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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.
Three pieces of information were confirmed. First, that in June 1943, Lars von der Haas, his wife and daughter, and his parents had all been moved from the transit camp in Westerbork to the Nazi extermination camp in Sobibór, Poland.
Second, that among the Jews who remained in that camp for labor purposes—the few who were not exterminated immediately after getting off the trains—there had been an uprising in October 1943, during which the detainees killed a number of SS guards and tried to escape. Many were killed in the attempted escape, either by gunshots fired by SS officers or by the thousands of land mines buried in the ground outside the camp. But somewhere between fifty and one hundred Jews had managed to escape with their lives.
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 Göttingen, 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?”
