The Pigeon Tunnel (4 page)

Then, pulling open an imaginary drawer of the Albert Speer 3-acre desk, he extracts for us the West German Foreign Office's own confidential internal telephone directory, bound, he tells us, in finest calf. He is holding it out to us in his empty hands, head devoutly bowed over it as he scents the leather, rolls his eyes at its quality.

Now he opens it. Very slowly. Each re-enacting is an exorcism for him, a choreographed purging of whatever came into his head the first time he saw the list of names staring at him. They are the same aristocratic names and the same owners who earned their diplomatic spurs under the ludicrous Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler's Foreign Minister, who from his death cell in Nuremberg continued to proclaim his love of Adolf Hitler.

They may be better diplomats now, these noble names. They may be reformed champions of the democratic way. They may, like Globke, have struck their deals with some anti-Nazi group against the day when Hitler fell. But Johannes is not of a mood to see his colleagues in this kindly light. Still watched by our small audience, he slumps into an armchair and takes a pull of the good red burgundy I have bought in his honour from the Economat where we diplomats do our privileged shopping. He is showing us that this is what he did that morning in his state apartment after he had taken a first look at the calf-bound, confidential West German Foreign Office internal telephone directory: how he flopped into a deep leather armchair with the directory open in his hands, silently reading one grand name after another, left to right in slow motion, every
von
and
zu.
We watch his eyes widen and his lips move. He stares at my wall. This is how I stared at the wall in my state apartment, he is telling us. This is how I stared at the wall of my Siberian prison.

He bounces out of my chair, or better the chair in his state apartment. He is back at Albert Speer's 3-acre desk, even if it's only a rickety mahogany sideboard next to the glass door leading to my garden. He flattens the directory on the desk with his palms. There is no telephone on my rickety sideboard but he has picked up an imaginary receiver and with the help of the forefinger of his other hand he is reading off the first extension number in the directory. We hear the
zup-zup
of an internal phone ringing out. This is Johannes,
zup-zupping
through his nose. We see his broad back arch and stiffen and hear his heels snap together in approved Prussian style. We hear the military bark, loud enough to wake my sleeping children upstairs:

‘
Heil Hitler, Herr Baron! Hier Ullrich! Ich möchte mich zurückmelden!
' – Heil Hitler! This is Ullrich! I wish to report myself back for duty!

I wouldn't want to give the idea that I spent my three years as a diplomat in Germany fulminating about old Nazis in high places at a time when my Service's energies were devoted to promoting British trade and fighting communism. If I did fulminate about old Nazis – who weren't actually that old, given that in 1960 we were only half a generation away from Hitler – then I did so because I identified with the Germans my age who, in order to get on in their chosen walks of life, had to make nice to people who had participated in the ruin of their country.

What must it be like, I used to ask myself, for an aspiring young politician to know that the upper ranks of his party were adorned by such luminaries as Ernst Achenbach, who, as a senior German Embassy official in Paris during the Occupation, had personally supervised the mass deportation of French Jews to Auschwitz? Both the French and the Americans tried to put him on trial, but Achenbach was a lawyer by trade, and had secured some kind of mysterious dispensation for himself. So instead of being hauled before the courts in Nuremberg, he set up his own lucrative law firm, defending people accused of crimes identical to those he had committed. How did my aspiring young German politician respond to having an Achenbach watch over his career? I wondered. Did he just swallow and smile?

Amid all the other preoccupations of my time in Bonn and later Hamburg, Germany's unconquered past refused to let me go. Inwardly, I never succumbed to the political correctness of the day, even if outwardly I conformed. In that sense, I suppose I behaved as many Germans must have done during the 1939–45 war.

But after I had left Germany, the subject refused to let me go. With
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
long behind me, I went back to Hamburg and sought out a German paediatrician accused of taking part in a Nazi euthanasia programme to rid the Aryan nation of useless mouths. It turned out that the case against him had been cooked up by a jealous academic rival and was baseless. I was duly chastened. In the same year, 1964, I visited the town of Ludwigsburg
to talk to Erwin Schüle, Director of Baden-Württemberg's Centre for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes. I was looking for the kind of story that later became
A Small Town in Germany
, but I hadn't yet got round to using the British Embassy in Bonn as its background. I was still too close to the experience.

Erwin Schüle turned out to be exactly as billed: decent, frank, committed to his work. And his staff of half-a-dozen or so pale young lawyers, no less. Each to his separate cubbyhole, they spent long days poring over horrific evidence gleaned from Nazi files and the skimpy testimony of witnesses. Their aim was to award atrocities to individuals who could be brought to trial, rather than military units that could not. Kneeling before children's sandpits they set out toy figures, each marked with a number. In one row, toy soldiers in uniform with guns. In the other, toy men, women and children in daily clothes. And running between them in the sand, a small trench to indicate the mass grave waiting to be filled.

Come evening, Schüle and his wife entertained me to dinner on the balcony of their house set on a forested hillside. Schüle spoke passionately of his work. It was a vocation, he said. It was an historical necessity. We agreed to meet again soon, but we didn't. In February of the following year Schüle stepped off a plane in Warsaw. He had been invited to inspect some recently discovered Nazi files. Instead, he was greeted by an enlarged facsimile of his Nazi Party membership card. Simultaneously, the Soviet government launched its own string of charges against him, including an allegation that while serving as a soldier on the Russian front he had shot dead two Russian civilians with his pistol and raped a Russian woman. Once again the charges were found to be baseless.

The lesson? The harder you looked for absolutes, the less likely you were to find them. I believe that Schüle, by the time I met him, was a decent man. But he had to live with his past and, whatever it amounted to, deal with it. How Germans of his generation did that has been one of my abiding interests. When the Baader–Meinhof era broke upon Germany, I for one was not surprised. For many
young Germans, their parents' past had been buried, or denied, or simply lied out of existence. One day something was sure to boil over, and something did. And it wasn't just a few ‘rowdy elements' who boiled over. It was a whole angry generation of frustrated middle-class sons and daughters who tiptoed into the fray and provided the front-line terrorists with logistical and moral support.

Could such a thing ever happen in Britain? We have long ceased to compare ourselves with Germany. Perhaps we no longer dare. Modern Germany's emergence as a self-confident, non-aggressive, democratic power – not to speak of the humanitarian example it has set – is a pill too bitter for many of us Brits to swallow. That is a sadness that I have regretted for far too long.

3

Official visit

One of my more agreeable duties while serving at the British Embassy in Bonn in the early sixties was escorting, or ‘bear-leading' as the Germans have it, delegations of promising young Germans to Britain to learn from our democratic ways and – such was our proud hope – emulate them. Most were first-time parliamentarians or rising political journalists, some very bright, and all, as I only now remember, male.

The average tour lasted one week: depart Cologne airport on the Sunday evening
BEA
flight, receive welcoming address from British Council or Foreign Office representative, return on the following Saturday morning. Over five close-packed days, the guests would visit both Houses of Parliament; attend Question Time in the Commons; visit the High Courts of Justice and maybe the
BBC
; be received by government ministers and Opposition leaders of a rank determined in part by the standing of the delegates and in part by the whim of their hosts; and sample the rustic beauties of England (Windsor Castle, Runnymede for the Magna Carta, and the model English country town of Woodstock in Oxfordshire).

And come evening, they had a choice of going to the theatre or pursuing their private interests, by which was intended – see your British Council information pack – that delegates of the Catholic or Lutheran persuasion would consort with their co-religionists, socialists with their Labour comrades-in-arms, and those with more specialized private interests, such as the emerging economies of the Third World, could sit down together with their British counterparts.
For further information or requests, please don't hesitate to consult your tour guide and interpreter, meaning me.

And hesitate they didn't. Which was how it came about that at eleven o'clock of a balmy summer's Sunday evening in a West End hotel, I was standing at the concierge's desk with a ten-pound note in my hand and half-a-dozen well-refreshed young German parliamentarians leaning over my shoulder demanding female company. They had been in England for four hours, most for the first time. All they knew about London in the sixties was that it was swinging, and they were determined to swing with it. Thus far, a Scotland Yard sergeant I happened to know had recommended a nightclub in Bond Street, where ‘the girls played fair and didn't diddle you'. Two black cabs had rushed us to its doors. But the doors were barred and padlocked and no lights burned. The sergeant had forgotten that in those long-gone days we had Sunday closing laws. Now, with my guests' hopes dashed, I was appealing to the concierge as a last resort, and for ten pounds he did not disappoint:

‘Halfway up Curzon Street on your left-hand side, sir, and there's a blue light in the window says “French Lessons Here”. If the light's out, that means the girls are busy. If it's not out, that means they're open for business. But keep it on the quiet side.'

To accompany my wards through thick and thin, or leave them to their pleasures? Their blood was up. They spoke little English, and their German was not always on the quiet side. The blue light was not out. It was of a peculiarly insinuating fluorescence, and seemed to be the only light in the street. A short garden path led to the front door. An illuminated bell button was marked ‘Press'. Ignoring the concierge's advice, my delegates weren't keeping it on the quiet side. I pressed the bell. The door was opened by a large, middle-aged lady in a white kaftan and bandana headscarf.

‘Yes?' she demanded indignantly, as if we had roused her from her slumbers.

I was on the point of apologizing for disturbing her, but the parliamentary member for a constituency west of Frankfurt was ahead of me.

‘
We are German and we wish to learn French!
' he bellowed in his best English to roars of approval from his comrades.

Our hostess was undaunted.

‘It's five pounds each for a short moment, and one at a time,' she said, with the severity of a prep-school matron.

About to leave my delegates to their specialized interests, I spotted two uniformed constables, one old, one young, approaching us down the pavement. I was wearing a black jacket and striped trousers.

‘I'm from the Foreign Office. These gentlemen are my official guests.'

‘Less noise,' said the older one, and they walked sedately on.

4

Fingers on the trigger

The most impressive of the politicians that I escorted to Britain during my three years at the British Embassy in Bonn was Fritz Erler, in 1963 the German Social Democratic Party's leading authority on defence and foreign policy, and widely tipped as a future chancellor of West Germany. He was also, as I knew from stints of sitting out Bundestag debates, a scathing and witty opponent of both Chancellor Adenauer and his Defence Minister, Franz Josef Strauss. And since privately I disliked the pair of them as much as Erler appeared to, I was doubly pleased to be given the job of accompanying him on a visit to London, where he would be holding talks with leading British parliamentarians of all persuasions, including the Labour leader Harold Wilson and the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan.

The burning issue of the moment was Germany's finger on the trigger: how much say should the Bonn government have in the decision to launch
US
missiles from West German bases in the event of nuclear war? It was this topic that Erler had recently discussed in Washington with President Kennedy and his Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara. My job, on assignment from the Embassy, was to accompany him throughout his stay in England and generally make myself useful as his private secretary, factotum and interpreter. Although Erler, no fool, spoke more English than he let on, he liked the extra thinking time granted him by the interpreting process, and was undeterred when he was told I was not a trained interpreter. The trip was to last ten days and the schedule was tight. The Foreign Office had booked him into a suite at the Savoy
Hotel and provided me with a room a few doors down the same corridor.

Each morning around five o'clock, I bought the day's papers from a news vendor in the Strand and, with the Savoy's vacuum cleaners whizzing round my ears, sat in the hotel lounge marking up any bits of news or comment that I thought Erler should know about ahead of the day's meetings. I then dumped them on the floor outside his room, returned to mine and waited for the signal for our morning canter, which came sharp at 7.00.

Loping along beside me in his black beret and raincoat, Erler cut an austere and seemingly humourless figure, but I knew he was neither of these things. We would walk in one direction for ten minutes, each morning a different route. He would then stop, turn on his heel and, head down, hands linked behind his back, eyes fixed on the pavement, reel off the names of shops and brass plates that we had passed, while I checked them for accuracy. It was an exercise in mental discipline, he explained after a couple of such excursions, that he had acquired in Dachau concentration camp. Shortly before the outbreak of war, he was sentenced to ten years' incarceration for ‘planning high treason' against the Nazi government. In 1945, while on a notorious death march of prisoners out of Dachau, he contrived to escape and lie low in Bavaria until the German surrender.

The exercise in mental discipline had evidently worked, for I don't remember him fluffing a single shop name or brass plate.

Our meetings over the next ten days were a Cook's Tour of Westminster's great, good and not so good. I have a pictorial memory of the faces across the table, and an aural memory of certain voices. Harold Wilson's I found particularly distracting. Lacking the detachment of the trained interpreter, I was far too interested in the vocal and physical idiosyncrasies of my subjects. I remember particularly Wilson's unlit pipe and his theatrical use of it as a stage tool. Of the substance
of our supposedly high-level dialogues, I have no memory whatever. Our interlocutors appeared to have as light a grasp of defence matters as I had, which was a mercy, for although I had boned up on a list of technical terms from the macabre vocabulary of Mutually Assured Destruction (
MAD
), they remained as incomprehensible to me in English as they were in German. But I don't believe I ever had to trot them out, and today I doubt I would recognize them.

Only one encounter remains indelibly fixed in my memory, visually, aurally and in substance, and that was the grand climax of our ten-day tour: putative future Chancellor Fritz Erler meets incumbent British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan at 10 Downing Street.

We are in mid-September 1963. In March of that year, Secretary of State for War John Profumo had made his personal statement to the Commons denying any improper association with a Miss Christine Keeler, an English nightclub girl living under the protection of Stephen Ward, a fashionable London osteopath. That a married War Secretary should keep a mistress might be reprehensible, but not unheard of. That he might be sharing her, as Keeler claimed, with the Naval Attaché from the Soviet Embassy in London was excessive. The scapegoat was the luckless osteopath Stephen Ward who, after a trumped-up trial, killed himself without waiting for the verdict. By June, Profumo had resigned from government and Parliament. By October, Macmillan too had resigned, pleading ill health. Erler's encounter with him took place in September, just weeks before he threw in the towel.

We arrived at 10 Downing Street late, never a good start. The government car that had been sent for us failed to show up, and I had been reduced to stepping into the middle of the road in my black coat and striped trousers, forcing a passing driver to stop and asking him to take us to 10 Downing Street as fast as possible.
Understandably, the driver, a young man in a suit with a woman passenger at his side, thought I was mad. But his passenger rebuked him. ‘Go on, do it. Or they'll be late,' she said, and the young man bit his lip and did as he was told. We clambered into the back, Erler gave the young man his card, said any time they came to Bonn. But we were still ten minutes late.

Ushered into Macmillan's office, we made our apologies and sat down. Macmillan sat motionless behind his desk, his liver-spotted hands before him. His Private Secretary, Philip de Zulueta, Welsh Guardsman, soon to be knight of the realm, sat at his side. Erler regretted in German that the car was late. I seconded him in English. Beneath the prime ministerial hands lay a sheet of glass, and under it, in typed letters large enough to read upside down, lay a prime ministerial briefing paper with Erler's curriculum vitae. The word
Dachau
was written large. While Macmillan spoke, his hands travelled over the glass as if reading braille. His patrician slur, perfectly captured by Alan Bennett in the satirical
Beyond the Fringe
, was like an old gramophone record running at a very low speed. A trail of unstoppable tears leaked from the corner of his right eye, down a groove and into his shirt collar.

After a few courteous words of welcome, delivered with halting Edwardian charm – have they made you comfortable? are they looking after you? are they providing you with the right people to talk to? – Macmillan asked Erler with evident curiosity what he had come to talk about, a question that, at the least, took Erler by surprise.

‘
Verteidigung
,' he replied.

Defence.

Thus informed, Macmillan consulted his brief, and I can only assume that his eye, like mine, again caught the word
Dachau
, for he brightened.

‘Well then, Herr Erler,' he declared with sudden energy. ‘
You
suffered in the
Second
World War, and
I
suffered in the
First
World War.'

Pause for needless translation by self.

Another exchange of courtesies. Is Erler a family man? Yes, Erler concedes, he is a family man. I duly translate. At Macmillan's request he enumerates his children and adds that his wife is also politically engaged. I translate that too.

‘And you have been talking to America's
defence experts
, they tell me,' Macmillan went on in a tone of jocular surprise after another examination of the large print under the sheet of glass.

‘
Ja.
'

Yes.

‘And do you also have
defence experts
in your party?' Macmillan enquires as one beleaguered statesman commiserating with another.

‘
Ja
,' Erler replies more sharply than I would have wished.

Yes.

Hiatus. I glance at de Zulueta, trying to enlist his support. It is not to be enlisted. After a week of Erler at close quarters, I am all too familiar with his impatience when a dialogue fails to come up to expectation. I know that he is not afraid to show his disappointment. I know how thoroughly he has prepared himself for this meeting above all others.

‘They come to me, you see,' Macmillan complains wistfully. ‘These
defence experts.
As I expect they come to you too. And they say to me, the bombs are going to fall
here
, and the bombs are going to fall
there
' – the prime ministerial hands distributing the bombs across the glass – ‘but
you
suffered in the Second World War, and
I
suffered in the First World War!' – that sense of discovery again – ‘And you and I know that the bombs will fall wherever they're going to fall!'

Somehow I translated this. Even in German it took a third of the time Macmillan had needed, and sounded twice as ridiculous. When I had done, Erler ruminated for a while. When he ruminated, the muscles in his gaunt face had a way of rising and falling independently. Suddenly he stood up, reached for his beret and thanked Macmillan for his time. He was waiting for me to stand too, so I did. Macmillan, as surprised as we all were, half-raised himself for the
handshake and slumped down again. As we headed for the door, Erler turned to me and gave vent to his exasperation:

‘
Dieser Mann ist nicht mehr regierungsfähig.
'

This man is no longer capable of government. It is a formulation that strikes the German ear as odd. Perhaps he was quoting from something he had recently read or heard. Either way, de Zulueta heard it too and, worse still, knew German. A furious ‘
I heard that
', hissed into my passing ear, confirmed it.

This time the government car was waiting for us. But Erler preferred the walk, head down, hands linked behind his back, eyes fixed on the pavement. Back in Bonn, I sent him a copy of
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
, which had just come out, and confessed my authorship. When Christmas came round, he spoke kindly of it in the German press. That same December he was elected the official leader of the German parliamentary opposition. Three years later he had died of cancer.