‘The Stuka pilot? I remember you talking about him.’
Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘Ernst Hoffman. One of the top tank-busters of the war. Knight’s Grand Cross with oak leaves and swords. He was grounded after being wounded on the Russian front, and was posted as some kind of attache in Berlin. Aunt Heidi said he disappeared like so many others in the final Soviet onslaught, presumed killed.’
‘So why does Heidi want us to meet here now?’
Hiebermeyer paused. ‘I’m not sure. But there was a connection with Himmler, something that dogged Ernst right to the end. Heidi told me that as a boy, he’d seen a newsreel of an Ahnenerbe expedition to Tibet showing biplanes flying over the Himalayas, and had written to Himmler to volunteer as a pilot. After that, Himmler took an undue interest in his Luftwaffe exploits, and arranged his final posting to Berlin, where Ernst was feted as a war hero. Several years before that, it was Himmler who had organized the party where Ernst had first met Heidi. Himmler brought his favourites to Wewelsburg, and maybe Ernst and Heidi came with him. There must be something here she wants us to see.’ He looked at his watch, and stood up. ‘It’s a quarter to eleven. We’d better be on time.’
Fifteen minutes later Jack and Hiebermeyer stood at the entrance to the Obergruppenfuhrersaal, the SS Generals’ Hall, on the ground floor of the north tower of the castle. It was a stark room, devoid of furniture or wall hangings, focusing the eye entirely on the architecture and the pattern in the floor. Surrounding the open central space of the chamber were twelve columns joined by a groin vault, and between them lay deeply recessed apses with tall windows. The daylight coming through the windows illuminated the symbol in the centre of the floor, a green marble Sonnenrad sunwheel with a central axis of gold. Jack knew that this had been the epicentre of Himmler’s vision for Wewelsburg, the place where he had summoned his twelve top SS generals for ideological preparation before Operation Barbarossa in 1941. He heard a low electric hum, and a wheelchair appeared from one of the window niches. Sitting in it was an elegant woman wearing a flowery dress, her white hair done in the fashion of the 1930s. She had a striking face, with high cheekbones and startlingly blue eyes. She waved at Hiebermeyer, who bounded over and kissed her forehead. ‘Heidi,’ he said, holding her hand. ‘ Meine liebe Tante.’
Her bright eyes caught Jack’s and he quickly proffered his hand. ‘Frau Dr Hoffman. Pleased to meet you at last.’
‘Call me Heidi,’ she said in beautifully precise English, with the clipped accent of the 1930s. ‘You must be Jack Howard. It is such a pleasure to meet you. Maurice used to tell me about you when he visited during his school holidays, but by then I’d moved back to Germany and he never did bring you along. I was delighted when Maurice phoned to tell me you would be joining us. Ever since reading your Atlantis book, I’ve wanted to bring you here to show you some symbols. My son Hans sketched them once, but I can’t find his drawings now.’ She took a tissue out of her sleeve and dabbed one eye. Jack saw that her hands were shaking. He glanced across at Hiebermeyer. So that was it. Some symbols. The place was filled with symbols, every kind of device the Nazis had come across, including at least three different runic sequences that Jack could see. Some were genuine transcriptions of medieval runes; others clearly were made up. There were bound to be a few that looked like those they had discovered five years ago in Atlantis. For a moment Jack wondered if he was about to be sucked into the world of fringe archaeology, of so-called evidence collated by Himmler’s Ahnenerbe, picked from disparate sources and then arranged together in an apparently convincing whole. For all of the reality of their discovery in the Black Sea, he knew there would always be those who preferred to inhabit this parallel world, where the dream of Atlantis would remain just beyond reach.
‘Tante Heidi,’ Hiebermeyer said, glancing again at Jack. ‘When did you come here before? When Hans was a boy?’
She put away her tissue. ‘Once, when he was a high-school student, to try to interest him in a mystery. But of course I had been here before, when I first came to this chamber and the vault below and saw what I am going to show you now. Have you told Dr Howard about Ernst?’
‘He knows as much as I know.’
She took a deep breath, shuddering slightly, then composed herself. ‘Himmler brought us here on a celebratory tour after Ernst had been awarded the oak leaves and swords cluster to his Knight’s Cross. We were the perfect image of the Nazi couple, the war hero and his blonde Aryan wife, heavily pregnant. Only it was a charade, of course. We were taken first to this chamber, where Ernst was anointed an honorary knight. I thought Himmler was about to induct him into the SS, which would have been the worst horror for Ernst. Fortunately, Himmler said it was more important for the time being that he remain a shining star of the Luftwaffe.’
‘You always told me he only thought of the men in his squadron, Aunt Heidi,’ Hiebermeyer said quietly. ‘That was where his loyalty lay, and to you and Hans.’
Her eyes filled with tears again, and she wiped them. ‘It seems just like yesterday. I feel as if I could walk out of this wheelchair into the sun of the courtyard, see little Hans and hold Ernst by the hand. They were days of happiness, but it was a time of horror. In truth I cannot go back to them, even in my mind’s eye. When I shut my eyes, I only see again the horrors that I myself witnessed.’
She shuddered again, then held her hands tight on the armrests of the chair. ‘Now, we must go down the stairs, to the vault below.’ She raised herself with a walking stick that had been leaning on her wheelchair. The two men quickly took an arm each, and walked alongside her as she moved slowly to the spiral staircase, where Hiebermeyer led, with Jack taking up the rear. In a few minutes they had reached the bottom. They were in a gloomy beehive-shaped chamber, about eight metres high, positioned directly below the SS Generals’ Room and dug into the bedrock. Heidi pointed up to the vault with her stick. ‘There’s a swastika in the apex, directly below the Sonnenrad sun symbol in the floor above,’ she said. ‘The vault’s based on the shape of a Mycenaean Greek tomb, the so-called Treasury of Atreus at the ancient site of Mycenae. Himmler was obsessed with warrior kings of the ancient past. This vault is really a shrine to Agamemnon, the king of the Greeks who attacked Troy, the hero of another war between West and East.’ She brought down her cane and tapped on a marble slab in the centre of the floor. ‘If you look under this, you’ll see why.’
She sat down abruptly on a wooden bench beside the wall. Jack stared at the floor, but saw nothing in the closely fitted marble slabs to suggest an opening. Hiebermeyer knelt down and put his hand on the slab she had tapped. ‘How do you know anything’s here, Aunt Heidi?’
‘Because Himmler showed it to me. Ernst regarded all of Himmler’s archaeology as occult, and found a ready excuse that day to avoid the tour by volunteering to fly Nazi officials who accompanied us over the site of the castle to see Himmler’s grandiose construction scheme from the air. Himmler brought me down here alone. I never told Ernst what I saw; he would have scoffed at it. Himmler was very proud of this chamber. It was meant to be a kind of holy of holies, and a burial vault for the ashes of the greatest SS heroes. His top SS officers were meant to come and swear allegiance over the object buried below. But only a select few knew what it was.’
‘Is it still here?’
‘You can see where it rested.’ She tapped her stick against the wall behind her, then tapped it again, as if trying the find the right spot. The second tap produced a hollow sound, and where Hiebermeyer had been looking, an octagonal slab of marble about the size of a large dinner plate rose a few inches out of the floor. ‘There,’ she said. ‘I’m probably the only one left who knows how to do that. Even the curators of this place don’t know this is here. Go on, Maurice, pull it out.’