Fifth Column

by Christopher Remy

  The tall, lean SS General was the head of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt – the Reich Main Security Office. The RSHA controlled the security apparatus of the SS, the Nazi Party's Praetorian Guard, from criminal investigations to counter-intelligence. Ten years ago Heydrich had proposed to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler the establishment of a Sicherheitsdienst, a private security service of the SS. Under Heydrich's leadership, the SD had become a powerful intelligence agency both within Germany and abroad. His ambitions had been furthered when Himmler later made him head of the RSHA. Now he controlled the SD, the Secret State Police – the Gestapo – and the Criminal Police – the Kripo.

  Heydrich stood up from his desk and walked over to his private bathroom at the opposite end of the dark paneled room. He stood in front of the mirror, smoothing his brilliantined blonde hair over his high, broad forehead. Today, he felt sure that his ultimate triumph was at hand. He would administer the final blow to a longstanding problem.

  He could scarcely contain his glee when the phone rang. He darted back over to his desk, listened for a moment and bolted out of his office, leaving the heavy black phone off the hook. In the hallway he forced himself to stroll leisurely and struggled to maintain an appropriate scowl. He stopped in front of a door at the end of the hall and tapped on the frosted glass.

  A dour adjutant in SS uniform answered the door and showed Heydrich in.

  "You may have ten minutes, and then I must take him to the Chancellery," the adjutant told him.

  Heydrich nodded and strode through the adjutant's anteroom and into the main office. It was mahogany paneled, as all the offices of the SS elite were; only this office dwarfed all the others in size and emptiness. No sign of the occupant's family or interests adorned the walls or the lone bookcase. All that served for decoration was a portrait of Adolf Hitler on a wall opposite the desk.

  Knowing better than to speak without permission, he stopped in front of the massive oak desk and waited. The man behind it shuffled some papers around on its barren surface. Heydrich was sure there was no purpose to it, just a tactic to make him wait, as usual. Finally, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler looked up at him through his pince-nez and raised his eyebrows in greeting.

  "Reichsführer, I bring you excellent news," Heydrich said, his normally high-pitched voice rising further with excitement.

  Himmler said nothing and simply raised his eyebrows again

  "The old man has finally had it," he went on. "Canaris has finally done himself in."

  Leaning back in his chair, Himmler tapped his thumbnail against his teeth, an old habit that told Heydrich he had the SS chief's full attention.

  "Please get to the point, General, and quickly."

  "Today the American authorities have announced that nearly thirty men have been arrested in New York on suspicion of espionage. It is in all the American and British papers. One article referenced a suspect's involvement with the Norden bombsight, confirming that he is one of Canaris' agents."

  Himmler removed his pince-nez and closed his eyes.

  "I fail to see how this constitutes 'excellent news,'" he said in an exasperated tone, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

  "Reichsführer, this is our opportunity to bring Canaris down and finally take over the Abwehr. He has clearly proven his incompetence, giving us the opportunity to convince the Führer to give the SD control over military intelligence. This is our chance to realize our goal of total control."

  Himmler put his glasses back on and gave Heydrich his best condescending schoolmaster look, his myopic blue eyes narrowed.

  "Some people who may or may not be spies are arrested in America, and this is our chance to convince the Führer to abandon his trust in Canaris?" he asked.

  "Yes!" Heydrich exclaimed. His earlier feelings of exaltation were beginning to wane as he saw where this conversation was headed.

  "I don't have to tell you that events in America are not likely to rouse any interest in the Führer. He sees nothing more than millionaires, beauty queens and stupid music when he looks across the Atlantic. You were in the room when he said their military capacity was 'of no consequence whatsoever,' were you not?"

  "Reichsführer, with your help I believe I can convince the Führer that America is more of a threat than he believes. They are already sending ship after ship of materiel to the British. Schellenberg's report shows their industrial capacity is ten times what Goering has been telling the Führer. Ribbentropp's ignorant prattling has convinced the Führer the Americans will never go to war. What if we can show him that the Abwehr's bungling will only anger the Americans and push them to war? This must be our opportunity to strike!"

  Himmler waved his hand dismissively.

  "Whatever the case may be with the Americans, the Führer will not see this as a reason to hand us the Abwehr on a silver platter. Please do not concern yourself with Admiral Canaris or the Führer's attitude towards him. I don't wish to hear any more about it. Is there anything else?"

  Dejected, Heydrich realized he was getting nowhere. He said no and quickly took his leave.

  On his way out of Himmler's office, he clenched his fists at his sides. What the hell is that shit-stained chicken farmer so afraid of? He wants to take over the Abwehr just as badly as I do, but always draws the line at Canaris, that fucking old shit.

  He charged down the hall back to his own office, feeling the anger grow white hot within him.

  For years, Himmler and Heydrich had been talking about the need to take over all police and intelligence activities in the Reich. Only the Abwehr remained outside their grasp. Taking it over would create a truly centralized Security Office and give Heydrich the glory as he swept aside all enemies of the Reich. As an added benefit, we would be throwing Canaris and his gang of incompetents out on their asses.

  Returning to his office, he shoved his own secretary aside and slammed the door shut. He stood at the window, staring down at the traffic on Prinz-Albrechtstrasse below. The heavy rain matched his mood. A flash of lightning reflected off car windshields as they sped past the SD headquarters building. Straightening his tunic, Heydrich resolved not to let this opportunity pass him by.

  If Himmler won't act, I will.

  He strode over to his office door, threw it open and pointed to his startled secretary.

  "Get Schellenberg in here!"

  9

  One week later, Johanna was on a train bound for New York City. One of Pollack's men had given her a crash course in ciphers, secret writing and message passing. She had tried to take the training seriously, but she couldn't help feeling like it was all a game. Overall, the training seemed pretty thin and made her more nervous, not less.

  Now she opened a dossier on the German American Bund that had been prepared with the help of the FBI. Much of it she knew from being around the Bund in Yorkville or reading the papers. Founded in 1933 as the Friends of the New Germany, the Bund was mostly German immigrants who had joined for a sense of community with their fellow countrymen. Johanna remembered that her mother had written in a letter about her father being a member briefly in the mid-thirties. He had been involved with the German-American Businessmen's Association when, along with other similar organizations, it had merged with the Bund. He and many others had quit soon after realizing that the Bund leaders were nothing more than American Nazis.

  Fritz Kuhn had taken over the leadership of the Bund in 1936, calling himself the Bundesführer. He styled himself as an American Hitler, complete with his own fighting division, the Ordnungs-Dienst, or Uniformed Service, which he called his SS. The OD was implicated in various incidents of vandalism and intimidation aimed at Jews.

  Kuhn attempted to rally German nationals and Americans of German descent to the banner of race-comradeship and fascism. He went to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin where he briefly met Hitler for a handshake and a photograph, an occasion which he used to inflate his own importance and influence when he got back home. The FBI was convinced that Hitler directly controlled th
e Bund to further subversion and espionage activities in the United States.

  Johanna flipped through some newspaper clippings that were included in the dossier and saw an article about the Bund with a photograph of Kuhn at a MadisonSquareGarden rally for George Washington's birthday in 1939. Standing on a stage festooned with swastikas and American flags, he spoke to more than 20,000 about the 'historic opportunity for Aryans around the world to unite with Hitler to defeat the scourge of Bolshevism and International Jewry.' Later that year he was indicted, convicted of embezzlement and sent to Sing Sing.

  The public backlash against the Bund had begun with a Jewish boycott of German shops in New York in reaction to the anti-Semitic propaganda of Kuhn. Soon, Bund rallies began to draw more people protesting than attending. A hastily written addendum to the dossier stated that the suspected Nazi spies arrested at the end of June all had some connection to the Bund. Once this had become known to the public, fear of subversives grew to a fever pitch and the police and FBI were flooded with reports of Nazi spies and saboteurs.

  Following Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, most Bundists abandoned the group. The several camps the Bund had maintained for the recreational use of its members were closed and the silver and black uniforms of the OD became scarce on the streets of American cities. According to the FBI, there were still a group of committed Nazis who were active in what was left of the Bund. Johanna was to make contact with this group at the Bund headquarters in the Yorkville section of Manhattan.

  Before making any contact with the Bund, she was to meet with her FBI contact for a briefing. In order to secure FBI cooperation, Pollack had promised them she would report any information relevant to their ongoing subversion and espionage investigations. When they found out that she was not an experienced undercover agent they balked at the plan, but submitted when pressure was applied from above.

  Since she was first told of this assignment, her apprehension about going undercover had abated some. At Heidelberg, she had found that if she kept to herself, nobody would question her too closely. In essence, her semester at the University had been a dry run for her current task. In order to get German students and professors to be honest with her, she had had to pretend to be sympathetic to Nazi ideology and found it wasn't hard. Once they thought she was receptive, she barely had to say a word – they would go on for hours about Hitler's greatness and how he had changed Germany for the better. She expected it wouldn't be much different with the Bund.

  The only problem she could foresee was that due to the repeated investigations, arrests and trials of various Bundists, they might be suspicious about government informants. As concerned as she was about this, Johanna recognized that if she were to be found out by the Bundists, she would likely not be in any danger. Exposure would just mean the end of her assignment. It was once she got to Germany that the real danger began. Failure there could mean a bullet to the head in the middle of the night. No jail. No trial.

  While everyone was impatient for her to get to Germany and start gathering intelligence, they acknowledged that time would be an ally in gaining the confidence of the Bund and thus the DAI. As long as it would take, she would live in Yorkville and pretend to be just another German immigrant.

  After all this time of trying to get away, here I am going right back to where I started from. While she had written her mother a brief letter stating that she had taken a job at NYU and would be coming back home, she hadn't thought much about how it would be once she got there. She had only been back to visit a couple of times since she left at eighteen. Each time Yorkville became more and more alien to her, feeling less and less like home as she shed her German identity and became the American girl she had always wanted to be.

  To make matters worse, the uneasiness of returning home would be compounded by the role she was to play. She had to pretend to be sympathetic to the Nazis if she had any hope of infiltrating the Bund. She would have to maintain this charade all the time, in front of everyone. Luckily, the few friends with whom she still maintained contact had, like her, moved far away from the old neighborhood. That left her family.

  She felt a pang of guilt at the shame they were certain to feel if they thought she was a Nazi. Her mother had written repeatedly about how she told everyone in the neighborhood about their daughter the professor. Johanna regretted that her mother was going to have to face those same people thinking that the girl of whom she had once been so proud had abandoned her home in favor of Hitler and the Third Reich. She thought her father and brother would be able to deal with the shame by pretending she no longer existed, but that her mother would take it hard.

  She put down the dossier and watched verdant New Jersey farmland roll past the train window, wondering which was going to be more difficult: infiltrating the Bund and the DAI, or being home again?

  10

  New York City

  Later that afternoon, a taxi pulled away from the curb on East 89th Street, leaving Johanna standing on the sidewalk in front of her father's delicatessen. Looking around the neighborhood, she saw that although not much had changed over the years, it still seemed alien to her. If not for the occasional high-rise apartment building and wide streets, Yorkville could have been in the Aldstadt of Heidelberg, or any market street in any German city. Everyone passing by on the sidewalk was speaking German, and every shop and office sign was in German.

  This was the case in almost all of Yorkville. People called it Germantown or Little Berlin and, like many of New York City's ethnic neighborhoods, it was insulated from the outside world. German immigrants had been coming here for more than a hundred years, many never leaving the neighborhood or learning English. It was this insularity that had driven Johanna out. She didn't want to live with the old ways and saw them as nothing more than pomp and pageantry, not to be taken seriously. While so many of those she grew up around were proud of being 'hyphenated' German-Americans, she wanted simply to be an American and to be rid of Yorkville. And now here she was again.

  Down the long street Johanna could see the trees of Carl Schurz Park beyond East End Avenue. Growing up in Yorkville, the park and the Gracie Mansion museum within had always been a favorite spot of Johanna and her brother. During the summers, Johanna would sit and watch the boats sailing through Hell Gate in the East River.

  She saw that her father had put up a new sign, a larger one that ran the length of the shop with 'Falck's Delicatessen' painted in heavy black Gothic type. She could see him through the plate glass window, pulling something out of the meat case for an elderly woman. He still wore his black mustache in the old-fashioned style, long and twirled up at the ends.

  Further up the face of the four story red brick building, lace curtains billowed out of a second floor window where her bedroom used to be. When Klaus Falck first rented the store and an apartment above it shortly after arriving in New York, he planned to buy the entire building when he had saved enough money. The Depression had put an end to that and keeping the business solvent had become his only ambition.

  The bells on the door jingled as someone opened it. Johanna looked down and saw it was her mother who, for a moment, just stood in the doorway beaming at her daughter. Elisabeth Falck was not as tall as Johanna, but in every other respect they looked almost identical. She kept her long blonde hair in a braid, with loose strands framing her face. Even in her middle years she still had the same slim figure she did when she was Johanna's age.

  "Hello, Mother," Johanna said as she and her mother shook hands in the traditional greeting. Over her mother's shoulder she saw her father, now with another customer, look over and nod in greeting.

  "Come, say hello to your father."

  The two of them carried her luggage into the store. Elisabeth saw a customer needing help with some jars on a high shelf and with a smile and a pat on the cheek left Johanna to wait by the door.

  Standing behind the refrigerated cases, Klaus Falck was still the intimidating presence he had always been. He was a giant of
a man, well over six feet tall and built like a bear. Every Oktoberfest he would entertain the neighborhood children by carrying a full keg of beer like it was a sack of flour. He was considered an unofficial policeman in the neighborhood, his piercing blue eyes and massive frame extracting confessions and pleas for clemency from many a young scofflaw.

  He gave change to a customer and came around the counter, wiping his hands on his white apron. He shook Johanna's hand and asked about her trip on the train and her new job.

  She had almost forgotten about her 'job' at NYU. I need to work at remembering my cover story if I'm going to last one minute at this.

  "Your mother will be starting dinner while I close. Your brother should be back from his deliveries soon. Go up now and … get freshened, yes?"

  Johanna smirked. "Freshen up, Vati." His accent had improved quite a bit since she saw him last, but colloquialisms were still a problem.

  "Ja, that's what I said, freshen up," he replied. He reached over to flip the Open sign to Closed on the door and walked back to the counter to tend to his one remaining customer.