The Secret Agent by Stephan Talty

stoic. His escort then took him out of the courtyard and drove him back to the hotel.
    Erickson went to his room and locked the door behind him. He was chilled, deeply anxious. What was the meaning of making me watch that? What do they have on me? The Gestapo wasn’t prone to idle theatrics. They’d brought Erickson to the prison for a reason; he just couldn’t figure out what it was. The spy quickly packed up his things, called a taxi and headed to the airport. Another shock awaited him there: after studying his papers, German security agents told him that he couldn’t leave Germany.
    This had never happened to him before. It was clear the SS wanted to keep him in the country, either to study his reactions to the execution or to finalize the arrangements for his arrest.

Chapter Eleven
The Mighty Eighth
    After a few days, Erickson was allowed to leave Berlin. He flew back to Stockholm emotionally exhausted. He couldn’t ignore the obvious: he was under suspicion. There was no other explanation for the invitation to Moabit. But this realization came at a crucial time: the bombing of the oil facilities was finally being ramped up and Erickson was the only spy in the Allied program that could produce the needed target lists. He felt an obligation—to himself, to family, and to his native country—to see his commitment to the end, no matter his status with the Gestapo.
    â€œHitler was a lunatic,” he wrote. “I wanted to crush him.” In the weeks after the execution, images of Anne-Maria would flash into Erickson’s mind, unbidden. At times, he felt responsible for her death. At others, he felt sure he would follow her to the gallows.
    With his new pass, Erickson began traveling all over central Europe, from the western German border to Prague. It was around this time that he was caught in the Mercedes factory in Stuttgart, as the Americans bombed it. Erickson barely escaped. Despite the near miss, he was gathering huge amounts of classified information on plant locations and capacities, manufacturing sites, anti-aircraft batteries, even the effectiveness of previous bombing runs.
    One day Erickson was invited to Carinhall, Hermann Göring’s hunting estate northeast of Berlin. Carinhall was a secluded, wooded expanse where the Luftwaffe chief could relax and indulge himself as the “State Forestry and Hunting Master of Germany.” The architect, Werner Marsh, the same man who designed Berlin’s Olympic Stadium for Hitler, installed a small but luxurious hunting lodge on the estate, which was enlarged when Carinhall became Göring’s official summer state residence. The new wings included a bowling alley, a movie theater, a room for the master’s hunting trophies, a beer pub and a room dedicated to Göring’s beloved model train, which was 321 feet long and complete with miniature airfields and German fighters. Nearby was an immaculate tennis court, a shooting range, housing for Göring’s doctor, security and thirteen firemen who watched over the property, as well as a mausoleum for his first wife, a Swedish divorcee.
    When Erickson arrived at Carinhall, one of Göring’s chief adjutants invited him on a long drive. “Arrangements were made for the trip—to where I did not know.” They drove for hours until finally they wound up at Dachau, a concentration camp in Upper Bavaria, near Munich. Erickson had heard people “whispering about such places,” but this was his first confirmation that the camps were real.
    Dachau was an enormous, stinking, typhus-ridden work camp and death factory surrounded by an electrified barbed fence. Perhaps 30,000 prisoners were shot, beaten, tortured, worked to death and cremated inside its ovens during the years 1933-1945. Among its 69 barracks, there was a “Priest Block” that housed ministers who’d defied Hitler and another that housed the victims of medical experiments.