About fifteen hours had passed since Effi’s interview with Dobberke, and she hadn’t been summoned to another. She had met a new friend though, a young Jewish woman in her twenties named Nina. Effi had noticed her on the Saturday, a pale, thin, almost catatonic figure sitting in a corner with knees held tight against her chest. But on Sunday a package from the outside world had worked a miracle, turning her into the vivacious and talkative young woman who, that evening, introduced herself to Effi and Rosa. Nina, they learned, had been in hiding since the big round-up of March 1943. She had lived with a gentile friend – the way she talked about the other woman made Effi think they’d been rather more than ‘friends’ – and only been caught when a female greifer recognised her from their old school days together. That had been four weeks ago.
That morning, the mood engendered by her friend’s visit was still in evidence. When she, Effi and Johanna discussed the one question occupying every mind in the camp – what would the SS do when the Russians drew near? – Nina was the most optimistic. They would release their prisoners, she thought – what else could they do? The answer to that was depressingly obvious, but neither Effi nor Johanna put it into words. Were there enough of them to kill a thousand Jews, Effi wondered. Or would they just settle for murdering the hundred or so pure Jews in the collection camp? Making those sorts of distinctions with the world crashing down around them seemed utterly absurd, but when had they ever been anything else?
Later that morning, when the latest raid forced everyone down to the basement, she studied Dobberke’s face, hoping for a clue to his intentions. There was none, and when he suddenly glanced in her direction she quickly looked away; she had no desire to provoke another interrogation.
She tried to imagine herself in his situation. He had committed crimes which she hoped the Allies and Russians would consider serious enough to warrant the death penalty. It was often hard to believe that the people bombing Berlin had any sort of moral sense, but surely sending civilians to their death for being members of a particular race would be considered worthy of the ultimate punishment. So Dobberke had to be fearing the worst. Of course, it was possible that he had already decided on suicide – Hitler, she was sure, would take that way out – and, if so, he might well want to take them all with him. But Dobberke hadn’t struck Effi as the suicidal type. And if he wanted to survive he needed to provide his future captors with an ameliorating circumstance or two. Like letting his current charges go.
So maybe Nina was right. As the day wore on Effi felt more optimistic, right up to the moment when two of the Jews from the Lübeck train were escorted through the basement rooms, en route to the cells. The third Jew, the young man who had stayed in Bismarck Strasse, was nowhere to be seen, but one of these recognised her from the night in the forest, the eyes widening in his badly bruised face.
It didn’t matter, she told herself. It was too late in the day for Dobberke and his goons to start investigating individual stories. Whatever the fate awaiting those in their care, it seemed increasingly certain that everyone would share it.
It was long past dark when the chauffeur-driven Ford dropped Russell and Ilya Varennikov outside the NKVD barracks that served as their temporary home. They had done five drops that day, one in the pre-dawn twilight, three in daylight, and one as dusk shaded into night. The first had been the scariest, a long fall through gloom in which distances had been hard to measure, and only a serendipitous patch of bog had saved Russell’s legs from the clumsiness of his landing. The last, darker drop had been easier, the various lights on the ground providing more of a yardstick for judgement, but there was no guarantee of similar assistance in the countryside west of Berlin. A moon might make things easier, but it would also render them more visible. Russell found himself hanging on to the thought that the Soviets really wanted this operation to succeed, and would not be dropping him to a likely death just for the fun of it.
Although he and Varennikov were physically shattered, a day spent falling from the heavens had left them both with an undeniable sense of exhilaration. It had also brought them together, as risk-sharing tended to do. Russell had expected the usual Soviet caution when it came to dealing with foreigners, but Varennikov had been friendly from the start, and now, tucking into a large pile of cabbage and potatoes in the otherwise empty canteen, he was eager to satisfy his curiosity about Russell. How had an American comrade ended up on this mission?
It occurred to Russell that the young scientist might had been primed to ask him questions, but somehow he didn’t think so. And if he had, what did it matter? He gave Varennikov an edited version of the true story – his long career as a foreign correspondent in Germany before and during the war, his eventual escape with Soviet help, his time in America and Britain, his determination to rescue his wife and son in Berlin and his consequent arrival in Moscow. If only it had been that straightforward, he thought to himself in passing.
He expected questions about America and Britain, but Varennikov, like many Soviet citizens, seemed oblivious to the outside world. He also had a wife and son, and pulled two photographs from an inside pocket to prove it. ‘This is Irina,’ he said of the smiling chubby-faced blonde in one snapshot. ‘And this is Yakov,’ he added, offering another of a young boy gripping a large stuffed bear.
‘Where are they?’ Russell asked.
‘In Gorki. That is where I work. My mother is there also. My father and brother were killed by the Nazis in 1941. In the Donbass, where my family comes from. My father and brother were both miners, and my father was a Party official. When the Germans came in 1941 anti-Party elements handed over the list of local Party members, and they were all shot.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Varennikov shrugged. ‘Most Soviet families have such stories to tell.’
‘I know. Yours must have been proud of you. Doing the work you do.’
‘My father was. He used to say that before the Revolution, the sons of miners had no chance of going to university, or of becoming scientists. All such jobs were taken by the sons of the bourgeoisie.’ He gave Russell a smile. ‘I was born the day after the Party seized power in 1917. So my father decided that my life should be like a chronicle of the better world that the Party was creating.’
It was Russell’s turn to smile. ‘And has your life gone well?’
Varennikov missed the hint of irony. ‘Yes, I think so. There have been troubles, setbacks, but we are still going forward.’
‘And were you always interested in atomic physics?’
‘It’s been the most interesting area of research since the mid-thirties, and I… well, I never really considered any other field. The possibilities are so enormous.’
‘And what are you hoping to discover in Berlin?’
‘More pieces of the puzzle. I don’t know – there were so many brilliant German physicists before the war, and if they received enough government backing they should be ahead of us. But they probably didn’t – the Nazis used to describe this whole field as ‘Jewish physics’. Or the German scientists might have refused to work on a bomb, or worked on it without really trying. We don’t know.’
‘How powerful will these bombs be?’ Russell asked, curious as to current Soviet thinking.
‘There’s no obvious limit, but large enough to destroy whole cities.’
‘Dropping them sounds a dangerous business.’
Varennikov smiled. ‘They’ll be dropped from a great height, or attached to rockets. In theory, that is.’
‘And in practice?’
‘Oh, they won’t actually be used. They’ll act as a deterrent, a threat to possible invaders. If we had owned such a bomb in 1941 the Germans would never have dared to invade us. If every country has one, then no one will be able to invade anyone else. The atomic bomb is a weapon for peace, not war.’
‘But…’ Russell began, just as footsteps sounded behind him. The openness of their discussion might, he realised, be somewhat frowned upon in certain quarters.
Colonel Nikoladze sat down beside the physicist.
‘We’re imagining a better world,’ Russell told him.
‘Don’t let me stop you,’ Nikoladze replied. He didn’t care what they were talking about, Russell realised with a sinking heart. Varennikov could tell him that Stalin was partial to goats, and no one would protest. They hadn’t even forbidden him from writing about the mission once the war was over. Why bother when he wouldn’t be around?
‘I hear it went well today,’ Nikoladze said.
‘We’re still in one piece,’ Russell agreed. ‘When do we go?’
‘We leave for Poland early tomorrow. And if all goes well, you’ll be dropped over Germany early on Thursday.’
‘Four of us?’
‘Yes,’ Nikoladze answered. ‘The two of you, Major Kazankin who you’ve already met, and Lieutenant Gusakovsky.’
It seemed small for an invading army, but that was probably the point. If the Germans noticed them, it wouldn’t matter if they were a thousand-strong – they still wouldn’t get away with a single sheet of paper. But four men had a reasonable chance of passing unobserved. They could all get under one big bed if the situation demanded it. And the smaller the group, the better his own chances were of eventually cutting himself loose.
‘The final offensive began this morning,’ Nikoladze was saying. ‘More than a million men are involved. Assuming all goes well Stavka hopes to announce the capture of Berlin on this coming Sunday – Lenin’s birthday. So you’ll have three days to complete your mission and remain undetected. An achievable target, I think.’
Later, back in the small two-bunk room they shared, Russell asked Varennikov where Nikoladze was from.
‘He’s from Georgia. Tiflis, I think.’
Georgians seemed to be running the Soviet Union, Russell thought. Stalin, Beria – Nikoladze would have powerful friends.
‘He seems competent enough,’ Varennikov said with a shrug.
‘I’m sure he is. What made them select you from all the other scientists working on the project?’
‘Several reasons, I think. I speak English well enough to talk with you, I speak and read a little German, and I know enough about the matter in hand to recognise anything new. There are other scientists with a much better grasp of German,’ he added modestly, ‘but their minds were too valuable to risk.’
There was no obvious let-up in the Soviet bombing of the German defences during the night, and the members of Paul’s anti-tank unit saw little in the way of sleep. Roused bleary-eyed from the dugout shortly before dawn, and fully expecting a re-run of the previous day’s all-out artillery bombardment, they were pleasantly surprised to find nothing more immediately threatening than a cold but beautiful sunrise. A steaming mug of ersatz coffee had rarely seemed so welcome.
The respite lasted several hours, the Soviet guns finally opening up, in deafening unison, on the stroke of 10 a.m. Low-flying aircraft were soon screaming overhead, shells and bombs exploding in the wood around them. For thirty long minutes they huddled in their trenches, knees drawn up against their tightened chests, praying that they didn’t receive a direct hit. When a shell landed close enough to shake their ramparts, Paul fought off the temptation to risk climbing out in search of the new crater. Everyone knew that no two shells ever landed in the same spot.
As on the previous day, the gunners shifted their focus after half an hour, and began pummelling the German forward defences some two kilometres to the east. A look through the unit’s periscope revealed the familiar curtain of smoke above the invisible Oderbruch. Tank guns boomed in the distance.
An occasional plane still flew over their position, but the rain of shells had stopped, making movement beyond the trenches a relatively safe affair. The gun emplacements had survived several near misses, and the outer door to the dugout had been blown in, but the only real casualty was their football pitch, which now featured a large crater where the centre circle should be. Neumaier looked ready to kill, and Paul’s consoling remark that further fixtures were unlikely elicited a bleak stare.
Hours of nervous waiting followed. They could hear the battle, see it reaching for the sky in smoke and flame, but had no way of knowing how it was going. Were the Russians on the point of breaking through, or simply piling up corpses in the meadows? No one, with the possible exception of Haaf, actually expected the ‘turning of the tide’ their Führer was demanding, but stranger things had happened. Maybe Ivan had finally run out of cannon fodder. It had taken him long enough.
More likely, he was just taking his time, grinding down his opponent with the same remorseless disregard for life he’d demonstrated from day one. And any moment now his tanks would rumble into view.
But when? The unit radio just crackled, and no runners arrived with orders. Utermann sent two men off to battalion, in search of news and additional shells. Paul, on observation duty, watched a steady stream of laden ambulance carts lumber west towards Diedersdorf, and found himself remembering a long-ago birthday party, and the seemingly endless string of coloured flags which the hired magician had drawn from his sleeve.
The emissaries returned with neither news nor shells, but bearing two dead rabbits. The smell of cooking soon wafted along the trenches, and by three in the afternoon they were all licking grease from their fingers. As they dined a Soviet plane passed high overhead, and several leaflets drifted down amongst them. ‘Your war is lost – surrender while you still can’ was the basic message – one that could hardly be argued with. But here they were.
‘I bet they’re not having meat for lunch,’ Hannes muttered.
An hour or so later German troops, most of them Waffen-SS, appeared in the distance, falling back across the fields. The trickle soon turned into a flood, soldiers with smoke-scarred faces and dark-rimmed eyes, half walking, half running, passing them by with barely a glance. There were vehicles too, self-propelled guns and the occasional tank, with lines of soldiers clinging to whatever purchase they could find, bumping up and down like amateur horsemen as their mounts rumbled across the uneven ground and blundered their way through the trees.
A grey-haired Hauptsturmführer told them that Soviet tanks had broken through on either side of Seelow, and were close to surrounding the town. He looked as tired as any man Paul had ever seen. ‘They’re not far behind us,’ the SS officer said, looking back across the fields as if expecting to find the Russians already in view. ‘We’re moving back to the Diedersdorf line,’ he added, then managed the ghost of a smile. ‘But I doubt we’ll be there for long.’
He raised a weary hand in farewell and walked off towards the west. So this is it, Paul thought.
But it was another couple of hours before the enemy appeared, and by that time the fields ahead were bathed in the golden light of the setting sun. The first Soviet tank, a T-34, appeared as a flash of light, then coalesced into the familiar profile. As Hannes manned the sighter, Paul and Neumaier spun the direction and elevation wheels to his bidding, and Haaf stood waiting with the second shell.
‘Wait for it,’ Utermann warned. He might be an idiot, Paul thought, but he knew how to run a battery. ‘On the left,’ the sergeant reminded them. The other 88 would take out the tanks on the right.
A second T-34 slid into view, and a third. Soon there were ten of them, fanning out on either side of the road. They were advancing slowly, with all due caution. A big mistake.
‘Fire,’ Utermann said, almost too quietly to hear.
Paul’s left hand tugged on the trigger, and the gun shook with the force of the discharge. A split second later the other 88 followed suit. As the smoke cleared Paul could see two of the T-34s in flames. He thought he heard a distant scream, but was probably imagining it.
One of the other Sovi
et tanks opened fire, but it was still out of range. Haaf rammed another shell into the breech as Hannes barked instructions, and the other two adjusted their wheels. ‘Now,’ Hannes shouted, and Paul pulled the trigger again.
The target slumped to a halt, but no flames erupted. The crew were already tumbling out.
Three further tanks were destroyed, but more were moving into view, and the 88s were running out of shells. Another two burst into flame, and another two. It was like shooting ducks in the fairground on Potsdamer Strasse, Paul thought, only these ducks would outlast the supply of shot. And those that survived would be angry.
They were down to five shells when the first tank turned away, and the others soon followed suit. Their commander had probably just been told there was no chance of air support that evening, and had preferred a ten-hour wait to losing his entire brigade. He had no way of knowing his opponent was down to his last few shells.
It was time to get out. With two shells needed to render the 88s useless, there was no point waiting for morning to fire the other three. They might as well charge the Russians on foot.
‘Prepare the guns for demolition,’ Utermann told the two crews fifteen minutes later, apparently satisfied that the Russians weren’t about to reappear. ‘And get all the fuel into one of the half-tracks,’ he told Hannes.
They set to work. Ten minutes later Hannes returned with the bad news. ‘There’s no fuel in either tank,’ he said. ‘Those SS bastards must have siphoned it off.’
Utermann closed his eyes for a second and breathed out heavily. He was still opening his mouth to speak when they all became aware of the roar in the distance which heralded a katyusha attack. ‘Stalin’s organs!’ Utermann shouted unnecessarily, as everyone bolted for the nearest trench. Most were still running as the roar transmuted into a hissing howl, and an area of the wood some hundred metres to the west exploded in flames. By some merciful chance, Ivan had got the range wrong.
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