Beyond the Call (10 page)

Eastern Command, the Military Mission, and the United States government were facing a humanitarian crisis. All across the disintegrating territories of the Third Reich, millions of prison camp inmates were being turned loose. Rumors were coming through that they were being abused, enslaved, and massacred. How true these stories were, nobody could tell.

First had come the death camps, many of which were in the east of the Reich. In July 1944, the Soviets had liberated the death camp at Majdanek in eastern Poland, and even they were shocked by what they found there. In this instance they took their humanitarian responsibilities seriously, giving aid to the survivors and beginning trials of captured Nazis. By the end of 1944, they had even established a small museum at Majdanek memorializing what had been done there. Journalists from around the world were brought there to witness it.
²²
Behold the nature of fascism, the Soviets declared.

Other kinds of camps were less horrifying, and Soviet sympathies were not moved at all. When Red Army units began encountering
the dozens, then hundreds, of satellite camps and forced labor camps, they wanted no responsibility for them. The Poles and the Ukrainians could at least try to get home. The inmates from other nations had no hope at all.

On 12 January 1945, the Red Army, having halted on the Vistula River to build up their strength, launched the massive Vistula–Oder Offensive, pushing deep toward Germany. The Soviet Union's Western Allies watched anxiously as the Russian front line drew closer to the prisoner of war camps that were clustered around the German–Polish border. The stalags and oflags were filled with thousands upon thousands of American and British prisoners, as well as French, Dutch, Polish, Canadian, Australian, and every combatant nationality.

Russia's own people were also imprisoned, some in POW camps, many more in concentration camps, where they had been murdered in their thousands along with the other victims of the Holocaust.

The Soviet attitude toward soldiers who had allowed themselves to be taken prisoner was well known. It had been articulated in Marshal Stalin's infamous Decree of the Stavka of the Red Army Supreme High Command, Number 270, of August 1941, which declared that Red Army officers and commissars who became prisoners were ‘criminal deserters' who had ‘breached their oath and betrayed their Homeland'. They should be shot by their commanders if possible, and their families would be arrested. The order, together with Stalin's preamble to it, which equated all acts of surrender with cowardice and desertion – colored the attitude of Russian soldiers toward POWs for the rest of the war, and beyond.
²³
So did Stalin's declaration, when asked to comment on the order, that ‘there are no prisoners of war, only traitors'.
²⁴
A further order, No. 0391, reiterated that deserters and traitors must be put to death.
²⁵
These decrees were made in the climate of shock and fear that came with the German invasion of the Soviet Union and were designed to encourage Red Army troops to fight to the death. The views they embodied took root.

Would this attitude be limited to the treatment of liberated Russian POWs, or would it also lead to mistreatment of Americans, British, and
others? In military and diplomatic circles in Washington and London, and in the British and American Military Missions in Moscow, they suspected that it would. They began to lay plans, and Poltava – that fragile little island of America in the vast Communist bloc – was their focus.

Officially they professed to believe that the Soviet regime would do right. Accordingly they prepared transport, supplies, and contact teams for transfer to Poltava and on into Poland. As soon as the camps started being liberated, contact teams would round up American and British POWs and transfer them to holding centers where they could be given emergency care. Then they would be flown promptly to Poltava, where a hospital and accommodations would be established. From there, they could be transferred as quickly as possible via the Persian Corridor or the Black Sea ports, and shipped home.

Such a plan had worked before. The first mass liberation of POWs in Eastern Europe had occurred with the fall of Romania in August 1944. Their evacuation was arranged quickly by the American and Romanian governments, before Soviet forces took control of the country.
²⁶
There would be no such opportunity in Poland. The Soviets were eating it up in swathes, and already installing their Communist-friendly government.

So things stood in mid-February 1945, when Colonel Hampton sketched out the situation to a bewildered Captain Trimble in his office at Poltava. Robert couldn't imagine what all these vast political matters had to do with him. What could he possibly be expected to do about all those thousands of prisoners? It sounded like either there would be a massive airlift evacuation of POWs or a huge diplomatic fight between the Allies. Other than maybe flying a plane as part of the airlift, there didn't seem to be anything he could contribute.

He wondered when Hampton would get around to explaining his hair-raising allusions to Robert being some kind of agent, working with the OSS, and not being parachuted into Berlin.

The official plans and preparations depended on Soviet cooperation. Theoretically, there ought to be no problem. Only four days ago,
the latest ‘Big Three' conference had ended at Yalta in the Crimea. (Poltava had experienced a brief resurgence of activity, with Eastern Command providing air transport services for the British and American delegations attending the conference.) Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin had signed their names to an agreement which included provisions on the treatment of liberated prisoners of war.
²⁷
They must be kept separate from enemy prisoners; they must be fully cared for, sheltered, fed, and clothed; and full access must be given at all times for repatriation officers representing the POWs' home nations to inspect the camps and evacuate their people.

Stalin had signed the agreement, but it was doubtful whether he would even give permission for the Americans to conduct their own evacuation and welfare program, let alone cooperate actively with it. Hence the covert American preparations for an alternative way to get their men out. Whistling innocently, the Americans smiled benignly at the Soviet Union, while behind the Soviets' backs the Military Mission and its contacts in the OSS arranged to bring in an unsuspecting outsider to do their work.

‘You're being appointed assistant operations officer,' Hampton told Robert. ‘Officially your role will be aircraft salvage and aircrew rescue. But that's just your cover. What you'll really be doing is penetrating into Poland to make contact with POWs. It's your job to gather 'em up and get 'em to safety.'

Robert was assured that the Soviets would tail him relentlessly and do whatever they could to track and restrict his movements. But they couldn't touch him. His diplomatic passport, plus his status as an authorized US officer on sanctioned aircraft salvage business, should give him immunity from arrest and detention. That was the theory. As he would learn later that day, when his briefing got down to details and he met the two men who were going to be his contacts out in the field, his diplomatic status would actually put him in greater danger.

He would just have to ensure that the Russians didn't discover what he was doing, and watch them even more carefully than they watched him.

Chapter 5

A BRUTAL AWAKENING

16 FEBRUARY 1945: BRZEZINKA, TWENTY MILES WEST OF KRAKÓW, POLAND

A
JEEP ROARED ALONG
the road leading toward the village of Brzezinka, swerving to avoid shell holes and scatters of rubble. Its passengers clung on, bracing themselves against being flung out. Every 50 yards or so, the Russian driver had to slam on the brakes and lurch off the road to allow vehicles to pass the other way. The road was busy with traffic going both ways – artillery, supply trucks, ambulances, and troops going to and from the front line, creating a series of stop-go jams that went on for mile after mile.

During each pause, Robert Trimble, sitting in the back seat of the jeep, noticed that the sounds of gunfire had grown a little louder. Almost immediately after he had disembarked from the plane at Kraków, the faint rumble had been perceptible. It had grown gradually to an intermittent thunder that sounded like it was coming from just over the next hill. Now, as the jeep halted on the edge of the village, it was just possible to make out the burr of machine guns in between the booms of Russian artillery and the thunder of German shells exploding. The sweeping Soviet advance that had begun a month ago had slowed to a halt a few miles from here, and the Red Army was fighting for every foot of ground.

Robert looked about him. The jeep had halted to let through a column of Red Army troops, all dressed in their long greatcoats, some with white winter smocks. Most carried the distinctive submachine guns with round magazines which they called
Papasha
– ‘Daddy'. A
column of roaring, squealing tanks rolled by with squads of soldiers riding on them. Robert was astonished to realize that some of the tank commanders, standing up in their turret hatches, were women.

The jeep squeezed through the village streets. Despite the damage done by the battle that had passed through here a couple of weeks ago, it looked like a pretty place, with winding streets and tall, quaint, timber-framed houses.

It was his first day in Poland, and Robert had been diverted from his main mission. He had been brought to this place because there was something here that his superior officers at Eastern Command wanted him to look at and report on. Unusually, the Soviets were keen that an American come here and see it. Therefore, Colonel Hampton had regarded it as the perfect opportunity to get his agent rapidly into Poland, without the usual delays and stalling. Accompanied by a Russian escort and interpreter, Robert had set off from Poltava. He was in a daze, having had no chance yet to digest the intensive briefings or get his bearings.

His interpreter, sitting beside him in the jeep, was a young woman in Red Army uniform with a second lieutenant's star on her shoulders. Her name was Maiya, and like many of the female interpreters the Soviets provided for Eastern Command, she was rather pretty. She had large, doe-like eyes, accentuated by Slavonic cheekbones and a plump underlip. Her hair was blonde and glossy, worn in a neat, militarized Betty Grable style. Robert had been warned to regard Maiya with suspicion. The Soviets used pretty women as interpreters for the simple reason that they were liable to tempt unwary, sex-starved American personnel into being malleable and indiscreet. The interpreters – and the male officers provided as guides – were all, despite their Red Army ranks and uniforms, attached to the NKVD, the political police, the Soviet equivalent to the German Gestapo.

It had been founded under Lenin, in the turmoil that followed the 1917 Revolution. The Cheka, as the internal security police force was originally called, instantly became a byword for terror. Under Stalin's rule the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (
Narodnyy
Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del
, or NKVD) acquired all the roles of a police and emergency service, and became the most powerful instrument of repression in the Soviet Union, responsible for purges and mass murder.

The NKVD policed every boundary – physical and ideological – between the Soviet Union and the outside world. It was Stalin's guard dog, and along with the Foreign Office it controlled every aspect of American experience in Soviet territory.

Women were a favorite conduit for the NKVD's spies. Around Poltava, the organization used local women in attempts to seduce information out of American servicemen. It was such a prevalent practice, the GIs joked that NKVD stood for ‘no ketch venereal disease'.
¹
The Red Army translators and officer escorts were a more subtle means of spying. The Americans at Eastern Command called them ‘bird dogs'. They followed you everywhere and were adept at trailing.
²
Maiya seemed pleasant enough and struck Robert as entirely genuine. She had a coquettish little smile which was very charming, and Robert was rather susceptible.

She wasn't smiling now, as the jeep passed the last house in the village. She looked apprehensive and unhappy. Maiya evidently wasn't looking forward to seeing what it was they had come to see. Neither was Robert. Based on the sketchy information he'd been given, it sounded like something that nobody would want to look at.

They had almost reached their destination. The jeep rounded a bend; there was a long straight ahead, beyond which Robert could make out wire fences with guard towers and brick buildings. Beyond were rows of barracks buildings. From the road it looked vast, the fences marching on and on into the distance.

The road was converging with a railroad track which split away from the nearby main line and curved round in a great arc. Together the road and rail track headed toward a long, low building made of brick, with a tower in the center and two archways through which road and railroad passed.

In answer to Robert's query, Maiya told him the name of the
village they had just come through: Brzezinka it was called in Polish. In German they called it Birkenau. The neighboring town, which could be seen on the other side of the main railroad, was Oświęcim, which the Germans called Auschwitz.

The previous day

‘Y
OUR AREA OF OPERATIONS
will be in this triangle encompassing the cities of Lwów, Lublin, and Kraków.'s

Put like that, it sounded simple. But when he began learning the details of what he was expected to do in that triangle, Robert's already rattled nerves took another hit. In fact, it wasn't so much the details as the
vagueness
of the details. It sounded like he was going to be relying on his own initiative an awful lot.

He studied the map on Colonel Hampton's wall. It was marked with colored pins and ribbons indicating aircraft crash-landing sites, transportation hubs, and the current German/Soviet front line. Most of the positions were approximate, based on information that had come in from Soviet and Polish sources via Moscow, plus intelligence from rescued aircrews and a fair amount of guesswork.

‘Major Kowal will have more accurate information,' Hampton said. ‘He's our operations officer. Officially, you'll be subordinate to him, but in practice you're answerable to me and to Moscow.'

Robert understood that ‘Moscow' meant General Hill, who was CO of the Air Division, and General Deane, who was overall commander of the American Military Mission at the US Embassy.

The information on prisoners of war was even vaguer than that on downed aircrews. It was known that the recent Soviet advances had liberated some camps, but so far there had been no direct contact with any American or British POWs, and no information was forthcoming from the Russians. Nonetheless, the Military Mission in Moscow had many sources of intelligence, including agents and diplomatic channels,
as well as sources in the Polish provisional government. The Polish authorities were happy to cooperate, despite being Soviet puppets (the process of Stalinization was in its early stages still). Information even came from within Germany, via the Swiss legation in Berlin, who passed on Wehrmacht reports of American POWs being left behind in the retreat.
³

Then a breakthrough came. Just two days ago, while Robert was still en route from Tehran through the snowstorms of the Caucasus, a message had come through to General Deane at Moscow. Relayed from Lublin in Poland, the message confirmed everybody's fears – there were already thousands of liberated American prisoners wandering loose and uncared-for. The message originated from two officers who had escaped from a German POW camp, crossed German lines into Poland, and spent weeks there trying to find their way to freedom: paratrooper Colonel Charles Kouns and OSS Colonel Jerry Sage.
⁴
It was the first definite information that the Russians were not honoring their obligations under the Yalta agreement.

But in spite of all the leads and reports coming out of Poland and Germany, there was no information from the Soviets themselves: just glib denials.
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All was fine, they insisted; liberated prisoners would be well cared-for in the reception centers that were being established in major towns at this very moment.

General Deane, alarmed by the message from Kouns and Sage, immediately briefed two of his senior staff officers to prepare for a trip to Lublin. On arrival, they were to inspect the Russian facilities in Lublin and any other Polish towns that were being used for receiving POWs, and arrange for their prompt evacuation by air to Poltava. Deane received assurances from the Soviet government that his two officers would have full and free movement in Poland and access to POW facilities.
⁶
Orders were sent to Poltava to begin preparing to receive hundreds of POWs, who would need to be accommodated and then sent on by air to Tehran.
⁷

Deane's two officers, Lieutenant Colonels Wilmeth and Kingsbury, accompanied by an American interpreter, traveled from Moscow to
Poltava on 15 February, arriving on the very same day as Robert Trimble.
⁸
Two very different branches of America's plans for POW evacuation – the official and the strictly off-the-record – were now in place and ready to be put into action. General Deane, despite all he knew about the Soviet way of doing things, professed high hopes for his little inspection team, and also for the POW contact teams which had been assembled at the recommendation of the Military Mission and were currently supposed to be en route to Poltava from London. Privately, though, he thought the plan unlikely to succeed.
⁹

Eastern Command applied immediately to the Soviets for clearance for the two colonels and their interpreter to fly from Poltava to Lublin to begin their tour of inspection.

Permission was denied.

So began a pattern that recurred frequently over the coming days and weeks. While Captain Trimble entered Poland with the Russians' assistance, clearances for Wilmeth and Kingsbury were repeatedly sought and repeatedly denied. Less than a week had passed since the signature of the Yalta agreement, and already the Soviets were failing to honor it. General Deane had consciously played soft with them on the POW issue prior to Yalta, for fear of provoking them.
¹⁰
In the weeks that followed, he began to grow impatient and angry.

He wasn't the only one.

Beyond General Deane, the US ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, took a keen and close interest in the welfare of POWs in Soviet hands. So did Ambassador John G. Winant in London. Ambassador Winant had a personal interest in the matter; his own son was one of the prisoners likely to be liberated at any moment by Soviet forces.
¹¹
The President of the United States, reflecting the feelings of all those American families with menfolk in German prison camps, also regarded the matter as profoundly important.

Fortunately for his nerves on that first day in Poltava, Captain Trimble had little notion of how high and how far the chain of concerned parties went, or just how much hinged on his performance of the mission that was being entrusted to him. He was just meant to be
a backup, an emergency sideline, but he might end up being the only way out for the POWs.