The Execution Read online

  “Try to relax, Werner,” Stauffenberg said. “It’s only an assassination, after all.”

  Haeften’s mouth twitched. His eyes flicked to the handsome brown leather briefcase Stauffenberg held in his lap. “I wish there was another way.”

  Stauffenberg gave an impatient huff. “Caen is in ruins. We hold out pointlessly, dividing our forces into smaller and smaller divisions to cover ground we can’t possibly hold, while the Allies level cities to the ground and call it liberation. To say nothing of the Soviet front, which will be at the gates of Warsaw before the summer is out. No, Werner, there has not been another way for quite some time. The generals, so far, have done nothing. It is time for the colonels to act.”

  “I mean, I wish there was someone else to deliver the … package. If we could only get Rommel to—”

  “Rommel is a lost cause,” Stauffenberg said. “He likes being a hero to the German people too much. If we succeed, then he will magically appear at the forefront of our conspiracy in a puff of smoke. Wait and see.”

  “And if we fail?”

  Stauffenberg ran a finger along the brass buckle that latched the briefcase shut. Where will this little piece of metal end up? he wondered. Embedded in the Führer’s forehead? Himmler’s breastbone?

  He shrugged. “Then he will condemn us, like all the others. Or Hitler, in his madness, will have him shot.”

  The lane brought them out of the shelter of the forest. The bald outcrop where Hitler’s residence was perched came into view. Beyond it, the splendor of Bavaria unfolded in clover fields and rolling hills that galloped toward a low haze in the distance. Haeften downshifted and the staff car shuddered as he nosed down the steep approach to the Berghof.

  Stauffenberg tightened his grip on the briefcase. It had been a simple matter to stay calm in the quiet of the ancient forest, but now they were pulling up to the garage behind the Berghof. He could already see the pair of SS bodyguards from the Reichssicherheitsdienst who would meet him as he stepped out of the car. They were fiercely loyal men who would not hesitate to shoot anyone they suspected threatened their Führer—even if that man was as well regarded as Claus von Stauffenberg.

  Lightly, he ran a finger along the side pocket of the briefcase. Inside were the special pliers that would allow his three working fingers to break the vial of acid inside the fuse, arming the bomb that sat dormant inside the case.

  “Get out of there as fast as you can,” Haeften said.

  “I do not plan to linger,” Stauffenberg said. After he planted the bomb, Haeften would race him back to the airfield, where a plane was waiting to return him to Berlin to coordinate the Valkyrie takeover.

  Eliminating Hitler, Himmler, and whomever else on the high command they should be lucky enough to kill was only the first step. For this reason, it had been decided that Stauffenberg’s survival was essential. There was nobody else who could bring the many threads of the conspiracy together in the aftermath of the assassination.

  The SS must be neutralized and the government turned over to army officers dedicated to making peace with the Allies.

  Haeften brought the car to a halt in the shadow of the Berghof’s rear wing. He got out, gave a German greeting to the SS men, walked briskly around the front of the car, and opened the door for Stauffenberg.

  The colonel stepped out and gave a curt nod to the bodyguard who approached him. “Heil Hitler,” he said with just a hint of dismissiveness. An aristocratic bearing came naturally to Stauffenberg, and he found it useful as he navigated the corridors of Nazi power.

  “Colonel,” the SS officer said, reaching for the briefcase. “Allow me.”

  Stauffenberg tucked the briefcase under his arm. “I can manage, thank you.”

  His self-sufficiency was not out of the ordinary. In North Africa, after the American P-40 had strafed the column of vehicles carrying him, resulting in the wounds that would take his hand, two of his fingers, and his eye, Stauffenberg had refused pain-killing drugs as the surgeons labored to save his life.

  Now he could barely remember what he did with all ten fingers when he’d had them, anyway. What good was a pinkie?

  He followed the SS officer into the residence. The hall was dimly lit, and the row of small windows did little more than drag the afternoon’s gloom inside.

  The briefcase seemed to grow heavier with every step. He wondered, not for the first time, if a time bomb was a coward’s weapon. During this long, infernal summer of 1944, he had often dreamed of these horrid conferences, his dream self sitting at the long table and stewing in quiet rage, barely listening as lackeys like Field Marshal Keitel indulged the Führer’s mad whims, and the petty, childish fury that had led to the deaths of so many millions.

  Forbidding the Sixth Army to surrender at Stalingrad, even after all hope was lost.

  Sending V-1 rockets screaming into London and assuring the German public that the scattered attacks would bring the Allies to their knees.

  These dreams always unfolded the same way: Stauffenberg jumped to his feet, drew a hidden pistol, and put two bullets into the Führer’s brain at point-blank range.

  These dreams always ended the same way, too: The SS bodyguard emptied his Luger into Stauffenberg’s torso. At the moment of his death, his eyes would snap open in the dark and he would sit up, breathing so hard that his wife, Nina, would awaken from her own slumber to lay a comforting hand on him.

  Nina …

  The children …

  “Sir?” The voice of the SS bodyguard shook him from his reverie. Focus, Claus! He must keep his wits about him.

  “Yes?”

  They turned down a narrow hallway lined with lurid paintings depicting events in Hitler’s favorite opera: Wagner’s Ring Cycle. There was Wotan, king of the gods, with his long white beard and wooden staff. The smell of savory vegetable stew drifted down the corridor. Hitler, Stauffenberg knew, was a vegetarian.

  “I said I put in a request to be rotated to the Normandy front,” the SS man said.

  “Did you?” Stauffenberg asked dryly.

  “I want to kill as many Tommies as I can. My sister died in Hamburg.”

  “I’m sorry,” Stauffenberg said.

  They passed a portrait of Wotan’s daughter, Brünnhilde the Valkyrie, brandishing a silver sword.

  Stauffenberg allowed himself a tiny smile. Valkyrie, give me strength …

  “And the Americans and the Canadians,” Stauffenberg said, “will you kill them, too?”

  “All of them,” the SS man said.

  “I hope you get your chance,” he said, thinking, Very soon you will be reunited with your sister.

  Stauffenberg recalled the labyrinth of corridors from his last visit to the Berghof. One more left turn, and then he would inform the SS officer that he needed to visit the washroom before stepping into the briefing room for an audience with the Nazi high command. It would not do for an officer of his stature to arrive looking travel-weary and disheveled. In the privacy of the washroom stall, he would use his special set of pliers to crimp the fuse and clip the glass vial, setting the acid free to eat through the detonator. Then he would walk into the meeting, find a way to place the briefcase as close to the Führer and Himmler as possible, excuse himself to make an emergency call to Berlin, and hurry out of the Berghof and into Haeften’s waiting car. God willing, they would be through the perimeter checkpoint before the bomb exploded.

  He had to make sure his timing was perfect.

  “I’m afraid I’m running a bit late,” Stauffenberg said. “Tell me—has everyone arrived?”

  “Everyone but Reichsführer Himmler,” the SS man said.

  Stauffenberg’s heart quickened. He swallowed his surprise. “Oh? Airplane delay?”

  “I only know what they tell me, which isn’t much, but I believe he’s held up indefinitely in Berlin.”

  They took a left. The washroom door was twenty paces away. It was now or never.

  Stauffenberg cursed silently. If the Operation Valk
yrie plotters had had half the luck of these damned Nazis, the war would have been over in 1943.

  Ten paces.

  He already knew that Hermann Göring wasn’t in attendance. He could still assassinate the Führer himself, but he had been counting on, at the very least, taking out Hitler’s second-in-command, Himmler.

  To kill Hitler, but leave both Himmler and Göring alive?

  No. It was not enough. It left too many powerful Nazis alive and in a position to quickly work against the army’s takeover.

  With a heavy heart, he let the SS bodyguard lead him past the washroom to the windowless chamber. As he opened the door, Adolf Hitler looked up from a huge map of the Normandy front. The Führer looked haggard and exhausted. When he stepped forward to greet Stauffenberg, he dragged his left leg.

  Stauffenberg composed himself. He would have to sit calmly in a two-hour meeting in this stifling room with a dormant bomb at his feet.

  He would have to give a presentation on the state of the Reserve Army, for which he had barely prepared.

  All the while, poor Haeften would have to wait outside, wondering what had gone wrong.

  His fellow plotters manning the phones back at the Reserve Army headquarters in the Bendlerblock would be waiting for word of the explosion. His friends and coconspirators General Beck in Berlin, Henning von Tresckow in Russia, and Karl Heinrich von Stülpnagel in Paris were all waiting to issue commands to neutralize the SS.

  He thought of the brave resistance fighters holed up in safe houses in Berlin, wondering if all their efforts had been fruitless, waiting by the radio to hear news of the Führer’s demise.

  Max’s hands were sticky with pokeweed berry juice. He sat on his bedroom floor alongside Gerta and Kat, mashing the bright red berries into a small bowl, mixing them up into a crimson slurry. A hardy plant, the pokeweed grew wild in the backyard, and though its berries were inedible—poisonous, Mutti warned—the Red Dragons had found a way to put them to use.

  Kat was busy tearing a piece of butcher paper into small squares. On each square, Max had drawn a simple logo: a dragon with pointy teeth and majestic wings. Kat handed him one of the dragons. Max dipped a finger into the bowl and smeared some of the berry paste across the dragon’s belly. He colored in the lines as best he could, then set the paper aside to dry and moved on to the next one.

  The Nazi war hero trading cards had given Gerta the idea that the Red Dragons needed a calling card of their own. They wanted the Hitler Youth to believe that a well-organized resistance group was responsible for their troubles.

  Troubles that were set to begin tonight.

  “Remember Kristallnacht?” Kat said.

  The night of the broken glass. Max had been six years old in November of 1938, as the Nazis and their sympathizers rampaged through the streets of Berlin, smashing the windows of Jewish-owned shops, vandalizing synagogues with sledgehammers, and murdering Jewish citizens while the police looked the other way.

  At the time, the violence and the damage had seemed unreal to Max. He couldn’t imagine the years of Nazi horrors to follow, full of devastation that would make broken glass and angry mobs seem almost quaint by comparison.

  “Of course I do,” he said, mashing red paste into the third dragon.

  “Do you think Heinrich and his friends remember?” she asked slyly.

  “Maybe they need a reminder,” Gerta said.

  As the girls plotted, Max finished smearing berry juice on the dragons. Then he went to the tiny washroom at the end of the hall to rinse the juice off his hands. As he did, Max paused, listening. Mutti and Papa were downstairs, flipping through newspapers and drinking tea.

  His parents’ bedroom was just across from the washroom. Max could see the door was ajar.

  With a deep breath, he slipped inside. The curtains were closed but it was a bright afternoon. There was enough light to make out the neatly made bed, the small bureau with its cracked mirror, and the night table cluttered with books and papers.

  Max went to the bureau and opened the top drawer. There were two pairs of trousers and several shirts, perfectly folded. He closed the top drawer and opened the next one down. It was full of socks and undergarments. Gingerly, he poked around. Finding nothing, he closed that drawer and opened the bottom one. It was completely empty. He went to the nightstand and pulled open its single, small drawer.

  There was the knife, sheathed in a sturdy black leather scabbard. Four metal rings protruded from the hilt, perfectly spaced to fit four fingers. Knuckle duster, Max thought—like the brass version that Lady Danger hid inside her purse on Hornet and Wasp. His father’s knife was two weapons in one.

  Carefully, he brushed a finger along the hilt. The metal was cool to the touch. The desire to heft it, test its weight and feel it in the palm of his hand, warred with the desire to close the drawer and leave the room.

  He stood there for a moment, very quiet, listening. His parents were still downstairs. Gerta and Kat were talking quietly in his bedroom. Suddenly, without thinking, he found that he was lifting the knife out of the drawer. Keeping the blade sheathed, he slid his fingers through the rings and gripped the hilt. It was heavier than it looked. A little big for his hand, but not by much. Carefully, he began to pull the blade from its scabbard. Each side was honed to a fine edge.

  The blade was halfway exposed when reality caught up with him and he thought: I am holding a knife in Papa and Mutti’s room.

  He set the knife gently into the drawer and slid it shut.

  As he left the room, he vowed that he would never touch the knife again. He just wanted to know where Papa kept it. That was all.

  Stargader Strasse was thoroughly blacked out. Not a single window leaked light, and the dabs of phosphorescent paint that marked the curb looked like they hadn’t been refreshed in months.

  Despite the faint breeze that stirred the air, it felt as if the day’s trapped heat was radiating off the pavement. Max was struggling to keep up with the girls. He had done his share of sneaking around last winter, but Kat moved like a huntress on the prowl, melting into the darkness between the row houses and the spindly trees that lined the sidewalks. The spire of the Gethsemane Church loomed at the end of the block, a needle in the fabric of the night sky.

  Suddenly, Kat stopped. “There’s the bakery,” she said, pointing to a shop in the center of the next block, where the taller row houses gave way to a low-slung commercial strip. The white paint on its sign advertising FRESH BAKED BREAD was just barely visible. “And there’s number eleven, right next to it.”

  The Midnight Hunters’ “hunting lodge” looked, to Max, like any other nondescript building on the block. One door, two ground-floor windows, two second-floor windows. Heinrich’s father the SS Obersturmführer probably “appropriated” the building from a Jewish shop owner and gave it to his proud Nazi son.

  “Okay,” Max whispered. “Now we know where it is.”

  Tonight’s mission was reconnaissance. They had planned to scope out the street, get a sense of the area, and figure out what kind of tools they would need to properly vandalize the Midnight Hunters’ headquarters.

  Broken glass was only going to be the beginning.

  “I want to get closer,” Kat said. Without waiting to see if Max and Gerta were following her, she hurried across the street toward number eleven.

  Max grabbed his sister’s sleeve. “I know where this is going.”

  “Come on,” Gerta said. “Kat’s just … being Kat.”

  Reluctantly, Max followed Gerta across the empty street. He could just barely make out Kat’s dark figure stooping over to examine something on the ground in front of number eleven.

  “Oh no,” he muttered as they caught up with her. She was sifting through a pile of refuse that had collected against the curb. She straightened up triumphantly, holding a brick in her right hand.

  “It must have come loose from the sidewalk,” she whispered. Quickly, she reached into her pocket and pulled out one of the Red Dra
gon logo cards, along with a length of twine. With deft movements, she tied the card to the brick and finished with a little bow, like she was wrapping a gift.

  “Kat,” Max said, glancing up and down the street. “I thought we agreed that we were still in the planning stage.”

  “I am planning.” She paused for a moment. “And now I’m doing.”

  With that, she launched the brick toward one of the ground-floor windows of eleven Stargader Strasse.

  The noise was terrific—a burst of shattered glass, then a loud thunk as the brick struck something hard inside the hunting lodge. Almost immediately, lights blinked on behind closed curtains in row houses up and down the block.

  The windows in the hunting lodge stayed dark. The boys were probably out on patrol.

  “Time to go,” Max said.

  “One second.” Gerta knelt down, dug through the refuse pile, and came up with a small stone. She reached back and rocketed the stone through the window, widening the hole made by the brick.

  Max hesitated. Then he decided that he had to know what it felt like. He reached down and picked through the pile of food scraps and old newspapers until his hand closed around something smooth and hard.

  “A beer stein,” he said. The oversized mug was made of porcelain, cracked in two places, with a hinged copper lid. He let it fly. A sudden lightness came over him, a feeling of relief similar to when he came back to reality after one of his episodes. It might not be much—a single broken window—but for the first time since they’d gone into hiding, Max felt like a member of the Becker Circle once again.

  This is for you, Frau Becker, he thought.

  Already weakened by the brick and the stone, the entire window shattered and fell away, leaving a few pointy shards like jagged, irregular teeth around the frame.

  Down the block, a door slammed, and the sound of hurried footsteps came pattering up the sidewalk.

  Kat reached into her pocket and scattered a few more Red Dragon cards in front of the hunting lodge, then turned and sprinted across the street.

  “You!” It was a man’s voice, loud and commanding, coming out of the darkness. “Stop!”