Chapter 29: Midnight Plotting

Seeckt paced back and forth in the room, agitated and furious. Akado sat on the sofa in silence. The ticking of the wall clock echoed in the room, making the quiet night seem somewhat terrifying. Time flowed by with this heavy atmosphere, bit by bit, silently.

About an hour ago, the Reichswehr had dispatched three companies of troops and secretly arrested the only three secretaries in the president’s office.

The first secretary was sound asleep in his bed when he was arrested. When the Reichswehr stormed in, he hadn’t even put on his pants. He ended up being dragged onto a truck by the soldiers wearing only a pair of white underpants.

The second secretary was staggering home from a bar, drunk and humming a little tune, when he found his house completely surrounded by Reichswehr troops. As he was pushed against a wall and searched by the fierce-looking soldiers, he was still shouting, “I am the President’s secretary! I want to see Mr. President! You just wait!”

The third secretary didn’t escape either. He was sleeping at his lover’s place. Unfortunately, the Reichswehr found the mistress’s house through his friends and arrested both him and his mistress, taking them back to the Reichswehr High Command. Both were tied up securely—the Reichswehr soldiers had only brought one pair of handcuffs, so to avoid preferential treatment, they had to use rope.

The results were already in for two of them. The third secretary had attended a party with his lover that day. At least twenty men and women could prove they had an alibi. The cleared secretary was placed in a living room and “looked after” by two Reichswehr soldiers.

The first secretary had been playing mahjong with seven gambling buddies all day and had no time to commit the crime. He even recounted how his wife had beaten him for losing money. Looking at his tear-streaked face, he would have confessed to stealing things as a child if asked.

The second secretary, due to his drunkenness, was still being processed by the interrogation department. However, it was said that this second secretary was a drunkard who had only been placed in the president’s secretarial office because he was Ebert’s nephew. He was a complete good-for-nothing.

Seeckt and Akado were waiting for the results of the interrogation, but they already more or less knew the answer. The only people who could enter the presidential secretarial office in the middle of the night, besides the three secretaries, was Mr. President himself.

“Ebert has no reason to betray us! At that time, we were merely an appendage to him! We were still surviving on the funds he allocated. What good would betraying the Reichswehr do him?” Seeckt looked at Akado, perplexed, as if asking Akado, and also as if asking himself.

Akado stood up, his face looking somewhat grim. He started walking towards the door and said, “I don’t know why he would betray Germany either. So I plan to go ask him myself. General, sir, I’m heading to the interrogation room now to hear what that drunkard has to say. Are you interested in coming along?”

Seeckt snorted, picked up his military cap, and walked out the door ahead of Akado. The two of them, one after the other, arrived at the Reichswehr interrogation department’s interrogation room. This department was located within the High Command grounds, used for interrogating important prisoners, but it was not in the same building as the High Command’s office area. A guard battalion barracks separated the two.

The two men, with their respective bodyguards, walked under the dim streetlights. Not far away, soldiers of the newly transferred 103rd Regiment were jumping down from trucks and forming ranks. They were under orders to garrison the Reichswehr High Command to defend it in the event of a possible coup.

When Seeckt pushed open the door of the interrogation room, an officer was splashing cold water on the face of the second secretary, who was hanging from the ceiling. It was already November, and the weather was very cold. A bucket of icy water was thrown on the man’s face, and as expected, he let out a loud cry.

Seeing Seeckt and Akado enter, the soldiers and officers all stood at attention and saluted. The man heard the sound and looked towards the door with hazy eyes, spotting Seeckt and Akado coming in.

“General! Save me! General!” the man hanging in mid-air shouted. “I’m the President’s secretary, Seaman! You’ve met me!”

Seeckt looked at Secretary Seaman’s filthy, water-drenched, and pathetic state, closed his eyes, unable to bear it, and did not speak. Instead, Akado, who was beside him, took off his leather gloves and asked in an icy tone, “Mr. Seaman, I hope you will tell us what we want to know.”

“But you haven’t asked me anything!” Seaman said very innocently.

“…” Akado was a little embarrassed, and his imposing aura from a moment ago vanished into thin air. He turned his head. “You haven’t started asking yet?”

“Interrogation Room Three is different from the ones before it. Usually, we beat them for a while before asking, sir!” an officer stepped forward and explained. “This makes it easier for the criminals to recall what they have done.”

“That won’t be necessary!” Akado said, looking at the terrified drunkard Seaman and waving his hand. “Just ask him directly.”

The officer nodded, walked up to Seaman, glanced at a document, and asked, “You twice made a phone call to the Allied Military Control Commission from your office! What was the content?”

“Wha-what content?” Seaman stammered.

Even Akado could hear the panic in Seaman’s voice, let alone the room full of interrogation experts.

Without wasting any more words, two officers rushed forward and began to punch and kick Seaman in the waist. Screams immediately filled the entire room. Seeckt, at the side, seemed to let out a sigh of relief. He found a stool, sat down, and watched his men interrogate Seaman.

“Please, ah… please! Ah… don’t! Ah… don’t hit me… I! Ah… for God’s sake! Ah… I’ll talk! I’ll talk!” Seaman only held out for about two minutes before he vomited up the alcohol from the evening along with blood from his stomach. Then he screamed and prepared to confess.

The moment the officers and soldiers stopped, he spilled everything out like beans from a bamboo tube. “Don’t… don’t hit me anymore! That day, Ebert told me he had had enough of the Reichswehr’s threats and arrogance. He planned to weaken the Reichswehr’s power and make it give up a part of Operation Pluto.”

He gasped for breath and continued, “He didn’t want to completely stop Operation Pluto, he just wanted to bring the Reichswehr’s development under his control. So he felt that Akado was a threat and was preparing to get rid of him.”

He glanced at General von Seeckt and, seeing the ugly expression on his face, tried to defend himself. “Ebert and I are not traitors! We never thought of betraying the country! We just wanted the army to be a bit more restrained, to save more money to rebuild Germany! We were also in the right.”

“To hell with your so-called righteousness! Your stupidity directly led to the Ruhr Crisis! It brought shame upon the Reichswehr and disaster upon the German people!” Akado said angrily. “General von Seeckt, are you still planning to plead for Ebert now?”

“We cannot take measures against the President based on the testimony of a single secretary. That would be illegal,” Seeckt said with some resignation.

“General von Seeckt, he is trying to shake the very foundations of the Reichswehr! He is trying to destroy Germany! We should take action to prevent the disaster from continuing!” Akado said, somewhat relentlessly. “We should arrest Ebert and sentence him to death.”

“We are not the police, Colonel Akado!” Seeckt stared at Akado, annoyed. “And we are not judges!”

Akado nodded. “Correct! We are not! But we are the Reichswehr!”

“Arresting the President will cause riots. We have no certainty we can control the situation,” Seeckt said with a frown. “We need to think carefully and formulate a proper response.”

“We already have a response, don’t we?” Akado said, a smile playing on his lips. “As early as last year, I drafted an emergency plan for the Reichswehr in a secret meeting. We can proceed entirely according to Plan A.”

“In that case, let’s arrest Ebert first. Do not harm him.” Hearing Akado’s words, Seeckt’s attitude improved significantly. After all, the military controlling the government was much better than Ebert controlling the military.

Akado nodded and turned to walk out of the interrogation room.

“Take your men and come with me!” Akado said, seeing Colonel Hauck outside the door. He ordered, “Have the soldiers load their weapons! Level one alert!”

Inside the room, under Seeckt’s direction, several officers had already hanged Secretary Seaman. One of the corpse’s feet was still twitching.

“Are you really planning to let President Ebert go?” Hauck asked as he walked alongside Akado. “If you let him go, he will retaliate! By dawn, it will be too late to deal with him!”

“The problem you’ve thought of, I have of course thought of as well! So he will definitely resist arrest! The Reichswehr does not need a living president, don’t you think?” Akado said, turning his head. He then got into the car and motioned for Gehr to drive.

“General von Seeckt will send you to a court-martial, Akado. Firing on the President is a capital offense!” Hauck said to Akado through the car window. “Shouldn’t we reconsider?”

“Yes, General von Seeckt will not tolerate my acting on my own. However, the newly appointed president will be endlessly grateful to me. You still remember what I told you during General Walther von Lüttwitz’s coup, don’t you?” Akado said with a smile.

“The new president? Who is the new president?” Hauck was somewhat confused, but he still remembered what Akado had told him about the problems with General von Lüttwitz’s coup, such as not having chosen a new president beforehand.

It seemed that Akado, unlike the reckless Lüttwitz, already had a complete plan to guide his actions before he even started the coup.

Just as the car started moving, Akado spoke, “Gehr, drive! Colonel Hauck, we are now going to get rid of our former president, Mr. Ebert. And afterward, I am going to see the new president of Germany, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg.”