The Seventh Secret (14 page)

Emily wondered whether this was truer than the suspicions of one possibly crackpot dentist. Unless she saw the dentist and he was absolutely persuasive, she would have to buy Vogel's story, the accepted version, for the climax of the book. It was possible her father had been wrong, had been taken in. It was probable that what she had just heard was the whole truth, and that she did not need to pry further. She could safely finish the book with this account.

But the dissent still nagged at her. She had always respected her father, his diligence, his steadiness, his objectivity, and there had been something that disturbed him about the historical version. Besides, the reporter Nitz had warned her: Don't let Vogel discourage you too much. . . . After you've heard him out, go after your reluctant informant even harder. Use the straight stuff you learn from Vogel to bait your dissenter.

She realized that she must go on a step farther. One more step was demanded. If that was not the truth, then this was.

She was on her feet thanking Vogel, and promising to send him one of the first copies of the book.

B
ack in her suite at the Kempinski, Emily found herself wavering once more.

Ernst Vogel had been so convincing about the certainty of Hitler's death and burial in 1945 that any effort to refute it seemed utter foolishness. Perhaps her father's last quest in Berlin had been quixotic, a slippage from his normal stability, the sign of an inexplicable desire to produce a sensation in his waning years. Perhaps she, like most daughters, was automatically acting out the Freudian relationship that tied daughters to fathers. The father could do no wrong. In this civil war of uncertainty, she was almost prepared to retreat. Pack her bags, get out of Berlin, return to Oxford and finish the damn book.

But still the paternal ghost was watching her. She hesitated. It was difficult to disown her heritage so abruptly.

Although filled with doubt, she walked slowly into the bedroom, picked up the file of recent correspondence she had carried from Oxford, sat on the edge of the bed and leafed through it. She pulled out the letter to her father that had started all this—the letter from the dentist, Dr. Max Thiel of West Berlin. She began to reread it. "All histories to date on Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun may have been wrong in one major respect. It is quite possible that Hitler and Braun did not commit suicide in the
Führerbunker
in 1945. Both may very well have survived. I believe I have the evidence to prove it." She fingered the letter and recalled that her father had met with Dr. Thiel, and had been impressed enough to arrange to dig in the area of the
Führerbunker
for new evidence overlooked until now.

Emily continued through the file of correspondence. She found the copy of her letter in which she had written to Dr. Thiel that she intended to go on with her father's investigation, and that she needed Dr. Thiel's help. He was crucial to her research, she had written him, and it was imperative that she meet with him. Paperclipped to her letter was Dr. Thiel's curt one-sentence reply. "Dear Miss Ashcroft, I am sorry I can-not see you or anyone else about this matter."

Then something her father had said in their final conversation came back to her. He had said, "Emily, our book must be the last word, the absolute truth, the final word."

Quixotic? No. He had been onto something.

Emily put the file aside, resolutely marched into the sitting room, and placed herself before the telephone on the desk. Quickly, she dialed Dr. Max Thiel's number. A ring. Two rings. A pickup.

An old woman's voice in German. "Yes?"

"Is this the residence of Dr. Max Thiel?"

A short silence. "Who is speaking?"

"I am the daughter of Dr. Harrison Ashcroft. I must speak to Dr. Thiel. I have come from England to speak to him."

"A moment, please."

Emily could hear muffled voices in the background. She waited tensely.

Her father had told her that when he talked to Dr. Thiel on the phone, the dentist's deep voice had been unfaltering and assured. After meeting with Dr. Thiel, her father had reported that the dentist had also been most friendly.

Yet the voice she heard now, a man's voice, was somewhat less than friendly, even gruff.

"Who is this?"

"Dr. Thiel? My name is Emily Ashcroft." Briefly, she told him about herself, and reminded him of her father and their book. "You invited Dr. Ashcroft to call on you. He did so, and found you most cooperative and gracious. I have come to Berlin to follow through on my father's work, Dr. Thiel—"
   
.

"Please do not use my name on the phone again," he said sharply.

"I'm sorry. I won't, if you don't wish me to."

"I don't wish you to. It is unwise."

She could sense a certain fear in his voice, and expected him to hang up. She spoke quickly. "I have come here to Berlin to talk with you."

"Impossible."

"But you saw my father. You were willing to help my father."

"Look what happened to him," Dr. Thiel responded, more gruffly than before.

"It was an accident."

Dr. Thiel's voice softened slightly. "Maybe. Maybe it was an accident. I am not sure." He hesitated. "I am sorry for your loss." Then he added stubbornly, "Anyway, I want to take no risks. Please do not bother me again. You go write what you wish."

"I wish to write the truth," she said emotionally. She remembered what Nitz had suggested. Use Vogel's account to bait the informant. "I suppose I can only use what Ernst Vogel told me—"

"Who?"

"Ernst Vogel. He was an SS sergeant and honor guard at the
Führerbunker
. He witnessed Hitler's last days. I saw him today. He confirmed what Linge, Giinsche, and Kempka had given as sworn evidence. Vogel insists Hitler shot himself, and that he saw Hitler carried out to the bunker garden and cremated. He backed the standard story. He implied that any other version of Hitler's end could come only from cranks and crackpots."

Dr. Thiel took the bait. "Vogel is an absolute fool," he snapped with annoyance. "He believes what he was brainwashed to believe. I know of him. He is an idiot guard who never knew Hitler."

"But you knew Hitler?" she said innocently.

"Of course I did. Too well."

"And you knew something else that you had passed on to my father. It's a pity you won't tell me what you told him. Now I'll be forced to perpetuate the lie, not tell the truth, let history remain warped."

There was a short silence. "Does it really matter after forty years? Let sleeping dogs lie."

"But you hint that they may not be sleeping," she said passionately. "Yes, I think it does matter that everything about Hitler be known at last. So that such a man will not come among us again. If Hitler is still alive, he must be exposed and punished. He must not be allowed to go free. The truth matters very much, sir. My father thought so. I am his daughter and I think so. Do you believe the Vogels of the world should be allowed to perpetuate their false myths, if indeed they are myths? If there is more to the story, I wish you'd help me. For my father's sake. He was a good man who—"

"Yes, he was a good man," Dr. Thiel assented. "I found him most charming. But he was a reckless man, and perhaps he paid for it." He hesitated. "Well, now, perhaps I am a reckless man, too. Maybe I can see you for just a little while. If we meet quietly, and no publicity this time."

"None. I shall be a mouse, I promise you."

"Very well. You have my address. I have an hour before dinner. Can you come over immediately?"

"Immediately."

E
mily sat forward on what was the single chair in the small dental laboratory located in the business wing of Dr. Thiel's spacious two-story brick house set back from a wide boulevard called Heerstrasse, west of the river Havel and about twenty-five minutes by taxi from the Kempinski hotel. Dr. Max Thiel sat across from her, perched on a high white stool, one elbow on the Formica counter behind him.

He was friendly and courteous from the moment of her entrance. He was a tall, stooped man, heron-like, with fine gray hair combed sideways, alert blue eyes behind gold-rimmed spectacles, a long horsy face. He wore a dark summer suit, white shirt, plain navy tie pressed against a starched collar. She judged him to be in his eighties.

After showing her into his laboratory, he had disappeared and returned bringing a tray holding two cups of tea and a plate of cookies sent by his wife, who had not appeared.

He had lifted him-self onto the stool, noisily sipped at his cup of tea, and finally set the cup aside on the counter before speaking.

"So, Miss Ashcroft, we are here. Did your father tell you anything of our meeting a few weeks ago?"

"Nothing, except that whatever you told him excited him, and encouraged him to arrange for an excavation. He indicated that there was too much to go into on the phone, and that he would tell me about it when he returned to Oxford. So I know nothing of what happened between you. Only that it was of great importance."

"Now you shall know," said Dr. Thiel.

She leaned toward him with anticipation.

"You understand, of course, that the Soviets were the only ones to investigate Adolf Hitler's supposed death and burial."

"Yes, we have the records concerning his autopsy on file at Oxford. I have not reviewed them recently. I was going to study them when I reached the concluding chapter of the Hitler biography."

"To make the best use of our time, let me summarize for you the findings of the various Soviet investigators. To begin with, you must realize one vital omission in all the evidence. No one actually saw Hitler kill himself. No one saw Eva Braun kill herself. Not one person ever claimed that. We only know the scenario that the Soviets, as well as British, French, and American interrogators, heard from the Germans in and around the
Führerbunker
in April 1945. We heard the testimony that, with his cause hopeless and the Third Reich crumbling, Hitler planned to kill himself. After that we heard that he and his wife had committed suicide in privacy, had been seen lying dead, had been taken outdoors and put to the torch. But beyond the words of his staff and security guards, there never was any scientific proof that the couple that committed suicide was really Adolf and Eva. To prove a crime, self-inflicted or otherwise, it has generally been the rule of all courts to invoke the need for a
corpus delicti
—the material substance or body of the victim of violence. In this case there were no bodies—no corpses—to examine. The bodies had been hastily cremated, reduced to flaky ashes and charred bones. Without the bodies, how could any investigators be scientifically certain that Hitler and his wife had ended their lives?"

"But there was some material evidence," Emily interjected.

Dr. Thiel nodded. "Some. The Soviet investigators were convinced that Hitler and Eva were dead. But I was not convinced that they had actually died."

Emily's heart leaped at the last words. No wonder her father had been excited. She was becoming excited herself.

Still, she tried to contain her feelings, make one last feeble attempt at playing the devil's advocate. "Dr. Thiel, what you are saying is that Hitler may have survived and got away. If this happened, how could he have escaped? From transcripts I have seen, on this last day when the Soviets were ringing his bunker, he couldn't have got away on foot or by car. Possibly by airplane. But we were told by Hanna Reitsch, the woman pilot who visited him at the eleventh hour, that she herself flew the last available plane, an Arado-96, out of Berlin. Even Oberführer Hans Bauer, Hitler's own pilot, couldn't find a plane when he was ready to escape. He had to break out on foot and was captured and held in Russia until 1955. Besides, there were no German airfields left to take off from. SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny, the commando, testified that there wasn't a single air-port left for the Nazis to use." Emily threw up her hands. "If Hitler survived, how could he have got away?"

Dr. Thiel's answer was simple. "I don't know, Fräulein
 
Ashcroft. That's for you to find out. All I know, feel certain about, is that Hitler did survive his supposed suicide. He was not cremated that fateful day. The Soviets were wrong in their announcement, and I think I can prove it."

Once more, Emily felt a surge of hope and a rush of curiosity. In silence she waited for Dr. Thiel's evidence.

"Let me tell you what the Soviets found, and then I will tell you what I found," continued Dr. Thiel. "On the day before Hitler's supposed death, the Soviet command already inside Berlin organized a small special team of NKVD officers from the Russian Third Assault Army, assisted by a female interpreter named Yelena Rzhevskaya, to find Hitler's whereabouts, to locate Hitler dead or alive. Lieutenant Colonel Ivan Klimenko, a Soviet interrogator, officially led his own team to the
Führerbunker
. It was known by the Russians that this deep
Führerbunker
existed, and that Hitler already had spent one hundred five days inside it. Shortly before Klimenko began his search, other Russians had been directed to the
Führerbunker
, including twelve women doctors from the Red Army Medical Corps and around twenty Soviet officers. They had not been looking for Hitler, only for souvenirs. These booty-hunters confiscated everything from lamps to monogrammed silver-ware to Eva Braun's black satin French brassieres. On May 2, 1945, two days after Hitler's announced demise, Klimenko arrived at the
Führerbunker
and investigated it. By evening he had examined a male body that an-other team had found stuffed into an oak water tank. He ordered it laid out on the floor of a hall in the Old Chancellery next door and tentatively identified it as Hitler's corpse. Nevertheless, two days later, Klimenko returned to the
Führerbunker
. In a bomb crater in the Chancellery garden, Private Ivan Churakov had discovered the remains of a man and a woman. 'Of course,' said Klimenko, 'at first I didn't even think that these might be the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun, since I believed that Hitler's corpse was already in the Chancellery and only needed to be identified. I therefore ordered the corpses to be wrapped in blankets and reburied.' Meanwhile, inside the Chancellery, German officers and diplomats who had known Hitler agreed that the first body, now lying on the hallway floor, was not Hitler. Possibly a double. But not the Führer. Then Klimenko remembered the two bodies he had ordered reburied in the bomb crater three meters from the
Führerbunker
's emergency exit. With a team, in a jeep, Klimenko rushed back to the site. Let me read to you what happened next."