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Marburg an der Lahn, Germany
1030 7 October 1945
The house was large and in good shape, and the first thing Lieutenant Jim Cronley thought when he saw it was that it had most likely been requisitioned by the Army.
He told Elsa this, and added, “Maybe I better go with you.”
She nodded.
A middle-aged German woman answered their knock. She had a worried look when she saw what she understandably mistook for two Americans. The look was replaced by one of surprise and confusion when Elsa told her, in German, that she was looking for Family Hofstadter.
“They are no longer here,” the woman said.
“Where are they?” Elsa asked.
“How would I know?” the woman replied, unpleasantly.
“This was their house?” Cronley asked.
“It was forfeited,” the woman said.
“Why was it forfeited?” Cronley asked. “Forfeited to whom?”
“To the state,” the woman said. “After the attempt to murder Adolf Hitler, Oberst Hofstadter was arrested. On his conviction for treason, all of his property was forfeited to the Reich.”
“And you, being a good Nazi,” Cronley said sarcastically, “got to buy it for next to nothing?”
“Jimmy!” Elsa said warningly.
The woman’s face whitened, but she said nothing.
Elsa turned and stepped quickly down the walk to the Kapitän.
Cronley followed, then got behind the wheel.
“I can probably find these people for you,” he said.
She looked at him. He thought he could see tears forming.
“Can you?”
“I think so,” he said, and started the engine.
—
There was a thirty-five-year-old military police captain on duty in the offices of the Polizeidistrikt fur Kreis Marburg.
Relations between the MP and the CIC were usually frosty, and icicles quickly formed when the young CIC special agent—who the captain knew was probably a sergeant and certainly no more than a lieutenant—told the MP captain that he was sorry but the captain did not have the need to know why he wanted to know where the Hofstadter family, formerly of 233 Heinrichstein Strasse, could now be found.
If he calls Connell, Jimmy thought, I’m fucked.
“I’ll see what I can do, Sergeant . . . excuse me . . . Mister Cronley,” the captain said sarcastically. “It’s always a pleasure to cooperate with the CIC. When do you need it?”
Cronley remembered something from A&M: The best defense is the attack.
“Major Connell told me to get that information now.”
Ten minutes later, in the Kapitän, Jimmy handed Elsa a slip of paper on which was written: 4-E, 73 Obtierstrasse.
