Return to Berlin

by Noel Hynd

  “Definitely.”

  From there the recruitment was easy. Wesselmann resigned his job as a Berlin policeman and became an agent of the Geheime Staatspolizei, the Gestapo, the Nazi secret state police. He remained in the SS

  Hans was as subtle as a slash to the throat. He worked as hard for his new masters as he had for his old ones. He was a functionary from head to toe, wrapped up in regulations, statistics and notes, memos, regulations and civil codes. Gradually, he began to get out of the office and crack heads. His superiors unleashed him on troublesome leftists and Jews and Gypsies. Soon his personal reign of terror was well known in Munich. His skills at formal denouncements, blackmail letters, and terse quasi-literate threatening letters soon rose and expanded to medieval style torture, pistol whippings and secret executions by Luger.

  Wesselmann rose quickly through the ranks. He was a key participant and some celebrated cases. There was, for example, a Protestant Evangelical minister named Paul Schneider who opposed the Nazification of Lutheran churches in Germany. Schneider was reported to the Gestapo in Berlin. Wesselmann investigated and arranged for Schneider to be banned from preaching. While many of the churches accepted Hitler, or stood by in silence, there were some who were starting to cause trouble They needed to learn some lessons.

  Wesselmann led a Gestapo team that arrested the meddlesome priest one morning at three AM. Wesselmann arranged to send him to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Guards placed him in solitary confinement. He still refused to shut up. From memory he would recite passages from the Bible from the window of his cell to comfort other inmates every evening.

  For this, the small Gestapo and SS contingent at Buchenwald beat him brutally. The camp commandant offered him the chance of release if he signed a declaration promising never to preach again. Schneider refused to sign. What more could one do? On July 18th, 1939, he was killed by lethal injection. He was twenty-seven. Good riddance to a noisy enemy of Adolf Hitler.

  Then there was the case of a communist activist named Hanna Koch. Koch was a student of foreign languages at Humboldt University in Berlin when she apparently became disloyal and fell in with a notorious socialist resistance group called the Red Orchestra. A loyal neighbor wrote out a report of Hanna’s deplorable activities and sent it anonymously to the Berlin Gestapo. Wesselmann was on duty that day and seized the case for himself.

  Wesselmann led a raid aid on Koch’s flat in October of 1942. They found an anti-Nazi leaflet she had translated into French, an article meant for slave laborers working in munition factories in occupied France. Wesselmann had many problems with women. If they weren’t in a brothel, he had little use for them and the so-called educated ones were the worst. They too needed to learn obedience.

  Wesselmann led the interrogation of Hanna. He tied her to a chair and stripped her to her waist. He beat her. He demanded to know who else had worked on the document.

  “No one,” she insisted. “I translated this myself. I found it at the university. It was probably dropped off by a German soldier who has been to the eastern front. Are you aware of the crimes our armies commit or do you prefer to not see them?”

  He slapped her savagely across the upper body. It was obvious Hanna was protecting others. But the silly woman wouldn’t break. During her interrogation, Wesselmann tied her with her back to a sizzling radiator pipe in a standing position. He tore her blouse torn off as she faced him. He beat her, the flesh of her back against the pipe as he pummeled her. He told her that she would be treated more leniently if she were smart enough to remember the names of other collaborators within the group. “Now! Answer me!” he insisted. “I insist on names!”

  “That would make me as low as you are,” she said. She spit in his face.

  She went on trial for treason. She was found guilty of treason and sentenced to death. Her parents appealed to Adolf Hitler for clemency, but the Fuehrer knew best what was good for the war effort. He personally refused their request.

  At the age of twenty-two, Koch was guillotined at Plötzensee Prison, Berlin.

  Wesselmann’s superiors congratulated him on his exemplary work. They awarded him a medal. By 1937, shortly after Koch was beheaded, Wesselmann was promoted to high lieutenant, Kriminalkommissar.

  In Munich in 1938, a few weeks after Kristallnacht but before Christmas, there were rumors about a small theater that was showing American movies and anti-Nazi cartoons from America. The ex-policeman took it upon himself to find out who was dealing in such prohibited material. He tracked down the theater; it was in a hidden section of a cellar beneath an auto repair shop.

  Hans visited one evening when six employees were present and the screen was dark. He produced a Mauser that Himmler had gifted to him, lined the employees up against the wall and shot each of them. He calmly walked out, then returned with two liters of kerosene and set the place ablaze. Locals authorities declined to investigate either the murders or the arson.

  Himmler and Hendrich were elated. They had at least found a man with no intellect, no conscience and totally without any scruples, remorse or morality. They needed men with such unusual and laudable composition. And now they had found a stellar example in twenty-eight year old Hans. They had several delicate assignments. They knew Wesselmann would be perfect.

  There had also been the sordid business of a former Frankfurter Zeitung reporter who had become a member of the S.D. and had been stealing more than his fair share of expropriated Jewish property, fencing it, and fattening a numbered account in Switzerland with the proceeds.

  Himmler brought both these cases to the attention of the Fuehrer, who personally knew the two perpetrators. Hitler, furious, ordered the execution of both men. The SS major so fond of ballet executed his final pas de deux one night when a violent young thug broke into his home at four AM, pulled him out of bed, bound him, gagged him and hung him by the neck with piano wire from the antique pink crystal chandelier in his living room.

  Two months later, the former reporter suffered an equally cruel fate. A small slim man, he was easy to overpower. He was surprised in bed one night by a gunman. His Turkish houseboy who was naked in bed with him was shot twice in the head and neck. The former reporter was then dragged from his apartment, bound in rope, gagged and pushed into the trunk of a small construction truck. Still alive, he was taken to The Glienicke Bridge on sleet-filled night, tied to a two hundred pound diesel engine while still alive and struggling, and dumped into the black waters of the Havel River, which connected the Wannsee district of Berlin with the Brandenburg capital Potsdam. The Havel rarely yielded its dark bloody secrets. No investigation followed.

  With these missions accomplished, Hans never missed a day at his office. He was a logical choice when Himmler was faced with an even more serious breach of security, one of people and classified information disappearing to the Allies. The same case involved a scandal involving a woman, a student in the Munich area, who was a traitor to the Reich.

  Heydrich and Himmler discussed the case for a day, then came to the same conclusion.

  “We’ll assign it to Hans,” Himmler said. “Hans Wesselmann.”

  Himmler agreed. They shared a drink and a laugh over the prospects.

  Chapter 13

  New York

  November 1942

  “Excellent!” said General Donovan the afternoon of the next day. Cochrane and Donovan were again in the office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. “That’s your final answer? You’ll do it?”

  “I’ll go to Berlin for you,” Cochrane said.

  “Let’s be clear,” Donovan said. “Not for me. For your country.”

  “For my country,” said Cochrane.

  “I have a file ready for you to read,” he said. “You’ll have a private office here. Study the file, particularly your new identity. We’ll have a new passport for you. You’ll need to get to Portugal from New York, then continue to Switzerland. We’ll arrange the travel. Portugal will be the easy part. From there to Switzerland to Germany will be
the rough links, the dangerous ones in and out of Germany. We’ll do everything we can here. Thank Laura for me, personally. She’s making a sacrifice, too.”

  “Portugal, huh?” Cochrane asked.

  “Portugal,” said Donovan. “Lisbon. These days the world is a better place thanks to Portugal.”

  Portugal was a unique venue.

  The same day that France and England were declaring war on Germany, the Portuguese dictator Salazar officially declared that the alliance with England did not bind Portugal to enter the war. This decision had been negotiated with England beforehand. The neutrality of Portugal benefitted the allies. England in particular could use Portuguese ports.

  “I’ve met Salazar,” Donovan said. “He’s a handsome guy, part failed monk, part bookkeeper and part mystery man,” said Donovan. “He runs the country from a sparsely furnished, unheated office. He puts Portugal before all else and has to be approached that way. He’s got the shrewdness and parsimonious habits of a Portuguese peasant and had the cold detached outlook of an intellectual Catholic. From what I hear, he has a signed photo of Mussolini on his desk.”

  Cochrane grinned grudgingly.

  “The Portuguese people are grateful for not having to fight the war,” Dulles said. “This gives our friend Salazar room to maneuver. He can fabricate the image of a Father, protector of the land, a savior. That’s the thing about most dictators, you know, Bill. They secretly want to be loved. Sometimes not so secretly.”

  “I get it. May I ask you some questions?” Cochrane asked.

  “I expected you to. Fire away. As many as you wish.”

  “Just one or two for right now. I’ll wait till I see what’s in the file. But I’m curious on several points. First, your contact is well placed in the Reich. And he’s has been leaking material to us. Correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And he says he has another boatload of material.”

  “Correct again.”

  “How did you find him?”

  “He found us. He contacted another American he knew before the war. A man who works at Standard Oil and is with someone currently highly placed in the OSS.”

  “I assume that’s you.”

  “You assume accurately.”

  “Have you yourself seen the information this source in Germany is giving?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it’s solid?”

  “More than solid.”

  “How did you contact him in return?”

  “I contacted Dulles, who was still in London. Dulles took it from there and contacted the gentleman in Germany. Through intermediaries.”

  “Could you give me a hint of the process?”

  “For starters, notes in a dead drop in Berlin. A brick wall on a side street off the Kurfürstendamm. The information goes to Dulles first. Then Allen passes along what’s relevant to me.”

  “When did you see the product most recently?”

  “Yesterday. Half an hour before you came in.”

  “How is it getting to you so quickly?” Cochrane asked.

  “High speed blips across a telephone line. He has a one-time code book that matches one here and one in Washington.”

  “I’ve had some experience with such things,” Cochrane said.

  “I know. I remember.”

  “How did you get set up with that system here?”

  “Good question. Follow along,” Donovan said with a laugh.

  The new system had to do with the lack of train service in Europe, Donovan explained. Within hours following the German takeover of Vichy France in the latter weeks of 1942, a frozen curtain had descended around the Swiss borders. There was no more commercial aviation, except between Switzerland and Germany. All that remained was a single well monitored flight every other day from Lisbon, Rome and another from Madrid, one round trip from each city.

  Train service eventually resumed between France and Switzerland, but the searches at the French border were meticulous and exhaustive. Passengers coming from Germany or going to Germany were obliged to disembark from their original trains, walk a hundred meters past armed German soldiers and board connecting trains. Only Reichbahn trains could travel in Germany. Swiss trains were verboten.

  “You’ll run into this yourself when you’re ready to travel to Germany, Bill,” Donovan said. “It’s neither easy nor pleasant.”

  American and British diplomats were even denied basic courier service in Switzerland, Donovan continued, so there was no chance to pack goodies into the diplomatic pouch. The only end-run that was possible was a slow and circuitous route via the Peruvian consulate in Switzerland which carried - for a “fee,” which also might have been considered a black market bribe - a diplomatic pouch to its embassy in Lisbon, where a local gangster named Felix would pick it up, leave via the back exit at night, and deliver it to the U.S consulate disguised as a case of tennis balls the following day.

  So far, the system worked. But who knew who was reading what? The whole system and set-up could implode any day.

  Aside from dead drops and courier arrangements involving mail, radiotelephone and telegraph remained the only means of communication between those in Switzerland and those on the outside. But Donovan’s people in New York and Washington and Dulles’s people in Bern needed to communicate with each other quickly and efficiently. They found a way.

  Typically, Dulles or an agent in Switzerland, would commence telephone calls around midnight or one AM local time on a scrambling device attached to a covert phone in an embassy, consulate or in Dulles’s case, his home. The calls would go to Germany and to the United States. The early morning Swiss hours were essential to catch the end of a business day in Washington and New York. A missed day could cost an agent his or her life. German calls were made on Swiss time. Within the last week, Donovan had created a second extension for the phone system in the building at Thirty Rockefeller Plaza. Only he and a top assistant named Bloomfeld had access.

  “It’s in the room next to us here, Bill,” Donovan said, indicating the unused doorway to his left. “You have to walk through this office to get to it.”

  “And it works smoothly?”

  “Smooth as a wet cough drop,” said Donovan.

  Now, blips, dots and dashes shot through the night skies and landed in specific telegraph and telephone devices at a unique line in a heavily guarded room in Washington or at Donovan’s office in New York. The messages necessitated the OSS crew using clumsy one time code pads that had a cipher of randomly selected letters and characters printed on every sheet. Dulles’s senders had to translate each message according to the cipher for a single specific sheet.

  “On the Bern end of all of this,” Donovan explained, “Allen Dulles is taking some steps to alleviate some of the torture and speed things up. He thinks he has a solution. Ask him about it when you arrive if you wish and if you’re curious. You’ll be amused. It will illustrate how he gets things done in Switzerland.”

  At length, Dulles handed a file to Cochrane. He assigned Cochrane a reading room in the same suite of offices. Mrs. Fekerte led Cochrane to the room. There wasn’t much in it. A desk, good lighting and a good chair for reading. The windows were frosted and faced east. Cochrane could see out only through a small letter box slit in the glass. Cochrane was free to come and go as he saw fit. There was a Marine guard on duty, armed, and Cochrane was obliged to return his file personally to Donovan each time he left the premises, such as to the rest room down the hall.

  There was little in the file on the actual assignment in Berlin. Cochrane would receive a more detailed file in Switzerland. For now, he was to focus on his fake new identity and the fake personal background, that of Abe Stykowski, the Canadian confidence man and forger.

  The next day a photographer came by with a camera, a comb, a hairbrush and five different shirts. Cochrane was to change shirts and comb his hair differently from picture to picture. The photos were for various fraudulent pieces of identification that would be cre
ated.

  Cochrane read a detailed summary of Stykowski’s career and arrest, trial and imprisonment. He spent the next two days memorizing details but was able to go home and relax with Laura each night. Thanksgiving came and went. He began to dread the day that would soon come when he would have to ship out. But that sentiment was common, he knew. Millions of men would be shipping out in the next few years. That’s what a war was all about.

  He focused on memorization: the details of his fake life, his fake past. What the file didn’t know, the file invented. If pressed, hopefully he could fake this way through. Hesitation or contradiction could be fatal not just to him but to the whole operation.

  On the fourth day an “interrogator” came by to start quizzing him. The questions were rapid fire, Gestapo style. Hometown? Married? Destination? Reason to be in Germany? And so on.

  The fifth day, a Saturday, was smoother. They broke for Sunday.

  On Monday of the following week, a German speaking interrogator with a Hamburg accent turned up by surprise. The man wore a monocle and could have passed for a drill Sergeant. But Cochrane held his poise over a three hour interrogation. The interrogator, then, staying in character, rose and abruptly left without speaking further.

  New clothes were created and issued. Cochrane tried them on. Minor adjustments were made, fake labels sewn in. The clothing and a few other objects were packed in two large Canadian made duffel bags, which in turn were packed in two suitcases. Cochrane would jettison the two exterior bags when he got to Geneva, at which time his identity would again change under Allen Dulles’s direction.

  The OSS engravers in New York created two new passports. One was for Stykowski. Cochrane would start the trip with this one and carry it. The second was for a man named Henri Bremer. Same picture. Bremer was Canadian, also. The creators had used different pictures and had creatively retouched them, giving the impression of different men taken at different times. Additionally, there was also was a forged documento de identidad, purportedly issued in Madrid. Cochrane had a Cuban accent to his Spanish but many Spaniards had fled to Cuba in the twenties. The extra cards would be stitched into his luggage. He would need a knife to remove them. There were also extra needles and thread in a small packet. The packet looked like clothing repair but was actually for re-stitching the lining of his bags.