On this particular afternoon, Marianne could not tolerate the children’s bickering. All night, all week really, she was held in suspense. Any day now “the plan” was to unfold. Uncle Ulrich will join us next weekend, Albrecht’s latest telegram from Berlin had read. Please prepare his favorite Semmelkuchen. They had decided on the code words together. Since then sleep had been a delicate web she was too big and too clumsy to be caught in—she clutched at strands of it like a falling woman . . .
And despite the months and years of preparation, the arguments and discussions—What justifies a murder? Can right be achieved through wrong?—and despite the endless how and when and where and, most endlessly of all, What comes next?—it seemed incredible, impossible even, that their plot would unfold at last.
Albrecht had not approved at first. Assassination. Murder. It was not the culmination he wanted for the resistance movement. In his estimation, injustice could be fought only with justice—he was a lawyer to the core. Murder was evil. This was an absolute. But if it would end the war and prevent the murder of thousands? Even millions? They had debated this often, deep into the night with him probing his own convictions and Marianne playing devil’s advocate. Although, in fact, she was not the devil’s advocate. She believed Connie and von Stauffenberg and the others were right. Hitler must be killed.
For her, the case was sealed three years before, when Freddy Lederer returned from the east. He had stopped at Weisslau on his journey from the General Government zone of occupied Poland. And Freddy, an openhearted boy Marianne had known since childhood, always the first to jump off the dock at the lake and the last to come in for dinner at the Grand Hotel on the Ostsee, had been a gaunt shell of himself. He had recently returned from an intelligence trip for the Abwehr, and they had assigned him an SS escort, who had taken him to see an “action”—a “miracle of efficiency and dedication,” as this SS man described it. The “action” was being carried out by a unit of ordinary German reservists, older men for the most part, civilians with little or no training or military background. They had been instructed to “cleanse” the area south of Lublin. Lublin—Freddy had shuddered pronouncing the name—a kind of hell on earth. They were rounding up Jewish women, children, and old men and marching them into the forest to be shot.
To be shot? Marianne repeated. Are you certain? She had heard rumors, of course, but had still believed (though not supported) the Nazis’ Madagascar plan. All Polish Jews would be shipped to that island to form their own homeland. Other, darker stories trickled back from the front, but she had dismissed them as rumor or exaggeration. This was different, though. This was straight from the mouth of Freddy Lederer.
And he had seen it with his own eyes. German soldiers paired one-to-one: victims and their killers marched into the woods as partners. Children had been assigned their own executioners. He had watched one woman with three children—a little one, unable to walk yet, an older boy and a little girl, maybe seven or eight years old. The girl had refused to let go of her mother’s hand, so she had been allowed to walk together with her and the baby, a tiny thing wrapped carefully in blankets, looking around with wide eyes.
“That one will make trouble,” Freddy’s escort had said with indifference. “Three shots for one soldier. It will slow the process down.”
When Freddy finished speaking, silence welled up around them in the comfortable library of Weisslau with its roaring fire and plush furniture, its dog snoring lazily on the hearth. Marianne sat frozen with a kind of stillness that aimed to stop time, to go back, to untell Freddy’s story.
For the longest time, Freddy said, I could not grasp what I was looking at. I saw it, but I couldn’t take it in. It was—he groped for an analogy, his pale face haggard with the effort—it was like one of those hidden pictures; you see a goblet not a face, a stairway not a flower, you can’t see it even when it’s right there in front of you. And then suddenly—he raised his eyes and looked directly at Marianne—you do.
Marianne dreamed of them that night, the mothers and children walking into the woods. And the men, her own neighbors and peers, her fellow countrymen, marching them. This was what all Hitler’s frightening rants amounted to: ordinary, middle-aged men marching mothers and children into forests to be killed.
For so long Marianne and Albrecht and many of their friends had known Hitler was a lunatic, a leader whose lowbrow appeal to people’s most selfish, self-pitying emotions and ignorance was an embarrassment for their country. They had watched him make a masterwork of scapegoating Jews for Germany’s fall from power and persuade his followers that enlightenment, humanity, and tolerance were weaknesses—“Jewish” ideas that led to defeat. They had wrung their hands over his dangerous conflations, his fervor, and his lack of humanity. But Freddy Lederer’s account was something new to Marianne. She lay in bed that night and knew Connie was right. Hitler must die.
For Albrecht, though, the answer still lay in the pursuit of justice. He too was deeply affected by Freddy’s report. He redoubled his efforts to assist Jews in their attempts to escape, and to bring Nazi horrors like the one Freddy described to the attention of the British and the Americans, who he believed were the only hope for defeating Hitler. He was a religious person—much more so than Marianne—and he grappled with his faith. He lost sleep and barely ate. But he still believed the answer was to judge the man in the court of law. Only when we prove that international law and the human rights of all mankind are greater than any villain can we vanquish evil. He remained steadfast in this belief.
But this is impossible, Albrecht! Marianne argued. How are you to bring Hitler to a court of law? All of Germany would have to rise up against him.
With the support of the outside world, he would say. And with time . . .
He was a dreamer, though, Marianne felt. There was no time. And all of Germany would never rise up. They were too steeped in Hitler’s rhetoric, too cowardly, too implicated in the horrors of his war to reject him.
Two weeks after his visit to Weisslau, Freddy hanged himself.
It was not until the news of the extermination camps reached Albrecht—not the rumors, but the undeniable firsthand accounts he had access to through his work in the Abwehr—that he agreed. Assassination was the only way.