With a Magician's Help, Albert Speer Bugs Out of the Joint

“I’m sorry, colonel,” mumbled Speer.

Colonel von Poser looked away.

The laughter continued in sporadic bursts. Speer kept listening for other sounds, someone yelling, screaming, arguing. But all he heard was the laughing, loud and growing more hysterical, like whatever it was, had them busting their guts. Then suddenly it stopped and everything went quiet. Von Poser looked at Speer. This is it! They heard a lock turning on the steel door. Then it opened and out stepped the young man, only this time he wasn’t smiling or trying to look menacing. He handed them their identification books and gestured them to follow him. “Quickly,” he said.

They followed him down the corridor to another steel door. He took out a key on a long chain. He put a key in the lock, turned it and popped the door open. Dull gray daylight burst in. The young man stuck his head out but then pulled it back in and shut the door.

“Back,” he told them.

They went back up, past their cell, all the way to a place with three steel doors. Choosing the one on the left, he put his hand on the handle and looked at Speer and von Poser. “Just walk through quickly,” he told them in a quiet voice. “Don’t look around, don’t stop. Okay? Let’s go.”

He pushed the door open and quickly led them up another corridor through a small comfortable office with two desks at one side and on the other a low table surrounded by stuffed club chairs where the four men with automatics were sitting slumped over and leaning back, their mouths gaping open, the rest of their faces shot off. There was blood and brains everywhere. Speer did his best not to look.

The young man opened the far door and ushered them through, locking it behind them. They went up another corridor, much wider and lined with shelves and file cabinets. Halfway up, two men were going through an overhead cabinet. The young man turned back and fixed his eyes on Speer and von Poser. “All right,” he whispered. “One, two, three...”

They followed him past the two men who barely acknowledged them when they walked past. The next room was full of people at desks and typewriters and people carrying papers. Some people looked up, but nobody said anything. Twice people acted like they were going to say something. But somehow the young man’s nod quieted them and made them forget they were about to ask something pointed. Speer watched  the young man nod to different people and he guessed he had been somebody back when he was younger. Somebody whose face had been in photo magazines, always smiling, clean, bright-eyed, youthful Aryan laughter.

Who was he?

He took them through a lobby, past desks and rows of chairs and rifles and Party militiamen in brown coats with holster harnesses and black ammunition bandoliers strapped from their shoulders. He waved to a couple of burley men in feldgrau coats and constable’s hats. “Next time I’ll bring you some photographs,” he said like it would probably never happen. They nodded back like they didn’t really believe it either but looked forward to it just the same.

Outside, they went over to where Speer’s Mercedes had been left. The young man opened the back door and let them get in. Then he shut the back door, opened the front and put himself behind the wheel. The engine started up, he shoved it into gear and drove out.

They motored past milling groups of militiamen who ignored them, then went out a gate where no one bothered stopping them for papers. A few minutes later, they’d gone past streets full of bombed out buildings and then found themselves out of town and speeding up an empty road. Speer and von Poser sat back and exchanged looks of astonishment.

They drove past fields and pastures where cows were busily grazing, oblivious to everything but the grass.

Then the young man turned back to address them.

“All right, so here’s the deal,” he said. “I’m going to be your driver from now on. You’re trying to keep the Nazis from blowing everything up. Isn’t that right?” He said it like it was something everyone already knew. “Well you’re going about it the wrong way.”

“Apparently,” grunted von Poser.

“I can get you what you want,” the young man said. “I’ll have them eating out of your hands."

“How are you going to do that?” asked Speer.

“I’m magic,” the young man said. “No one ever refuses me.”

They looked at him dumbfounded.

“Why?” asked von Poser.

“I need to get around,” the young man explained. “Business to take care of.”

“Who are you?” asked Speer.

“Never mind who I am,” the young man snapped and returned to his driving.

Nobody said anything after that. Speer and von Poser settled into their bewildered silences. Speer stared out at the passing countryside. In the late afternoon sun, the winter fields no longer looked so bleak. He thought he saw hints of green beginning to emerge.

As he drove, the young man began whistling something Speer remembered orchestras playing back when he was still a young man with lots of dreams, but no job. A lyrical and melancholy number that expressed how everyone seemed to feel back then. Then he remembered it was called Harlem Rhapsody.

He remembered seeing the words in white lettering inside a black circle on a magazine page. And a crooked headline snaking across it asking Which One is Your Favorite?

And suddenly the names started hitting him like waves: Ziggy, Franzi, Sebastian and suddenly Speer knew exactly which one he was.

“Yes?” asked the young man.

“You’re Manni of the Flying Magical Loerber Brothers.”

The young man turned back and dazzled them with his smile. Then he turned back to keep his eyes on the road.
(Excerpt from Germania, first published in 2008 by Simon & Schuster, now also available on Kindle here).

Speer in the Ruhr: Speer's Rebellion Against Hitler's Scorched-Earth Orders Ends

In the town square, a solitary soldier stood by a dry fountain, calmly smoking a pipe, two panzerfaust rockets resting at his side. At von Poser’s direction, Manni stopped the car, got out and walked across the square toward him. He seemed to regard their approach with little interest.

“Hello soldier,” said Speer.

The man said nothing.

“Where is everybody?”

He jerked his head around to indicate all the executed. “They’re all here.”

“Who did this?” demanded von Poser.

“Koehl, the Party Chief,” answered the soldier. “He declared the town a fortress, demanded everyone fight to the death. Nobody wanted to.”

“So where is Koehl?”

“He left.” The man grinning like he’d wholeheartedly endorsed Koehl’s decision at the time.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“My orders are to wait for the Americans,” he said, pointing down the street with his chin. For the first time Speer was aware of the nearby rumbling of tanks.

“So what are you going to do when they get here?”

The soldier smiled. “Oh, they’re here.”

The rumbling grew louder. The soldier tapped the ashes out of his pipe and put it away in his side pocket. Then without saying anything, he picked up the two Panzerfausts and walked to the edge of the square, taking up a position behind the corner of a building. Up in the distance a large tank with a white star had turned the corner and come into view.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” said von Poser.

But Manni had an idea. “You know, we can just let them take us,” he suggested. “Five minutes from now it’ll all be a different story. Come on. What do you say?”

“For Christ’s sake,” said Manni. “All that stands between us and the safety of the American lines is that shovelhead? Let’s go!”

Von Poser looked at him angrily. “You can do anything you want,” he hissed. “But this is not what we came here for. We are not deserters. Let’s go, Speer.”

Speer turned to leave. He looked at Manni. Manni shook his head. “It’s been fun, Speer.”

Speer nodded.

“Keep practicing.”

“I will,” said Speer and started hurrying to get back to the car before the tank had made it to the square. Von Poser looked relieved when he saw Speer was alone. “Well, so much for that,” he grunted as he turned the car around. Speer didn’t say anything.

“Speer! We could juggle our way to freedom.”

“Goodbye, Loerber.”

They found the rest of the German army a few miles to the East. An expectant mood had come over the soldiers, like they believed their war was nearly over and in just a few more days they’d be home free. “Would you mind moving your car somewhere else, Herr Reichsminister,” one of them asked. “We don’t want their artillery spottersunnecessarily zeroing in on us.” A couple soldiers laughed. Then a wild pig came out of the woods, bleeding from a stray bullet, squealing wildly as the soldiers chased it around. Not bothering to ask directions, Speer and von Poserdrove east. They ate supper with a factory director he’d known from the old days. Afterwards he produced a bottle of cherry liqueur and they finished it off watching the sun set over a horizon of bombed-out factories. They got going soon after that, driving through the night and reaching Nuremberg just as dawn was breaking.

The drive itself was uneventful, except for the last five kilometers where the autobahn was lined with the burning wreckage of army convoys that had been shot up an hour earlier. In the faint early light, its ghostly silhouettes resembled a field filled with the skeletal carcasses of ancient extinct beasts, though the stench of the burning ammunition, rubber, and men, kept any of it from seeming remotely like a fantasy. And they’d all been his animals, his machines. And now in a few more days they’d all be just as extinct.

That was when von Poser turned to Speer. “Do you know how many times I took my daughter to see them? We must have seen them twenty times. We did it for years. The Flying Magical Loerber Brothers. I wonder what the others are doing? Ziggy, Franzi and the other one. Sebastian.”

“I wonder. And Manni.

Enemy daytime fighters appeared with the dawn, flying low, attacking any vehicle which hadn’t already found cover. But by then he and von Poser had already put the netting over the car.

They found the army headquarters hidden among the half-bombed factories just inside the city. Field Marshall Model was expected at noon. With nothing else to do for the next five hours, they got themselves directed to a darkened corner where dozens of cots had been laid out for officers and quickly went to sleep.

An hour later someone was tapping his side impatiently. “Reichsminister Speer?” It was a stern-looking captain with a pocket torch.

“What is it?”

“I’m to escort you to the airfield,” he said. “There’s a plane waiting to take you back to Berlin. Fuhrer’s orders.”
(Excerpt from Germania, by Brendan McNally, Simon & Schuster, 2008, now also available on Kindle here)