by Alex Gerlis
‘I don’t understand why you can’t deliver the message?’
‘Because Lang knows that area very well, he patrols it in his boat and says the security is tight. You’re only allowed near the docks if you’ve a good reason for being there. If you were to enter the area dressed in a… certain manner…’
‘You want me to become a prostitute?’
‘Not become one, Irma, just dress like one for an hour or so. I don’t know – lots of bright lipstick and maybe a shorter dress, perhaps some cheap perfume if you have any. It’s a red light district, so you won’t look suspicious. I’ll give you some cash to bribe the sentries, apparently that’s what the prostitutes do – it’s like a tax. Lang says the barge is due to dock there a week on Monday, the 3rd October. It arrives that afternoon, unloads its coal and will sail back to Bratislava later that night. Apparently it’s safer for them to travel at dark because of the bombing.’
***
The timing couldn’t have been worse for Irma. On the Friday before she was due to hand over the message, her husband was summoned to Army headquarters in Vienna and subjected to a swift medical examination. He was fine, they pronounced: fit and ready for action. He was to report to Army Group A headquarters in Warsaw the following week. He’d leave on the Tuesday morning.
They both knew the Monday night could well be their last one together – certainly for a few months but, the way the war was going, probably forever. This made it all the more difficult for her to explain why she was leaving the apartment just after 4.00 that afternoon. To get something special to eat for our dinner tonight, she’d explained, hoping her husband was distracted by his impending departure.
She hurried to the docks around Seitenhafenstrasse at the southern end of Leopoldstadt, not bothering with Viktor’s nonsense of dressing like a prostitute. She was running the risk of arriving before the boat, but she managed to find a sentry alone in a hut by the gate, sheltering from the sharp wind whipping up from the Danube. She fished out a couple of packets of Juno cigarettes and pressed them into his hand.
I’ve a boyfriend who sails on one of the barges... Can I dash down to see him, just for a few minutes?
The sentry must have been in his fifties and was shivering. He looked unsure, so she slipped him another packet of Junos and some Reichsmarks. Five minutes, he replied. Fifteen, she said. Fifteen and another two packets of these when I leave. He nodded her through and she hurried down to the dock. She soon spotted the Jelka, aided by a frayed Slovak flag fluttering in the wind above its little wheelhouse. A lorry was alongside, into which huge bags of coals were being loaded. She leaned over the side of the barge and shouted through the wind and the noise to one of the crew. ‘I’m looking for Ján.’
‘Which Ján? There are three Jáns aboard.’ He turned around and carried on manoeuvring a bag of coal.
‘Ján Kuchár.’
‘Wait.’
He disappeared below deck and Irma stood awkwardly on the quay, praying no one would come and ask why she was there. The crewman returned and indicated for her to climb aboard, pointing to a trapdoor that led her down into a noisy engine room. A large man covered in oil and sweat beckoned her over. ‘I’m Ján.’
‘I’ve a present for your mother.’ From her handbag she removed an ordinary-looking hairbrush and handed it over. The Slovak leaned towards her, a worried look on his face.
‘Why have you come so early? I told them to wait until it was dark and when we’d finished unloading the coal. Too many Germans could see you.’
‘This was the only time I could come. You know what to do with that?’
He nodded and slipped the hairbrush into the inside pocket of a jacket hanging on a nearby wall. ‘Isn’t there something else?’ he said.
‘Of course… I hadn’t forgotten.’ From her handbag she removed a roll of Reichsmarks and handed them to the Slovak, who looked at them, bounced the roll up and down in his hand as if weighing its value, then slipped it down the front of his trousers, grinning unpleasantly as he did so.
‘Do you want to stay for a while?’ He looked at her as if he expected her to say yes. When she explained she had to hurry, he looked surprised and dejected. Five minutes later she was handing her last two packets of Junos to the grateful guard.
She caught a tram back to the 4th District and, close to Schleifmuhlgasse, knocked at the back door of a butcher’s shop. The butcher ushered her into the doorway and handed over a package. She gave him a sum of money equivalent to what she’d normally spend on food for two people in a week. She hoped any suspicions her husband might have would be offset by the black-market veal. Your favourite meal, Wiener schnitzel. It took me so long to find it, she’d tell him.
The only thing he was suspicious about when she arrived home a few minutes later was the coal dust all over her: on her shoes, stockings, hands and even her face. A careless shopkeeper on Wiedner Hauptstrasse, she said. He dropped a bag of coal. It went everywhere. You should have seen the poor woman in front of me – she looked like she was from Africa!
***
The Jelka arrived in Bratislava early the following morning, around the same time as Irma bid farewell to her husband at Ostbahn station. Once the barge docked, Ján Kuchár remained below deck long enough to allow the rest of the crew to disperse. He trudged up the steep hill to a bar in the shadow of the ruins of Bratislava Castle. He nodded at the man behind the counter and told him he’d return that lunchtime. When he did so he went straight through to the small kitchen. The messenger was waiting there, a tiny man with a weathered face and sharp green eyes. Kuchár couldn’t tell if the man was dirty or just had a particularly dark complexion, but there was no doubt about his smell: it was as if he hadn’t washed that year. Kuchár took the hairbrush out of his pocket and handed it over to the man, along with a roll of Reichsmarks, somewhat smaller than it had been when he was given it by the woman in Vienna. The man slipped the hairbrush into his knapsack and stuck one of his filthy fingers deep into his mouth: it was glistening with saliva when he removed it and used it to count the money; nodding to indicate he was satisfied. He proffered a sticky hand for Kuchár to shake and the Slovak reluctantly did so.
Without saying a word, the man slipped out the back. All being well the message would be in Moscow in a few days: Kuchár had no idea how and didn’t really care – just so long as the Russians took care of him once they arrived in Bratislava.
***
Late that Friday night, Ilia Brodsky paced up and down his office in a corner of the Kremlin like an expectant father. There had been a telephone call that morning from the senior Red Army Commissar in Lvov, a city not long recaptured from the Nazis. A messenger had turned up, claiming he was from Bratislava and insisting he had a message for Comrade Brodsky in Moscow. What, the Commissar wanted to know, should he do?
‘You’re to get on a plane now, Comrade, and personally bring that message to me.’
‘I could probably come on a flight on Monday, Comrade, the situation here…’
‘No, you’ll go the airport immediately and commandeer an aircraft. If you encounter any problems when you arrive there, please telephone me. When you arrive in Moscow, bring the message straight to my office: you understand?’
The Commissar said he understood and would leave immediately. What, he asked, should he do with the messenger? Send him back to Slovakia?
‘You say he asked for me by name?’
‘Yes Comrade – Ilia Brodsky.’
‘Shoot him,’ he replied, his voice making it clear he was surprised the Commissar had even bothered to ask the question.
Brodsky was so angry when he read the message for the fifth or sixth time that, had the Commissar from Lvov still been in his office, he might well have shot him too. Nine months Krasotkin had been in Vienna now, nearly 10. Ten months! And this was the first message they’d received in all that time. The fact that Krasotkin was still alive was hardly any compensation. What had he achieved in all that time? Distributed a few leaflets and
put a couple of machines out of action for a few days. And, even worse than that, the British seemed to have an agent in Vienna – the British of all people – and they may well be in touch with Hubert Leitner.
That, Brodsky decided as he made up the narrow camp bed in his office, could be a disaster and there was precious little he could do about it.
He lay awake for most of that night, wondering what would happen if Comrade Stalin found out about this. And what would be worse, him telling Stalin, or not telling him? He knew having the ear of Comrade Stalin would end up being more of a curse than a blessing: maybe there was a way he could buy himself a bit more time.
Chapter 19
Vienna, November 1944
After the sabotage at the lorry-repair garage in September, Viktor decided Hades would wait until they were in a position to carry out a more spectacular attack. The American bombing of the city had intensified as the long-range bombers from Foggia became increasingly accurate. Viktor knew any sabotage attacks on the ground would need to be spectacular to be properly noticed. The leafleting had continued though; not as frequently as before, but still enough to add to the mounting sense of paranoia at the Gestapo headquarters on Morzinplatz.
There was amazement at Morzinplatz that Kriminaldirektor Karl Strobel had somehow managed to survive for as long as he had. The gossip in the corridors and behind closed doors was that Strobel had been lucky: in addition to his job of running the Vienna Gestapo, Huber had now been put in charge of the borders with Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Italy and Hungary, and had become preoccupied with that. Hungary was especially problematic: by early November the Red Army was just 40 miles from Budapest. There was a sense of unease and even nervousness around the Vienna Gestapo, and Strobel was lucky his boss had more important things to worry about than his failure to arrest anyone from Hades.
He’d also been helped by the fact Huber had put Kriminalrat Andreas Schwarz and a team from the Kripo in charge of catching the people distributing the leaflets. They enjoyed no more luck and Strobel was beginning to feel vindicated. But in the second week of November two events changed all that.
The first took place on Tuesday 7th November, but it could be traced back to a chance encounter Manfred Becker had in the middle of October. Becker’s job as a draughtsman at the Heinkel aircraft factory in Floridsdorf meant he was based in the research and development offices of the factory, and rarely had cause to visit other parts of it. He usually worked during the day – increasingly long hours certainly, but he was rarely there at night. But in the middle of October there had been a problem. The workshop in the factory responsible for manufacturing ailerons had to replace some of their tools and, as a consequence, the new ailerons no longer fitted properly onto the wings. Becker was told to sort this out as a matter of urgency, which meant he spent a fair amount of his time in the ailerons workshop and on a few occasions he had to work through the night.
It was on one of these nights he met Alois, although the word ‘met’ would convey a somewhat formal air to their encounter. ‘Bumped into’ would be a better description, but even that wouldn’t properly describe the drama of their meeting.
Becker had been in his office producing yet more drawings and was returning to the workshop. It was around 9.00 on a Wednesday night and winter was definitely in the air as he made his way across the complex, regretting he hadn’t bothered with a coat. Before arriving at the workshop he decided to visit the toilets in a block that also contained the locker rooms where the workers got changed. It was deserted as he made his way through its narrow and dimly lit corridors. He was unsure which door led to the toilets and tried a couple that were locked and another that opened into a room containing cleaning equipment. The next door looked more promising as he could see a pool of light creeping out from under it but, when he pushed the door open, the room was dark. He felt along the wall, found the switch and when it came on found he was in a long and narrow store room, at the end of which was a man cowering in the corner, stuffing pieces of paper into a bag.
Becker shut the door behind him. ‘Who are you?’
‘It’s nothing,’ said the man, who looked terrified and fumbled as he continued to stuff papers in the bag. ‘If you need the toilet, it’s along the corridor. Please leave me. It’s nothing, as I say. I’m just sorting things out.’
Becker walked over to the man, who was now backed against the wall, as if shielding himself from physical attack. Becker bent down and picked up one of the sheets of paper. It was a small, single sheet with stencilled writing on one side.
Our time has come
The Nazi menace will soon be at an end
The hour of our liberation approaches
Do not co-operate with the occupier
Prepare for freedom
Arise against your oppressors!
‘What on earth is this?’
‘If you turn me in they’ll execute me – my wife and children…’ The man buried his head in his hands. ‘I don’t know why I did this, I didn’t intend to do anything with them, in fact I brought them here to destroy them… I found them in the street you see, and decided to destroy them…’ The words spilled out, rambling and incoherent.
Becker knelt down beside the man and helped him collect the other pieces of paper and put them in the bag. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are it was me who came in just now,’ he told the man, as he placed a reassuring hand on his shoulder. ‘We need to get rid of these, don’t we? What’s your name?’
‘Alois.’
‘Well, Alois, you and I need to have a proper chat sometime, but not now and certainly not here.’
***
It took Lang and Becker a week to check out Alois. They established he lived with his wife and young children in Ottakring, the 16th District. He’d never been involved in politics, though he’d always regarded himself as being on the left. But, mostly, he just wanted a quiet life. He was grateful his job meant he wouldn’t be conscripted and he’d have been happy to see out the war that way, but he’d begun to hear things: too many elderly people dying conveniently soon after they’d been taken into homes; too many young soldiers dying; too many Jews disappearing.
One day he’d been sorting out the attic at his house when he came across an old stencilling set of his children’s. He came up with the idea of the leaflet. His plan was to put one in all the lockers at work. ‘Including my own,’ he reassured Viktor when the Russian interrogated him. ‘That way they wouldn’t have suspected me.’
Viktor was in two minds about Alois. On the one hand, anyone who thought they’d be above suspicion because they’d put a leaflet in their own locker was a fool. Yet it was clear he was genuine and was a skilled engineer, often based in perhaps the most important part of the factory – the workshops where the engines were fitted.
‘I’ve always thought that if you can take that workshop out of action,’ Becker told Lang and Viktor, ‘then you’d bring the whole factory to a halt. There’s a sophisticated system of hoists there, to get the engines into the planes. Stop that and you stop the factory, perhaps for days.’
When they brought Alois in on the plan, he made it sound even more attractive: there was one machine on which all the hoists depended. He was sure he could access it. The machine was inside a wall and could be reached through a narrow access shaft, which meant an engineer couldn’t be seen while they were working on it.
‘I can either put your oil in the machine when I’m on duty in that area, or I can risk going into it when I’m meant to be elsewhere,’ Alois told them.
The latter, Viktor decided. No question about it.
On the night of Monday 6th November, Alois was the duty engineer in the distributor plant. Just after 11.00 he left for his break, moving quickly through the complex, sticking to the shadows until he reached the engine-fitting workshop. Once there, the risks became very real: according to the rota on the noticeboard in their office the duty engineer should be taking his break at around the same time, but you
could never be sure. Alois slipped through a side entrance and avoided anyone until he reached the shaft that led up to the hoist machinery. He used his key to unlock the door to the shaft, closed it behind him and climbed the greasy metal ladder. If he was seen in there, he’d have no excuse. But he was lucky: it took him just five minutes to access the machine and insert the contaminated oil. No one saw him when he left the shaft and he quickly made his way back to the distributor plant.
Alois left the factory at 6.00 the following morning when his shift ended. Three hours later the hoists seized up in spectacular fashion. Two engines for a He177 bomber crashed to the ground, one of them smashing into the plane and the other landing on a generator, causing a fire that destroyed two other engines which were waiting to be lifted onto aircraft. Other hoists stopped with their engines in mid-air. The machine into which Alois had inserted the oil fused and caught fire. The damage and its effect were far more severe than the Hades group could ever have imagined. Even Viktor, for whom any show of satisfaction didn’t come naturally, was delighted.
The whole factory was out of action for three days and it took the engine assembly workshop another week and a half to return to normal. So serious was the incident that news of it reached Berlin. Huber returned from a visit to the Hungarian border and still had his coat on when Strobel was summoned to his office on the Tuesday afternoon.
Strobel realised that, once Huber was satisfied the sabotage had been carried out by the same group that had carried out the attacks in August and September, he’d be off to the eastern front that very night. But not for the first time, Strobel was lucky. The machine had been so badly damaged that it took another three days before the evidence came through. And, on the Friday, Strobel had an even greater piece of luck.
***
