Potsdam Station jr-4

by David Downing

  ‘You go,’ the sergeant ordered Paul.

  Cursing inwardly, Paul followed the Hauptsturmführer across the tarmac and around behind the huge concrete edifice. A fire escape zigzagged up the side of the buildings, and Paul spent most of the long climb wondering what the officer needed him for.

  He soon found out. Once they reached the huge flat roof, the officer unfolded the map he was carrying, carefully laid it out on the ground, and asked Paul to stand, legs spread, with a foot on each of two corners. He stood on the other two, and began scanning the surrounding city through his binoculars.

  Paul resisted the temptation to point out that a couple of chunks of masonry could have done the same job – SS Hauptsturmführers were notoriously unwilling to take criticism. Every now and then his companion would lower the binoculars, fall to one knee, and scrawl lines across the map with a piece of pink chalk. Watching him work, Paul decided he must be plotting the latest Russian advances.

  It wasn’t so easy to do. The flash and peal of cannonades and explosions were coming from every direction, but only a few of these could be attributed to actual fire-fights on the ground. Away to the east, on the far side of the aerodrome, one such battle was underway in Neukölln – Paul could hear the distinctive sound of tank fire, and the faint rattle of ma-chine-gun fire. The same was true to the south-west, where a battle was raging on their side of the S-Bahn. On the airfield itself German forces were still dug in to the north of the main runway, but their resistance would serve no purpose if the Soviets bypassed Tempelhof to both east and west.

  A loud explosion turned both their heads round. Two kilometres to the east a vast cloud of smoke and dust was rising into the sky. As it cleared, it became apparent that the huge Karstadt department store was no longer there. The SS had done what they promised, and Paul’s companion duly grunted his pleasure.

  The view to the north was presumably less to his taste – following the morning air raid most of the centre seemed to be on fire. The blessed Führer was somewhere under that lot, no doubt safe and sound in a concrete bunker. Paul wondered how Hitler’s morning was going. Surely he must realise it was all over – for all his increasingly apparent faults, the man was not stupid. But if he did, then why were they fighting on? Did his own troops’ lives mean nothing to him? That was hard to believe after all they’d been told of his First War experiences, but what other explanation could there be?

  ‘You can take your feet off now,’ the Hauptsturmführer said, breaking into his reverie. The SS officer folded his map back up, took one last look round, and headed for the fire escape. Paul followed with some reluctance. On the way up he had expected to feel appallingly vulnerable on the flat roof, but no plane had swooped down on them with machine-guns blazing, and a wonderfully deluded sense of being above the fray had slowly come over him. Now, each step down felt a little closer to hell.

  It proved an accurate assessment. They were just rounding the corner of the building when incoming katyushas started ploughing a wide path towards them. The Hauptsturmführer ran for the nearest door, and, for want of anything better, Paul followed in his wake. There was nothing to open – the door had already been torn off its hinges – and a down staircase offered sanctuary on the far side of the lobby. By the time the rockets crashed into the front of the terminal Paul was halfway down the stairs, but the Hauptsturmführer, hindered by his wounded arm, had only just reached the top. Thrown over Paul’s head, he hit the wall above the staircase with massive force, and dropped like a stone onto the bottom steps. His map, opened by the blast, fluttered down beside him.

  Though he tumbled down the last few steps, Paul sustained nothing worse than bruises. The barrage had rolled over, but he had been through enough katyusha attacks to know that another might plough the same furrow, and after a cursory glance at the dead Hauptsturmführer, he clambered over the body and continued on down the steps, only stopping two floors down when another SS officer told him he could go no further – his men were booby-trapping the building.

  He had no objection to Paul waiting out the barrage, and even offered him a cigarette. When Paul declined, he lit his own before delivering a rueful monologue on the evils of smoking. ‘You should hear the Führer on the subject,’ he said. ‘As I was once privileged to do. His hatred of smoking will one day seem prophetic – mark my words!’ He drew deeply on his cigarette and smiled through the smoke he exhaled.

  Paul said nothing – the only question seemed to be whether Berlin would be renamed Wonderland before the Russians razed it. After fifteen minutes the katyusha barrages abated for a while, half convincing him that they had stopped. Big guns were now firing somewhere close by. German ones, he hoped.

  He went back up. Someone had moved the Hauptsturmführer’s body to the side of the stairs, but had not bothered to close his eyes. Paul did so, and, on impulse, took the binoculars that were still hanging from the man’s neck. The machine pistol might come in useful, so he took that too. Some of Himmler’s officers liked to mark their guns with SS insignia, but this one had not, which was just as well.

  The doorway was a lot wider than it had been, and there was now a large crater on the threshold. Smoke and dust obscured most of the field ahead, but there seemed to be a lull in the bombardment. He worked his way round the rim of the crater, and hurried out past the still-standing ‘Welcome to Tempelhof’ sign in the direction of his gun emplacement. A few seconds later the curtain of smoke drew apart, and he could see the long barrel pointing straight up at the sky. He feared the worst, but the emplacement was empty – his comrades had fired their shells and gone. And so, he realised, had everyone else in this sector. While he’d been discussing Hitler’s tobacco-phobia there’d been a general pull-out.

  Abandonment was becoming something of a habit. But he wouldn’t be alone for long – the moving shapes in the distance looked like T-34s and their accompanying infantry. Was this the moment to surrender? He thought not. As he’d told Uncle Thomas, surrender was a risky business, best attempted away from the heat of an ongoing battle, when emotions were raw and trigger-fingers itchy.

  No, it was time for another retreat. There couldn’t be that many more. If the Soviet forces to the north of the city had breached the Ringbahn defence line, then all that remained in German hands was a corridor about five kilometres wide.

  He clambered out of the gun emplacement and started running, only stopping when he reached the sheltered rear of the terminal building. The Soviet artillery had thoughtfully pounded holes in the high wire fence that surrounded the aerodrome, and he had a clear run to the U-Bahn station on Belle Alliance Strasse. He took it at top speed, almost tumbling down the steps as shells exploded further down the road. The booking hall was packed with civilians, most of them women, and none seemed pleased to see him. ‘Either go or get rid of the uniform and gun,’ one old man told him imperiously. Paul could see his point, but still felt like hitting him.

  He went back up the stairs. The Landwehrkanal, just over a kilometre to the north, was the next obvious line of defence, and he supposed that should be his destination. He could think of none better.

  Out on Belle Alliance Strasse he could see men in the distance, heading in the same direction. Behind him, the battle for Tempelhof seemed to be winding down. The centre of the wide, traffic-free road offered the clearest path, but he kept to the edge for fear of shell-blast, wending and climbing his way along the rubble-choked pavement. The bodies he came across were mostly women’s, though sometimes it was hard to tell.

  A single shell exploded a couple of hundred metres up the road, taking the corner off a three-storey block and conjuring flames from within.

  As he passed another bombed-out house the Kreuzberg loomed into view, crowning the wooded slopes of Viktoria Park. Why choose blood and stone, he asked himself, when grass and trees were there for the taking? He took the first available turning and worked his way through to the park’s eastern gate, then followed a path up through blossoming trees to the summi
t. He and his Dad had come there often, catching a tram to the depot at the bottom of the hill, walking up, and sitting on a wooden bench, ice cream in hand, with Berlin spread out before them. On a clear day they could usually see the Hertha grandstand away across the city.

  There was no such clarity today, but he could still see enough to be shocked. Myriad fires were burning across the city’s heart, from the Ku’damm away to the west, through the district south of the Tiergarten, to the Old Town and Alexanderplatz in the east. Every few seconds the flash of another explosion would spark in the smoke-leaden gloom, reminding Paul of the matches flaring to life in the Plumpe grandstand as spectators lit their half-time cigarettes.

  Turning his head, he caught sight of Soviet tanks. They were crossing Immelmann Strasse and entering the street that ran along the bottom of the park’s western slope. And away to the west, marching up Monumenten Strasse towards him was an absurdly neat formation of infantry. There had to be a couple of hundred men, but there was something odd about them…

  Remembering the binoculars, he brought the formation into focus. The ‘something odd’ about them was their size – they were children. Two hundred neatly-turned out Hitlerjugend were marching out to meet the Red Army, panzerfausts at the ready. And they were walking into a trap.

  A machine-gun rattled but no one fell down – either the Russians were too drunk to shoot straight, or they were firing warning shots. The column visibly hesitated, but kept on coming, and more warning shots seemed only to encourage whichever heroic nincompoop was in command. The machine-guns opened up in earnest and the front lines went down, exposing those behind them. As bullets scythed through them, the rear echelons broke and fled, dropping their panzerfausts and sprinting back across the railway bridge. Ivan, to his credit, ceased fire.

  Other Russians were visible at the southern foot of the hill. It was time to go. Paul strode back down through the empty park, the clashing smells of death and spring mingling in his nostrils. The depot at the bottom had taken several hits, and through the wide-open entrance he could see one tram half raised on the rear of another, like a dog mounting a bitch. He walked round the corner of the building and started up Grossbeeren Strasse, which had lost most of its houses. At the first intersection he found six bloodied female corpses around a standpipe. Two were still clutching the water buckets they’d come to fill.

  A little further on a three-legged dog gave him a hopeful look, and started whining piteously once he’d gone past. Paul wanted to cry, but no tears came. Something inside him was irreparably broken, but he had no idea what it was.

  A Soviet plane flew low overhead, and opened fire on something behind the houses to his left. He walked on towards Yorck Strasse, where several women were gathered round a prone casualty. There was an air of hopelessness in their postures, and in the way they glanced up the street, as if they were pretending for everyone’s sake that help was on the way. Beyond them, outside the Yorck Strasse police station, another two corpses hung slack-necked from lampposts. Paul walked towards them. The first, a moustachioed man in his forties or fifties, was in army uniform. The second was Werner.

  The boy’s mouth was open, his fists clenched, his dead eyes full of terror. A piece of card bearing the message ‘All traitors will die like this one’ had been looped over the second button of his Hitlerjugend shirt.

  Paul stood there staring at the boy’s body until his legs suddenly folded beneath him, and a sound he didn’t recognise, a cross between a wail and a high-pitched hum, welled up from his soul and erupted through his lips.

  A few moments later he felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘Did you know him?’ a woman’s voice asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Paul managed to say. ‘He was only fourteen.’

  ‘He never said. He was a brave little bugger.’

  ‘You saw this happen?’ Paul asked. He climbed slowly back to his feet. Why hadn’t the boy ditched his uniform?

  ‘From my window. It was the redhead – we’ve seen him before. He’s an Obersturmführer, I think – I can never remember their uniforms. My husband was in the real army.’

  ‘By what authority…’

  She shrugged. ‘Who knows? He’s a law unto himself. He has a few helpers, but he’s the judge and the executioner.’

  Paul looked up at the body. ‘I’m going to cut him down.’

  ‘It’s your funeral.’

  He took out his knife, clambered up onto the police station wall and managed, with a couple of hacks, to slice through the rope. Werner’s corpse dropped to the pavement.

  Paul sank to one knee and closed the dead boy’s eyes. He went through his pockets, hoping to find something he could take to Werner’s mother and sister. Inside the Hitlerjugend documentation there was the family photograph that he’d showed Paul when they first met. It seemed like years ago, but was less than a week.

  ‘Where can I bury him?’ he asked the woman. Two of her neighbours had appeared, and all three of them looked at him as if he was mad.

  If there was a reply, he didn’t hear it. There was a sudden whoosh and the briefest sensation of flight. The earth seemed to explode, a hundred hammers seemed to hit him at once, and then all noise was sucked away, leaving only a shimmering silence. He felt a moment of enormous relief, and then nothing at all.

  Under the gun

  April 26 – 27

  Russell was woken by the thump of distant explosions. It had to be an air raid, but sounded louder than anything that had gone before. On and on it went without respite, like a berserk drummer with no sense of rhythm.

  Some of the bombs seemed to be falling not too far away, but as Leissner had said, it would take extraordinary bad luck for a shell or bomb to land on their roof, protected as it was by surrounding buildings and a secondary ceiling of elevated tracks. Sound reasoning, which didn’t quite still his nerves, or black out the images of trench life under shell-fire which rose unbidden from his memory.

  ‘What are you going to do now?’ he murmured to himself, partly in search of distraction, partly because he needed some sort of plan. Was his best bet to stay where he was, wait for the Russians, and hope for their help in finding his family? Mounting a tour of the giant shelters in search of Effi would be pointless. His chances of finding her would be minute, his chances of death by shellfire depressingly high. If Effi was in one of those shelters she should be safe; when the war ended and the shelling stopped, she would doubtless go home, and he would find her there.

  It was the sensible option, but still hard to take. Since 1941 a sense of failure, of letting her down, had churned away in the shallower recesses of his subconscious, and inaction always brought it bubbling to the surface. The urge to keep looking was almost irresistible, and he had to keep reminding himself that behaving like a headless chicken might very well lose him his head.

  Several hours went by. Varennikov woke up, and the two of them breakfasted on cans of cabbage and cold water. They talked for a while about Russia, and Russell’s first visit in 1924, when the hopes were still high. Listening to himself talk, and seeing the pride in Varennikov’s face, Russell felt sadness rather than anger. He was getting old, he told himself.

  Stefan Leissner had come to see them each morning so far, but noon passed without a visit. And, as a quick trip downstairs revealed, the sentry in the tunnel was gone. What was happening? Russell went back up to Varennikov, and asked the Russian if he fancied a trip to Leissner’s office – ‘you haven’t been out since we got here.’

  Varennikov demurred. He knew he was being over-anxious, he said, but there was always a chance that the papers they’d buried would be destroyed by a shell or a bomb. ‘Or even eaten by an animal,’ he added. ‘So I must keep myself safe until what I’ve learned has been passed on.’

  Fair enough, Russell thought. Crazy, but hardly grounds for committal. He descended once more on his own, walked down the short stretch of tunnel, and climbed the other spiral staircase. It seemed deathly quiet in the underground office complex, a
nd neither Leissner nor anyone else was in residence,

  He took the two flights of stairs to the elevated goods warehouse, which was equally deserted. The short walk along the elevated tracks offered a panoramic view of hell, the sort of thing Hieronymus Bosch might have painted if he’d been born a half-millennium later, but, for the moment at least, no shells were landing nearby. He hurried across the tracks, noting only the curtain of fire that hung above the northern horizon, and what looked like a rail-mounted flak gun further down the viaduct.

  He found Leissner in the goods station forecourt. A bomb had fallen on this side of the elevated tracks, killing two men he didn’t recognise and almost severing their host’s right leg. He – or someone else – had tied a tourniquet above the knee, but that had been some time ago, and if Russell was any judge the unconscious man was in serious danger of losing the limb. He loosened the tourniquet and wondered what else he could do. Nothing much, was the answer. He could haul Leissner back down to his underground office, but the leg might break off in the process. Or he could leave him here, on the old principle that two bombs never fall on the same spot. Out in the open he might attract a passing medic’s attention.

  Or not. If he fetched Varennikov, Russell realised, the two of them could carry the man down to his office. They could all stay there until the Russians came. It would be just as safe as their current abode.

  He made his way back through the offices and up towards the tracks, still juggling options in his mind. Perhaps he should head for Effi’s new flat now, and leave Varennikov with Leissner. They could welcome the Red Army just as well without him.

  As he emerged onto the viaduct he heard a rumbling sound. The rail-mounted flak gun was grinding its way along the viaduct some two hundred metres to the north. Spasms of black smoke rose behind it, as an invisible steam engine propelled it forward. The barrel of the gun was questing to and fro, as if it was smelling the air.