Return to Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  “The way the stupid Robert Jordan character in the book blew up that bridge,” Goff complained. “The way Ernie described it? Complete and utter bullshit. How’s that for literary criticism?”

  “Pretty precise, Irv,” Cochrane answered over wiener schnitzel and Berliner Weiss. “What part didn’t you like?”

  “I didn’t like any of it! The Jordan guy did it like he was blowing a seam in a goddamn coal mine. I've blown up fucking bridges, man,” said Goff, who would talk like a sailor even with ladies present. “A hell of a lot of them. You put a detonator in the explosives and then you get your sorry ass out of there as fast as possible. You'd better be twenty miles away when it blows. If the rocks and debris don’t kill you somebody’s soldiers or security cops will. Or maybe a pissed off farmer will shoot you just for sport. We went after bridges and railroads as much as we could in Spain. Usually the detonator would last five or six days behind the lines. You leave it there and let someone else worry about it.”

  “Yeah, well how about that Ingrid Berman?” Cochrane asked, referencing the soon-to-be released movie.

  “How about her, meatball?” Goff snorted. “That’s bullshit, too. I never saw Ingrid Bergman in all the time I was in Spain. If I had, I might still be there.” At that point, Goff’s wife elbowed him sharply and he finally laughed. The use of “meatball” meant Goff liked someone.

  "Those two and a half years I served in Spain,” Goff mused at the end of the evening. “Nothing as exhilarating will ever happen to me again.”

  “You fought the good fight,” Cochrane answered. “But Franco and the Fascists won.”

  “Don’t remind me, Bill,” Goff said, his expression turning very sour. “I feel I left Spain without blowing the heads off enough Fascists.”

  Cochrane paused. “Did you have a personal victory, maybe?”

  “Yeah. Sure! It was in Spain that I learned that all men could be brothers. Even now, wherever in this lousy world I meet a man or woman who fought for Spanish liberty I feel like I’m walking in a refreshing rain shower. I sense a kindred soul. Nothing will ever break that bond. We left our Goddamned hearts there, Bill. Our blood, our hearts and our souls. God damn it. We left everything behind except our bodies and some of us left those, too."

  He leaned back, his eyes red, half from rage, the other ninety percent from alcohol. “I think Donovan feels the same way. That’s why he tolerates us. Christ knows he’s not much farther left than Louis Quatorze; you know, that French king with the funny hair and the castle?”

  Goff shook his head.

  “But you know what kills me, Bill?” he continued with bitterness. “You know what claws at my guts and busts my balls every night? Yeah, meatball, you’re right. Franco won. The fucking Fascists won. And now, what the hell? What if Hitler wins? What if Mussolini wins? God damn it, what kind of world are we looking at when it’s run by bastards like that?”

  Cochrane didn’t have an answer. Laura didn’t, either.

  John Edgar Hoover hated Reds, no one doubted that.

  Hoover often dispatched agents with dossiers to Donovan with FBI snitch material on Maurice Halperin, Irv Goff and various Communist OSS employees. Hoover all but demanded that they be terminated: no regrets, no questions asked, and no explanations given.

  Donovan often picked up the phone and replied, "Oh, come on, J. Edgar. I know they're Communists.”

  “If you know they’re Communists, why did you hire them?”

  “That's why I hired them, John Edgar. Because they’re Communists. Now don’t bother me, which is a polite way of me telling you to lay off and get lost.”

  If Donovan didn’t hear Hoover’s phone slam down after a few words like that, he considered the call a failure.

  The presence of Communists in the OSS was a source of ongoing frustration for Mr. FBI. He sent his files to Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt spiked them with a chuckle.

  Eleanor Roosevelt was vexing. She had been one of the country’s most vocal activists on behalf of the Lincoln Brigade. Her close friend Joseph Lash, the author and left wing politician, made her a present of a small bronze statue of a Communist soldier in Spain. She kept it on her desk.

  For Hoover, if there was anything worse than a man he couldn’t control, it was a smart educated woman whom he couldn’t intimidate. Hoover had an enemies list and Eleanor was near the top. Irv Goff was on it, too. Hoover’s list wouldn’t have been complete without Eleanor Roosevelt and Irv Goff on it. The feeling was mutual.

  Cochrane knew a few of the special agents who were assigned this task of alerting the Roosevelts about Communists. He had worked with them as a peer. He tried to tell them they were wasting their time.

  “Hitler tells us to do it, so we do it,” one of them, a Special Agent named Jack Mayo once said. “Of course, it’s pointless, Bill. But what the hell are we going to do?”

  “You mean Hoover, not Hitler, right?” Cochrane corrected. “You said, ‘Hitler.’”

  “Oh, Did I? Yes. Of course. My mistake. Hey, don’t tell anyone I said that, okay?”

  In his New York apartment on this moody ghost-ridden November night, Cochrane sighed. His clunky three-in-the-morning dream vanished to wherever dreams go to hide until next time. He tired of watching the street. He released the curtain. He glanced at the clock above the fireplace. As he looked at it, it struck three thirty. From his own bar, he poured himself an Irish whiskey. Two solid fingers of the best stuff he owned.

  He walked to the sofa in the living room, his mind alive with images of life and death, haunted by friends who were no longer living and some who were but who had disappeared to other corners of a tumultuous world. He settled back on the sofa. He closed his eyes, trying to find order in the sleepy overstressed chaos of his thoughts.

  Irv Goff. Who knew if Irv was even alive or if he’d gotten himself killed?

  Everything about the man was more than the sum or its parts, or seemed to be, except when it was less. Goff had sent Bill and Laura a Christmas card in 1940, an attractive woodcut with a snowy scene of Washington Square in Greenwich Village, wreaths on the Washington Square Arch. Cochrane had kept the card on his desk and pondered its implications well into the following March.

  “Do you think there’s a message here?” Bill finally asked Laura, showing her the card again. “Something about the Square? A rendezvous point, maybe? A hidden message or signal? Am I missing something? What the hell is Goff up to?”

  “As Dr. Freud once said,” Laura answered, “‘Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.’ Maybe Irv just wanted to send a picture of Manhattan in the winter, dear. Have you thought of that?”

  “No,” Cochrane had answered. “I hadn’t.”

  In his apartment above East Seventy-Second Street, Cochrane drained his whiskey glass, leaned back and almost started to snooze. “What a cesspool of a world,” he thought. And I’m going to get killed for this?”

  He drifted.

  The next thing he knew, on the mantle in his apartment on East Seventy-Second Street, the Seth Thomas clock chimed four times, signaling four AM.

  When it stopped, Cochrane heard a voice. Female. His wife’s. Simultaneously, there was a sympathetic hand on his shoulder.

  Then, “Bill?” Laura asked.

  His eyes snapped open. He turned, startled. She was sitting next to him.

  “You all right?” Laura asked.

  He blinked half awake. “Yeah. I’m fine. A bit restless,” he said. A beat, then, “Just doing some thinking.”

  She reached to a lamp and turned on a low watt bulb. “Can’t imagine why,” she said.

  She embraced him and they kissed.

  “How long have you been sitting next to me?” he asked.

  “Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. Come on,” she said. “You can’t worry about what you can’t control,” she said. “Come back to bed. You need some sleep.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”

  “Listen to me,” Laura said. “You should accept his assign
ment. I’ve thought about it. You’ll have a better chance of surviving the war if you are left to your own resources. So do it. You have my prayers and my blessing. All right?”

  After several seconds, “All right. Thank you,” he said.

  “Now. Make me two promises,” she insisted.

  “Anything,” he answered. “I’ll do my best.”

  “When you’re in Switzerland, buy me a wristwatch,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be expensive. Just a sound watch in good taste. You pick something out that you like. I’m sure I’ll like it, too.”

  “That shouldn’t be difficult,” he said. “Okay.”

  “That’s only the first promise,” she said. “The second one? You have to bring it back in person and place it on my wrist yourself. How’s that? Will you do that for us, then?”

  “I promise,” he said.

  They started back toward the bedroom. She did not release his hand.

  They lay together very close as they both returned to sleep.

  Chapter 12

  Nazi Germany

  November 1942

  i

  Despite countless speeches, statements, rants, curses and gestures to the contrary, Adolf Hitler had never won the trust or respect of his army officers. Nor had they ever warmed to him. Much of this grew from his innate sense of inferiority as a lowly ex-corporal from upper Austria during the Great War of 1914-1918. Hitler’s first instinct, even as he rose in political power in Germany, was always to stand at rigid attention in the company of all these medal-bedecked old-guard Teutonic warriors. He looked at them as threats and potential adversaries, even now when they now came to him to solicit approval. They rarely wanted his advice, but his approval was frequently necessary.

  Sometimes he referred to them derisively as, Die Oberschist. The upper class. In Hitler’s opinion these doddering dinosaurs who were left over from the previous war had been in charge of protecting Germany and standing up for traditional values. And they had failed.

  He could have predicted it, he explained to the Nazi hierarchy. While Hitler had been slogging through Belgium and France, eventually suffering a wound in his thigh at the Battle of The Somme in the defense of these traditional German values, these men were sipping Asbach Uralt far behind the lines. He knew, or thought he knew, that in the opinion of men like these, wacky little Austrians like Hitler were best suited to be cannon fodder.

  Those who surrounded Hitler in the upper reaches of the Nazi pantheon, men like Himmler, Goebbels, and Heydrich, felt much the same way. Even Hitler’s porky Air Marshall, Hermann Goering, was sympathetic.

  “My army,” Hitler complained bitterly at a party function in 1939, “is reactionary. My Navy is Christian. And my Air Force is National Socialist.”

  Indeed, Goering had fed a small armada of new Nazi party recruits into the Luftwaffe, the newest branch of Germany’s military. The Christian protestants in the Navy were obedient and susceptible to Nazi orthodoxy. But the army remained a problem. It remained deeply monarchist, even to the point of continually organizing celebrations every January twenty-seventh on the birthday of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German Emperor and King of Prussia, who habitually wore a white glove on his withered left arm, the one that was six inches shorter than the right. Wilhelm had gained a reputation as a swaggering militarist through his belligerent speeches and ill-advised newspaper interviews, his foot never far from his mouth.

  He reigned for thirty years, was forced to abdicate and pass the rest of his life in cranky exile in the Netherlands. But the army, much to Hitler’s vexation, still celebrated his birthday.

  Nonetheless, many of these officers had presided over Germany’s defeat. Hitler was unforgiving. Despite the fact that he had never risen above corporal, he proclaimed himself, “a genius.” He told this to his ardent followers and they believed it. He felt his military skills and instincts, which he made up as he went along, based on no sound knowledge of situations, terrain or logistics, were superior to the methods taught in the prestigious academies and military schools. He wasn’t shy about telling people so. He felt he should impose his instincts and strategies on these pretenders who had failed to maintain Germany’s greatness. The rest of the goose-stepping German population agreed with him. They admired him. He had re-armed the nation when the generals couldn’t. His true believers were content to follow him anywhere. He had a vision to restore the greatness of Germany.

  Gradually, to the best of his abilities, he began to replace the professional military people, just as he had replaced intelligence and police agents who didn’t appear loyal to him. For Hitler, dumb unquestioning devotion was paramount.

  To rid himself of as many of the top professional soldiers as possible, Hitler used his two most powerful associates in the Gestapo: Heydrich and Himmler. Employing various intrigues of sexual blackmail and smears, he dishonored and discredited General Werner von Fritsch and Field Marshall Werner von Bloomberg. Von Fritsch was alleged to be a homosexual and linked to male prostitutes, a specious charge. Von Bloomberg was married to a woman half his age who had once posed for erotic photographs and worked as a prostitute when she needed money at age nineteen. After those two men were discredited, the opposition to Hitler in the army was tentative and reeling back on its heels. Everyone had something to hide and that’s what the Gestapo was for: to find those dirty secrets and exploit them.

  While it seemed omnipotent, the Gestapo was a very small organization. By late 1942, the time when Hans Wesselmann presided over the execution of two men on an icy tarmac in Marseilles, its active officers within Germany numbered fewer than fifteen thousand. They policed a population of sixty-five million people. In Düsseldorf, with a population of half a million, there were no more than one hundred and twenty Gestapo officers on the day Hitler declared war on the United States in 1941.

  Most rural towns had no Gestapo presence at all. The Gestapo was underfunded, under-resourced and over stretched. By the time Gestapo agents were sent to occupied areas in Belgium, France, and Poland, it was stretched even further. Everywhere they looked, there were enemies of the state, the vermin that dragged down the magnificent Aryan people: communists and socialists, religious dissidents, Jews, disobedient students, Gypsies, the retarded, the crippled, long-term criminals, prostitutes, homosexuals, immigrants from the east and the Balkans and juvenile gangs. Thank God, thought men like Hans Wesselmann, for someone like Hitler to lay down the law to these people.

  Even though the numbers were against them, those in the Gestapo did not see their agency as being weak or inefficient. To make up for a lack of staff, the Gestapo used the vast majority of the obedient population to its maximum effect. This was the golden age of snitching, and these “ordinary Germans” took great pleasure in reporting what they might have seen or heard to Gestapo agents, even the slightest anti-Hitler sentiment in a casual conversation. It was called ‘denouncing.’ It worked.

  Once the proper purges had been made to the traditional army, Himmler and Heydrich analyzed who in the Gestapo had been most helpful in completing their tasks. One man stood out among the others. He was the sturdy young man from the countryside named Hans Wesselmann.

  ii

  Hans was a career bureaucrat who had elevated his profession to a crude art form. He was not intelligent or gifted. But he was opinionated and stubborn as a mule. He might have become a farm laborer but instead worked hard at school with rote memorization. The approach worked in most subjects. His goal was to get himself into the German government bureaucracy, a position which would get him a pension later in life. He had the body of a thug and learned weaponry from ex-soldiers in his family. He joined the Munich State Police in 1926.

  The Munich State Police opposed the Nazis until 1933. But thereafter, the Nazis took control of the Munich police and some, including Hans, found themselves at ease with the nationalistic race-baiting philosophy of the new regime. Wesselmann had been born in Hesse in 1897. His father had been a gravedigger. In 1916, he joined the
army and fought on the Western Front until he was captured by the British. He spent the rest of the war as a prisoner and returned to Germany in 1919. As a soldier, he had been awarded the Iron Cross Second Class. After a series of odd jobs and unemployment, he used his army contacts to train as a policeman. He became a cop in Berlin in 1931 and wore a uniform he was proud of.

  Germany was rising again. Wesselmann went to hear Hitler speak several times. Enthralled, Wesselmann joined first the Nazi party and then the SS in 1932.

  Adolf Hitler said things that Wesselmann thought but didn’t dare say. The former corporal had suffered the same indignities thanks to the Communists and banking cabals and the other traitors who had sold out Germany. With Hitler, Germany could be great again. Wesselmann made a vow. He would die for Hitler if he had to. His devotion was that fervent.

  And so it went until one day in 1935 when an SS drinking companion, an ex-convict named Otto Kruger, sidled up to him one evening in the lounge of a brothel. Otto asked if he could introduce Wesselmann to a special friend. Wesselmann said he had no objection.

  Otto signaled with a hand to a sandy-haired man who was watching from the bar. The man nodded, left the company of a woman, came to their table and sat down. Otto explained that the friend, Gunther, was a major in the SS. Gunther spoke easily, treated Wesselmann as an equal and showed great deference. There were a few minutes of small talk. Then Gunther mentioned that Wesselmann had come to the attention of people very high up in the Nazi party.

  “As high as the office of Heinrich Himmler, himself,” said Otto reverently.

  At first Wesselmann thought he had done something wrong and was in trouble. Gunther kept talking. He asked if Wesselmann would consider taking a job that would have him doing something special for his nation and his race.

  “Of course,” Wesselmann said.

  “The job is not much different than what you are already doing as a policeman,” the man said. “But it will require you to be tough and uncompromising. Sometimes even brutal. Sometimes the tasks are distasteful but they must be done. Interested?”