Field Gray (8 page)

GERMANY, 1954

A
t least you did wake up,” said Silverman. “Unlike six million others.”

“You’re a funny guy. Are you always so quick with math, or is it just that one number you like?”

“I don’t like anything about it, Gunther,” said Silverman.

“Neither do I. And please don’t ever make the mistake of thinking I do.”

“It’s not me that makes mistakes, Gunther. It’s you.”

“You’re right. I should have made sure I was born somewhere other than Germany in 1896. That way maybe I could have ended up on the winning side. Twice. How does it feel, boys? To sit in judgment on someone else’s mistakes? Pretty good, I imagine. The way you two act, anyone might think you Americans really do believe that you’re better than anyone else.”

“Not everyone else,” snarled Earp. “Just you and your Nazi pals.”

“You can keep telling yourself that, if you like. But we both know it’s not true. Or is it that occupying the moral high ground is more than an aspiration for you Amis? Perhaps it’s also a constitutional necessity. Only, I suspect that underneath all that sanctimony you’re just like us Germans. You really do believe that might is right.”

“At this moment,” said Silverman, “all that really matters is what we believe about you.”

“He tells a good story.” Earl was speaking to Silverman. “A regular Jakob Grimm, this guy. All it lacked was the ‘once upon a time’ and the ‘happily ever after.’ We should get him some heated iron shoes and make him dance around the room in them like Snow White’s stepmother until he’s straight with us.”

“You’re quite correct,” said Silverman. “And you know? Only a German could have thought of a punishment like that.”

“Didn’t you say you had German parents?” I said. “Just a mother you’re sure about, I presume.”

“Neither of us feels very proud of our German background,” said Earp. “Thanks to people like you.”

For a while the three of us were silent. Then Silverman said:

“There was a Gunther we heard about in that town you mentioned. Baranowicze. He was an SS-Sturmbannführer with one of the small killing units belonging to Arthur Nebe’s Task Group B. A Sonderkommando. He organized one of the early gassings. Everyone in a mental hospital at Mogilev was killed. That wouldn’t be you, would it?”

“No,” I said. But seeing that they were hardly likely to be satisfied with a straight denial, I lifted my finger to indicate that I was trying to remember something. And then I did. “I think there was an SS-Sturmbannführer called Günther Rausch. Attached to Task Group B in the summer of 1941. It must be him you’re thinking of. I never gassed anyone. Not even the fleas in my bed.”

“But it was you who suggested to Arthur Nebe the idea of mass killings using explosives, wasn’t it? You admitted as much yourself.”

“That was a joke.”

“Not a very funny joke.”

“When it comes to blowing people up, I don’t think anyone has ever managed that more efficiently than America,” I said. “How many did you blow up in Hiroshima? And Nagasaki? A couple of hundred thousand and still counting. That’s what I’ve read. Germany might have started the process of mechanized mass killing, but you Americans certainly perfected it.”

“Did you ever visit the Criminal Technology Institute in Berlin?”

“Yes,” I said. “I often went there in the course of my duty as a detective. For forensic tests and results.”

“Did you ever meet a chemist called Albert Wildmann?”

“Yes. I met him. Many times.”

“And Hans Schmidt? Also from the same institute?”

“I think so. What are you driving at?”

“Isn’t it the case that you returned from Minsk to Berlin at the behest of Arthur Nebe, not to join the German War Crimes Bureau, as you told us, but to meet with Wildmann and Schmidt in pursuit of your explosives idea?”

I was shaking my head, but Silverman wasn’t paying attention, and I was gaining a new respect for him as an interrogator.

“And that, having discussed the idea in detail, you yourself returned to Smolensk with Wildmann and Schmidt in September 1941?”

“No. That’s not true. Like I said, I think you must be confusing me with Günther Rausch.”

“Isn’t it the case that you brought with you a large quantity of dynamite? And used it to rig a Russian pillbox with explosives? And that you then herded into it almost a hundred people from a mental asylum in Minsk? And that you then detonated the explosives? Isn’t that what happened?”

“No. That’s not true. I had nothing to do with that.”

“According to the reports we’ve read, the heads and limbs of the dead were strewn across a quarter-mile radius. SS men were collecting body parts from the trees for days afterward.”

I shook my head. “When I made that remark to Nebe…about blowing up Jews in a field. Look, I had no idea he would actually try something like that. It was sarcasm. Hardly a genuine suggestion.” I shrugged. “Then again, I don’t know why I’m surprised, given everything else that happened.”

“We’ve always thought it was Arthur Nebe himself who came up with the idea of the gas vans,” said Silverman. “So maybe that was another of your jokes, too. Tell me, did you ever visit an address in Berlin—number four Tiergartenstrasse?”

“I was a cop. I visited a lot of addresses I don’t remember.”

“This one was special.”

“The Berlin Gas Works was somewhere else, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“Tiergartenstrasse number four was a confiscated Jewish villa,” said Silverman. “An office from where Germany’s euthanasia program for the handicapped was planned and administered.”

“Then I’m sure I was never there.”

“Maybe you heard about what was happening there and mentioned it in passing to Nebe. As a little thank-you for getting you out of Minsk.”

“In case you’ve forgotten,” I said, “Nebe was head of Kripo and, before that, a general in the Gestapo. It’s quite likely he knew Wildmann and Schmidt for the same reason I did. And I daresay he would have known all about this place in Tiergartenstrasse as well. But I never did.”

“Your relationship with Waldemar Klingelhöfer,” said Silverman. “You were quite helpful to him. With advice.”

“Yes. I tried to be.”

“Were you helpful in any other ways?”

I shook my head.

“Did you accompany him to Moscow, for example?”

“No, I’ve never been in Moscow.”

“And yet you speak Russian almost as well as he does.”

“That was later, when I learned. In the labor camp, mostly.”

“So between September 28 and October 26, 1941, you say you were not with Klingelhöfer’s Vorkommando Moscow, but in Berlin?”

“Yes.”

“And that you had nothing to do with the murders of five hundred and seventy-two Jews during that time?”

“Nothing to do with it, no.”

“Several of them were Jewish mink ranchers who failed to provide the prescribed quota of furs for Klingelhöfer.”

“Never shot a Jewish mink rancher, Gunther?”

“Or blown one up in a pillbox?”

“No.”

The two lawyers were quiet for a moment, as if they’d run out of questions. The silence didn’t last long.

“So,” said Silverman. “You’re not in Moscow, you’re back on the plane to Berlin. A Junkers 52, you said. Any witnesses?”

I thought for a moment. “Fellow named Schulz. Erwin Schulz.”

“Go on.”

“He was SS, too. A Sturmbannführer, I think. But before, he’d been a cop in Berlin. And then an instructor at the police academy in Bremen. After that, something in the Gestapo, maybe in Bremen, too. I don’t remember. But we hadn’t seen each other in more than ten years when we both got on that plane out of Baranowicze.

“He was a few years younger than me, I think. Not much. I think he’d been in the army during the last months of the Great War. And then the Freikorps while he was at university, in Berlin. Law, I think. Tallish, fair-haired, with a mustache a bit like Hitler’s, and quite tanned. Not that he looked well when he was on that plane. There were huge bags under his eyes that were more like bruises, almost as if someone had punched him.

“Well, we recognized each other, and after a few moments we started talking. I offered him a cigarette and I noticed the hand that took it was shaking like a leaf. His leg wouldn’t stay still either. Like it had Saint Vitus’ dance. He was a nervous wreck. Gradually, it became clear that he was returning to Berlin for much the same reason I was. Because he’d put in for a transfer.

“Schulz said that his unit had been operating in a place called Zhitomir. That’s just a shit hole between Kiev and Brest. No one in his right mind would want to go to Zhitomir. Which is probably why the SS brass in the person of General Jeckeln had established its Ukrainian HQ there. Jeckeln was never in his right mind, as far as I could see. Anyway, Schulz said that Jeckeln had told him that all of the Jews in Zhitomir were to be shot immediately. Schulz wasn’t bothered about the men. But he had more than a few qualms about the women and the children. Fuck that, he said. But no one was listening. Orders were orders and he should just shut up and get on with it. Well, it seemed that there were a lot of Jews in Zhitomir. Christ only knows why that should be the case. After all, it’s not like the Popovs ever made them feel welcome there. The tsar hated them, too, and they had pogroms in Zhitomir in 1905 and in 1919. I mean, you would think they’d have got the message and cleared off somewhere else. But no. Not a bit of it. There were three synagogues in Zhitomir, and when the SS showed up, there were thirty thousand of them just waiting around for something to happen. Which it did.

“According to Schulz, the first day the SS got there they hanged the mayor, or perhaps it was the local judge, who was a Jew, and several others. Then they shot four hundred right away for one reason or another. Marched them out of town to a pit, had them lie down like sardines, one on top of the other, and shot them in layers. Well, Schulz thought that would be it. He’d done his bit and that was enough. I mean, four hundred, he thought. But no, he said, they kept on coming. Day after day. And four hundred Jews soon became fourteen thousand.

“Then Schulz was told that they would have to do the women and children as well and for him that was the last straw. Fuck this, he thought, I don’t care if Almighty God has ordered this, I’m not killing women and kids. So he wrote to the personnel officer at RSHA HQ. To a General Bruno Streckenbach. And put in for a transfer. Which was why he was on that plane with me.

“They were pretty pissed off with him, apparently. Especially his CO, Otto Rasch. He accused Schulz of being weak and letting the side down. He asked Schulz where was his sense of duty and all that crap. Not that Schulz said he was surprised about this. He said that Rasch was one of those bastards who liked to make sure that everyone, officers included, had to pull the trigger on at least one Jew. So that we were all equally guilty, I suppose. Only he had another word for it: one of those compound words that Himmler used at Pretzsch.
Blood part,
I think it was.

“Anyway, Schulz didn’t know what fate awaited him back in Berlin. He was nervous and apprehensive, to say the least. I suppose he was hoping his behavior would be overlooked and he’d get the okay to resume his police work in Hamburg, or Bremen. ‘I’m not cut out for this kind of thing,’ he said. ‘Don’t get me wrong, he said, ‘I care nothing for the Jews, but no one should be asked to do this kind of work. No one. They should find some other means of doing it,’ he said. That’s what he told me, anyway.”

“So,” said Earp. “Are you telling us your alibi is another convicted war criminal?”

“Schulz was convicted? I didn’t know that.”

“Gave himself up in 1945,” said Earp. “He was convicted in October 1947 of crimes against humanity and sentenced to twenty years. That was commuted to fifteen years in 1951.”

“You mean he’s here, in Landsberg? Well, then he can confirm our conversation on the flight back to Berlin. That I told him what I already told you. How I was sent back for refusing to kill Jews.”

“He was paroled last January,” said Earp. “Too bad, Gunther.”

“I don’t think he’d have made such a great character witness for you, anyway,” said Silverman. “He was a brigadier general in the SS when he gave himself up.”

“The reason Bruno Streckenbach went easy on Schulz is obvious,” said Earp. “Because he participated in the murders of fifteen thousand Jews before he sickened of the work. Probably Streckenbach figured Schulz had done more than his fair share of killing.”

“And I guess that must be why you let him go, too,” I said.

“I told you,” said Silverman. “That was down to the high commissioner. And the recommendations of the Parole and Clemency Board for War Criminals.”

I shook my head. I was tired. They’d been nipping at my heels the whole day like a pair of nine-to-five bloodhounds. I felt like I was trapped up a tree with nowhere left to run.

“Have you considered the possibility that I could be telling the truth? But even if I wasn’t, I might be tempted to put my hands up just to get you two off my back. The way you hand out paroles around here, I’d have to be Hideki Tojo to get more than six months.”

“We like things to be neat,” said Silverman.

“And you have got more loose ends than an old maid’s sewing basket,” added Earp. “So that when we leave this job, we can be sure that we gave it our best shot.”

“Pride in the job, huh? I can understand that.”

“So,” said Silverman. “We’re going to look into your story. Comb it through for nits.”

“That still won’t make me a louse.”

“You were SS,” said Silverman. “I’m a Jew. And you’ll always be a louse in my book, Gunther.”

GERMANY, 1954

I
t was easy to forget that we were in Germany. There was a U.S. flag in the main hall and the kitchens—which were seemingly always in action—served plain home-cooking on the understanding that home was six thousand kilometers to the west. Most of the voices we heard were American, too: loud, manly voices that told you to do something or not to do something—in English. And we did it quickly, too, or we received a prod from a nightstick or a kick up the backside. Nobody complained. Nobody would have listened, except perhaps Father Morgenweiss. The guards were MPs, deliberately selected for their enormous size. It was hard to see how Germany could ever have expected to win a war against this more obvious-looking master race. They walked the landings and corridors of Landsberg Prison like gunfighters from the OK Corral, or perhaps boxers entering the ring. With each other they had an easy way about them: They were all big, well-brushed smiles and booming laughs, shouting jokes and baseball scores. For us, the inmates, however, there were only stone faces and belligerent attitudes. Fuck you, they seemed to say; you might have your own federal government, but we’re the real masters in this pariah country.

I had a cell for two to myself. It wasn’t because I was special or because I hadn’t yet been charged with anything, but because WCPN1 was half empty. Every week, it seemed, someone else was released. But immediately after the war Landsberg had been full of prisoners. The Amis had even incarcerated Jewish displaced persons there, from the concentration camps of nearby Kaufering, alongside prominent Nazis and war criminals; but forcing those same ragged, threadbare Jews to wear SS uniforms had, perhaps, demonstrated a want of sensitivity on the part of the Americans that almost bordered on the comic. Not that the Amis were capable of seeing the funny side of anything very much.

The Jewish DPs were long gone from Landsberg now, to Israel, Great Britain, and America, but the gallows was still there, and from time to time the guards tested it just to make sure everything was working smoothly. They were thoughtful like that. No one really believed the German federal government was planning to bring back the death penalty; then again, no one really believed the Amis gave a damn what the federal government thought about anything. They certainly didn’t give a damn about scaring the prisoners, because at the same time that they tested the gallows they rehearsed the whole ghastly procedure of an execution with a volunteer prisoner taking the place of a condemned man. These monthly rehearsals took place on a Friday, because it was an old Landsberg tradition that Friday was a hanging day. A team of eight MPs solemnly marched the condemned man into the central courtyard and up the steps to the roof where the gallows was, and there they slipped a hood over the man’s head and a noose around his neck; the prison director even read out a death sentence while the rest of them stood at attention and pretended—probably wished—it was the real thing. Or so I was told. It might reasonably be asked why anyone, least of all a German officer, would volunteer for such a duty; but as with everything else in Germany, the Amis got exactly what they wanted by offering the volunteer extra cigarettes, chocolate, and a glass of schnapps. And it was always the same prisoner who volunteered to step onto the gallows: Waldemar Klingelhöfer. Perhaps the Amis were unwise to do this, given that he’d already tried to open a vein in his wrist with a large safety pin; then again, it’s no good looking for a whole flock when you’ve only got one sheep.

It wasn’t guilt about killing Jews that made Klingelhöfer try to kill himself and volunteer for a practice execution; it was his guilt over the betrayal of another SS officer, Erich Naumann. Naumann had written a letter to Klingelhöfer instructing him what to tell his interrogators and reminding him that there were no reports for the activities of Task Group B, which he himself had commanded after Nebe; but this advice also revealed the true depth of Naumann’s own criminality in Minsk and Smolensk. Klingelhöfer, who was deeply conflicted about the collapse of the German Reich, handed Naumann’s letter to the Amis, who produced it at the Einsatzgruppen trial in 1948 and used it as prima facie evidence against him. The letter helped convict Naumann and send him to the gallows in June 1951.

The consequence of all this was that none of the other prisoners spoke to Klingelhöfer. No one except me. And probably no one would have spoken to me either but for the fact that I was the only one currently being interrogated by the Americans. This made some of my former comrades very nervous indeed, and one day two of them followed me out of the common room where we ate, played cards, and listened to the radio, and into the courtyard.

“Hauptmann Gunther. We would like a word with you, please.”

Ernst Biberstein and Walter Haensch were both senior SS officers and, regarding themselves not as criminals but as POWs, persisted in the use of military ranks. Biberstein, a Standartenführer, equivalent to a full colonel, did most of the talking, while the younger Haensch—only a lieutenant colonel—did most of the agreeing.

“It’s several years since I myself was interrogated by the Amis,” said Biberstein. “I think it must be almost seven years ago now. No doubt these things are different from the way they used to be. We live in rather more hopeful, even enlightened circumstances than we did back then.”

“The Americans no longer seem to be driven by the same sense of moral superiority and desire for retribution,” added Haensch redundantly.

“Nevertheless,” continued Biberstein, “it’s important to be careful what one tells them. During an interrogation they sometimes have an easygoing way about them and can appear to be one’s friends when in fact they’re anything but that. I’m not sure if you ever met our late lamented comrade Otto Ohlendorf, but for a long time he made himself very useful to the Amis, volunteering information without restraint in the misguided expectation that he might curry favor with them and, as a result, secure his freedom. Too late, however, he realized his mistake and, having given evidence against General Kaltenbrunner at Nuremberg and effectively sent him to his death, he discovered that he had managed to talk his way onto the gallows.”

Biberstein had a thoughtful-looking face, with a broad forehead and a skeptical cast to his mouth. There was something of the serious clown about him—an authority figure and white-faced straight man whose sour, rising diphthongs and way of speaking at someone instead of to them reminded me that before joining the SS and the SD, Biberstein had been a Lutheran minister in some northern peasant town where they didn’t seem to mind that their pastor was a long-standing Nazi Party member. Probably they hadn’t minded, either, that he led a murder commando in Russia before being promoted and asked to take charge of the Gestapo in southern Poland. A lot of Lutherans had seen Hitler as Luther’s true heir. Maybe he was. I didn’t think I’d have liked Luther any more than I ever liked Hitler. Or Biberstein.

“I wouldn’t like you to make the same mistake as Otto,” said Biberstein. “So I’d like to give you some advice. If you can’t remember something, then really you should just say so. No matter how feeble that might seem or how culpable it might make you look. When you’re in any doubt at all, remind the Amis that this all happened almost fifteen years ago and that you really can’t remember.”

“Speaking for myself,” said Haensch, “I have always maintained that any prisoner has the right to silence. This is a legal principle known and respected throughout the civilized world. And especially in the United States of America. I was a lawyer in Hirschfelde prior to joining the RSHA, and you can take it from me that there is no court in the Western world that can force a man to give evidence against himself.”

“They managed to convict you, didn’t they?” I said.

“I was convicted in error,” insisted the bespectacled Haensch, who had a lawyer’s slimy face to match his lawyer’s slimy manner and even slimier patter. “Heydrich did not order me to Russia until March 1942, by which time Task Group C had more or less completed its work. Quite simply, there were no Jews left to kill. However, all of this is beside the point. As Biberstein says, this happened almost fifteen years ago. And one cannot be asked to remember things that happened then.”

He took off his glasses, cleaned them, and added exasperatedly, “Besides, it was war. We were fighting for our very survival as a race. Things happen in war that one regrets in peacetime. That’s natural. But the Amis weren’t exactly saints in wartime themselves. Ask Peiper. Ask Dietrich. They’ll tell you. It wasn’t just the SS who shot prisoners, it was the Amis as well. To say nothing of the systematic mistreatment of the Malmédy prisoners of war that has occurred in this and other prisons.”

Haensch twitched nervously. His were the kind of chinless, weak features that gave war criminals and mass murderers a bad name. Not that the Amis looked on Haensch with any more disgust than anyone else. That particular distinction was reserved for Sepp Dietrich, Jochen Peiper, and the perpetrators of the so-called Malmédy Massacre.

“Just remember this,” said Biberstein. “That we’re not without friends on the outside. You certainly should not feel that you are alone. Dr. Rudolf Aschenauer has represented hundreds of old comrades, including Walter Funk, our former economics minister. He is a most ingenious attorney-at-law. As well as being a former party member, he is also a devout Roman Catholic. I’m not sure what your religious affiliations are, Hauptmann Gunther, but it cannot be denied that in this part of the country, the Catholics have the louder voice. The Catholic bishop of Munich, Johannes Neuhäusler, and the cardinal of Cologne, Joseph Frings, are active lobbyists on our behalf. But so is the evangelical bishop of Bavaria, Hans Meiser. In other words, it might be in your interests to find your Christian faith again, since both churches support the Committee for Church Aid for Prisoners.”

“I myself have had the personal support of the evangelical bishop of Württemberg, Theo Wurm,” said Haensch. “As has our comrade, Martin Sandberger. And you needn’t worry about paying for a defense. The committee will take care of all your legal team’s expenses. The committee even has the backing of a few sympathetic U.S. senators and congressmen.”

“Quite so,” said Biberstein. “These are men who have been most vocal in their opposition to Jewish-inspired ideas of vengeance.” He turned for a moment and waved his hand dismissively at Landsberg’s brick walls. “Which is all this is, of course. Keeping us here, against all the rules of international law.”

“The important thing is that we all stick together,” said Haensch. “The last thing we want now is any unnecessary speculation as to what some of us did or did not do. Do you see? That would only complicate matters.”

“In other words, it would be desirable, Hauptmann Gunther, if your statements to the Amis concerned only yourself.”

“Now I get it,” I said. “And here I was thinking it was really my welfare you were concerned about.”

“Oh, but it is,” said Haensch. “My dear fellow, it is.”

“You’ve got a big pile of potatoes in the office of the Parole and Clemency Board,” I said. “And you don’t want anyone like me knocking it over.”

“Naturally, we want to get out of here,” said Haensch. “Some of us have families.”

“It’s not just in our interest that we’re released soon,” said Biberstein. “It’s in Germany’s interest that we draw a line in front of what happened and then move on. Only then, when the last prisoner of war has been released from here and in Russia, can we Germans plan for the future.”

“Not just German interest,” added Haensch. “It’s in American and British interest, too, that good relations are fostered with a fully sovereign German government, so that the real ideological enemy can be effectively opposed.”

“Don’t you think we’ve killed enough Russians?” I asked. “Stalin’s dead. The Korean War is over.”

“No one is talking about killing anyone,” insisted Biberstein. “But we’re still at war with the communists, whether you like it or not. A cold war, it’s true, but a war nonetheless. Look, I don’t know what you did during the war and I don’t want to know. None of us do. No one in here talks about anything that happened back then. The important thing is to remember that every man in this prison is agreed on one thing: that none of us is or was criminally responsible for his acts or those of his men because we were all of us following orders. Whatever our personal feelings or misgivings about the odious work we were tasked with, it was a Führer order and it was impossible to disobey. As long as we all stick to that story, it’s certain we can all of us be out of this place before the decade is out.”

“And hopefully, well before that,” added Haensch.

I nodded, which was misleading, because it made me look as if I cared what happened to any of them. I nodded because I didn’t want any trouble, and just because they were convicts was no reason they couldn’t give me any. The Amis wouldn’t have minded that at all. Unlike the Parole and Clemency Board, most of the MPs in Landsberg were of the opinion that we all deserved to hang; and possibly they were right. But most of the reason I nodded was that I was tired of not being liked by anyone, including myself. That’s okay when you can go and put that feeling under several milliliters of alcohol, but the bars in prison are never open, especially when you need a drink the way I needed one now. Life in most prisons would be improved by the ration of a daily tot of liquor, like the British Royal Navy. That’s not a penal theory with which Jeremy Bentham would have agreed, but you can take it to the bank.

Most of all, I could have used a drink at night just before I went to bed. Perhaps it was having to talk about and relive the summer of 1941, but while I was in Landsberg, sleep provided little respite from the cares of the world. Often I would awake in the unfocused gloom of my cell and find myself soaked in sweat, having dreamed an awful dream. And more often than not it was the same dream. Of earth shifting strangely beneath my feet, turned not by any unseen animal but by some darker, subterranean elemental force. And as I watched closely, I saw the black ground as it shifted again and the blank-eyed head and spiderlike hands of some murdered Lazarus, self-rising from its own corpse gases, appeared on the mysterious surface. Thin and white like a clay pipe, the naked creature lifted its behind, its chest, and, last of all, its skull, moving backward and unnaturally, the way a collapsed puppet might arrange its various limbs until, at last, it appeared to be kneeling in front of a cloud of smoke, which cleared suddenly as it was sucked into the muzzle of the pistol in my steady hand.