Field Gray

by Philip Kerr

  I drank the schnapps. What else was I going to do with it? People say all kinds of crazy things when they’ve had a drink—me included. They talk about God and the saints and hearing voices and seeing the devil; they shout about killing Franzis and Tommies, and they sing Christmas carols on a summer’s day. Their wives don’t understand them and their mothers never loved them. They’ll say black is white, up is down, and hot is cold. No one ever expects a drink to help you make sense. Arthur Nebe had taken several drinks, but he wasn’t drunk. Even so, what he said sounded crazier than any drunk I’d ever heard and ever hope to hear again.

  I stayed at Lenin House for two or three weeks, sharing a seventh-floor billet with Waldemar Klingelhöfer, who was an SS-Obersturmbannführer—a colonel—in overall charge of the antipartisan hunts in the Minsk area.

  Minsk was one place where German propaganda did not exaggerate the strength of local partisans, who took advantage of the huge thick forests called pushcha that characterized the area. Most of these fighters were young Red Army soldiers, but quite a few were Jews who’d fled from pogroms to the comparative safety of the forest. What did they have to lose? Not that the Jews were always welcomed with open arms: Some of the Byelorussians were no less anti-Semitic than Germans, and more than half of these refugee Jews were murdered by the Popovs.

  Klingelhöfer spoke fluent Russian—he’d been born in Moscow—but he knew nothing about police work or hunting partisans. Real partisans. I gave him some advice on how to recruit some informers.

  Not that my advice to Klingelhöfer really mattered, because at the end of July Nebe ordered him to Smolensk to obtain furs for German army winter clothing; and I was ordered to Baranowicze, about one hundred fifty kilometers southwest of Minsk, to await transport back to Berlin.

  Formerly a Polish city until the Soviets occupied it at the beginning of the war, Baranowicze was a small, prosperous town of about thirty thousand people, more than a third of whom were Jews. In its center was a long, wide, suburban-looking tree-lined street with two-story shops and houses, which the occupying German army had renamed Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse. There was an Orthodox cathedral recently built in the neoclassical style, and a ghetto—six buildings on the outskirts of the city—where more than twelve thousand Jews were now confined, at least those Jews who had not escaped into the Pripet Marshes. Two whole regiments of the SS Cavalry Brigade commanded by Sturmbannführer Bruno Magill were searching the thirty-eight-thousand-acre marshland, killing every Jew they could find. This left the city quiet—so quiet that for a couple of days, until a seat became available on a Ju 52 back to Tegel Airfield in Berlin, I was able to sleep in a proper bed in what formerly had been Girsh Bregman’s Leather Goods and Shoe Store.

  I tried not to consider the sudden fate that had overtaken Girsh Bregman and his family, whose framed photographs were still on top of an upright Rheinberg Söhne in the little parlor behind the shop; but it was only too easy to think of them enduring the close privations of the ghetto, or perhaps fleeing their persecutors, who included not just the SS but also the Polish police, former Polish army soldiers, and even some local Ukrainian clergy who were keen to bless these “pacifications.” Of course, it was possible that the Bregmans were already pacified, which is to say that they were dead. That’s about as pacified as you could get in the summer of 1941. Most of all, I just hoped they were alive. Only, it was the kind of hope that looked like a canary in a mine full of gas. I wouldn’t have minded a little gas myself. Just enough to sleep for about a hundred years and then wake up from the nightmare that was my life.

  8

  GERMANY, 1954

  At least you did wake up,” said Silverman. “Unlike six million others.”

  “You’re a funny guy. Are you always so quick with math, or is it just that one number you like?”

  “I don’t like anything about it, Gunther,” said Silverman.

  “Neither do I. And please don’t ever make the mistake of thinking I do.”

  “It’s not me that makes mistakes, Gunther. It’s you.”

  “You’re right. I should have made sure I was born somewhere other than Germany in 1896. That way maybe I could have ended up on the winning side. Twice. How does it feel, boys? To sit in judgment on someone else’s mistakes? Pretty good, I imagine. The way you two act, anyone might think you Americans really do believe that you’re better than anyone else.”

  “Not everyone else,” snarled Earp. “Just you and your Nazi pals.”

  “You can keep telling yourself that, if you like. But we both know it’s not true. Or is it that occupying the moral high ground is more than an aspiration for you Amis? Perhaps it’s also a constitutional necessity. Only, I suspect that underneath all that sanctimony you’re just like us Germans. You really do believe that might is right.”

  “At this moment,” said Silverman, “all that really matters is what we believe about you.”

  “He tells a good story.” Earl was speaking to Silverman. “A regular Jakob Grimm, this guy. All it lacked was the ‘once upon a time’ and the ‘happily ever after.’ We should get him some heated iron shoes and make him dance around the room in them like Snow White’s stepmother until he’s straight with us.”

  “You’re quite correct,” said Silverman. “And you know? Only a German could have thought of a punishment like that.”

  “Didn’t you say you had German parents?” I said. “Just a mother you’re sure about, I presume.”

  “Neither of us feels very proud of our German background,” said Earp. “Thanks to people like you.”

  For a while the three of us were silent. Then Silverman said:

  “There was a Gunther we heard about in that town you mentioned. Baranowicze. He was an SS-Sturmbannführer with one of the small killing units belonging to Arthur Nebe’s Task Group B. A Sonderkommando. He organized one of the early gassings. Everyone in a mental hospital at Mogilev was killed. That wouldn’t be you, would it?”

  “No,” I said. But seeing that they were hardly likely to be satisfied with a straight denial, I lifted my finger to indicate that I was trying to remember something. And then I did. “I think there was an SS-Sturmbannführer called Günther Rausch. Attached to Task Group B in the summer of 1941. It must be him you’re thinking of. I never gassed anyone. Not even the fleas in my bed.”

  “But it was you who suggested to Arthur Nebe the idea of mass killings using explosives, wasn’t it? You admitted as much yourself.”

  “That was a joke.”

  “Not a very funny joke.”

  “When it comes to blowing people up, I don’t think anyone has ever managed that more efficiently than America,” I said. “How many did you blow up in Hiroshima? And Nagasaki? A couple of hundred thousand and still counting. That’s what I’ve read. Germany might have started the process of mechanized mass killing, but you Americans certainly perfected it.”

  “Did you ever visit the Criminal Technology Institute in Berlin?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I often went there in the course of my duty as a detective. For forensic tests and results.”

  “Did you ever meet a chemist called Albert Wildmann?”

  “Yes. I met him. Many times.”

  “And Hans Schmidt? Also from the same institute?”

  “I think so. What are you driving at?”

  “Isn’t it the case that you returned from Minsk to Berlin at the behest of Arthur Nebe, not to join the German War Crimes Bureau, as you told us, but to meet with Wildmann and Schmidt in pursuit of your explosives idea?”

  I was shaking my head, but Silverman wasn’t paying attention, and I was gaining a new respect for him as an interrogator.

  “And that, having discussed the idea in detail, you yourself returned to Smolensk with Wildmann and Schmidt in September 1941?”

  “No. That’s not true. Like I said, I think you must be confusing me with Günther Rausch.”

  “Isn’t it the case that you brought with you a large quantity of dynamite? And
used it to rig a Russian pillbox with explosives? And that you then herded into it almost a hundred people from a mental asylum in Minsk? And that you then detonated the explosives? Isn’t that what happened?”

  “No. That’s not true. I had nothing to do with that.”

  “According to the reports we’ve read, the heads and limbs of the dead were strewn across a quarter-mile radius. SS men were collecting body parts from the trees for days afterward.”

  I shook my head. “When I made that remark to Nebe…about blowing up Jews in a field. Look, I had no idea he would actually try something like that. It was sarcasm. Hardly a genuine suggestion.” I shrugged. “Then again, I don’t know why I’m surprised, given everything else that happened.”

  “We’ve always thought it was Arthur Nebe himself who came up with the idea of the gas vans,” said Silverman. “So maybe that was another of your jokes, too. Tell me, did you ever visit an address in Berlin—number four Tiergartenstrasse?”

  “I was a cop. I visited a lot of addresses I don’t remember.”

  “This one was special.”

  “The Berlin Gas Works was somewhere else, if that’s what you’re implying.”

  “Tiergartenstrasse number four was a confiscated Jewish villa,” said Silverman. “An office from where Germany’s euthanasia program for the handicapped was planned and administered.”

  “Then I’m sure I was never there.”

  “Maybe you heard about what was happening there and mentioned it in passing to Nebe. As a little thank-you for getting you out of Minsk.”

  “In case you’ve forgotten,” I said, “Nebe was head of Kripo and, before that, a general in the Gestapo. It’s quite likely he knew Wildmann and Schmidt for the same reason I did. And I daresay he would have known all about this place in Tiergartenstrasse as well. But I never did.”

  “Your relationship with Waldemar Klingelhöfer,” said Silverman. “You were quite helpful to him. With advice.”

  “Yes. I tried to be.”

  “Were you helpful in any other ways?”

  I shook my head.

  “Did you accompany him to Moscow, for example?”

  “No, I’ve never been in Moscow.”

  “And yet you speak Russian almost as well as he does.”

  “That was later, when I learned. In the labor camp, mostly.”

  “So between September 28 and October 26, 1941, you say you were not with Klingelhöfer’s Vorkommando Moscow, but in Berlin?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that you had nothing to do with the murders of five hundred and seventy-two Jews during that time?”

  “Nothing to do with it, no.”

  “Several of them were Jewish mink ranchers who failed to provide the prescribed quota of furs for Klingelhöfer.”

  “Never shot a Jewish mink rancher, Gunther?”

  “Or blown one up in a pillbox?”

  “No.”

  The two lawyers were quiet for a moment, as if they’d run out of questions. The silence didn’t last long.

  “So,” said Silverman. “You’re not in Moscow, you’re back on the plane to Berlin. A Junkers 52, you said. Any witnesses?”

  I thought for a moment. “Fellow named Schulz. Erwin Schulz.”

  “Go on.”

  “He was SS, too. A Sturmbannführer, I think. But before, he’d been a cop in Berlin. And then an instructor at the police academy in Bremen. After that, something in the Gestapo, maybe in Bremen, too. I don’t remember. But we hadn’t seen each other in more than ten years when we both got on that plane out of Baranowicze.

  “He was a few years younger than me, I think. Not much. I think he’d been in the army during the last months of the Great War. And then the Freikorps while he was at university, in Berlin. Law, I think. Tallish, fair-haired, with a mustache a bit like Hitler’s, and quite tanned. Not that he looked well when he was on that plane. There were huge bags under his eyes that were more like bruises, almost as if someone had punched him.

  “Well, we recognized each other, and after a few moments we started talking. I offered him a cigarette and I noticed the hand that took it was shaking like a leaf. His leg wouldn’t stay still either. Like it had Saint Vitus’ dance. He was a nervous wreck. Gradually, it became clear that he was returning to Berlin for much the same reason I was. Because he’d put in for a transfer.

  “Schulz said that his unit had been operating in a place called Zhitomir. That’s just a shit hole between Kiev and Brest. No one in his right mind would want to go to Zhitomir. Which is probably why the SS brass in the person of General Jeckeln had established its Ukrainian HQ there. Jeckeln was never in his right mind, as far as I could see. Anyway, Schulz said that Jeckeln had told him that all of the Jews in Zhitomir were to be shot immediately. Schulz wasn’t bothered about the men. But he had more than a few qualms about the women and the children. Fuck that, he said. But no one was listening. Orders were orders and he should just shut up and get on with it. Well, it seemed that there were a lot of Jews in Zhitomir. Christ only knows why that should be the case. After all, it’s not like the Popovs ever made them feel welcome there. The tsar hated them, too, and they had pogroms in Zhitomir in 1905 and in 1919. I mean, you would think they’d have got the message and cleared off somewhere else. But no. Not a bit of it. There were three synagogues in Zhitomir, and when the SS showed up, there were thirty thousand of them just waiting around for something to happen. Which it did.

  “According to Schulz, the first day the SS got there they hanged the mayor, or perhaps it was the local judge, who was a Jew, and several others. Then they shot four hundred right away for one reason or another. Marched them out of town to a pit, had them lie down like sardines, one on top of the other, and shot them in layers. Well, Schulz thought that would be it. He’d done his bit and that was enough. I mean, four hundred, he thought. But no, he said, they kept on coming. Day after day. And four hundred Jews soon became fourteen thousand.

  “Then Schulz was told that they would have to do the women and children as well and for him that was the last straw. Fuck this, he thought, I don’t care if Almighty God has ordered this, I’m not killing women and kids. So he wrote to the personnel officer at RSHA HQ. To a General Bruno Streckenbach. And put in for a transfer. Which was why he was on that plane with me.

  “They were pretty pissed off with him, apparently. Especially his CO, Otto Rasch. He accused Schulz of being weak and letting the side down. He asked Schulz where was his sense of duty and all that crap. Not that Schulz said he was surprised about this. He said that Rasch was one of those bastards who liked to make sure that everyone, officers included, had to pull the trigger on at least one Jew. So that we were all equally guilty, I suppose. Only he had another word for it: one of those compound words that Himmler used at Pretzsch. Blood part, I think it was.

  “Anyway, Schulz didn’t know what fate awaited him back in Berlin. He was nervous and apprehensive, to say the least. I suppose he was hoping his behavior would be overlooked and he’d get the okay to resume his police work in Hamburg, or Bremen. ‘I’m not cut out for this kind of thing,’ he said. ‘Don’t get me wrong, he said, ‘I care nothing for the Jews, but no one should be asked to do this kind of work. No one. They should find some other means of doing it,’ he said. That’s what he told me, anyway.”

  “So,” said Earp. “Are you telling us your alibi is another convicted war criminal?”

  “Schulz was convicted? I didn’t know that.”

  “Gave himself up in 1945,” said Earp. “He was convicted in October 1947 of crimes against humanity and sentenced to twenty years. That was commuted to fifteen years in 1951.”

  “You mean he’s here, in Landsberg? Well, then he can confirm our conversation on the flight back to Berlin. That I told him what I already told you. How I was sent back for refusing to kill Jews.”

  “He was paroled last January,” said Earp. “Too bad, Gunther.”

  “I don’t think he’d have made such a great
character witness for you, anyway,” said Silverman. “He was a brigadier general in the SS when he gave himself up.”

  “The reason Bruno Streckenbach went easy on Schulz is obvious,” said Earp. “Because he participated in the murders of fifteen thousand Jews before he sickened of the work. Probably Streckenbach figured Schulz had done more than his fair share of killing.”

  “And I guess that must be why you let him go, too,” I said.

  “I told you,” said Silverman. “That was down to the high commissioner. And the recommendations of the Parole and Clemency Board for War Criminals.”

  I shook my head. I was tired. They’d been nipping at my heels the whole day like a pair of nine-to-five bloodhounds. I felt like I was trapped up a tree with nowhere left to run.

  “Have you considered the possibility that I could be telling the truth? But even if I wasn’t, I might be tempted to put my hands up just to get you two off my back. The way you hand out paroles around here, I’d have to be Hideki Tojo to get more than six months.”

  “We like things to be neat,” said Silverman.

  “And you have got more loose ends than an old maid’s sewing basket,” added Earp. “So that when we leave this job, we can be sure that we gave it our best shot.”

  “Pride in the job, huh? I can understand that.”