Judgment in Berlin: A Spy Story Read online

  JUDGMENT IN BERLIN

  By Noel Hynd

  © Noel Hynd 2021

  Previous books in this series:

  Flowers from Berlin

  Return to Berlin

  "What happens to Berlin, happens to Germany.

  What happens to Germany, happens to Europe."

  Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov

  Moscow, USSR – 1948

  *

  “We’re staying in Berlin. Period!”

  President Harry S. Truman

  Washington, USA - 1948

  Prologue

  New York City - November 10, 1989

  On the second floor of the Overseas Press Club Dining Room at a few minutes before one PM, more than a hundred and fifty foreign correspondents waited attentively for the man who had just moved before the microphone on the speaker’s dais. The club’s building stood at 40 West Forty-Fifth Street in Manhattan. The room was crowded.

  The speaker was William Thomas Cochrane, banker, economist, occasional spy, occasional FBI and CIA agent, and veteran of more than one intrigue in the Nazi era and postwar Germany. The subject was Berlin, a place Cochrane knew well.

  The audience included many men and women who had served in the press corps in World War II, both in the Pacific and in Europe. Some had visited Berlin since the war had ended, a few had ridden into the city on Jeeps or tanks in the 1940s. Most had not. But today they were at the club to hear from a man who had spoken to them before. And this day was different. Four thousand miles away, piece by piece, overwhelmed and overrun by joyous people seeking to destroy a symbol of repression, the Berlin Wall was coming down.

  “This is a wonderful, momentous day,” Cochrane said as he began. “It is a day that will forever be looked back upon, but it is not one that happened by chance. Today I want to take you back forty-three years. You must remember that for many months after the Second World War, Berlin was a city in devastation. It was thoroughly defeated, and its population reduced to legions of walking dead. We are talking about a world capital, the pride of Goethe, Wagner, Kaiser Wilhelm, Albert Einstein, and yes, unfortunately, Adolf Hitler, that was rendered to its knees and occupied by four conquering powers. Allied bombardment had dropped sixty-seven thousand tons of bombs on the city,” he said scanning the room, “destroying six thousand acres of central Berlin. More than a hundred thousand civilians died. A hundred thousand! Please think about that. If you want to know what the legacy of Nazism is, Hitler’s so-called National Socialism, the Thousand Year Reich, look no farther than Hitler’s capital city - one of the great cities of the world – practically obliterated.”

  Cochrane took a quick visual survey of the room.

  “Let me ask all of you a question,” he said after a moment’s pause. “Let me see a show of hands. How many of you have ever heard of a German town named Demmin? It’s in East Germany. In Pomerania. It is still there today.”

  A few hands came aloft around the room. No more than half a dozen.

  Bill Cochrane continued.

  “There are three parts of the story I’m going to tell you,” he said. “First, this.”

  He reached into his pocket. He pulled out a small, round metal disc. He smiled. He held up a coin. It had a dull finish like an American nickel but was about the size of a U.S. quarter.

  “The first part centers around a coin,” he said. “One Deutschmark. This one is from 1950, the first year the Deutschmark was minted. Odd, isn’t it? A whimsical new currency at the time of its creation. It replaced the Reichsmark, the currency of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. The Deutschmark has flourished and is now one of the strongest currencies in the world.”

  Cochrane smiled. “Because of this coin, and the East-West tensions and competitions surrounding it, there was something called ‘The Berlin Airlift.’ For most Americans now, more than forty years later, the Berlin Airlift is not even a memory, maybe just a distant skirmish in the Cold War. But for the veterans who took part in what was the greatest humanitarian airlift in history, the operation is as fresh as yesterday.”

  A silence went around the hall. Cochrane had hooked his audience.

  “While ‘The Big Lift’ was a British idea, I’m proud to say that Americans piloted three-quarters of those flights. At the peak of the lift, more than thirty thousand American military personnel were involved, supported by another twenty-five thousand civilians in the United States, the Allied nations, and in postwar Germany.”

  Bill Cochrane flipped the coin in the air, caught it, and pocketed it. He reached to a medium-sized box that he had brought with him. From it, he withdrew a model airplane. With a smile as audience members shifted position to see, he held it aloft.

  “This, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “is what former President Eisenhower referred to as one of the five greatest weapons of World War II. The Douglas C-47. The so-called ‘Gooney Bird.’ America’s do-anything, go-anywhere WWII airplane.”

  With a grin, Cochrane hoisted aloft a model of the Douglas C-47. His model was eighteen inches in length but with a two-foot wingspan.

  “Quite a beautiful beast, isn’t it?” he asked. “This is only a model of the real thing, of course. Scale of one to one hundred. The real thing was about sixty-four feet in length with a ninety-six-foot wingspan. This model was created from scrap metal many years ago by a close friend.”

  Cochrane turned it aloft so the audience could appreciate it from all angles.

  “The C-47 was employed for troop and cargo transport, dropping paratroops, towing a glider, medical evacuation, and almost any other task assigned to it. It was a rugged, reliable warhorse. It functioned well under all weather conditions on every continent around the world, and it did so with grace. Quite a marvelous bird,” he said, setting it on a side table. “When necessary, it transformed into a troop-carrying glider by the removal of its engines. The addition of pontoons could transform it into a seaplane. Imagine that! A seaplane!” He grinned, as if primed by a specific memory.

  “But there is a third element to the story I wish to tell you today,” he said. “The truth of history and the humanity of history often rest in the small supporting stories that are the foundation of the larger events. So it is with the destruction of the odious Berlin Wall. So let me transport you back to the spring of 1945 and the final weeks of fighting in Europe. It will place in full perspective why the Berlin Wall is coming down today.”

  Chapter 1

  Washington, D.C – 1945-1948

  When Harry and Bess Truman moved into the White House following the death of Franklin Roosevelt in 1945, they heard the resident “ghosts” almost immediately. The building’s groaning floors and odd creaks that sounded like footsteps and drafts that sounded like whispering voices had been known to residents for decades.

  President Truman heard "ghosts" – that was what Harry called them and that was what the press reported – roaming the halls of the second-floor residence. He complained about them to the Secret Service. Many agents had also heard the sounds. Truman didn’t expect his guards to shoo the spirits away, but he wanted to make them aware of them.

  The ghost of Abraham Lincoln, previous residents had reported, still meandered through the White House. Lincoln had not died at the White House following his assassination at Ford’s Theater in 1896. He had died at Perry House across the street from the theatre. But his ghost had returned. Or so the “wisdom” went and so the sightings confirmed.

  Lincoln haunted the corridors and the Lincoln Bedroom, which was now used for guests. Some claimed to have had “seen” Lincoln sit on the edge of the bed in “his” chamber and pull his boots on. Mary Eben, Eleanor Roosevelt's secretary, once ran screaming from the r
oom after seeing Lincoln. First Lady Grace Coolidge did even better. She reported seeing the ghost of Lincoln in the Yellow Oval Room staring out over a full-length mirror over her shoulder, looking out over the murky Potomac. After a few moments in otherworldly contemplation, Abe turned to her and smiled. This wasn’t something Mrs. Coolidge liked to talk about, she being a sober, straight-laced lady. But she couldn’t forget about it, either. She insisted that it really happened.

  Margaret Truman, daughter of the president, was twenty-one when her father took office. She was a smart, rational, young woman who had recently graduated from George Washington University and had commenced a career as a coloratura soprano. She frequently stayed overnight with her parents at the White House.

  Margaret said she heard a specter rapping one time at the door of the Lincoln Bedroom when she stayed there. She, too, believed it was the ghost of Lincoln. President Truman himself also admitted to having once been awakened by what seemed like raps at the door while spending a night in the same Lincoln Bedroom.

  Several other eyewitnesses, credible, lucid people, claimed to have seen the shadow of Abraham Lincoln stretched out on the bed in the Lincoln Bedroom. It would be there one minute, then gone seconds later.

  During one of his stays at the residence in the 1940s, British Prime Minister Churchill had just finished a bath and was walking into the main bedroom. As was his habit, he was completely naked with a Scotch in one hand and a cigar in the other, when he saw Lincoln standing by the fireplace.

  “Ah! Good evening, Mr. President. You seem to have me at a disadvantage,” Churchill claimed he had quipped. The specter smiled and faded out, according to Churchill, who requested different rooms on subsequent visits. Sir Winston’s anecdote might have been dismissed with a wink, except around the same time, FDR’s chauffeur, Cesar Carrera, ran from the building claiming he had encountered Lincoln’s shadow.

  Ghosts. Apparitions. Unhappy spirits.

  Creaking floors. Groaning ceilings. Unsteady walls.

  Strange stuff that would not stop.

  In early 1946, during a large formal reception in the Blue Room, Mrs. Truman noticed the crystal chandelier swaying overhead. Its crystals tinkled and clattered. Then just as suddenly as it had started, it stopped. Mrs. Truman also noticed that the floor of the Oval Study, when observed from the floor below, sagged when walked on. A valet to the president also observed with horror that the floor in the family bathroom gave way and creaked when Mr. Truman was taking a bath precisely when a convention of patriotic, gray-haired ladies of the D.A.R. was in progress directly below.

  Harry Truman, who had served in combat as an artillery captain in World War I, was undeterred by such daily events. He didn’t discount them, took them somewhat seriously, and eventually made light of them.

  “Imagine me in my bathtub falling through the floor into the midst of a tea for the Daughters of the American Revolution wearing nothing more than my reading glasses,” the president mused to friends and family. The comment reappeared in the newspapers, friendly and unfriendly.

  Much like the United States, the White House may have gleamed on the outside after World War II, but the interior was in unsteady, questionable shape. The floors swayed as people walked on them. Joints popped and cracked. Rats brazenly scurried through holes in the walls and across the floors. Specters, noises, and apparitions aside, the official presidential residence was sorely in need of repair after twelve years of neglect during the Depression and World War II.

  Things worsened as weeks passed. More creaks. More sightings. More press coverage of the “apparitions.”

  There was a rational explanation, of course. Government agencies had expressed concern about the condition of the White House in the past, including a 1941 report from the Army Corps of Engineers. The study cited deteriorating masonry, failing wood structure, and more fire hazards than the corps could count. President Roosevelt had dismissed the report. He had other things on his mind in 1941. Roosevelt personally solved the problem by spending more time at his vacation home in Warm Springs, Georgia, on the presidential yacht, and at the official retreat in Maryland.

  The Public Buildings Administration investigated the condition of the White House after Roosevelt’s death. No action was taken until January 1948. After the commissioner of the Public Buildings Administration, who had responsibility for the White House, also noticed the Blue Room chandelier swaying overhead during another crowded reception, the commissioner and the White House architect conducted their own on-site investigation the next day.

  On January 30, 1948, the president received a confidential report from the commissioner of public buildings. The building inspectors had discovered split and gouged-out beams supporting the ceiling and second floor above. To make things complete, structural architects concluded that the entire second floor was “in danger of imminent collapse” and that "the beams are staying up there from force of habit only."

  The number of occupants on the second floor was immediately restricted. Temporary fixes were made to some of the beams. Carpenters installed supports of scaffolding throughout the first family's second-floor living quarters.

  Truman often commented to his inner circle that he was the one man in American history who had attained the role of president of the United States who had never sought the office. He might also have quietly wondered why fate had singled him out. First, he thought that ghosts were pursuing him. Then the explanation for the funny noises at the White House suggested something worse: imminent collapse.

  Suddenly landing jaybird naked amidst the D.A.R ladies wasn’t so amusing. And it wasn’t enough that his home and his office were collapsing beneath him. So was the rest of the post-war world, as if there weren’t enough ghosts from the bloody World War to pursue him.

  There was, after all, the dominant issue before the president: the uneasy ally of the United States during World War II, the Soviet Union, had turned overnight into an adversary. An “Iron Curtain” had descended, as Winston Churchill had observed in 1946.

  There were now two world superpowers. The United States and The Soviet Union. Relations between the two were deteriorating day by day. It didn’t take a genius to figure out where the new East-West hostilities could create a flashpoint that could trigger a war: Berlin.

  Bess Truman bailed out of Washington and went home to Missouri, leaving her husband alone and crankier and more cantankerous than ever in the crumbling White House. Harry tried to put the ghosts out of his mind and focus on Berlin. What in the hell was Joseph Stalin up to with his increasingly complicated and stubborn machinations in the occupied German capital?

  Truman could have used some foreign policy advice from Lincoln, had such been possible. But in the early weeks of 1948, none had been forthcoming.

  Chapter 2

  Germany - 1945

  The final weeks of fighting in Europe, the spring of 1945, had been structured by two events that, for the moment, drew the world’s attention away from the victorious march of the Allied armies moving eastward.

  First, President Franklin Roosevelt had died at Warm Springs, Georgia on April 12. The passing of Roosevelt was momentous. Many American soldiers openly cried in their trenches. “I felt like my father had died,” one said. In Berlin, Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, rushed to Hitler. “We are saved!'” he exclaimed. “This is the miracle we have been hoping for!”

  Goebbels and Hitler rejoiced. They thought that somehow the passing of the American president and his replacement by Harry Truman would help the Nazi cause. They were wrong. The Allied war machine continued. The deaths of Hitler and Goebbels followed eighteen days later.

  On the next day or shortly thereafter, while the attention of the world was focused on Washington, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied commander, ordered his armies to stand on the Elbe River, approximately seventy-five miles southwest of Berlin. Ike held his position and refused to push on to the German capital.

  Lt. Gen. William Simpson
, in command of the U.S. Ninth Army, had reached the Elbe at Magdeburg on April 11 and secured two bridgeheads. Units of Lt. General Simpson's army took Jeeps to the outskirts of Berlin without resistance. The Germans had ceased fighting. Simpson's bridges were sixty miles from the city. But not all German units were yet ready to surrender. And the fact that the Wehrmacht allowed a few Jeeps to drive to the edge of Berlin did not prove that Simpson's Ninth Army would not have been furiously resisted.

  On April 14 Simpson asked General Bradley for permission to go on to Berlin. Bradley relayed the request to General Eisenhower.

  Ike gave a clear response. ''No.''

  Eisenhower had his reasons. Three days after Roosevelt’s death, war correspondents had been allowed to visit Eisenhower in his headquarters in Reims, France. Ike’s aides ushered them into his cramped office. In unison, they asked the same questions.

  ''Why did American troops stop on the Elbe? Why don't you capture Berlin?''

  ''Berlin is only a political objective,” Ike answered. “It is not a military objective.''

  He then deflected further with one of his characteristically charming, non-response responses. The more complete story emerged later. Eisenhower had conferred with his field commanders.

  Gen. George Patton had said, ''We had better take Berlin, and quick.'' But Gen. Omar Bradley estimated that to take Berlin would necessitate one hundred thousand Allied casualties.

  Eisenhower had two larger reasons for staying in place on the Elbe.

  First, his armies were already positioned well beyond the line of the Western Occupation Zones that had been agreed to with the Soviets at the Yalta conference of 1943. At war’s end, which was soon to come, the Western Allies had agreed to allow Soviet occupation of Saxony and Pomerania in exchange for a portion of Berlin. Like Germany as a whole, the city would be divided into occupied sectors: American, French, British, and Soviet. Why take a hundred thousand casualties for land that would have to be handed over?