by Philip Kerr
‘We don’t have much to do with the propaganda ministry, Frau Meyer. Not if we can help it. Perhaps it’s them you should be speaking to.’
‘I don’t doubt you mean what you say, Herr Gunther,’ said Siv Meyer. ‘Nevertheless British war crimes against defenceless German hospital ships make good propaganda.’
‘That’s just the kind of story which is especially useful now,’ added Klara. ‘After Stalingrad.’
I had to admit she was probably right. The surrender of the German Sixth Army in Stalingrad on February 2nd had been the greatest disaster suffered by the Nazis since their coming to power; and Goebbels’s speech on the 18th urging total war on the German people certainly needed incidents like the sinking of a hospital ship to prove that there was no way back for us now – that it was victory or nothing.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘I can’t promise anything, but if you tell me where they’re holding your husband I’ll go there right now and see him, Frau Meyer. If I think there’s something in his story, I’ll contact my superiors and see if we can get him released as a key witness for an inquiry.’
‘He’s being detained at the Jewish Welfare Office, on Rosenstrasse,’ said Siv. ‘We’ll come with you, if you like.’
I shook my head. ‘That’s quite all right. I know where it is.’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Klara. ‘We’re all going there anyway. To protest against Franz’s detention.’
‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ I said. ‘You’ll be arrested.’
‘There are lots of wives who are going,’ said Siv. ‘They can’t arrest us all.’
‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve arrested all of the Jews.’
*
Hearing footsteps near my head, I tried to push the heavy wooden door off my face, but my left hand was trapped and the right too painful to use. Someone shouted something and a minute or two later I felt myself slide a little as the rubble that I lay on shifted like the scree on a steep mountain side, and then the door was lifted away to reveal my rescuers. The apartment building was almost completely gone, and all that remained in the cold moonlight was one high chimney containing an ascending series of fireplaces. Several hands placed me onto a stretcher and I was carried off the tangled, smoking heap of bricks, concrete, leaking water pipes and wooden planks and laid in the middle of the road, where I enjoyed a perfect view of a building burning in the distance and then the beams from Berlin’s defence searchlights as they continued to search the sky for enemy planes; but the siren was sounding the all-clear and I could hear the footsteps of people already coming up from the shelters to look for what was left of their homes. I wondered if my own home in Fasanenstrasse was all right. Not that there was very much in it. Nearly everything of value had been sold or traded on the black market.
Gradually, I began to move my head one way and the other until I felt able to push myself up on one elbow to look around. But I could hardly breathe: my chest was still full of dust and smoke and the exertion provoked a fit of coughing that was only alleviated when a man I half recognized helped me to a drink of water and laid a blanket on top of me.
About a minute later there was a loud shout and the chimney came down on top of the spot where I’d been lying. The dust from its collapse covered me, so I was moved further down the street and set down next to some others who were awaiting medical attention. Klara was lying beside me now at less than an arm’s length. Her dress was hardly torn, her eyes were open, and her body was quite unmarked. I called her name several times before it finally dawned on me that she was dead. It was as if her life had just stopped like a clock, and it hardly seemed possible that so much of her future – she couldn’t have been older than thirty – had disappeared in the space of a few seconds.
Other corpses were laid out in the street next to her. I couldn’t see how many. I sat up to look for Franz Meyer and the others, but the effort was too much and I fell back and closed my eyes. And fainted, I suppose.
*
‘Give us back our men.’
You could hear them three streets away – a large and angry crowd of women – and as we turned the corner of Rosenstrasse I felt my jaw slacken. I hadn’t seen anything like this on the streets of Berlin since before Hitler came to power. And whoever would have thought that wearing a nice hat and carrying a handbag was the best way to dress when you were opposing the Nazis?
‘Release our husbands,’ shouted the mob of women as we pushed our way along the street. ‘Release our husbands now.’
There were many more of them than I had been expecting – perhaps several hundred. Even Klara Meyer looked surprised, but not as surprised as the cops and SS who were guarding the Jewish Welfare Office. They gripped their machine pistols and rifles and muttered curses and abuse at the women standing nearest to the door and looked horrified to find themselves ignored or even roundly cursed back. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be: if you had a gun, then people were supposed to do what they were told. That’s page one of how to be a Nazi.
The welfare office on Rosenstrasse near Berlin’s Alexanderplatz was a grey granite Wilhelmine building with a saddle roof next to a synagogue – formerly the oldest in Berlin – partly destroyed by the Nazis in November 1938, and within spitting distance of the Police Praesidium where I had spent most of my adult working life. I might no longer have been working for Kripo but I’d managed to keep my beer-token – the brass identity disc that commanded such craven respect in most German citizens.
‘We’re decent German women,’ shouted one woman. ‘Loyal to the Leader and to the Fatherland. You can’t speak to us like that, you cheeky young bastard.’
‘I can speak to anyone like that who’s misguided enough to be married to a Jew,’ I heard one of the uniformed cops – a corporal – say to her. ‘Go home, lady, or you’ll be shot.’
‘You need a good spanking you little pip,’ said another woman. ‘Does your mother know you’re such an arrogant whelp?’
‘You see?’ said Klara, triumphantly. ‘They can’t shoot us all.’
‘Can’t we?’ sneered the corporal. ‘When we have the orders to shoot, I can promise you’ll get it first, granny.’
‘Take it easy corporal,’ I said and flashed my beer token in front of his face. ‘There’s really no need to be rude to these ladies. Especially on a Sunday afternoon.’
‘Yes sir,’ he said, smartly. ‘Sorry sir.’ He nodded back over his shoulder. ‘Are you going in there, sir?’
‘Yes,’ I said. I turned to Klara and Siv. ‘I’ll try to be as quick as I can.’
‘Then if you would be so kind,’ said the corporal, ‘we need orders, sir. No one’s told us what to do. Just to stay here and stop people from going in. Perhaps you might mention that, sir.’
I shrugged. ‘Sure, corporal. But from what I can see you’re already doing a grand job.’
‘We are?’
‘You’re keeping the peace, aren’t you?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘You can’t keep the peace if you start shooting at all these ladies, now can you?’ I smiled at him and then patted his shoulder. ‘In my experience, corporal, the best police work looks like nothing at all and is always soon forgotten.’
I was unprepared for the scene that met me inside, where the smell was already intolerable: a welfare office is not designed to be a transit camp for two thousand prisoners. Men and women with identity tags on string around their necks like travelling children were lined up to use a lavatory that had no door, while others were crammed fifty or sixty to an office where it was standing room only. Welfare parcels – many of them brought by the women outside – filled another room where they had been tossed, but no one was complaining. Things were quiet. After almost a decade of Nazi rule Jews knew better than to complain. It was only the police sergeant in charge of these people who seemed inclined to bemoan his lot, and as he searched a clipboard for Franz Meyer’s name and then led me to the second-
floor office where the man was being held, he began to unroll the barbed S-wire of his sharp complaint:
‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with all these people. No one’s told me a damn thing. How long they’re going to be here. How to make them comfortable. How to answer all of these bloody women who are demanding answers. It’s not so easy, I can tell you. All I’ve got is what was in this office building when we turned up yesterday. Toilet paper ran out within an hour of us being here. And Christ only knows how I’m going to feed them. There’s nothing open on a Sunday.’
‘Why don’t you open those food parcels and give them that?’ I asked.
The sergeant looked incredulous. ‘I couldn’t do that,’ he said. ‘Those are private parcels.’
‘I shouldn’t think that the people they belong to will mind,’ I said. ‘Just as long as they get something to eat.’
We found Franz Meyer seated in one of the larger offices where almost a hundred men were waiting patiently for something to happen. The sergeant called Meyer out and, still grumbling, went off to think about what I’d suggested about the parcels, while I spoke to my potential war-crimes witness in the comparative privacy of the corridor.
I told him that I worked for the War Crimes Bureau and why I was there. Meanwhile, outside the building, the women’s protest seemed to be getting louder.
‘Your wife and sisters-in-law are outside,’ I told him. ‘It’s them who put me up to this.’
‘Please tell them to go home,’ said Meyer. ‘It’s safer in here than out there, I think.’
‘I agree. But they’re not about to listen to me.’
Meyer grinned. ‘Yes, I can imagine.’
‘The sooner you tell me about what happened on the SS Hrotsvitha von Gandersheim, the sooner I can speak to my boss and see about getting you out of here, and the sooner we can get them all out of harm’s way.’ I paused. ‘That is if you’re prepared to give me a deposition.’
‘It’s my only chance of avoiding a concentration camp, I think.’
‘Or worse,’ I added, by way of extra incentive.
‘Well, that’s honest, I suppose.’ He shrugged.
‘I’ll take that as a yes, shall I?’
He nodded and we spent the next thirty minutes writing out his statement about what had happened off the coast of Norway in August 1941. When he’d signed it, I wagged my finger at him.
‘Coming here like this I’m sticking my neck out for you,’ I told him. ‘So you’d better not let me down. If I so much as get a whiff of you changing your story I’ll wash my hands of you. Got that?’
He nodded. ‘So why are you sticking your neck out?’
It was a good question and probably it deserved an answer, but I hardly wanted to go into how a friend of a friend had asked me to help, which is how these things usually got fixed in Germany; and I certainly didn’t want to mention how attractive I found his sister-in-law Klara, or that I was making up for some lost time when it came to helping Jews; and maybe a bit more than only lost time.
‘Let’s just say I don’t like the Tommies very much and leave it at that, shall we?’ I shook my head. ‘Besides, I’m not promising anything. It’s up to my boss, Judge Goldsche. If he thinks your deposition can start an inquiry into a British war crime, he’s the one who’ll have to persuade the Foreign Office that this is worth a white book, not me.’
‘What’s a white book?’
‘An official publication that’s intended to present the German side of an incident that might amount to a violation of the laws of war. It’s the Bureau that does all the leg work, but it’s the Foreign Office that publishes the report.’
‘That sounds as if it might take a while.’
I shook my head. ‘Fortunately for you, the Bureau and the judge have a great deal of power. Even in Nazi Germany. If the judge buys your story we’ll have you home tomorrow.’
CHAPTER 2
Wednesday, March 3rd 1943
They took me to the state hospital in Friedrichshain. I was suffering from a concussion and smoke inhalation; the smoke inhalation was nothing new, but as a result of the concussion the doctor advised me to stay in bed for a couple of days. I’ve always disliked hospitals – they sell just a little too much reality for my taste. But I did feel tired. Being bombed by the RAF will do that to you. So the advice of this fresh-faced aspirin Jesus suited me very well. I thought I was due a bit of time with my feet up and my mouth in traction. Besides, I was a lot better off in hospital than in my apartment. They were still feeding patients in the state hospital, which was more than I could say about home, where the pot was empty.
From my window I had a nice view of the St Georg’s cemetery, but I didn’t mind that: the state hospital faces the Böhmisches Brewery on the other side of Landsberger Allee, which means there’s always a strong smell of hops in the air. I can’t think of a better way to encourage a Berliner’s recovery than the smell of German beer. Not that we saw much of it in the city’s bars: most of the beer brewed in Berlin went straight to our brave boys on the Russian front. But I can’t say that I grudged them a couple of brews. After Stalingrad I expect they needed a taste of home to keep their spirits up. There wasn’t a great deal else to keep a man’s spirits up in the winter of 1943.
Either way I was better off than Siv Meyer and her sisters, who were all dead. The only survivors of that night were me and Franz, who was in the Jewish Hospital. Where else? The bigger surprise was that there was a Jewish Hospital in the first place.
I was not without visitors. Renata Matter came to see me. It was Renata who told me my own home was undamaged and who gave me the news about the Meyer sisters. She was pretty upset about it too, and being a good Roman Catholic she had already spent the morning praying for their souls. She seemed just as upset by the news that the priest of St Hedwig’s, Bernhard Lichtenberg, had been put in prison and seemed likely to be sent to Dachau where – according to her – more than two thousand priests were already incarcerated. Two thousand priests in Dachau was a depressing thought. That’s the thing about hospital visitors: sometimes you wish they simply hadn’t bothered to come along and try to cheer you up.
This was certainly how I felt about my other visitor, a commissar from the Gestapo called Werner Sachse. I knew Sachse from the Alex, and in truth he wasn’t a bad fellow for a Gestapo officer, but I knew he wasn’t there to bring me the gift of a Stollen and an encouraging word. He wore hair as neat as the lines in a carpenter’s notebook, a black leather coat that creaked like snow under your feet when he moved, and a black hat and black tie that made me uncomfortable.
‘I’ll have the brass handles and the satin lining please,’ I said. ‘And an open casket, I think.’
Sachse’s face looked puzzled.
‘I guess your pay grade doesn’t run to black humour. Just black ties and coats.’
‘You’d be surprised.’ He shrugged. ‘We have our jokes in the Gestapo.’
‘Sure you do. Only they’re called evidence for the People’s Court in Moabit.’
‘I like you Gunther, so you won’t mind if I warn you about making jokes like that. Especially after Stalingrad. These days it’s called “undermining defensive strength” and they cut your head off for it. Last year they beheaded three people a day for making jokes like that.’
‘Haven’t you heard? I’m sick. I’ve got concussion. I can hardly breathe. I’m not myself. If they cut my head off I probably wouldn’t notice anyway. That’s my defence if this comes to court. What is your pay grade anyway, Werner?’
‘A3. Why do you ask?’
‘I was just wondering why a man who makes six hundred marks a week would come all this way to warn me about undermining our defensive strength – assuming such a thing actually exists after Stalingrad.’
‘It was just a friendly warning. In passing. But that’s not why I’m here, Gunther.’
‘I can’t imagine you’re here to confess to a war crime, Werner. Not yet, anyway.’
&n
bsp; ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
‘I wonder how far we could get with that before they cut off both our heads?’
‘Tell me about Franz Meyer.’
‘He’s sick, too.’
‘Yes, I know. I just came from the Jewish Hospital.’
‘How is he?’
Sachse shook his head. ‘Doing really well. He’s in a coma.’
‘You see? I was right. Your pay grade doesn’t run to humour. These days you need to be at least a Kriminalrat before they allow you to make jokes that are actually funny.’
‘The Meyers were under surveillance, did you know that?’
‘No. I wasn’t there long enough to notice. Not with Klara around. She was a real beauty.’
‘Yes, it’s too bad about her, I agree.’ He paused. ‘You were in their apartment, twice. On the Sunday and then the Monday evening.’
‘That’s correct. Hey, I don’t suppose the V-men who were watching the Meyers got killed, too?’
‘No. They’re still alive.’
‘Pity.’
‘But who says they were V-men? This wasn’t an undercover operation. I expect the Meyers knew they were being watched, even if you were too dumb to notice.’
He lit a couple of cigarettes and put one in my mouth.
‘Thanks, Werner.’
‘Look, you big dumb ugly bastard, you might as well know it was me and some of the other lads from the Gestapo who found you and pulled you off that pile of rubble before the chimney came down. It was the Gestapo who saved your life, Gunther. So you see we must have a sense of humour. The sensible thing would probably have been to have left you there to get crushed.’
‘Straight?’
‘Straight.’
‘Then thanks. I owe you one.’
‘That’s what I figured. It’s why I’m here asking about Franz Meyer.’
‘All right. I’m listening. Get your klieg light and switch it on.’
‘Some honest answers. You owe me that much at least.’