‘You sent the message from Halle?’
‘No. There was only a single line working for ten miles north of Halle -it’s a big junction and the Allied bombers had hit it again and again-the train was rerouted through Leipzig. We opened the sealed orders there.’
‘And?’
‘Our orders were to take the Führer’s personal papers to a salt mine at Merkers in the Thüringer Wald. An infantry regiment stationed at Hersfeld, not far from the mine, would provide us with help and assistance. The sealed orders specified that the papers were to be referred to as “songs”, the military escort as “pianoforte”, the movement of the material to the mine was a Lied mit Klavierbegleitung, song with piano accompaniment.’
‘Curious code names,’ said Stuart.
‘You cannot call such words code,’ said Wever pedantically. ‘They give very little security to a message. Such words are intended only for convenience and brevity. The German word Begleit means escort as well as accompany-the FBB was the Führer Begleit Batallion. It would not require a team of cryptographers to guess what we were doing, always providing they had an Enigma decoder.’
Wever reached into the pocket of his coat and got out a cigarette machine. He dumped a tin of dark tobacco on the table and then a packet of papers. ‘Even so, Breslow was most particular about the security of the messages to Berlin and to the army at Hersfeld.’ Wever pinched some tobacco and rolled it into the machine before feeding a paper into it, licking the gummed edge and rolling it some more. ‘You need two operators to work one of those old Enigmas, three to be really fast. It’s like a typewriter, but the letters light up instead of going onto paper. Breslow helped me with it. He called out the letters as they came up.’ Wever continued rolling the machine as if he had forgotten what he was doing. Then suddenly he clicked it open to release the newly made cigarette. He picked it up and carefully tucked a few loose strands of tobacco back into the open ends. Then he studied it, as if pleased with the result of his handiwork. He lit the cigarette and inhaled gratefully with that very deep breath which marks the tobacco addict. Then he blew smoke and smiled with satisfaction.
‘How far did you get with the train?’ Stuart asked.
‘We couldn’t get beyond Erfurt,’ said Wever. He smoked the cigarette with a furtiveness which suggested that his wife would not have approved of his weakness. ‘A railway bridge was damaged. The engineers said it could not bear the weight of the Führer’s train which was specially constructed with tons of lead in the bogies to give an extra-smooth ride. And there was the weight of all our special equipment and the Flakwagen at front and back. It would have been too much for the buckled girders. Moving it across piecemeal would have meant several hours delay. And there were hospital trains coming back up the line as well as troop trains going westwards. Erfurt was close to the autobahn, so we called Hersfeld-which was also on the autobahn-and asked them to come and get us. What a fiasco!’ Wever got up in order to tap his ash into the stove. ‘We couldn’t reach them by teleprinter, no operators on duty. The Americans were heading directly for Hersfeld and the regiment had moved out. Next we tried telephoning them. Eventually, after a long and acrimonious conversation with a half-witted major who refused to believe that we were engaged on a special mission for the Führer, they sent us two trucks and a platoon of infantry.’ He inhaled and looked at the cigarette again.
‘When they arrived they were more like walking wounded than infantry: old men, kids, cripples and rejects. Even the trucks the major sent us were in such poor mechanical condition that the drivers had to nurse them to keep them going.
‘When we got to the mine at Merkers there was no one ready to accept the papers. It is a bleak and dirty place, the yard was muddy and littered with broken boxes and rubbish. Some of the mess was the outer packing from other treasures which had been put into the mine. There was another truck there when we arrived. It contained Reichsbank Director Dr Frank and a Reichsbank procurist-the official who was in charge of all newly printed paper money. It was Dr Frank who signed for our consignment, and eventually let me go.
‘I wanted to get back to my parents in Berlin. The railway was still working-it was just the heavy trains, transporting big guns and tanks, that could not get through Erfurt. Breslow said he wanted to find the nearest Waffen SS outfit and get back into the fighting. It was probably true, but at the time I suspected that he was merely looking for some way of changing his SS papers and uniform for those of an ordinary army officer before surrendering himself to the Americans, who were getting closer every hour. There was a railway transport officer at Merkers who agreed to give me top-priority orders to rejoin my unit in Berlin. Anything less than a top-priority movement order would expose me to the risk of being given a rifle and sent into action by any military police patrol that stopped me and asked for my papers. There was a delay while I got a photo for the movement order.’
‘But you had top-priority papers from Hitler,’ said Stuart. ‘What could be better than that?’
‘These were dangerous times, Mr Stuart,’ said Wever. ‘The American armies were very close and the Red Army pressing nearer day by day. I would have been a fool to carry any document associating me with the Führer’s immediate entourage. I wanted very ordinary military papers that showed that I was going to the Berlin signals office-no mention of the Reich Chancellery assignment-just a teleprinter specialist returning to special duty. I got hold of the army photographer but by the time the papers were all ready the American soldiers had arrived… that was April 4. I was interrogated by an American military police office but he thought I was part of a military escort provided for the gold from the Reichsbank. It was a perfunctory interrogation and after that I went to a POW cage and eventually to England.’
‘And more interrogations?’
‘Everyone wanted to know about the gold. They kept asking me about the origin of the gold-was it from the Reichsbank, was there any gold still in Berlin, were there shipments of foreign gold? France, Holland and Norway were already asking for the return of the gold that had been taken from them. I knew nothing about any of this, and eventually the interrogators lost interest in me.’
‘And what happened to Hitler’s papers?’
‘They went down into the mine. There were only six boxes of them. I went down into the shaft with Reichsbank Director Frank. He had the keys of a vault which had been built to protect the gold and foreign currencies. It was very light; the low roof of the salt mine had been strung with hundreds of electric light bulbs. Frank warned us that the atmosphere of the salt mine was too dry to be suitable for the long-term storage of archives. He had similarly warned the museum officials who sent valuable documents there. He said that more than six months in the mine could result in permanent damage. Breslow said that he did not expect that they would remain there that long.’
‘I’ve been through the statements, interrogations and reports about the mine, Mr Wever,’ Stuart told him. ‘But I don’t recall anyone named Frank. Certainly there is no record of a Reichsbank director of that name.’
Wever looked into space and nodded. ‘I always suspected that Frank was not his real name.’
‘Why?’
‘Breslow was not the sort of officer who would so readily hand those secret papers to a civilian in return for a scribbled receipt. I believe Breslow had secret orders to make contact with this man who called himself Reichsbank Director Frank. I think Frank was a Sicherheitsdienst official working for Kaltenbrunner so that they could be quite sure where the documents were.’ Wever nodded as if to confirm this idea to himself. ‘And Breslow spent a lot of time with Frank-meetings from which I was excluded.’