by Noel Hynd
He had already heard stories about spies behind the lines “neutralized” by their own planes. The potential of adding to the statistics on the subject was not something to which he wished to contribute.
Above all, he concluded that his first instinct was the best one: get in and out of Berlin as quickly as possible, get whatever it was he was here for and make the trek back to Switzerland.
He left the café.
It was his plan to return to the hotel, wash, change clothes and have a modest dinner. Daylight was dying. He decided to postpone his visit to the apartment address until the next day. Speed was essential in this mission but caution trumped speed. He needed to be patient.
As he walked back to the hotel however, he noticed a small crowd on the corner. He walked to it.
As he drew closer, he realized that what had drawn the crowd was the latest edition of Der Sturmer, a weekly tabloid-format newspaper of public disinformation that was devoured edition by edition by those who supported Hitler. It was a significant instrument of Nazi propaganda and was vehemently anti-Semitic. The paper was published privately by a vile little man named Julius Streicher. The paper did not display the Nazi party swastika in its logo, but everyone knew what it was. The billboard heading read, Mit der Sturmer gegen Juda: “With the Stürmer against Judea.”
Copies of Der Stürmer were displayed in prominent Nazi-red display boxes called Stürmerkasten throughout the Third Reich. The display boxes allowed its fictions to reach those brain-dead readers who either did not have time to read a daily newspaper or could not afford the expense. All one needed was a low enough intellect to believe a word that was in the rag.
Cochrane knew all about the publisher, Julius Streicher. Streicher was a virulent anti-Semite and prominent member of the Nazi Party. He had been prominent in Nazi circles during Cochrane’s first visit to the city. Der Stürmer was a sleezy central element of the Nazi propaganda machine.
The paper had an audience of half a million true believers every day. The newspaper had originated at Nuremberg during Adolf Hitler's rise to power. The first copy had been published in 1923. Der Stürmer’s circulation grew over time, the degree of his outright lies and conspiracy theories intensifying over the years.
The paper was the mouthpiece for the downtrodden angry ignorant little man in the street. It ran daily caricatures of Jews and accusations that Jewish people used the blood of Christians in religious rituals. It also dealt in sexually explicit, anti-Catholic, anti-Communist, and anti-monarchist propaganda.
As early as 1933, Streicher had been calling for the extermination of the Jews of Europe. He had given vicious fringe ideas a pseudo-respectability by putting them in print. Now his ideas were part of the mainstream of German public thought, further legitimized by a leader who embraced and expounded them. With the war going, Streicher regularly attacked recent immigrants and intellectuals. His readers cheered him on.
From the late 1920s, Julius Streicher's broadsheet had been so strident that it was even an embarrassment for the Nazi party. In 1936, the sale of the Der Stürmer in Berlin was restricted during the Olympic Games, rather than give visitors too good a look at what was going on in the Reich. Joseph Goebbels tried to outlaw the newspaper in 1938. Hermann Göring, whom Der Sturmer had libeled earlier in his career, banned Der Stürmer in all of his departments. Göring had a hatred of the paper after it published a completely fallacious article alleging that his daughter Edda had been conceived through artificial insemination. It was only through Hitler's intervention that Streicher was spared any punishment.
As Cochrane looked at the posted newspaper in revulsion, a young woman in her early twenties made a strange gesture at the displayed paper. Then she saw Cochrane and gave him a doubletake. At first, he feared she was someone he knew. But it wasn't. She turned and quickly stepped away.
As Cochrane moved into the small assemblage of a half dozen people in front of him, his eyes settled on a wet portion of that article. It took him a moment to realize what he was seeing and had seen. Someone had spit at the article and the paper was still wet from saliva. The spit was fresh. He guessed it was the young woman whom he had surprised and who had hurried away.
He looked at the article. It was another bit of rabid anti-Semitism, complete with a screaming headline and cartoonish illustrations. It was packed with racist caricatures and driven by a semi-pornographic story of a hairy apelike Jewish man seducing a virginal German girl. Cochrane bailed on the article after three paragraphs
Cochrane felt like spitting also. He turned away. He knew the direction to his assigned rooming house. He began to walk, circling twice en route to see if he could catch any followers, turning suddenly three times to smoke out any pavement teams. He went in and out of a café, reversed directions and was convinced his back was clean.
He continued on to a building at 125, Friedrichshain which was in the Kreuzberg neighborhood. The street was a narrow collection of shops, private houses and apartment buildings, middle class to working class. He did not know the neighborhood well but had no trouble orienting himself.
He found the specific location assigned by Dulles. By then it was dark. The instructions he had memorized called for him to go to that location during daylight hours and find the small apartment number 110 on the ground floor. A key would be under a flowerpot by the door. A local custodian would remove the key overnight so no intruder could take it.
Cochrane bought a small bottle of German brandy and pocketed it. He returned to the hotel, watching his back the entire time.
His spirits were buoyed by not being able to discern a shadow behind him. He took dinner early in the hotel refectory, then repaired to his assigned room. He lit a dim lamp, by which he read the opening thirty pages of Vol de Nuit. He took out his set of domino tiles and played two solitaire games.
Then he slept.
Chapter 29
Berlin
January 1943
The next afternoon, Bill Cochrane found his way back to 125, Friedrichshain.
He found the key under the flowerpot outside the door to the unit. The key was to a small apartment on the ground floor on the side of a brick building. There were stairs at the rear of the entrance foyer, and two apartments on the ground floor.
He took the key and entered the apartment. The flat was narrow, cramped and had a musty smell. The paint on the wall was chipped and stained. There had been water leakage from above. He wondered who had used the unit previously. There was a small kitchen area, a sitting room and a sleeping alcove. There was one window which had bars. It looked out onto an alley. The unit had electricity, though there was also a supply of candles, matches and two small gas lamps. It was not homey. It was gritty and rough edged: all the more reason to complete his assignment and get out of Berlin and Germany.
He inspected it carefully and departed. He wanted to keep taking different routes to throw off anyone who might follow. He decided to look for the Tavern Wittgenstein that Dulles had mentioned, the venue that might be a sub rosa meeting place for other people working for Dulles.
He took the tram to the center of the city, getting off a block from Humboldt University.
Humboldt, like many of the German universities, had once been one of the finest in the world. The Nazis had done their best to destroy the learning systems in the country, always a goal of blind nationalists who never like the free exchange of knowledge. Men with solid academic credentials in the leadership positions of the high academies had been replaced by bigoted shills and ignoramuses with ranks in the SS. It had gone that way in Berlin, Munich, Heidelberg, Bremen and every other German city, much as it also had in Fascist Italy and Francoist Spain. In Germany, revered seats of learning and enlightenment had been turned into branch outposts of the Ministry of Propaganda, much to the delight of all those who hated learning and intellectualism.
On his way to the center of Berlin, Cochrane saw neighborhoods that had been reduced to rubble. The British had started bombing Berlin, t
hough most of the British bombs were still falling on Bremen, the port in the North Sea, to inhibit submarine activity. Bombing Berlin had proved difficult so far.
The tram dropped him the Mitte district in the center of Berlin. He drew a breath. He could not possibly have been in more dangerous territory as a spy. Something about having his feet on the ground in this place, not far from the Reichstag, not far from the Brandenburg Gate, a stone’s throw from Gestapo Headquarters, turned his stomach to water. It was like a special form of stage fright – he had done some acting in Provincetown, Massachusetts as a much younger man – that incapacitates even the most skilled of information gatherers from time to time. He was starting to feel it. It told him to back up and walk away.
He blanked for a moment. He froze. His nervous system stalled. It was two or three seconds at most but it felt like four hours. Then he realized was staring down the wide boulevard and looking directly at the main building of what had many times been referred to as “the mother of all modern universities.” He also saw a railroad bridge which ran close by the Humboldt academic buildings.
He drew a breath and kicked himself back in gear.
He chose – foolishly perhaps – to go forward. He had come this far. He waited for traffic, crossed the street and fell into a comfortable stride.
He scoured the neighborhood, paying special attention to bars located by or under the bridge, as Dulles had suggested. He checked the names. He found nothing called Tavern Wittgenstein. What was he missing? What was wrong?
There was no one he could trust enough to ask. Asking questions would only draw suspicion to himself. Maybe later if he got desperate. After an hour, he gave up.
He ducked into a doorway and pulled his map from his coat pocket. He quickly mastered the return route by foot and tram.
It took him forty-five minutes to get back to the Zum Ritter. The coin he had left in the doorway was still in place. That calmed him.
He gathered his baggage, paid his bill and took another tram back to Kreuzberg, walking the final block, covering his back. He still detected no surveillance, though he also knew it could be an illusion.
He settled into his small flat.
There was an eight PM curfew in the neighborhood, so he was sure to have a light dinner in a wine bar adjacent to his temporary new home. He returned to his flat by seven thirty, read for a while, played a few solitaire games of dominos, spent too much time worrying about Laura in New York, fought of an intense spasm of loneliness and depression and then slept.
Chapter 30
Berlin
January 1943
At his new location, he met his neighbors the next afternoon, the people who lived in the other unit on the first floor. The man was named Heinz Kessler. He worked as a welder in a bicycle factory, he said when they met. Heinz was also the air raid warden for the building and did some chores around the building for a few dollars less in monthly rent. Heinz had wife. She was a talkative bookish woman named Greta. She was friendly and was quick to announce that she had a job as a seamstress in a factory that made military clothing.
She was proud of her work. She stitched uniforms for the men in the Luftwaffe. Her skills focused on the gray greatcoats with embroidered cuffs that the officers wore.
A few years earlier, she had worked at Peek & Cloppenburg, a well-known department store in Berlin, she said. But things had changed, not necessarily for the better, though she did say that she was happy to have food and work and a place to live.
Greta and Heinz invited their new neighbor to join them at a small beer garden halfway down the block. Cochrane closed his new residence and used another one pfennig coin to monitor his security. He joined Heinz and Greta in the beer garden. For a few moments he felt as if it were 1937 all over again and he hadn’t made any enemies in Berlin, only friends.
Cochrane gave them his fake name and identity, however, and they had no reason to question it. They met at the beer garden at half past five in the afternoon. The day had remained dull and gray. But what further impressed Cochrane – what he had not anticipated - was that from what he could see, everyone was in the heart of a nation involved in a savage war, and everyone was going about their daily business, even the people who spit at the posted editions of Der Sturmer.
“So it’s a good place to work?” Cochrane asked Greta. “The factory that makes the coats?”
She said it was. She mentioned how things were scarce, despite what people said on the official radio. For part of the previous winter she had been without an overcoat. But her boss, Herr Braun, had given her some heavy black woolen fabric used for making Panzer tank division uniforms.
“As part of your apprenticeship,” he had said. “Let’s see if you can make an overcoat from scratch. Make it to your size. It’s your training assignment, then keep it.”
She did, and she was wearing it as they spoke.
“Do you read, Herr Stykowski?” she asked.
“Do I know how to read?” Cochrane asked in mind surprise.
“My wife is asking you if you like books,” Heinz interjected indulgently as he inhaled deeply on a cigarette.
“Oh,” Cochrane said with a laugh. “Yes, of course. I read and I do like books. Why?”
Greta leaned forward. “My grandmother was from Estonia,” she said. “I still read in Russian. You’re not supposed to have Russian books in Germany, but I have a few. Maybe six. Classics. Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky and Gogol. I’m not a defeatist, you understand. Hitler is a great leader doing great things. But I read in that language. Russian. It might make me useful to the Reich at some point in the future.”
“What she means is if the Red Army arrives in Berlin,” Heinz said, “she thinks she’ll be able to reason with the soldiers.”
Greta gave her husband a playful shove. Cochrane wasn’t sure if Heinz’s remark had been meant as a joke. Meanwhile Greta moved to the point of what she had to say. She had recently re-read The Overcoat, by Nikolai Gogol. In the story the main character, Akaky Akakievich is a put-upon clerk in a government office. He spends all his money on a new overcoat which is stolen. Further humiliations follow as he tries to find the coat.
“Because the man does not have the coat,” Greta recalled, “Akaky dies of pneumonia. Soon after, there are reports of his ghost haunting St. Petersburg, stealing coats from others.” She laughed. “Do you know the story?”
“I do know it,” Cochrane answered.
As she spoked, Cochrane watched Heinz’s brown cigarette slowly burning between his stained fingers. Her husband was indulging the conversation but had disengaged from it. Without warning, he stood up without speaking, leaving behind half a glass of pilsner. He left the table and walked back toward their building. He limped badly. Cochrane watched him go, wondering what was going on.
“He’ll be back,” Greta said, explaining it away. “He has a weak bladder. He goes to urinate two dozen times a day. He also doesn’t like this story. How do you know Gogol’s work?” she asked.
“I read it in university in Canada,” he said.
“They read Russian books in Canada?”
“Some do. Some don’t.”
“Why?”
“Some people choose to study world literature.”
“Oh. I read it with friends before the war, the story by Gogol,” she said. “We had a discussion group in a public konditorei. Some of us asked questions. Was the story about bureaucrats? About human need? Was it a satire, or a tragedy? But then an old man sitting at a nearby table got up and walked over and scolded us. He was wearing a merit medal from the Great War. The Order of the Red Eagle. It shocked us. Both that he was there, and that he had such a high award. We hadn’t seen him. He just appeared. We were all a little shocked. He scolded us all for missing the point.
“’Ghosts are very real,’ he said. ‘None of you understood the story. The story was about a real ghost.’ The old man said that he knew that ghosts were real because for years he had been in the Great War and still s
aw many of his friends who had been killed. Then we blinked and he wasn’t there anymore. But we all saw him. What do you think?”
“I wouldn’t know what to say to that,” Cochrane said. For a moment, the comic hijinks of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit passed through his mind. They triggered thoughts of Laura back in New York. Then those thoughts were gone and he was back to Berlin
He tried to change to subject. “Tell me more about where you work,” he said. “The factory.”
“Why?”
“I’m curious.”
“Curious why?”
“As a new friend,” Cochrane lied.
She rambled through several details. Her factory was in the Hackesche Höfe in Mitte, which Cochrane recalled as the heart of Berlin's Jewish district. Down the street from where she worked, Greta volunteered, was a nursing home in the Grosse Hamburger Strasse. It served as a collection center for Jewish people who were being relocated. Nazi terminology slithered softly through her lips.
"Berlin has already Judenrein,” she said, meaning ‘cleansed of Jews’.
“It is a nicer city,” she continued. “There were some Jewish girls in my school classes but mostly they are all gone. Jews all over town are being taken away, including the tailor, Goldberg, across the street. He was rounded up five days ago.” She shrugged. “There were some Jewish girls in my class at school in 1933 but by the time I finished school in 1936, they were all gone. When I asked my mother where they went. She said she didn’t know but wherever it was, the Jews had brought it on themselves.”