Peter Mann - The Torqued Man

For Mom and Dadmy original readers

Our country has been depopulated, our people degraded, our industries destroyed. If Hell itself were to turn against English policy, as it is known to us, we might be pardoned for taking the side of Hell.

Eoin MacNeill, article in Fianna

And the individual, powerless, has to exert the

Powers of will and choice

And choose between enormous evils, either

Of which depends on somebody elses voice.

Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal

Thou hast chosen an ill place to rest and slumber in, before the city of thine enemy.

The High Deeds of Finn McCool

Date: 05 September 1945

CPTN FLOYD WEEKS

BERLIN DISTRICT INTERROGATION CENTER

APO 755US ARMY

TO:

CPTN CHARLES CARSON

OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES, BERLIN

APO 401US ARMY

Charles:

Am sending the enclosed MS for your review in case it is of any value. It was found this morning in the remains of a bombed-out house in Schoeneberg following the arrest of former Abwehr agent Adrian DE GROOT. Little is yet known of DE GROOTs activities during the war, other than he was involved in Spanish and Irish operations before being imprisoned in 1944, then later drafted into the peoples militia. At the time of his arrest, he was living under the alias Johann GROTIUS and employed by the Real Estate and Labor Office at the new Coca-Cola plant in Steglitz. He is currently under interrogation and seems eager to cooperate.

The Brits want next crack at him, as it was SIS who tipped us to his identity. I figure if we can save them several hours of reading, it would be the neighborly thing to do. Anything in the MS that can clarify the role of Proinnsias Frank PIKE in his affiliation with the Abwehr would be of particular interest. PIKE, an IRA fighter and socialist agitator who escaped from a Spanish prison in 1940, is thought to have gone to Germany, where he disappeared during the war.

Please give this a look and send a report at your soonest convenience.

Yours,

Floyd

P.S. It appears there are actually two distinct MSS that have been collated either by their owner or the rubble women who found them. I leave it to you to puzzle out their relation.

November 30, 1943

Frank Pike is dead.

The news is not surprising, and yet it still comes as a shock. Strange, given the perpetual state of shock life has become. I wonder if he ever knew how much he meant to me. I do feel partly to blame for the way things turned out.

Kriegsmann saw the body before the hospital was hit. Now its a hole in the ground. I would have gone myself had I known he was there. But with this gash in my legdamn that dogand the mountains of smoldering rubble clogging the roads, it would have taken days just to get across the city. Imagine: Berlin burning all around him, and the man dies in bed from a fever. As though one needed other forms of dying these days. Nonviolent death seems like one of Gods little eccentricities.

According to Kriegsmann, he expired in the arms of a nun. Perhaps he had a chance to talk her out of her vow of chastityone last thrust of the pike, as it were. Even in his beleaguered state, deaf as a post and limbs atremble, his skin cirrhotic and face caving in on itself, Frank Pike knew how to charm. Its a pity he never could find a proper use for his talents. For all his peccadilloes, questionable loyalties, and that ceaseless Irish garrulitya verbal spigot for which there was no wrench, not even his handicapped Germanhe was, it must be said, a man of action. Or at least he could have been. It was our stymieing of his energies, those three years of forced indolence, that caused his undoing. Only in the Germany of today could a man of Pikes vitality become such a colossal waste. We may add it to the tally of murders foisted upon the world by our regime. Perhaps there are no nonviolent deaths after all.

I first met Pike in a Burgos prison in 1940. Despite the bleak setting, I felt almost giddy, as Id just spent a week in the company of Himmler and would sooner have chosen to become an inmate there than suffer one more minute with that dullard.

I still shudder when I recall that trip. I had been assigned to be the Reichsfhrers interpreter on his tour of Spain, a demotion that was part of the Security Offices attempt to flex its muscles over the Abwehr. I knew I was in for a miserable week as soon as Himmler boarded the train in San Sebastin. He immediately began complaining that the nitrate deficiencies of the Iberian soil had thrown off his digestion and were interfering with the rhythm of his bowel movements. As if that werent enough, his wife had neglected to pack his bee pollen supplements, no doubt a malicious act, thereby dooming him to eight days of throat constriction and adenoidal hell.

To my horror, this harangue directed at everyone in his retinueand to which we were obliged to listen attentively and fill the pauses with a natrlich! or wie interessant!did not end when we pulled into Atocha but continued for days. Through the galleries of the Prado, where the Reichsfhrer insisted on seeing only the German and Dutch Old Masters and admired them without breaking stride, he lectured us on the wonders of the neti pot, the earliest Aryan form of medicine, a nasal-irrigation system for the warrior caste that led directly to the conquest of the decadent Hittitesit was all to be found in a proper study of the Sanskrit documents. Only when we came to Boschs Garden of Earthly Delights did our group pause, as the Falangists and SS men all marveled at the ingenious tortures of the right panel, cooing like women ogling dresses in a window display.

The next day, the mayor of Madrid staged a bullfight exclusively for the Reichsfhrer. A poor showing. The corrida hadnt yet recovered from the long siege during the warthe bulls were sluggish, the matadors timid. The regime had to bribe or coerce several hundred civilians to fill the stands and, to ingratiate themselves further with their Nazi guests, had chosen only the blondest, most Aryan representatives of Madrid. Serrano Suer, who, as Francos brother-in-law and lickspittle-in-chief, had been tasked with showing Himmler around the country, presented the Reichsfhrer with some fragments of a mixing bowl from an archaeological site in Segovia. Hmm, said Himmler, examining the shards. Could be a neti pot!

You see, Reichsfhrer, said Serrano Suer, we Spaniards are descended from the Visigoths. There is good Aryan blood running through our veins, like yours.

Himmler scoffed. No Aryan, he said, would make such a grotesque sport out of maiming innocent animals.

I hated seeing Spain papered over in swastikas. I state this with absolute sincerity, even while I admit my sympathies had once been with the nationals. I didnt want to see Spain go redthe churches torn down, the women renouncing dresses and dancing for overalls and agitprop, the vineyards collectivized and turned into Stalinist beet farms. In my navet, I had believed a conservative stand against the excesses of materialism would preserve the soul and, with it, art, which is always, in its authentic form, an expression of the soul. But those of us with a true preservationist impulse against the onslaught should have known we had no party to speak for us. I soon learned that Francos regime, in its obsession with limpieza social and terror of foreign infection, was really only a rebirth of the Inquisition. Perhaps my idea of Spain, the one I saw threatened by the left, had never existed in the first place and was merely a postcard fantasy from my student days in Salamanca. But with Francos victory, it had become clear to me that the caudillo and his Falangists were of the same stunted, loathsome issue as the thugs of our own regime.