End of Spies by Alex Gerlis (best free ereader txt) 📗

many years, the poor man had found a degree of happiness, and now all that was being taken away from him. Lean told him that his wife had been working for the RAF in Scotland and had been killed in an air accident. Sadly, no remains had been found. When he asked if there was anyone he could let know – maybe family or friends who could come round – Nicholas Butler shook his head and said there was no one. No family, no friends.

Major Lean added the Ferret’s details to all the watch lists, including an internal SOE one, and wasn’t terribly surprised – though he was horrified – when N Section contacted him the following May to say that a man matching that description, and with the same nickname in Dutch, appeared to be responsible for the death of an SOE agent called Peter Dean in Enschede, along with a woman called Frieda Mooren who ran the local resistance group.

Later, he also learned of other atrocities committed by this young, rather presentable Gestapo officer, possibly with an Austrian accent, who answered to the nickname ‘the Ferret’.

The SOE agreed that Major Lean would be the officer responsible for tracking him down.

In August 1945, Charles Lean was enjoying his first holiday in nearly four years when the receptionist at the hotel in north Devon handed him a message. A Christopher Stephens had called: please could he call him back on this number? Apparently it was urgent.

By the time Lean had incurred the considerable wrath of his wife and returned to London, Captain Stephens was ready to brief him. A man matching the Ferret’s description had been briefly detained by American military police officers after a bar brawl in Munich. There’d been some kind of argument and insults had been exchanged with a group of men, one of whom told the policemen that the man was in fact a Gestapo officer known as das Frettchen.

‘And you say he was released?’

‘Unfortunately, but a sergeant checked his name out and found him on our watch list. Fortunately the system appears to have worked sufficiently well for us to find out about it, what… three days later?’

‘We need to get someone out to Munich, Christopher.’

‘I’d like to volunteer, sir.’

‘I need you here.’

‘Why, sir? The war’s over and we’re not running agents any longer. I speak German and I know the case – and I’ve worked in Europe on clandestine missions: this one ought to be much more straightforward.’

Later, Major Lean reflected that Stephens had sounded a bit too complacent, too careless of the danger that still existed in Germany despite the Allied victory. But by then it was too late.

Captain Stephens arrived in Munich two days later. The American military police were somewhat chastened by their failure to detain a man identified to them as a Gestapo officer, and did what they could to help.

The young sergeant from Chicago who’d found the Ferret’s details on the watch list was assigned to help the captain. He took him to the bar north of the station where the fight had taken place, and eventually they traced one of Emil’s friends. Emil himself had left town, but the friend told the British officer what he knew: that the man who said he was known as das Frettchen was from Vienna, that he carried a Gestapo identity badge and had stolen a young prostitute from Emil, a girl called Gisela.

It was only when he was threatened with arrest that he revealed more. It’s only rumours, but Emil told me he’d heard this Austrian was living with Gisela near the Theresienwiese.

For the next few days Christopher Stephens hung around the bars of central Munich, and especially those near the Theresienwiese, asking people if they knew a young Austrian – maybe from Vienna – known as das Frettchen. He was generous with whoever talked to him, buying drinks and promising rewards if they could help him find the man.

But he wasn’t careful enough. He forgot that this was Munich, the city where the Nazi Party had started and that could still be regarded as its heartland. One man who overheard Stephens in a bar became suspicious and didn’t believe the story about the young Austrian owing him money. He mentioned it to a friend, who told someone else, a man who’d been an SS officer and was now living under an assumed identity. This man contacted someone he knew who’d been in the Paris Gestapo, and fairly soon word reached a man in Frankfurt who said not to worry, he’d take care of matters.

Ulrich and Wolfgang Steiner had first met in late 1943, and instinctively trusted each other. It was immediately apparent to Steiner that they could not be more different: one a working-class Protestant from Lower Saxony, the other a middle-class Catholic from Vienna. Ulrich had joined the SS as a private and worked his way up through the ranks, gaining a reputation for being especially ruthless. He’d lost an arm at the Battle of Kursk, and after that was based in Berlin, where the two men had got to know each other. Sometime in late 1944 Steiner provided Ulrich with an excellent new identity, and in return, Ulrich – who was very well connected in the SS – promised to act as a point of contact for both Wolfgang and his son.

Now they were in a café on Munich’s Promenadeplatz, where the windows had been replaced with planks of wood. Ulrich looked carefully around before he spoke.

‘He called me.’

‘When?’

‘Just before I left Frankfurt – and after I got word that someone was looking for him.’

‘Did he say where he was?’

‘Here in Munich, but he didn’t say where. He admitted he was having trouble with a man called Emil, but I don’t think he’s aware people are searching for him. I told him to lay low and meet me in two days at a grocery shop I know on Türkenstrasse, near the Wittelsbach Palace – the owner’s