Death of a Cop

Sergeant Werner Stephan, 40, was one cop whom West Berliners really liked. For twelve years, as the city's top bomb expert, he had Berlin's toughest and most dangerous job--defusing the thousands of unexploded bombs and shells still hidden in the debris of the shattered city. With his close police pal Gerhard Raebiger, he removed fuses from some 8,000 dud bombs, some 10,000 grenades. Through the years of reconstruction he was on call day and night, sometimes working 48 hours at a stretch on some particularly ticklish job. Once, when rubble removers uncovered a nest of three blockbusters smack in the middle of a heavily populated apartment district, he shoveled away the rubble himself to get at them; then for 18 hours he sweated out the delicate job of taking the fuses out of the lurking monsters. In May 1952, Stephan and Raebiger won the West German Merit Cross for their services.

Last week Stephan was all primed to take off on a vacation with his wife and 15-year-old son in his new Volkswagen. There was just one more chore to do before the fishing trip. A lot of old Russian shells had been fished out of Berlin's Havel River and brought to the police explosives site on the city's outskirts. To Stephan the job seemed routine. But as he unscrewed the fuse of a six-inch grenade, friction may have touched off a spark. The shell went up with a great explosion. When the smoke cleared, Berlin's disarmament expert was dead. At week's end 8,000 Berliners flocked to pay tribute at the funeral of Sergeant Werner Stephan.

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