War Cry

‘Well, I suppose that’s a reassuring thought. Care for another drink?’

The following evening, Leon wrote one of his regular letters to Saffron. He gave her a vivid account of the debate, as discussed by him and Erroll, and let her know in no uncertain terms of his extreme disapproval of its outcome and of the Oxford students who had voted for it. ‘I warn you now, my girl, if you should ever be courted by an Oxford man I will refuse to allow him into my house. I’m sure you will read these words and think, “Oh, the old boy’s just having his little joke,” and you may be right. But I am shocked to think that a supposedly great university should have become a nest of Reds, traitors and pacifists and I would disapprove most strongly of you having anything whatever to do with it.’

Saffron received the letter a week later in South Africa. She had never given much thought to any universities, let alone Oxford, but the idea of students being so provocative and so tremendously annoying to their elders pricked her curiosity. So she asked her form teacher, ‘Please, Miss, can girls go to Oxford University?’

‘Indeed they can, Saffron,’ her teacher replied. ‘None of our pupils has ever gone to Oxford, or not yet, at any rate. But our sister school in England regularly puts girls up for both the Oxford and Cambridge entrance examinations, with considerable success.’

‘So if I went to the other Roedean, I might be able to get into Oxford?’

The teacher laughed. ‘Well, I suppose so, Saffron. But you would have to work rather harder than you do presently. There are very few places for young women at England’s great universities, so competition to get in is very fierce indeed.’

To some teenage girls, those words might have been enough to put them off the very idea of university education. But Saffron was different. The thought of going halfway across the world to engage in a winner-takes-all contest filled her with excitement and enthusiasm.

‘Have I been any help to you, my dear?’ the teacher asked.

‘Oh yes, Miss,’ beamed Saffron. ‘You have been a very great help indeed!’

Of all the discoveries Saffron had made since arriving at her new school, the most surprising was that she enjoyed her lessons much more than she’d expected. She was hardly an intellectual, for whom thought was preferable to action, but she had a quick mind, grasped ideas easily and, because she enjoyed the feeling of getting things right, worked to make that happen as often as possible. Sadly, however, there were so many other things going on in her life that work was not always possible, or not in Saffron’s view at any rate, with the result that her school reports were filled with teachers’ pleas that if only Saffron could possibly give her studies her full concentration and effort, great things would surely follow. Now, however, she had a purpose, a goal at which to aim. And once she had her mind set on something, she pursued it with a determination a terrier would have envied.

In mid-January 1934, Saffron flew back down to Johannesburg with her father for the start of the new school year. She assured him that she was perfectly capable of handling the journey alone, for she had already flown unaccompanied from South Africa to Kenya and back again for her mid-year holidays, but he insisted. ‘What kind of a father would I be if I didn’t take my daughter all the way to school, at least once a year,’ he said. ‘Besides, who’s going to pay for all your shopping if I’m not there to do it?’

That was a point to which Saffron had no counter, for another expedition to the emporia of Johannesburg was required to replace everything that she had either broken, worn out or grown out of during her first year. When they went to the outfitters, Leon doffed his hat to Miss Halfpenny, gave her a winning smile as he said how charmed he was to see her again and obediently did as he was told when Miss Halfpenny said, ‘Father may leave us now. We ladies will manage quite nicely by ourselves.’

Leon felt an unexpected pang of disappointment at his dismissal. But there was something else, too, a bittersweet realization provoked by two little words: ‘We ladies.’ That was what Miss Halfpenny had said, and she was right. Saffron was becoming a young lady. She wasn’t just his little girl any more. And as much as Leon was proud at the woman he could see his daughter becoming, it saddened him, too, to say goodbye to his little girl.

Five thousand miles from Johannesburg, at the Meerbach Motor Works, a sprawling citadel of industry that covered several square kilometres in the southeast corner of Bavaria, Oswald Paust, the Head of Personnel, was coming towards the end of his annual report to the company’s trustees. ‘After many months of hard work, the task of ridding the company of all Jewish employees, as well as other undesirable races, workers with any form of mental or physical deformity, no matter how minor, and sexual or political deviants is very nearly complete,’ he proudly asserted. ‘I can now confirm that Jews, who used to form some 4.2 per cent of the workforce, have entirely disappeared from all our factories, workshops, design studios, maintenance depots and offices …’

His next words were drowned out as the trustees banged the palms of their hands against the boardroom table around which they were gathered as a sign of approval.

‘As I was saying …’ Paust went on. ‘There are six remaining cases of so called “Mischlinge”, which is to say mongrels who have one Jewish parent, or one or more grandparents. I am presently in discussions with representatives from the SS Race and Settlement Main Office to determine whether the fact that none of them shows any signs of Jewish appearance, or practises any Jewish religious or domestic customs, entitles them to any special consideration. I am deeply indebted to Herr Sturmbannführer von Meerbach for his assistance in this regard.’

More palms were slapped against the great oak tabletop and the massive, brooding figure at the end of the table nodded his head in acknowledgement of the tribute.

‘The work has not, of course, been without difficulties,’ Paust said, in the tone of a man who has taken on a great burden, but borne it willingly. ‘It was relatively easy to weed out the communists, since we already knew who the troublemakers and strike leaders were. These people have never kept their affiliations quiet. Establishing the deviancy of suspected homosexuals, however, required considerable investigation, which proved expensive. Nevertheless, a little over one per cent of our workers were found to be practising homosexuals and lost their jobs as a consequence. It must be noted, unfortunately, that the loss to our workforce from these two groups was disproportionately skewed towards higher skill occupations, so that our legal, accounting, marketing, design and research departments have been quite severely affected and may take some months to recover from the loss of experienced and, if I may say so, talented personnel. Of course it is no surprise that the Jew, with his greedy, disputatious nature, should gravitate towards legal and financial work, while the effeminacy of homosexuals may give them a certain aesthetic flair in the design of advertising posters, for example, or even aircraft fuselages. But I feel sure that the trustees will accept that any short-term loss of company income will be more than outweighed by the benefits of knowing that our workers are all decent, healthy Aryan folk.’

This time the banging was markedly less hearty. As keen as the trustees were to ensure that they maintained the highest standards of racial, sexual and political purity, they were even more interested in maintaining the highest possible profit. SS-Sturmbannführer Konrad von Meerbach had dropped his aristocratic title in favour of his Nazi rank, but he remained chairman of the company that bore his name. Clearly irritated by the want of enthusiasm for Paust’s conclusions, he made a point of slamming his great lion’s paw of a hand, its back covered with a furry mat of ginger hair, so hard that all the pens and coffee cups sitting in front of the company trustees rattled with the impact.

‘Thank you, Paust,’ said von Meerbach, rising to his feet. He was still young, in his very early thirties, but his physical stature – for he had the massively muscled shoulders, thick chest, tree-trunk neck and glowering brow of a heavyweight boxer – and inborn air of dominance gave him the authority of a much older man. ‘I am deeply appreciative of your efforts and I am sure that all my fellow trustees would wish to join me in applauding your achievements.’ He gave half-a-dozen hearty claps, prompting six of the eight other attendees at this meeting of the Meerbach Family Trust to take the hint and join in with equal heartiness.

The only two whose applause seemed perfunctory at best were a thin, nervous-looking woman in her mid-sixties, whose fingers were otherwise occupied holding a long, black cigarette holder, and a young man sitting next to her. He was not clad in a formal business suit and stiff collar, as the other men present all were, but preferred a jacket cut from heathery grey-green tweed, a flannel shirt and a knitted tie over a pair of grey worsted trousers. He looked like an academic or some form of intellectual – neither of which was a remotely complimentary description in Germany any more – and the impression of nonconformity was reinforced by the sweep of dark blond hair that insisted on flopping down over his right eyebrow no matter how often he swept it back up to the side of his head. He could, however, afford to treat Konrad von Meerbach more casually than the others did for he was his younger brother, Gerhard, and the woman sitting next to him was their mother, the dowager Countess Athala.

‘You may go now,’ said Konrad, and Paust scuttled from the room. Konrad remained standing. He looked from one side of the long, rectangular table to the other, scanning the faces pointing back at him.

‘I am shocked, gentlemen, truly shocked,’ he said, ‘at the idea that anyone here … any … single … one,’ he repeated, jabbing a finger onto the table with each word, ‘could possibly consider it more important to grab a few more Reichsmarks than to carry out the work to which the Führer has sacrificed his entire life, namely the purification of the Aryan race. Anyone would think that you were Jews, the way you place money first, above all else, when we all know that our first duty is to our Führer. I would give away these factories here, all the estates around them, even the schloss that bears my family name, all the great works of art and furniture within it, everything I own, in fact, before I parted with this …’

Konrad pointed to the Nazi badge on his jacket lapel: the black swastika on a white background surrounded by a red ring and outside that a gold wreath, running right around the badge. ‘The Führer himself pinned this golden badge, awarded for special services to the Party, on my chest, because he remembered me from the early days, this rich kid, not even twenty, who joined the march through Munich, November the ninth, 1923 …’

‘Oh God, here we go again …’ Gerhard sighed to himself

‘… who stood shoulder to shoulder with the others who were proud to call themselves National Socialists, who did not break ranks when the police fired on us. Oh yes, the Führer remembers those who stood by him then and who remain true to him now. That is why I combine my role as the head of this great company with the even greater honour of serving as personal assistant to SS-Gruppenführer Heydrich, and why I am privileged to enjoy the confidence of the most senior members of our Party and government. And this is where I come full circle, gentlemen – and Mother – for it is precisely because I put the Party first, and everyone knows it, that I am now able to tell you that the Meerbach Motor Works is about to enjoy the greatest prosperity we have ever known.’

He put his hands on his hips and looked around triumphantly as the room once more echoed to the sound of flesh and bone upon wood.

‘Over the next four to five years the Reich will embark upon a period of military expansion that will make its enemies quake in fear. German factories will build aircraft by the thousands and tanks by the tens of thousands. The days when our nation was forced to bow its head by the Allied Powers will be gone for good, just as the Jews whose betrayal undermined our country and led to its defeat will be gone. And all these fighter aeroplanes and bombers and transports – warplanes unlike any the world has ever seen before – will need engines. All these new tanks, with designs far, far superior to any other tanks on the face of this planet – for who can match Germany for engineering genius? – will require engines to power them, too. And who will supply these engines? Who else but a company cleansed of Jews and commies and perverts, a company whose loyalty to the Party is unquestioned, a company, in short, like the Meerbach Motor Works!’

Konrad bowed his head in modest appreciation of the applause his words had provoked, sat back down again and then, when order had been restored, said, ‘And so, let us proceed with the private element of the meeting. Herr Lange, perhaps you would give us your report on the state of the Meerbach Family Trust’s funds at the present time.’

A short, bespectacled man consulted the papers in front of him and proceeded to give a long and extremely detailed account of capital, income and expenditure, delivered in a flat, nasal monotone. His droning intonation, however, could not disguise one salient, inescapable fact. The Meerbach family was extraordinarily wealthy: not merely rich, but blessed with a fortune on a par with the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers and the Fords. The Meerbach estate stretched for more than thirty kilometres from one end to the other along the shores of the Bodensee. The bank deposits in Frankfurt, Zürich, London and New York matched the reserves of many a nation.

When the recital of facts and figures was complete, various other items on the meeting’s agenda were dealt with, before Konrad said, ‘Very well, I think we can now break for a very well-earned lunch. Unless there is any other business anyone wishes to raise?’

His tone very strongly suggested that there ought not to be and there was much shaking of heads from the men in suits. But then Gerhard von Meerbach raised his hand. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I do have a request to make.’

‘Oh really, what is that?’ Konrad snapped back, with no suggestion whatever of brotherly love.