The Plot to Kill Hitler

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/books/review/munich-robert-harris.html

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MUNICH By Robert Harris 303 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95.

In the countdown to World War II, no event more aptly symbolized false hopes and Nazi duplicity than the Munich accord. In September 1938, Adolf Hitler threatened to send Wehrmacht troops into Czechoslovakia to seize the ethnic-German border regions known as the Sudetenland. Britain’s prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, flew to the birthplace of the Third Reich to meet Hitler and try to stave off a conflict. Twenty-four hours later, Chamberlain returned to London, where he brandished an agreement permitting Nazi Germany to occupy the territory and pronounced four words that would forever be linked with naïveté and appeasement: “Peace for our time.”

Robert Harris’s meticulously researched and expertly paced thriller, “Munich,” recounts the days leading up to the ill-fated agreement. As in most of his historical novels, Harris relegates major figures to the background, focusing on two marginal characters with intimate views of the event. Hugh Legat, a junior Foreign Service officer with an Oxford degree and fluency in German, wins Chamberlain’s confidence and secures a place among the inner circle at 10 Downing Street. His fellow Oxford alumnus Paul von Hartmann, a well-bred third secretary at the Foreign Ministry in Berlin, despises Hitler and plots with a handful of diplomats and officers to kill the Nazi leader. Hartmann and his co-conspirators hope to scuttle the looming Munich accord, force France and Britain to declare war on the still-unprepared Third Reich, and persuade the Wehrmacht generals to rally to their side.

When Hartmann obtains a secret memorandum outlining Hitler’s plans to seize all of Czechoslovakia and much of Europe, he alerts his fellow Oxonian through an intermediary. British intelligence enlists Legat to travel to Munich with Chamberlain to meet Hartmann, get the secret document and expose Hitler’s duplicity. This sets off a dangerous game played by both Legat and Hartmann as they head to their rendezvous in Munich — where they risk exposure and, in the case of Hartmann, arrest and execution.

Harris steeps his tale in vivid descriptions of Europe on the brink of conflict. Londoners dig slit trenches in Green Park, fit their children with gas masks and raise barrage balloons to protect against aerial attack — “tiny silver torpedoes, some already thousands of feet high.” The prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street reflects the fustiness of a weakened empire: dowdy furnishings, corridors lined in linoleum, a cramped attic for advisers stranded overnight. It was, Harris writes, like “some gentlemen’s club that was no longer fashionable.” Berlin, in contrast, brims with sinister glitz: “The dome of the Haus Vaterland, with its UFA-cinema and its giant cafe, was lit by traceries of 4,000 electric bulbs,” he writes of Potsdamer Platz, the main square in the Nazi capital. “Opposite it, an illuminated billboard showed a movie star with glistening jet-black hair, his face at least 10 meters high, smoking a Makedon cigarette — ‘Perfekt!’”

Harris takes a sympathetic view of Chamberlain, written off by many historians — including his successor, Winston Churchill — as Hitler’s dupe. Aging yet still forceful, he prowls the corridors of 10 Downing Street in a fog of cigar smoke, bitterly cognizant of the folly of placating Hitler yet knowing that he has no choice: Britain has only 20 fighter planes that work at high altitude, and Chamberlain desperately needs to buy time to allow his country to rearm. By contrast, the Führer, idol of millions, is an ill-tempered and nondescript figure with a bad case of body odor. “He looked like a lodger who always kept himself to himself,” Legat observes after being in the same room with him for the first time, “or a night watchman who disappeared in the morning as soon as the day shift arrived.”

Like his breakthrough novel, “Fatherland,” set in a Nazified Germany 20 years after the Third Reich defeated the Allies in World War II, Harris’s new novel initially seems headed into the realm of fantasy. But it quickly becomes clear that Harris isn’t out to create an alternate history. “Munich” sticks close to the facts — even as it holds out the tantalizing hope of a different outcome. There’s a roundelay of diplomatic meetings in smoke-filled chambers, as well as a speech before the House of Commons and letters delivered to embassies and other corridors of power. The suspense begins to build as the British diplomats and their Nazi counterparts head toward their destiny in Munich. Hartmann’s train ride to Berlin is a tour de force, complete with a tightly guarded, vital document, a gun secreted beneath a bathroom sink and a menacing SS Sturmbannführer who keeps his eye fixed on the young diplomat.

The last third of the book unfolds in Munich — turned by Hitler and his architects into a monstrous shrine to Nazism. The Führerbau, built for Hitler the year before as a “monarch’s court,” is a white-stone monolith adorned with “bronze eagles, wings outstretched, swastikas in their talons.” As Hitler and Chamberlain, joined by their Italian and French counterparts, gather to seal the fate of Czechoslovakia, Legat stumbles into two Czech diplomats being held captive by the SS in their hotel room. He leads them to a meeting with members of the British delegation, who unroll a map showing them the new reality: “Three large chunks along the border … had been excised, like bites from a piece of meat.” Like the captive diplomats, Legat and Hartmann are fated to remain on the sidelines, powerless against the tide of history.