The man sat down in the chair across from Danforth’s desk. “My name is Edward Brock. I understand you’ve been looking for an American woman who you think was executed by the Germans.”
Danforth nodded.
“I can save you some work,” Brock said. “Her name was Mildred Harnack. She was an American who lived in Germany and spoke and wrote fluent German. She was a Communist, but — get this — she was also a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.” He drew a paper from his jacket pocket and handed it to Danforth. “The State Department kept an eye on her.” He nodded toward the paper. “Here in a nutshell is what we know.”
Harnack had moved to Germany with her husband in 1929, Danforth read. She’d gotten interested in Communism and later toured the Soviet Union. By 1933 she’d begun teaching English literature at night-school classes in Berlin. Still later she’d published articles in the Berliner Tageblatt and Die Literatur, but the work had dried up once the Nazis came to power. It was then she’d stepped over the line and become what amounted to a Soviet agent, a fact the Gestapo had discovered and for which both she and her husband had been arrested in the fall of 1943. Her husband had been sentenced to death, but for some reason Mildred had received a mere six-year imprisonment, a sentence that was not to Hitler’s liking and which he’d ordered to be reviewed. The review had ended with a predicable result, and Mildred Harnack had been executed at Plötzensee on February 16, 1943-
Most decidedly, Mildred Harnack had not been Anna Klein.
Danforth gave the paper back to Brock. “Thank you,” he said wearily. “You’re right, that will save me a lot of time.”
Brock folded the paper and returned it to his jacket pocket. “Who are you looking for?” he asked. “Because I might be able to help you there too. We have quite a few documents from German intelligence, you know.” He lit a cigarette. “So, who was this woman?”
“Her name was Anna Klein,” Danforth said. “She worked for me before the war. We were in Berlin in August of 1939. She was arrested by the Gestapo. I never saw her again.”
“What can you tell me about her?” Brock asked.
Danforth told him that she was Jewish, that she was in her twenties, small, dark, with curly hair.
“That’s not a lot to go on,” Brock said.
“She was brilliant with languages,” Danforth added. It was little more than a futile aside, and he was surprised to see that this suddenly spurred Brock’s interest.
“How many did she speak?” he asked.
“Nine that I know of.”
“Was Ukrainian one of them?” Brock asked significantly.
“Yes,” Danforth said. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I have an intelligence report on a Ukrainian named Rudy Romanchuk. He was a forger who specialized in fake documents for people who were trying to get out of Germany He was working for the Russians too. A low-level informant. But they began to suspect that he was working for the Germans. So they picked Rudy up and took him to Warsaw for interrogation. Rudy’s Russian wasn’t so great, so they brought in an interpreter. An American. In her twenties. Quite pretty, according to Rudy.”
“When was this interrogation?” Danforth asked.
“A week or two before the Germans attacked Russia,” Brock answered. “Which means she could be anywhere now.” He let this sink in, then added, “As you know, we’re not that chummy with the Russians anymore, so we’d be interested in tracking down any American citizen who might be in their hands.” He plucked the cigarette from his mouth and crushed it into the ashtray on Danforth’s desk. “So, this woman. The one who was in Warsaw. Could she have been Anna Klein?”
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
“I had no idea, of course,” Danforth said, “and I told Brock that. I had too little to go on, and I didn’t want to tell him anything about Anna he didn’t already know. Which was nothing.”
“So, you don’t think Brock knew anything about the Project?” I asked. “Anything about Anna being in France, anything at all about her?”
“I couldn’t tell what he knew,” Danforth said, “other than that an American woman had been translating for the Soviets in Warsaw just before the Germans invaded Russia, which was in June of 1941.” He leaned back slightly. “But if this woman was Anna, then she was still alive in June of 1941, alive and in Warsaw, which meant that she’d been turned over to the Soviets.” He paused, then added, “But why would the Germans have turned a woman who’d plotted to kill Adolf Hitler over to the Russians?”
I had no answer for this, and so I simply shrugged.
“Don’t feel inadequate, Paul,” Danforth said. “No one knew the answer to that question. Which is why I was ordered to find it.”
“Ordered? You?”
“I was still in the army, so who would have been a better choice?” Danforth asked. “By that time, I spoke passable Polish and a little Russian. Brock had a few leads. He knew that Romanchuk had later been arrested and sent to Auschwitz, which he’d survived. It was only after the war that he’d vanished. But then so had this woman, which left me no option but to assume that she was still alive.”
I thought over all Danforth had just told me, then said, “But realistically, could a woman who’d tried to kill Hitler have survived the war?”
“I had the same question, Paul,” Danforth answered. “And although the supposition seemed far-fetched, I looked into whether it might be possible. That’s how I came across the file on Olga Chekhova.”
Then he told me who she was.
She’d been born in Armenia in 1897, a niece by marriage to the great Russian writer Anton Chekhov. She’d gotten married quite young to a Jewish man, and she’d borne him a daughter. She later divorced him but she never lost interest in the welfare of her daughter. The Russian Revolution drove her to Germany She went by train to Vienna in the company of a Soviet agent, then on to Berlin, where she managed to get work as an actress. By 1930, she’d become one of the brightest stars in German cinema. She’d also attracted the notice of Adolf Hitler, in whose company she’d been photographed. Olga looked quite lovely as she sat next to the man himself, and the picture’s significance had not been lost on Soviet intelligence.
“From that picture, the Communists knew that Olga was a member of the true in crowd, familiar with all the Nazi bigwigs,” Danforth said, “and since she had family still in Russia, they decided she could be pressured into the spy game.”
They were right, and Olga Chekhova became a sleeper agent, Danforth told me. At one point she’d even been discussed as a critical figure in a Russian secret police plot to assassinate Hitler.
“Rather like Anna, don’t you think, Paul?” Danforth said at the conclusion of this narrative.
“A little too much like Anna,” I agreed. “What happened to Olga?”
“She was never discovered by the Germans,” Danforth answered. “Once Berlin fell, she was flown to Moscow, where she was debriefed. Then she went back to Germany, where she lived quite well under Soviet protection.” He smiled. “Her last words were ‘Life is beautiful.”‘