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  While Maxwell was delighted with his new name, not everyone felt the same way. Fed up with all the paperwork involved, his bank manager told him that if he ever changed it again, he was closing his account immediately.

  Late in the afternoon of 17 January 1945, 1/5th Battalion of the Queen’s Royal Regiment crossed a frozen canal, the Vloed Beek, in south-eastern Holland. Conditions, as the official regimental history noted, ‘were extremely bad’. For the last few days snow had fallen. In places it had melted and then frozen again, forming great sheets of ice that were as flat and grey as the sky above. To protect themselves from the cold – the night before, the temperature had fallen to minus 20 Fahrenheit – some of the soldiers stitched rabbit skins on to their battledress.

  Having crossed the canal, the battalion headed to a nearby concrete works, where they spent a sleepless night huddled around campfires. The first thing next morning, they attacked the small town of Susteren. Within a few hours, the town had been taken, but at a heavy cost – thirty-nine Allied soldiers had been killed and twenty-nine were still missing.

  The battalion then moved on towards the village of Paarlo on the banks of the River Roer. All around, the terrain was flat and featureless, broken only by dykes and belts of bare trees. By now, another thaw had set in. The sheets of ice had turned to mud, slowing progress to a crawl. To make matters worse, the retreating Germans had left behind large quantities of mines buried in the mud which had to be cleared before anyone could advance. Periodically, thick fog descended and everything ground to a halt.

  Finally, on 29 January,’ the battalion succeeded in capturing Paarlo. But that night around fifty German troops crossed the Roer in rubber boats and attacked a row of houses in the village. Inside was a small group of Allied soldiers. Bursting in, the Germans rolled grenades along the corridors, then moved from room to room, spraying everyone inside with machine-gun fire.

  Seeing ‘fierce fighting in the dark’, Maxwell’s commanding officer, Major D. J. Watson, led a counter-attack. Along with twenty other soldiers, Watson began to crawl towards the houses. The only light was a pale glow that came from distant searchlights bouncing off low cloud – ‘Monty’s Moonlight’, as it was known.

  Moving closer, Watson saw a wounded German lying in the street. ‘The man started crying, “Please, friends, come and help me.”

  ‘I stood up, but the moment I did so another German a few yards away blazed at me with a Spandau. He missed me and hit a lance-corporal by my side.’

  Withdrawing with his men, Watson witnessed a remarkable sight. As he wrote in his official account, ‘Mr Maxwell, also a platoon commander, sallied out of the darkness . . .’

  Maxwell had ‘repeatedly asked to be allowed to lead another attempt on the houses’. At first, Watson had refused his entreaties; but when it became clear that the men inside were sure to be killed unless there was another rescue attempt, he changed his mind:

  ‘The officer – Maxwell – then led two of his sections across bullet-swept ground with great dash and determination and succeeded in contacting the platoon who had been holding out in some buildings. Showing no regard for his own safety, he led his sections in the difficult job of clearing the enemy out of the buildings, inflicting many casualties on them, and causing the remainder to withdraw. By his magnificent example and offensive spirit, this officer was responsible for the relief of the platoon and the restoration of the situation.’

  According to one of the soldiers there, Lance-Corporal Dennis, Maxwell’s courage had nearly cost him his life. ‘Thinking there were Germans upstairs, he ordered them to come down – in German.’ In fact, there were several British soldiers there, one of whom shouted, ‘“Yes, you fucker!”, and let go with his rifle. He just missed.’

  There may have been more to the incident than that. Maxwell’s own account differs in one key respect from Watson’s. ‘My company commander [Major Watson] ordered me to retreat, saying the position was untenable with heavy German fire against us. I told Major Watson that I believed that some of his men in the other platoon may still be alive and was determined to lead a counter-attack . . . The major left me, saying that it was a stupid enterprise and I might have to face a court-martial if I came out alive. I organized my remaining forces and counter-attacked.’

  In other words, Maxwell had effectively disregarded an order – and risked a court martial – to save the trapped soldiers. Was this also an exaggeration? Plainly it wouldn’t have been out of character. Yet there is something about Maxwell’s disregard for authority, his recklessness, his ability to inspire others and his sheer bravery that rings true.

  Maxwell’s men seem to have regarded him with a mixture of awe and suspicion. ‘He had a smooth, silky way about him,’ recalled one of them. ‘A big fellow,’ a former adjutant would tell the Sunday Times in 1969. ‘Very dark. A bit of a mystery.’ Understandably, they didn’t much care for his habit of keeping all the banknotes from any Germans they captured, and giving them any loose change to share out.

  At the beginning of March 1945, he was presented with his Military Cross by Field-Marshal Montgomery. A photographer was there to record the scene. In the photograph, a mustachioed Maxwell is standing to attention with his head slightly bowed and his eyes half closed. The day before, he had learned that his mother and one of his sisters had been murdered by the Nazis eight months earlier.

  A week after he had been given his MC, Maxwell headed back to Paris on an army motorbike for seven days’ leave. This time he had even more important business to attend to: he was getting married. Maxwell had first seen Elisabeth – Betty – Meynard across a crowded servicemen’s club in Paris in the autumn of 1944:

  ‘I stayed in the doorway, gazing at her,’ he recalled. ‘She was pretty, very vivacious, she was slim, well-built, above all I could not take my eyes off her face, on which shone and sparkled the most lovely pair of blue eyes I had seen. She had a lovely look of slight childish desperation as she was talked to by so many people at the same time. I loved her dearly then and there. From the minute I saw her, I wanted her for my wife.’

  What Maxwell didn’t mention was that Betty had been so struck by her first sight of him that she had nearly passed out. ‘Bob had one of those mysterious and attractive faces,’ she would recall in A Mind of My Own, the memoir she wrote fifty years later. ‘A face of extraordinary mobility which captured your attention magnetically but could suddenly be transformed into a strange, steely mask, sending a chill right through you . . . When he spoke, his swift-moving lips, thick and red like two ripe fruits, evoked luxury and youthfulness. Yet sometimes, thin as filaments of blood, they depicted death and carnage.’

  Coming from a sophisticated – and prosperous – Protestant family, Betty had never come across anyone quite like Maxwell before. He was also unlike anyone her parents had ever come across before. Appalled by Maxwell’s background, and by his boorish habits, the Meynards did everything they could to dissuade their daughter from seeing him.

  Despite their efforts, the courtship quickly picked up speed. In December 1944, two months after the couple had met, they slept together for the first time. ‘Although he was ablaze with desire, he did not rush me,’ Betty recalled. ‘I was ready for love, eager to be at one with him, and we made love. But despite my readiness, it was a painful first experience. He was in tears at the thought of having hurt me. Nothing was ever to move me more than my husband’s tears, and by the time I next felt them mingle with mine, a full ten years of togetherness would have gone by.’

  Maxwell’s marriage proposal caused the Meynards to shed some tears of their own. Her father wrote to the Czech embassy asking for any information they could provide. The embassy replied that as far as they could tell, Maxwell had never been sentenced for any crime – which must have come as a comfort of sorts.

  But after a visit from Brigadier Carthew-Yourston – still keeping a protective eye on Maxwell – the Meynards had a change of heart and gave the couple their blessing with as much g
race as they could muster. The couple were married on 14 March 1945 at the town hall in the 16th Arrondissement. Betty wore a lace dress and a petticoat made out of parachute silk. Maxwell was in uniform, proudly sporting the ribbon of his Military Cross. ‘Resplendent in his new service dress completed by my father’s Sam Browne belt, he really looked like the hero of my dreams.’

  The following day there was a religious service to solemnize the wedding at the Meynards’ local Protestant church. Four days later, Maxwell rejoined his regiment. Shortly afterwards he wrote his new wife another letter. This one was rather more brisk and businesslike in tone. It began: ‘Here are my six rules for the perfect partnership:

  Don’t nag.

  Don’t criticize unduly.

  Give honest appreciation.

  Pay little attentions.

  Be courteous.

  Have the utmost confidence in yourself and in your partner.’

  But by then Maxwell was in no position to offer anyone handy tips on etiquette. Two weeks after his wedding, his platoon came to a village ‘deep inside Germany’. He asked an elderly man where the German soldiers were. The man pointed out a group of sixteen houses. Maxwell told him to pass on a message to the soldiers inside – either come out carrying a white flag, or he would start shelling them.

  Rather than obey his instructions, the soldiers ran out of the house. Maxwell opened fire. ‘I got two of them,’ he noted with satisfaction afterwards. A few minutes later, a white flag appeared above the church. As far as Maxwell was concerned, the tactic had worked so well that he decided to use it again when he came to the next town. A German prisoner was sent to tell the inhabitants to surrender immediately, or else the town would be destroyed. Shortly afterwards, another white flag appeared. But as Maxwell and his men entered the town a German tank opened fire. To teach the townsfolk a lesson, and ensure it didn’t happen again, Maxwell took the mayor to the main square, where he shot him through the head.

  According to one of his fellow soldiers, Victor Sassie, later to become a London restaurateur, he shot several other German civilians at the same time. This wasn’t Maxwell’s first experience of killing, of course. The ‘death and carnage’ that Betty had noticed in his lips hadn’t got there by accident. Only the week before, he had been commended for his role in attacks on two more German villages: ‘A Company led off successfully and by noon had cleared Sudweyne . . . [Lieutenant R. Maxwell] alone having killed fifteen SS men and taken fourteen prisoners.’

  But this was the first time he’d executed an unarmed civilian in cold blood. It’s also possible that some of the men he killed that day had already surrendered. Maxwell once told the journalist Mike Molloy that towards the end of the war he and his platoon had come across a heavily defended farmhouse: ‘I got up close to the farm door and shouted in German, “Come out with your hands up. You are completely surrounded.” They came out and I shot them all with my sub-machine-gun. I thought my boys would be pleased, but all they said was, “That’s not fair, sir, those lads had surrendered.”’

  According to Molloy, an incredulous Maxwell had said, ‘Can you understand such an attitude?’

  At home, though, he told a different story. Maxwell’s son Ian remembers his father coming into the kitchen at Headington Hill Hall one night while he and his brother Kevin were watching a documentary about the War. ‘It showed some German lads with their arms in the air. Dad said, “I remember shooting boys that age. Just about the same age as you and Kevin. I always regret it.”’

  If in later life Maxwell would claim to be haunted by the incident, at the time he had no such qualms. Maxwell’s letter to Betty describing the incident begins, ‘I had a very amusing day yesterday. I will now give you a report of it . . .’ The letter continues in similarly breezy tones. ‘As soon as we marched off, a German tank opened fire on us. Luckily he missed, so I shot the Mayor and withdrew.’

  A week later, Maxwell was given another spell of leave. He headed straight to London, where he had sent Betty to live – he felt she would be safer there than in Paris. ‘Most of our time was spent in bed!’ she would recall fifty years later. ‘We just could not stop making love. Our need to feel close to each other was insatiable, and as I think of those days now, I remember so well Bob’s incredible energy, well matched by my own. It was as if he needed to assuage all his pent-up desires and realize all his dreams, as if our carnal pleasure was the living proof that life had prevailed over death.’

  On 2 May 1945, together with the 1/5th Battalion of the Queen’s Royal Regiment, Maxwell marched into Hamburg. That night, Germany surrendered and the war was over. In July, he was posted to Berlin – part of an advance guard to pave the way for the takeover of the British section of the city from the Russian army.

  Maxwell had a new wife, a new job, a newish name, and a blazing determination to make his way in the world. Thinking it might come in useful, he had also taught himself Russian. But before he could face his future, there were significant gaps to fill in from his past. Later that summer, he drove to Prague to find out what had happened to his family. He knew that his mother and one of his sisters had died, but next to nothing about the circumstances of their deaths.

  In Prague, Maxwell learned that throughout the war conditions had deteriorated in Solotvino. Men of working age had been taken away to labour camps, while the women were forced to watch a number of the town’s inhabitants being shot, including most of the rabbis. Then, in April 1944, on the orders of Adolf Eichmann, the centre of Solotvino was turned into a ghetto. Five thousand Jews were confined there, with fifteen to twenty people crammed into each room of the town’s houses. There was a strict 5 p.m. curfew; after that, no one was allowed to step outside.

  Four weeks later, everybody in the ghetto was loaded into cattle trucks – seventy to a truck – and taken by train to Auschwitz, 350 miles away. The journey took three days. Each truck was given two buckets – one full of water, the other for use as a toilet – and two loaves of bread.

  Most of the people who survived the journey were gassed the same day they arrived. Along with Maxwell’s mother, two of his sisters, his brother and his grandfather also died in the camp’s gas chambers. His nineteen-year-old sister, Shenya, was arrested in Budapest in the winter of 1944 and never seen again. She probably suffered the same fate as other Jews who were arrested at the time: forced to strip naked, roped together, then thrown off a bridge into the Danube.

  Despite being incarcerated in two concentration camps, Mauthausen and Buchenwald, Maxwell’s older sister Brana had managed to survive the War, So too had his younger sister Sylvia, who narrowly missed being put on a train to Auschwitz. She had been rescued from Budapest station by the Swedish businessman Raoul Wallenberg, who issued all Jewish children under the age of fifteen with Swedish identity papers.

  Just like Maxwell’s mother, his grandfather and three of his siblings, his father, Mehel, had also died in Auschwitz. Instead of being gassed, he is believed to have been shot – either as soon as he arrived or shortly afterwards.

  3.

  An Adventurer of Great Style

  A few months after arriving in Berlin, Maxwell decided to get himself a dog. He had noticed that a number of British officers kept dogs, and felt it might make him look more distinguished. The trouble was that by then there were hardly any dogs, or pets of any kind, left in Berlin: food was so scarce that most of them had been eaten.

  One day, suffering from toothache, Maxwell visited a dentist called Dr Eibisch. During the War, Eibisch had been one of a host of dentists who had treated Hitler’s rotting teeth. He mentioned to Maxwell that he knew of a kennel where he might find a dog. It was the same kennel that had bred Hitler’s German shepherd, Blondi – a gift from Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery.

  Maxwell went straight there and found that the breeder had just one dog left, improbably named Barry. He bought him on the spot. Distraught to have lost Barry – and with him his chances of keeping the kennel open – the b
reeder committed suicide a few days later. A photograph taken at the time shows a grinning Maxwell, wearing an immaculately tailored tunic instead of his old battle-dress, standing in the back of a Mercedes and holding Barry up for the camera.

  But while Maxwell was delighted with his new dog, his fellow officers were aghast when they learned where he had come from – and what had happened to the man who had bred him. ‘Do you know, the other officers all felt sorry for him?’ Maxwell would tell Mike Molloy years later, his hands spread in disbelief. ‘Can you believe it? Sorry for the man who’d bred dogs for Hitler?’

  Berlin, as Maxwell wrote to Betty, was ‘a shambles. You can ride in a car for an hour without being able to see one house intact. The people are on starvation rations and no doubt before the year is out thousands of them will perish of hunger.’ The stench of decomposing bodies permeated people’s clothes and stuck in their nostrils. Splintered trunks of trees were covered in notices appealing for news of loved ones. Desperately hunting for tobacco, Germans fought for the privilege of emptying ashtrays in Allied messes.

  What struck another British soldier, George Clare, most of all was the strange silence everywhere. ‘This absence of the constant roar of city life was more unsettling than the sight of bombed and shelled buildings, of jagged outlines of broken masonry framing bits of blue sky. I had been prepared for that, but not for a city hushed to a whisper.

  ‘Yet Berlin was not a lifeless moon-scape. It lived – albeit in something of a zombie trance – mirrored in the dazed looks of many of the people I passed, more often noticeable in men than women. But then the men were mostly old or elderly, bowed and bitter-faced. The few youngish ones who were about – emaciated shadows of the soldiers who had almost conquered an entire continent – looked pathetic and downtrodden in the tattered remnants of their Wehrmacht uniforms.’

  Maxwell’s first job in Germany was at the Intelligence Corps headquarters at Iserlohn, 250 miles from Berlin. Along with the other British officers working there, he was given a pseudonym to protect his identity. For the next six months, he became ‘Captain Stone’, part of a team interrogating German prisoners and others who had worked for the Nazi regime.