The Last Alchemist by Robert McParland

Author:Robert McParland [McParland, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-11-21T18:45:00+00:00

16.

THE ALCHEMIST’S NOTEBOOK

My life has become an endless war of memories. I remember how Dr. Brunner approached me one afternoon, when I was all of twenty. He had a forceful and engaging smile, a graying mustache, and a monocle in one eye. “We wish for you to specialize in obstetrics,” he told me. I was obliging. I thought it a privilege to bring life into the world. Some months later, when I heard that I would be stationed in the north, I assumed that meant the clinic at Wernigrode near the Harz Mountains. The children would be born in clinics, I was told. The program was called “the spring of life.” It sounded innocuous and hopeful to my ears.

In the spring of our lives, my brother Franz and I inherited the family business. Franz was given charge of industrial responsibility. I was recruited for something rather unique. To be a doctor was an honor, I had been told. Yet, what came next- an invitation to join the Abwehr intelligence service - was something greater. The Abwehr was involved with counter espionage. It also acted as cover for conspiracy. Abwehr agents could travel and move abroad fairly freely. State secrets were exempt from the Gestapo. So, there was some jealously and conflict with the SS/SD. Sprange Abwehr it was called: “to ward off.” Agents would dress in enemy uniforms. These spies were recruited from officers, lawyers, and in my case, from doctors.

“No one can know this,” Franz told me. “No one, Jonas.”

“I could not keep it from Elise.”

“Does she know of the plan?”

“No.”

“Keep it that way”

What fate or fortune kept Hitler alive through those years? Admiral Canaris and General Oster of the Abwehr surely wanted him dead. They were fatalists, men schooled on Spengler’s Decline and Fall of the West. They had seen the broken remnants of the Great War. They were men who expected the worst from Hitler, men who wished to delay the war Hitler clearly wanted. The generals wanted to preserve Germany, to keep the nation from being embroiled in an escalating conflict with the West. Once lebensraum was obtained in the German speaking territories, that was enough for them. Full-scale conflict with the West was suicidal madness. Hitler, of course, had other things in mind.

The planning of the generals to eliminate Hitler began before the war. It went on into the final year of the war. That was one of the things that my brother Franz insisted must remain a secret. It has long been thought that the clockmaker who tried to assassinate Hitler with a bomb secreted into a column of the Burgerbrau beer hall was acting alone. Yet, others, following the Oster plan, acted in concert. Most well-known was the general’s plot in which a bomb was exploded in a meeting room and Hitler was saved by the leg of a table. But these efforts had a long history and the Abwehr knew of them. Indeed, the Abwehr, with the guidance of General Oster, participated in several plots to assassinate the Fuhrer.

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