Prague Fatale (49 page)

Answer: No. Clearly there’s been some sort of mistake here. I’ve never been in any trouble before. I am a good German. A law-abiding citizen. Commissar Gunther will vouch for me. So will my employers
.

Question: But aren’t you also working for UVOD?

Answer: I don’t know what you mean by that. What is UVOD? I do not understand
.

Question: UVOD is the Home Resistance Network here in Prague. We know you are working for UVOD. Why?

Prisoner refused to answer the question
.

Prisoner refused to answer the question
.

Prisoner refused to answer the question
.

Answer: Yes, I am working for UVOD. Following the deaths of my husband and my father in February and May 1940, for which I held Adolf Hitler ultimately responsible, I decided to work for a foreign government against the National Socialist government of Germany. Since I am from Dresden and my mother is Czech, it seemed logical that this foreign government should be Czech
.

Question: How did you go about establishing contact with UVOD?

Prisoner refused to answer the question
.

Heydrich interrupted the stenographer. ‘Perhaps I did not make myself entirely clear, my dear young woman,’ he said patiently. ‘I asked you to read out only the salient points. What I meant was that it will save a great deal of time if you omit all mention of when the prisoner refused to answer a question.’

The stenographer coloured a little. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

‘Now continue.’

‘Yes sir.’

Question: How did you go about establishing contact with UVOD?

Answer: I made contact with an old friend from university called Friedrich Rose in Dresden, a Sudeten German communist, who put me in contact with a Czech terrorist organization that is part of the Central Leadership of Home Resistance – UVOD. I am part Czech myself and I speak a little Czech and I was pleased when, having investigated my background, they accepted me into their organization. They said a native German could be very useful to their cause. Which is all that I wanted. After my husband died on a U-boat all I wanted was for the war to be over. For Germany to be defeated
.

Question: What did they ask you to do?

Answer: They asked me to leave Dresden and to undertake a special mission on their behalf. In Berlin
.

Question: What was this mission?

Prisoner refused to
—.

‘Sorry, sir . . .’

After a short pause, while she tracked down the transcript with a well-manicured fingernail, the stenographer started reading again.

Answer: At the request of UVOD I joined the Berlin Transport Company in the autumn of 1940 and worked for the BVG director, Herr Julius Vahlen, as his personal secretary and sometime mistress. It was my job to monitor Wehrmacht troop movements through Berlin’s Anhalter Station and to report on these movements to my Czech contact in Berlin. This I did for several months
.

Question: Who was your contact?

Answer: My contact was a former Czech German Army officer I knew only as Detmar. I didn’t know his surname. I would give him a list of the troop movements on a weekly basis. The troop movements were passed on to London, I think. Detmar would give me
some more instructions and some money. I was always short of money. Living in Berlin is so much more expensive than Dresden
.

Question: What else did Detmar tell you to do?

Answer: At first I had to do very little. Just give him the troop movement reports. But then in December 1940 Detmar asked me to help the Three Kings organization in Berlin to plant a bomb in the station. This was much more important work and much more dangerous, too. First of all I had to obtain a plan of the station building; and then, when the bomb was ready, I had to prime it and put it in a place where it had been decided it would cause the most damage
.

Question: Who taught you how to prime a bomb?

Answer: I am a qualified chemist. I studied Chemistry at university. I know all about handling difficult materials. It’s not difficult to prime a bomb. I’m better at that than I was as a stenographer
.

Question: What was the purpose of that bomb?

Answer: The purpose of the bomb at Anhalter Station was to cause panic, to demoralize the population of Berlin; and to disrupt troop movements in and out of the city
.

Question: Wasn’t the real reason for planting that bomb altogether different? Wasn’t the real reason that you had inside information about the train belonging to the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler, that was due to be leaving the station? And that the bomb was meant to kill him?

Answer: Yes. I admit that this bomb was really designed to assassinate the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler. I planted the bomb in the left luggage office in February 1941. This is right by the platform where Himmler’s train was to leave from; and, even more importantly, the office is also beside the place on the platform where Himmler’s personal carriage was usually located. The assassination was unsuccessful because the bomb was not powerful enough. It was meant to bring down a joist on top of the train and it didn’t
.

Question: Then what happened? After the failed assassination?

Answer: With the war in Europe more or less won, it was decided by my controller that troop movements in Germany were of less importance to UVOD; and a few months afterwards I left the BVG’s employment. I was not unhappy about this as my boss, Herr Vahlen, was besotted with me and something of a nuisance. Thereafter I worked in a series of nightclubs. Especially the Jockey Club, where I was supposed to befriend Germans from the Foreign Ministry in order to sleep with them and get information useful to the Czech cause. I did this. Again I was short of money and sometimes I was obliged to sleep with some of these men in the Foreign Ministry for money so that I could keep myself. I also worked for UVOD as a courier. Then in the summer of 1941 my contact Detmar was replaced by another Czech called Victor Keil. I do not know what happened to Detmar and I don’t know Victor’s real name. But we were very uncomfortable comrades. Victor was a very demanding man to work for and I did not like him at all. He was not brave like Detmar. He was fearful and he did not inspire much confidence. He didn’t understand my situation at all, how difficult it was for me in Berlin. And we often quarrelled. Usually about money
.

Question: Tell me what Victor asked you to do for him
.

Answer: He gave me a gun and asked me to shoot someone for UVOD. I don’t know the man’s name. All I had to do was meet the man and shoot him. I didn’t want to do this. I was worried the gun would attract too much attention and I’d get caught. So Victor gave me a knife and ordered me to use that instead. Again I refused. I am not a murderer. So Victor murdered the man himself at a railway station in Berlin where I had arranged to meet him. He was a foreign worker, Dutch I think, and all I had to do was ask him for a light and distract him and Victor would commit the murder. Which he did. But it was horrible. And I said I couldn’t ever do something like that again
.

Question: What station was this?

Answer: The S-Bahn station at Jannowitz Bridge
.

Question: What else did he ask you to do?

Answer: Victor had come into possession of an important list of Czechs who were working for the Germans in Prague. I don’t know where he got this list. He was intending to return to Prague with it. Leaving me on my own. Which greatly alarmed me as I suspected he wasn’t planning to come back. He was scared he was being followed and so, temporarily, he gave me the list to look after until he was sure he wasn’t being shadowed by the Gestapo. Then Victor and I quarrelled, again about money. I was broke and I said that if I was going to stay on in Berlin and do important jobs for UVOD like help to kill people I wanted more money to cover my expenses. We’d arranged to meet at the station in Nollendorfplatz, in the blackout, but as he went away there was an accident and Victor was knocked down and killed by a taxi. Which was a disaster
.

Question: So what did you do then?

Answer: I was in real shit here. Without a contact in Berlin I had no way of getting the list of traitors to our people in Prague. And no way of getting more money. So I resolved to try to go there myself and make contact with someone from UVOD. But it was dangerous and, of course, I was still very short of money. Not to mention a suitable cover story to get myself down to Prague
.

Question: So how did you do this?

Answer: After Victor’s fatal accident I had become intimate with a police officer called Bernhard Gunther, who was investigating Victor’s death. When I met him I didn’t know he was a policeman; but when he turned up at the bar one night I got a bit suspicious and searched his coat pockets in the cloakroom and found his Kripo identification disc. At first I thought he was suspicious of me so I decided that the best thing to do would be to seem to take him into my confidence. And to throw myself on his mercy and persuade him
that I was simply a joy-girl who had made a bad mistake. When I told him this he didn’t know that I knew he was a cop
.

Anyway I told him that a man I’d met in the Jockey Bar who I knew only as Gustav had hired me to give an envelope to a stranger on a railway station in return for a hundred marks. I told Gunther that I got greedy, which is why the transaction went wrong. And I also told him I had no idea what the envelope contained as I’d since lost it
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Question: Which station was this?

Answer: The S-Bahn station at Nollendorfplatz
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Question: Tell us about Gustav
.

Answer: There never was a Gustav. In fact it was Victor who had given me the envelope. And I didn’t mention anything about a list of Czech agents who were working for the Gestapo. I just told him about the envelope and that I’d been looking to make an easy hundred marks. Subsequently Gunther revealed he was a policeman and told me that he believed Victor had been working for the Czechs and that I was in danger. I think it flattered him that he could help me; and I allowed a relationship to develop. An intimate relationship
.

Question: Tell me more about your relationship with Bernhard Gunther
.

Answer: After Victor was killed, I had no one to help me in Berlin. I thought of returning to Dresden but then the idea of developing Gunther as an unwitting source of intelligence presented itself to me. I knew he was a senior detective in Kripo. So I began a relationship with him. I told him I loved him and he believed me, I think. It was dangerous but I felt the possible benefits were worth taking that kind of risk. And when he told me he had been posted to Prague, I saw a way of travelling there in comparative safety and comfort: as Gunther’s mistress. This seemed a fantastic opportunity that was too good to ignore. After all, what better cover could I have for travelling to Prague than as a Kripo Commissar’s bit on the side? He
even paid for my ticket and arranged my visa at the Alex. In all respects he was very kind to me
.

Question: Did Commissar Gunther know of your involvement with UVOD?

Answer: No, of course not. He suspected nothing except perhaps that I had been a whore. Or very stupid. Or both. Either that or he didn’t care to ask very much. Perhaps it was a bit of both. He was in love with me and he liked sleeping with me. And, of course, also he was too busy with his own work
.

Question: Did he talk about his work?

Answer: No. It was very hard to get any information out of him. He said it was safer for me that way. It took me a while to find out that he was working for General Heydrich and that he was coming to Prague to work at Heydrich’s country house. But he didn’t say what he was doing there
.

Question: What happened when you arrived in Prague?

Answer: We arrived in Prague and stayed at the Imperial Hotel. We spent the first day together. For most of the next day Gunther was away on official business. He turned up at night to sleep with me. Which suited me very well as I had the rest of the time to myself. I had heard Detmar talk about what to do if he and I ever lost contact. The places to go for help. There was a man in Prague, a UVOD agent called Radek. I should go to these places myself and try to make contact with this man. And I decided to go to these places and ask around for Radek. It was taking a risk but what choice did I have?

Question: What were these places you went to?

Answer: Elektra. It’s a café on Hoovera Ulice, next to the National Museum. And Ca d’Oro, a beer restaurant on Narodni Trida, in the same building as the Riunione Adriatica di Sicurta. Detmar had given me some instructions in how to go about this: I should take a red rose wrapped in an old copy of
Pritomnost
and leave it on
the table while I ordered something
. Pritomnost
is
Presence,
the weekly review that Masaryk helped to found. I could buy a copy on the black market quite easily. That’s what happened. And having made contact with Radek in the Elektra – I do not know his last name – I handed over the list of traitors
.