Secrets of the Last Nazi (16 page)

7
.36 p.m
. CET (6.36 p.m. GMT)

D
ieter watched
, calm and still. Hidden from view, he watched as one by one, the international team stepped into the hole.
Down they go …

He waited, enjoying the moment. Just being so close to them gave him an adolescent thrill. He even felt the urge to giggle, but managed to supress it.
They were all so dumb …

Instead, he just kept watching, listening as the last footsteps clanged down the metal rungs.

He didn’t know what the motley international team would find down there, but he knew it would make things much easier for him. After all, they’d got him the stuff from Vienna. Useful stuff. Papers he wouldn’t have found on his own.

Information which confirmed he was close to Stolz’s secret.

He lifted out his smartphone. With a smirk, he replied to Father Samuel.

Then he switched to his own webpage, and began to type.

He checked the message – was 2059 too far away to be scary? Maybe, but the date was accurate. Stolz’s predictions were always precise.

Briefly, he wondered whether Father Samuel might stumble across the page, and realise what he was doing. But it was unlikely. And so what if he did? Samuel’s money mattered less now. Dieter had seen a much greater prize.

He pressed ‘send’, knowing the obstacle course of fake IP addresses, proxy sites and multiple web chains made his submission completely untraceable. Not even the CIA would be able to track him down.

It meant he could attack without being attacked himself. Just like Hitler in the early days …

Dieter also knew he had developed the perfect form of warfare – his strikes were invisible because they were never really made. He was just claiming credit for the inevitable, and letting people assume he commanded a great force.

He leaned his head over the manhole. Near the bottom of the ladder was the last of the international team, just going down the final rungs.

No time to do anything as clever as put gasoline in the sprinkler system now. That had been a masterpiece.

He needed something quicker – much quicker.

Casually, he bent down, and inspected the old Nazi ladder. A few metres below the surface, there was a join where two parts of the metal were held together by just four rusted steel bolts. Weak bolts. And with just a single kick, he was able to knock two of the bolts away.

He checked down below. None of the team had noticed the loose bolts clanging onto the concrete floor.

Then Dieter grinned: the team may have been able to descend into the cavern. But they would never climb out …

T
he descent was
through what seemed to be a wide chimney, lined on all four sides with brick, until it opened out into a much wider space near the bottom. Myles sensed a musty smell in the air – the space had probably been sealed for many years.

About halfway down he saw a flashlight switch on below him. ‘Watch out for the junk,’ Glenn called out, shining a small light at the bottom of the ladder. Directly below Myles was a decayed mattress, and part of an old vehicle chassis. Both must have been thrown down – or fallen into the space – several decades ago. ‘Stay to the left, Myles, and you can get round them,’ directed the American.

Myles took the cue from Glenn and lifted his immobile leg around the obstacles. He was soon standing on a firm concrete surface.

Glenn swung the light around, gradually tracing the edge of the floor. The wall was mostly intact, with only some water damage where it met the flat base they were standing on. Then something shone back – two small circles, glowing in the dark. Glenn fixed the beam at them, pointing it straight in their direction, and the reflections seemed to dart away. Myles wondered what they were. Then a squeak, and a rodent scampered into the darkness.

‘Rats!’ exclaimed Zenyalena. She shivered. ‘I’m cold. Glenn – give me the torch …’Glenn didn’t respond immediately, but kept pointing the beam around. It was several seconds before he offered to hand it over.

Zenyalena tugged it out of his hands. ‘… Thank you.’ She stepped out, away from the ladder, and pointed the light upwards. Although the beam wasn’t really powerful enough, it was clear that they were in a huge cavern. She shone the light at joints in the concrete slabs which formed the ceiling several metres above them. ‘Man-made. Probably by the Nazis.’

Glenn disagreed. ‘We know the prison was built
before
the Nazis came to power.’

‘Yes, Glenn, but the Nazis converted this place into … into …’ Zenyalena didn’t know what they had converted it into.

Myles called over to her. ‘There’s probably a lighting system. See if you can find a bulb somewhere.’

Zenyalena swung the beam above them until she found a 1940s-style lightbulb dangling from a cable, happy to prove Myles right. Then she traced the cable back with the flashlight. It ran down the wall, into a metal box near the floor.

Pascal walked over to the metal switching box, with Zenyalena – and her torch – close behind. For a few moments Pascal peered inside, and swapped some fuses around, muttering in frustration. ‘The fuses have blown – maybe all of them,’ he complained.

‘Do you think the Nazis vandalised it before they left?’

‘No, just abandoned ...’ Pascal pressed something and looked up, optimistic. For a moment the lights blinked on, then they went out again. ‘… And this thing’s rusted. Stolz couldn’t have used it recently.’ Angry, Pascal kicked the metal. There was crackle and some sparks, and finally the lights hummed on again – permanently this time.

The whole, huge cavern was illuminated around them. The team stared at it, eyes wide with awe and bewilderment.

There was desk in the middle of the room, next to a table covered in papers. Boxes were piled in a far corner. Maps lined the walls, many with Nazi markings.

Myles peered back up. He could see the ceiling clearly now. It was the underside of the concrete plinth beneath the prison. Oddly, bolted onto it were several small upside-down railway tracks – nine concentric circles - and from each one hung a wire with a globe attached.

He remembered the clue: ‘Where it was written – and he grew fat - minus 32 metres.’

Myles got his bearings and tried to work out exactly where in the vast underground space would be exactly below Hitler’s cell. ‘It’s somewhere in the middle of this space.’ He limped towards the table in the centre of the cavern. On top of it, half buried in papers, was a book. Myles picked it up and read the cover.

Ephemeris

Strange. ‘Anyone know what an “ephemeris” is?’ he called out, the words echoing from the concrete walls.

He was greeted by blank faces, as Glenn, Heike-Ann, Zenyalena and Pascal drew near.

Myles began flicking through – it was a book of timetables, just like the one he’d found in Stolz’s East Berlin apartment. With a different month on each page, there were several columns with a different symbol at the top of each.

Zenyalena pointed at the page. ‘Look – the crescent symbol. That must mean the moon …’

Then Glenn noticed the last column was topped with the letters ‘PL’. ‘And this must be Pluto …’

Myles understood: it was a timetable for the planets. He checked the first page and the last.

January 1
^st
1900 – December 31
^st
2099.

Someone had calculated the position of the planets on every day for the whole of two centuries.

Then an idea came to him. He turned to the middle of the book, then back a few pages to 1989 – November. He ran his finger down the column next to Pluto, and the column three away from it. ‘We can test Stolz: Saturn and Neptune …’ As Myles looked down the columns, he realised it confirmed what Stolz had written: Saturn and Neptune appeared together in the sky exactly when the Berlin Wall came down, both at ten-and-a-third degrees of longitude. The ephemeris was precise to the day.

Quickly Myles turned to 1917, to see where Saturn and Neptune were during the Russian Revolution. The planets crossed – both at four degrees this time – in exactly the month that Czar Nicholas and his royal family were kicked out by the masses. He was about to check on Stalin’s death thirty-six years later, but he was distracted.

It was Zenyalena, calling out from a corner of the cavern. ‘I think it’s a control panel.’ She had found a corroded metal desk, and was pointing to the dials and lettering. ‘I’m freezing – does this control the heat, do you think?’

Myles directed Heike-Ann towards the device. ‘Can you make sense of it?’

Heike-Ann went to join Zenyalena and nervously reached out at the dial. ‘I think it’s … it’s some sort of calculating machine ...’ Heike-Ann slowly turned the knob, experimenting as numbers rotated behind a glass display. ‘… Not a number calculating machine. This is a calendar.’ She pointed to the dials. Each was inscribed with a single word. ‘Look – this means “Uranus, Jupiter, Neptune …” It’s a calendar for calculating the position of the planets.’

Zenyalena tried turning one of the dials. There was a clunk from the ceiling as something lurched along the rail. The globe beneath it followed, swinging slightly as it juddered into a new position. Zenyalena’s jaw dropped. ‘Amazing. The Nazis must have used it to work out where the planets were.’ She turned the dial again, causing another clunk on the rail above. A different hanging ball shifted this time.

Myles shook his head, still not understanding. ‘But why? The ephemeris told them where the planets were. So, how did this help them? It just shows them what they already knew.’ He pointed again at the control panel. ‘There must be something we’re missing. Some other button or … something.’

Heike-Ann started checking out the desk for any other buttons or switches; something they hadn’t found yet. She looked all around the sides, then at the bottom of the desk. Suddenly she reacted to something. She bent down and flicked a switch. The globes lit up, projecting light onto one of the spheres near the centre.

Zenyalena ran over to it, marvelling upwards at a spectacle of 1940s engineering. ‘Look – this one’s the Earth,’ she shouted, excited. ‘It’s got the continents painted on it. And there are dots for major cities.’

Glenn squinted up. ‘It’s kind of an odd way to light up the Earth, wouldn’t you say?’

But it was Pascal who realised more. ‘The lights from the planets: they cast a shadow. It allowed the Nazis to calculate where each planet would rise in the sky, and where it would set. See this: the red light …’ Pascal was pointing to the red sphere next to the ‘Earth’ globe. ‘… It must be Mars. The light from it hits half of the Earth – the other half is in shadow.’

Realising Zenyalena was still baffled, the Frenchman tried to explain. ‘There’s a line all around Earth where the light becomes shadow,’ he said, turning his finger in a circle. ‘The line joins all the places where Mars would appear on the horizon – either rising or setting. This model allowed them to calculate the places where the planet would be on the horizon, as viewed from Earth.’

Myles, Zenyalena, and Heike-Ann gazed up, wondering at the bizarre, antiquated invention slowly revolving above them. Then Glenn called out from the back of the cavern. While the others had been distracted by the metal control desk and the hanging spheres, the American had been rummaging through the papers on the tables behind them. ‘Hey, you guys,’ he called. He was holding up some large maps of the world. Heavy curved lines had been drawn on them. ‘Could these be Nazi satellite tracks?’

‘Not for man-made satellites,’ Myles called back, ‘Because the Nazis didn’t have them …’ Then he got it. ‘… But if you put these lines on a globe they’d divide it into two halves. Each line must show all the places on Earth where a planet was on the horizon.’

The team understood. But they were no wiser – why had the Nazis done it? And why build such a huge facility to make the calculations?

Glenn noticed one of the maps had been copied several times. First he saw the birth date and time.

Then, underneath, in gothic script, two words which provoked both disgust and fascination.

Zenyalena lifted it out, and held it flat with Glenn’s help. Heike-Ann, Pascal and Myles crowded around.

It showed several lines flowing like satellite tracks over a map of the world, each labelled with the name of a planet, written in German: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus …

Heike-Ann pointed to places which had been circled. ‘Look: important places in Hitler’s life: Stalingrad in Russia, the Western Front in France, Warsaw …’

But Zenyalena saw them differently. ‘They’re also places with lines going through them. That line shows almost exactly how Hitler divided Poland with Stalin, and look at Hawaii – when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour it undermined his authority.’ The she noticed another line, which cut through the Ardennes and ran up into Norway. ‘And look: this is where Hitler did his Blitzkrieg – his “lightning war” which surprised the Western Allies – twice, when he attacked there in 1940 and again, in 1944.’

Glenn was cynical. ‘You mean where he lost the Battle of the Bulge?’

But Zenyalena refused to concede. ‘Don’t you see?’ She thrust her face towards Glenn to make her point. ‘His 1944 offensive was almost brilliant. If he hadn’t squandered his army in the East, it would have broken through. It was a real shock.’

Myles acknowledged the point. ‘She’s right, Glenn. Those places in France and Belgium were important to Hitler. It’s also where Hitler won his reputation in the First World War.’

Zenyalena was already pointing at another line. ‘And again: look, Mercury. The mythical “winged messenger” of the Gods. When Hitler was born, Mercury was on the horizon in a line running up through Munich, Nuremberg and Berlin – the places where he made his greatest speeches, and where propaganda gave him power.’ Her finger darted to yet another line. ‘And another – Mars, planet of war: it was just setting, just going below the horizon, over both Stalingrad and El Alamein – the two most important places where the “God of War” abandoned him.’

‘Oh come on,’ huffed Glenn, letting go of the paper. ‘This is getting ridiculous. You can’t say Hitler lost at Stalingrad because at the moment he was born in 1889, fifty years before the battle, the planet Mars happened to be setting over the city.’

‘Look at the facts, Glenn: this Mars tracks the limits of Nazi military forces …’ Zenyalena’s voice was quiet as she spoke in awe. ‘… And it’s amazingly accurate.’

‘So you’re saying if Hitler had been born an hour later,’ – Glenn could barely bring himself to say it, it sounded so ludicrous – ‘his armies would have been stopped hundreds of miles further west?’

Zenyalena didn’t answer. Instead, she began sifting through the rest of the papers on the desk. She pulled out three more maps and read the titles. ‘We have, er … 7
^.
October 1900; 15.30 Uhr, 48.08 Nord, 11.34 Ost (München). Who’s that?’

Heike-Ann looked at the gothic script in the bottom corner of the sheet. ‘Himmler. The man who set up Hitler’s killing factories.’ She pointed to a place which had been circled in South-East Poland. ‘Look, they’ve circled Auschwitz.’ Auschwitz was on the intersection of two lines labelled ‘Uranus’ and ‘Jupiter’.

Zenyalena answered without looking up. ‘According to legends and old literature, Uranus is associated with surprises, Jupiter just exaggerates everything – which sums up Auschwitz.’

Myles noticed another line, running through western Germany. ‘And that’s Mars, setting on the horizon where Himmler surrendered to the Allies in 1945,’ he said, looking up at the others. ‘There was an old prophecy that he’d betray Hitler, and he did. With this map the Führer knew exactly where.’

Zenyalena had already picked up the next chart. ‘This one is 30
^th
November 1874, 01.30 (51:52 North, 01:21 West Oxfordshire, England). Winston Churchill …’ She was taking in the map and the places which had been circled. ‘… So Churchill had Mars rising in Italy – where he tried to get the Allies to launch the second front. Uranus directly over Moscow – he sent shock troops to attack the Soviet Union in 1919, and Mars setting over Washington DC.’

Glenn chuckled slightly. ‘Churchill surrendered to the Yanks, huh?’

‘Yes, Glenn, in a way he did,’ admitted Myles. ‘When he was in charge, the British Empire gave way to American leadership in the world.’