Authors: David Downing
They were in the last room when two things happened. First there was a shout, a few frantic words in German that included
nein
. And then, only a heartbeat later, the window blew in, sucking in the roar of an exploding bomb with a hail of shattered glass. Russell felt a sharp pain in his face, and heard Varennikov gasp. An instant later, a second bomb exploded, then another and another, each one sounding a blissful stretch further away.
Russell picked a small shard of glass from his check, and felt the blood run. He trained each eye in turn on the moonlit gardens – both were still working. Varennikov, his flashlight revealed, had lost his right ear-lobe, and the stub was bleeding profusely. He seemed more shocked than harmed.
Russell suddenly remembered the shout. He switched off his flashlight, carefully opened the door, and stepped out into the dark corridor. There was nothing moving, and no sign of Gusakovsky or Kazankin, but a thin wash of light filled the lobby area some twenty metres to his left. And there was a dark shape on the floor.
Two, as it turned out. The old man was nearer, a neat black hole drilled through the left side of his forehead, a few locks of silver hair draped across his right eye. Gusakovsky was just beyond him, unnaturally twisted, the back of his head glistening in the dim light. He had been thrown against the wall by the blast, Russell guessed. The bomb must have landed almost on the doorstep, blowing the doors inwards, a split second after Gusakovsky’s shooting of the caretaker.
The Russian’s gun was lying close to his splayed hand. Russell bent down to pick it up, and placed it in his belt.
‘Wh-where’s Kazankin?’ Varennikov stuttered behind him.
It was a question that needed answering, but far from the only one. Were there any emergency services still operating in Berlin? If so, were they already fully occupied? If any were spare, how long would it take them to arrive? Sooner or later someone was bound to. They had to get away from the Institute.
But where to?
And where was Kazankin?
Russell worked his way between pieces of furniture to the open doorway, and clambered gingerly out across the ruined portico. The moon was almost down, but flames were rising from a building away to his left, flooding the world in yellow light. The bomb had gouged a sizable crater across the pathway leading to the street gates, and the remains of a body lay heaped on the grass ten metres beyond. From a distance, it looked like a shapeless mass of bloodied flesh; closer up, Russell could identify shreds of the foreign worker uniform. One quarter of the face was strangely untouched, and in it a single staring eye. Kazankin’s.
He wasn’t supposed to feel sorry for his potential executioner, but he almost did.
He looked around. One building on Gary Strasse was merrily burning, but the other three bombs had only inflicted blast damage. No more were falling, and the sky sounded empty of planes. Had Kazankin and Gusakovsky fallen prey to a single stray stick, not so much aimed as discarded?
Varennikov had followed Russell out, and was now standing there, clutching the sheaf of papers, staring down at what was left of Kazankin. He ran a hand through his hair. ‘What now?’ he asked. It sounded more like a plea than a question.
Russell responded. ‘This way,’ he ordered, leading the Russian out through the gates and across the empty street. As they approached the intersection with Boltzmann Strasse they both heard vehicles approaching from the Thiel Allee direction. Russell broke into a run, Varennikov following. They turned the corner into Boltzmann Strasse and headed for the pool of deep shadow offered by two large trees.
They had barely reached it when two vehicles drove across the intersection they had just left behind. Fire trucks of some kind, Russell guessed. They would find three bodies, one caretaker and two foreign workers.
One of whom, he realised, was still carrying his Soviet pistol. Fuck!
It was too late to do anything about it. With any luck the Nazis would assume that there’d only been two of them. ‘Let’s go,’ he told Varennikov.
‘Where are we going?’ the Russian asked as they walked towards the Thielplatz U-Bahn station.
‘To my brother-in-law’s house,’ Russell told him.
‘Your brother-in-law? But he’s a German!’
‘Yes he is. And he’s probably the best chance we have of saving our lives.’ He certainly couldn’t think of any others. But was it fair to land on Thomas’s doorstep with a Soviet physicist, and half the Gestapo in probable pursuit? The thought crossed his mind that he could simplify matters no end by taking out Gusakovsky’s silenced gun and leaving Varennikov in a Dahlem gutter. But he knew he couldn’t do it. The Soviets might find out. And he rather liked the young Russian.
He asked himself how he would feel if Thomas turned up at his door with a ticking bomb. He would take him in, he knew he would. He and his ex-brother-in-law had fought on opposite sides in the First War, but they’d been on the same side ever since.
Thomas even had a cellar – Russell could remember him remarking how they’d probably need it after one of Goering’s speeches on the invincibility of the Luftwaffe. They should be able to hide out there until the Red Army reached Berlin. And once they did, then saving Varennikov should earn both him and Thomas some much-needed credit with the Soviets.
All of which assumed Thomas being there. He could imagine him evacuating Hanna and Lotte to Hanna’s parents in the country, but he found it hard to imagine Thomas leaving his factory or his Jewish workers. As far back as 1941 he’d been all that stood between them and the trains heading east – he had even taken to cultivating a few Nazi acquaintances as insurance. And things was unlikely to have improved. If the bombing had spared him, Thomas would be there.
‘How far is it?’ Varennikov asked, interrupting his thoughts.
‘About two kilometres,’ Russell told him. He couldn’t remember hearing an all-clear, but the bombers seemed to have gone. With the searchlights dimmed, the moon down, and the blackout still in force, it could hardly have got any darker. Even the whitened kerbs offered little help – six years of weather and footfalls had worn the paint away.
They took the bridge across the U-Bahn cutting, and headed up the narrow Im Schwarzen Grund. It might be dark, but the main roads carried a heavier risk, and he was fairly confident of finding his way through Dahlem’s suburban maze. Varennikov looked less certain, but plodded dutifully along beside him. If the sheaf of papers under his arm amounted to a bomb for Stalin, then the Americans would eventually have questions for Russell. He decided that Thomas didn’t need to know what this was all about. For everyone’s sake.
The street was quiet. In the poorer parts of Berlin, people would be hurrying home from the large public shelters, but in richer suburbs like Dahlem most houses and blocks had their own. And for obvious reasons the police presence had always been thinner here than in the old socialist and communist strongholds of working-class Wedding and Neukölln. In some areas of Wedding even the Gestapo had needed military back-up.
The streets were quiet, but not entirely empty. Twice on Bitter Strasse the two men were forced to skulk in the shadows while people went by, an air-raid warden on an unlit bicycle, a woman in a long coat. Two of the phosphorescent badges that Russell remembered from the early years of the war were pinned to her chest like pale blue headlights.
There was no sign that Dahlem had been bombed that night – apart, that is, from the four which had fallen around the Institute – but it had clearly suffered during the preceding months. As they crossed the wide and empty Königin Luise Strasse, Russell noticed several gaps in the once imposing line of houses, and the depredations onVogelsang Strasse seemed, if possible, even heavier. Had the Schade residence survived?
It had. Identifying the familiar silhouette against the starry backdrop gave Russell an intense sense of relief. He had spent many happy hours in this house and the garden that lay behind it. Thomas had bought it in the early 1920s, soon after taking over the family’s paper and printing business from his ailing father. Russell and Ilse had stayed there when they returned, as lovers, from the Soviet Union in 1924. Through the 1930s he and Effi had spent many a Sunday lunch and afternoon as part of the extended family, eating, drinking and lamenting the Nazis.
Unsurprisingly for four in the morning, the house lay in darkness. But the small front garden did look unusually unkempt, and the thick spider’s web which Russell encountered on the porch implied a distinct lack of human traffic.
‘It looks empty,’ Varennikov said. He sounded relieved.
‘Come,’ Russell told him, heading for the archway at the side of the house, where another web was waiting. Many years earlier, Thomas had invited him back to the house, only to realise he’d forgotten his keys. ‘There’s a spare one round the back,’ his friend had said, and there it had been, gathering moss under a water bucket.
The bucket was in the same spot, and so was the key. It felt a little rusty, but still opened the back door. Russell ushered Varennikov into the huge kitchen that Hanna loved so much, and told the Russian to stand still while he attended to the blackout curtains. Once these were closed, Russell used his flashlight to reveal the room’s geography.
Two things immediately caught his eye. The documents on the large kitchen table were Thomas’s Volkssturm call-up papers. They had been issued the previous autumn.
And on the mantelpiece above the stone fireplace there was one of the black-bordered memorial cards that Russell remembered from 1941. Joachim Schade smiled out of the photograph. Thomas had lost his son.
We killed them all
April 20 – 21
P
aul let himself out of the temporary barracks just before seven, and took a deep breath of fresh air – most of the
Hitlerjugend
still sleeping inside had probably forgotten what soap and water were for. The sound of aircraft lifted his eyes – high in the sky above Erkner the sun glinted on the silver bellies of Allied bombers. All through the night he had listened to the dull thud of distant explosions, and day it seemed would bring no mercy. To the west, Erkner’s Rathaus was silhouetted against a sky laced with the colour of fire. It was, he realised, Hitler’s birthday.
He walked across to the railway station and down the short street to the town centre, intent on finding someone from his own division, or at least news of its whereabouts. How else was he going to get away from a bunch of deluded children with a collective death-wish?
But he was out of luck. The traffic clogging the main road west was mostly civilian; the only uniforms in motion were black, and they belonged to embarrassed-looking Waffen-SS soldiers clinging to a farm tractor. At the crossroads an unusually cheerful MP had no idea where the 20th might be, but more than enough information about the Russians, whose advance was apparently gathering speed.
‘How far away are they?’ Paul wanted to know.
The man shrugged. ‘Two days? Maybe only one. But we’ll all be pulled back into the city before they get here.’
He made Berlin sound like a real barrier, but Paul had seen French prisoners-of-war hard at work on the so-called ‘obstacle belt’ on his last trip to the city. A few trenches and gun emplacements weren’t going to hold up the Red Army for long, even when manned by soldiers too young to know fear.
Returning to the canteen, he saw Werner across the road, happily chatting to the woman from the day before. ‘Frau Kempka’s husband was in Italy with the same division as my father,’ the boy announced happily, as if that was some consolation for them both being dead.
‘Was he really?’ Paul said. ‘Good morning, Frau Kempka,’ he added. She had a coat on, and a suitcase sat by the front door.
‘I’m going to try and reach Potsdam,’ she said, noticing his glance. ‘My brother lives there, although I expect he’s serving in the Volkssturm now. It seems safer than staying here, don’t you think?’ She looked at Paul, as if confident he would know the answer.
I’m only eighteen, Paul felt like saying. ‘You’re probably right,’ was what he said. Potsdam, about twenty-five kilometres south-west of Berlin, seemed as good a place as any.
‘We’re moving out,’ Werner told him. ‘They told us fifteen minutes ago – you might have been left behind.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘A few kilometres east. There’s a gap between two lakes, and we’re supposed to plug it. Us and a police battalion. And the local Volkssturm.’
Paul groaned inwardly – police battalions were notoriously prone to disappearing without warning, and the Volkssturm would probably just get in the way.
Over the next couple of hours, as they waited for the fuel they’d been promised for their lorries, he saw nothing to make him more optimistic. The members of the police battalion were all armed with rifles, but their eyes looked inward and their faces were pale with fear. The older men of the Volkssturm looked more depressed than frightened, but they were woefully short of weapons. They would only have a rifle each when half of them were dead.
The fuel finally appeared, two barrels on the back of a horse-drawn cart which needed siphoning. It was almost ten when they finally set off, and by then the sky was clouding over. The
Hitlerjugend
sat clutching their rocket- launchers; apart from a few exceptions like Werner, they seemed eager for battle. Today was the Führer’s birthday, they kept reminding each other, the day on which the wonder weapons would be unleashed. This would be the moment the Soviets were stopped and driven back, and they would be able to tell their children that they had been part of it.