by Philip Kerr
“Yes. But even before I got to Vilnius I’d begun to hear stories of local pogroms against the Jews because the Jews in the NKVD were busy murdering all of their prisoners instead of releasing them. It was all very confused. You’ve no idea how confused. Frankly, I didn’t believe these stories at first. There were plenty of stories like that in the Great War, and most of them turned out to be false.” I shrugged. “In this particular case, however, even the worst, most far-fetched stories were nearly all true.”
“Exactly what were your orders?”
“That our job was a security one. To keep order behind the lines of our advancing army.”
“And you did that how?” asked Silverman. “By murdering people?”
“You know, being a detective in the police battalion, I paid a lot of attention to my so-called comrades. And it turned out that a lot of these murdering bastards in the Task Groups were lawyers, too. Just like you guys. Blume, Sandberger, Ohlendorf, Schulz. I expect there were others, but I can’t remember their names. I used to wonder why it was that so many lawyers took part in these killings. What do you think?”
“We ask the questions, Gunther.”
“Spoken like a true lawyer, Mr. Earp. By the way, how come I don’t have one here? With all due respect, gentlemen, this interrogation is hardly consistent with the rules of German justice; or, I imagine, the rules of American justice, either. Doesn’t every American have a Fifth Amendment right not to be a witness against himself?”
“This interrogation is a necessary step in determining if you should be tried or released,” said Silverman.
“This is what we German cops used to call an Eskimo’s fishing trip,” I said. “You just drop a line through a hole in the ice and hope that you catch something.”
“In the absence of any clear evidence and documentation,” continued Silverman, “sometimes the only way to gain knowledge of a crime is by questioning a suspect such as yourself. That’s usually been our experience with war crimes cases.”
“Bullshit. We both know you’re sitting on a ton of documentation. What about all those papers you recovered from Gestapo headquarters that are now in the Berlin Document Center?”
“Actually, it’s two tons of documentation,” said Silverman. “Between eight and nine million documents, to be precise. And eight or nine represents our total staff at the OCC. With the Einsatzgruppen trial we got lucky: We found the actual reports that were written by the Task Group leaders. Twelve binders containing a gold mine of information. As a result, we didn’t even need a prosecution witness against them. All the same, it took us four months to put the case together. Four months. With you it might take longer. Do you really want to wait here for another four months while we work out if you have a case to answer?”
“So go and check those Task Group leader reports,” I said. “They’ll clear me for sure. Because I wasn’t one of them, I’ve told you. I got an exeat back to Berlin, courtesy of Arthur Nebe. Out of the task area. He’s bound to have mentioned it in his report.”
“That’s where your problem lies, Gunther,” explained Silverman. “With your old friend Arthur Nebe. You see, the reports for Task Groups A, C, and D were very detailed.”
“Otto Ohlendorf’s were a model of accuracy,” said Earp. “You might say he was a typical fucking lawyer in that respect.”
Silverman was shaking his head. “But there are no original reports written by Arthur Nebe from Task Group B. In fact, there are no reports from Task Group B until a new commander is appointed, in November 1941. We think that’s why Walter Blume took over from Nebe. Because Nebe was falling down on the job. For whatever reason, he wasn’t killing nearly as many Jews as the other three groups. Why was that, do you think?”
Arthur Nebe. It had been a while since I’d really thought about the man who’d saved my life and, perhaps, my soul, and whom I’d repaid so unkindly: Effectively, I’d murdered Nebe in Vienna during the winter of 1947–1948, when he’d been working for General Gehlen’s organization of old comrades, but I hardly wanted to tell the two Amis anything about that. Gehlen’s organization had been sponsored by the CIA, or whatever they called it back then, and possibly still was.
“Nebe was two different men,” I said. “Perhaps several more than just two. In 1933, Nebe believed that the Nazis were the only alternative to the communists and that they would bring order to Germany. By 1938, probably earlier, he’d realized his mistake and was plotting with others in the Wehrmacht and the police to overthrow Hitler. There’s a propaganda ministry photograph of Nebe with Himmler, Heydrich, and Muller that shows the four of them planning the investigation of a bomb attempt on Hitler’s life. That was November 1939. And Nebe was part of that very same conspiracy. I know that because I was part of it, too. However, Nebe quickly changed his mind after the defeat of France and Britain in 1940. Lots of people changed their minds about Hitler after the miracle of France. Even I changed my mind about him. For a few months, anyway. We both changed our minds again when Hitler attacked Russia. Nobody thought that was a good idea. And yet Arthur did what he was told. He’d plot away and do what he was told even if that meant murdering Jews in Minsk and Smolensk. Doing what you were told was always the best kind of cover if you were simultaneously planning a coup d’état against the Nazis. I think that’s why he seems like such an ambiguous figure. I think that’s why, as you said, he was falling down on the job as commander of Task Group B. Because his heart was never in it. Above all, Nebe was a survivor.”
“Like you.”
“To some extent, yes, that’s true. Thanks to him.”
“Tell us about that.”
“I already did.”
“Not in any great detail.”
“What do you want me to do? Draw you a picture?”
“Really, we want as many details as possible,” said Earl.
“When someone is lying,” said Silverman, “it’s nearly always the case that they start to contradict themselves in matters of detail. You should know that from being a policeman yourself. When they start to contradict themselves on the small things, you can bet they’re lying about the big things, too.”
I nodded.
“So,” he said. “Let’s go back to Goloby, where you murdered the members of an NKVD squad.”
“The ones you claim had murdered all of the inmates at the NKVD prison in Lutsk,” said Earp. “According to the Soviets, that was just German propaganda, put out to help persuade your own men that the summary execution of all Jews and Bolsheviks was justified.”
“You’ll be telling me next that it was the German army who murdered all those Poles in the Katyn Forest.”
“Maybe it was.”
“Not according to your own congressional investigation.”
“You’re well-informed.”
I shrugged. “In Cuba, I got all the American newspapers. In an attempt to improve my English. Nineteen fifty-two, wasn’t it? The investigation. When the Malden Committee recommended that the Soviets should answer a case at the International Court of Justice in the Hague? Look, it’s a story I’ve been interested in for a long time. We both know the NKVD killed as many as we did. So why not admit it? The commies are the enemy now. Or is that just American propaganda?”
I fetched a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of my prison jacket and lit one slowly. I was tired of answering questions, but I knew I was going to have to open the door of my mind’s darkest cellar and wake up some very unpleasant memories. Even in a room with bars on the window, Operation Barbarossa felt like a very long way away. Outside it was a bright and sunny June day, and although it had been a very similarly warm June day when the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union, that wasn’t the way I remembered it. When I recalled names like Goloby, Lutsk, Bialy-stock, and Minsk, I thought of infernal heat and the sights, sounds, and smells of a hell on earth; but most of all I remembered a clean-shaven young man aged about twenty standing in a cobbled town square with a crowbar in his hand, his thick boots an inch
deep in the blood of about thirty other men who lay dead or dying at his feet. I remembered the shocked laughter of some of the German soldiers who were watching this bestial display; I remembered the sound of an accordion playing a spirited tune as another, older man with a long beard walked silently, almost calmly toward the fellow with the crowbar and was immediately struck on the head like some ghastly Hindu sacrifice; I remembered the noise the old man made as he fell to the ground and the way his legs jerked stiffly, like a puppet’s, until the crowbar hit him again.
I jerked my thumb at the window. “All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you everything. But do you mind if I put my face in the sun for a moment? It helps to remind me that I’m still alive.”
“Unlike millions of others,” Earp said pointedly. “Go ahead. We’re in no hurry.”
I went to the window and looked out. By the main gate a small crowd of people had gathered to wait for someone. Either that or they were looking for the window of cell number seven, which seemed a little less likely.
“Is someone being released today?” I asked.
Silverman came over to the window. “Yes,” he said. “Erich Mielke.”
“Mielke?” I shook my head. “You’re mistaken. Mielke’s not in here. He couldn’t be.”
Even as I spoke, a smaller door in the main gate opened and a short, stocky, gray-haired man of about sixty stepped out and was cheered by the waiting well-wishers.
“That’s not Mielke,” I said.
“I think you mean Erhard Milch, sir,” Earp told Silverman. “The Luftwaffe field marshal? It’s him who’s being released today.”
“So that’s who it is,” I said. “For a moment there I thought it was a real war criminal.”
“Milch is—was—a war criminal,” insisted Silverman. “He was director of air armaments under Albert Speer.”
“And what was criminal about building planes?” I asked. “You must have built quite a few planes yourself, if the state of Berlin in 1945 was anything to go by.”
“We didn’t use slave labor to do it,” said Silverman.
I watched as Erhard Milch accepted a bunch of flowers from a pretty girl, bowed politely to her, and was then driven off in a smart new Mercedes to begin the rest of his life.
“What was the sentence for that, then?”
“Life imprisonment,” said Silverman.
“Life imprisonment, eh? Some people have all the luck.”
“Commuted to fifteen years.”
“There’s something wrong with your high commissioner’s math, I think,” I said. “Who else is getting out of here?”
I took a puff on my tasteless cigarette, flicked the butt out of the window, and watched it spiral to the ground trailing smoke like one of Milch’s invincible Luftwaffe planes.
“You were going to tell us about Minsk,” said Silverman.
6
MINSK, 1941
On the morning of July 7, 1941, I commanded a firing squad that executed thirty Russian POWs. At the time, I didn’t feel bad about this because they were all NKVD and, less than twelve hours before, they themselves had murdered two or three thousand prisoners at the NKVD prison in Lutsk. They also murdered some German POWs who were with them, which was a miserable sight. I suppose you could say they had every right to do so, given that we had invaded their country. You could also say that our executing them in retaliation had considerably less justification, and you’d probably be correct on both counts. Well, we did it, but not because of the “commissar order” or the “Barbarossa decree,” which were nothing more than a shooting license from German field headquarters. We did it because we felt—I felt—they had it coming and they would certainly have shot us in similar circumstances. So we shot them in groups of four. We didn’t make them dig their own graves or anything like that. I didn’t care for that sort of thing. It smacked of sadism. So we shot them and left them where they fell. Later on, when I was a pleni in a Russian labor camp, I sometimes wished I’d shot many more than just thirty, but that’s a different story.
I didn’t feel bad about it until the next day when my men and I came across a former colleague from the Police Praesidium at the Alex, in Berlin. A fellow named Becker, who was in another police battalion. I found him shooting civilians in a village somewhere west of Minsk. There were about a hundred bodies in a ditch, and it seemed to me that Becker and his men had been drinking. Even then I didn’t get it. I kept on looking for explanations for what was essentially inexplicable and certainly inexcusable. And it was only when I realized that some of the people Becker and his men were about to shoot were old women that I said something.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I asked him.
“Obeying my orders,” he said.
“What? To kill old women?”
“They’re Jews,” he said, as if that was all the explanation that was needed. “I’ve been ordered to kill as many Jews as I can, and that’s what I’m doing.”
“Whose orders? Who’s your field commander and where is he?”
“Major Weis.” Becker pointed at a long wooden building behind a white picket fence about thirty yards down the road. “He’s in there. Having his lunch.”
I walked toward the building, and Becker called after me: “Don’t think I want to do this. But orders are orders, yes?”
As I reached the hut, I heard another volley of shots. One of the doors was open and an SS major was sitting on a chair with his tunic off. In one hand he held a half-eaten loaf of bread and in the other a bottle of wine and a cigarette. He heard me out with a look of weary amusement on his face.
“Look, none of this is my idea,” he said. “It’s a waste of time and ammunition, if you ask me. But I do what I’m told, right? That’s how an army works. A superior officer gives me an order and I obey. Chapter closed.” He pointed at a field telephone that was on the floor. “Take it up with headquarters if you like. They’ll just tell you what they told me. To get on with it.” He shook his head. “You’re not the only one who thinks this is madness, Captain.”
“You mean you’ve already asked for the orders to be confirmed?”
“Of course I have. Field HQ told me to take it up with Division HQ.”
“And what did they say?”
Major Weis shook his head. “Questioning an order with Division? Are you mad? I won’t stay a major for very long if I do that. They’ll have my pips and my balls, and not necessarily in that order.” He laughed. “But be my guest. Go on, call them. Just make sure you leave my name out of it.”
Outside there was another volley of shots. I picked up the field telephone and cranked the handle furiously. Thirty seconds later, I was arguing with someone at Division HQ. The major got up and put his ear to the other side of the telephone. When I started to swear, he grinned and walked away.
“You’ve upset them now,” he said.
I slammed the phone down and stood there trembling with anger.
“I’m to report to Division, in Minsk,” I said. “Immediately.”
“Told you.” He handed me his bottle, and I took a swig of what turned out to be not wine but vodka. “They’ll have your rank, for sure. I hope you think it was worth it. From what I hear, this”—he pointed at the door—“this is just the smoke at the end of the gun. Someone else is pulling the trigger. That’s what you have to hold on to, my friend. Try to remember what Goethe said. He said the greatest happiness for us Germans is to understand what we can understand and then, having done so, to do what we’re fucking told.”
I went outside and told the men I’d brought with me in a Panzer wagon and a Puma armored car that we were going into Minsk, to make a report on the morning’s antipartisan action. As we drove along I was in a melancholy frame of mind, but this was only partly to do the fate of a few hundred innocent Jews. Mostly I was concerned for the reputation of Germans and the Germany army. Where would this end? I asked myself. I certainly never conceived that thousands of Jews were already being slaughte
red in a similar fashion.
Minsk was easy to find. All you had to do was drive down a long straight road—quite a good road, even by German standards—and follow the gray plume of smoke on the horizon. The Luftwaffe had bombed the city a few days before and destroyed most of the city center. Even so, all of the German vehicles moving along the road kept their distance from one another in case of a Russian air attack. Otherwise, the Red Army was gone and Wehrmacht intelligence indicated that the population of three hundred thousand would have left the city, too, but for the fact that our bombing of the road east out of Minsk—to Mogilev and Moscow—had forced as many as eighty thousand to turn back to the city, or at least what remained of it. Not that this looked like a particularly good idea either. Most of the wooden houses on the outskirts were still ablaze while, nearer the center, piles of rubble backed onto hollowed-out office and apartment buildings. I’d never seen a city so thoroughly destroyed as Minsk. This made it all the more surprising that the Uprava, the City Council, and Communist Party HQ had survived the bombing almost unscathed. The locals called it the Big House, which was something of an understatement: Nine or ten stories high and built of white concrete, the Uprava resembled a series of gigantic filing cabinets containing the details of every citizen in Minsk. In front of the building was an enormous bronze statue of Lenin, who viewed the large number of German cars and trucks with an understandable look of anxiety and concern, as well he might have done, given that the building was now the headquarters of Reichskommissariat Ostland—a German-created administrative area that stretched from the Byelorussian capital to the Baltic Sea.
Pushing a heavy wooden door that was so tall it might still have been growing in a forest, I entered a cheap, marble-clad hall that belonged in a Métro station and approached a locomotive-sized central desk where several German soldiers and SS were attempting to impose some kind of administrative order on the ant colony of dusty gray men who were pouring in and out of the place. Catching the eye of one SS officer behind the desk, I asked for the SS divisional commander’s office and was directed to the second floor and advised to take the stairs, as the elevator was not working.
