by Paul Grant
The regime was tough on the prisoners. If Hans happened to be one of the six guards on duty in the cellar, he would be forced to look at the prisoners through the spyhole in the cell door. He would then record any observation about the prisoner’s behaviour or actions. The cells had pallet-type laths for a bed and a bucket as a latrine. Unsurprisingly, the place smelled rank. Hans would take two showers after guard duty in the ‘U-Boot’, and even then he wouldn’t feel clean.
It was explained to Hans that normally his position in the KVP, as a junior officer, would preclude him from actually guarding the prisoners, but he had to take time to learn the regime. To Hans that indicated his stay there would be more permanent than temporary, which was starting to worry him. He couldn’t understand why he was there. Hohenschönhausen was a Staatssicherheit (State Security) controlled site, and as far as he was concerned, it was their job to manage the place.
The more he got to know about the workings of the prison, its regime and the people running it, the more he became concerned, and the more he wanted to leave. At the administration building he’d managed to look at some of the prisoners’ files. The cases against many of them were either flimsy, or they had been entrapped by agents working for State Security. He felt sorry for the poor souls kept down in the cellar, isolated from the world. If that wasn’t enough to cause him concern, there was a prisoner whom he had been ordered to take to the ‘special’ area for further interrogation. There was no request to return this prisoner to his cell. Hans had been working the whole night and the prisoner had not been brought back. He marked it down in the shift log book. He wanted to ask the other guards what could have happened, but thought it sensible not to; some of the guards appeared reasonable, but others were clearly thugs, seemingly happy to be carrying out this kind of work. Hans kept checking. During his next shift, the cell in which that particular prisoner had been housed, was empty. Hans checked all the cells, lifting and dropping the spyhole covers in turn, in search of the tall man with the dark hair, roughly forty years old. The man had disappeared.
Hans Erdmann was determined to find out about the fate of Prisoner 61/1.
CHAPTER 21
MAY 1953, EAST GERMANY
Klaus Schultz had to pinch himself.
He was shocked at the speed of his release, the ultimatum from Burzin, the fear of Dobrovsky. It was all catching up with him. Burzin was true to his word. Klaus waited twenty-four hours in Moscow where he was deloused and provided with fresh clothes. Freshly shaved, and looking at himself in a mirror for the first time in years, he spent an age running his fingers over the contours of his thin, gaunt face. He wondered if Maria would recognise him, as he barely recognised himself. It seemed he was really going home, and he was about to find out the answer to all those questions, those nagging doubts he’d never had to face whilst there was no hope of a return home.
Burzin had him moved quickly, fearful that Dobrovsky would catch up with him. From Moscow he was put on a plane to Brest-Litovsk. There he joined up with comrades recently released from their own captivity. There were around two hundred of them, thin and bedraggled like him before the clean-up. Klaus didn’t know them. Some of them didn’t appear to know themselves, mere shells, worn away by the grind of life in the Gulag. Klaus made the rest of the journey home with them by train. That suited him fine. It was always how he’d imagined his repatriation to be. It was always how his dreams had ended; a triumphant march with cheering and an abundance of flag-waving along a platform thronged with his well-wishing country folk. If he’d have slipped into Germany by plane, alone, all that would have been lost.
Their arrival at Frankfurt Oder-Gronenfelde in East Germany was everything Klaus had hoped for. There were young children dressed in smart blue shirts sporting flags and flowers. There were cheers and applause, even a band. As Klaus stepped from the train, with only a small shoulder bag, a young girl thrust some flowers into his hand. Klaus looked in awe at the flowers. There was more vegetation in his hands than he had seen for the last ten years put together. He smiled, which only seemed to scare the poor girl as she scuttled back to the safety of her friends.
In spite of the enthusiastic welcome, there was a strange feel to it all. They were trying to treat them like the conquering heroes they clearly were not. The returnees were an awful sight. In fact, they had become the embodiment of those sub-humans Goebbels brainwashed the population into fearing: dirty, the beaten shadow of men, shuffling along the platform as if still bound by their chains. Klaus felt the children were repulsed by them, yet they lined up in strict regimentation and were ordered to cheer. They appeared to be organised by men in uniforms; in the end, nothing had changed. This part of Germany had a new master, but it wasn’t a new master to Klaus. It was the one he’d been serving under duress for the last ten years.
At the camp, Klaus was told he needed rest and recuperation, battered as they were by their experiences. They needed to be rehabilitated before being sent home. Klaus knew what they actually meant; they couldn’t be released straight back into the population. It would be clearly apparent how badly the Russians had treated them. They needed to go back looking a bit fitter, maybe a bit fatter. The fact they couldn’t change what was in the minds of the returnees seemed irrelevant.
Klaus climbed into a comfortable bed with clean sheets. It was a unique feeling after ten years in a prison camp. Underneath the surface though, Klaus felt the blueprint. It was cleaner and friendlier than its Russian counterpart yet the atmosphere, the regime, was still there. There were noticeboards aplenty extolling the virtues of the ruling party, the SED. There was no mention of any other political organisation from what he could see. There were all sorts of magnificent statistics about the building programmes going on in the country. Klaus was back in Germany, but it wasn’t the Germany he knew. The overall power and the message emanated from Moscow. Klaus was keen to be out of this place, out of the reach of Dobrovsky, as quickly as possible.
***
He still had to go and jump through the bureaucratic hoops before they allowed him to leave. Klaus sat waiting for his stamp to be able to renew his journey west.
‘The German Democratic Republic offers many opportunities for a man like you, Herr Schultz.’
The man opposite Klaus was young, ambitious, and ever so slightly brainwashed. He believed what he was saying and he believed in his new country. Klaus didn’t. He was about thirty, which made Klaus wonder what he had been doing during the war. His sweeping blond fringe and crystal-blue eyes meant the Nazis would have had a field day with his features.
‘If you have no surviving family, we can settle you wherever you want. We are in the process of setting up a new military organisation. We think your skills would be more than welcome there. The pay and conditions are good and we will ensure you have the best accommodation…’
Klaus listened, but was having difficulty with the message. The older man next to him had something to add. ‘Of course, we expect certain assurances from you, a gesture of your loyalty.’
Klaus felt his brow pinch. ‘Loyalty?’
‘It is expected you will join the party,’ he explained.
‘The party?’
The younger one jumped in, possibly sensing Klaus’ misgivings. ‘Well, if not the party, then at least the Society of Friendship.’
‘Society of Friendship?’ Klaus said. ‘It sounds like a church.’
‘It does have its roots in deep, strong-held beliefs, the Society of Friendship between the GDR and the Soviet Union.’
Klaus was stunned.
‘As a minimum precondition,’ the older man wanted to reinforce the ignominy.
Klaus had said little so far. Before he’d arrived at this meeting, he’d decided not to reveal the existence of his family in Berlin. He knew he wanted to go to West Germany and he was having great difficulty comprehending where this pair of buffoons were taking him. As he had understood it, they were asking him to sign some pact of friendship with the very peop
le who had tortured him and killed his comrades.
‘So, Herr Schultz, did you decide where you’d like to settle?’ the younger man said.
‘Koblenz,’ Klaus fired back.
The men were so sure of themselves that the younger one nearly dropped his forms in carbon duplicate on the desk. Klaus presumed they were the forms he was to sign, but they wouldn’t be needed.
‘But Koblenz is in the Federal Republic, Herr Schultz,’ the older man said.
‘And so is my brother. Well, at least he was when I was last there.’
It was a lie. Klaus had no idea if his brother was dead or alive and he certainly didn’t live in Koblenz. The atmosphere in the room had now turned decidedly frosty.
The older man took over now, as if the young one didn’t have a script for this eventuality. ‘I see. You know life in West Germany is not all it’s made out to be. The Americans are ruining the place. It’s lost its Germanic identity.’
Klaus could only raise his eyebrows wondering if the man realised how much this part of Germany had done the same. He didn’t really care about the conditions. It just felt it gave him more chance of justice, away from Russian interference, free from Dobrovsky’s clutches. He knew he could find Maria back in Berlin from a West German base.
‘I’ll take my chances.’
‘You’ll find standards are not the same. Here at least there is respect, discipline and order. If you take up our offer to join the police force, you’ll be provided with a uniform, an identity, comrades to socialise with…’
Klaus had heard enough. ‘What makes you think I want a bloody uniform?’
The two men looked at him aghast.
‘I’ve spent ten years struggling to survive in conditions you could never begin to imagine. I ended up there because of a German regime that preached discipline, order and gave everybody in the country a bloody uniform of one form or another. I’m not interested. I want nothing to do with it. Just put me on a train out of here. And another thing, when we were on the trains to the Gulags, the very people whom you want me to sign a pact of friendship with made my comrades die in their own shit. You can keep your bloody friendship and I know I won’t be the only one to tell you that.’
CHAPTER 22
JUNE 1953, EAST BERLIN
Over the weeks at the prison, Hans had been befriended by one of the other guards, Dieter Wallach. Hans liked Dieter. He was a genuine person, a character Hans was surprised was working at a place like Hohenschönhausen. He put that down to Dieter’s history; he had been a prisoner of the Nazis at Sachsenhausen. Having being on the receiving end of a particularly nasty prison regime, and knowing exactly what that felt like, to Dieter, fair treatment of the prisoners was very important. Over the weeks, Dieter explained to Hans about the prison and how things were changing there, especially recently.
They sat together on their lunch break whilst Dieter talked.
‘Before you came here, Hans, we would take in ten prisoners a week maybe. Now, it’s more than that each day.’
‘But there are only so many cells?’
Dieter shrugged. ‘Something is going on. Maybe it’s about these protests on the work sites, I don’t know.’
Hans had heard something about the workers on Stalinallee. He pressed on, interested in the comings and goings. He still needed to know, for sure, what had happened to Prisoner 61/1.
‘What exactly is inside the “special” area?’ Hans asked quietly.
‘You don’t know what goes on there?’ Dieter’s eyebrows were raised.
‘I can guess.’
‘Different things. Tough measures for the difficult prisoners,’ Dieter said evasively.
Hans knew Dieter was a committed Communist. He imagined, much like Hans himself, Dieter had difficulty reconciling his feelings on fairness to prisoners and the prison’s regime.
‘Is it right?’
‘Sometimes the ends justify the means,’ Dieter said vaguely.
‘What’s down there exactly?’
Dieter sighed. Hans could tell he was uncomfortable talking about it. ‘I don’t know all the things they use. There is a dark cell. Very narrow. The prisoners can only stand and not see anything. A long period in there might make a prisoner more likely to give information about his crimes.’
‘Maybe,’ Hans said. ‘What else?’
There was a pause. Dieter’s look told Hans he shouldn’t be asking these questions.
‘They use water. Two buckets, simulating drowning. They never go too far, but I believe it’s effective.’
Hans nodded, his mind working overtime. He wondered if he could trust Dieter to talk about what had happened to the prisoner.
‘I took one of the prisoners down there the other night. They didn’t call me to take him back.’
Dieter shrugged. ‘Maybe he went back later, after your shift. Maybe he was transferred to another prison.’
Hans shook his head. ‘I checked. He’s not in another cell.’
‘Then he left for another prison, or was freed.’
‘That seems a relaxed attitude to take,’ Hans said meaningfully.
Dieter sat up from his slouched position, his dark eyes staring intensely at him. ‘Sometimes it’s best not to ask too many questions.’
‘But you were a prisoner once…’
‘And if you ask too many questions, do too much snooping, you might become one too. Remember that.’
Dieter stood up to leave. ‘Be careful, my friend.’
***
It was towards the end of the day. The clerks in the administration building had left. Hans had been asked to collect some files and take them across to the second floor of the main prison building. He knew the files were to be used for interrogation in the rooms directly above the ‘U-Boot’. It was the same every day. He looked out of the window across the prison yard to the large door where the new prisoners would be pulled from the transport vans this evening. Hans shivered at the thought; he hoped they wouldn’t call on him to assist in the ‘welcoming’ ceremony tonight.
Dieter’s warning was still very much in Hans’ mind. He had every intention of being careful. He also had every intention of using his time in the administration office to continue his own investigation into Prisoner 61/1. He popped his head out into the corridor, leaving the door open so he could hear anybody approach. He’d learned something about the cross-referencing index of prisoners, but he didn’t know exactly where the files were kept, especially for those prisoners who were no longer at Hohenschönhausen.
He started with the filing index of cell numbers. He knew this was how each prisoner was identified. At cell 61 he found no prisoner card; no doubt the cell will be filled that very evening. After closing the filing cabinet, he once again walked to the door to check if it was clear. Content he was free to continue, Hans checked the next cabinet. In the bottom drawer, he found what he was looking for. He could see a weekly list of cross-reference numbers but no names. Next to the numbers were dates and times, and sometimes the name of another prison, sometimes the word freigegeben (released).
Hans just closed the cabinet when he heard somebody enter the office. He looked up, shocked, and was grateful to see it was only Dieter.
‘The Leutnant asked for the shift’s files to be taken over.’
‘I’ll be over shortly,’ Hans said, as calmly as possible.
Dieter dropped some paperwork in one of the trays and went to leave. ‘I’d be quick about it if I were you. He’s none too happy.’
Hans nodded.
Dieter left and Hans breathed a sigh of relief. He would have found it hard to explain digging around in the files like that. The cabinets were the domain of the clerks only. That had been made very clear when Hans had arrived.
Hans didn’t have long. He decided to check in one last filing cabinet and then try another time if necessary. He opened the cabinet to see a number of prisoner files by name only which didn’t help him. He was about to give up, knowing he had to
deliver the papers to the Leutnant or he would have some explaining to do, when he noticed a number at the bottom of one of the prisoner files. It looked like the cell number. He smiled to himself. He was getting somewhere.
He quickly searched the other files in the cabinet. After five or six of the files, he realised from the photograph, they were all current prisoners. The ex-prisoners’ files would be in another drawer. He closed the top drawer and started on the second drawer. When he noticed there were a number of prisoners with the same cell number, he knew these must be the ex-prisoners.
Hans was sweating now, knowing he was racing against time, but making progress. He kept looking anxiously towards the door, worried he might be discovered at any time, and having no reasonable cover story for doing what he was doing.
Finally, he found the cross-reference 61. Some had ‘/2’ after the number. This denoted the mattress number to each cell. He found a number of 61/1 files as he might expect. Almost frantic, he started to pull open the files one by one to check the photographs.
He found what he was looking for in the tenth file. The photograph was that of the man Hans had transferred to the special area two nights before.
The name of the prisoner was Paul Hauser.
Hans scanned his eyes down the file trying to take things in. There were a number of typed pages from what must have been a transcript of the interrogation. The file ended abruptly. He turned over the page.
The file was stamped in red: Verstorben (Deceased).
CHAPTER 23
MAY 1953, WEST GERMANY
It was with some relief that Klaus Schultz stepped onto the train at Frankfurt an der Oder. He was eager to get on with his new life. H was also anxious to leave the eastern part of Germany behind. When the train reached the border from East into West Germany, Klaus was still trying to understand this post-war division of his homeland. He had little doubt once he had. There was a first fence, posts with barbed wire over three metres high, then a no man’s land cleared of buildings and trees, a strip guarded by men with guns and dogs. After this area was a second final frontier, taller than the first, and beyond that the Federal Republic of Germany. Klaus had looked at the perplexed faces around him for answers. What was the reason for the armed border? Did it keep the Americans out? Did it keep the people of East Germany in?
