Secrets of the Last Nazi (15 page)

‘So the page immediately before this paper about “Location Two” was the one torn from
Mein Kampf.
Right?’

Glenn started to show he understood. ‘So the clue, “Where it was written” means where
Mein Kampf
was written? So, Myles, where did Hitler write
Mein Kampf
?’

‘Near Munich, southern Germany, when he was in prison in 1924,’ said Myles. ‘Location Two must be thirty-two metres from Hitler’s jail cell.’

Zenyalena stood up. ‘So, we go to Munich.’

‘OK,’ said Pascal, ‘but we need to be much more professional. Whoever is doing this – starting the fire, killing Jean-François – we’ve made it easy for them. If just a single one of us is reporting back to our national capitals, it’s easy to see how someone could be on our trail.’

He stopped, realising from the reactions around the table that he had said something significant. ‘What did I say?
Is
someone reporting back to their capital?’

Silence. After a few moments Glenn held up his hand, as if pleading in court, and said, ‘Fifth Amendment.’

Pascal’s face relaxed. ‘OK - no phone calls, and all phones turned off.’

Glenn nodded. ‘… And we better take the SIM chips from our phones too – just to make sure they’re not tracked.’

The whole table understood: some mobile phones could be tracked even when they were switched off.

As the four team members started to take out their mobiles and extract the chips, it was Heike-Ann who was left to order a taxi.

Within minutes a Viennese cab adorned in the latest advertisements had appeared. The team knocked back their drinks and climbed aboard for the four-and-a-half hour drive to Landsberg prison.

T
he taxi
soon found its way to the autobahn – the high-speed motorway link between the historic cities of Vienna and Munich, laid down during Hitler’s heyday. Famously, there were no speed limits on these roads – it was one of the few areas of public life the dictator had not tried to control. Contemporary newsreels about them portrayed Hitler as the master of new technology, which the
Autobahnen
were at the time. Myles and the team were travelling along an avenue of Nazi propaganda.

But just as the Nazis had tried to lead the new ‘science’ of fast roads, they had also been busy trying to forecast the future. To control the future. Myles realised: Stolz’s work gave the Nazis authority over people’s lives. Like shamen and witchdoctors, if the Nazis had been able to predict what was to happen, it would make them enormously powerful.

Myles imagined how Hitler’s regime would have used their knowledge. They would have built a bureaucracy around it – perhaps a ‘Ministry of the Future’. He pictured a little man with an artificial expression on his face, welcoming him into an office. Myles would sit down to be told what he was going to do. He might complain, but he would have no choice, because Stolz’s science of prediction had squeezed choice out of people’s lives. Myles would be interviewed, interrogated, forced to sign …

The image jolted Myles awake. He looked up. The taxi was slowing down, as it came to their destination. They had arrived.

Myles recognised the building immediately. It wasn’t like a normal prison. Instead of the usual grey concrete, the facade was Art Nouveau, from 1910. Inside, the four main cell blocks formed a cross, allowing a single guard in the centre to keep track of all comings-and-goings. And the most celebrated ‘going’ of all was that of the prison’s most famous resident: Adolf Hitler.

Myles remembered how the judge in Hitler’s trial had been sympathetic to the Nazi firebrand. The prisoner was let out after just 264 days, despite a charge of treason for trying to overthrow Germany’s democratic government. The future dictator would go on to sentence many Germans to much worse punishments for much smaller offences.

Myles recognised the building from one of the most haunting photographs of the Hitler story. It showed Hitler standing outside the prison the day he left, at the end of 1924. Even though the man had put on weight – just as in Stolz’s clue – Hitler’s eyes were still determined, and somehow dead looking.

Glenn was also staring up at the green copper turrets and latticed windows as if it was familiar, a wry expression on his face. ‘So this is where we put ’em, huh?’ said the American, half admiring, half gloating.

Myles realised the American had heard of the building from a slightly later time in history. ‘Yes, Glenn. In 1945 it became known as “War Criminal Prison Number One”. All the top Nazis who’d been caught were locked up here until the Nuremberg trials.’

Zenyalena and Heike-Ann also gazed at the building. Like Myles and Glenn, they reacted with a mixture of awe and disdain
. This was where
Mein Kampf
was written: a place so historic, and yet so evil, too.

Pascal was last out of the taxi. He looked up like the others, then asked a more practical question. ‘So, do you think they’ll let us in?’

He turned to Heike-Ann, who understood the cue. She stepped forward, and walked towards the reception area. Her eyes met an official – an older man with heavy glasses sitting behind a transparent partition. The official seemed intrigued by the pregnant lady and the foreigners accompanying her as Heike-Ann politely introduced herself. ‘Heike-Ann Hassenbacker.’

The official silently raised his eyebrows, as if to ask, ‘and what do you want?’

Heike-Ann pulled out a folding license holder and showed the man her police identification card. The man asked for it to be handed to him under the glass. Heike-Ann passed it through. Only after he had inspected it for several seconds did the official concede it was genuine. ‘
Wie kann ich Ihnen helfen?
’ he asked in a gruff voice.

Heike-Ann paused before she responded. ‘Do you speak English? I would like to talk to you in English please – so these four people can understand me.’

The official scowled at Zenyalena, Pascal, Glenn and Myles. ‘Alright, then. We can speak English.’

‘Thank you,’ said Heike-Ann. ‘This is the prison where
Mein Kampf
was written?’

The official’s face reacted immediately. He’d seen Hitler tourists before. Several of them came by the prison every month. Some to mock, some to wonder, a disturbing few to worship. Widespread fascination with Hitler, and the huge efforts to wipe away everything which could be a shrine to Nazism, meant this was one of the small number of places which still had a clear link to the dead mass murderer. ‘It is,’ conceded the official.

‘Do you have a record of visitors to the prison?’ Heike-Ann eyed the man’s computer. ‘Can you tell me when a man called Werner Stolz visited?’

The official turned to his keyboard and typed in the surname. A list appeared on the screen.

He scrolled down the list, starting to shake his head before he reached the end. ‘No. No “Werner Stolz” came here.’

Heike-Ann halted, puzzled.

Zenyalena pushed her way to the window. ‘How far back do your records go?’

‘On the computer, back to 1989.’

Myles could tell Zenyalena was thinking of asking the man to go back before then, through the paper records. But the official was anticipating the request, and his face already told them the answer: if they asked, he would say no.

Myles started to think aloud, knowing there must be another way around the problem. ‘We don’t need to go back before 1989. We know Stolz hid the papers recently, in the last few weeks – since the break-ins at his flat.’

Heike-Ann started to look confused. ‘So he didn’t come here?’

Myles shook his head. ‘He didn’t enter the prison as a visitor, no. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t here …’ Myles turned to the official. ‘Do you have a … a basement, or underground section or a cellar?’

‘Just a store room.’

‘How far down is it?’

The official shrugged. ‘One floor. A few meters down, maybe.’

‘Could someone have tunnelled down from there?’

The official shook his head. ‘No way. This is a prison. When it was built they made sure no one could tunnel out.’ The uniformed man checked the faces of the people in front of him, confirming to himself that Myles and Heike-Ann were genuine. Then he opened a drawer, pulled out a sheet of paper, and unfolded it to his visitors. ‘This is a map of the prison.’

Myles and the team stared at the simplified blueprint. It was obvious that several details had been missed off so the illustration couldn’t be used to help prisoners escape.

The official pointed to a large rectangle around the main buildings. ‘This line here shows the borders of a plinth,’ he said. ‘Before they started building the prison, they laid down foundations. The prison stands on a layer of concrete twelve meters thick. No one could tunnel under here.’

Disappointment washed over the whole team. They must have misunderstood Stolz’s clue.

Where it was written – and he grew fat – minus 32 metres

Stolz couldn’t have buried something thirty meters below where
Mein Kampf
was written.

Glenn started shaking his head. ‘Looks like Stolz has been yanking our tails.’ The American didn’t need to say they should give up. His tone made that obvious.

Zenyalena was frustrated. She tried to peer at the map in more detail, as though if she looked hard enough she might find something.

Pascal leaned back. ‘Don’t forget, Stolz was more than a hundred years of age, and frail,’ he suggested. ‘Even if the old man could slip into the prison unnoticed somehow, there was no way he could dig through twelve meters of concrete. He’d need help, and they’d make a huge amount of noise.’ Pascal was shrugging. Like Glenn, he seemed ready to stop the search.

Heike-Ann was waiting for orders from the team. Only Zenyalena seemed intent on breaking the code. But, like the others, she could see no way it could be true.

Then Myles realised. He clutched the paper, and turned it over, checking it was blank on the other side. He pointed to the rectangle of concrete. ‘What’s outside here?’

The official looked confused by the question and simply pointed around. ‘Streets. It’s the outside of the prison.’

‘Yes, but what’s below it?’

The man shrugged again.

It was the answer Myles had expected. He turned to the team. ‘Looks to me like Stolz found the perfect hiding place. Nobody’s going to start digging thirty-two meters below a prison – because the prison authorities won’t let them.’

Glenn’s face still looked bemused. ‘So how did he dig?’

‘He didn’t,’ answered Myles. ‘Remember – as Pascal said, he was an old man. He just climbed down. Down, then across. There must be some other entrance to a place thirty-two meters below the prison. And that entrance must lie outside the prison perimeter.’

Pascal started to come alive at the idea. ‘You mean, a secret trap door?’

‘Something like that. It would cover steps leading down to under the prison. And that’s what we have to find.’

The team started to spread out, moving away from the prison and the bemused official.

Pascal was the first to see something promising. ‘This could be it …’ he declared, peering down at a plate on the ground.

The team came over, with Myles vaulting on his crutches behind them, and Heike-Ann walking at a more deliberate pace than the others.

Pascal had found a folding metal cover surrounded by weeds and long-grass. It was half-hidden, and sited in a triangle of turf behind a bus-stop. The plate looked old – slightly rusted, and covered in a pattern of small squares which Myles had seen before on the floor of German tanks from World War II. It was fixed in place with a modern padlock. Pascal gripped the shiny lock, sizing it up. ‘It’s heavy, but we can probably break it open.’

Zenyalena found a nearby drain cover. She lifted out the thick grill with both hands – it was obviously a strain - then hauled it over to Pascal. ‘Will this do?’

Pascal raised his eyebrows – he didn’t know, but he’d try. Swinging the drain cover, he tried to knock the padlock off.

Clunk
.

Nothing.

He tried again. This time the lock sprang open. He tossed the drain cover away, allowing it to clatter on the ground, then peeled off the broken padlock and heaved up the rusted cover to the manhole.

The whole team peered down, staring into a deep, black hole.

Myles pulled a small coin from his pocket and tossed it down. It took more than two seconds of silence before a few faint ‘tings’ echoed back up, as though the coin was bouncing around the inside of a giant slot machine. ‘Well, it’s deep. And there’s probably a solid floor down there.’

Pascal knelt on the ground and poked his head into the darkness. The team waited while his eyes adjusted to the light. Then the Frenchman re-appeared, a new expression on his face. ‘There’s a ladder, leading down,’ he said, excitedly.

Zenyalena pushed herself towards the hole. ‘Can I go first?’

No one answered. They all knew the Russian would go forward anyway.

Pascal helped Zenyalena swing her legs into the space where the metal cover had been and pointed towards the ladder. She looked pleased as her feet found the rungs, then began climbing down, into the darkness.

After several seconds, the team heard her voice call back. It sounded as though she was inside a cavern. ‘It’s definitely very deep …’

Glenn prepared to climb down after her, but Myles stopped him. ‘Wait, Glenn. Wait until she’s at the bottom.’

Glenn accepted the Englishman’s advice. The four waiting above ground lingered, looking at each other as they waited.

Finally Zenyalena emerged again, breathing heavily from the climb, but exhilarated. ‘It’s a vertical tunnel – probably about thirty meters deep,’ she said, exhilarated, ‘although I didn’t go all the way down.’

‘Can you see down there?’

Zenyalena nodded, still catching her breath. ‘Yes – as long as you let your eyes adjust. It takes a few seconds.’

Glenn fished out his key chain, and the small flashlight attached to it. He pressed a button, and the light turned on. ‘And what’s down there?’

The Russian smiled. ‘You’ll have to see for yourselves.’ And she disappeared again.

Glenn took the cue, and approached the edge of the hole. He peered into the darkness, waiting until Zenyalena had stepped off the ladder at the bottom, then followed her down. Heike-Ann did the same, followed by Myles – whose ruptured knee ligament made him the slowest to descend. Pascal was the last of the five to step onto the ladder, and begin the long climb down.