The Nazi's Son

by Andrew Turpin

  The German’s eyes widened a little as he stared at Johnson. But he said nothing.

  “It seems to me that you have built quite a position in Leipzig. Respected former church organist, ex-chairman of the Bach festival. And your retirement is a peaceful one, I am guessing. You seem very settled in this community.” Johnson indicated around the room with his hand. “It would be a shame if all that was to be shaken up and destroyed, especially at your age, because certain truths about your past were uncovered.”

  Helm exhaled and gazed at Johnson from beneath lowered white eyebrows. He had a look of resignation on his face, and when he spoke there was a defeatist tone in his voice. “Before we go any further, I just want to tell you that the Nazi Party and the SS were not organizations that I wanted to join. I didn’t do so voluntarily. With my father being in the position he was in, I had no choice. I was only twenty years old. He would have had me killed if I had done otherwise. You can believe that or not, but it is the truth. I was relieved to get out when I did without having done too much damage to others. I never killed anyone—I can at least say that.”

  “Really? How can I believe that?”

  Helm stared at the floor. “You can’t know what it was like then. The leadership, the Nazi Party, were desperate to recruit and train more boys into the Hitler-Jugend and then the Junkerschulen. After the Sixth Army was defeated at Stalingrad, and the Germans were pushed out of North Africa and Italy was invaded by the Allies, there was a massive manpower shortage in the armed forces. The Jugend was the only way to fill the gap. We had no choice. There were fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds being sent to the Russian front. Thousands of them were being killed daily, but to have resisted joining would have been suicide. It seemed that either way lay death. I was fortunate that I was sent to Junkerschule instead of the front, and that was right at the very end of the war—that’s why I survived.”

  Johnson nodded. He knew very well the background to events in Germany toward the end of the war as Hitler battled desperately to retain power. What Helm was telling him was probably correct.

  “How did you manage to get into the Stasi with that SS background?” Johnson asked.

  “I had to lie a little. I rewrote my history, my CV, to remove the Junkerschule period. That was the only way—we all did it, not just me.”

  “I thought so,” Johnson said.

  Eventually Helm looked up again. “Now, tell me how you found me. And what do you want, Mr. Johnson?”

  Johnson scrutinized the old man. He had heard such mitigative claims many times before in his investigations into Nazi war criminals over the years, but what Helm was saying did tally with what was in his file. Johnson was inclined to give this one some credibility, although he assumed that, as a Junker, the old man must have done some things against the Jews or other minority groups that he wouldn’t admit to.

  He summarized for Helm the story of how he had come to visit Yezhov’s apartment in St. Petersburg, the outcome of that, and details of his flight from Russia via the Saimaa Canal. The old man listened in silence, raising his eyebrows occasionally.

  “Gennady Yezhov’s daughter gave me a message,” Johnson said. “She said her father had told her that if anything happened to him, and if anyone was investigating that, they should come and talk to you, as you were an old friend of his. Now, I happen to know that Gennady had information about La Belle that he was going to pass on but was unable to do so because the SVR gunned him down. And you were in the Stasi in Berlin at the time of the La Belle bombing. So what can you tell me?” He leaned back in his chair and fixed Helm with a level gaze.

  Helm levered himself out of his armchair and got to his feet, wobbling a little as he did so. He made his way to a chest of drawers near the piano, his feet shuffling on the wooden floorboards. There he opened a drawer and took out a slim cardboard box. He brought it back to the armchair, removed the lid, and took out a sheaf of papers and photographs.

  While Helm was focused on his drawer, Johnson took his phone from his pocket, opened his voice recorder app, and pressed the red start button. It would be useful to have a record of what the old man was going to say.

  After shuffling through the papers, Helm handed Johnson a black-and-white photograph of a group of people sitting around a table that was covered in papers and boxes. A low-hanging ceiling light illuminated three of the five faces in the group, but the other two were in dark shadow. White plumes of smoke were curling up toward the light from cigarettes being smoked by several of the group.

  Johnson studied the photograph. The three visible faces, despite being younger and slimmer, were recognizable.

  “I know some of these people,” Johnson said. “Your friend Gennady Yezhov?”

  “Yes. He is there.”

  “And Reiner Schwartz, and that is you on the left, I think.”

  “Correct.”

  “But I can’t see these other two in the shadows. The man on the right looks as though he has his arm around the shoulders of the other person, a woman, right?”

  “The one on the right in the shadow is another KGB man, Yuri Severinov, and the woman—”

  You have got to be kidding me, Johnson thought.

  “Yuri Severinov?” Johnson could not help interrupting. It was difficult to see the face properly because he was sitting back, slightly out of the light. “Is it really?”

  “Yes, it is him. Do you know him?”

  Johnson pressed his lips into a thin smile. “You could say that. And the woman?”

  “That is also a KGB officer. They were sleeping together. His girlfriend, I believe. Her name was Ana.”

  “Ana who?”

  “I do know her last name. It has slipped my mind.” He must have caught Johnson’s impatient look because he gave a thin smile. “Don’t worry. It will come back to me.”

  Johnson studied the photograph again. So many questions to ask.

  “What is going on here—what is this meeting? Why the photograph?”

  “You asked about La Belle. This meeting was about La Belle.”

  “I’m sorry. You need to explain.”

  It turned out that the meeting, in late March 1986, was one of a series of joint gatherings between KGB and Stasi officers to discuss the terrorist situation in West Germany. The Libyans in particular were very active in West Berlin at that time, but they were able to operate because they were based out of East Berlin, where the government gave them shelter and cover.

  Helm reeled off a list of various terrorists who were given such refuge by the East German leader Erich Honecker and his Stasi henchmen.

  They included Carlos the Jackal—Ilich Ramírez Sánchez—the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine mass killer who became an internationally wanted fugitive. “They gave him a car, a house, an office, secretaries, helpers. Everything,” Helm said.

  “There was the Red Army Faction as well as others like Abu Nidal and Yasser Arafat. And then there was Abu Daoud—he was the ringleader behind the massacre of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972. We knew about them all—and because we talked all the time to the KGB, they knew about them all. And of course, the KGB passed on those details to the Soviet leaders, Brezhnev and his boys.”

  Johnson listened carefully. Having been a student in West Berlin in the early 1980s, he knew something about the backgrounds of all the terrorists whom Helm was listing. The Red Army Faction, also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, had carried out bombings of West German targets, kidnappings of West Berlin businessmen, bank robberies, and assassinations.

  “And La Belle?” Johnson asked. “What happened there?”

  Helm paused. “We found out a few weeks beforehand that the Libyans were going to bomb La Belle. We told the Stasi boss, Erich Mielke, and he informed Honecker. And at this meeting, shown in the photo, we told the KGB—we gave Severinov and Ana all the details. The timings, the explosives that were going to be used.”

  He leaned forward and used a bony forefinger to stab at the p
hotograph that Johnson was holding. “I had that photo taken because Mielke asked for it—he wanted to cover his ass. He wanted something to show who on the KGB side was attending those joint meetings.”

  Johnson nodded. That made sense.

  “My feeling was that we should stop the attack—it was pointless,” Helm continued. “It would not achieve anything. It wouldn’t help East Germany, and it wouldn’t help the Soviet Union. It wouldn’t help Honecker. It wouldn’t help Gorbachev.”

  “Did you have the power to stop it?” Johnson asked.

  Helm gave a snort. “Of course. The Stasi had the power to do that—if the KGB would let us stop it. But they didn’t. Severinov shrugged his shoulders and asked who normally used the disco. We told him it was mostly American troops. And he smiled and said, ‘That’s just too bad. Sounds like it will be a good firework display.’”

  Johnson felt his stomach tighten. “Did you challenge him?”

  “You don’t understand. They were the puppet masters; we were the puppets. He told us that the KGB and Moscow were content to let the attacks continue—he said he only liked dead Americans. Of course, his girlfriend Ana agreed with him, like she always did. She said they would go and watch the bombing—she said it would be interesting. The KGB had some safe house, an apartment, on the other side of the street from La Belle, but a bit farther along. They were going to watch it from there.”

  “And there was nothing you could do?” Johnson asked.

  “Nothing. What the KGB said, we had to do. It would have been suicidal to do anything else.”

  From what Johnson knew of the relationship between the two organizations, he knew that Helm was most likely telling the truth.

  There was silence for several seconds. Helm was breathing hard, as if he had just climbed a flight of stairs. The only sounds were those of a ticking clock in the room and the occasional faint growl of a car in the street outside. A dog barked in the distance.

  “So tell me,” Johnson said. “Why did Gennady Yezhov, a KGB officer, have this arrangement with you, a member of the Stasi, that you would be the guardian of all this information? I assume that what you have told me may be part of the information he was intending to hand over when he defected? Although, of course, he never quite made it.”

  Helm ran a hand through his white hair. “I am certain this is what he was intending to pass over, yes. He told me more than once that he planned to eventually make it public, at the right time. It was because we were like-minded on this issue. We both did our jobs at the time, but we didn’t like it, and we had conversations about that. We kept in touch over the years, and we both said we should do something.” He shrugged. “But time went by, and neither of us had the guts to do so—until, that is, Gennady decided late in his life that it was the right time. I think his children had grown up by then, and he felt they could take care of themselves if needed, because what he was doing was high risk. As he unfortunately discovered.”

  “Yes, very high risk,” Johnson said. He leaned forward. “Do you have any proof of this?” he asked. “You are telling me that the people in that room, in that photograph, effectively passed a death sentence on those in the La Belle nightclub. But how do I know that it’s the truth?”

  Helm nodded. “Actually, I do have proof. It has been sitting in a safe-deposit box in a bank vault in Vienna for the past twenty-five years or so.”

  “What?”

  “Yes. There is a copy of that photograph you are holding, together with a few other photographs and the minutes I took of that meeting and others. I used to write a few notes during the meetings in my notebook, then turn them into longer notes afterward. I didn’t tell the others, of course. The notebook, together with the papers containing the longer minutes, are all in the bank vault.”

  “Why in Vienna?”

  “I took them there not long before the Berlin Wall came down, when I started getting suspicious that the KGB were putting me under surveillance, and I haven’t moved them since. I wanted them out of the country.”

  “Can we get the notebook?”

  Helm shrugged. “I guess so. I am not going to Vienna to fetch it, but you can if you want to. There is nothing else in the vault. I can give you the key and the password. I haven’t been there for more than eight years. The last time I went, it was all there.”

  Johnson nodded. “Yes, please. That would be very helpful.”

  Helm reassured Johnson that provided he held the key and knew the password, he could get access to the box, no matter that he wasn’t the person named as primary account holder.

  Helm struggled to his feet and went to the drawer from which he had taken the photograph. He felt inside and came back holding a flat brass key and a business card, both of which he handed to Johnson. The key had a six-digit number imprinted on one side, and the business card, which was for a private bank in Vienna, had a handwritten number on the back.

  “Take these,” Helm said. “I would like you to return the key when you have what you need, of course. What will you do with the information, though?”

  Johnson put the two items into his wallet, which he pocketed. “Thank you. That’s very helpful. I am not sure what I will do yet. I would like to find a way to prosecute Severinov. It might be possible, especially if I can somehow arrange to have him arrested while outside Russia. I know that he travels frequently. We will see. Don’t worry, you will not be under threat during the process.”

  Helm seemed to relax. “Good,” he said.

  There were so many more questions Johnson wanted to ask Helm, but one thing in particular had intrigued and puzzled him.

  “How did you and your Stasi colleagues and the KGB get from East to West Berlin?” he asked. “And how did the Libyans and the other terrorists get through? It seemed so heavily guarded when I was a student in Berlin.” He was wondering if there had been collusion on the West German side to facilitate that.

  Helm said nothing for several seconds, then he wheezed. “You know Friedrichstrasse station?”

  Johnson gave a faint smile. “Yes, you could say that. I knew it during the ’80s when I was a student in Berlin. And I was reacquainted with it when I was expecting to debrief Gennady who arrived there. But before we could talk to him, he was shot dead.”

  Helm paused for several more seconds. “We got over the border through the station. There was a secret route through,” he whispered. “The railway staff entrance on the East German side, the Diensteingang. It led through a control room and a few back passageways to a door on the West German side. The Stasi, the KGB, the PLO, the Red Army Faction and other terrorists, East German spies who had been blown . . . they all used that route.”

  Johnson nodded. “That’s interesting. Thank you.”

  Helm nodded in acknowledgment.

  “Now, have you remembered the name of the girlfriend, by chance? Ana?”

  “No, I still can’t recall it. I will do though. But it is in the notebooks in any case.”

  Johnson rose slowly to his feet. It seemed that over the past several days, via St. Petersburg, the Saimaa Canal, and Berlin, he had taken a very convoluted route to get the information that Helm had just handed to him, but it was more than worth it. It was real evidence. They had a case.

  Helm also stood. “Before you go, would you like to see Thomaskirche? It is worth a quick visit, and it is only just across the street. It’s a beautiful building—dates to the twelfth century.”

  “Why not? Yes, I can have a quick look.”

  Johnson scrutinized the old man.

  The image he had conjured up in his mind when Katya had told him he needed to speak to the Nazi’s son was somewhat different from the reality. It probably stemmed from years, decades, of chasing war criminals who had tortured and murdered large numbers of people.

  The jury was out on what the old man had done during his short time in the SS, although it seemed highly unlikely to have been damaging. The role he had played in the Stasi was also somewhat shrouded in mis
t. Maybe his subsequent stint as organist at Thomaskirche had been somehow redemptive.

  But Johnson knew one thing: the old man had provided the ammunition he needed in this investigation, and for that he was very grateful.

  His mind went back to the lecture he had given at the University of Law in early March, when Vic had first approached him about this investigation. He had meant what he told the audience about the need to continue prosecuting elderly war criminals. However, his gut feeling was that Helm wasn’t in that category.

  Johnson followed Helm out the door, then waited patiently in the corridor as the elderly German struggled to lock it.

  Finally Helm managed to turn the key in the lock, and the two men made their way to the elevators.

  When the elevator stopped at the ground floor, the twin brass-plated doors opened, and Helm exited first.

  An elderly woman was standing outside the elevator, a shopping bag in each hand, and Helm moved to one side to get around her.

  Johnson had just stepped into the doorway when he caught a glimpse of a dark shadow emerging from an alcove farther along the corridor toward the main exit into the street. The figure stood, legs apart, and rapidly raised a hand—it was holding a gun. In that second, Johnson instantly recognized the muscular, thickset outline of the man.

  Vasily Balagula.

  “Get down!” Johnson screamed at Helm, shoving down hard on his shoulder.

  There was a flash and a deafening bang, and Helm staggered backward, his arms flailing, before falling against the wall behind him. The woman screamed and dropped her shopping bags.

  Instinctively, Johnson dropped to the floor and rolled back into the elevator.

  How the hell did that bastard know we were here?

  He knew he had to act fast. Reaching up, he hit the elevator button for the third floor, where he had just come from, followed by the Door Close button, then threw himself to the floor again.

  A split second later came another shot. The round crunched into the full-length mirror that covered one wall of the elevator car, smashing it and sending shards of glass flying.