Burning Angels

‘Gentlemen, Irina, thank you for coming.’ Peter Miles’s words served to drag Jaeger’s mind back to the present. The elderly man glanced around at the concrete and steel edifice. ‘Much of what we are here for is rooted in this place. In its terrifying history. In these dark walls.’

He turned his attention fully on his audience. There was an intensity about the man’s gaze that Jaeger hadn’t seen before. It demanded attention.

‘Germany. Spring 1945,’ he announced. ‘The Fatherland had been overrun by the Allies, German resistance crumbling fast. Many of the key Nazis were already in Allied hands.

‘The top commanders were taken to an interrogation centre near Frankfurt, codenamed Dustbin. There, they tried to deny point blank that the Reich had ever possessed weapons of mass killing, or planned to use them to win the war. But, one of the captives eventually broke, and confessed to what at first seemed to be a series of incredible revelations.

‘Under intense questioning he revealed that the Nazis had developed three fearsome chemical agents: tabun and sarin nerve gases, and the fabled Kampfsoffe — poison gas — called N-stoff, or Substance N. He also confessed to the full extent of Hitler’s Chemicplan — his project to manufacture thousands of tonnes of chemical agents to crush the Allies. What was extraordinary is that this was utterly unknown to the Allies, and consequently we possessed no defence against such agents.

‘How could this have come to pass? First, as you’ll have noticed, the Falkenhagen complex is set deep underground. From the air, it is more or less invisible. And it was in places like this that the most fearsome agents were manufactured. Second, Hitler contracted out his chemical weapons programme to a civilian company: the massive industrial complex I. G. Farben.

‘They masterminded the building of these factories of death. It would have been an entirely daunting task were it not for the fact that the Nazis possessed a seemingly limitless supply of slave labour. Underground facilities like Falkenhagen were built by the millions of hapless souls sent to the Nazi concentration camps. Even better, the hazardous production lines were also staffed by concentration camp inmates — for of course, they were all destined for death anyway.’

Miles let his words hang in the air, portentously. Jaeger shifted about uncomfortably in his chair.

He felt as if a strange and ghostly presence had crept into the room, its icy fingers clutching at his fast-beating heart.

25

‘Massive stockpiles of weaponised agents were found by the Allies,’ Miles continued speaking, ‘including at this place, Falkenhagen. There was even talk of a long-range V weapon — the V-4, a sequel to the V-2 rocket — that could drop nerve agents on Washington and New York.

‘The general feeling was that we had won the war by the skin of our teeth. To some it made sense to harness the Nazi scientists’ expertise in preparation for the coming war with the Russians — the Cold War. Most of the Nazi V-weapon scientists were shipped off to the USA to design missiles to combat the Soviet threat.

‘But then the Russians dropped their bombshell. In the midst of the Nuremberg war crimes trials, they called a surprise witness: Brigadier General Walter Schreiber, of the Wehrmacht’s medical service. Schreiber stated that a little-known SS doctor named Kurt Blome had run a beyond-top-secret Nazi project whose focus had been biological — germ — warfare.’

Miles’s eyes narrowed. ‘Now, as you all know, germ weapons are the ultimate mass killers. A nuclear bomb dropped on New York might kill everyone in the city. A sarin warhead might do likewise. But a single missile carrying bubonic plague could kill everyone in America, for the simple reason that a germ agent is self-replicating. Once delivered, it breeds in the human host and spreads, so killing all.’

‘Hitler’s germ warfare project was codenamed Blitzableiter — lightning rod. It was disguised as a cancer-research programme, to hide it from the Allies. The agents so developed were to be used under the Führer’s direct orders to achieve the final victory. But perhaps the most shocking of Schreiber’s revelations was that at war’s end, Kurt Blome was recruited by the Americans to re-create his germ warfare programme — only this time for the West.

‘Certainly, during the war Blome had developed a fearsome array of agents: plague, typhoid, cholera, anthrax and more. He had worked closely with the Japanese Unit 731, which had unleashed germ agents that killed half a million Chinese.’

‘Unit 731 is a dark stain upon our history,’ a quiet voice cut in. It was Hiro Kamishi, the Japanese member of Jaeger’s team. ‘Our government has never truly said sorry. It has been left to individuals to try to make their peace with the victims.’

From what Jaeger knew of Kamishi, it would be entirely in keeping with his nature to have reached out to the victims of Unit 731, to seek peace.