The Wolf Children

by Cay Rademacher

  ‘You stabbed the boy in cold blood.’

  ‘A blackmailer crazy enough to sit there on top of an unexploded five-hundred-pound bomb doesn’t exactly leave you many options. Either you give in or,’ he hesitated, ‘you do what you have to. I took the tapes and left. I was afraid the bomb could go off at any moment. I should have risked it and tossed the boy into the Elbe.’

  ‘But why take the risk at all? Why kill him? They’re just tapes,’ Stave asked, taking the rucksack from Kümmel's shoulders and glancing into it: tapes in cardboard boxes with the Nazi eagle and swastika and the letters ‘RRG’. ‘What's on them?’

  ‘Music.’

  ‘This isn’t exactly the best time to be making jokes.’

  ‘Classical music. The Berlin Philharmonic. Furtwängler. Playing Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart. All the greats.’

  ‘I thought the only “greats” you recognised were boxers?’

  ‘You just don’t understand,’ Kümmel closed his eyes, exhaustion overwhelming him. He pulled himself out of it with a look of extreme pain. ‘Have you got a cigarette?’

  ‘You do smoke, after all?’

  ‘Only on special occasions.’

  The chief inspector searched his pockets and produced a soggy packet of Senior Service with a sailing ship on the front. Apt for the occasion. ‘I doubt I’m going to be able to light one for you.’

  ‘Just put the thing between my lips. It’ll help me breathe.’

  ‘We’ll play your tapes from beginning to end back at CID headquarters.’

  ‘That will be good for your education. The Berlin Philharmonic are rather better than the fiddlers hawking around the ruins here in Hamburg. “RRG” stands for Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft. Recordings made before 1945. By the best of the best, nothing less for Herr Goebbels.’

  ‘How did you get hold of them?’

  ‘Pure chance. One of my fiancée's drivers drove a truck full of tapes out of Berlin at the end of 1946, just before the great famine winter. Greta was furious because he insisted on using them as payment and what use were old tapes here then? She had hundreds of the things piled up in her living room when I came across them.’

  ‘And you realised there was business to be done?’

  ‘That's what makes the difference between winners and losers.’

  ‘Why would the Americans buy them? They all listen to jazz.’

  ‘They listen to classical music too. And they are mad keen on Europe's geniuses. They’re buying up old masters’ paintings, taking our best professors from our universities, getting German architects to design their skyscrapers. And you can’t beat the combination of Furtwängler and Beethoven.’

  ‘So the boxing promoter became a music promoter?’

  ‘Not at all. I would really have to have been crazy to sacrifice my career for the sake of a few smuggled tape recordings. I was using them as promotional material.’ Kümmel closed his eyes again and shook his head. Stave felt like a slow-learning child sitting in front of an impatient teacher. His right hand was twitching with rage. He put the safety on his weapon; the last thing he needed to do was execute the man.

  ‘I want to get my fighters to America. Big business needs big promotion. Reporters, camera teams, the weekly news. The best way to get people interested in America is the radio: live reporters at the ringside, hysterically commenting on every blow landed. Millions of listeners. There are hundreds of radio stations in America. In Texas, Colorado, Iowa, places you’ve never even heard of. Totally different from Herr Goebbels's Reichsfunk or even the few stations the British let us have here. Private little radio stations run like local newspapers. Run by businessmen, for profit. And they need more than boxing matches for their broadcasts. They need to fill up the airtime, with the best stuff they can get hold of, at the lowest price.’

  ‘German music,’ Stave's hand had stopped twitching.

  ‘Classical music is harmless. Of course lots of stations aren’t interested in Beethoven. They play only jazz. But a minority are, and over there a few is still a lot. There are dozens of stations that play classical music.’

  ‘I hide the tapes around the harbour. Then I get them on board ships bound for New York. A partner of mine over there copies them on to long-playing records and sells them on cheap to the radio stations.’

  ‘Good business for you and your partner.’

  ‘Just for my partner. Not for me. At least not straight away. I sell the tapes for next to nothing, a few dollars each, pocket money. A joke compared to the effort involved. But,’ and despite the pain he was in Kümmel finally managed a smile, ‘in return radio stations all over America, from the east coast to the west, from Alaska to the Mexican border, owe me a favour. They know me over there, and they remember my name.’

  ‘And if and when you and your boxers ever cross the Big Pond, then they’ll broadcast your boxing matches. In exchange for Furtwängler, they broadcast Max Schmeling live. But what I don’t understand is all this secrecy. Surely you could just have got a licence? Tapes aren’t exactly illegal material that you have to smuggle out. Nobody would have been interested.’

  Kümmel gave him a long hard stare with those luminous eyes of his. ‘Because the American side of the business is a grey area,’ he explained. ‘Is it legal to make copies from German tapes and broadcast them? No American wants to get involved in a court case. That's why they prefer to keep a low profile.

  ‘The Leland Stanford brings over a small load every time. Not all at once. That could cause trouble with customs in New York. And in any case sending them all at once would defeat the purpose. By the time I got to New York, people would have forgotten my name. The deliveries were meant to keep going on a regular basis until I got there – then Adolf came along. The boy would have messed up the system. This was my ticket to America and the boy just didn’t understand. If he hadn’t been sitting on an unexploded bomb smiling so glibly at me, I might have been able to explain it to him.’

  ‘What about the girl?’ Stave asked, a harshness back in his voice. ‘Why did Hildegard Hüllmann have to die?’

  ‘Was that her name? The little whore turned up a few days afterwards, knocked on the door of our apartment, said she just happened to be passing by. Cheeky brat.’

  The chief inspector cast his mind back to the girls’ home, but said nothing.

  ‘She claimed to have been Adolf's girlfriend, bombarded me with accusations.’

  ‘How did your fiancée react?’

  ‘I’m glad to say Greta was out with one of her deliveries. I’d never seen the girl before, never heard of her. She used language a sailor could have learned a few lessons from. Accused Greta and me of having Adolf's death on our consciences. I was taken aback and tried to find out exactly what she knew. I never did, but just the fact that she had turned up on our doorstep was shock enough.’

  ‘So you murdered her?’

  ‘No. I faced her down, told her other people had had it in for Adolf. No names, no details, but I told her I could prove it to her. She wasn’t interested, said she was going to the police. An unusual approach in her line of business. I promised I’d get proof and meet up with her again.’

  ‘On the Hansaplatz?’

  ‘That was her suggestion. And that we meet at night. She made it all a bit easy for me.’

  Stave tried to keep his anger down. And what about Wilhelm Meinke?’ he asked as calmly as possible. ‘Why did the little coal stealer have to die?’

  Kümmel leaned back. Stave realised he was relaxing, no longer on his guard.

  ‘Never heard of any Meinke. No idea who that is. You can’t accuse me of anything there, because I haven’t had a hand in that.’

  ‘Hand,’ Stave thought to himself. Meinke's murderer had been right-handed. Perhaps the unbearable Dönnecke had been right on that. One of the wolf children might have done for Meinke. He felt all of a sudden as if someone had turned off the electricity that had kept him running for the past few hours. He glanced over at MacDonald.


  ‘I’ll fetch the military police.’

  ‘If you go back through the tunnel and report to the guard there, it’ll cause a fuss.’

  ‘I’d rather swim across the Elbe than deal with those stairs again. I’ll hail a patrol car.’

  The lieutenant stumbled out of the door. The storm was over, the rain merely a shower now. The chief inspector had no idea what the time was. There was nobody about on the landing stages. It must be after curfew time, he reckoned. Every German would be at home and just British Jeeps trundling around the empty streets. As a pedestrian in civilian clothing, MacDonald would be noticed straight away. He would be back before long.

  A few minutes later he heard the growl of an engine and MacDonald arrived with two military policemen. ‘Everything in order?’ he asked.

  ‘Get this thug out of my sight,’ Stave said. Then he realised he was still gripping his gun. The two military policemen were watching him nervously. He forced a smile and put his weapon away.

  The two men in uniform lifted the handcuffed Kümmel under the arms and dragged him, ignoring his groans, to the first of two Jeeps, piled him on to the rear seat and secured him to the vehicle with another set of handcuffs.

  ‘He’ll be a hard nut to crack in court,’ Stave whispered, closing his eyes and thinking of the huge pile of papers on Ehrlich's desk and the slim file on his own.

  MacDonald was in a better mood. ‘We have a confession in front of two witnesses, and who could be better witnesses than a German police inspector and an officer of His Majesty. We have a suspect for the Blohm & Voss murder; we’ve arrested the killer of a young girl; we’ve put an end to a smuggling racket that had gone unnoticed for months. And we’ve been so discreet that not one American citizen has got wind of the entire business. Obviously we will simply let the Leland Stanford weigh anchor in a few hours’ time. No bad blood in Washington. Everybody in London happy. At least one less problem at the dockyard. The governor will be a happy man.’

  ‘And Palestine will seem further away than ever.’

  ‘I would like you to be a witness at our wedding when all this messy business is over. Do you fancy sailing the Albatross IV back across the Elbe with me? A patrol car will take us over. The rain's stopped. It’ll be a pleasure cruise.’

  ‘Britannia rules the waves,’ Stave said with a friendly but dismissive wave, ‘but the German CID rule the pavement. I’d prefer to walk home.’

  Stave waved goodbye to the British officer and promised to turn up next morning at Governor Berry's residence with a full official report. Then he set off. It would take him one and a half hours, he reckoned, maybe two. He would be exhausted. But at least after the rain the air was clean and cool. The cobbles steamed and shone below the ruins that reared above them like ghostly castles. His footsteps sounded loud amid the rubble.

  Just a few streets away Anna would be asleep in her basement apartment. Every step took him further away from her. I would love to put my arms around her right now, he thought, lie down next to her, inhale the scent of her skin, her long hair, fall into a deep and dreamless sleep. He had so much to tell her.

  He thought of Adolf Winkelmann, the smuggler, the dealer who had lost his life, all for the sake of a few music tapes. Hildegard Hüllmann, the wolf child who had to die because she wanted to know who had killed the boy who had given her the only flicker of hope in a life of violence and degradation. Wilhelm Meinke, the coal thief, maybe murdered by another wolf child in a crime that Stave had failed to solve, while the officer in charge had almost certainly already forgotten the case. Lost children, lost families. We, their elders, did this to them. We turned them into orphans, destroyed the world around them, and now we push them around, throw shit at them. We might at least punish those who murder them.

  And then at last his thoughts turned to Karl. Would he have read the letter he had left pinned to his door? Would he be waiting for him when he got home? He hoped so.

  Afterword

  The children named in this book are fictitious but their stories are real. By May 1947 the two main churches in Hamburg occupied with refugees had counted some 40,000 orphans. Children who either through the bombing or other violence caused by war had lost both parents. Volunteers were unable to find a single living relative for some 21,000 girls and boys. Over a thousand of these children were living not in homes but roamed the devastated city streets alone or in small groups. They built themselves shelters or slept in the Nissen huts or flak bunkers. They survived by dealing on the black market or stealing coal. Or prostituting themselves.

  ‘Wolf children’ was the name given in East Prussia and other eastern areas of the former Reich to those that had lost or become separated from their parents as they fled west. The youngest were barely six years old but they wandered for months, even years, through forests and the ruins of devastated villages until a few at least reached the western occupation zones.

  A few of these ‘wolf children’ wrote of their experiences later, notably Ruth Kibelka in her book Wolfskinder. On the Borders of the Memel River. Yet popular memory in Germany today has all but forgotten them, and their fate.

  A few peripheral characters in the book are real, notably Hamburg Mayor Max Brauer and British Governor Vaughan H. Berry. The singer Margot Hielscher appeared with an American jazz band at Moorweide. Tattoo-Willy really did have his studio on Grosse Frei-heit, although the description of the property is based on what is standing there today. The trial that led to the shooting of British prisoners-of-war took place with those named in the account here, although obviously not with the involvement of the fictitious Public Prosecutor Ehrlich. Journalists at Die Zeit will recognise that Ludwig Kleensch represents a former colleague with a different name and whose career took a different path. There was also a widowed transport business operator, as well as a post-war boxing promoter who had the boxers Max Schmeling and Hein ten Hoff as well as many others under contract and had his offices in the Chilehaus. The historical characters on which the promoter and transport businesswoman are based had different names and most certainly had nothing to do with smuggling or murder. That is pure fiction.

  I have also taken several other dramatic liberties such as changing by several months the date of the performance of Wolfgang Borchert's Draussen vor der Tür. Theatregoers will, I hope, forgive me.

  A few of the places mentioned have remained largely unchanged, even if they are used quite differently today: including both well-known ones such as the Chilehaus or the Elbe Tunnel, and less well-known such as the police headquarters or the girls’ home. Some other venues have gone forever, such as the institute in which my fictive pathologist Dr Alfred Czrisini dissected his corpses. In its place today stands the Sophie Barat Roman Catholic School.

  The American freighter Leland Stanford did visit Hamburg, but there is nothing to suggest it was used for smuggling.

  Recordings made by the former Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft were indeed smuggled out of Germany, and the classical music recordings made before 1945 were issued as records in the USA and distributed to radio stations. This early example of music piracy did not, however, come to the attention of the authorities in 1947 but only six years later.