Midnight in Berlin Read Online Free PDF Page A

chancellor. The man who was head of the National Socialist Party, the government and the German state never got to his desk at a regular hour and sometimes didn’t appear in his office until the early afternoon. Only when he did so were his three secretaries able to confirm his diary for the day. Usually the chancellor rose at ten o’clock, took breakfast of toast and his favourite brand of German marmalade at eleven, and only then walked through from his living quarters to the office.
    Those who worked most closely with Adolf Hitler felt that he enjoyed the element of surprise that his refusal to conform to an arranged timetable gave him. He was a creature of habit, they said, especially when it came to his vegetarian diet, but not when it concerned the management of state affairs. In such matters he was deliberately unpredictable.
    Hitler lived where he worked, in the Reich Chancellery on Wilhelmstrasse. From his office on the second floor he could look across the street to the Hotel Kaiserhof, preferred by senior Nazis to the Adlon. Here the chancellor would often take tea at four o’clock with his inner circle of advisers and such favoured foreign visitors as the British socialite Unity Mitford. For an hour or more, he would indulge his passion for cakes and regale his audience with long monologues about foreign affairs. The hotel made sure that the chancellor was presented with a different choice of cakes every day – all baked with care in their own kitchen.
    The hotel was flanked by government ministries, which Hitler had personally sited on the street. Wilhelmstrasse was Hitler’s powerbase in Berlin. Across the road from the Chancellery, he could almost look into Goebbels’s office, while at a corner on the crossroads a few hundred yards away stood the Gestapo headquarters. This was important. Above all, the chancellor wanted Heinrich Himmler, head of state security, and Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo, the rising man he admired so much, close at hand. If there was a flaw in the urban geography of power, it was the presence of the British embassy a mere three hundred yards up the street. It was far too easy for the ambassador to visit him.
    Sir Nevile Henderson called the twice-weekly meeting of senior staff his morning prayers. Shortly after nine o’clock thisJanuary morning they gathered in the conference room next to his office, gratefully pouring coffee or tea from Thermos flasks placed on a side table. The first secretary, Kirkpatrick, sat to his left and the political attaché, David Buckland, to his right. Very much feeling like the new boy at school, Macrae took a seat at the far end of the table. The commercial, naval, air and military attachés made up the meeting.
    Roger Halliday was there that morning, but he only attended when he felt like it – a fact that irritated the ambassador. Halliday reported directly to the Secret Intelligence Service HQ in London. The ambassador had no control over the man – or his drinking, for that matter. He distrusted Halliday’s information and disliked the methods by which it was obtained – bribery and blackmail, as far as Sir Nevile could gather. There was something else about Halliday the ambassador deeply disliked. The man was unmarried and made little secret of the reason why he never would marry. Henderson was surprised that the Secret Service employed such people. Apart from anything else, it left them wide open to blackmail.
    The meeting began with the ambassador welcoming Colonel Noel Macrae to the embassy team. Heads turned and smiled and Macrae nodded back. Each member of staff then described their plans for the days ahead and reported any information of interest. At the end, Sir Nevile summed up with the same short address they had all heard before, although at every meeting he tried to deliver it with a different angle. The message was simple. They were all working to ensure that diplomacy would triumph,