There was no doubt in Callum Jardine’s mind that Hitler had to be stopped and the sooner the better. He had spent too much time in the country to harbour any illusions about the intentions of the so-called Fuhrer of the German Reich, and had seen at first hand the effect of a totalitarian police state on the behaviour of the mass of its citizenry.
Even in a big sprawling city like Hamburg, home to millions, the presence of the state was all-pervasive, with formal political opposition neutered in every aspect of what had once constituted normal life. The communists had been rounded up or fled in the first year of Hitler’s rule, the social democrats or anyone mildly left of centre cowed into silence by public beatings or selective incarceration in numerous concentration camps.
In the camps they were subjected to a brutal political re-education, a fate the Nazis were equally willing to hand out to any member of a former right-wing party as well if they did not put enough verve into their ‘ Heil Hitlers ’ or dig deep enough into their meagre wages to support that fraud upon the public called Winterhilfe.
Such overbearing weight did not even begin to account for what had happened to Jews, Gypsies, the mentally retarded and those considered sexually deviant. Conformity was all, strikes were banned, unions suppressed and all other organisations, from workers to Boy Scouts, subsumed into things like the Nazi-created German Labour Front or the Hitler Youth.
When it came to the rights of the citizen they were quite simply whatever Adolf Hitler or one of his satraps decided they would allow. No one openly complained and even in private it was wise to be careful for there were those all around at work, and even in your own street or tenement, just looking for someone to denounce to prove their own loyalty to the party and the Fuhrer.
Until the beginning of the year the structures of the German army had been intact, but even they were now subject to Hitler’s will. He had removed Blomberg, the Minister of War, somehow got rid of the head of the army, von Fritsch, and appointed himself Supreme Commander. Those running the armed forces were his personal appointees, beholden to him, so now, even for the army to rise up and remove the Nazis would take a lot of nerve.
Every facet of German life was controlled, every organisation, military and civilian, including their own party organs, spied upon; it was claimed half the office walls in the Berlin ministries contained hidden microphones and that officials, for their own safety, even if it was not proven, communicated in writing or whispers to avoid the attention of the Geheime Staatspolizei.
By decree, the Gestapo were not subject to any law; you could be arrested on a whim and just disappear, it being their decision, if they put a bullet in a victim’s brain or tortured them to death, as to what the victim’s family were told. Often nothing was said; at other times a wife, father or mother received an urn of ashes accompanied by the terrifying mantra that their loved ones had died while trying to escape.
Lost in this gloomy introspection Cal had to remind himself that he had managed to live for many months outside the attentions of the state and had, in that time, helped many Jewish families to escape to a safer place, not only with their lives but with the bulk of their portable possessions.
This had been achieved when most Jews wishing to depart Germany were forced to leave with no more than what they could carry in a single suitcase, and that after having paid hefty bribes or transferred valuable property, houses, businesses and works of art to the SS for a pittance.
If there was no underground movement, the German state still possessed an underbelly in the big cities: a black market in scarce goods particularly, the best customers now those with the means to pay, the higher-ranking Nazis and the industrialists and employers who had done so well out of the suppressed workers.
Criminals and those who lived the life of the quasi-legal had a natural survival strategy, particularly in the big commercial and industrial cities where once the Reds and socialists had ruled, places where people still had the guts to make jokes debunking Hitler and his satraps, the most obvious of those being Berlin — no wonder the Fuhrer hated the place.
Cal’s beat had been the Hamburg quarter of St Pauli, a place of hucksters, whorehouses, prostitutes in windows and highly suspect drinking dens dedicated to fleecing their itinerant customers — visiting sailors or provincials come to test out the fleshpots — a district where they also showed a cunning ability to circumvent the endless freedom-limiting decrees.
Was there enough of that commodity in an institution like the armed forces to curb Hitler and his plans for expansion? In many ways, especially in its codes of conduct, it was still the Kaiser’s army — the officer corps hidebound in its traditions, fiercely clinging to its codes of honour and obedience, those hiding, in too many cases, the hypocrisy of professional ambition.
A lot of questions, few definitive answers, but the other nagging uncertainty was naturaclass="underline" should he get involved at all? Though he had been active in many places either fighting, training or supplying weapons, the last four years seemed to have been an ongoing fight against Fascism in its various incarnations, first in Hamburg, then Ethiopia and lastly Spain; this was no exception.
Yet if he lacked one thing it was an ideology; his politics did not go much beyond a hatred of any government dedicated to killing or imprisoning innocents to maintain power, and that included Communism. Peter was not the only person who openly wondered at what triggered his actions; Callum Jardine often asked himself the same question.
Was he a soldier of fortune, an international crusader or out of his mind, nothing more than a psychotic thrill-seeker, never happy unless he was in some place where the bullets were flying or there was order to be circumvented? He had never known the answer and it did not surface now as sleep took over.
What the captain of the freighter called his ‘motor launch’ was a bit less than that — one of his lifeboats fitted with an outboard motor — and since he did not want to re-enter French territorial waters, that meant in excess of a three-mile boat ride in a vessel that seemed designed to ship water over the bows in any kind of sea, and the one on which they were travelling was excessively choppy.
Their destination was the sandy beach on the southern shore of a low-lying peninsula called the Ile d’Oleron, a rocky sandbar jutting out into the Bay of Biscay, which became an island at very high tide. In a country with such a huge and fragmented coastline, the chances of being intercepted by authority were low, while the island was a place to which folk travelled for sea and sunshine, so that strangers excited no comment.
Peter’s small suitcase had been replaced with a sailor’s ditty bag and once on land it was a hot and dusty trek to find first the road which acted as a spine along the island, then wait for an infrequent bus to take them to the mainland and a town big enough to have a railway connection to the regional capital of Angouleme and the main route north.
The journey back to and across Paris to the Calais boat train provided ample time to talk, eat, doze, make a decision and plan; there was no thought of stopping en route, which would have required a hotel and the necessary registration. Bar that, it seemed all the difficulties lay on the opposite side of the Channel.
‘If I’m going to do as you ask, I have to put in place my own plan, because I tell you this, Peter, I will deal only with you and I would ask that you tell no one where I am, what I’m doing and to whom I’m talking.’
‘You can’t do this alone, you need money, papers and the means of keeping in contact as well. What if I seek to come out to help you?’