The Berlin Affair

by David Boyle

“Don’t worry yourself. Happens to me all the time. I take it you’re a newspaperwomen?”

  “I try to call myself a reporter,” she said, with proper immodesty.

  Sigrid was suddenly back. “Go fuck yourself, Fred…”

  There was a delicate moment when a flush went over his face. Xanthe watched him struggling with himself. Then he smiled and raised his arms in surrender.

  “I was just going to offer your friend a drink,” he said, innocently. “Another time perhaps.” And he was gone inside the press of people.

  “It just goes to show how careful you have to be,” said Sigrid, as soon as he had gone. “That was Fred Kaltenbach. From Iowa. He hates the Jews so much, he has gone over to the other side. I know, it isn’t exactly treason but it isn’t friendly either. Sorry to be so tough. But you know how it is…”

  *

  Xanthe felt she had learned precisely nothing at the press conference. It was hard not to find yourself suspicious of the daily bombast on these occasions, she told herself. Mostly Fritzsche and his colleagues were enraged by their collective failure to report the news precisely as the Nazis wanted. She soon discovered that press conferences were mainly rants about their inability to tow the party line.

  She began to do as suggested, investigating the impact of the war so far on ordinary people. There was hardly any soap to buy, and to buy a dance record you had to hand over an old one for melting down. It was also now practically impossible to buy toilet paper anywhere. Those all might make stories, she thought.

  There was a poster everywhere around the parts of the city that she tended to go in daylight which said that “NOBODY SHALL HUNGER OR FREEZE”. She had it pointed out to her by a large man who sidled up to her in the Hotel Adlon. “They’ve forbidden being hungry or getting cold now,” he said. “What next!” Then he gave a great guffaw and he went on to tell her that all the foreign correspondents get regular off-ration eggs and bacon from occupied Denmark.

  “Really? I seemed to have missed out on that.”

  She mentioned the joke to Shirer when she was finally introduced to him, and he seemed gracious and helpful, though Xanthe knew he was also terrified about how to get his wife and child out of Italy before the French capitulation that now seemed inevitable. He had no idea where they were.

  “I have no idea who to trust, when I ask people about their ordinary lives,” she said. She told him about the poster.

  “Well, as you may have been told already…”

  “I know – don’t trust anyone.”

  “I mean, for example, who told you the joke about the poster?”

  “It was a German guy in the Adlon. I know it sounds silly but I was inclined to trust him because he bowed to me so formally.”

  “Was he a big guy, large?”

  She nodded.

  “We call him Fatty. He is definitely in the pay of the Nazis, or he wouldn’t be allowed to talk to us. That doesn’t mean that what he says is all lies – just that somebody up there wants us to be aware of what he tells us. I wouldn’t dismiss it; just check it out.”

  She began to despair of ever cracking the Berlin code that would lead her to any kind of unambiguous truth. She must have looked a little crestfallen because Bill perked up too, and made her an offer.

  “Listen, I’ve been asked to go up to Kiel tomorrow. They want to show us how little damage the RAF did a few days ago. Do you want to hitch a ride? I can probably get you permission to come. We fly out at six a.m. if you can face that?”

  *

  It was a fateful visit in more ways than one, and it certainly was for Xanthe. But ostensibly it was for the press to assess the Propaganda Department’s report of a recent RAF raid on the naval facilities there – but also perhaps also to let them boast about the damage they had inflicted on British warships during the Norwegian campaign, now that it was clearly at an end.

  Bill kept his word. They met the next morning, some hours before breakfast, arranged a pass for her, and soon they were swooping low in a light plane over the German countryside, heading north-west. A junior official was there as well, fussing away like a duck with ducklings at the small brood of accompanying reporters from the foreign press. It was a military plane and the seats had no cushions. Bill complained to anyone who might hear, but Xanthe kept her discomfort and nerves to herself.

  They drove in a small fleet of cars through the morning into the naval base and most of the navy appeared to be there, under battalions of barrage balloons. The base was busy, with many ships under camouflage netting and others behind huge screens. There were sailors and shipwrights everywhere. The sunlight reflected blindingly off the sea and Xanthe watched the little tall-funnelled tugs busying themselves around the grey-painted ships. There seemed to be a great deal of construction, including what looked like a half-built aircraft carrier. “Keep your eyes skinned,” said Bill. “The fact that they want us to come at all implies that the British claims are a little, shall we say, over-optimistic – but who knows.”

  “I expect they’ve had time to do a bit of spring cleaning,” she said.

  “Well, some things can’t be cleaned in a day or so. Look for funnels and masts sticking up out of the harbour…”

  “Do you know, I have about as much naval knowledge as I need to tell if a ship is afloat or not – so I’m just the right reporter for this task.”

  Bill laughed. “Keep your ears skinned too – the navy is not a place where Nazis find life that comfortable for some reason.”

  They wandered hopefully around the biggest ship in harbour, which they were told was called Gneisenau, and she was immediately impressed by the rapport her colleagues managed to maintain with the officers and men.

  “So you can see, no damage – despite what they say,” said one of the ship’s officers. Their minder had wandered off to find the rest of his brood.

  “Quite right,” said Bill. “But the British said one of their submarines torpedoed and sank a cruiser. It couldn’t have been you could it?”

  One of the officers tapped his nose and winked and took them over to the side. “Over there,” he said indicating a ship in dry dock with a huge hole in the side. “It was the Leipzig. Not sunk but damaged.”

  “Aha,” said Bill. “Not sunk, I see. I can certainly report that.”

  It was pretty clear that, in this case, the RAF raid had caused about as much damage as Dr Goebbels had said they had. “It’s pathetic,” said Bill under his breath, as they watched the evening come down in the harbour. “I mean, how can they expect to hold the Nazis at bay if they’re that incompetent?”

  “Practice makes perfect,” they said, thinking of Jack and the other young men she had known in Cambridge. “Give them a chance.” She wondered how many of those youths had given their lives for this botched raid. They looked sadly at the intact docks and bridges.

  It was when they were being shown around below decks on the Gneisenau – technically, it was a battlecruiser, she was told – that the officers began to relax. They were taken into their mess room, with a smell of oil and alcohol, and Xanthe found herself talking to a good-looking lieutenant about the sinking of the British aircraft carrier Glorious. The schnapps was flowing quite freely – they were all feeling a little confessional.

  When she was sure nobody was listening, she dared to ask the question she had been formulating in her mind.

  “I know that, in the last war the British navy was able to read most of your wireless messages and signals to the fleet,” she said. “It is pretty well known that they were able to. I don’t really understand how they did it. Are you – that is to say – how are you going to make sure they can’t do the same this time?”

  Once she had made herself understood, what she saw was a mixture of triumph and nervousness on his face. “I don’t want to get you into trouble,” she smiled, reassuringly. “But is there anything you can say about that? I apologise for my German.”

  “Your German is excellent. But, as you must know, Fraul
ein, this is a subject on which I must not speak. It is summed up in one word – Enigma. That is our weapon in the naval war this time, and I think you will find it is an effective one. Now I must say no more.”

  By the look on his face, he clearly wished he had said nothing. Strange, thought Xanthe: it isn’t a word she had heard before. Neither Fleming nor Turing had allowed it to pass their lips. Her mind reeled. What could this Enigma be? Was it the name for a code or for some piece of technology?

  But she hardly had time to think any further about it because there was a clatter of footsteps on the metal deck outside, the door to the wardroom opened and – judging by the reaction of the naval officers there – a very senior officer, followed by a man in the kind of leather trench coat the Gestapo were renowned for wearing. She was staring at the officers and trench-coat man while, all around her, the ship’s officers were leaping to their feet. Bill joined them (“Force of habit,” he said later). Then, all of a sudden, in came Ralph.

  She stared at him, incredulous. She had been wondering how to run into him without raising suspicion in Berlin and here they were, falling over each other by genuine coincidence in the bowels of a battlecruiser on the northern coast, though – as Bill and Sigrid had warned her to – she checked her own credulity to believe that coincidences were quite what they seemed. Perhaps she had failed the test at this point, she wondered.

  The officers soon realised there was a lady in the room and were clicking their heels at her in a most disconcerting way. She raised her arm in an apologetic half acknowledgement, then – realising it might be interpreted as a Hitler salute – she put it down again and just nodded her head.

  The man in the leather coat, with a rather bulbous nose and very small eyes, took her hand and kissed it. Then Ralph saw her.

  She had been wondering what his reaction would be when they met – suspicion, rage, indifference, snobbery? It could have been any or all of them. When it came to the point, he actually burst out laughing. “I don’t believe it! Xanthe! What on earth are you doing here?”

  She found herself laughing too. It was infectious. The naval officers around her were laughing without understanding why.

  “I don’t know what you mean!” she said. “I’m with the American press – what on earth are you doing here?” She glanced to the two officers with him. “Have you been captured?”

  He translated – “Sie haben gefangen genommen worden?” – and the two roared with laughter.

  She was so used to the idea that traitors – if indeed he was a traitor – were furtive, secretive people, that this show of extraordinary confidence wrong-footed her. Bill and the other reporters were looking at them in astonishment. Ralph was so obviously British, so overwhelmingly relaxed, that it was hard to read the situation.

  Ralph said: “We knew each other in London. How are you, Xanthe?”

  The man in the trench coat stood expectantly. “Herr Lancing-Price, would you please introduce me to your friend?”

  “Oberleutnant Gustav Stumpf, let me introduce you to my old friend, Xanthe… um… Schneider.”

  “Charming. And a good German name too. Now, may I say, young lady, and to our colleagues in the press – that nothing about this meeting must be reported. I will inform the censor. You are welcome of course to tell the story of our fleet and their indomitable work in Norwegian waters. But this conversation I fear we must be discreet about. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Xanthe, where are you staying?” said Ralph in her ear. “I will call on you tomorrow, if that is ok.”

  “Very well,” said Stumpf, a leer creeping down his face. “Fraulein, I also will call on you – but perhaps at a different time…”

  She stared at their departing backs as the door to the wardroom closed behind them. There was a silence and she knew she would have to be ready with some answers once the questions started: unaskable questions irritate reporters, she knew. She also had to be as honest as she possibly could be.

  They were driven back to the airport and were soon in a tiny plane flying over the German countryside in the early evening. It was just as uncomfortable and this time also freezing cold. But it also looked idyllic as they passed over small farmhouses and great dark woods, casting long shadows on the fields. It seemed to be magically untouched by war and Xanthe compared it in her head to Poland and France where, even now, the refugees were drudging under dive-bombers, pushing their few possessions in a pram.

  “Who was that guy, Xanthe? He seemed to know you well. I’ve seen him around a bit too.” Bill was the first to voice the questions.

  “Well, I knew him a little some months back in London. The thing is I can’t really understand it. He was a politician. A member of Parliament, with links to the navy. I suppose he must have defected over here or something – or wants us to think he has.”

  “As I say, he seemed to know you well.” There was a slight edge to his voice that she recognised but dared not respond to.

  “We met a few times after we ran into each other at the Savoy. I hadn’t heard from him for weeks and weeks – perhaps that’s the reason: he was here.”

  “So whose side is he on, do you think? I mean really?”

  “I just don’t know, Bill. But I’m going to find out…”

  It was as much as she was going to say and it seemed to satisfy him. She would need some more answers later if her new press colleagues were not going to think more closely about the issue than would be entirely comfortable. The oddest thing was that, if Ralph had gone over to the other side, it was strange that neither side was admitting it. Perhaps the stakes were too high and neither were quite sure yet about whose side he was really on, apart from his own.

  5

  Berlin, July 1940

  The Berlin blackouts seemed deeper somehow than the London ones, though as far as Xanthe knew, there had been no bombing so far. It was dark beyond dark, and made all the more difficult to navigate by the fact that German lamp posts were usually in the middle of the pavement, rather than on the edge, as they were in London. That meant she was constantly colliding with them as she made her way home to her small room, and she found herself counting them – twenty-four to the end of Unter den Linden, and four fire hydrants too.

  Apart from that, Berlin seemed remarkably untouched by war. She found herself wishing the city had been a little damaged so that she could explain something about ordinary life there. There had been occasional raids, as there had in Kiel, but either they were hugely inaccurate or they just confined themselves to the usual diet of propaganda leaflets. Also, unlike the local population, she had access to the news wires which included broadcasts from London as well. There was claim and counterclaim and there seemed to be little strict regard for the truth on either side, though the Propaganda Ministry sank the Ark Royal a number of times in her weeks in the city. This was disappointing.

  Yet the German news also appeared to be so wholly partial, and their lies seemed overblown somehow, as if they were bound to be found out. Perhaps that hardly mattered in a totalitarian state where what the leader says is true becomes true by definition. Except that it doesn’t actually become so, at least not while the foreign press is there.

  She decided the outright lies were for Sigrid, Bill and their more experienced colleagues to skewer (Sigrid kept up a close link with Goering, despite her ferocious views on the Nazi system). Xanthe herself concentrated on the lives of Berlin people in wartime and, because of that, she attracted peculiarly close attention from the censors. Sigrid explained that they were sensitive because the last war ended with revolution thanks to the same naval blockade that was already causing some deprivations again. Xanthe knew from her history lessons that it had been the civilians who had given up in 1918, helped by the sailors of the High Seas Fleet who had risen in revolt, partly from sheer boredom, partly because they were afraid their families were starving back home.

  Even that was important to pin down, she felt. She knew from so many conversations from Cambri
dge and London that the prevailing view there, especially on the political left, was that Germany could not endure war for more than a few months. Yet, judging by what she was seeing every day, just on the streets and in the shops, they were wrong.

  It was a vital message to get across, she told herself. If they were there in the war cabinet in London, taking decisions based on the idea that Germany was about to implode economically, then they were deciding things on the wrong basis. She talked to Sigrid about this, but was told this was the ‘wrong motivation’.

  “You see Xanthe, you’re new to all this. The idea is that – whatever the reason is – we tell the truth. Nobody appears to have any kind of commitment to the truth, and when we do pinpoint it, then the censors stop us writing it. When John Dickson wrote that Hitler and Stalin would divide Poland between them, that was worth it, not because it helped them take decisions in London – and it didn’t seem to – but because it was true. The world needs the truth, that’s all.”

  “Who’s John Dickson?”

  “Oh, well, that was me – I needed a pseudonym.”

  They laughed. Sigrid had hidden depths. “Can people see the truth now? Can people even recognise it when they see it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sigrid, a little sadly. “I guess so. I hope so. But even if they can’t, I need to believe they can. Otherwise I’d have to go home and be a ploughgirl.”

  After the attentions of Stumpf and a few like him, mainly Nazis who had lost control of whatever used to restrain them, Xanthe felt she needed advice from a tough woman. “Listen Sigrid, can I ask you something else? What can you do when they hit on you – the Nazi ones, I mean?”

  Sigrid looked suddenly concerned. “Are you having trouble with anyone? If so, we can tell Boris. He’s our senior government handler, a lugubrious type who I don’t trust at all. But he probably has the power to haul someone off to the concentration camp if we ask him nicely…”

  “Heavens no, nothing like that.” The last thing Xanthe wanted was to attract any kind of attention. But there was a worryingly intense element to some of the men she had met, something frenetic, almost frightened. She was unsure quite how to conduct herself as a foreign correspondent. The men never received this kind of attention. It made her nervous. And on one occasion, she was forced to slap a young army officer who had tried to pull her, quite literally and bodily, out of the hotel foyer with him.