The Mask of Atreus (39 page)

It was several days after Hitler's death that the Russians found what they took to be his remains, days in which, according to Voloshinov, the real corpse was packed into a crate, given an armored escort, and sent south to the Swiss border. The body which the Soviets dug up, he said, was one of Hitler's doubles, though which one, he seemed unsure. Some evidence pointed to Gustav Weber, other to an actor called Andreas Kronstaedt, still other evidence pointed to Julius Schreck, a Nazi Party member since the twenties and Hitler's favorite driver. It was one of these men, said Voloshinov, who had been so conveniently photographed by the Germans before the pyre had rendered the body unrecognizable. It was this body--not Hitler's--which was placed in a wooden shell crate and transported to the Russian pathology lab in Berlin-Buch. On May 8, 1945, as Europe celebrated V-E day, Russian forensic pathologist Dr. Faust Sherovsky and an anatomical pathologist called Major Anna Marantz performed an autopsy on the remains.

328

A. J. Hartley

The corpse was eventually buried in a piece of waste ground at 30-32 Klausenerstrasse in Magdeburg and remained there until 1970, when the KGB, apparently in an attempt to prevent Hitler from attaining the status of martyr to right-wing sympathizers and German nationalists, dug up the body and destroyed it, scattering the remains over the River Ehle, near the village of Biederitz.

Apart from the window between Hitler's death and the discovery of the corpse by the Soviets, a window which certainly allowed for the real body to be spirited away, Deborah initially thought that there was little to give credence to Voloshinov's story. The more she learned, however, pressing Alexandra's plodding and broken translation from file to file, the more she began to wonder.

The accounts given by those captured Germans who had found Hitler's body after he had killed himself and then participated in its burning didn't tally in small but significant ways. The gunshot wounds were identified as being in different places: some said in the mouth, others said in the temple, or the corner of one eye. One said the body was on a couch with the body of Braun, another said it was in a chair by itself. The bloodstains on the couch were reportedly of the wrong type.

But the first thing which really struck her was a bizarre detail about the journey which the body made from Berlin to Magdeburg. According to official records, the Russians buried the corpse on the road itself and then dug it up again. This curious pattern was repeated as many as nine or ten times between Berlin and Magdeburg. No clear reason was offered by the state for why this occurred, and Voloshinov had drawn his own conclusions, namely that the Soviets were torn between wanting to learn more about the body and wanting to make it disappear. Both impulses came from a deep uncertainty about the nature of the corpse itself, a nagging anxiety that they had gotten the wrong one.

Even when the formal autopsy was performed, the results raised as many questions as they answered. The Germans 329

T h e M a s k o f A t r e u s

who had survived the bunker were adamant that Hitler had shot himself--as was suggested by the baffling photographs whose veracity was impossible to verify--but the body showed traces of cyanide and shards of glass in the mouth, and no bullet could be found. Of course, the Nazi leader could have bitten down on an ampule of poison as he shot himself, and the bullet could have been lost, but the discrepancy clearly caused some unease. Later reexamination of the bunker site produced a piece of the body's skullcap, apparently blown out by the bullet's exit wound. This piece was kept separate and, so far as Deborah could see, was still in the possession of the Russian government, though it remained pointedly untested for DNA evidence of its origins. Voloshinov believed that the very recovery of this bone fragment was suspicious, an attempt by the authorities to close up the holes in the autopsy report. It could not, moreover, prove the identity of the corpse, or even prove categorically that it came from the same corpse. Dental examinations were performed on a piece of bridgework found in the chancellery garden and, again, seemed to confirm that the body was Hitler's, but the records used to verify those examinations were based on the dubious memories of dental assistant Kaethe Hausermann and dental technician Fritz Echtmann. These two had worked for Hitler's dentist, Dr. Fritz Blaschke, and were committed Nazis who--Voloshinov argued--could have colluded on false testimony well in advance of its use. The crucial bridgework itself could, he argued, have been reconstructed and placed where it would be found to mislead the Russians. It was further evidence, he claimed, that the Nazis had planned an exit strategy for Hitler's remains which would leave just enough evidence to convince the Soviets, while not actually proving anything. This was why the corpse was so conveniently burned beyond recognition but not destroyed, so the Russians would not keep searching for the real body. This was why the similarly convenient photographs had been allowed to fall into Russian hands. Why, he said, would any loyal and respectful Nazi shoot pictures of his leader's body before it was 330

A. J. Hartley

incinerated? It made no sense, except as a strategy of misinformation. When the remains were finally dug up and destroyed in 1970 by the KGB, Voloshinov argued, the Soviets were not trying to rid the world of a potential Nazi shrine so much as they were trying to end the constant disputes about a body they knew had not belonged to Hitler. This one act alone suggested that the Russians believed it impossible--even with new forensic technologies--to prove that the corpse had really been Hitler.
It wasn't him. They knew it wasn't. The Soviets had
brought a body to Magdeburg, and they didn't want to admit
to the world that they had got it wrong, but they
had
got it
wrong, and they knew it
.

The final pieces of evidence, and the one which led to Voloshinov's obsessive pursuit of this personal crusade, concerned his friend and mentor, Menshikov. It was Menshikov's original testimony shared privately with Alexandra's father about what he had seen and not seen in Berlin in May 1945 that had set Voloshinov thinking. The piece of information passed on to Voloshinov seemed to Deborah more astonishing and compelling than all the rest combined. She read the account three times, barely breathing.

In the corner of a roomlike portion of the bunker's central corridor, a corridor which led to the stairs up to the garden where the bodies were burned, Menshikov, moving cautiously, his submachine gun gripped firmly in his hands, had found a dagger. It was not a Nazi dagger but something far more beautiful and strange with a slender blade made of bronze and inlaid with golden images of lions and a charioteer: a ceremonial weapon from Bronze Age Greece.
At last. The link
.

But it wasn't the Mycenaean dagger which had driven Voloshinov to pursue that crate across fifty years and half the globe, nor was it the inconsistencies in the official story which had kept him searching and writing to the government as his rank and status was gradually stripped away from him. 331

T h e M a s k o f A t r e u s

It was a hatred for what the Nazis had been and a deep and paradoxical relationship with his own country and its problematic authorities. The last, most crucial event which had driven him was the death of his friend Menshikov, who had been executed secretly with thirty other Russians by his own government for refusing to put down an East German rebellion in Magdeburg in 1953. It was this fact more than any other which had driven Sergei Voloshinov to champion his cause.

Deborah sat in her chair and held up the knife Menshikov had found, the dagger he had passed on to his disciple in his quest for truth, the only object from the boxes that wasn't paper. She barely had to look at it. It had been, she was sure, part of the collection which now sat in a hidden room in a small Atlanta museum.

That's it,
she thought.
That's the missing piece of the puzzle
. CHAPTER 67

Deborah stared out of the window as Moscow fell away behind them and thought about Alexandra and her husband, who had served her dinner which had included caviar and vodka as if she were an ambassador and they had a duty to demonstrate their Russianness and hospitality. Vasily had watched her cautiously through dinner, but after a while his attention had gone to his wife, whose habitual silence seemed preserved only with a great effort. As dinner progressed, Deborah thought that Alexandra's face resembled a dam at flood stage, and as the vodka began to go round the table for a third time, the dam cracked.

"You think . . ." she began, her face pink, "you think my father, perhaps, was not crazy?"

She could hardly breathe, had hardly been able to get the words out, and Deborah felt a heavy silence and watchfulness descend on the room as she tried to decide. Had Alexandra always carried a candle of hope that her father had not been the clown he was painted, carried it in shame and embarrassment, never able to snuff it out completely? It would explain, perhaps, why she had allowed Deborah to see the files she would not read by herself.

Deborah looked at the woman as she wrestled with her feelings and was glad that she could be honest.

"No," she had said at last, "I do not think he was crazy. I think . . ." She paused, half amazed by the idea still. "I think he was right."

The dam broke then, and Alexandra wept for herself and for her dead father.

333

T h e M a s k o f A t r e u s

So now she knew. From time to time she had had the impression that she was on the wrong track, that the story she was discovering was somehow the wrong story, and now she knew why. It had never been about archaeology, except insofar as the Nazis had seen themselves as the new Greeks. Hitler saw himself as a new Agamemnon waging his xenophobic war against inferior peoples, and when that war ended and he killed himself, he wanted to lie in state like the Greek kings of old.

She remembered talking to the Mycenaean craftsman about the list of famous Nazis who had come to tour the sites, butchers and lunatics like Himmler and Goebbels who had thought Schliemann a Teutonic superman, in part because he had unearthed other supermen: the heroes of Agamemnon's army. It all made a kind of warped sense. This was why Hitler had wanted the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, she thought; he believed it was Germany's right as the inheritors of the ancient Greek physical and cultural supremacy. She had flicked through a book on Nazi aesthetics in a Moscow bookstore before making the trip to the airport, and had done so with a sort of dread, fearing it would contain images of savagery and degeneration; the opposite was the case. Nazi art was restrained, classical, eschewing the abstract and the expressionist in favor of the conservative. Above all, they loved the art and architecture of ancient Greece. The book was full of building plans--many drawn up by Hitler himself--that looked like the Parthenon in Athens, and of statues clearly modeled or copied from classical originals. Even the Aryan political "philosophy" was grounded in a Greco-Roman aesthetic, or in a nationalistically, ethnocentrically, and racist version of it which said that the decline of the classical world into the degeneration of the modern was the direct consequence of racial mixing. In purging themselves of "inferior" people, the Nazis believed they were reconstructing a golden age exemplified by the art and culture of ancient Greece.

334

A. J. Hartley

At the last, then, they had dressed their general in the grave goods of Agamemnon in tribute to his classicist dignity and imperial ambitions, but the artifacts--whether they knew them to be fake or not--had been mere trappings: grave goods. It was the body that had counted.

Deborah had been struck by the fact that in all of Voloshinov's papers, there had been no whisper of the possibility that Hitler himself had not died in the bunker. It had all been about the real corpse escaping the Russians, not about Stalin's old notion that the living man himself might have walked free. There was, she supposed, too much information out there to make that particular conspiracy stick, though it had been peddled for a while quite extensively. But it raised another question. Why, with the country burning around them, had the Nazis bothered to try to preserve the body of their leader, a leader whose plans had failed and who was already dead?

For next time,
said the voice in her head, darkly. This was no mere corpse. It was an icon, a monument like Lenin's body lying beside the Kremlin wall years after the social system he had striven to create had finally broken down, a symbol. Whatever other motive the Russians had had in destroying the remains buried in Magdeburg, they had known that a martyr to a dead cause was only fractionally less dangerous than the living man himself. His very bones could be a rallying point for Nazi sympathizers . . .
OK,
thought Deborah,
so what had happened next?

Some body double had been left for the Russians to identify, but en route to Switzerland Hitler's actual body--decked out in all its Mycenaean finery--had been intercepted by one of the units most clearly opposed to all Hitler had represented: an all-black tank battalion.
Ironic, huh?

She supposed that if it had remained with them, that would have been the end of the matter, but Nazi Germany did not hold the monopoly on racism.

335

T h e M a s k o f A t r e u s

"Pretty wild stuff," said Deborah aloud.

That's what Tonya's father had told his driver, Thomas Morris, about what he had seen in the crate. "Pretty wild stuff."

I guess Hitler laid out like Agamemnon would qualify,
she thought.

An MP had stolen the crate, killing one black tank commander in the process, a crime he believed--correctly--

would not be considered serious enough to warrant full investigation. At first he probably didn't know what the Greek pieces were, except that they could be valuable. He put out some feelers and contacted a British collector to find out what he could about the gold mask and other artifacts carried in there with the corpse, presumably promising a sale, a way to raise money to move Hitler's body. That done, he sent the crate to the United States, but for some reason it never arrived, and the MP lost track of it. He set up a secret rightwing society to track it down. For years the crate's whereabouts were unknown, till it surfaced on a French beach. Richard got word of it through black market channels and brought it to Atlanta, but decided that the body--which he took to be Agamemnon--should be returned to Greece.