Prussian Blue

by Philip Kerr

  Attached to the typewritten police report were three photographs. Two were autopsy pictures of a bearded man in his forties or fifties. And I had seen worse, much worse. For every cop, the sight of violent death is the carpenter’s plane that shaves away our ordinary human feelings until we’re almost desensitized and close to becoming unfeeling planks of wood. In the third photograph a group of four grinning Freikorps were standing beside the same man’s lifeless body; they looked like a group of big-game hunters on safari, posing proudly with a trophy animal they had bagged. One of the men, who appeared to be the leader, I recognized immediately: he was wearing a short leather coat, a tin hat, and puttees and he had one boot resting on the dead man’s badly contused face. I hadn’t seen a photograph like that before; no one had. And of course I was lost for words, as Albert Bormann had predicted. I heard a distant voice from my own past that seemed to say I told you so. For a moment, a sentence took shape in my buzzing head and I felt my lips start to move like a ventriloquist’s dummy, but all that came out of my gaping mouth were a few syllables of startled surprise and horror as though I’d lost the power of speech. And after what seemed an eternity, I closed the file and handed it back to Bormann before it could contaminate me, and it was probably just as well that what I’d almost said to Martin Bormann’s brother, Albert, and Hitler’s close friend Gerdy Troost was left unsaid forever.

  SEVENTY-ONE

  October 1956

  Even after seventeen years I remember that photograph very well, and how it was enough to overshadow the remainder of my time in Berchtesgaden like a glimpse into some devil’s private nightmare. Seeing it made me regret my curiosity and I was more than glad to return to Berlin, as if merely being near the Berghof knowing what I knew about the Leader would cause me trouble. I can’t say that it ever did. Nor that it changed my opinion of Hitler very much. But I could easily understand why it wasn’t the sort of thing any chancellor would have felt comfortable sharing with the German folk, and why Albert Bormann treated it like a great state secret. It’s one thing to murder a man in cold blood; it’s something else to have your picture taken while standing on his face with a big grin on your own. Gerdy Troost chose not to look at the picture after all, on my advice, which I now regret having given her, since she remained loyal to the Leader right up until and well after the end. Given the hell Hitler unleashed upon the world, it might have been better if she’d seen him for what he was: a political criminal. Everyone knows that now, of course; Hitler’s name is a byword for mass murder, but back in 1939 it was still shocking to realize that the head of the government was capable of such barbarous behavior. Until then all I’d heard had been rumors that he’d been in charge of a Freikorps death squad in Munich, but these were nothing more than that: rumors. Bormann’s photograph was the first time I’d seen actual evidence and when you’re a cop, that’s really all that’s supposed to matter.

  The last I heard of Frau Troost, she’d been ordered not to work as an architect for ten years and fined five hundred deutschmarks by some Allied denazification board. But I liked Gerdy, even admired her, which, at the time, was probably why I thought it best to talk her out of looking at the picture. I was more thoughtful then. Like the way I made sure that the one thing I did before I left the Bavarian Alps was to seek out Dr. Brandt at his little home in Buchenhohe and let him know I’d guessed it was he who’d cut the brake hoses on Hermann Kaspel’s car, he who’d murdered him, and that I knew all about his crummy little racket in Pervitin and Protargol, not to mention those illegal abortions. He arched a dark eyebrow and smiled thinly as if I’d told him a very vulgar joke, said I was sadly mistaken, and then closed the door in my face like someone who was absolutely certain that I couldn’t touch him. He was right about that, of course. I’d have had a better chance arresting Josef Stalin. But still, I wanted to say my piece and not to let him think he had gotten away with it entirely, for Kaspel’s sake and, I suppose, because I felt it was my duty. No one else was interested—interested, I mean, in the kind of justice to which everyone in a decent society is entitled. I saw Major Peter Högl again, too. He turned up at the hotel in a nice little blue sports car and cheekily offered to drive me to the local railway station—I suppose he just wanted to make sure I actually left Berchtesgaden; I let him drive me, too, just so I could tell him what I thought of him and the whole rotten operation on Hitler’s mountain, and when I finished he told me to disappear, or words to that effect.

  Would that I had disappeared, in which case perhaps the war might have worked out differently for me; if Heydrich hadn’t drafted me into the SD from Kripo I might never have gone to France and seen Erich Mielke again, nor saved his life. Not that the comrade-general thought himself in my debt; not anymore, that much was certain. And while I was hopeful that having at last got rid of the tenacious Friedrich Korsch permanently I might escape the now leaderless Stasi hounds Mielke had sent after me, I can’t say I was certain. But I did at least feel a greater sense of confidence that it would be a long time before they caught up with me, especially given that I was back in West Germany. I slipped across the new border soon after leaving the Schlossberg Caves and made my way via Cologne and Dortmund to Paderborn in the British zone, which I’d heard was now Germany’s number one dirty-laundry center for “Old Comrades” seeking new identities. I don’t think the poor Tommies suspected such things as laundries for old Nazis even existed, least of all that one would have operated out of a secondhand bookshop next to the university. And seventy-two hours after arriving there, I was checking into the local Hotel Löffelmann as Christof Ganz, with one hundred and fifty deutschmarks in my pocket, a passport, a railway ticket to Munich, and a new driver’s license. I even managed to knock a few years off my age and instantly became a much more youthful fifty. At this rate I could go back to Paderborn in ten years, get another new identity, and not age at all.

  A few days later I arrived in Munich. Of course, I’d have preferred it to have been Berlin I was returning to, but home was out, possibly forever; surrounded by the GDR, it was pointless even thinking about it. Berlin looked like a pearl of freedom in a bucketful of ball bearings and, probably, was the second-most beleaguered place on earth. I might as well have tried to get into Budapest, which the Red Army’s tanks were currently blowing to pieces following the Hungarian uprising. Besides, I knew lots of people in Berlin and what was worse they knew me, so I thought Munich was best. It wasn’t like it used to be, but it would do. Besides, Munich was in the American zone, which meant there was always money to be made there. And while Bernie Gunther and Walter Wolf may have been wanted by the Amis and the French, Christof Ganz was a man without a past, which suited me very well because without a past I at least had a fighting chance of having a future.

  On my first night back in Munich my aimless footsteps led me from the Christliches Hospiz in Mathildenstrasse, where I was staying, to Odeonsplatz and the Feldherrenhalle, which was a copy of the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence. While I haven’t seen the original building myself I can easily imagine that it probably contains some beautiful Renaissance marble statues and works of art in bronze—all very Italian. The Munich copy contained a monument to the Franco-Prussian war and a couple of heavily oxidized statues to some now forgotten Bavarian generals. All very German and, once, very Nazi, too: on the left of the Feldherrenhalle, in Residenzstrasse, there had been a memorial to the so-called beer-hall putsch, but that was now gone and so, thank God, was the misguided man who’d instigated this doomed attempt at a coup d’état. But the jackboot echoes were still there and probably so were a few of the ghosts. And as I stood there brooding on the old Germany, I managed to forget the foreign tourists who were still milling about. Gradually they melted away and, perhaps more important, so did I. Then a dark cloud shifted, revealing the bright moon, and I was suddenly able to picture the scene that had existed there on that fateful day back in November 1923, as if I’d been in a cinema theater. Theodor Mommsen probably puts it
better than Christof Ganz, but for a brief, enchanted, almost transcendental point in time, I perceived how history was nothing more than an accident, a fluke, a matter of a few centimeters here or there, a head turned, a sudden gust of wind, a dirty gun barrel, a misfired cartridge, a breath held for a second too long or too little, an order misheard or misunderstood, an itchy trigger finger, a second’s delay, an instant’s hesitation. The idea that anything is ever meant to be seemed nonsensical; small causes can have large effects, and some words of Fichte came to mind, about how you could not remove so much as a grain of sand from its place without changing something in the immeasurable whole.

  When Adolf Hitler, Ludendorff, and more than two thousand SA men had marched to this spot from the Bürgerbräukeller some two kilometers away, they encountered a blockade made up of a hundred and thirty policemen armed with rifles. The standoff that took place ended when one of those guns—history doesn’t tell us to which side it belonged—was fired, after which there was a lot of shooting on both sides. Four policemen and sixteen Nazis were killed. By all accounts Göring was struck by a bullet in the groin, while some of the men standing beside Adolf Hitler were killed outright, so perhaps it was hardly surprising he thought he had been picked by God to lead the country. Had he, I wondered, ever really believed that what he was doing was right? Or was it that he had been possessed by a misplaced and overriding devotion to pan-Germanism, which is to say he was infected with too much Germany as an idea, in inverse proportion to no Germany at all, which was the situation that existed until the unification that followed the conclusion of the Franco-Prussian war of 1871? It was of course unfortunate that the outcome at the Feldherrenhalle had not produced an alternative result. History would certainly have been very different. But I could hardly argue with the blockade or the decision to shoot, only the marksmanship.

  It seemed that for once the Bavarian police had been doing their job properly.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Following Heydrich’s assassination in June 1942, Ernst Kaltenbrunner became the chief of the RSHA, which comprised Kripo, the Gestapo, and the SD, in January 1943; he was tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg and hanged in October 1946.

  Hans-Hendrik Neumann remained Heydrich’s adjutant until the capitulation of Poland in 1939, when he was sent to Warsaw to set up the SD office there. Subsequently he became police attaché at the German Embassy in Stockholm in 1941, again on Heydrich’s orders; and then served with the SS in Norway. After serving a short prison sentence he joined Philips Electrical GmbH in Hamburg where he worked for the rest of his life. He retired in 1975, and died in June 1994.

  Gustav Landauer was a leading anarchist at the beginning of the twentieth century. He was stamped to death by members of the Freikorps in May 1919. His last words were, “To think that people like you are human.”

  Colonel Johann Hans Rattenhuber’s RSD units murdered hundreds of Jews at Hitler’s Werewolf HQ in January 1942. He was captured by the Russians in May 1945 and served ten years in prison before being released by the Soviets in October 1955. He died in June 1957.

  Major Peter Högl followed Hitler into the Führerbunker in early 1945. It seems probable that he commanded the firing squad that executed Himmler’s liaison man and Eva Braun’s brother-in-law, Hermann Fegelein, on April 28, 1945. Högl was killed on May 2, 1945, while crossing the Weidendammer Bridge under heavy fire in Berlin.

  The fate of Arthur and Freda Kannenberg, who were the house managers at the Berghof, is unknown.

  Martin Bormann became Hitler’s private secretary and the most powerful man in Germany after Hitler himself. He died while making his escape from the Führerbunker on May 2, 1945. His co-conspirator in the murder of Walther Kadow in 1923, one Rudolf Höss, was released from prison in 1928; he joined the SS in 1934, and subsequently became the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. He was hanged as a war criminal in Warsaw in 1947.

  Albert Bormann flew out of Berlin in April 1945. He was arrested in 1949 and, having served six months’ hard labor, was released that same year. He refused to write his memoirs and never ever spoke about his elder brother, Martin. He died in April 1989.

  Wilhelm Zander accompanied Hitler to the Führerbunker in early 1945. Zander was one of three men Hitler entrusted to take his political testament and effective command of German forces to Admiral Doenitz in April 1945. He survived the war and died in Munich in 1974.

  Wilhelm Brückner was sacked by Hitler in October 1940 and replaced as chief adjutant by Julius Schaub. He joined the German army and by the end of the war held the rank of colonel. He died in Chiemgau in August 1954.

  Dr. Karl Brandt took charge of the Aktion T4 Euthanasia Program in 1939, which gassed some seventy thousand victims. He was one of the defendants in the so-called Doctors’ Trial, which began in 1946. Charged with carrying out medical experiments on prisoners of war, he was found guilty and hanged in June 1948.

  The Krauss brothers were Berlin’s most famous burglars. They really did burgle the police museum. Their fate is unknown to the author.

  Gerdy Troost resumed her design work in Haiming, Upper Bavaria, in 1960. She died in Bad Reichenhall in 2003 at the age of ninety-eight.

  Polensky & Zöllner continued in business long after the war. In 1987, the German arm of the construction company went bankrupt. But an arm of the company continues to exist today under the old name, in Abu Dhabi.

  Erich Mielke served as the head of the Stasi from 1957 until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Prior to this, in October 1989, Mielke had ordered the Stasi to arrest and indefinitely detain eighty-six thousand East Germans in what he considered was a state of emergency. But local Stasi men refused to carry out his orders for fear of being lynched. Mielke resigned on November 7, 1989. He was arrested in December 1989 and went to trial in February 1992. Suffering from the effects of old age, he was released in 1995 on compassionate grounds and died in May 2000.

  The tea house at the Kehlstein exists to this day and is a popular visitor attraction, as is the excellent Hotel Kempinski in Obersalzberg, which is built on the site of Herman Göring’s house. The ruins of both the Berghof and Bormann’s house are still visible. The Türken Inn continues in business as a hotel and may be visited throughout the year. The Villa Bechstein no longer exists, but Albert Speer’s house is still there and was sold recently to a private buyer for several million euros.

  Albert Speer was tried as a war criminal at Nuremberg and sentenced to twenty years in prison. He died in London in 1981.

  I am grateful for the help of Marie-Caroline Aubert, Michael Barson, Ann Binney, Robert Birnbaum, Robert Bookman, Paul Borchers, Lynn Cannici, J. B. Dickey, Martin Diesbach, Gail DiRe, Abby Fenneweld, Karen Fink, Jeremy Garber, Ed Goldberg, Margaret Halton, Tom Hanks, David Harper, Ivan Held, Sabina Held, Kristen Holland, Millie Hoskins, Elizabeth Jordan, Ian Kern, Caradoc King, John Kwiatkowski, Vick Mickunas, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Christine Pepe, Barbara Peters, Mark Pryor, Jon Rinquist, Christoph Rüter, Anne Saller, Alexis Sattler, Stephen Simou, Matthew Snyder, Becky Stewart, Bruce Vinokaur, Thomas Wickersham, Chandra Wohleber, Jane Wood, and, above all, Marian Wood, as always.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels have been national bestsellers and finalists for both the Shamus and Edgar awards. He is the recipient of the British Crime Writers’ Ellis Peters Award for Historical Crime Fiction. As P. B. Kerr, he is the author of the young adult series Children of the Lamp. He lives in London.

  philipkerr.org

  * Three years later, in May 1942, I would have sight of a confidential medical report that raised the possibility that, on Himmler’s orders, Brandt had poisoned Heydrich, who was recovering from wounds sustained during an attack by Czech partisans.

  * A couple of years later, at Heydrich’s country house near Prague, in Bohemia, Geschke was to remind me of this acquaintance when he tried to strike up a
friendship with me. But in 1939 I didn’t know him.

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