Armageddon (54 page)

“Gerd! Germans have to change their ways!”

“How, Erna? Do you believe a doddering old fool like Uncle Ulrich can lead the German people? Do you believe the German people will be kept down? We have energy and brains. We are not nigger slaves or wailing Jews.” He laughed with irony. “Even this destruction will have its compensations. Homes and factories have to be built and we need machinery and guns. This will bring Germany jobs and prosperity. Total destruction means total reconstruction.”

“For God’s sake! Don’t you know about Auschwitz?”

“Of course. In the prison camp the Amis held classes called reorientation to democracy. We were told at great length about our wicked ways. It was a joke among the prisoners.”

“You feel no shame?”

“Why should I? What did I do? Besides, let us not pretend we suddenly love the Jews because we lost the war. I think it’s a pity we didn’t kill all of them.”

Ernestine jumped off the boulder. Gerd reached for her. She stiffened at his touch. “Dietrich Rascher always told me you took things too seriously.”

Hilde was getting more nervous around Elke Handfest. Elke’s hand was constantly touching her, squeezing her leg, brushing her bosom. One night she asked Fritz Stumpf not to give her any more dates with Elke.

But she was no longer in a position to make demands. Her day as queen bee was over. Berlin swarmed with beehives and queen bees. Women came in too many varieties and men were too fickle. It was an echo of the orgy running wild all over Germany.

Hilde began to suspect that Fritz Stumpf was deliberately withholding dates from her. Evening after evening now she sat alone in a booth at the Paris Cabaret. She looked bitterly at the new girls, listened to the same tired songs, heard the same complaints. Her dates were with lower-ranking officers and enlisted men, fewer Amis, more Russians. She became fearful that she was losing her beauty. She needed a drink to keep her composure.

When a good date came it always was double with Elke. That made her nervous and she needed a few drinks before leaving the Cabaret.

Hilde toyed with the idea of leaving the Paris. But she knew that all similar places with good connections cooperated with each other. And what if she went out on her own and contracted gonorrhea again. Only someone like Stumpf would be able to supply penicillin.

Trying to leave could bring the risk of blackmail against Uncle Ulrich, or worse, physical harm to herself. Fritz Stumpf had a few more around like the ex-pug, Hippold. There was talk that Hippold had a specialty of using a knife to scar a girl’s face and body. The thought of mutilation of her beautiful body began to bring her to nightmares like Ernestine used to have. In these dreams glass cut her and animals’ teeth ripped her.

She knew now about the velvet room in Stumpf s apartment. The war wound had left him impotent. His pleasure was watching women with each other in the velvet room while a trio played Bach and an ancient actor read the poetry of Schiller and Heine. She cringed with fear now, as Stumpf would often summon a half-dozen girls without dates to come to his apartment.

Gerd’s homecoming set off problems. She remembered Ernestine’s warnings that she was killing a chance for a normal life with a German boy. Chances were slipping that an Ami would have her.

In the days after Gerd’s arrival Hilde began drinking heavily. Sometimes her date found her angry and other times found her remorseful and complaining about her terrible situation. She had started along the path that Elke had warned her against in the very beginning.

“Herr Stumpf wants to see you,” Hippold said.

Fritz Stumpf was no longer gentle or elegant to her. “Hilde,” he said, “your bar bill is growing too large. Last week you drank more than you earned.”

The girl was still beautiful, but the childish charm had hardened and she no longer played at innocence.

“You do not get enough dates for me.”

“There are over a quarter of a million lovely girls in Berlin. Thousands of them would change places with you in a moment. Do you need a drink now, Hilde?”

“Yes.”

She used both hands to steady her glass.

The chanteuse sang the old Kurt Weill Berlin theater song:

“Oh, the shark’s teeth,

How they bite....”

“We are having a little party at my apartment later,” Fritz Stumpf said. “Some of your friends will be there. Elke asked me particularly to invite you. You might be surprised. Things could become better for you again. Shall you be there, Hilde?”

She closed her eyes and nodded ... yes.

Chapter Twenty

A
WEEK BEFORE THE
elections the weather began to be cold.

In the Potsdam palace of Commissar V. V. Azov, Rudi Wöhlman and Heinrich Hirsch went over final campaign plans.

“It is time for the American radio,” Azov said. He turned the power on and dialed RIAS, paced in a slow gait, hands clasped behind him, eyes on the floor.

“This is the Voice of Freedom.”

Rudi Wöhlman laughed. A slight twitch developed on the right side of the commissar’s face. Heinrich Hirsch prepared to scribble notes.

This is RIAS, Radio in the American Sector. The next voice you hear will be Colonel Neal Hazzard, commandant of the American Sector.”

Azov stopped his pacing and hovered over the radio.

“My friends. In keeping with American policy of bringing the truth to the people of Berlin, I will debunk the latest lie written in the Soviet newspaper,
Täglische Rundschau,
yesterday. The article by Heinrich Hirsch gave false figures on the contributions of the four occupation powers in the feeding of Berlin. Soviet contributions have amounted to 10 per cent of the total although a third of the population is in the Soviet Sector. Furthermore, this food has been taken entirely from the economy of the Russian Zone of Germany. The United States has spent sixty million dollars of the American people’s money to bring food to this city in the first year of occupation ...”

Azov snapped the radio off, returned to his desk, drummed his fingers. The portrait of Comrade Stalin seemed to glower at him.

Wöhlman wiped his glasses, replaced them. “RIAS has some nuisance value. It will have no effect on the election.”

Wöhlman had reasons to be cocksure. He had engineered a classical campaign mixing inducements with threats. Feed them with the right hand, hold a club with the left.

“Let us continue,” Azov said testily.

Heinrich Hirsch had plotted a whirlwind campaign finish. The usual demonstrations, speeches, and inundation of literature. “In addition, we have the special events. Four days before elections a fifteen-car trainload of wheat and potatoes will arrive and be distributed with extraordinary news coverage.”

There was more. Ten thousand tons of Polish Silesian coal would arrive for the winter.

The final coup would take place two days before the election. Five Democratic candidates for assemblyman had been “persuaded” by Schatz’s SND to join the anti-Fascist front, legal only in the Russian Sector. They would make their announcements at almost poll time.

It all looked well on paper. Yet Azov was not entirely certain. Brigadier Trepovitch had reported a stiffening Western attitude at the Kommandatura. Moreover, the Western military government personnel had too much experience in open elections to fall for trickery. The Russian attempt to have different-colored ballots for each party failed.

The West insisted Trepovitch submit the list of eligible voters and that he use the stamping of ration books to assure a single ballot to a single voter.

British, French, and American officials would be on hand at every polling station in the Russian Sector.... It would be damned hard to rig.

“These bourgeois gestures do not disturb me,” Wöhlman said.

While Wöhlman exuded confidence, Heinrich Hirsch wondered. He had known Wöhlmans, Azovs, Schatzes, Ecks all his life. At a certain point their ability to have individual thought processes stopped, and their minds were completely dominated by party thinking. They functioned without a shred of anger, curiosity, or protest in their being. They were unable to have concepts of right or wrong.

Men who had no anger, curiosity, or protest in themselves could not understand how it could exist in other people.

Hirsch had never entirely lost these traits despite his training. He feared that their efforts had been a deception so transparent that the people of Berlin were going to rally behind Falkenstein in a display of defiance.

Azov was looking at Hirsch. The younger man had been under suspicion, but he possessed a mind far keener that Wöhlman’s.

“What is your opinion, Comrade Hirsch?”

“I cannot completely share Comrade Wöhlman’s confidence. We should win in a stampede. Yet, some final dramatic gesture is called for on the eve of the election.”

“But we have spent millions of rubles to bring in food and coal.”

That was what annoyed Hirsch. In the coal negotiations with the British they were forced to stick to the line that the Soviet Union could not force the Poles to give up Silesian coal. When Azov wanted coal as a campaign gesture, Polish sovereignty did not exist.

Wasn’t this last-minute flood of food rather obvious when it was known the Americans had maintained the ration for over a year? And now they had RIAS to give their story. Had they all underestimated RIAS?

“Comrades,” Hirsch said, “I believe I have the type of message the Berliners will understand.”

Two days before the election, Heinrich Hirsch’s plan unfolded. The Soviet Union controlled the flow of electricity to the Western Sectors.

At darkness, the people of the Steglitz Borough discovered they had no electricity.

Twenty minutes later the lights went out in the French boroughs of Wedding and Reinickendorf.

An hour later the central British boroughs of Tiergarten and Charlottenburg were plunged into darkness.

Alternating borough by borough, the lights went out in a wordless bit of last-minute electioneering. Without Russian electricity there would be no industry, transportation, sewage disposal, communication, schools, or hospitals.

The day of October 20 in the year of 1946 was a misery of cold and drizzle. For the first time in a decade Berliners went to the polls. The outpour of people brought mile-long lines of ragged humanity huddling for warmth against the first real bites of winter. Ballot boxes were crammed to elect the new Assembly of 130 members.

At dawn of the next day, Berlin was awakened by a now familiar voice:

“This is RIAS calling. The results of yesterday’s election is as follows. The Democratic Party, 1,015,000 ballots giving them sixty-three Assembly seats with 49 per cent of the vote.

“The Christian Party was second with over 460,000 ballots, winning twenty-nine Assembly seats and receiving 22 per cent of the vote.

“Third, the Communists under the name of People’s Proletariat received 400,000 ballots, twenty-six Assembly seats and 19 per cent of the vote.

“The Conservative Party won the balance of twelve seats with 195,000 ballots constituting 9 per cent of the vote.

“The free parties have swept the election with a staggering combination of 81 per cent.”

Chapter Twenty-one

T
HE STINGING DEFEAT AT
the polls presented a new tactical problem to V. V. Azov. He realized the new Berlin Assembly would never elect a Communist Oberburgermeister and so he threw their strength to retaining the old Democrat Berthold Hollweg, whom they could control.

The Communist Heinz Eck was unable to attain to higher than second deputy mayor.

In the Kommandatura a new wrinkle was added as Nikolai Trepovitch ordered investigations into the backgrounds of a great number of free party assemblymen for “suspected Nazi pasts.” He was thus able to keep them from taking their office.

Although the West grew passive again after the election, the first open break between America and the Soviet Union had taken place that wild autumn of 1946.

The Berliners were certain that the few gestures of the West were in the nature of face-saving. They remained cool to each other.

Repercussions of the election continued to be felt throughout all facets of the society. At the university a rumble grew and grew.

Heidi Fritag and Matthias Schindler shared the common heritage of having parents murdered by the Nazis.

Heidi was half Jewish, her father once a professor at the university. Except for the “taint” in her ancestry, the intense girl was a physical personification of Hitler’s Aryan dream; tall, full-busted, blond. When her father was taken away, Heidi and her mother lived in seclusion in that low caste of being daughter and wife of a Jew.

Matthias Schindler’s story was one of pure horror. His father had been a Democratic Party leader in Brandenburg. He was sent to Dachau early in the regime as a political undesirable; his mother died shortly thereafter. Matthias was placed in a series of work camps for children of political prisoners and Jews. The end of the war found him having survived a dozen camps and working as a slave laborer of the Krupp Industries and the death of his father confirmed.

The university had a tradition sweeping back a century and a half with such honored names as Humboldt and Niebuhr and the Brothers Grimm. War had ravaged many of the main buildings on the Unter Den Linden.

Heinrich Hirsch re-established the university in the Russian Sector, appointed a Communist rector, filled the faculty with hand-picked teachers, texts, and curriculum to convert it into a school of Marxism.

All the new students were carefully screened. Both Heidi Fritag and Matthias Schindler were clean of Nazi taint and thought to be pro-Russian.

The returning professors and many of the students did not fit neatly into Hirsch’s vision of the institution. They began to complain to the Americans for a liberalization of studies.

In the autumn of 1945 American policy had been to cooperate with the Russians at any price. Neal Hazzard brought up the question of the university at the Kommandatura, taking the view that it should be under four-power control.