111
Safe house
Potsdam, Germany
BAUER AND VON DER Haas stopped once again at the safe house in Potsdam, where each of them gathered more letters.
For Bauer, it was more correspondence from his wife and kids, more updates, more photos.
For von der Haas, it was more news from Amsterdam, from their intermediary friend who updated him as best he could about the status of von der Haas’s family.
And third, after the inmate uprising at Sobibór, Heinrich Himmler had ordered the immediate closure of the camp and the slaughter of any remaining Jewish detainees. The camp was leveled, and trees planted to hide the atrocities.
Now, Von der Haas sat inside a barn on a barley farm outside Cottbus owned by a sympathetic resistance fighter. “Quite a ride we’ve had,” he told Bauer. “I don’t think we’re needed anymore. The Allies can reach everything by air now. The ground invasion is inevitable.”
Over the past ten months, the two of them had moved throughout Germany, committing acts of sabotage and guerrilla warfare, focusing on targets that were strategically significant to the Nazis but difficult for the Allies to reach in their bombing campaigns—particularly the more distant targets in central and eastern Germany.
Their two-man team was small but nimble, able to move quickly and without detection.
They’d blown up supply depots in Frankfurt and Saarbrücken, destroyed a bridge in Gottingen, bombed supply factories in Ingolstadt and Augsburg, ambushed Nazi convoys in Würzburg and Nuremberg, and caused derailments of armament trains in Gera and Magdeburg and Dresden and Rottendorf.
They were running out of armaments, down to the end of their plastic explosives and grenades and bullets, but by now, there was no denying that Germany would lose the war.
The Americans had landed on Normandy Beach in June.
By August, Paris was liberated, followed soon after by the Allied liberations of Brussels, Belgrade, and all of Estonia.
Italy was fully in Allied hands. Russia’s Red Army had pushed the Nazis all the way back to Warsaw, Poland.
And though the Allies had not yet crossed the Rhine—the long and expansive river that served as a natural wall against invasion from the west—the Americans had already captured the German city of Aachen, on its western border, in October 1944.
Bauer drank from a bottle of beer, courtesy of their farmer host. “You have somewhere else you want to be.”
He handed the bottle to von der Haas, who took a swig. “I need to,” he said. “We’re only thirty kilometers from the Polish border. I need to know.”
Bauer sat down next to him on the floor of the barn. “You know where the AK is located?”
The Armia Krajowa, he meant—the organized Polish resistance.
“Yeah,” said von der Haas. “And I know one of their leaders. We served together in the Abwehr in the first war.”
“A fellow spy.”
“If he’s still alive.” Von der Haas handed the bottle back to Bauer.
“And being the planner you are,” said Bauer, “I assume you’ve already figured out how to smuggle yourself over the border into Poland.”
“I have.”
Bauer took another drink. “It’s too dangerous.”
Von der Haas laughed. “I think we passed ‘too dangerous’ about ten years ago, Bauer.”
“But we were fighting. This isn’t fighting. This is getting information. It can wait.”
“I can’t wait.” Von der Haas pushed himself off the floor. “I’ve waited long enough. You miss your family like crazy, I know—but you know they’re alive and safe. I need to know, Tom. I need to know if any of my family survived Sobibór.”
It took them a week. Bauer and von der Haas smuggled themselves over the Polish border by jumping onto a freight train hauling food to the Nazi soldiers in Warsaw.
They jumped off south of Warsaw’s city center in the Wilanów district.
They had to evade Nazi troops and gain the trust of enough local Poles to get where they wanted.
It led to some difficult moments, the occasional gun pointed in their faces, but after several days, von der Haas met with an old comrade in Abwehr, Germany’s spy agency.
Stanislaw was a dark-eyed, broad-shouldered man with a thick mustache.
He gave von der Haas a hearty greeting when he walked in.
“This man,” he said to Bauer, “could decode a message like no man I’ve met.
You two need something to drink!” He barked in Polish at one of the armed guards standing sentry at the door, clearly an underling.
Von der Haas waved him off. “How are you doing, Stan?”
“They have destroyed Warsaw. On Himmler’s orders.
” Stanislaw leaned back in his chair. “The Russians will have taken Warsaw from the Nazis within the month. But the city is in tatters. And the Russians? They are now remembering how much they hate us, and we them. The future does not look bright for Poland. Will the Allies protect us when this is over? Or will they hand us over to Stalin?”
The guard put down three tin cups filled with vodka.
“Na zdrowie.” Stan raised his cup. They clinked their cups and downed the liquor.
“Now.” Stan wiped his mouth. “Your note. We have a Polish man in our ranks who escaped the pit of hell, Sobibór. I brought him with me. You want to meet him?”
The man’s name was Marek Jaruszek. He was hunched in posture and thin to the point of emaciation, with clear blue eyes and flyaway blond hair. He held his flat cap in his hands and only reluctantly took von der Haas’s hand when it was offered.
“I must translate,” said Stanislaw. “He does not speak German.”
“I’ll leave you,” said Bauer, getting up from his seat.
“No.” Von der Haas grabbed Bauer’s arm and looked at him. “Please stay.”
Trembling, Erich von der Haas reached inside his coat and removed a photograph of his brother, sliding it across the table to the man. “His name is Lars,” he said.
The man took the photograph in his hands. “Ah, Lars,” he said, then closed his eyes.
“You knew him?” Von der Haas burst into tears, an outburst of emotion Bauer had never seen from him. “Is he… alive?”
The man spoke in Polish as Stanislaw translated. “I remember this man… he was… put in the carpentry workshop… he built shelving units for the administration office…”
“Is he alive?” von der Haas pleaded again.
Marek spoke without looking in von der Haas’s direction, with Stan translating: “He arrived… with his family… his family… was sent immediately to the showers…”
Von der Haas shook his head furiously, tears falling down his face.
Marek continued to speak in a flat, monotone voice. “Every day he asked, where was his family, where was his family,” Stan translated. “When he learned what we all eventually learned… we were not supposed to discuss it… when he realized what had happened to them… he attacked one of the SS guards.”
“No. God, no.” Von der Haas clutched his hair, eyes squeezed shut.
“They beat him with their whips… and their rifles… and hanged him in front of us… to make an example… I am sorry. He was a brave man. I am very sorry.”
Bauer put his arm around von der Haas, who could not contain his emotions. The man, Marek, left quietly. Stanislaw left, as well, out of respect. Bauer wrapped both arms around his friend and held him while von der Haas wailed and sobbed and pounded the table.
It felt like forever, but was probably no more than twenty minutes, before Erich von der Haas finally exhausted himself and collapsed, his head on the table, eyes shut, his body spasming.
“Hey,” Bauer said quietly. “You want some water? Vodka? You want to be alone for a while?”
He didn’t respond. After a while, Bauer moved himself out of the seat, prepared to give his friend some time alone to grieve, when von der Haas finally spoke.
“I only want one thing.” Von der Haas sat upright, his face red and puffy from tears, but his eyes cold as ice.
“Anything,” said Bauer. “Name it.”
“I don’t care if the war’s almost over,” he said. “I don’t care if it makes no difference. I don’t care if it’s too late.”
“What is it, Erich?” asked Bauer. “What do you want?”
Von der Haas swallowed hard and drew a deep breath.
“I want to kill him,” he said. “I want to kill Adolf Hitler.”