A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9)

by Philip Kerr

  ‘Germany’s always been unlucky that way,’ I said. ‘With her friends I mean.’

  Ignoring my sarcasm, Von Dohnanyi put his glasses back on his face and continued: ‘Possibly even as soon as August 1941, the Abwehr has been receiving reports of a mass murder of Polish officers that took place in the spring or early summer of 1940. But where this took place was anyone’s guess. Until now, perhaps.

  ‘There’s a signals regiment, the 537th, commanded by a Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Ahrens, stationed in a place called Gnezdovo near Smolensk – I understand from Judge Goldsche that you’ve been to Smolensk, Captain Gunther?’

  ‘Yes sir. I was there in the summer of 1941.’

  He nodded. ‘That’s good. Then you’ll know the sort of country I’m talking about.’

  ‘It’s a dump,’ I said. ‘I can’t see why we thought it worth capturing at all.’

  ‘Er, yes.’ Von Dohnanyi smiled patiently. ‘Apparently Gnezdovo is an area of thick forest to the west of the city, with wolves and other wild animals, and right now, as you might expect, the whole area is under a thick blanket of snow. The 537th is stationed in a castle or villa in the forest that was formerly used by the Russian secret police – the NKVD. They employ a number of Hiwis – Russian POWS like those glaziers in the corridor – and several weeks ago some of those Hiwis reported that a wolf had dug up some human remains in the forest. Having investigated the site for himself, Ahrens reported finding not one but several human bones. The report was passed on to us in the Abwehr and we then set about evaluating this intelligence. A number of possibilities have presented themselves.

  ‘One: that the bones are from a mass grave of political prisoners murdered by the NKVD during the so-called Great Purge of 1937 to 1938 following the first and second Moscow trials. We estimate as many as a million Soviet citizens were killed and that they are buried in mass graves all over an area west of Moscow hundreds of square kilometres in size.

  ‘Two: that the bones are from a mass grave of missing Polish officers. The Soviet government has assured the Polish prime minister in exile, General Sikorski, that all Polish prisoners of war were freed in 1940, after having been transported to Manchuria, and that the Soviets have simply lost track of many of these men because of the war, but it seems clear to our sources in London that the Poles do not believe them. A key factor in the Abwehr’s suspicion that these bones might be those of a Polish officer is the fact that this explanation would fit with previous intelligence reports about Polish officers who were seen at the local railway station in Gnezdovo in May 1940. Remarks made by Foreign Minister Molotov to Von Ribbentrop at the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact in 1939 have always led us to suppose that Stalin has a deep hatred for the Poles that dates from the Soviet defeat in the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–20. Also, his son was killed by Polish partisans in 1939.

  ‘Three: the mass grave is the site of a battle between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. This is perhaps the most unlikely scenario, as the battle of Smolensk took place largely to the south of Smolensk and not the west. Moreover the Wehrmacht took over three hundred thousand Red Army soldiers prisoner, and most of these men remain alive, incarcerated in a camp to the north-east of Smolensk.’

  ‘Or working in the corridor outside,’ I said helpfully.

  ‘Please Gunther,’ said Goldsche. ‘Let him finish.’

  ‘Four: this is perhaps the most politically sensitive of all the possibilities and is also why I have asked you to forbear from taking notes, Captain Gunther.’

  It wasn’t difficult to guess why Von Dohnanyi hesitated to describe the fourth possibility. It was hard to talk about this subject – hard for him and even harder for me, who had first-hand experience of some of these dreadful things that were so ‘politically sensitive’.

  ‘Four is the possibility that this is one of many mass graves in the region full of Jews murdered by the SS,’ I said.

  Von Dohnanyi nodded. ‘The SS is very secretive about these matters,’ he said. ‘But we have information that a special battalion of SS attached to Gottlob Berger’s Group B and commanded by an Obersturmführer by the name of Oskar Dirlewanger was active in the area immediately west of Smolensk during the spring of last year. There are no accurate figures available, but one estimate we have holds Dirlewanger’s single battalion responsible for the murders of at least fourteen thousand people.’

  ‘The last thing we want to do is step on the toes of the SS,’ said Goldsche. ‘Which means this is a matter requiring great confidentiality. Frankly there will be hell to pay if we go around uncovering mass graves of their making.’

  ‘That’s a delicate way of putting it, Judge,’ I said. ‘Since I assume it’s me you want to send down to Smolensk and investigate this, then I’m supposed to make sure that this is the correct mass grave we’re uncovering, is that what you mean?’

  ‘In a nutshell, yes,’ said Goldsche. ‘Right now the ground is frozen hard, so there’s no possibility of digging for more bodies. Not for several weeks. Until then we need to find out all we can. So, if you could spend a couple of days down there. Speak to some of the locals, visit the site, evaluate the situation, and then come back to Berlin and report directly to me. If it is our jurisdiction, then we can organize a full war-crimes inquiry with a proper judge almost immediately.’ He shrugged. ‘But to send a judge at this stage would be too much.’

  ‘Agreed,’ said Von Dohnanyi. ‘It would send the wrong signals. Best to keep things low-key at this stage.’

  ‘Let me check my mental shorthand, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘About just what you want me to do. So as I know, for sure. If this mass grave is full of Jews, then I’m to forget about it. But if it’s full of Polish officers, then it’s the Bureau’s meat. Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘That’s not a very subtle way of putting it,’ said Von Dohnanyi, ‘but yes. That’s exactly what’s required of you, Captain Gunther.’

  For a moment he glanced up at the landscape above Goldsche’s fireplace as if wishing he could have been there instead of a smoky office in Berlin, and I felt a sneer start to gather at the edge of my mouth. The picture was one of those Italian campagnas painted at the end of a summer’s day, when the light is interesting to a painter, and some tiny old men with long beards and wearing togas are standing around a ruined classical landscape and asking themselves who’s going to carry out the necessary building repairs because all the young men are away at the wars. They didn’t have Russian POWs to fix their windows in those Arcadian days.

  My sneer expanded to full contempt for his delicate sensibility.

  ‘Oh, but it won’t be subtle, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘I can promise you that much. Certainly nowhere near as subtle as in that nice picture. Smolensk is no bucolic demi-paradise. It’s a ruin all right, but it’s a ruin because that’s how our tanks and artillery have left it. It’s a ruin that’s full of ugly frightened people who were only just managing to eke out a living when the Wehrmacht turned up demanding to be fed and watered for not much money. Zeus won’t be seducing Io, it’ll be a Fritz trying to rape some poor peasant girl; and in Smolensk the pretty landscape isn’t covered in an amber glow of warm Italian sunlight but a hard permafrost. No, it won’t be subtle. And believe me, there’s nothing subtle about a body that’s been in the ground. It’s surprising how indelicate something like that turns out to be, and how quickly it becomes something very unpleasant indeed. There’s the smell for example. Bodies have a habit of decomposing when they’ve been in the earth for a while.’

  I lit another cigarette and enjoyed their joint discomfort. There was a silence for a long moment. Von Dohnanyi looked nervous about something – more nervous than what he had just told me suggested, perhaps. Or maybe he just wanted to hit me. I get a lot of that.

  ‘But I take your point,’ I added, more helpfully this time, ‘about the SS, I mean. We wouldn’t want to upset them, now would we? And believe me I know what I’m talking about, I’ve done it before, so I’m equally
anxious not to do it again.’

  ‘There is a fifth possibility,’ added Goldsche, ‘which is why I would prefer to have a proper detective on the scene.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘I would like you to make absolutely sure that this whole thing is not some ghastly lie dreamed up by the ministry of propaganda. That this body has not been deliberately planted there to play first us and then the world’s media like a grand piano. Because make no mistake about it, gentlemen, that’s exactly what will happen if this does turn out to be the dwarf’s ring.’

  I nodded. ‘Fair enough. But you’re forgetting a sixth possibility, surely.’

  Von Dohnanyi frowned. ‘And what is that?’

  ‘If this does turn out to be a mass grave, that it’s full of Polish officers that the German army murdered.’

  Von Dohnanyi shook his head. ‘Impossible,’ he said.

  ‘Is it? I don’t see how your second possibility can even exist without the possibility of the sixth one, too.’

  ‘That’s logically true,’ admitted Von Dohnanyi. ‘But the fact remains that the German army does not murder prisoners of war.’

  I grinned. ‘Oh, well that’s all right then. Forgive me for mentioning it, sir.’

  Von Dohnanyi coloured a little. You don’t get a lot of sarcasm in the concert hall or the Imperial Court, and I doubt he’d spoken to a real policeman since 1928 when, like every other aristocrat, he’d applied for a firearm permit so he could shoot wild boar and the odd Bolshevik.

  ‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘this part of Russia has only been in German hands since September 1941. There’s that and the fact that it’s a matter of military record which Poles were prisoners of Germany and which were prisoners of the Soviet Union. This information is already known to the Polish government in London. For that reason alone it should be easy to establish if any of these men were prisoners of the Red Army. Which is why I myself think it’s highly improbable that this could be something manufactured by the ministry of propaganda. Because it would be all too easy to disprove.’

  ‘Perhaps you’re right, Hans,’ admitted the judge.

  ‘I am right,’ insisted Von Dohnanyi. ‘You know I’m right.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said the judge, ‘I want to be sure exactly what we’re dealing with here. And as quickly as possible. So, will you do it, Gunther? Will you go down there and see what you can find out?’

  I had little appetite to see Smolensk again, or for that matter anywhere else in Russia. The whole country filled me with a combination of fear and shame, for there was no doubt that whatever crimes the Red Army had committed in the name of communism, the SS had committed equally heinous ones in the name of Nazism. Probably our crimes were more heinous. Executing enemy officers in uniform was one thing – I had some experience of that myself – but murdering women and children was quite another.

  ‘Yes sir. I’ll go. Of course I’ll go.’

  ‘Good fellow,’ said the judge. ‘As I said already, if there’s even a hint that this is the handiwork of those thugs in the SS, don’t do anything. Get the hell out of Smolensk as quickly as possible, come straight home and pretend you know nothing at all about it.’

  ‘With pleasure.’

  I smiled wryly and shook my head as I wondered what magic mountain top these two men were on. Perhaps you had to be a judge or an aristocrat to look down from the heights and see what was important here – important for Germany. Me, I had more pressing concerns – myself for example. And from where I was sitting the whole business of investigating the mass murder of some Poles looked a lot like one donkey calling another donkey long-ears.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ asked Von Dohnanyi.

  ‘Only that it’s a little difficult for me to see how anyone might think Nazi Germany could ever occupy moral high ground on an issue like this.’

  ‘An investigation and then a white book could prove extremely useful in restoring our reputation for fair play and probity in the eyes of the world,’ said the judge. ‘When all this is over.’

  So that was it. A white book. An evidentiary record that influential and honourable men like Judge Goldsche and Court Official von Dohnanyi could produce from a Foreign Office archive after the war was concluded to show other influential and honourable men from England and America that not all Germans had behaved as badly as the Nazis, or that the Russians had been just as bad as we were, or something similar. I had my doubts about that working out.

  ‘Mark my words,’ said Dohnanyi, ‘if this is what I think it is then it’s just a beginning. We have to start rebuilding our moral fabric somewhere.’

  ‘Tell that to the SS,’ I said.

  CHAPTER 5

  Wednesday, March 10th 1943

  At six a.m. on a bitterly cold Berlin morning I arrived at Tegel airfield to board my flight to Russia. A long journey lay ahead, although only half of the other ten passengers climbing aboard the three-engined Ju52 were actually going as far as Smolensk. Most it seemed were getting off at the end of the first leg of the journey – Berlin to Rastenburg – which was a mere four hours. After that there was a second leg, to Minsk, which took another four hours, before the third leg – two hours – to Smolensk. With stops for refuelling and a pilot change in Minsk, the whole journey to Smolensk was scheduled to take eleven and a half hours, all of which helped explain why it was me being sent down there instead of some fat-arsed judge with a bad back from the Wehrmacht legal department. So I was surprised when I discovered that one of the other dozen or so other passengers arriving on the tarmac in a chauffeur-driven private Mercedes was none other than the fastidious court official from the Abwehr, Hans von Dohnanyi.

  ‘Is this a coincidence?’ I asked cheerfully. ‘Or did you come to see me off?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ He frowned. ‘Oh, I didn’t recognize you. You’re flying to Smolensk, aren’t you, Captain Bernhard?’

  ‘Unless you know something different,’ I said. ‘And my name is Gunther, Captain Bernhard Gunther.’

  ‘Yes, of course. No, as it happens I’m travelling with you on the same plane. I was going to take the train and then changed my mind. But now I’m not so sure I made the right choice.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re between the wall and a fierce dog with that one,’ I said.

  We climbed aboard and took our seats along the corrugated fuselage: it was like sitting inside a workman’s hut.

  ‘Are you getting off at the Wolf’s Lair?’ I asked. ‘Or going all the way to Smolensk?’

  ‘No, I’m going all the way.’ Quickly he added: ‘I have some urgent and unexpected Abwehr business to attend to with Field Marshal von Kluge at his headquarters.’

  ‘Bring a packed lunch, did you?’

  ‘Hmm?’

  I nodded at the parcel he was holding under his arm.

  ‘This? No, it’s not my lunch. It’s a gift for someone. Some Cointreau.’

  ‘Cointreau. Real coffee. Is there nothing beyond your great father’s talents?’

  Von Dohnanyi smiled his thin smile, stretched his thinner neck over his tailored tunic collar. ‘Would you excuse me please, captain.’

  He waved at two staff officers with red stripes on their trousers and then went to sit beside them at the opposite end of the aircraft, just behind the cockpit. Even on a Ju52, people like Von Dohnanyi and the staff officers managed somehow to make their own first class; it wasn’t that the seats were any better up front, just that none of these flamingos really wanted to talk with junior officers like me.

  I lit a cigarette and tried to make myself comfortable. The engines started and the door closed. The co-pilot locked the door and put his hand on one of two beam-mounted machine guns that could be moved up and down the length of the aircraft.

  ‘We’re a crew member short, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘So does anyone know how to use one of these?’

  I looked at my fellow passengers. No one spoke, and I wondered what the point was of transporting any of these men nearer
the front; none of them looked as though they could have worked a door-lock, let alone an MG15.

  ‘I do,’ I said, raising my hand.

  ‘Good,’ said the co-pilot. ‘There’s a one-in-a-hundred chance we’ll run into an RAF Mosquito as we’re flying out of Berlin, so stay on the gun for the next fifteen minutes, eh?’

  ‘By all means,’ I said. ‘But what about in Smolensk?’

  The co-pilot shook his head. ‘The front line is five hundred miles east of Smolensk. That’s too far for Russian fighters.’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ said someone.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ grinned the co-pilot. ‘The cold’ll probably kill you long before then.’

  We took off in the early morning light, and when we were airborne I stood up, slid the window open and poked the MG outside, expectantly. The saddle drum held seventy-five rounds, but my hands were soon so cold I didn’t much fancy our chances of hitting anything with it and was quite relieved when the co-pilot shouted back that I could stand down. I was even more relieved to close the window against the freezing air that was filling the aircraft.

  I sat down, tucked my numb hands under my armpits and tried to go to sleep.

  *

  Four hours later, as we approached Rastenburg, in Eastern Prussia, people turned around in their seats and, looking out of the windows, eagerly tried to catch a glimpse of the leader’s headquarters, nicknamed the Wolf’s Lair.

  ‘You won’t see it,’ said some know-it-all who’d been there before. ‘All of the buildings are camouflaged. If you could see it then so could the fucking RAF.’