The British zone lay northwest of the bigger stretch of territory the USA administered. Signs in German lined the road. THE FANATICS HURT YOU! they said, and THE WAR IS OVER, and DON’T LET THE MADMEN GET AWAY WITH IT. Lou didn’t know how much the propaganda helped, but it sure couldn’t hurt. He wished U.S. military authorities were trying more of the same thing.
There’d been more fighting here than in most of the American zone. Wrecked trucks and tanks-U.S., British, and German-still lay by the side of the road and in the fields. They made Lou nervous: too many of them offered perfect hiding places for a diehard with a Panzerschreck or a Schmeisser or even a Molotov cocktail. Hastily dug graves were scattered over the countryside, some still marked by no more than a bayoneted rifle thrust into fresh-dug earth, sometimes with a helmet on it, sometimes without.
Only makeshift bridges led across the Rhine to Cologne. Bombing had destroyed some of the real ones, and the Nazis the rest. In the Rhineland, relatively close to England, Cologne had got the hell bombed out of it all through the war, and then the Germans fought in the ruins. Lou hadn’t thought a city could be in worse shape than Nuremberg, but this one was.
He presented his papers at an enormous tent near the ruins of the train station. “Care for a glass of beer?” asked the British Intelligence major who cleared him.
“I’d love one. Thanks,” Lou answered. “Although after what the Jerries did to Ivan last week…”
“They’ve played with poisoned liquor here, too. Haven’t they in your zone?”
“Yeah, but with hard stuff, not beer. And they’ve done it by nickels and dimes, not all at once like they did with the Russians.”
“By nickels and dimes,” the major murmured. Lou realized people from the other side of the Atlantic sometimes needed to pause and decipher American lingo, too.
The beer was excellent, far better than anything you could get back in the States. The Germans might be murderous, “Heil!”-screaming brutes, but by God they could brew.
Lou was halfway down his stein when the man he was waiting for strode into the tent. The British major-his name was Hudgeons-introduced them in fluent German: “Herr Adenauer, this is Oberleutnant Weissberg, of U.S. Counter-Intelligence. Oberleutnant, this is Konrad Adenauer, former lord mayor of Cologne, former denizen of one of the late regime’s concentration camps, and current founder of the Christian Democratic Union.”
“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Lou said. Most Germans these days claimed to have been anti-Nazi. Adenauer really had been. He was around seventy, with thin, foxy features and a perpetually worried air. Well, he’d earned the right to that.
“A lieutenant,” Adenauer said sadly. “Well, I suppose I am pleased to meet you, too. Not your fault your superiors don’t take this more seriously.” No matter what he claimed, he was affronted. Europeans set more stock on status and rank than Americans did; Lou’d seen that before. Adenauer thought he deserved a colonel or something. Chances were he was right, too.
“Tell me about your new party, Herr Adenauer,” Lou urged.
“Before 1933, I belonged to the Catholic Center. Thanks to the Nazis, though, this party is now kaput. No point trying to make a dead body into Lazarus,” Adenauer said, and Lou nodded. He only wished the Nazis made as quiet a corpse as the Catholic Center Party did. Hudgeons’ batman or whatever the noncom was called fetched Adenauer a mug of beer. After a healthy swig, the German went on, “So we try something new, eh? Germany needs a responsible conservative party. We will not work with those, ah, to the right of us. We know better.”
“Hope so,” Lou said. Back in 1933, plenty of conservatives thought they could work with the Nazis. Hitler’s henchmen chewed them up and swallowed them.
“We do-from experience,” Adenauer said. “If Germany is to become a democracy-a proper democracy-she must sooner or later have her own parties. And they must be independent, and be seen to be independent. Otherwise, our folk will think they are tools of the occupiers, and will not want much to do with them. They will instead work with Heydrich’s maniacs…and with those on the left. We also aim to form a bulwark against Communism.”
Maybe the American occupation authorities had sent Lou to Cologne instead of somebody more senior so they wouldn’t seem too interested in the Christian Democratic Union. That was possible, but Lou didn’t believe it. His superiors didn’t have the subtlety for a move like that. They were paying for the lack, too.
“Heydrich’s goons take Konrad seriously,” Major Hudgeons put in. “A bloke with a bomb under his clothes tried to take him out, but the bloody thing didn’t go off. We nabbed him, and we’ve learned some interesting things about how the fanatics operate in our zone.”
“I lit a candle in the church of St. Pantaleon to thank the Lord for sparing me,” Adenauer said. “I take it as a sign that I am meant to succeed. And if I fail, what is left for Germany but the old dreadful choice between brownshirts and Reds?”
“Sooner or later-sooner, with luck-Germany will need to stand on her own two feet again,” Hudgeons said. “So we see it, anyhow. The only other choice is sitting on this country forever, and that would be…difficult.”
Lou thought it was just what Germany deserved. Whether the rest of the USA felt the same way was liable to be a different story. People with picket signs marching in front of the White House? Congressmen and Senators with them? If they’d done that while the war was still going, it would have been treason, or something close to it. It still felt that way to Lou, even though the fighting was officially over. But more and more Americans seemed to think otherwise. And fewer and fewer dogfaces on occupation duty wanted to do anything more than pack up and go home in one piece.
“We can stand up, stand alongside of the United States and Britain and France as a free and prosperous democracy,” Adenauer said. “We can. But we will not, not until people are able to go about their business without worrying whether a fanatic will blow himself up in the market square or explode a truck in front of the church on Sunday morning. However much you may hate it, fear is a weapon.”
He had a point. Lou wished he knew how to keep Heydrich’s men from making everybody else afraid. No one seemed to know how to do that, not yet. Could something like the Christian Democratic Union make a difference? Lou didn’t know-but if it could, he was all for it.
XI
Sometimes you stepped on a dog turd and came out smelling like a rose. Sometimes the bread landed butter side up. Sometimes, even in the newspaper game, you had to go easy on the cliches and just write.
When the Army booted Tom Schmidt out of Germany, he’d been afraid he would have to quit reporting and find a real job. If he didn’t have to go that far, he’d figured he would end up on a weekly in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that never got word of his fall from journalistic grace.
He’d been doing what he thought was right when he passed on the fanatics’ film of luckless Private Cunningham. He’d had the nasty feeling that would make him a villain to almost everyone outside the news business. To his surprise, he turned out to be wrong. A startling-and growing, which was even more startling-number of people back in the USA were loudly calling for President Truman to bring all the GIs home from Germany. They weren’t always people he was comfortable with, but he was in no position to be choosy.
He was, for instance, a staunch New Dealer. The Chicago Tribune had gone after FDR from the minute he got nominated to run against Hoover. The Tribune showed no signs of letting up on Democrats just because a new fanny sat in the Oval Office swivel chair, either. But when it offered him a slot in Washington at twice the money he’d been making before he had to come home, how could he say no?