Agent in Peril, page 9
But as the war progressed, it became clear there were fewer British agents in the city. His debriefings in Berne were now, more often than not, carried out by a man called Noel, who he’d known from the British Passport Control Office on Tiergartenstrasse when he’d come across him on official business.
He’d meet with Noel Moore whenever he was back in Berne, calling a number as soon as he arrived and asking the person answering to tell Maria he was in the city and the person would reply and say Maria was out until a particular time and Harald would know that was when the rendezvous would be. He’d walk the short distance from his apartment on Zähringerstrasse, near the university, to the rear of a small, shabby office building on Schützenmattstrasse. The meetings would usually be in the evening when the area was quiet. He’d approach the office building from the other side of the road and if he saw a black bicycle with a red saddle propped up on the side wall, he’d cross the road and know it was safe to enter.
The meetings tended to be quite quick.
Is everything in order?
You have no worries?
And then he’d hand over whatever he’d brought with him from Berlin and Noel would do likewise with whatever was to be taken back to Germany and then he’d slip him some money – sometimes as much as a hundred Swiss francs, sometimes fifty. Harald would insist that wasn’t necessary and he wasn’t doing this for the money, but Noel would smile conspiratorially and place the money inside Mettler’s jacket pocket nevertheless, patting it to ensure it was safe. They’d then each smoke a cigarette or two and Noel would ask him about Berlin – the mood, food shortages, fuel, any gossip he’d picked up, what were people saying at the embassy…
Harald would leave first, Noel passing him by on his bike a few minutes later, always whistling a jolly tune.
But that evening in March 1943 it was very different. When he entered the building on Schützenmattstrasse Noel Moore wasn’t alone. Sitting at a table in the damp room was Basil Remington-Barber, his overcoat drawn tightly round him and a cigarette held horizontally in front of his face, meaning he sat behind a veil of blue-grey smoke.
Good to see you, Harald, you look well – please, please do sit down.
Harald said thank you very much and was going to say he may look well but he didn’t feel it – actually he was exhausted and living a clandestine life in Berlin was taking its toll, especially after all these years. But he didn’t bother: this was clearly no welfare meeting. If Basil Remington-Barber was there it was about something far more important than how he was feeling.
‘Have you heard of cricket Harald?’
‘It’s an English game, isn’t it, Basil?’
‘Well, yes – others play it too – Indians et cetera – but that’s not the point. Do you know anything about it?’
Harald shook his head and said not really, though he thought it may be something like hockey and Noel Moore laughed while Basil made a play of looking appalled.
‘Never mind: I’m using cricket as a way of describing its team structure. Don’t look quite so confused, Harald, you’ll soon catch my drift. There are eleven men in a cricket team and when batting the best batsmen bat first and so on, with the least competent batsmen batting towards the end. Got that?’
Harald said he had, though he wasn’t sure he had and if he didn’t know Basil better, he’d have thought he’d been drinking.
‘Now, every so often a batsman – say he’s been coming in at number six or seven – does frightfully well, so in the next game he’s moved up to bat at – say – four or five. We call that being promoted up the batting order.’
Harald nodded and said he got it, hoping Basil would now start to make sense. He was used to the Englishman being discursive, but he was struggling to see the point of this.
‘It’s quite an honour to be moved up the batting order. Happened to me a few times. Did you play much cricket, Noel?’
Noel looked as if his mind was elsewhere and said ‘pardon’ and when he did reply said he preferred tennis and Basil made a disapproving noise.
‘Point is, the higher one is in the batting order, the more responsibility one has. It’s more dangerous too, faster bowling and the like. All of this is by way of telling you you’re being promoted up the batting order, Harald.’
He paused and lit another cigarette and watched the young Swiss for a response, but Mettler said nothing at first and then asked if Basil would mind being a bit clearer.
‘You’ve done jolly well for us in Berlin, Harald. We trust you. You do what we ask you to do and you’ve avoided being caught, which is no mean achievement after all this time. But up until now you’ve been batting lower down the order for us: you’ve been a messenger, an odd-job man as I call it, a fixer as London have taken to describing chaps like you. But now I need you higher up the batting order. When you return to Berlin, we want you to be an agent – gathering information for us.’
Harald found himself saying that was indeed an honour, though in truth he’d felt a wave of fear sweep over him. He wanted to say he’d prefer to be asked if he wanted to be a British agent rather than being told he was one, but Basil was looking at him as if he’d done him an enormous favour.
‘Is there any particular mission?’
Basil said absolutely, of course, and perhaps Noel would be so good as to take the new ball, which must have been an English joke because both Basil and Noel laughed while he didn’t have the faintest idea what they meant.
Noel Moore pulled his chair closer to table and produced a flask, which he passed round. Basil drank from it first and when it was handed to Harald the whisky tasted of tobacco.
‘You recall how at the end of 1941 we asked you to keep an eye on that woman in Charlottenburg, Sophia von Naundorf?’
‘You mean the one with the SS officer husband?’
‘Correct. Your job was simply to pass by every month or so, make sure she was still around and be there in case there was ever a problem.’
‘Which I have been doing. Is there a problem?’
Both Noel Moore and Basil Remington-Barber nodded.
‘We last heard from her just over a fortnight ago, on Wednesday the tenth when she sent a short message through the kiosk on Budapester Strasse saying we may not hear from her for a while. Importantly, there was no coded warning embedded in the message, which there would have been had she been caught or was about to be caught.’
‘And that’s it, old chap,’ said Basil. ‘Since then, nothing. Now London’s jumping up and down wanting to know where the hell is she – as if it’s our fault, dammit – and when I reply saying we’d quite like to know too, that doesn’t seem to ameliorate matters. So, we need to know where she is.’
‘The last we heard of her husband,’ said Noel, ‘was that he was taking part in the defence of Stalingrad and, as you know, that didn’t end terribly well for them, so he’s either dead or a prisoner, though I suppose there’s a very remote chance he made it back to Berlin. We’d quite like to know what happened to him. That could give us a clue as to where Sophia is.’
For the next hour they briefed Harald, suggesting ways he could find out what had happened to Sophia, advice on how to ask about her in the least obtrusive or obvious manner, other places she could be and…
‘What we really do need to know though is whether she’s been captured. If she’s in the hands of the Gestapo, we need to know – and it so happens we have a contact inside Prinz Albrecht Strasse, though he doesn’t know he’s a contact of ours, if you see what I mean. He’s someone who if approached in the right way will know it’s in his interests to help you. You need to listen carefully, Harald.’
Chapter 9
Berne, Switzerland
March 1943
‘Is this all?’
The man was pointing at the documents she’d shown him as if they were of little consequence. Sophia started to respond, and then stopped herself. She was tempted to ask the man opposite her what more he wanted, but thought better of it. She was beginning to get used to people in Switzerland being so dismissive of her.
It was the Wednesday – 17 March – and she’d travelled from Geneva to Berne the previous day, staying at a pension on Kramgasse overnight and presenting herself at the Soviet Legation soon after it opened the following morning. They’d been quite pleasant at first: when she showed them her Kennkarte and Reisepass and said she had information to help the Soviet Union and they’d taken her to a side room and said someone would be with her soon.
Half an hour later a man more or less her age entered and explained he worked for the legation – he gave no name, no job title – and perhaps she’d like to start from the beginning. Which she did: she told him her husband was a senior SS officer – a Brigadeführer, and there was a delay as she had to spell it, twice. She told of how she disagreed strongly with him because she was opposed to the Nazis, though he was unaware of that – she’d married him before he’d become a Nazi. She explained how she’d discovered this diary – she pushed it towards him – in which her husband wrote in detail about the murder of Jews in Kielce and elsewhere in the diary were details of other atrocities committed in Poland. He was last heard of at the headquarters of the 6th Army at Gumrak Airbase – near Stalingrad – and she assumed he’d be captured and—
‘How do you know he wasn’t killed? Many thousands of your soldiers were killed at Stalingrad.’ A thin smile revealed a row of yellow teeth.
‘I agree it’s quite possible he was killed, but if anyone could avoid being killed it would be him. In any case, he’d arranged a disguise, as a Wehrmacht officer called Oberleutnant Karl Naundorf. He was gambling on a junior army officer being treated very differently to a senior SS one. Here, look at this letter…’
This was when he asked if this was all and Sophia replied it was and she hoped the Soviet Union would be able to use it to apprehend her husband.
The man said to wait please, which she did. For over an hour. The next person to come into the room was much older, perhaps in his sixties and he moved stiffly, in the manner of someone with a bad back. He sat down slowly, wincing as he did so. He looked at Sophia for a few moments, nodded and handed her a card:
A. I. Stepanov
Soviet Legation to Switzerland
Berne
‘What is it you want from the Soviet Union, Frau von Naundorf?’
She was beginning to think very much the same. It had never been her intention to have anything to do with the Soviet Union. Her original plan had been to escape from the Reich, withdraw everything from the bank in Zürich, travel to Geneva to inform the Red Cross about her husband and then present herself here in Berne at the British Embassy and resume her career as a British agent.
But it had gone wrong in Geneva when the Red Cross didn’t want to know about her husband. They weren’t interested, but the woman who’d shown her out of the building had suggested she contact the Soviet Legation in Berne and here she was.
She now regretted doing so. She ought to have considered the matter more carefully because she now realised that, had she done so, she’d have realised that turning up at the Soviet Legation like this was too rash and impulsive. She ought to have taken precautions, maybe gone to the British first to see what they said. Maybe they could have passed the information about Karl-Heinrich to the Soviets – they were meant to be allies, after all.
But she had to admit that she was too preoccupied with ensuring her husband was brought to justice and, if she was honest, she also had to admit that she was motivated in good part by a desire to see him punished.
She looked at the man sitting opposite her – A. I. Stepanov, according to his card – and he seemed pleasant enough, and although he smiled at her in quite a pleasant manner and wasn’t leering at her in the way so many men did, she still wondered if she shouldn’t gather up everything laid out on the table and leave.
She explained to A. I. Stepanov that she didn’t really want anything as such, but she felt her husband deserved to be punished for his crimes and expected the Soviet Union would feel the same way.
‘And you say you have money and gold from his account in Zürich?’
She hesitated, worried the man would see through her reply.
‘I told you, I left Berlin last Friday and travelled to Zürich. I visited the bank on Monday, but it turned out there was very little in the account, just some cash.’
‘How much?’
‘Just three hundred Swiss francs.’
‘Is that all?’
‘I’m afraid so: it’s typical of my husband to exaggerate like that, to make himself sound important. He was all bluster.’
‘It hardly seems worthwhile – going to all the trouble of opening a Swiss bank account with so little in it.’
‘I know: maybe he withdrew some funds without me knowing.’
‘And where’s the money now?’
She pointed to her handbag and he asked to see it. She’d concealed the other two hundred she’d kept in her bra.
‘And what do you intend to do, Frau von Naundorf?’ He placed a sarcastic emphasis on the ‘von’.
She said she wasn’t sure what he meant, and he shifted awkwardly in his seat and asked what were her plans: would she be returning to Germany, for instance, and she said she doubted it, she was just looking for justice and—
‘Would you be prepared to be of assistance to the Soviet Union?’
‘I’d rather hoped that providing this information would be of assistance to the Soviet Union.’
‘But after this matter has been dealt with. Would you be prepared to be of further assistance?’
She knew better than to say ‘no’, so she said she was prepared to do anything to help defeat the Nazis. She was now beginning to feel hot and uneasy and was worried her discomfort showed. There was no question now in her mind that she’d made a big mistake coming here. She would leave now and go straight to the British Embassy. She leaned forward to collect the diary and the other papers but the man opposite her held up a hand to indicate she should stop and moved everything towards him.
‘First things first, Frau von Naundorf. It will take us a few days to investigate the matters you have raised regarding your husband. In the meantime, you will be a guest of the Soviet Union.’
‘Thank you very much, but I’m fine, thank you, I have a room at a very pleasant pension on Kramgasse and—’
A. I. Stepanov put up a hand to stop her and said there would be no need to return there. ‘We have a very comfortable and secure place where you will stay.’
* * *
The very comfortable place turned out to be on the outskirts of Münsingen, a small town that followed the River Aare on its course south-east from Berne, with the Bernese Oberland and the High Alps in the distance.
She’d been driven there straight from the Soviet Legation that morning, soon after her encounter with A. I. Stepanov. She didn’t exactly feel like a prisoner, but she had little doubt that if she had done anything other than what they’d suggested, matters would have been very different.
She was accompanied on the journey by the first man she’d met at the legation, who sat in the front of the car next to the driver. A woman sat next to her in the back. The journey took less than half an hour and was conducted largely in silence. They drove through Münsingen, at which point the man in the front turned round and spoke sharply in Russian with the woman sitting next to her, who looked contrite as she leaned across her and drew the blinds on the windows.
Sophia could just about make out where they were going through the front window: they turned off the main road, along a narrow road with farmland on either side, and then slowed down to turn onto a track that took them alongside a wood until they came to a house, the grounds of which were enclosed by a high wall.
And this was where Sophia von Naundorf remained for the next few weeks. The house was rather elegant: the design reminded her of Bauhaus, with stunning views of mountains through the picture windows, and parquet wood flooring and walls covered in landscapes. Her bedroom was on the first floor, with its own bathroom, and this was where she spent most of the day, coming downstairs only for her meals and to walk in the grounds twice a day, always accompanied by the woman who’d sat next to her on the journey from Berne, the man who’d first interviewed her constantly lurking in the background.
Very little was said – the woman spoke little German – and while the door to her room wasn’t locked, whenever she opened it, someone appeared in a matter of moments. The external doors were certainly locked the whole time.
She had begun to think about how she could escape and get to the British Embassy in Berne, but her situation was hopeless. Even if she got out of the house, the walls were some ten feet high, their tops studded with broken glass.
The Tuesday after she arrived there – she reckoned it was 23 March – she heard a car pull up at the front and she was soon summoned downstairs and into the lounge overlooking the garden. A. I. Stepanov was sitting in the sofa and indicated she should sit opposite him.
‘We are making progress.’
‘Have you found my husband?’
He shrugged as if to indicate not that kind of progress. ‘There are hundreds of thousands of German prisoners in and around Stalingrad. What I require you to do is write a letter to your husband now. Tell him everything and if we find him, we’ll make sure he sees that letter and the extracts from his diary. You’ll write the letter now – everything you need is on that table. I’ll wait for you to write it. If I’m satisfied with it the letter will go in tonight’s diplomatic bag to Moscow. With some luck it should be with our comrades in Stalingrad by the end of the week.’
Sophia spent the next hour and a half writing the letter. More than once, she found herself overwhelmed by an emotion she couldn’t quite put her finger on. It felt as if she was writing her husband’s death warrant and she couldn’t decide whether she was relieved or appalled at doing so. Stepanov constantly peered over her shoulder and made the occasional suggestion or asked her to start the page again.
