Agent in Berlin, page 21
‘Go on.’
‘I’m told that foreign correspondents in Berlin will be in the same category as heavy labourers and we’ll get double rations.’
‘Well, that’s something.’
‘Yes, two hundred and twenty grams of marmalade.’
‘Is that official then?’
‘As I’m now a fully signed up foreign correspondent I’ve started hanging around the Propaganda Ministry for their daily briefings, which is tedious but could turn out to be useful, and I met a couple of American correspondents who invited me to join them at an Italian restaurant where they have a Stammtisch – have you heard of that?’
‘A table of some sort?’
‘It’s a corner table reserved for them – they just turn up late in the evening and the owner lets them stay as long as they want, I’m not surprised, given the amount they drink. I think it’s going to be a useful place to pick up gossip. That’s where I heard about the possibility of us getting double rations.’
‘Anyone there who could be of use, Jack?’
The American shrugged. ‘Not seen enough of them sober. You never know though: I’ll keep my eyes open. How much longer are you in Berlin?’
‘As long as I’m able to be, Jack: if the Nazis announce their pact with the Soviet Union then I’d say it’s just a matter of days before we sign something with Poland and once that happens I think Berlin will be a less than hospitable place for an Englishman. I aim to be in Belgium or France by the end of the week.’
‘You’re Canadian – remember?’
‘Even so – I don’t fancy sitting in a Gestapo cell answering a general knowledge quiz about Canada to prove my credentials.’
‘The Mackenzie.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘The Mackenzie’s the longest river in Canada, if the Gestapo ask you.’
‘Thank you, Jack, that’s terribly helpful. Noel Moore will introduce you to the Luftwaffe officer tomorrow and after that you’ll make your own arrangements. And of course, once war starts, you’ll only be able to write for your American newspapers so…’
‘We’ve been through this, yes, I know.’
‘That chap in New York – Ted Morris – he’s been terribly helpful, very committed to helping us.’
‘I think you’ll find most Jews are.’
‘Indeed. And you have the code sheets somewhere safe? You will find it takes longer to formulate a message that way, but once he sees your copy is preceded by a coded message, he’ll pass it on to our man in New York. You’ll soon get used to it.’
‘You must have been through this a dozen times at least.’
‘Practice makes perfect. Now, just one more thing… you need to know how to get something like photographs to us or communicate with us in a real emergency. Come closer.’
1940
Chapter 20
Kielce, Poland
January 1940
Oberführer Karl-Heinrich von Naundorf was beginning to realise that war was a funny business. Not funny as in hilarious, although it certainly had its amusing moments. But more funny as in unusual.
One of the unusual aspects to war – which he’d not expected – was the pace of it: short bursts of intense activity followed by long periods when very little happened.
That was certainly the case with von Naundorf’s SS battalion. They’d been heavily involved in a brief spell of at times quite bitter fighting during the invasion of Poland in September 1939, though in truth the conquest of the country hadn’t exactly been a battle between equals. The following few weeks had seen more intense activity as they rounded up local officials, prominent Jews, socialists, communists and Polish nationalists, as well as officers from the Polish army.
He’d allowed his unit to have plenty of fun with their prisoners – until at a meeting of the divisional command it was pointed out that one of the main purposes of taking prisoners was to put them in prison, preferably while they were still alive.
After that he exercised more discipline with his battalion and in the middle of December they were posted to Kielce, a city one hundred miles south of Warsaw, which was becoming full of Jews who’d been expelled from their homes in the surrounding towns and villages. As a result, the Jews now made up around a third of the city’s population of about eighty thousand, a fact that angered the local Polish population who didn’t seem to like the Jews any more than the Germans did.
Von Naundorf’s unit was there to help guard the Jews and keep an eye on the locals. They became part of the 4th SS Police Regiment and this led to a growing sense of disquiet among his men. They were soldiers, they insisted: fighters, certainly not policemen. There was also a tension between Karl-Heinrich von Naundorf and Oberführer Fritz Katzmann who was based in Kielce but was in charge of policing for the whole of the Radom district. Von Naundorf the lawyer felt that even though both men were of the same rank, he was superior to Katzmann, a man who’d been a mere carpenter before joining the Nazi Party rescued him from obscurity, as it had done with so many others.
Von Naundorf did his best to ensure there was plenty to keep his men occupied. There were the beginnings of some resistance in the area that took up some of their time and he did his best to ensure there were plenty of actions against the Jews.
In this respect von Naundorf had an ally at their headquarters on the corner of Paderewskiego and Solna Streets. Franz Wittek was something of an enigmatic character, sometimes referred to as the Scarlet Pimpernel. No one was quite sure who he was, where he was from or indeed where he was and what he was doing at any particular time.
In fact von Naundorf had first met Wittek when he was running the Selbstschutz operation in Breslau before the war. Wittek was originally a Croat who’d spent many years in Germany and was now able to pass himself off as a Pole. He was also a committed Nazi and a clever, ruthless man. In Kielce he’d set up an effective network of informers and was loathed by the local population.
Von Naundorf did all he could to encourage Wittek and most important of all ensure that he was given the best tip-offs first. It hadn’t quite been like that on the last Friday in January though. Wittek had discovered that a group of young Jews – all members of the Jewish Socialist Bund – were hiding in a house on Pocieszka, just behind Targowa. But somehow Wittek had managed to tell Katzmann about this first and von Naundorf was furious.
He burst into Katzmann’s office and demanded to know what was going on. Katzmann said not to worry: everything was under control and he’d ‘got his eyes on them’.
‘Katzmann what the hell’s the point of keeping your eyes on them? What are you waiting for – you want them to start taking shots at our boys?’
‘I’m sick and tired of you always criticising, Naundorf. You deal with it.’ Katzmann had a habit of dropping the ‘von’ in an attempt to bring his fellow officer down to his level.
So Oberführer Karl-Heinrich von Naundorf did deal with it. He treated it as a proper operation, surrounding the area and then leading his men into the house on Pocieszka. There were around a dozen Bundists in the house: all in their late teens or early twenties, a mixture of men and women. They looked shocked but one of the men asked von Naundorf if they had a warrant, so von Naundorf hit him across the face with his Luger.
The search of the house revealed nothing and the group was lined up outside the house waiting to be marched to the Gestapo headquarters on Paderewskiego. It was then that one of the women – more a girl, really – said they were ready to go along with them and although his troops laughed, von Naundorf thought that was odd. It was as if they were eager to get away from the house, so he ordered another search and told his men that this time they need to be thorough, like opening the odd door.
It didn’t take them long: they found a trap door under a sheet of tarpaulin in the cellar and under it a tiny cellar – with half a dozen petrified young children aged around five or six hidden in it.
All hell broke loose when they dragged the children into the street to join the older ones, some of whom even tried to bargain with the officers, pleading with them to take the adults but spare the children.
They marched the prisoners along for a while, the children crying and the adults trying to calm them down and assuring them all would be fine and von Naundorf noticed one of his storm troopers looked pale and upset and briefly put a comforting hand on the shoulder of a young boy. He made a mental note to have him transferred east that night. That would teach him.
Then one of his junior officers, an Obersturmführer from Dresden called Gerd, had a smart idea, one that appealed to von Naundorf. It would serve the dual purpose of keeping his men amused and getting a problem off their hands. They came to the River Silnica and Gerd ordered his men to line the children up on the riverbank. He waited until the children realised what was about to happen before pushing them into the freezing water. Each of them only thrashed around very briefly before drowning. When it was all over – it had only taken a minute or two – the men noticed a group of local Poles had lined up on the bank of the Silnica and were cheering.
Von Naundorf didn’t know whether to be appalled that they’d done something the Poles approved of or pleased they appreciated it. War was a funny business.
It all became rather messy after that. A lorry was meant to meet them to take the other prisoners back to Paderewskiego but it didn’t turn up so he decided they’d march there, but hadn’t reckoned on it taking as long as it did and then it started to pour with rain, so by the time they got back there he was soaking wet and had had enough.
As a consequence, he wasn’t in the mood for dealing with Oberführer Katzmann who was insisting that as von Naundorf was responsible for arresting the group he was also responsible for processing them and when von Naundorf replied there was really no need for that Katzmann said there really was, unless he had a problem with orders that came from the Führer himself and von Naundorf said not to be so ridiculous, the Führer had more important things to worry about than fingerprinting and photographing Jewish prisoners – and it all descended into a shouting match, which became quite unedifying.
Von Naundorf stormed out of Katzmann’s office and ordered Gerd to assemble the prisoners in the yard and line them up against the wall.
They realised what was happening, of course. They were all defiant, pushing and pulling and swearing at the Germans in Yiddish or Polish, but they knew what their fate was and as the last of them was put against the wall they fell quiet and stared at the Germans in a dignified manner and von Naundorf noticed that unsettled one or two of his men so he told them to get a move on and then the prisoners began to sing, quietly but in a remarkably harmonious way, so much so they sounded like a choir.
The song didn’t last long, of course, before it was broken by the machine-gun fire.
Try as he might, Oberführer Karl-Heinrich von Naundorf couldn’t get that song out of his head. That was the night that his nightmares began.
War was a funny business.
Chapter 21
Berlin
February 1940
Life was difficult in so many ways for Jack Miller that he sometimes wondered quite how he coped.
Of course, life was unquestionably difficult for any civilian in Berlin, having to survive on ever-diminishing food rations and meagre clothing coupons. At least as a foreign correspondent he was entitled to increased rations, but life was still hard. The winter had been particularly gruesome: no coal for homes and they weren’t allowed to use gas for hot water, which was only available on Sundays. He was dreading the next winter.
There was also an atmosphere in the city that was hard to ignore. When the war began the previous September the majority of the population were shocked. They’d not expected war, having been assured the British and the French would bow to the might of Germany. As a result, a pall of gloom had descended over the capital. Much of the civilian population appeared to be distressed. One of the ways in which the reality of war showed itself was the death notices in the newspapers. The approved form of death notice was to say a soldier had ‘died for the Führer’. It didn’t take long for this phrase to disappear from many of the death notices.
Since the previous August – just before the start of the war – he’d made an effort to be an ‘official’ foreign correspondent. Although this had undoubted advantages, it was also time-consuming. He attended the Propaganda Ministry daily briefings as often as possible, always making a point of being sociable with the other foreign correspondents and seeking out Boehmer, the man in charge of foreign press at the ministry who it was advisable to keep on the right side of. At least twice a week he’d go over to the Reich Foreign Ministry on Unterwasserstrasse where matters were altogether more sombre and foreign correspondents treated with more suspicion. The daily briefings were carried out in a large conference room in the basement: on the days they were allowed to attend, the foreign reporters had to sit in the rows behind the German journalists.
But it was important to be there and just as he cultivated Dr Boehmer at Propaganda, he also did his best to maintain good relations with Dr Aschmann, the head of the press office at the Foreign Ministry, and with Dr Zallatt, a nervous-looking man whose job it was to look after the American press pack. He knew it was important to get to know the right people and stay on the right side of them and for that reason he also made frequent trips to Westend to maintain his relations with the Reich Sports Office and to bump into the Reichssportführer.
He envied the foreign correspondents whose job seemed to revolve around attending the daily briefings, going on the occasional escorted press trip and then writing up their copy before heading to their regular Italian restaurant and a late night around their Stammtisch.
Jack Miller also had all his sporting events to cover and on top of this, being a British agent in Berlin was more than a full-time job, yet the journalism – the ‘day job’ as Barney called it – was a vital front to allow him to do his espionage, the ‘night shift’, as described by Barney. He felt over-worked and exhausted. Most nights he fell asleep in his armchair and occasionally at his desk. He felt he’d aged ten years and it had been months since he’d brought a woman back to his apartment.
Increasingly he felt overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work along with the omnipresent threat of being caught and the fear that came with that. Sometimes he allowed himself the indulgence of wondering why on earth he was doing this, why he’d agreed to become a British agent. But when he thought about it he realised he’d not so much agreed to become a British agent but rather he’d discovered he’d already been recruited as one and the decision he’d had to make then was whether to stop – and it was far harder to stop than to start.
He got into the habit of going for a walk through to the nearby Preussenpark, which was just a short stroll from his apartment and which tended to be particularly quiet in the middle of the morning or early afternoon and it felt safe to lose himself in his thoughts, and it was here he debated with himself what would happen if he stopped, if he decided to leave Germany and return to the United States and write a brief but perfectly civil letter to Barney – he’d have to send it care of the British embassy in Washington but he was sure it would find its way to him. He’d explain that he’d felt he’d done as much as could be reasonably expected of him – he liked that phrase, it felt very ‘British’ – and he’d felt it would be a good time to leave, before he became a liability, and he was sure Barney would understand and he’d wish him all the best and he thought about adding a postscript that Barney had his word that he would never write about his experiences working for the British, but then thought that could be a hostage to fortune as he’d been thinking of writing a novel about an American journalist spying for the British. In Germany. He’d wait until the war was over, of course, and he’d assure readers that it was entirely fictional.
But then something would cause him to snap out of such daydreams and make him realise why he was prepared to continue taking the enormous risk of spying for the British. It could be rumours of an atrocity – there were enough of those – or the publication of yet more appalling restrictions on liberty or something he’d see as he went about life in Berlin.
Earlier that month had been a good example. He been for a walk in Preussenpark in what were for him the ideal conditions: a light but persistent drizzle, which meant he was alone in the park and with his thoughts. He reached a vague conclusion that he’d give Berlin a few more months – perhaps May, maybe June – and then he could leave with his head held high, though not so high as to draw attention to himself.
He left the park on Brandenburgische Strasse, hoping to find a bakery with some bread in it. As he passed to the corner of Sauerland Strasse he saw a commotion – lots of police and shouting – and the journalist in him knew turning into the road and walking by was less likely to draw attention to himself than standing and watching.
As he walked down the street, he saw the cause of the commotion. Gestapo officers were dragging a family out of a basement and towards a police van parked in the street. Jack Miller slowed down a little, just enough to spot the terrified father and the weeping mother and the three young children following in their wake. The yellow stars on their coats told him all he needed to know. At that moment a Gestapo officer looked quizzically over at him.
Jack turned into the entrance of an insurance building where he waited a few minutes for someone to give him a form for insuring the contents of his apartment.
By the time he left, the street was empty and he knew he would carry on as a British agent for as long as it took.
He’d made his decision.
And there was some hope. Just before he’d left Berlin Barney Allen had hinted there’d be another agent to work with him and whenever he asked when that help would be forthcoming the reply would be the same as Barney Allen had always given: the time’s not right at the moment.
