by Philip Kerr
At the top of the first flight of stairs was a bronze head of Stalin, and at the top of the second there was a bronze head of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Operation Barbarossa looked like it was going to be bad news for Russian sculptors, just like everyone else. The floor was covered with broken glass, and there was a line of bullet holes on the gray wall that led all the way along a wide corridor to a couple of open facing doors, through which more SS officers were passing to and fro in a haze of cigarette smoke. One of these was my unit’s commanding officer, SS-Standartenführer Mundt, who was one of those men who look like they came out of their mother’s womb wearing a uniform. Seeing me, he raised an eyebrow and then a hand as he casually acknowledged my salute.
“The murder squad,” he said. “Did you catch them?”
“Yes, Herr Oberst.”
“Good work. What did you do with them?”
“We shot them, sir.” I handed over a handful of Red identification documents I’d taken from the Russians before their executions.
Mundt started to look through the documents like an immigration officer searching for something suspicious. “Including the women?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Pity. In future, all female partisans and NKVD are to be hanged in the town square, as an example to the others. Heydrich’s orders. Understand?”
“Yes, Herr Oberst.”
Mundt wasn’t much older than me. When the war broke out he’d been a police colonel with the Hamburg Schutzpolizei. He was clever, only his was the wrong kind of cleverness for Kripo: To be a decent detective you have to understand people, and to understand people you have to be one of them yourself. Mundt wasn’t like people. He wasn’t even a person. I supposed that was why he had a pet dachshund with him—so that it might make him seem a little more human. But I knew better. He was a cold, pompous bastard. Whenever he spoke he sounded like he thought he was reciting Rilke, and I wanted to yawn or laugh or kick his teeth in. Which is how it must have looked.
“You disagree, Hauptmann?”
“I don’t much care to hang women,” I said.
He looked down his fine nose and smiled. “Perhaps you’d prefer to do something else with them?”
“That must be someone else you’re thinking of, sir. What I mean is, I don’t much like waging war on women. I’m the conventional type. The Geneva Convention, in case you were wondering.”
Mundt pretended to look puzzled. “It’s a strange way of observing the Geneva Convention you have,” he said. “To shoot thirty prisoners.”
I glanced around the office, which was a good size for just one desk. It would have been a good size for a sawmill. In the corner of the room was a fitted cupboard with its own little sink, where another man was washing his half-naked torso. In the opposite corner was a safe. An SS sergeant was listening to it like it was a radio and trying, without success, to persuade the thing to open. On top of the desk was a trio of different-colored telephones that might have been left there by three wise men from the East; behind the desk was another SS officer in a chair; and behind the officer was a large wall map of Minsk. On the floor lay a Russian soldier, and if this had ever been his office it wasn’t anymore; the bullet hole behind his left ear and the blood on the linoleum seemed to indicate he would soon be relocated to a much smaller and more permanent earthly space.
“Besides, Captain Gunther,” added Mundt, “it may have escaped you but the Russians never signed the Geneva Convention.”
“Then I guess it’s fine to shoot them all, sir.”
The officer behind the desk stood up. “Did you say Captain Gunther?”
He was a Standartenführer, too, a colonel, the same as Mundt, which meant that as he came around the desk and placed himself in front of me I was obliged to come to attention again. He had been spawned in the same Aryan pond as Mundt and was no less arrogant.
“Yes, sir.”
“Are you the Captain Gunther who telephoned to question my orders to shoot those Jews on the road to Minsk this morning?”
“Yes, sir. That was me. You must be Colonel Blume.”
“What the devil do you mean by questioning an order?” he shouted. “You’re an SS officer, pledged to the Führer. That order was issued to ensure security in the rear for our combat forces. Those Jews set their houses on fire after having been ordered to make them available as billets for our troops. I can’t think of a better reason for a reprisal action than the burning of those houses.”
“I didn’t see any burning houses in that area, sir. And Sturmbannführer Weis was under the impression that those old women were being shot only because they were Jews.”
“And if they were? The Jews of Soviet Russia are the intellectual bearers of the Bolshevik ideology, which makes them our natural enemy. No matter how old they are. Killing Jews is an act of war. Even they seem to understand that, if you don’t. I repeat: Those orders must be carried out for the safety of all army areas. If every soldier only carried out an order after having considered the niceties of whether or not it agreed with his own conscience, then pretty soon there would be no discipline and no army. Are you mad? Are you a coward? Are you ill? Or perhaps you actually like the Jews?”
“I don’t care who or what they are,” I said. “I didn’t come to Russia to shoot old women.”
“Listen to yourself, Captain,” said Blume. “What kind of an officer are you? You’re supposed to set an example to your men. I’ve a good mind to take you to the ghetto just to see if this is some kind of an act—if you really are this squeamish about killing Jews.”
Mundt had started to laugh. “Blume,” he said.
“I can promise you this, Captain,” said Colonel Blume. “You won’t be a captain anymore if you can’t manage it. You’ll be the lowest private in the SS. Do you hear?”
“Blume,” said Mundt. “Look at these.” He handed Blume the papers of the NKVD I’d executed at Goloby. “Look.”
Blume glanced at the documents as Mundt opened them for him. Mundt said: “Sarra Kagan. Solomon Geller. Josef Zalmonowitz. Julius Polonski. These are all Jewish names. Vinokurova. Kieper.” He grinned some more, enjoying my growing discomfort. “I worked on the Jew desk in Hamburg, so I know something about these yid bastards. Joshua Pronicheva. Fanya Glekh. Aaron Levin. David Schepetovka. Saul Katz. Stefan Marx. Vladya Polichov. These are all yids he shot this morning. So much for your fucking scruples, Gunther. You picked a Jewish NKVD squad to execute. You just shot thirty kikes whether you like it or not.”
Blume opened another identification document at random. And then another. “Misha Blyatman. Hersh Gebelev. Moishe Ruditzer. Nahum Yoffe. Chaim Serebriansky. Zyama Rosenblatt.” He was laughing now, too. “You’re right. How do you like that? Israel Weinstein. Ivan Lifshitz. It sounds to me like you hit the jackpot, Gunther. So far you’ve managed to kill more Jews in this campaign than I have. Maybe I should recommend you for a decoration. Or at the very least a promotion.”
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 h
ospital 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.
7
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 Himmle
r 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.”