Chapter 405: Final -

「July 1991, Berlin.」

Werner stood before the floor-to-ceiling window in his office, watching the summer sun spill onto the construction site at Potsdamer Platz. Crane after crane stood densely packed, like a forest of steel. The city was rebuilding at a frantic pace, changing every single day.

“Mr. Betelich?” his secretary reminded him softly from the doorway. “The reporter from *Der Spiegel* is here.”

Werner turned and straightened his tie.

“Please show her in.”

Monica Weber walked in, holding a black notebook and a tape recorder. She looked to be in her early forties and was dressed in a smart suit.

“Mr. Betelich, thank you for agreeing to this interview,” Monica said, extending her hand.

“Please, call me Werner.” He shook her hand, then gestured to the sofa area. “Please, have a seat. Coffee or tea?”

“Coffee, thank you.”

The secretary quickly brought the coffee. Monica surveyed the office—teak bookshelves lined with books, abstract paintings on the walls, and a globe in the corner. There was no trace of East Germany, save for a dusty gray piece of concrete under a glass cloche in the most inconspicuous corner of a bookshelf.

“And that is?” Monica asked.

“A piece of the Berlin Wall,” Werner said, picking up his coffee cup. “I chipped it off myself near the Bornholm Street checkpoint on the night of November 9th, 1989.”

Monica took the tape recorder out of her bag. “You don’t mind if I record this, do you?”

“Not at all,” Werner said. “Everything I’m going to say can see the light of day anyway.”

Monica smiled and switched on the recorder. “Then let’s begin. Mr. Werner, could you start by telling me a little about yourself? Where you were born, your family background, and how you came to work for the Commercial Coordination department?”

Werner lit a cigarette and gathered his thoughts. “I was born in East Berlin. My father died in the war, and my mother remarried and didn’t pay much attention to me after that. I worked as a laborer in a state-owned machinery factory during the day, and at night and on weekends, I hung out on the streets, occasionally helping people smuggle Western goods like cigarettes and chocolate to make a little extra money. After the Berlin Wall went up in 1961, I started a small business on the Black Market—reselling coffee and radios from West Germany in exchange for foreign currency coupons.”

“Back then, a lot of people in East Berlin did the same,” he said, exhaling a plume of smoke. “You couldn’t get those things through normal channels, or you’d have to wait in incredibly long lines. The Black Market was illegal, but it was an open secret.”

Monica nodded, jotting in her notebook. “And then? How did you get into the Commercial Coordination department?”

“1963,” Werner said. “At the time, Koko needed people who understood foreign trade. Because of my experience on the Black Market, I knew the market prices in West Germany and had some contacts, so I was recruited. I started as just a procurement agent, then slowly worked my way up to supervisor.”

“What exactly did the Commercial Coordination department do?” Monica asked.

“Earn foreign currency for the East German Government,” Werner said. “We imported goods that East Germany lacked from West Germany—industrial raw materials, machinery, medicine, food. And we exported East German products to the West—chemicals, optical instruments, weapons.”

“That sounds perfectly normal,” Monica said.

“On the surface, it was,” Werner said. “But in practice, there were a lot of… gray areas. For example, we’d inflate import prices and transfer the difference to overseas accounts. Or we’d trade East German products for luxury goods from West Germany and then sell them to high-ranking East German officials.”

“And you participated in this?”

“I had to participate,” Werner said, looking at her. “In that system, if you didn’t play along, you’d be kicked out, or even thrown in prison. I wanted to survive, I wanted to have a job, so I did it.”

“But I had my limits,” he stressed. “I never informed on anyone, never hurt anyone, and never took part in political persecution.”

“That leads to my next question.” Monica flipped through her notebook. “You helped some political prisoners get released. Can you talk about that?”

Werner paused for a moment, as if lost in thought.

“In the early 1960s, the East German Government began trading political prisoners for foreign currency and goods from West Germany,” he said. “Since I worked for Koko and had channels in West Germany, I became a middleman. I was responsible for liaising with West German lawyers, confirming the lists of names, and coordinating the releases. Later, I realized I could use this to save people.”

“Save people?” Monica repeated.

“Yes.” Werner nodded. “Many of those so-called political prisoners were just people who had tried to escape to West Germany, or who had said a few words of complaint. They were locked up in prison, some sentenced to ten, twenty years. Without this program, they might never have gotten out.”

“So I began to actively push the project forward,” he said. “I would go to the prisons and select those with the lightest sentences, those who had been imprisoned the longest, and those with children at home. I gave their names to West Germany and persuaded the West German Government to pay for their release.”

“Between 1963 and 1989, I handled thousands of cases,” Werner said. “Every time I saw those people walk out of prison and get into the cars headed for West Germany, I felt… that what I was doing was right.”

Monica looked at him, a hint of emotion in her eyes. “You were inside the system, yet you did something that went against it.”

“I’m not against the system,” Werner corrected her. “I just didn’t think those people deserved to be in prison.”

“Weren’t you ever afraid of being found out?” Monica asked. “If the East German Government had known you were using this program to save people, what would they have done to you?”

“I thought about it,” Werner said. “But I was careful. I never kept any written records; all communication went through intermediaries. Besides, I had an advantage—I made the East German Government a lot of money. They needed me, so they wouldn’t touch me easily.”