by Norman Lewis
Two hundred yards from the Gasthaus at the end of the street three wonderfully polished cannons pointed down the open road to a checkpoint a couple of miles away on the boundary of the Russian zone of occupation. Germans still in uniforms rumpled from sleeping rough wandered aimlessly along the roads outside the town and we first ignored them, then came close to forgetting their presence. There were rumours of last-ditch stands being planned by Nazis who had not surrendered, and following investigations we concluded that they might be correct. Back in the imperial days, the milk barons of Engelsdorf had built vast semi-castles in which to enjoy the views over the mountains, lying in folds at the back of the town, and there were reports that some were occupied—and would be defended—by regrouped SS formations when the time seemed ripe. We in fact discovered a vast, decaying mansion with the SS still in possession, and borrowed a half-company of infantry from the nearest Army HQ to deal with the crisis. What followed was something of an anti-climax, for having arranged for the surrounding of the supposed redoubt, my friends and I went in through the front door to find the SS occupants already lined up, as if on parade, in the principal room in readiness for the offer of their surrender.
The takeover by our troops of this corner of southeast Austria provided hardly more excitement than the routines of civilian life. We learned of the commanding general’s concern that the hunt for war criminals had produced scanty results and that he had spoken of his hope that the presence of trained security personnel might remedy the situation. By chance our arrival coincided with the capture of our only big fish to date, a Gestapo chieftain called Heinrich Poldau, whose mistake it had been to stay quietly at home instead of mingling with the streams of displaced persons and ordinary soldiers who no longer attracted attention. The nature of Poldau’s service committed him to a somewhat solitary existence and he had taken a small house out of town, where he had lived with an Austrian girl who had decamped as soon as the first reconnaissance car flying the Union Jack drove into Engelsdorf. Frau Pauli knew this girl, who had whispered to her of the Secretary’s secret activities. Now our hostess rushed to tell us of the prize lying within our grasp and later that day we picked him up.
When I met him I realised that I had known almost exactly what to expect. This was a quiet man who concealed himself behind the facade of a small bourgeois life, a man who knew how to enter and leave a room without the occupants being aware of his presence. The house he had chosen to rent was a showpiece of domestic clutter. Trinkets of all kinds were pinned to the walls of his living room, and a pair of stuffed owls held a stuffed mouse apiece in their claws. There was a shelf full of decorative pipes, and a faded print of the Redeemer, who, apart from his oriental garments, could have been a middle-class Austrian of the last century. This assemblage of objects if anything strengthened an underlying sensation of emptiness.
Poldau was a neat man in one of those rough-surface woollen jackets popular whatever the weather in places where mountains are sometimes in view. His hands were well looked after. He wore a plain ring and a plain watch. I was most taken by his face, which reminded me of one of those serious portraits carved in stone in the porch of a Gothic cathedral, depicting more calculation and less religiosity than those of its neighbours. I explained why I was there and he listened intently, nodding his head at the end of each sentence. Finally I told him he was under arrest and he bowed slightly and said, ‘At your service.’ I gathered from his accent that his English was good. I took him back to the Gasthaus where the girl called Fruli came down dust-covered from mending the roof, to serve him an evening meal. He was exceptionally polite to her, but she dumped the food down, turned her head and flounced off. After the meal I accompanied Poldau to the town jail—a medieval building entered through a portcullis—signed the register and left him to the jailer who, as usual in such institutions, appeared more than a little mad. Poldau’s only reaction to his caperings was the slightest trace of a smile.
Back in the Gasthaus I sent off a hasty note by dispatch rider to the Staff Officer (Intelligence) at Klagenfurt. ‘Poldau, Heinrich, believed Gestapo, held under arrestable categories. PIR follows.’
There was a reply within the hour. ‘Good luck. Ascertain urgent priority whether Poldau with Einsatz Gruppen, Poland and Russia.’
The problem next day was where best to talk to this man. The prison environment is the one least likely to foster relaxed and possibly revealing conversation. Rough guidelines for dealing with such situations were offered in a leaflet passed out at Security Headquarters containing for me at the time the truly remarkable suggestion that the suspect under interrogation should be taken, if the surroundings were suitable, for a quiet walk. Bizarre as it sounded, it seemed in these circumstances not altogether a bad idea. As a precaution I borrowed a rifleman from the RA unit and then, collecting Poldau at the jail, told him we were going for a stroll in the country.
We drove up steeply into the foothills of the Glein Alps rising from the back of the town, and stopped for a last view of its pinnacles and golden roofs through the oaks spreading their foliage like a tinsel decoration in the summer light. I parked the car and told the soldier we were all going for a walk in the woods and he nodded, worked the bolt of his rifle and dropped a bullet into the breech. An extraordinary transformation took place in Poldau’s manner and appearance. He breathed out, then laughed. ‘Why is he afraid?’ he asked. ‘The war is over. No more war.’
‘He’s not the slightest bit afraid,’ I told him. ‘He has orders to carry out.’
Poldau laughed again, as I speculated on the change he had undergone. Now it was all over. The game was up. In some way he could now relax.
We set out on a narrow path through the woods, the soldier in the rear humming a monotonous tune.
‘I have some questions to ask you,’ I told him.
‘Whatever you like,’ he said. ‘I think the time for secrets is at an end.’
‘What is your rank in your organisation?’
‘We do not speak of ranks. Only duties. I am a secretary.’
‘Tell me how you were recruited.’
‘That is simple. It was by accident. I was born in Gorlitz near the Polish border, where most people spoke some Polish. When the talk of war began there was a call for Polish speakers. We were told only that the matter was confidential, having some connection with the police. It was of interest to me because the pay at the bank was very low, and because successful candidates would not be subject to military call-up.’
‘So that was the Gestapo?’
‘It was not a name we ever used. I was officially listed a member of the Statistics Bureau of the Security Police. After a few weeks’ training I was sent to Poland.’
‘Tell me something about your activities there.’
‘Really it was no more exciting than the bank. It was office work as before, but I was sometimes employed to question Poles who were unable to speak German. With the end of the campaign I returned to records and statistics in Bremen. In the end I asked for an interview with the Chief Secretary and told him I was bored. He was sympathetic and said I could not be allowed to resign, but I might take six months’ leave to join the army, after which I would return to the office.’
‘So you got six months’ leave from the Gestapo merely for asking? I find it hard to believe.’
‘The Bureau was very flexible,’ Poldau said—I thought with a touch of pride. ‘I was encouraged by the Chief Secretary to take courses in army organisation and the Russian language,’ he went on. ‘After that my leave came through. I was under the minimum height for the Waffen SS, but the Chief organised things for me and I got in with the rank of Standartenführer, and was sent to the Eastern Front.’
‘When you were in action in Russia were you a member of an Einsatz Gruppe?’
‘Of course,’ Poldau said. ‘All soldiers with my qualifications were automatically directed into such groups. Let me explain that their task was to ensure nothing could hold up the speed of our
army’s advance. Large areas of enemy territory were surrounded by our pincer movements in a matter of days and many prisoners taken without a fight. Thus thousands of these were left behind. Our regular troops could not speak their language, and Einsatz groups took over.’
‘And many starved?’
‘They starved because an army moving at high speed can carry provisions only for its soldiers. In a single day we might take twenty thousand prisoners and be compelled to leave them behind. Camps had been designed to hold them, but they could not be made ready in time. When two hundred thousand prisoners were taken and brought to Stalag VIIIB, we found this to be no more than a square of ground with no buildings of any kind. This was inevitable, because the roads were blocked with snow.’
‘Were you at Salsk?’ I asked.
‘I was at Salsk, where not only the Russians but we ourselves came close to starving. It was ten days before food reached us, and then there was little of it. The Russians ate the bodies of their comrades who died from sickness or starvation. At first there were struggles over dividing up human meat, but then we permitted only doctors and butchers among the prisoners to do this, and order was restored.’
The rifleman, eager to listen to such gory details, had come closer and I waved him back.
‘How many died in all?’
‘In Salsk there is no way of knowing, because in some cases only the bones were left.’
‘I mean in all the camps.’
‘Figures were never given. Five million? Ten million? Perhaps more. I could talk to Russians but never understand their mentality. In battle they laughed at death. When we attacked our orders were to kill all wounded Russians left lying on the ground, because otherwise they would drag themselves to their knees as soon as we had gone through and shoot us in the back.’
I was beginning at this point to question how much of this catalogue of horrors it was necessary to include in the report. A vague multitude of men had vanished from the earth as if through a monstrous conjuring trick. No more than a legend, eventually to be forgotten. The figures were guesswork. Those who had kept records had themselves been swept away, so there were to be no names on Russian memorials, no epitaphs to be inscribed. As García Lorca had written of a single brave man killed by a bull, ‘a stinking silence settled down’.
We walked on and Poldau spoke eagerly, as solitary men sometimes do, of his childhood and background, and reverently of the skilful surgery of modern warfare as demonstrated in the blitzkrieg by which France had been overthrown in a matter of weeks, compared with those slogging years of trench warfare in the First World War. Only the snow had put an end to Germany’s dream of carrying its eastern frontiers as far as the Urals. ‘Not only Germany but Europe has been defeated,’ he said, ‘and Bolshevism remains intact.’
I returned him to prison, finished the report and took it to the Staff Officer (Intelligence), a classical scholar whose habit it was to slip admiring references to Caesar’s campaigns into discussions of the military chaos of Austria. Major Stevens was a worrier also, distraught at that moment at the news that Russian Asiatic troops had broken into the town and were chasing all the women in sight. He ran through the report. ‘My God,’ he said. ‘This man mustn’t be allowed to slip through our fingers.’
‘He won’t. He comes into the arrestable categories. Pending further investigations, we can hold him as long as we like. But that’s as far as it goes.’
‘Even if he was involved in mass killings?’
‘That has to be proved.’
‘You say here he was at Salsk. Isn’t that the camp where Russian Jewish prisoners were forcibly fed with excrement and drowned in urine?’
‘Poldau denies that the Final Solution was ever employed in the Stalags. He admits the death total was high, but says that prisoners died of diseases, hunger and the cold.’
‘What was this man doing in Engelsdorf?’
‘He was sending back stories he’d made up about Austrian separatists so that they’d keep him here. He knew that Germany was finished and decided to lie low until it was all over. His plan was to stay here until things settled down, then change his identity and go home.’
‘Could we use him?’
‘In what way, sir?’
‘It’s been confirmed that war-criminal trials are to be held. This man was there. He’s seen it all. He would make a sensational witness. Perhaps he could be sounded out?’
‘In a way that’s already been done. I believe he would agree to anything we propose.’
‘With some sort of inducement no doubt?’
‘It might help.’
‘There’s little we could offer. All these people will have to be let go in the end. Might be able to speed up the process, that’s all. Any question of financial inducements has to be ruled out.’
‘Money doesn’t interest him. He’s an abstemious sort of man. Strangely infantile. He had a collection of toy railway engines and is fond of animals. He mentioned he’d carried a white rat as a mascot through the Russian campaign. It died through eating unsuitable food. He likes painting.’
‘What does he paint?’
‘Sea views.’
‘Is he married?’
‘No. He is too devoted to his mother, he told me, to marry. The worst thing for him about the Eastern Front was that her letters took up to three months to come through.’
‘In a way none of this surprises me,’ Stevens said.
‘It didn’t surprise me either, sir.’
‘Any thoughts as to what might help to bind him to our purpose?’
‘So far as I’m concerned, discussions are complete and as soon as they’re ready, he’ll be sent to one of the camps in Germany. They’re opening one near Bremen, where his mother lives. If it could be arranged for her to visit him there, I’m sure he would show his appreciation in any way he could.’
‘Well, I imagine we could do something about that,’ Major Stevens said.
1997
Memories of an Indulgent Burma
I AM PROBABLY ONE of the few persons to have been tipped by a taxi driver, instead of the normal reverse of this transaction being the case. It was a small matter, yet provided an unforgettable moment of illumination of a cultural and spiritual divide between the East, as represented by Burma, and the West. The driver, affectionately known locally as Oh-oh, charged reasonable sums for ferrying Burmese passengers in his canary-coloured taxi about the southern town of Moulmein, but offered his services free to foreigners deposited there for a day or two when the ship from Rangoon put into port. Most of these fares, Oh-oh had heard, were enjoying a temporary escape from the capital, where visits into the surrounding countryside were not permitted. Like so many of his countrymen he was constantly on the alert for an opportunity to acquire merit, and being kind to foreigners came under the heading of meritorious actions. When the Menam tied up, the yellow jeep would be seen waiting on the quay, with Oh-oh offering a free ride to the new arrivals to any part of the town, plus a visit to the pagoda at Mudon, a few miles away, if the road happened to be clear of insurgents.
At the end of such trips passengers received a small present in the form of an ornament cut from mother-of-pearl. In my case the gift was a superior-quality bird’s nest. We had visited the caves where the earliest of the season’s nests were being collected, and this was the first ‘number one’ nest of that day. It had probably been finished only the day before, and was therefore spotlessly clean—a tiny amber saucer constructed from secretions in glands located in the bird’s head. The collector gained merit, too, by giving it away, and we shook hands and he congratulated me with a wide smile when Oh-oh passed it over.
Oh-oh now proposed that we should take breakfast—it was by this time midday—by joining a party given by a local family to celebrate the entry of their son into the Buddhist novitiate. We found ourselves in a large hall in which we joined about 200 people seated upon mats on a polished floor. Oh-oh assured me that our host had collected many of
the guests at random off the streets. Girls dressed in old-style finery were going round distributing snacks of pickled tea-leaves, salted ginger and shredded prawns. Once again merit-gain was what mattered, and it was an occasion for the family to give a substantial portion of their possessions away. It might take them two years, Oh-oh thought, to settle the debts incurred by this entertainment.
It was Oh-oh who warned me, when I told him of my hope to travel in the interior of the country, that I should do something to modify the extreme pallor of my skin. ‘They will not stare because they are polite,’ he said, ‘but the young people in the villages have never seen an Englishman before and they will believe you are Japanese. We are entertaining bad memories of these people.’
‘What can I do about it?’
‘You may make your face darker by keeping it as much as you can in the sun.’
I took this warning seriously, and after three days’ exposure as suggested on the deck of the Menam, my skin was the colour of freshly cut mahogany, except for white circles left by the sunglasses round the eyes. This caused some amusement among the European passengers, but evoked the sympathetic concern of the Burmese, one of whom being the assistant purser, who confided in me his belief that I was the victim of witchcraft.
There was no outright prohibition on foreigners travelling in the interior of Burma at this time, six years after the conclusion of the Second World War, but those who arrived in Rangoon found that such were the obstacles encountered in their efforts to do so that they soon gave up. When I presented my letter of introduction to U. Thant, head of the Ministry of Information, he saw no reason why I should not go where I wished. Later he admitted that, this being his first experience of a request to travel in the country, he was not sure of the official procedure to be followed. Later still I was to be informed that the US Military Attaché had fared no better and that a team sent by Life magazine to do a picture reportage had left after two uninteresting weeks spent in the Strand Hotel, Rangoon.
