Armageddon (45 page)

Hirsch became irritated as the dialogue of justification continued.

“If Berlin is not evacuated by the West it will turn into an outpost of spying against us,” Azov said. “And the longer they remain the greater the risk of building Germany for a war of revenge.”

“How do we serve our purpose by stocking our own bins with Nazis?”

Azov smiled, and kept walking around a trap. “This question has been pondered by the Politburo of the Communist Party, by Comrade Stalin, by our great dialecticians. We realize that the Nazis are so deep in every phase of German life that we cannot carry on normal functions without using them. At the moment, the West is our greatest enemy. You yourself worked at persuading German prisoners over to the anti-Fascist bloc.”

“Using common soldiers and officers is one thing. Using SS men and hiding wanted Nazi war criminals is another.”

Hirsch was neither to be convinced nor bullied. He was adamant.

“Many Nazis,” Azov said, “are truly repentant about their past. They have seen the light through Communism.”

They have saved their asses through Communism! Anger began to gnaw at Hirsch. He knew now he had to keep his tongue from wagging further. The whole sordid business was becoming a windfall for hundreds of Nazis all over the Soviet Zone. If the Nazi could be of use, there was a simple formality to purge him of his past. The Russians knew they would be willing workers for the Communists for their past records were held over their heads as blackmail.

Azov saw the young man was backing off, and applied the final wisdoms. “We who believe in world Communism must overlook a few injustices in the light of the over-all aspirations.”

Heinrich’s eyes flashed black. Those were Hitler’s words and the Nazis’ excuse to justify criminal behavior and genocide. But what was so different? Hadn’t the Soviet Union always found an excuse for purges, deportations, privations? Hadn’t the excuse always been that it was justified for the great goal? Hirsch packed his notes quickly and left.

The exchange continued to annoy the commissar. He knew that Heinrich Hirsch was disciplined to realize the consequences of challenging a Moscow decision. But Hirsch had done the same thing earlier in protesting the removal of war reparations and he knew Hirsch had gone to Marshal Popov regarding the behavior of the Red Army upon entering Berlin.

Azov wondered what this strange blind spot was in the man that gave him the effrontery to break party discipline.

For a long time he had sensed this flaw in Hirsch’s character, felt he gave too much loyalty to being a German. He smelled that Hirsch was groping for independent German thought and action. This touched upon the two cardinal sins of nationalism and deviationism.

Yet, Azov was reluctant to take measures against him. He was the most brilliant member of the German Liberation Committee—Adolph Schatz was a clod and a bully, Heinz Eck a pawn. Rudi Wöhlman was clever and a good organizer but never added new ideas for he was determined only to please and to stay out of controversy.

But Hirsch had ingenuity, was sharp in analyzing the West, was brilliant. Yet, the damned blind spot was there, a flaw in his strain. He is half Jew, Azov thought, all Jew by character. Stalin had an uncommon suspicion of Jews. Azov recalled many a night he was summoned to Stalin’s villa and handed a list of Jews to purge. Stalin had an intuition about Jews. But, for the time, Hirsch was needed.

Heinrich Hirsch ordered his chauffeur to drive him to People’s Proletariat Party Headquarters.

He damned himself for not holding his mouth. The entire discussion was an invitation to receive a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Yet, he was unable to contain himself, even with party discipline drilled into him for a decade.... They were pardoning the men who had murdered his beloved father.

Chapter Seven

E
RNESTINE BLINKED OPEN HER EYES.
A wind blew at the canvas patch over the broken wall. Hilde sat on a wooden crate before a small mirror. Ernestine watched her sister pull on a silk stocking, holding out her slender leg to admire its shapeliness.

Hilde spotted Ernestine watching her through the mirror, turned, and said, “Good morning. How do you feel? Any better?”

“I’m fine,” Ernestine said.

“You don’t look so fine. You screamed again in the middle of the night.”

“I am sorry I disturbed you.”

“I’m getting used to it,” Hilde snapped. “Why don’t you put on a little makeup. The circles under your eyes would not show so much.”

“It does not matter.”

Hilde sighed, tossed down her lipstick, regretted her sharpness. She sat alongside the bed she shared now with Ernestine, ran her fingers through her sister’s hair. “It’s this living on top of each other. Erna, you’re your own worst enemy. Dr. Hahn has said so. You take life too grimly.”

“There is nothing to be joyful about in Berlin.”

“Fine, so make the best of it.” Hilde returned to the mirror.

“Hilde,” Ernestine said. “I want to talk to you about the things in your trunk.”

The younger girl was startled.

“It was by accident,” Ernestine said. “I was looking for your red sweater to borrow. The lock was open. Besides, where does one hide a trunk, or anything, in this place? Where did you get cigarettes, chocolates ... those stockings?”

“I made contact with some old friends.”

“I am your sister, Hilde. I will not be set aside.”

“All right.”

“We have been taught right from wrong.”

Hilde laughed bitterly. “There is no right and wrong in this place. There is only survival.”

“No matter what has happened, we still have our decency.”

“Decent? Are we decent? Have we ever been?”

“Hilde, you are getting yourself into serious trouble. There is no justice today, not even from the Amis.”

Hilde shrugged, and flipped the powder box shut “Your baby sister gets around. You could also make life easier for yourself.”

“Easy? It only looks easy.”

“Have it your way, Ernestine. I’ll leave something to eat for you on the table. Dr. Hahn should be here soon.”

“Hilde! You are only twenty years old. It is too soon to give up on life.”

“It seems that you are the one who has given up. I’m just trying to get along with a bad situation. Erna, you will promise me you won’t say anything to father about the trunk.”

“I promise,” her sister whispered in defeat.

“You’re a dear.” Hilde leaned over, kissed Ernestine’s cheek, and went out of the alcove.

In a few moments old Dr. Hahn arrived. “Well, how is the patient today?”

“I am afraid I am causing everyone a lot of trouble.”

He creaked to her bedside, pinched her drawn cheek. “If I could only put a little color back into that pretty face. Are the sleeping powders helping you?”

“For part of the night.”

The drugs had been obtained on the black market at great cost. He would find more, somehow. “I don’t want to keep you using it. It is bad to start at your age.”

Ernestine looked up to the same old grizzly face she remembered from earliest childhood. It seemed to her that Dr. Hahn was born old. She knew the touch of his hand as he examined her and she knew the familiar grunts of his meditation. He pulled the covers back over her shoulders, slipped the stethoscope from his ears.

“I am not going to lecture you, young lady. But you cannot get better until you help yourself.”

He packed his instruments into a battered bag, rummaged through for his almost diminished supply of drugs, and refilled a bottle at her bedside.

“Ernestine, someone came with me today. I want you to see him.”

“Who?”

“Your Uncle Ulrich.”

She rolled away, turning her back. “No,” she said shakily.

He went out into the hallway where Ulrich Falkenstein had waited. The two men had known each other for nearly three decades. Hahn shook his head. “Physically, she is in weak condition. Not enough to eat, overwork. It is the same as everyone in Berlin. Yet, I do not believe she is ill enough to be in bed.”

“I am told by her mother that she lies there day after day and that she screams in her sleep.”

“My dear Herr Falkenstein. Yesterday, the Amis released the information that they, along with the British, dropped seventy-five thousand tons of bombs on Berlin in forty days of continuous air raids at the end. She has been brutally raped by Russian soldiers. Her fiancé is dead and her brother is in a prison camp. Anything she has ever known of a normal life is gone. The illness that afflicts her is mental exhaustion.”

“Is that a reason for her to refuse to see me?”

“Have you not noticed, Ulrich, when someone speaks to you they do as I. They look into the shadows on your right or left, but never into your eyes. To some of us you are the mirror of German conscience, the living reminder of what we have done.”

“I have had a long time to wonder, Dr. Hahn, who are the guilty? I cannot blame her for the Nazis.”

“Nor can you keep her from blaming herself. The true guilty draw a curtain on the past. The most innocent assume the guilt. Unfortunately there are too few Germans like that girl.”

“I must go to her,” Ulrich said.

“Be careful.”

Ernestine heard him come in and cringed into the folds of the bedding.

“Ernestine,” he said.

“Please go, Uncle.”

“Ernestine.” He reached out and touched the girl and she began to sob softly. “You must turn around and look at me now.” His hands were firm. He dried her tears. There were large black circles beneath her eyes.

“Is it true?” she asked.

“It is true.”

She slumped back. “I am so ashamed,” she whispered. “Dietrich ... shot them down in cold blood. I loved him. He shot them down in cold blood.”

“You did not know, child.”

“Because I did not want to know. No one could have lived in Berlin in these years and not know.” It was not so hard as she believed to look at her uncle. At the moment it seemed a burden was lifting.

“Every German must face the past before he can face the future. Otherwise, there can be no redemption. You have taken the first cruel step, my child, and tomorrow you must start all over again.”

She reached for his hand and pressed it to her cheek,

“You can sleep now,” he said.

Chapter Eight

N
EAL
H
AZZARD,
A
MERICAN COMMANDANT,
was the most gregarious of the brass and the best-known occupation officer in the city. The Berliners loved his gruff bravado, his showing up at rubble-clearing sites, in beer halls, schools, union meetings, churches. Mostly he traveled alone and unarmed, a distinction in Berlin.

From the start the rules of the four-power Berlin Kommandatura were stacked against the West by the presence of a veto. He was compelled to accept all the Russian entrenchments before American arrival.

Even though Hazzard operated in a deep hole, he took a personal liking to the Russian Sector commandant, Colonel Nikolai Trepovitch, who, like himself, was from the ranks and had held fighting commands. Trepovitch was the most outgoing of the Russians, having a sparkling pixyish sense of humor.

However, the meetings of the Kommandatura often as not turned into a nightmare, with translations and conversations going in senseless circles for hours. What would, on the surface, appear to be a routine matter could suddenly turn a session into hairsplitting, bickering, and endless dialogue. Trepovitch and his deputies could haggle for hours and neither Hazzard nor the other Western commandants knew from one time to the next what the Russians had in store.

Hazzard realized that Trepovitch was allowed little room for flexible thinking, having to carry out his directions to the letter. He never pressed the Russian when he knew he could not give; Trepovitch appreciated it.

Hazzard was unable to achieve this silent rapport with the British colleague, Colonel T. E. Blatty, who would argue for hours for no other purpose than to keep the game by the rules. The Englishman, a classical officer, would never anger, never raise his voice, never become vexed. His endurance was the antidote to Trepovitch’s ponderous attacks.

The fourth member of the Kommandatura was Colonel Jacques Belfort. Trepovitch made the Frenchman aware that his country’s presence in Berlin was more of a gesture than a reality. The friction between these two was the most obvious. Belfort made up in sheer pride what he lacked in actual power, and it was his intent to make himself conspicuous for the sake of French prestige.

On certain issues the Russian would not budge. Attempts to regulate the currency with closer four-power control, attempts to liberalize the courts, quit the use of rations for political control, all met with filibuster and evasion.

On other matters the four worked together rather well. Housing was the worst of any civilized city in modern history, and worsened by the occupation powers requisitioning the best of what remained.

There was universal cooperation in the field of public health where mass inoculations tried to stem a rampage of typhus, typhoid, and diphtheria. The mushrooming incidence of tuberculosis, the terrible dysentery, and venereal disease taxed the medical facilities of all four powers.

The number of hospital beds was a third of prewar level and much equipment had been carted off by the Russians as reparations. The four powers set up joint garbage removal, sewage treatment, and other crash programs to head off epidemic.

Transportation was crippled in the broken city. There were no private German automobiles, buses, or taxis. Many chunks of the elevated were down and sections of the underground flooded in the last days of the fighting. Hundreds of rail cars had been shipped off to the Soviet Union. Traffic was perilous because of collapsing walls and half the streets were blocked by debris. Ricksha bikes and a few trams drawn by horses were a poor supplement in the gigantic area of nearly four hundred square miles. Berlin had an extensive canal system and an inland harbor and more bridges than Venice. Half of them were twisted into the Spree and Havel rivers, blocking the barges. The West Harbor was a shambles.