by Ib Melchior
They had stayed off the main highways and kept to the back-country roads—some hardly more than dirt paths—traveling from one small village to another, encountering the same sullen, hostile faces in all of them, and the same disinterest from the occasional Russian patrol.
The second night they had spent in the remains of a partly burned barn at an abandoned farm near the village of Wiesen-burg, and the third night—the most comfortable—in a forest outside Güterglück, perched high in a Hochsitz—a sort of sheltered crow’s nest built up in a tree and meant for a hunter to sit in comfort and await an easy shot at an unsuspecting deer grazing below. They had hidden their bikes under branches and leaves and hauled the Hochsitz ladder up after them. It had been the only night they had felt safe. Eva had gone to sleep in Willi’s arms. It had seemed natural.
It was Friday, May 4, a few minutes past 1400 hours. Willi and Eva had just passed through a village called Förderstedt, according to Willi’s map, about twenty-five kilometers south of the town of Magdeburg. They were both fatigued. Eva was at the end of her strength. Every muscle in her body ached, her shoulders were cramped, her thighs were chafed raw by the bicycle seat and her legs sent waves of pain through her with every pump of the pedals.
Willi, hungry for news, had found part of a current newspaper crumbled up on the street as they rode through the village. A crudely printed, makeshift local tabloid. Hamburg had fallen to the British. The occupation troops in Holland and Denmark were surrendering. It would soon be all over.
They had stopped at a farm just outside the village and had asked to be allowed to wash themselves at the farmyard pump. The farmer had taken a resentful look at the little Luxembourg flag and had gruffly ordered them off his property.
Willi looked at Eva, valiantly pedaling along the road beside him. He admired her stamina and her determination. She had not complained. But he was gravely concerned. He knew she could not last much longer and he was worried that they might not reach their destination before she was forced to give up.
They gave way and rode out onto the road shoulder as a truck approached them from behind. It was an American weapons carrier. In the back sat a handful of soldiers peering out over the tailgate. They waved and yelled at Eva.
Willi was suddenly struck by an idea.
“Fall!” he called to Eva. “Fall off your bicycle!”
She turned to him uncomprehendingly.
The truck was rapidly drawing away.
Willi quickly brought his bike up next to Eva. He swerved toward her. He gave a quick kick to her front wheel.
Eva lost control. The bike went out from under her and she took a headlong spill.
Willi stopped at once. He threw his bicycle to the ground and ran back to Eva. He bent over her. He was aware that the truck had stopped. He did not look back.
Eva was crying. She was exhausted to the point of collapse. She hurt all over. She felt absolutely terrible—and . . . Why had Willi made her fall? She lifted her tear-streaked face to him. “Why?” she sobbed. “Why did you do that? I—I hurt my knee.” She tried to get up.
“Don’t!” Willi said tightly. “Stay down! And let me do the talking.” The urgency in his tone of voice sobered her. She obeyed.
Willi did not look up as the truck came backing up. One of the soldiers called to him.
“Frau—kaput?"
Willi looked up at him. Carefully he helped Eva sit up. “Ja,” Willi said in German. “She has been hurt. Her knee is bruised.”
The GI threw up his hands. “Nix sprechen sie Deutsch,” he said.
“Parlez-vous Français?” Willi tried. “Do you speak French?”
The GI shook his head and shrugged. “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi?” he grinned. “That’s all I know, Buddy.”
Willi helped Eva to her feet. “Limp,” he whispered to her. She leaned on him as he helped her over to her bicycle. The GI—obviously the linguist among them, Willi thought contemptuously—jumped down from the truck. “Smile at him,” Willi whispered. Eva gave the man a wan smile. The GI pointed to the flag on Willi’s bike.
“Luxembourg—nach Hause?” he asked. “Home?”
Willi nodded vigorously. “Ja,” he said, still speaking German. “We are from Luxembourg. We are trying to get home.” He picked up Eva’s bike. He examined it. It was undamaged. He looked at her knee. It was slightly skinned.
The GI watched. He pointed to Willi, to Eva, and to the truck. “Du,” he said. “You. Frau. Mitkommen. Blankenburg?”
Willi gloated inside. They were being offered a ride. It was exactly what he had hoped for. The Amis were following his scenario perfectly. It was a good fifty kilometers to the town of Blankenburg in the Harz, and from there only seven kilometers to their destination. He grinned hugely and nodded vigorously.
“Ja, Ja!” he said. “Bitteschön!"
The GI helped Willi load the bikes on the truck—and several eager and willing hands reached out to help Eva climb over the tailgate.
The hour-and fifteen-minute ride was full of laughter and pleasantries as the GIs tried to make conversation and solicitously administered to Eva’s knee with materials from their first-aid kits.
Eva seemed to regain her strength and spirit, Willi thought. She had winked at him, and he knew she understood why he had made her fall off the bike. Somehow it made him feel better.
She waved enthusiastically to the Ami soldiers as the truck pulled away after having deposited them and their bikes in Blanken-burg-Harz.
Willi looked after the departing truck. They were either fools, those Amis, he thought, or monumentally naïve.
The road to Rübeland was winding and mountainous, and they walked a good deal of the way, pushing their bikes. It was 1627 hours—an hour and five minutes later—when they rode into the sleepy village of Rübeland.
They had reached their destination.
The address in Rübeland Willi had been given by Konrad Bock turned out to be a tiny novelty shop that in the days of flourishing tourism had sold souvenirs of the Baumannsböhle—the ancient, spectacular cave that was one of the tourist attractions of the Harz Mountains. The shop was closed, but in the little display window some of the uninspired Andenken—mementos—were still exhibited. Faded, once-gaudy pillows with the embroidered message Grüsse aus dem Harz—Greetings from Harz; postcards and bits of rock from stalactites; dusty little glass balls filled with water around a fake cave scene and tiny white particles that would swirl around the miniature rock pillars when shaken; and a framed, amateurish oil painting of a scene from the caverns entitled Saülenhalle—Hall of Columns—with the legend, Von Inhaber Herbert Kotsch Gemahlt—painted by the owner, Herbert Kotsch. On the green window backing next to it was a rectangular area where the paint had faded in telltale manner.
Herbert Kotsch, a stodgy, taciturn man in his fifties, and his wife, Gertrud, lived in cramped quarters behind the souvenir shop. They had placed Willi’s and Eva’s bicycles in a ramshackle lean-to in back of the house, and taken them into their little Stube.
Willi had been surprised—and not a little apprehensive—at seeing Ami jeeps and trucks moving through the village. There seemed to be more enemy activity than would be expected for such a remote area. It disturbed him. He asked about it.
“They will not bother you,” Kotsch said.
“It is because of the factories,” his wife said. Kotsch glowered at her, but she went blithely on. “Down near Nordhausen. Only forty kilometers south of here.”
“What factories?” Willi asked.
“The ones that make the Vergeltungswaffen—the Weapons of Reprisal—the V-l and the V-2. For Pennemünde. The factories are hidden in the underground caverns there. Huge they are. Thousands of foreign laborers worked there. That is why the SS troops defended it so stubbornly and courageously—and for so long. Only two weeks ago were the Amis able to overrun the Harz,” she said proudly.
Willi frowned at her. “With all the enemy activity will it be safe for us to hide out here?�
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The woman laughed. “But of course! With them being so busy with the factories will they have time to look for anything else? And who would expect anyone to hide in the midst of the enemy? Besides,” she said mysteriously, “we will take you to a place no one could ever find you.”
“Tonight,” Kotsch said. “After dark. It is a place only I and Mutti know about. It is ready for you.”
It was shortly after 2100 hours when Herbert and Gertrud Kotsch led Willi and Eva to the entrance to the Baumannshöhle. Everything was boarded up except the heavy wooden door to the anteroom, which was locked. Kotsch unlocked it. Inside they each picked up a large reflector carbide lamp that had seen years of service and in single file, with Kotsch leading the way, they started down into the caves below.
It was an eerie, shadow-filled fairyland that unfolded itself before them as they made their way deeper and deeper down into the fantastic caverns. They walked along a narrow pathway through great halls with multicolored stalactites hanging like giant stone icicles from the vaulted ceilings, glistening and glittering in the light from their lamps. They wound their way through witching, unearthly galleries of tall, gnarled columns and misshapen toadstool stalagmites, past grottos of fluted, translucent sheets of rock, petrified waterfalls, and shimmering flowstones. It was grotesque and beautiful—forboding and sheltering.
They came to the last chamber of the caves open to the public.
Kotsch squeezed through a narrow opening. The others followed. Behind was a tight crawlway.
“This part of the caves is largely unexplored,” Kotsch said. “It is a dangerous place for one who does not know his way. There are pitfalls and other hazards, and it is easy to get lost in the labyrinth of passages.”
The crawlway widened and they were able to stand up. They walked on. Suddenly Eva stumbled. She put out a hand to keep herself from falling and scraped it along the rocky wall. She gave a little cry. Willi shone his lamp on her hand.
“It is nothing,” Eva said. “Just a little scratch.” She took a small handkerchief from a little pocket in her skirt. She cleaned the abrasion and wound the cloth around her hand. “It will be fine,” she said. Carefully they moved on. A short distance farther on Kotsch turned into a narrow side passage and they entered a chamber of softly rounded rock, craggy walls, and striated rock curtains.
In the light from their lamps they saw two cots standing at one end of the chamber, heaped with army blankets. It was evident that the place was well stocked with all provisions necessary for comfortable survival.
Kotsch turned to them. “This is where you will stay,” he said. “And wait.”
“You will find everything you need,” his wife said. “I have seen to that. You will not be cold. It is always comfortable down here. A little damp, perhaps, but the temperature is always the same. I have left you a deck of cards. You can play Skat, perhaps. You will find food and drinking water over there.” She pointed. “And several two-pound cans of carbide for your lamps. And there are books for you to read.”
“Any Karl May?” Eva asked, in a pathetic attempt at gallows humor.
“Karl—May?” Frau Kotsch asked, puzzled.
“It is all right,” Eva said. “I—I was only . . .” She let the sentence die.
“I have also left you a calendar,” the woman continued. She walked over to a crate and picked up a large, wind-up alarm clock. She began to wind it.
“And this,” she said. “Down here time can be distorted. You must keep the clock going, and cross out the days on the calendar. That way you will not lose track of time.”
“How long will we be here?” Willi asked.
“We do not know,” Kotsch said. “They will inform us.”
“If it is more than three weeks,” Frau Kotsch added, “we will come to you. We will bring news and provisions. But, until then, it is best we leave you alone. We will not go near the caves. Gott sei mit euch—God be with you.”
They left; their spectral shadows malformed on the gnarly walls until they disappeared.
Willi and Eva stood staring at the cave which would be their home for the next few weeks. With all the comforts, with all the provisions, and with the safety it afforded it was still a dark, dank, and depressing place.
Eva shivered. She had felt claustrophobic in the confines of the terrible sewer. Here—with the weight of the earth above her—the crushing feeling was ten times worse. She felt threatened. Imprisoned.
The next three weeks would be a harrowing ordeal, she thought dismally.
But she and Willi both knew that their real ordeal lay ahead.
At the same hour, 350 miles to the north, a German staff car threaded its way through the dark, narrow streets of the old harbor town of Flensburg on the Danish border, bound for the submarine pens of the Kriegsmarine at the heavily damaged naval base. The streets in this, the last bastion of the dying Nazi Reich, teemed with soldiers and were jammed with military traffic.
After passing through checkpoints and barriers, the vehicle came to a stop at an undamaged berth. In the black waters under the leaden night sky rode a Type XXI, ocean-going, Schnorckel-equipped U-Boat.
A short, stocky man dismounted from the staff car. Hunched in a large SS leather greatcoat, the collar turned up, effectively concealing his face, he walked rapidly to the gangplank and boarded the submarine, disappearing into its bloated metal womb.
Below, in his cramped quarters, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann at once felt the crushing feeling of claustrophobia crowd in on him. Grimly he clenched his teeth against it. He forced himself to ignore it. How else would he cope, once underway, with the weight of an ocean above him? It would be a long voyage to Argentina.
As he felt the powerful engines throb to life with a deep, trembling rumble he gave a fleeting thought to Eva Braun Hitler and the insufferable young SS officer with her. He regretted having lost the Hitler fortune to which the girl had been the key, but he did not have to rely on it. He had seen to it that he would never want for anything. That, after all, was the only matter of importance. Not the resurrection of the Third Reich.
He had no doubt that Eva and the young man were lying dead in the streets of Wilhelmstadt—or swinging from a lamppost.
If not, they soon would.
There was no way they could survive.
PART II
May 31 -June 14, 1945
13
CIC AGENT WOODROW WILSON WARD watched the long-legged, statuesque woman walk toward him, a cup of steaming coffee in her hand. What a looker, he thought. She moves with the elegance of one of the three Graces. Thalia, of course. Who the hell but she could look like a goddess at 0700 hours in the morning—without makeup? He remembered being totally smitten when he saw her in the film Destry Rides Again. A couple of years before the war. Marlene Dietrich. Would anyone ever believe that she was serving him coffee at 0700 hours in the dingy dining room of a small hotel in Regensburg? Hell, no. But that didn’t matter. He knew.
Marlene handed him the coffee cup. “Good morning,” she said, smiling at him. Her husky voice caressed his ears. “Here is your coffee. I know you take it black.”
“Good morning,” he said. “Thank you.”
He watched her return to the coffee urn. Some woman, dammit!
When Corps had moved to Regensburg, CIC had set up shop in a small Gastwirtschaft next to a theater on Maximilianstrasse, and one day Marlene Dietrich had shown up. She was in the ETO, and had been for months, entertaining the troops. He remembered, back last October, somewhere in France—at Pont-à-Mousson just north of Nancy it had been—he’d attended a USO show starring Marlene Dietrich. In the middle of a song—from Destry—German artillery had opened up. It came in pretty heavy. And he remembered La Dietrich calmly saying: “We had better cut this show short, boys. The Germans know I am here. They don’t like me much, and I’m sure they’re firing at me! I don’t want anyone to get hurt.” So the show was cut short and the piano and sound equipment loaded on the truck, and it w
asn’t more than five minutes later that the Krauts laid a shell right on top of the damned building, blowing it to smithereens! Marlene had been calm as a cucumber. Now that’s elegance!
Apparently she preferred staying with the CIC rather than in the Officers’ Guest Quarters up the street. And every morning, first thing, she was there to serve the agents coffee. She was obviously fascinated with investigation and interrogation work. And, of course, she spoke German fluently. So they’d let her question a few suspects, and he’d been impressed with her perception and astuteness. She was one bright lady—besides being the best-looking dame in the ETO—who made one helluva cup of coffee.
She was probably the closest he’d get to glamour—as in “five-pointer-glamour case,” he thought gloomily. As he’d feared, occupation duty had quickly settled down to a routine of chasing after garden variety Mandatory Arrestees and minor War Criminals. It was now over three weeks after V-E Day, and it was still the same. He sometimes had the feeling he’d have to go through the entire two-inch thick Mandatory Arrestee & War Criminals Wanted List all by himself before they’d let him go home.
His despondent thoughts were broken off when the field telephone rang. He picked it up.
“Ward,” he said. “CIC.”
“Hope I didn’t disturb your beauty sleep, Woody, my boy.” It was Major Hall, being disgustingly cheerful.
“Who needs sleep,” Woody grumbled. “I get enough of that on the damned job.”
“Well, get your ass over here,” Hall said. “I’ve got something I want to show you. I think it’ll give you a kick. And Woody, make it now. I’ve got to get this thing back where I got it.”
“Coming, Mother!” Woody wailed, imitating the inimitable Henry. He hung up.
Woody threaded his jeep across the railroad tracks near the demolished Albertstrasse Bahnhof. He bounced along a narrow path that snaked between deep bomb craters and corkscrew twisted rails, the result of plaster bombing attacks on the switching yards by the AAF. Actually, most of the picturesque old town of Regensburg had escaped damage by the Allied air raids which had been directed mainly against the Messerschmidt factories on the outskirts of town, against the shipping basins on the river and, of course, against the railroad marshaling yards, all of which targets had been almost totally destroyed. The only real damage to the inner city had been inflicted by the Germans themselves when they blew up the famous twelfth-century stone bridge, the Steinerne Brucke, in a futile attempt to stop the American advance.
