When Brickhill asked what sort of Christmas the Gades children could expect, their mother told him that she would be digging into her supply of potatoes to make the children potato and barley soup, plus bread spread with the luxury of a little ersatz honey or jam. Normally the family’s daily ration was a few potatoes, some dry bread with a hint of margarine, and for ten days a month, a little meat. Vegetables were unheard of. On being asked by Brickhill if the children would be receiving Christmas gifts, Frau Gades showed him two pathetic rag dolls she’d made for her daughters, three-year-old Brigide and seven-year-old Lise. Her four sons would not be receiving presents. The boys were stoically resigned to the fact.
When Brickhill asked the children whether they believed in Father Christmas, all shook their heads. Frau Gades said that Christmas Day would, for her family, be much like any other winter’s day in 1945. After their meal, the children would play in their rubble-strewn street until around 4.30, when the sun went down, and then clamber into their beds to keep warm. With luck, the authorities might give the family a hoped-for gift of candles. Otherwise, Christmas night would be long and dark for Frau Gades and her children.148
Returning to his warm hotel, and after a good dinner, Brickhill sat down at his typewriter to write about the Gades family, feeling a little less embittered towards all Germans than he had a few days before.
Christmas Day, 1945. A Tuesday. Before Brickhill enjoyed a relatively lavish Christmas dinner at his hotel, he had a driver take him around the city to see how Berliners were celebrating their first Christmas after twelve years of Nazi rule. Few people ventured into the streets. Those who did seemed to Brickhill to be in a daze. A number walked lethargically into the path of his car, jumping back as if in slow motion when the driver tooted them.
As he was being driven through the poorer districts, Brickhill opened his window. Eerily, he didn’t hear a thing. No traffic noise, no singing, no laughing children. Millions of Berliners were cloistered indoors, huddled, shivering in the winter cold and downing their meagre Christmas fare. In wealthier suburbs, he did hear the occasional sounds of revelry. Black-market food and booze had obviously found their way here. At one point he got out to walk, hoping to find an English speaker among these Berliners who could afford contraband luxuries. A woman walking along the broken pavement told him her name was Dolly Angels, and that she was a doctor of philosophy. He asked her if she was fearful of the threat of a major epidemic striking the city.
‘I think such fears are exaggerated,’ said Dr Dolly, nonplussed.
He asked her what she thought of the Nazis.
‘They were not too bad,’ she said, betraying lingering National Socialist sympathies.
What were her thoughts on the Nuremburg trials?
‘Grossly exaggerated,’ she said dismissively. At least she was aware of the trials, unlike Gertrude the nightclub girl and other Berliners Brickhill had spoken to. But the doctor of philosophy seemed to have ceased to care about anything other than the exacting business of maintaining life from one day to the next.149
Dr Dolly went on her way, and Brickhill returned to the car, resuming his trawl of the city. In the Bülowstrasse, he saw an old man slip and fall to the frosty pavement. Too weak to regain his feet, the old man lay there, working his arms and legs uselessly, reminding Brickhill of an overturned beetle. Other pedestrians walked on by as if he didn’t exist. Instructing his driver to stop, Brickhill jumped out and went to the old man’s aid. Helping the German to his feet, he steadied him as he wiped blood from his nose.
What had the old boy done during the war? Been an air-raid warden, perhaps? He was too old to have served in the military. In all probability he had fought in the First World War. Pulling a chocolate bar from his greatcoat pocket, Brickhill broke off a large chunk. The old man accepted the chocolate, stuffing it all into his mouth at once. Brickhill looked at passers-by. They were glassy-eyed, indifferent. Feasting on the Australian’s chocolate, the old man stumbled away.150
Continuing to cable articles to Sydney, Brickhill lingered in Berlin, hopeful of receiving permission to enter the Soviet Zone. He knew that people enjoyed reading about other people, and was always looking for what the American press called ‘human interest’ stories. Once 1946 rolled around, in the first week of January he stumbled on a rich source of stories, an office in Military Government House in Berlin’s British Zone with an intriguing role and a very interesting female operative. To this office came applications from Berliners claiming British citizenship and seeking to escape war-ravaged Germany. With Australians then still officially British citizens, Brickhill was intent on documenting the stories of applicants hoping to settle in Australia.
Assessing these applications was the British Army’s Paddy Rose, a Suffolk girl of mixed Anglo-Irish parentage. ‘She is one of the most ruthlessly efficient, likeable characters I’ve ever met,’ Brickhill would write. Pert, pragmatic Paddy showed a typical application to Brickhill, from seventy-three-year-old Rudolph Laver. After migrating to Australia as a young man, Laver had returned to Germany in 1899. During both world wars he’d produced electrical equipment for Germany. In his application he wrote that ‘my constitution is weak’, and that his wife suffered from ‘child failure’ and ‘overdosisses of morphium’ (sic). Paddy had turned down his application.151
At least Herr Laver could speak English, if imperfectly. Many applicants could no longer speak or write English, and frequently they were consigned to the ‘Rejected’ pile, along with those whose names appeared on what was called the ‘Renegades list’ – British citizens living in Germany or occupied Europe known to have supported the Nazis.
‘I get the same stories every day,’ Paddy told Brickhill, ‘and they’re nearly all lies. I’m getting so I can smell this pure Aryan blood a mile away. They all claim to be of such loyal British stock, but most of them have been sitting on the fence during the war and are sorry that the Nazis lost. Had the Germans won they’d have been rabid Germans. They thought they had it all lined up so they couldn’t lose.’152
But Paddy had been briefly shaken a few days earlier when a woman claiming to be a duchess appeared in her office. Aged around fifty, she had given her name as Lilli von Kent. She’d demanded special and immediate treatment, failing which her husband the duke would not be pleased. But she astonished Paddy by proceeding to list the names of thirty illegitimate children she’d borne all over Europe. Deciding that Lilli was more prostitute than aristocrat, Paddy sent her for immediate attention – from a doctor.
Those applicants who seemed to have a genuine right to repatriation to Australia were invited in for personal interviews with Paddy. Among them was Mrs A. Pianos, who’d been born in Sydney to Australian parents and in the 1930s married an Englishman. In September 1939, when war was declared, she was visiting Germany, and found herself trapped there. Paddy was likely to give her favourable consideration. A number of other Australian-born women who’d married German men and survived the war in Germany would also receive the nod.
Brickhill used his charm to wheedle the address from Paddy of a woman who’d passed muster and received approval to return to Australia. Vera Hoffman had been born in Tanunda, South Australia to a German immigrant family involved in grape growing. She had married and had a son, Dirk, but lost her first husband when Dirk was very young. In 1930 she’d married a German, Herr Boeckmann, and Vera and Dirk had moved with him to Germany. Herr Boeckmann had survived the war and was still living with his wife and stepson in Berlin. While mother and son would soon be leaving for Australia, Vera’s husband hadn’t received permission to migrate, and would be remaining in Berlin. When Brickhill tracked down Vera, he found a woman who was painfully thin and weak as a result of the food shortage. She was only now recovering from illness with the help of fortnightly Red Cross food parcels from England.
‘Recently, after a couple of weeks in bed,’ Vera told Brickhill, ‘I fainted at suddenly seeing in my mirror how thin I had become.’ She assured Brickhi
ll that she’d had nothing to do with Nazis. ‘Throughout the war I dropped all friends showing Nazi tendencies and lived very quietly.’ Since the German capitulation eight months before, Vera had been teaching English to eager Germans, and had more prospective students than she could handle. She had also written an English textbook for German readers, which would soon be published in Berlin.153
Brickhill was able to meet Vera’s son, seventeen-year-old Dirk, an intelligent blond-haired youth who spoke good English and was looking forward to going to Australia.
‘For democratic freedom?’ Brickhill asked.
‘Not so much,’ Dirk confessed. ‘For eating grapes, which I have tasted only once.’154
Vera told Brickhill that she had kept up her morale during the war with a chain letter that had circulated since 1942 around Australian-born women living in Hamburg, Coblenz, Danzig, Vienna, Paris and Berlin. Her correspondents were Leonie Miller, Muriel Mudge, noted Kalgoorlie-born contralto Lorna Sydney, who had married an Austrian baron, and, most surprising of all, Margaret Murdoch, niece of Sir Keith Murdoch and cousin of Rupert Murdoch. The Australian women had called this chain letter hopping around Nazi Europe their ‘kangaroo’.
Wishing Vera and Dirk every success with their new life in Australia, Brickhill retired to his hotel to write up several articles. He had completed one about Paddy Rose and her work when he received a message to say that a party of British journalists had been approved by the Russian military to shortly enter their sector, and he had been included. Generously handing his notes about Vera and Dirk to fellow Australian journalist Keith Bean, who would file an article about the pair under his own name but with an acknowledgement to Brickhill as his source, Brickhill prepared to be in that first British press party to enter the Soviet Zone. At last he might have the chance to view Nazi documents which could reveal the true fate of the Fifty.
Beyond the bullet-scarred pillars of the Brandenburg Gate, the Soviet Zone in eastern Berlin was just as bleak and war-torn as the sectors controlled by other Allied powers. The first thing that Brickhill noticed as he and other journalists in the press party were taken into the Soviet Zone was that the Russian military drove much more quickly than the British, French or Americans did in their sectors. Heaven help any Berliner who walked into the path of a Russian vehicle. The driver would happily run him or her down, or so it seemed.
One of the first places the journalists were taken to in the Soviet Zone was the Jewish Relief Committee’s transit camp, which was occupied by 1700 Jewish refugees from Poland. Jews had been arriving in the British Zone with stories of intimidation by Polish partisans, who’d allegedly given Jews two options: pay up and leave the country within twenty-four hours, or be shot on the spot. Speaking with Jewish refugees, Brickhill found no one who could corroborate that rumour. While the British journalists were in the Russian sector, the Jewish camp emptied overnight. It turned out that the Russian military had suddenly warned Jewish refugees that within two days they would be taken to camps close to the Polish border. Some fleeing Jews turned up in the British and French sectors. Others evaded Russian troops to reach the Americans in southern Germany.155
Meanwhile, Brickhill’s quest for information about the fates of the Fifty hit a brick wall. The Russians were keeping a firm grip on captured German records and weren’t sharing them with anyone.
Across the room from Brickhill sat Hermann Goering. What an odd feeling, seeing the infamous Reich Marshal in the flesh. It was early February, and Brickhill was in Nuremberg, Bavaria, to cover the war trials being held at the Palace of Justice by the International Military Tribunal. Here, the Australian would apply his forensic eye for detail, mood and character to the men in the dock, and their judges.
In January, Brickhill’s six-month leave without pay had ended, and he’d reported back to 11PDRC. Brickhill was enjoying his press work, and was coming to terms with the demons that had gripped him when first he’d been released from captivity. He was in no hurry to return to Australia. With his leave without pay extended as ‘emergency leave’ until his discharge from the RAAF in April, he preferred to remain in England for the publication of Escape to Danger, and to cover the big stories of the day. And the Nuremburg trials were the world’s biggest news story at that time.
Nuremberg had been deliberately chosen by the victorious Allies for the trials of surviving National Socialist leaders because the city had been the spiritual home of the Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s, the place where they’d held their massive party rallies. Now, Nazi political and military leaders were in the large, two-level dock, being called to account for their crimes, and Brickhill was in the press gallery alongside the world’s leading newspaper correspondents, to observe and report.
Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels had all suicided. But Goering, Hitler’s former number two, was alive and well and taking pride of place among the defendants in the crowded courtroom. For the first time, Brickhill laid eyes on the man whose air force he’d fought, whose Luftwaffe men had held him captive, and who’d personally played a leading role in the fates of the seventy-three Stalag Luft 3 escapees in 1944. The once-ostentatious Goering still wore the pearl grey Reich Marshal’s uniform he’d designed for himself. The brass buttons remained, but not the once-numerous decorations or eagle and swastika emblem. Brickhill noted a red scarf around Goering’s neck. And, in the winter chill that gripped the vast barn of a courtroom, he had an American army blanket wrapped around his ‘Falstaffian’ middle.
‘Goering still has an aura of cruel strength as he continually gestures and poses,’ Brickhill wrote.156 Yet the Reich Marshal didn’t come across as a politician, or a military leader. There was something ‘rascally’ about Goering. He put Brickhill in mind of a pirate.157 Goering had been a key figure in the rise of the Nazi Party, creating the SS, overseeing the murder of political opponents, even administering the German economy at one point. The fact that an increasingly insane Hitler had ordered Goering’s arrest by the SS in the dying days of the war in no way mitigated the war-crimes charges the Reich Marshal faced.
Another man in the dock, former German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, had also fallen out of favour with Hitler towards the end of the war, but that would not save him from Allied retribution either. ‘The bags under Von Ribbentrop’s eyes seem to be getting heavier,’ Brickhill observed. ‘He is a very worried and frightened man as he follows the trial closely and constantly scribbles notes to his lawyer.’158
For the previous few days, Brickhill had been closely watching two of the accused in particular. Red-faced Hjalmar Schacht, one-time finance minister under Hitler, a man Brickhill described as possessing a face like ‘an over-ripe tomato with an expression of wounded dignity’. And handsome forty-year-old Albert Speer, the former Nazi armaments minister, who, in Brickhill’s opinion, was looking heavy and gloomy. Schacht and Speer had been in a huddle for two days, and none of the other defendants had spoken a word to them in that time.
‘They’re getting ready to spill the beans,’ another journalist assured Brickhill. The Australian’s next report for readers Down Under would be headlined: ‘Nazi Leaders Plotting To Rat on Mates.’
Once the trial wrapped up for the day and Brickhill was leaving the massive court building, he noticed that machineguns had been installed along hundreds of metres of rambling corridors. Out front, a Sherman tank stood by the wrought-iron gates. For the past few days, a rumour had been circulating that Nazi sympathisers were planning to raid the Palace of Justice and free Goering and his co-defendants. The American military, who had charge of the security of the building and the trials, weren’t taking any chances.
Yet in the street, something resembling normal city life was playing out, with vehicles and pedestrians passing without anyone giving a second glance to the court building. ‘From the outside,’ Brickhill would comment, ‘you wouldn’t think that a trial – the greatest in the world – was in progress, has been for three months. Even inside the court the proceedings go th
eir quiet and almost prosaic way.’ 159
The rumoured bid to rescue the Nazi leaders failed to eventuate. Apart from Goering, none of the men in the dock was widely popular with Germans, and most friends of the military men on trial were now either dead or themselves under indictment.
In March, Brickhill was on assignment in Austria and Hungary for Associated Newspapers. From Budapest, he reported on the political and economic situation in former Nazi ally Hungary. Tongue-in-cheek, he told readers back home, ‘Budapest shows you can survive on £40,000 a week,’ as he described out-of-control inflation and widespread starvation in a country where ‘Millionaires go hungry’.160
He also saw the political writing on the wall. ‘They whisper in Central and Eastern Europe that Stalin made two mistakes – he showed the Red Army to Europe, and Europe to the Red Army.’ Despite obvious dislike of communism among the majority of Hungarians he encountered, Brickhill perceived that the Red minority held sway, and predicted, presciently, that under the threat of the Red Army the entire Eastern Bloc would before long become governed by the communists.161
Returning to England for his official discharge from the RAAF on 8 April, Brickhill prepared for a new posting – US correspondent for Associated Newspapers, based in New York City. His parents were keen for him to return home, but the temptation of a new adventure was too great. On 7 May, he boarded the Ile de France at Southampton to sail to New York via Halifax, Nova Scotia, revisiting that Canadian port city for the first time since his departure from there in 1941.
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