Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [51]
The second level of bunker society were those who visited the complex often, both the military men whose duty brought them underground and the sycophants who had somehow gained both the Führer's favor and valid passes. The former included Keitel and Jodl, Generals Krebs and Guderian, Admiral Doenitz, and Ministers Goebbels and Speer. The latter included General Hermann Fegelein, the SS liaison who was married to Eva Braun's sister, and who did little more than gossip with anyone he could slow long enough to catch an ear. These visitors were not considered family by the Führer, and were handled with less patience and less solicitude.
Battlefield commanders — Manteuffel and Busse and many others — arrived at irregular intervals, mud on their boots, uniforms often torn, faces haggard, anxious to report and get away from this place Often as not, they would be summarily promoted or transferred or dismissed, and they rarely knew their fate when they arrived In their demeanor and haste, these generals brought shocking reality into the bunker, where eight-foot-thick concrete walls muffled both bombs and unpleasant reality. The contempt felt for those safely ensconced below- ground was visible on every battlefield commander's face, and those in Führerbunker society were just as relieved to see them go as the commanders were to go. These front-liners were certainly not members of the underground family.
This bunker had been built just the year before, but had not been completed. Construction was halted after the place had been made habitable but before it had been made comfortable. No one knew why construction had stopped, at least no one Sergeant Kahr had spoken with. He skirted the crowd, passing the first door on his left, which was to the telephone switchboard and guards' room. Here the overhead lights were for some reason orange, giving everyone's face a malarial hue. In other rooms the light was white, almost incandescent, a light that flattened perspective and revealed blue veins beneath skin. Older rooms were dusty with new concrete, while newer rooms were damp, the concrete not fully set Some walls seeped water and were discolored by mold. A few walls were carefully painted to match furniture, but others had been left as unpainted concrete. Some rooms were as warm and humid as a hothouse, others were dry and cool. Everywhere was the soprano hum of the ventilator fans, and in some rooms this sound was supplemented by the gurgle of the toilet plumbing or the rumble of the sump pumps or the clang of exterior doors. Each underground room had its own combination of scents and colors and sounds, and there seemed to be no reason to any of it. And Ulrich Kahr liked none of it, except the ventilator's hum.
The sergeant thought of the Führerbunker as a concrete submarine, the walls always pressing in on him. As the end of each shift neared, the place became more and more oppressive, and Kahr always emerged from the bunker gasping, eternally grateful for the sky, whether it was clouds or sun or firestorm smoke or the darkness of night. He dreaded those days that called him to sleep at his post, on a Pullman cot in his generator-ventilator room.
He rang the buzzer of the second door on the left with that day's signal; two rings, then one, then one more. The door was a solid steel plate with a dead bolt that could be opened only from the inside. Because of the room's critical equipment, the door was kept locked at all times. A Wehrmacht sergeant pulled open the door, and Kahr entered his domain, a cubicle filled with machinery. At the far end were two diesel generators, quiet for the moment because electricity had been patched through to the bunker. Many times a day the bunker would plunge into the absolute darkness of a coal shaft. The beating heart of the Reich would be utterly still until Ulrich