Return to Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  “Herr Stein?” he asked aloud.

  He didn’t expect a response, which was fortunate: none came.

  He moved quickly to the sleeping room and stopped short. He gagged in disgust. A man, presumably Stein, was hanging in a noose that was part of a heavy rope that had been thrown over a closet door. Cochrane gagged. The victim’s face was blue and there was an expression of agony remaining.

  Suicide or murder? Cochrane stepped closer.

  There was no chair to have kicked away. There were marks on the body. The dead man’s clothing was torn. There had been a struggle. Cochrane knew from his days as an FBI special agent on assignment what to look for next.

  He reached to the hanging man’s hands. Sure enough, there was blood and skin under the nails. The victim had fought the men who had come to kill him but they had overpowered him.

  “Jesus…” Cochrane muttered.

  He put his pistol away. He had just tucked it securely into the holster on his belt when he heard the distance wail of sirens. At first he thought it was another air raid, but then another moment passed and he realized that the two sirens were very different. And in that immeasurably short space of time, he knew he was as good as captured. The sirens drew near and stopped.

  He turned from the sleeping room, bolted through the living area and went to the hallway outside the apartment. The stairs continued upwards but he reckoned he would corner himself and die in a shootout. He ran to the stairs that led downward but could already hear several voices shouting on the ground floor. The surly superintendent was yelling that the foreigner had come again and was upstairs.

  Cochrane looked for any escape route. The only thing he saw was a window that faced the rear of the building. He went to it. It was closed and locked. He drew his pistol and smashed the glass. The pane fell out. He could hear a commotion on the staircase. The garbage that littered the stairs was delaying the police. For that he was thankful.

  He looked out the window. The drop was about forty feet. He would break an ankle or leg and be captured. He looked each way. There was an alley below and it led to open streets on both sides. No one was covering either exit.

  To his left there was a drainpipe which led from a rooftop gutter. It was his only chance. He pulled on his gloves. He pulled himself through the shattered windowpane. He managed to grip the pipe with one hand. He leaned forward, prayed to God Almighty, lunged and caught it with his other hand. It was cold but stable.

  The pipe swayed. Gravity pulled him downward. His grip slid on the pipe but eased him fifteen feet closer to the alley. He tightened his grip and slowed the descent to a stop. Then he released, eased down another ten or twelve feet, then a final five and let go.

  He braced himself. He softened his fall by keeping his knees agile and bent. He hit the ground, fell and got to his feet. Remarkably, he was still alive and not injured.

  He looked each way, orienting himself in a narrow alley with brick walls and garbage cans. He wanted no part of the front of the building where police cars were assembled. He headed away, then heard a voice from above yelling, “Halt!”

  He kept going. There was a gunshot from above that smashed into the bricks near him. Then a second shot that missed him by six or seven feet.

  He whirled and pressed himself against the wall of Stein’s building. He drew his Mauser, looked upwards and saw a man in a black coat pointing a pistol at him from the same window from which he had escaped from.

  The man was trying to get a clean shot. Cochrane raised his pistol and launched a barrage of three shots at the window. The man above him howled and his gun flew wildly from his hand. Cochrane figured one of his shots had hit the man.

  Cochrane turned and ran down the alley. He turned away from the building, pushed his way threw a crown of pedestrians, weaved through some pushcarts and cut his pace to a quick walk.

  He had escaped the immediate premises. But for how long?

  There was a shopping district nearby. Cochrane quickstepped through it. He knew that police would floor the area. They were after him and there were no two ways about it. He was blown, his identity was known and his head was destined for a guillotine if he was captured. He could not imagine it turning out any differently.

  As he moved and distanced himself from Stein’s building, he scanned every store and shop that he passed. Finally he made his way to Leipziger Platz and found what he needed most. A huge department store.

  The establishment had once been known as the Wertheim store. It had been the flagship of the largest department store chain in Berlin. This particular location had once the biggest department store in Europe during its glory days of the 1920s and early 1930s. The company had been victimized by the Nazi Aryanization policies in the 1930s. The new restrictive laws forced Jewish employees from their jobs, both in management and in sales. Now the store had been renamed AWAG, an acronym for Allgemeine Warenhandelsgesellschaft A.G.

  The store was a shadow of its former glamorous self. But it had dozens of elevators and a glass-roofed atrium. It offered a fleeing spy what he needed most: crowd cover, many choices of routes and a chance to change his profile.

  At the same time, glancing over his shoulder, he tallied that there were at least two men on his trail, moving quickly about a hundred feet behind him. There was another team also keeping pace, a man and a woman. The woman held a yellow handbag which made her easy to spot.

  Using a crowd of shoppers for cover, he quickly shoved his hat under his coat as he went through the door to the department store. With a similar gesture a few paces later, he stole a cloth carrying bag on the first floor.

  He found his way up a flight of stairs to the men’s department.

  He loitered long enough to make sure that the two men who were following him were still behind him, probably reluctant to come as close as the men’s department. When the coast was clear and when the two salesclerks were busy, he grabbed a Tyrolean hat and crumpled it to make it look used. Then he folded a brown cloth coat, common like one would see on the street, onto his arm, and ducked into the lavatory.

  There were several men in the room. He ducked into a toilet stall and listened to a filthy story told by one man to another about what he wife did for him. With this as the soundtrack, he ditched his original coat into his new carrying bag, pulled the new one on, popped the Tyrolean hat on his head, and waited till two other men were exiting.

  He started a brief conversation with them in German, making it look as if they were three friends who knew each other, extolling news of two great German victories in the east and casting doubt on the news of the surrender at Stalingrad, all while keeping his hand to his face to stifle the watchers if they were still on him.

  Conveniently, the men laughed with him and took the bait, exchanging conversation. He amused them with a dirty joke about promiscuous English women and they all laughed together.

  He thought he spotted a member of a team assigned to him. It the woman with the yellow handbag, except she had changed her hat. The followers didn’t see him: more than likely they were watching for a single man exiting.

  He peeled off from his new best friend on the second floor and found an emergency staircase. He ran down to the street level floor, then saw that the stairs descended again. He took a chance, went to an empty basement and found a door that led out to some steps that he led up to the street.

  The door was locked with a chain and a padlock the size of a man’s fist.

  Inspired, he saw a half window that led to the same staircase. He smashed it, broke the sash by kicking it in half, and escaped onto some stone steps that led up to a filthy alley which led out to the street.

  On the street, he thought he saw two members of a team that was following him, but their backs were to him. He also noticed that there were many uniformed police coming into the area: not a coincidence. The cops stood around looking in every direction but luckily for Cochrane, not knowing exactly who they were searching for.

  He rounded the f
irst corner possible and went into a small shop, which was just about to close. It was starting to rain. He bought a black raincoat and pulled it on over his other coat. He was just paying when he realized that a man standing next to him, watching him, was a Wehrmacht officer. Looking more closely, he could see the insignia of the Fourth Panzer Division.

  The man was dark-haired, thin lipped, and covered with braids and badges. The military officer had a sidearm on the right side. Their gaze met. Cochrane offered him a smile. He received none in return.

  There was a mirror behind the clerk’s station and Cochrane looked to it, trying to escape the army’s officer’s attention. It didn’t work. Their gazes crashed together again. Cochrane shifted his eyes slightly. There was something “off” about the man’s posture. Then Cochrane saw what it was. The officer’s left arm was missing, the sleeve of his uniformed pinned against his left side.

  Cochrane turned back to him.

  “Russians?” he asked, indicating the loss of the arm.

  “French,” the officer said. “Gembloux.”

  “Filthy degenerates,” said Cochrane.

  A pause, then, “You’re not German?” the soldier asked, suspicious.

  An inspired moment, then, “Spanish,” said Cochrane. “General Franco sends you his good wishes,” he added with a man-to-man wink.

  “Just one thing,” the officer said.

  Cochrane turned.

  “It gets very cold here. You should buy gloves.”

  Cochrane reached to his pocket and showed his gloves.

  “I used to have many pairs. Now I only need one,” the disabled officer said. “You’d think they’d give me a discount,” he said.

  Then he threw back his head, laughed and slapped Cochrane on the back. “An arm! A small price to pay for the glory of the Third Reich,” he said.

  “Heil Hitler,” said Cochrane moving toward the door as fast as he could without arousing further suspicion.

  “Heil Hitler!” The man used his one remaining arm for an awkward salute.

  Cochrane was quickly back out onto the street.

  He remembered the name and address of a watchmaker who had been his friend in the old days. He went to the man’s shop and found it closed. It had been spared damage from the recent air raid, however.

  He went around to the back of the shop and broke quietly and without damaging anything.

  He was afraid to turn on a light, so he groped around in the darkness. He found a box of matches and a piece of half eaten loaf of bread that the watchmaker had left in a bag on the counter, along with a jar of pickles.

  The bread was a godsend. Cochrane devoured half of it. He found a wind up alarm clock and set it for six AM. He wanted to hide out and yet be gone before the watchmaker appeared, but not so early that he couldn’t blend in with morning crowds going to work.

  He huddled under a counter and slept fitfully, waking up three times overnight. But at least he had escaped. Or he thought he had. Temporarily.

  The next morning he used the private water closet at the back of the shop and consumed the other half of the loaf of bread. He left at seven AM.

  He had no map, but still had his bearings. The morning had broken cloudy and gray. He found his way to one of the suburban train stations but saw police and Gestapo everywhere. He turned tail and ran. He racked his head for some sort of contact from his old days, someone who wouldn’t turn him in.

  He was desperate. He was even afraid to return to his temporary lodging with Heinz. He figured crossing the city would be impossible.

  He found a public phone and called two numbers that he could remember. Neither were operational. He wandered the city, starting to freeze and not knowing what to do. Berlin was a city at war, with no friendly embassy, no old contacts that he dared go near, and none of the connections that Dulles had promised.

  He figured the Gestapo would now have staked out the Swedes, the Swiss, the Portuguese and the Spanish, just in case. And none of these would have any reason to help him. The majority of the people working in these posts were probably pro-Hitler.

  He wandered back to his old neighborhood where he had lived in the 1930s. Staggering from fatigue, his eyes at half mast, he asked a man on the street when Klienstrasse was, since all the signs were gone. The man gave an honest answer, then demanded to know who he was.

  Only then did Cochrane realize that the man he was talking to was a policeman. He hurried off, pretending he had not heard the follow-up question.

  There were several houses that were bombed out.

  With the heaviest of hearts, he selected one that had once belonged to friends. He broke in, found some food in a kitchen, ate again, then crawled to a place in the cellar where he slept for his second night on the run.

  He must have made mistakes. When he rose the next morning, he had decided that he would go to the big train station and try to get out of Berlin, as far south as he could, then make a run for the Swiss border. His assignment here was shot to living hell and he would be lucky to escape alive.

  But when he came to the hollowed-out door frame where the front door had once stood, he froze. The house was surrounded by police. He tried to wait it out and hope they weren’t there for him, but he must have been spotted. He crouched behind a tattered sofa.

  Two men from the Home Guard came in seconds later with pistols drawn.

  Cochrane stood. He was about to lunge for his own gun and go out in a blaze of bullets when a third man grabbed him from behind.

  It was over. He was as good as dead.

  They led him outside, handcuffed him to a lamp post and for good measure, blackjacked him across the back of both legs. All hell broke loose. Within a few minutes, there was a flurry of activity and various police arrived in what must have been a dozen official cars.

  A crowd gathered. Workmen. Soldiers. Pretty young women.

  Cochrane figured he was down to his final days, if not hours, if not minutes. He could hear a story circulating in the crowd that he was an English spy, probably a “spotter” for the recent air raid. People threw garbage and stones. The police stood by and laughed.

  Then two more unmarked cars arrived. This was even worse. The cars had government plates, swastikas and the flag of Nazi Germany on each front fender.

  Two men stepped out quickly. The Home Guard cops were shoved aside and a local police captain pointed out Cochrane. He was still chained to a lamp post, as if anyone could miss him.

  The two men walked toward him. The doors to the second car opened.

  A Wehrmacht officer stepped out with the driver, who also looked Gestapo.

  Cochrane knew this was it. Mission unaccomplished, it would be weeks before Dulles could even assume he had failed and died.

  The four recent arrivals walked to him.

  Three were Gestapo. The fourth was the one-armed Wehrmacht officer whom he had spoken with in the clothing store.

  The soldier nodded slowly and triumphantly. He raised his one remaining arm.

  “That’s him,” he said. “May I use your gun to shoot him?”

  “Our orders are to hold him,” said one of the Gestapo officers. “We have something worse in mind.”

  Cochrane thought he was dreaming. Or in a nightmare.

  The Gestapo agent looked familiar. Then Cochrane realized he knew him. It was the same man who had executed two spies on the tarmac in Marseille.

  Wesselmann. If this wasn’t the bitter end, it was damned close to it.

  Chapter 39

  Berlin

  February 1943

  News of the surrender at Stalingrad did not reach to Berlin until February second. When it did, Hitler flew into a rage. He blamed Field Marshal Paulus for the catastrophic defeat in the east that he, Hitler, had engineered. He vowed never to appoint another field marshal again, as if that would solve the problem.

  What followed was perplexing. For several years, certain anti-Nazis had attempted to undermine Hitler and reform Germany. All efforts had f
ailed. The vigilance of the various secret police agencies, most notably the Gestapo, had sabotaged all efforts. In the armed forces, many opposition groups existed but much of the officer corps had been bought off by solid pay and easy promotions. Yet with the loss of the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, many in the army could see the inevitable scenario for the next few months.

  Troops would be diverted from positions in western Europe to slow or halt the advance of the Soviet Red Army which would now target Berlin the same way Hitler had targeted Stalingrad and Moscow. Various anti-Hitler resistance groups formed and strengthened, both within the civilian population and the armed forces.

  But almost all of it stayed underground with the notable except in the universities. And again, just as Munich had played a vital part in the ascent of National Socialism, so it now played a role in civilian opposition to it.

  The Hitler Youth movement, which represented itself in great numbers in the universities, had promoted Hitler’s rise to power. Now in Munich, few able bodied male students remained. The student population of the university consisted of cripples, disabled veterans, females, and brown-shirted Nazi shills who passed themselves off as student leaders. The Nazi party had planted deep spy networks within the universities but the students were adept at spotting the rats among them.

  The defeat at Stalingrad was announced on German radio on February third. It ignited even more anti-Nazi sentiment. The Soviet Union was happy to fan the flames. German language propaganda radio emanating in Russia filled the airwaves across Germany with the names and hometowns of German troops captured at Stalingrad. Across Germany there was increased bitterness and discontent. And while the names of the captured were being broadcast, a relentless barrage of postal notifications was returning to Germany of soldiers who had died in action on the Russian front.

  Worse, anyone looking at the situation rationally knew the war had been lost at Stalingrad. With the obliteration of the Sixth Army, the westward advance of the Red Army was inevitable. Added to that, the inevitable invasion of France by American, Canadian and British troops loomed to the west. Anyone with two eyes, a brain and a sense of military history could see that Hitler and his unchecked Deutschland Uber Alles nationalism had dealt the country a catastrophic losing hand.