Dan Fesperman - The Arms Maker of Berlin

Yet when Liesl Hartz opened her door, she did not bother with a security chain or even a precautionary glance through a peephole. She simply threw it open and looked straight into his face. Her voice was neither harsh nor challenging. Nor was it timid or cowed.

“Good afternoon. Whom do you wish to see?”

“Liesl Hartz. Or, as I expect you were once known, Liesl Folkerts.”

Her eyes betrayed a flash of surprise, and she stepped back from the threshold.

“Oh, my,” she said, raising a hand to her neck. “No one has spoken my maiden name for quite some time, and I’m not sure I like the idea of anyone knowing it. Who are you, and how did you find me?”

“I’m an American historian, Dr. Nathaniel Turnbull. But I hope you’ll call me Nat. And, well, I found you, at least indirectly, through the granddaughter of the woman who was once your best friend.”

“You must mean Berta Heinkel, Hannelore’s favorite. The one who did her in, poor child, quite unwittingly.”

“Oh, she knows, I’m afraid. In fact, she seems to have spent the better part of the past year trying to make up for it. It has practically ruined her.”

Liesl shook her head. Then her expression took on an air of suspicion.

“I was just about to invite you in. But I would feel more comfortable about it if you could first indulge me by answering one more question.”

“Certainly.”

“Are you here on behalf of Kurt Bauer?” She placed a hand on the doorknob, as if preparing to shut the door.

“Definitely not. If he knew I was here, he’d probably be doing everything in his power to stop me. Because I’ve come to ask you about the war years, and the White Rose, and everything else that happened then.”

She exhaled in apparent relief.

“Then I had better make some coffee. You’re going to be here for quite a while.”

She showed Nat to a couch in the parlor. The furniture was clean but threadbare, and the walls were unadorned except for a few simple prints. Her television set was a small black-and-white model, ancient, but her bookcases were full. A tea table was piled high with newspapers and magazines. The place bore all the earmarks of someone who had little money for luxuries yet had never stopped feeding an active mind.

She carried in a wooden tray with a coffee thermos and two plain white mugs.

“Milk and sugar?”

“Just milk, thank you.”

“I’m afraid this coffee may be the only item of any real value that I can offer,” she said. “I have my impressions, of course, and my memories. But I have none of the sort of items that historians usually think of as proof, at least where Kurt Bauer is concerned, even though I have never had any doubt since the end of the war as to what really happened. Hannelore also knew, but she, too, had nothing you would ever call proof. It’s why neither of us was ever bold enough to come forward. Until, well… I suppose you must already know of how Hannelore died? Or was killed, rather.”

“Yes, I read the report. But I wouldn’t worry any longer about not having any proof against Bauer.” He handed her a copy of Göllner’s interrogation transcript. “Take a few minutes to read this.”

Liesl slipped on a pair of glasses, and for most of the next half hour the only sound in the room was of the traffic, whisking by out front. Her eyes glistened a few times, and she paused often to shake her head, slowly and dolefully. Twice she sighed loudly and put down the papers, as if struggling to maintain her composure. But she never once shed a tear. Too much hard-earned endurance for that, Nat supposed.

As Nat watched her, it occurred to him why this case had fascinated him so much, even apart from the personal connections, and why it would probably continue to absorb him for months to come, or longer. It wasn’t just the opportunity for a world-class “gotcha” in exposing Bauer, or even the higher motive of helping Holland and playing a small role in a twist of global history. It was more that this cast of players-Bauer and Berta, Gordon and Sabine, Liesl and Hannelore-perfectly encapsulated his life’s work. The six of them were his curriculum, Modern Germany made flesh, in all its macabre and tragic grandeur.

Liesl put down the transcript with a final sigh. Dry-eyed, she handed it back.

“Keep it,” he said. “I’ve made copies.”

“Thank you. But tell me, if you have this, what could you possibly need from me?”

“Well, one thing I’d like to know is how the hell you got away from Plötzensee Prison without anyone finding out you’d survived?”

She smiled.

“That was Hannelore’s trick. The bombs blew open her cell, of course, and I happened to be standing in a hallway at the time. I had just been released. Göllner himself had come to sign the discharge papers, which were still in my hand. One of the walls collapsed, and everything was pretty crazy, pretty frightening. Somehow I ended up outside, half in shock, and that’s when she saw me. She took me by the arm and we ran. And that might have been it, except Hannelore had the presence of mind to place my release papers in that poor girl’s hand, the one who was already half-buried in the fallen bricks. Another prisoner, I suppose. No one has ever known her name, because when the authorities found her they logged her death under my name.”

“Göllner must have realized the mistake.”

“I’m certain he did. He knew my face, and he would have seen hers. But he would have been glad to keep it a secret.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Because of what he had just told me, inside the prison, while I waited for him to sign my papers. He told me all about what Kurt had done. His idea of a joke on Kurt, I suppose. I gather he was feeling ill-treated by his superiors as the result of all the pressure being applied by Kurt’s father. Telling me about Kurt’s betrayal was his only way of getting back at the Bauers. And when he heard later that Kurt thought the dead girl was me, it must have made him even happier.”

“Where did you go from there?”

“We tried my house first. But by then my family had been killed, that very morning. So we went across town, to some friends of Hannelore’s in Prenzlauer Berg. We barely survived all the bombings during the next few months, and then we barely survived the Russians. I was raped by a soldier in the Red Army. Hardly unusual, as you must know. Hannelore was a far better survivor. She killed one of them with a pair of scissors. She was also better than me at surviving the Worker’s Paradise, at least for a while. She was quite the firebrand at first. Then they put her in prison for two years, and she was never quite as vocal afterward. Nor was I. After a while I no longer had much spirit for dissent.”

“Weren’t you ever tempted to contact Bauer, or confront him in some way?”

“Hannelore and I always talked about that. In private, of course. We drafted several letters to the press, laying out our case. And I found out his phone number, the one to his home. But we never mailed the letters, and I never called.”

“Why not?”

“Only two things could have happened, and neither was satisfactory. Without proof, the West would have seen it as another trumped-up Communist attempt to smear a good capitalist. There were quite a few of those, you know, complete with forgeries. In some ways that would only have made him stronger, an object of pity.”

“Maybe.”

“Yes, maybe. Meaning maybe we could have succeeded. But then we realized what that would have meant. Hannelore and I would have been celebrated as heroes of the Worker’s Paradise. Sturdy tools in the hands of our new enemy. The very people who were making others spy on us would have been richly rewarded. Besides, part of me simply never wanted to relive those days. Those horrible executions. Discovering that my true love had betrayed us. Then learning that my entire family had been blown to pieces. All in one terrible day. Those sorts of memories don’t bear much stirring up. Even after Hannelore and I were both married, with new names to hide behind, we never said much about our days in the White Rose. Although I gather that toward the end Hannelore told some of her stories to Berta. Maybe that’s what finally inspired the girl to try and take down Bauer.”