D-Notice by Bill Walker (big ebook reader txt) 📗

Robert, who resisted the urge to retreat. “You are to monitor the situation and keep me and the PM informed.” He paused as a thought occurred to him. “Anyone else know of this?”

“Aside from the Germans?”

“Yes.”

“Just some bureaucrats who have been making inquiries about war graves. I’m having my Deputy handle it.”

MacKinnon nodded. “Good. We can’t afford to have it splashed in the bloody tabloids just yet. This mess can still embarrass us. I want it nice and tidy. Is that understood?”

All too well, you bloody popinjay.

“Perfectly, sir,” he said.

But MacKinnon was already hurrying back into the Common’s chamber. Watching him, Sir Robert knew with a certainty that came with his years of service that no matter what happened, Roger MacKinnon would somehow see to it that none of the shit splashed onto his natty Savile Row suit.

Chapter Fourteen

Dark gray clouds hung low and heavy over East Berlin, especially over Stasi Headquarters on Nonnenstrasse. Taking up nearly the entire block, the nerve center for the Deutsche Demokratisch Republik’s Secret State Police never slept. Even now, at just after six a.m., the offices hummed with activity, lights shining out from nearly every window.

On the top floor, at the northeast corner overlooking the twice-life-size statue of Karl Marx, a man stood gazing out of his office window, his expression bemused.

Time had not been kind to Gerhard Müller. His once jet-black hair was now nearly white, the sharp planes of his handsome face had softened and bloated from years of overindulgence of black-market food and drink. But the eyes remained the same: greedy, all-consuming, merciless. They were still the eyes of a predator, a survivor.

And survived he had. As the war neared its end, Müller—now a Gruppenführer—saw the ways the winds were blowing. On the one hand, fleeing to the West would offer salvation of a sort, though he knew he’d spend his life running from both the Jews and those in the Allied governments determined to make the SS pay for its alleged crimes. Unfortunately, he had no funds saved with which to make that flight, and Müller had no intentions of living like a beggar. And despite rumors of an organization forming to help SS members evade justice, he knew this was not an option open to him, for he’d never been popular with those in power.

On the other hand, fleeing to the East seemed just short of suicide. The Russians hated the SS. He knew the part of Germany captured by the Russians would never be given back, and any government set up in their zone of occupation would be as ruthless as the one for which he now worked. And they would need skilled practitioners in forming the new state.

The decision was obvious: he would flee to the Russians. With the armies of the Allies moving ever closer to Berlin, Müller had set about remaking an identity for himself. Identity papers were prepared showing him to be a former member of the Kriminalpolizei who’d been drafted into the army to fight in the east in the last desperate offensive. He then had his blood group tattoo removed from under his left arm—a mark that would positively identify him as a member of the SS—disguising it as an old bullet wound, which was duly noted in his false papers, along with an award of the Black Wound badge.

When the end came in April 1945, the late Gruppenführer Müller donned his ragged Wehrmacht uniform and disappeared into the Eastern Zone of Occupation, spending a few days in hiding.

So, it was Hauptwachtmeister of Police Werner Mueller who “surrendered” to a Russian patrol, and after a few months of interrogation and imprisonment, he was brought before an ad hoc committee comprising a Political Commissar and two high-level Russian officers. Mueller smiled inwardly as the committee pointed out his previous “experience” as a policeman in the Reich, their eyes taking on a greedy gleam.

They then gave him a choice: spend the rest of his life in a gulag, or serve the budding Staatspolizei, an organization that would soon be feared under its diminutive name: Stasi.

For Mueller, it was no choice at all, but he made it look as if the struggle with his conscience was genuine. He asked to have twenty-four hours to think it over, and then after a presumed night of hard contemplation, told the committee that he accepted their offer.

Within weeks he found himself in Moscow undergoing “reeducation” and training not unlike he’d received in the SS. A year later he was back in East Berlin as a Leutnant in Stasi. Now, after nearly forty years of political toadying—something he abhorred—he ran the organization. Men who would bridle with rage if they knew the truth about his Nazi past, now took his orders without question. He was respected.

Feared.

Somehow, it was fitting.

Werner Mueller’s mind came back to the present when his eye caught sight of a lone peddler pushing a cart laden with fruit and day-old baked goods up the street, his back bent with age, his clothes little better than rags. He watched the old man struggle with the weight of his wares and briefly toyed with the idea of ordering him brought before him. He could picture the scene: the old man trembling, his soiled tweed cap twisted in his callused hands, a look of silent pleading on his wizened face. He would approach the man and ask him a single question, the first question he always asked during the course of an interrogation: “Do you love the state?”

Invariably, the subjects reacted in one of three ways. Some would trip over their tongues trying to spit out their love for the DDR and of President Honecker, thinking the more they said, the better off they would be. What they didn’t know is that