Fifth Column

by Christopher Remy

  Under the trees, the two horses began feeling the ground with their lips, looking for errant blades of grass, and swished their tails at the flies. The two men discussed the prospects for success in Russia, shared gossip and laughed over Himmler's most recent astrological obsessions.

  Twisting a braid in his horse's mane, Schellenberg turned serious.

  "I don't have to tell you that Heydrich has it in for you. He has made it his life's work to get control of the Abwehr and create his 'greater Schutzstaffel' where the SS controls all," he said.

  Canaris chuckled. "Nor do you need to tell me that it gets cold in Moscow."

  "I think Heydrich has gone mad over it. I don't mean obsessed, I mean absolutely mad."

  Canaris knew Heydrich, his next door neighbor, very well indeed. He considered the head of the Reich Main Security Office cold and ruthless. Mad would imply a passion that, for Heydrich, only existed where other men's wives were concerned.

  "If you have something to tell me, Schellenberg, why don't you say it?"

  Schellenberg hesitated, absently scratching his horse's withers. "Heydrich has hatched a plot he is convinced will bring you down."

  Canaris heard of such plots on a daily basis, none of them concerning him in the least.

  "I see. A plot."

  "Don't misunderstand me – this is not another case of faked photographs or charges of smuggling Jews out of the country. This is serious. If it succeeds, you will have real trouble. If it fails, it could be the casus belli for the Americans to enter the war."

  At the mention of Americans, Canaris perked up. He had long believed that Hitler's underestimation of their industrial capacity to make war could be his ultimate undoing. This was a war of economies, not just of militaries. He had helped Schellenberg prepare his report to the Führer on just that issue. Hitler had laughed and Reich Marshall Göring had suggested that Schellenberg see a psychiatrist. Canaris considered American force to be the deciding factor in the war if Hitler, Ribbentrop and all the rest of those fools were stupid enough to draw them in.

  "Very well, you have my attention."

  Schellenberg detailed the plot and explained his own central role in it, recounting the objections he had raised with Heydrich to no avail. He suggested a plausible explanation for Canaris' knowledge of the plot so as not to implicate himself, and proposed a course of action to foil it.

  When Schellenberg finished speaking, Canaris stared off into the distance, shaking his head.

  "Don't worry yourself about it, my dear Schellenberg. This nonsense doesn't change anything. It merely accelerates the inevitable – the end of Germany."

  20

  Stuttgart

  Johanna stirred a simmering pot over a gas ring on her kitchen counter. Upon her arrival in Stuttgart, her new employers at the DAI had arranged for her to move right in to a flat in a pleasant walkup near the Schillerplatz. When the landlady had let her in, Johanna had been surprised to find the three-room flat furnished and decorated. It was as if the previous occupants had gathered but a few of their belongings and left. After she found some photographs and clothes at the bottom of a bureau drawer one day, she suspected that was exactly what had happened. Since then, she tried to put it out of her mind, but she felt like she was living with ghosts.

  She blew on the steaming spoon and sampled her potato-and-onion creation; it was bland and watery, but it would have to do. This soup and the two loaves of rye in the breadbox would have to suffice for the next few days.

  Even after more than a month of living with rationing, Johanna still had trouble managing her meals to make meat and fresh vegetables last. Potatoes and scraps would be it until the next coupon book. The rumors were that the occupied countries were enduring harsher rationing so that Germans would not have to do without. Johanna believed it – bottles of French wine and wheels of Dutch cheese tempted her from store shelves, but conscience would not let her take them.

  Sitting back down at the table, Johanna resumed writing this week's report. Today was Friday, so she had to finish the report and encode it in time for her rendezvous with the courier tomorrow. This would be her fifth report passed to the courier, whom she had never seen, each pass occurring without incident. It seemed that her good luck had followed her to Germany; everyone she had met at the Foreign Institute had been very accommodating and unsuspicious. While she had many paranoid moments of imagining Gestapo agents on every street corner, so far her mission in Germany was proceeding smoothly. Just as they had with the Bund in New York, all her fears subsided and she was able to focus on the task at hand.

  The DAI was the central repository for information about ethnic Germans, volksdeutsche, living abroad. The DAI chose Stuttgart in the 1920s due to its reputation as a "foreign city" – most German émigrés came from Stuttgart or the surrounding Swabian region. After the National Socialists took power, they remade the DAI to serve the racial theories of the new regime, and its charter became one of studying Aryans around the world in the context of the "master race" and the role of the Nazi party among these "Foreign Germans."

  Johanna reported all of this background information to COI in her first report, knowing that none of it was new. Over the last few weeks, however, she had found some things of interest. The men and women who worked at the DAI were reputable scholars, now in the service of Nazi ideology. She found that, although the DAI was indeed a major point of contact for the Bund in the U.S., the scholars were contemptuous of the "American pretenders." For almost five years, the Nazi leadership had ordered the DAI not to provide any more than token support of the Bundists after the repeated investigations and bad publicity had made them a liability. They were limited to pamphlets, newspaper articles and the occasional propaganda tour.

  While Johanna hadn't heard or seen anything specific about the DAI's support of subversive activities, it became clear to her that this support had existed in the first few years after Hitler's rise to power. Discussions about the Bund with her fellow scholars revealed that the government had directed the DAI to spend much money and time trying to rally the foreign Germans to the cause of National Socialism and their racial theories.

  It soon became clear to the experts in American volksdeutsche, however, that the German-American community largely saw themselves as Americans of German descent, not "Germans living in America" as the racialists preferred. This coupled with the amateurism and bombast of Bundesführer Fritz Kuhn and the negative attention he drew to the "New Germany" image Goebbels was portraying, spelled the end to Berlin's support for the American Nazis.

  Johanna wondered what the FBI would make of this information. Everything Wexler had told her about the Bund belied a conviction that they were taking orders from Hitler, and were ready to perform the same subversive activities in the U.S. that had led to the disasters of Austria and Czechoslovakia. She hoped it would strengthen the hand of law enforcement to know that the American Nazis were being left out in the cold by their more dangerous German cousins and that no additional support would be forthcoming.

  The ease with which she was operating and the value of the information she was reporting back to COI made her glad she accepted the job. She seemed safe and felt productive. Whatever the success she had had so far, however, she considered the report she was working on now to be her first major contribution to American intelligence gathering.

  Assigned to the America section of DAI, Johanna had worked with another naturalized American citizen named George Brochoff, an expert in political science. Brochoff was a bookish man in his fifties with salt-and-pepper hair and goatee. With his help, Johanna was able to learn the job of being a scholar at DAI.

  Initially wary of Johanna as a potential usurper, Brochoff had quickly warmed to her. At first, her colleagues at DAI seemed just like the fanatical Nazi students and faculty at Heidelberg, repeating the same racial theories and anti-democratic slogans. And with their pride at the stunning successes of Hitler and his military, Johanna thought they were insufferable. Sh
e planned to keep to herself to avoid accidentally giving herself away, but mostly out of revulsion. Her conviction that all Germans were Nazis, or at least passively submitting, only intensified.

  Brochoff, however, gave Johanna a glimpse that there was something else besides "ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer" uniformity among her DAI colleagues. He told her who to avoid, who was a notorious plagiarizer and the like. One day this past week, as they ate lunch in the cafeteria, he had tutored Johanna in what he called his key to happiness at the DAI: the "path of least resistance."

  He said that as the war ground on, Abwehr and SD intelligence personnel were tasking DAI scholars to assist in military and political intelligence analysis at the expense of their "Ausland German" work. In his case, he said he had been asked on numerous occasions to help prepare reports on American military capabilities and industrial capacity.

  Every time, he had been ordered to rewrite these reports, omitting portions that referred to things like the ability of American industry to rapidly convert into a war machine. On another occasion he had been told to remove a section about how German-Americans would likely fight for the United States in the event of war and replace it with "some fiction about how they would rise up against their Jewish masters."

  Brochoff had explained that the "path of least resistance" was to anticipate what fantasy these government fools would like to see, and tailor your work to fit it. They weren't interested in the truth, and this scheme would make everyone happy. Johanna had been amazed at his admission. She had asked him about what other information wasn't making its way up the chain of command.

  As her makeshift soup simmered, Johanna sat at the kitchen table, recording the specifics of her conversation with Brochoff. A picture began to emerge that she hoped would be an 'ace-in-the-hole' for the U.S. She knew that the unwillingness of the German high command, Hitler and Göring especially, to hear bad news or 'inconvenient' information had to be an advantage they could leverage. With no way of knowing whether her reports were of any use to COI, she added a postscript suggesting that the courier might pass her a note indicating whether she was on the right track. For all she knew, the courier was burning her reports in his fireplace.

  21

  Berlin – October 1941

  In the center of Berlin, at 31 Nürnberger Strasse, was an apartment building with a two room flat in the cellar, listed under the name and telephone number of the landlord. Theodor and Elisabeth Strünck were hosting, as they did most evenings, a gathering that stretched the limits of the tiny flat. While Elisabeth prepared a pot of coffee in the corner kitchen, Theodor and six other men sat shoulder to shoulder around a table. They were waiting for one more guest, who was late.

  They engaged in small talk, sharing stories of wives, children and work. And, of course, the war. Three of them were involved with the military in some capacity, and they talked shop while their civilian friends listened with interest. Finally, after half an hour of waiting, a knock sounded at the door. As soon as Elisabeth opened it, a breathless figure came rushing into the flat.

  Silver haired, with a large, downward-pointing nose, he wore the gray uniform of the Kripo – the Criminal Police.

  He removed his peaked cap and sat down at the table with a thud.

  "My friends," he exclaimed. "I have astounding news. A major, undisguised defeat is at hand outside the gates of Moscow."

  Seeing their shocked expressions, he continued.

  "My rotation out to the Eastern front was intended to show off our new blitzkrieg against the Bolshevists. Instead, I saw beaten divisions, demoralized officers and exasperated generals. The Red Army is turning back the Wehrmacht, just as the Russian winter is setting in. Our troops are in summer uniforms! High Command has ordered them to stand their ground, even as their supply convoys are frozen in the mud and the Russians are throwing everything they have at them."

  He paused to let the news sink in as Elisabeth poured coffee.

  "There can be no doubt – the Eastern campaign will be lost, it is only a matter of time. There will be no hiding it, no matter what Goebbels says or does. Every German will know that disaster is at hand.

  "Dear friends, we cannot sit idly by. We must do something."

  Stunned into silence, they sat drinking their coffee until the Kripo man turned to the officer next to him, a middle-aged man in a Wehrmacht uniform.

  "Hans? What do you suggest?"

  The Wehrmacht man sipped his coffee. After a minute, he answered, "Let me think about it, Arthur."

  22

  Stuttgart

  Originally a source of worry and paranoia, Johanna's Saturday courier drops had become an enjoyable ritual, especially now with autumn setting in.

  Her work at the DAI was going well; she had expanded her circle of acquaintances and was able to get quite a lot of information out of them without raising any suspicions. She had now passed eight reports and received three replies from COI, including one from Charlie Daly telling her that her intelligence was proving very useful. She hadn't seen her courier once, and felt confident that their meetings went unobserved.

  Every Saturday morning was the same routine. She placed her report in the front pocket of her red mackintosh, usually some innocuous grocery list or office memo with the encoded message written in invisible ink on the back. She walked the few blocks to the Market Hall, a large indoor shopping center with merchants set up under the two-story glass ceiling.

  These walks around Stuttgart had provided quite a contrast to Johanna's earlier travels through Germany. In the late Thirties, the entire country seemed overcome with optimism and a newfound self-respect, Hitler's "economic miracle" creating a boom where there once was shame and poverty. The wave of support for the National Socialists had grown to such a fever pitch that in 1937 the party closed its ranks to new members. Swastika flags flew everywhere, and people embraced Hitler as the man of action who took all responsibility upon himself for the good of the Fatherland.

  Now, Johanna noticed a shift in the mood of the people she met on the street. The support for Hitler hadn't subsided, and the stunning successes of the German military filled everyone with nationalist pride, but there seemed to be an undercurrent of cynicism. Johanna thought it might be the first signs of war-weariness, with so many fathers and sons gone for a year or more. She had been hopeful that maybe some people were having second thoughts about Hitler and the Nazi state, but found that rationing was the worst criticism anyone had to offer.

  As much as Johanna had contempt for what her native country had become, she found it to be quite beautiful. In a bowl-shaped valley carved by the NeckarRiver, Stuttgart was surrounded on three sides by gentle sloping hills with houses built up the sides. There was an enormous zoo that she thought she had visited with her family before they had left. She wasn't sure if she really remembered being there or if she was remembering the photographs in her mother's album. She spent much of her free time walking the streets as a tourist, visiting the palaces and other historic sites.

  This morning, like every other Saturday, the Market Hall was at its most crowded, making it perfect for meeting her courier. Women buying groceries and older couples window shopping packed the long building. On the main floor, merchants of every kind set up tables and booths to sell their wares. Johanna's usual habit was to stroll along the floor as if shopping; most of the time that was exactly what she was doing, always careful that her bags didn't obstruct her coat pocket.

  After leaving the fishmonger's stand, she checked to see if her "grocery list" was still there. It was. Twice in the last two months, she had spent over two hours walking around the hall, thinking that her courier had not shown only to find that he had picked her pocket without her noticing. Today, however, she had done all her shopping, walking as slow as possible, and the courier still had not taken her report. She walked up and down the floor three more times, checking her pocket frequently and looking around even though she knew she wouldn't recognize him if she saw him. Stil
l nothing.

  Several times during her training, Johanna had been told that if she failed to show for a courier pass, it would be assumed that she was in trouble, supposedly triggering some sort of rescue or extrication. But what if it was the courier that was missing? What if he never came back? Johanna would be left without a link back to COI. She suddenly felt like her safety line to Washington was tenuous indeed.

  She decided to walk across the main hall two more times and then go home. Then she would come up with an alternate plan to contact COI. Maybe she could go to the Swiss, or some other neutral country's consulate and try to send a message.

  Once across the hall, and she checked her pocket. Still there. One last time, walking slowly and pretending to look at every single stand on the way, holding her bags in her left hand, keeping her right front jacket pocket accessible. At the exit doors, she checked one last time.

  As she stuck her hand in her pocket, she saw something shiny and black out of the corner of her eye. It was a man in a leather overcoat, the unofficial uniform of the Gestapo.