The Berlin Spies
Page 38
While the plot involving the recruitment and training of a group of young, English-speaking SS recruits is fictional, it is nonetheless true that a number of seemingly desperate plans were put in place by the Germans as an Allied victory became inevitable after D-Day in June 1944. One of these was Operation Greif. In October 1944 Hitler asked SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny to form a special brigade of English-speaking troops to be part of the Ardennes Offensive, the aim being to exploit confusion among British and American forces and operate behind Allied lines. Skorzeny formed a SS Panzer Brigade with a commando unit of around 150 English-speaking German troops, but by the time it joined the Battle of the Bulge, in December 1944, the course of the battle meant plans to use the English-speaking commandos were abandoned.
It was the policy of the Allies that all SS prisoners of war were brought back to camps in the United Kingdom. A number did escape, but they never got very far – they were on an island that was overwhelmingly hostile to them. However, the references to Nazi sympathisers in the UK are not as unlikely as they may seem. There were a few hundred such people, many of whom were interred at various stages of the war or who were active to varying degrees in supporting the Nazi cause, including aiding escaped SS prisoners.
In Chapter 19 Georg Stern recounts how his parents were transported to Auschwitz on 2nd March 1943. There was an actual transport of 1,529 Jews on that date from Berlin to Auschwitz. Georg’s parents are of course fictional, but their story and fate would not have been dissimilar to many on that and other transports. More than 55,000 Jews from Berlin were murdered in the Holocaust.
Some readers may wonder about the Wilhelm Richter (Heinz Fleischhauer/Werner Pohl) character working at various times for the Nazis, the Soviet Union, Britain and West Germany. In fact, the idea for this character came when I was researching at the excellent Topography of Terror in Berlin (well worth a visit, it’s the former HQ of the SS, just off Wilhelmstrasse). There I came across an exhibit on Heinz Felfe (1918-2008), who joined the Nazi Party in 1936 and became an officer in the intelligence wing of the SS. After the war he spied for the British, before becoming an officer in the West German Federal Intelligence Service. Around this time Felfe had also been recruited as a Soviet spy. He was arrested in 1961 and jailed for 14 years. He was released early in 1969 as part of a spy swap and settled in East Berlin. I ought to emphasise that the character in this book is not based on Felfe, although the concept of someone managing to work for four different intelligence agencies is.
The banks referred to in the book – notably in Chapter 28 – are all genuine, though of course there is no suggestion that they were involved in the channelling of Soviet funds to the Red Army Faction. That is fiction. The Centro Internationale Handelsbank in Vienna is no longer a separate entity. However a 2002 CIA report on ‘Soviet banks in the west’ described this bank as one of a number ‘established with Polish participation’.
I’d like to express my appreciation to the many people who helped me with The Berlin Spies, not least those giving professional and expert advice in a number of areas. I’d like to thank my family for their support and encouragement, not least my wife Sonia. And finally, the publication of this book would not have been possible without the support and expertise of everyone at Curtis Brown and Studio 28, especially my agent Gordon Wise and Niall Harman.
Alex Gerlis
London
December 2018