Midnight in Berlin (34 page)

And so it proved. In the second of their two meetings, the Führer launched into a frenzied diatribe about the persecution of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, renounced all previous agreements on the subject and told his startled visitor that the Sudetenland would fall to the German army by the end of the month, on September 30th – in exactly eight days' time.

Chamberlain returned to London convinced he was dealing with a madman but clinging to the hope that a peace deal might be extracted from the wreckage if Czechoslovakia …

If Czechoslovakia – there was the rub. This was the heart of the issue that confronted the British cabinet and that was being examined carefully by the interested parties in Berlin, in Paris, in Moscow and above all in Prague. Was the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia, a nation of fifteen million people, the price that had to be paid for peace in Europe? And if the price was paid, would there be further demands?

Macrae had not been included in the British delegation at the talks on, or rather across, the Rhine. Protocol demanded his presence, since military matters were clearly on the agenda, yet he had not been surprised at his exclusion.

He and Sir Nevile Henderson had not spoken since their last encounter. He remained at the embassy, watching the cable traffic that connected the prime minister to his cabinet in London. The teleprinters clattered from dawn deep into the night, delivering reams of coded reports. Finally, it seemed the British government, if not the blissfully deluded public, were waking from the dream of peace and confronting the reality of war – a war for which the country was woefully ill-equipped.

The War Office in London had cabled Macrae for the latest news of Germany's rearmament programme in light of the 1 October deadline. The reply was the same as it had been for several months: in armour, aircraft and artillery the German military were ahead of anything the British or French could put in the field. The crucial difference was manpower. The German conscription programme had given their generals a pool of several million trained men to draw on. Training programmes were accelerating. In only one area did Britain maintain superiority – naval power.

After the Bad Godesberg talks, the British cabinet agreed that the main battle fleet should leave its Scapa Flow base for
manoeuvres in the North Sea. But the orders from Downing Street to the Admiralty were clear. The manoeuvres must not take the big ships within sight of the German coast.

Macrae felt himself a distant observer of these events, much as he had in the trenches with his sniper rifle. The powerful telescopic sights gave him a sense of detachment from the horrors around him. He could look over several hundred yards of cratered mud deep behind enemy lines and see men hurrying from trench to trench, bent double to escape a possible line of fire.

He had once trained his rifle on a man squatting to relieve himself in a shallow depression. The fellow was hunched up and seemed in pain as he defecated. Macrae had held him for a moment in his sights and then swung the rifle away, seeking a less obviously human target. He preferred to be disconnected from the inhumanity of war. The abstraction of a sniper's role was such that a snap shot at a head bobbing up from a distant trench would seem more like target practice than killing a fellow man.

And that was how he felt now, disconnected, a spectator at a theatre of the absurd, wishing to leap onto the stage and warn the actors, but imprisoned in paralysis and unable to do so – a nightmare familiar to psychiatrists.

There were nights when his feet took him where he did not want to go. He would walk from the embassy past the Brandenburg Gate and through the Tiergarten. When he reached his own house just off the avenue he would walk on, telling himself he needed the exercise. When the park gave way to the suburb of Charlottenburg itself, he would keep on walking. There were art galleries whose windows were filled with the kind of wholesome art approved by Joseph Goebbels. There were cafés with amazing cakes and small taverns where a weary diplomat could take a glass of cool
white wine without fear of interference. And there was also the Salon. Although he reached the door several times, he never went in.

Primrose continued her life with the other embassy wives on the usual round of dinners, cocktail parties and charitable work. She and Macrae met more often now for supper at home and occasionally for dinner at a neighbouring restaurant. They began to make love, although they did so not as lovers, nor even as a long-married couple who recognised the departure of passion, but rather as strangers seeking mutual solace stripped of emotion. Afterwards they would lie, breathing hard, sweating, saying nothing, not touching, two people bedded in different worlds.

They talked over drinks and meals in the desultory fashion of people whose thoughts were elsewhere. They discussed news from friends and family at home, embassy gossip and whatever entertainment happened to interest them in the city. They never talked of the prospect of war, because Primrose dismissed the idea as a fantasy dreamed up by journalists and politicians. Germany would take Czechoslovakia, expel the Jews and get back to making good cars and running an efficient railway system; that was her view and that would be the end of a middle European melodrama as far as she was concerned.

“And the Jews?” Macrae had asked. “Expelled, stateless, stripped of their homes and possessions after living here for centuries – is that what you want?”

“They can go to Palestine, can't they? They want their own country, don't they? Well, we should give them one – solve the problem for all time.”

They never talked of Koenig either. Primrose said she had not heard from him for weeks and Macrae believed her. He had also tried to contact Koenig without success. He had
sent carefully worded anonymous notes to the staff headquarters stating the times of the morning service at the Berliner Dom on Sundays. But Koenig never turned up.

Macrae realised he was almost certainly with his unit on the endless manoeuvres being conducted along the eastern border. He also knew that, like his fellow officers, Koenig would be taking care to stay well away from Berlin and any contact with foreigners.

Roger Halliday had disappeared again too. Macrae had not seen his colleague since just before Chamberlain's first meeting with Hitler. Even Daisy Wellesley, a reliable embassy gossip, had no idea where he had gone.

“Better not ask,” was her advice. “Those people do things a little differently from the rest of us.”

Sir Nevile Henderson had also been absent from the embassy for much of the month of September. He was shuttling back and forth between Berlin and London and now spent most of his time working from 10 Downing Street. Daisy Wellesley was twice summoned to London to work with him, but after the last occasion said only on her return, “They're working on the next step,” she said. “God knows what that will be.”

Macrae had a good idea what that step would be. As the weather changed and the warmth of September gave way to the autumn rains in the last week of the month, the nations of Europe would prepare for the final act of delusion and deceit. He remembered a story he had heard from a fellow officer in the war. Flying over Normandy as a passenger in an open biplane, the man said he had looked down to see two cars moving fast on separate roads towards a junction. The high hedgerows prevented the drivers seeing each other, and their speed and distance from the crossroads made a collision almost certain. Powerless, he and the pilot had watched for
almost a minute as the cars converged, until they collided and burst into flames.

He was gripped by the same feeling of impotence now. The army putsch against Hitler had been forestalled by the British peace diplomacy. Koenig and his conspirators had been denied the strong signal they needed to confront the Nazi regime.

The American military attaché, Percy Black, passed on reliable information that the Luftwaffe was testing a prototype jet engine-powered aircraft. In the naval dockyard at Hamburg, a 42,000-ton battleship named
Bismarck
was being constructed and would be launched the following year. The ship, and its sister the
Tirpitz,
also under construction on the north coast, would be both larger and more powerfully equipped than any vessel in the British fleet.

Macrae could do nothing as he watched a stream of cables revealing that Chamberlain planned a third meeting with Hitler, this time in Munich.

William Shirer was by temperament a cheerful optimist who delighted in the regular absurdities of life in the Third Reich. As a radio journalist, he worked hard to attract and hold the interest of an audience that stretched across America. The intellectual elite on the east coast and the wealthy upper class on the west coast were a natural audience for Shirer's narrative of the lawless actions and limitless ambitions of the Nazi regime.

The difficulty that he and CBS faced was how to reach out to a truly national audience and get the struggling farmers and their hard-pressed wives in the Midwestern corn belt and the good old boys in the southern states to tune in to what was happening in Europe.

Descriptions of Hitler's latest denunciation of the Czechs, the punitive treatment of the Jews and the slow-moving machinery of European diplomacy did not interest people struggling to avoid foreclosure and debt. The New Deal had been up and running for five years, but the misery of unemployment and the struggle for a livelihood in the Dust Bowl states remained unchanged for many people.

When Shirer invited Macrae to tea at the Hotel Adlon, he gladly accepted. Shirer was always good company and usually very well informed. He had seemed excited on the phone, claiming to have information that would “really get them talking out there in the West and might even make you Brits sit up”.

Macrae had been spending a lot of time at the hotel, finding refuge in the calm of the bar, where the unchanging nature of the staff, the guests, the cocktails, the potted plants and the floral display seemed a bulwark against the world outside. Even the Gestapo informant shaking cocktails at the bar had become an essential feature of this orderly universe. Macrae had never taken tea in the bar, nor had he seen any journalist do so. The sight of the famous American correspondent presiding over a table laid with a large teapot, patterned china cups on saucers and a collection of cakes on small plates was a surprise.

“I have news for you,” said Shirer, beckoning him to a seat. “Sit down, sit down.”

It was four o'clock in the afternoon and the bar was empty except for a lunch party of German businessmen who were drinking their way towards the cocktail hour. Shirer poured the tea, handed a cup to Macrae and offered him a small cake.

His face was flushed and there was a sheen of sweat on his bald pate. He seemed animated and Macrae wondered whether he had been drinking. He pushed the thought away. Shirer took his job very seriously and he obviously had something to say.

“No thanks,” said Macrae. “I'm not a cake person. A toasted scone with jam is about as close as I get.”

“Is that a Brit joke?” said Shirer, suspicious that his guest was making fun of him.

“No. I don't have a sweet tooth.”

Shirer sat back suddenly, smiling. “You just said it!”

“What?”

“‘Sweet tooth'. That's my story – that's what is going to get them talking all over America.”

“Really?” Macrae smiled and sipped his tea. Maybe Shirer had been drinking.

“Yeah, and you British might do something with this story, so listen up.”

Shirer had been covering the recent rounds of talks between Chamberlain and Hitler in Berchtesgaden and then on the Rhine at Bad Godesberg. But it was during the first session in Hitler's mountain retreat in the Bavarian Alps that he had come across a story that threw new light on the Nazi leader, or so he said.

As the talks had dragged on from morning into late afternoon, Shirer had grown weary of waiting for a meaningless communiqué and had gone for a walk in the town. While taking coffee in a patisserie, he had heard a young woman at the counter talking about an order for a special cake and chocolate biscuits. She was due to pick up the order but said she would wait because she wanted a change in the topping of the cake. It was an apple cake but she had said it needed more nuts and raisins strewn across the cream on top, and the cream had to be thicker.

The pastry shop was empty and Shirer had only half listened to the conversation as he drank his coffee. Then he heard the phrase “Führer cake”, and paid attention. The young woman was dressed in the black and white dress of a maid. Outside, Shirer could see a large official car with a chauffeur at the wheel. The engine was running, but when the young woman went out and spoke to the driver, the engine was turned off.

The woman re-entered the shop, at which point Shirer rose from his table, introduced himself as an American tourist
and offered her a coffee while she waited. The young woman accepted and said her name was Elizabeth.

“This is where it gets interesting – are you listening, Macrae?” said Shirer.

No one ever called him by his first name, and Macrae preferred it that way. And he was indeed listening.

Shirer and Elizabeth had talked for half an hour while the cake was being altered. Shirer learnt that she came daily to the pastry shop to collect the “Führer cake”, Hitler's favourite apple cake. It was specially baked with extra quantities of sugar, but the raisins and nuts were a key ingredient, apparently because as a vegetarian the Führer liked to think it made the confection more healthy. The cake was collected every day, along with a selection of smaller pastries and chocolate treats.

Shirer had told the girl that, as a tourist, he had come to the Berghof hoping for a glimpse of the Führer and planned to ask him for an autograph, if there was a chance. Elizabeth had laughed at the naive optimism of the American and said that no one in the town ever saw the Führer when he was in residence. Even she, a maid who had worked in his household for two years, only saw him once a day at teatime. Her main task was to prepare and serve the afternoon tea and make sure the right amount of cake and biscuits were on the table. And how he loved his tea, she had said. It was served punctually at four o'clock and was the most important meal of the Führer's day.