Field Grey

by Philip Kerr

  He reached into his jacket pocket and fished out several folded sheets of paper which he handed to me. Then he and Scheuer stood up and moved towards the cell door.

  'You read that over and then decide whether working for Uncle Sam is such a bad thing after all.'

  Helmut Knochen, interviewed March 1954

  My name is Helmut Knochen. I was the senior commander of the security police in Paris during the Nazi occupation of France between 1940 and 1944. My jurisdiction extended from Northern France to Belgium. Until the appointment of Carl Oberg as supreme leader of the SS and the German police in France I had full responsibility for keeping order and upholding the rule of law. As a policeman I tried to ensure that relations between the French and the Germans were without friction and that the proper administration of justice was unhindered by the occupation. This was not always easy. I was not always made privy to senior policy decisions. And the most profound tragedy of my life has been the fact that, in an indirect way, and without being aware of it, I was involved in the persecution of the Jews of France. At no point did I know or even suspect that Jews deported to the East were to be exterminated. If I had known this I should never have gone along with their deportation. Let me say that the greatest crime in history was the systematic murder of Jews by Adolf Hitler.

  Of course there were many other crimes inflicted upon the French people and I always saw my job as being to help restrain some of my colleagues from acting with excessive zeal, not least because I was always fearful of the impact of heavy-handed policing on French public opinion, and on those Vichy officials whose willing collaboration was needed in all security matters. I was always reluctant to provoke an embarrassing confrontation. For example, in September 1942 I thwarted an early attempt

  to round-up prominent French Jews in Paris. There were other occasions when this happened but that was the largest I think, involving as many as five thousand Jews. This often brought me into conflict with Heinz Rothke, who was chief of the Gestapo's Jewish office in France.

  But my relationship with other fanatical elements in the SS and SD was no less fractious and difficult. Frequently I had to censure those officers who, arriving from Berlin, believed that the SD uniform permitted them to deal summarily with the French. I remember one junior officer from Berlin, Hauptsturmfuhrer Bernhard Gunther, who in the summer of 1940 was dispatched to the refugee camps at Gurs and Le Vernet in order to arrest a number of French and German communists and bring them back to Paris for questioning. But instead this officer ordered the men to be shot at the side of a French country road. When I heard about this I was shocked; then furious. When he subsequently murdered another German officer, Hauptsturmfuhrer Gunther was sent back to Berlin.

  Helmut Knochen, interviewed April 1954

  My name is Helmut Knochen and I have been asked to make a statement concerning information I gave regarding another German officer, Captain Bernhard Gunther, in a previous statement.

  I first met Captain Gunther in Paris, in July 1940. The meeting took place at the Hotel du Louvre, or possibly the HQ of the French Gestapo at 100 Avenue Henry-Martin. Other officers present at this meeting included Herbert Hagen and Karl Bomelburg. Gunther had arrived in Paris as the special emissary of SS General Reinhardt Heydrich and he was ordered to track down a number of French and German communists who were wanted by the Nazi government back in Berlin. Gunther struck me as typical of the type who found favour with Heydrich: cynical, ruthless and not at all a gentlemen. He made clear his own detestation of the French and, in spite of my efforts to rein him in, he insisted on flying to the south of France and collecting a detachment of motorised SS to drive him to Gurs and Le Vernet, to search those two camps for Heydrich's wanted men.

  It was my own feeling there was nothing to be lost by delaying matters until the end of summer, largely out of sensitivity to the defeated armies of France. But Gunther was most insistent. He was ill, I recall - I don't remember why, but later on there was talk of his involvement with a Swiss prostitute - but, in spite of this, he still travelled south to carry out his mission, to which Heydrich had given top priority. In fairness to Captain Gunther, it may have been this illness that prompted his summary action in regard to the prisoners. He was accompanied by another German officer, Hauptsturmfuhrer Paul Kestner, and it was he who informed me of what had happened on the road from Gurs to Lourdes.

  Almost a dozen men were arrested in Gurs. Among these was the head of the French communist party in Le Havre, Lucien Roux. It seems terrible to think it, but apparently these men knew what Captain Gunther had in store for them. The SS drove a few kilometres out of Gurs and stopped in a forest clearing. There Gunther ordered everyone out of the trucks. The prisoners were lined up, offered a last cigarette and then shot. Gunther delivered the coup de grace to several men who showed signs of life and then they all went on their way, leaving the bodies where they fell.

  Frankly, when Captain Kestner told me exactly what had happened down there I thought seriously about making a formal complaint against Captain Gunther; but I was advised against it: Gunther was Heydrich's man and this made him all but untouchable, you understand. Even when he murdered another officer at a brothel in Paris and it might reasonably have been expected that Gunther would be court-martialled, he managed to evade all charges. He was merely recalled to Berlin, from where he was immediately dispatched to the Ukraine, most likely to carry out the kind of dirty work for which the SS is now notorious. It's not given to every German officer to behave like a gentleman.

  Later on, I met Heydrich and expressed my own reservations about Gunther, and his response was typical of the man. He said that he rather agreed with Schopenhauer that all honour ultimately rests on considerations of expediency. Heydrich was of course strongly influenced by Schopenhauer; and I don't just mean his anti-Semitism. Anyway, I didn't argue with him. That was never wise. Like Kant, I believe that honour and morality contain their own imperatives. And this is of course why I was part of Count Stauffenberg's plot to kill Adolf Hitler. And why I was arrested by the Nazis in July 1944.

  Helmut Knochen, interviewed May 1954

  My name is Helmut Knochen and I have been asked to provide a description of SS Hauptsturmführer Bernhard Gunther, for the record. I met Gunther in 1940. He was older than me, I think. Perhaps forty years old. I recall also that he was a Berliner. I myself am from Magdeburg and I have always had a fascination for the Berlin accent. Well it wasn't so much his accent that marked him out as a Berliner as his manner. This might be described as rude and uncompromising; cynical and unfriendly. It's no wonder that Hitler disliked Berlin so much. Well, this man Gunther was doubly typical because he was also a policeman. A detective. I always think that the character of Doubting Thomas in the Bible must have been a Berliner. This fellow would only have believed Christ had risen from the dead if he could have looked through the holes in his hands and feet and seen a judge and a research physicist on the other side.

  He was very German-looking. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, about one ninety centimetres tall and powerful in the arms and shoulders, even a little heavy. His face was pugnacious. Yes, he was very much the kind of man I didn't like at all. A real Nazi, you know?

  [The witness, Knochen, was subsequently shown a photograph of a man and positively identified him as the wanted war criminal, Bernhard Gunther.]

  * * *

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: FRANCE, 1954

  From the grimy window in the holding cell at Paris's Cherche-Midi prison I could just see the front of the Hotel Lutetia, and for a long while I stood pressed into the cobwebbed corner, watching the hotel closely as if I almost expected to see myself coming out of the door with poor little Renata Matter on my arm. It was hard to know who I felt more sorry for, her or me, but eventually she edged it. She was dead after all, when she would have had every reason to expect that she might still be alive. But for me. I didn't spare myself anything in the way of reproach or blame. If only I hadn't fixed her up with a job at the Adlon, I tol
d myself, then she wouldn't have been killed. If only I had left her here in Paris, then there would have been a small but nonetheless real possibility that she could have turned left out of the Lutetia, crossed the Boulevard Raspail, and come to see me in the Cherche-Midi. It would have been easy enough. The Cherche-Midi was, after all, no longer a prison but a court, and like many others in Paris - most of them journalists - she might have gone there to see the trial of Carl Oberg and Helmut Knochen and seen me there, too. My hosts in the SDECE - the French counterespionage service - had thought it necessary to remind me that I was in their power, and that like Dreyfus, who had also been imprisoned in the Cherche-Midi, they could do what they liked with me now that I had been extradited to their custody.

  Not that custody in Paris was such an enormous hardship. Not after everything else. Not after Mainz and the French Surete. They had been a little rough. And it was true that La Sante Prison where I was currently held wasn't exactly the Lutetia, but the SDECE wasn't so bad. Probably not as bad as the CIA, anyway; and certainly not as bad as the Russians. Besides, the food at La Sante was good and the coffee even better; the cigarettes were tasty and plentiful; and most of the interrogations at the Caserne Mortier - nicknamed the Swimming Pool - were conducted politely, often with a bottle of wine and some bread and cheese. Sometimes the French even gave me a newspaper to take back to La Sante. None of this was what I'd been expecting when I left WCPN1 in Landsberg. My French improved - enough to understand what was in the newspapers and a little of the proceedings on the day I went to court, which just happened to be the day when the military tribunal brought in its verdict and handed down the sentences. My hosts in French intelligence had a point they wanted to make after all. I could hardly blame them for that.

  We sat in the public gallery, which was full. A civil judge, M. Boessel du Bourg, and six military judges came into court and took their places in front of a large blackboard, so that I half expected them to write out the verdict and sentence with a piece of chalk. The civil judge wore robes and an extremely silly hat. The military judges were all wearing lots of medals, although it was unclear to me what any of these could have been for. Then the two accused were led into the dock. I hadn't seen Oberg before except on the German newsreels during the war. He wore a smart, double-breasted pinstripe suit and light- framed glasses. He looked like Eisenhower's older brother. Knochen was thinner and greyer than I remembered: prison does that to a man - that and a death sentence from the British hanging over your head. Knochen looked straight at me without showing a sign of recognition. I wanted to shout at him that he was a damned liar, but of course I didn't. When a man's on trial for his life it's not good manners to bend his ear about something else.

  At considerable length M. Boessel du Bourg read the verdict and then delivered the sentence, which was death, of course. This was the cue for lots of people in court to begin shouting at the two defendants and, a little to my surprise, I found I was almost sorry for them. Once the two most powerful men in Paris, they now looked like two architects receiving the news that they hadn't won an important contract. Oberg blinked with disbelief. Knochen let out a loud sigh of disappointment. And amid more abuse and cheers from all around me the two Germans were led out of court. One of my SDECE escorts leaned towards me and said:

  'Of course, they will appeal the sentences.'

  'Still, I do get the point,' I said. 'I am encouraged by Voltaire's example.'

  'You've read Voltaire?'

  'Not as such, no. But I'd like to. Especially when one considers the alternative.'

  'Which is?'

  'It's hard to read anything when your head is lying in a basket,' I said.

  'All Germans like Voltaire, yes? Frederick the Great was a great friend of Voltaire, yes?'

  'I think he was. At first.'

  'Germans and French should be friends now.'

  'Yes. Indeed. The Schuman Plan. Exactly.'

  'For this reason, I mean for the sake of Franco-German relations, I think the appeal will be successful.'

  'That's good news,' I said, although I could hardly have cared less about Knochen's fate. All the same I was surprised at this conversational turn of events, and I spent the drive back to the Swimming Pool feeling encouraged. Perhaps my prospects were improving after all. Despite the trial of Oberg and Knochen, and the verdict, there was perhaps good reason to imagine that the SDECE was keener on cooperation than coercion, and this suited me very well.

  From the Cherche-Midi we drove east to the outskirts of Paris. The Caserne Mortier in the barracks of the Tourelles was a traditional-looking set of buildings near the Boulevard Mortier in the twentieth arrondissement. Made of red brick and semi- rusticated sandstone, the C.M. held no obvious affinity with a swimming pool beyond an echo in the corridors and an Olympic-sized courtyard which, when it rained, resembled an enormous pool of black water.

  My interrogators were quiet-spoken but muscular. They wore plain clothes and did not give me their names. No more did they accuse me of anything. To my relief they weren't much interested in the events that had happened on the road to Lourdes in the summer of 1940. There were two of them. They had intense, birdlike faces, five o'clock shadows that appeared just after lunch, damp shirt collars, nicotine-stained fingers and espresso breath. They were cops or something very like it. One of the men, the heavier smoker, had very white hair and very black eyebrows that looked like two lost caterpillars. The other was taller, with a whore's sulky mouth, ears like the handles on a trophy, and an insomniac's hooded, heavy eyes. The insomniac spoke quite good German but mostly we spoke in English, and when that failed I took a shot at French and sometimes managed to hit what I was aiming at. But it was more of a conversation than an interrogation and, save for the holsters on their broad shoulders, we could have been three guys in a bar in Montmartre.

  'Did you have much to do with the Carlingue?'

  'The Carlingue? What's that?'

  'The French Gestapo. They worked out of Rue Lauriston. Number ninety-three. Did you ever go there?'

  'That must have been after my time.'

  'They were criminals recruited by Knochen, mostly from the Fresnes prison,' said Eyebrows. 'Armenians, Muslims, North Africans, mostly.'

  I smiled. This, or something like it, was what the French always said when they didn't want to admit that almost as many Frenchmen as Germans had been Nazis. And given their postwar record in Vietnam and Algeria it was tempting to see them as even more racist than we were in Germany. After all, no one had forced them to deport French Jews - including Dreyfus's own grand-daughter - to the death camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka. Naturally, I hardly wanted to hurt anyone's feelings by saying so directly, but as the subject remained on the table, I shrugged and said:

  'I knew some French policemen. The ones I've already told you about. But not any French Gestapo. Now the French SS, that's something else again. But none of them were Muslims. As I recall they were nearly all Catholics.'

  'Did you know many, from the SS Charlemagne Division?'

  'A few.'

  'Let's talk about the ones you did know.'

  'All right. Mostly they were Frenchmen captured by the Russians during the battle for Berlin, in 1945. They were men in the POW camps, like I was. The Russians treated them the same way they treated us Germans. Badly. We were all fascists in their book. But really there was only one Frenchman in the camps I got to know well enough to call him a comrade.'

  'What was his name?'

  'Edgard,' I said. 'Edgard de something or other.'

  'Try to remember,' one of the Frenchmen said patiently.

  'Boudin?' I shrugged. 'De Boudin? I don't know. It was a long time ago. A lifetime. Not a good lifetime, either. Some of those poor bastards are only just coming home now.'

  'It couldn't have been de Boudin. Boudin means sausage, or pudding. That couldn't have been his name.' He paused. 'Try to think.'

  I thought for a moment and then shrugged. 'Sorry.'

  'Maybe if y
ou told us something of what you can remember of him, the name will come back to you,' suggested the other Frenchman. He uncorked a bottle of red wine, poured a little into a small round glass and then sniffed it carefully before tasting it and pouring some more for me and the two of them. In that room, on that dull summer's day, this small ritual made me feel civilised again, as if, after months of incarceration and abuse, I amounted to something more than just a name chalked on a little board by a cell door.

  I toasted his courtesy, drank some wine, and said, 'I first met him here in Paris, in 1940. I think it must have been Herbert Hagen who introduced us. Something to do with the policy on Jews in Paris, I don't know. I never really cared about that sort of thing. Well, we all say that now, don't we? The Germans. Anyway, Edgard de something or other was almost as anti-Semitic as Hagen if such a thing was possible, but in spite of that, I quite liked him. He had been a captain in the Great War, after which he'd failed in civvy street, and this had led him to join the French Foreign Legion. I think he was stationed in Morocco before being sent to Indo-China. And of course he hated the communists, so that was all right. We had that much in common, anyway.

  'Well, that was 1940, and when I left Paris I didn't expect to see him again, and certainly never as soon as November 1941 in the Ukraine. Edgard was part of this French unit in the German army - not the SS, that was later - but the Legion of French Volunteers against Bolshevism, or some such nonsense. That's what the French called it. I think we just called it the something infantry. The 638th. Yes. That was it. Mostly the men were fascists of Vichy French or even French POWs who didn't fancy being sent to Germany as forced labour with the Todt organisation. There were probably about six thousand of them. Poor bastards.'