Читать книгу In the Way of the Reich - Paula Astridge - Страница 6

PROLOGUE

It was April 15, 1944, and Bucharest was burning. Bombed and beaten into submission by the last Allied aerial attack.

The jarring aftershock of their incendiary shells had left the city teetering on the brink of collapse, its charred remains standing in crumbling defiance of defeat. As if asphyxiated by the smoke and stench of death the streets had fallen silent. Their uneasy peace broken only by the sound of Mendelssohn’s Liebestraum drifting from a candlelit, third floor apartment. Its haunting melody floated out into the night air and settled over the city like a soothing balm.

Albert Goering sat at his piano with his friends gathered around him. Having gagged their party celebrations during the bombing raid, their inebriated voices now burst back into song, broadcasting, in baritone, a slurred Slavic rendition of the famous German song to those very few still left alive outside in the mood to listen.

It was not until its second verse that they were interrupted. From across the road, two strong male voices cut in, singing its lyrics out loud in German. Albert stopped playing, picked up his champagne glass and wandered out onto his terrace. There, on the balcony opposite were two Nazi officers. With their black, threatening uniforms and sober expressions, neither was in a partying mood.

But undeterred, he tackled them directly.

‘You two gentlemen are interrupting our private recital,’ he said in his cultivated German.

‘It is our duty,’ one of them immediately responded. ‘By right of that song’s German origin, it must be sung in German and German only. To sing it in another language at such a time is a sacrilege. As the German citizen you obviously are, you should know better.’

Albert casually stubbed out his cigarette, squashing its embers underfoot with much the same contempt in which he held these two men.

‘As a German,’ he replied, ‘I shall do whatever I damn well please.’

It was only the street-distance between them, the Nazi officers reasoned, that was giving this stranger the outrageous audacity to defy them. But at this point it must stop!

‘What gives you the right to address officers of the Third Reich in such a manner?’ the more senior of the two demanded. ‘Who in the Fuhrer’s name do you think you are?’

There was a short pause: a deliberate drawing out of the moment which Albert was determined to enjoy before he answered with calm, deadly assurance. ‘I think I’m Albert Goering.’

Both officers stopped short. ‘Are you any relation?’

‘Yes, our grand and glorious Reich Marshal, Hermann Goering, is my brother.’

Stunned into silence, the two officers could say or do nothing but fall back on that one tried and true safety net of theirs. They stood to rigid attention, clicked their heels and thrust out their right arm. ‘Heil Hitler!’

And to toast their salute, Albert lifted his champagne glass and said:

‘Hitler can kiss my arse!’