Field Gray (7 page)

Mundt read out some more names just to rub it in. “You should feel proud of yourself.” Then he clapped me on the shoulder. “Come, now. Surely you can see the funny side of this.”

“And if you can’t, then that only makes it all the more funny,” said Blume.

“What’s funny?” said a voice.

We all looked around to see Arthur Nebe, the general in charge of Task Group B, standing in the doorway. Everyone came to attention, including me. As Nebe came into the office and walked up to the wall map, with hardly a look at me, Blume attempted an explanation:

“I’m afraid this officer was exhibiting a degree of scrupulousness with regard to the killing of Jews that turns out to have been somewhat misplaced, Herr General. It seems he already shot thirty NKVD this morning—apparently unaware that they were all Jews.”

“It was the nice distinction between the two we found amusing,” added Mundt.

“Not everyone is cut out for this kind of work,” murmured Nebe, still studying the map. “I heard that Paul Blobel’s in a Lublin hospital after a special action in the Ukraine. A complete nervous breakdown. And perhaps you don’t remember what was said by Reichsführer Himmler at Pretzsch. Any repugnance felt at killing Jews is a cause for congratulation, since it affirms that we are a civilized people. So I really don’t see what’s funny about any of this. In future, I’ll thank you to deal more sensitively with any man who expresses his inability to kill Jews. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

Nebe touched a red square on the top right-hand corner of the map. “And this is—what?”

“Drozdy, sir,” said Blume. “Three kilometers north of here. we’ve established a rather primitive prisoner-of-war camp there on the banks of the Svislock River. All of them men. Jews and non-Jews.”

“How many in total?”

“About forty thousand.”

“Separated?”

“Yes, sir.” Blume joined Nebe in front of the map. “POWS in one half and Jews in the other.”

“And the ghetto?”

“South of the Drozdy camp in the northwest of the city. It’s the old Jewish quarter of Minsk.” He put his finger on the map. “Here. From the Svislock River, west on Nemiga Street, north along the edge of the Jewish cemetery, and back east toward the Svislock. This is the main street here, Republikanskaya, and where it meets Nemiga, that will be the main gate.”

“What kind of buildings are these?” asked Nebe.

“One-or two-story wooden houses behind cheap wooden fences. Even as we speak, sir, the whole ghetto is being surrounded with barbed wire and watchtowers.”

“Locked at night?”

“Of course.”

“I want monthly actions to reduce the number of Byelorussian Jews there in order to accommodate the Jews they’re sending us from Hamburg.”

“Yes, Herr General.”

“You can start reducing the numbers now in the Drozdy camp. Make the selection voluntary. Ask those with university degrees and professional qualifications to come forward. Deprive them all of food and water to encourage volunteers. Those Jews you can keep for now. The rest you can liquidate immediately.”

“Yes, Herr General.”

“Himmler is coming here in a couple of weeks’ time, so he’ll want to see that we’re making progress. Understand?”

“Yes, Herr General.”

Nebe turned and finally looked at me. “You. Captain Gunther. Come with me.”

I followed Nebe into the adjacent office, where four junior SS officers were reading files taken from an open filing cabinet.

“You lot,” said Nebe. “Fuck off. And close the door behind you. And tell those lazy bastards next door to get rid of that body before it starts stinking the place out in this heat.”

There were two desks in this office, overlooked by a set of French windows and a poor portrait of Stalin in a gray uniform with a red stripe down the side of his trouser leg, looking rather less Caucasian and more Oriental than was usual.

Nebe fetched a bottle of schnapps and glasses from one of the desk drawers and poured two large ones. He took his own drink without a word, like a man who was tired of seeing things straight, and poured himself another while I was still sniffing and tensing my liver.

MINSK, 1941

I
hadn’t seen Nebe in more than a year. He looked older and more worn than I remembered. His previously gray hair was now the same silver color as his War Merit Cross, while his eyes were as narrow as his pillbox slit of a mouth. Only his long nose and prominent ears seemed much the same.

“It’s good to see you again, Bernie.”

“Arthur.”

“A whole lifetime spent arresting criminals, and now I’ve become a criminal myself.” He chuckled wearily. “What do you think of that?”

“You could put a stop to it.”

“What can I do? I’m just a cog in Heydrich’s machine of death. The machine’s in gear, too. I couldn’t stop it even if I wanted to.”

“You used to think you could make a difference.”

“That was then. Hitler has the whip hand since the fall of France. There’s no one who dares to oppose him now. Things will have to go badly in Russia for us before that can happen again. Which they will, of course. I’m certain of it. But not yet. People like you and me will have to bide our time.”

“And until then, Arthur? What about these people?”

“You mean the yids?”

I nodded.

He tossed back his second drink and then shrugged.

“You really don’t give a damn, do you?”

Nebe laughed a wry sort of laugh. “I’ve got quite a lot on my mind, Bernie,” he said. “Himmler’s coming here next month. What do you expect me to do? Sit him down somewhere quiet and explain that this is all very wrong? Explain that Jews are people, too? Tell the Emperor Charles the Fifth and the Diet of Worms, ‘Here I stand, I can do no other’? Be reasonable, Bernie.”

“Reasonable?”

“These men—Himmler, Heydrich, Muller—they’re fanatics. You can’t reason with fanatics.” He shook his head. “I’m already under suspicion after the Elser plot.”

“If you don’t, you’re no better than they are.”

“I’ve got to be careful, Bernie. I’m only safe as long as I’m doing exactly what I’m told. And I’ve got to be safe if there’s ever going to be another opportunity for us to get rid of Hitler.” He poured his third drink in as many minutes. “Surely you of all people can understand that.”

“All I know is that you’re planning mass murder in this town.”

“So go ahead and arrest me, Kommissar. Christ, I wish you would. Right now I’d love to see the inside of a police cell back at the Alex instead of this ghastly frontier town.” He put down his glass and held out his wrists. “Here. Put the cuffs on. And get me out of here if you can. No? I thought not. You’re as helpless as I am.” He picked up his glass, drank it, and started another cigarette. “Exactly what did you tell those two bastards, anyway? Blume and Mundt?”

“Me? I said I didn’t come to Russia to kill old women. Even if they were Jews.”

“Unwise, Bernie. Unwise. Mundt is very highly thought of in Berlin. He’s been a party member since 1926. That’s even longer than me. Which counts for something with Hitler. You ought not to say such things again. At least not to the likes of Mundt. He could make life very awkward for you. You have no idea what some of these SS are capable of.”

“I’m beginning to have a clear idea.”

“Look, Bernie, there are others here in Byelorussia and in Germany who think the same way as me and you. Who are ready to move against Hitler when the time is right. We’ll have need of men like you. Until then, it might be best if you were to keep your trap shut.”

“Keep my trap shut and shoot some Jews, is that it?”

“Why not? Because you can take my word for it, shooting the Jews is just the beginning. After all, it’s hardly the most efficient method of killing thousands of people. You wouldn’t believe the pressure I’m under to come up with some other means of killing Jews.”

“Why don’t you just blow them all up?” I said. “Take all of the Jews in Byelorussia, assemble them in a field with a couple of thousand tons of TNT under their feet, and put a match to it. That should solve your problem very nicely.”

“I wonder,” said Nebe thoughtfully, “if that might work.”

I shook my head in despair and, at last, downed the schnapps.

“I’d like to be able to count on you, Bernie. After all we’ve been through. In Berlin. There’s no one in this godforsaken country I can really trust, you know. Certainly none of these other officers.”

“I’m not even sure I can trust myself, Arthur. Not now that I’ve seen what I’ve seen. Not now that I know what I know.”

Nebe refilled our glasses. “Hmm. That’s what I suspected, you mad bastard.” He grinned, bitterly. “You’re just about capable of doing it, aren’t you? Shooting your mouth off about the Jews when Himmler comes here to Minsk next month. Something like that. What am I to do with you?”

“I can be shot. Like some old Jew.”

“If that was all there was to it,” said Nebe, “then perhaps I’d make it happen. But you’re being very naïve, just like always. No German officer of RSHA gets shot without the Gestapo getting involved. Especially not a man with your background. Who was close to Heydrich. Who was close to me. They would want to interrogate you. To ask you questions that don’t have a yes-or-no answer. And I can’t afford that you might tell them something about me. About my past. About our past.”

I was shaking my head, but I knew he was probably right.

Nebe grinned and started biting his fingernails, which I noticed were bitten right down to the quick.

“I wish I could stop doing this,” he said. “My mother used to dip my fingers in cat shit to try to prevent me from doing it. Doesn’t seem to have worked, does it?”

“You’ve still got shit on your fingers, Arthur.”

“But I can see now it was me who was being naïve. About you. I need you out of Minsk before you open that stupid trap of yours when I’m not around to prevent it, and get yourself arrested. And possibly me, too. You’re too old for frontline duty. They wouldn’t take you. So that’s out.” He sighed. “I can see it’s going to have to be intelligence. There’s precious little of that to go around in this war, so you should fit in. Of course, they’ll think you’re a spy, so this will have to be a temporary attachment. Until I can think of something to get you safely back to Berlin, where you can’t do any harm.”

“Don’t do me any favors,” I said. “I’ll take my chances.”

“But I won’t. That’s rather the point I’ve been making.” He pointed at my drink. “Come on. Get that down and cheer up. And stop worrying about a few Jews. People have been killing Jews since the Emperor Claudius ordered them expelled from Rome. What does Luther say? That next to the devil there is no more bitter, more poisonous, more vehement enemy than a real Jew. And let’s not forget the Kaiser, Wilhelm the Second, who said that a Jew cannot be a true patriot—that he is something different, like a bad insect. Even Benjamin Franklin thought that Jews were vampires.” Nebe shook his head and grinned. “No, Bernie. You’d better pick another reason to hate the Nazis. There are any number of reasons. But not the Jews. Not the Jews. Maybe if there are enough pogroms in Europe they’ll get their fucking homeland, like that British idiot Balfour promised, and then they’ll leave the rest of us in peace.”

I drank the schnapps. What else was I going to do with it? People say all kinds of crazy things when they’ve had a drink—me included. They talk about God and the saints and hearing voices and seeing the devil; they shout about killing Franzis and Tommies, and they sing Christmas carols on a summer’s day. Their wives don’t understand them and their mothers never loved them. They’ll say black is white, up is down, and hot is cold. No one ever expects a drink to help you make sense. Arthur Nebe had taken several drinks, but he wasn’t drunk. Even so, what he said sounded crazier than any drunk I’d ever heard and ever hope to hear again.

I stayed at Lenin House for two or three weeks, sharing a seventh-floor billet with Waldemar Klingelhöfer, who was an SS-Obersturmbannführer—a colonel—in overall charge of the antipartisan hunts in the Minsk area.

Minsk was one place where German propaganda did not exaggerate the strength of local partisans, who took advantage of the huge thick forests called
pushcha
that characterized the area. Most of these fighters were young Red Army soldiers, but quite a few were Jews who’d fled from pogroms to the comparative safety of the forest. What did they have to lose? Not that the Jews were always welcomed with open arms: Some of the Byelorussians were no less anti-Semitic than Germans, and more than half of these refugee Jews were murdered by the Popovs.

Klingelhöfer spoke fluent Russian—he’d been born in Moscow—but he knew nothing about police work or hunting partisans. Real partisans. I gave him some advice on how to recruit some informers.

Not that my advice to Klingelhöfer really mattered, because at the end of July Nebe ordered him to Smolensk to obtain furs for German army winter clothing; and I was ordered to Baranowicze, about one hundred fifty kilometers southwest of Minsk, to await transport back to Berlin.

Formerly a Polish city until the Soviets occupied it at the beginning of the war, Baranowicze was a small, prosperous town of about thirty thousand people, more than a third of whom were Jews. In its center was a long, wide, suburban-looking tree-lined street with two-story shops and houses, which the occupying German army had renamed Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse. There was an Orthodox cathedral recently built in the neoclassical style, and a ghetto—six buildings on the outskirts of the city—where more than twelve thousand Jews were now confined, at least those Jews who had not escaped into the Pripet Marshes. Two whole regiments of the SS Cavalry Brigade commanded by Sturmbannführer Bruno Magill were searching the thirty-eight-thousand-acre marshland, killing every Jew they could find. This left the city quiet—so quiet that for a couple of days, until a seat became available on a Ju 52 back to Tegel Airfield in Berlin, I was able to sleep in a proper bed in what formerly had been Girsh Bregman’s Leather Goods and Shoe Store.

I tried not to consider the sudden fate that had overtaken Girsh Bregman and his family, whose framed photographs were still on top of an upright Rheinberg Söhne in the little parlor behind the shop; but it was only too easy to think of them enduring the close privations of the ghetto, or perhaps fleeing their persecutors, who included not just the SS but also the Polish police, former Polish army soldiers, and even some local Ukrainian clergy who were keen to bless these “pacifications.” Of course, it was possible that the Bregmans were already pacified, which is to say that they were dead. That’s about as pacified as you could get in the summer of 1941. Most of all, I just hoped they were alive. Only, it was the kind of hope that looked like a canary in a mine full of gas. I wouldn’t have minded a little gas myself. Just enough to sleep for about a hundred years and then wake up from the nightmare that was my life.