The Man Who Started the War by Günter Peis

Author:Günter Peis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Published: 2016-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8—Venlo

The telephone rang shrilly. Alfred groped for the bedside light, pressed the switch and groaned. The little black travelling clock said twenty to four. He picked up the receiver, dropped it, swore, and grunted a hello.

“Naujocks, get down here right away. I’ve just had Himmler on the line. It’s urgent.” The phone clicked, and he put the dead instrument back with a feeling of annoyance.

Schellenberg. Had it been anyone else he wouldn’t have minded so much. But that namby-pamby, pasty-faced little man was just the sort to ring you up in the middle of the night for a joke, “keep you on the qui vive, you know, old boy.” He wouldn’t really, he supposed, but he gave you the impression he would.

Schellenberg during his early years in the Party served the SD as an Intelligence agent, writing reports about his fellow-students. He himself studied a little of everything—mainly languages, history and a little medicine. Later he changed over to law. Now, in 1939, he was one of the “scientific boys” of the SD—a half-educated man of 29 among other pompous Party members. Later he was to become chief of combined Intelligence services.

Sticking one leg into the cold air, Alfred wished for the hundredth time that he hadn’t come on this job. It was too damned complicated, and it all seemed a bit pointless anyway. But that was the trouble with Schellenberg. The more complicated and devious the scheme, the more it appealed to him, and the less it appealed to Alfred. Others dreamed up the ideas; Alfred had to do the work.

He dressed untidily, and splashed cold water on his face. Two minutes later he was tapping at the door of ex-student Schellenberg on the floor below, and walked in to find the man in bed. It was unfair, and Alfred looked as if he thought it was.

Schellenberg, in scarlet silk pyjamas, was sitting up, smoking. He slid a gold case across the glass-topped bed-table, and Alfred took a cigarette.

“Sorry to bring you down, but Himmler has just called from the Führer’s special train. It seems there was an assassination attempt in Munich.” He spoke quite calmly, but Alfred could see that he was concealing an inward excitement. “It alters our plans quite a lot. We now have to arrest those two tomorrow and take them to Berlin. Hitler thinks they had something to do with it.”

Alfred raised his eyebrows. “My God! What was it? Bomb, gun or dagger?”

“Bomb. It exploded in the beer cellar—but fortunately sometime after he had left. I haven’t had much of a report, but there are quite a few casualties. It was a hell of a bang, apparently; it exploded within a few feet of where the Führer had been standing.”

Last year, when reading a newspaper report of the speech by Hitler in the cellar where the Nazi Party had been born in 1923, it had struck Alfred that it was a dangerous thing to do, to go to the same place, every year, on the same date and at the same time.

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