Judgment in Berlin: A Spy Story

by Noel Hynd

  Losing patience, he quietly approached the table in a circular route, scanning quickly for weapons. He saw none. The boys were apparently off duty. Some sort of Communist youth military, he guessed. Plenty of dumb muscles, height, and brawn, but not much in terms of brains, and fortunately, no weapons other than fists. The same that would have been recruited for Hitler Youth ten years earlier.

  Hanging around the morgue was their idea of great entertainment.

  Two of the young soldiers, then a third, saw him and their smiles vanished. Then a fourth. Quickly he realized: an older man in civilian gear meant trouble more often than not for these young men. The ones who didn’t see him continued to laugh and jest.

  Cochrane moved to the head of the table and looked down as his breath made a small cone of condensation in front of him.

  The uncovered body was that of a young woman, very blonde, still frozen in death, her neck twisted in an impossible angle. Cochrane’s guts surged. He had seen plenty of death before – more than any decent man should have to see — in most of its horrific forms, but this one was a singular horror.

  It was more heinous than usual. The woman had long hair. Very long, it had probably hung halfway down her back when she was alive. It appeared that she had been strangled with her own hair.

  Cochrane gagged. Then his eyes rose angrily and slammed one by one to the gaze of each of the young pseudo-warriors.

  “Which one of you is a doctor?” Cochrane demanded in German.

  None answered. The conversation crashed.

  The group fell silent. Two smirked.

  “Which one of you is a medical technician of any sort?” Cochrane asked next.

  None of them answered. Then one of the smirkers, a big thuggish one, who must have been six-three, responded in peasanty German.

  Geh weg, du dummer alter Mann. Wir werden alle die Leiche ficken.

  It took a moment as Cochrane interpreted.

  Go away, you stupid old man. We're all going to fuck the corpse.

  Denken Sie so? Cochrane asked. Do you think so?

  Ja! said the kid.

  They laughed, all but one who was to the side in the back, wearing a military greatcoat.

  In anger and indignation, stoked by a sense of decency, Cochrane pulled the Czech pistol from his coat pocket, drew it aloft, pointing it to the ceiling first then lowering it and pointing it at the forehead of the loudmouth and evident leader of the group.

  Ich glaube nicht, he said. I don’t think so.

  Everyone froze.

  The young German taunted. Sie würden es nicht wagen! You wouldn’t dare!

  Ich würde es nicht tun? Cochrane answered. I wouldn’t?

  Nein! came the response, a dare. No!

  Cochrane’s hand moved slightly to the left. The sighting of the pistol found an open space between the young man’s head and that of the youth next to him.

  Cochrane pulled the trigger. The room rocked with the sound of the shot and the smashing of the bullet into the cement walls behind them and then a crazy ricochet around the chamber. The young men bolted from the table. The leader staggered, expecting to have been hit, then turned, his eyes wide, and beat half of his comrades to the door. Whoever the man in the overcoat was, the boys reasoned, and none of these brats wanted any part of him.

  For good measure, as they scrambled and fell over each other trying to get out the door, Cochrane fired a second shot into the cracked transom above the door. The glass shattered, the bullet went through to the brick and cement hallway and treated the escapees to a shower of shattered brick and dust that fell upon them. The gesture moved them even faster.

  As the recurrent echo of the gunshots subsided, Cochrane holstered his pistol.

  For a moment he stood in silence, amazed at his nerve and the depths of his indignation. A lone figure stood across the table from him. Scarf across the lower half of the head, the heavy, battered military greatcoat hanging on the body.

  He realized that he was looking into female eyes. The one remaining witness to everything was a woman. Blue eyes, fierce and angry, were aimed at him.

  He said nothing. He reached to the canvas blanket that had by now fallen to the floor. On one hand, twenty million people had been killed in the war in Europe: this was just one more. From his perspective of decency, one more was still one more too many.

  Cochrane picked up the canvas and pulled it up across the body of the strangled woman. He pulled it carefully from the feet up. When he came to the neck and shoulders the woman across from him held out a hand and stopped the movement of his hand.

  She said nothing but he did not force the issue. He held the canvas so that she could see the face of the deceased. He looked at her eyes. They were deep wells of sadness. Tears flowed. The upper portion of her face was pretty but there was a red scar across the upper part of her nose where it connected to her forehead, as if she’d been recently punched or hit.

  Then her head gave a quick nod, meaning yes, Cochrane could shroud the deceased. She turned and left the room. Cochrane took a final look at the victim, her expression of torture, the bruises, and coloration at the neck. He gagged a final time. He covered the body, gathered himself, turned, and left the room. He looked in both directions but did not have to look far to locate the young woman who had just left the room.

  She was in the dim side hallway, one of several, leading from the examination room. She was leaning against a wall, her face in her hand, her back against the rough cinderblocks that formed the dank corridor.

  She looked at him, then allowed her body to slump to the floor. She buried her face into her hands and cried.

  Cochrane went to her. He felt awkward standing over her, so he sat on the floor next to her, allowing her some space and allowing her several moments to sob deeply. He glanced around, surprised that the gunshots had not drawn police or other doctors. Maybe shots were too common or maybe everyone knew to avoid them.

  He reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a pack of cigarettes. He offered her one. She took it. He lit a match and she smoked. She leaned back and stared straight ahead, the million-mile stare, the one that had seen too much death and war.

  He spoke softly in German, asking if she had known the woman well. Kannten Sie die Frau auf dem Tisch?

  Ja. There was a long pause and a breaking voice. meine Schwester.

  The dead woman was her sister. Cochrane put a hand on her shoulder in support but removed it quickly, lest the gesture was taken the wrong way. "I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “I understand your grief.”

  “How could you possibly?” she asked.

  “I lost a woman I loved more than twenty years ago,” he said. “My first wife. I’ve found another woman whom I love but that doesn’t mean I love the woman who died any less.”

  She looked at him as if he had lost his mind. He tried to read her thoughts. Hardened by the cruelties of war, he guessed, it was almost impossible for her to comprehend human kindness. “I know this sounds absurd. We’ve never seen each other before,” Cochrane said. “But is there anything I can do for you?”

  She snorted a little bitter laughter. “What could you possibly do?” she asked.

  “Less than you might need, more than you might hope for,” Cochrane said.

  Sie Sind Englisch? she asked.

  Ich bin Amerikaner, he answered.

  She looked at him long and hard. She switched into a heavily accented version of Cochrane’s own language. “So. You want sex with me?” she asked. “Is that it?”

  “No. I don’t want anything from you. I’m looking for an old friend I last saw in 1943. She used to work here, I think,” he said. “Her name is Bettina Schneidhuber,” he said. She smoked and stared straight again. “Does that name mean anything to you?” he asked.

  She returned to German. Nein, she said.

  Not knowing exactly what to say next, he said nothing and kept silent sitting at the bereaved woman’s side, almost like sitting a vigil or, to put a keener
edge on it, a wake: a situation where it was not so important what you said or did; what was important was just being there, showing up in the first place. After many seconds, maybe a full minute, for lack of anything better, he asked, “Are you a Berliner?”

  She shook her head to indicate, no. Then, sitting together, they fell into a long silence which Cochrane was disinclined to break.

  Chapter 42

  Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania – April - May 1945

  The Soviet Sixty-fifth Army and the First Guards Tank Corps, including Colonel Kovalyov’s unit, arrived in Demmin within the hour. Approximately a hundred Wehrmacht troops had not yet left in the city. Russian troops executed them.

  The remaining citizens of Demmin hoisted a white banner of surrender on the tower of the main church. A dozen Soviet negotiators, including a captain, approached the anti-tank ditch. They promised to spare Demmin's civilian population from "harassment" and looting if the city surrendered without a fight.

  In the 1920s and 1930s, Demmin had been a power center for nationalist right-wing parties. Now, however, was payback time and the town knew it.

  Diehard members of the Hitler Youth secured sniping positions while the surrender was being negotiated. Several shots volleyed from within buildings. Three German soldiers, one of them an officer, died from the rifle fire. The remaining Wehrmacht units, including elements of Waffen-SS, retreated. Within the hour, German troops dynamited all three bridges leading out of Demmin. By that time, Soviet units, spearheaded by units of the Soviet Sixty-fifth Army under Colonel Kovalyov’s command, were patrolling the streets of Demmin.

  The fallen bridges blocked the flight of the Demmin civilian population, which was trapped by the rivers that circled the town. While many attempted to surrender, chaos reigned.

  The scattered Hitler Youth continued to snipe at the Soviet soldiers from positions where white flags had been hoisted. Soviet officers used binoculars to pinpoint the snipers’ locations. Then Russian rifle teams invaded the buildings and killed every German they saw. There were other small incidents of resistance. One Nazi loyalist schoolteacher, having slain his wife and children, used an anti-tank grenade on Soviet soldiers before hanging himself.

  Where possible, Russian soldiers dragged the captured snipers out into the main square and executed them with pistol shots to the neck. Colonel Kovalyov supervised and executed the first German snipers. After neutralizing all of them, Soviet troops withdrew to a cautious distance during the late afternoon. A strange quiet descended on the city, right around the time the German citizens caught radio broadcasts of news reports that Adolf Hitler was dead, having taken his own life that afternoon. Demmin had been staunchly pro-Hitler. The death of the leader suggested a morbid finality to the war. Meanwhile, Soviet tanks that had come from the east and the west blocked all the streets.

  On the evening of April 30 before darkness fell, joyous, celebratory Soviets troops flooded into Demmin and overran the town, breaking into houses for loot, taking jewelry, heirlooms, and whatever else they found valuable. They broke into the city’s significant storage of alcohol: grain distilleries and several depots and stores that sold gasoline and alcohol.

  Later, angry at the unnecessary losses they had taken in seizing Demmin, they used the gasoline to incinerate buildings. In the buildings that were not on fire, they shot the men, grouped the women in specific chambers, and committed mass gang rapes of local women regardless of age. The Russians shot German men who protested the rapes and they shot women who resisted or women they were “finished with.”

  Russian soldiers, most of them now drunk, laughed and set fire to large areas of the town, often with residents in the buildings and doors bolted shut from the outside. Soviet soldiers stood guard to prevent anyone from extinguishing the fires and shot anyone, including local clergy, who tried to intervene.

  As the night passed and the next two days came and went, a mass panic followed among the population of Demmin. Many local and refugee families performed suicides with guns, razor blades, or poison. Several mothers killed their children before killing themselves. A local forester shot his three young children, then their mother, his wife, and then himself.

  More than one thousand people took their own lives in the first seventy-two hours of Soviet occupation. Meanwhile, other units of the Soviet army rolled westward toward Berlin, in their various columns. Resistance gradually crumbled before them, the predictable waves of rapes and suicides, executions and pillaging taking place.

  Closer afield, in the woods on the other side of the River Peene, Soviet infantrymen prowled the woods in lethal squads, looking for men, women, and children who had fled Demmin. All Germans were to be shot on sight. More than a hundred were killed, many left to die, half the victims dumped into a mass grave a week later. Six Soviet fighters were called in also and swept the area, picking off escapees from the village. They killed more than a hundred, leaving the corpses to litter the landscape. Colonel Kovalyov took great pleasure in this, assuming that the two troublesome girls had been killed by Soviet airpower.

  It was two hundred twenty-four kilometers south to Berlin. Anna and Lena Schroeder had taken the first steps to Berlin. They knew the terrain better than anyone who was out to stop them. They had a long-shot chance to arrive in the capital, and a chance to survive was better than no chance at all. But now, Anna and Lena had disappeared. They were not seen again by anyone from their village nor accounted for either as the war concluded and as the Red Army rolled toward Berlin. It was a time when many young German women, for whatever reason, simply vanished, as if somewhere in the woods they had had a secret hiding place.

  Chapter 43

  Berlin - July 1948

  Seated with the shattered blond girl in the medical facility and morgue, Cochrane allowed several minutes to pass. Then he repeated his question, attempting to sound more sincere than trite. “Look, please. I would love to be able to help you. Could you give me a simple answer?”

  She shook her head again to indicate that she wouldn’t.

  “Displaced by the war, I assume,” Cochrane said, persistent in the face of his self-doubts. “I’m sorry.” When she said nothing, he tried a long shot. “Where were you before the war displaced you?” he asked.

  “A town named Demmin,” the blond woman finally said.

  “Ah!” he said. “I know the town. I’ve done much reading about the war. I know what happened there. Horrible. You must believe that I’ll help you in any way I can. May I ask your name?”

  For a moment, she looked at Cochrane with unfocused eyes, rather as if she were looking through him and seeing something or someone very different.

  “Anna,” she said.

  “I’m William,” he said. “And your sister’s name?”

  “Lena,” she said with a trembling lip. Then she looked away and the tears began to roll and the sobbing deepened into wails of sorrow and hysterics.

  “Lena what?” he asked.

  She sobbed something that was nearly inaudible, but he took it to be Schroeder.

  “So she was Lena Schroeder,” Cochrane said. “And you’re Anna Schroeder?”

  There was no immediate answer. Her crying was uncontrollable. All Cochrane could do was extend an arm and hold her as her body quivered and trembled. Wanting to do something, anything, he placed the pack of cigarettes in her free hand.

  She exploded, she pushed at him, shoved him away, and flailed at Cochrane with her fists. He did not fight back. She struggled to her feet. In a fury, she crunched the pack of cigarettes in his fist and threw it back to him, hitting him in the mouth and chest.

  Anna turned and ran from the room. Cochrane stood and listened to her footsteps hurry away down a corridor he could not see. He pondered his next move. He heard another set of footsteps approach and an agitated conversation in working-class German and Russian. He patted his pistol and readied himself for trouble.

  He reached down and picked up the bent cigarettes and the pack from the floor.
The smokes weren’t pristine anymore, but they were serviceable. He stuffed them into his pocket. He emerged from the side corridor with a cover story ready, but no one wanted it.

  Instead, he saw two young Red Army soldiers with sidearms, pistols in holsters on the right side of the belt, accompanied by two men speaking German. Cochrane assumed they were medical people of some sort, possibly doctors or possibly technicians, in filthy lab coats covered with dark red stains that looked like blood.

  They ignored him completely, or maybe they didn’t even notice him.

  They went into the room where lay the body of the girl identified as “Lena.” They stepped in a few paces and looked around, taking a quick reading of the room. Acting on impulse, Cochrane followed them in. One soldier called the attention of the other soldier to the bullet damage. They exchanged smiles and conversation in Russian that Cochrane couldn’t understand. They were surprised when they suddenly saw him.

  Cochrane kept his hands visible. One of the young cherry-cheeked Russians placed a hand on his pistol and looked as if he were anxious to shoot someone.

  “What happened here?” one of the Germans asked, turning to Cochrane.

  Cochrane eyed the two Germans. They had nameplates. Only surnames: Vogelsang and Keller. Keller was mid-twenties. Vogelsang was ten years older, with some white in his hair, a facial scar, and a paunch. He looked like an ex-soldier. His glare wasn’t just hostile, it was belligerent.

  “I have no idea,” Cochrane said. “There were some young men in the room. Big group of them. They looked like military cadets. Suddenly there were shots fired. I didn’t want to be anywhere near.”

  The young Russian eased his hand away from the pistol. Cochrane guessed that the Russian understood German.

  “One of those young cadets must have a weapon,” Cochrane went on. “You should look into that,” Cochrane suggested, knowing that if they followed up, which was doubtful, they’d be chasing their tail for several hours. “Damned crazy if you ask me,” he said, “firing a weapon in a small room like that!”