The Murderer in Ruins

by Cay Rademacher

  ‘You might give me at least some general idea of the direction your investigations are taking. Is this a political matter?’

  Stave thought for a moment. ‘Possibly, eventually. Primarily it requires me to make some discreet inquiries about my colleagues.’

  Ehrlich looked at him with those pale bright eyes.

  ‘Do you mean colleagues who are also involved in the rubble murderer investigation?’

  ‘If I told you that, I would already be setting you after those involved. This needs to be discreet in the utmost.’

  ‘Understood. What files do you need?’

  ‘Oradour. A town in France where the SS committed a massacre in June 1944.’

  ‘I’ve heard of it,’ the prosecutor broke in. ‘The massacre, that is.’

  He stared long and hard at Stave. The chief inspector stood there, feeling like he was on trial himself. He squirmed uncomfortably in the chair while Ehrlich just sat there looking at him.

  ‘The office next to mine is empty today,’ the man said at last. ‘I’ll have the files brought to you there. You can study them as you will, but you can’t take them away with you. There isn’t a lot in any case.’

  ‘Wasn’t there an investigation?’

  ‘Of course there was, but there were no suspects. Immediately after the massacre, Field Marshal Rommel tried to set up a court martial, but Hitler himself cancelled it. After that, the issue simply disappeared. The SS unit was in any case wiped out fighting the Allies at the end of June 1944. Wiped out completely.’

  ‘No survivors?’

  Ehrlich gave him a bleak smile. ‘Up until a few minutes ago, I thought there had been no survivors. Now I’m not so sure.’

  Stave smiled back. ‘Thank you, prosecutor.’

  ‘Keep me in the loop. If you find something, I want to know about it. And if you don’t find anything, I’d like to know that too.’

  Stave sat in the office next door, enjoying the quiet, the warmth. He could even take his overcoat off. Ehrlich had ordered tea for him and he sat there drinking it. Maybe life’s not so bad after all, he thought to himself.

  Eventually a bespectacled filing clerk in a grey coat brought him a Leitz box file. The chief inspector did his best not to be disappointed at how light it was.

  It didn’t take him long. He already knew the story of the massacre, and the testimony of the little girl in the Warburg children home’s matched what was in the file. Then he scanned a mimeographed copy of the names of soldiers in the SS unit. It included ‘Herthge, Hans’, which hardly surprised him. Nor did the absence of anyone called Maschke.

  There was a second list, much shorter. It was the names of the survivors. He ran his eyes down it: ‘Desaux, Joseph; Delluc, Yvonne; Fourché, Roger; Magaldi, Anouk.’ There were a few more. He made a list of all the names even though there was only one he needed: Anouk Magaldi. The fact that her name was on the list was enough to make her a credible witness in court.

  There were also a few witness statements, including an extract from the War Log compiled by the Supreme Command of the Wehrmacht for 30 June 1944, which noted: ‘3 Company SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment 4 wiped out.’

  The only other thing was a document in French which, thanks to his old school language lessons, Stave just about managed to translate: the public prosecutor’s office in the city of Limoges had issued a warrant for the arrest of all members of the SS unit. But that was it. Nothing more. Not a single letter or document to suggest that any members of the SS unit had ever been brought to trial.

  The chief inspector rubbed the back of his neck. At least he could now substantiate the little girl’s story. Hans Herthge was a murderer. All he had to do was prove that Maschke was really Herthge. There was just one more line to cross and the matter was done and dusted. But he still felt he had missed something.

  Stave set the box file down on Ehrlich’s desk.

  ‘Anything you want to share with me?’ the prosecutor asked.

  ‘Not right now, but soon. There is one other lead I need to track down. Then we need to talk.’ Stave nodded at the box file and said, ‘You’ll be able to add a couple more documents in here.’

  ‘That’s my man,’ Ehrlich replied.

  Stave walked down Feld Strasse and through the backstreets of St Pauli until he reached Altona. He was walking fast, to keep the warmth of the office in his bones. He reached the Search Office building, pushed open the great door and looked at the endless lines of boxes in which the individual fates of human beings were catalogued. There was nobody to be seen in the gloomy corridors. It was as if even the search for the missing had been frozen solid. He knocked on Andreas Brems’s door and walked in without waiting for a reply. It will already have been dealt with, he thought to himself.

  Brems greeted him with a gentle but weary smile. ‘Are you looking for your missing person or somebody else’s?’

  ‘Somebody else’s. One Lothar Maschke.’

  Brems indicated that he should sit down at his desk. He got up himself and went out, coming back a few minutes later with a yellow filing card.

  ‘Maschke, Lothar, born 1916 in Flensburg, lived in Hamburg from 1920, called up to the navy in September 1939, appointed leading seaman on board U-453. Reported missing on 2 June 1945 by his neighbour, Wilhelmine Herthge.’

  ‘Got you!’ Stave said under his breath.

  That had to be his colleague’s mother, Stave reckoned. She reports a neighbour missing, and at the same time her son returns from the war. Her son who’s somehow survived the fighting in Normandy in which all his other SS comrades may have died. Her son who had committed cold-blooded murder in Oradour. A son who realises that the massacre could still be a threat to him. And who suddenly finds out that the next-door neighbour, who just happened to be about the same age, is missing. A neighbour with no living relatives left. If he had, why would it have been Frau Herthge who reported him missing, rather than his own mother or wife? How easy must it have been to break into his apartment, steal a few papers and take his name. He would only have to have persuaded his mother, but she was unlikely to betray her own son, who from now on would be living with her at home, and unlikely to stray too far. Nothing to stop his mother keeping her own name. Who would notice that mother and son had different surnames? And even if they did, people would think that his mother had probably been widowed after his birth, remarried and taken the name of her new husband. Not exactly unusual in a time when millions of women had lost their husbands. No funeral, no death certificate, no need to report anything to any bureaucratic office – the real Lothar Maschke had been declared missing, but not dead. And who in any case bothered to check the names of everyone in Hamburg against the vast number of index cards in the hands of the Search Office? Nobody. So Hans Herthge simply becomes the new Lothar Maschke. The new Maschke gets new personal documents – not hard in a city where tens of thousands of identity cards and birth certificates were destroyed in a firestorm of bombing. Who was going to check every application for a duplicate? So the new Maschke simply took over all the documents of the old one, even claimed his ration card. He was probably interviewed at some time by a British officer and asked about his relationship with the Nazi party, but U-boat crew were generally approved. And in the end this new Maschke is in the clear and feels so secure that he can even chat about his time in France. He settles down in his little nest, starts a new life and what better disguise than to apply for a job with the police, of all things?

  ‘I’ll need to take this card,’ Stave told Brems, ‘it’s evidence.’

  The researcher shrugged. ‘Nobody has ever asked about him, or we’d have had a note on the file. But let me make a copy, just to keep things in order.’

  He took a second card from a box and began copying the details with a fountain pen, though it was so cold that the ink was almost freezing and there were blank lines left on the new card.

  Nobody will ever be able to read that, the chief inspector thought, but it doesn’t matter any more
.

  Stave nodded in farewell, and was just about to open the door when Brems cleared his throat, and said: ‘I don’t want to give you any false hopes, by the way, but we are expecting a letter from the Red Cross today with a new list of prisoners-of-war in the Soviet Union. I know that there is not much chance of finding names on it that we don’t already have. But we can’t rule it out.’

  ‘Just check names beginning with “St” for me,’ the chief inspector said, hoping that the tremor in his voice wasn’t too noticeable. Then he turned away quickly.

  Don’t get your hopes up. No unrealistic hopes.

  On the way back Stave dropped into a cafe that had survived the war almost intact, apart from the fact that the four-storey building’s façade had collapsed, as if some monster had ripped its face off. The front of the cafe had been boarded up and a couple of pieces of glass inserted with nails and putty to let light in. The chief inspector ordered a bowl of potato soup, which came with grey bread, butter and tea.

  The soup was a pale yellow colour, but at least it was hot. The bread crumbled beneath his fingers, and he had no idea what the paste on it was, except that it certainly wasn’t proper butter. The tea smelt of nettles. Supposed to be good for you, Stave told himself, and slurped at the bitter brew. He left the cafe feeling hungrier than ever.

  When he got back to the office he was surprised to find MacDonald waiting for him.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ the lieutenant said.

  ‘My lucky day,’ Stave answered, offering the officer a chair.

  Erna Berg glanced through the outer door, seemingly calm, clearly with no idea what her lover had on his mind, Stave reckoned. So she wasn’t in on it. He closed the door.

  ‘You’ve been back to see Frau Hellinger,’ MacDonald said bluntly. It was a statement, not a question.

  ‘Are you having me watched?’

  The Brit smiled apologetically. ‘Not you. We’re watching Frau Hellinger.’

  ‘Who’s “we”?’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘Have you come to tell it to me?’

  ‘I’m afraid there’s no alternative,’ MacDonald said with a sigh. Then he smiled again, one of those apologetic, charming Oxford smiles, and took a loose-leaf binder out of his briefcase.

  It was the case files.

  ‘I’m sorry for the inconvenience, old boy. I thought I could get away with it. But you’re too good. I’m going to have to let you in on a secret.’

  Stave looked down at the files, then at MacDonald, and then eventually said, ‘What is it that you have to “let me in” on?’

  ‘Operation Bottleneck,’ the Brit answered, smiling yet again. He shrugged and raised his hands, then let them fall to his side. ‘I should probably have done so earlier, at least when Hellinger’s name first came up.’

  MacDonald glanced briefly at the closed door, then at the files. ‘The other story is actually a lot more complicated than Operation Bottleneck, but I think you’re already in the picture there.’

  ‘Is there something I can help you with?’

  ‘Yes, you could take your service issue revolver and put a neat round hole in Frau Hellinger’s husband’s head,’ the lieutenant replied, pulling a face. ‘Only joking. This is my problem and mine alone – unlike the other one.’

  ‘Operation Bottleneck. It was you there that morning that Martin Hellinger disappeared?’

  ‘I abducted him.’

  Stave leant back. ‘Maybe you want to start at the beginning?’

  ‘I am an officer in His Majesty’s Army,’ MacDonald began, ‘but I also belong to another organisation, which recruited me back in my student days, the British Intelligence Objectives Sub-Committee. They used a good argument to convince me to sign up. They saw to it that the scandal surrounding my affair with a married lady from an aristocratic family just disappeared, like snuffing out a match.’

  ‘Must be a very specific sort of organisation.’

  ‘You could call it,’ the lieutenant hesitated, ‘a sort of secret service.’

  ‘Like the Gestapo?’

  For the first time, MacDonald seemed to lose control of himself, gave Stave a look of disgust and said, ‘I hardly think so. We are a few dozen men, officers of His Majesty and a few officials in a couple of ministries in London, scientists and academics in universities and a few specially chosen companies. We answer directly to the government. Our task is to seek out scientists and technicians in occupied Germany who worked for the Nazi regime.’

  ‘To punish them?’

  ‘Personally that would be my preference. But no. Our job is not to punish these gentlemen. We are after men with all kinds of technical knowledge, aircraft engine manufacturers, physicists who developed bombs, U-boat developers. But also specialists who could be useful to our badly damaged economy: chemists who researched using excrement as fertiliser, steel industry and mining engineers, technicians who might have plans for new cars or better radios lying in their desk drawers.’

  ‘Or precision timepieces?’

  ‘And trigonometric calculators. Calculating machines are going to be big business in the future, and Dr Hellinger recognised that sooner than most people.’

  ‘What do you do then?’

  ‘We abduct the gentlemen concerned,’ MacDonald replied, as if it was some student prank. ‘We knock on their doors and take them away. A trip in a jeep to the nearest military airfield where a plane is already waiting, engines running – and before the gentlemen concerned know what’s hit them, they are guests of His Majesty in a castle in the Scottish Highlands. Or in a laboratory outside London. Or a shipyard in Liverpool. They get milked; we drag all the knowledge we can out of these specialists, let them do their calculations, experiments, screw things together, until we know everything they know. Then we use what we’ve got out of them for our own research, either civilian or military.’

  ‘And these gentlemen don’t mind being milked? Is there no such thing as patent law?’

  MacDonald laughed. ‘Patent law, after a war which killed 20 million. What good is it winning the war? In the old days the temples would have been plundered, today it’s knowledge we’re stealing. Not an altogether unfair price for what your country inflicted on the world.’

  ‘And these specialists are happy enough just to give away their knowledge?’

  ‘The sooner they tell us all they know, the sooner they get to go home again. We’re not monsters. We don’t need to use Gestapo methods. We just wait for them to agree. Usually they’re like show-off children, so proud of their inventions, they tell us everything we want to know on day one. Even if they’re murderous weapons. In fact particularly so.’

  ‘So does that mean Dr Hellinger is going to turn up again one day soon?’

  ‘Of course. He’s not exactly one of the most reluctant. Unfortunately this damn cold has hit my homeland too, and we have hardly any aircraft fuel. Many of our harbours too are frozen in. We simply have no way of getting Hellinger back at the moment, either by ship or plane. But as soon as the thaw sets in, he’ll be on his way home. He’ll make up some story to tell his wife to explain his absence. We’ll help him with that and from now on he and his family will get heavy industrial worker ration cards in return for their silence. That is Operation Bottleneck. It’s gone well up until now. Hellinger would have turned up again. His wife would have withdrawn the “missing person” report. And that would have been it. No questions and nobody would have noticed.

  ‘But then the cold set in, and the murderer appeared on the scene. The Hellinger case has nothing to do with the rubble murderer. Pure coincidence. But then his name is listed in a murder file and who knows who might read it there? And the damn note Hellinger left. I had told him about the operation when I picked him up so that he wouldn’t kick up a fuss. But then he does the dirty on me by leaving this note. No idea how he managed to write it in time. I had him out of the house in two minutes flat.’

  ‘And then you simply stole the files?
’

  ‘I removed them. You would suddenly have come across them again, as soon as Hellinger was back. You would have taken Hellinger off the list of victims and that would have been that.’

  ‘Stupid thing to do.’

  MacDonald was taken aback for a minute, then he laughed. ‘You’re right. I hadn’t thought it through. I just happened to be here to see Erna and spotted them lying there.’

  ‘The two of you were in my office?’

  ‘Don’t blame Frau Berg. I persuaded her. We were alone and less likely to be disturbed than in the outer office, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘You and my secretary … here in my office?’ Stave didn’t quite know how to complete the accusation.

  ‘Good grief, old boy, were you never in love? We just suddenly found ourselves on our own together once again. It was a perfect opportunity.’

  ‘A perfect opportunity for you to take my files at the same time. Opportunistic indeed.’

  ‘Don’t take offence. I swear it was purely amorous intentions that brought us into your office. And afterwards my head was possibly not as clear as it should have been.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  Stave closed his eyes and thought. ‘I’ll believe you, Lieutenant, if only because your story is so distasteful and your motive so badly thought through. I also believe that there’s no connection between the Hellinger case and the rubble murderer. But his name was in the file, and I am going to have to explain why his disappearance is no longer relevant.’

  ‘Who’s likely to ask?’

  ‘Nobody, probably. But I take pride in my investigations being thorough and properly documented.’

  ‘Make an exception this time.’

  ‘What if I choose not to?’

  ‘One mention of Operation Bottleneck and you’ll find yourself the next guest of His Majesty. We have just about enough aircraft fuel to see to that.’

  ‘I thought as much,’ Stave replied. ‘There again I’ve always wanted to see a Scottish castle.’

  ‘Not when it’s minus 20 Celsius.’