It was mid-afternoon before Colonel Meinerz was able to set up a meeting. The same young corporal arrived with the Jeep, and Adam and Meinerz climbed in the back.
“No ‘escort’?” Adam asked.
“The boundaries of our access zone change almost daily,” Meinerz said. “As of 0100 this morning the entire suburb of Schoenberg is part of the American sector. But you can bet your ass they’ll be waiting for us at the Kommandatura.”
“The Kommandatura?”
“The Allied Control Council, where the occupying powers are supposed to work out the administration of the country.”
The Kommandatura was housed in a former Supreme Court building in Schoenberg, a four-story, fortress-like structure with marble stairways arching up from either side, leading to stout, three-meter-high, oaken doors. As Meinerz predicted, a Russian Army truck was waiting for them in front of the building. This time, however, the scruffy Red Army soldiers in the back had been replaced by snappily uniformed NKVD riflemen.
“Looks like we’ve moved up in the world,” Adam said. “Who are we going to see?”
“A Red Army general by the name of Kovalenko.”
Adam inhaled sharply then coughed, trying to hide his surprise.
Meinerz glanced at him. “Something wrong?”
“It’s nothing,” Adam said. “Just some of this damn dust in my throat.”
There was a suspicious look in Meinerz’s eyes, and Adam turned away, thinking about Kovalenko, wondering if the general would remember him. Most likely he would, but all Kovalenko would have known on that night eight months ago was that Adam was an American diplomat, an obscure envoy sent by the Polish Government-in-Exile. It was the same story now. There was no connection to the AK, no connection to “Wolf.”
The driver retraced the same route back to the Landwehrkanal, then crossed the foul-smelling waterway on one of the only intact bridges and headed toward what was left of the Berlin city center.
Adam found some vengeful comfort in the destruction on the other side of the canal. Detouring around craters and mountains of rubble, they followed the Russian truck through a maze of barely passable streets lined with demolished buildings and eventually entered a vast open area of fetid swamps on either side of a pockmarked road. The remains of armored vehicles lay mired in muck, scattered among thousands of charred tree stumps. It took Adam several minutes, mentally recalling maps of Berlin, to figure out where they were. He nudged Meinerz’s shoulder. “The Tiergarten?” he asked, remembering pictures he had seen of Berlin’s magnificent central park.
“What’s left of it,” Meinerz said. Then he pointed to a shadowy silhouette off in the distance. They turned right and followed an intersecting road through the murky swamp, drawing closer to the silhouette, now recognizable through the haze as the shattered remains of a colossal building with four towers and a domed top. “The Reichstag,” Meinerz explained. “The SS Nordland Battalion was holed up there in the final days of the assault. The Russians circled it with heavy artillery and spent a whole day shelling it before the battalion surrendered. It’s a wonder there’s as much of it left as there is.”
Farther on, they passed the Brandenburg Gate. Atop the heavily damaged monument, where a goddess in her chariot had overlooked the city since the beginning of the nineteenth century, a Soviet flag fluttered in the breeze. Smoky, dust-filled air burned Adam’s throat as they turned onto Wilhelmstrasse, the main artery of central Berlin and its administrative center since the days when it was the Kingdom of Prussia. A shiver ran down the back of Adam’s neck as they drove past the bombed-out Reich Chancellery, where a cadre of NKVD riflemen stoically guarded Hitler’s vacated Fuhrerbunker.
Meinerz leaned over. “I was attached to the Sixty-Ninth Infantry Division, First Army Group. We made contact with the Russians on the Elbe, west of Berlin. The higher-ups had decided that the Russians were going to take Berlin, so we stopped and sat there while the Red Army pounded the hell out of the city for over a week with heavy artillery and Katyusha rockets. They had a million troops closing in on Berlin from three directions, probably killed as many of their own men as they did Germans.”
Adam knew about Katyusha rockets, incongruously named after a Russian wartime song about a girl longing for her lost lover. The rocket launchers weren’t very accurate but, when they were massed in large numbers for saturation bombardments, they created a hell of a paralyzing shock on enemy troops and civilian populations.
Adam imagined the scene: So Meinerz had just sat there with the rest of the Americans, watching as the Russians laid waste to Berlin, watching those rockets blast the life out of the city. Wasn’t it the same thing the Russians had done in Warsaw, standing by while the Germans blew it to hell? Did it matter whether it was Germans or Poles, Russians or Americans? Did it make a difference depending on which countries were allies at the moment? He didn’t know. Nobody did.
A moment later they drove past a group of Red Army soldiers smoking cigarettes and jeering at a couple of elderly women hoisting rubble into a horse-drawn cart. Adam instinctively jerked his thumb toward the Russians. “These are the same fucking cowards who sat in their tanks and watched while a quarter of a million Polish civilians were slaughtered in Warsaw and the rest driven out of their homes!” He stopped abruptly, realizing he couldn’t say any more without creating doubts about his cover story. Meinerz was a savvy, no-nonsense officer, and that suspicious look in his eye had returned. But with that spontaneous outburst Adam realized he had just answered his own question. What happened in Warsaw and Berlin were different. They were different because he was in Warsaw when it happened, and Poland was his birth country. It wasn’t a matter of who was right and who was wrong. But it did make a difference. It made a difference to him—because it was personal.
Meinerz raised his eyebrows. “Christ, if you hadn’t told me differently, I’d swear you were right there watching it happen.”
“We got the reports in London,” Adam replied quickly, then changed the subject. “I understand the only German troops left to defend Berlin by the time the Russians got here were old men and the Hitler youth.”
Meinerz looked at him for a moment before responding. “Yeah, and most of them ran away when the Red Army moved in. The Russians charged through the streets tossing grenades into the cellar windows of wrecked buildings. They didn’t care who they killed—women, children, it didn’t matter. Then they’d kick in the doors, drag out any women still alive and rape them.”
Adam took a last glance at the Red Army soldiers, wishing once again for a weapon.
Farther along Wilhelmstrasse, the Russian truck slowed as they approached a massive seven-story structure surprisingly intact in this area of almost complete devastation. “Here we are,” Meinerz said. “It’s the Air Ministry building that Hermann Goering built in honor of his Luftwaffe. I’m told the ceilings of the upper floors were constructed with sixty centimeters of steel-reinforced concrete. That’s why it’s still standing.”
The truck came to an abrupt halt, forcing the corporal to slam on the Jeep’s brakes. He mumbled a curse as the NKVD riflemen jumped off the truck and came to rigid attention. Adam and Meinerz climbed out of the Jeep. Adam stiffened as the thick-necked major from the aerodrome emerged from the cab of the Russian truck. He glared at Adam and Meinerz, then spun on his heel and marched briskly toward the steps of the imposing structure. One of the riflemen motioned for them to follow.
Soviet flags stood on each side of the entrance next to hand-lettered signs in Russian and English, indicating this was the headquarters of the Soviet Military Administration. Inside the building, broad corridors extended in two directions as far as Adam could see. Russian officers scurried past them carrying briefcases and armfuls of documents, the sound of their boots echoing off the hard marble surfaces. Three NKVD officers and a young woman in a Red Army uniform sat behind an enormous reception desk flanked by hard wooden benches.