by Robert Moss
When the French sent their troops into the Ruhr — Germany’s industrial heartland — on the pretext that the Weimar government had not kept up with the schedule of tribute imposed at Versailles, Johnny went too, at the head of a combat squad, to organize armed resistance. The sight of giant smelters shut down, of swollen, sullen breadlines, told him the revolution could not be long delayed. What he saw on his return to Hamburg made him sure of it.
By late October 1923 the daily wage of a worker on the Hamburg docks was seventeen billion marks. Hungry mobs broke into bakeries and food stores. Near midnight, on his way to an emergency meeting called by Kordt, Johnny passed a crazy old woman who was burning currency in a rust-eaten gasoline drum to warm herself. Everyone knew the French were to blame. When they had marched into the Ruhr, they had starved the German government of money, and the government had turned to the printing presses. Day and night the presses spewed out paper money, with more zeroes on every bill every time you looked. It was the death of the currency and the death of the middle class. A man who had spent his life salting away his savings in bonds and bank deposits was now worth less than his drunken brother who had saved the bottles his booze came out of. It was a good season for speculators — and for the Communist party.
The meeting room, a pistol shot away from the Kali-Bar, was crowded and overheated. They had three or four trestle tables pulled together. Heinz and Waldemar presided together at one end. The men who squeezed in along the sides were not ordinary party members. They were chiefs of Red Hundreds and cadres from the M-group, the party’s professional combat organization. They whispered to each other as they waited for the meeting to come to order. It had been a week of wild rumours and false alarms. The political bosses of the German Communist Party were meeting in Chemnitz, on the other side of the country. As far as Johnny was concerned, the only item on their agenda that mattered a damn was whether to order an armed insurrection. The German leaders were said to be divided; so were the observers from the Comintern. So, it was rumoured, were the Russians. While telegrams were fired back and forth to Moscow, the men in this room worried at their leash.
Heinz looked drawn and tired. As Johnny watched, Magda crossed the room and whispered something in Kordt’s ear. Immediately his face seemed to regain colour and life.
He got to his feet and banged his fist on the table.
“Comrades! A courier has just arrived from Chemnitz by train. They’ve made their decision! By God, I believe it’s the right one! We move at first light!”
He made the clenched-fist salute. The next instant, every man in the room was on his feet.
“Red Front!” a dozen voices chorused.
Heinz and Waldemar rehearsed the targets assigned to each group.
There was at least one doubter in the room, a shoemaker from Barmbek who sat across the table from Johnny.
“We can’t fight with broomsticks,” he pointed out. “My group has only got three revolvers and a few hand grenades.”
There were sympathetic murmurs from some of the others. Despite Trotsky’s promise, weapons were in short supply.
“If you need a gun, Georg—” Kordt wagged a finger at him “—you catch a policeman. We’ll take what we need from the enemy. All right?”
“What if the government sends troops?”
“The honourable Minister for War will be busy saving his own rear end,” Kordt said contemptuously. “There will be simultaneous risings in Berlin, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Bremen — where are reinforcements going to come from?”
The shoemaker sucked on his pipe, apparently pacified. But a young seaman spoke up with a different complaint. “We can’t count on anyone around the docks except our own men,” he said. “Not since the strike.”
This touched a raw nerve. The communists had called for a total shutdown of the port early in the summer. The strike had been a success to begin with. Then hunger had started to wear down the strikers’ resistance. Finally the communists themselves had decided to break the strike. Secret orders had gone out: party members should go down to the docks at first light and get themselves signed up for any job that was going. By this cynical device, the communists had hoped to turn half the ships in the harbour into floating fortresses. But in the eyes of a lot of angry, unemployed men around the waterfront, they were blacklegs. Johnny had heard the ugly word hurled at him. He didn’t like the way it sounded. In their ignorance, in their misery, those angry men could not be expected to understand that what looked to them like a sordid manoeuvre would help them in the long run by building workers’ power.
Heinz might have made a speech along these lines, but it was not a night for speeches. He simply growled at the young sailor, “The Hamburg docks belong to me! Let any man try to prove otherwise.”
Then Waldemar got up, and a deep hush grew around him. They were all in awe of him, this man who had fought with Lenin and Trotsky.
“I know a bit about revolution.” His voice was warm and protective. “On the eve of revolution, there are always voices that say, ‘The masses aren’t ready.’ On the night before, they are probably right. It doesn’t matter a damn. Once we strike, the masses will follow.”
With that, all hesitation seemed to leave the room.
The first target for Johnny’s group, in the early dawn, was a police station within sound and smell of the harbour. He had twenty men, including Klaus Behring. Only a few were armed with rifles. The rest had to make do with revolvers, bottle bombs, kitchen knives and spiked clubs. Inspecting his ragtag army, Johnny wondered again what had happened to Trotsky’s shipments.
By the time they converged on the station, they had two more guns. With knives at their throats, the policemen they ambushed weren’t reluctant to part with their Sam Browne belts. But one of them was less cooperative when Johnny ordered him to strip. Johnny knocked him out cold with a blow to the back of the neck. The uniform was a reasonable fit.
He stopped at an all-night cafe a few blocks from the station, to use the telephone.
“Police? I want to report a rape. Yes. It’s still going on. The screams are terrible. Please hurry.” He gave a made-up address and hung up.
In the cold morning light he watched two more policemen pedalling off in the direction of the reported crime. The odds were narrowing by the minute. But the men at the station weren’t asleep. They had turned their post into a blockhouse, with rolls of barbed wire and a machine gunner up on the roof.
Johnny deployed sentries at the street corners and massed the rest of his men in an alley in the lee of a boarded-up dress shop.
“Can you throw straight?” he asked a muscular young stevedore with a brace of hand grenades in his belt. “Straight as an arrow.”
“Very well. As soon as you hear shooting inside, aim for the machine gun. And don’t forget to take out the pin.”
Johnny strolled into the police station as if he lived on the premises. He and his companion were wearing the green tunics and shakos of the Hamburg police.
Inside the building, several men were dozing on camp beds. The others were hunched around a table, playing poker.
“Who the hell are you?” the duty sergeant addressed Johnny, turning his attention from a busted straight.
“You’ve been expropriated, friend.” Johnny flourished a pistol in one hand and a grenade in the other. “This station belongs to the people.”
“Leck’ mich am Arsch,” said the sergeant, unimpressed. He grabbed for a rifle from the rack.
He had his hand on it when Johnny shot him behind the ear. The somnolent forms at the back of the room began to stir. Johnny yanked the pin from the grenade with his teeth and lobbed it towards them. Everyone rolled for cover. The building rocked with a double explosion, from inside and overhead. Streaked white with plaster dust, the surviving policemen gave up meekly enough. One of them, cooler than the rest, plucked the scattered playing cards off the floor and said, “Do you mind if we play another hand, Your Excellency?”
Johnny let t
hem go on with their game in the cells. He left the station with enough rifles for all his men and a few to spare for the volunteers who started bobbing up out of nowhere. He did not spare a thought for the sergeant he had killed; history would justify him. All the same, he avoided looking at the man’s clumsy body. It was easier to kill when the enemy was impersonal.
By midday it was obvious that things were going badly wrong. In some areas—especially in the working-class citadel of Barmbek — the people joined the rising in great numbers. But they fled from the armoured cars that shoved their ugly snouts over the barricades, spitting machine-gun bullets.
Johnny saw Kordt, riding on the running board of a truck, shouting orders.
“Heinz! Any news from Berlin?”
“Nothing.”
Heinz let himself drop from the running board.
“What about the fleet?”
He shook his head. “Listen. To fight the armoured cars, we must have explosives. You know the dynamite factory?”
Johnny remembered. It was west of the city and heavily guarded.
“Can you take it?”
“I’ll try.”
“Good luck.” Heinz clapped him on the shoulder and ran after the truck.
The navy got to the factory first. Johnny and his men were pinned down by a hail of fire from blue-uniformed German sailors. These were not the sailors of 1918. The rumour spread that a battle flotilla was steaming up the Elbe, ready to shell the rebels into submission if they captured the port or the business quarter.
Klaus Behring made a mad dash for the blockhouse commanding the gates and was caught in a murderous crossfire. Johnny saw his old shipmate fumble forward and lie still in a pool of his own blood.
Someone will pay, he promised himself, emptying his magazine at the line of sailors that was inching steadily, relentlessly forward.
Finally Magda came on a bicycle with a message from Heinz.
He saw her beside the road, her mouth opening and closing. He couldn’t make out the words. He ran towards her, ducking and weaving.
“Give it up!” she yelled. “We’ve been stabbed in the back!” Before he could reach her she was speeding away, her head bent low over the handlebars.
He was reduced to running to save his skin. The old instinct drove him back towards the harbour. He found the waterfront swarming with police. They were checking anyone who tried to cross to the Free Port by bridge or tunnel. He slipped behind a warehouse and found a dinghy that had been hauled up for repair. It had sprung a leak, but it might hold out long enough to serve his purpose.
Paddling and bailing by turns, he crossed the inner harbour and spotted a passenger boat that was just getting up steam. It was flying the Dutch flag. In the chaos of departure, he was able to haul himself up on deck without being spotted. But almost at once he saw one of the ship’s officers strolling his way. Where could he hide? If he were discovered here, they would turn him over to the police. He saw only one chance — the manhole cover a few yards away, in the bow of the boat. He sprang at it and hauled it open. Even as he jumped inside, he realized his mistake.
He was inside the chain locker. Once he had pulled the cover back over his head, he was left squatting uncomfortably on a great iron anaconda — the coiled anchor chain, hundreds of feet long. Still, he would be safe enough until they got out to sea, when he might be able to find a softer berth.
He had not slept for two days and he soon dozed off, lulled by the familiar reek of bilge water and the vibration of the hull against his side. It was an uneasy sleep. In his dream he was being prodded up a cattle run behind Heinz Kordt and a dozen other men he knew from the Thüringen and the Hamburg underground. They were all bent over, running on all fours like brutes. At the head of the cattle run stood a masked man with an iron mallet, waiting to brain them one by one. Stabbed in the back, Magda’s words came into the dream. Stabbed in the back...Now the feet were thudding harder, faster, threatening to trample him unless he hurried. A tremendous howl burst against his eardrums — and he snapped awake.
Above, the foghorns wailed. He heard the creak of a windlass. Disoriented, still half in the grip of the dream, he stared at the vertical length of chain beside him, trailing from the hole in the hull. Suddenly he was on his feet, wrestling with the manhole cover.
For some reason — the fog on the river? the ship was going to drop anchor. When the crushing metal weight was loosed, the coils of chain that had made his bed would lash up at him and batter him to pieces. The cover wouldn’t shift. He pounded and clawed, but he couldn’t move it an inch. Someone must have secured it from above.
Desperate, he hammered on the metal with both fists. “For the love of God—”
“For the love of God, is it?” The cover was pulled back and Johnny found himself looking up into a ruddy face embellished with thick white eyebrows.
At the same instant, he heard the splash of the anchor. The chain kicked and sawed, and he clutched at the edges of the manhole, swinging his legs up under him.
His rescuer seized his forearm and dragged him up on deck.
A white-jacketed purser came running. “Need any help, sir?”
“No, I reckon he’ll be docile for a bit.”
Johnny realized he was dealing with the skipper himself. “You’ll be one of them Reds, I venture? Well, come along with me. I want to hear all about it.”
For once luck was on Johnny’s side. Captain Jan Gallagher, Irish on his father’s side, took a liberal view of human foibles and didn’t mind other men’s politics — even the Bolshevist sort as long as they didn’t try to spread them on his boat. He also had a liberal hand with his genever. He poured both of them a few glasses in his cabin, eager to hear a first-hand account of the Hamburg rising.
“What happened in Berlin?” Johnny asked him. “Did you hear any news?”
“None of your comrades lifted a finger, in Berlin or anywhere else. They left your lot in Hamburg to swing by yourselves.”
Johnny was stunned by this information. This must have been what Magda had meant. They had been stabbed in the back. Even if they had won in Hamburg, the government would have been free to throttle them with fresh troops from all over the country. They had been led on a dance of death. But why? Had the party leaders changed their minds? Were they cowards? Had the groups in other cities been betrayed?
He thought of Klaus Behring, face down in his own blood. Someone would have to atone for that and all the other wasted lives.
Captain Gallagher looked at him with a sort of pity.
“Here. Have another drop of gin. I’ll take you to Rotterdam if you’re willing to work your passage. But I won’t have any politics on my ship. Agreed?”
It was not a hard promise to keep. On that voyage Johnny was in no mood to play the apostle.
7
“It was a fuck-up.” Heinz delivered his post-mortem six months later. “The orders were changed at the last minute. The rising was called off. The couriers had already left the party congress in Chemnitz. They sent men to stop them. But when they got to the station the messenger for Hamburg had left. They could still see the lights of his train.”
“Wait a minute.” Johnny leaned across the table. “What are you telling me? That we spilled our guts because nobody bothered to tell us the operation was cancelled? Couldn’t they have sent another messenger by car? Don’t they even know how to drive?”
He sat back, furious and mildly nauseous. They were in a booth at a restaurant on the Hedermanstrasse in Berlin, shielded by panels of frosted glass. The place served excellent bratwurst and latkes, but it hadn’t been chosen for its cuisine. The owner was a member of the N-group, one of the most secret components of the underground party Apparat. The “N” stood for Nachrichten, or intelligence. He was said to have an unerring nose for police spies.
“It was a fuck-up,” Heinz repeated, fanning his hands. “It’s not the end of the world. There’ll be plenty more battles to fight.”
“Not for Klaus
Behring,” Johnny said savagely. “Or a lot of other good men.” By the end of the rising one in three Communists in Hamburg had been killed or captured. “It was Thälmann who lost his nerve, wasn’t it?” he pressed on. Thälmann was emerging as the biggest of the Bonzen, as the party leaders were unflatteringly described by the rank and file.
“It was the Bonzen,” Heinz half confirmed.
Johnny had spent half a year on the run from Rotterdam to Marseilles, where he had washed up at the Comintern liaison office, which operated under the cover of a seamen’s club down at the docks. They had given him odd jobs to do, running around as a messenger boy with an envelope glued to the skin of his back. Then the telegram ordering him to meet Heinz in Berlin had come. He hadn’t hesitated. Whatever he might think of the Thälmanns, he would cross oceans for Heinz.
“Have you got something for me?” Johnny asked.
“That depends on the man you’re going to meet.”
“Do I know him?”
“You may have imagined him,” Heinz replied oddly.
“Is he German?”
“No. Though he speaks better German than Thälmann.”
“Russian, then.”
“He speaks that, too. Someone told me once that he was born in Riga. Also that he went to school with the Jesuits. I don’t know if it’s true. I know he was with Dzerzhinsky, when he defeated the plot against Lenin.”
“So he’s a chekist.” The word was widely used in party circles, as in Russia, to describe a member of Soviet intelligence. It derived from the original name Lenin had given to his secret police.
“He is a man who lives in shadow country,” Heinz responded. “He has his own network in the West. He told me once that it extends from Iceland to the Cape. In Germany, he controls the N-group. Also the T-groups.” The “T” stood for “Terror.”
