by Lawton, John
Opposite was a clean, unmarked, vast, eight-storey building. Not a scratch on it. A sign curving around the front read, “Victory Club NAAFI—Other Ranks.”
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Burne-Jones. “It didn’t survive the raids. It wasn’t there. We built this from scratch last year. Ballroom, gym, shop . . . you name it.”
Wilderness stared.
“Ballroom? A bloody ballroom?”
The building all but shone. In a city where people shuffled around in rags, half-starved, picking over the contents of dustbins—a city in which that which was not grey with ash was yellow with vitamin deficiency—where people lived in holes in the ground . . . we had built this?
He said as much to Burne-Jones, and Burne-Jones replied, “Siegerrecht. To the victor the spoils.”
§71
In the middle of the day, the club was largely empty. They took deep bucket chairs and a low table in a bar that would not have looked out of place on the Queen Mary. In fact, everything about the Victory Club reminded Wilderness of an ocean liner. He’d never seen one, inside or out, but just the same . . .
Never one to rush anything, Burne-Jones continued his lecture while they were served coffee, but with the first sip said, “How many Germans were Nazis, would you say?”
“All of them,” said Wilderness knowing that Burne-Jones was inviting the obviously wrong answer.
“We reckon about twelve million.”
“Why so sure?”
“Because party records survived the war intact. They were at a paper mill in Munich waiting to be pulped when the Americans arrived.”
“That’s . . . incredible.”
“Nonetheless it happened. So now almost every German has had to fill in one of these.”
Burne-Jones slid a thin sheaf of papers across the table to him, four pages bound by red string with shiny metal tags through punched holes at the top left-hand corner.
Wilderness leafed through it. Four pages, two columns, questions in two languages.
“We call it the Personnel Questionnaire. The Germans just call it Fragebogen—‘Questions.’ One hundred and thirty-one in all, and how they answer determines what category they get bunged into and whether they get one of these.”
Another sheet of paper slid across the table. Small and yellowing, the sort of thing you’d fold up in your wallet next to your identity card, a smudged blue number stamped into one corner, an unreadable signature in another.
“This is an Entlastungsschein. They call it a ‘Persilschein.’”
“What, like the washing powder?”
“Exactly. It washes whiter than white. It’s official exoneration. You have one of these and you can prove to any employer, any copper, or any nosy parker that you’re not considered an enemy or a threat. I’d go so far as to say it’s the most valuable document in Germany . . . until we find Adolf’s will or Eva’s love letters.”
Wilderness flicked through the questions.
“Were you a member of the Korps der Politischen Leiter? Were you a Jugendwalter? What the fuck is a Jugendwalter?”
“Hitler youth leader. In all likelihood a teenager good at ordering smaller teenagers around.”
“All sources of income since 1933? . . . and they answer this lot?”
“Indeed they do. They all want their Persilschein. As you might expect there’s a fair trade in fake Persilschein, but that’s not our problem. Our problem lies with the ones we’ve been asked to re-examine.”
At last, the rat Wilderness had been sniffing since breakfast.
“That’s why you got me here?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“One million three hundred thousand, give or take.”
“You couldn’t just send me back to square-bashing and jankers?”
“Very funny, Holderness. Stop sneering and let me put you in the not-so-pretty picture. In the first few weeks after the war, things got a bit gung ho. The French wanted vengeance. There were a few, shall I say, incidents that won’t ever make the papers. The Americans, strangely, also seemed to hate the Germans more than we ever did. The result was chaotic . . . and answers to this form, matched against party records, led to a hell of a lot of minor Nazis—Muss-Nazis—being dismissed from public life, kicked out of their jobs, denied their Persilschein. Madness. After all we knew full well that some jobs under the Reich couldn’t be held down without joining the damn party and every boy and every girl in Germany were, theoretically, enrolled in the various branches of Hitler Youth with neither consent nor responsibility. Interpreted too rigorously the Fragebogen became a rubber stamp for the joke you cracked a few minutes ago. Everyone, absolutely everyone, was a Nazi. I say again, chaos. To give you just one example: eighty per cent of all schoolteachers in the American Zone got the sack. Extrapolate that to public life as a whole and you can guess what happened, the civic structure just caved in. Nothing got organised because there was no one there to organise it. Germans were starving, most lived off rations not much better than a prisoner got in Belsen. Now, odds are, Germany was going to starve anyway. But it’s undeniable that the mess we created made it worse. So what happened next? Uncle Sam puts the machine into reverse. Revises its classification system and starts actively hiring ex-Nazis. But, there’s more to it than that . . . for years, perhaps since the first doodlebug landed on London, they . . . I think I mean we . . . the Allies . . . have wanted to get our hands on the blokes who designed V-1s and V-2s. Mostly this was done in the American Zone at Peenemünde, Nordhausen, and Dora. And no one really gave a toss whether these blokes were Nazis or not. Personally, I think that’s a mistake. If they weren’t party members, they still had a lot to answer for. Dora was a concentration camp manned by slave labour, they worked people to death. But it was pretty obvious no one was going to ask Werner von Braun about dead slaves. We collared our share. Shipped a dozen boffins back to Cambridge. The Russians indulged in an unholy scramble that included kidnapping people off the streets . . . but above all the Americans wanted their rocket boys. They have most now, but not all.”
Burne-Jones looked around for something, reached for a roneoed, smudgy menu off the next table—egg and chips, saveloy and chips, peas and chips, chips with everything—and turned it over. A rough map of Europe sprang from the tip of his pencil. A shapeless blob for Ireland, a blob with proboscises for England, a square for Spain, a boot for Italy.
“We know that a lot of Nazis have escaped Germany in the last eighteen months.”
He scribbled arrows down through Italy, across the South of France and into Spain and Portugal.
“There are fairly obvious escape routes. Most, we reckon went south. Most ended up in Lisbon, a city where nobody asks too many questions, and from there to Brazil or Argentina. A five-bob postal order and a Mars bar to the man who spots Martin Bormann or Adolf Eichmann. But, supposing some clever bastard went north?”
A long, thick black arrow was scribbled in, like an imaginary, unswerving autobahn from Stuttgart to Hamburg.
“You could lose yourself in the British Zone, but getting a ship out to anywhere would not be easy.”
“So you think some of these boffins are hiding out in Hamburg.”
“I don’t know. But the Americans are insistent that we look.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who? Who are we looking for?”
“Don’t know that either.”
“So we’re searching for people who might not exist, might not be here, and we don’t know what they look like?”
“That about sums it up. But if they’re here . . .” He picked up the Fragebogen. “They’ve filled in one of these, and they’ve lied. That’s where you come in. Read them through, look for the loopholes that tell you they’re lying.”
“One million three hundred thousand!”
“Of course not. Just Hamburg, and just the ones we’re sceptical about. A few hundred at most.”
W
ilderness scanned the pages again.
“Who interviews these people in the first place?”
“Straight to the heart as usual . . . yeeees, that’s our problem really. Fluent German speakers, of course . . . many of them former refugees themselves . . . but few of them regular soldiers . . . in fact I’ve not yet met one who saw combat. They tend to be older men, men who were in Civvy Street much of the war.”
“And?”
“And they can be next to useless. On the one hand all the pent-up hatred of chocolate soldiers, Blimps who watched the war from an insurance office in Guildford, on the other Mr. Chips, soft old prep-school Latin masters who think a smack on the wrist and forgive and forget will fix anything and anyone. Even a Nazi. Not a lot in between in my experience.
“We’re re-interviewing. You’ll be working with a Pioneer Corps chap, Captain Yateman.”
The rat loomed larger.
“Twat, is he?”
“Don’t spare the qualifiers, Holderness. He’s a fucking twat, to use your habitual phrase.”
“If he’s so sodding useless, why don’t you replace him?”
“Because I didn’t appoint him. I don’t get to appoint the denazification team. I get to appoint the intelligence officer attached to the denazification team. In this case, you.”
“Me? Leading Aircraftman Holderness?”
“Yes.”
“Then why not make me an officer? How easy is it going to be if I have to contradict an army captain with nothing but an LAC’s rank to stand on?”
“You’d hate it. You’d absolutely hate being an officer. You’ve risen to LAC. Accept that promotion and be content for the time being.”
“Hate it? Give me a half a bloody chance. I’d have been LAC nine months ago if I hadn’t gone to Cambridge.”
“If you hadn’t gone to Cambridge you’d be in a military prison. Where were you when I found you?”
Wilderness said nothing and stared at him. Anger was a waste of time.
“Where were you?”
“In the glasshouse.”
“Quite. In the glasshouse on a charge sheet as long as your arm. Be grateful for small mercies, Joe. Being an LAC is a small mercy. Not being in prison is a big, fat, Technicolor mercy.”
Wilderness said softly, “Sergeant would be good, even corporal, much as I hate corporals.”
“And you’d hate them even more if you were one. Think how happy you’d be in the NCO’s mess surrounded by them. Stick with this, Joe. We’ll talk about promotion in a month or two.”
Wilderness did not believe this. They might never discuss his promotion again.
“OK. Let’s get back to the real question. If Yateman fucks up how do I overrule him with no pips and no scrambled egg?”
“Trust me. You’ll have that authority. You can investigate anyone you think fit, whatever the good captain says. He might rant, he might have steam coming out of his ears and arsehole . . . you just refer him to me.”
§72
This called for a little privacy. Back at the Atlantic. Up in Burne-Jones’s suite. They awaited a man Burne-Jones referred to as the armourer, whom he greeted as Major Weatherill. About Burne-Jones’s age, and in the same Guards regiment.
“Standard procedure. You’re part of the occupying force. You have to carry a gun. King’s regs and all that. You’re lucky. I can give you a pistol. There are plenty of chaps nipping out for a swift stein of lager lugging Bren guns with them. Now, would you kindly remove your blouse, LAC Holderness.”
Wilderness obeyed silently. Somewhat awed by the man’s apparent indifference to his lack of rank. He did not give orders; he made requests. It was like being at the tailor’s. A gentleman was a gentleman—a bloke whose cheques didn’t bounce.
Wilderness held up his arms as Weatherill fitted a shoulder holster under his left armpit.
“Comfortable?”
“Fine.”
When did officers ever care about your comfort?
“Good. Try this.”
Weatherill upended his satchel and took out three automatic pistols.
“The Colt .45.”
It was big and felt like a log inside the holster.
“It’s won’t be easy to get at under my blouse.”
“The point is to have it,” said Burne-Jones. “Not to get at it. Or did you see yourself having to outdraw Wyatt Earp? You can have a button-flap waist holster if you insist but you’ll look like a military policeman.”
“Hmm . . .” said Weatherill, ignoring Burne-Jones. “Perhaps not the Colt.”
Wilderness could almost hear him saying “perhaps something in dark blue.”
He handed the Colt back, wondering at what point he should speak up, and thinking now might not be the moment.
“Try this. Beretta .22.”
It was like a toy, vanishing down the mousehole of his holster, all but weightless.
“No. Not that either. Never really cared for the .22. More of a lady’s gun, alright in a handbag but . . . but . . . we still have the Sauer 38H. Point 32, takes standard 7.65mm ammunition, and God knows Germany is awash with that. We confiscated about twenty-five thousand of these off Jerry. Does the job. And the German coppers seem to like it.”
Wilderness slipped it into the holster, decided he liked the feel of it, hefted the weight of it in his hand. Took a look at it. Small, smaller than his own hand, only about six inches long, black with an elaborate S stamped into the grip.
“Of course some of them have red swastikas inset. We tend not to give those out. Some chaps would simply sell them to souvenir hunters after all. Now, you happy with that?”
“Perfectly, sir. There is just one thing.”
“Yeees?”
“I’ve never fired a gun in my life.”
Burne-Jones looked up from the newspaper he’d been reading.
“What? What? It’s part of basic training.”
“Where was I when you found me? I hadn’t got as far as weapons training when they bunged me in the glasshouse for the last time. The most I’ve done is swing a broom handle around and attempt to slope arms with it.”
“Bugger,” said Burne-Jones.
“Bugger indeed,” said Weatherill. “It might be best if you didn’t try and shoot anyone. At least not just yet.”
§73
After a month Wilderness had come to look forward to his meetings with Major Weatherill.
He spent his days in a clumsily refurbished office, seized from the Hamburg Port Authority, overlooking Planten un Blomen Park. They consisted of repetitive sessions with Captain Yateman.
The first session had not gone well.
“Intelligence Officer? You’re an enlisted man!”
“The English language is prone to creating confusions, sir.”
Burne-Jones had been emphatic about the “sirs.” And when talking to a short, stout, ruddy man who had spent most of the war behind a desk at the Hatfield branch of the Herts and Cambridge Allied Assurance Society, it was as well to P the ps and Q the qs. Yateman puffed up like a bantam cock, and stood on enough dignity to provide a solid footing for the Empire State Building. He sat behind a desk here too—complete with in-tray and out-tray, although there was never anything in either as Wilderness held the files, and Wilderness concluded that the captain could not bear to be parted from them, the symbols of his authority . . . his crook and mitre . . . his helmet and truncheon . . . his inkwell and quill. He’d probably brought them with him from England.
They interviewed Germans together. Tedious beyond belief, and on Burne-Jones’s advice Wilderness intervened only when necessary and as yet necessity had not arisen.
Alle Ihre Dienstverhältnisse seit 1. Januar 1930 bis zum
heutigen Tage sind anzugeben.
And once they had reached that at the top of page three, Wilderness would be listening for what seemed like hours to every job the bloke had ever had and every pfennig he’d ever pocketed.
Some of them were lying, perhaps mor
e out of fear of the tax man than the English man, but it struck Wilderness as trivial. Anyone who lied about their party membership was caught as easily as swatting a fly. They checked against party records. And most who tried that lie had been caught at the first examination not the second.
Yateman’s failing, Wilderness concluded, was that he favoured the Muss-Nazi for no better reason than that they tended to be of the same class—searching for a word that bridged the two languages, he coined “burger.” Roger Yateman was a “burger.” The sort of man who was a Rotarian and a pillar of the Chamber of Commerce, who gave generously to selected charities and who despised the poor as feckless and lazy, and who despised the rich as feckless and lazy. The sort of man who had no politics, so he joined the Conservative Party—the sort of man who had no faith, so he joined the Church of England. A “burger.” Most of the selfish, prim, morally vacuous sods arraigned before them were “burgers.” Solid citizens of a bourgeois world that had dissolved around them. Men with no real conviction but enough savvy to have bent to the political wind, and not to have much troubled their consciences these last thirteen years. They too might have been insurance office managers in Hertfordshire. Wilderness agreed with Burne-Jones—the Muss-Nazis probably no longer mattered. Yateman no longer mattered, except in his capacity to fuck up.
A von or a zu affixed to a German surname could drive the man apoplectic. Nazi or anti-Nazi, they seemed to bring out in him a scarcely veiled counter-snobbery.
Again Wilderness did not intervene, any more than he did with the burgers, confining himself to “this way, follow me,” “thank you,” and “good luck.” Whether he intervened or not would depend on what he did with his nights—reading through pile upon pile of Fragebogen looking for Burne-Jones’s rocket scientists. And thus far not finding them. The rest, the underwhelming majority of the culpable, the innocent, and indifferent were of no concern. “In denial,” Burne-Jones had said. Germany was a land of ostriches. And heads buried in the sand could bleedin’ well stay in the sand.
But . . . two mornings a week he and Weatherill drove out to the far east of Hamburg, past fragile suburbs, to abandoned farms, and an empty silage pit lined with sandbags. There he learnt how to shoot.