by Noel Hynd
This gave them even more to talk about. The bond between them formed quickly.
Back at the rooming annex to the Club Weimar, the women she bunked with knew she sometimes went missing for overnights. But they said nothing, not even to each other. It was too easy to be overheard and ratted out.
Chapter 70
Berlin – August 1948
Horst Schmid, as he sat in a holding room at Tempelhof, did not know whether he was a hostage or an evacuee. One couldn’t have blamed him.
Otto Kern stood near Schmid, flanked by the shorter but no less authoritative figures of Sgt. Pearson and beside him, Major Pickford. Schmid was a man in manacles, his sixth decade, and shock. Fewer than twenty-four hours earlier, he had been completing his shift in a forced-labor factory in northeastern Germany well inside the Soviet Zone and not far from the Polish border.
A team of six men from Major Pickford’s “remote unit” had come together, neutralized the guards, walked into the sleeping barracks unobstructed, turned on the lights, and walked bed to bed until they had located Schmid and pulled him out of sleep. Conveniently, each bed was marked at its base with the laborer’s name. Schmid was allowed to put personal belongings in a pillowcase and was told to accompany them. Immediately.
Schmid, convinced that he was being taken to the Soviet Union to be interrogated as an ex-Nazi, tortured, and executed, put up a fight and began to scream bloody murder. One of Pickford’s people pushed a pillow over his face to shut him up and another shoved a needle through his thin sleeping gown and into his thigh. When the drugs kicked in and Schmid stopped struggling, Pickford’s team handcuffed him and placed tape across his mouth. It wasn’t pretty, but it was effective.
After that, things were simple. The few items Schmid had on his nightstand were shoved into the pillowcase. He and his belongings were carried outside where two motor vehicles waited. Schmid was an average-sized man, no more than five-nine in height. He was easy to carry as he was many pounds lighter than a two hundred forty-pound sack of coal.
The team then delivered him to a pier on the Baltic Sea ten kilometers away. A small boat took him to an unmarked C-47 with pontoons that sat on the water. Victor Moreno and a co-pilot waited. Two of Pickford’s babysitters accompanied the captive cargo. Six minutes after delivery, the plane was airborne, going out over the Baltic Sea to sea, then returning to a port in the British Zone to transfer the cargo. Eventually, the cargo landed in Wiesbaden, then transferred again to another C-47 to enter the corridor to Tempelhof.
Now Schmid sat in a wooden chair in a spartan room, waited, and warily eyed his captors. Everyone in the room fell silent as they heard footsteps approach on the tile corridor outside the room.
The door opened. Bill Cochrane entered.
Cochrane looked at Schmid. There was a blink of recognition in the former gauleiter’s eyes. But then this was quickly negated by his ongoing fear.
“You might remember me,” Cochrane said in German. “You also might not. I stayed with Bettina Schneidhuber for a week in the spring of 1943. You watched out for us.”
Schmid had a quizzical look on his face as if the drugs had not completely worn off.
He fidgeted with long dry fingers. He still wore handcuffs.
“Please release him,” Cochrane said.
The key to the cuffs passed along to Sgt. Pearson. Pearson unlocked the man’s wrists.
“No one is going to harm you,” Cochrane said, still standing. “My guess is that at some point in the past you and Bettina were promised passage from Germany. We’re here to make that happen.”
At the invocation of the woman’s name, something changed in Schmid’s eyes.
“Let me talk to Herr Schmid for a few moments,” Cochrane said to the others who stood by. He pulled a chair close to the new arrival. He suggested that Otto Kern remain, Kern being German and a native speaker if one was needed. Major Pickford and Sgt. Pearson left the room, though Cochrane could tell from the departing footsteps that Pearson had stayed on the other side of the door, just in case.
Kern stepped back a few paces and neatly folded his arms behind his back. Aside from flexing his newly freed wrists, watching the blood come back to his skin, Schmid did nothing. He simply sat there. He said nothing. He finally raised his eyes and his gaze met Cochrane’s.
“See?” Cochrane said, half-prepared for Schmid to attack him but reckoning that he wouldn’t. “We mean you no harm. But we do think you will fare better outside of Germany for the next few years, at least. You and Bettina. You would be leaving together. Very soon. To England. Within a day or two if we can manage it. Cigarette?”
Cochrane had a pack ready. He offered a smoke. To his astonishment, Schmid shook his head slowly and declined. Cochrane noticed that there was a powdery whiteness to the man’s skin. He quickly calculated that Schmid had spent more than eighteen months in a labor camp, only to be ripped away from it one night by strangers. No wonder that he was in shock. Small wonder that he wasn’t deranged. Or maybe, it suddenly occurred to Cochrane, he was.
Cochrane trotted out his analysis of events. Schneidhuber and Schmid had been part of a ground team during the war. Everyone else on it may have been blown to bits by the bombing, but the American government tried to act with compassion in those occasional cases when it could.
“Hence, things like getting Bettina and Horst out of Germany, as promised,” Cochrane said. “Hence, things like der Luftbrucke,” he added.
Schmid’s brow furrowed. Then, uttering his first words, “Was Luftbrucke?” the ex-gauleiter asked. What Airbridge?
Cochrane, sensing a moment of triumph, leaned back and turned to Otto Kern.
“Perhaps you could bring the gentleman up to date on the Big Lift,” he asked gently, thinking the explanation might ring truer from German to German.
Kern said he could.
Kern pulled up a third chair and began an explanation. Several minutes into the explanation, a dialogue developed between Kern and Schmid. At times, the German language was so rapid-fire that Cochrane was taxed to follow it. But he did follow the overall sense of the conversation.
When Kern concluded, Horst Schmid turned back toward Cochrane.
Fragen? Cochrane asked. Questions?
“Are you English or American?” Schmid finally asked.
“Would it matter?”
Nein.
“I’m American,” Cochrane said.
“Bettina will exit with me?” Schmid asked.
“She will be on the airplane with you,” Cochrane said. “You will be relocating to a university town in England. If you do not see her on the aircraft, you don’t have to board. I promise you.”
“And we will go to England?”
“You will go to England.”
Schmid turned to Kern. Kern explained that the American here could be trusted.
Schmid looked back to Cochrane. “I agree to go,” he said.
Cochrane nodded. From a nearby desk, he picked up an envelope, a paper, and a pen. He handed them to Schmid.
“Do us both a favor,” Cochrane said. “Write a note to Bettina. Tell her who you are with and where you are. I will take it to her and then I will bring her to you. How’s that?”
Schmid took the pen and paper in hand, thought for a moment, and began to write.
Chapter 71
Berlin – August 1948
Throughout July and the first half of August in Berlin, the new airlift commander, General William Tunner, gradually retired the C-47s that had initiated the airlift in favor of an augmented force of C-54s. Tunner also began to covet the airfields in the British Zone: the flying distances from Wiesbaden were a third shorter than Tempelhof and the flat landscape allowed for shorter climbs on takeoff.
British authorities agreed to make room for the more productive Skymasters, suggesting that the Americans use Fassberg, the old Luftwaffe training base. Fassberg still had solid permanent buildings, a gymnasium with an indoor swimming pool, and a visiting office
rs’ quarters, complete with a huge armchair. The latter was rumored to have been reserved for Hermann Göring, the former Luftwaffe chief. Göring had committed suicide in 1946 on the eve of his scheduled execution at Nuremberg. He would no longer be needing the chair.
The initial results at Fassberg were good, but as the operation lurched into day-to-day practicality, difficulties began to develop and the operation at Fassberg began to come apart.
A solution came from an unexpected source. The air force reorganized the pilots and mechanics into squadrons and started to make recreational runs to Hamburg and Copenhagen. The British turned Fassberg over to the U.S. Air Force, with Col. John Theron “Jack” Coulter in command. Colter was married to an American film actress named Constance Bennett, who had been a major star during the 1920s and 1930s. Bennett frequently played society women, people of James Forrestal’s world, focusing on melodramas and comedies. She had had a prominent supporting role in Greta Garbo's final film, Two-Faced Woman, before the World War.
Bennett was one of the most industrious scavengers ever known to any military service. Turning the heat of her charm on anyone she met, she spruced up the mess halls and the barracks with new furniture. Using her extensive Hollywood contacts, she made sure the latest American movies were flown in. In this way, Fassberg became state-of-the-art and a morale boost for the men and women who worked the Big Lift.
The RAF followed up its gift of Fassberg with an offer of another base at Celle, near Hanover. An old combat base, Celle was without runways or, it seemed, room for a runway, but the facilities were excellent. Bennet waved her magic wand here, too.
As the summer went on, the airlift began to lose the haphazard informality of its initial weeks. Then came August 13th, a Friday, when the haphazard informality collapsed completely.
The weather was horrendous, heavy rain with violent thunderstorms. General Tunner was due in Berlin. He was, in fact, overdue, bouncing around the clouds and bolts of lightning as his C-47 circled in the stack with several scores of other aircraft, all of which were running low on fuel.
Simultaneously, new arrivals were in mid-flight along the corridors, generating a chaotic condition that infuriated Tunner. The weather had been balmy when Tunner departed from Wiesbaden, but his C-47 was enveloped by black clouds as soon as it entered the corridor. As his pilot followed the prescribed flight path to Tempelhof, radioing the exact moment he passed over the Fulda low-frequency, he knew there were C-54s behind and ahead of them, each precisely three minutes apart, and each flying at a speed of 180 miles per hour.
When they arrived over Berlin, there was a heavy rainstorm. Visibility was zero. The rain also sabotaged the radar screens in Tunner’s aircraft. Ahead of them, two C-54s endured accidents on landing that tied up the Tempelhof runway. A C-54 came in behind them, had nowhere to go, and skidded to a swerving emergency halt, completely blocking any further incoming traffic.
Tunner grabbed the microphone in his C-47, identified himself, and called the Tempelhof tower. “Tell everyone in the stack above and below me to go back home,’ he demanded. “Then tell me when it’s OK to land.”
The other aircraft returned to their bases. Tunner landed. Before the day had ended, he had overhauled the rule book for instrument flying. He ordered that all flights, regardless of the weather, would follow instrument flight rules, the IFR playbook. Any pilot who missed an approach for any reason would immediately return his load to his base. No one would be given another chance to try an approach and hold up other aircraft.
Once this rule was put into effect, the tonnage to Berlin rose steadily in good weather or bad as air force crews flew the hundred plus miles in and out, round-the-clock through the three air corridors.
The flights became a steady routine. Each pilot received a precise takeoff time. At that exact moment, he or she would push the throttle forward and climb out on the prescribed flight path to the first beacon at Darmstadt and level off at the assigned altitude.
Toward the end of August, however, as things settled in the skies, there was a further bit of merriment provided by the French, who had otherwise been quiet during the Big Lift.
The British, French, and Americans had constructed a third airfield, Tegelhof, located on a former panzer drill ground in the French Sector. The labor force that carried out this project was recruited from the local populace and was made up of a most unlikely mix of women and men, young and old, most of whom gave no indication of having ever before done manual labor. However, no group had ever worked harder and with such goodwill.
Material for the runways had come from the rubble of air raids. At last, everything was ready for the start of operations, except for one thing. In the center of the air traffic pattern stood a two-hundred-foot-tall unused radio tower. The tower rose in the Soviet Sector.
British and American diplomats proposed a diplomatic solution to the problem. It called for the Soviets, in return for compensation, to dismantle the obstructing tower. Ever unhelpful, the Soviets refused to acknowledge the request.
Western diplomats continued to hector the Soviets for assistance. The Soviets had no desire to assist the Lift in any way. So one wet morning a few minutes after dawn, French Brigadier General Jean Ganeval ordered a platoon of soldiers and engineers to march to the tower, lay some dynamite charges, and blow up the tower.
Direct action, the general said, was what the Soviets understood.
Chapter 72
Berlin – August 1948
Major Pickford was in command of the operation of removing Bettina from the Club Weimar. He assigned six men. Cochrane, Roth, and Kerr were the three principles. They were joined by three men from Major Pickford’s unseen and unappreciated local army of anti-Communist thugs who had somehow landed in Berlin after the war and had found it profitable to stay. Most were Serbs or Ukrainians who were approved by a back-channel chain of command that led all the way to Washington, not that anything was on paper, or anyone could prove it.
Cochrane didn’t know the three men, but Pickford vouched for them. One went by the name of Rodzienko. There was another who called himself Stasiuk, and a final goon who was tagged with the name of Zeisel.
Cochrane didn’t care for men like this but he also knew they had their uses. Not for a minute did Cochrane believe any of these men were operating under their real names. They were local underworld and human flotsam left behind by the armies of the war. He also had nothing against them. He tried not to be judgmental against men who had lived rougher lives than he had and hadn’t enjoyed the same privileges of birth.
The three new men rallied with Cochrane, Roth, and Kern in a private staging area in a dingy warehouse on the Tempelhof grounds at 9 PM the following Saturday so that everyone could get a good look at each other and go over the script. Kern was calm and gathered, Roth had a jittery edge that Cochrane had never seen before. At least it suggested that Roth was human.
“I’ll only ask you this about them,” Cochrane said privately to Pickford as they gathered. “Does the defense secretary know who they are and does he vouch for them?”
“More or less and of course,” Pickford answered.
“Which is the answer to which question?” Cochrane asked.
“Both to both,” Pickford said with a wink. “Really, Bill. That’s all you need to know. They know the club. They know the routine and they know what we’re there to accomplish. Stasiuk has a girlfriend who works there. They speak Russian, German, Ukrainian, and God knows what else. They’re warriors. They’re steady. Balkan brotherhood, it’s Forrestal’s “in”’ thing since the war. Didn’t you get the memo? For each pistol they’re carrying, they’ve got three clips. Just stay out of the line of fire if things go off the rails. Get it?”
“That would be my priority just from common sense,” Cochrane said.
“Most times the two are interchangeable,” Pickford said.
Pickford added that the use of the professional Berlin underworld was something that his “superiors”
- and by this Cochrane assumed he meant Forrestal and the people across the ocean at Foggy Bottom - insisted upon. It would be one thing if a few of the Tempelhof cargo men got into hot water at a verboten club, quite something else if there were a half-dozen of them. So Kern and Roth were okay for this operation, but beyond that, no one else from Tempelhof was to be used. Deniability, again, as a working concept. Weapons should be as untraceable as guilt, and vice versa. It was the same principle for the vehicles. The Opel could be used, as well as a pair of banged-up old French cars, two mismatched Citroens. No Jeeps, no Kubelwagens.
The six men arrived at Club Weimar in pairs, shortly after ten PM, using three vehicles from what Cochrane now laughingly referred to as Sgt. Pearson’s “fleet.” Roth drove the Opel and parked it a block away in its usual spot. Zeisel was his passenger. He was armed with a Mauser, one like most of the weapons in Sgt. Pickford’s arsenal: an untraceable, recent war relic. By ten after ten he was in the club and stationed at the bar, with one eye out for trouble and the other eye out for a certain blonde.
Kern came in with Rodzienko a few minutes later. Rodzienko bought a drink and went downstairs right away. Kern positioned himself on the right end of the bar. If things blew up he was to jump the bar, according to the advance plan, knock out the bartender, and throw the circuit breaker behind the bar. Darkness was a good cover when it came as a surprise, but the downstairs tables still had candles, so there would be some light.