The salesman tells us that the Low Countries have not really warmed to the Internet. I begin to understand why. [ Previous Radical’s Diary ] Knokke (Belgium) RAINING most of the daylight hours. Dining out with Jaenelle Antas is a delightful ordeal: we enter a lush restaurant, surrounded by elegant guests whose every eye swivels onto her, and the waiters scurry over and test what language she can understand them in — none.
They lay the leather-bound menus in front of her with a practised flourish. The prices, I note, read more like zip codes. These gourmet chefs then learn that this Minnesotan does not eat meat, nor fish, nor shellfish, nor vegetables; nor drink wine nor alcohol. As though to say, “Climb out of that one, Mister Waiter!” It is difficult for me to keep my temper, or a straight face, depending on my mood that evening.
Knokke (Belgium) – Groningen (Holland) A DREAM-LADEN night: wild car chases. Fury at the Belgacom store in Leopold Street, who have sold us a Vodafone Internet “stick” three days ago. Their “four-day” card has expired after fewer than three, with thirty megabytes of download still unused — the appalling woman at their customer service desk indicates that she could not care less.
Her manageress comes over and shows the same attitude, and we are nearly bowled over by the stench of stale tobacco smoke that accompanies her. The Phone Store over the road sells us a fifteen-euro top-up, but that turns out not to work either once we hit the Netherlands this evening, despite what the Belgians said. So much for Vodaphone. The salesman tells us that the Low Countries have not really warmed to the Internet. I begin to understand why.
Groningen (Holland) – Hannover – Lüneburg (Germany) THE DUTCH hotel charges six euros ($7.50) for just fifty minutes usage of their Internet, the minimum! Since they also charge for a skimpy breakfast, we flee hungrily at nine a.m. We discover that our target for today, my old friend the historian Ministerialdirektor a.D. Fritz Tobias , will be home; we drive over to Hannover, Germany, arriving around midday.
He is ninety-eight; a beaky, wiry, fit, alert-eyed old man, he appears unchanged from when I last saw him twenty or more years ago, writing on Joseph Goebbels . At first he orates fluently about the past — his past, his wars with the Swiss Professor Walter Hofer , Edouard Calic , and other figures. The case of H W Wicks eventually comes to mind — the danger of becoming fixated, obsessed with past wrongs done.
He still thinks I am wrong about Adolf Hitler ‘s partial ignorance on what Heinrich Himmler was up to. He has hundreds of ring binders lining the walls of his rooms. There is also an intimidating array, and for an author a frankly depressing one, of thousands of well-thumbed books suffocating the house, lining bookshelves everywhere. It is every wife’s nightmare. Dr Baumgarten of the German Bundesarchiv is keen to acquire his whole collection, but says “we have no money.”
I tell him of the Erich Benndorf Collection in California, over which the Bundesarchiv dragged their feet for months, then informed me that the Innenministerium had now forbidden them to have any contact with me or through me whatsoever! He is agape. I find four of his binders of special interest, on Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich , and photograph some 370 pages of documents in them.
In the 1970s Tobias struck up a cautious friendship with the former SS Sturmbannführer Hans-Hendrik Neumann — now long dead (1994) — who was Heydrich’s adjutant from 1935 to 1939, and latterly director of Philips Germany. Neumann was never prosecuted or even interrogated by the Allies. He did gradually divulge good stuff in interviews with Tobias.
So did Erich Sanders , who was beneath Josef Meisinger in Himmler’s Kriminalpolizei, and knew a lot of inside detail about the 1938 General von Fritsch case. BY the time we both leave it is seven p.m. and T.’s lady friend — who speaks English — has arrived, a lovely old lady in her seventies, I would guess. I tell him he has Marcus Henneke to blame for my visit. “He said you wished I would visit once more,” I relate. He chuckles.
I am glad to say he has several sets of clippings covering the entire 1964 trial of Himmler’s chief of staff SS Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff — which ended in a fifteen-year sentence of which he served, I believe, ten: not easy for a man of his age.
Tobias also had good access, as I did, to the secret files of the BDC; he tells me that Karl-Heinz Janßen of Die Zeit , our common benefactor, suffered serious brain damage in a road accident some years ago; he does not know what became of our mutual friend Heinz Höhne , the senior editor at Der Spiegel . His memory for names and dates half a century or more ago is extraordinary; of what happened yesterday, rather more vague.
He is an outsider, loathed by the professionals who have ridden off slowly into sunsets of the past on their own commissions and committees, and know less about Real History than is in the scrapings under one finger nail. I have decided to risk visiting the Himmler death house in Lüneburg tomorrow, on our way up to Hamburg. Around ten-thirty p.m. we find a Landgasthaus south of the city and I work until one a.m. on the documents I have photographed.
Lüneburg – Hamburg – Kiel (Germany) WE DRIVE over to Lüneburg early, to the house in Uelzener Strasse where death awaited Heinrich Himmler, No. 31a. Himmler was not the only top S.S. officer to emerge feet-first and blanket-shrouded from this sinister British Intelligence headquarters. No blue plaque on the wall records his brief stay.
There are instead white enamel plates marking clinics and practices and meeting places of an evidently low-budget character — an Alcoholics Anoymous group, a prostate cancer screening clinic, an Active Life group, Lange Aktiv Bleiben. ” If you live for the moment, you will have a long future !” says its rather incomprehensible slogan in German. We walk up the six stone steps to the front door and press all the bell-pushes. Nobody answers. The building is deserted.
We hang around taking photos and filming a brief report , , but not too long in case neighbours report a suspicious activity and a malheur results with the German police, Himmler’s successors. The big front room where the terminal event in Himmler’s forty-four year career took place faces east or south-east, so far as I can tell from the morning sun. There was therefore no light going into its bay windows at eleven p.m. that night from outside, from the moon and star charts I have seen.
An important point . The houses to either side seem to be new, as do many of those around, so I guess that No. 31 was one of the few houses left standing when the British arrived in May 1945. The front room windows are high off the ground — the window sill is level with the top of my head.
I find it hard to understand how those Tommies including Sergeant Carl Sutton looked through the window and “saw Himmler’s body lying on the floor,” unless they knew what they were looking for and one stood on the other’s shoulders. There is a shallow flight of steps up to the windows to the right, behind the tall conifer that has grown up in front unchecked since the war, and they may have used that.
Jaenelle takes photos of the steps, although they do not afford any view into the front room — either now or in 1945. We have driven through forests to reach the town, and drive through more when we leave. This is the Lüneburg Heath somewhere in which Himmler’s remains still lie buried. “What kind of people bury a body in an unmarked grave in a forest,” we muse, and answer it ourselves: “Murderers.” No reason otherwise for the concealment and mystery. Nacht und Nebel .
An invention of Himmler’s own doing. AT ELEVEN-THIRTY a.m. we arrive, equally unannounced, at the home of Gerd Heidemann , until 1983 one of the Stern magazine’s greatest investigative journalists. He greets me as an old friend. There are 7,000 black ring-binders lining the walls of his apartment in Hamburg-Altona, all identical and meticulously labeled.
He is very bitter about the “Hitler Diaries” forger Konrad Kujau (whom he knew under his alias Connie Fischer); the man had gleaned tidbits about the plane crash that killed Hitler’s manservant Wilhelm Arndt and his personal pilot Flugkapitän Major Friedrich Gundelfinger in East Germany on April 21, 1945, and fed them