Stasi Winter Read online

  Contents

  Prologue

  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

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Stephanie

  For details about the real-life weather conditions in the winter of 1978/79 please see the author’s note at the end of this book.

  Prologue

  The Ostsee north of Rostock, East Germany

  January 1979

  The figures moved like ghosts blown in by the Siberian wind – ethereal, colourless, camouflaged so well that she couldn’t be sure they were there. The bitter north-east wind had transformed the Ostsee into a sea of jagged white and grey, blocks of ice broken by the waves and icebreakers, then refrozen as the thermometer plunged still further, like some collapsed ancient monument whose giant stones lay scattered in random patterns. Only those blocks were in fact made of seawater – frozen so hard you could almost believe it really had petrified.

  This was the Republic’s ‘catastrophe winter’.

  A hundred-year winter.

  A killer winter.

  Major Karin Müller carefully moved forward over the frozen sea, her finger resting on the Makarov’s trigger guard. There was no crunch of ice – the layer of new snow softened the fall of her boots, as though she was tiptoeing around in fur-covered slippers. As snowflakes hit her face, she expected them to melt. They didn’t – it was too cold. Instead, they collected on her eyelids and nose, so that every so often she had to wipe them off with her gloved left hand.

  She couldn’t be sure who was who. Two of the ghosts were her quarry – but one was her deputy, Hauptmann Werner Tilsner. Together, Müller and Tilsner made up the major part of the Republic’s Serious Crimes Department. But what exactly was he up to? Allegedly he had gone on ahead to get closer to the Republikflüchtlinge – the escapers – to cut them off. Yet when the mist and snow temporarily cleared, it was as if he’d become one of them, camouflaged in matching white.

  Then – as the visibility suddenly improved again – she saw the girl’s telltale shock of red hair. ‘Wildcat’ was her code name, given to her as part of a deal some four years earlier. A deal brokered by her handler in the Ministry for State Security, Klaus Jäger. A deal that Müller herself had wanted no part of. But who was she to defy the Stasi?

  She raised the gun. Brought the shock of red hair into her sights.

  ‘Irma Behrendt!’ she cried. ‘Stop there and raise your hands! Otherwise I won’t hesitate to shoot!’

  Tilsner seemed to be nearer to the girl, yet he was continuing to move, rather than helping Müller to arrest her.

  Her focus returned to the girl. Irma had ignored her warning; she’d tucked her hair back under what looked like a bed sheet covering her head, and had broken into a run.

  ‘This is your last warning, Irma! Don’t do this to yourself, to your family! Stop or I’ll shoot!’

  The girl continued running.

  Müller’s finger wrapped more tightly around the freezing cold metal of the trigger.

  And began to squeeze.

  1

  Sellin, Island of Rügen, East Germany

  The previous month – December 1978

  I am still the same girl – the same Irma Behrendt – who made that fateful telephone call almost four years ago. That’s what I tell myself. But that phone call still haunts me, now as a twenty-year-old woman, just as it did then as a sixteen-year-old girl, only recently released from the hell that is the Republic’s reform school system. Having to force my finger to turn the dial, and then knowing – as soon as I talked to him, the local officer in Bergen from the Ministry for State Security – that there was no turning back. I had made my choice.

  You probably wonder why I did it. I know I do. But I wanted, above everything, to keep my mother out of jail this time. I naively thought that by co-operating, by giving them information, by spying on her, that I would be helping. That’s what I told myself anyway. That’s how I still justify it.

  I was barely sixteen. Can you really judge me? Would you have done anything different? You can’t say, because you’ve never been in the position that I’d been put into.

  When I followed her and the man she’d met up Wilhelm-Pieck-Straße, past the piles of snow, hunching into my anorak to try to keep out the wind, I knew that I was going to do it. I couldn’t face being sent back to Jugendwerkhof Prora Ost. My friend had been abused then killed by them. I’d been treated as little more than a slave. Yet – to my shame – I still co-operated when the Stasi officer Jäger asked me to.

  So I watched them as they walked out along the Seebrücke, the wooden pier that was such a landmark in our little seaside town until the authorities demolished most of it earlier this year. Of course, he wasn’t necessarily a dissident. He could have been a secret lover. But my job wasn’t to assess the situation, it was simply to report on it. I watched them for a few moments through the telescope – the one the children use in summer to look at boats out on the sea. But there were no boats that day. Just a woman with angular features and red hair – an older version of me, really – standing talking to a man on a pier. Easter had been and gone, not that observance of religious holidays was encouraged in the Republic, but winter still hadn’t released its grip on Rügen. Behind them, I could see a lamppost sugar-coated with layer upon layer of sea ice. It was certainly a romantic setting. But in my heart, I knew this rendezvous had nothing to do with romance.

  I slowly walked over to the yellow phone box, pulled back the hood of my anorak, and dialled the Bergen-auf-Rügen number that Jäger had given me. When the operator answered, I asked for the person whose name he’d written down – Hauptmann Gerd Steiger – and identified myself by my new code name, Wildcat.

  What did I think would happen? Jäger had convinced me that reporting on my mother’s activities was the best way of keeping her out of jail. That if the Stasi had her under close surveillance through a family member, they could protect her from herself. Protect her from falling into her old ways. Ni
p anything in the bud before it became too serious.

  So I made that phone call.

  I gave a description of the man she’d met.

  The next day – at the campsite where my grandmother is the manager – they arrested my mother. She was sent back to Hoheneck women’s prison. She’s been there ever since.

  They tricked me, and I’m sure I’m not the first.

  I felt so alone then. So awful. I’d condemned my own mother to a life back in jail, so soon after her release.

  Yet still they wanted me to spy for them. On relations, on friends and on enemies. I continued to give them information, but I made sure it was useless. Frau Kästner buying some fish was constructed into an elaborate, detailed report. Herr Schlender getting a delivery of coal was made out to be some highly suspicious activity. My old boyfriend Laurenz’s love of the cinema was reported on in intricate detail, even though the films we went to see together were ‘approved’ and on general release in the Republic.

  But then I met Dieter.

  He was based at the other end of Prora to the Jugendwerkhof – the hated reform school I was determined never to be sent back to. He’d refused to do his regular National Service with the People’s Army. So he’d been sent to Rügen – to Prora – to join a construction brigade, working on roads, bridges, and the harbour at Sassnitz.

  Dieter’s helped the scales fall from my eyes. He’s taught me what’s right and what’s wrong.

  Now he has a plan.

  A plan to change everything.

  And he wants me to be a part of it, alongside him.

  2

  Play area near Karl-Marx-Allee, East Berlin

  December 1978

  The meeting hadn’t been one Karin Müller had been looking forward to, and now it was over before it had really begun. She and her ex-boyfriend, Emil, were supposed to have been discussing access arrangements for their two-and-a-half-year-old twins, Jannika and Johannes. But this very moment, Emil had stormed off without them getting any closer to resolving their differences. The two children – oblivious to the frostiness between their parents – were happily playing with toys in the sandpit. Johannes was wielding a garish plastic representation of the Soyuz craft which had launched East Germany’s first cosmonaut into space some four months earlier. He propelled it like a javelin towards his unwitting sister, hitting her square on the side of the head.

  ‘Johannes!’ cried Müller, as her daughter started bawling. ‘If you don’t play nicely, we’re going straight home.’ She rushed to her daughter, picked her up, and after checking there was no real damage, kissed the side of the girl’s head better. ‘Now, say sorry, Johannes, and give your sister a kiss too.’ The boy reluctantly complied, transforming Jannika’s tears into a shy grin, confirming Müller’s suspicions that the tears had mostly been play-acting. The spat would soon be forgotten, unlike the rift between Müller and her ex. She knew the only reason he’d got together with her was because he’d been detailed by his Stasi bosses to keep tabs on her. The result, a few months later and not without a little drama, had been the twins – children that doctors had said Müller would never be able to have because of a sexual attack on her years earlier at her police college. Despite the baggage around their birth, whenever she saw them Müller was filled with joy and unconditional love.

  The chilly atmosphere between Müller and Emil reflected the way the temperature had suddenly dropped here in Berlin: a relatively mild Christmas cut short by Siberian temperatures. The leaden skies overhead were the embodiment of what the Republic’s weather forecasters had been predicting. Snow was imminent – and the fall could be heavy, especially from Berlin northwards to the Ostsee coast.

  Despite the weather, Müller relished the chance to spend the Christmas and New Year period with the twins and her maternal grandmother, Helga. She was the twins’ great-grandmother, but still a sprightly woman in her sixties who’d been their full-time carer until Müller’s decision to quit her career as a detective in the Republic’s People’s Police more than a year previously. It wasn’t something she regretted, but as Helga had pointed out, their savings were now pretty much used up. Müller was in that grey area of employment that officially didn’t exist in the Republic: not working, but not unemployed. No one was unemployed here. No one was homeless. That was the official line, and one that Müller respected. She’d seen with her own eyes, and from her own experience, that it only told half the truth. Nevertheless, the industrial strife, strikes and general discontent that had seemed ever present in the West – judging by the Western TV news she watched with the illegally aligned aerial in the Strausberger Platz apartment – were indeed absent. Or at least, absent in public. She had no doubt that behind closed doors, in the privacy of the family, grumblings went on. The lack of ability to travel to the western part of Germany, to the BRD – especially for families that had been split up when the Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier had been erected – that was a source of constant grievance. But everyone – from the cradle to the grave – was given constant reminders of its necessity. How else could the counter-revolutionaries, the fascists, and – yes – even the Nazis, be kept at bay? Yet she knew that was again a half-truth. Nazis still existed this side of the Wall. Her last case before she handed her resignation to the police had been evidence enough of that.

  And those Nazis – at least in the present day – hadn’t even been law-breakers. They were supposed to be upholders of the law, defenders of the Republic. Yet their past deeds had come back to haunt them, and Müller had decided she could no longer work with them. In the case of one of them, she hadn’t been entirely surprised. A Stasi colonel with an all too smooth mien that seemed to have been cultivated by aping one of the well-known presenters of the BRD’s nightly news programme. But the other? That had been a shock, and had prompted her resignation decision. None other than her own deputy in the short-lived Serious Crimes Department of the People’s Police, Hauptmann Werner Tilsner. Tilsner, who she’d long suspected was an unofficial informant for the Ministry for State Security, the MfS, aka the Stasi. That much had been true. But the last case had revealed he had been something far worse. A member of the Hitler Youth who had stood alongside the boy who would later become that Stasi colonel, gun poised, as a 1,000-strong group of slave labourers were massacred. An utterly senseless, disgusting crime perpetrated just hours before the Nazis surrendered.

  She hadn’t spoken to him since.

  She didn’t intend to ever again.

  *

  Müller’s musings about her past career were made possible by the fact the twins had begun playing sweetly together. Johannes – clearly taking his mother’s chastisement to heart – was allowing Jannika to play with the rocket, and she in turn had offered him her doll. Müller allowed a smile to broaden across her face, and as a first snowflake landed on her nose, it transformed into a small laugh. A laugh that died in her throat when she saw a man approaching from the direction Emil had so recently departed towards.

  His silhouette, his confident gait, were horribly familiar.

  So too, as he drew closer, was the sandy, shoulder-length hair, and smarmy expression.

  The spitting image of that West German newsreader she’d just been thinking about.

  Klaus Jäger.

  Oberst Klaus Jäger of the Ministry for State Security. His appearance sent a sudden chill through her bones. The bitter cold which in the company of the twins she’d been able to ignore, now set her teeth chattering, her back and shoulders shivering.

  ‘It’s been a long time, Karin.’ The use of her first name, the faux friendliness, wasn’t going to disarm her. She knew what he was.

  ‘Oberst Jäger,’ she nodded. ‘What brings you here? I wish I could believe it was something good, but in my experience that tends not to be the case.’ She was no longer in the police – why should she kowtow to him? But what she said was only partly true. Her last dealing with the Stasi colonel had brought her unbridled and surprising happiness. He’d a
rranged travel warrants and visas for a visit to her father. A father she’d never seen before, conceived as she was as the result of a brief relationship between a victorious Red Army soldier and a teenage German girl at the very end of the Second World War. But that had been the exception and had only come about – Müller knew full well – because she had a hold on him: her knowledge of Jäger’s part in the slave labourer massacre, and a threat to expose them to the Western press.

  She noticed he was carrying a shopping bag. He arranged his winter overcoat, sat down next to her on the bench, and delved into it.

  ‘I’ve bought some Christmas presents – for the children.’

  Müller tried to hide the shock from her face. Surely there had to be something more to his visit than playing an avuncular Weihnachtsmann? But she couldn’t think of anything she’d done that would arouse the interest of the Stasi. The only change to her life since quitting the Kriminalpolizei had been a gradual erosion of her and Helga’s funds. Her grandmother had saved a little money from her pension by living with her in Berlin rather than in her own flat in Leipzig. But Müller had reached the point where she needed an income again – she’d recently applied for a job teaching at the People’s Police university in Potsdam. It seemed the logical option if she wasn’t going to return to the force – and she was determined that would not happen.

  ‘That’s kind of you. They’ll be thrilled – although they’ve probably received too many already.’

  ‘They’re only this young once, Karin. Enjoy it while you can. Mine are already heading towards becoming bratty teenagers. Always answering their father back.’ He raised a sandy-coloured eyebrow wryly.

  The presents, she could see, were neatly wrapped – one for each twin, with name tags on the wrapping.

  ‘Something for you too,’ he said, his face colouring as though he was embarrassed. Müller couldn’t believe that. Stasi colonel Klaus Jäger did not do embarrassment. ‘It’s a little thank you for keeping your side of the bargain.’

  Now it was Müller who found her face reddening.

  ‘Open it,’ he prompted in a half-whisper.