Karl Wegener's Blog

I'm working away at the sequel for Grown Men Cry Out at Night, another work of historical fiction set during the Cold War, based on true events.

In March 1955, Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Nikolai Bulganin, Chairman of the Soviet Council of Ministers signed government decree no. 589-365. Their action set in motion one of the most secret military actions of the Cold War - the stationing of strategic nuclear missiles on the territory of the German Democratic Republic, East Germany.

These were the same missiles that precipitated the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, but in this case, the Soviets deployed them to East Germany as early as 1959 and they remained there, undetected, until the mid-1960s.

The yet untitled sequel is a cautionary tale about the limitations of intelligence and why it is important for intelligence analysts to be able to "connect the dots" to create a complete picture for policy makers and leaders.

If you haven't yet purchased your copy of Grown Men Cry Out at Night, it is available in paperback or as an eBook at the following online retailers, or wherever you like to buy your books.

Barnes & Noble

Bookshop.org - Please note, this is my favorite online retailer. It allows readers to support local bookstores of their choosing. When you purchase my book here (or any other title for that matter), the profits all go to support a local bookstore of your choosing. Check them out, please!

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Before I wrote a single word, I spent 18 months reading and researching the background and history behind Grown Men Cry Out at Night. You see, I have always been a reader. From the time I was four years old and my sister took me to a library for the first time, I have loved to read. I currently have more than a dozen books on my Kindle that I am reading. And reading the works of the writers whom I admire, and whose work I love, helped me shape my book.

I read the entire George Smiley series by John Le Carre. I also read selected works of Graham Greene, especially his stories that centered around espionage and war. I thought of them often when I actually started writing, hoping to emulate their style and create characters that jumped off the page.

But if I was reading, that meant I wasn't writing. As I started to write Grown Men Cry Out at Night, the challenge became to write more than I read. As a former intelligence analyst, it is very easy for me to fall back into more research. If I could just find this one nugget of information, everything would fall into place. The plot would naturally flow, and the characters necessary to execute the plot would magically appear. Research is a natural act for me. Writing, especially a novel, is not.

But then, two very interesting things happened.

First, I saw an interview on television of the writer Amor Towles. Towles is a hugely successful writer and I happened to be reading his book, A Gentleman in Moscow when the interview aired. Something Towles said completely flabbergasted me.

Towles told the interviewer that he does most of his research AFTER he completes his first draft. He said that helps him find the story and let the characters speak without constraints.

Upon hearing that, I decided I would give it a try. I was beginning to feel desperate because writing was such a struggle. So with Towles words in my mind, I made the decision to no longer stop in the middle of my draft to go back and research some obscure historical fact. I would just let the words flow from my imagination.

I was liberated. I just started writing, knowing I could “correct” any historical inaccuracy if it was necessary. And as I did that, the words began to flow. And that is when the second thing happened.

My characters started speaking to me. I could hear dialogue in my head. Scenes would play out in my mind’s eye. I became a scribe, transcribing the scenes and dialogue as it was presented to me by my characters. When I started writing Grown Men Cry Out at Night, I struggled to meet my daily goal of writing 500 words. Once I adopted Towles approach, I was easily writing 1000, 2000, 3000 words a day, and sometimes more.

So, I will always be a reader and a researcher at heart. But if I want to be a writer, I have to sit down, listen to my characters, and write down what they say. They will tell me the story, they will construct the plot.

As my readers may know, Grown Men Cry Out at Night is a novel based upon true events. We have already learned about the Valentin Bunker, which plays a prominent role in the book. The story takes place within the Bremen Enclave, an area within the British Zone of Occupation that was administered by American forces. The Americans wanted to ensure access to the ports of Hamburg and Bremerhaven, and their administration of the Bremen Enclave allowed them to do so.

The 323 U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps Detachment actually existed. Just like in my book, the unit was headquartered at the Hotel Zur Post. The hotel still exists today. The primary function of the unit was to screen, interview, and process refugees and German nationals returning from the war.

Finally, Caspar Lehman is a fictional character. However I want readers to know know that one of the other main characters, Ludmilla Haas, is based on a person who actually lived named Maria Krystyna Janina Skarbek.

Skarbek was born in Warsaw to an aristocratic family, and while raised as a Roman Catholic, she had Jewish ancestry. She was Great Britain’s first female agent to serve in the field. She was serving as an agent before Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) formally accepted women into its ranks. She also had the distinction of being the longest-serving among all of Britain’s women wartime agents. She served from 1940 through the end of the war in 1945. Her longevity is particularly remarkable given the life expectancy of field agents was estimated to be approximately six weeks once they deployed to the field.

There are at least four biographies written about Skarbek should my readers wish to learn more about this remarkable woman. I consider The Spy Who Loved: The Secrets and Lives of Christine Granville, by Clare Mulley written in 2012 to be the best as I have read them all while researching my own book. I have found another brief, but very well written biography of her on The Heroine Collective. I hope you will take the time to read more about her. She is a woman whose name should be known by everyone.

I am not the first writer to base a character upon Skarbek. Ian Fleming based two characters on Skarbek; the first was Vesper Lynd in his 1953 novel, Casino Royal, and the second was Tatiana Romanova from 1957's From Russia with Love.

While I certainly could have used Skarbek's real name, I felt that anything I would write would pale in comparison to the life Skarbek actually lived and the feats she accomplished. So, in my novel, her spirit lives within the character of Ludmilla Haas and I hope Haas's spirit lives up to Skarbek's.

Grown Men Cry Out at Night

My novel, Grown Men Cry Out at Night, is set in Bremen Germany in 1946 and there is a German naval facility located in the Bremen suburbs that figures prominently in the story. The facility is called Bunker Valentin, or the Valentin Bunker.

In the novel, Caspar Lehman, a U.S. Army counterintelligence agent and Luba Haas, a former Special Operations Executive (SOE) operative are given the assignment to find and capture the bunker’s former head of security, Gestapo Senior Lieutenant Ulrich Dettmer.

Dettmer, a man of extraordinary cruelty, is among those chiefly responsible for working thousands of laborers to death during the bunker’s construction. Haas has additional motivation to find Dettmer. Her husband, a Polish resistance fighter who was trained by the SOE, was among those interred at the nearby Farge concentration camp, which supplied the laborers for the bunker. She desperately wants to know his fate.

So, what was the Valentin Bunker?

The bunker was intended to be a submarine assembly facility and it is located about 25 miles northwest of Bremen, near the villages of Rekum and Farge. The bunker, which actually acts as a protective shell for the submarine assembly lines inside is enormous, and it is the largest free-standing bunker in Germany. Rising up from the otherwise flat Northern German plain, the bunker stands more than 25 meters tall, 97 meters wide, and 426 meters long.

Construction on the bunker began in February of 1943 and continued until March 1945 when it was abandoned. By then, the fate of Germany was sealed. The Wehrmacht was reeling from the pounding it was taking by the Soviet Red Army in the East and Allied forces attacking from the West. The camp’s Kriegsmarine guards, and their SS and Gestapo overseers wanted to cover evidence of their abuses, so prisoners from the Farge camp were packed into railcars and sent to other camps to await their fate.

Building the Valentin Bunker is a story of incredible cruelty. Bunker construction was carried out by thousands of slave laborers. The majority of the laborers were POWs – Russian, Polish, Greek, and French soldiers. There were 32 Irish prisoners illegally held at the Farge camp; Ireland was a neutral country, but they were held, nevertheless. These men were Irish merchant seamen who served on British vessels and were captured by German Navy raiders. But there were also ordinary Germans who worked on the bunker. Many were political prisoners, some were communists or labor activists, members of the clergy, and there were a host of others who were convicted of various crimes against the Nazi regime.

Workers were fed a starvation diet and disease was rampant. Medical care was rudimentary at best, and supplies were scarce. There was at least one documented outbreak of cholera during the construction of the bunker. But what took its greatest toll on the laborers was the work itself. It was backbreaking and exhausting. Workers poured thousands of tons of concrete, they hoisted and put steel girders into place, all while working largely by hand. Many workers died in place during the construction, their remains are still there to this day, entombed in the concrete that now surrounds them forever.

Had the bunker’s submarine assembly lines become operational, intelligence estimates are that the bunker would have eventually produced more than a dozen Type XXI submarines each month. The Type XXI was a state-of-the-art submarine, unlike any other submarine of its day. It was the first submarine designed to operate primarily submerged. Other submarines of the period spent most of their time operating on the surface and only submerged to avoid detection. Other design improvements made the Type XXI a submarine a formidable weapon that was in a class by itself and was more advanced than any other submarine of the period, Allied or Axis. Thankfully, only two Type XXI’s made it to active service, and they never saw combat.

We do not know the actual number of those who died building the bunker. About 550 names, mostly French POWs are recorded today on the memorial that has been erected at the site. However, deaths are estimated to be at least 6,000 and some estimates are much higher.

Today, the bunker stands as a memorial site “in remembrance of the war and the crimes committed by the Nazis.” Grown Men Cry Out at Night is dedicated to the thousands of slave laborers who lost their lives and to those who survived the ordeal of building the Valentin Bunker. Although we may not know your names, we shall never forget your suffering.

I never set out to write an espionage novel. When I told close friends I planned to write after I retired from my freelance writing gig of 15 years, the first question they would ask me was, “So, are you writing a cookbook?”

My friends know that I am a passionate amateur cook and they know how I love to create menus and prepare meals for them. Like many of my earlier writing projects, I had started a kind of cookbook / memoir titled “My Mother’s Table.” I even turned it into a podcast for awhile until I lost the passion for it and ran out of steam. I lost focus and could no longer feel the arc of a story.

Then there was another book idea, a coming of age story set in 1968. That book is tentatively titled, “Angela and Tommy” and tells the story of three friends whose lives are changed when they decide to take a road trip together to view Robert Kennedy’s funeral train. For those of you who lived through it, 1968 was a tumultuous year and I still believe there is a story there to be told. I have tens of thousands of words written for both these projects. They sit in various folders on my laptop, waiting for the day when I will give these ideas the attention they deserve. Or not.

But during the summer of 2021, another story line came to me out of the blue. It was around that time I began to hear stories of “The Ritchie Boys,” a band of intrepid, largely immigrant warriors who were trained in the darker arts of combat and formed the nucleus of the Army Counterintelligence Corps, the OSS, and other service counterintelligence organizations during Word War II. Their work during the war was honored by a congressional resolution in August 2021 and one estimate reveals that more than 60 percent of all credible intelligence gathered in Europe during the war could be attributed to them. I also had firsthand experience working with U.S. Army Counterintelligence when, many years ago I supported their work as a targeting analyst.

Another impetus to write the story came later that summer when I learned of the existence of a submarine factory housed in an enormous bunker in Bremen Germany. The Valentin Bunker is a place which figures prominently in my book.

I have visited Bremen many times and like Caspar Lehman in my book, my family comes from there. But the bunker was unknown to me and that is a surprise in itself. The sheer size of the bunker and the fact that thousands of slave laborers housed in camps located in Bremen’s suburbs died building it, make the structure impossible to ignore. While its intent and purpose may not have been known by the local population, its existence had to have been known by most of the locals. It’s just too big to miss. Thousands died there and will forever remain unknown. So, I thought their story needed to be brought out into the light.

Celebrating the Mundane and the Ordinary
One of my pet peeves is the way in which the intelligence services are portrayed in popular culture. While characters such as Jason Bourne and James Bond make for great storytelling, the intelligence community is not dominated by “solo operators” running around the world, blowing things up, and saving the world from destruction. On the contrary, the intelligence community as noted by CIA director Anthony Blinken in the premiere edition of the CIA podcast, The Langley Files, is a “team sport.” Every day, thousands of ordinary people go about their jobs collecting, analyzing, preparing, and disseminating intelligence to their consumers in government. In the nearly twenty years I spent in military intelligence and later working with and at various “three-letter” agencies in Washington, D.C., ordinary people showed up each day and did their jobs.

And that is what I’ve tried to write about in Grown Men Cry Out at Night. I try to celebrate what is ordinary and mundane and the chapter which I share with you today extols the ordinary. Having sat through hundreds of them, I can tell you that within the intelligence community, there is nothing more ordinary than an “intelligence briefing.”

I support independent bookstores.

While it’s wonderful my debut novel, Grown Men Cry Out at Night is available through the major online retailers such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and more, it’s also available at thousands of indie bookstores all over the world. If they are not currently stocking my book at your local bookstore, just ask them to order it. Grown Men Cry Out at Night is available through my distributor, Ingram Content Group, which is the world’s largest book distributor, and provides both digital and print book distribution, print on demand, and other services for the publishing industry.

My 2023 planned book tour will be held at independent bookstores around the United States. I’ll be publishing more information about the tour, the dates, times, and locations after the first of the year.

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Grown Men Cry Out at Night is set in 1946 and it is a story about three people whose lives are thrown together in post-war Germany as they work together to track down a Gestapo officer accused of war crimes.

Today, in my inaugural blog on Goodreads, let's take a closer look at the three central characters in my novel.

Caspar Lehman is a battle-weary U.S. Army Counterintelligence agent assigned to lead a counterintelligence detachment in Bremen Enclave. His service during the war has left him emotionally scarred. He suffers from what today we would call post-traumatic stress, but in 1946 was called “shell shock” or “battle fatigue.” Upon his arrival at his new unit, Lehman is given orders to capture the Gestapo officer responsible for the death of thousands of POWs who worked under horrific conditions at the Valentin Bunker, a massive U-boat construction facility located in a nearby Bremen suburb.

Ludmilla Haas is a Polish woman from Gdansk and former British SOE agent who is now searching for her husband, a Polish resistance fighter who was last seen being herded onto a cattle-car outside the Valentin Bunker. Haas was a hero during the war and fought to liberate not only her native Poland, but France as well. However, she has struggled to find meaning and a place for herself after the war. She is a woman who has lost everything. She’s lost her husband, her family, and her country, which is now under Soviet control.

Lehman discovers his own family is complicit in carrying out the war crimes he seeks to avenge. He discovers a cousin named Therese Weber who still lives in Bremen and who was the chief accountant for the civilian construction company responsible for building the bunker. Weber has the detailed knowledge necessary to help Lehman and Haas capture  those responsible for the deaths of thousands and hold them accountable. She literally knows where the bodies are buried, and who buried them.

The question is, will she cooperate?