Potsdam Station jr-4

by David Downing

  Kazankin strode on ahead, his body radiating bullish confidence. They crossed a couple of paths and one clearing dotted with picnic tables which Russell thought he recognised from years before. At one point Kazankin halted and gestured for quiet, and a moment or so later Russell saw the reason – a cyclist was crossing their line of travel, the beam from his handlebar lamp jerking up and down on the uneven path. Where on earth could he be going?

  After half an hour’s walking they reached the Avus Speedway, which had served as the world’s narrowest motor racing circuit until 1938, its eight kilometres of two-way track topped and tailed by hairpin bends at either end of the Grunewald. The two lanes had been part of the autobahn since then, but that evening’s traffic was decidedly sparse, an official-looking car heading towards Potsdam, two military lorries rumbling north-west towards the city. Once they had vanished, the road lay eerily empty, two ribbons of concrete stretching away between the trees. As they walked across, Russell remembered driving Paul down the Speedway in his new car, early in 1939. His son had been only eleven years old, still young enough to be thrilled by a 1928 Hanomag doing a hundred kilometres an hour.

  He wondered if the car was still where he’d left it in 1941, gathering rust in Hunder Zembski’s yard. If the authorities had known it was there, they would surely have confiscated it. But who would have told them? The Hanomag had probably fallen victim to Allied bombs – only a brick wall separated Hunder’s yard from the locomotive depot serving Lehrter Station, an obvious target.

  They crossed the railway tracks on the eastern side of the Speedway and plunged back into forest. Russell knew this part of the Grunewald reasonably well – his son Paul, his ex-brother-in-law Thomas and Effi’s sister Zarah had all lived fairly close by – and the paths seemed increasingly familiar. Another twenty minutes and they would reach Clay Allee, the wide road that separated the Grunewald from the suburbs of Dahlem and Schmargendorf.

  Which was far from comforting. He felt safe in the forest, he realised. Streets would be dangerous.

  As if to confirm that thought, a siren began to wail. Others soon joined in, like a pack of howling dogs.

  This could be construed as good news – the streets would be emptied, making it less likely that they would encounter the authorities. The familiar drone of bombers grew louder behind them, and the searchlight beams sprang up to greet them. Tonight though, there were no clouds to turn back the light, and the overall effect was to deepen the darkness below.

  The first bombs exploded several kilometres to the east, and through the remaining screen of trees Russell saw rooftops silhouetted against the distant flashes. Closer still, a car with thin blue headlights drove towards them, and then turned off down an invisible road.

  Kazankin halted. He had brought them out of the forest at exactly the right place, not much more than a kilometre from the Institute. Russell was impressed, but wasn’t about to say so. ‘That’s Clay Allee,’ he told the Russian. ‘The Oskar Helene Heim U-Bahn station is down to the right, about two hundred metres.’

  They had discussed this last lap earlier in the day. They could approach the Institute through Thiel Park, a long, twisting ribbon of greenery which stretched from Clay Allee almost to their destination, but Russell, looking at the Soviet map, had argued for the shorter, simpler route. Two minutes on Clay Allee, ten on Gary Strasse, and they would be there. There would be nothing furtive about their progress, nothing to raise suspicion.

  Rather to his surprise, Kazankin had agreed. Now, eyeing the prospect, Russell began to wonder. The street looked far too empty, and not nearly dark enough. And who in their right mind would be promenading down a suburban street in the middle of a bombing raid? So far the bombs seemed to be falling on other parts of the city, but would Berliners be that blasé? Would anyone?

  He said as much to Kazankin, and got short shrift in return. ‘This is perfect,’ the Russian insisted. ‘They’ll be no one on the street. Let’s go.’

  They went, abandoning the single file of a partisan detachment for the sort of tired grouping a quartet of foreign labourers might form on their way back from a long day’s work. As they reached Clay Allee and turned south towards the U-Bahn station a military lorry without lights roared into view and out again, leaving Russell’s heart thumping inside his jacket.

  It seemed to be the only vehicle moving in Dahlem. They crossed the bridge over the U-Bahn tracks and turned left onto Gary Strasse. Several houses had been hit in earlier bombing raids, and much of the debris was still lying in the road, which shocked Russell almost as much as the level of damage. The fact that the German authorities could countenance such levels of civic untidiness spoke volumes.

  Their boots had not been chosen for softness, and their footfalls on the city pavements sounded distressingly loud. As if to confirm Russell’s fears, he saw a curtain twitch in a bedroom window. He imagined someone reaching for a telephone, then told himself it wouldn’t be working. No system could function in these conditions.

  They turned a bend in the road to find two men walking towards them. In uniform. One hastened his stride, as if eager to deal with them. ‘What are you doing out?’ he asked, while still ten metres away.

  ‘We’re on our way back to our barracks,’ Russell told him, in what he hoped was Polish-accented German. ‘They kept us working on the new defences until late,’ he volunteered, holding up his spade as evidence, ‘and there was no transport to bring us back. We’ve walked about ten kilometres.’

  The policeman was in front of them now. ‘Papers,’ he demanded preemptorily. His companion, walking up behind him, looked a lot less interested.

  The first man was at least fifty, Russell thought. Probably sixty. But he seemed confident of his ability to deal with four potential opponents. He was probably used to ordering foreign workers around.

  Russell handed over the papers that identified him as Tadeusz Kozminski, a construction worker from Kattowitz in Silesia.

  The officer examined them, or at least pretended to – it was hard to believe he could read anything in this much gloom. Behind him a series of flashes lit the night sky, swiftly followed by the sound of explosions. They seemed to be getting nearer.

  The others passed over their papers.

  ‘Your name?’ the policeman barked at Kazankin.

  ‘He doesn’t speak German,’ Russell interjected. ‘I’m the only one who does.’

  ‘Where is your barracks?’ he was asked.

  This was the question they had feared. During their discussions at the Polish airfield, Nikoladze had asked Russell whether he knew of any places in Dahlem where foreign workers might be billeted, and the only one he could think of was a stormtrooper barracks once infamous for its book-burning excesses. It was in the right area.

  ‘On Thiel Allee,’ Russell said. ‘Just up from Berliner Strasse.’

  ‘Where do you mean?’ his interrogator asked, suspicion in his voice. His hand was busy unclipping the leather holster on his hip.

  Russell saw surprise bloom in the man’s eyes, heard the sudden ‘pff’. As the policeman sank to his knees, revealing the dark shape of his companion, the noise was repeated. The other man collapsed with little more fuss, leaving life with only the slightest of gasps.

  The two NKVD men just stood there for a moment, their silenced pistols pointing down at the ground, ears straining for any indication that the crime had been witnessed. There was only the rumble of distant explosions.

  Satisfied, they each grabbed a pair of legs, hauled the fresh corpses across to the low hedge bordering the road, and tipped them over. They would doubtless be visible in daylight, but by then…

  Varennikov’s mouth was hanging open, his eyes reflecting the shock that Russell felt. He had seen a lot of dead bodies over the last few years, but he couldn’t remember ever watching another human being lose his life at such close quarters, and with such astonishing suddenness. And the sangfroid of the Soviet security men was breathtaking. Two Germans, two bullets
, two bodies dumped in the shadows. And if there were wives or mothers who loved them, who the hell cared?

  Kazankin urged them back into motion with the jerk of an arm. They had to be nearly there, and sure enough, a sign for Ihne Strasse soon emerged out of the gloom. They were only a block away.

  Russell had visited the Institute once before, on a journalistic assignment in early 1940. He had made an appointment to see Peter Debye, the Dutch physicist then in charge, but had received a less than fulsome welcome when he reported at reception. Debye, it later transpired, had just been fired for refusing to accept Reich citizenship, but the news had not been cleared for official release, and Russell had spent an hour strolling around the grounds before he received the definitive no. If Nikoladze was right and it hadn’t been bombed, he was fairly sure he would recognise the building. The Lightning Tower – the large cylindrical structure at its western end – was too distinctive to miss.

  It would probably still be. The Americans would have done their damnedest to destroy the whole complex once they discovered that atomic research was going on there, and they would have redoubled those efforts once they knew that the Soviets would be reaching Berlin before them. But trying and succeeding were two very different things where aerial bombing was concerned. If any country’s bomber command had won medals for precision in this war, then Russell hadn’t heard about it. The fact that they’d been aiming at the Institute seemed a near-guarantee of its survival.

  A few moments later his cynicism was rewarded, as the stark silhouette of the Lightning Tower reared up against the flare of a distant explosion. They had reached their first objective, and much quicker than he had expected. ‘That’s it,’ he told Kazankin in a whisper.

  They advanced along their barely discernible road, and crossed another. Beyond the dim shape of the tower, the long three-storeyed building stretched away. As they drew nearer the deepening orange of the sky reflected in the even rows of windows that lined the sides and roof. There were no lights visible, but blackout curtains were bound to be in place. The whole German scientific establishment might be inside, all working flat out on some new monstrosity for the Wehrmacht to use.

  But Russell didn’t think so. The building felt empty. In fact the whole area – all the large shapes in the darkness that made up Wilhelm II’s dream of ‘a German Oxford’ – felt empty. As if the German scientific establishment had finally summoned the nerve to say ‘Fuck you, Adolf’, and headed on home.

  He remembered the building standing in an open, well-manicured square of parkland, but the war had taken a toll, and patches of unkempt vegetation now offered useful camouflage for a raiding party. Kazankin pushed his way through the surrounding hedge and led them to one such patch, not far from the base of the Lightning Tower. Looking up, Russell could see the vertical ribs, and the small rectangular windows just below the coolie hat roof which gave the tower its resemblance to a fat medieval turret. When the war began it had housed a particle accelerator for atomic experiments, but that was probably long gone.

  The eastern sky was growing lighter with each new blaze, and Kazankin found he could read his watch. ‘Almost eleven,’ he told Gusakovsky – they were slightly ahead of schedule. The moon would rise in twenty minutes, and on a clear night like this would make a considerable difference. But it would only be up for four hours, which they’d spend in the hopefully empty Institute, out of sight and searching for secrets. When it went down at a quarter past three, they would still have three hours of darkness in which to reach the sanctuary of the Grunewald forest.

  They crouched there for what seemed an age, until Kazankin was satisfied that no one had seen them. He then led them across to the nearest porticoed entrance, and hopefully depressed the handle on one of the double doors. It swung slowly open. This implied human occupancy, but the complete lack of light suggested the opposite. Which was it? Had the Institute been closed down? Had its scientists decided that the war was over and gone back to their families? Or had the whole shebang been transferred to some safer location? That would explain the absence of security – there would be nothing left to guard.

  There should at least be a caretaker, though. Some hapless old man, down in the basement, waiting for the all-clear to sound.

  Kazankin disappeared into the darkness, and for what seemed like several minutes the others waited where they were, listening to the muffled sounds of his exploration. Finally the thin beam of the Russian’s masked flashlight blinked on, revealing a long corridor in which every door seemed to be closed.

  ‘Is it empty?’ Varennikov asked in a whisper.

  ‘No,’ Kazankin answered shortly. ‘There are no blackout curtains down in the offices, so we must lower them ourselves before we use any light. Now…’ He took the folded diagram of the building out from inside his jacket, flattened it against the corridor wall, and shone the flashlight on it. Several rooms at the western end, close to where they stood, were marked with crosses. So was the Lightning Tower.

  ‘I think we’re wasting our time,’ Russell heard himself say.

  ‘That is possible,’ Kazankin said coldly. ‘But since we have three hours to waste I suggest you and Comrade Varennikov start here’ – he picked out the nearest cross in the diagram, which marked a large room facing onto the inner courtyard – ‘and work your way down this side of the building to the tower.’

  ‘Where will you be?’ Russell asked, thinking about the possible caretaker.

  Kazankin paused for a long moment, as if he was wondering whether to divulge the information. ‘Shota will stay here by the entrance,’ he said eventually. ‘I will check the building next door. According to our information, it has a lead-lined basement area known as the Virus House where certain experiments have been performed. If I can find it, and if anything looks interesting, I will come back for Comrade Varennikov. If not, you must be back here by three-fifteen. Understood?’

  Russell nodded. It was the first time he’d heard Gusakovsky’s first name, and the extra intimacy was somehow comforting. Once he and Varennikov were inside the first office, Russell closed the door behind them and carefully closed the blackout curtains before trying the light. Unsurprisingly, the electricity was off – they would have to rely on their flashlights. Which was probably no bad thing, he decided. Most curtains bled a little light around the edges, and the brighter the source the sharper the glint.

  Varennikov started rummaging through the desks and filing cabinets. They had not been cleared out, which might bode well, but the young physicist gave no sign of finding anything significant. Outside, the level of bombing seemed to have abated, although it might just have moved further away. ‘There’s nothing here,’ the Russian concluded.

  They moved on to the next room, a laboratory. Once Russell had blanked off all three windows, Varennikov used his flashlight to explore the room. The various items of scientific equipment meant nothing to Russell, but the physicist seemed encouraged, and swiftly applied himself to sifting through several filing cabinets’ worth of experimental results.

  To no avail. ‘Nothing,’ he said, slamming the last cabinet shut with a loud bang, and then wincing at his own stupidity. ‘Sorry.’

  The next room was almost bare, the laboratory that followed devoid of anything useful. Only two small offices remained on this side of the corridor, and the first was replete with papers. Halfway through the first pile, Varennikov extracted a single sheet and sat staring at it for what seemed a long time.

  ‘Interesting?’ Russell asked.

  ‘Maybe,’ the Russian said. He put that sheet and several others to one side.

  The next office was even more rewarding. Halfway through one folder of papers the Russian’s excitement became almost palpable. ‘This is very interesting,’ he murmured, apparently to himself. ‘An ingenious solution,’ he added in the same tone, taking out the relevant sheet and placing it with the one he had taken from the previous room. Others followed: the beginnings of a nuclear pile in more ways than one
.

  At the end of the corridor a door and small passage brought them into the Lightning Tower. The particle accelerator had been removed, leaving a vast echoing space, and only the metal stairway spiralling up the sides and the Manhattan-style island of filing cabinets in the centre of the floor precluded the tower’s re-employment as a fairground wall of death. The perfect metaphor for Nazi Germany, Russell thought. Once the petrol ran out, it had dropped like a stone.

  ‘It must have been huge,’ Varennikov was saying, a look of awe on his face. Almost reluctantly, Russell thought, the Russian turned his torch beam on the filing cabinets, and began rummaging through their contents.

  He was soon lost in the task, throat clicking in apparent appreciation as he added more papers to the Moscow-bound sheaf. It took the better part of an hour to riffle through each cabinet, and by then the file was bulging, the physicist smiling. ‘We’ll have to be quick with the rest of the offices,’ Russell told him.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Varennikov agreed, with the air of a man who already had what he needed.

  Which, as they soon discovered, was just as well. The outside offices contained only administrative records. They found no further evidence of Heisenberg’s progress in creating a German atomic bomb, but they did discover what the famous physicist’s salary was. Russell thought about translating the Reichsmarks into roubles for Varennikov’s enlightenment, but decided it would be unkind.

  They were in the last room when two things happened. First there was a shout, a few frantic words in German that included nein. And then, only a heartbeat later, the window blew in, sucking in the roar of an exploding bomb with a hail of shattered glass. Russell felt a sharp pain in his face, and heard Varennikov gasp. An instant later, a second bomb exploded, then another and another, each one sounding a blissful stretch further away.

  Russell picked a small shard of glass from his check, and felt the blood run. He trained each eye in turn on the moonlit gardens – both were still working. Varennikov, his flashlight revealed, had lost his right ear-lobe, and the stub was bleeding profusely. He seemed more shocked than harmed.