My father used to say that the claim of the von Dennims to any Empire of Germans was rather better than that of the Hapsburgs. So it is, if you conveniently ignore —as he did —that our direct descent from the House of Hohenstaufen began with a daughter. However, by 1922, when I was ten, orphaned, and collecting cheese rinds from other people’s garbage cans, the point was of minor importance.
As soon as the inflation which followed the First World War was over and the Austrian Republic securely established, enough was recovered from the utter wreck of the family estate to give me comfort and a good education. I specialized in forestry and ecology. Even as a child I was a keen naturalist — too passionately fond of the gun, of course, but that was the fashion of the time.
In 1935 the government sent me to the United States to study some new forestry techniques and report. I was over there when Hitler marched into Vienna. I did not make any secret of my opinion. Normally that would have been recorded against me; but there were no Nazi spies in the forests of the State of Washington.
Our Canadian colleagues across the border were very friendly, and I used occasionally to meet distinguished visitors from London. It must have been one of those who recommended me as a useful man, but I really do not know through what grapevine I was tested and recruited.
In 1939 I was cut off by the blockade without a chance of returning to Europe till the end of the war. But I did return. I was flown to London secretly and trained for a year. My chief was Colonel Ian Parrow.
At the end of my training I was returned to the United States — there was no evidence of any sort that I had ever left it —and told how to make my way to Vienna across the Pacific to Vladivostok and on by the Trans-Siberian railway. I managed it, arriving in the spring of 1941, just before Hitler’s attack on Russia.
I was not suspect. My story was carefully prepared and unshakable. I had completed a long and difficult journey to fight for Hitler, and I was held up as an example of the penniless aristocrat who had made good. God, the nonsense I had to talk!
The channel through which I reported and received my orders was that friend, now in the Ministry of Justice, to whom I had written. He had influence and was trusted by the Nazis. He suggested that I was just the fellow to train security units for operation in dense forest. Though the German armies in Russia had complete control of the main routes, they were bothered by the infiltration of agents and partisans. They wanted police patrols which could operate and maintain themselves out in the thick country on the flanks.
I knew more about trees themselves than playing Red Indians, but I quickly became an authority. It was worth the trouble. The continual posting of personnel to and away from the depot gave me a very good picture of troop movements, and I could pass on the information through my cell for transmission to London.
Then I myself was given command of a unit; but instead of sending us to the Russian forests — all armies are alike — we were stationed in the Apennines, where a good tree was a rarity.
In Italy there was little I could do beyond letting the organization know I was there. That was a pity, for I had two other patriotic, anti-Nazi Austrians in my command. Our chance came when Italy surrendered. We organized the escape of an entire prisoner-of-war camp — routes, stolen transport and all.
Owing to long boredom, we were careless and came under suspicion. Even so it could only be proved that we had been slack and inefficient. My two collaborators were punished by being drafted to grave-digging, and continued accurate reports of troop movements though they had ceased to move. I, since in a sense I was a policeman, was posted to the Gestapo and soon afterwards to the concentration camp at Buchenwald. It was a studied humiliation of my name. Even Hitler despised the Gestapo.
They may have thought that I would commit suicide. Perhaps I should have done so. Day after day I forced myself to resist the temptation to dig myself in with a machine gun and kill the swine till I was killed. But Ian Parrow’s cold-blooded training counted. I was in charge of records and could read committal orders and abstracts of interrogation. Sometimes the documents showed me what the enemy most wanted to know. It was my duty to get the information out.
Since I was hopelessly out of touch with the Austrian organization, it took me months to reopen some channel of communication. When I did, it was direct to London — usually by secret radio, but surprisingly often by what was practically air mail. Chaos in Germany was beginning, and the night sky was so full of activity that an occasional aircraft could land and take off unnoticed.
As soon as the war was over and the Buchenwald guards arrested, I was spirited away. I was not asked to give evidence at the war trials — partly because I was too valuable to be exposed, partly because Ian understood that I had had enough and that my whole soul was rotted by disgust. It was he who obtained for me British nationality — easily, for there was already a distinguished branch of the Dennims in England which had long since dropped the “von” and the title — and he who arranged a future career for me as soon as I had come out of hospital and could bear human society without washing myself continually.
For nine years I had not seen him.
“My dear Charles!” he exclaimed. “You haven’t changed a bit I And what a good little book that was on the squirrel I Obviously they took you for one of themselves!”
He always said in the old days that I reminded him of some confident squirrel flashing a swift look at the intruder before vanishing into the blackness of trees. My russetty color of hair and skin, I suppose, plus a pointed nose and the angular bones of cheek and jaw. But I cannot see any mischief in my face when I look at it. I am more like a tall, thin, battered monkey than a squirrel.
When we had had a drink together and sung the praises of old friends, I told him the story.
“So it’s obvious that someone who was a prisoner in Buchenwald has waited all these years for his revenge. And I am next on his list.”
“But you can’t be!” he insisted. “You weren’t a jailer. You weren’t involved in any of the brutality and executions. You were a sort of adjutant always in the office. Why you? And why now?”
Why me, I could not answer. Why now rather than long ago was pretty plain. Walter Dickfuss had screamed out some accusation during those three days of torture.
“It’s more likely,” Ian said, “that some crazy ex-Nazi who has just been let out of jail is taking revenge on you for spying on him or Hitler or what-have-you.”
I pointed out that my cover had never been broken. Also I doubted if former enemies ever took revenge on each other when war was long over. It was out of character. They were too tired of it all.
“Yes. I am. Well, we’ll go to Scotland Yard straight away. Somebody there ought to remember who I was. You’ll be guarded as if you were the Prime Minister.”
“So was Hans Weber,” I said.
“But damn it, you shall be!”
I reminded him that no private citizen could be efficiently guarded forever. An assassin ready to wait ten years would be perfectly ready to wait a few months more, taking a look at the setup from time to time to see how careless the victim and the man in the turned-down hat and mackintosh were getting. I wasn’t going to have policemen on my walks, testing my meals, sitting outside the museum. I hated policemen. I’d had enough of them. And I should be executed just the same — not tomorrow or next week, but as soon as we were all convinced that the danger was over.
“Suppose we have your whole story published?” he suggested. “I should think any Sunday paper would jump at it.”