Return to Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  “You’re going to need people who are fluent in French,” Reilley said to Donovan. “Mr. Cochrane here speaks it very well.”

  “I’ll need German specialists, too,” Donovan had said.

  “That would be Mr. Cochrane here, also,” said Reilley.

  “Is that a fact?” Donovan answered, impressed. Donovan turned to Cochrane. “When are you going to learn Spanish?” he asked.

  “I speak Spanish, too, sir.”

  “How about Russian? That’ll be the pain in the ass for the next generation.”

  “Find me an opportunity, give me four weeks, and I’ll learn it,” Cochrane said.

  “Pretty confident of yourself, aren’t you?” Donovan replied.

  “That would be true, sir,” said Cochrane, cementing the deal as a man Donovan could use in the future.

  Donovan was almost sixty years old in 1942. Had the world been more a peaceful place, he might have entered the comfortable pipe-and-slippers retirement that many American men dreamed about. But the world wasn’t peaceful and never would be. So Donovan was far from retired and as far as anyone knew, he owned neither pipe nor slippers.

  Donovan, Cochrane knew, had been born into a conservative family of Irish Catholic immigrants in upstate New York. He found his way to New York City, graduated from Columbia University where he played baseball years before Lou Gehrig made the lawn in front of Low Library famous for long home runs.

  In 1907, Donovan graduated from Columbia Law School and entered private practice. He soon grew bored. So he quit law and looked for something more physical. He landed in the New York National Guard in 1912 as a captain and became part of the New York’s hardnosed 69th “Fighting Irish” Regiment. He fought in the war on the Tex-Mex border in 1916 when his regiment was called in to assist the US Army in tracking down the Mexican bandit Pancho Villa. Donovan’s unit then became part of the 165th Regiment of the US Army. During his time leading the regiment, Donovan gained a nickname. The men in his battalion called him “Wild Bill,” a nod to the legendary lawman Wild Bill Hickock.

  Three times during the Great War Donovan was wounded in action. On July 18, 1918, for bravery under fire on the River Ourcq during the Second Battle of the Marne, he was awarded the Medal of Honor. By the end of the war, he was a colonel.

  In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge appointed Donovan to serve as the assistant to the Attorney General as a monopoly buster. He travelled the world and entered the dark world of espionage. He came to the notice of President Roosevelt, who asked him to visit England as an unofficial envoy in November 1940. Through his meetings with Col. Stewart Menzies, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, as well as King George VI, and Winston Churchill, Donovan concluded that the United States needed a centralized means of collecting foreign intelligence.

  Donovan returned to Washington and met with Roosevelt. Not long afterwards, President Roosevelt established the Office of the Coordination of Information, called the COI. The COI morphed into the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS. By June of 1942 the agency was up and running in Washington and New York with General Donovan in charge.

  Donovan drew up plans to open an office in New York City. He asked Allen Dulles to head the New York office. Both Donovan and Dulles had long had contacts in British Intelligence. Hence, it was no surprise that they opened their offices in Room 3603 of Rockefeller Center on the floor immediately above the suite of Britain's MI6.

  In the back of the drafty Jeep as they travelled through northern New Jersey, Cochrane reached for the envelope that Colonel Sawyer had given him. In the dim light from the stars, moon and reflected headlights of other cars, he glanced at the text and saw again the address that he was ordered to report to the following day.

  Sure enough: Room 3603 of 30 Rockefeller Center.

  Santini had developed a lead foot an hour into the ride. The Jeep hit a hard bump on the road, either a pothole or a tree branch or a stone. The vehicle bounced, took a short flight but stayed its course as Cochrane bounced high in his seat and hit his head against the roof of the Jeep.

  “Very sorry, sir!” Santini said.

  “No apologies necessary, Sergeant. It wouldn’t be an official army trip without a bump or two, would it?”

  Santini laughed. “No, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “Hell, no one’s shooting at us. We should be happy, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I guess that’s why we have ragtops, right?”

  “Correct, sir!”

  In the back of the Jeep, Cochrane rubbed his head. He glanced at his watch. It was almost eleven PM. Some rain had started. The windshield wipers worked well but noisily as Sergeant Santini dropped down a gear and drove cautiously. There was a nearly full moon. It lit the way. The cold was creeping into the Jeep. They passed some open fields, most likely farms, Cochrane reasoned. Strands of mist hung over them.

  “How are we doing, Sergeant?” Cochrane finally asked, breaking a silence of at least sixty minutes.

  “I’m just fine, sir. We’ll have you there within another half hour. See up ahead?” he asked. “We’d be able to see the glow from the city if it weren’t for the dimout.”

  Cochrane had already noticed exactly that. He agreed that it was odd how New York City had disappeared. But, “I’m in no rush at all, Sergeant. Just drive safely. You need to get home, too.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Santini said.

  They arrived in Weehawken several minutes later. They passed the dueling grounds where Aaron Burr had killed Alexander Hamilton. They passed over a long downhill stretch and then hit the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, the first tube of which had opened four years earlier.

  The tunnel led into Manhattan. At a few minutes before midnight, Sergeant Santini delivered Cochrane to his overnight address, which was a small hotel in Murray Hill on the east side of Manhattan. Cochrane grabbed his two duffels and stepped out. Through the front door of the hotel, he could see a night clerk at the desk.

  “You’ll be okay getting to Brooklyn, Sergeant?” Cochrane asked.

  “I should be there in another forty minutes.”

  “No falling asleep at the wheel. Right?”

  “Oh, no, sir! I took some Dexedrine before we started. I’ll be fine.”

  “Ah! I should have known. No wonder we were flying low.”

  “Correct, sir,” Santini said with a laugh. “Very good, sir!”

  The Jeep continued along. The check-in at the hotel was smooth.

  Cochrane was in his room within ten minutes, opened the flask of magnolia state moonshine that Colonel Sawyer had given him, knocked back three long gulps, felt the burn and was asleep before Sergeant Santini was across the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Chapter 8

  Nazi Germany

  January 1933 – November 1942

  At the age of fifteen in 1933, Hans Scholl joined Der Hitlerjugend, the Hitler Youth, much like many other obedient German boys of his generation. His parents, liberal-minded anti-Hitler educators, were horrified.

  Hans’ father, Robert Scholl, insisted that Hitler and his brown battalions of thugs were marching Germany down a road to destruction. Hans didn’t believe him. While the typical German might be a conforming soul, there is also the rebel German personality, the outspoken eccentric, who could be tolerated for a while. Hans was a rebel.

  Hans made friends easily in the Nazi youth organization. In September of 1935, his peers selected him to represent their branch of the Hitler Youth at the Giant Nuremburg rally of the National Socialists, the Nazi party. He was in for a shock.

  The anti-Semitic and other hateful diatribes at the rally disgusted him. Gradually, Hans concluded that his father had been right. When he returned home, he quit the Hitler Youth and joined a group called German Youth, Deutsche Jugend. The group was liberal, open minded and opposed to Nazism. The Gestapo arrested Hans and held him in jail for several weeks; no charges filed. By association, his parents and younger sister, Sophie, were branded ene
mies of the Hitler regime.

  Meanwhile, the Wehrmacht was active. Hans was allowed to end his confinement and be conscripted into the army. In 1939, he began medical studies while remaining in the Wehrmacht. The war began. He was sent to the eastern front: Poland, then Russia. What he saw there, perpetrated by his fellow soldiers, more than appalled him. He saw Jews and civilian Russian prisoners impaled on spikes, hanged, shot and set on fire while alive. Even out in the steppes of southern Russia, two thousand kilometers from Berlin, Jews were forced to wear a yellow star. If they didn’t they were shot. Any civilian believed to be a member of the Communist party was handed over to the SS to be hanged. Farmers were tortured to find where they had hidden their grain. Their homes were torn down for firewood, their wives and daughters raped and their sons, if they hadn’t fled or been conscripted into Slavic armies, executed. More than fifty thousand civilians were deported back to Germany to serve as slave labor. Hans witnessed some of the worst parts of it, including massive bonfires made from the corpses of Russian soldiers.

  When he returned to the Fatherland in 1942, he kept quiet. The army allowed him to continue his medical studies at the University of Munich. In spirit, he had moved a long way from the boy who had joined the Hitler Youth nine years earlier. He was now a young man, thoroughly shaken, and convinced that his only moral path was to actively oppose the Nazi regime.

  At the time, there were many disillusioned former soldiers at the university. They formed a small but quiet minority of anti-Nazi free-thinkers. There was one whose name was Alexander Schmorell. Schmorell had been born in Russia but was a German citizen. He, too, was a medical student and a former conscript. He, too, was disgusted with what his country was doing.

  In 1941, Schmorell had fought in the devastating German blitzkrieg that overran Poland and continued unchecked for many months into Russian territory. Like Hans Scholl, he was sickened by what the Nazified German army did to civilians. Back home, he kept quiet and applied to continue his medical studies, “to greater serve the Third Reich.”

  In the summer of 1942, Hans resumed his medical classes at the University of Munich, arriving within a few weeks of Hans Scholl. The two young men soon met. Their private conversations were tentative at first. They dropped hints to each other about how they felt politically. One could draw a very unpleasant visit from the Gestapo by trusting the wrong person. But inevitably, their private conversations drifted toward how best to resist the Nazi administration. They were in a perfect place for it. Not only had Munich been the cradle of the Nazi party, but now the university was a crucible of unrest against fascism and the party, even if those who felt that way had been forced deep underground.

  Also at the university by this time was Hans’ younger sister, Sophie. She too at one point had been part of Hitler Youth but had soured on it. In November of 1938, Sophie had been horrified by Kristallnacht. Many of her close Jewish friends and Jews throughout Germany were attacked by bands of Nazi thugs. Less than a year later, she was equally infuriated when the Second World War began.

  Shortly thereafter, the regime forced her to take state work duty in exchange for eventual permission to attend university. She kept her opinions to herself, quietly seethed and completed her national service. In May of 1942, she began to study philosophy and biology at the University of Munich. Her brother Hans met her the day she arrived.

  Brother and sister, Hans and Sophie, kept to themselves at first. Then a few weeks later, Hans came to Sophie late one afternoon. “There are some people I want you to meet,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Some very close friends,” Hans said.

  There was a basement bar not far from their living quarters. Two evenings later, again in the summer of 1942 while the war raged in Russia and while the Wehrmacht began to lay siege to Stalingrad, Hans led his sister to the noisy student gathering spot: the Rathskeller Kleindienst. At the table waiting was Alexander Schmorell. The other former soldier was now Hans’ best friend. With Schmorell was Christoph Probst, Schmorell’s boyhood friend and a former Luftwaffe pilot, who was now fervently anti-Nazi. He had been allowed to leave the Luftwaffe to study medicine.

  Also at the table was a young man named Willi Graf. Graf had grown up a devout Catholic and had opposed the Nazi party. He believed it to be at odds with the teachings of Christ. He had been arrested by the Gestapo in 1935 for membership in an anti-Nazi Catholic youth group. He later found his way into the army as a medical orderly. He completed his tour in the army in early summer of 1942, landed at the University of Munich to continue his studies, and gravitated toward the classes of a dynamic professor named Kurt Huber.

  Huber taught music and philosophy. Born in Switzerland in 1893, Huber was a learned man who achieved his doctorate in musicology in 1917. He had taught philosophy at the University of Munich from 1926 and was a respected researcher of traditional Germanic folk songs. He had published a popular book on the subject. In 1937 Huber became head of the Department of Folk Music at the Berlin Institute of Music Research. In 1938 he was denied a teaching contract at Berlin University because of his, "adherence to Catholicism."

  Huber returned to Munich to teach in 1940. Huber fascinated his students, particularly because of his wide range of interests and clear lectures. As a child, he had contracted infantile paralysis. Like President Franklin Roosevelt of the United States, he remained partially paralyzed as an adult.

  Huber walked with a limp and he spoke with a severe speech impediment. But his lectures were among the most popular on the Munich campus. They were tinged with anti-Nazi sentiment that many students felt to be a brave voice in the darkness. Many students saw him in inspirational terms, a hero who had risen to the height of academia and intellectual prominence despite being blackballed by the Nazis and limited by his physical afflictions. The Nazi authorities considered Huber to be cripple and therefore not a member of the master race.

  In May 1942, when Sophie Scholl entered the University of Munich, Kurt Huber was one of her tutors. Willi Graf was one of her classmates. One time, during a lecture on the banned philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, Huber admonished the class, "Careful! Spinoza was a Jew! Don't contaminate yourselves!"

  Knowing it was a dark joke and a criticism of Nazi thought, many members of the class hooted, cheered and applauded. Sophie was in the lecture hall that day. She noticed that there was a girl in the class who was younger than the others. She was light blonde and pretty. Aryan features, some would have said. She had applauded, also. Sophie made a mental note that the girl might be another student she could take into her confidence. She was easy to spot each time she attended: she always wore a small fur cap and a light blue scarf.

  Sophie chatted with her after class one day and learned her name was Frieda. Frieda avoided questions about what she was studying, only allowing that she loved books, mathematics and music. Sophie and Frieda became nodding acquaintances, then friends.

  Talk like Huber’s was dangerous, however. Sophie’s father by now had drawn a brief but unpleasant prison term for a casual remark to his secretary.

  “The war! It is already lost! This Hitler is God’s scourge on mankind. If the war doesn’t end soon, the Russians will be sitting in Berlin,” he had said.

  The secretary was pro-Hitler. She reported him. The Gestapo arrested him. A magistrate sent him to jail for “defeatism.”

  Sophie told her brother about the lectures. Hans began to attend, bringing along Schmorell and Probst. They sat apart from each other, not wishing to draw attention to themselves as an emerging clique. Sophie and Frieda attended together but sat a few rows apart. The overall atmosphere in the lecture hall was free-thinking. But even the most naïve of students knew that “brown rats,” Gestapo infiltrators and informers, were everywhere. Some of them, thugs posing as students, were so obvious and proud of what they were doing that they openly wore brown shirts.

  On this night in early June of 1942, the young people at the table laughed, drank beer, ate cheap bratwurs
ts and pretzels and had a shot or two of schnapps to keep things free and easy. Several friends joined them. Frieda smiled and listened. They discussed a book that was popular among the students. It was written by a shadowy literary figure who called himself Bruno Traven.

  Traven communicated with the outside world through literary agents who shielded his true identity. He lived in Mexico, where the majority of his fiction was set, including the immensely popular The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, published in 1927, for which the motion picture rights had been sold to an American film company. So far the film remained unmade.

  Many of the students felt that Traven was actually a German stage actor and anarchist named Ret Marut, who departed Germany for Mexico around 1924. Marut had edited an anarchist newspaper called Der Ziegelbrenner, “The Brickburner,” that was published in Munich and Cologne from 1917 to 1921. The author’s true identity was elusive, and his stories were free-wheeling, anti-establishment and free thinking, which made him a cultural hero to the students in Munich. To no one’s surprise, his work was banned by the Nazis. So when the students passed his books around, they wrapped them in a newspaper or placed them in a large envelopes.

  One of Traven’s books that had been published in 1929 had had a resurgence in popularity this year. It was a story set in Mexico. It recounted a monumental confrontation in the 1920s between a ruthless robber baron, an owner of a North American oil company, and an indigenous Mexican farmer who lived on a modest hacienda with his family and workers. The name of the hacienda in the novel was La Rosa Blanca. The White Rose. The name of the book took its name from the hacienda, The White Rose.