23rd Hour, 23rd Psalm

Berlin 1969 - 23rd Hour, 23rd Psalm - continued

by R.W. Rynerson

The shuttle train from Dueppel linked one of West Berlin's more obscure corners with the center of Zehlendorf. Berlin's southwesternmost borough developed around the old steam railway line, but construction spurted when express commuter service to Potsdamer Bahnhof was introduced before World War I and again when U-Bahn subway service entered the area in 1929.

Streetlights and an occasional light in a window. A Berlin night. Our meander through the Berlin night continues. The tree canopy over Zehlendorf streets that was ravaged in the war's aftermath and in the Blockade years is starting to recover. In the dark the tree-lined streets can be disorienting. Our driver knows the way-- slowly we cruise by some of the landmarks not usually on tourist itineraries-- the pension in which the CIA and European intellectuals formed an agreement for American funds to subsidize a magazine of non-Communist political opinion, houses occupied by various unidentified government organizations, consulates, and the homes of famous 20th Century German figures. With few people on the streets, it is easy for us to imagine the Reichsfinanzminister, brilliant German banker Hjalmer Horace Greeley Schacht, arriving late at his villa after his dismissal by the Nazis who he had helped to power. The "Bankers' Express" S-Bahn trains were still making the fast run from Zehlendorf to the city center at 120 km/h, but that and the rest of Berlin's infrastructure was living on borrowed time when Schacht went home from the office into that January 1943 Zehlendorf night. Schacht was engaged in conspiracies against Hitler. Several of the interlocking circles of the Widerstand, the resistance, crossed paths in this far corner of the capital.

On another street in this neighborhood of villas, his successor -- the affable war criminal Walter Funk -- might have been staying up late, too. Known to pre-war Western journalists as one of the few Nazis who could crack a joke, Funk had been a business news journalist himself. Keeping his job amidst the plots and counterplots in Third Reich governing circles took its toll on this alcoholic. Funk left in 1945 for an appointment with the judges at Nuremberg.

Now our guide on this evening is one of the residents of the home, which the U.S. Army moved into after a Soviet officer was moved out of it in the summer of 1945. Since the inglorious end of the Nazi era, the villa has served a variety of purposes. Its tennis courts, now covered by an office building, served as a post-war recreation facility. Refugees of interest to the Allied governments were housed here at various times. And now, GI's with miscellaneous non-conforming jobs, such as the Commanding General's enlisted aide, live in rooms carved out of once grander rooms. A brick barbeque has been built in the secluded, walled garden and the Americans who live here invite their British, French and German colleagues over for an American tradition with German beer.

It is just a short drive from his home to the Krumme Lanke U-Bahn station, known as "Crummy Lake" to GI's. Trains from the Wittenbergplatz heart of the West Berlin U-Bahn lines are gliding into the station. A dribble of passengers disperses into the diverging streets. We'll return later to meet our contact for a ride "downtown" -- but there is more to see around each dimly lit corner.

We stop for a few minutes in the shadows of the Dahlem Church yard, the tombstones labeled with the titles of the scholars and officials who populated this parish. While it is amusing for a moment to reflect on the fact that Germans took their titles to the grave with them, the shadows here include the memory of Pastor Martin Niemoeller, vicar of Berlin-Dahlem, former World War I U-Boot Kapitan, and a man who took the responsibility to preach the Gospel as a duty, carried out in spite of the Gestapo. He was tried by a People's Court that could find no violation of law in his preaching, but the Gestapo took him from the back door of the courthouse and imprisoned him. The shadows here also include the unidentified young men who sat in his church, their hostile body language meant to intimidate, trying to find something in his words that would convict him, young men for whom he prayed.

A few streets away, we cruise past the street associated with the CIA in Berlin, tiny Foehrenweg. Our guide turns taciturn and suddenly reminds us that summer college students in North America are playing Frisbee on campus lawns right now after class. Someone is turning the pages of their Twentieth Century History text. Here, in this so quiet corner of Berlin, Twentieth Century History is not the title of a university course. Two-thirds of the way through this bloody century, someone on the streets we travel now is making history.

A light in a window flashes on and then off in a mansion. A millionaire getting up to take an antacid? A tired intelligence officer brushing his teeth in a bathroom that was last redecorated by its owner in 1935-- and who left suddenly in 1945? Or a diplomat coming home from an evening social event? There are no answers in our night survey. Nights in Berlin seem to be full of more questions than answers. Our driver is turning the car toward the U.S. Headquarters on Clayallee, where we will visit the Americans who stand guard through these restless nights.

Continued....

Bibliography:

Dittfurth, Udo and Braun, Dr. Michael; Die elektrische Wannseebahn - Zeitreisen mit der Berliner S-Bahn durch Schoeneberg, Steglitz und Zehlendorf; Verlag GVE; Berlin; 2004; ISBN 3-89218-085-7.

Niemoeller, Martin; God is My Fuehrer; Philosophical Library and Alliance Book Corporation; New York; 1941; preface by Thomas Mann.

Oldfield, Col. Barney, USA; Never a Shot Fired in Anger; Duell, Sloan and Pearce; 1956. Col. Oldfield set up the U. S. Army's press center in the villa at 11 Sven-Hedin Strasse that he was told had belonged to Walter Funk. He first had to talk Soviet soldiers into leaving it.
    Link to complete text on line.

Stockton, Bayard; Flawed Patriot: The Rise and Fall of CIA Legend Bill Harvey; "Lights blazed in the high-gabled redbrick building rising from a cleft in the wooded Berlin suburb of Dahlem, facing on what was now called Clay Allee. The real entrance was on an obscure, parallel dead-end street..."
Flawed Patriot - publisher's link.

U.S. Military Liaison Mission veterans' recollections of life at 11 Sven-Hedin Strasse in 1951-54 (2002).
    USMLM veterans' website.

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