Spandau Phoenix Read Online Free PDF Page B

in. They pulverized the prison's masonry, dismembered its iron skeleton, and piled the remains into huge mounds that looked all too familiar to Berliners of a certain age.
     
    This year Berlin was 750 years old. All across the city massive construction and restoration projects had been proceeding apace in celebration of the historic anniversary. Yet this grim fortress, the Berliners knew, would never rise again. For years they had passed this way as they went about their business, rarely giving a thought to this last stubborn symbol of what, in the glow of glasnost, seemed ancient history. But now that Spandau's forbidding battlements no longer darkened the Wilhelmstrasse skyline, they stopped to ponder its ghosts.
     
    By dusk, only the prison heating plant still stood, its smokestack painted in stark relief against the gunmetal clouds. A wrecking-crane drew back its mammoth concrete ball. The stack trembled, as if waiting for the final blow. The ball swung slowly through its arc, then struck like a bomb.
     
    The smokestack exploded into a cloud of brick and dust, showering what had been the prison kitchen only minutes before.
     
    A sharp cheer cut through the din of heavy diesel motors.
     
    It came from beyond the cordoned perimeter. The cheer was not for the eradication of Spandau particularly, but rather a spontaneous human expression of awe at the sight of largescale destruction. @tated by the spectators, a French corporal gestured for some German policemen to help him disperse the crowd. Excellent hand signals quickly bridged the language barrier, and with trademark efficiency the Berlin Polizei went to work.
     
    "Achtung!" they bellowed. "Go home! Haue ah! This area is clearly marked as dangerous! Move on! It's too cold for gawking!
     
    Nothing here but brick and stone!"
     
    These efforts convinced the casually curious, who continued home with a story of minor interest to tell over dinner.
     
    But others were not so easily diverted. Several old men lingered across the busy street, their breath steaming in the cold. Some feigned boredom, others stared openly at the wrecked prison or glanced furtively at the others who had stayed behind. A stubborn knot of young toughs@ubbed "skinheads" because of their ritually shaven scalpsswaggered up to the floodlit prison gate to shout Nazi slogans at the British troops.
     
    They did not go unnoticed. Every passerby who had shown more than a casual interest in the wrecking operation had been photographed today.
    Inside the trailer being used to coordinate the demolition, a Russian corporal carefully clicked off two telephoto exposures of every person who remained on the block after the German police moved in.
     
    Within the hour these photographs would find their way into KGB
    caserooms in East Berlin, where they would be digi tized, fed into a massive database, and run through a formidable electronic gauntlet.
     
    Intelligence agents, Jewish fanatics, radical journalists, surviving Nazis: each exotic species would be painstakingly identified and catalogued, and any unknowns handed over to the East German secret policethe notorious Stasi-to be manually compared against their files.
     
    These steps would consume priceless computer time and many man-hours of work by the East Germans, but Moscow didn't mind asking.
     
    The destruction of Spandau was anything but routine to the KGB.
     
    Lavrenti Beria himself, chief of the brutal NKVD under Stalin, had passed a special directive down through the successive heads of the cheka, defining the importance of Spandau's inmates to unsolved cases.
     
    And on this evening-thirty-four years after Beria's death by firing squad-only one of those cases remained open.
     
    Rudolf Hess. The current chief of the KGB did not intend to leave it that way.
     
    A little way up the Wilhelmstrasse, perched motionless on a low brick wall, a sentinel even more vigilant an the Russians watched the Germans clear the street. Dressed as a laborer and