by Philip Kerr
“So,” said Silverman. “We’re going to look into your story. Comb it through for nits.”
“That still won’t make me a louse.”
“You were SS,” said Silverman. “I’m a Jew. And you’ll always be a louse in my book, Gunther.”
9
GERMANY, 1954
It was easy to forget that we were in Germany. There was a U.S. flag in the main hall and the kitchens—which were seemingly always in action—served plain home-cooking on the understanding that home was six thousand kilometers to the west. Most of the voices we heard were American, too: loud, manly voices that told you to do something or not to do something—in English. And we did it quickly, too, or we received a prod from a nightstick or a kick up the backside. Nobody complained. Nobody would have listened, except perhaps Father Morgenweiss. The guards were MPs, deliberately selected for their enormous size. It was hard to see how Germany could ever have expected to win a war against this more obvious-looking master race. They walked the landings and corridors of Landsberg Prison like gunfighters from the OK Corral, or perhaps boxers entering the ring. With each other they had an easy way about them: They were all big, well-brushed smiles and booming laughs, shouting jokes and baseball scores. For us, the inmates, however, there were only stone faces and belligerent attitudes. Fuck you, they seemed to say; you might have your own federal government, but we’re the real masters in this pariah country.
I had a cell for two to myself. It wasn’t because I was special or because I hadn’t yet been charged with anything, but because WCPN1 was half empty. Every week, it seemed, someone else was released. But immediately after the war Landsberg had been full of prisoners. The Amis had even incarcerated Jewish displaced persons there, from the concentration camps of nearby Kaufering, alongside prominent Nazis and war criminals; but forcing those same ragged, threadbare Jews to wear SS uniforms had, perhaps, demonstrated a want of sensitivity on the part of the Americans that almost bordered on the comic. Not that the Amis were capable of seeing the funny side of anything very much.
The Jewish DPs were long gone from Landsberg now, to Israel, Great Britain, and America, but the gallows was still there, and from time to time the guards tested it just to make sure everything was working smoothly. They were thoughtful like that. No one really believed the German federal government was planning to bring back the death penalty; then again, no one really believed the Amis gave a damn what the federal government thought about anything. They certainly didn’t give a damn about scaring the prisoners, because at the same time that they tested the gallows they rehearsed the whole ghastly procedure of an execution with a volunteer prisoner taking the place of a condemned man. These monthly rehearsals took place on a Friday, because it was an old Landsberg tradition that Friday was a hanging day. A team of eight MPs solemnly marched the condemned man into the central courtyard and up the steps to the roof where the gallows was, and there they slipped a hood over the man’s head and a noose around his neck; the prison director even read out a death sentence while the rest of them stood at attention and pretended—probably wished—it was the real thing. Or so I was told. It might reasonably be asked why anyone, least of all a German officer, would volunteer for such a duty; but as with everything else in Germany, the Amis got exactly what they wanted by offering the volunteer extra cigarettes, chocolate, and a glass of schnapps. And it was always the same prisoner who volunteered to step onto the gallows: Waldemar Klingelhöfer. Perhaps the Amis were unwise to do this, given that he’d already tried to open a vein in his wrist with a large safety pin; then again, it’s no good looking for a whole flock when you’ve only got one sheep.
It wasn’t guilt about killing Jews that made Klingelhöfer try to kill himself and volunteer for a practice execution; it was his guilt over the betrayal of another SS officer, Erich Naumann. Naumann had written a letter to Klingelhöfer instructing him what to tell his interrogators and reminding him that there were no reports for the activities of Task Group B, which he himself had commanded after Nebe; but this advice also revealed the true depth of Naumann’s own criminality in Minsk and Smolensk. Klingelhöfer, who was deeply conflicted about the collapse of the German Reich, handed Naumann’s letter to the Amis, who produced it at the Einsatzgruppen trial in 1948 and used it as prima facie evidence against him. The letter helped convict Naumann and send him to the gallows in June 1951.
The consequence of all this was that none of the other prisoners spoke to Klingelhöfer. No one except me. And probably no one would have spoken to me either but for the fact that I was the only one currently being interrogated by the Americans. This made some of my former comrades very nervous indeed, and one day two of them followed me out of the common room where we ate, played cards, and listened to the radio, and into the courtyard.
“Hauptmann Gunther. We would like a word with you, please.”
Ernst Biberstein and Walter Haensch were both senior SS officers and, regarding themselves not as criminals but as POWs, persisted in the use of military ranks. Biberstein, a Standartenführer, equivalent to a full colonel, did most of the talking, while the younger Haensch—only a lieutenant colonel—did most of the agreeing.
“It’s several years since I myself was interrogated by the Amis,” said Biberstein. “I think it must be almost seven years ago now. No doubt these things are different from the way they used to be. We live in rather more hopeful, even enlightened circumstances than we did back then.”
“The Americans no longer seem to be driven by the same sense of moral superiority and desire for retribution,” added Haensch redundantly.
“Nevertheless,” continued Biberstein, “it’s important to be careful what one tells them. During an interrogation they sometimes have an easygoing way about them and can appear to be one’s friends when in fact they’re anything but that. I’m not sure if you ever met our late lamented comrade Otto Ohlendorf, but for a long time he made himself very useful to the Amis, volunteering information without restraint in the misguided expectation that he might curry favor with them and, as a result, secure his freedom. Too late, however, he realized his mistake and, having given evidence against General Kaltenbrunner at Nuremberg and effectively sent him to his death, he discovered that he had managed to talk his way onto the gallows.”
Biberstein had a thoughtful-looking face, with a broad forehead and a skeptical cast to his mouth. There was something of the serious clown about him—an authority figure and white-faced straight man whose sour, rising diphthongs and way of speaking at someone instead of to them reminded me that before joining the SS and the SD, Biberstein had been a Lutheran minister in some northern peasant town where they didn’t seem to mind that their pastor was a long-standing Nazi Party member. Probably they hadn’t minded, either, that he led a murder commando in Russia before being promoted and asked to take charge of the Gestapo in southern Poland. A lot of Lutherans had seen Hitler as Luther’s true heir. Maybe he was. I didn’t think I’d have liked Luther any more than I ever liked Hitler. Or Biberstein.
“I wouldn’t like you to make the same mistake as Otto,” said Biberstein. “So I’d like to give you some advice. If you can’t remember something, then really you should just say so. No matter how feeble that might seem or how culpable it might make you look. When you’re in any doubt at all, remind the Amis that this all happened almost fifteen years ago and that you really can’t remember.”
“Speaking for myself,” said Haensch, “I have always maintained that any prisoner has the right to silence. This is a legal principle known and respected throughout the civilized world. And especially in the United States of America. I was a lawyer in Hirschfelde prior to joining the RSHA, and you can take it from me that there is no court in the Western world that can force a man to give evidence against himself.”
“They managed to convict you, didn’t they?” I said.
“I was convicted in error,” insisted the bespectacled Haensch, who had a lawyer’s slimy face to match his lawyer’
s slimy manner and even slimier patter. “Heydrich did not order me to Russia until March 1942, by which time Task Group C had more or less completed its work. Quite simply, there were no Jews left to kill. However, all of this is beside the point. As Biberstein says, this happened almost fifteen years ago. And one cannot be asked to remember things that happened then.”
He took off his glasses, cleaned them, and added exasperatedly, “Besides, it was war. We were fighting for our very survival as a race. Things happen in war that one regrets in peacetime. That’s natural. But the Amis weren’t exactly saints in wartime themselves. Ask Peiper. Ask Dietrich. They’ll tell you. It wasn’t just the SS who shot prisoners, it was the Amis as well. To say nothing of the systematic mistreatment of the Malmédy prisoners of war that has occurred in this and other prisons.”
Haensch twitched nervously. His were the kind of chinless, weak features that gave war criminals and mass murderers a bad name. Not that the Amis looked on Haensch with any more disgust than anyone else. That particular distinction was reserved for Sepp Dietrich, Jochen Peiper, and the perpetrators of the so-called Malmédy Massacre.
“Just remember this,” said Biberstein. “That we’re not without friends on the outside. You certainly should not feel that you are alone. Dr. Rudolf Aschenauer has represented hundreds of old comrades, including Walter Funk, our former economics minister. He is a most ingenious attorney-at-law. As well as being a former party member, he is also a devout Roman Catholic. I’m not sure what your religious affiliations are, Hauptmann Gunther, but it cannot be denied that in this part of the country, the Catholics have the louder voice. The Catholic bishop of Munich, Johannes Neuhäusler, and the cardinal of Cologne, Joseph Frings, are active lobbyists on our behalf. But so is the evangelical bishop of Bavaria, Hans Meiser. In other words, it might be in your interests to find your Christian faith again, since both churches support the Committee for Church Aid for Prisoners.”
“I myself have had the personal support of the evangelical bishop of Württemberg, Theo Wurm,” said Haensch. “As has our comrade, Martin Sandberger. And you needn’t worry about paying for a defense. The committee will take care of all your legal team’s expenses. The committee even has the backing of a few sympathetic U.S. senators and congressmen.”
“Quite so,” said Biberstein. “These are men who have been most vocal in their opposition to Jewish-inspired ideas of vengeance.” He turned for a moment and waved his hand dismissively at Landsberg’s brick walls. “Which is all this is, of course. Keeping us here, against all the rules of international law.”
“The important thing is that we all stick together,” said Haensch. “The last thing we want now is any unnecessary speculation as to what some of us did or did not do. Do you see? That would only complicate matters.”
“In other words, it would be desirable, Hauptmann Gunther, if your statements to the Amis concerned only yourself.”
“Now I get it,” I said. “And here I was thinking it was really my welfare you were concerned about.”
“Oh, but it is,” said Haensch. “My dear fellow, it is.”
“You’ve got a big pile of potatoes in the office of the Parole and Clemency Board,” I said. “And you don’t want anyone like me knocking it over.”
“Naturally, we want to get out of here,” said Haensch. “Some of us have families.”
“It’s not just in our interest that we’re released soon,” said Biberstein. “It’s in Germany’s interest that we draw a line in front of what happened and then move on. Only then, when the last prisoner of war has been released from here and in Russia, can we Germans plan for the future.”
“Not just German interest,” added Haensch. “It’s in American and British interest, too, that good relations are fostered with a fully sovereign German government, so that the real ideological enemy can be effectively opposed.”
“Don’t you think we’ve killed enough Russians?” I asked. “Stalin’s dead. The Korean War is over.”
“No one is talking about killing anyone,” insisted Biberstein. “But we’re still at war with the communists, whether you like it or not. A cold war, it’s true, but a war nonetheless. Look, I don’t know what you did during the war and I don’t want to know. None of us do. No one in here talks about anything that happened back then. The important thing is to remember that every man in this prison is agreed on one thing: that none of us is or was criminally responsible for his acts or those of his men because we were all of us following orders. Whatever our personal feelings or misgivings about the odious work we were tasked with, it was a Führer order and it was impossible to disobey. As long as we all stick to that story, it’s certain we can all of us be out of this place before the decade is out.”
“And hopefully, well before that,” added Haensch.
I nodded, which was misleading, because it made me look as if I cared what happened to any of them. I nodded because I didn’t want any trouble, and just because they were convicts was no reason they couldn’t give me any. The Amis wouldn’t have minded that at all. Unlike the Parole and Clemency Board, most of the MPs in Landsberg were of the opinion that we all deserved to hang; and possibly they were right. But most of the reason I nodded was that I was tired of not being liked by anyone, including myself. That’s okay when you can go and put that feeling under several milliliters of alcohol, but the bars in prison are never open, especially when you need a drink the way I needed one now. Life in most prisons would be improved by the ration of a daily tot of liquor, like the British Royal Navy. That’s not a penal theory with which Jeremy Bentham would have agreed, but you can take it to the bank.
Most of all, I could have used a drink at night just before I went to bed. Perhaps it was having to talk about and relive the summer of 1941, but while I was in Landsberg, sleep provided little respite from the cares of the world. Often I would awake in the unfocused gloom of my cell and find myself soaked in sweat, having dreamed an awful dream. And more often than not it was the same dream. Of earth shifting strangely beneath my feet, turned not by any unseen animal but by some darker, subterranean elemental force. And as I watched closely, I saw the black ground as it shifted again and the blank-eyed head and spiderlike hands of some murdered Lazarus, self-rising from its own corpse gases, appeared on the mysterious surface. Thin and white like a clay pipe, the naked creature lifted its behind, its chest, and, last of all, its skull, moving backward and unnaturally, the way a collapsed puppet might arrange its various limbs until, at last, it appeared to be kneeling in front of a cloud of smoke, which cleared suddenly as it was sucked into the muzzle of the pistol in my steady hand.
10
GERMANY, 1954
It’s one of life’s little jokes that whenever you think things can hardly get any worse they usually do.
I must have fallen asleep again, and for a moment I thought it was just another bad dream. I felt several pairs of hands upon me, turning me over onto my stomach and ripping the pajama jacket off my back; and then I was simultaneously hooded and handcuffed. As the manacles pinched my wrists painfully I cried out, and for this sound I received a punch on the head.
“Quiet,” murmured a voice—an American voice. “Or you’ll get another.”
The hands, which wore rubber gloves, hauled me onto my feet. Someone dragged down my pajama trousers and I was dragged and then marched out of my cell, along the landing, and down the stairs. We went outside briefly and crossed the yard. Doors opened and slammed behind us, and after that I quickly lost track of where I was beyond the obvious fact that I was still within the walls of Landsberg. I felt a hand push down on top of my hooded head.
“Sit down,” said a voice.
I sat, and that would have been fine except that there was no chair and I heard several loud guffaws as I lay sprawled in pain on the stone-flagged floor.
“Did you think of that one all by yourself?” I said. “Or did you get the idea from a movie?”
“I told you to shut up.” Someone k
icked me in the small of my back, not so hard as to cause any damage but enough to shut me up. “Speak when spoken to.”
More hands picked me up again and dumped me onto a chair, and this time it was there.
Then I heard lots of footsteps leaving the room and a door closing but not being locked, and I might have supposed myself alone but for the fact that I could smell the smoke from a cigarette. I would have asked for one myself if I thought I could have smoked it with a hood over my head. There was that and the chance I might get kicked or punched again. So I stayed quiet, telling myself that despite their threats this was the opposite of what they wanted. Unless you’re going to put a man on a gallows trapdoor and hang him, you hood him for only one reason: to help soften him up and make him talk. The only thing was, I couldn’t imagine what they wanted me to say that I hadn’t already told them.
Ten minutes passed. Maybe longer. But probably less. Time starts to expand when they take your light away. I closed my eyes. That way it was me in control and not them. Even if they took the hood off now I wouldn’t see anything. I took a deep breath and let it out as steadily as I could, trying to get ahold of my fear. Telling myself I’d been in tighter spots. That after the mud of Amiens in 1918 this was easy. There weren’t even any shells bursting overhead. I was still wearing four limbs and my balls. A hood was nothing. They wanted me not to see anything, then that was fine with me. I’d lived through black and sightless days before; they don’t come much blacker than Amiens. The black day of the German army, Ludendorff called it, and not without justification. What else do you call it when you’re facing a force of four hundred fifty tanks and thirteen divisions of Anzacs? With more arriving all the time.
I heard a match and caught the smoke of another cigarette. A chain-smoker, perhaps? Or someone else? I took a deep breath and tried to get ahold of some smoke in my own lungs. American tobacco, that much was clear from the sweet smell. Probably they put sugar in it the way they put sugar in almost everything—in coffee, in liquor, on fresh fruit. Maybe they put sugar on their wives, too, and if the men were anything to go by, they probably needed a little sweetening.
