91
PETER HELLDORFF CLOSED HIS eyes as he watched Father Bernhard Stempfle march into the woods. He awaited the sound—maybe one crisp pop, perhaps a litany of gunfire—amid the sickeningly upbeat classical music.
Stempfle didn’t know Helldorff, but Helldorff knew him. Stempfle was the one who’d “recovered” Hitler’s pornographic sketches of Geli. And as the Führer’s sometime confidant, Stempfle likely knew a lot of other dirty secrets.
He is not the only one who knows too much, Helldorff realized, as he heard the cock of a pistol from the officer behind him.
“Sorry, Peter,” said the officer. “It’s not personal.”
That, of course, is what Helldorff had told himself when he’d betrayed Thomas Bauer and Fritz Gerlich. It isn’t personal. Now it had come full circle. The incriminating information Helldorff had turned over to the Nazis to obtain his promotion was the same information that now made him a liability.
He should have seen it coming. He’d prepared for it, saving money for his wife, Rebecca, and their infant son, Franklin.
He’d never told her what he’d done to get promoted.
He’d never told her that he’d blocked good people from trying to stop Adolf Hitler’s rise.
He didn’t tell her of his overwhelming shame.
He didn’t tell her that she had married a coward.
And Helldorff didn’t tell her about the reel of film he took from Thomas Bauer’s backpack the night he robbed Hitler’s safe.
He’d placed the film inside a small metal box and taped it shut, leaving his wife with only this instruction: If anything happened to him, she was to deliver the box to Thomas Bauer.
But now Bauer was nowhere to be found. He was either dead, on the run, or living abroad. Rebecca would not know what to do with the box.
“March forward,” said the officer holding the gun.
He walked toward the sound of the prisoners’ orchestra in the woods. The song they were playing was lively, a foxtrot. It reminded him of his wedding two years earlier. That was one of the last times he remembered feeling right.