Midnight in Berlin by James MacManus Read Free Book Online Page B

flipped the leaflet back into his pocket, patted Macrae on the shoulder and walked away. From the next-door room Macrae heard a child’s voice say, “Daddy, where have you been?”
    Back at the embassy, Macrae found several messages from the ambassador asking for a meeting. He ignored them and took out the files on senior German military personnel.
    The notes on Wilhelm Keitel were lengthy, well documented. He began reading and soon realised why Hitler trusted him so much.
    There was a knock on his office door. Macrae looked at his watch. It was five thirty. He had been reading the file for forty minutes.
    Daisy Wellesley peered round the door. “Sir Nevile wonders whether you have received his messages?”
    â€œPlease make my apologies and say that I would be happy to join him at six.”
    Daisy made a face. “All right,” she said.
    Sir Nevile Henderson was displeased. He had been waiting for his military attaché for almost two hours and had received what he felt were less-than-polite brush-offs. Now the man was coming to see him at a time of day when it would be difficult not to offer him a whisky. The trouble was military attachés reported to the War Office and not the Foreign Office. It was a damned nuisance.
    The two men settled down with their whiskies – a blended Scotch, Macrae noted, not the twenty-year-old Glenlivet malt he knew the ambassador kept in his drinks cabinet.
    Macrae talked quietly for ten minutes. Sir Nevile did not like what he heard.
    â€œWhen is this going to happen?” he said.
    â€œBy the end of the month. The arrangements are under way.”
    â€œAnd no one in the army knows?”
    â€œBlomberg’s misfortune to have married a woman who was once a prostitute is widely known. How Hitler plans to take advantage of this is not.”
    â€œIs it not a little strange that you know something as important as this and they don’t?”
    â€œI trust my source.”
    â€œDisinformation, perhaps?”
    â€œWhat would be the point? It would quickly be disproved and burn the source as far as we were concerned.”
    Sir Nevile moved from his chair and poured them both more whisky.
    â€œLet me sum up. Hitler is going to remove his two most senior army officers and then unleash a purge of most of his generals. He is going to transfer field commanders and declare himself supreme commander and war minister. This man Wilhelm Keitel will be the number two, in day-to-day control of the army.”
    â€œThat’s it.”
    â€œWhat do we know about Keitel?”
    â€œLoyalist, brilliant war record, which means a lot to Hitler, and heavily engaged in the secret rearmament programme.”
    â€œAh yes, that …,” murmured the ambassador.
    There was a silence. This was not what the ambassador wanted to hear. The German question was the major diplomatic issue for the government in London. Reaction to the alarming speed of events in Berlin had been based on the carefully calibrated diplomacy of reason and persuasion. The one unalterable fact that coloured the thinking of every politician in Britain and France, and indeed elsewhere in Europe, was that a return to the carnage of 1914–18 must at all costs be avoided.
    It was widely known that public opinion in Germany and that of the business community were of the same frame of mind. The wounds of the war were still fresh in a country that had suffered a disproportionate number of casualties. The German High Command was also known to be against any military adventures.
    Given these facts, it was beyond belief or rational construction to suppose that the German Führer would actually wanta new war. He himself had served in the trenches and lost many friends there, whom he still publicly alluded to as heroes.
    And yet now the ambassador’s new military attaché, a man he hardly knew, was telling him that Hitler was about to unleash a sweeping purge of the army command and