by Alex Gerlis
Edgar thought for a moment and shook his head. No idea. ‘A million? I recall it was a lot.’
Viktor smiled. ‘Closer to three million and let me tell you, Edgar, many of them never made it back to Germany: they either froze to death or starved. More brandy, perhaps some cake? Irma!’
There was a pause as Irma served a fruit cake along with coffee. Edgar noticed Viktor following her every move with his eyes and smiling at her affectionately. As she left the room she gently ran her hand over Viktor’s head, letting it rest briefly on his shoulder while he leaned over and kissed it.
‘You didn’t meet Irma in Vienna, did you?’
Edgar shook his head.
‘Irma worked for me in Vienna and I fell in love with her. Her husband was an officer in the Wehrmacht and when he was unexpectedly released by the Americans I had to get her out of Vienna in a hurry. I managed to get her a job in our embassy here. It has worked out well, in more ways than one. She’s been safe in East Berlin. This is her apartment, by the way. I trust her more than I trust myself. She knows everything. Now then, where was I?’
‘You were talking about there being so many German prisoners of war in the Soviet Union.’
‘Yes. The official line was they were all Nazis, but we knew that we had to differentiate between the ordinary conscripts, the Nazi Party members and the war criminals. They all needed to be questioned, we had to find a way of processing them and, frankly, it was an overwhelming task. To do it properly we required fluent German speakers, ones who could be trusted – and I can tell you, the Soviet Union was not exactly awash with them.
‘So my ability to speak German fluently saved me. For the next ten years I ran a unit which went round the camps, interrogating prisoners of war. We began to send back prisoners in large numbers around 1950, but still held on to many tens of thousands after that. The final prisoners of war were not repatriated to Germany until 1956. Stalin died in ’53, so by then I was safe, I had survived the purges.’
It was now quite warm in the apartment, so Viktor removed his jacket and loosened his tie. He filled up his brandy and tipped some of it into his coffee cup, a habit – he explained to Edgar he’d picked up in Spain. There was a further pause as he lit another cigar and savored it for a while, before addressing Edgar from behind the wisps of grey-brown smoke. The Russian bent over and kicked off his shoes before swinging round to lay across the settee, now at an angle to Edgar, the patient to Edgar’s psychiatrist. For a while he said nothing, as he finished his cigar and dropped the lit stub into the coffee cup.
‘Naturally, no German we interrogated admitted to being a war criminal. But I became very good at knowing who was telling the truth and who was lying. I became something of an expert on war crimes. My team and I were sent all over the Soviet Union to interrogate German prisoners. We were sometimes also sent into the countries that had come under our control. In June 1946 I was asked to go to northern Poland, Gdansk.’
‘The Germans called it Danzig, didn’t they?’
‘They did indeed. There was a concentration camp near Gdansk, called Stutthof. For much of the war Stutthof was for non-Jewish Poles, though by the end of 1944 it housed mainly Jewish inmates. According to the Poles, around 100,000 prisoners passed through Stutthof during the war, of whom some 60,000 were murdered. The Red Army liberated the camp on 9th May. I’m going to have some more brandy, Edgar. I think you’re going to need some now.’
Edgar poured large measures for both men, and removed his own jacket.
‘I was called to Gdansk because the Poles had arrested a large number of SS officers and other camp staff from Stutthof, and had just completed the first of a series of war crime trials. One of the SS officers who had been convicted and sentenced to death told the Polish prosecutor something very interesting, which he thought I ought to hear. I met the prosecutor and he arranged for me to meet this officer, whom I interrogated at the main prison in Gdansk. His name was Werner Krüger and he had been a Sturmbannführer, more or less equivalent to a major in the army.
‘Now, as I’ve already said to you Edgar, I was good at knowing who was telling the truth and who was lying. I expect you are too. Well, from the moment I first met him I was convinced Krüger was telling the truth. He had been found guilty of his crimes, and was due to be executed at the beginning of July. He knew he had committed war crimes and he wasn’t trying to squirm out of his sentence, like so many of them, with all that nonsense about only obeying orders. Krüger was no fool, he wasn’t pleading for his life or anything like that. But he told me a terrible story, which is why we’re here today.’
Viktor had hauled himself up in the settee and was now speaking in a quieter, more portentous voice. The atmosphere in the room seemed to have chilled. Edgar noticed Irma standing in the doorway, her head bowed.
‘In late January 1945 some five thousand, or possibly more, Jewish inmates from Stutthof – mainly women – were evacuated. They were being marched north-east, towards Konigsberg – which we now call Kaliningrad. Krüger was the officer in charge. The march was chaotic: some two thousand prisoners died en route, and the Red Army posed a constant threat. According to Krüger, they came to a fishing village on the Baltic coast and found they couldn’t move on. Evidently the overland route was blocked, and it seems there was some confusion and disagreement as to what to do. Krüger told me he had a young officer under his command, by the name of Wilhelm Richter. He was an Untersturmführer, a junior lieutenant. Krüger said this Richter had only been with the SS at Stutthof for a few weeks but had shown himself to be especially vicious and brutal. He’d tortured and murdered many prisoners and was a fanatical Nazi, still convinced they would win the war – which few of them believed by that stage. Krüger said he went into a house in the village to send a message back to Stutthof, to see what they should do, when he heard shooting. When he came out he saw that his men were marching the prisoners into the sea and machine gunning them – on the orders of Richter.
‘He described how he found Richter and asked him what was going on, and how the younger officer called him a Jew-lover and dared him to stop the attack. By the time they had finished, there were hardly any survivors. He described how young Richter waded through the edge of the sea wildly firing his pistol, laughing as he did so.’
‘So he was blaming another officer for the war crime of which he’d been convicted?’
‘Yes, but he was not seeking to exonerate himself. He knew he was guilty. But listen Edgar, I’ve not finished yet. Krüger told me something very strange about Richter. When he’d arrived at Stutthof the month before, Wilhelm Richter reported directly to an Obersturmbannführer Peters – a Lieutenant Colonel, and obviously senior to Krüger.
‘Krüger said it was most unusual for a junior officer to be so close to such a senior officer. However, Krüger and Peters were friends: both men came from Bremen. One night Peters got drunk and confided in Krüger. He told him Richter was on a top secret mission and he – Peters – was responsible for him and it was making him sick with worry. Apparently Peters’ instructions were to ensure Richter was captured by the British or the Americans, because there was a plan for Richter to be part of some future Nazi movement. Richter was supposed to be sent to a unit fighting in the west, and Peters was trying arrange it, but Richter was resisting Peters’ attempts to have him transferred because he was “having too much fun” at Stutthof. Those were the words he used.
‘According to Krüger, after the massacre they all returned to Stutthof. They remained there until the Red Army was a day or so away and then fled. Peters was desperate to get Richter to where the Americans or British were, as per his orders – but they’d only got as far as Poznan when they were caught by the Red Army. All of them were taken back to Gdansk as war criminals but, to everyone’s amazement, Wilhelm Richter – the man responsible for the massacre in the Baltic – managed to persuade the Germans to send him to the Soviet Union as a prisoner of war. Krüger also said Obersturmbannführer Peters
apparently committed suicide just before their capture. According to Krüger he was alone in a shack with Richter when there was a gunshot. Krüger naturally had his doubts as to whether it was suicide.’
‘And his reason for telling you all this… revenge?’
‘I imagine it was, but that’s as valid a reason as any other. Krüger thinks Richter may have persuaded a Red Army officer he was innocent of any war crimes because of his age, he was only eighteen or nineteen. Krüger wanted us – the Soviets – to know the truth because Richter was our prisoner of war. Who knows, maybe Krüger felt passing on the information would give him some peace of mind? I took down everything he said and resolved to investigate it. Krüger was executed at the beginning of July. Just before I left Gdansk, the Polish prosecutor there told me that Richter’s name kept coming up in his investigation: not just from survivors but also from other SS prisoners and kapos. He pleaded with me to try to find him. He was determined to put him on trial.’
The Russian said nothing for a while, as if he had reached the end of his tale. He had an unlit cigar in his hand.
‘And that’s it?’
‘No, no… When I returned to the Soviet Union, I made some enquiries. But, as I told you Edgar, we were overwhelmed. There were millions of prisoners at this stage. I was working ten, twelve hours a day, often seven days a week. I had no time to look for Richter. I forgot about him. And then, three years later – in 1949 – I was called to a camp near Rostov, where a young SS officer was insisting on talking to someone important. His name was Carsten Möller. He was worried about being repatriated to West Germany, because he had heard it was controlled by Nazis. Instead he wanted to be sent here, to the East, which was a most unusual request, I can tell you. He told me a long story, about how he had been part of a group of young SS recruits who all spoke perfect English, and were trained at a remote place near Magdeburg with the aim of then allowing themselves to be captured by the British or Americans. The story rang bells ,of course. It was more or less the same as the one Krüger had told me in Gdansk. After capture, the boys would be brought to England, where they would escape and eventually lead a revived Nazi movement.’
Viktor hauled himself up and slowly walked over to the window. He gently pulled the net curtain aside while standing well to the side of it, a move familiar to Edgar.
‘Möller told me how, a few months earlier, he’d been taken to a special camp near Kazan, the purpose of which was to assess prisoners to see if they could work for the Soviet Union. He was only there for a week or two: he was deemed unsuitable. He said the camp was divided in two. There was an assessment centre, where he was held, and then a training camp, nicknamed the ‘hotel’, for those who’d actually been recruited. One day he caught a glimpse of a group coming out of the hotel, and amongst them spotted one of the other recruits from Magdeburg: Wilhelm Richter. He described him as the most evil person he’d ever known.
‘I would have left it at that, but of course the mention of the recruits and of Richter in particular pricked my conscience. I’d promised the Polish prosecutor I’d look for him, and I never had. So after meeting Möller I started to look for Richter again. I thought that in my position it wouldn’t be hard to find out what had happened to him and where he was. But I was surprised at how difficult it was. I eventually found one file about Wilhelm Richter, but purely by chance – it had been kept in the wrong section, and I came across by chance while looking for another file. According to Richter’s file he’d had an SS rank of Untersturmführer, had been brought to the Soviet Union in June 1945 as a prisoner of war, and was eighteen at the time of his arrest, as Krüger and Möller had both said. The last entry in the file said he’d been sent to a camp near Kazan in 1948, where he was being assessed for “rehabilitation and training”, as they put it, which was a euphemism for working for the Soviet Union.
‘Now, I knew the commandant of that camp, and rang him. He was a friend of mine, but his reaction to my enquiry was not friendly. He told me to drop the case and forget about it. The next thing I knew, I was summoned to Moscow, to the headquarters of the Ministry of Internal Affairs on Zhitnaya Street. Forget what you hear about the Lubyanka, Edgar – worse things happened in much less famous buildings in Moscow. They still do. Anyway, at this meeting I was warned off Wilhelm Richter in no uncertain terms. And I may have gone along with it, had they not made a serious and very telling mistake.’
The Russian lit another cigar. Edgar noticed his hands were shaking. ‘They told me – almost as an afterthought – that Richter was dead. I asked when he’d died, and they said in 1947.’
Viktor jabbed his lit cigar in Edgar’s direction, his face red with anger. ‘The fucking idiots couldn’t even get their story right! I had Möller’s sighting from earlier in 1949, and I’d seen a file that told me that Wilhelm Richter had been in the camp near Kazan in 1948, a year after he was supposed to have died. So, unless it was his ghost…’
‘And since then?’
‘I haven’t finished yet Edgar. I decided to drop it, for the time being at least. I was no fool, it wasn’t worth the risk. I’d intended to resume the search for Wilhelm Richter when it felt safer. The fact that he’d disappeared, and my bosses had lied about him – well, that made him interesting, don’t you agree?
‘A few months after this meeting at the Ministry of Internal Affairs – this would now be 1950, perhaps in the spring – I was back at the camp near Rostov where young Carsten Möller had been held. I was there to see another prisoner but I did ask about Möller, and was told he’d been found dead in an outhouse the previous November, not long after I’d met him. His body had been found hanging from the rafters.’
‘Suicide?’
‘That’s what I assumed, but the commandant said if it was, Möller had managed to do it with his hands tied behind his back. Actually, he’d wondered if I’d been involved somehow.
‘Over the years I did wonder what had become of Richter. Whenever I got the chance I would look through the files, but all trace of him had disappeared, which was most unusual. Even the one file I had originally discovered – showing that he was in Kazan in 1948 – had disappeared when I went back to look for it. After the last German prisoners were sent back in ’56 I had a series of desk jobs: intelligence analysis, training new agents – that kind of thing. I missed being in the field, and it was difficult for me to travel out of the Soviet Union. But it was not all bad. I had a small flat all to myself in Moscow – no shared kitchen or bathroom – and the use of a dacha, and Irma was allowed to travel to Moscow, so I was certainly one of the privileged few. For twenty years, I kept my head down. Gradually life became a bit easier and I was permitted to travel more freely, only within the Eastern bloc of course. Then in 1974 a man I had trained in the ’60s – Yevgeny Yefimovich Mironov – became our deputy station head here in Berlin. The head of station is a fool called Kozlov, and Yevgeny arrived to find things in a mess. He decided to give our intelligence operation in the DDR an overhaul, and he thought I’d be a good person to help him with that.
‘Over the past couple of years I have been based here more or less full time. My main role is ensuring we have good systems in place, though I do also get to review our operations, and study the quality and quantity of the intelligence we’re getting. It’s a bit like the old days, except I’m at a remove from the agents in the field. I do miss that contact, which perhaps explains what happened next. You want some more brandy… no?’
Viktor poured himself a glass and studied it for a while. ‘I began to notice we were getting very high-grade intelligence from West Germany. Truly outstanding material, much of it coming from one source, with the codename “Goalkeeper”. I was intrigued about who “Goalkeeper” was and, frankly, investigating him was far more interesting than coming up with new systems to help Yevgeny. It felt a bit like running an agent again, like the old days. So, more out of curiosity than for any other reason, I started to look into “Goalkeeper” in more detail. Actually, I asked
Irma to look into it for me. Tell him, my dear.’
Irma straightened her skirt with her hands before speaking, quietly, her Viennese accent still noticeable despite her thirty-year absence from the city.
‘I am well-trusted in the Embassy. I have been working there for a long time, and there have never been any questions mark about my loyalty. After all, I had been a Communist in Vienna during the war – hardly any of the Germans working there have credentials as good as that. Nor, for that matter, do many of the Russians.
‘Since the late 1960s I’ve been based in the KGB section of the embassy. I am a senior clerk, I suppose you could say: I look after files and records, and encrypt documents. I have the highest level security clearance for someone of my grade. When Viktor asked me about “Goalkeeper” I tried to find out more, but it became clear this agent really was a top secret source, so any files relating to him would be kept by the most senior German in our department: Reinhard Schäfer. Apparently Schäfer was an ordinary police officer here in Berlin during the war, but had been all the while a secret Communist.’
‘Two months ago,’ said Viktor, patting Irma on the knee, ‘Schäfer was on leave for a week. Until then Irma couldn’t get anywhere near his “Goalkeeper” files. But while he was away his senior clerk was ill, and Irma had to cover for her. This gave her a chance to look for the information we wanted.’