Thoughts Are Free

by Max Hertzberg

  “I’m not happy about this,” Erika told me. “I’m not sure any of us should be putting ourselves at risk in this way.”

  “But we have to, because we don’t trust the cops, do we?”

  Day 9

  Tuesday 22nd March 1994

  Berlin: The Central Round Table has responded to the statement made by the CDU and SPD last Sunday. Round Table member Hanna Krause appealed for calm, saying that discussions around next month’s referenda should be measured and based on facts rather than propaganda.

  Martin

  I cycled past the fascist squat. All was quiet, no signs of life this early in the morning. It wasn’t actually a squat—they had once squatted the building next door, but now had quite legitimately rented a whole tenement building from the District Housing Association.

  I didn’t stop but carried on to the next junction and turned left. I locked my bike to a lamppost, blowing on my hands before jamming them under my armpits, trying to warm up my chilled fingers after the dawn cycle ride.

  As so often happens when you’re waiting, time telescopes and it feels like hours are drifting by. My impatience wasn’t helped by the fact that I was nervous; the last raid I’d observed hadn’t been pleasant, and quite a few people who had since become friends had been the victims of police violence that day. But, as I told myself in the grey darkness, this time I was less likely to feel any empathy for those who may be on the receiving end of truncheons and fists.

  My thoughts were interrupted by a patrol car drawing up across the junction at the end of my side street. An officer got out, holding a white and black traffic baton, posting himself in the middle of the road. This was my cue; I walked back to Weitlingstrasse, waving the traffic officer away with a flick of my RS identification card, then went down to the squat. A scrum of uniforms was gathered by the front door, slowly funnelling in through the narrow gap. By the time I reached them all but a handful were inside, and I pushed my way in too. I could hear boots hammering up the stairs, but no swearing, no shouts of resistance or cries: the only sound was that of the bulls crashing around. I went into the ground floor flat, which was where the office was meant to be. A couple of cops stood around, staring at the empty space. A couple of desks, a few overturned chairs and a telephone wire hanging from the wall; nothing else to be seen. No fascists, no electronic equipment, not even a typewriter or a scrap of paper. I went into the next room: also empty except for a couple of wooden pallets leaning against the wall.

  I stood for a moment, nonplussed, irritated by the echoing emptiness, then went back out into the hall, running up the stairs, looking in through open doors at each landing. Cops were standing around in the empty rooms, chatting and smoking. The only other occupants of these flats were dust and empty beer bottles.

  Our birds had flown.

  I went back down to the ground floor, where a sergeant was taking reports from other cops. Next to them was a low doorway, I stooped to go through, finding myself on a steep stairway. Feeling around, I found a light switch and twisted it until a bulb clicked on, lighting up the stained wooden steps. Careful not to slip, I made my way down to the cellars, looking into each of the three large, low rooms. These cellars were also empty except for bits of junk: a few crates of empty beer bottles, a tattered and ripped black hoody and a few wooden banner poles in the corner. I walked over to them, crunching across shards of glass and sandy grit, and kicked the stack of wood. Light-coloured timber, spruce or pine, about three by three centimetres, most just over a metre long, but a few were broken in half, jagged ends sometimes matching the negative impression of a neighbour. Many of them, particularly the broken pieces, had a reddish-brown discolouration, splashes that had soaked into the wood, in a few cases leaving a crusted layer on the surface.

  I stood for a moment, looking at the stains. Shuddering, I made my way back up the cellar steps.

  “All empty?” I asked the cop standing in the hallway, who was still taking notes while listening to colleagues’ reports.

  He nodded without looking up from what he was doing, and I went back out onto the street. A police lieutenant was leaning against a green and white Wartburg smoking a cigarette and toying with the microphone of the two-way radio hanging over his shoulder.

  “Are you in command of this operation?” I asked, impatiently holding my hand up to ward off a junior cop that looked like he might drag me away from his chief. My gesture must have carried enough authority, because the bull stopped, looking towards the lieutenant for guidance.

  “I asked you a question, Lieutenant!”

  The lieutenant didn’t seem too impressed with my performance, but did at least stand up straight.

  “Are you Captain Grobe?” he asked. “I was told to expect you. Yes, I’m in charge here. Lieutenant Steinlein. Anything I can help you with, comrade Captain?”

  “Lieutenant, I want to know why this house is empty!”

  The officer shrugged, turning towards the sergeant who was heading across the pavement, his notes clutched in his hand. “Better ask the people you were expecting to find.”

  Karo

  “Schimmel, we’ve got to do something!”

  Schimmel wasn’t awake yet. He just sat there, staring into his mug of coffee. I shook his shoulder.

  “Schimmel, wake up! This is important! We’ve got to do something!”

  Schimmel managed to look up from his coffee. He might have said something, I don’t know, I was too busy pacing around the kitchen. I’d had too much coffee already, and I was pissed off. Pissed off with the two skins yesterday. Pissed off with the computer stuff that Schimmel had shown me the other day. Pissed off with Martin for not taking it all seriously enough. Pissed off with the Antifa group even though I didn’t know exactly why.

  And now I was feeling pissed off with myself for not doing more.

  Martin

  My colleagues were surprised to see me back so soon.

  “They’d cleared out, the place was empty,” I told them.

  It was pointless speculating about why they would have given up the building they’d been using—the only reasonable explanation was that they’d been tipped off about the raid.

  The number of people who’d known about the plans for the raid had been pretty much limited to our team at RS2, and the main police station in the district, VPI Lichtenberg. Obviously we’d be pointing the finger at the cops, and they would be returning the compliment.

  “There has to be a leak at VPI Lichtenberg,” said Nik. “First of all the fashos find out about the mole, then somebody—presumably the fascists—murder him while he’s in a West Berlin hospital, even though nobody other than the Lichtenberg cops knew he was there. Now there’s been a tip-off about the raid. The whole thing stinks.”

  Yes, it stank, but was it so surprising? I almost said that, but held back. Such remarks weren’t going to help us decide what to do now.

  “We’ve already informed the Ministerial Committee that we’re unhappy with the way the VPI Lichtenberg has dealt with the matter of the informant, so we can just update our position with a memo,” stated Laura, as ever trying to deal with action points rather than speculation. “I think we need to stay on their case though. We can’t just let them do what they did during the Silesian Crisis, it’s not good enough to have a narrow investigation and ignore the wider picture. We should get authorisation to be more involved—that way the cops won’t be able to complain about us breathing down their necks.”

  We all agreed with Laura’s suggestions, but my mind was on more immediate matters.

  “I think one of us needs to go down to the cop shop and lean on them, I mean this morning, not sometime next week. Right now they’ll be trying to work out how to cover their arses, and we need to get to the bottom of this before they have a chance to get their story straight.”

  “I’m not sure you’re the right person to do that,” Laura objected. “Maybe someone who is less well known to the security forces would be more acceptable?” />
  We were just about to get into anther argument when Klaus stomped into the office, a deep frown creasing his face. In his hand he had a copy of the Berliner Zeitung.

  “Have you seen this?” he demanded as he sat down heavily in a chair opposite me, throwing the newspaper onto the desk.

  I looked at the article Klaus was pointing out. The chemical workers were saying that several of them had been detained by the police and questioned regarding future plans for their campaign.

  I passed the newspaper on to Laura, who scanned the article briefly and gave it to Erika. She shook her head in disbelief.

  “Where’s it all going to end? This is political policing, just like in the old days,” she said quietly. “For three or four years they go round with their tail between their legs, afraid of offending anyone, and now they’re growing in confidence again and they go after the chemical workers.”

  “It’s not a police matter,” Klaus said, obviously irritated by what he’d read. “And if anything actually needs to be done then we should be the ones doing it, not the cops.”

  “But it isn’t a matter for us either, is it?” was Nik’s reply. “The chemical workers aren’t posing any economic or political danger to the Republic, they’re just exercising their rights.”

  “Precisely!” Klaus responded. “They’re exercising their rights. Their political rights. Just because that’s uncomfortable doesn’t mean the bulls should get heavy on them.”

  “But even if the cops are involved it doesn’t mean we have to get involved, does it?” Nik insisted.

  “Nik’s right,” said Erika, so softly that her contribution was nearly lost in the scraping of chairs and rustling of the newspaper. “We’re not here to hold the police to account, or interfere in their cases—no matter how worrying they may be. That’s a job for the Ministerial Committee.”

  “But that’s exactly what we are doing: holding the cops to account, monitoring their investigation. Why else was Martin at the raid this morning? Why else are we hassling the cops to tell us what they’re doing about the dead informant?”

  Erika didn’t reply to Klaus’s questions, she just looked at Nik and me, expecting us to respond. Neither of us did, but Laura had something to say.

  “Klaus, listen: Martin’s back from the raid already because the squat was empty. We reckon they had a tip-off.”

  Klaus gave me a hard look, as if he blamed me. He pulled a half-smoked cigar out of his pocket and chewed on the end for a moment or two before responding.

  “And the only place they could have got the tip-off would have been VPI Lichtenberg?” It was a question but he said it more as a statement.

  None of us felt the need to answer, we just sat there, giving him time to think it through.

  “Then we definitely need to go and read them the riot act,” he said eventually.

  “We can’t just mix it all up because we’re cross with the Lichtenberg cops!” Laura took the newspaper back off Erika and crumpled it up. “There are different issues going on here: there are questions around the mole and the potential leaks and we need to handle those separately from any concerns we’ve got about whether or not the cops are getting political again. Maybe we should put some pressure on the cops about the leaks—like Klaus said, we’re already involved.” She tossed the mess of newsprint on to my desk. “But the other issue, well, if the cops are taking political decisions about who they will allow to demonstrate and how people may use their right to freedom of speech then that can only be a result of decisions taken at a high level. Dealing with that isn’t our job. But we can’t just ignore it either. We can’t allow political policing to begin again—the chemical workers aren’t breaking any law, at least nothing important. We should ask the Committee to give us oversight powers in the interests of accountability, the same responsibility we had when we sent Martin along to observe the Weitlingstrasse raid.”

  We thought over Laura’s suggestion, and eventually everyone agreed.

  But Klaus had the last word: “And if the Committee says no then we should do it anyway!”

  Somehow I got my colleagues to agree to let me be the one to talk to the cops. It wasn’t far to the district police headquarters on Schottstrasse—just over the road from the Lichtenberg courthouse where I’d met Evelyn last week. Unlike most police stations in Berlin it wasn’t built in an imposing style, it looked more like an ordinary pre-war tenement block.

  The Kripo were based at the back of the building, overlooking a concrete yard. But first I had to get past the front office. While I was waiting for the officer at the front desk to get round to noticing my presence, Lieutenant Steinlein sauntered in, accompanied by several other uniformed officers. He hesitated for a moment when he saw me, then came over, wearing a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

  “Comrade Captain Grobe,” he said, giving me a relaxed salute.

  I glanced over to the duty officer behind the front desk who was still studiously ignoring me, and took Steinlein by the elbow, steering him through the double glass doors that led into the police station proper.

  “You’re going to take me to the Kripo officer responsible for handling the IKM in the squat. When you’ve done that, I want you to fetch the written orders you received for the raid this morning, plus any other paperwork you have on this matter. Understood, comrade Lieutenant?”

  Something in my tone must have warned Steinlein. He just nodded, no attempt to be as cool as was this morning at the raid. He took me straight to a door that looked like all the others on an endless corridor. The plaque on the wall said Captain Neumann, Kriminalpolizei Department K1.

  Neumann looked up from his desk, irritated, as I opened the door and went into his office without knocking.

  “Dismiss, comrade Lieutenant,” I said over my shoulder, but Steinlein announced me instead.

  “Comrade Captain Neumann! Comrade Captain Grobe from the Republikschutz to see you. The comrade captain wishes to see all written orders regarding the operation this morning.”

  Neumann looked me in the eye while he countermanded my order and dismissed his subordinate. I looked straight back at the captain for a few moments, then sat down in the chair in front of his desk.

  “Comrade Captain, I think we can dispense with the formalities and get down to what matters. You know why I’m here, and I’m sure you are aware that there will be consequences if you refuse to co-operate.”

  But Neumann wasn’t taken in by my bluff, he just sat there, quite calm and collected in his brown corduroy suit, light brown shirt buttoned up to the collar, but minus a tie. A bonbon, the Communist Party badge, adorned his button hole.

  “And your authority, comrade Captain Grobe?” he asked, holding out his hand for the written authorisation he knew I wouldn’t have. I might get it one day—although that was far from certain—but the slow milling of government machinery meant it was impossible for me to have gained authorisation to investigate something that had happened just a few hours ago.

  Round one to Neumann.

  I leant back in my chair, crossed my legs, breaking Neumann’s staring competition for long enough to pick an imaginary speck of lint from my knee, noticing as I did so that I was still wearing my cycle clips. I ignored them. Looking up at Neumann, I started round two.

  “Comrade Captain, you know as well as I do that written authority will not have been issued yet, but make no mistake, it will be. And when it is, any early co-operation—or lack thereof—will be noted.”

  I was putting Neumann in a difficult spot. Although both of us held the same rank, he would be aware that I had the Ministerial Committee’s collective ear, whereas he was just one captain among many others on the police force. That gave me the potential for a lot more clout, although he could count on his colleagues to block, hinder, obfuscate and fudge any internal investigations. And whether or not he was responsible for the leaks, or was aware of who may be responsible, he could hardly tell me about it without incurring the wrath of his comrades.
He was a member of a militarist organisation with a strong corps d’ésprit and a harsh system of informal punishment for those who stepped out of line.

  All in all I think it was fair to say that in Neumann’s position I would think twice before co-operating.

  Neumann lifted the left edge of his lips in a crooked half-smile. The right side of his face was immobile, pinched to a scar that ran down the side of his nose and past the corner of his mouth. Now that we’d stopped the staring contest I was finding it difficult to keep my eyes away from his damaged face. I focussed on his eyes again, waiting for a response.

  He leant back in his chair, pulled open a drawer in his desk, removing a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches. Taking out a cigarette, placing it carefully in the left corner of his mouth, he looked up at the ceiling as he struck a match and lit up. He exhaled through the nose, then balanced his cigarette on the edge of a small glass ashtray.

  “What is it you want to know?” Pause, “Captain Grobe.”

  “I wish to speak to the officer who handled the informant in the Weitlingstrasse squat.”

  “I’m sure that can be arranged. In the meantime, how else can I be of assistance?”

  “Do you have any other informants in place in the fascist, hooligan or skinhead scenes here in Lichtenberg?”

  “Captain, I can’t possibly let you have that kind of information. It’s a matter of protocol. And of safety for the putative IKMs, of course.”

  I considered my position. At some point I would have to start pushing back, but was this the right moment? I decided to give him an easy question, see if he had any intention at all of ‘being of assistance’ as he had put it.

  “What operational procedures did you use to handle the IKM? How often did the handling officer and the IKM meet, how were crash meetings arranged? I want to know about briefings and debriefings, support mechanisms—the lot.”