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Synopsis
Nothing thrived here, but something grew...
Germany, 1945. Year Zero. The war is at an end. When Ireland's ambassador to the Third Reich finally leaves the war-torn country, Garda detective Stefan Gillespie makes his way home under the watchful eye of British Intelligence, who are searching for some of the Irish citizens Ireland doesn't want back. The usual dirty business. But suddenly Stefan is drawn into a murder inquiry.
Unexpectedly arriving in a town he knew in his youth, on visits to his German relatives, Stefan feels compelled to help his cousin Annaliese and her hostile daughter Krista. Maybe it's nostalgia for first love, or for a time of peace, or maybe he just wants to do something that feels clean. But the past is a dangerous place to return to...
A darkness still hangs over Germany, and Stefan Gillespie is walking right into it.
Release date: August 7, 2025
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Print pages: 90000
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The City in Year Zero
Michael Russell
Germany, Saxony-Anhalt, Ilsenburg, April 1945
On the steep hill overlooking Ilsenburg, above the River Ilse, lay the castle and the abbey, a crumbling mansion and what was left of the Benedictine monastery, just the church and the pillared refectory and the shape of what were once cloisters. They were crumbling too. Extending back into the thick woodland that marked the first slopes of the Harz Mountains, some straggling outcrops of grass-covered stone mapped what had collapsed entirely centuries earlier. Not so long ago, the thin, sour soil that lay between these remnants of the abbey’s walls was left to itself and the scrubby growth that crept out from the encroaching trees. Now, among the stones, patches of earth had been dug and raked and planted. Nothing thrived here, but something grew. That was enough. There were the black-green leaves of potatoes, and cabbages and kale. There were heaps of manure at intervals, to feed the unresponsive soil, and on this warm April day, flies hovered over them. A group of men spread out among the vegetables, digging in the dung and earthing up potatoes. They were noticeably thin. They were unwashed. Their clothes were filthy, ragged, torn. Some wore grey trousers or khaki tunics, but part of every man’s outfit carried the stripes that marked them out as forced labourers.
The girl walked past the prisoners without seeing them. There was, after all, nothing to see. In any case, she had more important things on her mind. She moved quickly, with a determination that wasn’t just about purpose, but anger. She carried on past the abbey buildings and out through the arch to the path that led down to the town. She heard voices. They were young voices, shouting and laughing. She didn’t register them either. But as she walked towards the Marienkirche there was a louder, sharper sound. A gun shot. She stopped. There was another shot. Then an indignant voice. The voice came from somewhere above her. And she looked up.
‘What the fuck are you doing, you arseholes!’
In the arched window of the squat tower below the church’s spire was a face she knew. Erich Schröder, in the black and tan of his Hitler Youth uniform, was halfway out of the arch on to the narrow ledge that would let him climb up higher.
‘You won’t shoot it down!’
Above the yellow brick, where the dark slates of the spire began, she saw the white flag on a pole, no more than a piece of torn sheet nailed to a broomstick. But she knew what it meant. And the anger she already felt grew. The laughter that answered Erich came from below. She looked down again to see three more boys. And they were all boys, thirteen and fourteen, dressed in the mix of uniforms that made them members of the Volkssturm, the army of children and old men that was going to halt the advance of Germany’s enemies when Germany’s army had finally failed to do it. There were Hitler Youth shirts, naturally, along with Luftwaffe jackets and army forage caps. And there was the rifle, the one rifle they had, that Klaus Voss had been firing up at the humiliating flag of surrender someone had fixed to the Marienkirche steeple.
‘It’s all right, Erich, we’re aiming at the flag, not you!’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of Klaus! You never hit what you aim at.’
There was more laughter.
‘I’ll get it! Save the ammo for the Yanks!’
‘OK. Don’t fall off!’
Only now did Erich see the girl looking up.
‘I’ve done this before, haven’t I Krista?’
‘You were ten then,’ she called, laughing. ‘And not so fat!’
The boy grinned and pulled himself out and up towards the flag.
‘Who did it?’ asked the girl, moving closer.
The other boys shrugged.
‘Could have been anyone,’ said Klaus.
It was a reply that instantly turned the girl’s attention back to what she was doing. What she had to do. No, not anyone. There couldn’t be so many traitors in Ilsenburg that it could be just anyone. She turned away abruptly, and walked on, faster and more determined than before. As she reached the steps down to Schloßstraße, her head was too full again, too angry again, to hear the cheer behind her as Erich Schröder threw the white flag down from the church tower.
In her bedroom in the Yellow House, in Mühlenstrasse, the girl was looking at herself in the mirror. She had changed her clothes. She had on the uniform of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls. She was thirteen now, not as close to fourteen as she wanted to be, but old enough to move up from the Jungmädelbund and wear the long blue skirt she had made herself from precious, hoarded material, the white blouse with its patch pockets that somehow her mother had found for her, and the black neckerchief held in place by the knot of woven leather. It was right that she was wearing her uniform. She had no doubts about what she had to do, but it still made her feel stronger. She turned away to the door. As she did, she looked out through the window to the street. The river was there and above the river the hill. And on the hill the Schloss and the abbey behind it. She had seen him go into the abbey earlier. She had followed him after she spotted him by the telegraph wires. He could still be there. He was often in the chapel for hours, playing the organ. She didn’t know why that thought came into her head, except that they might find him there, if he hadn’t gone home. It didn’t matter.
The girl came downstairs. The noise her marching shoes made on the wooden steps startled her mother, coming into the kitchen through the back door.
‘What’s all that clatter for?’ she said, grinning.
And then she stopped grinning. This wasn’t a time to put on that new uniform and walk out in it. She had already decided it was time to get rid of her own uniform. The time for uniforms was over. If there were people who couldn’t see that, good luck to them. She knew better. Everyone knew the Americans were coming, even those who wanted to pretend they could be stopped. And if no one would quite say it out loud, everyone knew too that they were coming in days, not weeks. The rolling thunder of heavy guns had been a part of their lives for a long time. Distant and then less distant, constant and then intermittent, and now, barely heard. You didn’t need to ask what that silence meant. There was no one to fire the guns. In Ilsenburg, the Luftwaffe camp outside the town had been empty for a week. The soldiers had gone. The SS men had gone. The forced labourers who marched out every day to work at the camp were digging up roads, supposedly to stop tanks, or just planting more vegetables in the abbey grounds.
But it wasn’t the unexpected sight of her daughter in her BDM uniform on its own that surprised her mother. It was the expression that went with it. Hard and purposeful in a way that didn’t go with her thirteen years. Something was wrong.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m doing my duty, Mother.’
The girl turned and walked away. She went to the hall and out through the front door of the Yellow House. For a moment there was the stiff clip-clop of the black boots on the stone path to the gate. There had been something like contempt in the words the girl had thrown out. Her mother had heard that contempt before. And she had heard that word: duty. It echoed in her head, and what had gone with it. Her daughter had been eleven then. She had learned to be afraid of her.
*
Anselm Ebbers sat at the keyboard of the great organ that seemed somehow out of place in the bare space that made up most of the chapel. But it wasn’t all that was out of place. Cold, empty stone made up the narrow, truncated Romanesque building that was the church of St Peter and St Paul. The stone almost smelt of its Benedictine antiquity. But around the altar there was an elaborate, Baroque surround of richly carved wood that stretched from wall to wall and floor to arched roof with scenes from the crucifixion at its centre. And above it, in peeling, fading paint, the blue and white clouds of heaven sailed across the plasterwork. The organ, like the altarpiece, was somehow bigger than its building. So was its sound.
However, what the young organist was playing was quiet and mediative. He didn’t excel at the organ. He was competent rather than good. He played often now because no one else did. The chapel was hardly used. It was part of life in Ilsenburg that had ended even before the war came to put an end to many things, slowly at first and then faster. The abbey had been a home for those parts of the Protestant Church that had resisted, in whatever way they could, the new Germany that National Socialism had brought into being. As resistance went, it probably didn’t amount to much, except to try to maintain at least some distance between God and the great maw of the state that would consume all things. But if it wasn’t much, it was still too much, and in 1936 the little evangelical college at the abbey, that trained missionaries for the wrong kind of mission, had been shut down. The chapel was surplus to requirements, the organ almost never played. Anselm Ebbers, a theology student whose studies had come to an unsurprising halt in the middle of a war that had no place for theology, made a point of playing it, perhaps as a kind of prayer.
He played the last chords of Buxtehude’s chorale, ‘Saviour of the Nations, Come’, slowly and quietly, letting the resonance fade into the air around him before he lifted his hands gently from the keyboard. Luther’s words were in his head as he sat back in the silence that followed. ‘Praise to God the father sing, Praise to God the son, our King, Praise to God the spirit be, Ever and eternally.’ It was only as he got up that he turned and saw the policeman and two boys who stood beside him. Wachtmeister Vennemann, Erich Schröder, Klaus Voss. He smiled for only the few seconds it took him to realise they had come for him. The combination of awkwardness and disdain in their faces told him that. He understood even before he registered the rifle Klaus carried. It hadn’t occurred to him, when he saw Krista Friesack earlier, on the road behind the abbey, that it meant anything. He had only seen her walk away. But he knew now that she must have been watching him. His first reaction was simply surprise. He thought of her as a child. What had she said?
‘You’ll come with us, Anselm,’ said the policeman.
Anselm Ebbers nodded. He bent down beside the organ stool.
‘What are you doing? Keep your hands in sight!’
The rifle was pointing at Anselm as he stood up, holding the leg iron of leather and steel he wore on his left leg, a permanent souvenir of childhood polio.
‘I need this on, Herr Vennemann. I take it off for the foot pedals.’
He sat back down on the stool and tightened the straps of the leg iron.
In the dark, wood-panelled room at the front of the townhall, three men sat a table. On one side, Wachtmeister Jürgen Vennemann, sixty, gaunt, a little deaf. All that was left of Ilsenburg’s police force. In the middle the mayor and Nazi party leader, Oskar Mommsen, fifty-five, lazy, officious and today clearly uneasy. He didn’t like this. He had no choice about what had to happen, but he wished the damned girl hadn’t seen anything. Couldn’t she just have ignored it? Did it matter now, any of it? His thoughts were on a future that was very close and as a man who had always sweated, he sweated more now, more than ever. He was afraid. As for this, he wanted it over and done with. On the other side of the mayor, the town’s military commander, Hauptmann Rainer Becker. He had lost an eye fighting in Poland at the start of the war. He wore an eyepatch, and he was in the habit of rubbing it continually as he spoke. It could be said that he wore the patch with a sense of gratitude. It had kept him alive, unlike most of the men he served with, whose bodies were scattered across thousands of kilometres of Russia between Leningrad and Stalingrad. Now, with the departure of the troops at the Luftwaffe camp and the SS men who did whatever it was they did there, which never seemed to be very much, preparations for the defence of the town had fallen on him. There were no soldiers left, only the old men and boys who made up the Volkssturm. They would make a good show of it. The enemy would pay dearly for every metre of German soil. That’s what he told them. There could be no question of defeat. This man Ebbers, this traitor to the Fatherland, would make that point.
Anselm Ebbers stood to one side of the table, flanked by the Hitler Youth uniforms of Klaus and Erich. A group of townspeople sat on benches or stood at the back of the room. Mostly they were the party faithful, gathered together by the mayor. He had wanted a bigger crowd. It wasn’t long ago that he would have got one. But as the news of what had happened spread through Ilsenburg, most people closed their doors and stayed where they were. But there were enough people there, enough at least to give Mommsen the sense of legitimacy he needed to feel.
The only witness was Krista Friesack. She stood in front of the table.
‘I saw Anselm – Herr Ebbers – when I was walking behind the abbey.’
‘Where was he?’
‘I saw him on the wall by the stable yard, at the back of the Schloss.’
‘And what was he doing?’
‘He got up onto the roof and crawled along to the corner of the building, there’s a telegraph pole, and the wires come down, across the yard, into the back of the Schloss. He could reach the wires from where he was standing. He cut them.’
The police sergeant held up a pair of long-handled shears.
‘These were found at the house of the accused.’
‘What happened then, Krista?’ asked the mayor.
‘He got back onto the wall and then climbed down to the road.’
‘Did he see you?’
‘I know he saw me when he was walking back towards the town. That’s all. I don’t think he knew I’d seen him up on the roof. He didn’t know I was watching.’
‘And you came straight to tell me what had happened.’
‘I knew my duty, sir.’
The three-man tribunal nodded in unison.
‘You can go, Krista,’ said Mommsen. ‘You should go home now.’
The girl hesitated. For the first time she looked at the man standing only a little way from her. He shrugged and there was almost a smile. For the first time, there was a question in Krista Friesack’s head. She didn’t even know what it was, except that she didn’t like it much. Everything had stopped. What happened now?
‘Your acts will be recorded,’ continued the mayor. ‘But we’re done.’
As Krista turned to leave, there was a murmur of approbation running through the onlookers. Someone started clapping. Then they all clapped, including the judges. She put her head down. She knew she was blushing. She walked out.
There was silence. The three men stared intently at Anselm.
‘You obviously know, Ebbers, that my office is in the Schloss.’ It was Hauptmann Becker who spoke. ‘The telephone wires you cut connect that office to other military commanders and bases. Your purpose was to sabotage the defence of the town and deliver it up to the enemy. It’s very simple, very clear. Treason.’
There was nothing for Anselm to argue about, except his reasons.
‘Everyone knows how close the Americans are. I’ve seen towns flattened by the bombing. I’ve seen the bodies in the streets. There aren’t even any soldiers here now. They’ve gone. You know they’ve gone, Hauptmann. All I wanted to do was to stop the town’s destruction, to stop us all from being killed for no reason at all.’
There was a hiss of anger in the room. Becker got to his feet.
‘Surrender? Is that how you keep your oath to the Führer? You piece of shit. And you’re not alone. There’s evidence. You’re one traitor. Who are the others?’
The mayor and the police sergeant felt obliged to stand now. The room had erupted. Indignant abuse was being hurled at the young student from everywhere.
‘Look at these!’ shouted the military commander, holding up some pieces of paper. ‘These call for surrender. Found in your house. But who printed them? Where do they come from? And this.’ He held up the white flag that had fluttered over the Marienkirche that morning. ‘You didn’t climb up there, you crippled bastard. You might manage a wall, but not a church steeple. So, who put this up?’
Mommsen picked up a wooden gavel and banged the table.
‘Order! Let’s have order. I understand how you feel. We all feel the same.’
The noise subsided into a low rumble of continuing outrage.
‘Who else is involved in this?’ The mayor, still standing, was looking at Anslem again. ‘Where do these leaflets come from? Who put up the white flag?’
‘No one else is involved.’
‘Names. Give us names. Give us names and you might save your life.’
Mommsen looked at the other two judges. Jürgen Vennemann nodded. Rainer Becker shook his head decisively. The room was suddenly very quiet. The words had been spoken. Death was coming. No one was surprised, and by now that included Anselm Ebbers himself, but saying it aloud for the first time hit home.
‘There are no names. The leaflets are mine. All they say is that when there’s nothing left to fight for, then there’s no reason to die. As for your white flag, I’ve never seen it. But am I alone in knowing it’s finished? I don’t think so. Am I?’
The last question was addressed to the room. There were a few people who looked down at the floor, but for the rest, it was enough to restart the rage. Whether that came from belief or desperation, it came, loud and strong. The death sentence was given in seconds, called out by Oskar Mommsen over the competing voices.
There would be no reflection. There would be no last moments for the condemned man. The sentence would be carried out immediately. The urgency of the drumhead had taken over. It needed doing. It needed doing quickly. This was the example Hauptmann Becker wanted. Everyone wanted it.
Anselm was already being dragged out of the room. Men and boys of the Volkssturm surrounded him, among them Klaus and Erich. As he was pulled through the crowd there were punches and kicks, and spit covered his face. They poured out into the marketplace. Anselm was struggling, but he was held too tight to move. He was pulled and pushed across the cobbles towards the little lake at the edge of the town. There was a stone arch that led to the waterside. The sun shone on the water. It was sparkling and bright. On the other side of the lake, the tree-covered hills rose towards the Harz Mountains. But no one saw any of that. No one in the marketplace saw beyond the scrum of angry, jostling, shouting men and women they were part of, pushing the terrified man towards the arch and the lake.
A noose hung from the arch. It had been thrown up there even as Anselm Ebbers walked into the room for what the mayor of Ilsenburg had recorded as a trial. He had added the words in extremis. That, he felt, covered all eventualities. There had never been any doubt what would happen. Everyone knew it. For now, Mommsen stood at the back of the crowd, on the townhall steps. He lit a cigarette. He was drenched in sweat. Somewhere in the throng were Hauptmann Becker and Wachtmeister Vennemann, the military commander and the policeman. They could deal with the business end of it. It was out of his hands, wasn’t it? It had been out of his hands from the start. From the moment the stupid BDM bitch came to him with the story, it was already out of his hands. As he looked across at the crowd, he wanted to turn away. But he didn’t. It wouldn’t look good if he did.
He couldn’t see who was pulling the rope as Anselm Ebbers rose up under the stone arch, almost out of the press of people it seemed. He was gasping and choking. The sounds were screams and cries of pain, but the noose was too tight to let them out. There were shouts and roars from the onlookers. Arms shot up in the air. The cry ‘Sieg Heil’ rang out. But there weren’t so many arms. Oskar Mommsen noted that. The body, and now it seemed somehow a body although Anselm was not yet dead, kicked and jerked and gasped for several minutes. There were people walking away from the scrum. And the shouting had stopped, quite suddenly. The body hung limply now. It was done. And the crowd had thinned. They had got what they came for and some were less satisfied than others. Oskar Mommsen walked down the steps and across the marketplace to the gate into the hotel overlooking the lake. He needed a drink.
There was no one in the hotel when Mommsen entered. He walked behind the bar and poured himself a large glass of schnapps. It was his hotel, so it was his schnapps. He drained the glass and poured another. He looked up to see Rainer Becker. The soldier looked a little wild and flushed. But his job was done. He, at least, was satisfied with the point that had been made so forcefully. The mayor poured out another schnapps and pushed it along the bar. Becker drank it.
‘More?’
‘No, I’ve got work to do. But well done. You did a good job.’
The mayor said nothing. These were congratulations he did not want.
‘Just leave the cripple hanging there, Oskar. Leave him till he stinks.’
*
The next day, Hauptmann Rainer Becker, as military commander of Ilsenburg, gave his last command. American tanks were only kilometres away. They had halted that afternoon, somewhere east of Goslar. And Goslar had surrendered without a fight. American planes had flown low over Ilsenburg that morning. There was nothing to stop them. There would be nothing to stop the tanks and the soldiers either. From the centre of the town, you could still hear artillery fire, but it was further away than it had been even days before and there was less and less of it. It was certainly a long way from Ilsenburg. Whether you wept and raged, or quietly rejoiced, or just wanted to get the bloody thing over with, there was no one who didn’t realise the unbreakable Will they were supposed to have was broken, even among those who had shouted their final Sieg Heils as Anselm Ebbers’s body was hoisted beside the lake only twenty-four hours ago. His last gasp had been the Will’s last gasp, as brutal and pointless at the end as it had been at the beginning. But there was still a game to play in the debris. Hauptmann Becker still played it.
There was still resistance, said the captain. Resistance that would be unyielding and unrelenting. The forests and mountains of Germany would be turned into fortresses. From there heroic Werwolf warriors would emerge to wreak destruction on the Allies and make the occupation of the country impossible. Even now, he announced, a detachment of Wehrmacht and Volkssturm commandos was making its way toward the high peak of the Brocken above Ilsenburg and into the Harz Mountains to continue the fight. He didn’t have the men to defend the town. Reluctantly, he had to accept that. They were too weak. But they could still use what resources they had to give the Werwolf fighters time to reach the hills and lose themselves in the impregnable Harz. The American advance along the valley of the River Ilse could be delayed. Every day, every hour, counted in this new way of war. And so it was that Rainer Becker deployed his little army of old men and boys on the backroads and tracks into the mountains. They set off from Ilsenburg, carrying little more than rifles and a handful of the precious Panzerfäuste rocket launchers that might, given more luck than judgement, disable a US tank.
Erich Schröder, Klaus Voss, Johann Koch, and Poldi Neumann headed out of town along Mühlenstrasse, heading for the forest road that would take them to the small bridge over the River Ilse that they were to hold against the Americans for as long as they could. Truly every day, every hour, counted. The more time they bought for the commandos, the stronger the fight back would be. Maybe Ilsenburg’s military commando did believe in the Werwölfe. Maybe he just said what he felt he had to say. His own actions, after all, had given him an intimate knowledge of the rewards of defeatism. But whatever he knew, or didn’t, there was no commando army gathering in the mountains. The soldiers who had left Goslar without even attempting to defend it, like more and more troops in what remained of Germany, were simply fading away. They were dumping their weapons and heading home, or looking for a safe place to surrender, or walking somewhere, anywhere, that took them away from the fighting. It was true that some of the SS men who recently abandoned the Luftwaffe camp outside Ilsenburg had made their way into the mountains. They did so in civilian clothes and their aim was to disappear. However, such details were not Rainer Becker’s concern.
When the Hauptmann called into the hotel by the lake to see Oskar Mommsen that afternoon he wasn’t wearing his uniform. He came on a bicycle he had just requisitioned, since he didn’t have one of his own. He came, he said, to say goodbye. It was important that he wasn’t captured. The implication was that he was determined to carry on the struggle, somewhere, somehow. But he left that hanging in the air. He didn’t have the gall to say it. He didn’t relish the look the mayor might have given him if he had. He had never liked Oska. . .
On the steep hill overlooking Ilsenburg, above the River Ilse, lay the castle and the abbey, a crumbling mansion and what was left of the Benedictine monastery, just the church and the pillared refectory and the shape of what were once cloisters. They were crumbling too. Extending back into the thick woodland that marked the first slopes of the Harz Mountains, some straggling outcrops of grass-covered stone mapped what had collapsed entirely centuries earlier. Not so long ago, the thin, sour soil that lay between these remnants of the abbey’s walls was left to itself and the scrubby growth that crept out from the encroaching trees. Now, among the stones, patches of earth had been dug and raked and planted. Nothing thrived here, but something grew. That was enough. There were the black-green leaves of potatoes, and cabbages and kale. There were heaps of manure at intervals, to feed the unresponsive soil, and on this warm April day, flies hovered over them. A group of men spread out among the vegetables, digging in the dung and earthing up potatoes. They were noticeably thin. They were unwashed. Their clothes were filthy, ragged, torn. Some wore grey trousers or khaki tunics, but part of every man’s outfit carried the stripes that marked them out as forced labourers.
The girl walked past the prisoners without seeing them. There was, after all, nothing to see. In any case, she had more important things on her mind. She moved quickly, with a determination that wasn’t just about purpose, but anger. She carried on past the abbey buildings and out through the arch to the path that led down to the town. She heard voices. They were young voices, shouting and laughing. She didn’t register them either. But as she walked towards the Marienkirche there was a louder, sharper sound. A gun shot. She stopped. There was another shot. Then an indignant voice. The voice came from somewhere above her. And she looked up.
‘What the fuck are you doing, you arseholes!’
In the arched window of the squat tower below the church’s spire was a face she knew. Erich Schröder, in the black and tan of his Hitler Youth uniform, was halfway out of the arch on to the narrow ledge that would let him climb up higher.
‘You won’t shoot it down!’
Above the yellow brick, where the dark slates of the spire began, she saw the white flag on a pole, no more than a piece of torn sheet nailed to a broomstick. But she knew what it meant. And the anger she already felt grew. The laughter that answered Erich came from below. She looked down again to see three more boys. And they were all boys, thirteen and fourteen, dressed in the mix of uniforms that made them members of the Volkssturm, the army of children and old men that was going to halt the advance of Germany’s enemies when Germany’s army had finally failed to do it. There were Hitler Youth shirts, naturally, along with Luftwaffe jackets and army forage caps. And there was the rifle, the one rifle they had, that Klaus Voss had been firing up at the humiliating flag of surrender someone had fixed to the Marienkirche steeple.
‘It’s all right, Erich, we’re aiming at the flag, not you!’
‘That’s what I’m afraid of Klaus! You never hit what you aim at.’
There was more laughter.
‘I’ll get it! Save the ammo for the Yanks!’
‘OK. Don’t fall off!’
Only now did Erich see the girl looking up.
‘I’ve done this before, haven’t I Krista?’
‘You were ten then,’ she called, laughing. ‘And not so fat!’
The boy grinned and pulled himself out and up towards the flag.
‘Who did it?’ asked the girl, moving closer.
The other boys shrugged.
‘Could have been anyone,’ said Klaus.
It was a reply that instantly turned the girl’s attention back to what she was doing. What she had to do. No, not anyone. There couldn’t be so many traitors in Ilsenburg that it could be just anyone. She turned away abruptly, and walked on, faster and more determined than before. As she reached the steps down to Schloßstraße, her head was too full again, too angry again, to hear the cheer behind her as Erich Schröder threw the white flag down from the church tower.
In her bedroom in the Yellow House, in Mühlenstrasse, the girl was looking at herself in the mirror. She had changed her clothes. She had on the uniform of the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the League of German Girls. She was thirteen now, not as close to fourteen as she wanted to be, but old enough to move up from the Jungmädelbund and wear the long blue skirt she had made herself from precious, hoarded material, the white blouse with its patch pockets that somehow her mother had found for her, and the black neckerchief held in place by the knot of woven leather. It was right that she was wearing her uniform. She had no doubts about what she had to do, but it still made her feel stronger. She turned away to the door. As she did, she looked out through the window to the street. The river was there and above the river the hill. And on the hill the Schloss and the abbey behind it. She had seen him go into the abbey earlier. She had followed him after she spotted him by the telegraph wires. He could still be there. He was often in the chapel for hours, playing the organ. She didn’t know why that thought came into her head, except that they might find him there, if he hadn’t gone home. It didn’t matter.
The girl came downstairs. The noise her marching shoes made on the wooden steps startled her mother, coming into the kitchen through the back door.
‘What’s all that clatter for?’ she said, grinning.
And then she stopped grinning. This wasn’t a time to put on that new uniform and walk out in it. She had already decided it was time to get rid of her own uniform. The time for uniforms was over. If there were people who couldn’t see that, good luck to them. She knew better. Everyone knew the Americans were coming, even those who wanted to pretend they could be stopped. And if no one would quite say it out loud, everyone knew too that they were coming in days, not weeks. The rolling thunder of heavy guns had been a part of their lives for a long time. Distant and then less distant, constant and then intermittent, and now, barely heard. You didn’t need to ask what that silence meant. There was no one to fire the guns. In Ilsenburg, the Luftwaffe camp outside the town had been empty for a week. The soldiers had gone. The SS men had gone. The forced labourers who marched out every day to work at the camp were digging up roads, supposedly to stop tanks, or just planting more vegetables in the abbey grounds.
But it wasn’t the unexpected sight of her daughter in her BDM uniform on its own that surprised her mother. It was the expression that went with it. Hard and purposeful in a way that didn’t go with her thirteen years. Something was wrong.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m doing my duty, Mother.’
The girl turned and walked away. She went to the hall and out through the front door of the Yellow House. For a moment there was the stiff clip-clop of the black boots on the stone path to the gate. There had been something like contempt in the words the girl had thrown out. Her mother had heard that contempt before. And she had heard that word: duty. It echoed in her head, and what had gone with it. Her daughter had been eleven then. She had learned to be afraid of her.
*
Anselm Ebbers sat at the keyboard of the great organ that seemed somehow out of place in the bare space that made up most of the chapel. But it wasn’t all that was out of place. Cold, empty stone made up the narrow, truncated Romanesque building that was the church of St Peter and St Paul. The stone almost smelt of its Benedictine antiquity. But around the altar there was an elaborate, Baroque surround of richly carved wood that stretched from wall to wall and floor to arched roof with scenes from the crucifixion at its centre. And above it, in peeling, fading paint, the blue and white clouds of heaven sailed across the plasterwork. The organ, like the altarpiece, was somehow bigger than its building. So was its sound.
However, what the young organist was playing was quiet and mediative. He didn’t excel at the organ. He was competent rather than good. He played often now because no one else did. The chapel was hardly used. It was part of life in Ilsenburg that had ended even before the war came to put an end to many things, slowly at first and then faster. The abbey had been a home for those parts of the Protestant Church that had resisted, in whatever way they could, the new Germany that National Socialism had brought into being. As resistance went, it probably didn’t amount to much, except to try to maintain at least some distance between God and the great maw of the state that would consume all things. But if it wasn’t much, it was still too much, and in 1936 the little evangelical college at the abbey, that trained missionaries for the wrong kind of mission, had been shut down. The chapel was surplus to requirements, the organ almost never played. Anselm Ebbers, a theology student whose studies had come to an unsurprising halt in the middle of a war that had no place for theology, made a point of playing it, perhaps as a kind of prayer.
He played the last chords of Buxtehude’s chorale, ‘Saviour of the Nations, Come’, slowly and quietly, letting the resonance fade into the air around him before he lifted his hands gently from the keyboard. Luther’s words were in his head as he sat back in the silence that followed. ‘Praise to God the father sing, Praise to God the son, our King, Praise to God the spirit be, Ever and eternally.’ It was only as he got up that he turned and saw the policeman and two boys who stood beside him. Wachtmeister Vennemann, Erich Schröder, Klaus Voss. He smiled for only the few seconds it took him to realise they had come for him. The combination of awkwardness and disdain in their faces told him that. He understood even before he registered the rifle Klaus carried. It hadn’t occurred to him, when he saw Krista Friesack earlier, on the road behind the abbey, that it meant anything. He had only seen her walk away. But he knew now that she must have been watching him. His first reaction was simply surprise. He thought of her as a child. What had she said?
‘You’ll come with us, Anselm,’ said the policeman.
Anselm Ebbers nodded. He bent down beside the organ stool.
‘What are you doing? Keep your hands in sight!’
The rifle was pointing at Anselm as he stood up, holding the leg iron of leather and steel he wore on his left leg, a permanent souvenir of childhood polio.
‘I need this on, Herr Vennemann. I take it off for the foot pedals.’
He sat back down on the stool and tightened the straps of the leg iron.
In the dark, wood-panelled room at the front of the townhall, three men sat a table. On one side, Wachtmeister Jürgen Vennemann, sixty, gaunt, a little deaf. All that was left of Ilsenburg’s police force. In the middle the mayor and Nazi party leader, Oskar Mommsen, fifty-five, lazy, officious and today clearly uneasy. He didn’t like this. He had no choice about what had to happen, but he wished the damned girl hadn’t seen anything. Couldn’t she just have ignored it? Did it matter now, any of it? His thoughts were on a future that was very close and as a man who had always sweated, he sweated more now, more than ever. He was afraid. As for this, he wanted it over and done with. On the other side of the mayor, the town’s military commander, Hauptmann Rainer Becker. He had lost an eye fighting in Poland at the start of the war. He wore an eyepatch, and he was in the habit of rubbing it continually as he spoke. It could be said that he wore the patch with a sense of gratitude. It had kept him alive, unlike most of the men he served with, whose bodies were scattered across thousands of kilometres of Russia between Leningrad and Stalingrad. Now, with the departure of the troops at the Luftwaffe camp and the SS men who did whatever it was they did there, which never seemed to be very much, preparations for the defence of the town had fallen on him. There were no soldiers left, only the old men and boys who made up the Volkssturm. They would make a good show of it. The enemy would pay dearly for every metre of German soil. That’s what he told them. There could be no question of defeat. This man Ebbers, this traitor to the Fatherland, would make that point.
Anselm Ebbers stood to one side of the table, flanked by the Hitler Youth uniforms of Klaus and Erich. A group of townspeople sat on benches or stood at the back of the room. Mostly they were the party faithful, gathered together by the mayor. He had wanted a bigger crowd. It wasn’t long ago that he would have got one. But as the news of what had happened spread through Ilsenburg, most people closed their doors and stayed where they were. But there were enough people there, enough at least to give Mommsen the sense of legitimacy he needed to feel.
The only witness was Krista Friesack. She stood in front of the table.
‘I saw Anselm – Herr Ebbers – when I was walking behind the abbey.’
‘Where was he?’
‘I saw him on the wall by the stable yard, at the back of the Schloss.’
‘And what was he doing?’
‘He got up onto the roof and crawled along to the corner of the building, there’s a telegraph pole, and the wires come down, across the yard, into the back of the Schloss. He could reach the wires from where he was standing. He cut them.’
The police sergeant held up a pair of long-handled shears.
‘These were found at the house of the accused.’
‘What happened then, Krista?’ asked the mayor.
‘He got back onto the wall and then climbed down to the road.’
‘Did he see you?’
‘I know he saw me when he was walking back towards the town. That’s all. I don’t think he knew I’d seen him up on the roof. He didn’t know I was watching.’
‘And you came straight to tell me what had happened.’
‘I knew my duty, sir.’
The three-man tribunal nodded in unison.
‘You can go, Krista,’ said Mommsen. ‘You should go home now.’
The girl hesitated. For the first time she looked at the man standing only a little way from her. He shrugged and there was almost a smile. For the first time, there was a question in Krista Friesack’s head. She didn’t even know what it was, except that she didn’t like it much. Everything had stopped. What happened now?
‘Your acts will be recorded,’ continued the mayor. ‘But we’re done.’
As Krista turned to leave, there was a murmur of approbation running through the onlookers. Someone started clapping. Then they all clapped, including the judges. She put her head down. She knew she was blushing. She walked out.
There was silence. The three men stared intently at Anselm.
‘You obviously know, Ebbers, that my office is in the Schloss.’ It was Hauptmann Becker who spoke. ‘The telephone wires you cut connect that office to other military commanders and bases. Your purpose was to sabotage the defence of the town and deliver it up to the enemy. It’s very simple, very clear. Treason.’
There was nothing for Anselm to argue about, except his reasons.
‘Everyone knows how close the Americans are. I’ve seen towns flattened by the bombing. I’ve seen the bodies in the streets. There aren’t even any soldiers here now. They’ve gone. You know they’ve gone, Hauptmann. All I wanted to do was to stop the town’s destruction, to stop us all from being killed for no reason at all.’
There was a hiss of anger in the room. Becker got to his feet.
‘Surrender? Is that how you keep your oath to the Führer? You piece of shit. And you’re not alone. There’s evidence. You’re one traitor. Who are the others?’
The mayor and the police sergeant felt obliged to stand now. The room had erupted. Indignant abuse was being hurled at the young student from everywhere.
‘Look at these!’ shouted the military commander, holding up some pieces of paper. ‘These call for surrender. Found in your house. But who printed them? Where do they come from? And this.’ He held up the white flag that had fluttered over the Marienkirche that morning. ‘You didn’t climb up there, you crippled bastard. You might manage a wall, but not a church steeple. So, who put this up?’
Mommsen picked up a wooden gavel and banged the table.
‘Order! Let’s have order. I understand how you feel. We all feel the same.’
The noise subsided into a low rumble of continuing outrage.
‘Who else is involved in this?’ The mayor, still standing, was looking at Anslem again. ‘Where do these leaflets come from? Who put up the white flag?’
‘No one else is involved.’
‘Names. Give us names. Give us names and you might save your life.’
Mommsen looked at the other two judges. Jürgen Vennemann nodded. Rainer Becker shook his head decisively. The room was suddenly very quiet. The words had been spoken. Death was coming. No one was surprised, and by now that included Anselm Ebbers himself, but saying it aloud for the first time hit home.
‘There are no names. The leaflets are mine. All they say is that when there’s nothing left to fight for, then there’s no reason to die. As for your white flag, I’ve never seen it. But am I alone in knowing it’s finished? I don’t think so. Am I?’
The last question was addressed to the room. There were a few people who looked down at the floor, but for the rest, it was enough to restart the rage. Whether that came from belief or desperation, it came, loud and strong. The death sentence was given in seconds, called out by Oskar Mommsen over the competing voices.
There would be no reflection. There would be no last moments for the condemned man. The sentence would be carried out immediately. The urgency of the drumhead had taken over. It needed doing. It needed doing quickly. This was the example Hauptmann Becker wanted. Everyone wanted it.
Anselm was already being dragged out of the room. Men and boys of the Volkssturm surrounded him, among them Klaus and Erich. As he was pulled through the crowd there were punches and kicks, and spit covered his face. They poured out into the marketplace. Anselm was struggling, but he was held too tight to move. He was pulled and pushed across the cobbles towards the little lake at the edge of the town. There was a stone arch that led to the waterside. The sun shone on the water. It was sparkling and bright. On the other side of the lake, the tree-covered hills rose towards the Harz Mountains. But no one saw any of that. No one in the marketplace saw beyond the scrum of angry, jostling, shouting men and women they were part of, pushing the terrified man towards the arch and the lake.
A noose hung from the arch. It had been thrown up there even as Anselm Ebbers walked into the room for what the mayor of Ilsenburg had recorded as a trial. He had added the words in extremis. That, he felt, covered all eventualities. There had never been any doubt what would happen. Everyone knew it. For now, Mommsen stood at the back of the crowd, on the townhall steps. He lit a cigarette. He was drenched in sweat. Somewhere in the throng were Hauptmann Becker and Wachtmeister Vennemann, the military commander and the policeman. They could deal with the business end of it. It was out of his hands, wasn’t it? It had been out of his hands from the start. From the moment the stupid BDM bitch came to him with the story, it was already out of his hands. As he looked across at the crowd, he wanted to turn away. But he didn’t. It wouldn’t look good if he did.
He couldn’t see who was pulling the rope as Anselm Ebbers rose up under the stone arch, almost out of the press of people it seemed. He was gasping and choking. The sounds were screams and cries of pain, but the noose was too tight to let them out. There were shouts and roars from the onlookers. Arms shot up in the air. The cry ‘Sieg Heil’ rang out. But there weren’t so many arms. Oskar Mommsen noted that. The body, and now it seemed somehow a body although Anselm was not yet dead, kicked and jerked and gasped for several minutes. There were people walking away from the scrum. And the shouting had stopped, quite suddenly. The body hung limply now. It was done. And the crowd had thinned. They had got what they came for and some were less satisfied than others. Oskar Mommsen walked down the steps and across the marketplace to the gate into the hotel overlooking the lake. He needed a drink.
There was no one in the hotel when Mommsen entered. He walked behind the bar and poured himself a large glass of schnapps. It was his hotel, so it was his schnapps. He drained the glass and poured another. He looked up to see Rainer Becker. The soldier looked a little wild and flushed. But his job was done. He, at least, was satisfied with the point that had been made so forcefully. The mayor poured out another schnapps and pushed it along the bar. Becker drank it.
‘More?’
‘No, I’ve got work to do. But well done. You did a good job.’
The mayor said nothing. These were congratulations he did not want.
‘Just leave the cripple hanging there, Oskar. Leave him till he stinks.’
*
The next day, Hauptmann Rainer Becker, as military commander of Ilsenburg, gave his last command. American tanks were only kilometres away. They had halted that afternoon, somewhere east of Goslar. And Goslar had surrendered without a fight. American planes had flown low over Ilsenburg that morning. There was nothing to stop them. There would be nothing to stop the tanks and the soldiers either. From the centre of the town, you could still hear artillery fire, but it was further away than it had been even days before and there was less and less of it. It was certainly a long way from Ilsenburg. Whether you wept and raged, or quietly rejoiced, or just wanted to get the bloody thing over with, there was no one who didn’t realise the unbreakable Will they were supposed to have was broken, even among those who had shouted their final Sieg Heils as Anselm Ebbers’s body was hoisted beside the lake only twenty-four hours ago. His last gasp had been the Will’s last gasp, as brutal and pointless at the end as it had been at the beginning. But there was still a game to play in the debris. Hauptmann Becker still played it.
There was still resistance, said the captain. Resistance that would be unyielding and unrelenting. The forests and mountains of Germany would be turned into fortresses. From there heroic Werwolf warriors would emerge to wreak destruction on the Allies and make the occupation of the country impossible. Even now, he announced, a detachment of Wehrmacht and Volkssturm commandos was making its way toward the high peak of the Brocken above Ilsenburg and into the Harz Mountains to continue the fight. He didn’t have the men to defend the town. Reluctantly, he had to accept that. They were too weak. But they could still use what resources they had to give the Werwolf fighters time to reach the hills and lose themselves in the impregnable Harz. The American advance along the valley of the River Ilse could be delayed. Every day, every hour, counted in this new way of war. And so it was that Rainer Becker deployed his little army of old men and boys on the backroads and tracks into the mountains. They set off from Ilsenburg, carrying little more than rifles and a handful of the precious Panzerfäuste rocket launchers that might, given more luck than judgement, disable a US tank.
Erich Schröder, Klaus Voss, Johann Koch, and Poldi Neumann headed out of town along Mühlenstrasse, heading for the forest road that would take them to the small bridge over the River Ilse that they were to hold against the Americans for as long as they could. Truly every day, every hour, counted. The more time they bought for the commandos, the stronger the fight back would be. Maybe Ilsenburg’s military commando did believe in the Werwölfe. Maybe he just said what he felt he had to say. His own actions, after all, had given him an intimate knowledge of the rewards of defeatism. But whatever he knew, or didn’t, there was no commando army gathering in the mountains. The soldiers who had left Goslar without even attempting to defend it, like more and more troops in what remained of Germany, were simply fading away. They were dumping their weapons and heading home, or looking for a safe place to surrender, or walking somewhere, anywhere, that took them away from the fighting. It was true that some of the SS men who recently abandoned the Luftwaffe camp outside Ilsenburg had made their way into the mountains. They did so in civilian clothes and their aim was to disappear. However, such details were not Rainer Becker’s concern.
When the Hauptmann called into the hotel by the lake to see Oskar Mommsen that afternoon he wasn’t wearing his uniform. He came on a bicycle he had just requisitioned, since he didn’t have one of his own. He came, he said, to say goodbye. It was important that he wasn’t captured. The implication was that he was determined to carry on the struggle, somewhere, somehow. But he left that hanging in the air. He didn’t have the gall to say it. He didn’t relish the look the mayor might have given him if he had. He had never liked Oska. . .
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The City in Year Zero
Michael Russell
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