The Berkut (11 page)

When Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviets, Petrov was assigned to a small, elite branch in the NKGB, reporting directly to Stalin and charged with a single mission. For weeks, Soviet intelligence agents and reconnaissance flights had shown Hitler's Wehrmacht massing along Russian borders across an incredibly wide front. There had been more than five hundred overflights by German aircraft, and in the days just before June
22
the overflights had attained massive proportions. There was positive identification of more than a hundred newly built airstrips, all less than a hundred kilometers from the borders. Even though there was convincing evidence of an estimated buildup of more than three million German soldiers, military
reports and pleas through channels had gone unheeded by Stalin, who continued to insist that Hitler could be trusted. The Russian leader had been adamant from the first moment he'd been told of the buildup that no Russian soldier was to take any action that might be interpreted by the Germans as provocative. He had a treaty with Hitler; the Austrian had given him his word.

Three days after the invasion began, Petrov was summoned to a meeting in a small room deep in the Kremlin. The walls were lined with shelves of books, all leather-bound and hand-stitched, many of them priceless, most of them never opened by the current tenant. The air was foul with cigarette smoke and there were fresh tea stains on a light-colored throw rug. Maps and charts cluttered the floor in no apparent order. Outside in the corridor, Petrov had found generals with red epaulets and Asian guards with green tunics milling around, getting in one another's way, while they waited for orders. The Germans had charged across the Bug River and established a battle line that stretched more than fifteen hundred miles from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Reports from the front were fragmentary and garbled, but it was clear that three large spearheads of German armor were advancing toward major Russian cities. More than two thousand Soviet aircraft had been destroyed on the ground by the Germans during the first hour of the invasion, and now the Nazis had free rein because of superior air cover. Tens of thousands of Russian soldiers and civilians were already dead or captured; dozens of cities and towns were burning.

Sitting at a small octagonal table of dark wood, Stalin doodled with a goose-feather quill on a sheet of crisp yellow vellum. Petrov was impassive as the Russian leader sketched the head of a wolf, then retraced the outline over and over until it blurred and was obliterated. The only light in the room, which came from a small, hissing kerosene lantern on the desk, reflected off the black onyx inlay in the desk. Finally Stalin turned to face Petrov. He carefully folded the vellum and tucked it into a jacket pocket, buttoning it after the paper was safely stowed. There were dark bags under his bloodshot eyes; his silver-tipped hair looked wet and greasy. His oversize head, sitting on his tiny but muscular body, looked larger than it was and gave him a grotesque appearance.

"The bastard lied," the supreme leader of the Soviets whispered, his voice menacing. "A lie. That fucking Nazi bastard lied to me; he told me he would honor the treaty for a thousand years; he
said Germany and Russia were bound inexorably. And I listened to him; I believed him! He even called me
Soso,
and I was touched by his gesture. My family called me that when I was a boy, and I let that Nazi swine call me that! I never want to hear that word again."

"Our army needs orders, comrade," Petrov said.

"Fuck the army!" Stalin roared, his eyes bulging. "Hitler is all I care about. He calls himself the Wolf. The slinking, stinking, lying wolf. I
know
about wolves! The wolf kills sheep. It runs from common dogs and rolls in its own shit." The Russian leader was shaking, trembling, kicking at the maps and papers on the floor, hurling them into dark corners. "So this is how he wants it: Wolf against Bear. Napoleon came and learned the lesson. Now this Nazi wolf comes, this Austrian maniac. I know now, I know. I
understand the game."

"Comrade Stalin?"

"The game," Stalin repeated, his voice softening again. "Don't you see? It's me he wants.
I've seen his kind before. Here,
I have their bones and their fathers' bones, and their sons'; now I'll have his. You want my orders? Find him. Bring him to me. Alive."

Henceforth Petrov's orders came directly from Stalin, with whom he met periodically to discuss his progress. As befitted his mission, the little Ukrainian was given supreme power, authority and autonomy. He pursued his mission with zeal, engaging the entire Nazi Propaganda Ministry of Joseph Goebbels in what is now known in modern intelligence circles as "disinformation."

Hitler feared capture by the Russians more than any other fate.

He believed that the Russians would take him to Moscow and put him on display like an animal in a zoological exhibit. The fear was not unfounded. Stalin used Petrov to feed this plan to Hitler through well-placed tips in Berlin itself. This information was disseminated in such a way that it would be sure to reach Hitler's ears from impeccable sources. Petrov and Stalin wanted Hitler to know what was waiting for him; their hope was that it would panic him.

Petrov did not fear that his efforts would drive Hitler to suicide.

His psychological profile of the German leader, built in the same way that the Allies constructed theirs, indicated that the leader of the Third Reich, while threatening suicide from time to time because of setbacks during his climb to political power, had never made a genuine attempt. Hitler, the Russian was certain, was all talk, an actor well versed in using his own behavior to create cal
culated impressions and percep
tions. The Russian profile showed that the behavior Hitler had exhibited time and again was that of fleeing from conflicts he could not win. Petrov believed that this was precisely what Hitler would do when the Third Reich collapsed.

In the early 1940S American psychiatric experts interviewed several doctors who had treated Hitler as a patient and arrived at a different conclusion. The OSS shared the profile with the Russians, and Stalin brought the report to the attention of Petrov. It listed several possible outcomes for Hitler, with the most likely being suicide. Petrov rejected the report out of hand. Hitler was first and foremost a coward and therefore a survivor, he believed. The man would try to escape, and it was Petrov's task to intercept or prevent such flight.

Petrov and his unit were with Marshal Zhukov's armies as they battered their way from the Oder River to Berlin in April 1945. The Americans-in fact, all the Western Allies-believed that at this time Hitler was in the mountains of the Obersalzberg in what the Nazis called the Alpine Redoubt. Eisenhower's G-2 was so convinced of this that, it was a major factor in the Allied decision to delay a final assault on Berlin; instead they sent their armies across the southern half of Germany to cut off the mountains where Hitler was thought to be.

In December 1944, when the Germans launched their "Watch on the Rhine," the desperate operation the Allies called the Battle of the Bulge, Petrov and his men were in the Obersalzberg area in southeast Germany, investigating the mountainous region for evidence of any buildups. In the absence of such characteristic German preparation, Petrov concluded that the Alpine Redoubt was no more than a red herring, painstakingly and expertly created by Goebbels to divert and divide the resources of the invading armies. Stalin was so informed by his Berkut, and the decision was made to undertake the final drive on Berlin. While Petrov did not know precisely where Hitler was, he knew where he was
not.
The Fü
hrer liked to call himself Europe's greatest actor, and this self-image demanded center stage; center stage, Petrov reasoned, was Berlin.

Stalin supported Petrov. In fact, he did much more. He urged the Allies to push into the mountains and gave them false intelligence reports to support their belief that Hitler was in the Obersalzberg. It may have been on the basis of this false evidence that Stalin was able to work out an agreement with Eisenhower that the Allied forces would press no closer to Berlin than the Elbe River, some seventy kilometers
to the west of the city. Meanwhile the Russians would advance all the way to the Nazi capital and smash it once and for all. In any event, Stalin wanted Berlin in payment for what the Nazis had wreaked upon the Motherland.

16 – May 3, 1945, 7:00 A.M.

The sky was lighter, but the passing of darkness did not cheer Rudolf; he still felt terrible. He moaned and rolled over, wondering if today he would have the courage and the opportunity to move out of his hiding place.

The morning before, he had awakened with his legs hanging off the footbridge. Grabbing desperately at a vertical support, he had clawed his way back to safety. Ahead of him lay his helmet with a dent several centimeters deep. He had been hit, but it had saved him. He'd never curse it again. There had been a haze and he thought it must be dawn. The others were gone. Fires burned as far as he could see. Landmarks were gone; bodies bumped against the shoreline below like beans in a soup bowl. His watch and wallet had disappeared. Behind him he had heard automatic weapon fire, and instinctively he had scrambled forward and fallen down an iron stairwell to the ground below the bridge on the far bank of the river. He had struggled to his knees, trying to recover his mind, but was nearly paralyzed by fear. Another volley had sent him forward into a massive clutter of rubble. He had kept moving until he lost his balance and fell into an opening between overturned slabs of concrete. Rolling under their protective shadow, he had curled up like a fetus and stayed through the day and night.

During the previous afternoon Rudolf had noticed that the artillery shelling had ceased. There remained the muted reports of small-arms fire, but nothing close; there seemed to be some kind of cease-fire, a halt in the fighting. The breakout groups had talked incessantly about Wenck's army coming to relieve Berlin; perhaps he had gotten through and driven the Ivans back!

His head was clearer now. He began to feel hunger, a sure sign
that he was on the mend. But it was too soon to leave his hiding place. Even if Wenck had reached the city, the Germans couldn't have cleared out the Russians so fast. Today it was curiously quiet, the silence broken only by the sound of fires and an occasional shot. He peeked out of his hiding place under some concrete slabs from time to time, but there were no people about and this unnerved him. He needed food, but something more powerful inside him kept him where he was, and soon he was asleep again.

He was awakened by voices. They seemed to be some distance away, by the river's edge. He listened. The voices were getting closer. Russians! He began clawing at the soft earth, trying to clear a deeper hiding place under the slabs. Within seconds he heard the voices only a few meters away. He couldn't tell how many were in the group, but there were males and females and their conversation was animated, almost playful. And they were out in the open, not hiding! That goddamned Wenck had
not
arrived; the Soviets had taken the city. That was why the shooting had tapered off; their work was done.

Now Rudolf felt fear and despair as never before. Death now seemed a certain fate. Scuttlebutt said that in East Prussia the Red Army had run over civilian refugees with tanks. Women and their babies had been shot. Several German soldiers had been crucifiedan irony that gave birth to the saying that the Ivans not only had Western allies but were trying to recruit God as well.

Rudolf had no knowledge of the Russian language and it was foul to his ear, but he recognized drunks when he heard them. It sounded as if the invaders were settling in; he heard their weapons and gear clatter against the rocks. He looked around desperately for an escape route, but his legs were too weak to lift him. His rock pile was under the Pichelsdorf Bridge, a protected area. No wonder the Russians had decided to pause.

After a while the loud talk subsided and Rudolf heard footsteps.

Above him, on a ledge, he could see two sets of calf-high black leather boots. The pairs of boots faced each other for a long time; then they stepped down a level and sat down. Both intruders wore heavy trousers, shirts and soft hats, and for a moment Rudolf was confused when they began to wrestle. They were going to fight! He cringed.

As quickly as the wrestling began, it stopped, and one of the intruders began to undress. Rudolf understood. A woman! The two Russians were going to ... “My God!” he thought. They were no more than three meters away, perhaps only a meter above him. If they looked up from their passion, they couldn't miss seeing him. He tried to curl up even smaller and to push back into the shadows of his hiding place.

Obviously the pair was not looking for Germans; they had a more basic diversion in mind. The woman undressed quickly, spread her clothes on a flat rock, lay on her back and beckoned to her partner by lifting her thick legs, as if she were on the verge of delivering a baby. The man, whose upper half Rudolf could not yet see, reached down and handed her a flask. She took a long pull; the fluid ran down her chin. As the man stepped out of his pants she turned over on all fours and spread her legs slightly. He knelt beside her. They both grunted and laughed as he entered her from behind.

Rudolf was as fascinated as he was frightened. He'd seen stag films before, but never had he witnessed the act personally as a spectator. Unbelievably, he felt himself becoming aroused as the man rammed away; the woman kept laughing and urging him on in some sort of guttural cadence, barking at him in their barbaric language. He was amazed at how long they kept going. After what seemed an interminable time, the man withdrew, then jumped down to within arm's reach of Rudolf and scooped up water from the river to pour over himself. As he did so the woman kept talking to him. She was lying on her side, her small breasts hardly moving as she shifted. She had a large tangle of black pubic hair that curled up onto her abdomen. Rudolf stared. It was all a bad dream; it occurred to him that he was dead, and that this was Hell.

The dream ended when a gun barrel was suddenly thrust into Rudolf's hiding place, striking him hard on the forehead. A shaggy head with crooked teeth stared at him with a grin, then shouted happily to the woman.

"Out of your hole," the woman ordered in rough German. She was still undressed, but now there was a huge revolver in her hand and it was pointed at Rudolf. Suddenly he felt cold. He tried to move, but couldn't. A hand jerked him out of his crevice, but he remained curled up tightly, hoping for protection. The two Russians stood over him, their weapons pointed down. He was looking directly up between the woman's legs. Opaque strands of semen glistened in her pubic hair. He stared, unable to look away, disgusted with himself, sick to his stomach.