Judgment in Berlin: A Spy Story

by Noel Hynd

  “Let me tell you about the three B’s. Birds, Bees and Berlin.”

  “I’m listening,” Cochrane said, sipping his Scotch. Cochrane was appreciative that, for starters, Pickford had made the Scotch happen. He settled in to listen.

  “Berlin has two types of dames. First, you have the Trummerfrau — and then what the GIs refer to as Veronika Dankeschön. Of course, you cannot squeeze every female in the city into one category or the other, but they reflect what’s going on out there as soon as you get out of the airport. Trummerfrau means ‘rubble woman’,” Major Pickford explained. “You’ll see them all over, the females hammering bricks, sifting through the ruins off the streets, saving materials for reconstruction. There are probably about fifty thousand of them in the city. They do this for extra rations. A hausfrau receives a lot less to eat than the women who clear the streets. Food rations are everything, especially when the women support old people and children in the home. Their men have been killed, severely crippled from war wounds, or emotionally damaged. I hate to say it, but three years after the war, people are still starving in Berlin, something those Red bastards are trying to make worse with their goddamn blockade. This is a country and city of suicides, William, and most of the suicides after the war are likely to be men, returning soldiers. Right now the women of Berlin are working night and day to feed their families. While they’re earning their food rations, they’re also gluing the city back together.”

  “After the men of Berlin destroyed it,” Cochrane observed.

  “Bit of a cynic, aren’t you, major?” Pickford chuckled.

  “More a realist, but also a student of history,” Cochrane said. “What is the other ‘type’?”

  “The opposite of the trouser-wearing, hardworking, gritty Teutonic Trummerfrau is the dame people back in the States would call ‘loose.’ The Veronika Dankeschön, God love her.”

  Cochrane worked over the double entendre and grinned. “Veronika Dankeschön. I assume the initials purposely spell ‘VD’.”

  “Yup. Clap. Many different strains of it, none of it fun. It’s a serious problem in Berlin. Don’t take any home as a souvenir.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it.”

  “Veronicas use sex to get the basic things they need. Look, there’s a shortage of German men and a surplus of Allied men, so none of this is a surprise. Not every woman who goes out with an Allied soldier is Veronika. Plenty of young German dames just want to have some fun after the war, meet new people, get past the damned fighting. They go out with Allied soldiers for many other reasons. Food and cigarettes. Nylons. New music in the Allied clubs. There’s even the hope of marrying and being taken to hell out of Europe and back to the States as a trophy. But keep this in mind, the Germans as a whole look warily at the girl who’s hanging around a U.S. soldier. She might be called an Ami-liebchen: an American-lover.” He paused. “There’s an implication. The term is just short of ‘prostitute’.”

  “I’m not here to find forbidden romance or assignation,” Cochrane said.

  “Good for you. I felt obligated to walk you through the minefield, though. Sorry.”

  “No apologies necessary.”

  “The thing is,” Major Pickford said, “you’re looking for an adult female. There’s a good chance that she’s dead. There’s a better chance that she’s no longer in Berlin. Maybe she fled, maybe the Soviets abducted her to a labor camp. There’s a chance she changed her name. So you got about a forty percent chance of finding her. If you do find her, it’s fifty-fifty that she’s going to turn out to be a Trummerfrau or a Veronika. If you get that far, proceed accordingly.”

  Major Pickford finished his second shot. He eyed the bottle and went for a third pop while Cochrane was still on his initial pour. “There’s your afternoon orientation,” Pickford said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Where did this woman of interest live?” Pickford asked.

  Cochrane gave the address.

  Pickford considered it for a moment and made a face.

  “That block was obliterated. You’ll be starting at ground zero.”

  “That surprises me not at all,” Cochrane said.

  “You and me both,” Pickford said. A pause, then, “Why don’t you unwind a little? Let Pfc. Crenshaw show you around Tempelhof, then we’ll meet here in my office again briefly after dinner. You might have more questions after you’ve done some reading and looked around.”

  “Sounds good,” Cochrane said.

  Chapter 33

  Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania – April - May 1945

  A little more than three years before the Big Lift in April of 1945, both sides of the global conflict knew which side was going to lose World War II in Europe. On the Eastern Front, the momentum of the war had turned with the surrender of the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad in 1943. Like a tidal wave growing in force and intensity, the Red Army began to roll eastward from Russia across devastated Poland. It continued into Eastern Germany where the Wehrmacht could slow the advancing Soviet onslaught but could not stop it.

  Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had personally set in motion a competition between two Soviet marshals, Georgy Zhukov and Ivan Konev, to crush the remaining Nazi resistance and lead the first Russian troops into Berlin. The Soviet armies advanced into East Prussia in long wide columns. They were an extraordinary mixture of the modern and the medieval. There was a professional corps of officers, men who were — above all — soldiers. There were tank troops in padded black helmets manning T-34s and T-70s, probably the best tanks in the world, and the weapon that had turned the tide on the Eastern Front. There were Cossack cavalrymen on shaggy mounts with loot strapped to the saddle, lend-lease Studebakers and Dodges towing light field guns, and then a second echelon in horse-drawn carts.

  The variety of characters among the soldiers was almost as great as that of their military equipment. There were freebooters who drank and raped shamelessly. There were idealistic, austere Communists and members of the intelligentsia appalled by such behavior. And there were professional soldiers who obediently served the state.

  On April 28, 1945, Lena Schroeder, nineteen, and her younger sister, Anna, seventeen, awoke to the sound of heavy motor vehicles moving through the streets. It was an hour before dawn in the home they shared with their parents in the small city of Demmin, a community in Pomerania. Demmin normally had a population of sixteen thousand. But Demmin’s population had doubled. Thousands of refugees from the East were also in Demmin, living in abandoned buildings, parks, and the streets.

  Lena climbed out of the bed the girls shared and went to her window. The weather had been warm in the early summer. She wore nothing but a flimsy nightgown. Anna had no night gown. The one she had owned had disintegrated from daily use and lack of washing. She wore nothing but bloomers. The girls were exhausted. In late April, as Soviet troops approached and Wehrmacht divisions prepared to withdraw, the remaining German soldiers had ordered women, children, and elderly men to dig a three-mile-long anti-tank ditch east of the city.

  Lena nudged open the slatted wooden shutters outside her window, carefully holding her gown to her as well as her long blond hair so as not to attract attention. The girls had learned to be careful around soldiers.

  Anna came up behind Lena and looked over her sister’s shoulder, hiding her bare breasts as she craned her neck to see outside. There were German soldiers in the street. At first, this was reassuring because Russian guns could be heard in the near distance, volley after volley, drawing closer by the hour.

  Lena opened the shutters farther. She and her sister gazed down as some of the more attentive soldiers gazed appreciatively up at them and waved. Lena waved back, visible in the reflected light of headlamps on Wehrmacht troop transports. But then Lena and Anna gasped. Far from being reassured, they were horrified at what they saw. The Wehrmacht had begun an evacuation of Demmin. Hitler had promised that the Red Army would be stopped. The German generals had promised that there would be no retreat. Now, as t
he horizon glimmered faintly with the dawn, these promises lay broken.

  The door to the sisters’ room eased open with a squeak. Fritz Schroeder, their father, entered holding a candle. “Close that window!” he said. “Now!”

  They pulled in the shutters and turned. Their father was a local policeman, the second-in-command in the town. The first-in-command had not been seen for several days. One rumor was that he had fled. The other rumor was that he was dead, either from his hand or that of someone else.

  “Pack one small bag each,” Fritz said. “We’re leaving.”

  “Where are we going?” Lena asked.

  “Berlin,” he said. “If we are lucky enough to get there. Not all of us will.”

  Fritz approached his two daughters and embraced each. “My duty is to stay until the last of our soldiers departs. Then we, and the town, are on our own,” he said.

  “How soon?” Anna asked.

  “Within the hour.”

  He looked at his daughters. Part of their beauty was their long blond hair. But it could also be a target for rape-inclined soldiers.

  “Make yourselves look like boys,” he said. “Be at the barn in ninety minutes. If we don’t stay ahead of the Russians, we’re dead.”

  Two weeks earlier Fritz Schroeder had anticipated this moment. He had hidden an old car between two haystacks outside an old stone barn. It was a small, gray 1934 Citroen that had been confiscated. He had repainted it and put fuel in it. The barn was on a small plot of land that bordered some woods half a kilometer down the road that went to the northwest. A circuitous route to Berlin was less obvious and worked best. He had taught his daughters how to forage and survive in the woods. The goal was to at least get to the woods on the other side of the River Peene. The girls had played there as younger children and knew the terrain well. They knew where the undergrowth of the forest was thick enough to provide cover, they knew where there was water, and they knew where berries grew wild. Their father had taught them well.

  There was also an alternative destination in case of an emergency or extreme danger. Several kilometers to the north in a thick area of woods there was a small habitable ramshackle cabin against a wall of granite on a hillside thick with foliage. The family owned it. The girls called it unser geheimes Haus, our secret house. They had visited it since being children, and as recently as two months earlier. There was no distinguishable path to it. But they knew the way by heart. No one else had visited it since before the first great war.

  “One other thing,” Fritz said.

  He dug into a coat pocket and pulled out two Dreyse pistols. The guns were small and compact, left over from the previous World War, but they still fired. Each held seven bullets. He handed one weapon to each daughter. The girls were familiar with the pistols. In recent weeks, Fritz had taught his girls how to use them.

  “Use it if you have to,” he said. “Save the last bullet for yourself if you need to. Your mother and I will probably be killed. Don’t waste your bullets defending us. Do what you must. Get to Berlin, change your names. Survive. Bear my grandchildren in a better place than this.”

  As dawn broke, Lena and Anna packed. Beyond their window, chaos reigned. Hysterical Nazi party functionaries ripped off their red and black armbands, dropped them in the street, and left the city on confiscated fire engines, pushing off the firefighters. Near the town square, German personnel deserted the single town hospital. German police had disappeared from the streets. Fistfights were everywhere as citizens scrambled to get to the road that led out of town.

  By the time dawn broke, there was a small armada of people on bicycles or tractors or small cars, all heading westward. Hundreds of civilians had also started to walk. Death, or a fate worse than death, surely awaited anyone who fell into Soviet captivity.

  Fritz Schroeder and his wife walked as a couple. Lena and Anna stayed together, their hair tucked up under old hats that had belonged to their father, wearing drab coats and pants. They were dressed as boys. Beneath their feet, the ground shook from the movement of two enormous armies. The Wehrmacht divisions were in retreat and the Red Army was advancing, firing artillery shells that flew high above them and burst along the road ahead.

  Demmin was surrounded by two rivers. To the north and the west, the River Peene enclosed Demmin. To the south, the River Tollense flowed by the city. There were bridges in three locations. All roads leaving the city crossed a bridge. Fritz Schroeder expected the bridges to be disabled by the retreating Wehrmacht as the Red Army approached the town from the east. He knew that to have any chance at survival, his family needed to cross the bridges as soon as the Wehrmacht had crossed them. There would only be a few minutes of opportunity before the fleeing German army blew up the bridges behind them.

  As Lena and Anna started out of town, they were nearly run over by a speeding car. They recognized the license plate. It began with WL-602. The sisters recognized it as a police car, its markings painted over so recently that the paint was runny and wet. They saw five men crowded within it, one man on the left side of the front seat with an upraised Mauser automatic pistol in his hands.

  The two daughters made a successful rendezvous with their parents at the barn. Madly, the four family members clawed away the straw from the Citroen. They pushed and piled themselves into the vehicle. Fritz Schroeder turned the ignition. Three times it failed to turn over. His wife said a prayer aloud. Perhaps the prayer was heard, because, on the fourth try, the ignition kicked in. On the road out of town, the Schroeder family fled westward.

  Fritz drove, leaving the road where necessary to make better time. His wife rode next to him. Lena and Anna crouched low as they rode in the back seat. Artillery fire was everywhere. At first, it sounded as if the big guns were behind them, then it seemed in front of them, and then the war surrounded them. To each side of the road, there were corpses. Germans who had tried to flee but hadn’t been successful. Many vehicles were on fire. Bodies of young men and women lay strewn across fields, bicycles were abandoned, frames shattered, and tires on fire.

  Fritz Schroeder regained the crowded road that led to the bridge that went west. There were more casualties. In the sky, two Russian fighters strafed the Germans trying to flee.

  Anna’s father weaved furiously in and out of a swarming crowd of pedestrians, bicycles, and battered cars. As they approached the single bridge, the dead and gravely wounded were even more plentiful. Suddenly Anna raised her hand and pointed.

  “Look!” she said. Sieh dir das an!

  She pointed out the police car with the WL-602 license plate that they had seen leave the city thirty minutes before them. It was half-overturned and on fire, its chassis pockmarked by several volleys of bullets, probably from the heavy machine gun of one of the Russian aircraft. In it, five corpses blazed, the charred skeletons of hands and heads raised as flames consumed the car and its contents.

  They reached the crowded two-lane bridge that crossed the Peene. They squeezed onto it with other traffic. It took ten minutes to cross due to traffic inching off on the western side. When they neared the bridge’s western side, the sound of another Soviet fighter could be heard overhead. The plane strafed the fleeing cars and civilians. Two bullets hit their Citroen, but they remained unharmed. They finally reached the land on the other side. Fritz Schroeder drove the car across a field, driving parallel to the road.

  They proceeded for a kilometer and a half. Most vehicle traffic had disappeared. Adjacent to the road, beyond the casualties that littered the landscape, were trees and heavy foliage. Many fleeing Germans had abandoned their vehicles and sought shelter in the forest. Up ahead, emerging suddenly from a bend in the road, a tank appeared.

  Deutsche? asked Frau Schroeder.

  Nein! Russisch! her husband said. He spoke softly and with a terror that he had never known in his life. The Russian tanks blocked their escape route.

  Chapter 34

  Berlin - July 1948

  Pfc. Crenshaw showed Cochrane to the room in
the residence wing where he would be billeted, plus where the commissary was and other points of interest, including a bar and a newspaper reading room. After a brief tour of airport facilities, Cochrane returned to the secured reading room in the administrative wing. He engaged the files. They reinforced the former addresses of Frau Schneidhuber’s home and most recent workplace, the purported medical facility, or as it was termed in the correspondence, Die Medizinische Klinik.

  Cochrane took dinner in the commissary. Tommy Olson and Glenn Taylor were sharing a quick dinner before having to turn around from Tempelhof to take a few passengers and some cargo back to Rhein-Main. They introduced Cochrane to several other pilots, including Victor Marino and two other newcomers, First Lieutenant Charles King of Aberdeen, South Dakota, and First Lieutenant Robert Stuber of Arlington, Virginia.

  Cochrane sat and listened. Olson and Taylor were needling each other about who was inherently more qualified to fly, men or women. Marino was complaining about the paperwork involved with getting his wife to come over and join him. He listened to some explanations and comments about the DPs, the brigade in black. King and Stuber were complaining about inaccurate cargo weight on their C-47, as measured by the ground crews in Wiesbaden. They had reported some potentially lethal downdrafts on approach to Tempelhof – something noted by other pilots, also – and inaccurate cargo weigh-ins were not helping.

  After dinner, Cochrane had a final half-hour briefing with Major Pickford.

  “A couple of things you should know about,” Pickford said. “First off,” he said. “The ‘Erlking Fund’.”

  “The what?”

  “Have yourself a look, major,” Pickford said with a grin.

  Pickford rose from behind his desk. He went to the chunky piece of furniture covered by a sheet and the unit military flags. He pulled the coverings away and revealed a wooden cabinet, or, rather, a fake one. Major Pickford swung the front of it open, crouched down, and seconds later was spinning the knob on a sturdy black safe.