Armageddon (44 page)

“It will be talked about. I cannot bear more drunken Frenchmen—and I don’t like the idea of your mother cleaning floors for Amis.”

“I won’t work for Uncle Ulrich,” Ernestine protested.

“I demand to know why. You are trained as a legal secretary. You worked for one of the finest law firms in Berlin.”

“There is no German law, any more.”

“But you know that your training makes it possible to do a number of things. So long as Ulrich is throwing us a few bones you could think of your family.”

“I have decided against it, Father,” she said shakily.

“Ernestine,” her mother said, “what is disturbing you about Ulrich?”

She tried to eat. It was impossible.

“Can’t you talk at all?” her father demanded.

“It’s those places,” she blurted impulsively.

“Places? What places?”

“The things they are saying about us at Nuremberg.”

A terrible silence followed. At last, Herta took her daughter’s hand. “It is all over. We must forget.”

“But, if what they say is true ...”

“Truth?” Bruno said. “What is truth? Do you believe you can get truth from a Russian radio? You are a German, girl. Do you think your people could have done these things?”

“The pictures ...”

“Ernestine,” her father said testily, “you should be able to recognize propaganda. Our faces are being rubbed in the mud. We have no way to answer back. Even if there was a shred of truth, how can you feel that you and I are to blame?”

“Your father is right, Ernestine. Close your ears, forget the lies. They are trying to turn the world against us.”

Yes, Ernestine thought, Father is always right ... always. Father is never wrong. “Did you know about slaves in your Labor Bureau?”

He smashed his fist on the table. “How dare you!”

“Apologize to your father,” Herta demanded.

“I am sorry, Father. Forgive me.”

Her sister, Hilde, pushed away from the table and walked away. Arguments! Always damned arguments!

“Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“Where?”

“Just out of here.”

“When will you be back?”

Hilde shrugged and left.

“All day she is gone,” Bruno said. “Where does she spend her time? Where does she get that stuff to paint her face?”

“Uncle Ulrich gave it to her,” Ernestine said quickly. “I must go to work.”

“Think about Ulrich’s offer. Think about us,” her father said as she left.

When in the devil will she learn to leave the past alone, Bruno thought when she left. Life is hard enough. The future looks hollow. Fate has been cruel.

Herta packed a small sack containing a tin with five ounces of tobacco strained out of cigarette butts that Bruno had gathered at the beer garden and she put in a number of bars of soap made from laundry scrapings that she had remelted. Herta was clever in the ways of the open barter market in the Tiergarten, where trading was permitted.

She learned to stay clear of the Russian soldiers who had been paid in occupation currency which was near worthless
in Berlin and which they could not send home. They were forced to work the barter market themselves, and bullied merciless bargains.

“Try to get a camera,” Bruno said. “I have a line with some Ami soldiers. I will be able to get up to a dozen cartons of Ami cigarettes for a decent one.”

A dozen cartons of Ami cigarettes! A dozen bags of gold!

The underground took Ernestine out of Steglitz to the center of the city. She had to take a round-about way to get to the hospital where she worked in Neukölln as a nurse’s aide. In the last-ditch fighting many parts of the subway system had been flooded, forcing innumerable detours.

The car was filled with sallow, ragged people. She was a bit lightheaded, now remorseful about the question she had asked her father. Of course he would not know about slave labor. It was the times. One had to remember father was a respected official and had given them all a good life. It was a pity to see so proud a man reduced to poverty.

How could she really tell him why she worked for Dr. Hahn and could not take Uncle Ulrich’s offer?

Hospital? It was a sorry excuse for a hospital. Half bombed out, boarded windows, stripped down to the bedding by the Russians. It was filled with patients, even in the corridors, and there was a shortage of everything. So many old people died these days in a state of confusion, and the newborn screamed into a world of hunger and fear.

Only yesterday the gas was turned on in a section of Neukölln and the hospital received nearly a hundred suicides and attempted suicides. Ten yesterday had died of dysentery, typhus, and diphtheria. Half were little children.

Ernestine followed the lethargic line of trudgers to Potsdamer Platz, close to what was once the heart of Berlin. It was too horrible to walk in Berlin any more. The city was a grotesque, surrealist graveyard palled in a gray mist. The half lifeless who staggered about were damned and tormented.

Dietrich Rascher was dead. When she grew fuzzy-minded she thought of him. At first she would not accept that he would never return, even after the last letter from Stalingrad. But there would be no miracle.

In the last years, through the agony of Berlin, it was Ernestine who was the one of calm strength in the Falkenstein family. They all looked to her, even her father. She held them together during the bombings, the news of Gerd’s capture, the rape by the Russians. But now, Ernestine was unable to keep from plunging into deep smoky pits and mazes.

She came to the Tiergarten; barter market and black market were in full swing.

She stared at ravaged trees and gardens and for a moment in her haze she was once again strolling with father and Dietrich down flower-lined paths and the band was playing Strauss waltzes and the people drank strawberry beer ... Berlin! Paris on the Spree, the Athens of the East!

She was carried with the moving river of human misery into the subway again. The melancholy that had been running days and nights together closed in on her. She put her face in her hands. The train wheels sang out ... Dachau ... Dachau ... Dachau....

The visions came to her as they came in her terrible dreams: a clear recollection of sullen silences in her law office before the war; there were questions that were not asked; a clear recollection of those long moments of searching her father’s eyes when he did not want to look at her; a faint recollection of the names of Jewish playmates; a blurred remembrance of Uncle Ulrich’s strange disappearance and of the whispers after the hanging of Uncle Wolfgang.

More than any of it, Ernestine vividly relived those moments when Dietrich Rascher was on leave from the Eastern Front and of his drunken babblings. She remembered the little music box he had given her and a rain-streaked hotel window where they loved... she remembered him blurting out the name of Blobel ... Colonel Blobel ... Kiev ... Commandos 4A Special Action Group C.

“Auschwitz station!”

She looked up horrified.

“Grenzalle station,” the trainman repeated.

It was a mile to the hospital. The surface transportation was either by ricksha bicycle or horse-drawn street car. The street car was filled beyond capacity, no rickshas around. She walked on foot down Rudower Allee. It was dangerous because it was close to the Russian Sector and oftentimes they crossed over and accosted Germans on the streets, and other Germans were powerless to stop them.

“Hey, fraulein,” an American soldier said, blocking her way.

She looked at him. He was young, like Gerd, and he was nervous about trying to pick her up. “Ich have cigaretten .. . and ... uh ... chockolade ...”

“Bitte,”
she pleaded, and brushed past him quickly.

She was alone on the dead street. Walls of shorn buildings like large fingers hovered above her. With each step, Dietrich Rascher’s mumblings beat into her brain.

Then, yesterday she heard it! “This is the People’s Radio. We announce a massacre outside Kiev at the pits of Babi Yar. It is now confirmed that 33,000 Jews were gunned down in open pits. It was the work of Colonel Blobel, Special Action Group C!”

Dietrich Rascher! Ernestine struggled up the last three steps to the hospital door. Her eyes rolled back in her head and she toppled to the ground.

No one got excited. This sort of thing happened every few seconds in Berlin these days.

Chapter Six

E
VEN AT THIS MOMENT
of self-criticism there was an undeniable air of satisfaction as Heinrich Hirsch reviewed the accomplishments of the German People’s Liberation Committee.

Rudi Wöhlman closed his eyes, pressed his fingertips together, and nodded in rhythm to Hirsch’s monologue as though he were beating time to music.

The other two Germans present formed the inner circle. There was Adolph Schatz, appointed president of police, and Heinz Eck, appointed deputy mayor of the city.

V. V. Azov sat dull-eyed at the end of the table, in his usual posture of no commitment of pleasure or displeasure.

Heinrich flipped a page. The final tally was that 85 per cent of the Western Sectors were stripped of “war-making” potential before arrival of the British and Americans.

Before the arrival of the West:

A banking monopoly had been established in the Soviet Sector, controlling the finances of the city;

A food ration system was established in five categories. The highest ration was twenty-five hundred calories a day and the lowest twelve hundred. Control of the ration system was in Soviet hands. Use of the ration system was proving an effective way to gain converts. Top rations went to those who cooperated best with the Soviet Union.

Hirsch reviewed the positions of each of the two dozen members of the German People’s Liberation Committee, how they moved into pre-selected positions, each holding a key to life.

Hirsch reported that hundreds of other Germans who had been Russian prisoners of war and converted into an “anti-Fascist league” were placed in the school system, the union, the police force.

Adolph Schatz, nominally a German like Rudi Wöhlman, had been with Azov as an officer in the NKVD; now he was president of police with headquarters in the Soviet Sector.

Rudi Wöhlman led the Communist Party, licensed under a thin guise as the People’s Proletariat Party. He moved into the city’s civic machinery, grabbed the abandoned judiciary, filled the courts with judges from the party. The Berlin Magistrat, the city’s executive branch, had some two-dozen departments covering education, welfare, transportation, public works, police. Wöhlman loaded them with Communists. The personnel director of the Magistrat was a member of the German People’s Liberation Committee and personnel directors of eighteen of Berlin’s twenty boroughs were either Communists or in tune with Wöhlman’s directives.

Hirsch reported that a single labor union had been licensed and was under absolute control of the Communists. The union formed “Action Squads” for use in demonstrations and to persuade other workers to stay in line.

Wöhlman’s most clever move, however, came in the digging up of the old Democrat, Berthold Hollweg. He was found in a shack on the Teltow Canal, adjudged harmless, and appointed as Oberburgermeister. Hollweg suited an excellent purpose. He still had a name from the old days and could be used as window dressing and “prove” how democratic the Communists were in appointing a non-Communist as lord mayor. Hollweg made a fine figurehead to be controlled by Deputy Mayor Heinz Eck of the German People’s Liberation Committee.

Young Hirsch took the post on the Magistrat as secretary of education and a second post as secretary of culture and information. From here he could control the texts and the teachers. At the university he formed and controlled a student organization on the lines of an Action Squad.

The single radio transmitter in the city was under Hirsch’s supervision.

While the Communists set their roots deeply, entwined their tentacles tightly, the other political parties were in no position to protest. Even after the arrival of the West, they were not permitted a rebuttal in their newspapers for the source of all newsprint was controlled by the Communists.

The German People’s Liberation Committee moved in from Moscow with an awesome speed and efficiency. Before the West could get bearings they were faced with the accomplished feat of the police, Magistrat, courts, union, banking, ration, education, information, mayor’s office, all under Russian control.

Heinrich Hirsch concluded his report. The West would not be able to get out of the hole. The rules governing the four-power occupation
Kommandatura
saw to that.

When the report was concluded, each of the four discussed the next moves.

They had begun the classic maneuver of infiltrating the other three political parties using both police pressure and the Action Squads.

V. V. Azov was rather pleased. All the planning during the war had paid off. The West had done no planning. The instruments to shove the West out of Berlin were established.

Heinrich Hirsch was told to remain after the others left.

“You sent a note that there was a matter you wished to discuss with me privately, Comrade Hirsch?” Azov asked.

“Comrade,” he began with caution, “I must express concern regarding the use of former Nazis, particularly in educational and police posts.”

“You are, perhaps, speaking for a group?”

“Only for myself. And only because I feel this is harmful to our aims. Even if we are able to hide the facts from the West, the German people will recognize it. They may tend to doubt our sincerity.”

Azov had to be careful not to be drawn into an argument with Hirsch, for he was certainly the most articulate of the Germans. “Tell me,” he said, resorting to standard trickery, which Hirsch recognized from years of schooling, “do you know why we are in Berlin?”

“Of course,” Hirsch said. ‘To Sovietize the German people in accordance with Lenin’s words that he who controls the German working class controls Europe.”

“Now, Comrade Hirsch, why are the Americans and British here?”

“As a symbolic token.”

“Ask ten Americans what they are doing in Berlin and you will get ten different answers. Most don’t know. However, we do know.”