Field Gray

by Philip Kerr

  Sandberger had a ruffian’s face, with a jaw like a flat tire and a boxer’s hostile eyes. It was hard to imagine how anyone could have become a lawyer or a judge with a face like that. It was easier to imagine him murdering sixty-five thousand Jews. You didn’t need to be a criminologist to figure out a physiognomy like Sandberger’s.

  “I hear the Amis have been giving you a hard time of it,” he said.

  “You hear good with those things on the side of your head.”

  “So I took the liberty of mentioning you to the evangelical bishop of Württemburg,” he said. “In my last letter to him.”

  “As long as there are prisons there will be prayers.”

  “There’s a lot more he can do than just pray.”

  “A cake would be nice. Lots of cream and fruit, and a Walther P38 filling.”

  Sandberger smiled a lopsided smile that wasn’t provoking any second thoughts in my mind about the descent of man.

  “He doesn’t do prison breaks,” said Sandberger. “Just letters to influential people here and in America.”

  “I wouldn’t want to put him to any trouble,” I said. “Besides, I just came back from America myself. But I certainly didn’t make any friends while I was there.”

  “Which part?”

  “The southern half. Argentina, mainly. You wouldn’t like Argentina, Martin. It’s hot. Lots of insects. Plenty of Jews. But you’re only allowed to kill the insects.”

  “But lots of Germans, too, I hear.”

  “No. Just Nazis.”

  Sandberger grinned. Probably he meant it well, but it felt like seeing something unpleasant and atavistic toward the end of a séance. Evil flickering on and off like a faulty lightbulb.

  “Well,” he said, full of patient menace. “Let me know if I can help. My father is a friend of President Heuss.”

  “And he’s trying to help free you?” I tried to contain the surprise in my voice. “To get you a parole?”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks.” I walked away before he could see the look of horror on my face. It was beginning to look as if the only way I was ever going to have any friends in the new Germany was to have friends I really didn’t like.

  My American friends, both of them, were in cell seven when, after breakfast, I was returned there by one of the guards. This time they’d brought a little tape recorder in a leather case with a microphone not much bigger than a Norelco shaver. One was filling his pipe from a pouch of Sir Walter Raleigh; the other was adjusting his clip-on bow tie against his reflection in my cell window. There was a short-brimmed Stetson on my bed and both men smelled lightly of Vaseline hair tonic.

  “Make yourself at home,” I said.

  “Thanks, we already did.”

  “If you’re here to record my singing voice, I should warn you fellows I already made a deal with Parlophone.”

  “This is for our listening pleasure,” said the one puffing some heat into his Sir Walter Raleigh. “We’re not planning on a general release. Not this Christmas.”

  “We think we’re getting to the interesting part,” said the other. “About Erich Mielke. At long last. The part that affects us now.” He snapped on the machine and the spools began to turn. “Say something for recording level.”

  “Like what?”

  “I dunno. But let’s just hope that the oral tradition is not yet dead in Germany.”

  “If it isn’t, it must be the only thing in Germany that’s not dead.”

  A few seconds later, I heard for the first time the sound of my own voice uttered by someone other than myself. There was something about it I didn’t like. Mostly it was the laconic way I had of speaking. It was five years since I’d seen my home city, but I still sounded as unhelpful as a Berlin grave digger. It was easy to see why people didn’t like me very much. If ever I was going to make a useful contribution to society I was going to have to fix that. Maybe take some lessons in courtesy and charm.

  “Think of us like the Brothers Grimm,” said the Ami smoking the pipe. “Gathering material for a story.”

  “I try not to think of you at all if I can help it. But the Brothers Grimm works for me. I never liked their stuff very much. I especially hated the story about the village idiot with the pipe and the bow tie and his wicked Uncle Sam.”

  “So, then. After Paris. You went home to Berlin.”

  “Briefly. I organized Renata a job at the Adlon and lived to regret it. The poor kid was killed in the first big bombing raid on Berlin, in November 1943. Some help I was.”

  “And Heydrich?”

  “Oh, he was killed much earlier than 1943. Only, he had it coming and on a silver salver. But that’s another story.”

  “Did he believe you? About not finding Mielke?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. You never knew with Heydrich. We talked it over in his office at the Prinz Albrechtstrasse. Next thing I knew, I had orders to go to the Ukraine. I might have taken that personally except for the fact that everyone had the same orders.” I shrugged. “Well, I expect your friends Silverman and Earp told you all about that. Then I was in Berlin for a while before going to Prague. That was the summer of 1942. Let’s see, now. A year later, I was in Smolensk with the War Crimes Bureau. As an Oberleutnant. But after the Battle of Kursk we were out of that whole theater pretty quickly. The Red Army was in the driver’s seat, you might say. I got a leave. I got married. To a schoolteacher. Then I was recruited into the Abwehr—military intelligence—and promoted to captain again.”

  “Why were you demoted?”

  “Because of what happened in Prague. I stepped on someone’s corns, I guess.” I shrugged. “Anyway, February 1944, I joined General Schörner’s Northern Army as an intelligence officer. I spoke a fair bit of Russian by then. And a bit of Polish, too. The work was mostly interpreting. At least it was until the fighting started. Then it was just fighting. Kill or be killed. Tell me something. Did either of the Brothers Grimm see combat?”

  “Nope,” said the man with the pipe. “I was flying a desk for the whole of the war.”

  “I was too young,” said the man with the bow tie.

  “I didn’t think so. You get to recognize that in a man’s eye. It might interest you to know that by 1944 there was no such thing as ‘too young’ for the German army. There was no ‘too old,’ either. And no one was left flying a desk, as you put it, when they could fly a plane, or sit in a tank, or man an antiaircraft battery. Boys of thirteen marched alongside men aged sixty-five and seventy. You see, it wasn’t until the Red Army reached East Prussia that German civilians began to suffer in the way Russian civilians had suffered. This meant that there was more for us to fight for; and it was why men and boys of all ages were conscripted into the army. Nothing and no one was to be spared, least of all ourselves. Total war was what Goebbels called it. And it means what it says, which was rare for him. Total means everything. All in, nothing left out.

  “You Amis talk about this Cold War of yours with no understanding of what it means to fight a cold, pitiless war without mercy and against an enemy who never stops coming. Oh, believe me, I know. I was killing Ivans for fourteen months and I can tell you this—there’s no end to them. As many as you can kill, they keep on coming. So remember that if the time ever comes when you have to do the same. Not that anyone believes you’ll stop them. Why would you fight to save Europe, to save Germans? That’s the only reason we fought. To stop the Ivans from slaughtering the population of East Prussia. You might say that this was what we had done to the Jews, and you’d be right. But there were no war crimes trials for Soviet officers, no Ivans here in Landsberg. You would have to see what happens to a crowd of civilians when a Russian tank drives straight through its middle, or watch a fighter strafe a line of civilian refugees, to know what I’m talking about. Sepp Dietrich and his men shot how many Americans at Malmédy? Ninety? Ninety. A war crime you call it. For the Russians in East Prussia, ninety wasn’t even an infraction, it was a misdemeanor. Except that it’s hardly
a misdemeanor when the general demeanor of your soldiery is one of barbarous cruelty.”

  I was silent for a moment.

  “Something wrong?”

  “I never talked about this before,” I said. “It’s not easy. What does Goethe say? About sun and worlds I can tell you but little. All that I can see is the suffering of humanity. Still, it’s right that you should hear it. The trouble with you Amis is that you think it was you who won the war when everyone knows it was the Ivans. Without you and the British, they’d have taken longer to beat us. But they’d have beaten us all the same. Stalin’s maths, we used to call it. When there were just five of us left, there would be twenty Russians. And that was how Stalin was going to win. You’d better remember that if the Ivans ever invade West Berlin.”

  “Sure, sure. Let’s talk about Königsberg. You were taken prisoner at Königsberg.”

  “Don’t rush me. I have to tell this in my own way. When something has been asleep for this long, you don’t just shake it by the shoulder and shout in its ear.”

  “Take your time. You’ve got plenty of time.”

  24

  GERMANY AND RUSSIA, 1945–1946

  Königsberg is, was, important to me. My mother was born in Königsberg. When I was a child, we used to go on vacation to a seaside town near there called Cranz. Best vacation we ever had. My first wife and I went there on our honeymoon, in 1919. It was the capital of East Prussia—a land of dark forests, crystal lakes, sand dunes, white skies, and Teutonic knights who built a fine old medieval city with a castle and a cathedral and seven good bridges across the River Pregel. There was even a university founded in 1544, where the city’s most famous son, Immanuel Kant, would one day teach.

  I arrived there in June 1944. As part of Army Group North. I was attached to the 132nd Infantry Division. My job was to gather intelligence on the advancing Red Army. What type of men were they? What condition were they in? How well armed were they? Supply lines—all the usual stuff. And from the German civilians who fled their homes ahead of the Russian advance, the intelligence I had was of well-equipped, ill-disciplined, drunken Neanderthals who were bent on rape, murder, and mutilation. Frankly, a lot of this seemed like hysterical nonsense. Indeed, there was a lot of Nazi propaganda to this effect that was designed to dissuade everyone from surrendering. And so I resolved to discover the true situation for myself.

  This was made more difficult when, at the end of August, the Royal Air Force bombed the city to rubble. And I do mean rubble. All of the bridges were destroyed. All of the public buildings lay in ruins. So it was a while before I was able to verify the reports of atrocities. And I was left in no doubt as to the truth of these when our troops retook the German village of Nemmersdorf, about a hundred kilometers east of Königsberg.

  I’d seen some terrible things in the Ukraine, of course. And this was as bad as anything we’d done to them. Women raped and mutilated. Children clubbed to death. The whole village murdered. All seven hundred of them. You’ve got to see it to believe it, and now I believed it and I could have wished I didn’t. I made my report. The next thing, the Ministry of Propaganda had it and was even broadcasting parts of it on the radio. Well, that was the last time they were honest about our situation. The only part of my report they didn’t use was the conclusion: that we should evacuate the city by sea as soon as possible. We could have done it, too. But Hitler was against it. Our wonder weapons were going to turn the tide and win the war. We had nothing to worry about. Plenty of people believed that, too.

  That was October 1944. But by January the following year, it was painfully clear to everyone that there were no wonder weapons. At least none that could help us. The city was encircled, just like at Stalingrad. The only difference was that as well as fifty thousand German soldiers there were three hundred thousand civilians. We started to get people out. But in the process, thousands died. Nine thousand died in just fifty minutes when a Russian submarine sank the Wilhelm Gustloff outside the port of Gotenhafen. And we kept on fighting, not because we obeyed Hitler, but because for every day that we fought, a few more civilians managed to escape. Did I say it was the coldest winter in living memory? Well, that hardly helped the situation.

  For a short while, the artillery and the bombing stopped as the Ivans prepared their final assault. When it came, in the third week of March, we were thirty-five thousand men and fifty tanks against perhaps one hundred fifty thousand troops, five hundred tanks, and more than two thousand aircraft. Me, I was in the trenches during the Great War and I thought I knew what it was to be under a bombardment. I didn’t. Hour after hour the shells fell. Sometimes, there were as many as two hundred fifty bombers in the sky at any one time.

  Finally, General Lasch contacted the Russian High Command and offered our surrender in return for a guarantee that we would be well treated. They agreed, and the next day we laid down our arms. That was fine if you were a soldier. But the Russians were of the opinion that the guarantee had never applied to Königsberg’s civilian population and the Red Army proceeded to exact a terrible revenge on it. Every woman was raped. Old men were murdered out of hand. The sick and wounded were thrown out of hospital windows to make room for Russians. In short, the whole Red Army got drunk and went crazy and did what it liked to civilians of all ages before finally they set on fire what remained of the city and their victims. Those they didn’t kill they let fend for themselves in the countryside, where most of them starved to death. There was nothing any of us in the army could do about this. Those who did protest were shot on the spot. Some of us said this was justice—that we deserved it for what had been done to them—and this was true, only it’s hard to think of justice when you see a naked woman crucified on a barn door. Maybe we all deserved crucifixion, like those mutinous gladiators in ancient Rome. I don’t know. But every man who saw that wondered what lay in store for us. I know I did.

  For several days we were marched east of Königsberg, and as we walked we were robbed of wedding rings, wristwatches, even false teeth. Any man refusing to hand over an object of value in a Russian’s eyes was shot. At the railway station, we waited patiently in a field for transport to wherever we were going. There was no food and no water, and all the time more and more German soldiers joined our host.

  Some of us boarded a train that took us to Brno in Czechoslovakia, where at last we were given some bread and water; and then we boarded another train headed southeast. As the train left Brno we caught sight of the city’s famous St. Peter and Paul Cathedral, and for many men this was almost as good as seeing a priest. Even those who didn’t believe took the opportunity to pray. The next time we stopped we got out of the cattle cars, and finally we were given some hot soup. It was the thirtieth of April, 1945. Twenty days after our surrender. I know this because the Russians made a point of telling us the news that Hitler was dead. I don’t know who was more pleased to hear this, them or us. Some of us cheered. A few of us wept. It was the end of one hell, no doubt. But for Germany and us in particular, it was the beginning of another—hell as it really is, perhaps, being a timeless place of punishment and suffering and run by devils who enjoy inflicting cruelty. Certainly, we were judged by the book that was open, and that book was Mein Kampf, and for what was written in that book we were all going to suffer. Some more than others.

  From that transit camp in Romania—someone claimed it was a place called Secureni, from where Bessarabian Jews had been sent to Auschwitz—there was another train traveling northeast, right through the Ukraine, a country I had hoped never to see again, to a stop in the middle of nowhere where MVD guards drove us from the cattle cars with whips and curses. Standing there, faint from lack of food and water, blinking in the spring sunshine like unwanted dogs, we awaited our orders. Finally, after almost an hour, we were marched along a dirt road between two infinite horizons.

  “Bistra!” shouted the guards. “Hurry up!”

  But to where? To what? Would any of us ever see home again? Out there, so far away from a
ny sign of human habitation, it seemed unlikely; even more so when those who had only just survived the journey found they could walk no farther and were shot where they fell at the side of the road by mounted MVD. Four or five men were shot in this way like horses that had outlived their usefulness. No man was allowed to carry another, and in this way only the strongest of us were permitted to survive, as if Prince Kropotkin had been in charge of our exhausted company.

  Finally, we arrived at the camp, which was a selection of dilapidated gray wooden buildings surrounded by two barbed-wire fences, and remarkable only because next to the main gate was the steeple of a nonexistent church—one of those sharp, metallic-roofed Russian church edifices that looked like some old Junker’s Pickelhaube helmet. There was nothing else for miles around—not even a few huts that might once have been served by the church to which the steeple had once belonged.

  We trooped through the gate under the silent, hollow eyes of several hundred men who were the remains of the Hungarian Third Army; these men were on the other side of a fence, and it seemed we were to be kept separate from them, at least until we had been checked for parasites and diseases. Then we were fed, and having been pronounced fit for labor, I was sent to the sawmill. I might have been an officer, but no one was excused from work—that is, no one who wanted to eat—and for several weeks I spent every day loading and unloading wood. This seemed like a hard job until I spent a whole day shoveling lime, and returning the next day to the sawmill, half blinded by the stuff blowing in my face, and blood streaming from my nose, I told myself I was lucky that a few splinters in my hands and a sore back were the worst I had to suffer. In the sawmill I befriended a young lieutenant called Metelmann. Really he was not much more than a boy, or so it seemed to me; physically he was strong enough, but it was mental strength that was needed more and Metelmann’s morale was at a very low ebb. I’d seen his type in the trenches—the kind who awakes every morning expecting to be killed, when the only way of dealing with our predicament was to give the matter no thought at all, as if we were dead already. But since caring for another human being is often a very good means of ensuring one’s own survival, I resolved to look after Metelmann as best I could.