The Interrogator (32 page)
Authors: Andrew Williams
‘I’m sorry.’ He cleared his throat nervously: ‘It’s a war crime, a bloody war crime.’
‘What?’
‘The U-boats. The attack on our merchant ships.’
Lindsay felt an urge to laugh. Instead he looked away, an angry
knot in his stomach. Shafts of sunlight were streaming through a high window on to the wall at the end of the washroom, bleaching the colour from the blue-grey tiles. And then the room was plunged into shadow again.
‘Shall I tell them to take Mohr back?’
‘No. I’ll see him now.’
‘Are you surprised to see me, Mohr?’
Kapitän zur See Jürgen Mohr raised his dark eyebrows and his lips twitched in a small smile: ‘No. I’ve been looking forward to talking to you again, Lieutenant.’
He was standing in front of the table. The guard had removed the other chair. ‘But couldn’t we have met somewhere pleasanter than the shithouse?’
Lindsay glanced up at the pipe above their heads and Mohr followed his eyes: ‘Terrible,’ and he shook his head a little. ‘And it was terrible news about the
330
. No survivors. Oh, you’re surprised? You shouldn’t be. Your BBC has been gloating about the sinking for nearly twenty-four hours.’
Lindsay stared at him coldly. ‘Isn’t the BBC propaganda?’
‘We sort the truth from the fiction,’ he said with a smile. ‘The
330
was a fine boat. You should be proud of Schultze. He died with honour for his Führer and Fatherland – they all did.’
‘Honour?’ Lindsay almost spat the word at him. Leaning forward to the table, he flipped open the brown cardboard file that was lying in front of him, then slid it towards Mohr. ‘And was this for Führer and Fatherland too?’
Mohr glanced down at the swollen blue face of Heine, his tongue hanging obscenely from his mouth.
‘No. Take a good look, Herr Kapitän,’ Lindsay snapped.
Without taking his eyes off him, Mohr reached across the table for the picture, lifted it deliberately and looked at it again. And for a fleeting moment his expression changed as he struggled to maintain his composure, his weathered face cut by lines of pain and regret.
‘Poor man.’
In an effort to disguise his feelings he casually tossed the picture back on to the table, sending it spinning towards Lindsay.
‘The sinking of our boat. The humiliation. And prison drives men to terrible things.’
‘Spare me the lies. You pushed him very hard, didn’t you?’
‘Pushed him?’
‘You interrogated him. You interrogated a number of the prisoners. The evening with the PK man at the jazz café – remember?’
Mohr smiled: ‘Leutnant Lange is fond of the story, he tells it to everyone.’
Lindsay lifted his hand and rested it on the thick file in front of him: ‘I’ve spoken to the other U-boat officers and I know the Ältestenrat wanted to know what they’d said to us. You were looking for someone who gave away just a little too much and you thought you’d found him – Heine. But this . . .’
He pushed the picture back across the table: ‘You authorised this senseless killing, this murder.’
‘Is this going to go on much longer? Perhaps I can have a chair?’ There was an impatient, contemptuous note in Mohr’s voice and he turned to look at the guard who was standing stiffly to attention at the far wall.
‘A chair, please,’ he shouted in English. The soldier did not move a muscle.
‘Well?’
The guard just stared back at him belligerently.
‘You’re a prisoner, Mohr,’ said Lindsay coolly. ‘Remember?’
Mohr flinched as if the words had stung him between the shoulders and he turned quickly to face Lindsay, his boots squeaking sharply on the stone floor. Was it the affront to his dignity? Something inside him seemed to snap. ‘You’re the murderer, Lieutenant. You drove him to it.’
Mohr didn’t shout or thump the table, his voice was only a little louder but his face was livid and blotchy red and there were anxious scratch marks on his throat, a sort of wildness in his eyes. The quiet military veneer had cracked for the first time.
‘You interrogated Heine, you threatened him. He told me you were going to tell me he was a traitor. He was a vulnerable prisoner. His mind was clouded – he was sure he’d betrayed his U-boat comrades and his country. He could not live with the guilt and he took his own
life. So you put the rope around his neck, Lieutenant, you did – not me.’
Mohr looked down at the photograph still lying in the middle of the table between them and his shoulders seemed to drop a little as if the anger was draining from him. When he spoke again his voice was cool and reflective: ‘Heine was a casualty of your war.’
And he lifted his head to make firm eye contact with Lindsay: ‘Our war. The dirty little war we’re fighting.’
Their dirty war. The thought beat long after Mohr had been led away. It was beating in the mess over lunch and in the camp commandant’s office as Lindsay said goodbye to smug, self-satisfied Benson. It was beating in his head now as the jeep swung him backwards and forwards along country lanes to the station. Was it dirtier than the one being fought in the Atlantic? Perhaps Mohr had become the demon he was fighting inside himself. But it was the same war, it was cold, it was ruthless, and to the victor the spoils – there were always casualties.
TOP SECRET:
Characteristics of an Interrogator
A breaker is born and not made. Perhaps the first-class breaker has yet to be born. Perhaps he has yet to be recruited from the concentration camps, where he has suffered for years, where, above all he has watched and learnt in bitterness every move in the game.
Lieut.-Col. Robin Stephens, Commandant of MI5’s Camp 020,
The Interrogation of Spies, 1940–47
Top Secret ‘C’
The security of a source is worth more than any product or by-product, however spectacular.
Admiralty NID 11
Assessment of German Prisoner of War Interrogation, 1945
40
06°54S/07°35W
South Atlantic
T
Her deadlights were not pulled down over the ports and she was twinkling provocatively at the
115
.
‘Have the crew eaten?’
‘Yes, Herr Kaleu.’
‘Good. She’ll turn south-westerly and cross our course within the hour.’
The sea was building, a summer gale forecast. He would attack from the surface, the dark grey hull of the U-boat lost in the restless night.
The
U-115
had found her at a little before ten that morning. Her smoke was drifting in a long tail across the ragged tops of the ocean at the very edge of the horizon. A large ship, and where Kapitänleutnant Paul Hartmann expected to find her.
‘Full ahead both engines. Course two-one-zero.’
The deck beneath Hartmann’s feet had trembled, the diesels hammering their battle song as the U-boat plunged forwards at attack speed, its bow rising in fine clouds of spray that swept across the foredeck and into the faces of the men atop the tower. Urgent, incessant, beating the length of the boat, from the crew quarters aft to the forward torpedo room, and every man’s heart beat with the engines, faster and faster and faster, an end to the poor hunting, an end to idle
days of African sunshine. And the excitement had been plain in the faces of the watch and of the men squinting at the horizon from the rail of the gun platform, older than their years, weathered and lined by the sea and the tropical sun, their beards flecked white with salt. It was Hartmann’s first patrol as their commander but they knew of his record, that he had served with one of the great U-boat heroes – with Kapitän Mohr.
He had followed the wisp of grey smoke through the bridge’s firing binoculars until his eyes began to water and late in the afternoon he sent a signal to U-boat Headquarters:
TARGET LOCATED GRID SQUARE FF 71. IN PURSUIT. NO ESCORT. COURSE SOUTH WEST. FOURTEEN KNOTS.
And headquarters had replied:
AT THEM. ATTACK THEM. SINK THEM.
He had smiled quietly to himself because he knew it must have been written by the Admiral. It was pure Dönitz.
‘Tubes one and three ready?’
‘Tubes one and three ready, Herr Kaleu.’
‘She’s turned. Steering 200 degrees, approximately twelve knots.’
Yes, she was a big ship, close to 20,000 tons, roughly camouflaged in grey, deck guns fore and aft and a watch searching the dark surface of the sea for an enemy bow wave.
‘Take her hull down.’
The order was repeated to the control room below and as the waist tanks of the submarine flooded the sea swept up the foredeck until only the tower was breaking the waves. They would catch the ship just before she turned again, broadside on, in – he glanced at his watch – perhaps six minutes.
‘Half engines.’
He could sense the intense excitement of the men about him, as they turned stiffly through the points of the compass, their glasses hunting the darkness for escort ships. He bent to the voice tube:
‘Stand by tubes one and three.’
In the ‘cave’ for’ard, the torpedo men would be clutching their
stopwatches, ready to count out the seconds from release to impact. Anything between a thousand and three hundred metres would do. She was edging into the spider lines of Hartmann’s firing sight now, rising and falling gracefully in the swell, her bow cutting a crisp white wave. And as he followed her stately progress the heavy night cloud parted, catching her in silhouette against a bright sickle moon.
‘Twelve hundred metres.’
He could see sailors moving about her foredeck. There was a small yellow flash of light – one of them must have lit a cigarette.
‘A thousand metres.’
He heard a sharp intake of breath at his side and his heart leapt into his throat. Was she beginning to turn?
‘Steady, steady, there’s still time.’
Final bearing check, final distance check, and with his eyes still on the target he reached for the firing handle and pressed down with the full weight of his body.
‘Tube one: fire!’
The first torpedo was on its way.
‘Ready tube three: fire!’
And the second in its wake. Steel fish they called them for’ard, seven metres long, contact detonation and enough explosive to blow a hole in the side of the ship a bus could drive through.
‘Hard rudder right.’
The
115
began to turn sharply away but Hartmann’s eyes didn’t leave the ship.
‘Two minutes. One minute. Thirty seconds. Twenty seconds. Ten.’
Had he made a mistake? No. A hard little explosion, a column of white smoke and water rising like a glorious fountain up her side and cheering, he could hear the men cheering in the control room below. Thank God. Then the second torpedo burst through her plates and almost at once she began to heel to starboard. It was a small miracle. Twenty thousand tons of steel and wood brought to a standstill in seconds. The first torpedo must have struck her amidships in the hold – he could see the ragged hole in her side – and the second in or close to the engine room. A cold inexorable tide of water surging into her hull: the ship was surely doomed. He lifted his head from the glasses and leant over the tower hatch.
‘Has she given her name yet?’
‘No, Herr Kaleu.’ It was his first officer, Werner. ‘Will she need a third?’
‘No, she’s finished. Let’s take the boat a little closer and pick up her captain if we can.’
‘Perhaps we’ve bagged a regiment of British soldiers with two torpedoes.’
‘Perhaps.’
The sea was still building, the weather turning for the worse and with the ship listing heavily, swinging out and filling the lifeboats would be no easy task. But he could see the first of them slipping slowly down her side. There was the urgent ring of boots on the tower ladder behind him and he turned to find the chief wireless operator climbing on to the bridge, his signal board in hand.
‘Well, Weber?’
‘The liner’s sent a distress signal, Herr Kaleu. SSS. 06.54° south, 7.35° west. She’s the
Imperial Star
. Lloyd’s lists her as 18, 480 tons, built in 1913.’
‘Damn them.’
If the British picked up ‘SSS’ they would know the ship had been torpedoed and would assume the enemy submarine was still close by.
‘All right. Ready tube two. Let’s send her on her way.’
41
I
U-115
. Then he clipped the piece of flimsy signal paper to his board and moved on.
And it was still on his board when Mary Henderson stepped through the door of the Tracking Room at a little after seven that morning. Winn’s hat and coat were already hanging on a hook and she turned to look at his office. He was bent over his desk, his back towards her, smoke curling through his fingers, preoccupied with the night’s traffic. A grey and bleary-eyed Wilmot was talking to one of the Wren plotters in front of the German grid map that hung on the wall at the far end of the room. The U-boat gave its position in signals at sea as a lettered and numbered square on the map. Somehow – Mary was not sure how or when – the Division had acquired its own copy. Two of the clerical assistants were perched on the edge of their desks enjoying a few precious minutes of calm and conversation that was nothing to do with convoys or casualties or the deadlines of the day. It would be another hour before the first visitor, before the ringing of the telephones and the clatter of the typewriters and teleprinters reached its customary infernal pitch. Time enough for breakfast. Mary glanced guiltily at her desk where a bundle of signals and reports was sitting at the top of the in-tray. But her stomach was urging her in a most unladylike manner, much to the sly amusement of the clerical assistants.
