1957
Robert Buettner
1957
Seven nights a week extraordinary blondes, on the arms of tuxedoed blond Nazis, decorated the crowds that packed Berlin’s Aces American Bar. The crowds overpaid to drink, dance, and sweat, and this November Thursday night was beginning just as sweaty and as profitable as every other night in 1956 had.
Some said the blondes drew the crowds. Some said it was the club’s aeronautical theme.
Most said the crowds came for American whiskey, backroom gambling, and the Negro musicians who played American rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues. Even though, or perhaps because, all of those things were officially illegal in Berlin.
For that matter all of those things were illegal across the Greater Third Reich. Which in 1956 stretched north beyond the Arctic Circle, south across the Mediterranean into North Africa, west to the English Channel, and east beyond Hitlergrad, formerly called Moscow.
Robby Ritter liked to think Aces’ success had a lot to do with its owner’s nightly presence on the balcony that overlooked Aces’ dance floor. Although the blondes did make keeping an eye on his investment less a job than a pleasure.
Tonight one particular blonde who entered drew his eye. He had to peer around the prewar American Gee Bee racing plane that hung from the ceiling, and the contortion aggravated the scar tissue in his neck. But the view was worth it. She slithered out of her wrap, and the backless sequined emerald sheath she wore underneath clung like paint. She handed the wrap to the silver-haired fat man who had brought her so he could check it.
She turned, surveyed the club, and Robby’s view improved from magnificent to breathtaking.
The fat man also turned, took the goddess’s gloved elbow, then spotted Robby on the balcony and waved.
Robby blinked. “Of all the Nazis in Berlin she’s with Tauscher?”
Robby trotted downstairs from his perch and met the couple as they reached the bar.
Max Tauscher was the gauleiter of Berlin. Technically that meant he was the head of the Nazi Party for the region that contained Berlin. Practically that meant that Max was the man to see if you wanted anything in Berlin done. Or not done.
Max already smelled of bourbon as he bear-hugged his host and Robby felt the Knight’s Cross with Leaves and Swords that gleamed on Max’s tuxedo’s lapel. Max pushed him back to arm’s length then hailed Hitler. At the moment there was whispered doubt whether Hitler was still alive, but even if he were dead Germans would hail him forever.
Tauscher shouted to be heard above the band. “Robby, it’s been so long!”
Robby shouted, “You were here last night, Max.”
Tauscher cocked his head. “So I was.”
The woman hailed Hitler with her right hand then extended it to Robby and smiled. “I insisted Max bring me here to meet you. Margarethe Kohl, Mr. Ritter.”
A diamond-rimmed black-on-red swastika brooch, denoting Nazi Party membership, was strategically pinned on her gown’s décolletage. Robby smiled, bowed, then kissed her extended hand. “I’m flattered, Miss Kohl.”
She raised her big blue eyes to the stubby red-on-white Gee Bee. As the music boomed the plane trembled at the ends of the cables it hung from. Everything else in the club shook too, from the air-racing trophies and memorabilia that lined the club’s walls, to the bottles behind the bar, to the jitterbugging Germans.
She said, “I’m impressed with what you’ve created here. It exceeds its considerable reputation.”
Tauscher turned his head in response to a shout, shouted back, then pointed away from them. “It’s a toady of Himmler’s. I must go genuflect!” He winced as the band’s American guitars screeched louder. “Robby, don’t you have a quiet table where Margarethe
and I can talk with you?”
Before Ritter could answer Tauscher disappeared into the crowd.
Table 3 was a linen-draped island in the corner, an acoustic dead spot that Robby reserved for business meetings.
Thomas saw them coming, seated the lady, lit a Chesterfield for her, then asked Ritter, “What’ll it be, boss?”
Kohl smiled at Robby. “I’ll have whatever the boss is having.”
Ritter said to her, “Straight-up Manhattan’s the house specialty. We import the best bourbon Kentucky makes, bitters from Trinidad and Tobago, and we marinate our own Washington State cherries.”
Robby raised two fingers, and Thomas disappeared.
Robby asked her, “When did you leave the States?”
She blew smoke, then peered at him through it. “I didn’t mention where I was from. And I’ve been told my accent is indistinguishable from a native Berliner’s.”
“It is.”
“Then how—?”
“Your legs. German women wear Axis-made Japanese silk stockings even though nylons wear better. The tariffs on American nylons are deliberately confiscatory. But a lady can bring in a reasonable quantity for personal use.”
She laughed. “I was warned. I stocked up last year before I left Los Angeles. Maxie told me you know the black market as well as you know flying. But what piqued your interest in women’s stockings?”
“Puberty. What piqued your interest in a draft-dodging saloon keeper?”
“I’m not interested in your politics or your saloon keeping except as they relate to your flying. By the way, one American to another, let’s speak English. And call me Peggy.” Peggy Kohl pointed at the drinks-and-smokes menu clipped into a stand on the table. Her English had a midwestern twang Robby hadn’t heard for far too long.
She said, “This is the swankiest club in Berlin, but you sell top brand American booze and cigarettes for half what the cheapest dive in town charges for tap water and peanuts. How do you manage that?”
Robby shrugged. “I keep costs down.”
Peggy Kohl laughed again. “Maxie already explained how you manage that. I just wanted to hear how you’d handle a question about smuggling.”
“I didn’t say I smuggle.”
“I didn’t expect you to.”
What Germans today called Pax Germanium had kept America and the Axis powers at peace with one another for the thirty-seven years since the Great War ended in 1918. But more significantly, in 1942, the
Stockholm Treaty ended the Eurasian War. The treaty confirmed the Greater Third Reich’s current vast reach. So the Pax had for the last thirteen years brought widespread Peace on Earth, or at least on the parts of Earth that the Nazis considered worthwhile.
But Peace on Earth didn’t equal One Big Happy World. Treaties or no, the Greater Reich secured its economy, its ideology, and its racial purity by tight trade policies and even tighter borders. So smuggling, in both directions across what the British politician Churchill called the Iron Curtain, had been a lucrative, but risky, business for a while.
Robby narrowed his eyes as he pointed to her Nazi Party pin. “My turn to see how you handle a question. How and why does an American get one of those?”
It was Peggy Kohl’s turn to shrug. “My boss values my services. And I value my job.”
Before Robby could ask more Max Tauscher returned. He sat, waved to Thomas for a Manhattan, then boomed, “So! Tomorrow. Zero nine hundred. I will begin the new year high in the sky. Will you both be too hung over to keep up?”
Max was a potbellied, middle aged, glad-handing National Socialist hack. But during the short and glorious Eurasian War of 1939 through 1942, he had been “Murderous Max” Tauscher, lean and dashing fighter ace. His scarlet-cowled Messerschmitt Bf 109 had been the last thing twenty-nine Russian pilots saw in their rearview mirrors.
Max still crammed his body into his restored old crate and flew it at least weekly. Robby hangared and maintained Max’s Messerschmitt, free of charge, at Aces Air Park. He hangared his own two-plane special-purpose air force there too.
Still, Robby wrinkled his brow as he looked from one Nazi to the other then said in German, “Zero nine hundred? Max, what are you talking about?”
Peggy answered. “My idea. As you were about to ask, I make films. I got my BA in film, with honors, from USC. But I found out that all career paths for women in Hollywood involve a stop on some man’s couch. So last year I wrote to the only woman in the world I knew of who had any real stroke in the film business. And Minister Riefenstahl offered me my job as her personal assistant.”
Robby’s jaw dropped.
When film and television’s influence had exploded in the 1950s, the Reich’s Propaganda Ministry adapted. Goebbels remained in charge, but Leni Riefenstahl, whose 1930s films had iconified Hitler and the Nazis, had been appointed Minister of Graphic Information.
Robby whistled softly. “Your boss is the most influential woman in Europe?”
Max clapped Robby’s shoulder. “And she’s making a movie! About me!”
Peggy smiled. “Not only about you, Max.” She turned to Robby. “Leni’s given me carte blanche to create a documentary about war heroes across the Reich who have transformed themselves into heroes of peace. Right now I need a chase plane and a pilot so I can film Max air-to-air. Of course the Ministry will pay you well for your time and expenses.”
Robby already paid Max well, and often, to assure that neither Aces nor Aces Air Park would be audited, raided, inspected, or have its Negro employees harassed or deported, by any entity in Berlin, from the health department to the Berlin office of the Gestapo.
Robby smiled at his new passenger. “Lady, I’ll fly you anywhere you want to go for nothing.”
The next morning Robby sat in the left-hand seat of the de Havilland Mosquito that he normally used to “import” contraband across the Baltic from Sweden. The Mosquito in turn sat silent in its hangar, facing out toward the blue-sky rectangle of the hangar’s open doors. On the airfield’s apron Max Tauscher idled his red-nosed Messerschmitt’s engine toward operating temperature. Peggy Kohl sat in the Mosquito’s eccentric second-seat position, behind Robby but staggered to his right.
She tapped Robby’s shoulder. “You say our radio is broken. So how do I direct Max so I get the shots I want?”
“It isn’t broken. I just told Max that.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve flown with Max recently. He isn’t the Ace he was. I won’t be party to a blonde, who an old man flying an antique airplane wants to impress, demanding aerobatics that neither he nor his airplane can deliver. Max will fly straight and slow like he usually does these days. We will orbit his plane while you take all the motion pictures you want from every angle you want.”
Peggy raised her chin. “Do you have any idea how boring a plane flying straight and slow looks on the screen?”
“Do you have any idea how an overstressed plane looks when its wings rip off? But at least watching its pilot die won’t bore anybody.”
“You care about Max’s life.”
“I care about nobody’s life but mine. I care about Max’s influence. I’ve invested plenty in him to keep me out of trouble.”
“Your compassion is touching.” She looked around the cockpit. “This Mosquito is British, right? The Reich is so committed to ‘Buy Axis’ that I had to pack my own nylons. Doesn’t this plane get you into the very trouble that you say you want to stay out of?”
Robby shook his head. “The Stockholm Treaty gutted the British Air Force just like the Treaty of Versailles gutted the German Air Force in 1918. Hitler loved getting even. And the German people will always love him for doing it. So the Reich had a hundred Mosquitos shipped to Germany, then scrapped the rest for replacement parts. This one sat in mothballs outside Frankfurt for years. I bought it for peanuts. All perfectly legal.”
“Why not just buy an Axis-made plane?”
“A Mosquito will still outrun anything but a jet. It can carry two tons. It flies well
very high or on the deck. And, like I said, parts are cheap and easy to get.”
“Is the black paint so border patrol planes don’t spot this one at night?”
“I just like black. And, as you see, we’re about to fly just fine in daylight.”
“That’s an evasion, not an answer. Doesn’t ‘on the deck’ mean so low that radar can’t spot it either?”
“Are all documentary filmmakers this nosy?”
“Just the good ones.” Peggy pointed at Robby’s other ancient black plane, the trimotor parked to the Mosquito’s right. “Your other plane looks like a corrugated shed with propellors. But it has more side windows. I could film better from it. Why aren’t we flying that one?”
Robby reached up and rapped his knuckles on the segmented Plexiglas canopy above their heads. “You can film out of this fishbowl better than out of a side window. Besides a Junkers 52 can’t keep up with a 109. It’s an airliner made to carry seventeen people, which is why the windows. We don’t need a plane like it.”
“Oh. If this plane is so good for smuggling why do you even have a plane made to carry people?”
Robby shrugged and looked left, eyeing the Mosquito’s silent port engine. “I never said I smuggled anything. You did. And that Ju-52 is just a sentimental indulgence. A museum piece. It rarely leaves the ground.”
“Then why is that mechanic balanced on a ladder working on a museum piece’s engine, like its passengers’ lives depended on it?”
Out on the tarmac Max tugged the 109’s canopy down, then his old fighter rolled forward.
Robby turned and studied the starboard engine.
Peggy said, “You’re avoiding my questions. Is it because you’re hiding something or because you think I’m a pain in the ass?”
“Some pains in the ass are worth the trouble.”
Robby pressed the engine start button and the starboard Rolls-Royce Merlin coughed smoke, then thundered into deafening life. When both Merlins were singing Robby released the brakes, eased the throttles forward, and the Mosquito rolled out into the sunlight.
Thirty mostly quiet minutes later Max’s old fighter and the Mosquito flew alongside one another in the sunny sky four thousand meters above the winter-brown and snow-white checkerboard of rural northern Germany. The old pilot turned his head toward them, flicked a salute, then banked away and turned back to land at the airpark.
Peggy spoke to Robby over the intercom. “I got all the shots I wanted. You fly every bit as well as Max said you did. Thank you. So now we turn back and land?”
Robby shrugged beneath his jacket. “Shame to waste such a beautiful day.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Want to see what this baby’s got?”
“I think you’re actually asking whether I want to see what this baby’s pilot’s got.”
Robby nosed the Mosquito over and screamed down to the deck. Then for fifteen minutes he hedge-hopped trees and barns, and flew under a railroad trestle, at five hundred kilometers per hour. Peggy out-screamed the Merlins the whole way.
When he rolled the Mosquito to a stop and shut it down he unbuckled his harness, then turned to look back at Peggy. She sagged in her seat, panting audibly in the cockpit’s sudden silence.
She smiled. “Do you seduce all your women this way?”
Robby twisted back toward her, grinning, but she stiff-armed his chest. “No.”
He drew back. “I’m sorry. My radar about things like this is usually good.”
Her smile returned. “Your radar’s perfect. But our first time isn’t going to be in a fishbowl that smells like gasoline.”
On a sunny Sunday morning a month after the Mosquito landed Robby levered himself up onto one elbow, in bed alongside Peggy in her apartment. He watched her sleep, cheeks like Dresden porcelain and hair splashed golden across her pillow. She had been traveling all week, got in near midnight, and the subsequent welcome-home activities had run very late. So he tried not to wake her.
The previous month had been the happiest of his life. Every minute of every day she was in town and not at the Ministry they were together. He stayed home from the club to be with her most nights. The boss’s absence hadn’t hurt revenues, so maybe delegation wasn’t just a catchphrase.
He eased from beneath the covers, padded to the kitchen and started coffee.
When he ran the water she called from the bedroom, “Bring me a cup?”
He called, “Sure, babe. Then I’m going out for the papers and a strudel.”
“Welcome me home again first.”
At midafternoon Peggy, in a satin robe, sat cross-legged next to him on the couch. The Sunday papers lay jumbled at his feet, and strudel crumbs littered plates on the coffee table.
She laid her head on his bare chest. “Babe, it’s time we talk.”
“Agreed. I need to quit hogging the strudel.”
“No. I mean cards-on-the-table talk.”
His heart skipped. “Okay. You first or me?”
“Robby, I know you’re not who you say you are.”
“Bullshit. You told me I smuggled contraband into Germany the night you walked in my door. And you know I’ve paid off people like Max for years so I can keep doing it.”
“That’s not what I
mean.”
“Oh really?” Robby smirked but he knew his eyes gave him away. “And how would you know I’m not who I say I am?”
“Because I’m not who I say I am. Robby, when I came to Germany to work for Leni I already worked for the U.S. government. I still do.”
“You’re a spy?”
“A pretty fair one. But you’re not Robert Ritter, minor league air racer who ran away to Portugal in 1940 to dodge the U.S. draft. Which is the fairy tale Max believes.”
He shrugged. “Maybe it’s not a fairy tale.”
She shook her head. “For years the Nazis have been spinning their own tales about how all the undesirables in the Greater Reich just moved on and now there are none left. You know and U.S. Intelligence knows it’s the biggest lie in history. And we both know surviving Jews still trickle out of hiding in attics and cellars across the Reich and make a run for it.”
“That’s a sad story.”
Peggy smiled. “You know, babe, some of the runners make it. Some of them make it all the way to America. And do you know the first thing that happens when they arrive? We debrief them because we know fuck all about what goes on behind the Iron Curtain.”
“Sounds like a happy ending for you and for them.”
“And some of them told stories. Stories about an American who smuggled Jews and gypsies and homosexuals out, flying them across the Baltic to Sweden. He refused to take a cent from his passengers. In fact he gave them money to help them get started in their new lives.”
Robby shrugged. “Well, that can’t be me. Because he sounds like a sucker.”
Peggy shook her head. “Have you been playing a selfish jerk so long that you don’t remember who you really are?”
“I remember who brought you breakfast. And even though I just found out that you’ve been lying to me since the minute we met I still want to bring you breakfast. Forever. Isn’t that enough?”
“Robby, before I was a spy I was an analyst. Analysts connect the dots so the real spies know what to look for. I turned up two hundred records of Americans who knew how to fly, who dropped out of sight in Europe before this mystery pilot popped up. I handed the personnel file of one of those two hundred to a refugee who I was debriefing. A Jewish orphan who your sucker had flown out of Berlin. She recognized the file photo before I could blink.
“His name was Robert Roark. Trust fund kid. Graduate aeronautical engineering student. Had it made but dropped out of Purdue after the war started in Europe. Went to Canada, enlisted in the British Royal Air Force. So many Americans like him refused to do nothing while America watched the Nazis rape Europe that the RAF assigned the Yanks their own squadrons. Roark’s Hurricane was set afire during an Eagle Squadron dogfight over
Lille in 1941. Nobody saw a chute.”
Robby swallowed.
Peggy said, “Since you probably haven’t heard, Roark’s squadron leader wrote that Roark saved his wingman’s life by sacrificing his own. He was decorated posthumously. And the orphan told me that if Judaism had saints a thousand Jews would vote for the man in that picture.”
Robby felt his lip quiver and his eyes flooded.
Peggy took Robby’s face in her hands as her own eyes flooded. “My darling, you are so much handsomer than your photograph.”
In the Sunday-evening twilight they walked arm in arm along the Unter den Linden, just one couple among many. The lime trees were still bare and the cold wind made eavesdropping unlikely.
Peggy said, “You never came home. Why?”
“I broke my neck when I crashed. The Germans had occupied Lille so the resistance people who hid me couldn’t get it set properly at a hospital. I took months to heal. Most days I still ache.
“By the time I was healthy enough to think about going back to America to rejoin the fight, the fight was over. America never even entered the war. I had been a sucker. I wasn’t sticking my neck out again. Certainly not for America. Instead I became the kind of American the Nazis would tolerate over here. Then I did what I could about the things America wouldn’t do.”
“The world needs more suckers like you.”
“What about you? You’re not really a movie professional, then?”
“Oh that part’s strictly true. No spy would dare try to fool one of the world’s most professional filmmakers with a legend studied up on in a couple of months. Leni hired me because I’m the real McCoy. It’s the tradecraft I had to learn in a couple months.”
“Tradecraft. Secret messages, that stuff?”
“Mostly.”
“You could’ve told me sooner, babe. It would have eased my conscience to know I wasn’t sleeping with a Nazi. For that matter, why did you tell me now?”
She looked up into the lime trees. “Because now I’m sure I need your help.”
“Huh?”
“To fly one planeload of people out to Sweden. Basically the same thing you’ve been doing for years. Until yesterday I wasn’t sure all of them would come out.”
Robby stopped, stepped back from her and narrowed his eyes. “You put Max in your movie just to get to me.”
“You thought it was because I have a thing for fat, disgusting Nazis?”
“Oh. So tell me. Which one of us have you hated fucking least?”
She slapped him so hard that he staggered.
A green-coated uniformed cop strolling the boulevard’s opposite sidewalk stopped and peered at them through the lime trees.
Peggy pulled Robby tight against her and whispered in his ear, “Smile and wave or we may both wind up dead.”
They both turned toward the cop, smiled and waved.
He smiled back as he touched his baton to his flat-topped helmet’s brim, saluting two quarreling lovers who had made up. Then he walked on.
They walked on too and Robby said, “You exaggerated, right? If they catch Germans spying that’s treason and they kill them. But if you get caught spying they just revoke your visa and ship you home.”
Peggy shook her head. “If I were a spy working out of the U.S. Embassy, yes. But I don’t operate under an official cover. The Nazis hang my kind of spies’ bodies from piano wires after they torture us.” Peggy tugged up her coat collar. “It’s chilly. Do you want to stop for schnapps?”
“Jesus!” Robby paused alongside a bench and leaned against its back, then he sat.
Peggy sat beside him. “What is it?”
“You say it like you’ve been risking a jaywalking ticket.”
“You take risks too.”
“I can buy my way out of the trouble I risk.”
“Which is why I didn’t tell you before. If they caught me you couldn’t confess to what you didn’t know. Robby, you can’t buy your way out of the kind of trouble I’m asking you to get into. You can still walk away from it.”
“That would mean walking away from you. I’d sooner hang.”
“Are you sure you understand?”
“I’m beginning to. All these trips you’ve been taking? To godforsaken corners of the Reich like Jáchymov in the Sudetenland and Peenemünde on the Baltic? Any filming of heroic Nazis you did was incidental to recruiting the defectors who you need me to fly out.”
“For a dumb saloon keeper you catch on quick.”
“Not entirely. Why do they do it? Switch sides I mean.”
Peggy shrugged. “Figuring out why is the key to recruiting defectors. For some people it’s money. For some people it’s ego. With men that usually means they follow their dicks. For women it may mean following someone they love. For other people it’s because the country did them, or someone they love, wrong. ...
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