The Katyn Order

by Douglas W. Jacobson

  Later, they were sitting on the terrace of an immense three-story mansion in Schoenberg, part of the American district of Berlin. The elaborate brick-and-stone structure, complete with marble columns, tiled gables and wrought-iron railings, had somehow survived the Russian bombardments with only a few broken windows.

  “The house used to be owned by some big-shot German industrialist,” Meinerz said, handing Adam a bottle of dark and refreshingly cold German beer. “He owned some chemical plants in the Ruhr valley, a loyal Nazi, so I heard. Apparently he and the family fled just before Berlin fell, took only what clothes they could carry and the contents of a wall safe in the drawing room. We commandeered it for American officers, and guests.”

  “How fast the mighty can fall,” Adam said, glancing out at the neatly trimmed hedges that surrounded a rose garden just beginning to bloom.

  Meinerz took a long swallow of beer, then ran a hand through his thick, curly hair. “I looked over the dossier we received from the Brits. You’re a former American soldier with medals in marksmanship and sniper training?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you spent the war as a diplomat in London?”

  Adam had prepared himself for how strange that would seem. “I served back in the thirties, peacetime army, Fort Benning, Georgia.” He tapped his eyeglasses. “Since then my eyesight’s gone bad. Probably from all the damn books we had to read in law school.”

  Meinerz smiled, taking another swig of beer. “Amen to that.” He pointed at Adam’s left ear. “You get that at Fort Benning?”

  Adam shook his head. “London, buzz-bomb explosion, lost part of my hearing as well.”

  Meinerz nodded, though Adam guessed he wasn’t completely convinced. “The dossier also said you’re fluent in German as well as English and Polish. And you studied law at Jagiellonian University in Krakow.”

  “I returned to Poland in ’36, following my discharge from the army.”

  “So, are you up to speed on what we’re doing here and the doctrine of ‘crimes against humanity’?”

  “That was part of my course work at Jagiellonian.”

  “Though I guess the operative term now is genocide, isn’t it?” Meinerz paused for a moment then added, “By the way, wasn’t it some Polish fellow who coined that term?”

  Adam set his beer on a glass-topped table and looked Meinerz in the eye. “Are you testing me, Colonel?”

  Meinerz was about to respond, but Adam held up his hand, stopping him. “The man’s name was Lemkin, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish legal scholar who is now an adviser to the U.S. Army. You may have read his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. And, you’re correct; he did coin the term, ‘genocide,’ based on his studies of the slaughter of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks. It seems he agreed with Churchill: ‘the world has come face-to-face with a crime that has no name.’”

  Meinerz finished his beer. “No offense, Mr. Nowak—”

  “You can call me Adam.”

  “No, offense, Adam, but this mission is likely to get pretty dicey. I don’t like surprises.”

  “I don’t either. And you may as well know: while I’m here to help you if I can, I represent the Polish Government-in-Exile, and their main concern is to determine the fate of a number of specific individuals.”

  “I see. You have a list?”

  “I do. Would you like to see it?”

  Meinerz shook his head. “Let’s wait and see how cooperative our Russian allies are first. It may take some doing to get into Sachsenhausen. Another beer?”

  Twenty-Seven

  17 MAY

  ADAM WAS UP EARLY the next morning, woken first by the usual dream, then by sounds of an idling engine and voices from outside. He pulled back the curtain and looked out the window. A U.S. Army truck stood on the cobblestone drive, and two soldiers were unloading crates from the back. A gray-haired civilian wearing a tweed suit coat waited nearby.

  After he’d washed up and shaved, Adam put on the new navy-blue suit provided by SOE. He left his second-floor bedroom and made his way along the hallway to the main staircase. Amidst the ruins of Berlin it was hard to comprehend the elegance that now surrounded him. He descended the broad oak staircase, glancing at oil paintings of German landscapes lit with wall sconces, powered by a generator Meinerz said was located on the premises. At the bottom he made his way through a richly decorated parlor with a cavernous stone fireplace flanked by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

  He paused at one of the bookshelves and scanned the titles. They were mostly German, but included a smattering of English and French, even some Polish. He noticed an entire shelf of German legal volumes: maritime law, taxes, labor law. He skimmed through the volume on labor law, shaking his head at the sections dealing with fair pay and penalties for discrimination. He shoved it back on the shelf, guessing it was written before the Nazis took over, and headed for the kitchen.

  Adam stepped through the swinging door, just as the gray-haired man in the tweed coat dragged a crate filled with vegetables and fresh bread through the kitchen. He stopped abruptly and straightened up, to stand stiffly, staring at Adam. “Guten Morgen,” Adam said.

  The man nodded. “Guten Morgen.” He appeared to be in his sixties, thin and tired-looking. The tweed coat was well-worn but clean. The man fidgeted, his eyes darting around as though he were trying to decide what to say next. Before he could respond, a woman stepped into the kitchen from the same back door.

  She bowed her head to Adam and said in fractured English, “Good morning. I Frau Hetzler. This is husband.” She wore a crisp white apron over a flower print dress, her gray hair knotted in a tight bun. She shot a sharp glance at her husband, who bent down and dragged the crate into a large pantry. Then she bowed again and stepped through a second set of swinging doors, beckoning Adam to follow.

  They entered a room Adam had not seen the night before. It was apparently a breakfast room with floor-to ceiling leaded glass windows, half of them boarded up, overlooking the terrace. A massive oak table dominated the center. On a sideboard stood a coffee urn, cups and saucers; a cream and sugar service; and a platter of dark bread and cheese. Frau Hetzler served coffee, then gestured toward the cream and sugar, and the platter of bread and cheese.

  Still having trouble adjusting to this sudden abundance of food, Adam settled for coffee, holding the cup under his nose for a moment, savoring the sweet aroma. He was stirring in the cream when a man’s voice from behind said, “The coffee is real and so is the cream.”

  Adam turned and saw Colonel Meinerz standing in the doorway. Frau Hetzler had disappeared. “Good morning,” Adam said, and took a sip of the first real coffee he’d had in years. “How is it possible?”

  Meinerz stepped over to the sideboard and poured a cup for himself. “The owner had a pile of ten-kilo sacks of coffee beans squirreled away in the cellar along with a dozen blocks of cheese, some bags of sugar and a case of French cognac. As for the cream, the Hetzler’s keep a cow locked in a garage in back of the house.”

  “The Hetzler’s are the caretakers?”

  Meinerz nodded as he carved a slice of cheese. “Yes. We’re all amazed the cow is still here.”

  “That’s because Ivan cares more about drinking than eating,” said a new voice from the doorway. A stocky crew-cut American officer entered the room and stepped up to Adam. “Major Mark Thompson.”

  Adam shook the officer’s hand and introduced himself.

  “According to Herr Hetzler,” Thompson said with a laugh, “there was a lot more than one case of cognac in that cellar before the Russians got here. They probably got so plastered they couldn’t even see the cow, let alone try to shoot it.”

  “Mark was the first one here,” Meinerz said, “so he got all the inside dope from Herr Hetzler.”

  Thompson had poured himself a cup of coffee and was stirring in a third spoonful of sugar. “Yeah, it was just the old man and me for the first two days. Frau Hetzler was so terrified of being raped by the Russians t
hat she locked herself in the garage.”

  Frau Hetzler returned with boiled eggs and sausages, then backed out of the room again as Colonel Meinerz pulled out a chair. “Well, gentlemen, shall we have breakfast?”

  When they were seated, Thompson immediately began to spread strawberry jam on a slice of bread. “So, you’re the chap representing the Polish Government?” he said to Adam. “And you’re American?”

  “An American with special ties to Poland,” Adam replied.

  “You’ve spent time in Poland, then?”

  “I was born there.”

  Meinerz cut in. “I’ll explain it all later.” Then he turned to Adam. “I’m not sure I mentioned it last night, but we’re the only ones staying here at the moment. Since we don’t have clearance from the Russians to visit Sachsenhausen yet, the rest of the team has gone down to Dachau. At least that’s in the American sector, and we don’t need their fuckin’ permission. Mark will be joining them later today. You’ll go with me to visit the Russians here in Berlin and see what we can get done.”

  It was mid-afternoon before Colonel Meinerz was able to set up a meeting. The same young corporal arrived with the Jeep, and Adam and Meinerz climbed in the back.

  “No ‘escort’?” Adam asked.

  “The boundaries of our access zone change almost daily,” Meinerz said. “As of 0100 this morning the entire suburb of Schoenberg is part of the American sector. But you can bet your ass they’ll be waiting for us at the Kommandatura.”

  “The Kommandatura?”

  “The Allied Control Council, where the occupying powers are supposed to work out the administration of the country.”

  The Kommandatura was housed in a former Supreme Court building in Schoenberg, a four-story, fortress-like structure with marble stairways arching up from either side, leading to stout, three-meter-high, oaken doors. As Meinerz predicted, a Russian Army truck was waiting for them in front of the building. This time, however, the scruffy Red Army soldiers in the back had been replaced by snappily uniformed NKVD riflemen.

  “Looks like we’ve moved up in the world,” Adam said. “Who are we going to see?”

  “A Red Army general by the name of Kovalenko.”

  Adam inhaled sharply then coughed, trying to hide his surprise.

  Meinerz glanced at him. “Something wrong?”

  “It’s nothing,” Adam said. “Just some of this damn dust in my throat.”

  There was a suspicious look in Meinerz’s eyes, and Adam turned away, thinking about Kovalenko, wondering if the general would remember him. Most likely he would, but all Kovalenko would have known on that night eight months ago was that Adam was an American diplomat, an obscure envoy sent by the Polish Government-in-Exile. It was the same story now. There was no connection to the AK, no connection to “Wolf.”

  The driver retraced the same route back to the Landwehrkanal, then crossed the foul-smelling waterway on one of the only intact bridges and headed toward what was left of the Berlin city center.

  Adam found some vengeful comfort in the destruction on the other side of the canal. Detouring around craters and mountains of rubble, they followed the Russian truck through a maze of barely passable streets lined with demolished buildings and eventually entered a vast open area of fetid swamps on either side of a pockmarked road. The remains of armored vehicles lay mired in muck, scattered among thousands of charred tree stumps. It took Adam several minutes, mentally recalling maps of Berlin, to figure out where they were. He nudged Meinerz’s shoulder. “The Tiergarten?” he asked, remembering pictures he had seen of Berlin’s magnificent central park.

  “What’s left of it,” Meinerz said. Then he pointed to a shadowy silhouette off in the distance. They turned right and followed an intersecting road through the murky swamp, drawing closer to the silhouette, now recognizable through the haze as the shattered remains of a colossal building with four towers and a domed top. “The Reichstag,” Meinerz explained. “The SS Nordland Battalion was holed up there in the final days of the assault. The Russians circled it with heavy artillery and spent a whole day shelling it before the battalion surrendered. It’s a wonder there’s as much of it left as there is.”

  Farther on, they passed the Brandenburg Gate. Atop the heavily damaged monument, where a goddess in her chariot had overlooked the city since the beginning of the nineteenth century, a Soviet flag fluttered in the breeze. Smoky, dust-filled air burned Adam’s throat as they turned onto Wilhelmstrasse, the main artery of central Berlin and its administrative center since the days when it was the Kingdom of Prussia. A shiver ran down the back of Adam’s neck as they drove past the bombed-out Reich Chancellery, where a cadre of NKVD riflemen stoically guarded Hitler’s vacated Fuhrerbunker.

  Meinerz leaned over. “I was attached to the Sixty-Ninth Infantry Division, First Army Group. We made contact with the Russians on the Elbe, west of Berlin. The higher-ups had decided that the Russians were going to take Berlin, so we stopped and sat there while the Red Army pounded the hell out of the city for over a week with heavy artillery and Katyusha rockets. They had a million troops closing in on Berlin from three directions, probably killed as many of their own men as they did Germans.”

  Adam knew about Katyusha rockets, incongruously named after a Russian wartime song about a girl longing for her lost lover. The rocket launchers weren’t very accurate but, when they were massed in large numbers for saturation bombardments, they created a hell of a paralyzing shock on enemy troops and civilian populations.

  Adam imagined the scene: So Meinerz had just sat there with the rest of the Americans, watching as the Russians laid waste to Berlin, watching those rockets blast the life out of the city. Wasn’t it the same thing the Russians had done in Warsaw, standing by while the Germans blew it to hell? Did it matter whether it was Germans or Poles, Russians or Americans? Did it make a difference depending on which countries were allies at the moment? He didn’t know. Nobody did.

  A moment later they drove past a group of Red Army soldiers smoking cigarettes and jeering at a couple of elderly women hoisting rubble into a horse-drawn cart. Adam instinctively jerked his thumb toward the Russians. “These are the same fucking cowards who sat in their tanks and watched while a quarter of a million Polish civilians were slaughtered in Warsaw and the rest driven out of their homes!” He stopped abruptly, realizing he couldn’t say any more without creating doubts about his cover story. Meinerz was a savvy, no-nonsense officer, and that suspicious look in his eye had returned. But with that spontaneous outburst Adam realized he had just answered his own question. What happened in Warsaw and Berlin were different. They were different because he was in Warsaw when it happened, and Poland was his birth country. It wasn’t a matter of who was right and who was wrong. But it did make a difference. It made a difference to him—because it was personal.

  Meinerz raised his eyebrows. “Christ, if you hadn’t told me differently, I’d swear you were right there watching it happen.”

  “We got the reports in London,” Adam replied quickly, then changed the subject. “I understand the only German troops left to defend Berlin by the time the Russians got here were old men and the Hitler youth.”

  Meinerz looked at him for a moment before responding. “Yeah, and most of them ran away when the Red Army moved in. The Russians charged through the streets tossing grenades into the cellar windows of wrecked buildings. They didn’t care who they killed—women, children, it didn’t matter. Then they’d kick in the doors, drag out any women still alive and rape them.”

  Adam took a last glance at the Red Army soldiers, wishing once again for a weapon.

  Farther along Wilhelmstrasse, the Russian truck slowed as they approached a massive seven-story structure surprisingly intact in this area of almost complete devastation. “Here we are,” Meinerz said. “It’s the Air Ministry building that Hermann Goering built in honor of his Luftwaffe. I’m told the ceilings of the upper floors were constructed with sixty centimeters of steel-reinforced con
crete. That’s why it’s still standing.”

  The truck came to an abrupt halt, forcing the corporal to slam on the Jeep’s brakes. He mumbled a curse as the NKVD riflemen jumped off the truck and came to rigid attention. Adam and Meinerz climbed out of the Jeep. Adam stiffened as the thick-necked major from the aerodrome emerged from the cab of the Russian truck. He glared at Adam and Meinerz, then spun on his heel and marched briskly toward the steps of the imposing structure. One of the riflemen motioned for them to follow.

  Soviet flags stood on each side of the entrance next to hand-lettered signs in Russian and English, indicating this was the headquarters of the Soviet Military Administration. Inside the building, broad corridors extended in two directions as far as Adam could see. Russian officers scurried past them carrying briefcases and armfuls of documents, the sound of their boots echoing off the hard marble surfaces. Three NKVD officers and a young woman in a Red Army uniform sat behind an enormous reception desk flanked by hard wooden benches.

  The thick-necked major stepped up to the desk, spoke briefly to the woman, then marched off without a word. Adam and Meinerz looked at each other and turned to follow, but one of the riflemen blocked their way. He motioned toward the benches instead.

  Half an hour passed, then forty-five minutes. Finally, the woman emerged from behind the desk, stepped over and said in English, “Gentlemen, if you please to follow me.”

  She led them down the corridor to the left, up two flights of steps and down another corridor. She stopped at a set of double doors. Adam tensed when he saw the brass plate fixed to the wall. He couldn’t read the Cyrillic letters but he knew the name was General Andrei Kovalenko.