A Type of Infamy E-Book

Orlando Pearson

• Herausgeber: Delos Digital
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Giallo - novelette (30 pagine) - A mystery solved in the ruins of Vienna in the bitter winter of 1945/6.

It is March 1938 and  a print worker petitions Holmes about the disappearance of a fellow worker at the Daily Mail newspaper. 

Holmes investigates and interviews the newspaper’s proprietor, Viscount Rothermere, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador to London. 

Diplomatic immunity and the weakness of the British government prevent any further action being taken in 1938, and the mystery is only finally solved in the ruins of Vienna in the bitter winter of 1945/6.

London businessman, Orlando Pearson is the creator of The Redacted Sherlock Holmes series, which buries forever the idea that Sherlock Holmes might not have been a historical person.

Do you want to see Sherlock Holmes come to the rescue of Queen Victoria, arrange the borders of post-war Europe, clear Macbeth of murder, unravel King Oedipus’s complexities, or provide advice to the Almighty? Then you will find all this and more in the seven collections of short stories, two novels, and the six plays in the series.

When not communing with the spirits of 221b, Orlando enjoys sport, music, and browsing price comparison websites.

He has written Sherlock Holmes stories on all these topics.

Leseprobe

Luigi Pachì, editor

Orlando Pearson

A Type of Infamy

NOVELETTE

ISBN 9788825426465

© 2023 Orlando Pearson

Ebook edition © 2023 Delos Digital srl

Piazza Bonomelli 6/6 20139 Milano Italy

Version: 1.0

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Collection edited by Luigi Pachì

Contents

CoverThis bookThe AuthorA Type of InfamyIn this series

This book

A mystery solved in the ruins of Vienna in the bitter winter of 1945/6.

It is March 1938 and  a print worker petitions Holmes about the disappearance of a fellow worker at the Daily Mail newspaper. 

Holmes investigates and interviews the newspaper’s proprietor, Viscount Rothermere, and Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador to London. 

Diplomatic immunity and the weakness of the British government prevent any further action being taken in 1938, and the mystery is only finally solved in the ruins of Vienna in the bitter winter of 1945/6.

The Author

London businessman, Orlando Pearson is the creator of The Redacted Sherlock Holmes series, which buries forever the idea that Sherlock Holmes might not have been a historical person.

Do you want to see Sherlock Holmes come to the rescue of Queen Victoria, arrange the borders of post-war Europe, clear Macbeth of murder, unravel King Oedipus’s complexities, or provide advice to the Almighty? Then you will find all this and more in the seven collections of short stories, two novels, and the six plays in the series.

When not communing with the spirits of 221b, Orlando enjoys sport, music, and browsing price comparison websites.

He has written Sherlock Holmes stories on all these topics.

From the same author

Orlando Pearson, The Führer and his Deputies221BISBN: 9788825404081Orlando Pearson, A Scandal in Nova Alba221BISBN: 9788825404494Orlando Pearson, The Minister and the Moguls221BISBN: 9788825404630Orlando Pearson, A Scandal in Nova Alba - Stage-play version221BISBN: 9788825409840Orlando Pearson, Sherlock Holmes - The Poet and his Muse221BISBN: 9788825418408Orlando Pearson, Sherlock Holmes: A Seasonal Tale221BISBN: 9788825418583Orlando Pearson, Sherlock Holmes and the German Interpreter221BISBN: 9788825418835Orlando Pearson, Sherlock Holmes and the Trial of Joseph Carr 221BISBN: 9788825419085Orlando Pearson, Sherlock Holmes - A Question of Time 221BISBN: 9788825419252Orlando Pearson, The Baron of Wimbledon221BISBN: 9788825420197Orlando Pearson, Sherlock Holmes and the Adventure of the Fourth Messenger221BISBN: 9788825420371Orlando Pearson, The Queen, the Prince, and the Munshi221BISBN: 9788825426205

After the death of my second wife in 1937, I moved down to Sussex to share once more living quarters with Sherlock Holmes. My friend and I were by now both in our early eighties and the cliff-top village on the South Downs was sleepy in the extreme. I therefore expected no repeat of the adventures that had been such a feature of our lives in the 1880s and 1890s.

Holmes’s cottage was small but comfortably furnished. His house-keeper was Mrs Turner, the married name of the daughter of Mrs Hudson. She had bought her own cottage in the village and came to us early in the morning to make breakfast and tidy. Otherwise, Holmes and I led the solitary bachelor existence that Holmes had always craved, but from which I had been happy to escape at the time of my two marriages, first in 1888 and then in 1907.

As my reader may imagine, some of the routines which had formed such a part of our lives in Baker Street found their own forms, mutata mutandis, in Sussex.

Holmes would spend most of his days in his preferred activity of apiculture. When there was some lull in these activities, we would ramble through the Downs and cliff country where Holmes’s observations about nature were as acute as those he had made about London life nearly half a century earlier.

Of an evening, we would smoke a pipe together and talk of many things but, inevitably in the late 1930s, political developments were a frequent topic of conversation. During his long career as the world’s only consulting detective, Holmes had conducted investigations in which he had assisted a prime minister and two foreign secretaries. The insights that this had given him meant that our discussions ranged further than they had when we had first met in the closing years of the previous century, at which time his knowledge of politics had been almost non-existent. My reader will also be aware of our investigation of 1930 in Berlin into the fatal assault on Horst Wessel, leader of one of the city’s battalions of storm-troopers, and of the abortive commission to find discreditable material about Hitler in the winter of 1932/1933. Our involvement in these two cases informed our discussions as we watched with mounting horror the gathering of storm clouds over Europe.

The case that follows had as its inception a matter that was at first sight serious but mundane. Certainly, it gave no indication as it opened that it was a minor but significant cog in the great machine driving world events. One morning in early March 1938, just as breakfast had been cleared away, there was a knock at the door and a gaunt, mousy-haired young man stood before us.

“You may call me Mr McGregor,” he said in a voice with a tremor of nervousness. “I have a most peculiar matter that I want to raise with you.”

“A case is always welcome, even in my retirement,” said Holmes, lighting his pipe, “although I would have thought that your work at the hot metal press would have precluded you from coming to consult during the working week.”

“Mr Holmes,” said our pallid visitor, “this is better than anything Dr Watson has written about you! How do you know that I work in the print trade?”

“My good Mr McGregor! I see before me a man who comes with bluish black edging to his gums and with fingertips stained from long contact with printer’s ink. He could have come from no other background. You are in contact with lead for the typeface and ink for the press every working day.”

“What you say is true, sir,” said McGregor. “My work is at the Daily Mail and I spend all day at the foundry making letters and then testing their reproduction at the press. We form the letters in all manner of different fonts using an alloy with a high lead content, so the bodies of all of us who work there bear the signs of it.”

“And what brings you here to consult?”

“Most of my work is to create letters for the newspapers, as each metal font will only last for a few issues before its surface becomes worn down. As a side-line, we also make fonts to order. These are fonts a commercial company may order so that they have a particular shape that cannot be used by anyone else. We also receive occasional requests to reproduce a specific font for a document. It happens mostly when an old document with sentimental value is damaged or destroyed and the owner wants to create an exact replica.”

“You make yourself very plain.”

“I have a colleague called Jeremy Fisher who works at the same work-bench as I do. Last week, the proprietor, Viscount Rothermere, came to the shop floor in the company of another gentleman. It is a rare occurrence indeed for the proprietor to be seen on the shop floor. He went over to Fisher and I heard him say he had an unusual commission, before the three started to speak in tones that were hushed so I could no longer overhear.”

“Pray continue.”

“I thought no more of it until the day before yesterday. There was a burglary at our work shop overnight. The burglars had made off with a number of items – mainly tools on work benches – but when I went to my own work bench I found they had used a chisel on Fisher’s secure locker and it stood open and empty.”

“Were any other lockers emptied?”

“No, Mr Holmes, or at least none that I could see.”

“So, are you saying that the burglars stole the valuable things they could lay their hands on quickly and broke open one locker only?”

“I did not go around the rest of the workshop, but what you say is what I saw.”

“Could it be that having broken open your colleague’s locker, they concluded that the other lockers were not worth breaking into?”

“That is possible.”

“And was a police investigation conducted?”

“The police were briefly on our premises.”

“Did they interview you?”

“They did not. Our supervisor said he would deal with the issue and I had no desire to have anything to do with the police.”

“So, this is a matter of minor larceny. Why have you come to see me?”

“Mr Holmes, the day before yesterday, Mr Fisher did not come into work. I had taken my work-apron home the day before that and had forgotten to bring it in. I therefore decided to put on Fisher’s apron, which he had left hung from the hook next to mine. In the pocket I found a photograph.”

He handed it to my friend, who looked at it under a magnifying glass. I went and stood at Holmes’s shoulder to take a look for myself. I had expected to see a picture of a person. Instead there was a picture of some faded text from a greying document in a font I had not seen before. The text was in German and had the following words, which I print as Holmes and I saw them that morning:

“Sohn. Mit der Ehr– und Tugendsamen Rosalia Buschini zu Gföll in U.Ö. gebürtig”

“It is a very short extract of an official document,” said Holmes after he had examined the photograph minutely under the glass. “It looks like an entry to an official register. I can read ’… son. With the honourable and virtuous Rosalia Buschini born in Gföll in Lower Austria …’. That is the eastern part of what now constitutes the Republic of Austria. I would date it to the second half of the eighteenth century, although then Austria was a constituent part of the Austro-Hungarian empire and had a much larger territory.”

“From my experience of typefaces, Mr Holmes, you are right with the date. But for jobs like this, I don’t pay too much attention to the content or the language, so what sort of document it is hardly matters to me. This would be a clear enough photograph to make typefaces to reproduce the letters that are on this photograph, and there are enough different letters to make a good job of reproducing the ones that are missing.”

“So, what is your concern? Your colleague may have had a commission to reproduce this typeface. I understand from what you say that this is an unusual although not an unheard-of commission. What is there to examine?”

“Fisher wasn’t in yesterday either, sir.”

“Is that not a matter for your employer to concern himself with rather than you?”

“Mr Holmes, you seem not to know how the print shop of a newspaper works. We operate the so-called Spanish practices. I don’t know the true name of any of my colleagues and am never sure who will come in to work or when. We are paid in cash and there are often more pay envelopes than there are workers. But it does seem strange that Fisher’s locker alone should have been broken into, that Fisher is missing, and that he should have been working to make letters that have this strange foreign font.”

Holmes was silent for a second and then asked, “Can you describe the stranger?”

“He was very smart, sir. Silvery hair swept back. Couldn’t say much else.”

“Did you hear him speak?”

“No, sir.”

“And Fisher?”

“He’s in his mid-thirties and has a pale face. He has a tooth missing at the front.”

“So, Mr McGregor,” said Holmes, “Let me summarise to you what you are saying: Your colleague was given a commission to reproduce an eighteenth-century Austrian typeface. This commission was given to him by a stranger in the presence of Viscount Rothermere. There is reason to believe that the fonts that Fisher created have been stolen, as his locker was empty when it was broken open as part of this theft, although, conceivably, this minor break-in is unrelated to the commission. Fisher has not been seen for two days, although the working days of all of you at your newspaper are somewhat irregular.”

“That’s about my take on it, sir.”

“And did you hear nothing else of the conversation between Rothermere, Fisher and this stranger?”

“Nothing … except when they were leaving, Rothermere said that it was very appropriate to use a drunk frog for this commission.”

I noted my colleague’s eyebrows shoot up at this extraordinary statement.

“Was Fisher of French origin?” he asked eventually.

“Not as far as I am aware, sir.”

“And what do you know about his drinking habits?”

McGregor smiled briefly before saying, “Well, sir, Fisher’s not the only one where we work to enjoy a drink, even in working hours.”

McGregor had nothing else to add and was soon on his way.

When our client had gone, Holmes sat in his chair smoking. I knew better than to disturb him and a whole hour passed before he said anything.

“If matters are as I stated when McGregor was here, then it must be someone endowed with exceptional resources who wants this typeface. That must mean either a large organisation or a state. Moreover, if the break-in and the disappearance of Fisher have anything to do with the generation of the typeface, the need for obtaining it must have become more urgent still. But why the urgency to create a document from eighteenth-century Austria?”

“Could it be an attempt to change some land deposition?”

“What you say might explain the request and possibly the urgency. Watson, this is unlikely to be a trivial matter. Fifty years ago I might have staged my own break-in at the offices of the Daily Mail, but that time is past. Instead let us to London and seek an interview with Viscount Rothermere. He clearly knows what this is about.”

Even in 1938, my friend’s visiting card could still gain access to all the most prominent people in the country. As we waited in the reception for Viscount Rothermere to become free, we could see framed on the walls front pages of past editions of the newspaper covering major events. “VICTORY AT LAST” was how the newspaper had proclaimed the Armistice in 1918, while “BACK TO WORK” marked the end of the General Strike. “HURRAH FOR THE BLACKSHIRTS” spelt out Rothermere’s support for Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists, and “AIRSHIP CATASTROPHE” announced the Hindenburg crash. We were brought before Viscount Rothermere – a man in his mid-seventies though still full of vigour.

“How can I help you, Mr Holmes?” asked the magnate as we eventually sat down.

“I am investigating the disappearance of one your employees, Fisher. Has he been reported missing from work?” said Holmes.

Rothermere stared at us for several seconds before speaking.

“My dear Mr Holmes,” he eventually expostulated, “you obviously have no understanding of the way business operates in Fleet Street. So-called Spanish Practices mean employee lists are not reliable, and I have no idea if we are missing any employees as I do not know who works either in the print shop or in type setting. Our workforce is irregular, and we could not have it any other way if we want to have our newspaper published and distributed. We have none of the disciplines on the shop floor that are common to other businesses. In any case, the demanding nature of the work of our employees makes absenteeism a common feature of our workforce. I fear I am unable to pursue your enquiry as any attempt to reveal the true identity of members of our workforce is likely to provoke a walk-out and consequent suspension of our business. Indeed, there are grave restrictions on my setting foot on the shop floor at all.”

“So, you have no idea of who your employees are or when they should be present?”

“What did you say the name was of the employee you say is missing, Mr Holmes?”

“Jeremy Fisher.”

“Ah, he is evidently from the Beatrix Potter part of the shop floor. Working there we also have a Mr McGregor, a Mr Tiggy-Winkle and a Squirrel Nutkin. In more recent times, the Disney characters have also become prevalent as a source of names. Thus, we have a Michael Mouse and a Donald Duck on our books. But tomorrow is pay day and I shall be surprised indeed if the missing operand does not call in to collect his money.”

“I understand that you gave a commission to Mr Fisher, as I shall continue to call him.”

“That may be so.”

“May I ask what it was?”

“Mr Holmes, you may not. You have no standing here and unrequested investigations into our commercial arrangements are not something we are accustomed to facilitating. I would ask you and your friend to leave.”

“He was shaken,” said Holmes as we headed out for the street.

“What are to be your next steps?” I asked.

“I shall have to reflect further,” said Holmes. “I have nothing I can raise with the authorities at present.”

There was a small café opposite the headquarters of the Daily Mail, to which Holmes and I now repaired. I knew Holmes would want no disturbance from me while he sat in contemplation, and so I bought an early edition of the Evening Standard. On the front cover was a picture captioned: “Foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, in discussions with German ambassador Ribbentrop.”

The article that followed stated that the minister and the diplomat had been engaged in discussions about Germany’s continued objections to the post-Great War settlement of boundaries in central Europe. At this point in 1938, Austria was the main focus of discussions, but German minorities in Poland and the Sudetenland – the Western part of Czechoslovakia – were also discussed. Halifax was quoted as saying, “Nationalism and racialism are a powerful force, but I can’t feel that either is unnatural or immoral! And I daresay if we were in the German position we might feel the same as they do!”

Holmes looked at me from his deliberations. “I make no progress,” he said wearily. “What is going on in the world?”

I showed Holmes the article and, to my surprise, he snatched the newspaper from my hand. “By Jove, it all fits,” he exclaimed. “German agitating at the Austrian border. A government in Germany convinced of its people’s racial superiority. There must be a connection between that and an attempt to create a document that appears to be Austrian and to come from the second half of the eighteenth century. And it would take a government to have the connections to use the manufacturing facilities of a national newspaper as well as the resources to carry out an abduction! Let us to the German embassy and see what the ambassador has to say for himself.”

Not many minutes passed before we were at the door of the white-stuccoed German embassy at Carlton House Terrace, overlooking St James’s Park. Once again, Holmes’s card gained us swift entry to a building to which access might otherwise have been denied. A flunky accompanied us up a broad staircase but, rather than being presented to the ambassador, we were asked to wait in an anteroom.

I had heard reports of how the German ambassador kept people waiting hours to see him and was pleasantly surprised when, after a short space of time, we found ourselves in front of him.

The man who had introduced himself to us as McGregor had told us that the stranger on the print shop floor had been well dressed, and the attire of the forty-five-year-old diplomat was notably elegant. His head was topped with thick silver hair. As we came into his spacious office, he stood up from behind his desk, raised his right arm in salute, and roared, “Heil Hitler!”

I was at a loss as to how to respond to this greeting, but Holmes was quite undiscommoded. He reached into his pockets for matches and lit his pipe before replying, “Heil Holmes,” in his most languid tone.

The German took a while to compose himself after this response, which he clearly had not been expecting. He proved, however, to speak excellent English, so the exchanges below are reported more or less verbatim.

“So, we meet again, Herr Holmes,” said Ribbentrop.

“I was not,” replied Holmes, “aware that I had previously had the pleasure of making your acquaintance, Herr Ribbentrop.”

“Herr von Ribbentrop,”

“Ah, you are right,” replied Holmes smoothly. “I had forgotten that you had yourself adopted by an aunt of yours so that you could use the “von” in her name to make it appear that you were of noble descent.”

“I can see no reason to object to a man changing the record as long as it is done legally. My aunt had the noble particle “von” in her name and, when she adopted me, I could adopt it.”

“Your appropriation of the noble particle was doubtless legally admissible.”

“Irrespective of title, we are all Germans. And when I said we had met before I was referring to the self-serving account of the events in what is called His Last Bow. It is described there how you crossed swords with the chief secretary of the German legation here, Baron von Herling, in 1914, as well as his colleague, Baron von Bork, who had a somewhat more irregular position. I have merged their roles into mine as ambassador and, particularly at this moment, I feel as though I am striding in tight formation with my brave compatriots. Their spirit courses through my veins.”

“It is certainly true,” said Holmes with an unaccustomed show of cordiality, “that you seem very well suited to the role of Baron von Herling’s successor as well as to being a compatriot of von Bork. As I recall, they swore vengeance on me in 1914. And yet, in the words of your compatriot Martin Luther, ‘Here I stand.’”

“What can I do for you, Herr Holmes?” asked Ribbentrop and turned his back on us to look out of the window across the darkening St James’s Park.

“I believe you are behind the disappearance of a print worker from the Daily Mail known as Jeremy Fisher. I believe you commissioned him to prepare fonts that would enable you to forge documents from the eighteenth century.”

“Herr Holmes, I cannot have you come here making accusations like that. I am the ambassador, I have diplomatic immunity, and I can do what I wish.”

“What were you doing with Viscount Rothermere at the Daily Mail on Friday?”

“I am under no obligation to answer your questions. Rothermere is a man with whom I often have dealings.”

“I would suggest that the disappearance of Fisher is connected with your visit to Viscount Rothermere.”

“You can surely do better than that, Mr Holmes,” sneered Ribbentrop. “Maybe I did visit the Daily Mail,” he continued airily. “You talk about how a person of whose name you are unsure suddenly cannot be found. My dear Mr Holmes, my country is on the march and I have much bigger things to talk about. We Germans are taking back what is due to us. Step by step. The Saarland had a plebiscite in 1935 and voted to join us. The Rhineland was remilitarised a year later and that was confirmed by plebiscite. Now there are more injustices we would like to right. Austria is an artificial creation of the Treaty of Versailles. It is all that was left once the victorious powers had dismembered the old Austro-Hungarian Empire into a patchwork of new countries. You would not even allow it to have its preferred name of German-Austria or Deutsch-Österreich. One by one these missing pieces of the German map will fall into our hands.”

“And you will use peaceful means to achieve this?”

“My dear Herr Holmes, we have got everything we want so far without a shot being fired. And yet we Germans operate under significant handicaps when we seek to get what the majority of our people wants. It was the ally of your country, Woodrow Wilson, who promulgated the idea of self-determination. And yet the allies of your country have an unfortunate habit of ignoring displays of self-determination which don’t deliver the results they want. The Vorarlberg voted to join Switzerland in 1919 and is still part of Austria. The Tyrol and the province of Salzburg held plebiscites and voted to join Germany in 1922 and yet are also still part of Austria. Perhaps you think that German speakers, uniquely among Europeans, are not suited to self-determination. Perhaps we will, at some point, need to find an alternative approach to achieving what we want.”

“Why do you wish to recreate documents from the eighteenth century?”

“Questions, questions, Mr Holmes. You seem as interested in old documents as you are in the propriety of my having a noble name. Germany is a land of noble heroes. We create them, we evaluate them and, sometimes, we remove them if they don’t fit the pattern. Sometimes we need to create new heroes. Sometimes we protect our heroes from unfortunate antecedents. We are prepared to make adjustments to present a correct picture of what a German is. When we put on the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream by the famous Anglo-Saxon poet, Shakespeare, we no longer play the incidental music of the wandering Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy who spent so much time in this country. And we have taken down his statue in Leipzig.”

He paused before continuing.

“And if you travel down the Rhine and pass the famous Lorelei Rock, some friendly local may quote a verse or two to you about it. We used to say it was by someone with a German name based in Paris. But Rootless has been replaced by Anonymous. We now no longer claim to know who has written it. Who controls the present can control the past. And who controls the past, Mr Holmes, owns the future.”

“Where have you got Fisher?”

“My dear Mr Holmes, I think you will find that the man you called Fisher is very sick. He is wont to ask a lot of questions about matters that do not concern him, he is seldom sober, and he suffers from chronic lead poisoning, which causes convulsions. That is an unfortunate combination of symptoms. There are many reasons to think he might have had a fall.”

At that moment, there was a knock on the door. An attendant put his head round and said, “Lord Halifax has arrived, Ambassador.”

“Send him in,” said von Ribbentrop, and shortly afterwards the British foreign secretary was in the room.

“I took the liberty while you were waiting in the anteroom,” said Ribbentrop to Holmes and me, “to ask Lord Halifax, your foreign secretary, to come over from the Foreign Office to join us when I heard you wanted to speak to me, Mr Holmes. I always find him very obliging when I ask him to come. We have a very good understanding, and Halifax also has a very good understanding with our Reichsmarschall.” He paused as Halifax came through the door, “Could you remind me of the name that Göring has given you, Foreign Secretary?”

“He calls me Halalifax,” replied Halifax, his face with its high forehead reddening slightly. “Göring is, like me, an enthusiast for field sports,” the foreign secretary explained, “and he thinks my name sounds like the German hunting call, ‘Halali.’ Hence the name he has bestowed on me. Can I ask you, Herr von Ribbentrop, why you summoned me?”

Holmes repeated his questions about Fisher and Ribbentrop gave the same answers as he had given previously.

“It is a very serious matter, even for an ambassador with diplomatic immunity, to abduct and detain a British citizen,” said Halifax in a voice which sounded less than firm. He paused before repeating, “A very serious matter indeed. Especially at a time when the Germans are seeking our understanding of their approach to Austria.”

“I think,” said Ribbentrop in a voice laden with the menace that had been notably lacking in Halifax’s manner, “that the British government only understands the German position when it is a fait accompli. Austria had never existed in its current form as a German-speaking independent republic and its people have no desire to remain citizens of a country so constituted.”

“As you well know, Herr von Ribbentrop, Austria has existed for centuries in various forms. We cannot accept a change in a national boundary without clear evidence that such a change is the will of the people whose statehood is affected. That remains the British position,” countered Halifax.

Ribbentrop paused for a minute before responding.

“I am sure that we can arrive at an accommodation, gentlemen,” he said eventually. “We Germans are used to organising plebiscites and we act on the will of the people. We organised one to unify the posts of chancellor and president after President Hindenburg had died. The Germans voted overwhelmingly for our Führer to adopt both positions. I am sure that there will be no change in that constitutional amendment for as long as our Reich exists. We organised another to obtain retrospective approval for the remilitarisation of the Rhineland and to choose the members of our parliament. This poll too was characterised by a high turnout and by such a high degree of unity among our voters that all the members of our parliament are now from one party. We used to have political parties, but now we just have Germans. I am sure that once the border between Austria and Germany has been abolished, the Austrians will vote in a predictable way if they are faced with a plebiscite question framed in an appropriate fashion.”

“Perhaps you might be so kind as to set out what you have in mind?” said Halifax.

“I would propose something like, ‘Do you approve of the reunification of Austria with the German Reich and do you vote for our party leader, Adolf Hitler? Yes. No.’”

“But,” objected Holmes, “you are conflating the question of unity between Austria and Germany with one about who should head the government, and there is no one standing as an alternative head of government. Moreover, you are asking the electorate to approve the reunification of Germany and Austria even though they have never been one country in the past.”

“Details, Mr Holmes, details,” said Ribbentrop impatiently. “I used to be a seller of German sparkling wine,” he continued. “I was so persuasive that I was able to get the same prices for my products as the French got for their champagne. I am sure that Austrian voters will demonstrate their openness to persuasion and be able to answer two questions at once.”

Holmes and I turned to Halifax expecting a response, but Ribbentrop continued before the foreign secretary could say anything.

“And I think it would be unfortunate for the good relations that exist between Germany and the United Kingdom if these unfounded accusations of Mr Holmes were to receive wider currency.”

I expected a series of objections from Halifax to Ribbentrop’s comments. Instead, I could see that he was readying himself to go back to the Foreign Office.

“I have learnt,” he said as he left, “that it does not do to interfere too much in the government of other countries. People often contend for liberty, but the usual outcome is that they end up with a different set of rulers. I would wish you gentlemen a good evening.”

“Perhaps,” said Ribbentrop to Holmes and me, “you might also see your way to leaving. You two gentlemen occupy rather too large a portion of the embassy carpet.”

Within a few minutes, Holmes and I were back on the pavement of Carlton House Terrace.

“What are we to do?” I asked Holmes.

“I am not sure there is much I can do. I cannot take on the resources of the German government without the support of the British government, and Lord Halifax is clearly not willing to pursue this matter.”

 

Within a week of the conversation, the German army had crossed the border into Austria and Hitler was proclaiming the country of his birth to be the newest bulwark of the German Empire before a vast crowd of ecstatic Austrians in Vienna’s Heldenplatz or Heroes’ Square.

Integration between the two countries was swift. Austrian vehicles had previously driven on the left whereas in Germany they had driven on the right. The switch to driving on the right in Austria was immediate, although British newspaper coverage took much delight in pointing out that it was harder to convert trams to driving on the right, and that Viennese trams now drove in the opposite direction from the rest of the traffic. The Austrian army was purged before it was integrated into the much larger German army while the notorious Nuremburg Laws were applied to Austria from May 1938, requiring, amongst other things, a town’s mayor to attest to the blood purity of any couple wanting to marry.

As well as these bureaucratic changes to Austria, visible efforts were made to make it seem that Germany and Austria had always been united. Sports teams representing Austria disappeared immediately while clubs in Austrian sporting leagues found themselves incorporated into German leagues.

But there was one man on whose life and works propaganda focused to represent this fictional continuity in the union of Germany and Austria. This was Johann Strauss the Younger, composer of the Blue Danube Waltz, and son of Johann Strauss the Elder, whose music was less widely known but whose works included The Radetzky March.

The great German writers were perhaps not widely enough read in German society to fill this unifying role, while the masters of Classical music were not considered accessible to the anti-intellectual National Socialist ethos. The younger Strauss, by contrast, seemed to meet all the criteria for a popular hero.

The newspaper of the stormtroopers, Der Stürmer, broke off from its regular output of rebarbative invective about international Jewish conspiracies and the perceived iniquities of the Versailles Treaty, to produce a three-part series about him. The newspaper drew attention to the fact that Strauss had changed from Austrian to German citizenship, just as Hitler has done, although in Strauss’s case this was done to facilitate a divorce and remarriage, whereas the Austrian-born Hitler had become a German citizen so that he could stand to be German Chancellor. The series concluded with the words: “There is perhaps no other music which is so German and so in tune with the spirit of the people as that of the great Waltz King.”