The Nazi's Son

by Andrew Turpin

  “If you are driving, don’t go flying past; just take your foot off the gas a little. You need to be traveling at around twenty-five miles per hour. No faster. The SRAC will connect quickly, but don’t take a chance. On the other hand, don’t slow too much, or else if you have surveillance they will spot it.”

  “I am certain I’ve not had surveillance,” ANTELOPE said.

  “Fine. You need to be one hundred percent sure. And even then, when you transmit, you are in danger because you will need to reach into a bag on the seat next to you with one hand and operate that. You press this button and hold for three seconds.” Shevchenko pointed to the SRAC device.

  “They may be watching you from a vehicle through binoculars or filming you to analyze later. So you need to be able to drive completely straight during that three-second hold,” Shevchenko continued. “You must also sit straight, not turn your shoulders while you are operating the device, or do anything else unusual that might give you away. Do I make myself understood?”

  “Completely understood.”

  “Good,” Shevchenko stood. She wanted to get out as quickly as possible.

  “I will think through which is the best way of doing the drop,” ANTELOPE said.

  Shevchenko nodded. “I will leave it up to you which option you choose. Just make sure that either way, you send me a short ‘okay’ message, a secure text, once the data has been uploaded.”

  “Of course. You don’t need to worry,” ANTELOPE said. “There’s just one other thing. I heard that Joe Johnson has been into St. Petersburg and out again. He’s over the border into Finland.”

  Shevchenko swore. “The FSB are losing their touch. Thankfully Yezhov’s wife is dead.”

  “Yes, but his daughter is very much alive. Johnson is apparently with her. I don’t know much more, but I heard that.”

  As she put her jacket back on, Shevchenko stared out the ninth-floor window over Lord’s Cricket Ground, where another match was being played.

  She had not expected Johnson to emerge unscathed from Russia, let alone with a potential lead. That did not sound good.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Thursday, April 10, 2014

  Berlin

  “Ludwig Helm? One of the Nazi’s sons?” Schwartz asked with a wide grin. “Yes, I knew him—I used to work with him for the Stasi. I could have told you that. And what’s more—”

  “What do you mean you knew him?” Johnson snapped. He felt irritated. Schwartz was putting on a performance, being overly chatty, clearly enjoying the fact that Johnson had been all the way to St. Petersburg to find out something that he could have told him in Berlin.

  Schwartz shrugged. “I mean what I said. I knew him. I worked with him.”

  He glanced alternately at Johnson, then at Katya, who sat next to him on the leather sofa at the CIA safe house on Limonenstrasse.

  “So tell me why you call him ‘one of the Nazi’s sons,’” Johnson went on.

  He had heard Katya’s version and now wanted to see whether it tallied with Schwartz’s account.

  Schwartz narrowed his eyes. “That’s what he was. We used to call both him and his brother, Christoph, die Söhne der Nazi—the Nazi’s sons. Their father, Heinz, was some senior officer in the SS. A Gestapo chief. He vanished off to South America somewhere after the war and left his family behind. The boys were in the SS, too, at a much lower level, and they both got jobs with the Stasi.”

  “It would have been helpful if you had told me before,” Johnson said, although more out of annoyance than anything.

  The corner of Schwartz’s mouth turned up. “Well, Herr investigator, why would I? And anyway, you never asked.”

  Johnson had to admit to himself that there was indeed no reason why Schwartz should have mentioned Helm. He stood and walked out to the kitchen. He needed a drink of water.

  As he went, he couldn’t help recalling his son Peter’s question before he had left Portland, and his response.

  “So will you be hunting Nazis this time, Dad?”

  “No, not this time. No Nazis involved.”

  Johnson and Katya had arrived at Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport just after lunchtime. By that stage, after nine hours’ sleep and a few coffees, both of them were feeling significantly better. They had been collected by Neal and his driver, who took them back to Limonenstrasse after a lengthy surveillance detection route.

  After drinking the water, Johnson put his head around the door of a meeting room next to the kitchen. In there, Neal was busy delegating to Mary Gassey the task of working out a settlement plan for Katya somewhere in the West: it was likely to take some considerable time. It had to be somewhere that Katya was comfortable with and that gave her sufficient anonymity and security. The tentacles of Moscow Center reached far, and there was no way she was going back to Russia.

  The biggest issue in Johnson’s mind was whether Katya was a safe person for resettlement, given he had witnessed her kill three men. But the shootings were all in extreme circumstances, and given that Johnson owed her his life, he decided to disclose the kills she had made in Russia only to Neal, who understood immediately. The decision was made to give her a chance.

  The favored location for resettlement was not Germany but the United Kingdom: probably some small village tucked away in the countryside many miles from anywhere the SVR would think to look. However, achieving that and establishing an appropriate false identity involved a lot of red tape and multiple discussions with civil servants. Johnson was glad he didn’t have to get involved in the process.

  Katya was going to miss her father’s memorial service in St. Petersburg, scheduled for the following week, as would her brother, who was now staying temporarily with friends in Istanbul. It remained unclear whether Gennady’s body would be returned to Russia for burial: it was lying in a Berlin morgue, where forensic pathologists still had not completed an extensive round of tests.

  Varvara Yezhova’s funeral was also still to be arranged somehow, but there was no way either Katya or Timur would be able to attend that service either. Johnson felt deeply for them both.

  While Johnson was away, Neal had decided that despite his mounting concerns, they should continue to detain Reiner Schwartz, although not under the same duress as during his initial few days in CIA custody. It was certain that Schwartz would vanish out of Germany, probably to Moscow, the moment he was released, and they could not yet afford for that to happen. Vic, however, remained paranoid that the SVR would discover his whereabouts and try to launch some kind of operation to rescue him.

  Johnson walked back into the interrogation room and sat down on the sofa. A CIA guard holding a Beretta was sitting six feet behind him, next to the wall.

  “I need to know where this man Helm is,” Johnson said. “Do you have any clue?”

  “No.” Schwartz shook his head. “We are not in contact.”

  But Johnson wasn’t going to give up that easily. He knew Schwartz had more useful information about Ludwig Helm in him.

  Johnson realized he was probably going to need some leverage to persuade Ludwig Helm to give him what he needed. He recalled that a significant number of SS officers had found work at the Stasi.

  Johnson leaned forward. “You said that Ludwig Helm was an SS officer during the war, as was his father.”

  Schwartz yawned and nodded. “Yes. A junior officer. A Junker. He had just gone to one of the training schools, the Junkerschulen, when the war ended. I remember him mentioning it to me and saying in a joking way that his father had high hopes for him—he seemed disappointed that his ambitions were terminated. He became a musician instead.”

  Johnson knew that the Junkerschulen had been set up to train SS cadets to become leaders for the future. Getting a place in the schools was a significant first step on the career ladder.

  But even at that level, any SS officer might have been a candidate for prosecution after the war ended. In line with guidance from Moscow, the German Democratic Republic was anti-fascist�
��at least officially, if not in practice. The GDR convicted more than eight thousand former Nazis, many of whom received death sentences. If they weren’t prosecuted, they were often coerced: a significant number were blackmailed into working for the Stasi as spies, interrogators, and in various other roles, both in East and West Germany. Others joined of their own accord, having concealed or downplayed their time in the SS, and applied through normal channels, desperate for any sort of employment amid the economic wreckage of the postwar years.

  Johnson tugged at the old wound on his right ear. “Presumably the Russians, the KGB, did not know that Helm was SS?” he asked.

  Schwartz shrugged. “I doubt it. He had only just started in the training center when the war ended, and he would have hidden that fact to get his job with the Stasi. The Russians would not have been able to get into the Nazi Party files because you Americans had them.”

  Johnson knew very well that was true. In April 1945, as the war ended, the Nazi leadership sent their entire portfolio of ten million party membership card files to be pulped.

  But a paper mill manager, instead of pulping the documents, hid them under wastepaper until US Army archivists obtained them in October 1945. Eventually, they were moved to a Berlin document center, and microfilmed copies were made for use at the National Archives in Washington, DC. The copies of those files later became vital evidence in the prosecutions of Nazi war criminals, including at the Nuremberg trials. Johnson himself had used them on many occasions while working at the Office of Special Investigations when he needed evidence against certain war criminals who had taken refuge in the United States.

  All this gave Johnson an idea.

  He quickly wrote an email on his phone to a former colleague at the OSI, Ben Veletta. Since 2010, the unit had been part of a new division of the Department of Justice, known as the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions section, of which Ben was now deputy chief historian. Johnson had kept in touch with Ben over the years and had occasionally asked him for help. Now he asked Ben if he could obtain copies of Ludwig Helm’s and Heinz Helm’s Nazi Party files, which with any luck would be with all the other files at the National Archives in Washington, DC.

  After dispatching the email, Johnson began making checks on Ludwig Helm’s whereabouts. There were four people of that name listed in the online German Telefonbuch phone directory. But it was obvious after a few searches online, including checking their social media accounts, that none of them were the former Stasi officer he was seeking. Neither was there any trace of him elsewhere.

  In the end, it required an afternoon’s work by Jayne’s contacts at GCHQ to track him down to an address in the city of Leipzig, almost a hundred miles southwest of Berlin.

  At the same time, Nicklin-Donovan’s office unearthed a brief MI6 file on Ludwig Helm dating from 1989. The short memo inside noted that MI6 had tried to persuade him to go on the payroll, but the attempt had not been successful. At the bottom was a list of some of his known colleagues, contacts, and acquaintances in both the KGB and the Stasi. Among them was a Gennady Yezhov, a Varvara Menshikova—so Menshikova must have been her maiden name—and Reiner Schwartz. It gave his birth date, December 2, 1924, but there was nothing about Helm himself having been in the SS or a Nazi Party member.

  However there were several paragraphs about Helm’s father, Heinz, and his Nazi background. This was of significant interest to Johnson, given his background as a war crimes investigator. It turned out that Heinz Helm, who held the rank of SS-Gruppenführer, was a very senior Nazi Party official, third in command of the secret state police, the Gestapo, and played a major part in planning the Holocaust. He was one of the top Nazis who had never been captured nor confirmed dead. There were reported sightings of him in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the 1950s, but nothing after that. He had, as Schwartz had indicated, apparently vanished, leaving his family behind in Leipzig.

  Nicklin-Donovan had also included a separate, much larger file on Heinz Helm, likely knowing Johnson would find it interesting to see. The elder Helm must have died many years ago, though, given he was born in 1902, so Johnson turned his attention back to his son Ludwig.

  Finally, at around half past nine in the evening, a secure email arrived from Ben at the HRSP containing the Nazi Party files on Ludwig and Heinz Helm. The files corroborated all that was in the MI6 file and what Schwartz had told Johnson: Ludwig had been in the Hitler-Jugend, the Hitler Youth, and then attended Junkerschule as the Second World War came to an end.

  Although there was no indication that Ludwig had been involved in any activity that might trigger a war crimes prosecution, Johnson nevertheless had the ammunition he needed to put his idea into action.

  Johnson immediately arranged for a US embassy car and driver to take him to Leipzig the next day. He also reclaimed the Beretta M9 from the weapons locker at the CIA station that he had deposited before departing for St. Petersburg.

  “Let’s hope our friend Ludwig proves less obstructive than he was in 1989,” he said to Neal.

  Johnson pointed toward Schwartz, who was still on the sofa under the CIA guard’s watchful eye. “I think we should let him go now. We’ve bled him dry.”

  Neal nodded. “Yes, I agree. Kiss him goodbye.” He called the guard over and instructed him to have Schwartz ready for release first thing the following morning.

  “Make sure he’s taken back to his house in a blacked-out car,” Johnson said. “It’s obvious the Germans still don’t know we’re holding him, but nevertheless, I don’t want to run the risk of him being arrested by the police outside our embassy or something. That would be a PR disaster, and the ambassador would kill us.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Thursday, April 10, 2014

  Moscow

  The fragments of broken glass that lay on the floor in front of the three-meter plasma television screen and the fist-size hole in the center of the screen itself gave a small clue as to Severinov’s state of mind after he arrived back home from St. Petersburg.

  Of course, the news bulletin on his television, detailing American navy moves in the Aegean Sea, near the Bosporus, in response to the reclaiming of the Crimea by Russian forces, had been but the final straw. He had catapulted the drinking glass he had been holding and the sparkling water it contained against the giant screen attached to his living room wall.

  He wasn’t surprised that the house staff at his residence in Gorki-8 was giving him a wide berth. He had no doubt that word had quickly got around: something had gone wrong on his trip, and the boss was in a foul mood.

  It would have been difficult to deny. His nose was badly bruised, dried blood clearly visible, his lip was cut, and his face had a number of scratches from scrambling through the forest.

  None of his staff were prepared to ask for the precise details, but Severinov guessed that someone would have given the rest of them the general outline of what happened in the Saimaa Canal. It was most likely a member of his aircrew who had flown him, Pugachov, and Balagula back to Moscow from St. Petersburg.

  Severinov glared at the pile of glass on the floor, then retreated to his study and tried to think through what to do next. The mission to assassinate Varvara Yezhova had been completed successfully. Likewise with her husband. But after the unexpected appearance of Joe Johnson in St. Petersburg, Severinov had certainly not anticipated coming off worse in the ensuing tussle—not on his home turf.

  In retrospect, Severinov felt he had made a fairly fundamental error in not taking Balagula with them in pursuit of Johnson and Katya toward the Finnish border. The decision to leave him behind in St. Petersburg had been made on the spot. He had allowed himself to be influenced by Pugachov, and it had been wrong: it might have taken a bit of time to fetch Balagula, but the debacle at Cvetotchnoe lock almost certainly would not have occurred had he been there.

  He and Pugachov had eventually made their way through a dense forest to the highway and had halted a truck. The driver was visibly horrified at the two men’s app
earance—soaking wet, half frozen, bloodied, and scratched.

  Pugachov had used the driver’s cell phone to call the Border Service. But it had been too late. Johnson and Katya Yezhova had already gone through and were over the border into Finland. Quite apart from the discomfort and indignity inflicted on Severinov and Pugachov, the fugitives had the deaths of two Russian policemen and an FSB officer on their hands. If Severinov had anything to do with it, the pair of them would pay heavily in the end for all of it.

  Severinov and Pugachov had returned to St. Petersburg in the back of a police car. En route, Pugachov received a message saying that the police had managed to determine the false identity under which Johnson was traveling: it was that of William Cadman, a law lecturer from Washington, DC, who had a place at the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum but had failed to turn up to any sessions apart from on the first morning.

  Severinov snorted in disgust when Pugachov passed on the details.

  What use is that now?

  He felt as though his pride and his professionalism, as well as his body, had taken a severe knock.

  Severinov felt certain that Johnson would now be fired up, full of adrenaline, and probably more determined than he previously had been to get to the bottom of his investigation into Gennady Yezhov’s death.

  He knew he had to put a halt to it. But how?

  What would Johnson’s next step be, after his failure to speak to Varvara? Although the American was presumably still with Yezhov’s daughter, Katya, Severinov still doubted that the daughter would have been fully briefed by her father on highly classified matters relating to national security. He knew how the likes of Yezhov thought. Secrecy was hardwired into the old KGB culture of which Gennady was a part, despite his eventual defection.