Many are the visitors to Berlin who make a day trip out of the capital to nearby Potsdam. It is just a half hour journey on the train from Berlin to the small city which has as fine an assemblage of royal palaces as any feature European capital. And, for those who tire of great buildings and their manicured parklands, there are Potsdam's Dutch and Russian settlements. The Holländisches Viertel (Dutch Quarter) becomes ever smarter, and the gabled houses once built by Dutch artisans are now home to chic bars and restaurants, galleries and antique shops. On Potsdam's northern outskirts, Alexandrowka boasts a fabulous collection of Russian rural blockhouses, each surrounded by generous orchards. Visitors eat pierogi and drink vodka, before continuing up the hill to the remarkable pink Russian Orthodox church that was built for the Russians colonists who came to Alexandrowka almost two hundred years ago.
In spring and summer, the Potsdam parks and the communities around them are seductively beautiful places. Visitors wander from the domed Alexander Nevsky Church, past the Jewish cemetery and on over the Pfingstberg (Pentecost Hill) to the Neuer Garten (New Garden), a piece of exquisite landscape design that blends natural and manmade elements. The Neuer Garten area incorporates a number of roads with dwellings - some handsome villas and many more modest residences.
History fades fast in this part of the world, and few visitors to the Neuer Garten nowadays have any inkling that there is another side to this secluded area. Tourists drive through the Neuer Garten every day en route to the palace and hotel at Cecilienhof. But until 1994, the entire Neuer Garten area was a secret forbidden city - a little Russian enclave which served as a Soviet military outpost and the KGB's administrative headquarters in Germany.
Maria-Louise Steinart, Marlise to her closest friends, arrived in Potsdam in January 1945, fleeing from the fighting in the troubled lands further east. She came with her mother, her sister and her three children. There was the eldest Marlene, then thirteen, Alexander and little Lore, aged just seven. The family was lucky to get a couple of rooms at a house in the Neuer Garten, a quiet and leafy area north of town just near Cecilienhof. For the Steinart family, their new home seemed altogether grander than the small quarters they had left behind in Latvia.
Sometimes, on frosty winter afternoons, in the weeks after they arrived in Potsdam, Marlise and her children walked down from the Neuer Garten to the banks of the Havel. From the waterside there was a fine view of the chateau at Cecilienhof. And, in the other direction, the green Glienicke bridge. They liked the old bridge, and each of them was a little sad when one night around Easter an unexploded shell detonated beneath the bridge and its main deck collapsed, like a felled tree, into the Havel. It wasn't long after that the Russian soldiers arrived in Potsdam.
Peace came. So did Winston Churchill. He came and smoked cigars in the old library at Cecilienhof, just down the road from where Marlise lived. Stalin and Truman both came to meet Churchill at Cecilienhof. The old men spent the days drawing lines on maps of Europe and planning a better world. In the evenings, bands played and the visiting statesmen drank whisky.
Cecilienhof palace in Potsdam is now a luxury hotel. In 1945, the Potsdam Peace Conference was held here (photo © hidden europe).
We do not know whether Stalin went for leisurely walks around Cecilienhof’s parks and gardens while he attended the Potsdam Conference. But his aides and attachés certainly did, and they were rather taken by the sculptured slopes and sedate charm of Potsdam’s Neuer Garden. They explored the Pfingstberg, and the old Jewish cemetery, already then as eerie a spot as it is today. They were pleased to find a little reminder of home just a few minutes walk away: the pink walled Russian Orthodox chapel. Many times these civil servants and minders walked past the villa where Marlise lived, and on up Great Winemaker Street past the Women’s Mission of the Evangelical Church. These were fine buildings, set in a fine landscape… a contrast indeed to the bombed remains of Potsdam just a mile or two to the south.
Stalin’s men spoke to their friends in the KGB, and shortly after the Potsdam Conference ended, a delegation of KGB officers arrived in the Neuer Garten, and quickly set about making this area their own. This “Russification” of the garden and its villas went largely unnoticed by the people of Potsdam, for quickly the Neuer Garten was walled off and became a forbidden city. Great Winemaker Street became Ulica Central’naja (Main Street), and other Russian names popped up: Ulica Zelennaja (Green Street) and Ulica Bibliotečnaja (Library Street). The old Empress Augusta Foundation villa, the largest building in the enclave, was converted into the KGB Headquarters, and the Church’s mission for women became a KGB prison.
Marlise counted herself lucky that she was allowed to stay in the Neuer Garten area as the KGB moved in. The street name changed, but Marlise and her family all spoke both Russian and German, and the changes were ones to which they could easily adapt. Indeed, the Russian arrival bought tangible benefits, for Marlise, now aged exactly forty, quickly found work as an interpreter. Life was good for the Steinart family for a couple of years… at least as good as life could ever be in the fractured world of post-war Germany. There was food, and more than just the sugar beet and potatoes available to those who lived outside the protected Russian enclave. This was a better kind of world.
It was a Saturday morning many years later. 1962 in fact. It was February, and a day which had dawned damp and misty, but a little after 8.30 am the sun pierced through the clouds in the eastern sky. All was silence around the Glienicke bridge, save only for the unsteady chatter of the engine of a black limousine which brought the American along a road of faded villas, past the point where the tram lines give up, and on to the checkpoint at the bridge, now reconstructed after wartime damage. A sentinel of uniformed guards, grey in their austerity, stood at the barrier that marked the start of the bridge. The American stepped out of the car; he replied cautiously to the guards’ greetings, and then he stood uneasily on the potholed road.
To his left and right, below the bridge, the quiet waters of the Havel, all tamed woodlands and manicured lawns, here a small chateau, Cecilienhof itself to the north, and there in the distance the old Romanesque basilica of Sacrow, to which a hundred years earlier, the Hohenzollern Princes, the Kings of all the Prussians, had travelled by boat each Sunday from their nearby palaces at Potsdam. The American, whose name was Powers, had never been to Germany before, and, for all the worry of the past hours, he still pondered the perfect composition of this watery landscape, with its avenues of light and green colonnades. Nervously, Powers looked out across the battered bridge and polished his sunglasses.
On the other side of the bridge, where the road comes out of the woods onto the Glienicke bridge, there stood a similar posse of men, caught in shaft of sunlight. Some wore uniforms resplendent with military honours. Among them, a thin man, who looked for all the world like a benign general practitioner, stood in a severe grey suit, a striped tie and brimmed hat, with a pale raincoat hanging loosely over his left arm. He too was newly arrived in this eastern part of Germany, his plane — a noisy DC7 — having touched down at Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport little more than an hour earlier. This man, a Russian, seemed to find it difficult to focus through his spectacles, but he was tired, and every bit as nervous as the American, whom he could now see approaching towards him from the far side of the bridge. A soldier stepped forward, touched the Russian on the arm, and said, in that elusive American drawl that speaks only of somewhere south of the Carolinas: “You may cross now, Mr Abel.”
Not a glance, not even a nod as Francis Gary Powers and Rudolf Ivanovich Abel crossed the Glienecke bridge that spans the Havel and separates the adjacent cities of Berlin and Potsdam. It was, for all the world, just like any other Saturday morning that winter, except that, on this particular Saturday, the two arch protagonists of the Cold War years had just swapped spies. Exactly two hours later, at 10.45 am, the same DC7 that had brought agent Abel to Tempelhof was taking off again, now heading west, transporting Gary Powers back to the American base at Wiesbaden in West Germany. There he would tell of all that had happened since his reconnaissance plane was shot down over Siberia on May Day 1960.
Later that same Saturday morning, Rudolf Abel was at East Berlin’s Schönefeld airport, evidently now an altogether happier man, awkwardly carrying a small bunch of roses, but smiling and chatting briefly with Markus Wolf, the head of East Germany’s foreign intelligence operations, before boarding a plane bound for Moscow. Abel had been away in the US for five long years, and rarely has a man looked forward so much to getting home, as Abel did then, as his plane took off from Schönefeld’s long runway and headed towards the River Oder. Now he could put June 1957 behind him, and the night when an elaborate game of hide and seek with the FBI concluded with his arrest at New York’s Latham Hotel on charges of espionage. The KGB operative whom the Americans called “Mark” was coming home.
By now, Marlise was living far from Potsdam, in Verden, the smart little market town with its handsome stone cathedral and timber framed houses, in the Aller Valley, not far from the great trading city of Bremen. It was there in Verden that Marlise saw a short note in the Monday newspaper about what had taken place on the Glienicke bridge two days earlier, and it reminded her of Potsdam, of those walks with Marlene, Alex and Lore, down to the banks of the Havel, and of the bridge itself. The newspaper piece also mentioned that Powers had spent some time at Ljubljanka Prison, being interrogated by the KGB and that reminded Marlise of the harsh yellow fortress in the middle of Moscow, and the time, fourteen winters ago, when she too had spent many months in Ljubljanka’s fearsome cells.
It all started on a Thursday in August 1948. It was the summer day on which India and Pakistan celebrated their new status as independent nation states, and Marlise had left the family home as normal, dressed in a light dirndl, white socks and a top, and walked to work along Ulica Moščonnaja. It was a normal day, and in the afternoon Officer Kulischew asked Marlise to follow him to the KGB’s prison, just along the way from the Headquarters in the old Empress Augusta Foundation house. It would just be a short translation, he told her, and she’d not be away more than five or ten minutes. Marlise followed Kulischew up the few iron steps that led into the green door of the secret prison, and there she was met by a sergeant. Kulischew bad her follow the sergeant upstairs, and this Marlise did. But this was no routine assignment for the interpreter.
The sergeant was severe in his demands, that Marlise hand over her jewellery, her hairclips, and the small red handbag that she took everywhere with her. Then he led her down to the cells, dim airless corners in the basement of the building that had until recently served as a sanctuary for the women of the Evangelical Church in Potsdam. There was a tiny window high in the corner of the cell, where a daddylonglegs played in the grimy dust.
And, then, shortly before midnight, Marlise was summoned by the guards, and led in the warmth of the summer night across to the interrogation centre in the adjacent building. She knew the building well, but always before as interpreter, never as detainee.
As night fell, one of the guards brought supper to Marlise — a simple meal of thick lentil soup, meat and potatoes. Outside the window, Marlise heard the Russian soldiers singing… this she was well used to, for these were the Russian songs that she and the children could often hear from their own house, but it sounded so different that evening from inside the gloomy surrounds of the prison. And, then, shortly before midnight, Marlise was summoned by the guards, and led in the warmth of the summer night across to the interrogation centre in the adjacent building. She knew the building well, but always before as interpreter, never as detainee.
There was no pattern to the days that followed: sometimes the interviews lasted hours through the night, and other times only in the day. Sometimes both! Marlise noted only the passing of the sixteenth birthday of her eldest daughter, Marlene, and the gradual yellowing of the leaves on the slender birch tree that she could just see from the interrogation room. Over four weeks passed thus, while Marlise wondered quite what she had done so to affront her masters in the KGB.
One day Captain Tichomirow came to her cell; Marlise knew him well, too well, from many interrogations. He gave her a coarse grey blanket of the kind used by the Russian soldiers, a woollen jacket and other winter clothes. On the next day, a Saturday, Marlise was bundled into a van and taken, down past the villa where her family lived, and over to Berlin. There her military escort accompanied her onto a train bound for Moscow, where she arrived the following Tuesday morning. There followed a winter of incarceration, first in the prison at Lefortovo and later at Ljubljanka. Marlise was at Ljubljanka many months. The following year Marlise was sent to Kazakhstan. There on the Kazakh steppes the winter cold was intolerable and the summer heat was stifling. Marlise was eventually released in the amnesty that followed Stalin’s death.
Her journey home was a long one, with a further period of detention in Lithuania, but by midday on Christmas Eve 1953 Marlise found herself on the railway station at Brest in Belarus. There she and about twelve hundred other prisoners were transferred into freight trucks of the German Reichsbahn, and slowly they rattled west across Poland. It wasn’t until two days later that Marlise’s train crossed the Oder River at Frankfurt. After over five years away, Marlise was back at last in Germany. Here, on the snow covered railway platforms at Frankfurt an der Oder, the women of the Red Cross distributed sweet tea. A church choir was there on the station to welcome the returnees. They sang Christmas hymns. There were new clothes for everyone.
By lunchtime the next day, Marlise was back in Potsdam but by then her family had long since moved away from the KGB enclave in Potsdam. That first night, Marlise sat alone in the church on Pentecost Hill above the New Garden where she had once lived and worked. Her family, people told her, had gone to Verden in the Aller Valley, some hundreds of kilometres to the west. It took time to get a police permit for the journey across the border into West Germany. Marlise reached her new home in Verden as dusk fell on New Years Eve 1953. Marlene, Alex and Lore were waiting for her on the station platform when the train arrived.
Marlene long outlived Gary Powers and Rudolf Abel. The Soviet agent died of cancer not long after he returned home. As for Powers, he perished in a helicopter crash in Los Angeles. But Marlise lived well in Verden until her death in 1982.
The houses of the Neuer Garten in Potsdam are now being refurbished. The last of the KGB and the Russian soldiers left in August 1994, and there are few reminders today of this darker side of Potsdam. Who now remembers Marlise or the hushed spy swaps on the worn iron bridge that links Berlin and Potsdam? Families picnic in the Neuer Garten, rich tourists stay at Cecilienhof Hotel; some smoke cigars and drink whisky in the rooms where in 1945 the old men pored over their maps. Students discuss love, life and politics on the meadows that lead down to the Havel, and children play hide and seek in the woods of Glienicke. Gone are the barricades and watchtowers that once marked the front line of imperial opposition in the Cold War. Glienicke today, like the nearby Neuer Garten, is a place of studied tranquility.
In preparing this article, hidden europe has drawn extensively on Maria-Louise Steinart’s unpublished diaries. For the descriptions of the Gary Powers / Rudolf Abel spy swap, we have drawn on newspaper reports from 1962 and other archival material.
