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Last Night. Last week Otto John made a pilgrimage to Berlin for the roth anniversary of the July 20 uprising. He was a drinking man, and his round of reminiscences with other survivors was argumentative and well liquored. An acquaintance recalls considerable talk about Communism, and John, visibly annoyed, snorting: "You're all afraid of Communists. I'm afraid of Nazis." Those who saw him then thought that he was short tempered, nervous, almost in a daze. His wife said he was "mentally depressed." At the memorial ceremony in grisly Plötzensee Prison, he seemed haggard beyond his 44 years.
That evening in Berlin, Otto John sought out strange company for one who was head of the Bonn FBI. He drove to the apartment-office of Dr. Wolfgang Wohlgemuth, a busy, prosperous gynecologist who plays a hot trumpet, shares John's interest in woman-chasing, and is known to be a Communist. Sometime that evening, Wohlgemuth sat down at his desk and wrote a note: "The fact is that Dr. John will not return to the Western sector." Then they left together. Curiously enough, John left behind him in his hotel room a notebook that would have been useful had he intended selling out.
When the news came that John had gone over to the East zone, Bonn could not believe it, partly because it could not afford to. The Interior Ministry charged abduction; the police hinted at hypnosis. The U.S. High Commission agreed that the Soviets had "trapped or forced" John.
But three days later, in the afternoon, over East Berlin's radio Deutschlandsender came the clear, firm voice of Otto John, slow at first, then normal: he had defected to "establish contact with the Germans in the East," and because "Nazis are reappearing everywhere [in West Germany] in political and public life . . . West German policy has entered a blind alley . . . Possibilities for German reunification . . . must at least be tried out."
"A major catastrophe," said an allied intelligence source. Otto John had returned only ten days before from a six weeks' study tour in the U.S., where he talked with CIA Director Allen Dulles; on his way back he had conferred with British security men. Presumably neither had told him the names of any of their agents in West or East Germany, but undoubtedly he had picked up a good bit of information about their techniques and knowledge. London rushed two top agents to West Berlin to assess the damage, and canceled its code for communicating with West Germany. Soon reports arrived from the Red zone of a wave of arrests of Western secret agents. "Everything and everyone is compromised," a West German intelligence officer cried. "We must start again at the bottom."
Some of John's old friends still could not believe it. "He is absolutely a man of Western ideas." said a Bonn diplomat. "He was against all totalitarian systems, Nazi and Communist," said a Berlin colleague. But whether he had sold out, defected, or had been lured across, the ugly fact was that, voluntarily or involuntarily, Otto John could give the Communists more valuable information than anyone since Klaus Fuchs.