Space: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘You make all the Germans get out, one by one, and you give them ordinary visitors’ passes. In three months they can exchange these for permanent permission, and in however many years it takes, they can apply for citizenship.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  So on a bright Thursday morning one hundred and ten German scientists who had never been in the United States, officially, climbed into buses at Fort Bliss, entered the international bridge at 0945 and drove into Mexico. Once in Ciudad Juárez, the buses circled about a statue of some Mexican general and came immediately back across the bridge, where they were halted peremptorily by the chief of immigration. The scientists filed out of the buses and marched into the immigration offices, where they solemnly swore that they had, for some months, been living in Mexico City. They petitioned for entry permits, which were granted, after which they filed back into the buses and drove to the prison at Fort Bliss, legally entitled to be there.

  One scientist, looking at his stamped paper with the silver eagle, said, ‘It was so very German, that whole arrangement.’

  A few days later the wives arrived, and when Rachel watched them disembark she burst into tears, for their patient, aging faces reminded her of her own, and of the years of absence, and of the endless journeys back and forth. When the women embraced their husbands she had to turn away, and she was weeping when Dieter Kolff came to her: ‘My wife did not come. What can I do now?’

  In that chaotic spring of 1945 when Stanley Mott had wandered into yet another German village, searching for scientists, and had stumbled upon one of the men he sought most avidly, he carried with him memorized instructions as to how he must handle Dieter Kolff and any unnamed men, like General Funkhauser, who might be fleeing with him:

  Because there is a strong likelihood that Himmler’s SS Troops will seek to machine-gun the entire Peenemünde cadre to prevent them from bringing their secrets to us, speedy efforts must be made to move any captives to the secure area which will be established near Munich.

  But these careful plans had made no provision for handling wives, especially those with no legal proof of their marriage.

  So Liesl Koenig Kolff was left stranded in central Germany, with no papers, no wedding license and no knowledge of where her husband might be, her only consolation being that she had escaped the Russians. When stories began to filter out concerning conditions in East Germany, she was grateful that Dieter’s resolve had saved her at least from that fate. Rumors circulated that men from Peenemünde were being kidnapped right off the streets of West German towns, so highly did the Russians value their knowledge, and for some months Liesl trembled with fear, convinced that she was about to be snatched because she knew that secret papers regarding future rockets existed.

  She became one of the millions of women of this period who had no meaningful past that could be certified, no papers to prove her identity, no sensible hope for the future. In her wanderings she became much like Elinor Grant and Rachel Mott in their years of ceaseless travel without their husbands. Men went away to the excitement of war; women were left to meander with ration books and babies, and neither would ever understand the miseries of the other.

  When Liesl learned that the scientists’ wives were congregating at the barracks in Landshut, she traveled across much of Germany to join them, but since none of them had known her as Dieter’s wife and since she had no papers or anyone to certify her, the American guards would not permit her entrance, and she drifted off to Hamburg, where city-wide rebuilding provided opportunities for almost anyone who would work.

  Even so, she found it difficult to land a job of any kind and had to be content with a frowzy night club near the waterfront, not as an entertainer or a hostess, for she was neither pretty enough nor young enough for such glamorous work. She did not qualify even as a waitress or a kitchen helper; the best she could get was a job as a cleaning woman. She reported seven days a week at nine o’clock in the morning, and worked till ten or eleven at night; in time the new German government would halt such exploitation, but in this time of crisis she was glad to have a job of any kind and did not complain.

  She roomed with two other girls, much like herself, whose husbands had either died or absconded, and because Liesl knew how to hoard pfennigs and buy always at the cheapest places, they managed. When she tried to correspond with her parents at the farm, she received no reply, and this worried her, but when one of the girls suggested that she cross over into East Germany to see what had happened to the farm, she shuddered.

  She had better luck with her husband. Through authorities with the American occupation forces, she learned with difficulty where the German scientists were imprisoned. ‘That’s altogether the wrong word,’ a major from California said. ‘They’re being kept together because they work well as a team.’ He gave her the address of Fort Bliss, to which she sent a stream of letters advising her husband of her plight as a displaced person with no documentation.

  She sent five letters before she received a reply, and when it arrived, all stamped and censored by two governments, she sat down in the night-club kitchen and held it unopened in her lap, just staring at it and trying to estimate what plan of salvation it might contain. That Dieter would somehow rescue her, she had no doubt, and this was justified, for when she opened it, she found it full of the most soaring optimism. It was the first letter she had ever received from him, so she could not claim to recognize his handwriting, but she did recognize the competence with which he wrote:

  Life here is good. Professor Mott’s wife is a fine, decent person who teaches me English. We work as you can guess, and although we are in a fort we are not in prison. I have been to Mexico three times.

  I have discussed with both Professor Mott and Mrs. Mott ways by which you can get to the United States. Do everything possible to get here. It is not heaven, but it is certainly not Russia.

  There are three ways we can do it. First, go to the collection center at Landshut near Munich and join the other wives. I am surprised you haven’t done this. Second, see if there is any way you can get from the church in Wolgast where we were married by the Lutheran minister a copy of our wedding certificate, which will authorize you to join me when the time comes. Third, if all else fails, I shall hurry back to Germany as soon as the law allows and fetch you. Von Braun and Stuhlinger say they will return to Germany to marry their childhood sweethearts.

  As soon as she read Dieter’s second suggestion she understood his tactic; they would have to convince the authorities that they had been married in a church in Wolgast, the small town opposite Peenemünde’s island, and that the papers had somehow been lost when the Russians arrived. Her sixth letter to Fort Bliss covered this point nicely:

  Two times I have traveled to Wolgast to see if I could get a copy of our marriage certificate, but when the Russians reached there, they tore our little church apart, and all the records are lost.

  Husband and wife corresponded thus for many painful months, building a careful history of their past lives, and Liesl eased Dieter’s mind when she reported that she had quit her job in Hamburg in order to move closer to the other wives at Landshut ‘so as to be ready to join them when the time comes.’

  The time came, but she was not allowed to accompany them on their journey to the United States, for the American authorities, well versed in such problems, concluded that she was merely one more prostitute trying to slip into the States on the spurious claim that she was married to somebody. In despair she watched the legal wives move out, then found her way back to West Berlin, where she was lucky to get another job cleaning up the kitchen of a cabaret.

  She was there one night, sweaty, tired, bedraggled and hopeless, a drab thirty-year-old German woman given to plumpness, when the manager informed her that an American man wished to speak with her. Realizing how dismal she must appear, she started to tell the manager that she could not go into the cabaret, but he anticipated her: ‘Not in there. I took him into the alley
.’ After wiping her hands, she met him, Professor Mott, with whom she had spent three wonderful days at the time of her deliverance.

  ‘I’ve been sent over to investigate—” he began, in good German.

  ‘And Dieter ask you to find me,’ she interrupted in English.

  ‘How did you learn English?’ he asked.

  ‘I know some day I be going to America. People everywhere speaking English these days.’

  He wanted to take her immediately to his hotel and give her a good wash and a meal, but she said she must finish her work, so he waited, and when they were alone he spoke rapidly and frankly: ‘I am quite sure that you and Dieter were never married, and this raises all sorts of difficulty.’

  ‘We were married in a little church in Wolgast, but the Russians—”

  ‘Drop the Russians! You’re a woman without papers, and Army Intelligence will spot you a mile off.’

  ‘I was married in Wolgast,’ she said stubbornly, ‘and when the Russians—’

  ‘Here’s what we’ll do. I will go before a notary public at the American embassy in Bonn. And I’ll swear that when I rescued Dieter Kolff and General Funkhauser in 1945, you were there as Dieter’s wife and it was you who possessed and delivered to me the papers we so badly wanted.’

  ‘I did,’ she said quietly. ‘Did Dieter tell you how I got them?’

  ‘He told me two things, Liesl. How you saved them at the farm. How you got them from Funkhauser.’

  ‘It’s strange,’ she said in German. ‘Funkhauser is there safe, and I am a fugitive.’

  ‘From the way Funkhauser’s starting, he’ll be president of something one of these days.’

  On his return to Bonn he made the deposition, and Army Intelligence sent men to Berlin to investigate the case of Liesl Koenig, who claimed she was the wife of Dieter Kolff. It took them about six minutes to decide that she was lying, but when they also went to Hamburg and Landshut, they found that she had left a trail of good remembrances: ‘Hard-working. Studied English. Saved her money.’ Her roommates, when questioned, proved that they were of the same type, not prostitutes at all, but merely women left adrift. Not many interrogations produced so consistent a record, and the investigators reported: ‘About her marriage, many questions. About her character, none.’

  The clerk at the Bonn embassy who handled such routine matters was a black man, assigned there to prove to the Germans that America did not want to go the way of Hitler’s racism. He was, of course, the only black in the embassy and vastly overeducated for his job, but he was effective; any German who wanted a visa to visit America, or a permit to emigrate there, had to satisfy this black man as to credentials, and he was very canny. Looking only at the reports of the field investigators, he was inclined to deny Liesl Koenig a visa, but when he studied Professor Mott’s report of the woman’s behavior at the time of Germany’s surrender, he realized that here was an exceptional case.

  Summoning Mott, he said, ‘Bring that woman in. She merits closer attention,’ and when he saw Liesl and heard her stubborn insistence that she had been married, in a little church … ‘I know about Wolgast,’ he said, ‘we’ve made inquiries there. No such church ever existed. The Russians left Wolgast untouched.’

  ‘I was married in a small church—’

  ‘Fraulein Koenig,’ the consul interrupted, ‘because of your great service to the United States, I am issuing you a visa. It refers to you as Mrs. Kolff. When you reach Fort Bliss you may want to get married legally, but at any rate, you’re entitled to join your …’ He stopped, cleared his throat and ended, ‘You are herewith given entrance so that you may join Mr. Kolff in El Paso.’

  At the fort, Liesl was amazed at how quickly the German wives had adapted to American ways: there was a school, from kindergarten to the fifth grade, a kind of hospital, garages for the family cars. They had already made a shrewd analysis of the El Paso stores. The women were all learning English, and some wrote long reports to young girls back in Germany whom the unmarried scientists were planning to import as wives.

  Liesl was even more impressed by the Motts. They looked after the entire German contingent, and she discovered that she was not the only drifting wife that Mr. Mott had succeeded in getting into the States. When Wernher von Braun was called to Washington to give advice to the American government, Mott went along to protect and advise him, and in all the work at White Sands, Mott served as intermediary between the American military and the Germans. In addition, he was a constant friend, and when General Funkhauser was arrested for running a public taxicab without a license, it was Mott who explained to the Texas Rangers that the voluble general was both legally in the United States and well on his way to becoming a citizen.

  ‘That’s all well and good,’ the Ranger said. ‘But he’s operating that damned Buick of his as a taxi.’

  ‘He’s helping out the men here who have no cars. And he’s doing it at the Army’s suggestion.’

  ‘Who suggested it.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Are you Army?’

  ‘I’m liaison. I represent the Army.’

  ‘Well, Professor, you tell that fat-ass German that if the El Paso traffic cops catch him one more time driving Mexican women over to Juárez in his taxicab, he’s in jail.’

  The way Mott handled such matters won him the affection of the German wives, but it was his work on scientific problems that gained him the respect of their husbands; originally he had known little about rockets, but his solid work in aeronautics had enabled him to learn rapidly, and before long he was almost as capable as Kolff in anticipating and solving problems.

  ‘He is very good, that one,’ Dieter told his wife. ‘In daytime he keeps General Funkhauser from being arrested by the traffic police. At night he helps men like Stuhlinger get permission to do the things that are necessary.’

  One night both Mott and his wife came to visit the Kolffs, and it was Rachel who said, ‘I’ve been visiting with a minister in El Paso, and he assures me that he would be most happy to arrange a wedding for you. He’s Lutheran.’

  Dieter and Liesl looked at each other, then she turned away and went over to a desk, pulled open a drawer, and rummaged till she found her passport, visa and qualifying documents. Handing them to Mrs. Mott, she pointed to the various lines that identified her as Mrs. Dieter Kolff. ‘I swear many times I married. You, Professor, do the same. And Dieter swear, too. If I change my story now, I go to jail. You and Dieter go to jail.’

  There was much legalistic discussion of this, until Liesl grew angry. ‘Listen, you! It matters not whatever you say. Because I truly married. In a field near Wolgast. Just as I have said.’

  When the Motts looked at her in amazement, fearing that the years of hardship had somehow addled her, she stood there angrily and said, ‘When the world falls apart, when this man’—and she indicated her husband—’knew not what to do with his papers, he comes to me and asks my help. We take our lives in our hand. We fight the whole SS, and I bring the shovel and we bury them. And I ask him, “Dieter, will you marry me?” and he say, “No, it is too dangerous.” And I almost die with shame. And then he say, “Much dangerous we do it public in church. The SS ask about papers. But I marry you here under the eye of God.” And in an open field near Wolgast we marry ourselves. And always I am his wife. I don’t need no El Paso church.’

  After a long pause Mrs. Mott, who was never deterred from a course she believed was right, said, ‘Liesl, the German wives here in camp … they say the American authorities at Landshut turned you back because they knew you were never legally married. If you allow me to arrange a wedding now …’

  Liesl spoke solely to Mrs. Mott, in German: ‘Every woman in this camp, you and the German and American wives, we all got through the years of war somehow, and the years of destruction that came after. And I do not now ask you how you lived during the long years when your husband was away. I do not ask how the German wives lived before they reached El Paso. For myself, I found work in
night clubs, not singing, not dancing with the customers. I was the lowest helper, not even washing dishes in the kitchen. I worked in the toilets, scrubbing floors. So I do not give one damn what the others say. I survived, and that’s enough.’

  Her own problems faded into insignificance when Stanley Mott informed the Kolffs that he had heard there would be an investigation of General Funkhauser. ‘The Army and the FBI aren’t stupid,’ he said. ‘They know that some of the German scientists we brought here were committed Nazis, and they’re going to keep digging them out until they’re all back in Germany.’ The Kolffs seemed stunned by this. ‘You’ll be questioned, I’m sure,’ Stanley went on. ‘But don’t worry. We’ll be right there with you.’

  From the first day the Peenemünde men arrived in the United States, there was constant agitation against them. Politicians who had served in the Allied armies at Salerno or the Bulge were little inclined to extend a cordial welcome to their former enemies. Some Jewish veterans who had seen Buchenwald and Auschwitz were repelled by the thought that now their country was depending upon former Nazis for its military might, and occasionally ugly incidents had occurred in El Paso when the Germans went shopping. Some veterans were especially outraged when the women spoke German in the stores, and the FBI received numerous anonymous complaints that the Nazis at Fort Bliss were communicating with Communists in Mexico.

  It fell to Stanley Mott to defend his charges, and he did so faithfully. He told Congress, the local newspapers, the weekly magazines and the area Rotary Clubs that the most careful screening had been conducted, and that every individual guilty of criminal behavior or even suspected of it had been weeded out and sent back home. As for the remainder, and particularly Von Braun’s inner team, he assured his listeners that they had been as much endangered by the Nazis as any other Germans who had been destroyed:

  ‘On the morning that I rescued General Funkhauser, Dieter Kolff and his wife, with their ultra-precious secret documents which they had been endeavoring to deliver into our hands, I learned that in a different part of Germany, Heinrich Himmler’s SS troopers had massacred eleven scientists they suspected of sabotage. And we had frightening proof that Himmler’s men intended doing exactly the same to the brilliant men who are now housed at Fort Bliss. Gentlemen, it was touch and go. And if Himmler’s men didn’t get them, the Russians were going to.