Chapter Fifty

AN ELECTRIC MOTOR whirred and the entire wall holding the toilet and cistern pivoted open. It was masterly in the way it was built – the wall itself was made of stone blocks and must have weighed a ton, while all the water and sewage pipes were able to move without being torn apart.

Just inside the newly opened cavity was a large niche which housed the electric motor that operated the mechanism. A set of stone steps – broad and beautifully constructed – led down into gloom. I saw three brass switches on the wall and figured they were for lights, but I didn’t flick them – I had no idea what might be ahead of me and, like any covert agent, I knew that, in darkness, lay safety. I considered finding the button which would close the wall behind me, but rejected the idea. It was safer to leave it open. If I had to run like hell back towards it, I didn’t want to waste time fumbling for a switch and waiting for a door to open. It was a mistake.

I walked silently down the steps and entered a tunnel tall enough to stand upright in, well built and properly drained, with flagstones on the floor and a ventilation shaft built into the roof. The air was fresh and sweet.

The thin beam of my flashlight shone ahead and, before it was swallowed by the blackness, I could see that the tunnel was hewn out of solid rock. Somewhere ahead – through the cliff and far below the sweeping lawns – I was certain it would connect to the mansion.

I moved forward, and my weak finger of light caught a glint of bronze on the wall. As I got closer, I realized it was a plaque set into the rock. My German was rusty but it was good enough for the purpose. With sinking heart, I read: ‘By the Grace of Almighty God, between the years 1946 and 1949, the following men – proud soldiers of the Reich – designed, engineered and built this house. ’

It then listed their names, military rank and the job they had undertaken during the construction. I saw that most of them were members of the Waffen SS – the black-shirted, armed wing of the Nazi Party – and as I stood a million miles from safety the photo of the mother and her kids on their way to the gas chamber rose before me. It was a section of the SS that had operated the death camps.

At the bottom of the plaque was the name of the group that had funded and organized the construction of the house. It was called Stille Hilfe – Silent Help – and it confirmed what I had suspected ever since I had seen the swastikas on the wall of the library.

Stille Hilfe was an organization – ODESSA was reputedly another – that had helped fugitive Nazis, primarily senior members of the SS, to escape from Europe. It was one of the best clandestine networks ever established and you couldn’t have worked as an intelligence agent in Berlin and not have heard of it. My memory was that they had provided money, fake passports and transport along secret routes that were known as ‘ratlines’. I was certain the mansion had been built as the terminus to one of those lines, an embarkation point to take the fugitives and their families to Egypt, America, Australia and, mostly, South America.

I took a breath and thought how wrong I had been: despite the ventilation system, the air wasn’t fresh and sweet at all. It was rank and foul, and I hurried forward, wanting to be done with the place and the terrible memory of the men who had once escaped down the tunnel.

Up ahead, the beam from the flashlight showed that I was approaching the end of the tunnel. I was expecting flights of steep stairs, so it took me a moment to realize I had underestimated the German soldiers’ engineering skills: it was an elevator.