Dominion (14 page)

Suddenly, she was aware of a commotion. Four boys of about twenty, in raincoats and carrying satchels, were racing down the street towards her, weaving through the crowds and pulling leaflets
from their satchels, thrusting them into the hands of surprised passers-by and tossing handfuls into the air. Someone shouted, ‘Hey!’ Sarah wondered if it was a student prank, but the
boys’ faces were serious. They ran past, tossing a shower of leaflets at the costermonger’s stall. The newsvendor shouted, ‘Bastards!’ after them as they ran past the
entrance to the tube station. A rush of hot air from inside sent the leaflets swirling like confetti. One blew against Sarah’s coat and she grasped it.

She looked up. The four boys were just turning the corner. Then, as though from nowhere, a dozen Auxiliary Police appeared, running at the boys and throwing them to the pavement. One fell into
the gutter and a taxi swerved wildly, honking its horn. The policemen hauled the boys to their feet, thrusting them against the wall, heedlessly pushing several people aside. An old woman, carrying
a shopping bag, was sent flying, packages in greaseproof paper spilling onto the street. A man with an umbrella and bowler hat was knocked over. Sarah watched as the bowler rolled under a bus, the
wheels crushing it. The passengers inside turned to look at the scene, mouths open. Most looked quickly away again.

The police had pulled out their truncheons and were beating the boys mercilessly now. Sarah heard the crack of wood on a head, then heard a cry. The Auxiliaries, mostly young men themselves,
laid in mercilessly. Sarah glimpsed a boy’s mouth shining red with blood. One of the policemen was repeatedly punching another boy, his face white with fury, punctuating the blows with
insults. ‘Fucking – Yid-loving – Commie – bugger.’

Most people hurried by, faces averted, but a few stopped to look and someone in the crowd shouted out, ‘Shame!’ The policeman who had been punching the boy turned round, reaching to
his hip. He pulled out a gun. The watchers gasped, stepped back. ‘Who said that?’ the Auxie yelled. ‘Who was it?’

Then, with a loud ringing of its klaxon, a police van pulled up to the kerb. Four more policemen ran out and opened the double doors at the back. The boys were thrown in like sacks, the door
slammed and the van pulled away, klaxon shrieking again. The Auxies adjusted their uniforms, looking threateningly at the crowd as though daring anyone else to call out. Nobody did. The policemen
shoved confidently through. Sarah looked at the pavement by the wall, now spotted with blood.

Next to her an old man in a cap and muffler stood trembling. Perhaps it was him who had shouted out. ‘The bastards,’ he muttered, ‘the bastards.’

Sarah said, ‘It was so sudden. Where will they take them?’

‘Scotland Yard, I expect.’ The old man looked Sarah in the face. ‘Down to the interrogation rooms. Poor little devils, they’re only kids. They’ll probably bring the
black witches in from Senate House to them. They’ll tear them to pieces.’

‘Black witches?’

The old man gave her a look of contempt. ‘The Gestapo. The SS. Don’t you know who’s really in charge of everything now?’

G
UNTHER
H
OTH ARRIVED IN
London early on Friday afternoon. He had taken the daily Lufthansa shuttle from Berlin. A large black
Mercedes with embassy plates was waiting for him at Croydon; the driver, a sharply dressed young man, greeted him. ‘
Heil Hitler!
’

‘
Heil Hitler!
’

‘Good flight, Herr Sturmbannführer?’

‘Fairly smooth.’

‘I am Ludwig. I will be assisting you today.’ The young man spoke formally, like a tour guide, but his eyes were keen. He was probably SS. Gunther sank gratefully into the
comfortable upholstery of the car. He felt tired and the sore place in the middle of his back hurt. Last night he had gone straight from the meeting with Karlson to pack and get some sleep, then
risen early to get the plane. He looked out of the window as the car drove smoothly through the grey London suburbs. England was just as he remembered it, cold and damp. Everyone looked pale,
preoccupied, the clothes of working people worn and shabby. Many of the grimy buildings seemed in poor condition. There were lumps of dog dirt everywhere in the gutters; on the pavements too.
Things had barely changed since he was last here seven years ago; in fact they looked much the same as when he first came to England as a student, back in 1929.

He was glad, though, for this assignment. He was weary of his Gestapo job, tired of interviewing informers whose eyes shone with malice or greed, tired of searching through the endless file
cards. Even the payoff when, through one of his intuitive leaps, he found one of the few remaining hidden Jews, was less rewarding these days.

For over twenty years he had been full of anger at the Jews, at the terrible things they had done to Germany. He knew they were still a threat, with their power in America and what was left of
Russia, but in recent years it was as though his rage, his strength, was wearing out as he got older – he would be forty-five soon. Yesterday he had arrived at a home in a prosperous Berlin
suburb at daybreak with four policemen, banging on the door and shouting for entry. They had found a family of Jews, a mother and father and a boy of eleven, in a damp cellar. Bunks and armchairs
and even a little sink had been installed there. They hauled the three upstairs, the mother yelling and screaming, and took them into the kitchen where their hosts, Mr and Mrs Muller, waited with
their children, two little blonde girls in identical blue nightshirts, the younger one clutching a rag doll.

Gunther’s men shoved the three Jews against the kitchen wall. The woman stopped screaming and stood weeping quietly, head in hands. Then the little boy, crazily, attempted a run for it.
One of Gunther’s men grabbed his arm, banged him back against the wall, and gave him a punch that sent blood trickling from his mouth. Gunther frowned. ‘That’s enough,
Peter,’ he said. He turned to the German family. He knew Mr Muller was a railway official with no political record. ‘Why have you done this?’ he asked sadly. ‘You know it
will be the end of you.’

Muller, a little balding stick of a man, inclined his head to a small wooden cross on the wall. Gunther nodded. ‘I see. Lutherans? Confessing Church?’

‘Yes,’ the man said. He looked at the captive Jews, and added, with sudden anger, ‘They have souls, just like us.’

Gunther had heard that stupid argument many times before. He sighed. ‘All you have done is bring trouble on yourselves.’ He nodded to the Jews. ‘Them too. They should have gone
for resettlement like all the others. Instead they’ve probably spent years running from house to house.’ People like Mr and Mrs Muller were so stupid; they could have lived normal quiet
lives but now they would suffer SS interrogation and then they would be hanged.

Mrs Muller took a deep breath. ‘Please do not hurt our little girls,’ she pleaded, her voice trembling.

‘Shouldn’t you have thought of them before you did this?’ Gunther sighed again. ‘It’s all right, your girls won’t be harmed, they’ll be sent for
adoption by good German families – who’ve probably lost sons fighting in the East,’ he added bitterly, looking the woman in the eye.

Her husband said, ‘Do I have your word on that?’ Gunther nodded. The woman said, ‘Thank you,’ then lowered her head and began to cry. Gunther frowned; no-one he had
arrested had ever thanked him before. He looked at the little cross on the wall. He had been brought up a Lutheran himself, and was aware the cross was supposed to be a symbol of sacrifice. Gunther
knew about real sacrifice. Hans, his twin brother, had been killed eight years ago by partisans in the Ukraine. Sitting in the comfortable car crossing London he remembered his brother’s
first leave, after the invasion of Russia in 1941. Hans had gone into Russia as part of an SS Einsatzgruppe, liquidating Bolsheviks and Jews. Hans was thirty-three when he came back that December,
but he looked older. He had sat in Gunther’s house, after Gunther’s wife had gone to bed, his face pale and drawn against the black of his SS uniform. He said, ‘I’ve killed
hundreds of people, Gunther. Women and old people.’ Suddenly he was talking fast. ‘A whole Jewish village once, a
shtetl
, we got them to dig a huge pit, then kneel naked on the
edge while we shot them. It was so cold, they began shivering as soon as we got them undressed; it was fear as well, of course.’ Hans took a deep, shuddering breath, then braced himself,
squaring his shoulders. ‘But Himmler says we have to be utterly hard and ruthless. He addressed us before we went into Russia. He said we must do this for the future of the Reich. For the
generations unborn.’ He looked at his brother, a desperate fierce stare. ‘No matter what it costs us.’

After the arrests Gunther had spent the rest of the day back at Gestapo headquarters in Prince Albrechtstrasse, dealing with the paperwork. He signed the documents transferring
the Jewish family to Heydrich’s Jewish Evacuation Department, the Mullers to interrogation. Then he went wearily down the wide central staircase, past the busts of German heroes, and walked
home to his flat. His route took him through the vast, endless works being carried out in the city centre to build Germania, Speer’s new Berlin, in time for the 1960 Olympics. The buildings
they planned were so huge the sandy soil on which they would be built could never support them without concrete foundations hundreds of feet deep. A special railway line had been laid to take away
the sand. On a cold, clear day like this the air was full of dust; sometimes the pall hung so heavy that Gunther, like other people susceptible to it, wore one of the new little white facemasks
from America. Thousands of Polish and Russian forced labourers swarmed round the giant pits that made up the largest building site on earth. A few always died during the day and Gunther saw the
hands and feet of corpses sticking out from underneath a tarpaulin to one side. Police patrolled with their rifles; they were vastly outnumbered by the labourers but one man with a gun can command
many without.

He noticed that fewer passers-by wore their Nazi Party badges these days. The streets that weren’t being rebuilt looked increasingly shabby. Cheap imports from France and the occupied east
had kept German living standards up until a couple of years ago, but they were falling now as the Russian war ground on; five million Germans dead and more announced each week. It was daily talk in
Police Intelligence that morale was falling; many citizens didn’t even give the German greeting ‘Heil Hitler’ to each other any more.

Back home in his flat he ate his usual lonely dinner at the kitchen table, then sat and listened to the radio. He opened a beer and began thinking of his wife and son. Four years ago Klara had
left him for a fellow police officer; they had taken his son, Michael, and gone to live as subsidized settlers in Krimea, the only part of Russia that had been completely cleared of the original
population and, an easily defensible peninsula, it was deemed safe for Germans. Gunther knew, though, that the thousand-mile-long railway the Germans had built to it was under constant partisan
attack.

He switched off the radio – Mozart was playing and he found his music effete and irritating – and put on Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. He liked the confident, crashing beat,
even though Tchaikovsky was Russian and disapproved of. The music stirred him but when it was over the sad empty bleakness that came over him sometimes crept back. He told himself it was the times;
those who believed in Germany had to pay a hard price for the future.

The telephone’s ring made him jump. The call was from Gestapo headquarters. He was to come in at once, to see Superintendent Karlson.

Karlson had a large office on the top floor of the building on Prince Albrechtstrasse. There were thick carpets and pictures of eighteenth-century Berlin on the walls, little
figurines on the desk and tables. They had probably been taken from Jews; Karlson had been in the Party since the twenties and enjoyed all the privileges. He was one of the ‘golden
peasants’. He was large, with an air of cheerful bonhomie, and like many old Party men he was coarse but clever. Another man sat beside the big desk, under the portraits of Himmler and the
Führer. The stranger was tall and slim, in his forties, with black hair and sharp blue eyes, immaculate in his SS uniform, the swastika in its white circle on his armband standing out against
the black uniform. Karlson, too, wore his uniform today, though usually he wore a suit; as did Gunther, whose work involved moving in the shadows, unnoticed. Gunther saw the stranger had a file
open on the knees of his immaculately creased trousers.

Karlson greeted Gunther warmly and waved him to a chair in front of the desk. He said, ‘Thank you for coming at such short notice.’

‘I wasn’t doing anything particular, sir.’

Karlson then turned to the stranger, a deferential note in his voice. ‘Allow me to introduce Obersturmbannführer Renner, from Division E7.’ Gunther thought, an SS Brigadier from
the section of the Reich Security Office responsible for Britain; they’re after someone important. Karlson continued, ‘Sturmbannführer Hoth is one of my most prized officers. He is
in charge of ferreting out the Jews still left in Berlin. He caught three today.’

The dark-haired man nodded. ‘Congratulations. Are there many left, do you think?’

‘Not many in Berlin. We’re near the end now. Though I hear that Hamburg still has a few.’

‘Maybe more than we know,’ Karlson said. ‘They’re like rats; you think you’ve got rid of them, and then back they come, gnawing at your toes with their little sharp
teeth, right?’ He’s playing to the gallery, Gunther thought.