The Courier

By Dahn Batchelor

Reading about history can be boring at times but not when it is incorporated into a novel such as The Courier.

The plot of this story is about the attempt to bring to the Americans information about the Nazis secret endeavors to produce an atomic bomb and the attempts of the Nazis to prevent the secret from falling into the hands of the Americans.

This story is encompassed by actual historical events in which those events told in this story occurred prior to, during, and after the Second World War in Europe.

The locales in this story are in Belgium, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States; however, the stories in those locales arent necessarily told in that order.

The main fictional characters in this book are an American navy captain, a Dutch family, and a German gestapo agent. Aside from several minor fictional characters, the other people that are described in this book were real people.

The events described with reference to the real people depicted in this book actually occurred. Think of this book as a promenade into the events of the last century, when one of the greatest wars in history was initiated by Adolf Hitler.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781514470671

Dahn Batchelor

About the Author coming soon...

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Copyright © 2016 by Dahn Batchelor.

ISBN:                Softcover                978-1-5144-7068-8

                          eBook                     978-1-5144-7067-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 05/12/2017

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Contents

Preface

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Preface

I have added a great deal of historical facts in this novel so that my readers will understand what my fictional characters and the real life characters written in this book experienced and did prior to, during and after the Second World War. These incidents I described really occurred and as you read about them, you will have a better understanding as to what motivated both the fictional and real-life characters into doing what they did during those incredibly interesting years.

Dahn Batchelor

Chapter One

Erich Kruger, a former SS officer and senior Gestapo agent had been sentenced to death in July of 1945 as a war criminal and it was on the 15th of September of that same year, that he was standing on the scaffold that was originally built by the Germans in the prison yard of the Hameln Prison near Hanover in Germany. During that particular year, that area was under British jurisdiction.

Erich was looking upwards towards the blue sky as the executioner was placing the black hood over his head. He shivered a bit when he felt the rope being placed around his neck and the knot being tightly secured around the back of his left ear.

Just before the executioner did his job of executing the condemned man, Erich called out loudly, I did what I believed was the right thing to do.

Suddenly the small three-legged stool he was standing on was pulled away and he dropped down only a half inch because the length of rope was shorter than it normally would have been had he been executed in England. He was strangling at the end of his rope since at that time in Germany, the American military executioners at the request of Polish authorities would sometimes use the short drop so that the condemned would strangle for many minutes rather than die instantaneously.

Erich began hallucinating, an experience some dying people go through and he was seeing in his mind, segments of his past when he was one of Hitler’s personal guards and when he later became a Gestapo agent investigating suspected plots against Hitler.

As he was hallucinating, he heard a voice yelling in the distance. It was the boy! It was the boy! He then began seeing in his mind the images of the very boy and his family he previously had been hunting before the end of the war so that they couldn’t courier a secret message to the Allies about Germany’s attempt at building an atomic bomb. Five minutes later, he sank into unconsciousness.

Dr. Friedrick Gottleib, a chubby middle aged man was an assistant physicist professor at the University of Leipzig in 1944 when he was seconded in November of that year by Professor Werner Heisenberg who previously left the University of Leipzig to be the head of the German nuclear program that began a year earlier in a small town in Germany. Heisenberg wanted Gottleib along with ten others from the Physics Department at the university to assist him in his research at the recently built nuclear facility in the town of Haigerloch.

About a century previous to him arriving in that town, a large beer cellar had been excavated in the rock under the Schloßkirche (Castle Basilica) in Haigerloch. No explanation whatsoever was given to Gottleib or the others as to why they were being sent to Haigerloch. The project was so super-secret; very few people actually new of its existence or its purpose. He only learned after he arrived at Haigerloch that during the latter months of 1944,

Haigerloch was the location where part of the German nuclear program was being undertaken. The scientists in that cellar were researching nuclear fission for the purpose of building an atomic bomb. To do this, they had to create a sustained nuclear chain reaction with uranium; a feat that was not within their reach at that particular time.

The beautiful town of Haigerloch during the war years had a population of less than 10,000 and is located at the southeastern part of Germany. The town is 115 kilometres (71 miles) south of the city of Heidelberg and 77 kilometres (48 miles) east of the Rhine River. A river runs through the centre of the town and the houses and buildings are on high hills on both sides of the river. The hills are between 430 metres (1,410 feet) and 550 metres (1,804 feet) in elevation in the valley of the Eyach, which forms two loops in a steep limestone valley. It calls itself the ‘Felsenstädtchen’ which means, ‘rocky small town’.

After Gottleib and the others arrived in the town under a SS security escort, they were taken to the ancient beer cellar. The entrance was built into the hill on which the basilica stood. The scientists were using this hidden area to carry on further experiments that had originated in Berlin since Hitler had some concerns that if the reactor they created prematurely exploded; it might wipe out the entire city of Berlin. For this reason, he preferred to risk losing the town of Haigerloch rather than his capital.

Physicists in Germany realized that if chain reactions could be tamed, fission would then lead to a promising new source of power. What was needed was a substance that could control the energy of neutrons emitted in radioactive decay that they could be captured by other fissionable nuclei. Heavy water (which contains deuterium) was one such necessary ingredient for the task. Heavy water can be separated from regular water by electrolysis.

After the discovery of fission, Heisenberg was recruited to work on a chain-reacting pile in September 1939 that was built by Nazi physicist, Kurt Diebner. The American scientists, including renowned scientist, Enrico Fermi chose graphite to slow down, or moderate the neutrons produced in the fission of uranium 235 so that they could cause further fissions in a chain reaction whereas Heisenberg chose heavy water to slow down the process. Heisenberg knew that reactors that use uranium are easier to slow down with heavy water because it is a more efficient neutron moderator.

The German’s development of heavy water was created in a hydro electric plant next to a dam near the town of Rjukan in Norway. Before the plant was destroyed by Allied bombing in early 1943, the last batch of heavy water from that source had been placed on a ferry that had begun crossing Lake Tinnsjoe but was deliberately sunk by Norwegian partisans before it reached its destination on the other side of the lake. The sinking of the ferry with its load of heavy water considerably slowed the German attempts with their nuclear program.

Nazi physicists had drafted a patent for a plutonium bomb as early as 1941. The bombs which were produced and tested were reportedly ‘dirty bombs’, which were made of up conventional explosives which were packed with nuclear material to add nuclear fallout to the bomb’s destructive power. Several nuclear dirty bombs were exploded by the Nazis in the latter part of 1944, where hundreds of POWs and other internees from a concentration camp died as part of the tests. What Hitler wanted was a nuclear bomb that would also destroy buildings.

One day, Gottleib met at the latter’s home to discuss their work and during their discussion, Heisenberger, a bespectacled man in his late fifties was sitting at a drafting table in his study when Gottleib expressed his feelings about the deaths of the POWs and other internees.

Heisenberger responded with stress lines forming on his brow to Gottlieb’s concerns, I too am dismayed about the use of the POWs and other internees that were being used as guinea pigs in such a horrible manner.

Gottlieb then decided to take a chance and said, I wish I hadn’t been brought into this project. It will only serve an evil purpose.

Heisenberger decided that he could trust Gottleib so he said, I think this war is going to end soon and Hitler and his gang of thugs will be gone from us once and for all. He knew that talk like that was a capital offence in Germany but it was the only way he could feel out Gottlieb’s thoughts on the matter.

"I agree with you, Werner but the army officers failed to kill off Hitler in July so there isn’t much we can do to stop our work on this nuclear project.

Heisenberger smiled and replied as a question, What we can do is to slow down this project. Heisenberger paused and then continued, I have convinced Hitler that we need thirty-two hundred kilograms of Uranium to build a bomb.

Gottlieb responded We will never get thirty-two hundred kilograms of Uranium brought to us. I don’t even think Germany has anything like that much on hand.

Actually we only need a hundredth of that amount but our work has slowed since last summer because of our shortage of heavy water.

Gottleib asked, Are efforts still being made to obtain more Uranium despite the slowdown?

Yes but obviously the amount I am asking for will never arrive since I doubt that much even currently exists. For this reason, I am really convinced that the project will be finally shut down.

That’s what I am hoping for. replied Gottleib with a faint smile on his lips. When Gottleib was now apprised as to what Heisenberger’s real feelings were, he realized that he had to do something; anything to stop the Nazis from creating an atomic bomb that would have the explosive power that could exceeded any known explosive power in existence. He also realized that in six months, an atomic bomb might be actually created at Haigerloch if other German scientists at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute in Berlin since they might have concluded that a much smaller amount of Uranium would be a sufficient amount to create an atomic bomb and more heavy water could be created and shipped to Haigerloch. He knew that if that happened, the work at Haigerloch would begin again in earnest. He further knew that he couldn’t sabotage the work being done at Haigerloch as the facility was being too closely watched by SS security guards who were keeping their eyes on everyone who worked there. There was only one way that he could think of in which the work on the bomb could be halted at Haigerlock. The Allies and more specifically, the Americans could bomb the basilica at Haigerlock and destroy the cellar below it if they received the information as to where it was and what was being done in the basilica’s cellar.

As Gottleib pondered about what to do, he remembered that he had an old friend living in the Town of Rangendinger that was nine kilometres (5 miles) northeast from Haigerlock. He had known Dr. Alfred Bergmann, a well-respected psychiatrist who had retired from his practice in Berlin and returned to his birthplace several years ago and he remembered his friend telling him how disappointed he was that the Nazis had taken over Germany. Perhaps he could advise Gottleib what he should do. Since the scientists at Haigerloch were permitted to wander about the town and environs on weekends, he decided that he would visit his old friend, Alfred Bergemann in the village of Ranhendingen the following weekend.

When he reached his old friend’s home on Kreustrafe Street, he was greeted by him at the front door of his home and after they shared some of his wine, Gottleib decided to bring up what had been on his mind. Alfred, my old friend! Do you still feel the same way you felt several years ago about Hitler and Nazism?

Alfred replied as his lips curled in anger, We should never have voted Hitler into office. He is destroying our country.

Gottleib then began to tell him about the work he was doing under the basilica in Haigerloch. He said, "My friend. If they discover that they only need one point eight kilograms of Uranium to build the bomb and they bring us more heavy water and subsequently built the bomb and it accidentally goes off, it could destroy everything that is within twenty kilometres of Haigerloch.

Damn! cried out Bergmann angrily I am extremely happy living in Rangendingen.

I don’t know what I can do to stop the creation of the atomic bomb in Haigerloch. said Gottleib sadly.

Bergmann didn’t respond for at least a minute and then he said, I’m afraid the only way that that project can be stopped, is if the Americans bomb Haigerlock’s basilica.

Gottleib responded sadly Alas, judging from what I have been hearing about the American bombings, they will drop their bombs all over Haigerlock and that beautiful town will end up as a pile of rubble.

Bergmann replied, Let me think on this for a week. Visit me next Saturday and perhaps by then, I may have a solution for you.

The following Saturday, he went to Bergmann’s home, When he arrived at his friend`s house, Bergmann said to him, There is a way that this problem may be solved. I have communicated with a friend of mine who thinks the same way we do about our country’s future. He lives in northern Switzerland. As you know, Switzerland is neutral in this war and for this reason; he has the means to contact the Americans since the Americans have an embassy in Zurich. I have asked him to pass on your concerns to the Americans. Visit me in three weeks and I will have the answer for you.

Gottlieb walked back to Haigerloch hoping that whatever happens, his attempt to stop the atomic bomb project in its tracks, isn’t traced back to him and his friend. Three weeks later, he met his friend and the latter said to him, I need you to write a full report on the current status of the research being done at that facility in Haigerloch and I will arrange for you to take it to an acquaintance of mine who will arrange to have your report taken to the Allies who are already in Antwerp.

In the United States, Robert Wilson had graduated from the University of Maryland with a master`s degree in mathematics in 1925 and a minor in physics and subsequently, he had joined the American navy in 1930 as a lieutenant. In 1932, he was transferred to the Office of Naval Intelligence as an intelligence analyst specializing in code breaking.

The Office of Naval Intelligence was originally established in the United States Navy in 1882. It was created to seek out and report on the advancements in other nation’s navies. Its headquarters are at the National Maritime Intelligence Center in the town of Suitland in Maryland. It is the oldest affiliate of the United States Intelligence Community and is also therefore it was by default, the senior intelligence agency within the armed forces

When Hitler declared war on the United States on December 8, 1941, the day after Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbour, Robert was assigned to the task of assisting in the decoding of the German naval secret codes since he had studied German at University for two years. He and the others had no success because the Germans had coded their messages in small typewriter-sized coding machines called the Enigma. Previous to the German invasion against Poland in 1939, the Poles opted to share their code breaking secret with the British and Britain’s Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park at the town of Buckinghamshire. It had become the centre for Allied efforts to keep up with war-induced changes in the German’s Enigma’s codes output. The Enigma code machine operated on a mechanical system. The mechanical system consists of a keyboard; a set of rotating disks called rotors arranged adjacently along a spindle; and one of various stepping components to turn one or more of the rotors with each key press. That code machine could put a message into code in over 150 million, million, million different ways. There were as many as 100,000 Enigma code machines used by the Germans during the Second World War and they sent out messages everywhere using the same coding machines. The British were originally very reluctant to pass on information to the Americans due to their concerns over security at the American end. The Americans wanted to know why information was drying up from the British but the reason was because the British chose not to share much of the information they deciphered from the German’s Enigma code since they knew that if the secret leaked back to the Germans that the British were using the machine to break the German’s highly secret code, the machine would be useless to both the Germans and the Allies and the Germans would design another one.

It wasn’t until January 1943, that the British cooperated more fully with the American navy codebreakers. Up to then, Robert was forced to rely on the old German naval code which was by then being used by the Germans far less since they were now using the Enigma code machine starting in 1939.

Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of the German Abwehr, (intelligence) had made plans for bringing the war directly to the United States via a series of sabotage attacks by Nazi German agents inside the United States. The operation was staged in June 1942. Recruited for the operation were eight Germans who had previously lived in the United States. Two of them, Ernst Burger and Herbert Haupt, were actually American citizens. The others, George John Dasch, Edward John Kerling, Richard Quirin, Heinrich Harm Heinck, Hermann Otto Neubauer, and Werner Thiel had previously worked at various jobs in the U.S. They were all what are commonly referred to as sleepers.

Their mission was to stage sabotage attacks on American economic targets such as hydroelectric facilities at Niagara Falls; the Aluminum Company of America in Illinois, the locks on the Ohio River near Louisville, Kentucky; the Horseshoe Curve, a crucial railroad pass near Altoona, Pennsylvania, as well as the Pennsylvania Railroad’s repair shops at Altoona, a cryolite plant in Philadelphia; Hells Gate Bridge in New York and Pennsylvania Station in Newark, New Jersey. They were given a quick course in sabotage techniques, given nearly $175,000 ($1.5 million in 2015 American money) and put aboard two submarines and headed towards the east coast of the United States.

Before the mission was even launched, it was in danger of being compromised, since George Dasch, head of the team, had left sensitive documents behind on a train while they were in England. The information was passed onto the British authorities who in turn sent it to the Americans. Robert had already been deciphering coded messages sent to him by the British who used their own code when he became informed from one of the messages that two German submarines were heading towards the Atlantic coast of the United States with the purpose of dropping off German saboteurs. He passed this information to his superior. Although no one knew specifically where the saboteurs would land, an all alert was sent to all American navy ships and the American Coast Guard to be on the lookout for the saboteurs.

On the 12th of June 1942, the first German submarine, U-202 landed at a beach (what today is called Atlantic Avenue Beach) near the town of Amagansett, on Long Island, the town being 115 miles (185 km) east of New York City. The sub was carrying Dasch and three other German saboteurs; Burger, Quirin, and Henck. The team came ashore wearing military uniforms so that if they were captured they would be classified as prisoners of war rather than spies. Once ashore, they changed to civilian clothes and buried their uniforms and other equipment. From then on, if they were captured, they would be executed as spies as per the Articles of War, as defined in the Geneva Convention.

Early that morning, John C. Cullen, a Coast Guardsman from the station in Amagansett, Long Island spotted Dasch and three others posing as fisherman off the coast of Long Island in a raft. He saw that the men were armed and he also noticed a submerged submarine. The men offered him $260 in American money (equivalent to $27,300 in 2015) as a bribe to keep him quiet. He took the bribe, but alerted his superiors. By the time an armed patrol returned to the site, the Germans saboteurs had already taken the Long Island Rail Road train from the Amaganset station into Manhattan, New York City where they checked in and stayed at a hotel.

Meanwhile a search of the beach revealed concealed explosives, timers, blasting caps, incendiary devices, cigarettes along with their military uniforms to support their two-year campaign in the sabotage of American defense-related production factories. The other four-member German team headed by Edward Kerling landed without incident at Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, south of Jacksonville on June 16th 1942. They had been on the U-584, another submarine. This group started their mission by boarding trains to Chicago, Illinois and Cincinnati, Ohio. Dasch and Burger, two of the Germans who were in New York City had decided to defect to the United States immediately. Dasch went to Washington, D.C., and turned himself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Initially the agents he spoke to adduced that he was a crackpot until he dumped his four-team mission’s entire budget of $84,000 ($8,810,000 in 2015 American money) on the desk of Assistant Director D. M. Ladd. At this point Dasch was taken seriously and interrogated for hours. None of the others saboteurs knew of his betrayal.

Over the next two weeks, Burger and the other six were arrested. All eight were put on trial before a seven-member military tribunal on specific instructions from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They were charged with violating the law of war; violating Article 81 of the Articles of War, defining the offense of corresponding with or giving intelligence to the enemy; violating Article 82 of the Articles of War, that defines the offense of spying; and conspiracy to commit the offenses alleged in the first of the charges.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Wilson was becoming bored deciphering codes since most of his work was merely passing messages he decoded to his superiors from British codes so he asked to be transferred to the Intelligence Section where he could analyze intelligence coming in from various sources around the world. His wish was granted and his first job was to investigate the backgrounds of all eight saboteurs where they previously lived and worked in the United States. It took him a month to get all the information needed and it was passed onto the office of the prosecutor of the military tribunal that would be trying them.

During the trial of each of the saboteurs, Robert testified as to what he learned about each of the saboteurs and their lives in the United States. All eight defendants were found guilty and sentenced to death. President Roosevelt commuted Burger’s sentence to life in prison and Dasch to 30 years, because they had turned themselves in and provided information about the others. The others were executed on the 8th of August 1942 in the electric chair on the third floor of the District of Columbia (Washington DC) jail and they were buried in a potter’s field called Blue Plains in the Anacostia area of Washington. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman granted executive clemency to Dasch and Burger on the condition that they were to be immediately deported to the American Zone of occupied Germany.

Meanwhile, Robert continued his work in the Intelligence Section of the Office of Naval Intelligence and in 1943; he was promoted to the rank of Lt. Commander.

He had so far been in the American armed forces for 13 years and he was extremely disappointed when he learned that he had been seconded to the Manhattan Project in 1944. It was a research and development project that produced the first atomic bombs during World War II. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was the scientific director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory that designed the actual bombs.

Robert had really preferred a transfer to a ship where the fighting would be conducted. Despite his efforts to get transferred onto a ship, he feared that he was destined to remain in the United States for the duration of the war. The reason why he was chosen to work at the Project was that Robert had during the last six months of 1942, supervised the security detail during the building of the Pentagon, the largest building in the world. Robert had been was seconded for the new job by General Leslie Groves who had been previously overseeing the construction of the Pentagon and as such, he was familiar with Robert’s ability to keep a tight ship with respect to security. By the time Robert had arrived in the secret location in northern New Mexico, there were as many as 130,000 people involved in the Project.

There were three major research sites. Robert was to be assigned to the weapons research and design laboratory at Los Alamos in 1943 for the purpose of heading the security of that particular facility. He didn’t really appreciate how secret the project was until he was being driven along a very long dusty road in the hot desert as the road headed towards low level hills in the distance. When he arrived at his destination, all he saw were many wooden buildings in an area that was spliced by dirt-dusty streets. Some of the buildings were residential buildings, some were storage buildings and others were where the research was being undertaken. He saw hundreds of people on the streets scurrying about like ants. General Groves, decided that Robert should also be his Chief of Intelligence.

General Groves told Robert that he would be responsible for finding out what the Germans were doing in their efforts to create an atomic bomb by interviewing a German nuclear scientist who had defected from Germany when Hitler came to power and was currently working at Los Alamos.

After the German Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Niles Bohr was smuggled out of Denmark late in 1943, Robert became his personal handler and he had spent many hours quizzing him about the German research efforts as per