Gregory Lee is the author of the Amazon number one bestselling historical novel The Nero Decree and the pen name of Greg Williams, an award-winning journalist, author, and screenwriter who currently serves as Editor-in-chief of Wired UK. Now based in London, he spent a decade working in publishing in New York City.
Berlin: Day Zero is his sixth novel. His screenplay, The Doorman - co-written with Matthew McAllester - was released in October 2020 and stars Ruby Rose and Jean Reno.
A native Londoner, his motivation for writing The Nero Decree, is explained below:
On September 7, 1940, the Luftwaffe attacked London. The assault by 950 aircraft was the first of 57 consecutive nights on which the capital was bombed. My mother's family were beneath the ordinance as it fell, most of them sheltering on the platform of Bounds Green tube station in north London. But my grandfather, Harold Newell, was elsewhere. He was a member of the Auxiliary Fire Service, a civil defence group mobilised in 1938 in anticipation of hostilities. Every night, he and the rest of his crew would leave the fire station in Bowes Park in the borough of Haringey and drive their trucks towards the blazing parts of the city.
The area around St Paul's cathedral came under particularly heavy bombardment, with thousands of tonnes of incendiary devices being dropped onto the narrow, complex streets, some of which dated from the Middle Ages. My grandfather is quoted in the book Firefighters and the Blitz as saying: "I knew if St Paul's went, then we'd all be in trouble." He wasn't talking about himself and his fellow firemen - he meant London. The city faced an existential crisis.
Contemporary reports describe walls of flame hundreds of feet high, collapsing buildings, billowing smoke and embers, the roaring of plane engines overhead, the thunder of anti-aircraft guns and bombs raining from the sky. But my grandfather - an autodidact who had left school before he was a teenager - was a survivor, making it through the deprivation of the thirties, he had chanced his arm as an amateur wrestler, and wasn't a stranger to conflict, having been one of the thousands who fought running battles on Cable Street in the east end of London to stop Oswald Mosley and his fascist organisation marching through a Jewish neighbourhood. Harold was resolute. He didn't grumble. He took his chances.
He travelled to Coventry and Liverpool while the Heinkels, Junkers and Dorniers did their worst. In the north of England in 1940, so family legend has it, he cooked his crew a Christmas lunch of sausages in an upturned trashcan lid heated by still smoldering embers from a raid the night before. Like many of his generation he bore danger and adversity with stoicism and expectancy. Things were never that bad, as they had always been much worse.
One night the bombs were coming down so heavily that he and the rest of his crew were trapped in a street by buildings that had collapsed around them. There was no way out and the heat from the flames was overwhelming. The group took a snap decision: they would escape through the sewers. They removed a manhole cover and climbed down into a network of tunnels that had been constructed by Victorians. Days afterwards, Harold was called into the station chief's office. There was a man in the room he didn't recognise who wore a smart suit and maintained a patrician air. The commander showed him something that was laid out on his desk: a Nazi newspaper. My grandfather was shown a photo - the fire truck that he and his crew had had to abandon in order to escape the inferno. He was told that the caption accompanying it informed German readers that the bombing of London was so successful that it had broken the resolve of its residents; even fire crews had given up hope and were abandoning their vehicles.
Each of the crew members were questioned: had any of them taken a photo of the fire truck before climbing into the sewer? The question was preposterous: none of the men owned a camera, let alone would have risked their lives taking a photo in such circumstances. The matter was laid to rest, although my grandfather long pondered the provenance of the photo: how had he not seen a Nazi spy taking a picture of the truck that night?
My book The Nero Decree is set in Berlin four years after the London blitz finished, when German civilians - largely starving and war-weary - were subject to constant bombing by the RAF and USAF. The desperation of the situation was exacerbated by the Nazi regime, which took its own destructive measures with total disregard for civilians. While The Nero Decree is a work of fiction, some of the events in the book are based on fact.
The Demolitions on Reich Territory was an executive order passed by Hitler on March 19, 1945, aimed at denying the Allies all German infrastructure. It became known colloquially as the Nero Decree. Acting under this order, the SS flooded Friedrichstraße U-Bahn station on April 25 by planting explosives on the ceiling of the north-south axis. The station was said to be full of injured soldiers and civilians. Due to the chaotic conditions in Berlin at the end of the war, there are no records of how many lives were lost. What is known is that the flooding affected sixty-three kilometers of tunnels and twenty-five stations - one-third of the Berlin U-Bahn system. A 1990 study by the Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (the Armed Forces Military History Research Office) estimated that between 360,000 and 370,000 German civilians were killed by strategic bombing during the Second World War during which sixteen square kilometers of Berlin were reduced to little more than rubble.
One evening towards the end of the war, Harold held my infant mother up to show her an armada of RAF bombers heading to Germany. He knew as well as anyone the hellish nature of the aircrafts' payloads. Before the decade was out, he would see for himself: he and my grandmother joined the first postwar organised tour - a coach trip - to Germany from the UK. Over the following years they travelled to several of the most-heavily bombed cities, including Hamburg, Cologne and Berlin. Harold never talked much about why he liked it there, he just kept going back.
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