Reichsminister Albert Speer Pays His Respects to a Dead Jewish Acrobat

Except for the old lady who owned the house, everyone else was gone.

Ziggy stared down at the body. Looking at his dead brother, he still didn’t know what to feel. Regret? Loss? Inconsolable sadness? None of them were there. Perhaps they’d come later.

Manni came over and sat down across from the body.

Ziggy looked over at him. “He told me you were an assassin,” he said.

Manni looked at him like he wasn’t sure he was an imbecile. “And you’re a U-Boat captain with the Knight’s Cross,” he answered. “How many ships did you sink?”

"Including my time with Luth, fourteen.”

"That’s a lot of ships,” said Manni.


"Manni, do you feel the British gave you enough respect?”


Manni blew a burst of air through his nose, letting Ziggy know that what he’d said was funny, though not amusing.

"Where were you when Father died?” asked Ziggy.

"In Canada,” he answered. “Did you hear where Franzi was?”

Ziggy shook his head.

Manni offered a wry smile. “Tibet.”

"Tibet?”

"Ahnenerbe field trip.”

"Did he find anything?”

"Besides a bad case of the clap? I don’t think so.”

The door opened and the old lady gestured at Manni from the threshold. He got up. “Look,” he said, “we’re going to have to decide what to do about Franzi. We’ll talk about it when I get back.” Then he followed the old lady into the hall, closing the door behind him.

Ziggy stared down at the threadbare carpet and the stray threads splitting off from the worn spots and suddenly knew the path that lay ahead for Franzi. Himmler’s group wouldn’t stay together much longer. It wasn’t possible. Things were so unstable now that even the slightest obstacle would cause them to fray and spin out in different directions, and once that happened, Franzi would be free. He saw it with diamond-sharp clarity.

He looked at Sebastian and suddenly the sadness was tearing him apart. If only he could have known this. How long had he been dead? He looked at the reddening sky outside the window. Twenty four hours, the same as eternity.

He stood up and went over to the body and brushed his hand against Sebastian’s hair. He found himself remembering the old days when they were performing. Had he ever known how brilliant he was? Had he ever looked beyond the top hats and tails, the five-six-seven-eight razzmatazz and seen what the rest of the world all took for granted? That the seedy glamour and corniness were nothing more than a picture frame in which genius ran free? Ziggy had hated the reminiscing too. But they really had been something. Better than cartoons, as good as jazz.

The door opened. Ziggy looked up and saw Manni re-entering the room, followed by a man in a dark suit. It was Speer.

"Ziggy, you’ve met Herr Reichsminister Speer, haven’t you?” said Manni. Speer put his hand out and Ziggy shook it. “Please, allow me to extend my condolences over the death of your brother,” said Speer.

"Thank you,” said Ziggy.

Speer looked down at Sebastian’s body and tears welled in his eyes. He turned to Manni. “Honestly, Herr Manni, after all we’ve been through, I didn’t imagine anyone’s death would bother me this much, but it does. I don’t understand why.

"It’s funny how you hope for things. I thought that with the war ending we’d all get to see you perform again.” A tear ran down his cheek. He gave a polite bow and left.

Ziggy and Manni returned to their chairs. They sat for a while, then Manni said; “Sebastian is dead. That can’t be changed. Now what are we going to do about Franzi?”

Ziggy spoke quietly. “I’ve got a feeling that Franzi’s time will come soon. And when it does, he won’t need our help.”

"Is this something that you suspect, or are you getting premonitions?”

"No and yes,” said Ziggy.

Manni looked genuinely amazed. “I thought you didn’t do this anymore.”

Ziggy shrugged.

The hostess gestured at Manni again. “We’ll talk about this later,” said Manni. “Let me see what she wants.”
(Excerpt from Germania, Simon & Schuster, 2008, now also available on Kindle here).

Schellenberg Picks a New Masseur for Himmler

When the call came, Franzi Loerber had already officially gone off duty and was sitting by himself in the staff and junior officers’ canteen having a cigarette while working out the final calculations on a large batch of horoscopes he’d been assigned to do on senior members of the planning staff. It was crap work, very tiresome. Calculate algorithms based on the variations factored from the shifting positions of fifteen ascendant and twelve descendant groups of stars over twelve nine-day intervals starting a month before conception. It was all complete nonsense, something he’d invented on the spur of the moment a long time ago, but for some reason people swore by it. And far be it from Franzi to tell anybody what they should believe in.

All in all, horoscopes were fairly formulaic stuff. The calculations took forever but the actual writing never took more than five minutes. You always had to make sure it offered so much opportunity, so much warning, and lots and lots of ambiguity. Just write something down, and boom, you’re done and you move on to the next one.

He went on with his number crunching for another hour until the tediousness finally got to him. Putting the horoscopes aside, he took out his hand-written Moscow Center coding chart and began composing a long overdue report.

“47361 73908 66214 38947 03418 87451,” he wrote. It was his way of saying everything was under control and that some promising leads were coming up. “15376 21294 97124 33965,” he added, more as an afterthought. It meant everyone believed the end would come soon.

Franzi looked up to see the cute captain from internal security eyeing him from the next table. Under normal circumstances he might have seen if he could take it somewhere, but since the captain was a spy-hunter and Franzi happened at that moment to be writing a coded letter to Moscow, he instead looked away. He thought about mentioning him in the report. Moscow seemed to like hearing who in SS Headquarters was queer. He tried to remember what the captain’s name was; Hessler, Hindemann?

“96101 49327 85634.” He hated what he was doing. Ziggy was a U-Boat captain, Manni an assassin, Sebastian was an operative for a secret Jewish terror network, all of them living lives of adventure and excitement. And all Franzi had done this entire war was calculate horoscopes and report his fellow SS queers to Moscow and London. “68225 79031 66496.”

Franzi looked at the clock. There was a dead drop hidden in one of the lavatories on the second floor. If he posted the message in the next twenty minutes, he could have Moscow off his back for at least two weeks, maybe longer if things went downhill fast enough. “98343 74588 19632.” He stared at the paper for a long time. Then he looked up. The cute captain was staring at him again. What did he want? Sex? Betrayal? Both? Why not? The captain smiled. Franzi smiled back. He crumpled the paper into a ball, then tossed it into a wastebasket along the wall. Franzi rolled his eyes. The captain gave him a sympathetic smirk like he knew what that was like.

He was done serving Moscow, Franzi decided. The war was all but over and now he had to start taking care of himself. Manni was already gone. He’d left for the Ruhr a month earlier and by this point he was probably safely behind Allied lines. Now Franzi needed to do the same. But how?

It had been a big mistake agreeing to spy for the Russians in the first place, but then at the time he hadn’t felt like he had any right to be picky. If he’d only waited for two more weeks, he could have gone to work for the British. It turned out their friend Nigel Westerby was a British operative and had already signed up Manni. Though Franzi readily agreed to share his information with them, he remembered seeing the disappointment on Westerby’s face.

He remembered how the Russians had first come to him after they’d found out Gustav had just wangled him a cushy research post with the Ahnenerbe, the SS-run racial heritage and occult studies institute. Franzi hadn’t liked the idea of spending the war working with a bunch of charlatans and mystic crackpots, but the Russians insisted it would be an excellent career choice and a great way to fight the Nazis from the inside. It turned out he’d been right on his first guess; it was worse than being a librarian. For someone like him, who’d spent his entire life in the celebrity spotlight, it was a living death. He remembered how, at first, everyone there was excited to have one of the Magical Loerber Brothers on the staff and people would come up to him all the time to ask questions and reminisce, but it wasn’t long before the utter mid-level facelessness of his new job wiped the shine right off him. And once that happened, everyone stopped thinking of him as anyone special.

He noticed two staff majors waving frantically at him from the canteen doorway. “Loerber, come here!” one of them hissed. They waited until Franzi was up close, then whispered. “You’re a masseur, aren’t you?”

Franzi nodded warily. “I’ve done some,” he said. “Not professionally.”

“Get your things,” one of them whispered. “You’re needed immediately at the Reichsfuhrer’s offices.”

Franzi picked up his papers and followed them upstairs to the fifth floor. He was brought past the guards and the identity checkpoint without anyone even taking his name down or checking his papers. Once inside, he was led through a warren of corridors and outer offices where an array of majors, colonels, generals and secretaries all stood attentively, waiting for his arrival. Outside the Reichsfuhrer’s office, a young general stood before the door. Franzi recognized him at once. It was Schellenberg, head of SS intelligence, head of all German intelligence, foreign and domestic, and Franzi’s boyfriend’s boss.

“The Reichsfuhrer needs your help,” Schellenberg said. “Do the best massage you can. And not a word of this to anybody, do you understand?”

Franzi nodded.

But Schellenberg wasn’t satisfied. “I mean nobody. Not your office mates or your fellow astrologers, and certainly not your boyfriend. Clear?”

Franzi nodded.

“Good,” said Schellenberg. “Now go in.”

“But Herr General, isn’t Professor Kersten the only one...?”

“Kersten is gone,” answered Schellenberg, holding open the door and then following him inside.
(Excerpt from Germania, Simon & Schuster, 2008, now also available on Kindle here).

Himmler's Death in Allied Custody

It was him all right, thought the intelligence officer when they brought the little man into the room. Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, biggest mass murderer in history. Problem was, he didn’t look like anything. Meek little man, that’s what he looked like, not a military leader, not the head of a grand police state, not the architect of genocide.

He’d come in wearing dirty, shabby clothes, a makeshift eye patch and papers identifying him as a sergeant in the Geheim Feldpolizei, but then he readily admitted who he was.

They made him undress and took his clothes away. Searching them, they found two brass capsules. One still held a glass phial that looked like poison. The other one was empty, but he wouldn’t say why. Then they’d offered him some British army trousers and a shirt to put on, but he refused them, saying he was afraid they’d let photographers in to take his photo. So instead they let him have an army blanket to wrap around himself.

And for the next few hours, it was just the two of them sitting in a room waiting for the interrogators from Headquarters to arrive. ‘Don’t try interrogating him yourself,’ they’d told him. ‘Leave him alone until we get there. Just keep an eye on him, that’s all.’

Except that Himmler wanted to talk. So they talked. They talked about the weather, and how the intelligence file photo they had of him was out of date, since it had him in his black SS uniform and he hadn’t worn that since the beginning of the war. He clucked with visible self-satisfaction at that. Then the intelligence officer asked him about his hobbies. Did he garden, have children, keep pets? Dogs?

“No, I don’t like dogs,” snapped Himmler, like it was something everybody was supposed to know.

After that they talked about other things; automobiles, airplanes, travel, dancing. Himmler told him how he’d been walking since that morning, that things had not gone well, and that the people wandering about were miserable and disorderly and that he hoped they would all be put to something useful in exchange for food.

“I’ll bet you must be hungry,” the intelligence officer said.

Himmler brightened. “Yes, I am,” he said. “I haven’t had anything all day.”

“I’ll get something for you to eat.”

“Yes, that would be nice,” he agreed eagerly.

“Stay in the chair,” ordered the intelligence officer. Then he opened the door and shouted, “Bring up some food.”

“Bring up some food,” repeated Himmler, recognizing that it might be a useful phrase to know in the future.

The intelligence officer smiled at Himmler. “We’ll have something for you in just a minute. But first I’d like you to look at some photos I took.”

“Oh?”

"Bergen-Belsen,” said the intelligence officer, handing Himmler the photographs. “I was just there. Take a look.”

Politely Himmler examined them, one after another, each for a couple of seconds then he’d move on to the next. Stacks of dead bodies, ditches filled with skeletal figures, children. He looked at the last one and then handed them back. His expression wasn’t any different. Bland, accommodating, uninvolved.

“So, do you have anything to say?” the intelligence officer asked.

Himmler looked almost surprised by the question. “Am I to blame for the excesses of my subordinates?”

“Are you?”

Himmler seemed affronted. “Should I be?”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s just your opinion,” said Himmler.

The intelligence officer was about to suggest something else, but then Himmler asked, “Do you know when the food will be here?”

There was a knock on the door and a corporal brought in a tray with bread and thick slices of cheese. The intelligence officer set the tray down on the table and gestured for Himmler to eat. With a nod, Himmler began chewing on the bread and cheese.

“Good?” asked the intelligence officer.

Himmler smiled and nodded that, yes, it was good.

After that they talked some more. Himmler told him how he’d get terrible stomach cramps, but that he’d had an excellent masseur who also did his horoscope and was a wonderfully sympathetic person, who’d previously been a famous entertainer.

“Really?” asked the intelligence officer, wondering if Headquarters might know anything about it.

Then the door opened and three men came in. One was Colonel Murphy, commander of the unit. He’d just been made colonel two weeks earlier and was, by the intelligence officer’s own estimation, something of a massive prick. Along with him was Command Sergeant Major Austin, who wasn’t that much better, and an older man in the uniform of a captain in the Medical Corps named Wells, whom he had never seen before.

“How is everything?” asked Murphy.

“Everything is just fine, sir,” the intelligence officer answered.

“Any problems?”

“None at all, sir. He’s just had his lunch and before that he was telling me about how much he loves dancing.”

“You don’t know if he speaks English,” asked Murphy.

“No sir, I don’t believe he does.”

Himmler coughed, covering his mouth with his hand momentarily.

“What else did he talk to you about?”

“He has two children and doesn’t like dogs or gardening.”

“Ah,” said Murphy, like it might mean something.

“I showed him the photographs.”

“You did?” Murphy’s face colored. “You weren’t supposed to do that on your own. I was supposed to be there to record the reaction.”

“Well, there wasn’t much reaction, sir.”

“What do you mean, no reaction? Did he deny it?”

“He doesn’t seem to think it has anything to do with him, sir.”

“He doesn’t?” asked Murphy angrily. “You’ve ruined the whole thing. This was supposed to have been done in an expert way so we could maximize the effect and properly document the proceedings.”

The intelligence officer shrugged apologetically. “I’m sorry, sir, but the prisoner wanted to talk. So we talked. I merely obeyed the first rule of intelligence, ‘strike while the iron is hot!’”

Murphy didn’t like that. For the next two minutes he rained abuse down on his head, much to the amusement of Himmler, who grinned at him from his chair. He opened his mouth a crack and in that moment, the intelligence officer thought he saw something lodged in his upper back teeth.

“Sir,” he said to Murphy, sotto voice. “I think I just saw something in the prisoner’s mouth. Don’t turn, don’t say anything.”

“I thought you said he’s already been searched and poison has been removed.”

“Yes, sir, but ...”

“Plus you just fed him lunch. How is he going to eat a sandwich with a poison phial between his teeth?”

“Sir?”

Murphy was livid. “You’ve completely fouled this investigation, captain.” He turned to Wells and barked, “You’re the doctor, examine the prisoner for poison.”

“Sir,” snapped Wells. “I am a doctor, not a detective. Let the sergeant conduct the search.”

At that, the young colonel exploded. “You will do as you’re told!” he shouted.

With much unpleasantness, Wells approached Himmler and began looking into his half-opened mouth. “Yes, I think I do see something in there in between his back teeth,” he said.

“Colonel,” said the sergeant, standing behind Himmler. “If you’d like, I can sandbag the prisoner.”

“No don’t,” said Murphy. “Look closer,” he shouted to Wells. “What do you see?”

Wells moved closer to Himmler, who had now shut his mouth. “Open your mouth,” he ordered.

But as Wells grabbed him, Himmler jerked his head back and bit down on what he had in his mouth. There was the tiny crunch of thin glass and the harsh smell of cyanide filled the air. Himmler fell to the floor, twitched a few times and then went still.
(Excerpt from Germania, Simon & Schuster, 2008, now also available on Kindle here).

Albert Speer, Juggling Fool!

"If the image of Albert Speer, a prominent Nazi, juggling rubber balls as a way to relieve stress in the waning days of the Third Reich doesn't make you sit up and say, "Mein Gott, vas is los?" then Brendan McNally's debut novel, Germania, might not be for you. On the other hand, if rollicking adventures of Jews masquerading as Nazis, secret wartime shipments of gold, SS officers dreaming of hunting walrus in Greenland, and the tense emotional dynamics of theatrical families intrigue you, then Germania will fit the bill quite nicely." (from a review by David Abrams for Barnes and Noble)

Germania by Brendan McNally was first published by Simon &  Schuster in 2008. Now it is also available as a Kindle ebook here.

Walter Schellenberg: SS Spymaster Genius or Total Putz

There is something about SS Spymaster Walter Schellenberg that sets him apart from most of the other Nazi bigwigs. He's a lot like Albert Speer in that what's at stake isn't so much what he was, as much as what we need to see him as. Speer is often seen as "the nice Nazi," Schellenberg is a little different from that. Nobody needs to see him as "nice," but there is still this tendency to perceive him as different from all the other evil, knee-jerk, cardboard character Nazi baddies. Unlike all the others, Schellenberg is almost someone we can relate to.

Anyone who reads spy/intrigue/thriller fiction set in Nazi Germany during World War II probably will have encountered Walter Schellenberg at least a dozen times. In whatever particular story you're reading, he's the SS spy chief, whom the protagonist meets just after the first or second plot twist. He's the SS general who is not an evil Nazi ogre, nor is he the smooth, worldly and cultured Nazi who turns out to be utterly twisted. No, Schellenberg is the apparently rational, highly competent, non-fanatic spymaster who has a unique proposition for the protagonist which usually involves him working together with a German opposite number with whom he has much in common, and might ultimately consider a friend until the final reel, when he kills him, or doesn't because it turns out he's actually Jewish or something else in keeping with the genre. 

Whatever the case, Schellenberg is the one hoping to cut a deal, because, unlike all the other die-hard fanatics, he actually grasped the ugly reality of the situation Germany had put itself into. And in this sense alone, the Walter Schellenberg of popular literature did resemble the Walter Schellenberg of reality.  He was the SS Spy Chief who was desperately trying to engineer a peace deal between Nazi Germany and the West. He'd probably had some low-level discussions going on via intermediaries as early as 1942 in places like Lisbon. But in the Spring of 1945, the writing was on the wall for anyone who wasn't totally deluded. At this point, Schellenberg had much higher level discussions going on with the Western Allies in Stockholm. They weren't actual peace negotiations as much as they were an ongoing prelude to peace talks, and they were permanently snagged on one big point.  The Allied representatives made it clear to Schellenberg that there couldn't be any real discussions unless Hitler was removed from office. He could be deposed, assassinated, arrested, or merely persuaded to step down. But until that happened, there could be nothing.

It was a reasonable precondition to peace discussions. The problem was, that Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, the man Schellenberg hoped would be an acceptable alternative to Hitler, was a hopeless waffler. As much as Himmler believed he ought to be the man who'd lead Nazi Germany into a Grand Alliance with the West against Russia, he couldn't quite bring himself to actually confront Hitler or move against him. It is also at this point where the whole mythology of SS General Walter Schellenberg, the cooly competent spymaster, collapses into slapstick comedy.

Schellenberg wasn't particularly different from the horde of ambitious young men who found their way into the Nazi Party and then the SS in the period immediately following Hitler's ascendency to power in 1933. He'd gone to university first studying medicine, then switching to law. Presumably Schellenberg became a Nazi not out of any grand conviction, but because that was where the opportunity was. He joined the SS and found his way into the counter-intelligence branch of the SD, the SS's burgeoning security apparatus, which was already a confusing mass of departments and sections all vying against each other for power. Luckily for Schellenberg, he was able to attach himself to another rising star, Reinhardt Heydrich.

But what really insured his rise above all the competition was one supremely ballsy feat, which he pulled off early in the war. He got through to some top-level British intelligence officials operating in then still-neutral Holland and created for them the impression that there was a group of discontented German Army officers who might be convinced to depose the Fuhrer. A number of meetings took place and everything seemed to be going positively as far as the Brits were concerned. Another meeting was arranged, this time at the tables outside a cafe in Venlo, a Dutch town, just across the German border. The two British officers were there along with a Dutch colleague. This time one of the disaffected Wehrmacht officers was actually an SS Major named Schellenberg. The trap was sprung, a gunfight ensued and the next thing anyone knew, the Dutch agent was shot dead, and the two British officers had been whisked across the border and into German imprisonment. Not long after that, Schellenberg was made head of SS foreign intelligence.

But despite all the hype, Schellenberg's performance as a spymaster wasn't actually anything great. Most of what he knew about the spy business came from all the cheap, pulpy spy novels he'd read. It wasn't entirely his fault. As much as Germany might have had a long history as a police state, when it came to foreign intelligence, all their continual regime changing meant they were perpetually stuck re-inventing the wheel.  By comparison, Britain's foreign intelligence apparatus went back all the way to Queen Elizabeth I with probably very little in the way of interruption. The closest thing Germany had to a real intelligence service was the Abwehr, but since their chief, Admiral Canaris, was actively involved in the conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, he wasn't terribly inclined to serve as much of a mentor to Schellenberg. With nothing but proto-James Bond novels for guidance, Schellenberg built his version of a spy service with more emphasis on honey traps and flashy gadgets than on an actual foundation of spycraft. To show off his incredible amateurishness, Schellenberg's great pride was his desk, which he had equipped with hidden guns aimed out the front which he could fire with the touch of a button.

There is an old saying about people rising to their level of incompetence. For Schellenberg, it came in the aftermath of the failed, July 20, 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler. Having been discovered among the conspirators, Canaris was arrested, and eventually executed, and the Abwehr and all the other German foreign intelligence agencies were rolled up, combined and put under Schellenberg's control.

With all the information he now had access to, Schellenberg ought to have seen the writing on the wall and correctly concluded that Germany's situation was now hopeless and that the only possible course of action was unconditional surrender. But Schellenberg was an incorrigible optimist, not a good quality for an intelligence officer. Despite everything, he remained convinced not only that the West would be willing to effect a separate peace with Germany and join with them against the Soviets, but possibly, most ridiculous of all, Schellenberg believed they would accept Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler as an ally and partner in a new Grand Alliance. Even though Schellenberg was himself quite aware of  Himmler's role carrying out the wholescale murder of millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and others, he still assumed Eisenhower and the other Western leaders would blithely overlook it all in the interests of defeating the Soviets.

But perhaps, craziest of all was believing that his boss, Heinrich Himmler, was capable of standing up to Hitler, let alone moving against him. The fact was that, despite his cold efficiency and utter remorselessness in carrying out Hitler's orders, Himmler was completely incapable of acting on his own. With Himmler, as with many of the top Nazis, there was an odd sort of anti-darwinism in play.  He became one of the most powerful men in Europe largely because he never once made any decisions on his own.

The Nazis believed in the Law of the Jungle and to them, the "Fuhrer-Prinzip" was an extension of this natural law. They accepted its harshness, and though they would never discuss it, there was an implicit understanding that even a supremely great leader like Adolf Hitler would ultimately get replaced, the same way any lion-king would have to give way to a younger, more powerful successor.  Hitler might have initially led Germany to many great victories, but now the victories had all turned to disaster and he'd shown he was incapable of doing anything to stop it.  Being the one with the most power, it was now Himmler's time to step to the fore and take over. But even if Himmler did have the power, he didn't have the will.

It went on like this until late April, 1945, when the Red Army was just hours from closing the ring on Berlin. Only then did Himmler make his move. On the last commercial flight into Berlin from Stockholm, Schellenberg brought down their longtime intermediary, Count Folke Bernadotte, the head of the Swedish Red Cross, along with Norbert Masur, from the World Jewish Congress. After promising to Masur that no more Jews would be harmed or moved, Himmler extended his hand to Masur, declaring that he was now taking charge and that it was time for the SS and the Jews to "bury the hatchet."   Masur did as he was asked, and soon after that they returned to Stockholm.  Bernadotte immediately sent word to Western intelligence that Himmler would be taking over from Hitler and that negotiations could now finally begin.

With Hitler stuck in Berlin, all but dead, and the war all but over, Himmler and Schellenberg settled down in Luebeck, a small city in northern Germany, and while they waited for Eisenhower to get back with them, they began happily planning their role in what would soon be a new world order. In a way, it must have been a wonderful time. Each day saw visits from former Nazi bigwigs that had managed to get out of Berlin, now angling for top jobs in Himmler's administration. Schellenberg had convinced Himmler that it was just a matter of time before he would be accepted by Eisenhower as a key new ally. Himmler liked the way that sounded. It all seemed so nice, that Schellenberg probably was believing it himself.

The problem was, Himmler kept his coup a secret and Hitler only learned about it a week later, when word of it got publicly announced at the United Nations conference in San Francisco. Hitler, who at that point was already on the verge of blowing his brains out, held off just long enough to denounce the treachery of the man he'd always called his "Faithful Heinrich," and strip him of all offices, ranks and party membership. To stick the knife deeper, Hitler then named Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz, head of the Navy, as his successor, and having done that, went ahead and committed suicide.

Thus began Heinrich Himmler's steep decline and fall. That night Doenitz took the unprecenteded step of ordering Himmler to his headquarters in Ploen, in Northern Germany, where he bluntly informed him that he, not Himmler, was the new head of state, and even if they did not know at that moment whether Hitler was dead or alive, Himmler would be following Doenitz' orders.  Himmler was shocked, but even so, recovered quickly enough to ask the Grand Admiral to make him the "Second Man" in his government.  Doenitz coldly responded that this would not be the case, since, as he explained, he planned on setting up a government that was less overtly political in nature.  The real reason was that Doenitz, as a soldier, could not countenance Himmler's duplicity. He'd witnessed it first hand,  having had to visit the Reichsfuhrer's headquarters twice earlier that day. Doenitz also didn't bother raising the question of Hitler's firing of Himmler, figuring he'd cross that bridge later.

The next day, at the behest of Schellenberg, Himmler returned to Doenitz' headquarters in a last desperate attempt to wheedle a post in the new administration. This time Schellenberg went with him, along with the current Finance Minister, Schwerin von Krosigk. Von Krosigk had been a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford thirty-five years earlier and even though he had not been in England or anywhere abroad since, they touted him as a foreign affairs expert. Over lunch, Doenitz rejected Himmler's entreaties, though he did make Schwerin von Krosigk his foreign minister.  A couple days later Himmler received official notification that he had been removed from all offices. By then he had gone from one of the most powerful men in Europe into a kind of living ghost. For the next three weeks he drifted about. His empire evaporated around him until it was just a small handful of followers.  Schellenberg, it appears, was not among them.

Schellenberg also became a ghost, although of a much different sort. While the history books do tell us that Doenitz made Schwerin von Krosigk his Foreign Minister at the same time that he told Himmler to take a hike, they leave out Schellenberg, who was also at the meeting. Officially, nothing happened. Nothing in the official records of the Doenitz Government indicates he was given any kind of post. But one extremely controversial writer, forensic doctor and historian Hugh Thomas, alleges that Schellenberg was then provided with a diplomatic passport, the first issued by the Doenitz regime. He then traveled to Stockholm where he met again with Bernadotte and it was further alleged, British Intelligence officers, including Anthony Blunt, who, years later, was revealed to be a Soviet mole.

It's not known when it finally dawned on Schellenberg that the talks he'd been having with Allied representatives and intermediaries were not going to actually come to anything. One of the last images he presents in his memoir, The Labyrinth, was of leaving Stockholm and arriving in Copenhagen, where the Danes, mistaking him for one of the liberators, greeted his car with joyousness. If he ever reported back to Doenitz, who'd set up his short-lived government at the naval academy in Flensburg on the Danish border, no one knows. But if he did, he didn't stick around very long.

What had probably happened during his lunchtime meeting with Doenitz, was that Schellenberg painted a version of the same optimistic picture he'd been painting for Himmler. He probably insisted that the Western Allies would be agreeable to a peace deal, especially since the negotiations, which were already underway, were going so well. Of course these were the same negotiations, which, Himmler had insisted only the day before, were nothing but a piece of Allied disinformation. Once it became clear to Doenitz that the peace talks actually did exist and that they were making solid progress, he probably gave Schellenberg permission to go back to Stockholm and continue them. Doenitz was the first to admit, he knew nothing whatsoever about international politics. Since Schellenberg had been the Reich's top foreign intelligence official, he assumed he must know what he was talking about.

Of course the actual fact was, despite everybody's claims to the contrary and otherwise, the peacetalks had never actually started. The Western Allies weren't interested in discussing anything with the Germans other than an unconditonal surrender, which is what Doenitz ultimately found out when he sent delegations, first to British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery in Luneburg, then to Eisenhower in Rheims and finally to the Russians in Berlin. He probably had little interest in hearing what Germany's spymaster had to say after that.

When Doenitz's pathetic little government finally got arrested and rolled up on May 23, 1945, Schellenberg was in Denmark. It wasn't until sometime in June that he finally got tracked down and taken into custody. It was the British that took him prisoner and, interestingly, they would not let the Americans talk to him for a long time, which has led some to suspect that British discussions with the the SS leadership were far more extensive than the British have ever acknowledged.  The one American intelligence officer who did interview Schellenberg was a onetime Hollywood actor named Horace L. Hahn.

Schellenberg's postwar career wasn't much to speak of. He cooperated with Allied prosecutors and testified against various top Nazis at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials and was himself sentenced to six years imprisonment.  He was let out early for health reasons.  He managed to write his memoirs, which were extremely interesting without being overly frank or confessional. It has been continually in print over the years. He died in 1952, soon after completing it.  He had contracted some mysterious liver ailment, which many suspected might have been the result of an exotic poison which he'd been given. Although he was only 42 when he died, by all accounts he looked like a very old man.

But what died was only Schellenberg the man. As long as Nazi Germany continues as a subject for spy fiction and thrillers, Schellenberg the fictional spymaster and worthy enemy will probably outlive us all.

Walter Schellenberg is also a major character in my novel Germania (first published by Simon & Schuster in 2008, now also available on Kindle here).

Flensburg: The Bizarre, Three-Week Post-Hitler Government

My novel Germania is set in Germany during the last days of the Third Reich and is about living in the strange moments that take place in the space between epochs.

On May 1, 1945, mere hours after Adolf Hitler had killed himself deep in his Berlin Fuhrerbunker, a new Nazi government was coming to life in the little north German town of Flensburg. Set up by Grand Admiral Doenitz, the head of the navy and Hitler’s hapless successor, the ‘Flensburg Reich,’ was an absurd little comic opera affair which somehow managed to hold on for three weeks before the Allies decided to unceremoniously roll it up and arrest everyone.But much of what happened in Flensburg during that three weeks was so odd it defies credulity. With the war over and Hitler no longer telling them what to think, Flensburg’s inhabitants, mostly high-ranking Nazis who’d managed to flee Berlin, were suddenly free to imagine up whatever bright, shiny postwar future struck their fancy. Neither are they hindered by their guilt or by the fact that the Allies are now walking among them.

SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler now fancies himself co-ruling postwar Europe with Dwight Eisenhower, while Hitler’s architect and armaments minister Albert Speer contemplates escaping to Greenland with a friend to hunt walrus, fish, and write their memoirs together. In a brazen attempt at reinvention, SS doctor Karl Gebhardt appoints himself as the new head of the Red Cross and wanders about easing any misery he can find. Meanwhile Rosenberg, Ribbentrop and other former top Nazi henchmen, having lost their jobs, now stumble around in drunken desperation, trying to get their hands on anything that might give them official cover, or allow their escape: ministerial appointment, diplomatic passport, submarine, medical certificate, desk, or even just a few sheets of office letterhead.

Woven among all this craziness is the story of four Jewish brothers, former Berlin vaudeville child-stars, Manni, Franzi, Ziggy, and Sebastian, known during the 1920s and 30s as the Flying Magical Loerber Brothers. Flensburg is where they find themselves reunited after twelve years apart and suddenly things start getting quite strange...
Germania was first published by Simon & Schuster in 2008, but is now also available on Kindle here.

Albert Speer, Magic, the Fall of Nazi Germany and the Story of the Flying Magical Loerber Brothers

Maybe my big problem as an author is that I don't properly grasp the concept of "Paranormal."

I just write novels about reality and if that reality happens to have what someone else considers "magic," that's kind of their problem.  I just consider it reality.  Reality is what exists and it has rules and, being reality, it's mostly gritty and messy and utterly, totally lacking in wonderfullness.  Okay, so people have visions, and can levitate and project ideas into other people's minds. They still have itchy feet and achey knees and if Franzi Loerber, one of my protaganists, has just managed to project enough psychic slippery onto a couple of stairsteps that an SS Major going down them has just flown ass-over-teakettles and broken his neck,   well Franzi is definitely going to be so wiped out from that feat, that all he's going to do is go find an empty chair and curl up into it and crash. To me, that's just reality.  But in book publishing, it's considered paranormal.

Both of my novels, Germania and Friend of the Devil, are full of encounters with the magical and the surreal and characters with abilities that are beyond their understanding. But I still think of it as realism rather than "Paranormal."

So you may wonder who the Flying Magical Loerber Brothers are and what all this happens to do with Albert Speer and the fall of Nazi Germany. Read on.

They were the toast of old Berlin. For ten years, during the raucous golden era before the Nazi takeover, the Magical Loerber Brothers were indisputably Berlin's most popular variety act.

What was it about the four young men that so completely captured the hearts of their audiences? Was it simply that they were identical? Or was it the way they somehow brought kitschy, lowbrow entertainment to a level which even the edgiest of the avant-garde found irresistible? No, it was something more than that. The brothers were magic. They were so magic, in fact, that even when the Nazis took over, none of them bothered noticing that they were Jewish.

But even magic has its limitations. In life, no one is ever truly exempt. What were they like ten years after their act had broken up, when they were pushing thirty and the Third Reich which had loved them so unconditionally was in its last bloody weeks?

Perhaps the best person to answer that question would be Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, armaments minister, and estranged only friend. At the time he ran into Manni Loerber, Speer was crisscrossing the industrial Ruhr in a lonely, fruitless rebellion against Hitler's orders to blow up everything before it fell into American hands. Manni was sneaking around the Ruhr, killing any Nazi Party official he could get his hands on. Speer needed help. Manni Loerber needed cover. And with Manni's uncanny ability to talk anyone into nearly anything, things suddenly began turning around for Speer. They were going so well, in fact, that Speer soon began believing that, like Manni, he could alter reality. Crazier still, he even started to think he had freed himself from Hitler.

What happened to Speer was not that different from what was also happening to SS spymaster Walter Schellenberg. After more than a year unsuccessfully trying to goad his powerful but hopelessly indecisive and superstitious boss, Reichsfuhrer SS Himmler, into deposing Hitler and ending the war, Schellenberg had just about given up hope. Then in walked Franzi Loerber, a low-level horoscope-jockey who'd spent the entire war buried in the bureaucratic depths of the Ahnenerbe, the SS mystical research institue. Franzi, it turned out, had an ability to calm Himmler and quickly turn his waffling into confidence and steely determination. Suddenly Schellenberg was back in business, or so he thought.

The normally crafty and suspicious Schellenberg should have easily figured out that Franzi Loerber was a Soviet mole, but he didn't, for the same reason Speer didn't really care that Manni Loerber was most certainly a British spy and assassin. They needed to believe in magic.

Then, of course, there are the other two Loerber brothers. There is Sebastian, whom everyone believes is long dead, only now he has turned up with the Blood of Israel, a Jewish underground group which is using his unique ability to project dreams to sow terror in their enemies' hearts. And then there is the normal one; Ziggy Loerber, the U-Boat ace, whose hatred of the Nazis runs nearly second to the aversion he feels toward his own nutball siblings and their carryings-on. Given the choice of a reunion or death, he would have gladly chosen the latter. But things don't always turn out the way people would like.

With Berlin falling and the war crashing towards its end, everything is thrown into chaos, and responsibility for continuing the fighting falls onto the shoulders of Grand Admiral Doenitz, head of the Navy and commander of the Northern Zone. With the war lost, all he wants is to die like a soldier. And he might have gotten to, had a telegram not arrived from Berlin, informing him that Hitler was dead and he was now the new Fuhrer.

In the midnight after Hitler's death, the remnants of Nazi Germany converge on Flensburg, a small port city on the Danish border where Doenitz has set up his capital. There they try to conjure up a rosy future in which their Nazi pasts do not matter. Some imagine glowing relationships with Eisenhower, the man they presume will now rule Europe like a Caesar. Others dream of escaping to Greenland to write their memoirs. Others try ingratiating themselves with the Allied Control Commission representatives wandering about. It's springtime and seeing Doenitz' government grow each day, people begin believing it might actually put down roots and last beyond the few days allotted to it through the world's inattention.

And into this world sail the four Magical Loerber Brothers. Though most have spent the war far from the spotlight, once in proximity of each other, their celebrity quickly catches up with them. Nobody cares that they are not the same people they were fifteen years earlier. In the public's memory, they are inseparable from the good old Weimar days and by extension, a portent of better times to come.

But to them, it is not so easy. While their reunion might be preordained by the stars, its tragic outcome is written in the war's lingering brutality and their divergent paths which can no longer be fully bridged by love, hope or magic.