by Philip Kerr
It wasn’t easy getting into Landsberg to see Fritz Gebauer. I’d had to telephone Erich Kaufmann and eat a couple of spoonfuls of humble pie in order to persuade him to contact Gebauer’s lawyers and persuade them that I could be trusted.
“Oh, I think we can rely on you, Herr Gunther,” Kaufmann had said. “That was a good job you did for Baron von Starnberg.”
“What little I did I got paid for,” I said. “And handsomely, too.”
“You can take a certain amount of satisfaction in a job well done, can’t you?”
“A certain amount, sometimes, yes,” I said. “Not too much on this one, though. Not as much as I got from working your case.”
“Proving the unreliability of PFC Ivanov? I’d have thought that being an ex-SS man yourself, you would be keen to see your old comrades out of prison.”
This was the cue I had been waiting for. “It’s true,” I had told him, bowdlerizing the lecture he had given me in his office. “I was in the SS. But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in justice, Herr Doktor. Men who have murdered women and children deserve to be in prison. People need to know that doing wrong will be punished. That’s my idea of a healthy Germany.”
“Lots of people would say that many of these men were POWs who were only doing their duty, Herr Gunther.”
“I know. I’m perverse that way. Contrarian.”
“That sounds unhealthy.”
“It could be,” I said. “On the other hand, it’s easy to ignore someone like me. Even when I’m right. But it’s not so easy to ignore Bishop Neuhausler. Even when he’s wrong. Imagine the hurt to my job satisfaction when I read what he had to say about the Red Jackets in the newspapers. It was like no one had told him that Ivanov was a chiseler and a thief with an ax to grind.”
“Neuhausler is the creature of people much more unscrupulous than myself, Herr Gunther,” said Kaufmann. “I hope you can appreciate that I had nothing to do with that.”
“I’m doing my best.”
“People like Rudolf Aschenauer, for one.”
I had heard this name before. Aschenauer was the Nuremberg attorney and legal adviser to nearly seven hundred Landsberg prisoners, including the infamous Otto Ohlendorf, and a member of the right-wing German Party.
“As a matter of fact,” said Kaufmann, “I’ll have to speak to Aschenauer to get you into Landsberg, to see Gebauer. He is Gebauer’s lawyer. He was the lawyer for all of the accused of the Malmedy massacre.”
“Gebauer’s one of them?”
“That’s why we want him out of an American prison,” said Kaufmann. “I’m sure you can imagine why.”
“Yes,” I said. “In this particular instance I probably can.”
I parked my car and walked up the castle esplanade to the gatehouse of the fortress, where I showed my papers and a letter from Aschenauer’s office to the black American GI on duty. While I waited for him to find my name on his clipboard, listing the day’s visitors, I smiled amiably and tried to practice my English.
“It is a nice day, yes?”
“Fuck off, kraut.”
I kept on smiling. I wasn’t exactly sure what he had said but his expression told me he wasn’t inclined to be friendly. After he had found my name on his list, he tossed my papers back at me and pointed to a white, four-story building with a mansard roof made of red tiles. From a distance it looked almost like a school. Up close, it looked exactly what it was: a prison. Inside was no different. All prisons smell of the same things. Cheap food, cigarettes, sweat, urine, boredom, and despair. Another stone-faced military policeman escorted me to a room with a view of the Lech Valley. It looked lush and green and full of the last days of summer. It was a terrible day to be in prison, assuming there’s such a thing as a good day to be in prison. I sat down on a cheap chair at a cheap table and dragged a cheap ashtray toward me. Then the American went out, locking the door behind him, which gave me a nice warm glow in the pit of my stomach. And I imagined what it must have been like to be one of the Malmedy Unit, in WCP1.
Malmedy was the place in Belgium’s Ardennes Forest where, during the winter of 1944, at the Battle of the Bulge, eighty-four prisoners of war had been massacred by a Waffen-SS unit. American POWs. The entire SS unit—seventy-five of them, anyway—were now in Landsberg, serving long terms of imprisonment. A lot of the men had my sympathy. It’s not always possible to take a lot of men prisoner in the middle of a battle. And if you let a man go, there’s always the chance that, later on, you might find yourself fighting him again. War wasn’t some game played by gentlemen, where paroles were given and honored. Not the war we had fought. And inasmuch as these particular SS men had been fighting one of the most brutal battles of the Second World War, it hardly made sense to charge them with war crimes. To that extent Kaufmann was right. But I wasn’t sure if my sympathy extended to Fritz Gebauer. Prior to his front-line service with the Waffen-SS, Obersturmbannführer Gebauer had been the commandant of Lemberg-Janowska. At some stage he must have volunteered to fight on the western front, which required a certain amount of courage—perhaps even a certain amount of distaste for his job at the labor camp.
The key scraped in the lock and the metal door opened. I turned around to see a strikingly good-looking man in his late thirties enter the room. Tall and broad-shouldered, Fritz Gebauer had a vaguely aristocratic bearing and, somehow, managed to make his prisoner’s red jacket look more like a smoking jacket. He bowed slightly before sitting down opposite me.
“Thanks for agreeing to this meeting,” I said, placing a packet of Lucky Strikes and some matches on the table between us. “Smoke?”
Gebauer glanced around at the soldier who remained with us. “Is it permitted?” he asked, in English.
The soldier nodded, and Gebauer took a nail from the packet and smoked it gratefully.
“Where are you from?” asked Gebauer.
“I live in Munich,” I said. “But I was born in Berlin. I lived there until a couple of years ago.”
“Me, too,” he said. “I’ve asked to be moved to a prison in Berlin, so that my wife can visit me, but that doesn’t appear to be possible.” He shrugged. “But what do they care? The Amis. We’re scum to them. Not soldiers at all. Murderers, that’s what we are. It’s fair to say that there are some murderers among us. The Jew killers. I never much cared for that kind of thing myself. I myself was on the western front, where Jew killing was of little importance.”
“Malmedy, wasn’t it?” I said, lighting one for myself. “In the Ardennes.”
“That’s right,” he said. “It was a desperate fight. Our backs were really against the wall. It was all we could do to look after ourselves, let alone a hundred surrendering Amis.” He inhaled deeply and looked up at the green ceiling. Someone had done a good job of matching the paint on the walls and the floor. “Of course, it doesn’t matter to the Amis that we had no facilities for taking prisoners. And no one thinks for a minute to suggest that the men who surrendered were cowards. We wouldn’t have surrendered. Not a chance. That’s what the SS was all about, wasn’t it? Loyalty is my honor, wasn’t it? Not self-preservation.” He took a hit on the cigarette. “Aschenauer says you were SS yourself. So you would understand what I’m talking about.”
I glanced at our American guard, uncomfortably. I hardly wanted to talk about having been in the SS in front of an American MP. “I really wouldn’t like to say,” I said.
“You can speak quite freely in front of him,” said Gebauer. “He doesn’t speak a word of German. Few of the Amis in here do. Even the officers are too lazy to learn. From time to time you get the odd intelligence officer who speaks German. But mostly they don’t see the point of it.”
“I think they feel that it would demean their victory to learn our language,” I said.
“Yes, that might be true,” said Gebauer. “They’re worse than the French in that respect. But my English is improving all the time.”
“Mine, too,” I said. “It’s a sort of mongrel langu
age, isn’t it?”
“Hardly surprising when you see the miscegenation that’s gone on,” he said. “I’ve never seen such a racially diverse people.” He shook his head wearily. “The Amis are a curious lot. In some ways, of course, they’re quite admirable. But in others, they’re completely stupid. Take this place. Landsberg. To put us here, of all places. Where the Führer wrote his great book. There’s not one of us who doesn’t take a certain amount of comfort in that. I myself came here before the war to look at his cell. They’ve removed the bronze plaque that was placed on the Führer’s cell door, of course. But we all know exactly where it is. In the same way that a Muslim knows the direction of Mecca. It’s something that helps to sustain us. To keep up our spirits.”
“I was on the Russian front myself,” I said. I was showing him some credentials. It didn’t seem appropriate to mention my sometime service with the German War Crimes Bureau, in Berlin. Where we had investigated German atrocities as well as Russian ones. “I was an intelligence officer, with General Schorner’s army. But before the war, I was a policeman, at the Alex.”
“I know it well,” he said, smiling. “Before the war I was a lawyer, in Wilmersdorf. I used to go to the Alex now and then to interview some rogue or other. How I wish I was back there now.”
“Before you joined the Waffen-SS,” I said, “you went to a labor camp. Lemberg-Janowska.”
“That’s right,” he said. “With the DAW. The German Armament Works.”
“It’s your time there that I wanted to ask you about.”
For a moment his face wrinkled with disgust as he recalled it. “It was a forced labor camp constructed around three factories in Lvov. The camp was named after the factory address: 133 Janowska Street. I went there in May 1942, to take command of the factories. Someone else was in charge of the residential camp where the Jews lived. And things were pretty bad there, I believe. But my responsibility was the factory only. This meant that there was a certain amount of friction between myself and the other commander, as to who was really in charge. Strictly speaking, it ought to have been me. At the time, I was a first lieutenant and the other fellow was a second lieutenant. However, it so happened his uncle was SS Major General Friedrich Katzmann, the police chief of Galicia and a very powerful man. He was part of the reason why I left Janowska. Wilhaus—that was the other commander’s name—he hated me. Jealous, I suppose. Wanted control of everything. And he’d have done anything to get rid of me. It was only a matter of time before he made his move. Framed me for something I hadn’t done. So I decided to get out while I could. And, after all, there was nothing worth staying for. That was the other reason. The place was ghastly. Really ghastly. And I didn’t think I could stay there and serve with any honor to myself. So I applied to join the Waffen-SS, and the rest you know.” He helped himself to another one of my cigarettes.
“There was another officer at the camp,” I said. “Friedrich Warzok. Do you remember him?”
“I remember Warzok,” he said. “He was Wilhaus’s man.”
“I’m a private detective,” I explained. “I’ve been asked by his wife to see if I can find out if he’s alive or dead. She wants to remarry.”
“Sensible woman. Warzok was a pig. They all were.” He shook his head. “She must be a pig, too, if she was ever married to that bastard.”
“So you never met her.”
“You mean she’s not a pig?” He smiled. “Well, well. No, I never met her. I knew he was married. Matter of fact, he was always telling us how good-looking his wife was. But he never brought her to live there. At least not while I was there. Unlike Wilhaus. He had his wife and little daughter living there. Can you believe it? I wouldn’t have had a wife and child of mine within ten miles of that place. Almost everything unpleasant you’ve heard about Warzok is likely to be true.” He laid his cigarette in the ashtray, put his hands behind his head, and leaned back in his chair. “How can I help?”
“In March 1946, Warzok was living in Austria. His wife thinks he might have used an old comrades’ network to get away. Since then, she’s heard nothing.”
“She should count herself lucky.”
“She’s a Roman Catholic,” I said. “She’s been told by Cardinal Josef Frings that she can’t remarry without some evidence that Warzok is dead.”
“Cardinal Frings, eh? He’s a good man, that Cardinal Frings.” He smiled. “You won’t hear anyone in this place say anything bad about Frings. He and Bishop Neuhausler are the ones trying hardest to get us out of here.”
“So I believe,” I said. “All the same, I was hoping that I might get some information from you that might enable me to find out what happened to him.”
“What sort of information?”
“Oh, I don’t know. What kind of man he was. If you ever discussed what might happen after the war. If he’d ever mentioned what plans he had.”
“I told you. Warzok was a pig.”
“Can you tell me any more than that?”
“You want details?”
“Please. Anything at all.”
He shrugged. “Like I said, when I was there, Lemberg-Janowska was just another labor camp. And there were only so many workers that I could use in the factory before they started to get in one another’s way. Nevertheless they kept sending me more and more. Thousands of Jews. At first we transported our surplus Jews to Belzec. But after a while we were told that this couldn’t happen anymore and that we’d have to deal with them ourselves. To me it was quite clear what this meant, and I tell you frankly that I wanted nothing to do with it. So I volunteered for front-line duty. But even before I had left, Warzok and Rokita—he was another of Wilhaus’s creatures—were turning the place into an extermination camp. But nothing on the industrial scale of some other places, like Birkenau. There were no gas chambers at Janowska. Which left bastards like Wilhaus and Warzok with something of a problem. How to kill the camp’s surplus Jews. So Jews were taken to some hills behind the residential camp and shot. You could hear the firing squads in the factory. All day that went on. And sometimes part of the night. They were the lucky ones. The ones who were shot. It soon turned out that Wilhaus and Warzok enjoyed killing people. And as well as killing large numbers of Jews by firing squads, these two started killing for their own amusement. Some people get up in the morning and exercise. Warzok’s idea of exercise involved walking around the camp with a pistol and shooting people indiscriminately. Sometimes he hanged women up by their hair and used them for target practice. For him, killing was like lighting a cigarette, having a coffee, or blowing his nose. Something utterly commonplace. He was an animal. He hated me. They both did, he and Wilhaus. Wilhaus told Warzok to think up some new ways of killing Jews. So Warzok did just that. And after a while they all had their favorite ways of killing people. After I left, I believe they even had a hospital for medical experimentation. Using Jewish women for research into various clinical procedures.
“Anyway, what I heard was this. That the camp was liquidated in the last weeks of 1943. The Red Army didn’t liberate Lvov until July 1944. Many of the people at Janowska were sent to the concentration camp at Majdanek. If you want to find out what happened to Warzok, you’ll need to speak to some of the other men who worked at Janowska. Men like Wilhelm Rokita. There was a man called Wepke—I can’t remember his Christian name—only that he was a Gestapo Kommissar and that he was friendly with Warzok. Warzok was also friendly with two fellows from the SD. A Scharführer Rauch and an Oberwachtmeister Kepich. They could be alive or dead. I have no idea.”
“Warzok was last seen in Ebensee, near Salzburg,” I said. “His wife says he was being helped to escape by the old comrades. The ODESSA.”
Gebauer shook his head. “No, it wouldn’t have been the ODESSA,” he said. “The ODESSA and the Comradeship are two very different things. The ODESSA is largely an American-run organization, not German. At the bottom level, yes, it uses a lot of the same people who work for the Comradeship, but at the top it’s CIA. T
he CIA set it up to help some Nazis escape when they outlived their usefulness as anticommunist agents. And I can’t see that Warzok would have been much good as a CIA agent. For a start, he knew nothing about intelligence matters. If he ever got away it’s the Comradeship, or the Web as it’s sometimes called, who would have helped. You’d have to ask one of the spiders where he might have gone.”
I chose my next words carefully. “My late wife was always afraid of spiders,” I said. “Really afraid. Every time she found one I would have to go and deal with it. The curious thing is that now she’s gone, I never see a spider. I wouldn’t know where to look for one. Would you?”
Gebauer grinned. “He really doesn’t speak a word of German,” he said, referring to the guard. “It’s all right.” Then he shook his head. “One hears things in here about the Comradeship. To be frank, I don’t know how reliable any of this is. After all, none of us ever managed to escape. We got caught and banged up in this place. It also occurs to me that what you’re doing could be dangerous, Herr Gunther. Very dangerous. It’s one thing to avail yourself of a secret escape route, it’s quite another to ask questions about such a thing. Have you considered the risks you are running? Yes, even you, a man who was in the SS himself. After all, you wouldn’t be the first SS man to cooperate with the Jews. There’s a fellow in Linz, a Nazi hunter by the name of Simon Wiesenthal, who uses an SS informer.”
“I’ll take my chances,” I said.
“If you were looking to go missing in Germany,” Gebauer said carefully, “the best thing to do would be to go and see the experts. The Bavarian Red Cross are very good at finding missing persons. I believe they also have some expertise in achieving the opposite result. Their offices are in Munich, are they not?”
I nodded. “Wagmullerstrasse,” I said.
“There you will have to seek out a priest called Father Gotovina and show him a one-way ticket for any local destination with the letter S printed twice in a row. Peissenberg, perhaps. Kassel if you were near there. Or Essen, perhaps. You must cross out all of the other letters on the rail ticket so that SS are the only letters remaining. When you speak to this priest or anyone else in the Comradeship for the first time, you must hand this ticket over. At the same time, you need to ask if he can recommend anywhere to stay in the place you bought a ticket for. That’s really all I know. Except for one thing: You will be asked some apparently innocent questions. If he asks what your favorite hymn is, you are to say ‘How Great Thou Art.’ I don’t know the hymn myself, but I do know the tune. It’s more or less the same tune as the Horst Wessel Song.”