Potsdam Station

Franco's furniture
April 6 –7
As they walked south towards Diedersdorf and the battalion command post, Paul Gehrts realised that he and his companion Gerhart Reheusser were grinning like idiots. The cloudless blue sky, warm sunshine and dust-free easterly breeze were responsible, banishing, if only for a few minutes, the grim anxiety that filled their waking hours. For the moment the occasional rattle of a distant machine-gun, the odd boom of a tank cannon or gun, could be ignored.
About five kilometres behind them, the Seelow Heights fell sharply away to the Oderbruch, the meadowlands which lay between the escarpment and the Oder River. Soon - in a few days, most likely - the men and tanks of the Red Army would storm across those meadows and throw themselves at the German defences. The Russians would die in their thousands, but thousands more would follow. It would only be a matter of time. But a sunny day was a sunny day, with a power all its own. The two men were approaching the first houses of the small town when they came upon a large group of soldiers spread out along the side of the road. Few looked older than fifteen, and one boy was actually passing round his army-issue bag of sweets, as if he were at a friend's birthday party. Most had their panzerfausts lying beside them on the grass, and all looked exhausted - the disposable rocket-launchers were a crippling weight for all but the strongest children. Their troop leader, who was probably almost out of his teens, was examining a weeping blister on one of his charges' feet. As Paul and Gerhard walked past he looked up, and offered them a brief rueful smile.
Almost all of Diedersdorf 's usual residents had left or been evacuated, and were now presumably clogging the roads leading westward, but the town was not being neglected - in the small central square an over-zealous staff-sergeant was supervising another band of young recruits in sweeping the cobbles.
'The madness of the military mind,' Gerhard

David Downing grew up in suburban London. He lives with his wife, an American acupuncturist, in Guildford, England.

Praise for Potsdam Station :
"John Russell has always been in the thick of things in David Downing's powerful historical novels set largely in Berlin . . . Downing provides no platform for debate in this unsentimental novel, leaving his hero to ponder the ethics of his pragmatic choices while surveying the ground level horrors to be seen in Berlin."
- The New York Times Book Review
"Reminiscent of Woody Allen's Zelig, Russell, the hero of Downing's espionage series, can't seem to resist inserting himself into climactic moments of the 20th century ... Downing has been classed in the elite company of literary spy masters Alan Furst and Philip Kerr ... that flattering comparison is generally justified. If Downing is light on character study, he's brilliant at evoking even the smallest details of wartime Berlin on its last legs.... Given the limited cast of characters, Downing must draw on almost Dickensian reserves of coincidences and close calls to sustain the suspense of his basic hide-and-seek story line. That he does ingeniously. It helps to read Downing's novels in order, but if Potsdam Station is your first foray into Russell's escapades, be forewarned that you may soon feel compelled to undertake a literary reconnaissance mission to retrieve and read the earlier books."
- Washington Post
"The echo of the Allied bombings and the crash of the boots of the invading Russians permeate the pages in which David Downing vividly does justice to the drama... The book is a reminder of what happened and those who allowed it to happen...The book lives up to the others in the Russell series, serving as yet one more reminder of a world too many have entirely forgotten."
- Washington Times
"Downing is brilliant at weaving history and fiction, and this plot, with its twists and turns - all under the terrible bombardment of Berlin and the Third Reich's death throes - is as suspenseful as they come. The end, with another twist, is equally clever and unexpected."
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