversation, the
three of us followed up the business of the reported works of art. The
other two occupants of the house—an old man and a young woman
who may have been the wife of the man who had opened the door—
responded to our questions with alacrity and took us to the cellar.
There we were shown a cache of pictures, all of them unframed and
none of them of any value. They appeared to be what the old man
claimed—their own property, brought to Bad Brückenau when they
had left Frankfurt to escape the bombings. In any case, we made a
listing of the canvases, identifying them as best we could and
making notations of the sizes, and also admonishing the couple not
to remove them from the premises.
After that the old man took us across the back yard to a large
modern barn which was heavily padlocked. Once inside he
unshuttered a row of windows along one side of the main, ground-
floor room. It was jammed to the ceiling with every conceivable item
of household furnishings: chairs, tables, beds, bedding, kitchen
utensils and porcelain. But no pictures. We poked around enough to
satisfy ourselves that first appearances were not deceiving. They
weren’t, so, having made certain that the old fellow, who claimed to
be merely the custodian of these things, understood the regulations
forbidding their removal, we picked up Captain Vassalle. He had
completed his interrogation of the alleged SS officer and placed him
under house arrest.
Our next objective was an old Schloss which, according to our
map, was still a good hour’s drive to the northeast. As it was nearly
noon and we were all hungry, we decided to investigate the
possibilities of food in the neighborhood. On our way back through
Bad Brückenau we stopped at the office of a small detachment of
troops and asked where we could get some lunch. The hospitable
second lieutenant on duty in the little stucco building, which had
once been part of the Kurhaus establishment, gave us directions to
the sprawling country hotel, high up above the town, where his outfit
was quartered. He said that he would telephone ahead to warn the
mess sergeant of our arrival.
For a little way we followed along the Sinn, which flows through
the grassy valley in which Bad Brückenau nestles. Then we began to
mount sharply and, for the next fifteen minutes, executed a series of
hairpin turns and ended abruptly beside a rambling structure which
commanded a wonderful view of the valley and the wooded hills on
the other side. Our hosts were a group of friendly young fellows who
seemed delighted to have the monotony of their rural routine
interrupted by our visit. They asked Charlie and me the usual
question—what was the Navy doing in the middle of Germany—and
got our stock reply: we are planning to dig a canal from the North
Sea to the Mediterranean.
We had a heavy downpour during lunch, and we waited for the
rain to let up before starting out again. Then we took the winding
road down into town, crossed the river and drove up into the hills on
the other side of the valley. An hour’s drive brought us to upland
meadow country and a grove of handsome lindens. At the end of a
long double row of these fine trees stood Schloss Rossbach.
“Castle” was a rather pompous name for the big seventeenth century
country house with whitewashed walls and heavily barred ground-
floor windows.
We were received by the owners, a Baron Thüngen and his wife,
and explained that we had come to examine the condition of the
works of art, which, according to our information, had been placed
there for safekeeping. They ushered us up to a comfortable sitting
room on the second floor where we settled down to wait while the
baroness went off to get the keys. In the meantime we had a few
words with her husband. His manner was that of the haughty landed
proprietor, and he looked the part. He was a big, burly man in his
sixties. He was dressed in rough tweeds and wore a matching hat,
adorned with a bushy “shaving brush,” which he hadn’t bothered to
remove indoors. That may have been unintentional, but I idly
wondered if it weren’t deliberate discourtesy and rather wished that I
had kept my own cap on. I wished also that I could have matched his
insolent expression, but thought it unlikely because I was frankly
enjoying the obvious distaste which our visit was causing the old
codger.
However, his attitude was almost genial compared with that of his
waspish wife, who reappeared about that time, armed with a huge
hoop from which a great lot of keys jangled. The baroness, who was
much younger than her husband, had very black hair and
discontented dark eyes. She spoke excellent English, without a trace
of accent. I felt reasonably sure that she was not German but
couldn’t guess her nationality. It turned out that she was from the
Argentine. She was a sullen piece and made no effort to conceal her
irritation at our intrusion. She explained that neither she nor her
husband had anything to do with the things stored there; that, in fact,
it was a great inconvenience having to put up with them. She had
asked the young woman who knew all about them to join us.
The young woman in question arrived and was completely
charming. She took no apparent notice of the baroness’ indifference,
which was that of a mistress toward a servant whom she scarcely
knew. Her fresh, open manner cleared the atmosphere instantly. She
introduced herself as Frau Holzinger, wife of the director of
Frankfurt’s most famous museum, the Staedelsches Kunstinstitut.
Because of conditions in Frankfurt, and more particularly because
their house had been requisitioned by the American military
authorities, she had come to Schloss Rossbach with her two young
children. Country life, she continued, was better for the youngsters
and, besides, her husband had thought that she might help with the
things stored at the castle. I had met Dr. Holzinger when I went one
day to have a look at what remained of the museum, so his wife and
I hit it off at once. I was interested to learn that she was Swiss and a
licensed physician. She smilingly suggested that we make a tour of
the castle and she would show us what was there.
The first room to be inspected was a library adjoining the sitting
room in which we had been waiting. Here we found a quantity of
excellent French Impressionist paintings, all from the permanent
collection of the Staedel, and a considerable number of fine Old
Master drawings. Most of these were likewise the property of the
museum, but a few—I remember one superb Rembrandt sketch—
appeared to have come from Switzerland. Those would, of course,
have to be looked into later, to determine their exact origin and how
they came to be on loan at the museum. But for the moment we
were concerned primarily with storage conditions and the problem of
security. In another room we found an enormous collection of books,
the library of one of the Frankfurt museums. In a third we
encountered an array of medieval sculpture—saints of all sizes and
description, some of carved wood, others of stone, plain or
polychromed. These too were of museum origin.
The last storage room was below ground, a vast, cavernous
chamber beneath the house. Here was row upon row of pictures,
stacked in two tiers down the center of the room and also along two
sides. From what we could make of them in the poor light, they were
not of high quality. During the summer months they would be all right
in this underground room, but we thought that the place would be
very damp in the winter. Frau Holzinger assured us that this was so
and that the pictures should be removed before the bad weather set
in.
The baroness chipped in at this point and affably agreed with that
idea, undoubtedly happy to further any scheme which involved
getting rid of these unwelcome objects. She also warned us that the
castle was far from safe as it was, what with roving bands of Poles
all over the countryside. As we indicated that we were about to take
our leave, she elaborated upon this theme, declaring that their very
lives were in danger, that every night she and her husband could
hear prowlers in the park. Since they—as Germans—were not
allowed to have firearms, they would be at the mercy of these foreign
ruffians if they should succeed in breaking into the castle. By this
time we were all pretty fed up with the whining baroness. As we
turned to go, Charlie Kuhn, eyeing her coldly, asked, “Who brought
those Poles here in the first place, madam? We didn’t.”
 To our delight, the weather had cleared and the sun was shining.
Ahead of us on the roadway, the foliage of the lindens made a gaily
moving pattern. Our work for the day was done and we still had half
the afternoon. I got out the map and, after making some quick
calculations, proposed that we could take in Würzburg and still get
back to Frankfurt at a reasonable hour. We figured out that, with the
extra jerry can of gas we had with us, we could just about make it.
We would be able to fill up at Würzburg for the return trip. So,
instead of continuing on the road back to Bad Brückenau, we turned
south in the direction of Karlstadt.
It was pleasant to be traveling a good secondary road instead of
the broad, characterless Autobahn, on which there were no
unexpected turns, no picturesque villages. There was little traffic, so
we made very good time. In half an hour we had threaded our way
through Karlstadt-on-the-Main. In this part of Franconia the Main is a
capricious river, winding casually in and out of the gently undulating
hills. A little later we passed the village of Veitschöchheim where the
Prince-Bishops of Würzburg had an elaborate country house during
the eighteenth century. The house still stands, and its gardens, with
a tiny lake and grottoes in the Franco-Italian manner, remain one of
the finest examples of garden planning of that day. As we drove by
we were glad that this inviting spot had not attracted the attention of
our bombers.
Alas, such was not the case with Würzburg, as we realized the
minute we reached its outskirts! The once-gracious city, surely one
of the most beautiful in all Germany, was an appalling sight. Its broad
avenues were now lined with nothing but the gaping, ruined
remnants of the stately eighteenth century buildings which had lent
the city an air of unparalleled distinction and consistency of design.
High on its hilltop above the Main, the mellow walls of the medieval
fortress of Marienberg caught the rays of the late afternoon sun.
From the distance, the silhouette of that vast structure appeared
unchanged, but the proud city of the Prince-Bishops which it
overlooked was laid low.
We drove slowly along streets not yet cleared of rubble, until we
came to the Residenz, the great palace of the Prince-Bishops, those
lavish patrons of the arts to whom the city owed so much of its
former grandeur. This magnificent building, erected in the first half of
the eighteenth century by the celebrated baroque architect, Johann
Balthasar Neumann, for two Prince-Bishops of the Schönborn family,
was now a ghost palace, its staring glassless windows and
blackened walls pathetic vestiges of its pristine splendor.
We walked up to the main entrance wondering if it could really be
true that the crowning glory of the Residenz—the glorious ceiling by
Tiepolo, representing Olympus and the Four Continents—was, as we
had been told, still intact. With misgivings we turned left across the
entrance hall to the Treppenhaus and mounted the grand staircase.
We looked up and there it was—as dazzling and majestically
beautiful as ever—that incomparable fresco, the masterpiece of the
last great Italian painter. Someone with a far greater gift for words
than I may be able to convey the exaltation one experiences on
seeing that ceiling, not just for the first time but at any time. I can’t. It
leaves artist and layman alike absolutely speechless. I think that, if I
had to choose one great work of art, it would be this ceiling in the
Residenz. You can have even the Sistine ceiling. I’ll take the Tiepolo.
For the next half hour we examined every corner of it. Aside from
a few minor discolorations, the result of water having seeped through
the lower side of the vault just above the cornice, the fresco was
undamaged. Considering the destruction throughout the rest of the
building, I could not understand how this portion of the palace could
be in such a remarkable state of preservation. The explanation was
an interesting example of how good can sometimes come out of evil.
Some forty years ago, as I remember the story, there was a fire in
the Residenz. The wooden roof over a large portion, if not all, of the
building was burned away. When it came to replacing the roof, the
city fathers decided it would be a prudent idea to cover the part
above the Tiepolo with steel and concrete. This was done, and
consequently, when the terrible conflagration of March 1945 swept
Würzburg—following the single raid of twenty minutes which
destroyed the city—the fresco was spared. As we wandered through
other rooms of the Residenz—the Weisser Saal with its elaborate
stucco ornamentation and the sumptuous Kaiser Saal facing the
garden, once classic examples of the Rococo—I wished that those
city fathers had gone a little farther with their steel and concrete.
We stopped briefly to examine the chapel in the south wing. Here,
miraculously enough, there had been relatively little damage, but the
caretaker expressed concern over the condition of the roof and said
that if it weren’t repaired before the heavy rains the ceiling would be
lost. Knowing how hard it was to obtain building materials for even
the most historic monuments when people didn’t have a roof over
their heads, we couldn’t reassure him with much conviction.
The spectacle of ruined Würzburg had a depressing effect upon
us, so we weren’t very talkative on our way back to Frankfurt. We
passed through only one town of any size, Aschaffenburg, which,
like Würzburg, had suffered severe damage. Although I had not
been long in Germany and had seen but few of her cities, I was
beginning to realize that the reports of the Allied air attacks had not
been exaggerated. I was ready to believe that there were only small
towns and villages left in this ravaged country.
One morning Charlie Kuhn rang up to say that I should meet him
at the Reichsbank early that afternoon. This was something I had
been looking forward to for some time, the chance to look at the
wonderful things from the Merkers mine which were temporarily
stored there. With Charlie came two members of the MFA&A
organization whom I had not seen since Versailles and then only
briefly. They had been stationed at Barbizon, as part of the Allied
Group Control Council for Germany (usually referred to simply as
“Group CC”) the top level policy-making body as opposed to SHAEF,
which dealt with the operational end of things. These two gentlemen
were John Nicholas Brown, who had come over to Germany with the
assimilated rank of colonel as General Eisenhower’s adviser on
cultural affairs, and Major Mason Hammond, in civilian life professor
of the Classics at Harvard.
It had been decided, now that we were about to acquire a
permanent depot in which to store the treasures, to make one
Monuments officer responsible for the entire collection. By this
transfer of custody, the Property Control Officer in whose charge the
things were at present, could be relieved of that responsibility. Major
Hammond had with him a paper designating me as custodian.
Knowing in a general way what was stored in the bank, I felt that I
was on the point of being made a sort of director, pro tem, of the
Kaiser Friedrich Museum.
The genial Property Control Officer, Captain William Dunn, was all
smiles at the prospect of turning his burden over to someone else.
But before this transfer could be made, a complete check of every
item was necessary. Major Hammond knew just how he wanted this
done. I was to have two assistants, who could come over the next
morning from his office in Hoechst, twenty minutes from Frankfurt.
The three of us, in company with Captain Dunn, would make the
inventory.
We wandered through the series of rooms in which the things
were stored. In the first room were something like four hundred
pictures lined up against the wall in a series of rows. In two adjoining
rooms were great wooden cases piled one above another. In a fourth
were leather-bound boxes containing the priceless etchings,
engravings and woodcuts from the Berlin Print Room. Still another
room was filled with cases containing the renowned Egyptian
collections. It was rumored that one of them held the world-famous
head of Queen Nefertete, probably the best known and certainly the
most beloved single piece of all Egyptian sculpture. It had occupied
a place of special honor in the Berlin Museum, in a gallery all to
itself.
Still other rooms were jammed with cases of paintings and
sculpture of the various European schools. In a series of smaller
alcoves were heaped huge piles of Oriental rugs and rare fabrics.
And last, one enormous room with bookshelves was filled from floor
to ceiling with some thirty thousand volumes from the Berlin Patent
Office. Quite separate and apart from all these things was a unique
collection of ecclesiastical vessels of gold and silver, the greater part
of them looted from Poland. These extremely precious objects were
kept in a special vault on the floor above.
 Captain Dunn brought out a thick stack of papers. It was the
complete inventory. Major Hammond said that the two officers who
would help with the checking were a Captain Edwin Rae and a WAC
lieutenant named Standen. Aside from having heard that Rae had
been a student of Charlie Kuhn’s at Harvard, I knew nothing about
him. But the name Standen rang a bell: was she, by any chance,
Edith Standen who had been curator of the Widener Collection?
Major Hammond smilingly replied, “The same.” I had known her
years ago in Cambridge where we had taken Professor Sachs’
course in Museum Administration at the same time. I remembered
her as a tall, dark, distinguished-looking English girl. To be exact,
she was half English: her father had been a British Army officer, her
mother a Bostonian. Recalling her very reserved manner and her
scholarly tastes, I found it difficult to imagine her in uniform.
Early the following morning, I met my cohorts at the entrance to
the Reichsbank. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Captain Rae
was an old acquaintance if not an old friend. He also had been
around the Fogg Museum in my time. Edith looked very smart in her
uniform. She had a brisk, almost jovial manner which was not to be
reconciled with her aloof and dignified bearing in the marble halls of
the Widener house at Elkins Park. We hunted up Captain Dunn and
set to work. Our first task was to count and check off the paintings
stacked in the main room. We got through them with reasonable
speed, refraining with some difficulty from pausing to admire certain
pictures we particularly fancied. Then we tackled the Oriental rugs,
and that proved to be a thoroughly thankless and arduous task. We
had a crew of eight PWs—prisoners of war—to help us spread the
musty carpets out on the floor. Owing to the fact that the smaller
carpets—in some cases they were hardly more than fragments—had
been rolled up inside larger ones, we ended with nearly a hundred
more items than the inventory called for. That troubled Captain Dunn
a bit, but I told him that it didn’t matter so long as we were over. We’d
have to start worrying only if we came out short. By five o’clock we
were tired and dirty and barely a third of the way through with the
job.
 The next day we started in on the patent records. There had been
a fire in the mine where the records were originally stored. Many of
them were slightly charred, and all of them had been impregnated
with smoke. When we had finished counting the whole thirty
thousand, we smelled just the way they did. As a matter of fact we
hadn’t wanted to assume responsibility for these records in the first
place. Certainly they had nothing to do with art. But Major Hammond
had felt that they properly fell to us as archives. And of course they
were archives of a sort.
On the morning of the third day, as I was about to leave my office
for the Reichsbank, I had a phone call from Charlie Kuhn. He asked
me how the work was coming along and then, in a guarded voice,
said that something unexpected had turned up and that he might
have to send me away for a few days. He told me he couldn’t talk
about it on the telephone, and anyway, it wasn’t definite. He’d
probably know by afternoon. I was to call him later. This was hardly
the kind of conversation to prepare one for a humdrum day of taking
inventory, even if one were counting real treasure. And for a person
with my curiosity, the morning’s work was torture.
When I called Charlie after lunch he was out but had left word that
I was to come to his office at two o’clock. When I got there he was
sitting at his desk. He looked up from the dispatch he was reading
and said with a rueful smile, “Tom, I am going to send you out on a
job I’d give my eyeteeth to have for myself.” Then he explained that
certain developments had suddenly made it necessary to step up the
work of evacuating art repositories down in Bavaria and in even
more distant areas. For the first time in my life I knew what was
meant by the expression “my heart jumped a beat”—for that was
exactly what happened to mine! No wonder Charlie was envious.
This sounded like the real thing.
Charlie told me that I was to fly down to Munich the next morning
and that I would probably be gone about ten days. To save time he
had already had my orders cut. All I had to do was to pick them up at
the AG office. I was to report to Third Army Headquarters and get in
touch with George Stout as soon as possible. Charlie didn’t know
just where I’d find George. He was out in the wilds somewhere. As a
matter of fact he wasn’t too sure about the exact location of Third
Army Headquarters. A new headquarters was being established and
the only information he had was that it would be somewhere in or
near Munich. The name, he said, would be “Lucky Rear” and I would
simply have to make inquiries and be guided by signs posted along
the streets.
I asked Charlie what I should do about the completion of the
inventory at the Reichsbank, and also about the impending report
from the Corps of Engineers on the University of Frankfurt building.
He suggested that I leave the former in Captain Rae’s hands and the
latter with Lieutenant Buchman. Upon my return I could take up
where I had left off.
That evening I threw my things together, packing only enough
clothes to see me through the next ten days. Not knowing where I
would be billeted I took the precaution of including my blankets.
Even at that my luggage was compact and light, which was desirable
as I was traveling by air.
 (3)
MUNICH AND THE BEGINNING OF FIELD WORK

The next morning I was up before six and had early breakfast. It
was a wonderful day for the trip, brilliantly clear. The corporal in our
office took me out to the airfield, the one near Hanau where Craig
Smyth and I had landed weeks before. It was going to be fun to see
Craig again and find out what he had been up to since we had
parted that morning in Bad Homburg. The drive to the airfield took
about forty-five minutes. There was a wait of half an hour at the field,
and it was after ten when we took off in our big C-47. We flew over
little villages with red roofs, occasionally a large town—but none that
I could identify—and now and then a silvery lake.
Just before we reached Munich, someone said, “There’s Dachau.”
Directly below us, on one side of a broad sweep of dark pine trees,
we saw a group of low buildings and a series of fenced-in
enclosures. On that sunny morning the place looked deserted and
singularly peaceful. Yet only a few weeks before it had been filled
with the miserable victims of Nazi brutality.
In another ten minutes we landed on the dusty field of the principal
Munich airport. Most of the administration buildings had a slightly
battered look but were in working order. It was a welcome relief to
take refuge from the blazing sunshine in the cool hallway of the main
building. The imposing yellow brick lobby was decorated with painted
shields of the different German states or “Länder.” The arms of
Bavaria, Saxony, Hesse-Nassau and the rest formed a colorful frieze
around the walls.
A conveyance of some kind was scheduled to leave for town in a
few minutes. Meanwhile there were sandwiches and coffee for the
plane passengers. By the time we had finished, a weapons carrier
had pulled up before the entrance. Several of us climbed into its
dust-encrusted interior. It took me a little while to get my bearings as
we drove toward Munich. I had spotted the familiar pepper-pot
domes of the Frauenkirche from the air but had recognized no other
landmark of the flat, sprawling city which I had known well before the
war.
It was not until we turned into the broad Prinz Regenten-Strasse
that I knew exactly where I was. As we drove down this handsome
avenue, I got a good look at a long, colonnaded building of white
stone. The roof was draped with what appeared to be an enormous,
dark green fishnet. The billowing scallops of the net flapped about
the gleaming cornice of the building. It was the Haus der Deutschen
Kunst, the huge exhibition gallery dedicated by Hitler in the middle
thirties to the kind of art of which he approved—an art in which there
was no place for untrammeled freedom of expression, only the
pictorial and plastic representation of all the Nazi regime stood for.
The dangling fishnet was part of the elaborate camouflage. I judged
from the condition of the building that the net had admirably served
its purpose.
In a moment we rounded the corner by the Prinz Karl Palais.
Despite the disfiguring coat of ugly olive paint which covered its
classic façade, it had not escaped the bombs. The little palace,
where Mussolini had stayed, had a hollow, battered look and the
formal garden behind it was a waste of furrowed ground and
straggling weeds. We turned left into the wide Ludwig-Strasse and
came to a grinding halt beside a bleak gray building whose walls
were pockmarked with artillery fire. I asked our driver if this were
Lucky Rear headquarters and was told curtly that it wasn’t, but that it
was the end of the line. It was MP headquarters and I’d have to see
if they’d give me a car to take me to my destination, which the driver
said was “’way the hell” on the other side of town.
Before going inside I looked down the street to the left. The
familiar old buildings were still standing, but they were no longer the
trim, cream-colored structures which had once given that part of the
city such a clean, orderly air. Most of them were burned out. Farther
along on the right, the Theatinerkirche was masked with scaffolding.
At the end of the street the Feldherren-Halle, Ludwig I’s copy of the
Loggia dei Lanzi, divested of its statuary, reared its columns in the
midst of the desolation.
It was gray and cool in the rooms of the MP building, but the place
was crowded. Soldiers were everywhere and things seemed to be at
sixes and sevens. After making several inquiries and being passed
from one desk to another, I finally got hold of a brisk young sergeant
to whom I explained my troubles. At first he said there wasn’t a
chance of getting a ride out to Lucky Rear. Every jeep was tied up
and would be for hours. They had just moved into Munich and hadn’t
got things organized yet. Then all at once he relented and with a grin
said, “Oh, you’re Navy, aren’t you? In that case I’ll have to fix you up
somehow. We can’t have the Navy saying the Army doesn’t co-
operate.”
He walked over to a window that looked down on the courtyard
below, shouted instructions to someone and then told me I’d find a
jeep and driver outside. “Think nothing of it, Lieutenant,” he said in
answer to my thanks. “Maybe I’ll be wanting a ship to take me home
one of these days before long. Have to keep on the good side of the
Navy.”
 In the Kaiser Josef chamber of the Alt Aussee mine Karl Sieber
and Lieutenant Kern view Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child,
stolen from a church at Bruges.

Lieutenants Kovalyak, Stout and Howe pack the Michelangelo

Madonna for return to Bruges. The statue was restored to the
Church of Notre Dame in September of 1945.
 The famous Ghent altarpiece by van Eyck was flown from the Alt
Aussee mine to Belgium in the name of Eisenhower as a token
restitution.

Karl Sieber, German restorer, Lieutenant Kern, American

Monuments officer, and Max Eder, Austrian engineer, examine the
panels of the Ghent altarpiece stored in the Alt Aussee mine.
 On my way out I gathered up my luggage from the landing below
and climbed into the waiting jeep. We turned the corner and followed
the Prinz Regenten-Strasse to the river. I noticed for the first time
that a temporary track had been laid along one side. This had been
done, the driver said, in order to cart away the rubble which had
accumulated in the downtown section. We turned right and followed
the Isar for several blocks, crossed to the left over the Ludwig bridge,
then drove out the Rosenheimer-Strasse to the east for a distance of
about three miles. Our destination was the enormous complex of
buildings called the Reichszeugmeisterei, or Quartermaster Corps
buildings, in which the rear echelon of General Patton’s Third Army
had just established its headquarters.
Even in the baking sunlight of that June day, the place had a cold,
unfriendly appearance. We halted for identification at the entrance,
and there I was introduced to Third Army discipline. One of the
guards gave me a black look and growled, “Put your cap on.”
Startled by this burly order, I hastily complied and then experienced
a feeling of extreme irritation at having been so easily cowed. I could
at least have asked him to say “sir.”
The driver, sensing my discomfiture, remarked good-naturedly,
“You’ll get used to that sort of thing around here, sir. They’re very,
very fussy now that the shooting’s over. Seems like they don’t have
anything else to worry about, except enforcing a lot of regulations.”
This was my first sample of what I learned to call by its popular
name, “chicken”—a prudent abbreviation for the exasperating rules
and regulations one finds at an Army headquarters. Third Army had
its share of them—perhaps a little more than its share. But I didn’t
find that out all at once. It took me all of two days.
My driver let me out in front of the main building, over the central
doorway of which the emblem of the Third Army was proudly
displayed—a bold “A” inside a circle. The private at the information
desk had never heard of the “Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives
Section,” but said that if it was a part of G-5 it would be on the fifth
floor. I found the office of the Assistant Chief of Staff and was
directed to a room at the end of a corridor at least two blocks long. I
was told that the officer I should see was Captain Robert Posey. I
knew that name from the reports I had studied at Versailles, as well
as from a magazine article describing his discovery, months before,
of some early frescoes in the little Romanesque church of Mont St.
Martin which had been damaged by bombing. The article had been
written by an old friend of mine, Lincoln Kirstein, who was connected
with the MFA&A work in Europe.
When I opened the door of the MFA&A office, George Stout was
standing in the middle of the room. The expression of surprise on his
face changed to relief after he had read the letter I handed him from
Charlie Kuhn.
“You couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune time,” he said. “I
came down from Alt Aussee today to see Posey, but I just missed
him. He left this morning for a conference in Frankfurt. I wanted to
find out what had happened to the armed escort he promised me for
my convoys. We’re evacuating the mine and desperately
shorthanded, so I’ve got to get back tonight. It’s a six-hour drive.”
“Charlie said you needed help. What do you want me to do?” I
asked. I hoped he would take me along.
“I’d like to have you stay here until we get this escort problem
straightened out. I was promised two half-tracks, but they didn’t
show up this morning. I’ve got a call in about them right now. It’s
three o’clock. I ought to make Salzburg by five-thirty. There’ll surely
be some word about the escort by that time, and I’ll phone you from
there.”
Before he left, George introduced me to Lieutenant Colonel
William Hamilton, the Assistant Chief of Staff, and explained to him
that I had come down on special orders from SHAEF to help with the
evacuation work. George told the colonel that I would be joining him
at the mine as soon as Captain Posey returned and provided me
with the necessary clearance. After we had left Colonel Hamilton’s
office, I asked George what he meant by “clearance.” He laughed
and said that I would have to obtain a written permit from Posey
before I could operate in Third Army territory. As Third Army’s
Monuments Officer, Posey had absolute jurisdiction in all matters
pertaining to the fine arts in the area occupied by his Army. At that
time it included a portion of Austria which later came under General
Mark Clark’s command.
“Don’t worry,” said George. “I’ll have you at the mine in a few days,
and you’ll probably be sorry you ever laid eyes on the place.”
I went back to the MFA&A office and was about to settle down at
Captain Posey’s vacant desk. I looked across to a corner of the room
where a lanky enlisted man sat hunched up at a typewriter. It was
Lincoln Kirstein, looking more than ever like a world-weary
Rachmaninoff. Lincoln a private in the U. S. Army! What a far cry
from the world of modern art and the ballet! He was thoroughly
enjoying my astonishment.
“This is a surprise, but it explains a lot of things,” I said, dragging a
chair over to his desk. “So you are the Svengali of the Fine Arts here
at Third Army.”
“You mustn’t say things like that around this headquarters,” he said
apprehensively.
During the next two hours we covered a lot of territory. First of all, I
wanted to know why he was an enlisted man chained to a typewriter.
With his extraordinary intelligence and wide knowledge of the Fine
Arts, he could have been more useful as an officer. He said that he
had applied for a commission and had been turned down. I was
sorry I had brought up the subject, but knowing Lincoln’s fondness
for the dramatic I thought it quite possible that he had wanted to be
able to say in later years that he had gone through the war as an
enlisted man. He agreed that he could have been of greater service
to the Fine Arts project as an officer.
Then I asked him what his “boss”—he was to be mine too—was
like. He said that Captain Posey, an architect in civilian life, had had
a spectacular career during combat. In the face of almost
insurmountable obstacles, such as lack of personnel and
transportation and especially the lack of any real co-operation from
the higher-ups, he had accomplished miracles. Now that the press
was devoting more and more space to the work the Monuments
officers were doing—the discovery of treasures in salt mines and so
on—they were beginning to pay loving attention to Captain Posey
around the headquarters.
I gathered from Lincoln that the present phase of our activities
appealed to the captain less than the protection and repair of historic
monuments under fire. If true, this was understandable enough. He
was an architect. Why would he, except as a matter of general
cultural interest, find work that lay essentially in the domain of a
museum man particularly absorbing? It seemed reasonable to
assume that Captain Posey would welcome museum men to
shoulder a part of the burden. But I was to learn later that my
assumption was not altogether correct.
Eventually I had to interrupt our conversation. It was getting late,
and still no word about the escort vehicles. Lincoln told me where I
would find the officer who was to have called George. He was
Captain Blyth, a rough-and-ready kind of fellow, an ex-trooper from
the state of Virginia. The outlook was not encouraging. No vehicles
were as yet available. Finally, at six o’clock, he rang up to say that
he wouldn’t know anything before morning.
Lincoln returned from chow, I gave him the message in case
George called while I was out and went down to eat. It was after
eight when George telephoned. The connection from Salzburg was
bad, and so was his temper when I told him I had nothing to report.
Lincoln usually spent his evenings at the office. That night we
stayed till after eleven. Here and there he had picked up some
fascinating German art books and magazines, all of them Nazi
publications lavishly illustrated. They bore eloquent testimony to
Hitler’s patronage of the arts. The banality of the contemporary work
in painting was stultifying—dozens of rosy-cheeked, buxom maidens
and stalwart, brown-limbed youths reeking with “strength through
joy,” and acres of idyllic landscapes. The sculpture was better,
though too often the tendency toward the colossal was tiresomely in
evidence. It was in recording the art of the past, notably in the
monographs dealing with the great monuments of the Middle Ages
and the Baroque, that admirable progress had been made. I asked