by Philip Kerr
Biberstein had a thoughtful-looking face with a broad forehead and a sceptical cast to his mouth. There was something of the serious clown about him - an authority figure and white-faced straight man whose sour, rising diphthongs and way of speaking at someone instead of to them reminded me that before joining the SS and the SD, Biberstein had been a Lutheran minister in some northern peasant town where they didn't seem to mind that their pastor was a long-standing Nazi Party member. Probably they hadn't minded either that he led a murder commando in Russia before being promoted and asked to take charge of the Gestapo in southern Poland. A lot of Lutherans had seen Hitler as Luther's true heir. Maybe he was. I didn't think I'd have liked Luther any more than I ever liked Hitler. Or Biberstein.
'I wouldn't like you to make the same mistake as Otto,' said Biberstein. 'So I'd like to give you some advice. If you can't remember something then really you should just say so. No matter how feeble that might seem or how culpable it might make you look. When you're in any doubt at all, remind the Amis that this all happened almost fifteen years ago and that you really can't remember.'
'Speaking for myself,' said Haensch, 'I have always maintained that any prisoner has the right to silence. This is a legal principle known and respected throughout the civilised world. And especially in the United States of America. I myself was a lawyer in Hirschfelde prior to joining the RSHA, and you can take it from me that there is no court in the Western world that can force a man to give evidence against himself.'
'They managed to convict you, didn't they?' I said.
'I was convicted in error,' insisted the bespectacled Haensch who had a lawyer's slimy face to match his lawyer's slimy manner and even slimier patter. 'Heydrich did not order me to Russia until March 1942, by which time Task Force C had more or less completed its work. Quite simply there were no Jews left to kill. However, all of this is beside the point. As Biberstein says, this happened almost fifteen years ago. And one cannot be asked to remember things that happened then.'
He took off his glasses, cleaned them and added, exasperatedly, 'Besides, it was war. We were fighting for our very survival as a race. Things happen in war that one regrets in peacetime. That's natural. But the Amis weren't exactly saints In wartime, themselves. Ask Peiper. Ask Dietrich. They'll tell you. It wasn't just the SS who shot prisoners, it was the Amis, as well. To say nothing of the systematic mistreatment of the Malmedy prisoners of war that has occurred in this and other prisons.'
Haensch twitched, nervously. His were the kind of chinless, weak features that gave war criminals and mass murderers a bad name. Not that the Amis looked on Haensch with any more disgust than anyone else. That particular distinction was reserved for Sepp Dietrich, Jochen Peiper and the perpetrators of the so-called Malmedy massacre.
'Just remember this,' said Biberstein. 'That we're not without friends on the outside. You certainly should not feel that you are alone. Doctor Rudolf Aschenauer has represented hundreds of old comrades, including Walter Funk, our former economics minister. He is a most ingenious attorney at law. As well as being a former party member he is also a devout Roman Catholic. I'm not sure what your religious affiliations are, Captain Gunther, but it cannot be denied that in this part of the country, the Catholics have the louder voice. The Catholic Bishop of Munich, Johannes Neuhäusler, and the Cardinal of Cologne, Joseph Frings, are active lobbyists on our behalf. But so is the Evangelical Bishop of Bavaria, Hans Meiser. In other words, it might be in your interests to find your Christian faith again, since both churches support the Committee for Church Aid for Prisoners.'
'I myself have had the personal support of the Evangelical Bishop of Württemberg, Theo Wurm,' said Haensch. 'As has our comrade Martin Sandberger. And you needn't worry about paying for a defence. The committee will take care of all your legal team's expenses. The committee even has the backing of a few sympathetic US senators and congressmen.'
'Quite so,' said Biberstein. 'These are men who have been most vocal in their opposition to Jewish-inspired ideas of vengeance.' He turned for a moment and waved his hand dismissively at Landsberg's brick walls. 'Which is all this is, of course. Keeping us here, against all the rules of international law.'
'The important thing is that we all stick together,' said Haensch. 'The last thing we want now is any unnecessary speculation as to what some of us did or did not do. Do you see? That would only complicate matters.'
'In other words, it would be desirable, Captain Gunther, if your statements to the Amis concerned only yourself.'
'Now I get it,' I said, 'and here I was thinking it was really my welfare you were concerned about.'
'Oh, but it is,' said Haensch. 'My dear fellow, it is.'
'You've got a big pile of potatoes in the office of the Parole and Clemency Board,' I said, 'and you don't want anyone like me knocking it over.'
'Naturally we want to get out of here,' said Haensch. 'Some of us have families.'
'It's not just in our interest that we're released soon,' said Biberstein. 'It's in Germany's interest that we draw a line in front of what happened and then move on. Only then, when the last prisoner of war has been released from here and in Russia, can we Germans plan for the future.'
'Not just German interest,' added Haensch. 'It's in American and British interest, too, that good relations are fostered with a fully sovereign German government, so that the real ideological enemy can be effectively opposed.'
'Don't you think we've killed enough Russians?' I asked. 'Stalin's dead. The Korean War is over.'
'No one is talking about killing anyone,' insisted Biberstein. 'But we're still at war with the communists whether you like it or not. A cold war, it's true, but a war nonetheless. Look, I don't know what you did during the war and I don't want to know. None of us do. No one in here talks about anything that happened back then. The important thing is to remember that every man in this prison is agreed on one thing: that none of us is or was criminally responsible for his acts or those of his men because we were all of us following orders. Whatever our personal feelings or misgivings about the odious work we were tasked with, it was a Führer order and it was impossible to disobey. As long as we all stick to that story it's certain we can all of us be out of this place before the decade is out.'
'And hopefully well before that,' added Haensch.
I nodded, which was misleading because it made me look as if I cared what happened to any of them. I nodded because I didn't want any trouble and just because they were convicts was no reason they couldn't give me any. The Amis wouldn't have minded that at all. Unlike the Parole and Clemency Board, most of the MPs in Landsberg were of the opinion that we all deserved to hang; and possibly they were right. But most of the reason I nodded was because I was tired of not being liked by anyone, including myself. That's okay when you can go and put that feeling under several millilitres of alcohol, but the bars in prison are never open, especially when you need a drink the way I needed one now. Life in most prisons would be improved by the ration of a daily tot of liquor, like in the British Royal Navy. That's not a penal theory with which Jeremy Bentham would have agreed, but you can take it to the bank.
Most of all I could have used a drink at night just before I went to bed. Perhaps it was having to talk about and relive the summer of 1941, but while I was in Landsberg, sleep provided little respite from the cares of the world. Often I would awake in the unfocused gloom of my cell and find myself soaked in sweat having dreamed an awful dream. And more often than not it was the same dream. Of earth shifting strangely beneath my feet, turned, not by any unseen animal, but by some darker, subterranean elemental force. And, as I watched closely, I saw the black ground as it shifted again and the blank-eyed head and spiderlike hands of some murdered Lazarus, self-raising from its own corpse gases, appeared on the mysterious surface. Thin and white like a clay pipe, the naked creature lifted its behind, its chest, and, last of all, its skull, moving backwards and unnaturally, the way a collapsed puppet might arrange its various
limbs, until at last it appeared to be kneeling in front of a cloud of smoke which cleared suddenly as it was sucked into the muzzle of the pistol in my steady hand.
* * *
CHAPTER TEN: GERMANY, 1954
It's one of life's little jokes that whenever you think that things can hardly get any worse they usually do.
I must have fallen asleep again, and for a moment I thought it was just another bad dream. I felt several pairs of hands upon me, turning me over onto my stomach and ripping the pyjama jacket off my back; and then I was simultaneously hooded and handcuffed. As the manacles pinched my wrists painfully I cried out, and for this sound I received a punch on the head.
'Quiet,' hissed a voice - an American voice. 'Or you'll get another.'
The hands, which wore rubber gloves, hauled me onto my feet. Someone pulled down my pyjama trousers and I was dragged and then marched out of my cell, along the landing and down the stairs. We went outside briefly and crossed the yard. Doors opened and slammed behind us and after that I quickly lost track of where I was beyond the obvious fact that I was still within the walls of Landsberg. I felt a hand push down on top of my hooded head.
'Sit down,' said a voice.
I sat and that would have been fine except that there was no chair and I heard several loud guffaws as I lay sprawled in pain on the stone-flagged floor.
'Did you think of that one all by yourself?' I said. 'Or did you get the idea from a movie?'
'I told you to shut up.' Someone kicked me in the small of my back, not so hard as to cause any damage but enough to shut me up. 'Speak when spoken to.'
More hands picked me up again and dumped me onto a chair, and this time it was there.
Then I heard lots of footsteps leaving the room and a door closing but not being locked, and I might have supposed myself alone but for the fact that I could smell the smoke from a cigarette. I would have asked for one myself if I thought I could have smoked it with a hood over my head. There was that and the chance I might get kicked or punched again. So I stayed quiet, telling myself that despite their threats this was the opposite of what they wanted. Unless you're going to put a man on a gallows trapdoor and hang him, you hood him for only one reason: to help soften him up and make him talk. The only thing was, I couldn't imagine what they wanted me to say that I hadn't already told them.
Ten minutes passed. Maybe longer, but probably less. Time starts to expand when they take your light away. I closed my eyes. That way it was me in control and not them. Even if they took the hood off now I wouldn't see anything. I took a deep breath and let it out as steadily as I could, trying to get a hold of my fear. Telling myself I'd been in tighter spots. That after the mud of Amiens in 1918 this was easy. There weren't even any shells bursting overhead. I was still wearing four limbs and my balls. A hood was nothing. They wanted me not to see anything, then that was fine with me. I'd lived through black and sightless days before. They don't come much blacker than Amiens. The black day of the German Army, Ludendorff called it, and not without justification. What else do you call it when you're facing a force of four hundred and fifty tanks and thirteen divisions of Anzacs? With more arriving all the time.
I heard a match and caught the smoke of another cigarette. A chain smoker, perhaps? Or someone else? I took a deep breath and tried to get a hold of some smoke in my own lungs. American tobacco, that much was clear from the sweet smell. Probably they put sugar in it the way they put sugar in almost everything - in coffee, in liquor, on fresh fruit. Maybe they put sugar on their wives, too and, if the men were anything to go by, they probably needed a little sweetening.
Not long after my arrival at Landsberg, Hermann Priess, the former commander of the offending SS troop at Malmédy, during the battle of the Bulge, had told me about this kind of rough treatment at the hands of the Americans. Before their trial for the murder of ninety US servicemen, Priess, Peiper and seventy-four other men had been hooded and beaten and forced to sign confessions. The whole incident had caused quite a stink at the International Court of Justice and in the US Senate. Since I hadn't yet been beaten, it was perhaps a little too early to say that the American military was incapable of learning a lesson in human rights but, underneath my hood, I wasn't holding my breath.
'Congratulations, Gunther. That's the longest anyone wearing a hood in here has ever kept his mouth shut.'
The man was speaking German, quite good German, too, but I was sure it wasn't Silverman or Earp.
For the moment I kept my mouth shut. And what was there to say yet? That's the thing about being interrogated: you always know that eventually someone is going to ask you a question.
'I've been reading over the case notes,' said the voice. 'Your case notes. The ones made by Silverman and Earp. By the way, they won't be joining us for the rest of your questioning. They don't approve of the way we do things.'
All the time he was speaking I was tensed for the blow I felt sure was coming. One of the other prisoners told me the Amis had beaten him for a whole hour in Schwabisch Hall in an effort to get him to incriminate Jochen Peiper.
'Relax, Gunther. No one is going to hit you. So long as you cooperate you'll be just fine. The hood's for my protection. Outside of this place it might be awkward for both of us if you ever recognised me. You see, I work for the Central Intelligence Agency.'
'And what about your friend? The other man in here? Does he work for the CIA as well?'
'You've got good ears, Gunther, I'll say that for you,' said the other Ami. 'Maybe that's why you've lived so long.' His German was good, too. 'Yes, I'm also with the CIA.'
'Congratulations. That must make you both very proud.'
'No, no. Congratulations to you, Gunther. Silverman and Earp have cleared you of any criminal wrongdoing.' This was the first voice speaking now. 'They're satisfied that you didn't murder anyone. At least, not by the inflated standard of everyone else who's in here.' He laughed. 'I know, that's not saying much. But there it is. As far as Uncle Sam is concerned, you're not a war criminal.'
'Well, that's a relief, 'I said. 'If it wasn't for these handcuffs I might punch the air.'
'They said you had a smart mouth. And they're not wrong. They're just a little, naive, perhaps. About you, I mean.'
'Over the years,' said the other man, 'you've caused us quite a few problems. Do you know that?'
'I'm pleased to hear it.'
'In Garmisch-Partenkirchen. In Vienna. As a matter of fact, you and I have met before. In the military hospital at the Stiftskaserne?'
'You didn't speak German then,' I said.
'Actually I did. But it suited me to let you and that American army officer, Roy Shields, think otherwise.'
'I remember you. Like it was yesterday.'
'Sure you do.'
'And let's not forget our mutual friend, Jonathan Jacobs.'
'How is he? Dead I hope.'
'No. But he's still adamant you tried to kill him. Apparently he found a box full of anopheles mosquitoes in the back seat of his Buick. Fortunately for him they were all dead of cold.'
'Pity.'
'German winters can be brutal.'
'Not brutal enough, it would seem,' I said. 'Almost ten years after the war, and you're still here.'
'It's a different kind of war now.'
'We're all on the same side.'
'Sure,' I said. 'I know that. But if this is how you treat your friends I'm beginning to see why the Russians went over to the other side.'
'It wouldn't be sensible to get smart with us, Gunther. Not in your position. We don't like wise guys.'
'I always thought that being wise was a useful part of Intelligence.'
'Doing what you're told when you're told is of greater value in our work.'
'You disappoint me.'
"That's of no real consequence beside the fact that you don't disappoint us.'
'I can feel that. I can't feel my hands, but I can feel that. But I should warn you. I might be wearing a hood but I've seen your
cards. You want something from me. And since it can't be my body it must be because you think I possess some information that's important to you. And believe me, it won't sound the same if you've just kicked my teeth in.'
'There are other things we can do to loosen your tongue, besides kicking your teeth in.'
'Sure. And I can do fiction as well as non-fiction. You won't even see the join. Look, the war is over now. I'm more than willing to tell you whatever you want to know. But you'll find I respond a lot better to sugar-bread than to the whip. So how about you take off these hand irons and find me some clothes? You've made your point.'
The two CIA agents were silent for a minute. I imagined one nodding at the other, who was probably shaking his head and mouthing a very clear 'No' like a couple of gossipy old women. Then one of them laughed.
'Did you see this guy bring a case full of samples in here?'
'A regular Fuller Brush man, isn't he?'
'Red Skelton with a bag over his head. Still trying to make a sale.'
'Not buying, huh?' I said. 'Too bad. Maybe I ought to speak to the man of the house.'
'I don't think a bag over his head was enough.'
'It's not too late for a noose. Maybe we should just hand him over to the Ivans and have done with it.'
'Aw, look, he's stopped talking now.'
'Did we get your attention, Red?'
'You don't want brushes,' I said. 'Okay. So why don't you tell me what you do want?'