Return to Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  Disappointed, Cochrane turned. He started toward his second address for the morning.

  The next destination was a street named Freiburgstrasse not far from the central train station. Cochrane went there by tram and on foot. He looked for the motor car that Dulles had mentioned but didn’t see it or anything resembling it.

  “We have a contact who parks his car on that block. It’s an Adler Standard from 1930. Beaten up. License plate ends in ‘99’. Leave a note asking if he wants to sell it. Use the workname you’re going under,” Dulles had said.

  So much wasted effort. A third of the block was in rubble. The rest of the block was without electricity. Damage from the November bombing, Cochrane guessed, yet to be repaired. He had already heard some stories: a few stray bombs had fallen far off their intended targets – or had been dumped by English pilots overanxious to get out of the battle zone. There were only three cars parked on the block, and none was an Adler Standard.

  One, a Mercedes, was a burned out chassis. The parts of it that hadn’t been incinerated had been stripped. One was a Volkswagen with a crushed roof and shattered windows. It lay flat on the ground on its rims. All four tires were long gone.

  The other vehicle was an old Ford with a tiny Third Reich flag on its front right bumper. It appeared that this vehicle still functioned. Very possibly, it belonged to the Nazi gauleiter, the block captain. Cochrane strolled too close to it and soon had an answer to his conjecture about the car’s ownership.

  In his peripheral vision, Cochrane saw a window shade jerk open in a street level apartment. A man of about fifty, stout with massive arms, broad shoulders and a black armband appeared in the window. The arms were folded and the man glared at Cochrane.

  Cochrane didn’t acknowledge the man. He quickly turned and vanished from the street, careful not to slip on the light accumulation of fresh snow.

  He turned the corner sharply. He broke into a quick jog. Conveniently, at the next corner a tram was just pulling away from a curb. He hopped on it, carefully surveying whether anyone had followed him on. He paid the conductor and watched the street.

  No one had followed. His back was clean.

  Thank God for small stuff. He felt better about things, with the exception of the departed Rhine maidens, whom he missed.

  Chapter 33

  Berlin

  January 1943

  Cochrane took the streetcar five blocks, got off, walked three blocks to enter the route of another streetcar, boarded that one and rode for two blocks. He stepped off a block before his address, 36 Kittelstrasse, a few streets north of Pariser Platz.

  This neighborhood was more middle class than the previous ones. From the way the neighborhood was decorated, he could tell that there had been a Nazi rally there within the last few days, if not the last day or two. There were flags in store windows and on lamp posts. As he walked toward his destination, he saw copies of the unavoidable Der Sturmer on each corner, feeding their malicious fables to anyone dumb enough to digest them.

  Cochrane stopped to look at the front page, not because one ounce of him flirted with agreement with any of this trash, but because it was always good to know what the enemy was saying and thinking. Even the lies promulgated by a notoriously dishonest government could suggest what was going on behind the scenes.

  There were special bulletin boards that displayed the paper.

  “Whoever knows a Jew knows the devil,” proclaimed one article.

  “The Jews are our saboteurs,” proclaimed another.

  A smaller article on the same page, also from Der Sturmer, told of a recent incident in Latvia. A heroic German death squad of ten had been captured by a Latvian defense militia and had been summarily been executed by a Communist-Jewish rifle squad.

  “Ten more martyrs for National Socialism!” proclaimed the article. “The international Jewish rabble led by Roosevelt, Churchill and the Elders of Zion provokes us, but we are a nation of Aryan brothers and sisters! We will triumph for our fallen comrades!”

  “Of course ‘we’ will,” Cochrane muttered under his breath.

  He continued on his way, changing direction twice to watch his back before presenting himself at the pre-assigned address at 36 Kittelstrasse.

  The building at was sandstone and bleak.

  Two front windows to the street were nailed in place with heavy wooden shutters. The front door was heavy and open. Cochrane looked to upper levels of the building. There were four floors above street level. Half the shutters were closed. Most were in disarray. One was linked to the old building with just one hinge, ready to crash to the sidewalk in the next stiff breeze.

  Cochrane saw no bomb damage on the block. He stepped into the building.

  The lobby was dingy, ill lit and needed to be swept. There was an old elevator behind a grate, a poster with a picture of a handsome uniformed Hitler, a Hitler youth calendar from 1940, and a door to a small apartment that bore a sign indicating that the caretaker lived within.

  The door was half open. Cochrane went to it and knocked.

  The door slid further open in response.

  A graying battered man sitting on a sofa, turned, got up, looked critically at Cochrane and walked to him. The man walked with a cane, his right knee buckling with each step.

  “What?” he asked as he neared.

  “I’m looking for a man named Fritz Stein,” Cochrane said. “I’m told he lives here.”

  “Who tells you something like that?” the man asked, suspicious.

  “Mutual friends.”

  “Stein has friends?” the man laughed. “If he has friends, his friends should give him some money. Then he could pay his rent.”

  “Everyone has friends,” Cochrane said, trying to keep things as light as possible. “You. Me? Maybe even Stein.”

  “He lives in Room 302,” the man said. “I haven’t seen Stein for several days,” he said. “You can knock. I don’t care.”

  “Danke schön,” said Cochrane.

  The small rusting elevator must have been forty years old. It sat like an antique cage behind the metal grate.

  “Is it safe to ride the elevator or should I take the steps?” Cochrane asked.

  The old man shrugged. “Everyone who’s gone up has come back down. So far. Take your choice. Easier to go up than to come down. Take your chances. I don’t give a crap.”

  At the caretaker’s doorway, just behind him, a large woman appeared with two crutches. She wore a heavy coat that was worn and soiled. Her hair was wrapped in a scarf. She watched the proceedings critically but kept silent.

  At one moment, her gaze rose and crashed into Cochrane’s eyes. As she leaned on her left crutch, her appraisal of him was chilly. There was something wrong with her. It took a moment, but Cochrane realized that one eye was a fake. It wouldn’t focus, much less move.

  “I’ll try the elevator,” Cochrane said.

  The woman muttered something guttural that he couldn’t catch. It sounded as if her teeth were missing.

  Cochrane stepped into the elevator and closed the double grates. He pressed the button for the third floor. The lift gave a wicked shudder and started to ascend.

  Looking down as the elevator struggled to rise, Cochrane saw the old man – probably a World War One veteran - and his invalid wife disappear between his feet.

  The lift rose grudgingly. There was no light. The gears screeched. The grill rattled like frozen branches in a forest. It groaned its way to the third landing. Cochrane put his hand on the gate handle to allow himself to step out. The mechanism jammed. He forced it. The elevator shuddered again and the door opened. He stepped out.

  “What a ride,” he thought.

  Cochrane stepped through the hallway. He felt a layer of grit under his shoes. Several doors had small German flags pasted to them, bold and red and with the swastika. He found Room 302. That door had the Nazi flag also.

  He knocked.

  There was no answer. Cochrane tried the doorknob. It turned slight
ly, then caught. He knocked again. No response. He tried the knob again, more forcibly this time, and it gave way with a snap. He pushed the door open.

  “Hello?” he called in German. “ Hallo? Ist jemand zuhause?” Anyone home?

  No answer.

  Cochrane stepped into the room, leaving the door open a quarter of the way behind him. The furnishings were simple. There was a table with a wooden chair, an ice box, and a small loveseat that was badly worn and covered with a blanket. A bare bulb was at the center of the ceiling. A chain hung from it for turning it on or off. Cochrane gently pulled the chain. It responded. The bulb was dim but the electricity was connected.

  He walked to the ice box and found nothing in it. There were some plates in the sink that hadn’t been washed. A small cloud of flies hovered. On a counter near a sink there was a paper bag. There were two apples in it. They hadn’t rotted. Someone had been here recently.

  Cochrane moved to the door to the next room, a narrow sleeping alcove with no light, not knowing what to expect, but fearing the worst. He glanced in. He saw no one, dead or alive, just a narrow unmade bed and a night table next to it with a clock. He walked to the clock. It was ticking. Someone had wound it, most likely within the last day. Most of these German clocks worked for thirty six hours.

  There was a closet. The door was half open. He pulled it all the way open. Two shirts, a pair of pants. Another heavy coat. No dead body. He was relieved.

  He considered leaving a note for Stein but decided against it.

  He retreated from the apartment and closed the door. He found the stairs and chose not to risk the elevator again. The staircase was unlit. When he rounded the first corner he found the steps were broken and blocked with an accumulation of garbage.

  The garbage rustled. Rats.

  He returned to the elevator, stepped in and took it back to the ground level. It landed with a thud and a clank. Cochrane pushed his way out. The caretaker hadn’t moved. The woman with crutches remained at the door. They stood in silence. The elevator door clanked shut with a predictable clatter.

  “You might want to oil this thing, don’t you think?” Cochrane said. “Before it stalls with someone in it.”

  “I keep requesting,” the caretaker said. “No one does nothing. All the oil is somewhere else.”

  “I imagine it is,” Cochrane said. “A small sacrifice to combat Bolshevism.”

  The old man was about to say something in response, then thought better of it. The woman with the crutches watched him through one narrowed eye, as if she knew there was something suspicious about Cochrane but couldn’t decide what. For whatever reason, they just plain didn’t like him. He assumed he wasn’t German enough.

  Cochrane tipped his hat. He walked to the front door, down the two transom steps to the sidewalk, and walked smack into two better dressed men in overcoats who smoked and talked. But their conversation crashed into silence as soon as they saw him. They turned away from him in unison the second their eyes met.

  Cochrane calculated quickly and felt a surge of fear. The men had new hats, clean coats and fresh shoes. They hadn’t been there when he had entered. They were police or Gestapo.

  Were they there for him or were they there for Stein? Or a lucky third party? Cochrane was not about to inquire. Fifty-fifty it was he who was in the cross hairs.

  Cochrane continued on his way, half expecting to feel a hand on his arm at any moment, his heartbeat quickening. When he turned the first corner, he again accelerated his pace. Fortunately the street was crowded. He removed his hat to make it harder to be spotted. The snow was helpful also.

  He continued quickly around two corners, keeping an eye out for tiny partnerships of two or three men – a Gestapo trademark – in overcoats, gloves and hats.

  There was now snow on most of the sidewalks. The weather changed the pace at which he needed to move. Traffic was creeping. People moved faster and everyone was wearing extra layers.

  Cochrane stopped quickly at a street vendor. He bought a gray wool cap and pulled it over his head. He bought a dark green scarf from the same man. He re-bundled himself and continued in a zigzag pattern through several blocks. Then he was lucky enough to come out on a block of Wilhelm Strasse south of Unter den Linden.

  He took a minor detour since he was in Der Mitte. He searched again for a Tavern Wittgenstein. Again, futility. He might as well have been searching for the gold at the bottom of the Rhine. Where, he wondered with irony, were the Rhine maidens when he needed them? Surely they would have known their way around the capital.

  He boarded a streetcar and escaped the neighborhood, not knowing when or if he would dare return.

  Chapter 34

  Stalingrad, Soviet Union

  January 1943

  During the first weeks of January the Wehrmacht had continued to hold their emergency airstrip on the outskirts of Stalingrad. Then a renewed Soviet offensive overran the airstrip in Stalingrad in the closing days of January. On the next day, Soviet commander General Konstantin Rokossovsky again offered Field Marshal Paulus, whose Sixth Army was now sealed off from escape, a chance to surrender.

  Paulus radioed Hitler again. He spoke personally with Hitler. Members of the Wehrmacht High Command stood by in Hitler’s bunker. Paulus stressed that his troops in Russia were without ammunition or food. He explained that he was no longer able to lead them because there was nowhere to go.

  “I also have nearly twenty thousand severely wounded men or men in immediate need of medical attention,” he said. “They are dying by the minute.”

  “Then they will die as founding heroes of the Thousand Years Reich!” Hitler screeched into the phone. Once again, the Fuehrer demanded that Paulus hold the stalemate at Stalingrad and fight to the death.

  The call ended.

  In Berlin, a furious Hitler turned to his assembled generals. Why was it, he demanded, that no one was as noble as he, the genius and infallible leader? “This Paulus is a man who sees fifty to sixty thousand of his soldiers fighting bravely to the end. How can he even talk of surrender himself to the Bolsheviks?”

  The question may or may not have been rhetorical, but no general was foolish enough to respond. The question hung in the room.

  The situation festered for four days.

  Another call came to Berlin. Paulus now informed Hitler that his men were only hours from collapse.

  Hitler, seemingly estranged from reality, replied with an avalanche of field promotions to Paulus and his officers to build up their spirits. Most significantly, he promoted Paulus to Generalfeldmarschall, papers to follow by military courier. In promoting him, Hitler also explained that there was no known record of a Prussian or German field marshal ever having surrendered.

  The message was clear. The Sixth Army was to hold its ground fight until their final bullets had been fired and their positions had been overrun. And Paulus was to put his pistol to his head and commit suicide. Hitler implied that if Paulus allowed himself to be taken alive, he would shame Germany's military history.

  Paulus set down his phone, knowing one way or another, the end was near. A Roman Catholic, he was morally opposed to taking his own life.

  He turned to his aid, who had heard the message from Berlin.

  “What will you do, sir?” the aid asked.

  “I have no idea what I will do,” Paulus said calmly. “But I have no intention whatsoever of shooting myself for this Bohemian peasant corporal."

  Chapter 35

  Berlin

  January 1942

  Air raid sirens began wailing in Berlin at 10:28 AM.

  Cochrane was on the street, about to do another morning of searching for his contacts in Berlin and for the Tavern Wittgenstein, when all hell broke loose from above. He ran toward the bunker that Heinz and Greta had shown him. As he ran, he could hear the drone of oncoming planes and then the thunderous pounding of anti-aircraft guns on the perimeter of the city. Other guns were on rooftops within the city. Bombs began to fall, first d
istantly, then closer, and then even closer.

  The noise was deafening.

  A final bomb exploded a hundred meters down the street. It rattled Cochrane’s teeth as he surged with a terrified crowd into the portals of the bunker, then into the bunker and then down a flight of steps. There was electricity and dim lighting. Then the lights flickered and were gone. Darkness followed.

  Cochrane moved down two flights of stairs. Fluorescent paint on the walls substituted for a lighting system. Everything else was pitch black. Cochrane went through several doors but had no desire to go deeper in the event of a cave-in. Some rooms were filled with terrified people huddled in small pockets of light punctuated by the occasional lit match.

  Children screamed. Adults cried. Old people groaned. Grown men cursed.

  A few people had already been injured, some badly, either from flying pieces of nearby buildings or from being trampled getting to safely. No doctors were apparent.

  Just before Cochrane had entered the shelter, a bomb had hit a building on the next block, sending a shower of heavy debris, sharp pieces of sandstone and plaster, down on the street where the bunker was located. Some of it had rained down on Cochrane.

  His eyes adjusted. There was some light but it was very dim.

  A middle aged German woman staggered into his room and looked for a place to sit. There wasn’t a place. Cochrane reached forward and guided her by the wrist. The room was loud with agitated terrified voices. Up at street level, the British bombs were pounding the German capital.

  Cochrane indicated that the German woman should take his seat. She accepted but could barely sit. She was sobbing and barely coherent. She had been separated from her husband in running to the shelter, she said. He was older and slow, she said. He had suffered a shattered hip in the last world war and she was terrified he wouldn’t survive this one. He had forced her to run on ahead.