by Philip Kerr
It was good advice. I lit another cigarette and then left without another word.
I turned right out of the shop and walked around the edge of the cemetery. All of the graves were gone, and in the misty darkness, it wasn’t much more than a gray-looking field. Was it just the tombs and the headstones that were gone, or had the corpses been moved, too? Nothing ever lasted the way it was supposed to last. Not anymore. Not in Berlin. Mielke was right. It was time for me to move on, too. Just like those other Berlin corpses.
The Volkswagen Beetle was where Mielke had said it would be. The glove box contained a large, thick manila envelope. On the dashboard was mounted a little vase, and in it were some small flowers. I saw it and I laughed. Maybe Mielke did like people after all. But I still checked the engine and underneath the chassis for a car bomb. I wouldn’t have put it past him to send funeral flowers before I was actually dead.
As it happens, those are the only kinds of funeral flowers I’ve ever really liked.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Erich Mielke (1907–2000) was minister of state security of the German Democratic Republic from 1957 to 1989. In 1993, he was convicted of the murders of police officers Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck in 1931. He was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment and paroled after less than two. Anyone interested in knowing more about Mielke could do worse than follow this YouTube link to one of the famous televised incidents in German history: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACjHB9GZN18. Six days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mielke addressed the members of the GDR parliament. Some members objected to his calling them comrades, as he was used to doing. Mielke tried to justify this wording, declaring, “But I love…I love…all people….” The assembly laughed, for this was one of the most hated and hateful men in East Germany, feared even by members of his own ministry.
Anyone who wishes to know more about the appalling conditions of the French concentration camps at Gurs and Le Vernet should read Arthur Koestler’s excellent Scum of the Earth (1941), which has lost none of its capacity to shock. Koestler was imprisoned at Le Vernet for several months after the fall of France in 1940. The Guardian described it as the finest book about the collapse of France, and I can’t bring myself to disagree with that assessment.
The best account of the French SS is Robert Forbes’s For Europe: The French Volunteers of the Waffen-SS (2006). The French SS-Charlemagne were the last defenders of Hitler’s Führer-bunker in May 1945.
My own favorite history of French collaboration and Nazism is to be found in Marcel Ophuls’s documentary The Sorrow and the Pity (1969).
I am especially indebted to Cécile Desprairies’s illuminating book Ville Lumière Années Noires (2008).
There are two outstanding books on the SS-Einsatzgruppen. Both are equally shocking in their own way. Richard Rhodes’s book Masters of Death (2002) remains the most readable and horrifying book on the subject and is highly recommended. And I am indebted to Hilary Earl’s book The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen Trial, 1945–1958 (2009) for information on the improbable fates of the twenty-four Einsatzgruppen defendants.
Of these, thirteen were sentenced to death, and four were executed on June 7, 1951. These were the last of 275 war criminals hanged within the Federal Republic of Germany.
Of the remaining twenty defendants who were not hanged in June 1951, all had been released or paroled by 1958—a fact that I continue to find incredible.
No less incredible is the fate of Martin Sandberger, who commanded Einsatzkommando 1a (part of Einsatzgruppe A). Sandberger was, until his death in a Stuttgart retirement home on March 30, 2010, at the ripe old age of ninety-eight, the highest-ranking war criminal known to be alive. A doctor of law, he presided over the murders of some 14,500 Jews and communists and was sentenced to death in 1951; this was commuted to life imprisonment, and Sandberger was paroled in February 1958.
Landsberg Prison ceased to be used by the Americans as a war crimes facility in 1958 and is now maintained by the Bavarian Ministry of Justice.
The best book on the Battle of Königsberg is Isabel Denny’s The Fall of Hitler’s Fortress City (2007).
I am indebted to a number of books about the Soviet POW camps. The best of these are Stefan Karner’s Im Archipel GUPVI (1995) and George Schinke’s Red Cage (1994). The best book on returning German POWs is Frank Biess’s Homecomings (2006).
Edgard de Boudel is a fictional character based on two real French war criminals: Edgard Puaud and Georges Boudarel.
Helmut Knochen and Carl Oberg were pardoned by Charles de Gaulle and released in 1962. Oberg died in 1965, Knochen in 2003.
*Voinapleni = POW; bistra = hurry up; davai = go on, or all right; nichevo = it doesn’t matter; kasha = barley broth; klopkis = lice; kate = hut or barracks; pravda = truth; Voronezh is a Russian province.
*Saklutshonni = a convict, as opposed to a POW.
*Author’s translation.
