“I know I’ve thanked you before, Dan, for getting Gudrun and the boys out of the East, but I still don’t know how you pulled it off?” said Horst. At Kelly’s insistence, Horst was now using the familiar ‘Dan’ rather than the very formal ‘Colonel’.
“Ah! That would be telling,” Kelly answered quietly. “I had the help of a few friends. I expect Gudrun told you all about it?”
“Yes, as much as she can remember. She said it all happened very quickly. She remembers lying down in the back of a powerful car.”
“Yes, my friends do have nice cars,” smiled Kelly.
Horst smiled in turn. He knew he wasn’t going to get any more information from Kelly.
“It was nothing really,” said Kelly by way of closing the subject.
It had been far from nothing and had involved a small degree of risk. Kelly had known that he would have to extract Gudrun and the boys from the East if he was to get Manteufel’s full cooperation, and consequently, she and the boys had become an essential part of the operation. Undercover, he had visited Gudrun twice whilst Horst was in Plötzensee Prison, to prepare her for the eventual move. Each time he had taken food and milk with him. Helmut and Gudrun herself were beginning to look alarmingly thin, though thankfully young Siegfried seemed quite healthy. After each visit, he had taken as many of their personal belongings back with him as he could and stored them at Spandau.
For the final extraction he had enlisted the help of BRIXMIS, a surveillance team who operated mainly in East Berlin. There was nothing particularly secret about BRIXMIS, and the Soviets had their own counterpart in SOXMIS. Both groups had marked vehicles which were allowed free entry to each other’s areas in order to carry out surveillance, repatriate prisoners of war and displaced persons and to hunt for war criminals. Kelly had used them on a number of occasions in the latter capacity. They operated in the main in plain view, but of course occasionally they ‘strayed’ into prohibited areas to take pictures of military installations and troop movement. The Soviets did exactly the same in the British sector, so it was very much tit for tat.
The boys in BRIXMIS, including the drivers, all considered themselves super spies, but in reality, it was mainly low-level surveillance. However, Kelly did nothing to disabuse them as he needed their invaluable help from time to time.
That had been the case in this operation. The cars, all specially prepared and tuned, carried three: a tour officer, a tour NCO and an RASC driver. On one particular occasion, the tour officer in the Opel Kapitan that was travelling slowly around the Prenzlauer Allee area was a half colonel in a borrowed Black Watch uniform. They stopped the car in an unlit area just off the side street leading to the apartment building housing the Manteufel family. Kelly waited until he was sure there was no movement nearby and ran to the door. He met Gudrun coming down the stairs carrying a battered suitcase of effects, while Helmut struggled along in front with another bag, almost as big as he was. Siegfried brought up the rear, clinging to his mother’s skirt.
Kelly had whisked them into the car, where, as previously briefed, they squeezed down between the front and rear seats, the tour NCO covering them with greatcoats, maps, scarves and left-over meal packets. They had then driven slowly and deliberately back into West Berlin and safety.
Kelly smiled as he thought about the operation—it had not been without risk, but the mission was accomplished without mishap. He turned to Horst. “We had better go over these points again, Horst, you all set?”
“All set. I’ve cleared the dining table; we can use that. It will give us more room to spread things out.” Turning to Helmut, he said, “All right soldier, you know the drill.”
Helmut saluted British style and barked, “Jawohl, Herr Stabsfeldwebel!” Moving to Kelly he said, “I have to go and play in my room now, Onkel Dan, but if you need help, just call me.”
Kelly put on his serious face. “Thank you Hellie. I’ll bear that in mind.”
After the boy had gone, Kelly smiled at Horst. “He’s coming on fine, Horst.”
“Yes, he’s a blessing. There were times when I thought I’d never see him and Gudrun again.”
“That would have been after you had left the bunker?”
“That’s right.”
“It’s your last few days in the bunker I’m interested in,” said Kelly. “Perhaps you can recall how you got out, and what happened in the months following that?”
“We were told at about four in the afternoon on 30 April that the Führer was dead. Committed suicide. Now you may find this hard to believe, but when a German soldier takes an oath, that oath is binding.”
“I don’t find it hard to believe,” said Kelly. “I know it for a fact.”
“Well,” continued Horst, “I had taken an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler, and as long he was alive, I would have stayed at my post and defended him. After his death, I was no longer under any obligation to remain in the bunker to be captured by the advancing Soviets. It was every man for himself at that stage.”
Manteufel’s Story – I Leave the Bunker
I packed a small side satchel with food and attached an extra water bottle to my belt, which also held my pistol, my trench knife—I preferred that to the gravity knife—and a torch I had liberated from the store. I then made my way out through the chancellery. The tunnels were full of debris—I had to wriggle through in some places—but I managed to get out into the open air just as
