Return to Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  The Wehrmacht had made a bold move in the east to capture Moscow in September and October of 1941. Cochrane knew as much from newspapers in New York and Washington. But now according to the Zurich newspaper, the move had officially failed. Or at best it had not yet been successful, which was the next worst thing to failure. No one in Berlin was admitting anything.

  From what Cochrane had read, the Soviet forces had constructed three defensive belts, deploying newly raised reserve armies, tank divisions and rifle brigades. The defenses had stymied further Wehrmacht advances on Moscow.

  Now in early 1943, a Soviet strategic counter-offensive was pushing the German armies back to the positions west of Moscow. All this while the dreaded Russian winter held on and snarled logistics for the invaders, much as it had for Napoleon in 1812. The failure to knock Russia out of the war was a major setback, terminating of the goal of a quick German victory in the USSR.

  The newspaper reported that Field Marshal Walther von Brauchitsch had, apparently been relieved as the commander of the Oberkommando des Heeres, the OKH, the High Command of the German Army. Hitler had now re-appointed himself as Germany's supreme military commander, much to the horror of the professional army which was in no position to voice objections.

  Cochrane was distracted from his book. He picked up the newspaper, stared at the article and processed its implications. If the German juggernaut failed and was locked into a stalemate, the war in the east could be endless. If the German armies were defeated, captured and collapsed – probably then to be liquidated by the Soviets – nothing would halt the westward advance of the Red Army and Bolshevism. The prospect was almost as frightening as National Socialism.

  A related article in the paper also mentioned that since the launching of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941 and date of publication, an estimated three million Soviet prisoners taken died while in German hands.

  Suddenly one of the German soldiers, seeing the front page while Cochrane read an interior page, got a burr up his backside. He took aim on the content of the news.

  “Lies! All lies!” barked the soldier. “Fraudulent stories and propaganda!”

  Jostled, Cochrane lowered the paper to see what the fuss was about. Two of the soldiers pointed at the front page headline in disapproval. The third one, the one with the war wounds, said nothing.

  “What is?” Cochrane answered in German. “What lies?”

  The German with only one and a half ears stood, leaned across the space between seats and brushed his hand forcefully across the newspaper.

  “Lies in the cheesemaker journal!” the soldier insisted. “We are winning the war against Bolshevism!”

  “Of course,” said Cochrane with a nod. “Complete lies in the Swiss papers these days. Where did you fight and what did you witness?”

  The German eased back and sat. “They treated is as liberators.”

  “Who did?” Cochrane asked.

  “The filthy Poles. The degenerate Red Russians.”

  “The Byelorussians, too,” said one of his Kammaraden.

  The others did not seem too sure, though the one with the soup stains mentioned that Jews and Communists controlled all of the French and English language press. This on orders from Churchill, Roosevelt and that weird de Gaulle fellow who was hiding out in London.

  “Oh, I’m sure they did welcome you as liberators,” said Cochrane, remaining in German. “How could it have been any other way? But you know, I don’t think the Reich will last a thousand years as the Fuehrer has promised.”

  Their gazes stiffened. All six bloodshot eyes narrowed on Cochrane.

  “I think it will last two thousand years!” Cochrane exclaimed. “Heil Hitler!”

  A moment, and all three barked and hooted their approval. Cochrane folded away the newspaper. He closed the book on Wagner. He engaged them in conversation about their military experiences, where they were stationed, troop strengths, movements, shortages and means of communications.

  “We shot a hundred civilians in a town named Griski in Poland,” one of them said. “They were trying to surrender. Our commander told us to shoot them.”

  Another of them, the one with one and a half ears, laughed. “There was a well in this one Belorussian village. We threw twenty-six Jewish children down it, then threw in two grenades.”

  “Where was that?” Cochrane asked.

  “Mogilev,” the soldier said. “Our orders were to exterminate Belarusian settlements for German colonization.”

  “And that’s what you did?”

  The soldier shrugged. “What would you have done? Those were orders. You obey or get shot.”

  “You served the Reich and did your job,” said Cochrane amiably, hiding his disgust. He reached into his bag and broke open a carton of Lucky Strikes. He flipped a pack to each soldier. The soldiers accepted the smokes and thanked him.

  Cochrane nodded to the sleeve and military insignias of the soldier with the wounds. “That’s your unit?” he asked.

  “Yes. Thirtieth Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS.”

  “You must be proud. Who was your heroic commander?”

  “Field Marshal Hans Seigling.”

  The discussion drifted. By now, Cochrane realized the soldiers were drunk. But he didn’t push the conversation. He let it ramble. He tried to memorize what they were telling him. He put an extra pack of cigarettes in his pocket and returned the rest to his luggage.

  “We had three teenage girls, hostages near Minsk. Blondes,” the soldier in the middle chipped in, opening a pack of smokes. “The whole rifle squad raped them. Then an SS major shot them. Sadistic bastard. Wrecked our fun.”

  So it went. It was extraordinary how much they had to say so early in the day to a stranger.

  The train based through Basel, the Swiss city at the border. There was a customs and immigration check. The stop was lengthy but went smoothly. Then the same train continued, which was unusual.

  There was one further wrinkle en route.

  When it reached the first station beyond the Swiss border, the train eased off the regular track to a waiting area. Cochrane broke a sweat. A local police official boarded and ordered all male passengers to disembark for a passport check.

  A Gestapo officer flanked by a huge soldier observed the procedure. He doublechecked some of the passports, including the one belonging to the lone North American traveler. Cochrane’s forged permit for travel eased the situation. But the Gestapo man carefully put down in his notebook the particulars of the passport.

  A few minutes later a local cop announced that an order had just been received from Berlin to detain all Americans and British Commonwealth subjects presenting themselves at the frontier and to report all such cases to Himmler immediately. A major search was on. They were looking for someone

  For the next half hour or so, Cochrane nervously paced the platform. He considered trying to escape into the nearby forests, where he would hope to meet up with resistance members. He decided against it. They were probably twenty kilometers into Germany and the terrain looked hilly, snowy and desolate.

  Finally, with the train about to leave, the gendarme rushed over to Cochrane and motioned him to climb aboard.

  “Are you certain?” Cochrane asked.

  The Gestapo officer was nowhere in sight, having gone to the neighborhood bistro for lunch.

  “Go!” the stationmaster said. "Go ahead," he whispered. "Our cooperation with these Nazi bastards is only symbolic.”

  “You won’t get in trouble?”

  “Herr Arschloch went upstairs with a cheap whore,” the man said. “If he reports me for letting the train go, I report him for sodomy while on duty. Who’s in more trouble then, Mein Herr?”

  “Good question,” said Cochrane.

  Cochrane tipped his hat and re-boarded the train. When he arrived back at his seat, however, the soldiers were gone. His book on Wagner was still there but his Swiss newspaper had been confiscated. The train however steamed smoothly
northward toward the capital and nerve center of Nazi Germany.

  Chapter 27

  Stalingrad, Soviet Union

  January 1943

  In the brutal battle for Stalingrad, the stalemate had turned more than bitter for the Wehrmacht’s Sixth army, under the command of Field Marshall Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus. Months had worn on; the Germans were unable to cross the Don and Soviet resistance was relentless. The Soviet military had captured the airfields used by German forces, shattering the supply lines needed by any army.

  Now the Sixth army was running out of food and ammunition. Many had no clean water, rats were everywhere. Skilled Soviet snipers were active day and night. Hundreds of German soldiers had gone crazy and thousands were wounded. Evacuation was impossible. The Germans held one makeshift emergency air strip for evacuation and the Red Army was closing in on that. The situation was so desperate that many of Paulus’s young soldiers were standing on top of their trenches in order to be shot by Soviet rifle squads and put out of their misery.

  On the seventh of January 1943, General Konstantin Rokossovsky, commander of the Red Army on the Don front, called a ceasefire. He offered surrender terms that were more than reasonable to Paulus's men: normal rations, medical treatment for the ill and wounded, permission to retain their badges, decorations, uniforms and personal effects. As part of his communication, Rokossovsky advised Paulus that he was in an indefensible position. Paulus could surrender his command or have the quarter million men under his command annihilated by the building Soviet forces. Those were the two choices.

  General Paulus contacted Berlin and requested permission from Hitler to surrender. Hitler was inside his Wolf's Lair field headquarters near Rastenburg, East Prussia.

  "Capitulation is beyond consideration!” raged Hitler in the response that came back to Marshall Paulus. “The front with Russia is fifteen hundred kilometers. Every day that the Sixth Army holds out longer helps the whole front and draws away the Russian divisions from Ukraine and Georgia. Continue to resist!” The Wehrmacht High Command rejected the offer, also.

  Paulus messaged back that he would obey the orders of the High Command.

  Chapter 28

  Berlin

  March 1943

  There are men who return to cities where they have once lived, worked or had romances and find part of their youth flirting with them from the streets and buildings, the sights and the sounds.

  For Bill Cochrane, when he arrived at Berlin’s main railroad station, the Anhalter Bahnhof, for the first time in four years, this was far from the case. He had no sooner set foot on the train platform after arrival than a scene before him gave him a jolt of horror.

  Armed guards who appeared to be from an SS unit were herding about two dozen elderly men and women, each carrying one small bag, toward a train that was readying to depart. Cochrane stopped to light a cigarette. A smoke was his way of surreptitiously watching something. With a further surge of disgust he saw that all of the docile elderly people wore yellow stars. A few wore medals from the Great War. He assumed quickly and correctly that they were Jews being deported. The group passed within a few meters of him.

  Cochrane made his mental notes. He was on Platform One. As he smoked, he watched with peripheral vision and saw the destination of the captive voyagers. They guards prodded them onto the train on the next track over. A sign on the platform gave the destination as Theresienstadt, which Cochrane knew to be a town in what was then Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. It had once been a spa. Who knew what was going on there now?

  The guards took the old people to the end of the train. They pushed them into two specially consigned third class carriages. That the carriages had no windows.

  The final passenger was an old woman in a babushka who must have been at least seventy-five. She protested her departure, probably already knowing she would never return. She started screaming and crying, hysterically yelling something about wanting to see her daughter.

  One of the guards grabbed her by the arm and neck. Cochrane’s sense of decency told him to intercede. But he stopped himself. The guard shoved the old woman roughly into the last carriage. Another pushed her harder with the butt of his rifle and his foot. When she fought back they punched her, picked her up and threw her into the car. Cochrane’s final glimpse of her had her falling. The guards pulled the door shut and padlocked it from the outside. They laughed.

  He turned away in disgust. He felt helpless. He hated the feeling. How could he not? He continued to watch.

  The guard unit fell out of formation and came back along the platform, passing close to Cochrane. Cochrane counted twelve of them. Most of them were laughing or smiling. They appeared to be proud of their work, though one young man who appeared to be no more than eighteen looked confused and stricken, as if he had trouble comprehending what he had just done. Not wishing to attract attention to himself, Cochrane dropped his half-smoked cigarette onto the platform. He had trouble fighting back the urge to say something. He turned and walked toward the exit, a deep sense of revulsion in the pit of his stomach.

  Cochrane dropped his cigarette, turned to leave and slammed right into two large uniformed soldiers. One grabbed his arm. The other put a hand on his shoulder.

  “You are watching something?” one asked.

  Jolted, “Not at all,” Cochrane said.

  “Papers?” the first one asked.

  As Cochrane pulled his documents from his pocket, the whistle of the deportation train screeched. The train lurched and began to move. His insides felt as if they were ready to explode. One of the soldiers looked him up and down while the other studied his papers.

  “I have business with the Reich,” he said.

  “What sort?”

  “Financial.”

  Cochrane watched the train roll out of the station. No one else paid it any attention. From that, Cochrane concluded that what he had seen was an all-too-common occurrence. He drew a breath. He knew he would be unable to forget what he had just seen.

  The soldiers who had approached Cochrane stepped away for a moment. Then they came back to him. They returned his documents to him.

  “Be on your way,” one said.

  “Yes, sir,” Cochrane said.

  The American spy emerged onto the street and into a blast of frigid wind. He drew a breath. He pulled his hat, coat and scarf close to him. So far, the previous winter of 1941-1942 had been the coldest on record in Europe, but this winter of Forty-tw0 Forty-three wasn’t much warmer.

  There were shivering merchants with pushcarts outside the train station. They had trash cans burning trash for heat, creating a putrid layer of low smoke. Cochrane stopped at a cart and bought a pair of woolen gloves, then a second pair in case he lost the first. Carrying only one suitcase now, he continued on his way. Nazi slogans and victory posters were everywhere.

  Cochrane had liked Berlin when he had been there. He liked the theater, the clubs and the restaurants but had loathed the politics of the Third Reich. And gradually the city had changed under the Nazis. Theaters were censored, as were artists and writers. Most of his friends had either fled or been arrested. The spirit in the dining places had changed. He knew one reason: non-Aryan owners and waiters had been barred from doing business.

  Yes, the city bustled as he remembered it, though in a different way than he recalled. He recognized his old surroundings but sensed a subdued mood on the street, even though the city was bedecked with red and black banners with prominent swastikas.

  Men in uniforms were everywhere: soldiers, police and who knew what sort of security. He wondered if the news of the lack of victory in Russia contributed to the mood on the street. He wondered how many Gestapo were embedded in the crowds.

  Cochrane crossed the street from the train station. He knew there had been a row of hotels across from the Anhalter Bahnhof before the war. He had never stayed at any of these hotels. They were mostly for transits of a day or two. He entered one called the Zum Ritter and politely reg
istered under his false identity. His Canadian passport bore no extra scrutiny when he provided his travel permit simultaneously.

  The Zum Ritter was what he needed. A modest hotel where he had never been before and where there was almost no chance of running into anyone who had known him in the nineteen thirties. Nor did he need any mention of his real name.

  The hotel was a temporary but brief part of his plan. He would register there and leave his suitcase. He would go out and scout his assigned location. He had memorized the locations Dulles had given him and knew his way around the city enough to find each address.

  Once he was convinced that his back was clean and that the small apartment that the anti-Hitler underground had arranged was secure, he would move.

  Not before. In the meantime, he would observe.

  He unpacked in his room at the Zum Ritter. He moved some of his cash in Swiss francs and German marks to his billfold. He kept some small denomination of American currency also. It came in handy. Everyone carried some if they were lucky enough to have it. Even in Germany the black market was greased by American dollars and British pounds sterling.

  He felt naked without a weapon. He was anxious to obtain one. He tucked his passport into his inner pocket and proceeded. From a pants pocket, he found the smallest coin he had, a one Reichspfennig piece, a worthless piece of zinc complete with German eagle and swastika. Zinc had replaced bronze in the coinage because everything bronze had gone off to war. The coin was worth less than an American penny.

  He prepared to move around Berlin. As he departed from his room, he made sure no one was watching. Then he wedged the one-pfennig piece into the slim gap between the door to his room and the door frame. The precise spot was two hand lengths below the doorknob. If the coin wasn't exactly in the same place when he returned, he would know that his room had been entered.

  He went out late in the afternoon. He bought a street map and a small notebook from a kiosk. He sat in a sidewalk café and noted how often police came by and whether there was any activity on rooftops. He knew that Berlin had been the target of occasional air raids by the Royal Air Force and once in a while by American airplanes based in England. Cochrane looked to see where the air raid shelters were. If there was anything he dreaded more than being recognized or taken prisoner it was being bombed to death by “friendly” British or American aircraft.