Sam Eastland - Berlin Red

‘Hunyadi!’ muttered Pekkala.

‘You know him?’ asked Swift.

‘By reputation, yes. Hunyadi is the best criminal investigator in Germany. When did Hitler assign him to the task?’ asked Pekkala.

Swift shook his head. ‘We’re not sure,’ he confessed. ‘It must be at least a few days.’

‘Then we are already behind schedule,’ said Pekkala. Turning to Stalin, he asked, ‘How soon can you get us to Berlin?’

‘If all goes well,’ he replied, ‘I’ll have you walking the streets of that city by the day after tomorrow.’

The ash on Swift’s cigarette was now precariously long and he began looking about for somewhere to tap it out. Stalin made no move to offer up his own ashtray and so, with gritted teeth, Swift tapped out the hot ash into his palm.

‘I’ll get a message through to agent Christophe,’ said Swift. ‘She will be waiting for you at the safe house upon your arrival in Berlin.’ He made his exit, still carrying the ash on his palm.

The men who remained waited until they heard the clunk of the outer door closing before they resumed their conversation.

‘There’s something he just told us which doesn’t make sense,’ remarked Stalin.

‘And what is that?’ asked Pekkala.

‘One of our sources in the Berlin Justice Department informed us that Leopold Hunyadi was condemned to death more than a month ago.’

‘What did he do to deserve that?’ asked Kirov.

‘It’s not clear,’ answered Stalin. ‘All we know is that Hunyadi was sent to the prison camp at Flossenburg to await execution.’

‘Maybe they got the name wrong,’ suggested Kirov.

Stalin slowly opened his hands and then set them together again, to show that it was anybody’s guess.

‘If Swift is right, however,’ said Pekkala, ‘then it will not be long before Hunyadi tracks her down. Lilya’s only chance is for us get there first.’

‘You depart tonight,’ said Stalin. ‘The appropriate weapons have been set aside for you at NKVD Headquarters, as well as those false identification papers provided by the British. All you have to do is pick them up and be ready to go by six o’clock this evening.’

As both men turned to leave, Stalin loudly cleared his throat to show he wasn’t finished with them yet.

Both men froze in their tracks.

‘A word with you in private, Inspector,’ said Stalin. ‘Major, you can wait in the hall.’

At that same moment, in the Flossenburg Concentration Camp in southern Germany, Leopold Hunyadi was preparing to meet his maker.

He was of medium height, with thinning blonde hair and a round and cheerful face. Hunyadi was in the habit of tilting his head back when he spoke to people, at the same time narrowing his eyes, as if to hide whatever emotions they might disclose. He was not a man who had ever been prone to physical exertion and now, as a result, possessed a belly that sagged over the old army belt he still wore, whose buckle was emblazoned with the words ‘In Treue Fest’, from his time in the Great War, when he had served as a sergeant in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment.

In 1917, in a battle near the town of Zillebeke in Flanders, he had saved the life of another German soldier who had become entangled in barbed wire while attempting to deliver a message from the trenches to a battery of artillery located just behind the lines. Due to a miscommunication, the battery had opened fire on German trenches, instead of the English lines. In the course of this bombardment, several soldiers were killed and the radio lines had been cut. In desperation, an officer scribbled out a message ordering the artillery to cease fire, handed it to a nearby corporal and told him to deliver it as quickly as humanly possible.

The name of this corporal was Adolf Hitler. Shortly after leaving the trenches, he was blown off his feet by an incoming shell and, although unwounded, became stuck in a nest of barbed wire.

At that same moment, Sergeant Hunyadi emerged from the bunker where he had been seeking shelter from the guns. Seeing the corporal tangled like an insect in a spider’s web, and hearing the man’s cries for help, he used a pair of pliers to cut the soldier loose from the snare of rusty talons.

When the war was over, Hunyadi went on to become one of the most successful detectives in the history of the Berlin police force.

Even though he had refused to join Hitler’s newly founded National Socialist Party, an act which would normally have guaranteed the swift termination of his career, Hitler never forgot the debt he owed Hunyadi and refused to have him dismissed.

Although frustrated by Hunyadi’s stubbornness, Hitler allowed the detective to continue his work unhindered by any lack of political affiliation.

But Hitler’s patience with his old friend came to an end in 1938, when he was informed by his intelligence service that Hunyadi’s wife, Franziska, a woman of legendary beauty in Berlin, had been born into a family of Sephardic Jews, who had emigrated from Spain generations before.

Hunyadi was summoned to the Berlin Headquarters of the Security Service. There he was informed that he should immediately begin divorce proceedings against his wife. An excuse would be provided by the courts. The paperwork would be expedited. The whole thing would be finalised within a week, after which his wife would receive permission to leave the country.

When Hunyadi protested, saying that he would rather leave the country with his wife than divorce her and remain in Germany, he was told that this was not an option. His services were required in Berlin. Any failure to carry out Hitler’s wishes would result in the arrest of his wife and the certainty of transport to the women’s concentration camp at Belsen.

Faced with this ultimatum, Hunyadi had no choice but to agree. The divorce papers were drawn up, Hunyadi signed them, and Franziska departed for Spain, where she was taken in by distant relatives.

With Hitler’s blessing, and under his personal protection, Hunyadi continued his work as an investigator, adding to his earlier reputation with a string of successful cases. Hitler himself called upon Hunyadi to undertake a number of investigations, including one in which a British major with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist had washed up on the coast of Spain. It appeared that the dead man, whose name was William Martin, had been killed in a plane crash off the Spanish coast. Although Martin had managed to make his way into a damaged life raft, he succumbed to injuries and drowned before reaching the shore, where he was found by fishermen as they prepared to set out their nets. Spanish authorities, being sympathetic to the German cause, had allowed German intelligence to open and photograph the contents of the briefcase before turning the body over to the British Embassy. The documents turned out to be a complete work-up of a planned invasion of Sardinia, signed by several members of the Allied High Command. In spite of the fact that Martin had been carrying tickets to a London theatre production, as well as a letter from his fiancee – details which did as much to convince the German High Command as the contents of the briefcase itself – Hunyadi’s recommendation was to treat the whole thing as a trick.

Disregarding the detective’s warning, Hitler ordered more than 20,000 combat troops to Sardinia, where they prepared for the imminent arrival of the Allies. By the time they figured out that Major Martin and his battle plans had indeed been a decoy all along, the invasion of Normandy had already begun.

Even before Hunyadi had returned from Spain, it came to Hitler’s attention through an informant in the Spanish government that the detective had secretly met with Franziska and, in a private ceremony, married her a second time.