Louise's Chance

by Sarah R. Shaber

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, stuffing the papers and booklets into my bag. I stuck my hand out to shake his. ‘You’ve been a great help.’

  Lt Rawlins held my hand a bit longer than necessary. I wasn’t really surprised. On a military base women were in short supply, and even a thirty-year-old widow such as myself could expect plenty of attention from men, none of it serious.

  ‘Are you going to be on base this weekend?’ Rawlins asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I answered.

  ‘I’m off duty on Saturday,’ he said. ‘We could go to a movie.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said, edging toward the door. ‘It depends. If I’m here I’m sure I’ll be working.’

  Rawlins looked disappointed, and I felt bad that I’d been so dismissive. But I just wasn’t interested. Knowing Joe was back in DC occupied any romantic ideas I had.

  ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ Merle asked.

  ‘Not at all,’ Miss Osborne said. Merle lit one of his PX cigarettes and watched as Miss Osborne and I spread out all the pay booklets Lt Rawlins had given me on one of the empty beds in our billet.

  ‘Do we have the paybooks for the Germans that went overboard?’ she asked me.

  ‘Rolf Muntz and Hurst Aach,’ I said. ‘Yes, we do.’ I grabbed up their booklets and opened them. I couldn’t read most of the German, of course, but I could decipher the names of towns. ‘That’s interesting, they’re both from the same place. Reichenberg.’

  ‘That’s in Czechoslovakia,’ Merle said. ‘Or was. The Sudetenland.’ Which had been annexed by Germany in 1938 on the pretext that most of its citizens were German-speaking.

  ‘Interesting,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘I wonder if they were conscripts.’

  Merle took the two paybooks and skimmed them quickly.

  ‘These guys lived at the same address,’ he said. ‘Maybe a boarding house.’

  ‘Odd,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘How likely is it that they would both find themselves on the same Liberty Ship headed for the States, and then kill themselves? On the same damn day?’

  Realizing that these two men might have known each other made me even more suspicious about their deaths.

  ‘Let’s not forget them.’ I was glad to hear Miss Osborne say that. ‘Louise, find Major Dieter Kapp’s paybook. He’ll be the first person we interview.’

  ‘You think he might cooperate with us?’ Merle asked.

  ‘Not at all. The man is SS. But I still need to talk with him. He’s the commanding officer of the Germans in the camp and I want to get a feel for how doctrinaire he is. Besides, it’s good psychology to address the officers first.’

  ‘Agent Williams suggested three men who are likely candidates for us to turn,’ I said. ‘One is a lieutenant who was conscripted out of a Lutheran seminary. The second is an ethnic Pole, and the third has family in the Wehrmacht.’

  Merle shuffled the paybooks. ‘Here’s the priest,’ he said, ‘Alfred Bahnsen. He was halfway through his final year when he was drafted. And the Pole’s name is Hans Marek. Marek is a Polish surname.’

  ‘OK,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘Tomorrow our first interview will be with our SS tank commander, Major Kapp. Then we’ll follow with Bahnsen and Marek. Merle, please look through all the paybooks tonight and let me know anything you find that’s unusual.’

  Miss Osborne glanced at the door. Merle understood that he had been dismissed. He gathered up the paperwork he needed and left for his lonely barracks.

  ‘Louise,’ Miss Osborne said, ‘tell me about Gray Williams.’

  I knew this was coming. Miss Osborne was bound to ask me how I happened to be acquainted with the FBI agent who was assigned to the Fort Meade POW camp.

  ‘I met Gray Williams the first time when someone – someone I knew, although I never found out her name – called the FBI and complained that I was drinking with a Frenchman in a hotel bar. Which I was. I’d met him at a party. He worked at the French embassy. Agent Williams called on me at home and warned me that government girls with Top Secret security clearance shouldn’t date foreigners.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘I’ve never approved of the FBI vetting OSS employees and keeping files on them. How would he know you weren’t on an assignment?’

  I left out the part about how my friendship with the Frenchman at the hotel bar was part of an unauthorized honey trap I’d set to get into the Vichy French embassy to steal files. Miss Osborne didn’t need to know that. This was the start of my continuing worry that the FBI would find out I was seeing Joe, Czech accent and all.

  ‘The second time I met Agent Williams I actually worked with him,’ I continued. ‘I was OSS liaison to a group, including the FBI, who were investigating an incident on the Western Shore of Maryland. It began with a suspicious postcard that the US Censor’s Office had sent the OSS.’

  ‘I remember that,’ she said. ‘I read about it in your file. That was quite an adventure.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am, it was,’ I said.

  ‘Is there anything else you need to tell me about Williams?’

  ‘Not that I should,’ I said.

  Miss Osborne thought about my response, staring at me with one eyebrow raised. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I asked for an assistant who could keep secrets, and it looks like I got one.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. So far in my career I’d never regretted keeping my mouth shut. Besides, no one could stop me from thinking whatever I liked.

  ‘You’ll let me know if Agent Williams tells you anything I should know.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said.

  The next morning we were escorted to the tent we were to use for interviews. It was fairly close to the stockade gate, under the main watchtower, and held two tables pushed together and several chairs. Miss Osborne set up our tape recorder, plugging it into an electric outlet mounted on a pole outside the tent. We’d be guarded by an MP standing watch outside and another inside, who’d also escort the prisoner to and from his quarters.

  ‘Louise,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘I want you to take notes on our conversations. Not about the substance of them – they’re being recorded and a typist will transcribe them later. I want to know your impressions and thoughts about the prisoners and their suitability for our work. Merle, I know Major Kapp speaks English, but please stay. I’d like you to hear what he has to say.’

  SIX

  Major Dieter Kapp would have been the perfect model SS officer for an Allied propaganda poster. He was thin but muscular, with clear Aryan blue eyes and blond hair cut short. He sat in the cheap wooden chair with an arrogant posture and attitude that didn’t correspond with his current situation, crossing his legs casually and taking his time lighting an unfiltered cigarette by striking a match across the edge of the table. Even the demeaning luggage tag still secured to one of his shirt buttons didn’t diminish his self-possession. He exhaled his cigarette smoke as if he was an actor in a film noir, and regarded us the way a bachelor uncle might tolerate a crowd of noisy children. I could easily picture him ordering a platoon of flame tanks to incinerate whatever stood in his way.

  ‘Who are you? Why are there no officers here to interrogate me?’ he asked us, in English with a British accent. ‘I am the senior German officer in this camp.’

  Miss Osborne didn’t answer his question.

  ‘Major Kapp,’ she said, checking the short handwritten paragraph of information Merle had gleaned from Kapp’s paybook. ‘You commanded a platoon of flame tanks in North Africa? And your platoon was part of the Twenty-first Panzer Division?’

  ‘You already know this,’ he said. ‘You are wasting my time.’

  ‘You have somewhere else to be?’ Miss Osborne said. ‘The crafts tent, perhaps?’

  Kapp took a long pull from his cigarette and stared at her with condescension. Miss Osborne didn’t flinch.

  ‘Prior to your assignment to the Twenty-first Panzer Division you were stationed in Poland and then in the Sudetenland, is that correct?’ she continue
d. ‘Then transferred to North Africa?’

  ‘Correct,’ he said.

  ‘And you were captured at Tunis?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘You surrendered your entire command also, I see. Without exchanging any gunfire with Allied troops.’

  Kapp’s eyes narrowed. ‘We were overwhelmed. It would have been useless to resist.’

  Miss Osborne ignored his response and continued. ‘You are a member of the Nazi Party?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I am SS, Waffen Schutzstaffel. You know that. You continue to waste my time.’

  ‘Your next of kin is your mother, who is living in Switzerland? Why does your mother live in Switzerland? Isn’t she German?’

  Kapp stubbed out his cigarette and uncrossed his legs, leaning across the table toward us. ‘Certainly she is German. She moved to Switzerland after my father died to live with her sister.’

  ‘Major Kapp, do your surrender and your mother’s residence have anything to do with how you view the progress of the war? Do you think that Germany is losing?’

  ‘No,’ he said, his voice clipped. ‘I am confident of a German victory. And I am committed to the Nazi Party and to the Führer. God is on the side of the Reich, our victory is destined. Every German soldier in this camp believes this. You will not get any intelligence or cooperation from any of them, I guarantee you.’ He half rose from his seat as if to leave, until the MP guarding him shoved him back into his chair. He didn’t like that, and he showed it by leaning over the table and crushing his cigarette into shreds, not in the ashtray at his seat, but in the one between Merle and Miss Osborne, all the while staring directly at her.

  Miss Osborne didn’t flinch. I scribbled my brief impression of Kapp in my steno book. ‘A dangerous, evil man.’ The tape recorder turned, recording pure silence, while Kapp and Miss Osborne conducted their staring contest. Kapp’s eyes were the first to blink, so he leaned back in his chair, ostensibly to light another cigarette.

  ‘Major Kapp, what do you know about the two men who killed themselves on the trip across the Atlantic? Their names were Hurst Aach and Rolf Muntz.’

  ‘They were German foot soldiers, Schützen, that is all I know. And cowards and traitors for killing themselves.’

  ‘You didn’t know them personally?’

  ‘Certainly not. Didn’t I say they were just foot soldiers? I commanded a tank platoon.’

  ‘We both know,’ Miss Osborne said, changing the subject, ‘that you possess information that would interest our military. The sooner the war ends the sooner you could join your mother in Switzerland. Until then we could arrange preferential treatment.’

  ‘I would rather never see my mother again than betray Germany,’ Kapp said.

  I believed him and added that impression to my notes.

  After an MP escorted Kapp out of the interview room, Miss Osborne exhaled in relief and I flexed my right hand, cramped from gripping my pencil tightly.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘No surprises there. As long as Kapp is the senior German officer I’m afraid we will have a difficult time recruiting volunteers for our operation.’

  ‘How can he stop them?’ I asked.

  ‘You’ll see,’ she said.

  Leutnant Alfred Bahnsen had a black eye, a bad one. His right eye was almost closed. Added to the long, livid scar on his face it gave him a damaged look.

  ‘Lt Bahnsen, your eye looks very painful,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘Have you had it attended to?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, in rapid German. ‘I’ve seen the medical officer. He gave me some aspirin. And I need to keep this ice bag on it.’ He held up the bag and pressed it to his injured eye, wincing as the ice cold met his face.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked.

  ‘I fell,’ he said. ‘Hit the edge of my bunk.’

  The army MP, a husky man with ‘Steesen’ stamped on his pocket who stood guard at the tent door, rolled his eyes. ‘Bahnsen is lying about his black eye,’ I wrote in my notes. ‘Ask Steesen about it later.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ Miss Osborne said. She pushed the ‘on’ switch on the tape recorder and our second interview began. Bahnsen kept the ice bag pressed to his injured eye.

  ‘You are a lieutenant in the Luftwaffe, I believe. Your plane was shot down at El Alamein.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, in English. ‘And you can tell your translator to take a coffee break. I speak English.’

  ‘What?’ Miss Osborne said. ‘Why didn’t we know that?’

  ‘I don’t want Major Kapp to know. I don’t trust him, and this way I can monitor what he says to you Americans. I’d appreciate it if you keep this a secret.’

  ‘It won’t leave here,’ Miss Osborne said, looking pointedly at the MP, who nodded. ‘You were attending a Lutheran seminary before the war, weren’t you?’ she continued.

  ‘I was. I was conscripted in my final year.’

  ‘Odd for a priest to go to war,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not ordained. I was the flight navigator for a photographic reconnaissance plane. I couldn’t defy conscription, I have family in Berlin. God understands. He doesn’t require perfection of any of us, even a priest.’

  ‘Are you a member of the Reich Church, or of the Confessing Church?’

  Bahnsen started. His expression changed from resignation to wariness, and his one good eye flickered away from us.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said.

  Miss Osborne made a show of shuffling her papers. ‘If you are a Lutheran you must be either a member of the Nazi wing of the Lutheran church, or with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s group, the Confessing Church.’

  ‘I’ve never met Bonhoeffer. He was banned from teaching in Berlin before I even arrived there.’

  ‘If you were a Lutheran student of theology surely you would have discussed Bonheoffer often with your fellow students.’

  ‘I’m not political. I’m not a Nazi; regular soldiers of the Luftwaffe are not permitted to belong to a political party.’

  ‘You must know that Bonhoeffer now resides in Tegel Prison.’

  ‘I did hear that.’

  ‘Do you think the Nazis will execute him?’ Miss Osborne asked. ‘What a shame that would be, such a brilliant theologian.’

  Tears began to dribble from Bahnsen’s eyes. He put down the ice bag and sopped up the moisture from his face with a handkerchief that he pulled out of his pants pocket.

  ‘My eye is extremely painful,’ he said. ‘I would like to go now, please.’

  ‘Is he crying because of his injuries, or because of Bonhoeffer?’ I wrote in my notes.

  ‘One more question and then you can leave,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘Did you know Hurst Aach and Rolf Muntz?’

  ‘The men who disappeared on our way across the ocean? Vaguely. We were kept in the same hold. The two of them knew each other before the war and spent most of their time together.’

  ‘You said disappeared,’ Miss Osborne said. ‘You don’t believe they committed suicide?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Bahnsen said. ‘I don’t know anything about what happened.’

  Miss Osborne nodded at Steesen, the MP who escorted Bahnsen out of the interview room.

  Miss Osborne turned off the tape recorder so we could talk freely.

  ‘I know who Dietrich Bonhoeffer is,’ I said. ‘But what is the Reich Church?

  ‘The wing of the Lutheran church that’s allied with Hitler,’ she said. ‘Hard to imagine, isn’t it? What did you think of Bahnsen? Do you think we can use him?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. He seemed a bit timid to me, but the mission won’t be that dangerous for a native German speaker, will it?’

  ‘No, but it will require conviction. His religious bent might help us; if he was a member of the Reich Church I think he would have said so, not pretended he’d never heard of it. Perhaps he is anti-Nazi. Let’s give our almost-priest some time to think things over before we approach him again. When he’s not in pain. I find it hard to believe he go
t that shiner in a fall.’

  ‘Did you see the MP’s expression when Bahnsen said that? He rolled his eyes. As if he knew that story isn’t true,’ Merle said.

  ‘I’ll find out what he knows about it,’ I said.

  ‘You do that, Louise. You’re less formidable than I am.’ Miss Osborne glanced at her watch. ‘Thank God,’ she said, ‘lunchtime. I’m ravenous.’

  I found Steesen on his way to the enlisted men’s mess. ‘Corporal Steesen,’ I said to him.

  ‘Ma’am?’ he said.

  ‘I need to ask you a question.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘When we were interviewing Lt Bahnsen and he told us how he’d been injured, you rolled your eyes, as if you knew he wasn’t telling the truth.’

  Steesen removed his white helmet and ran his fingers through his hair before replacing it. ‘Yes, ma’am, I’m sorry. My sergeant says I got to learn to control my facial expressions.’

  ‘What happened to Bahnsen?’

  ‘Major Kapp had a couple of his thugs beat him up.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. They were screaming at him, but I can’t speak German, ma’am, none of us can. But Major Kapp, he’s the senior German officer. He’s in charge. The prisoners, they do what he says. Or else. So I reckon he ordered it.’

  ‘You don’t intervene if there’s trouble?’

  ‘Ma’am, if that SS bastard keeps the camp under control it’s a lot less work for us. Seeing how we don’t know what’s going on anyway.’

  ‘This is the best tuna sandwich I’ve had in years,’ Merle said, as he bit into the soft white bread filled with a layer of tuna and mayonnaise an inch thick.

  ‘The Army School for Bakers and Cooks is on this base. We eat real good most of the time,’ McVey said.

  Miss Osborne and I were reveling in the lack of rationing too, enjoying hamburgers that weren’t stretched with oatmeal.