Berlin Finale (Penguin Modern Classics)

by Heinz Rein

  In one of the rooms in the building on Kurfürstenstrasse there sits a big, stout man, he wears the uniform of the SD, four silver stars flash on his collar, the features of his broad, slightly bloated face are remarkably taut, his left cheek is split from mouth to ear by a great scar, his white-blond hair is slightly thin and carefully parted at the side, his pale-blue eyes have something of the colour of a chill winter sky.

  This man, to whom all intelligence officers in the Berlin companies are accountable, is Sturmbannführer Wellenhöfer, director of the intelligence department of Berlin central office. He is feared because he has the reputation of being an ice-cold intellectual, a relentless sleuth, a ruthless go-getter. He is known to have access to no emotions, and to know no consideration. His smiling expression, which he displays both to his inferiors and to all visitors, and even to the unfortunate victims of his tracking dogs, is a calculated mask designed to lure others out of their reserve, and persuade them into confessing intimacies and indiscretions. Only someone who looked very closely at Wellenhöfer and gazed him attentively and fearlessly in the eye would recognize that his smile is not real, it is in a sense only applied to his face like a mask, through which only the eyes peer undisguised. Lips and eyes are not congruent in their expression, because while smiling wrinkles lie around the mouth and the teeth even flash now and then between the lips, there is a cold gleam in the eyes. Although Wellenhöfer demands short, clear, factual reports from his inferiors, tolerates no circumlocutions and abruptly dismisses any polite phrases, he lets the people who have the misfortune of being interrogated by him tell their stories at random, he never interrupts them, he even sometimes encourages them a little, but otherwise he maintains an agonizing silence. He knows that his victim will become more eloquent the longer he remains silent, and that the moment is eventually bound to come when the narrator will say things that he didn’t want to say. When this moment has come, Wellenhöfer pounces like a hawk, plunges his claws into the flesh of his victim and doesn’t let go until he has pulled out everything still hidden within. Wellenhöfer is a man who leaves nothing to chance. He runs all operations of any consequence himself, or at least directs them with precise instructions. He has an infallible eye for what is significant and would sooner forgive a big mistake committed in the heat of combat than an act of carelessness or failure to obey an order.

  On the morning of 15 April 1945 he is sitting opposite a civilian. It is not difficult to tell from his posture that a massive burden lies on his bent back, he is sitting on the outer edge of a chair, his arms are pressed tightly against his sides and bent in front of his chest, his fingers play nervously with the buttons of his waistcoat, his head is drawn deeply back between his shoulders, his gaze is uncertain and leaps from point to point, but he assiduously avoids the eye of the Sturmbannführer.

  This man is Reichsbahn Senior Inspector Deiters, the intelligence delegate of the Karlhorst depot of the Deutsche Reichsbahn. It isn’t the first time that he’s been in this room with Wellenhöfer. Since a series of malfunctions had occurred at the Karlhorst depot, which can only be put down to sabotage, he has been repeatedly ordered to Kurfürstenstrasse. Every time he has been asked by Wellenhöfer, in increasingly harsh tones, whether he had still not managed to catch the perpetrator or perpetrators, or at least prevent the continuation of the acts of sabotage through keen surveillance. Repeatedly Deiters had not only had to answer in the negative, but even to admit that here, once again, a locomotive has been rendered useless, that a coal crane has become inoperative, that the number of incidences of overheating is increasing all the time and that one day even the transfer table in the big workshop has been so badly damaged that a number of locomotives were blocked and unable to leave the depot. Once the perpetrator had almost been caught while planting explosives in the smokebox of one of the steam locomotives, but at the last moment he had been able to defend himself against his pursuer with a monkey wrench and had disappeared into the darkness of the great hall. Still, and this was the only positive aspect of the nocturnal scuffle, they had come a step further since they now knew that the perpetrator was without a doubt a German because he had, when he had been caught closing the smokebox, uttered a curse between his teeth, one that no foreigner could have used. But that had been all, in spite of the tightening network of surveillance and control they had not advanced a single step further. It was only clear that the perpetrator was to be sought among those employed in the factory, because apart from his precise knowledge of the work terrain with its locomotive halls, wagon sheds, boiler houses, crane plants, workshops, signal systems, water cranes, clinker pits, tracks and points, the form of the sabotage had also revealed an excellent knowledge of the subject, because with a minimum of effort a maximum of destruction had been achieved.

  Even if the big depot was not brought to a standstill, since there were enough fallback procedures in place, considerable disruption still occurred.

  The perpetrator, who must also have had access to the central locomotive control room, had preferred to render unusable precisely those trains intended to bring supplies to the eastern front.

  Now Deiters is waiting for the results of the SD investigations, after further pursuance of the matter was taken out of his hands early in February. ‘I called you here today, Mr Deiters,’ Wellenhöfer begins the conversation, ‘to tell you that we are almost certain that we have identified the perpetrator.’

  Deiters sits bolt upright.

  ‘Really?’ he says, almost breathless. ‘Congratulations!’

  ‘Thank you,’ Wellenhöfer says carelessly, looks at him with cool contempt and lights a cigarette.

  ‘So who is it, if I may ask?’ Deiters asks. ‘You must tell me, after all, so that I can take my own measures.’

  Wellenhöfer blows the smoke from his cigarette playfully in front of him. ‘You have absolutely no measures to take, Mr Deiters,’ he says in a cold and cutting voice. ‘You will do what I tell you to do, no more and no less.’

  ‘Of course,’ Deiters says and smiles awkwardly, ‘I was just saying.’

  ‘Your opinion is absolutely undesirable to me, and of no interest whatsoever,’ the Sturmbannführer continues in the same tone. ‘I have called you here today, not to hear your unimportant opinions, but to give you orders and precise instructions.’

  Deiters shrinks under his sharp, aggressive tone. ‘Of course,’ he says quietly. ‘May I be permitted one question, Mr Sturmbannführer?’

  ‘You may,’ Wellenhöfer replies contemptuously. ‘And I will draw your attention once again to the fact that Mr Sturmbannführer does not exist as a form of address. It always amazes me that as a Party member you are not more familiar with the customs of the SS. So what do you want to know?’

  ‘Has the perpetrator already been arrested?’ Deiters asks now.

  ‘Arrested?’ Wellenhöfer asks back. ‘I fear that you have lost your mind!’

  ‘I … I don’t understand, you said …’ Deiters stammers.

  ‘I am well aware that you understand nothing,’ Wellenhöfer continues. ‘Arrested! Had he been arrested straight away, the proverbial bull would have entered the china shop. No, my dear fellow, you don’t arrest a chap like your perpetrator, you let him run around freely for a while and observe him, because a customer like this always has an entourage. We will go in for the attack when we have the whole gang, not before.’

  ‘But until that happens,’ Deiters summons the courage to object, ‘he can do all kinds of damage.’

  ‘Do you take me for an idiot?’ the Sturmbannführer roars, lowering his head like a bull and placing both hands firmly on the desk. ‘Of course the man needs to leave the depot, he must be transferred to a position where he can’t stir and agitate and do damage, where he is under constant supervision. That’s why I summoned you here today, to …’

  The phone rings and Wellenhöfer picks up the receiver. ‘Siering is here? Tell him to come straight to me.’

  He hangs up and turns again to
Deiters. ‘Untersturmführer Siering is the man who brought the matter to its temporarily successful conclusion. You will hear very shortly.’

  Some minutes pass, Wellenhöfer appreciatively smokes a cigarette down to the butt, Deiters leans back in his chair, stares blankly in front of him, when there is a knock he gives a start.

  A young man is standing at the door.

  ‘Heil Hitler! Untersturmführer Siering reporting for duty!’

  Wellenhöfer returns the greeting and points to the chair. ‘This is Senior Inspector Deiters from the Karlhorst depot,’ he says, casually waving in Deiters’ general direction.

  Siering nods to him cursorily and sits down.

  ‘My suspicion has become a hundred-per-cent certainty, Sturmbannführer,’ he says.

  ‘Good, Siering!’ Wellenhöfer nods with satisfaction. ‘Thank you, after definitive and successful completion of the investigations I will put you forward for promotion.’

  ‘I am honoured,’ Siering says.

  Wellenhöfer waves his words away. ‘It’s fine,’ he says. ‘But now I would like to hear once again a complete report on the results of your work.’

  ‘In the presence of this gentleman?’ Siering asks, nodding towards Deiters.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Wellenhöfer replies, ‘we need to bring him into our confidence anyway, and your report will give him a rough idea of how we are supposed to work in such cases. So fire away.’

  Siering leans back and folds his arms over his chest. ‘The first thing to do was to mark out the circle of suspects, and draw that circle tighter and tighter,’ he begins. ‘At first I established the times when the different acts of sabotage were committed, and that produced a certain result: all acts of sabotage were performed in the shift from ten in the morning until six in the evening. Only manual workers, clerks and officials who worked during that period were taken into consideration, and with the exception of some office workers who only work by day, that was all of them.’

  ‘So not all of them, in fact,’ Deiters suggests, ‘I’m sure you won’t have suspected the executive staff.’

  Siering swings round and looks at Deiters as if noticing his presence for the first time.

  ‘Why not?’ he asks. ‘Fundamentally everyone is a suspect, even you, Senior Inspector.’

  ‘But please …’ Deiters says defensively.

  ‘Don’t interrupt me,’ Siering says roughly, ‘I don’t want to talk to you about my working method, and I need only refer you to the twentieth of July.’ He turns his back on Deiters again, and addresses the Sturmbannführer. ‘So I shall continue. The dates of the acts of sabotage already considerably reduced this great circle of suspects, because the dates yielded the following: the acts of sabotage were only carried out at night, and at very regular intervals of about three weeks, that is, they accumulated in one week, then there was a pause of fourteen days in which everything continued in an orderly fashion, and then they began again, stopping after a week, again for fourteen days. It could not be a coincidence. The solution to the apparent mystery presented itself to me when I got hold of the duty rosters of the Karlhorst depot. The circle in which the perpetrator was to be sought became considerably smaller, by precisely two-thirds.’

  ‘Excellent!’ Deiters cannot help interjecting.

  ‘Yes, excellent,’ Wellenhöfer says sarcastically. ‘It never occurred to you, you dyed-in-the-wool expert. Continue, Siering.’

  ‘I had a fixed circle of people that I now had to deal with,’ Siering goes on. The foreigners were ruled out, as the perpetrator, on the occasion when he had almost been caught, was said to have cursed in fluent German. I must say quite openly that this information did not seem to me to be nearly as valuable as the Senior Inspector likes to claim. What convinced me much more firmly that the perpetrator is a German was the thorough, systematic nature of his work, a quality which I would hesitate to attribute to the Belgians, Dutchmen, Serbs, Italians and whoever else is swarming around in the depot. If the circle of suspects had also become considerably smaller, it was still a large number of people, forty-seven in all. An unremarkable confrontation between the train driver who had scuffled with the saboteur and these forty-seven people led to nothing. Further investigation and detailed interrogations removed several more people from consideration. I might mention here only the two workers involved in de-clinkering the locomotives, who were kept busy all night and were able to keep an eye on one another, and the stoker who fills the stoves in the boiler room, the train driver and the stoker of the Teckel, the depot locomotive, who also keep checks on each other, and I also dismissed from the circle of suspects a number of officials who had already retired but volunteered themselves, and some doubtless dependable Party members. Through the application of this deductive method the number of suspects had dropped to eighteen, but after that it remained constant. So I had no other option but to subject these eighteen people to precise investigation. I looked into their domestic circumstances, I talked to their neighbours and concierges, and even made myself directly known to them. So suspicion was in the end narrowed down to a few people, but suspicion is not proof, and if I had simply issued a warrant against the six people whom I considered to be likely suspects, perhaps the actual perpetrator would have been among them, but we would not have tracked down the rest of the gang to which he doubtless belonged. I will not trouble you, Sturmbannführer, by listing every individual clue relating to one individual or another, I shall only say that those six people were all loners who had no family and came from elsewhere, some of them from territories currently inaccessible to us. The police registration cards were entirely blank and offered no clues, except that I was struck by the fact that one of them had moved house unusually often. To avoid being over-hasty and drawing false conclusions, I investigated all seven of his previous addresses and discovered that his frequent change of residence did not occur because he had been bombed out, for example, as one might have assumed, and neither was he dismissed by his landlord in six of those cases, but he gave up the room voluntarily. He always gave a good impression, he was described as a quiet man who kept himself to himself, who never received visits of any kind, and people were extremely surprised when he gave up his room one day for no reason. A few days’ observation produced no results, and the regular evening air-raid warnings kept thwarting my plans. I’m not mentioning the elements of suspicion against the other five people, I just wish to show how and why I … happened upon this particular person.

  ‘When I had access to the personnel files of these six individuals again yesterday afternoon, and flicked through them again and again, reading everything through very carefully, perhaps to extract a clue from some seemingly trivial detail, I read that for this … for this particular man for the period between the sixteenth of January and the seventh of February a sick note had been given, by one Dr Walter Böttcher, of 14 Frankfurter Allee, diagnosis: sepsis. This Dr Böttcher is not unknown to us, but we have had nothing to reproach him with for years, the fact that our man had consulted him could be entirely a matter of chance, because he lives near Dr Böttcher, on Lebuser Strasse. On the other hand, of course, one might also argue that the man in question lives near Dr Böttcher deliberately, probably seeing him as a kindred spirit. Now, one likelihood is worth as much as another.’ Siering breaks off, he has talked himself into a state of excitement, his cheeks are bright red and his eyes have the look of a hunting hound, he runs the fingers of his right hand between the collar of his uniform and his neck as if his collar is suddenly too tight.

  ‘You tell a good story,’ Wellenhöfer says benevolently, nodding to his inferior. ‘You crank things up like a thriller writer.’

  Deiters confirms his words with a vigorous nod of the head. He too is in a state of suspense.

  ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about the sick note,’ Siering continues at last, ‘I read it again and again, and then it came to me in a flash, I took out my notebook and ran through the dates of the acts of sabotage, and
then I had it: in the period between the sixteenth of January and the seventh of February there was a week with the shift in question, the one from the twenty-first until the twenty-seventh of January, and during that shift, for the first time, nothing had happened since the start of the acts of sabotage. Now it was clear!’ Siering exhales as if freed from a heavy burden. ‘But I wanted to be completely sure,’ he continues hastily. ‘This morning, when the landlady of the man in question had gone out, I gained access to the flat and carried out a search of his room. I must say: the man is entirely neutral, there was not a single belonging that would allow one to draw conclusions about his character, not a single monogrammed piece of underwear, no picture of family members, absolutely nothing, but it was precisely that neutrality that put the seal on my suspicion: I believe the man is an illegal.’

  ‘And what is the man’s name?’ Wellenhöfer asks.

  ‘Franz Adamek,’ Siering replies.

  ‘Good heavens,’ Deiters exclaims. ‘Adamek? Unbelievable, a quiet, thoughtful man, a good worker, unbelievable!’

  Wellenhöfer completely ignores his remark. ‘Franz Adamek?’ he says. ‘Never heard of him. Does he have any kind of record?’

  ‘No,’ Siering replies, ‘I’ve looked through all the wanted lists, but the name doesn’t appear anywhere. Of course, it isn’t necessarily his real name.’