Bruce Conord

An August Man

Thursday, 10 August, 1961

Otto Kruger hobbled up the marble stairs of the massive Ministry of the Interior building on Dorotheenstrasse, pausing on every landing. The overcast morning’s sultry weather and mid-summer humidity affected his bad leg more than usual.

In his tiny office in the Kriminalpolizei, the investigative division of East Berlin’s police force, Kruger found a message on his desk. See Chief Inspector Busch. He rolled his eyes. “Scheisse, what now?”

When Kruger entered Busch’s office, the chief motioned toward a man seated in the corner. “Comrade Inspector Kruger. This is our new political officer, Comrade Herr Braun, Ministry of State Security.”

As if Kruger couldn’t tell. The Stasi officer looked like every other East German politisch: mid-thirties, with dark, greasy hair and permanent frown lines etched on his face. Despite the summer heat, Braun wore a dark brown wool suit. His body language oozed self-important hostility—not much different from that of the SS two decades before.

Kruger nodded, but the man ignored him. The chief slunk from the room without a reassuring glance back at his detective. Kruger stood silent, wanting to take the weight off his leg.

“Comrade Kruger.” Braun rose and drew out the syllables in a gruff northern accent. “My job is to protect the people in the German Democratic Republic.”

“Oh? Is that what the Stasi does? I thought that was our job.” He knew Braun expected to be treated with deference, but his leg hurt too much.

Braun moved closer. “Be careful what you say, Inspekteur. I deal with troublemakers like you every day.”

“I know.” Kruger thought of the body of a young man they found the day before. An eyewitness reported that someone dumped the tortured corpse from a speeding Trabant salon car. “I’ve seen your work.”

Braun’s scowl morphed into a smirk as he pulled a gray folder from his briefcase. The folder’s logo featured an arm holding a bayonet-style rifle with the East German flag attached.

“Your file contains some interesting information.” Braun fanned an inch-thick sheath of paper.

Kruger shrugged. “Perhaps you could also ask my neighbors about me. You spooks are quite good at gathering that kind of pathetic information.”

Braun refused to be baited. “Yes, I think we should ask them about you. Your relationship with Colonel General Maron will only protect you so far. How is it you know the Minister of the Interior so well?”

Krueger measured his words, wondering where this was going. “I was his wrestling coach before the Great War.”

“Hmm. How athletic of you. But look at you now.”

Kruger knew how he appeared to the Stasi agent, an overweight man of sixty-four with wrinkles, a bum leg, and restricted movement in his left arm. He knew Braun couldn’t imagine him as a young man, full of health and hope. Both had long since slipped away.

“You served in the Imperial Army during World War I at sixteen.” Braun read the file aloud. “Gassed at Ypres in 1915, wounded in action at the Somme in 1916. Iron Cross First Class among several other medals.” He sneered. “Quite the hero, eh?”

Kruger closed his eyes and shifted his weight again.

“Interesting. You continued to serve as a ranking policeman after der Führer rose to power in ‘33.” He turned several pages of the file. “And served with the fascist Prussian, Arthur Nebe, in the Kripo. You were a Nazi who rounded up communists, Jews, and Roma, yes? Miss those days, Herr Kruger?”

This time, it was Kruger’s turn not to be baited. His past was far too complicated to explain—especially not to an apparatchik like Braun. Sycophants like him were like waves on the shore in the secret service, hiding behind their Soviet masters in a Ponzi scheme of repression.

“Is there a point to this, Comrade? Or are you just wasting my time?”

“The point is your daughter, Marta. She lives in the British section, does she not? Talk with her much?”

“I try to. Whenever the phones work. Which I am sure you tap, anyway. So, Comrade, I’m being interrogated because my daughter lives in the West? Old news. She’s lived there since June of ‘53.”

Braun ignored the subtle dig. The date marked the suppressed public uprising against the Sovietization of East Germany. “She works as a propaganda reporter for Der Spiegel, yes?”

Kruger limped to the window that overlooked empty building lots where the Thousand Year Reich ended with thousand-pound bombs. “If you have something to accuse me of, then say it. Otherwise, I have work to do.”

Braun growled. “This is a crucial time in our great republic, Comrade. Western capitalism is poisoning our young people.” He tucked Kruger’s folder back into the black briefcase. “Perhaps you are a security risk. Perhaps you are due for re-education.” He stared at the inspector. When he received no response, his tone became demanding. “You’ll tell us if you hear any useful rumors this week, especially anything Marta mentions, won’t you?”

Kruger wondered what rumors Braun was worried about. And why “this week?” It was a peculiar request from a security agency with ears everywhere. He’d have to dig around; the rumor kitchen spread most information in the East. He stared out the grimy window, longing for rain to lower the temperature.

“Let me ask you, Braun. What would happen if the Sahara Desert became a socialist country?”

“I don’t know, what?”

“Nothing for a while—and then there would be a sand shortage.”

Sunday, 13 August, 1961 

Loud clangs in the middle of the night roused Kruger’s sleep in a worn, overstuffed chair. Because of his detective status, he lived alone in one of the few Berlin buildings to survive the war. The apartment was redolent with the apple smoke scent from the pipe tobacco his daughter had given him on her last visit. One of these days, she’d warned, he’d fall asleep in that chair and burn the place down.

He checked his watch—one a.m. Outside his window, raised in the hope of a breeze, strident voices, shouts, and the deep rumble of diesel engines rose from the street below. Soldiers, uniformed police officers, and sanitation workers strung barbed wire across Wilhelmstrasse’s wide boulevard, separating East from West.

Like worker ants, men in overalls unloaded piles of cinderblock and heavy bags of cement off sagging flatbed trucks.

Kruger’s building’s ancient elevator creaked and groaned on its slow journey down. Once on the street, he passed a soldier slinging a Heckler & Koch submachine gun. “What’s this all about?”

The soldier looked down at him and brushed him aside. “Are you blind? We’re constructing a barricade.” Then he hurried off.

Across the street, four Russians sat inside a parked black Volga car, observing the work through a thick fog of acrid cigarette smoke. Kruger lumbered over to the driver’s side and showed them his detective’s badge.

“Why are they building a wall in the middle of Berlin?”

“It’s not a wall. It’s an ‘Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart.’”

Kruger almost laughed, but the reality sank in. He stood in the middle of the street and gaped at the harsh spotlights that illuminated the improbable scene in stark black and white. This will not end well.

“Move along, detective.”

Kruger shook his head and ambled home to his apartment. The phone rang while he fumbled with the door lock. “All right, wait for me, I’m coming.”

“Are you awake?” Marta asked when he picked up. “Do you see what is going on?”

“Gut morgen to you, too. Yes, they’re working right outside my building.”

“You knew about this and said nothing? A fucking wall? It’s sick! They want to trap Germans and put them in a cage. I can’t believe you still work for them.”

The stiffness in his knee almost caused him to buckle. He held the side of his heavy armchair and crumpled down into the seat. “I didn’t know, Marta, believe me. I’m only tolerated in the Criminal Investigation Department because of my experience in homicide. I’m not political.”

“Oh, no? You’re in the Socialist Unity Party, and you work for the government—that makes you part of their mindless machine. I swear, it’s like the Nazis all over again. ‘I was only following orders. I know nothing.’”

She spit out the word Nazi as if the horror of what they did occurred somewhere else, far away, not in their shared fatherland.

Kruger sighed. “Let’s not fight, mein libling. I didn’t know this would happen, and I think it’s a terrible mistake. But what can I do? I’m a simple policeman who solves crimes; is that so bad?” He paused. “So, how’s your mother?”

“Don’t change the subject. She’s fine.” Marta paused, sucking in her teeth. “I need you to do me a huge favor. I’ll use my press credentials to get in and come see you Thursday, okay?”

Kruger had not seen his daughter since spring and only spoke on the phone a few times this year. Resentments, politics, and misunderstandings had poisoned their relationship long ago.

“Yes, of course. Come to my apartment.”

“No. Meet me at Café Sybille on Karl-Marx-Allee.” The unobtrusive eatery was a hangout for the models and staff from Sybille, the copy-cat East German fashion magazine with offices nearby. “We’ll have lunch, and you can admire the magazine’s pretty models.”

Thursday, 17 August, 1961

Kruger came out of his apartment to inspect the slapped-together “rampart” before leaving for work. It was still an ugly monstrosity, a crude and uneven cinderblock eye-sore. Barbed wire crowned the top to discourage anyone from climbing over. Gobs of thick cement oozed from the seams and littered the ground like hardened lumps of oatmeal. He shook his head and departed for the CID office.

No new homicides occurred overnight, prompting Kruger to retrieve the folder for the tortured body dumped on the road. He knew the low crime rate in the East was due more to the lack of goods to steal, combined with the pervasive Stasi surveillance network, than a supposedly egalitarian political system. Every office, factory, restaurant, and apartment building harbored informants. He pursed his lips. One never knew who to trust, even in one’s circle of family and friends. Still, as long as people murdered each other, he’d have a job—and a duty to find the killer.

When his assistant broke the news that the unidentified body was now a closed case—meaning a traffic accident, suicide, or both, Kruger packed his files away and left for Café Sybille.

Marta sat in the rear, her back against the wall. With a slight lift of her chin, she signaled to her father that the man reading Neues Deutschland two tables away was her shadow. Kruger chose a seat so Marta’s tail couldn’t view his lips and where he could block the man’s view of hers.

The waiter came over. She ordered coffee, and Kruger ordered a glass of milk. He patted his chest. “Indigestion.”

Marta tilted her head. “Well, thanks for meeting me. It’s been a while.”

“Too long. I’ve missed you. How are you?”

“I’m fine. Last month, I got a cover byline about the GDR polluting the River Spree’s water.”

“I know. I read it. Well done.”

“Isn’t that treason or something, reading capitalist press?” Marta’s voice dripped with sarcasm.

He smiled, but it pained Kruger to think his daughter would never understand him or what he had done to protect her. They’d barely survived the Nazis, and seen firsthand the excess and brutality of the Russians, so he sent his wife and daughter to live on the Allied side. He’d stayed to finish an investigation and never left.

The waiter brought their drinks and retreated behind the counter. Marta leaned forward and lowered her voice. “I’ve been seeing someone—an engineering professor at Humboldt. We’re in love, and I need your help to get him across and to the West. Will you do it for me?”

As if Marta had told him a funny story, Kruger chuckled for the benefit of the watcher. “It’s not a matter of will I or won’t I. It’s a matter of how can I? I’m a senior police officer, not a border guard. I have no idea how to do such a thing.” He took a long drink of milk, his ulcer on fire. “Access won’t be so easy as it was. Have you thought about living here?”

His daughter jerked back. Once he said it, he realized it was an insult. He never did read her right—a girl who fluctuated from independent to insecure, but he knew she’d never accept the authoritarian, corrupt socialist culture of the GDR. He often wondered why he did.

“I never asked you for much, and you were never around, anyway. Papa, I’m begging for your help now.” She put her hand over his and slipped a folded paper into his palm. “Please, papa, he’s a good man, and I love him.” She searched his face for a reaction.

He leaned forward. “What’s his name?”

“So you can start a police file on him?”

“Marta, do you really think so little of me?”

She squeezed his hand. “Arthur Kleinstubber.”

 Kruger scratched his eyebrow. “You know what you’re asking is a lot. It will be a tremendous risk for all of us.”

Marta narrowed her eyes. “Mutter said you wouldn’t do it. She thinks you have no backbone. You don’t care about us; you never did. All you care about is your dirty job.”

He drained his glass and rose, bent in, and whispered in her ear. “I’ll see what I can do. I want you to know, Marta, that I’m very proud of you.”

She took a deep breath. “Thank you.” But her tone made the response sound more like a question.

He kissed her cheek and left her sitting there.

Friday, 18 August, 1961

Kruger requested the records of eleven random individuals and included Kleinstubber’s file—best not to let any single individual stand out and arouse suspicions. He was likely being watched after Braun’s visit, and, in hindsight, Kruger realized the Stasi agent had been fishing to learn if Marta knew of the plans to seal off East Berlin.

Arthur Kleinstubber’s profile proved thin. Born in 1920 and raised by a poor Catholic family in the Hellersdorf district of Berlin, his father, Rudy Kleinstubber, was a carpenter and a disabled Great War veteran; his mother was a hausfrau. He had an older brother, Robert, a soldier killed in the Poland Campaign in 1938.

An excellent student but a dismal athlete, Kleinstubber avoided military service, first in college and then by working in a tank factory during the war. In 1945, they pressed him into the defense of Berlin—along with retirees, children, and cripples.

Armed with a doctorate from the Technical University of Dresden, Kleinstubber taught undergraduate engineering at Humboldt University. According to the file, he had no political aspirations.

He put the folder down. Helping Marta’s fiancé defect would betray his ethics, not to mention the law. Although he’d become disillusioned with Soviet-style communism in Germany, he saw himself as above politics. Catching murderers was his single focus. But this favor was for his only child, and he loved her. He sighed and slipped out the back door of the headquarters building.

Kruger knew who to talk to—the black marketeers and criminals in Berlin’s underbelly would already be hard at work helping people escape—for a price. That afternoon, he had one of them contact Kleinstubber with the plan’s details—the professor would go over during the midnight shift change on Saturday night. Marta would wait for him on the French sector.

Saturday, 19 August, 1961

At eleven p.m., Kruger hobbled down to his car and drove the darkened streets of East Berlin to the rendezvous. Arthur Kleinstubber appeared from an alley on Unter den Linden between two university buildings near the Brandenburg Gate. He reasoned that the professor could claim he worked late at school if stopped and questioned.

Kleinstubber was an odd physical match for Kruger’s heavy-set, thirty-one-year-old daughter. He stood at least six feet tall and skinny. His unruly, wavy brown hair seemed incapable of deciding where it wanted to go. With horn-rimmed glasses, he fit the college professor stereotype.

Kleinstubber slid into the passenger seat, clutching a rucksack to his chest. “Herr Kruger. So nice to meet you at last. Marta told me a lot about you.”

Kruger nodded. “Not so much about you, Arthur, I’m afraid. Ready?”

They drove in silence north through the Pankow district, up Blankenfelder, then left for Hauptstrabe. The street dead-ended against the wall below elevated train tracks, illuminated in fixed spotlights. Now a ghost line, the tracks’ metal support frames reminded Kruger of a steel skeleton. Kruger pulled his Wartburg sedan into the shadows alongside a building about fifty yards from the wall’s construction zone. He turned the engine off.

“I’ve arranged everything. When the shifts change, the two guards will move down the street for a smoke. You’ll have five minutes; time enough to escape.” Kruger pointed ahead. “See the dark crook where the wall jags near the Nordgraben Canal? There’s a twelve-foot workman’s ladder in the building next to it. Put it against the wall and climb over. Marta will be waiting for you.” Kruger leaned across the narrow seats. “You treat her right; she’s a good woman.” He paused. “I never told her that enough.”

Kleinstubber smiled and checked his watch. “We have time for a smoke.” He smacked out a cigarette from a pack of f6’s and offered one.

Kruger shook his head and rolled down the window. “So, how did you meet Marta, Professor? You are at least ten years older than her.”

“She attended one of my lectures on assignment for an article and mentioned how unhappy her life had been in the East. Perhaps she saw a father figure in me? Someone to talk to. If you’ll forgive me, she seems to have a dim view of you. Why is that?”

Kruger took out his pipe and stuffed the bowl with tobacco. He struck a match against the dashboard and lit it. Apple-scented smoke curled to the ceiling and drifted outside in thin wisps. “Marta was eight when the war began and a girl of fifteen when it ended. She lived through the terror of the bombing and fighting and knew the horror it wrought. It was a difficult period for me to hold a family together.”

“But you were in the Kripo, weren’t you? Privileged. Part of the Nazi police state?”

“It was not the Gestapo.” Kruger faced his passenger, his expression stern. “My job as a detective was to solve murders, nothing more.” He sucked the pipe stem; the bowl glowed in the dark. “After the war ended, times were hard, and only my job kept us alive. Food was scarce, and fuel to stay warm was nonexistent. Marta lived in fear every day in the Russian zone. Perhaps she blamed me. Youth only see things in black and white. We live in a world of gray.”

Kleinstubber checked the side mirror. “Like the gray area between right and wrong?”

Kruger glared at his companion. “Tell me, Herr Kleinstubber, what makes you the arbiter of the past? Your records show you achieved swift academic success, but there’s meager information about you before ‘38. What skeletons are in your closet? Even your school records were sparse compared to your bruder, Robert.”

 “That’s easy to explain.” He checked the time on his wristwatch. Three minutes to midnight. The shift changed, and the new guards were already leaving for a smoke. “You see, my name was not always Kleinstubber. It was Klein. I’m a Jew. The Kleinstubbers worked for my father; they took me in and saved me from the camps. Changing my birth certificate by adding “stubber” to the end proved easy. What was hard was losing my entire birth family to the Holocaust.”

“I’m very sorry.” Kruger hung his head. “Germany may never cleanse this stain. It’s a source of enduring sorrow.”

Kleinstubber withdrew a Luger from his rucksack and pointed it at Kruger. “Tell me, Otto, do you remember where you were the night of 9 November 1938, during the pogrom known as Kristallnacht?”

“What’s this about? Are you going to kill me?” He saw the anger in Kleinstubber’s gaze—and the pain behind it. “Then please be kind enough to allow me to finish my last pipe.”

“I have no intention of killing you, Inspector. This is just so you’ll listen.”

“Well, you have my attention.” Kruger knew where he was that night and what he’d done, or rather, what he hadn’t done. He had years’ worth of memories like that.

“Klein Fine Furniture.” Kleinstubber’s eyes misted. “Remember the factory and showroom? My father employed twenty-six workers, both Jews and Aryans, making high-end furniture for the privileged. Even Hermann Goering once ordered a custom desk. But the Sturmabteilung, the hooligans and criminals Hitler used to persecute his ‘enemies,’ attacked my family that night—innocents who hurt no one.”

The hand holding the gun shook. Kleinstubber’s lips thinned. “I saw you that evening. You and your officers stood by and did nothing when they set fire to the building. Fueled by exotic woods, varnish, and turpentine, the flames spread so quickly that my father, mother, and sister, Rose, had no time to escape. I barely got out alive. They burned to death, and you, a police officer, did nothing to stop it.”

Kruger’s shoulders dropped. His superior had ordered them not to interfere. All over Berlin, gangs of SA and SS smashed Jewish stores and burned synagogues as the police looked on. “If you’re not going to kill me, what? Turn my daughter against me? You’re too late for that.”

The piercing lights of a Volga car drew up behind them. Kruger adjusted the rearview mirror to watch the Stasi agent Braun and two hefty sidekicks emerge.

“Hmm. So that’s it? Trading me for your freedom?” He knocked his pipe on the outside of the door. The amber ashes spilled on the curb. He had two murder cases under investigation with no more opportunity to solve them. His assistant was capable, but the detectives in his department were useless sycophants who cared more about not ruffling feathers than fighting crime.

Kruger exited the car, put the warm pipe in his sports coat pocket, and leaned on the edge of the door. “Please tell Marta I love her.”

Kleinstubber stared straight ahead. “Sorry, Otto. I’m not going anywhere. Especially not over the wall.”

Bruce Conord is the author of twelve published nonfiction titles—three children’s/YA best sellers and nine international travel guidebooks, two of which won national writing awards. He lives in Princeton, NJ, where everyone else is either an author or a critic.