Return to Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  Then she fell silent, looking at Cochrane. She pointed to his face where the debris had marked him. Instantly, he was aware that his left cheek was hot. It didn’t feel right. His hand went to it and came away with a sticky liquid that was dark in the very dim light.

  Blood.

  As the realization set in that he’d been cut by the debris, she pushed a handkerchief into his hand. He used it to mop the wound and stanch the bleeding.

  “English bastards!” someone cursed.

  Around the room where Cochrane sat was a vast network of abandoned tunnels from unfinished underground train routes. The tunnels were now safe-havens for thousands of Berlin's civilians as the British bombs fell from the sky. The tunnels were cold and damp. The air supply depleted quickly, making breathing difficult. The air vents clanged constantly. The overhead bombings shook the walls and floors even deep in the bunker.

  An hour passed. Then a second. More bombers were hitting the city. The local air raid wardens assembled on the first lower level. They took in everyone they could but allowed no one to leave. The ground, walls and ceiling continued to rumble. The sirens wailed intermittently, then came to full life again toward one PM.

  Toward five thirty PM, when it was almost dark outside, those who had sought safety and refuge were allowed to go to the street.

  Cochrane was one of the first civilians to emerge. On the street there was rubble everywhere. Halfway down the block, one building had been destroyed and the facades of three others had collapsed into the street. There were fires, large and small. There was crying and hysterical screaming.

  The woman who had offered him a handkerchief had found her husband. The man was dead a few meters from the entrance portal to the bunker. He had almost made it but then the left side of his body had been torn open by either a bomb or debris. He went to comfort her, but an ambulance and hearse crew arrived at the same moment that he spotted her. The crew attended to her.

  Blood, pieces of human bones and body parts were everywhere: on walls, on sidewalks, on cars and lampposts. Cochrane felt sick. He trudged back to the building where he was housed. Heinz stood at the door and gave him a look but said nothing

  He stepped inside. Greta was seated on a bench in the foyer, her head in her hands. He went to her. She muttered that two of her best friends had been killed, plus a child who had lived in this building on her way home from school.

  Cochrane touched her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I share your grief.”

  He paused. She said nothing.

  “I’m glad you’re alive,” he said.

  “I’m not sure I am,” she said.

  Greta looked up at Cochrane with red wet eyes. She shook her head and looked away. Heinz appeared and sat down next to her. Cochrane went to his small pair of rooms. The electricity was out.

  He lit and candle, sat on a hand wooden chair and lost himself in thought.

  When would it end, he asked himself just as Greta had asked him.

  There was no answer, other than the temporary one he found by drinking the last few gulps of whiskey that Colonel Sawyer had given him.

  Where did it all lead? Cochrane wondered and had no answer.

  The next day he learned more.

  The air raid, an attack of a large squadron of De Havilland Mosquitos flown by the Royal Air Force, had coordinated perfectly with the 11 AM speech by Goering, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Nazis' Machtergreifung. Goering was on the radio to a huge national audience when the bombs started coming out of the sky, many of them directed at him. He curtailed his remarks and ran for covered. Anyone listening could hear the explosions and the high anxiety in Goering’s voice.

  Then at 1 PM, the time of Goebbels’ speech, the second wave of RAF Mossies swept the German capital. Goebbels too ran for cover.

  Cochrane tried to process what he had experienced and what he was now seeing on the street. These were great propaganda raids, he reasoned, much like the Doolittle Raid on the Japanese home islands had done for boosting American morale in April 1942. But from what he was hearing, Berlin had taken enormous losses, with hundreds of dead civilians, thousands of wounded and even more left homeless. The attacks on Berlin were a severe embarrassment for the German leadership who had promised that there wouldn’t be any. But more immediately, there was the carnage on the street and parts of the city in ruins.

  Later in the day, Cochrane found a café that was open. He sat at a table and drank a bottled beer and a bratwurst of questionable freshness. Beside him at a neighboring table, there was a German woman of about fifty in a daze.

  Cochrane noticed there was blood on her clothing. With the intention of comforting her, he lured her into a conversation. It was a mistake.

  She rambled in a slow dazed voice.

  "I could hear the early warning siren, but I don't remember anything at all about the bombing raid,” she said slowly. “I passed out in a shelter. I thought I would suffocate. We took a direct hit from an English bomb. When I woke, it was dark. My sister’s family was lying near me and on top of me. I couldn't breathe.”

  She paused for more than a minute. Her voice wavered and she continued.

  “I asked my nephew who was lying on me to get off,” she said, “but he only groaned out loud and got heavier. Wherever I put my hand it was all slippery. I felt his heart stop. I felt him die. When I managed to lift myself up, I lit a match. The top of his head was blown off.”

  Cochrane opened his mouth to speak but couldn’t.

  The woman was expressionless. She got up from her table and walked slowly away. She moved like a ghost. Cochrane watched her until she was gone. Cochrane was so dazed by the experience that he began to question his own sanity. Was the woman a ghost? Had she actually been killed in the air raid and just not yet settled into an afterlife?

  He had never previously entertained such thoughts. Then he suddenly felt ill. He left money on the table, stood, walked a few meters, and felt worse. He turned and ducked into an alley, trying to keep his food down.

  This, too, was a mistake. In the alley were six dead bodies, two of them children. They were stacked up without body bags, waiting for removal. He turned away from them, leaned against a wobbly brick wall, braced himself and vomited.

  Later, when he returned to the building where he was staying, Heinz stopped him with more bad news. Horace, the block gauleiter, had been killed also.

  Chapter 36

  Stalingrad

  January 1943

  Winter mornings were normally dark and cold in the hours before dawn in the Soviet Union. But they were darker and colder than ever on the morning of January 31, 1943, the day after the British bombing of Berlin. The mission had taken eight hours round trip and the average age of a man on the attacking aircraft was twenty-two years old. In terms of the embarrassment to Hitler and the Nazi high command, the English boys had done themselves proud. In terms of the carnage on the ground in Berlin, well, war was war.

  Deep in Russian territory, the German commander, Friedrich Paulus was in a partitioned chamber in the cellar of a sturdy brick building that the Wehrmacht had requisitioned on the outskirts of Stalingrad. A fire burned in a corner, its smoke going up a makeshift chimney. Paulus was asleep that morning and in the midst of a depressing dream.

  There was a sharp knock on his door. He bolted upright in his bed and clutched his Mauser. Paulus awakened quickly into a reality darker than his dream.

  “Enter!” he said.

  He stood and trained his pistol at the doorway. He was ready to use it.

  His top military aide, a man named Wilhelm Adam, entered. Colonel Adam was a career soldier and had been awarded the Iron Cross as recently as December. Colonel Adam was also the Headquarters commander for the encircled Sixth Army.

  Adam handed Paulus a piece of paper. “Congratulations, sir,” he said.

  The paper confirmed to Paulus his recent promotion to Field Marshal.

  Paulus looked at the meaningless promotion w
ith no enthusiasm.

  “Thank you,” Paulus said. “Dismissed, if there’s nothing else.”

  “There is something else, sir,” Adam confirmed.

  “What would that be?” the Field Marshal asked.

  “I need to inform you, Herr Field Marshal,” said Adam, “that the Russians are at the door.”

  “The door to this building?” answered Paulus incredulously.

  “No, sir. The door to this chamber.”

  With these words, Adam opened the door behind him. A Soviet general named Kovalyov and his interpreter entered the room. The Soviet officer wished Paulus a good morning in Russian. He cheerfully added that every German in the building was now his prisoner. For that matter, the entire German Sixth Army was now his prisoner.

  Paulus considered the pistol in his hand. General Kovalyov eyed it, also. Wisely, Paulus placed the Mauser on a table.

  The Soviet general continued to speak. The interpreter passed along the message.

  “Prepare yourself for departure,” the interpreter conveyed. “We shall return for you at 0900. You will depart in your personal vehicle. That is all for now.”

  The Russians left the room. Colonel Adam recorded Paulus's new rank in his military document, stamped it with an official seal that bore a swastika, then threw the seal into the glowing fire.

  Soldiers of the Red Army closed the main entrance to the cellar and guarded it. An officer, the head of the guards, allowed Paulus and his driver to go outside and get the car ready at 0845. Coming out of the building into the cold gray day, Field Marshal Paulus stood dumbfounded at the surrealistic scene before him.

  Wehrmacht and Red Army soldiers, who just a few hours earlier had each other in their rifle sites, now stood quietly together in the yard. They were all armed, some with weapons in their hands, some with them over their shoulders. The German soldiers were ragged, tattered and bloodied in light coats against the brutal Russian winter. They looked like phantoms with hollow, unshaven cheeks. The Red Army warriors looked fresh. They were smiling and wore warm winter uniforms.

  At nine AM sharp the commander of the Soviet Sixty-fourth Army arrived to take the commander of the vanquished German Sixth Army and its staff towards the rear. Paulus removed his wedding ring and asked permission to have it sent back to his wife in Germany. Permission was granted. He would never again, however, see his wife.

  The Red Army took ninety-one thousand prisoners. Half of them would die on a forced march to prison camps in Siberia. Half of those would die in the camps. Eventually, six thousand would be repatriated to Germany in the 1950s.

  The German march towards the Volga had ended in catastrophe for the invaders. So ended the siege of Stalingrad.

  At the time, however, the more immediate repercussions, were just beginning.

  Chapter 37

  Berlin

  February 1943

  Two mornings after the January air raid on Berlin, Cochrane woke at dawn. He lay in bed for a half an hour thinking, listening to Berlin waking up on the other side of the walls of his building. Yes, he reminded himself. There was a war going on and he was in it, just like a soldier, except possibly even more so. He made a decision. He would start carrying a gun and hope he didn’t get stopped and searched.

  Toward seven forty-five AM, he emerged from his flat to the street, tired and hungry, and half in disbelief over what he had seen over the previous day. But there were plenty of reminders. The people who were still alive were cleaning up, just as the targeted English civilians had been cleaning up and putting one foot in front of the other in London for months on end. As he looked around, Cochrane asked himself again: what was the bombing accomplishing?

  He shuddered. Why did the world have to be such a violent unforgiving place? How had civilized nations devolved so quickly into barbarianism?

  Some random thoughts ran through his mind. In May of 1940, three German planes on a bombing mission that targeted a French airfield near Dijon went three hundred kilometers off course. But that didn’t stop them from finding a target that looked inviting. The German aircraft then bombed their own city of Freiburg am Bresgau, killing fifty-seven German inhabitants, including children.

  Hitler, seeing an opportunity not a disaster, and always comfortable with a lie that he could sell to his adoring public, blamed the civilian bombing on the British. The English had done it intentionally, he told the German people. He pledged a fivefold revenge against “the English murderers” and started to bomb English civilians. So began the Battle of Britain, the bombing campaign aimed at London. Eventually, the citizens of Berlin would have to pay the price.

  But the Nazi high command remained undeterred.

  "Do you want total war?" Goebbels shouted to a large crowd just hours after the January thirtieth bombing of Berlin. “Isn’t that what you asked for?”

  “Ja! Ja!” the crowd roared in response.

  Total war was what they had asked for and total war was what they were now getting.

  And so the war of terror from above was underway. The unwritten rules of war from World War one seemed forgotten when civilians were not bombed. The unarmed 'warriors' were therefore delivered up to the bombs, as required by the new rules of war, and the bombs shredded, entombed, suffocated or incinerated women and children, old people and infants, prisoners and hospital patients, friend and foe, National Socialists and camp detainees, guilty and innocent.

  Cochrane emerged from his small apartment. He found one store that was open. He stood in line for half an hour and bought bread and jam. He devoured it for breakfast.

  People on the street talked about getting to work and dealing with a tram system that had shut down. Increasingly now, the pressure was mounting on Cochrane to find a contact with Dulles’s sources. He had a choice between going back to the university area and try to find the Tavern Wittgenstein or return to the area near the Pariser Platz to find Fritz Stein.

  He chose the latter. He set out on foot.

  The British bombs had fallen haphazardly. Some blocks in the center of Berlin had been spared and some had been destroyed. If there had been a military target, Cochrane didn’t see it. What he did see was hunger and destitution and a landscape of rubble that was already crawling with rats. He also saw more body bags than he cared to tally.

  The stench of decay was already in the air. It might have stifled some human spirits, but the able-bodied Berliners continued to clean up. Many walked down the streets of their neighborhoods and passed the dreadful ruins of their stores and their neighbors’ homes. Perhaps, deep down, they had been expecting as much. Perhaps, deep down, most of them still believed in Hitler and awaited the miracle that he could pull out of his hat.

  Several blocks into his journey, Cochrane spotted an unusual sight: a working tram that had gone back into service, despite several broken windows. Thinking quickly, recalling the lines that had existed when he had previously been in Berlin, he realized this particular line would take him to the area of Humboldt University.

  He took the tram. It was slow. Twice the tram stopped because rubble needed to be cleared from the street. But people pitched in and cleared it, cursing the Allied bombers that had attacked the city.

  On the tram, Cochrane tuned into conversations among Berliners. No one was talking about anything except the bombings. Oddly, people discussed the event in dispassionate tones more usually reserved for Kaffee und Kuchen among close friends.

  Rumors abounded.

  Were some Berlin residents on the banks of the Havel machine gunned by low-flying British planes as some of the riders of the morning tram claimed? Another man on his way to work mentioned that a town north of the city had been completely obliterated. A woman said he received a call from his sister who said that her block had been destroyed. The most brutal forms of death were described. People who couldn’t find doctors went to the roofs of buildings and leaped to their deaths because of unendurable burns. There were mutterings about teenage girls being raped by Jews and Gypsi
es beneath the ruins.

  Cochrane arrived near the university around noon. The day was clear and cold, though little plumes of smoke rose from new ruins every few blocks.

  He looked again for the Tavern Wittgenstein. He searched the areas under the railroad bridge and wondered if the place still existed. All he knew was that he couldn’t find it.

  He wondered if he should make a bold move on Heinz, talk quietly and see if Dulles could be contacted. He put the idea on hold. The notion was risky. He made sure his gun was out of view, showing no telltale bulge beneath his coat. With a sigh of disgust, he gave up on the bar and set out on foot for a second visit to for Fritz Stein’s premises.

  Chapter 38

  Berlin

  February 1943

  Cochrane moved quickly through the entrance hall of Fritz Stein’s building. The door to the building custodian’s apartment was open a few inches as he passed. Cochrane saw the man loom into the doorway, then slide away and push his door shut. Cochrane heard latches fall and click into place. He heard a heavy chair being pulled into position across the door.

  Cochrane’s instincts told him to flee. He ignored them, increasingly desperate to make some sort of contact in Berlin. He took the stairs up to the third floor, stepping past the trash and the rats on the way.

  He arrived on the third floor and walked quickly toward Stein’s door, the one marked 302. He rapped sharply. There was no response. Cochrane tried the doorknob. The door swung open easily.

  Cochrane stepped in. Sensing disaster, Cochrane drew his Mauser.

  A moment passed before his eyes could focus and before he was able to process everything. The living area had been torn apart. The books from the bookcase had been ripped from the shelves and thrown to the floor. The single vase lay smashed in pieces. The plates and cutlery from the tiny kitchen were on the floor askew, the plates shattered. The single table had been turned over. One leg was broken. The chair was smashed. One window was broken. The ice box was overturned and opened.