Norman Ohler - The Infiltrators: The Lovers Who Led Germanys Resistance Against the Nazis

The
INFILTRATORS

ALSO BY NORMAN OHLER

Blitzed

The Lovers Who Led
Germanys Resistance
Against the Nazis

NORMAN OHLER

Translated from the German
by Tim Mohr and Marshall Yarbrough

This edition published by arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright Norman Ohler, 2020

Translation copyright Tim Mohr and Marshall Yarbrough, 2020

The moral right of Norman Ohler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitt ed in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Excerpts of unpublished lett ers accessed through the Red Orchestra Collection at the German Resistance Memorial Center and the archives at the Institute for Contemporary History. Used in English translation by kind permission of E. Schulze-Boysen.

Endpapers: Map of Berlin 1942 Pharus-Plan. Used by permission.

Illustration credits: All images reproduced by permission of the German Resistance Memorial Center, Berlin, with the following exceptions: page 11, Guillaume: Leurs Silhouett e No. 9 by Orens, October 11, 1908; page 42, bpk-Bildagentur; page 131, Gyula Pap/Design and Artists Copyright Society; pages 64, 156, 215, 221, Bundesarchiv.

Book design by Margaret Rosewitz

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978-1-83895-211-2

E-book ISBN: 978-1-83895-212-9

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-83895-213-6

Printed in Great Britain

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For the kids

It would make an amazing story if it werent so illegal.

A GESTAPO OFFICER

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize how it really was. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

WALTER BENJAMIN,

Theses on the Philosophy of History

The
INFILTRATORS

When I was about twelve years old, I was sitt ing in the garden of my grandparents house, set in a valley on the outskirts of a small city in southwest Germany, near the border with French Lorraine. In March 1945 the town, which was also the place of my birth, was leveled by the British and Canadian Royal Air Force, with more than 90 percent of the baroque buildings destroyed. My grandmother and grandfather fared the same as almost everyone else: nothing of their home survived the hail of bombs. So my grandfather built a new house after the war out of rubble, with his own hands. He dubbed it Haus Morgensonne, or the House of the Morning Sun, and the gravel road that led there he named Wiesengrund, or Meadowland, and it was later labeled as such on official maps.

We often played a board game called Mensch rgere Dich Nicht (Man, Dont Worry), similar to Sorry, in the garden of the House of the Morning Sun. Before the dice were rolled my grandfather usually said, Play hard but fair! This directive scared me a bit, even though I had nothing against fair play and he wasnt particularly serious about playing hard, since, after all, we were only trying to have as much fun as possible while passing the time. But on this particular afternoon, fair or unfair, I refused to roll the dice until he told me a story about the war. Wed seen a documentary that morning at school about the liberation of a concentration camp, the piles of eyeglasses, the emaciated faces, cutt ing effectively to shots of jubilant Germans hailing Hitler. Not a single pupil was allowed to leave the room before the film was over.

So I wanted to know whether my grandfather had anything to do with all of it. At first he shook his head and wanted to start playing the game. But I took the two ivory-colored dice and looked at him searchingly. Mottled sunlight shone through the leaves of the apple tree and cast a patt ern of light and shadow on the yellow game board. He explained he had been working for the Reichsbahn, the German railway. That wasnt news to me, and I pressed him to tell me something interesting, something concrete.

Lost in thought, he stared at the evergreen trees that lined the edge of the meadow. Then he coughed. Finally he slowly and casually said that hed been a true and avid railroader because hed always loved the reliability and precision of the railroads. And that he could never have imagined what was going to happen. I immediately asked: What happened? Hesitantly, he told me that hed been working as an engineer did I know what an engineer was? Even though I didnt really know exactly, I nodded. During the war, he continued, hed been transferred to the northern Bohemian town of Brx, a hole at the junction of the Aussig-Komotau, Pilsen-Priesen, and Prague-Dux lines.

One winter evening, as fresh snow covered the black double lines of the tracks, as well as the meadow, the trees, and the frozen Eger River, an arriving train was shunted onto a siding, my grandfather said with a halting voice, a long freighter with stock cars that had to let a munitions transport pass. Wheels screeched as they crossed the shunting switch, calls rang out, a long whistle. Steam billowed and dissipated. The stock cars were uncoupled. Silence descended on the white-covered valley again.

But something wasnt right. My grandfather felt it; his railroader instincts told him. After a while he left his litt le station house and approached the siding. The only thing audible was the gurgling water of the Eger flowing beneath its frozen surface. Uneasy, he walked along the entire row of cars. Just as he went to turn away, something moved in one of the narrow ventilation slits on the upper half of a sliding door on one of the cars. A tin cup on a string was lowered from the opening, clanged against the wood of the side of the car, got stuck on the door handle, broke free, and then dangled slowly down and dipped into the snow next to the tracks. A moment later the string tightened and pulled the filled vessel back up. A childs hand only a childs hand would fit through the slit appeared above and grabbed hold of the cup.

People, not livestock! People in the stock cars, even though this was contrary to the transportation regulations! What a mess. You just didnt do that sort of thing at the Reichsbahn. He went back to his station house to try to get some information about where the train was heading. Theresienstadt. The name meant nothing to him. A small place a few kilometers north of Bauschowitz, last station at the border of the protectorate. He went back out again to have another look at the cars, but two sentries in black uniforms came hustling toward him, machine pistols at the ready: SS. Grandfather turned around and walked quickly back. A gruff call followed him threateningly.

Its war, he thought, peeking out of the steamed windows of the overheated station house a short while later. With trembling fingers, he buttered himself a piece of onion bread.