Chapter 17
Hannah had quickly proved herself a fast and reliable typist who made few mistakes, and the supervisor was already assigning her more important documents.
Hannah kept her feelings tightly locked away as she went about her work in the epicentre of the Reich that was responsible for the devastating losses she had endured.
If she let herself feel the outrage, she wouldn’t be able to complete her mission.
There would be time for revenge, but now she must focus and follow the plan.
As she travelled to work every morning, she scoured the weary faces of her fellow passengers and wondered what they really thought of the new Germany.
Were they brainwashed to be part of Hitler’s diabolical thousand-year Reich and excited about his vision of a millennium of total German domination that would succeed the First and Second Reichs, or did they secretly wish they could escape this nightmare?
The train was a mix of older men on their way to work in the administrative district of Berlin, and women of all ages who had filled the workplace gap left by so many men of fighting age.
Like in Allied countries, women gave their husbands and sons to the war effort but gained a measure of personal independence.
The infamous Nazi slogan of Hannah’s youth: Kinder, Küche, Kirche—Children, Kitchen, Church still promoted the German ideology that a woman’s place was in the home, but the demand for more hands to fuel the feverish war machine, overpowered it.
Therefore, German women had also gained permission to work again, albeit under the ever-watchful eye of the National Socialist regime.
That morning, Hannah’s supervisor explained they were short-staffed in the filing department, which was a critical failing. Hannah saw the woman was visibly agitated by the thought that the files were in disarray.
‘Although I realise this is below your skill level, I need you to work on organising the files today. We’re falling behind, which creates mayhem, and we can’t allow it.’
Hannah acted as though she would be sorry not to be in the typing pool with the other women, but was dedicated to helping however she could.
That’s how she found herself surrounded by tall cabinets full of secret documents detailing Luftwaffe operations.
Anticipation surged through her as she evaluated the filing room where she stood all alone.
There was an outbreak of flu, and the usually efficient filing clerks had come down with it.
The regime had a fear of illness, and the second anyone showed signs of an ailment; they were sent home without sympathy.
Fortunately for Hannah, she had a robust constitution and prided herself on her physical fitness and mental fortitude, honed by years of living undercover.
Her mind flickered back to Lev in Toulouse.
He had become a good friend since they joined forces in the Lavender Network.
She knew he had feelings for her that went beyond friendship, but she had been careful not to encourage him.
They were a formidable professional team, and besides, she was engaged to Henry, and Lev respected that.
Henry’s lovely face loomed in her mind, and panic threatened to engulf her.
Had she lost the person she loved most in the world, just as she had lost the others?
Hannah breathed and pulled herself together.
Henry couldn’t dominate her thoughts whilst she was Else Weber, just as her missing family couldn’t, or she would fail in her mission.
Hannah filed papers away in various sections as she pulled open drawers and checked labels.
The organisation was impressive, and the cabinets covered critical areas run by the German Air Force, such as aircraft production, operations, personnel, logistics, and supply.
The hours passed quickly as she deftly filed documents and scanned anything that caught her interest, committing the details to memory.
She wished she had a mini camera, but Lizzie said the SOE wouldn’t approve one this time.
They assessed that smuggling it into Germany was far too risky and outweighed the benefits.
The outcome was that there was no foolproof quick way to collect accurate intelligence and get it out of the building.
They also had no wireless set and couldn’t transmit or receive messages from London, which meant they were operating in a vacuum.
Hannah had developed a system where she committed important details to memory by linking them to names, life events, and places she remembered well.
When she came across the name of a key official as she typed, she would tie it to the name of someone from her past. It made it easier to remember and was quite simple, really.
Hannah had excelled in her studies despite the mounting anti-Jewish feeling all around her.
Intellect wasn’t something she struggled with, and as she filed papers, she filed facts away in her brain to be extracted when she would be debriefed at the end of the mission.
The name that inflamed Hannah most, despite the tight rein she kept on her emotions, was Hermann Goring, the dreaded Reichsmarschall. As the head of the Luftwaffe, he controlled the Air Ministry, and his name appeared with almost every flick of the page.
As Hitler's designated successor and deputy, he wielded great power when Hannah lived in Berlin with her family, but it was obvious that morale at the ministry was low as war groaned on and their boss was losing favour with the Führer. Allied bombing had increased, and the Luftwaffe failed to keep German cities safe. There was, however, still a sense that the same devastation couldn’t happen in Berlin as there had been minimal bombing to the capital so far.
Hannah had overheard a whispered conversation between two secretaries in the canteen just the other day. The woman who had been most welcoming said to her co-worker with a wicked gleam in her eye, ‘We can call him Meier now.’
The other secretary dissolved into giggles, which was a rare occurrence in the ministry.
Hannah was familiar with the famous boast that Goring made in his address to the Luftwaffe at the start of the war when he mocked the enemy and said if they reached Germany’s industrial heartland, they could call him by the common German surname.
It was also a stereotypical Jewish name.
At the time it had made her blood boil, and now she relished the thought of the tyrant getting his comeuppance.
Perhaps his arrogance and cunning hadn’t kept him untouchable, and there were whispers throughout Germany that a rival might replace him in Hitler’s chain of command.
Hannah guessed it was just gossip and unlikely to happen because he was still Hitler’s right-hand man.
Hannah gave English nicknames to many of the Nazi henchmen.
She had learnt basic English at school and become fluent since she met Henry.
Now she called Goebbels, who was officially the Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Garbles, on account of the vile lies he had been spewing about Jews for over a decade.
Goring, she called Gore, because of the blood on his hands from the huge number of Jews he had sent to their deaths.
Hannah searched for documents pertaining to the weapons programme Ingrid Becker had told Lizzie about, but didn’t find anything in Research and Development.
It was top secret, so she hadn’t really expected to find much, but it was worth checking.
She was just about to finish up before breaking for lunch when she noticed a section in one of the tall cabinets marked Enemy Reconnaissance.
No one had entered the room since she’d been in there, such was the discipline of the department and the strict deadlines all the secretaries worked to.
Now Hannah walked to the door and checked outside, but the corridor was empty, and she was completely alone.
Fear rushed through her, and she almost wished she wasn’t.
It had been some time since she’d infiltrated a German organisation and was more used to working with the Resistance in France, which required a different skillset.
Posing as an employee in a key German ministry was more testing, and she must get used to taking daring risks under surveillance if she were to be successful in smuggling out the intelligence London needed.
Her fingers flicked through the files, and she withdrew one and scanned the contents.
Rows of British names of downed airmen were typed neatly on sheets of paper, and they flashed before her eyes.
Her stomach churned and her hands shook slightly.
This was too much even for her. The realisation that she had access to hundreds of names of Allied airmen who were missing in action or had died in Germany was overwhelming.
She couldn’t commit so many names to memory, and copying them all would take too long.
If she didn’t go to lunch at the exact allotted time, it could raise suspicion.
The Air Ministry ran like clockwork. Hannah was used to the renowned German punctuality from her youth and knew how critical it was.
She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the paper.
Some listings had official RAF identification tags in attached folders bearing their name, rank, service number and religion, and for others there were no tags, just accompanying records.
All typed neatly with the same information.
Lord help Jewish pilots who fell into the hands of the Nazis.
They couldn’t even try to hide their ethnicity, as it was on the identity tag. Thank goodness Henry wasn’t Jewish.
The knot in her stomach tightened as she saw a folder filed under the letter K.
K for King. The idea that she would look for records about Henry so she could learn his whereabouts had occurred to her, but now she could do so, she had never been more frightened in her life.
Did she want to know the truth, or was she better off keeping a glimmer of hope burning that he was a prisoner of war somewhere in Germany, waiting out the war?
Hannah took a deep breath and decided she must face her fate.
It was better to know the truth, and she might devise a plan to break him out when the time was right, if he was being held prisoner.
She and Lev had developed far-reaching contacts in the Resistance through their operations, and they didn’t rely solely on the SOE.
The British were their allies against their common enemy, but the infamous British White Paper of 1939 restricted Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s murder machine from entering the Land of Israel.
The result was the Jews of British Mandatory Palestine fought a two-pronged war where tens of thousands volunteered for the Allied war effort in Europe, but the local Jewish population was targeted by the British occupying force, as well as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who actively collaborated with the Nazi regime.
Hannah thought that David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community in Eretz Israel, said it best—they would fight the war as if there were no White Paper and fight the White Paper as if there were no war.
Hannah reached for the K folder and leafed through the pages, her heart thumping furiously.
She didn’t pray because although she had been raised to believe in Ha Shem—the God of Israel—she no longer did.
What kind of God would rip her from her family and allow the Nazis to devastate all that had been good in their world?
What kind of God would allow a devil like Hitler to perform such evil deeds?
Still, she murmured softly to herself, beseeching an invisible presence to watch over Henry as she read the names in the Missing in Action section.
Henry’s name wasn’t listed.
Hannah exhaled and leant against the wall, light-headed.
Just as she was about to move to the next page, which listed the names of the confirmed dead, she heard heels echoing on the marble floor outside.
She stuffed the file back into its place and rushed to the section she was supposed to be working on.
The supervisor opened the door as Hannah pretended to file her last document.
‘Finished that batch? We mustn’t be late for our allocated dining slot.’
They left the filing room together, and Hannah excused herself to visit the bathroom, where she locked herself in the cubicle and wretched into the toilet.
Emerging, feeling shaky, she washed her hands and went to the canteen for lunch, where she forced herself to nibble at the bland food and talk to the other secretaries as though it were just another day at the office.
That afternoon she might learn whether Henry was alive or dead, and she wished lunch would last forever.