Return to Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  “Everyone debark,” he demanded. In consternation, the passengers rose. Some tried to gather belongings. The Gestapo leader howled at everyone.

  “You bring nothing!” he said. “Nothing!”

  It was an order, not a statement.

  “We are seeking enemies of the Reich! All others will be allowed to board again and continue!”

  Cochrane’s eyes widened. An even larger fear rushed through him. Standing next to the Gestapo commander, obviously in collusion with him, was the fair-haired man with the wire-rimmed glasses who had been late to board the flight. Somewhere, an evil fix was in.

  The other passengers followed the orders. The Gestapo leader moved them quickly along. The Gestapo moved the men down the rear steps from the plane. The police on the tarmac herded them into three groups, four to a group. Their weapons were drawn. The two women stood separately next to each other.

  A stiff cold wind whistled across the tarmac. It cut through clothing. A gray sky hung overhead like a shroud. The agent with the Mauser stood as head guard. The Gestapo leader watched, eyeing everyone closely as his two aides went from traveler to traveler inspecting passports.

  Cochrane tried to keep his eyes trained straight ahead but watched what he could with a peripheral view. He was convinced he was moments away from dying. One by one, passengers were permitted to go back onto the plane. The two women were cleared first. Two men were cleared. One was told to remain. Another man was cleared and allowed to board the airplane.

  They came to Cochrane. He produced his forged Canadian passport under the name of Abraham Stykowski. Despite the cold, sweat poured down his back. One man eyed the passport, Wesselmann questioned.

  “You speak German?” asked the interrogator

  “I speak German,” Cochrane said,

  “How do you speak German?”

  “My grandmother was German. And I visited Germany during the degenerate Weimar years.”

  “To do what?”

  “Banking. I was a banker.”

  “Which bank?”

  “Morgan Guaranty Trust.”

  “What bank in Germany?”

  “The Dresdner Bank.”

  “Oh?” Wesselmann’s tone which had been frosty was now icy. “You’re a wealthy man? Privileged class?”

  “No. I work for a salary like everyone else. Much like you, perhaps.”

  “I have suspicions of a man who flatters,” the Gestapo officer said, still icy.

  “No flattery was intended. I’m telling you the truth.”

  The questions followed rapidly, meant to catch a hitch or hesitation or an uncertainty.

  “Your name. It’s Polish?”

  “Polish Canadian.”

  “You don’t look like a Pole.”

  “Really? How should a Pole look?”

  “You have a middle name?”

  “Stanislaus.”

  “Why were you named that?”

  “After an uncle.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Near Toronto. Canada.”

  “Canada is at war with Germany.”

  “That doesn’t mean I am.”

  “Good answer, Herr Stykowski,” Wesselmann said. “Why shouldn’t I arrest you?”

  Cochrane produced a transit permit with the proper Third Reich markings and signatures. It was a forgery. Wesselmann looked at it carefully, including the paper.

  “Are you Jewish?” Wesselmann asked.

  “I’m a Polish Catholic.”

  “Really? Why do Catholics worship Mary?

  “We don’t worship her. We venerate her.”

  “What’s the difference?””

  “Veneration is the honoring of a person. We worship Almighty God, our Creator.”

  “Good answer.”

  The Gestapo officer examined the passport, bending pages and holding it sideways to examine the binding. “This is very good. A professional product.”

  “It should be. It’s authentic.”

  “Issued when?”

  “A month ago.”

  “Where?”

  “In Brazil. Rio de Janeiro”

  “How did you get to Brazil?”

  “By steamship.”

  “Which one?”

  Quickly, “The Sao Paulo.”

  The Gestapo officer paused and checked the page with the appropriate stamps. All the fake details checked, but Cochrane felt sweat running down his back.

  “From?”

  “Nassau.”

  “When?”

  Cochrane gave the date.

  “And you were born where?”

  “Ottawa.”

  “When?”

  Cochrane gave an address and date. They matched the lies in the passport. Back in New York, he had done his memorization well.

  “You have an entry stamp which permits you to visit Germany. Why?”

  “I have financial business with the Reich.”

  “You are going where in Germany?”

  “Berlin.”

  “Then why do you stop in Geneva and not Zurich?”

  “My banking associates are in Geneva.”

  “Which bank?”

  “Credit Suisse.”

  “Credit Suisse no longer has branches in Geneva.”

  Cochrane managed a small smile. “You can do better than that, Kriminalkommissar,” he said. “Credit Suisse has branches in all the cities and all the cantons. Their headquarters in Zurich is under reconstruction. The headquarters is in Geneva. And they retain an office in Berlin on the Albertstrasse.”

  “You’re a smart man,” snapped Wesselmann.

  “Now, you flatter me, sir.”

  “Maybe too smart!”

  Wesselmann snapped shut the passport. Hard accusatory eye contact. Neither blinked. Wesselmann’s eyes were pools of intimidation and menace.

  Cochrane extended a hand for the return of his passport.

  “I will be holding this,” the Gestapo agent said, keeping it in his hand. From behind, one of the other agents placed his hands on Cochrane, patting him down, looking for a weapon. “You stay where you are with your hands at the height of your shoulders,” Wesselmann demanded.

  The Gestapo squad moved through the other passengers. They pulled aside Cambulat, the Turk. They dismissed three passengers, then pulled Skordeno out of the line. Two policemen held him, one on each arm. Skordeno didn’t blink but his eyes found Cochrane’s.

  The Gestapo held three passports in addition to Cochrane’s. They singled out the nameless Frenchman, too, the one with the Midi accent.

  Ten passengers were back on the plane. Four passengers were left on the tarmac, their hands aloft. The fair haired rat with the round glasses was with the French police. The Germans arranged carefully the four men in custody. They positioned Cochrane second from the left, pushing Skordeno next to him. Cambulat was to Cochrane’s right and the Frenchman was at the end. They continued to hold their hands aloft, palms at shoulder level.

  Cochrane looked up to the aircraft. They were twenty meters from the port side of the plane. There were faces at each window watching the proceedings.

  Wesselmann stood in front of the four passengers. The thin man with glasses left the police position. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a Luger. He strolled to the side of the four men on the tarmac and circled behind them, quiet as an eel in dark waters.

  Wesselmann switched into heavily accented English.

  “One of you we know to be an American spy,” he barked. “Another of you is suspected. The other two arouse our suspicions. But you may be free to go when our business in finished. Now! You will have fifteen seconds. If you are a spy, you will confess right here and now. You will be arrested and interrogated. You will have the opportunity to work with the officers of the Reich and assist us. If you remain silent and obdurate, you will be shot. Here. On this spot. Do you all understand?”

  Cochrane mumbled, “Yes.” So did the three other men.

  “Fifteen second
s begins!” the man said.

  No one confessed to anything.

  Fifteen seconds passed. Cochrane could sense the position of the man with the gun who had moved behind the line of four captives.

  Cochrane couldn’t help himself. He trembled.

  He thought of his wife back in New York. If he were to be killed, as he now knew he would be, he wanted the vision and thought of the woman he loved to be his final one in this world.

  “Very well!” Wesselmann snapped.

  There was a quick shuffling of feet behind the line of four captive travelers. The captain of the squad gave a nod and then a signal by hand.

  Cochrane could hear a second set of footsteps behind him, suggesting that there were two executioners. He heard the clicks of two handguns.

  A pair of shots erupted behind him into the neck and skull of Skordeno, who had been next to him. Parts of bone and blood sprayed Cochrane’s cheek and coat. With peripheral vision Cochrane saw Skordeno flail forward toward the ground, arms waving and spasming and half of his head missing, blood flooding obscenely from the shattered skull.

  He saw the people in the aircraft turn their faces away.

  Cochrane closed his eyes.

  Skordeno’s lifeless body was the last thing he saw. He closed his eyes, said good-bye to his wife when the thin man with glasses behind him raised his Luger and fired two more shots, instantly killing the suspected second spy.

  Chapter 3

  Nazi Germany and The Soviet Union

  Summer and Autumn, 1941

  On June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler took his greatest gamble of World War Two. He launched Operation Barbarossa, a three million man invasion across Poland and into the Soviet Union. Hitler was confident the Soviet Union would fall to his brutally efficient armies in a matter of months, if not weeks. Stalin had purged and executed some of his best military men over questions of loyalty, real and imagined. Soviet military equipment was years out of date. The generals of the Red Army were often drunk and more often incompetent. The Soviets had even suffered great difficulty scoring a victory over pesky little Finland in 1940, while Germany had routed Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland and France the same year. The western front was quiet by the end of June 1940. Nazi Germany had triumphed everywhere. The swastika flew above fifteen European capitals. The only resistance was half-paralyzed and far underground.

  There was no reason for Nazi Germany not to exude swagger and confidence. Joseph Stalin’s repressive regime was corrupt and had difficulty administering the more remote stretches of the Soviet Union. “We have only to kick in the door,” Hitler boasted, “and the whole rotten Communist structure will crash to the earth.”

  Barbarossa was magnificently efficient in its early stages. By September 1941, the Red Army was back on the heels of its muddy boots, its tanks and armies in desperate retreat, having lost two and a half million men. But the Red Army was also the largest in the world, comprising nearly three hundred divisions, and the Soviet Union was the world’s largest country by area, with vast natural resources. There was room to rebound if early defeat could be avoided.

  There was also Russia’s more dependable historical ally: the weather. In October, the annual snows began in Siberia. In November they worked their way west.

  Other allies for Russia were lurking, also. President Franklin Roosevelt occasionally flirted with the notion that he believed that the Russians and the Americans were on a path to convergence. He felt, sometimes anyway, that as the US was moving away from unfettered capitalism toward state-managed socialism, the Soviet Union might be moving from autocratic communism toward socialist democracy. The notion was overly optimistic, wishful, and not based on much, but it wasn’t a bad thought. FDR was at heart a populist. Sometimes he saw in Stalin, in his words, “a man of the people,” an autocratic spin on FDR’s own mandate.

  Roosevelt wasn’t the only world leader trying to see Stalin in clear daylight. “Any man or state who fights on against Nazism will have our aid,” Prime Minister Winston Churchill told the British people in a radio address on the BBC in reference to the Soviet dictator. Not many Brits disagreed.

  It was impossible to truly know what motivated Roosevelt any more than it was possible to know what motivated Stalin. As went a popular Russian proverb, “Another man’s soul is darkness.” There was plenty of darkness in Stalin’s soul, probably more than most.

  Roosevelt’s tolerance for Stalin was mostly strategic. Yet, Russia needed America, with its shipments of steel and low-interest loans, which Stalin had no intention of paying, far more than America needed Russia. Prior to Roosevelt’s presidency, in return for recognizing the Soviet Union, Washington wanted Stalin to stop interfering in American affairs through its secret agents, anti-democratic activity and counterfeiting schemes. The United States also asked Stalin to take a more humane stance on the Ukraine, where Uncle Joe had engineered a fake famine, starving two million people to death. Stalin just laughed.

  Great Britain, though, was already at war with Germany. Officially at least, the United States was still on the sidelines while Germany and Russian slugged it out.

  The pressure on Roosevelt to keep America out of another European war was enormous. For years Churchill, the shrewdest of the wartime leaders, had wooed, cajoled, and flattered Roosevelt in particular and the American public in general in an effort to ally with its vast resources and manpower. He wrote FDR two or three times a week. Roosevelt offered some ships and other arms and war equipment. But he stopped well short of promising a war alliance. The mood of America would not allow it. In 1940 and 1941 the national debate had intensified between isolationists who wanted America to stay out of another world war and interventionists, who favored extensive aid to Great Britain.

  In September 1940 a Yale Law School student named R. Douglas Stuart, son of the co-founder of Quaker Oats, founded The America First Committee, known as the AFC. There were several other co-founding law students, including future US President Gerald Ford. The group quickly became the largest homegrown pressure group against the American entry into World War Two.

  Almost overnight, the AFC had nearly a million paying members. On the other coast there were “peace strikes” at several campuses of the University of California. Politically, Roosevelt’s hands were tied. The isolationist movement was not shy about flexing its muscles.

  In May 1941, Charles Lindbergh, still a national hero, spoke at an America First rally before a capacity crowd of twenty-two thousand at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Those assembled roared their approval of staying out of another European war. On the other extreme, The Fight for Freedom Committee and the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies were active in New York, insisting that America confront fascism. Their rallies were meager and tame, however, compared to the boisterous tub-thumping America Firsters.

  The fighting on the Eastern Front between Russia and Germany was terrible beyond belief. The Germans wished to crush the hated Slavs. The Soviets threw into the battle anyone who could carry a weapon. Atrocities were everywhere. Armies slaughtered civilians by the thousands. Beheadings were routine, mass graves common. Brutal rapes happened by the hundreds. Soldiers set buildings on fire with prisoners crowded into them, then stood by, laughed and cheered. Millions of captured soldiers died of exposure, torture or mass execution.

  The German army slaughtered Jews and Slavic peasants with enthusiasm, the Slavs in the initial combat, the captured Jews by hanging or by SS rifle squads that followed the army. Hitler’s racial crusade against the Slavs soon backfired, however. Potential Nazi collaborators enlisted into the Red Army to fight for Stalin and defend the cities of the Motherland.

  The Germans besieged Leningrad and tried to subdue the city by starving its entrapped people. Hitler ordered that the entire male population of Stalingrad, a city of one million, be killed. Similar orders were in effect for Moscow. All captured females were to be deported to Germany for labor or sexual exploitation or both. Millions of victims of the Ge
rman invasion were noncombatants.

  Stalingrad emerged as the focal point of the push into Russia, the battle that would decide the war. In military terms, the irresistible force, the Wehrmacht, was driving headlong toward the immovable object, Stalingrad, the city of the “Great Leader,” who was portrayed in Pravda as a sympathetic but strong father figure, with the Soviet people as his "children".

  No battle in previous history was more ferociously waged.

  In house-to-house, farm-to-farm and factory-to-factory fighting, tens of thousands died, sometimes by knife or pistol. Snipers were used to great effect by both sides. The Axis forces suffered eight hundred fifty thousand casualties and the Soviets seven hundred fifty thousand. The Great Leader considered his losses necessary. The surrender of the city would have been an irreversible victory for the Nazis. The two sides fought on and on and on. Then in late November 1941 blizzards arrived. The Russian winter set in. Advancement and retreat froze to a halt.

  Next for Russia, a December miracle.

  Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, bringing the United States of America into the war. Insanely, Adolf Hitler compounded Japan’s strategic error by declaring war against the United States on December eleventh. The US reciprocated with a retaliatory declaration of war against Germany a few hours later. The America First Committee dissolved the same day. Non-intervention was no longer an option.

  “Greater good fortune has rarely happened to the British Empire than this event!” proclaimed Churchill. The United States and Great Britain had barely been on speaking terms with Stalin’s communist regime. Now Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin shared a common enemy. Hitler had blundered on a titanic scale and had accomplished Churchill’s goal for him.

  “I went to bed on December ninth and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful,” Winston Churchill wrote much later in his account of World War Two. To the British Prime Minister, this meant one thing above all: eventual victory.

  Britain was no longer alone.

  It was late 1941. Uncle Sam was finally ready to roll up his sleeves and fight.