Case white, p.24
Case White, page 24
“There – over there!” hoarse cries erupt through the door. “He’s in the corner! He’s here for me! Don’t let him touch me!”
At last Dr. Morrell is reached in Berlin. Instructions are issued. The terrified garbling ceases. Hearts pounding, the staff sit up the remaining night through, and in the morning the Führer leaves for Berlin seemingly refreshed and eager to go about his mission.
“I follow destiny with the confidence of a sleepwalker,” he says.
Late that day Krantz is summoned to the nearly finished Chancellery in Berlin. It is the last time he will see the monument unscathed by bombs, but now he strides slowly along the great gallery guarded by SS as still as statues. Fritz Ender was right. Pity the ambassadors who have to walk it on the way to face the Führer. Pity Josef Krantz.
Escorted into Hitler’s unheated office, the door booms shut and there he is, alone with the legend in the gloom. Expect the unexpected from the Führer, he has been told, but nobody mentioned the uncanny gray-blue eyes, or the fact that they will stand there without speaking for at least a decade, exhaling plumes of frosty air like a couple of stallions. The plumes are as blue as Hitler’s eyes in the faintly illuminated room. And they are apt little betrayals of each man’s inner state – in the Führer’s case, twin streams of stable respiration; in Krantz’s own, a flutter of cosmic steam, eddied, ragged. To top it off, the massive desk behind which Hitler stands is inlaid with what looks to be a fallen cross but gradually resolves itself into a half unsheathed sword.
And then the Führer’s voice touches the room, seeming to try out its acoustics, slowly at first, telling Krantz how discreet he has been in the past, how successful in the present, how important to the future. The voice picks up speed from surface to surface, listing Krantz’s skills like a soccer player’s statistics. Now the stream of words flows in excited bursts, now it soars in smooth arcs round the walls. And finally the voice returns to Hitler, becoming harsh, broken. Jagged sentences stab at world realities. And again it builds, but this time there are no ventriloquist tricks. The Führer is the absolute centrality. His words come out like arrows.
There follows a full half hour of histrionics and magnetism. The pale column of a face is suffused with vigor. Slashing hands cleave empires and destinies out of the air with trembling ecstasy. Truths and magic are revealed in bits and pieces, then upgorged like lava – the cyclical nature of civilization … an ultra-race in remission … Germany the plain, Hitler the gateway to return … reservoirs of power in the form of biological cells buried in the earth … a site that must be excavated at all costs.
A site for Josef Krantz to excavate. Because he understands ancient structures and archaeology and the Hel peninsula near Niski Kosciol. Because that is where the site is. On the coast of Poland. Beneath a glacial moraine. There he will uncover that reservoir which the survivors of the White Isle of Hyperborea have left. The White Isle.
Josef Krantz will be one of the few who understand the significance of the code name for the invasion of Poland: Case White.
Later that evening, while passing through a crowd, an incident happens that greatly disturbs the Führer. A woman admirer grasps him by the arm and says: “My Führer, do not touch black magic. The white is still open to you. If you accept the quick successes, your destiny will be dominated and held to this earth.”
That night, spent in Berlin, Dr. Morrell is again summoned to chase away a nightmare.
5
“Did you accept?”
Listening to Fritz Ender in the doorway of his apartment, Krantz has a sinking feeling. Did he really have a choice? The Reich made graduated assumptions about his reliability because he has never protested above a whisper. Now he knows too much to refuse. Fritz understands that. Fritz wants him to have accepted. Doesn’t he?
“You accepted,” Fritz concludes, closing the door behind him.
“I’m going to Prenzlau when they set up the team. In about a month. Hitler was vague about that. Political unknowns. It’s pretty clear, Poland is on the block.”
“There will be provocations.”
“Whose?”
Fritz drops into a chair. “Stalin has designs on Poland, too. If she fell into our hands, it would amount to protective custody.”
“You don’t really believe that, Fritz. She’s more like a piece of meat suspended between snapping dogs.”
“Ah, Josef, I worried less about you when you were politically innocent.”
“I’m still politically innocent.”
“Good.” Himmler’s unlikely adjutant says it twice without feeling. “That’s your armor. Stay out of political conversations at Prenzlau. Your candor is like a dormant disease. It flares up now and then.”
Suddenly the clock and the radiator and the elephantine beat of a Bavarian concert coming from a distant radio are very loud, and Ender shrugs ponderously for no reason at all beneath his uniform. The SS black tunic seems to wear him, as usual. More and more it makes him look convalescent, as if he has lost weight, or energy, a precise and theoretical man drowning in waves of raw reality.
“You know Heydrich disapproves of you,” he says.
“I lie awake nights.”
Fritz’s smooth face seems to thicken with the effort of communicating. “You may not know that the Spear was among the Hapsburg treasures transferred to Nuremberg last month. Himmler is angry that it didn’t go to Wewelsburg. Cooperation between his office and the Führer’s is at low ebb. He will listen to Heydrich.”
“Because I’m not a member of the Party?”
“That’s a start.”
“Hitler said it was of ‘no consequence’ to me yesterday. I brought it up. I told him I wasn’t political and I wasn’t hypocritical. I said I had no plans to join the Party. He said what you once said to me, Fritz. That Leni Riefenstahl had said the same thing to him. He said it was of no consequence, that the important thing is that I’m German and want to serve the Fatherland.”
Ender seems to drown a little more. “It may soon be impossible to stand outside the Party,” he murmurs. “You should prepare for that. Prepare for everything …”
“Someday,” Krantz says, “you’ll be given the honor of announcing the end of the world.”
“You’re going to get more than dirt on your hands digging in Poland, Josef.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you didn’t like political prisoners building your castle, and you didn’t like being German on ‘crystal night,’ how in the name of God are you going to function in occupied territory?” Following a thoughtful pause, Ender goes back to murmuring. “You’re like me, Josef. You have your microcosm of things, and you don’t have the wisdom or the foresight or the heart to deal expeditiously with people.”
“I won’t have to deal with people.”
“You didn’t have to at Wewelsburg. But it bothered you. You came close to disaster with Heydrich, whether you knew it or not. Himmler was your guardian angel.”
“That was different. I’m different.”
“Yes, now Hitler is your guardian angel.”
“He told me what I had to do. If it means some greater good too far down the road for me to see, that’s fine. I’ll take his word for it. I’m tougher now. What the hell, I’ve been asked to head an archaeological expedition, that’s all. Why are we arguing about it? You’re the one who’s been convincing me it’s all for the best.”
“I believe what I’ve been trying to do is convince you that it’s all real,” Fritz says carefully, and Krantz senses that the little adjutant is trying to clarify his own thoughts. Outside, the beat of the Bavarian band becomes leaden as Ender continues: “Of course it’s for the best. We can’t all see it, though … some greater good, like you said. But we have to try. We … have to understand our leaders. They’re the ones who can see it, and if we understand their motives, if we … trust their intentions, why, then we can be sure it’s all for the best, because … it means such a change in everything, I mean a whole new world order – my God! –everything. You have no idea what’s coming, Josef. Really. Total change. Everything. We can understand that, Josef. We have to understand that.”
The fascinating vehicle of inner Fritz completely distracts Krantz. A still life is in motion. He peers hard through the barrel of a microscope at the muddle of emerging self – Fritz Ender in vitro.
But the flow of truth is cut off with a little cough. The known timbre returns to Ender’s voice and the SS penguin reaggregates. He issues an invitation that Krantz barely hears.
Yes, he would like to see more of the Reich’s architecture, Krantz gets out tardily. Obersalzberg? No, he has never seen Hitler’s Berghof. Or his Eagle’s Eyrie – the amazing retreat Bormann has set atop the Kehlstein for the Führer, who calls it “Barbarossa.” Tomorrow? Yes. Tomorrow.
They travel to Munich by train and there rent a car for Berchtesgaden near the Austrian border. Ender, it turns out, is one of those enigmas of the open road: a soft, retiring personality who drives like a Valkyrie in a fiery chariot. He aims the car with apparent vagueness toward the middle of the road, allowing it to drift all the way to either shoulder before making corrections. Speed is irrelevant. Motion is motion, and he makes no distinction beyond the abiding faith that if he pushes the brake, the car will stop. Eventually.
“Bormann is an ant!” Fritz shouts above the roar. “He’s raped Obersalzberg. A berghof here, a hotel for Hitler’s visitors there – all at the cost of the loveliest country you’ve ever seen. He’s put a fence around the whole mountain. Two fences! The outer one is fifteen kilometers long. And everything inside is paved. Even the forest paths. Bormann is a blind, bulldozing ant!”
Just out of Munich they sideswipe a horse and cart. Krantz hasn’t been this thrilled since the airplane ride in the Junkers to Wewelsburg. Arms outspread, he braces himself at the juncture of door and seat, casting grave looks from the onrushing road to freewheeling Fritz.
The topic of Bormann’s rape is much too stimulating, he perceives. He tries to introduce banalities about the weather, his favorite puddings and some hardy winter foliage he would like to identify if only it wasn’t blurring by so fast. If only it wasn’t blurring by so fast, is repeated. But Ender speeds on as if the matter is entirely out of his control, and Krantz worries that it is.
On the outskirts of Berchtesgaden they reach the foot of the Obersalzberg and take a turn, literally for the worse, up a road more suited to half-tracks. A few farmhouses are visible and a church and, finally, clusters of barracks for construction workers.
“Ant hill!” Ender disdains, gesturing to the plethora of building sites.
It starts to snow. The little overhead wipers on the windscreen slash quadrants in gray mush.
And now, quite oblivious to his passenger’s alarm, Fritz begins to describe a history of treachery for the network of roads. Trucks loaded with building materials have gone over precipices, brakes have failed. The eight kilometers-plus route from the Berghof to the nearly two thousand meter high Kehlstein peak where Eagle’s Eyrie perches is especially tricky. It cost nearly thirty million Reichsmarks (that Bormann!), so difficult was it to build.
“If you think Himmler was a stern taskmaster at Wewelsburg, you should see Bormann dealing with private contractors,” Fritz recounts, “docking pay, suspending ration cards. He actually jailed a couple of them!”
On that indignant note, they veer perilously close to a sheer drop of some sixty meters. Krantz, rising half a head taller, experiences a premonition of his impact into the grandeur of the valley.
“Fritz …”
“Don’t worry, Josef. I know these roads. If I do a little circling, it’s to avoid the checkpoints. I’ll tell the guards at the tunnel you’re just here as one of our architects getting background on the Führer’s tastes.”
But that is why they are here, isn’t it?
The snow ceases as abruptly as it began. Dull sunlight splashes down the face of the mountain. Fritz points out several well-hidden machine gun nests and talks of the elaborate smoke machine that can actually obscure the crest of the Kehlstein and Eagle’s Eyrie from air reconnaissance.
Reconnaissance? What is the Führer expecting? This island in the sky is surely quite useless. What could ever penetrate the Reich here in the Fatherland?
But Fritz Ender goes on about the incredible defenses of the place and of how a Troop Carrier plane practiced snatching a glider off the peak with slow passes and an elastic towline. Modifications made after two lives were lost now insure the ultimate escape plan, should the Führer require it.
Topping the next crest, they are suddenly struck by a burning apparition in the setting sun. They have reached a parking lot blasted out of the rock of the Kehlstein and the glare arises from two massive bronze doors in the face of the peak. SS sentries, their machine pistols at the ready, instantly flank the car.
“Stay put,” says Ender.
The little adjutant maneuvers into the back seat with surprising agility as one of the SS leans his weapon against the dashboard and slides behind the wheel. No detectable signal is given, but the bronze doors swing open on a high domed tunnel with two lanes receding into the Kehlstein. Krantz is awed. The surreal magnitude of the thing in such a resistant setting!
“No other cars, Kurt?” asks Ender.
“Just the cook and staff up there,” replies the sentry, slowly accelerating into the mountain. “Goebbels sent up a special wine for later.”
“Mistress,” Ender explains, and Krantz receives an icy appraisal from the SS driver.
The point of the tunnel’s extinction broadens into a circular room and another pair of bronze doors, these being merely huge.
Ender regards Krantz keenly as they step from the car, but again his words are vapid, under-colored: “There are poison gas jets the length of the tunnel and in here.”
Here? The second set of bronze doors open on a luxurious square room with walls of polished copper, a carpet, phone, mirrors, upholstered furniture and benches. Ender follows Krantz inside where they settle into overstuffed leather chairs as the doors close.
“Do you know where you are?”
Krantz feels the pressure change in his ears. “We’re moving.”
Ender nods. “It’s very quiet for an elevator. The power comes from Berchtesgaden, with a back-up submarine generator in case there is a failure. Albert Hellmuth, the electrician, is the only one who understands it. He tells an amusing story about Hitler confining him to quarters for drinking, then sending for him when the elevator stopped running. He refused to leave his room until the Führer gave him permission personally, and since they were separated by the elevator, a phone line had to be strung up the Kehlstein, which is mined, to Hellmuth’s quarters. Hitler gave him permission to come out of his room, Hellmuth got the thing going in an hour, and the next day there was a bottle on his bed. Hitler told his generals that if they followed orders as faithfully as Hellmuth, he could take a vacation.”
All this is related without a trace of humor. And as the doors re-open, Ender adds a dreary note. “There are gas masks hidden here and in the Eyrie, in case the poison has to be triggered, though I’ve never been able to find the compartments.”
But Krantz is deaf to the last words as he rises from his leather chair in awe of the biggest fireplace he has ever seen. Circular, glassed-in, bronze-tiled, Roman-pillared, the grate holds what can only be described as a burning tree. This is the Führer’s tearoom, with its round table and thirty chairs surrounded by Cararic and Untersberg marble walls and encircling bay windows.
The panorama drops down snow-veined mountains to textured valleys and a river and, on one side, an abrupt rock face that looks molten in the eerie play of sunset. Caught between these final rays and a deep violet twilight, the snowstorm they have just fled seems to hang suspended in a vast ocean of air.
Krantz laughs in boyish astonishment, but when he turns, Fritz is standing in the same spot, the peculiar deadness still in his eyes.
“We can’t stay long,” the little adjutant says and guides Krantz through the various adjoining rooms, all the while narrating facts about the stone-lined walls inset with panels of pine and elm.
And suddenly they are standing at a descending flight of steps. Slowly, almost surreptitiously, Ender leads him down to a lower chamber where the tearoom’s enormous fireplace cannot reach and a deep chill prevails. The mechanical detailing resumes – background of the construction engineer, Fritz Todt – but this time Krantz interrupts to ask why it is so cold. The look Ender gives him is so utterly sterile that when it rises above his head and locks on the wall behind him, Krantz is compelled to turn around.
And there, springing vividly off the surface, are the most unbelievable obscenities he has ever seen or imagined. Fantastic paintings of women in detailed perversions with snakes, horrendous sodomies, mutilations, excremental defilements, torture sadism – Krantz is stupefied. And all the while, Fritz continues explaining in a sucked dry voice how Hitler’s workrooms are kept ten degrees colder than normal, that the Führer has decreed eleven degrees Celsius to be his optimum working temperature.
Hitler in the frosted gloom of his new Chancellery bursts upon Krantz’s memory, but the voice-over is Ender’s: We have to understand our leaders … if we understand their motives … if we trust their intentions … you have no idea what’s coming, Josef.…
They drive back in silence, and the hairpin descent leaves the young architect indifferent this time. Is it possible that the particular dislocation of morality he saw at a séance on Mehring Damm eighteen years ago now guides an empire? What has he gotten himself into?
What did Father Ledochowski say that long-ago winter evening? “… sexual perversion is the heart of black magic, the evoking of will, the subjugation of nature.”
