by Michael Dean
Arno sat down again at his desk as the new office manager came in. Some of the clerks thought Frau Quednau was intimidating. She could certainly be brusque, even rude, but she was also clever, fair and would further increase the success rate of the prosecutions, Arno believed.
*
Lieselotte Quednau owed this job, with its promotion to State Official Grade III, and her reinstatement in the Firm, albeit at a much lower rank, to H.R. Haldeman, the White House Chief of Staff. It was Bob Haldeman (not Kissinger), who had whispered in Nixon’s ear the idea that the number of Minuteman III missiles should be increased to over 500 (it finally reached 550) so the President could negotiate with the Communists from strength. The increase, coupled with the announcement of Nixon’s visit to China in July, alarmed the Russians mightily.
This alarm translated to a perceived need for a solid propellant rocket of their own, like Minuteman III. They intended, as an interim measure, to redesign their R-5s. The R-5 was based on the Nazi V2. So they needed an old Nazi scientist who knew the V2’s fuel system. They told the East Germans, in no uncertain terms, to get them one.
The command was dealt with by the newly-formed ZOS, the department which had sent Dorothea Stoll to Ludwigsburg. Going back through the files, Heinrich Damerau, Dorothea Stoll’s lover and boss, had discovered that an ex-SSD agent, Lieselotte Quednau, was living 3 kilometres from a leading Nazi-hunting outfit, the ZLS in Ludwigsburg.
With the zeal of the new, the ZOS in East Berlin excoriated those predecessors responsible for abandoning Frau Quednau, who they now needed. The fresh minds began to think of her not as an agent who had walked out on them, hut as some sort of sleeper. Kai-Uwe Prengel had been sent to reactivate her, but using indirect means, until they were sure of her again.
Lieselotte Quednau was not so much reactivated, she was rejuvenated, reborn, content, except for missing the baby son she had left behind in East Germany. She had her own little spy cell, here in Ludwigsburg. OK, Dorothea Stoll was already her enemy and the young woman had connections in Berlin that Lieselotte Quednau now lacked, but she could deal with that. Kai-Uwe Prengel was doing everything he was told, good boy. She had interesting and complex work to do. What more could anyone want?
*
Her smile faded as she looked with concern at Arno Götsch. It was not like the young man to be sitting there doing nothing, and he looked unwell.
‘Is everything OK?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he said shortly, but then he never wasted words.
‘What have you been working on? T-4?’
‘Yes.’
‘You can stop now. I’ve got something else for you.’
Arno looked relieved. As Office Manager, Frau Quednau’s job was to take instructions from the lawyers about which cases to follow and allocate research to each clerk. She then checked the progress the clerks were making, pulled it all together and reported back to the lawyers. It was a key position.
‘I want you to check out information on these three names,’ she instructed Arno. ‘They are rocket scientists. Start with this one.’
The one she indicated, Siegfried Henkins, was a talented young rocket-fuel scientist who had worked for von Braun on the V2 at Peenemünde and at Mittelwerk in the Harz Mountains. Funnily enough, he had also been called ‘the boy genius’, like Arno. He was supposed to be at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, working on the Aerobee rocket under another name, but the ZOS thought this was a blind. They thought he was somewhere in West Germany.
‘What’s the reason?’ said Arno. ‘What’s our interest?’
‘Mmm. They used slave labour at Mittelwerk,’ said Lieselotte Quednau, vaguely ‘The scientists must have known about it. They knew the names of the guards.’
The usually sharp Arno Götsch let that pass. ‘OK,’ he said, absently.
He was pleased to be away from investigating T4, but he still couldn’t get the face of the doctor, his darling Katya’s father, out of his head. He loved Katya Brenner very much. He loved her mother, Beate Brenner, and sadly he had loved her father, Dr Manfred Brenner, too.
23
Dorothea Stoll sighed contentedly. The Prengel idiot was unexpectedly good in bed. She needed sex from somewhere, and with a female boss, the only possibility had been Prengel. Sex outside the job was too dangerous. In any case, Prengel mustn’t be allowed to belong completely to Quednau. That would leave her, Dorothea Stoll, isolated.
Quednau had proved unexpectedly amenable to sharing Prengel, realising, Dorothea Stoll suspected, that having both women would help him keep it up, which he could not be expected to do indefinitely with Quednau alone. (It was a miracle he could do it at all, with her.)
In any case, today had been her day riding Prengel (she always went on top) and she was still tingling with the result. Dorothea Stoll padded up the stairs of the empty house to Hill’s room. Everything was going just fine. She had found Gudrun Ensslin and through her linked up with the rest of the Baader-Meinhof gang. Charming people!
As ever when she was happy, Dorothea hummed a nursery song from her childhood:
Hänschen klein ging allein
in die weite Welt hinein
She sat on Himmelfahrt-Hill’s bed. By now, the analysis of the strands from his towel had come through from Berlin. Semen, predominantly. Traces of urine. Dorothea Stoll had burned the report before the Quednau cow could see it. But, happily, she no longer needed the report, because she had found something better. Much, much better!
She had carried out a routine search of Quednau’s flat while the old cow was out playing Nazi-hunter. There, in Quednau’s desk, not even particularly well hidden, was a copy of an Employment Certificate in the name of Marcus Himmelfahrt. It was in Quednau’s writing!
Looking for the original, Dorothea Stoll had broken into the Aliens Office at night and searched the files. Yes, the original Employment Certificate for Marcus Himmelfahrt in Quednau’s writing was on file there. And so was Himmelfahrt’s Work Permit. Himmelfahrt had not got his own Work Permit, Quednau had kept it from him. Why? Obviously, so he couldn’t get away from her. Quednau was a British agent and Himmelfahrt-Hill was her Joe — she was running him.
Quednau had underestimated her, Dorothea Stoll. She had got her to investigate Himmelfahrt-Hill, expecting her to miss all the evidence and clear him. Then Quednau and Himmelfahrt-Hill could go on spying for the British under the very noses of the new SSD branch in Ludwigsburg. The audacity of it!
She had informed her boss and lover, Heinrich Demerau, immediately. But she needed more to make it stick. Quednau would be put on trial, back in Berlin, and the prosecution case had to be watertight. So here she was again, in Himmelfahrt’s room, planting some evidence that would leave the traitor Quednau and her man, Himmelfahrt-Hill, no room to wriggle out.
Dorothea Stoll smiled, took the transmitter from her suitcase and put it on Himmelfahrt’s bed.
The transmitter had been sent by Heinrich Damerau. At first he had demurred at the framing of Quednau, but one threat to tell his wife of their affair and he had caved in. Dorothea Stoll hadn’t even needed the photographs of herself and Damerau having sex in the Damerau family home. She smiled at the tuned transmitter the way some women smile at small children.
The transmitter was exactly what the spy Himmelfahrt-Hill would have used, or possibly was using, if only they could find it. It was a Larkspur C42 no 3 (only the British, thought Dorothea, would name a transmitter after a horse). The Larkspur series had originally been issued to the army, but some of the new ones, now made in India, had been given to spies on the advice of the All Arms Tactical Communications Committee, a body thoroughly infiltrated by Russian intelligence.
Checking the time on her watch, Dorothea Stoll was ready to transmit at 9.30, the time she had told ZOS headquarters in East Berlin to be ready to trace and record a signal. She decided to use Himmelfahrt’s operational name, Mark Hill, rather than a codename, to speed up his detection as a spy.
Dorothea
thought for a moment, then, grinning, sent this to GCHQ in Cheltenham on the frequency she had told the ZOS to monitor:
How is my old pal Siegfried Henkins these days? Do you have his address? Some friends from the east are looking for him. Yours, Mark Hill.
*
At the moment that a radio transmission went out from her back bedroom to British Intelligence, Elfriede Biedermeier developed a headache. It came on quite suddenly, at her parents’ house round the corner in Schlösslesfeld. Before that, Elfriede and Lothar Biedermeier, with some assistance from the elderly parents, had demolished a plate of quivering, pink Eisbein, the shank of boiled pork that her old mother always prepared so lovingly, Elfriede’s favourite. Her mother, father and Lothar were, as usual, most solicitous about Elfriede’s headache. She was prone to them. But then her parents had been marvellous to her all her life, and marvellous to Lothar, from the beginning.
The parents had given Lothar a job in the family firm, Dambach Sanitäre Anlagan, (leading toilet makers, Himmelfahrt would have loved them) when he was a near destitute toolmaker, come south from Essen after the war to look for work. And when the toolmaker fell in love with their daughter, and she with him, they had given the couple their blessing.
Then something terrible happened. The couple’s only child, Karl, died of meningitis at the age of seven. Lothar Biedermeier never recovered. His fragile mind shattered; he had a nervous breakdown and never worked again.
Elfriede’s parents had been magnificent. They let Elfriede work in the office, so some money was coming in. They bought the couple a house, instead of the rented flat they had been living in, so they didn’t have to worry about finding money for rent. Taking in lodgers was Elfriede’s idea, her parents did not think Lothar was up to it, but they didn’t say anything.
Lothar and Elfriede Biedermeier made their farewells to Elfriede’s parents, Herr and Frau Dambach. By now Lothar Biedermeier had a headache, too. He loved his wife and felt what she felt. They walked home together hand in hand, comfortable as a pair of old darned socks.
As they approached their home they saw that the light was on in Mr Hill’s room, but there was no reason why it shouldn’t be.
*
West Germany’s intelligence service, the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), had the best radio intercept capability of all the Allied nations in 1971. This was mainly due to the listening station codenamed ‘Eismeer’ (Polar Sea) near Cadiz that had been inherited from the Nazis, who had a matey relationship with Franco’s Spain. Eismeer had the capacity to decode signals from fourteen friendly nations.
So it is really quite ironic that Eismeer listeners missed a straightforward signal coming from their own country (Himmelfahrt’s bedroom) that was meant to be intercepted. One reason was the sending equipment was old; also Eismeer were not looking for signals from the Stuttgart area — there was no reason to.
Dorothea’s message on Himmelfahrt’s behalf was, however, picked up at GCHQ in Cheltenham where it was read with some bewilderment. It was also, as intended, received by the East German ZOS in Berlin.
Mindful of his wife’s powerful Party connections, and what she could do to him if she ever found out he had been unfaithful, Dorothea’s boss, Heinrich Damerau, made sure everyone from Markus Wolf down knew how right Dorothea Stoll was about Lieselotte Quednau and Himmelfahrt-Hill. But even the formidable Dorothea could not know that her message had been picked up in one more place.
At the moment the Biedermeiers returned to their home to nurse Elfriede’s headache, Joachim Mannich felt a moment of pure elation. Herr Mannich’s official designation was Intelligence Analyst, but he lived and breathed radio and radio communication. That evening he had been running an extra training session for a few trainee agents who were keen on radio. They had been playing about, fooling around really, with DF sets. Joachim had just switched on a DST 100 Receiver captured from the British during the war. It was tuned to 50Hz and it picked up a message sent from Ludwigsburg in English to GCHQ in Cheltenham about the rocket expert Siegfried Henkins.
The signal was loud and clear, but then Joachim and his class were a lot nearer than the Eismeer station, near Cadiz. They were in Heilmannstrasse, Pullach, near Munich, the headquarters of the West German Intelligence Service, the BND.
*
Up in Himmelfahrt’s bedroom, Dorothea Stoll heard the Biedermeiers come in. She heard his solicitous murmurings from downstairs and her tired acquiescence to something. Dorothea was mildly irritated, no more than that.
Working quickly but not hurriedly she packed the transmitter into its grey zip-up case, opened the hatch door and walked as far under the roof as possible, hiding the transmitter there. Then she replaced the hatch cover, put her coat on without buttoning it up and checked her appearance in Himmelfahrt’s wardrobe mirror. With a smile, she smeared her lipstick a little and undid the top two buttons of her blouse. Then she noisily left the room, swinging the empty suitcase, banging the door shut behind her. The Biedermeiers came out of their parlour as she was coming down the stairs.
‘Grüss Gott,’ sang out Dorothea Stoll to the Biedermeiers. And then turning, she called up the stairs in a Swabian accent ‘Bye Mark. You tiger! See you soon, eh? Any time you want, Big Boy.’
She gave the Biedermeiers a bright smile as she let herself out.
*
After his evening lesson, Himmelfahrt did not see the Biedermeiers as he let himself in and padded up the stairs, considerately quietly so as not to disturb them, so naturally they assumed he had been in his room all evening.
24
The euthanasia programme in the Third Reich never had legal status, as such. Hitler’s ruling to doctors to dispose of lebensunwerten Lebens (lives not worthy of life) was originally for children born with a range of defects like hydrocephalus and mongolism. A procedure for doctors to declare these births was established from August 1939 and became the model for the adult euthanasia programme which followed.
As early as the beginning of 1939, the search for suitable centres for the programme began, initially administered from Grafeneck, a few kilometres from Ludwigsburg. An old convalescent home at Schloss Hartheim, near Linz, Austria, was chosen as the main euthanasia centre in February 1939 and the organisational apparatus to send people there was established in Berlin in July 1939.
The early euthanasia operations on children had been carried out with Luminal and in tests in Berlin-Brandenburg in 1939-40, morphine-skopalamine injections had also been tried. But a convention of chemical experts under the leadership of Victor Brack recommended gas — carbon dioxide. Hitler himself took the final decision for gas.
So by the time Dr Brenner took up his position as a euthanasia doctor in Schloss Hartheim on 6 May 1940, gas chambers had been constructed that would serve as a model for those in the other five centres. These, in turn, were the model for the gas chambers in the concentration camps.
It was decided that as the earlier death injections could be given by doctors only, so the gas that would end the lives of those in the euthanasia programme could be switched on by doctors only. And doctors, only doctors, could certify that everybody in the shower rooms was dead after the gas had been passed through.
The exact procedure was this: After a sham ‘examination’ by the doctors, 40 or 50, sometimes as many as 80 people from each transport, were led through two narrow iron doors sealed with rubber into the gas chamber. Anyone who became ‘difficult’ was given a morphine injection by the doctors. The doctors then watched the gassing process through a spy hole from the next room.
There was no shortage of applicants for this work among qualified doctors, who made up the largest professional group by far with Nazi Party membership (22.5 per cent); 28 per cent of doctors had SA membership (as against 11 per cent of teachers who as state officials were under more pressure to join); 7.3 per cent of doctors were in the SS, as against 0.4 per cent of teachers.
*
Arno Götsch did not know why this should be. He also coul
d not understand why Katya Brenner wanted all this detail. Time and again she sent the pale young man back to the files to find answers, especially about doctors. The idea of her father as a doctor had always been important to Katya.
Arno found out everything she wanted to know — at some risk to himself as Frau Quednau had taken him off T-4 and he was not supposed to have access any more. Day after day, Arno reported to Katya in a low, factual, miserable voice as they walked round the lake at Monrepos, where the fairytale Lakeside Castle is lapped by the water.
Wrapped against the winter cold, they walked the woods where they had sketched together during a once endless shaft of summer now remembered as a past age of innocence. When there was no more to say they held hands like fallen babes in the wood and looked across the lake to the dainty, romantic cupola’d castle.
They were aware, because people kept telling them, that they looked alike. They were both tall, blond with sharp, alert features and clear complexions and both wore glasses. Sometimes they spoke together and said exactly the same thing.
25
Himmelfahrt threw himself into a flurry of evenings with John, with John and Naomi, with his classes, and the occasional elegant, chatty evening with Margarethe and Johannes Heer in their glossy-magazine-picture of a flat.
He had been showing off to Petra Weiss, among many others, for weeks in his classes. Petra laughed at his jokes. She was a pale slim blonde in her mid-thirties, always immaculately made-up and sleekly dressed — white or pastel tight sheath dresses, white, high-heeled shoes. She was overdressed for a language lesson.
Petra Weiss’s engineer husband worked away for weeks at a time. Petra was childless, prosperous, bored witless alone in her perfect flat, beginning to wonder what it was all about and to do the wondering over a drink. One evening at the end of the lesson she took Himmelfahrt up on what she thought he was offering.
