Man Who Came Back

Willi Frischauer

Description

Conspirator against Hitler, and postwar Chief of West German Intelligence, Otto John baffled the world when he "disappeared" from West Germany and emerged in Communist East Germany. His equally mysterious return to the West, and his controversial trial, posed the question: Was Otto John a criminal and a traitor, or a hero and martyr?

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Unmaterial Books
• Date de parution: 29 novembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783012824
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE MAN WHO CAME BACK
The Story of Otto John
WILLI FRISCHAUER
First published by Frederick Muller Ltd
London, 1958
This edition copyright 2013 The Estate of Willi Frischauer
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this publication may be reproduced, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN 978-1-78301-282-4
Published by

www.unmaterial-books.co.uk
eBook conversion by eBookPartnership
www.ebookpartnership.com
CONTENTS
Prelude
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Bibliography
Illustrations
About the author
Willi Frischauer in more ebooks
PRELUDE
July 21, 1954, was a bright summer s day, but the curtains were drawn and shutting out the sun when Frau Lucie John awoke with a start in her room at the Schaetzle Hotel, a small, quiet guest house in West Berlin s Grunewald district. The time by her clock was 9.45 a.m.
Though her husband s room was further down the corridor, she somehow expected him to be by her bedside to bid her good morning . Frau John collected her thoughts. She was disappointed, uneasy and - without an apparent reason - almost distressed. Lucie John had always been very close to her husband. Was there anything wrong? Where was he?
Her roving eye caught the half-empty bottle of Burgundy on the table . . . why, of course, she had asked for it to be sent up to her room the previous evening, when she had been slightly indisposed and had retired early without waiting for her husband to return to the hotel.
It was not unusual for Otto to stay out late, least of all during a visit to Berlin. Sometimes he would even spend the whole night on one of his secret missions. But invariably on such occasions he would telephone first thing in the morning - not that a wife would expect an explanation for a night s unforeseen absence on the part of a fond husband who, moreover, was Western Germany s Chief of Intelligence; and that was what Otto John s official position as President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution amounted to.
But then there was the oppressive thought of the previous day s drama - Tuesday, July 20, 1954. Frau Lucie John would not forget the date as long as she lived. Otto had been so terribly upset . . . it was an emotional climax after a long period of apprehension. The hotel was a haven of peace, but Berlin, after all, was a divided city, an island in the red sea of Communism with the sector boundary, an ominous stretch of the Iron Curtain, running along every turning.
Frau Lucie s head, which had been aching all Tuesday, was pounding again. Small incidents came to life in her memory like stabs at a sore wound. Otto in his room in conference with a contact from the Soviet sector . . . The gentleman who telephoned, speaking German with a trace of an English accent - it must have been one of the two British Secret Service officers who were expecting him at the Maison de France in the Kurfurstendamm at 7.30 p.m. He must have kept them waiting unduly long, or perhaps he had forgotten all about them. At times Otto could be so absent-minded.
But Lucie John, surely, was the last person to be troubled by the Phillips Oppenheim [spy thriller] atmosphere of Berlin; it was part of her life. She pulled herself together. Nonsense! Otto had probably been kept busy until the early hours and was sound asleep in his room.
She picked up the telephone and asked for her husband s room. The futile clicks seemed to confirm her worst fears. She slipped on a dressing-gown and rushed to his room. The door was open, the room empty. The bed had been made up for the night, but it had not been slept in.
Returning to her room, Frau John impatiently jiggled the receiver up and down. Harshly she asked the hotel operator to put her through to the Prince. Prince Louis Ferdinand, heir of the Hohenzollerns and a close friend of the Johns, occupied a room on the floor below. Frau Lucie had been talking to him just before going to her room the previous evening.
Have you heard from Otto? she asked.
He could hardly say No! before she slammed the receiver down.
Get me 22.16.67! Frau John was on to the operator again. She was not supposed to ring the telephone number which belonged to the Berlin branch office of her husband s Intelligence organization.
Frau John, you say? an impersonal voice replied. Your husband has not come home . . .? Wait at your hotel; we shall come and see you! The telephone went dead.
Hurriedly Lucie John began to dress. She went downstairs, her fear mounting to panic. Perhaps Otto s friend Wolfgang Hoefer could help - Captain Hoefer, the American Intelligence Officer who had been so concerned about Otto s movements. She called Hoefer, who arrived within a few minutes. He was no less agitated than she was.
With Hoefer, Frau Lucie joined Prince Louis Ferdinand, and together they tried to analyse the situation as calmly as possible. It was 11 a.m. Reasonable theories to explain Otto John s absence were running out. Something would have to be done about it.
Something was already being done. Frau Lucie s telephone call to her husband s Berlin branch office set a world-wide hue-and-cry in motion. From the Berlin number the word was passed to the headquarters of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Cologne. Cologne called the Ministry of the Interior in Bonn. The Ministry informed the Federal Chancellor, Dr Konrad Adenauer.
As yet Otto John s fate was a matter for speculation. But none of the eminent few who knew that something was amiss doubted for a moment that the explanation, whatever it was, could only be sinister, very sinister. Indeed, within forty-eight hours the name of Otto John, hitherto only vaguely known in Germany, ringing no bell at all outside his own country, blazed from the headlines of the world s press.
Forty-eight hours - and Otto John s disappearance turned out to be a new climax in the Cold War, an international event of tremendous significance, destined to become one of the most puzzling post-war political mysteries. It agitated the Pentagon in Washington. Moscow reacted strongly. In Western Germany there was all but political turmoil. It greatly troubled London s Whitehall - or did it?
What was it that stirred the imagination whenever Otto John s strange case was under discussion? It was not only what happened on July 20, 1954, though that was the stuff from which thrillers are made. It was what followed and, even more so, what had gone before. What exercised the mind of all who - like the author in his capacity as a foreign correspondent - delved deeper into the case, was the confluence of personal and political dramas on a historic stage; of Cold War and hot blood; of high politics and low espionage; of rivalries and intrigues - in short, a story of our times.
It really began in the late thirties . . .
CHAPTER 1
Seppl, the old wire-haired Dachshund, blinked a sad and tired eye as the noise of moving chairs and rustling paper disturbed his slumber by the side of his master s desk. Behind the desk, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris rose to mark the end of the daily morning conference. His senior officers bowed and filed out of the room to return to their own offices through the maze of narrow corridors and winding stairs of the Foxhole , as they called the rickety old building on the Tirpitz-ufer.
Not even people with an intimate knowledge of Berlin could have guessed that this was the headquarters of the Abwehr - German Military Intelligence - which, like most organizations of its kind, blossomed behind a smoke-screen of purposeful and sinister mystery. Even if more people had known about the Abwehr, in the year 1937 it was a subject best left severely alone.
After the conference only Colonel Hans Oster, Canaris s closest associate, stayed behind. The Chief rang the bell, and Frau Schwarte, a perfect secretary who anticipated his every wish, put a slim file before him. On the cover it said: Otto John . Oster, too, guessed what went through Canaris s mind as he glanced through the few pages of typescript: There isn t much more to know about him, I m afraid, he said. But what there is, isn t bad!
His father was an upright, strait-laced civil servant, Canaris read aloud, and kaisertreu . . . loyal to the Kaiser.
. . . and instilled these sentiments into the mind of his sons, Oster summarized the contents of the file. Otto John, he added, was almost twenty-eight years old to the day - to be exact, the day of his birth was March 19, 1909. Junior School in Marburg an der Lahn where he was born, High School in Wiesbaden when his father was transferred. He regards Wiesbaden as his home town . . .
It was a closely knit family, Oster said, but Otto John was especially fond of his mother and his younger brother Hans. He was the more affectionate of the two, and, though Hans was barely one year younger, Otto watched over him with fussy, fatherly affection.
Canaris smiled. He was reading the part of the report about Otto John s reaction to the introduction of a special Nazi prayer in schools a few years previously: If they can dictate to us how to pray, was John s angry comment, it will not be long before they control our whole lives! He had written a strong letter to a local newspaper, but the letter was not printed.
In the ordinary way the Abwehr would investigate only a man who was either suspected of subversion and military espionage, or was a prospect for a confidential assignment. Anybody openly critical of the regime would seem to fall in the first category; yet Canaris and Oster obviously liked what their