Albert Steinbock, a widower just turned 46, who hailed from Cottbus, was a policeman through and through. To his mind human beings required order to survive and they needed people who saw to it that this order was respected, people like himself, policemen. Policemen were just as important as doctors. Doctors fought illness and policeman fought crime. And crime was no different from illness, crimes were an illness of society. They must be extirpated. Without doctors and without policemen, things would go awry and that was why Albert Steinbock thought of himself as an extremely important and absolutely essential part of civilized society.
That was why it hit him so hard when at the start of the year 1949 he lost the job he held in his hometown. In the Soviet occupied zone (SBZ) or GDR (German Democratic republic) they had started reorganizing the police and that meant that any policeman who had close family in the West or who happened to have landed in an American, British or French POW camp during the war, had to give up his job. Steinbock had a son and daughter-in-law in the West, in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Plus he was an old SPD (German Social Democratic Party) member and had refused the forced union of the party with the Communists. Belong to the SED (German Socialist Unity Party? Over my dead body. He was placed early on the list of those to be dismissed that the new regime had drawn up because in the early summer of 1948 he had refused to support the so-called ‘referendum’ of the SED “For Union and a Just Peace”. Still, he hadn’t expected them to throw someone as deserving and experienced as himself out on the street and it still surprised him. What to do now? Now that he wasn’t allowed to be a policeman anymore… “In that case, I’ll take my own life.” His son had screamed at him: “Father, don’t you see? It’s simple: pack up your things and come to our place.” That’s what Albert Steinbock had done, even though old trees can’t take root in new soil. Through contacts he had become a patrolman … in the West Berlin police. And now he had to prove himself, he wanted to but it wasn’t so easy.
A bitter battle for power and influence had been playing itself out since 1948. Whereas the Western powers strove for a democratic police structure and wanted to resurrect the 1932 model, the police in the GDR was to be an instrument of power and had to be organized on a Stalinist, totally centralized model with a military type of command structure. For ordinary Berliners the two different police forces were quickly linked to the names of two men: Paul Markgraf for the Eastern structure, Dr. Johannes Stumm for the Western one. The East Berlin police department building was on Dirckenstrasse near Alexanderplatz, the West Berlin police was housed in Friesenstrasse near the downtown Tempelhof airport. And so things stood exactly as the August 19, 1948 headline in Der Morgen, the Berlin newspaper read: “Divided Berlin: A criminals’ paradise”. The article went on to explain how indicting a criminal was made even more difficult by the fact that some Western police precincts refused as a matter of principle to hand over people it had apprehended to Dirckenstrasse. Police officers in the West always suspected some communist villainy: there had in fact been a string of spectacular kidnappings and it happened repeatedly that some politically unpleasant person disappeared without a trace. Each police force accused the “other” of being illegal and anyone who wanted to conduct official business in the opposite sector was to be arrested immediately. A low intensity war was being waged between the two police departments and the hostility had escalated to the point where the East Berlin Chief of Police had been arrested by the Stumm (Western) police when he attempted, as a private citizen, to attend a boxing match in the Waldbühne outdoor arena in the West.
As long as the jurisdiction of the police ended at the border between the sectors, people who intended to break the law could operate in both parts of the city and rest assured that the mutual hostility would throw a monkey wrench in any investigation or at the very least make the necessary cooperation between the two sides difficult or impossible. The newspaper commented: It used to be that a dangerous criminal who wished to escape from the long arm of justice had to go across the ocean and even then he wasn’t necessarily safe. Now all it takes for him is to walk to the opposite sector where he can enjoy a comfortable feeling of safety.
“Father, must you constantly be doing overtime?” Steinbock’s son didn’t like to see his father crisscrossing the ruined landscape that stretched between the Zoo and the Knie late in the evenings in pursuit of the thieves stealing scrap metal.
“I’ve got to catch the buggers, I owe it to myself.”
“Just be careful.” Otwin Steinbock was a journalist and he knew that there were some people in the city who were afraid of nothing. Six months ago to the day Werner Gladow and his gang had been arrested after an Al Capone style shoot out in the East Berlin neighborhood of Friedrichshain. At the end of the trial, it was a foregone conclusion that the Senior Prosecutor would require the death penalty for a double murder and a series of other serious offences. In spite of that – or maybe because of it – Gladow had been turned into a hometown hero in both sectors of Berlin. Throughout the city youngsters played at being the Gladow gang.
Albert Steinbock laughed. He played the whole thing down with a joke: “Gladow or Kladow, isn’t that in Spandau, down by the Havel?”
“You and your stale jokes! You read my article about the body parts that were found at Stettiner station, didn’t you? The guy who’s doing these things …”
His father shrugged. “You can only die once.” And with those words he left. Stealing scrap metal was rampant since one could make a lot of money reselling lead, copper and brass. Especially if you stole it in the East and disposed of it in the West. Even here in Charlottenburg where they lived, the stealing was going on. Everywhere, especially in old cellars and empty lots scrap metal dealers sat waiting for loot. In Steinbock’s opinion they were all fences receiving stolen goods. When there were no lead pipes, brass faucets or locks or zinc window ledges to be found in the ruins, the thieves would slip into the houses still standing and set to work with saws, pliers and screw drivers. Just the day before, they had flooded a house on Carmerstrasse. ‘And who was blamed for all this? The police.’ That meant they were blaming him, Albert Steinbock. And that was why he had to catch the bastards.
And so he went on his usual rounds on the evening of December 9, 1949. From Hardenbergerstrasse to Schillerstrasse then on to Schlüterstrasse. He had noted down the houses that had been destroyed on Hardenbergerstrasse: numbers 1 to 5, 13 to 15, 20 and 21, 23 and 24, 27 and 37 to 42. Numbers 1 to 5 were on the Southside of the street between the Knie or Bismarckstrasse and the Renaissance Theater on Knesebeckstrasse, which had itself suffered comparatively little damage. Steinbock didn’t care whether they put on shows there ever again or what was playing, he would never go. “I have enough entertainment as it is, thank you.”
He suspected that the scrap metal thieves operated in groups of three. One stood watch while the other two sawed or unscrewed the metal. If they were working away inside a ruin they also needed someone to hold the flashlight or to watch out that the whole structure wasn’t going to come crashing down on them. Just then he thought he heard a whistle … He wasn’t sure because a streetcar rumbled by. If he had heard correctly the whistle had come from the corner lot between Schillerstrasse number 3 and Hardenbergerstrasse. Steinbock took a few steps and then stopped to examine the area. The entire block had been destroyed; what was left of the house fronts were already cleared but the ruined structures of the side and back walls still stood. The windows and doors to the cellars had not yet been walled up so that anyone could go in. Kids went in during the day and at night shadier types of people gathered there, the kind of people Steinbock was after. Had someone whistled again? Hard to tell… and harder to figure out where it came from. It could be a student across the way at the Technical Institute. Or maybe it did come from the clearing at the corner? He was torn between his hunter’s instinct to pursue and self preservation. The former won out. So he walked into the area and took careful steps over the cracked concrete, walking as if on thin ice. He could fall through at any moment. No, he couldn’t, of course not. He looked up and saw the black burnt out empty windows. A horrible sight. The scene was set: now the ghosts, dressed in floating white garb could appear. The light from the fairly weak street lamp on Hardenbergerger strasse didn’t reach into where he was so he turned on his flashlight. The beam lit the entrance to a cellar. He had heard a dragging noise down there. Maybe it was just a rat? Lovers trying to slip out? A hobo sleeping on his coat? Or maybe ‘his’ scrap metal thieves? Everything was possible.
He stood at the head of the stairs leading to the cellar. He took a few tentative steps down. He felt fear, of course he did, but when you’ve survived the Ardennes offensive, you can… Still, he couldn’t help screaming out loud. Right in front of him there was a dead body. No, not a dead body, he wouldn’t have screamed if it had been because he had seen so many dead: it was just a torso, with part of the neck left. No head, no arms, no legs. That was the horrible thing.