by Philip Kerr
I was with a reserve police battalion attached to the 49th Army. It was our job to find NKVD murder squads and put an end to their activities. We had intelligence that a death squad from Lvov and Dubno had gone north to Lutsk and, in our light panzer wagons and Puma armored cars, we tried to get there ahead of them. Lutsk was a small town on the Styr River with a population of seventeen thousand. It was the seat of a Roman Catholic bishop, which was hardly likely to endear it to the communists. When we arrived there we found almost the entire population gathered around the NKVD prison and in great distress about the fate of relatives incarcerated there. One wing of the prison was well ablaze, but using our armored cars we managed to break down a wall and save the lives of more than a thousand men and women. But we were too late for almost three thousand others. Many had been shot in the back of the head. Others had been killed by grenades tossed in the windows of cells. But most had just been burned to death. I will never forget the smell of burnt human flesh as long as I live.
The local townspeople told us which way the death squad had gone and so we gave chase, which was easy enough in the panzer wagons. The dirt roads were hard as concrete. We caught up with them only a few miles north in a place called Goloby. A firefight ensued. Thanks to the cannon mounted on our car, we won it easily. Thirty of them were captured. They hadn’t even had time to throw away their distinctive red identification documents, which, inconveniently for them, contained photographs. One of them even had the keys to Lutsk Prison still in his pocket as well as numerous files relating to some of the murdered prisoners. There were twenty-eight men and two women. None of them was older than twenty-five or -six. The youngest, a woman, was nineteen and good-looking in that high-cheekboned, Slavic way. It was hard to connect her with the murders of so many people. One of the prisoners spoke German and I asked him why they had murdered so many of their own people. He told me the order had come straight from Stalin and that their party commissars would have had them shot if they had failed to carry out his order. Several of my men were for taking them with us so they could be hanged in Minsk. But I did not care for this extra baggage. And so we shot them all, in four groups of seven, and headed north again, toward Minsk.
I had joined the 316th Battalion straight from Berlin, at a place called Zamosc, in Poland. Prior to this, the 316th and the 322nd, with whom we operated, had been in Kraków. At that time, so far as I was aware, no mass murders had been carried out by either of these two police battalions. I knew that many of my colleagues were anti-Semitic, but just as many were not, and I didn’t see any of this as a problem until we got to Minsk, where I made my report. I also handed over the two dozen sets of identification papers we had confiscated before executing their murderous bearers. It was July 7.
My superior, an SS colonel called Mundt, congratulated me on our successful action while at the same time issuing a reprimand for not bringing back the two women so they could be hanged. It seemed Berlin had issued a new order: all NKVD women and female partisans were to be hanged, in public, as an example to the population of Minsk.
Mundt spoke better Russian than I did at the time, and he could also read the language. Prior to his attachment to Special Action Group B in Minsk he had been with the Jewish Office of the RSHA. And it was he who noticed something about the NKVD prisoners we had executed. But even when he read aloud their names I still didn’t understand.
“Kagan,” he had said. “Geller, Zalmonowitz, Polonski. Don’t you get it, Obersturmführer Gunther? They’re all Jews. That was a Jewish NKVD death squad you executed. It just goes to show you, doesn’t it? That the Führer is right about Bolshevism and Judaism being one and the same poison.”
Even then it didn’t seem to matter that much. Even then I told myself that I hadn’t known they were all Jews when we shot them. I told myself that it probably wouldn’t have made any difference—they had murdered thousands of people in cold blood and they deserved to die. But that was on the morning of July 7. By the afternoon I had started to look upon the police action I’d led somewhat differently. By the afternoon I had heard about the “registration,” as a result of which two thousand Jews had been identified and shot. Then, the following day, I had happened upon an SS firing squad, commanded by a young police officer I had known back in Berlin. Six men and women were shot and their bodies fell into a mass grave in which perhaps a hundred bodies already lay. That was the moment when I realized the real purpose of the police battalions. That was the moment when my life changed, forever.
It was fortunate for me that the general commanding Special Action Group B, Arthur Nebe, was an old friend of mine. Before the war he had been the chief of Berlin’s criminal police, a career detective like myself. So I went to him and asked for a transfer to the Wehrmacht for front-line duties. He asked me my reason. I told him that if I stayed it would only be a matter of time before I was shot for disobeying an order. I told him that it was one thing to shoot a man because he had been a member of an NKVD death squad, but that it was quite another to shoot him just because he was a Jew. Nebe had thought that was funny.
“But Obersturmbannführer Mundt tells me the people you shot were Jews,” he said.
“Yes, but that’s not why I shot them, sir,” I said.
“The NKVD is full of Jews,” he said. “You know that, don’t you? Chances are you catch some more of these death squads, they’ll be Jews. What then?”
I stayed silent. I didn’t know what then. “All I know is that I’m not going to spend this war murdering people.”
“War is war,” he said, impatiently. “And frankly, we may have bitten off rather more than we can chew in Russia. We have to win in this theater as quickly as possible if we’re to secure ourselves for the winter. That means there’s no room for sentiment. Frankly, we’ll have a job looking after our own army let alone Red Army prisoners and the local population. It’s difficult work we have ahead of us, make no mistake. Not everyone is suited to it. I don’t particularly care for it myself, Bernie. Do I make myself clear?”
“Clear enough,” I said. “But I’d rather shoot at people who were shooting back. I’m peculiar like that.”
“You’re too old for front-line duty,” he said. “You won’t last five minutes.”
“I’ll take my chances, sir.”
He looked at me for a moment longer and then stroked his long, crafty nose. His was a cop’s face. Shrewd, tough, good-humored. Until then I hadn’t really thought of him as a Nazi at all. I knew for a fact that only three years before he had been part of an army plot to depose Hitler as soon as the British declared war on Germany following the annexation of the Sudetenland. Of course, the British never declared war. Not in 1938. As for Nebe, he was a survivor. And anyway, in 1940, after Hitler defeated the French in just six weeks, a lot of his opponents in the army had changed their opinion of him. That victory had seemed like a kind of miracle to many Germans, even those who disliked Hitler and all that he stood for. I supposed Nebe was one of these.
He could have had me shot, although I never heard of anyone who was shot for disobeying the so-called Commissar Order, which became little more than a license to murder Russian civilians. He could have had me sent to a punishment battalion. Those did exist. Instead, Nebe sent me to join Gehlen’s Foreign Armies East Intelligence Section, where I spent several weeks organizing captured NKVD records. And subsequently I was transferred back to Berlin, to the War Crimes Bureau of the German High Command. I figured that was Arthur Nebe’s idea of a joke. He always did have a strange sense of humor.
I thought of all the excuses for what had happened in Lutsk. That I wasn’t to know they were Jews. That they were murderers. That they had killed nearly three thousand people—probably more. That they certainly would have killed many more political prisoners if we hadn’t shot them.
But it always came up the same way.
I had executed thirty Jews. That they had killed all those prisoners simply to stop them from collaborating with the Nazi invaders—as
almost certainly they would have. That Stalin had recruited large numbers of Jews to the NKVD because he knew they had more to fight for. That I had played a part in the greatest crime in recorded history.
I hated myself for that. But I hated the SS more. I hated the way I had become complicit in their genocide. No one knew better than me what had been done in the name of Germany. And that was the real reason I was walking into that church with murder on my mind. It wasn’t just about a severe beating and the loss of my little finger. It was about something far more important. If anything, the beating had brought me to my senses about who these people were and what they had done, not just to millions of Jews, but to millions of Germans like me. To me. That was something worth killing for.
TWENTY-ONE
I sat in the fifteenth-century aisle of the Holy Ghost Church, close to the confessional, and waited for it to become free. I was more or less certain that Gotovina was in there because the two other priests I’d seen on my earlier visit were visible to me. One of them, a real understanding sort with a suffer-the-little-children smile, was having a quiet talk with a largish, market-ready woman just inside the front door. The other, dainty-looking with dark hair and a pimp mustache, and holding a walking stick with a silver top, was limping toward the high altar like an insect with only three legs, as if someone had swatted him hard and he was on his way to pray for them.
The place smelled strongly of incense, new-cut timber, and building mortar. A man with an eye patch was tuning a grand piano in a way that left you thinking he was probably wasting his time. About six or seven rows in front of me, a woman knelt in prayer. There was plenty of light coming through the tall arched windows and, above them, the smaller round windows. The ceiling looked like the lid on a very fancy biscuit tin. Someone moved a chair and, in the cavernous church interior, it sounded like a donkey braying a strong note of dissent. Now that I saw it again, the high altar, made of black marble and gold, reminded me of a Venetian undertaker’s fanciest gondola. It was the kind of church where you almost expected to find a bellboy to help you carry your hymnal.
The ox-blood was wearing off a little. I wanted to lie down. The polished wooden bench I was sitting on began to look very comfortable and inviting. Then the green curtain in the confessional twitched and was drawn back, and a good-looking woman of about thirty stepped out. She was holding a rosary, crossing herself more for form’s sake than anything else. She was wearing a tight red dress and it was easy to see why she had spent such a long time in the confessional. From the look of her, none of the venial sins would have detained her. She was built for just the one kind of sin, the mortal kind that cried aloud to heaven when you managed to touch her in the right places. She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath that drop-kicked my libido to the top of the rococo pillars and down again. The scarlet gloves matched the handbag that matched the shoes that matched the lipstick that matched the veil on the little hat that was doing what it was supposed to do. Scarlet was her color all right. She looked like the word made flesh, just as long as the word was “sex.” A kind of epiphany. The heavyweight champion of all scarlet women. When you saw her, you told yourself that the Book of Revelation was probably well named. It was Britta Warzok.
She did not see me. She made no act of contrition or penance. She just turned on her high heel and walked quickly up the aisle and out of the church. For a moment I was too surprised to move. If I had been less surprised I might have made it to the confessional in time to blow Father Gotovina’s brains out. But by the time I had gathered myself together, the priest was out of the confessional and walking toward the altar. He spoke to the dainty-looking priest for a moment and then disappeared through a door at the back of the church.
He had not seen me. For a moment I considered pursuing the Croatian priest into the sacristy—if that was where he had gone—and killing him in there. Except that there were now questions he needed to answer. Questions for which I did not yet have the strength. Questions about Britta Warzok. Questions that would have to wait until I was feeling stronger. Questions that required a little more thinking before I asked them.
I picked up my tool bag and shuffled slowly out of the church and onto Viktualienmarkt, where the cooler air revived me a little. The bell in the church clock tower was ringing the half hour. I took a few steps and then leaned on the Nivea girl who was adorning a poster pillar. I could have used a whole tin of Nivea on my soul. Better still, a whole of tin of her.
Stuber’s beetle came quickly toward me. For a minute I thought he was going to run me down. But he came to an abrupt halt, leaned across the passenger seat, and threw open the door. I wondered why he was in such a hurry. Then I remembered he was probably working under the assumption that I had shot and killed someone in the church. I took hold of the car door.
“It’s all right,” I said. “There’s no hurry. I didn’t go through with it.”
He pulled on the brake and got out, calmer now, helping me into the car as if I had been his old mother, and lighting me another cigarette when finally I was stowed away. Back in the driver’s seat, he revved the car hard, waited for a small troop of cyclists to pedal past, and then fired us on our way.
“So what changed your mind?” he asked.
“A woman.”
“That’s what they’re for, I suppose,” he said. “Sounds to me like she was sent by God.”
“Not this one,” I said. I sucked on the cigarette and winced as the heat of it hit my most recent scar. “I don’t know who the hell sent her. But I’m going to find out.”
“A woman of mystery, huh?” he said. “You know, I got a theory: Love is just a temporary form of mental illness. Once you know that, you can deal with it. Deal with it. Medicate for it.”
Stuber started going on about some girlfriend he’d had who had treated him badly and I stopped listening for a while. I was thinking about Britta Warzok.
A small part of my brain was telling me that maybe she was a better Roman Catholic than I had given her credit for. In which case, her meeting with Father Gotovina might just have been a coincidence. That maybe hers had been a genuine confession and that she could have been on the level all along. I paid attention to this part of my brain for a minute or two and then blew it off. After all, this was the part of my brain that still believed in the perfectibility of man. Thanks to Adolf Hitler we all know what that’s worth.
TWENTY-TWO
Days passed. I got a little better. The weekend came along and Dr. Henkell said I was fit to travel. He had a newish, maroon-colored Mercedes four-door sedan that he had gone all the way to the factory in Sindelfingen to collect, and of which he was very proud. He let me sit in the back so I would be more comfortable on the fifty-eight-mile journey to Garmisch-Partenkirchen. We left Munich on Autobahn Number 2, a very well-engineered highway that took us through Starnberg, where I told Henkell about the eponymous baron and the fabulous house where he lived and the Maybach Zeppelin he was using to run down to the shops. And, because he liked cars a lot, I also told him about the baron’s daughter, Helene Elisabeth, and the Porsche 356 she drove.
“That’s a nice car,” he said. “But I like Mercedes.” And he proceeded to tell me about some of the other cars that were stored in his Ramersdorf garage. These now included my own Hansa, which Henkell had kindly driven away from the place where I had left it on the night I had been picked up by the comrades.
“Cars are a bit of a hobby of mine,” he confessed as we drove on to Traubing and into the Alpine foothills. “So is climbing. I’ve climbed all of the big peaks in the Ammergau Alps.”
“Including the Zugspitze?” The Zugspitze, Germany’s highest mountain, was why most people went to Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the first place.
“That’s not a climb,” he said. “That’s a walk. You’ll be walking up it yourself, in a couple of weeks.” He shook his head. “But my real interest is tropical medicine. There’s a small laboratory in Partenkirchen that the Amis let me use. I’
m rather friendly with one of their senior officers. He comes to play chess with Eric once or twice a week. You’ll like him. He speaks perfect German and he’s a damned good chess player.”
“How did you meet?”
Henkell laughed. “I was his prisoner. There used to be a POW camp in Partenkirchen. I ran the hospital for him. The lab was part of the hospital. The Amis have their own doctor, of course. Nice fellow, but he’s not much more than a pill pusher. Anything surgical, they usually ask me.”
“Isn’t it a bit unusual researching tropical medicine in the Alps?” I said.
“On the contrary,” said Henkell. “You see, the air is very dry and very pure. So is the water. Which makes it an ideal place to avoid specimen contamination.”
“You’re a man of many parts,” I told him.
He seemed to like that.
Just after Murnau, our road crossed the Murnauer marshes. Beyond Farchant, the basin of Garmisch-Partenkirchen opened out and we had our first view of the Zugspitze and the other Wetterstein Mountains. Coming from Berlin, I rather disliked mountains, especially the Alps. They always looked sort of melted, as if someone had carelessly left them out in the sun too long. Two or three miles farther on, the road divided, my ears popped, and we were in Sonnenbichl, just a short way north of Garmisch.