Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [186]
They announced defiantly that a memorial service would be held for Heidi Fritag on the steps of the main building.
The People’s Radio reacted quickly to denounce Heinrich Hirsch as a traitor and his confession as a lie. The threat was made that a demonstration would be broken up by force and all participants expelled.
Neal Hazzard had taken Heidi Fritag’s death very hard. As a combat commander he had sent men into battle with a reasonable chance of defending themselves. Heidi Fritag died helpless ... as helpless as the students would be if they tried a demonstration.
The British and French commandants entered the Kommandatura conference room without greeting Nikolai Trepovitch. The Russian, stripped of flamboyance, stared emptily at the papers before him.
Colonel Neal Hazzard arrived last. He looked at the Russian for the first time with absolute hatred.
Nikolai Trepovitch had just finished a merciless session with Marshal Popov. As chairman, he called the meeting to order.
“I have requested this emergency meeting to discuss illegal activities planned at the university. Heinrich Hirsch is a traitor, a liar, and a provocateur. We have signed confessions of the accused. Unless this demonstration is called off we will resort to necessary measures.”
“I take it then,” T. E. Blatty said, “you propose to massacre students in the streets.”
“I propose to stop a demonstration of Fascist militarism.”
“But sir, you established the university, you screened these students, you chose their studies and their teachers.”
Trepovitch fell back to the second line of defense. The plan was to hold out bait of a promise of four-power control of the university in exchange for stopping the demonstration. Once the West agreed, Trepovitch could haggle over the control mechanism until the incident died down.
“We are a peace-loving people,” Trepovitch said. “The Soviet Union wishes to avoid bloodshed. For the sake of Allied unity we would consider the possibility of four-power control.”
“No,” Neal Hazzard said. “No four-power control, no one-power control. The school belongs to the people of Berlin. They have shown now they are ready to run it.”
The Russian could not buy it. It would mean the end of their domination completely. “You want this school to foster German militarism and rebuild the Nazis! We will not tolerate it!”
Neal Hazzard appealed to the cooler heads among the new leaders of the university and convinced them to hold their demonstration in the American Sector.
Twenty-five hundred students walked the Stresemann Strasse spanning from curb to curb, and behind them walked 25,000 Berliners. At a place where Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry once stood they came to a halt, looking across the street into the Soviet Sector, a leveled field that once held
Hitler’s Reich Chancellory. It was filled with Soviet tanks and guns.
The students wore black arm bands, carried black-bordered photographs of the first martyr of a new age, Heidi Fritag. Other placards demanded the freedom of Matthias Schindler.
At the head of their number walked Colonel Neal Hazzard.
Chapter Twenty-three Winter, 1946–47
IT WAS THE COLDEST in the history of Europe.
In Berlin blustery north winds and snow dropped the temperature to twenty and thirty below zero. People froze to death by the dozens, helplessly covered with rags. The infant mortality rate skyrocketed; the water supply froze; filth bred epidemic; rampages of pneumonia and TB swept the city along with a diphtheria epidemic. Gonorrhea and syphilis had long ago found a home in the orgy-filled town.
Berlin was an icebox with bare shelves. Emergency soup kitchens attempted to stave off starvation. People were driven from the heatless shells of buildings down into the underground railroad and to bomb shelters.
In one of the desperation measures, the Kommandatura gave permission for Berliners to cut down their forests for use as firewood. This became the most terrible symbol of the defeat. They trudged