The Good Cop

by Peter Steiner

  Sergeant Marschach stood up and handed the pistol to one of the guards. ‘So, Ingeborg, my love,’ he said softly. ‘That’s finally taken care of.’

  THE THOUSAND-YEAR REICH

  The Great War had been over for fifteen years. But it was still vivid in their recollection; they saw it around them and felt it in their bodies. The very ground they stood on sometimes seemed to go liquid and give way under their feet. Margarete von Horvath felt it more than Benno. Margarete would be standing or walking and would suddenly feel unsteady and reach out for something or someone – Benno – to hold on to.

  Their lives had shrunken. Their charming social evenings with champagne and cold buffets and lively discussion belonged to another world. They saw no one; they kept to themselves. Their friends had scattered. Willi Geismeier seemed to have disappeared.

  Something new and monstrous lay just ahead. You could smell it, taste it – acrid, like gunpowder. Its signs were everywhere. They knew, at least Benno did, it would soon be overhead, would come crashing down and crush them to smithereens. You could feel it approaching. You just couldn’t quite name it yet. It hadn’t yet taken on specific shape. So you could still hurry on your way, looking neither right nor left and pretend things were otherwise.

  It arrived as men marching. First you heard them, then you saw their brown uniforms, their faces like masks. Their torches rose and fell in unison, black smoke rising, a hypnotic harbinger of the destruction they would inflict and that would then consume them too. Once you could see such things, you chose not to. How else to survive?

  ‘Come away from the window, Margarete,’ said Benno. The reflected torchlight flickered and danced on the ceiling, and he drew the curtains closed.

  ‘What does it mean, Benno?’

  ‘Well, he has become Chancellor,’ said Benno. ‘We shall see soon enough what it means.’ He was thinking, though, It is the beginning of the end of Germany. Now he can do whatever he wants. He can attack or kill or persecute. Whatever he wants. This will be the hardest thing we ever face.

  Benno von Horvath had fallen in love with Margarete Bertelmann the moment he first saw her, before she had even spoken a word to him. That had been at a party celebrating the new century when they were students at the University of Vienna, a moment thirty-three years ago that already seemed lost in history. And, to his own astonishment, he had never moved beyond that first moment of love; he was as enchanted by her presence now as he had been that first day.

  Benno still thought of Margarete’s wellbeing and happiness as his first and principal duty. In the many years of their marriage he had never once wavered from this obligation. It was Benno’s extraordinary good luck that the fulfillment of this duty provided him with the greatest joy he had ever known. How many people are so fortunate as to enjoy more than anything that which they are obliged to do? he thought.

  Benno was not a romantic; he was of this world. He was well acquainted with the ugliest aspects of human existence. He had been a policeman. He had seen up close the worst things human beings can do to one another. He had lived through the Great War and its violent aftermath. He had lived through the Great Depression when people were starving in the streets and the Nazis were on the rise. By now he had no illusions about whether Hitler would seize power and what he would do once he had it.

  Surprisingly, though, as bleak as the world seemed to him, Benno did not have a dark or pessimistic approach to life. In fact, his life with Margarete allowed him, no, required him, to live life as an optimist. Because of her, he had worked as best he could for the betterment of man. He had been a conscientious policeman and a dutiful and generous citizen. And now he found himself obliged to resist however he could the evil that was taking over. Contrary to what one might imagine, this obligation lifted him out of darkness. This was Margarete’s gift to him, and, Benno realized, it was the greatest gift anyone could receive.

  Margarete believed in the essential kindness of human beings because she was herself incapable of anything but kindness and incapable of imagining anything else in others. This was a wondrous blessing and a grievous fault. Of course, she saw in Hitler someone deranged and disturbed. But when he and the National Socialists began public works projects like the construction of the Autobahn highway system or the Winter Relief to feed, clothe, and house the poor, she had to see it as a good thing and a hopeful moment. How could you see it otherwise? Even the massive build-up of the army and the construction of great factories turning out planes, tanks, guns, bombs put millions of people back to work, put money in their pockets and food on the table. Hunger and depravity disappeared from the streets. How was that not a good thing?

  Margarete worried deeply about the Jews and their persecution. She had Jewish cousins in Poland and in Austria. But she wondered whether, having brought Germany back from the depths of depression, Hitler might not now relent, might no longer need the Jewish scapegoat, might even find within himself a strain of kindness and mercy. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘what is to be gained by belligerence and anger?’

  It was not just Margarete who entertained such delusions. The whole German nation was wishing that what they saw coming was something else entirely. Even people less hobbled by kind spirits than Margarete was, even skeptics, cynics, religionists of all sorts embraced what was happening without seeing where it led.

  People cheered the Führer whenever and wherever he appeared. They attended his massive rallies and raised their arms and shouted ‘Heil, Hitler!’ in celebration. Red, white, and black flags flapped happily from masts and public buildings. More than ninety percent of Austrians voted to join the German Reich, which was, after all, where they belonged – with their own kind. Joyous masses filled the streets of Vienna when the German army rolled in. The Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia needed protection too, at least Hitler said so, and everyone was happy when the German army marched in. The rest of the world watched it happen and seemed satisfied. How could you argue with that?

  From such beginnings, the war came on inevitably, relentlessly, almost like a natural thing, a gigantic living being, a great, violent, seething, roiling cloud, lethal and poisonous, evil and ruinous. It rolled over them and consumed them. It grew larger and larger and endured longer and longer, nourished, it seemed, by anything and everything it consumed. It ate people by the thousands.

  The war weighed heavy on Margarete. ‘Why Poland?’ she said once it began for real. She was terrified. Her cousin Elsa in Krakow had not been heard from. A cold hand reached into her chest and squeezed her heart until she couldn’t breathe. ‘Why Poland?’ she said again.

  Benno held her hand. ‘Because,’ he said, but then was unable to find an answer that would satisfy both Margarete’s hope and the truth. ‘I hope Elsa is all right,’ he said instead. ‘She should be fine in Krakow.’

  Their life was diminished more and more by the war until there was nothing left to it but the war itself. It was a great carapace they carried on their back. They were like snails being killed by their own shells. Everyone was. It didn’t have to be, but the horrible truths that now hung in the air – that was how Benno saw the flags now, each one a stand-in for a lie, a brutality, an atrocity – kept you inside yourself. Friendships dissolved over the need to be alone, to hide until, who knows what. They listened to the BBC – their heads close to the radio so that the neighbors couldn’t hear – where they heard about the extermination of Jews, shot in vast numbers and buried in mass graves, then in the new concentration camps. ‘Auschwitz, Poland?’ That was a place they had never heard of before.

  ‘That can’t be true, can it?’ said Margarete. ‘That’s got to be propaganda, doesn’t it? Oh, Benno, please …’ She wept.

  The German news spoke of great victories. Operation Barbarossa – the invasion of Russia – was a stellar success. The BBC spoke of Stalingrad, of tens of thousands of dead German soldiers, the rupturing of supply lines, the deadly winter where entire battalions of German soldiers froze to death, the mass surrende
rs of others, the gross incompetence and failures of Adolf Hitler and his generals, and the inevitable defeat of the German armies in the East.

  In the greatest invasion ever, the Allies landed in Normandy. Six weeks later there was a loud knock on the door. Benno was arrested and taken away. There had been an attempt by German officers to assassinate Hitler. More than seven thousand suspects were arrested all over Germany. Many, like Benno, were never seen or heard from again.

  Then the bombers came, waves of them, night after night. Avenging angels, Margarete thought. ‘Take me,’ she prayed. ‘I was ignorant. That was a mortal sin. Take me.’

  1945

  The Americans had been in Munich a few weeks when First Lieutenant Tom O’Connor, US Army Intelligence, arrived. He had to maneuver his jeep through cratered, debris-littered streets. By the end of the war half the city had been damaged or destroyed in bombing raids. You would be going down a street, turn a corner and find total devastation, buildings reduced to piles of stone and shattered timbers. Or one wall would be standing inexplicably with its empty windows staring blindly into the ruin. Some streets were completely buried, so the lieutenant had to back up and find another way. Everywhere there were Germans picking through the rubble. Had they lived there, or were they just searching for something they could use or trade or sell?

  Lieutenant O’Connor was part of the 74th Military Police Battalion, whose job it was to reestablish a German police force throughout the Zone of American Occupation and bring order back to German society. The 74th had its headquarters in Frankfurt with the Seventh Army, but they had attached O’Connor to a Military Police battalion in Munich.

  ‘Basically, Munich was Nazi central,’ said Major Becker, the MPs’ operations officer. ‘The police here were the worst of the worst. We don’t know whether there were any decent cops at all by the end. So basically, O’Connor, we’re starting from scratch. You and your guys have to find a new police force. We’re looking for good cops from among a bunch of former Nazis. How many men do you have?’

  ‘Six or eight,’ said O’Connor. ‘I’m not sure, sir. We’ll see when they arrive.’

  ‘Eight? Jesus. I hope they’re good men,’ said the major.

  ‘I hope so too, Major. We’ll just have to see.’

  ‘OK, O’Connor. Any idea how you’ll proceed?’

  ‘No, sir, not really. I’ll know better in a day or two.’

  ‘OK, Lieutenant. For now we’ve got some Nazi cops on duty along with our men, but we’ve already had some problems. We need to build a new German police force top to bottom as fast as we can. We’ll train them up, but it’s up to you to find them.’

  Lieutenant O’Connor was to set up operations in what had been the old Ettstraße police headquarters. He picked his way past piles of rubble into the building. He found a table and a couple of chairs in a corner and dragged them into the center of the entry hall. That was his office. Next to the entry hall he found a row of offices that would make adequate billets for his little detachment. Behind him were steps down to the old Records Department. He went down to have a look around. The shelves had been knocked over at some point and everything had been set ablaze, probably in an effort to destroy old records, although it might have been an incendiary bomb. He couldn’t tell. The rest of the building was pretty much a bombed-out ruin.

  Sergeant Owens showed up the next morning in a truck. He had scrounged a couple of army-issue steel desks, some tables, chairs, bunks, and a couple of typewriters. Owens had spent the last two years of the war interviewing prisoners of war and anyone else who was thought to have useful intelligence. He was supposed to be pretty good at it.

  ‘Did you see action, Owens?’ said O’Connor.

  ‘Some, Lieutenant. You?’

  ‘Some. You have some German, is that right?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Not perfect, but good enough to work with.’ Owens was a muscular kid with a handlebar mustache and an accent that sounded like Kentucky.

  ‘Good. So, I understand we’ve already had some German cops showing up, wanting their jobs back. We’re going to be interviewing these guys. I’m not sure what we’re looking for exactly, but we’ll figure it out as we go along.’

  ‘OK, Lieutenant.’

  ‘Some of them are liable to be Nazis. Maybe most of them.’

  ‘So, you think they’re coming in early because they’re clean, or because they think we don’t care if they were Nazis, or what?’

  ‘Probably some of both. From what I hear about Munich, we’re going to have to take on some old Nazis. Anyway, we’ll just have to see.’ Owens and O’Connor were walking from room to room, seeing what was habitable and what wasn’t. O’Connor opened a door. It was a toilet. The plaster ceiling had pretty much fallen in. He pulled the chain and the toilet flushed. The two men listened silently as the tank filled up with water. ‘Well, whadya know?’ said O’Connor.

  ‘Things are looking up,’ said Owens.

  Two days later six men showed up. Three had some interrogation experience, two were infantry men, and one was a medic. Lieutenant O’Connor explained their mission.

  ‘How we gonna do that with six men, Lieutenant,’ said Private Veroni, one of the infantry men.

  ‘Eight,’ said O’Connor. ‘Sergeant Owens and I make eight.’

  ‘OK, eight,’ said Veroni. ‘We gotta build a whole fucking police force? From nothin’? That’s bullshit! It ain’t gonna happen.’

  ‘Oh, it’s gonna happen, Veroni,’ said Sergeant Owen. ‘You know why? What’s your MOS, Veroni?’

  ‘Machine gunner, sir.’

  ‘So, if it doesn’t happen, it’ll mean you didn’t pull your weight. And you’re gonna find your sorry ass carrying that big fucking machine gun up and down mountains out in the middle of fucking nowhere.’

  Lieutenant O’Connor had one of the German policemen still on duty type an announcement that the police were hiring. Becker’s clerk ran off a hundred copies on his mimeograph, and the MPs stuck them up around the city. Men showed up the next day wanting to apply. Some were even wearing their old police uniforms. They were given application forms to fill out. Hermann Gruber was among them.

  Lieutenant O’Connor and Manfred Schultz, a German police captain, sat collecting the applications and doing interviews. Interviews went on all morning. Decisions were made in the afternoon, and hires were posted on a bulletin board, along with where they were to report for duty.

  Manfred Schultz remembered seeing Gruber now and then at Nazi Party functions, although they hadn’t known each other. ‘Hermann Gruber’s a good man,’ he said.

  ‘You speak English?’ said Lieutenant O’Connor. Gruber had checked that box.

  ‘Yes, sir!’ said Gruber, but in fact he only had a few words, so they switched to German.

  ‘You were a policeman until the end, weren’t you, Herr Gruber?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And what was your job?’

  ‘I was a detective sergeant in the Tenth District, sir.’

  ‘How long were you in the force?’

  ‘Over twenty years.’

  ‘Do you have a family?’

  ‘No, sir. No children. And I lost my wife, sir. She was Jewish. She was sent to Auschwitz in forty-four.’

  O’Connor looked at Schultz. Schultz gave a slight nod to indicate it was true.

  ‘So you weren’t a Nazi, Gruber.’

  ‘I joined the Party, sir. You had to, back then. But I wasn’t a believer.’

  ‘Were you in the SA?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘Were you in the SS?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘But a lot of your colleagues were.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Gruber. ‘And I know which ones, sir.’

  O’Connor thought for a moment. ‘OK, Gruber. I’d like you to help in our selection process. That involves sitting with us afternoons, going through applications, and making hires. You’d get a half-day’s pay.’

  ‘Do you trust him?
’ said Sergeant Owen that afternoon when the Lieutenant explained why Gruber was in the meeting.

  ‘No,’ said O’Connor. ‘But he could be useful.’

  Day after day men came, defeated and ragged, and lined up with their applications in hand. It was not always O’Connor interviewing them, but he looked over every application. And after two days he got rid of Schultz, who was useless. He claimed everyone was ‘a good man’. Gruber seemed conscientious at least. There were different people in the selection meeting every day: usually a German policeman, that is, Gruber or somebody else, then O’Connor, Owen, one of the enlisted men, preferably an MP.

  One day, O’Connor noticed that Gruber spent a long time with one particular application. Gruber passed the application to the other German, a former assistant chief, who also reacted to the application. ‘What have you got there?’ said O’Connor and held out his hand. Gruber hesitated and then passed it to the lieutenant.

  ‘What’s special about this one?’

  Gruber hesitated again.

  ‘Was he a Nazi?’ O’Connor asked.

  ‘Yes, sir. This man is trouble.’

  The other German nodded in agreement.

  O’Connor looked to Owen and Veroni. He switched to English. ‘Do either of you guys remember this guy?’ He looked at the application. ‘Geismeier? Willi Geismeier?’

  ‘Wait. Was he the skinny guy with the thick glasses?’ said Sergeant Owen. ‘This guy spoke perfect English. Remember?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. That’s right.’

  ‘So, he’s a Nazi?’ said O’Connor to Gruber. ‘Was he high up in the Party? Do you know?