Judgment in Berlin: A Spy Story

by Noel Hynd

  There were a series of four clicks. Pickford opened the safe.

  Cochrane could see the contents: files mostly, but two pistols, two boxes of bullets, and an assortment of envelopes. Pickford pulled the fattest of the envelopes from where it lay and undid the flap. He displayed an unmistakable green-and-gray collection of American currency. He ran his thumb across it, flicking the bills, showing Cochrane a mix of twenties, tens, fives, and maybe two hundred ones, sorted by denominations.

  “The Erlking Fund,” Pickford announced. “Know what an Erlking is?”

  “From my readings of Grimm as a kid, isn’t it an evil elf or spirit from German folklore? Nasty little bastard who stalks children who stay in the woods for too long. He kills them by a single touch, often just when their mother finds them.”

  “Impressive,” Pickford said. He hefted the envelope in his hand, flipped it in the air, and caught it. “You must have spent much of your previous time in Germany accumulating a pile of useless knowledge. Anything you don’t know, Major Lewis?” Pickford asked.

  “All knowledge is potentially useful,” Cochrane answered, and the location of Frau Schneidhuber is the most immediate thing I don’t know.”

  “I have a feeling you’ll come across that woman eventually,” Pickford said. “Though damned if I know how.” The major fingered the currency. “The ‘Erlking Fund,’ we call it here,” Pickford explained. “It’s our funny money. The house reptile fund. Twenty-five hundred bucks off the books for bribes, big and small. If you need to access it, you ask me and give me a vague explanation that I can say yes to. I need to okay it and give it to you. Listen, take some right now for walking around the city. There are black markets all over the city, including a big one in the Soviet Sector way out at the end of the rail line. They’re officially off-limits and everyone uses them. They crawl with hookers, thugs, and pickpockets, so watch your step. Maybe take someone with you to watch your back.”

  “They’re right out in the open? Who runs them?” Cochrane asked.

  “What do you mean?’

  “I’ve never seen a criminal enterprise in my life that didn’t have a structure to it,” Cochrane said. “Sometimes it’s loose, sometimes it’s strict. Bootlegging liquor during Prohibition in the United States was like that. A lot of Indians, but somewhere there are some chiefs. Look far enough and you’ll also find a big chief.”

  “Russians mostly,” Pickford said. “A lot of ex-soldiers, including officers. Tough clever bastards or they wouldn’t even be alive. Not my territory, though, Major Lewis. Sounds like you have more of a background in that stuff than I do.”

  “Maybe,” Cochrane allowed.

  “The U.S. military has its hands full with Soviet aircraft, army blockades, and the diplomatic bullshit. If you go wading into the Russian criminal element, you’re on your own.”

  Pickford peeled off a hundred dollars in tens, fives, and ones. He handed the walk-around bribe money to Cochrane and returned the rest of the cash to the safe. He pushed the safe closed and reassembled the sheet and the banners on top of it. He also brought up the subject of the medical facility where Frau Schneidhuber was believed to have worked. He said he was asking the Soviet authorities for permission for a relief worker named Lewis to visit. But he wasn’t optimistic about even receiving a response.

  Then, “One final thing,” Major Pickford said. “And let me be clear about it. Stay away from the Berlin police as much as you can. Don’t have anything to do with them.”

  “Specifics?” Cochrane asked.

  “Effectively there are two city police forces, one allied with the Americans and the British, loyal to a guy named Johannes Stumm. Stumm’s been a cop here since the 1920s. Sacked by the Nazis in 1933, reinstated as commissioner by the postwar powers. But the police are headed by the SMA, the Soviet Military Authorities. The SMA says the Berlin police are now under the command of a Colonel Paul Markgraf,” Pickford said. “Markgraf is a former Nazi, became a prisoner of war when the Soviets captured him. ‘Reeducated’ in the Soviet Union, the Russians returned him and made him chief of the Berlin police. He fired Stumm but Stumm refuses to go and works out of a separate building in the Western Zone. You got to feel for the people of this city and what they would be abandoned to. The Communist police are in the majority as soon as you walk out of Tempelhof. They are as bad as the Nazis ever were. They kidnap citizens, even in the Western Zone, and no one ever sees them again. If they don’t like certain citizens or shopkeepers, bands of thugs turn up and the Red police not only protect them but facilitate the beatings. On June twenty-third, a couple of weeks ago, a commie mob attacked the city assembly that was instituting some of the new pro-Western licensing procedures. The police stood back, then helped the mob.”

  Pickford paused. “Look, Major Lewis,” he continued, “the police report to Colonel Markgraf, he reports to the SMA, the Soviet Military Authority, and the SMA reports directly to Stalin. Germany is important to Stalin. Berlin is crucial to Germany. Make sense?’

  “Too much sense,” Cochrane said. “I’ll stay away from them if I can.”

  “You can’t always,” Pickford said. “They find you even if you don’t want to be found.”

  Pickford sighed. “Okay final thing,” he said. “Personal safety. Yours.”

  Major Pickford opened a side drawer on his desk and rummaged through for a few seconds. Then his hand emerged with a semi-automatic pistol, a Czechoslovakian vz27, with a small clip-on belt holster and a handful of thirty-two caliber bullets.

  “This wouldn’t be a bad idea for you,” Pickford suggested. “It’s still the Wild West out there in some places.”

  “I appreciate that,” Cochrane said, accepting the weapon, taking it, checking the clip, and putting it onto his belt as Pickford concluded.

  “May I ask you something?” Pickford asked. “You don’t have to answer if it’s classified."

  “Try me,” Cochrane said.

  “Why is this Schneidhuber woman so important that Washington sends you back here to bring her out of Germany?”

  “I have no idea at all,” Cochrane said. “I wouldn’t be able to tell you if I did know, but I don’t.”

  “That’s what I figured you’d say,” Pickford said. “Listen, I set up one meeting for you to get you started. U.S. Army guy named Karl Zimmerman. An ‘M and M’ guy. Munich and Milwaukee. Learned Kraut-talk as a boy, family moved from Munich to Milwaukee when he was eight. Karl was an infantry captain on our side during the war. He knows what’s going on. I’ll warn you, though, he’s a cynic. Karl’s part of my team here, been a liaison guy with the East and West German police and military since 1945.”

  My team. If he was part of Pickford’s team, Zimmerman was an intelligence officer. No doubt about that, Cochrane reasoned.

  “Where do I meet him? Here?”

  “No. A place named the Bar Rosa. I’ll give you the address, time, and date. One of those places where East meets West and everyone goes to eavesdrop. You’re scheduled to hook up with Zimmerman two evenings from now. That okay?”

  “Sounds fine,” Cochrane said.

  “The Bar Rosa is in Berlin-Mitte,” Pickford added.

  “I know the area. Been here in Berlin before, you know.”

  “Yeah,” said Pickford. “So I hear.” A pause, then, “Anything else?”

  “Not for right now,” Cochrane said. “Thank you.”

  “You’re free to hit the Berlin sidewalks when you wish. I can’t stop you and wouldn’t even try. Good luck, warrior.”

  Chapter 35

  Berlin - July 15, 1948

  Tempelhof was in the center of the city, so Cochrane set out on foot to see what he could, hoping to arrive and find the location where Frau Schneidhuber’s home had stood. But Berlin, even on the balmier days of mid-summer, was a grim, joyless place. The first thing Cochrane encountered on the streets on the day after his arrival was the beleaguered faces and thin bodies of starving women and children, many of whom were outside
the airport begging to do laundry for soldiers and airport workers.

  Cochrane set out to walk to the Brandenburg Gate. He estimated that the walk would take him thirty minutes to an hour. From the Gate, Cochrane would have his bearings and could find his way along on foot. As he began, carrying his Czech pistol in his belt, the rumble of planes overheard became a constant backdrop, much like the din at a carnival or a factory. It ebbed and flowed but never relented.

  When the war in Europe had ended in May 1945, the severely damaged Brandenburg Gate stood over a ruined Berlin. The triumphant Soviet army paraded down Unter den Linden. Red Army soldiers invaded the half-destroyed Reichstag, killed anyone they found in it and ascended to the roof. They hauled down a shredded Nazi banner. As German war criminals fled and civilians took shelter, the Soviet flag above the Reichstag put a final punctuation point on the destruction of the Nazi regime that had brought so much suffering to all of Europe, including Germany.

  Now, as Cochrane made his way toward the Gate and with the three Western Allied Powers said to be discussing withdrawal from Germany by 1950, the historic Gate served more than the Reichstag as a de facto trophy for Soviet power and the Soviet desire to extend control as far west into Europe as possible. No Soviet flag was visible, but the Gate was located within the Soviet Sector.

  As Cochrane walked the streets of a city where he had once lived in the 1930s, and to which he had returned only briefly in 1943, women approached him, just as Major Pickford had warned. They offered to sell him household items for Deutschmarks, pounds sterling or dollars. Household items or sex. The solicitations were nonstop.

  On almost every block, Trummerfrau, rubble women, were noisily at work. As inspiring as it was to see the renewal in progress, a deep sadness was upon him. The culture of Goethe, Thomas Mann, Shiller, and Beethoven had been transmogrified by a mad man and a mad regime and reduced to an impoverished population digging through ruins. So it went for a crackpot-fringe political party that had gained power through the ballot box, then refused to relinquish it.

  Passing St. Thomas Cemetery, Cochrane managed a better look at the damaged church and the ravaged churchyard. There was a wooden fence that surrounded the yard. Just behind the lumber were the remnants of what had once been exquisite ironwork. A man given to noticing small details, he had admired the artwork many times during his time in Berlin. Elaborate and sophisticated street art had been popular in Berlin at the turn of the century and during the Weimar years but had been eradicated in favor of crude, crass, Fascist art after 1933. Then, in the late stages of World War II, desperate civilians carted off much of the iron and melted it down. He had seen the process begin during his weeks in Berlin in 1943.

  He paused again. Down the block stood the remains of a barracks that had housed forced laborers from Eastern Europe who had tended Berlin's graveyards toward the end of World War II. It had often been fatal work. British and American air attacks often missed the fringes of the airports and destroyed civilian buildings.

  American aircraft passed low overhead, their engines roaring. Cochrane stopped and stepped to the wooden fence of the old graveyard. He found a spot where a yard of paneling had been pushed aside. He cautiously stepped in to take a measure of the place.

  He gagged. What he saw repelled him.

  Many of the tombstones were overturned. Many graves had been pillaged for valuables like rings or gold fillings. The structure of the coffins had been ripped apart, smashed into pieces in some cases, probably for firewood. Walking gingerly through the uneven earth, Cochrane saw two decomposing corpses, half-buried. Emaciated dogs and rats investigated the human remains and fought with each other. Occasionally a dog would catch a rat and a horrid few seconds of squealing would precede the rat’s death. Cochrane moved along. He left the cemetery.

  He continued toward Brandenburg Gate. He remembered being in Berlin when it had been attacked day after day by British air raids in the spring of 1943. He remembered air raid shelters, the claustrophobia and the terror of bombs coming closer and closer. The Luftwaffe had abandoned the skies and Allied planes had free range if they could evade the artillery from the ground. He recalled the horror of coming out and seeing the dead on the street and the buildings in flames or smoldering rubble, sometimes with the limbs of the dead or dying still protruding — much the same as now existed in the cemetery.

  His mind teemed. What he couldn’t remember was anyone officially taking inventory of the damage or keeping track of the dead and mutilated. Someone must have been doing it, but Cochrane couldn’t remember from 1943. Or had the inner workings of the Nazi regime already collapsed?

  And who knew where those records would have gone between 1943 and 1948, if they existed at all? Were those records, if they had ever existed, now destroyed? Shipped to Moscow? Held by East German security in some remote vault? “They could be buried in a distant forest or secured in a local bunker,” he reasoned as he walked northward from St. Thomas Church.

  Moving about the city was difficult. There were few private cars. There was no gasoline available unless the buyer was military or diplomatic. Taxis, he observed quickly, were infrequent and stayed near the big hotels used by the diplomats. He assumed the drivers wanted Deutschmarks or hard Western currency. Very well. He had his supply.

  He arrived at Brandenburg Gate. It was forlorn, battle-scarred, and had scaffolding holding up its eastern half. It was surrounded by homeless people, street urchins, beggars, and Soviet soldiers on patrol. He scanned and examined another set of uniformed men. They were not marked with any military brigade but they carried Russian sidearms. East German police, he guessed. Many, he knew, had been pro-Hitler before and during the war and had now been “re-educated” into the pro-Soviet system.

  After he arrived at the Gate, he was weary of walking. He spotted an international hotel fifty meters from the gate. He saw a short line of taxis. The first vehicle was a battered pre-war Mercedes, which looked as if it had been cobbled together from the remains of several other vehicles. When Cochrane discreetly displayed an American five-dollar bill to the first driver in line, the driver was all smiles. He sprung from the driver’s seat and opened the door behind him before anyone else could poach his ride. He moved with a pronounced limp.

  Cochrane always felt that traveling in a foreign city by cab once a day was a profitable idea. Cabbies knew everything. They saw people and had heard the latest rumors. Today was no exception. When an aircraft with British markings rumbled overhead, the driver looked cautiously up to watch it. Cochrane caught a glimpse of it as it passed. It was a commercial flight, BEA.

  “Do you think the Luftbrucke will be a success?” Cochrane asked his driver.

  The driver exuded a giant shrug, but then the floodgate of conversation opened. “It remains to be seen,” the driver said. “When autumn comes and winter sets in, there will be a choice between fuel and food. We will freeze or starve.”

  “But if the lift gathers momentum,” Cochrane suggested, “if there are more planes, success in supplying the city could be possible.”

  “I can only hope,” the driver said. “You’re British or American, mein Herr?”

  Amerikaner.

  “I like Americans,” the driver said. “One of you shot me in the ankle at Aachen.”

  He motioned down to his left leg, which was a stump and a prosthesis.

  “Sorry about that,” Cochrane said.

  “I’m not. It took me off the front lines,” he said. Then, “Truman is not Roosevelt and Attlee is not Churchill,” he said continuing. “My guess is that your President Truman will be defeated, and the opposition party will abandon us. The British and Americans will go home from Berlin. And the Soviet tanks will roll west to Belgium until Germany is swallowed and Communism is forced upon us.”

  “I sincerely hope not,” Cochrane said.

  The driver sometimes left the road to avoid a crater or groups of ragged children playing and the rubble women clearing streets. They went around a few c
orners. Then they arrived at the intersection of two rubble-strewn streets. Half of the block was gone in all directions. The other half was boarded up.

  The taxi stopped. “This is the destination you requested,” the driver said.

  Through the front window of the Benz Cochrane could see Frau Schneidhuber’s old block. His insides tumbled, though this was close to what he had expected. “Obliterated,” Major Pickford had said casually. And obliterated was what he now saw with his own eyes.

  He stepped out of the taxi and studied what was before him without closing the cab door. “May I take a closer look?” he asked the driver. “Could you wait for me?”

  The driver nodded.

  “A friend lived here,” he said to the driver. “A good friend,” Cochrane emphasized.

  “I’m sorry,” said the driver.

  As aircraft droned in the distance and rubble work continued within earshot, Cochrane walked to what had been a block of homes. He could barely make out where Bettina’s home had been, but he could approximate it from the distance he walked down the block. There were a few fragments of facades remaining, which helped him find the spot. Everything had been destroyed. He turned and looked at the intersecting streets, where the café had been where he had once bought ice cream. Where neighboring homes had once stood, there were huge piles of rubble. He could see through to the intersecting streets where shops and small stores were gone, too.

  He walked back to the taxi. “Seen enough?” the driver asked.

  “Take me to Tempelhof,” he said. “I’ve seen enough for one day.”

  Chapter 36

  Berlin – Mid-July 1948

  The Bar Rosa was a hundred meters east of the Brandenburg Gate at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, a square in Berlin-Mitte, Germany. The square was dark and quiet as dusk turned to night. It was dominated by the Volksbühne, Berlin’s most iconic theater, built in 1930 and now partially in ruins, by the Karl-Liebknecht-Haus. The headquarters of the Communist Party of Germany had opened its headquarters on the square in 1926, closed it during the ugliness of the 1940s, and had now defiantly reopened, a reminder of who was now in control in the Soviet Zone.