by Heinz Rein
From here on the Adlergestell is cut into the Grünauer Forst, the trees shimmer, shady and rust-red in the bright sun, the mossy ground smells of an awakening spring, but the driver of the dark-green Adler limousine doesn’t notice that. Both his hands grip the steering wheel, his eyes, shaded by the cap pulled low over his forehead, stare fixedly at the dark strip of asphalt ahead of him. A menacing fold is carved deep above his nose, rising above his eyebrows and forming sinister runes among the wrinkles on his brow.
SS Untersturmführer Siering is in a particularly bad mood, a fidgety unease runs through him all the way to his fingertips. He has spent a disagreeable morning, he stood in front of Sturmbannführer Wellenhöfer and delivered his report, but it was a report which, for all its contorted explanations and justifications, could only be articulated in negative terms, and which concluded with an admission that the trail of Adamek alias Wiegand had gone cold. An air-raid warning had kept the surveillance man from doing his job, and Adamek-Wiegand had vanished from his flat the previous evening, neither had he reappeared, so however careful they had been, they had not been careful enough. As everyone knows, there is nothing more annoying than to discover that one’s own cleverness has been outdone by the cleverness of others, that the snare one has delicately set is closing, but only as an empty knot, and the booty one hoped for has slipped away. Sturmbannführer Wellenhöfer listened in silence to the report, his face frozen. When Siering had finished speaking, Wellenhöfer rose to his feet and walked to the window, he looked for a long time at the ruined houses as if he were seeing them for the first time, and ignored Siering, standing stiffly to attention by the desk. Siering has known his boss for long enough to be aware that this is not a good sign. Wellenhöfer is not a man who dwells on things past, whether good or bad, he is capable of forgetting a dozen successes over a single failure, a series of failures over a successful operation. When at last Wellenhöfer turned round, lighting a cigarette without offering one to Siering, he paced up and down a few times, then at last he glanced at Siering, his face contorting into a harsh grimace. ‘Siering, bring me Wiegand!’ Wellenhöfer said no more than that, but in those few words everything had been decided. Siering knows that the Sturmbannführer didn’t say those words casually, even though it sounded that way; he had taken measures, he had put guards on Lebuser Strasse and sentries in the grocers’ shops where Adamek alias Wiegand’s cards were registered, he posted a few people in and around the Karlshorst depot and finally ordered surveillance of Dr Böttcher on Frankfurter Allee, but essentially he expected little from these measures.
For that very reason he is now travelling to Eichwalde, where this man Wiegand’s wife lives, his foot never leaves the accelerator and he stays almost constantly in fourth. It isn’t that he is in a particular hurry to get to Eichwalde, he knows a few hours here or there won’t make any difference, because startled deer don’t leave their lair again straight away. But his furious driving corresponds to his inner state, a person’s essence is not only captured by his handwriting, not chiselled ineradicably in his features, it reveals its unmistakeable and immutable stamp in all his actions. The whole of Siering’s brutality and ruthlessness cannot be understood in a more exemplary fashion than in his way of driving. The constant violation of the rules of the road, the waste of fuel caused by such extreme acceleration, the violent application of the brakes and the reckless crossing of busy junctions are an absolute indicator of his total lack of respect for both lifeless material and living creatures. Siering takes out his fury on any inanimate objects and human vermin which might get in his way. He dashes along the Adlergestell through the Grünauer Forst, engine humming and klaxon sounding constantly, he doesn’t slow down even at intersections or side roads, grimly baring his teeth when a few people are able to escape with their lives only by leaping to the side.
When the first houses of Schmöckwitz appear, Siering slows down and stops at the filling station which marks the road to Eichwalde and Zeuthen. He asks for the town hall, is given directions and puts his foot down again. A few minutes later he turns left off Bahnhofstrasse and stops in front of the town hall. It is a bright, solid building, it doesn’t exactly reveal the artistic hand of an architect, more the clumsy paw of a decent and respectable master who understands his craft.
Here, in room 17 of the town hall in Eichwalde, in the district of Teltow, in the administrative region of Potsdam, sits Police Lieutenant Kiepert, a tall, imposing man with a slightly round face, fair, prematurely greying hair, good manners and a brisk bearing. He is one of the many millions of Germans for whom National Socialism may have become an element of life, but who have still preserved some small private views that do not cohere with National Socialist doctrines, and to which they are devoted partly out of habit and partly out of obstinacy, and who interpret these caveats as individuality.
In these individuals, who blindly carry out all orders and uncompromisingly recognize the authority of the state, conscience has not died out entirely, but to some extent it stirs only outside of office and within extremely narrow circles and it is silenced with the categorical imperative ‘orders are orders’ or ‘the law is the law’, and does not raise the question of whether orders and the law are a human right or a divine commandment. The order which gives the inherited sin of a corrupt tradition equal status to divine commandments relieves the individual of any personal decision-making, it is the regulation that lightens his conscience, at the same time turning him into a mesh in that net that has been stretched with mathematical precision over a people which has always apathetically and obediently allowed both good and evil to roll over it.
Kiepert is one of those people who only joined the National Socialist Party in 1933, and who are, to the casual onlooker, good National Socialists, but who by no means possess the brutal consistency of the old fighters and Party members from before 1933. Neither are they clearly aware that they are far more guilty than those other people, because they are acting for the sake of their lives, their advancement and also their comfort, against their better knowledge and against the voice of conscience. They see themselves as individuals because they have reservations about this or that National Socialist dogma, and have no idea that they are still falling for the horse-trading tricks and have slowly but surely succumbed to the standardization of thought. In the end they really come to believe that Hitler is the man of providence and the Germans are the chosen people, and they abandon their last reservations when war throws up the question of being or not being. Without being aware of it, and perhaps without even wanting it, they are by now so firmly bound up with the Nazi regime that the loss of the war and the collapse of the Party would also mean disaster for their own lives. Thus the Nazis have succeeded once and for all with their conjuring trick of putting their Party and the German people on the same plane and, even though the Second World War prompted no enthusiasm, there is no less inner willingness on the part of the bourgeois and petit-bourgeois parts of the population than in the mass delirium of 1914.
Police Lieutenant Kiepert would be extremely disobliged were one to describe him as a man given to brutality and excess, he might only smile in pitiful disbelief at such an accusation. In general terms, in fact, he is an open and companionable man who leads a harmonious family life and never gets too close to anyone. He is barely aware that he has allowed himself to be degraded to the tool of a tyrannical state, a cruel form of police-enforced justice and a monstrous policy of oppression. If he probes his conscience from time to time, and subjects his behaviour to an inventory, he feels entirely guiltless. Even if he executes the occasional order with inner reluctance, and cannot quite withhold a feeling of compassion for the victim, he still feels no guilt; he frees himself from his own scruples, arguing that if there is any guilt here at all, then it lies in the orders upon which he has no influence, and which it is not within his remit to criticize. Sometimes he also feels rage about those who bring him into a kind of conflict of conscience by virtue of their mere existence.
At any rate, Kiepert believes he is satisfying his conscience by separating his private life entirely from his public activity, by being blameless in one and correct in the other. He has no sense that what he calls fulfilment of duty is nothing but active participation in Nazi crimes, passing through the stages of carelessness, complicity, encouragement and aiding and abetting. To orient his professional activity according to the principles that hold for his private life would be an absurd idea.
Kiepert is the typical product of a citizen of the Third Reich, a synthesis of personal honour, weak character and unconditional compliance to all the demands of the state. It is the schizophrenic character of the normal German citizen, the negation of the unity between social and individual being, and finally the constraint, imposed from above, of a racial consciousness which makes it possible for an entire population of millions of hardworking, order-loving people to be debased into an army of helots, for technology unleashed against the whole of humanity to move with the even mechanism of a robot.
At this quiet time of the afternoon, Kiepert is sitting in his office, the town hall is still, since there are never many visitors after lunch. He flicks through the papers in front of him, trivial and insignificant applications and denunciations. A while later he hears quick footsteps echoing in the corridor, and a moment later the door is flung open. Kiepert is about to hurl a harsh remark at his impetuous visitor, but he leaps quickly to his feet when he glimpses the two SS runes on the collar and the SD lozenge on the right sleeve, and another glance at the three stars on his epaulet identifies the SS man as an Untersturmführer.
‘Heil Hitler!’
‘Heil Hitler!’
The greetings sound like blasts from a trumpet.
‘Untersturmführer Siering from Reich Security Head Office.’
‘Police Lieutenant Kiepert. Please have a seat!’
Kiepert closes his office door while Siering sits down, crosses his legs and disdainfully studies the police lieutenant. Kiepert sits down at his desk again and pretends to put his papers in order, while at the same time thinking very hard about what reason there might be for this undesirable visit by the SD man from the RSHO. Even though he is actually a colleague from a different faculty, he feels uncomfortable. No one likes to have anything to do with the Gestapo, even he, Kiepert, prefers to stay out of their way. All the more so when dealing with such a wild go-getter, who comes charging in without knocking and inspects you with his eyes, whose hard, determined face and cold eyes are a threat in themselves.
In the Third Reich there is no one who has a clear conscience in every respect, and even Police Lieutenant Kiepert has to run through his memory quickly to see whether his own flawlessness might be … Damn it all, did he not speak to the Jew Wiener last week, the only one in the town, and even shake his hand? Did he not warn the foreman at the Ratthöfer sawmill to be a little more humane in his treatment of his workers from the east? Did he not … All trivia, atavistic impulses of human weakness, twitches of a disposition that had not yet quite hardened, forgivable lapses into humanitarian folly, and hence undesirable and forbidden, nothing but trivia, but they can weigh as heavy as deadly sins when seen through the keen lenses of hard-line National Socialists, and brought to light with the probes of the Gestapo.
‘How may I help you?’ Kiepert asks, and struggles to give his voice a harsh and unselfconscious tone.
‘How may I help you? How may I help you?’ Siering tears into the police lieutenant. ‘That is how fishmongers and haggling Jews talk!’
Kiepert is hurt by the Untersturmführer’s outburst and flinches, his face expressing the wounded dignity of the police officer, the police enforcement officer in a town of 6,000 inhabitants. The other man has no right – and hopefully no cause – to talk to him like that, because as a police lieutenant he is on equal ranking with an SS Untersturmführer, but that is of course only true on paper. In fact every SD man, even a simple Sturmmann, is his superior not in terms of rank, but in terms of power. For that reason Kiepert says nothing and chokes back the sharp remark that had been floating on his tongue, particularly since he still doesn’t know why the other man has come.
‘I come on a special mission,’ Siering says and pulls a small, colourful package from his pocket, pinches a cigarette out of its paper wrapping and lights it. Then he sets the pack down on the edge of the desk and leans back and inhales his first few puffs.
Kiepert glances quickly at the pack and tries to read the writing on it. It is a pack of North State Blue. Where did the bastard get those, he thinks, English cigarettes, nowadays, in the sixth year of the war?
Siering has observed his look. ‘We took them from a parachutist,’ he says casually, and breathes the smoke deep into his lungs.
Kiepert still says nothing, in opaque situations he tries to let the others speak first.
‘Damned decent stuff,’ Siering continues and blows smoke out through his nose. ‘So, to the matter at hand. A certain Mrs Wiegand lives in the town.’
Kiepert sighs, his humiliation has fled in an instant, making way for relief that Zeus’s lightning bolt is coming down on someone else, even if that other person is a woman, and a woman whose humanity has often won his reluctant respect.
‘Do you know what this is about?’ Siering asks.
‘Of course,’ Kiepert replies, and closes a side door in his desk, ‘we have often had dealings with her, or primarily with her husband.’ He opens a drawer and takes out a file.
‘I’m not interested in these scribbles,’ Siering says, shaking his head, as the policeman tries to hand him the files, ‘I want to know what measures you have taken so that we can advance this case.’
‘Measures?’ Kiepert is surprised, and holds the file indecisively in his hand. ‘Wiegand had to report to the station every day, but he has been on the run since …’ He opens the file and flicks through it.
‘I know that already!’ Siering roars. ‘I don’t need you to tell me!’
Kiepert is even more startled by this fresh outburst from the Untersturmführer than he was by the first one. He is evidently in an extremely bad mood and unpredictable, he thinks. He was quite peaceful a moment before and now he is raging again, something must have gone belly up for him.
‘We informed Reich Security Head Office at the time that Wiegand was on the run,’ Kiepert says in a thick voice, weighing each word very carefully, ‘and no measures have been imposed by them in the meantime.’
‘No measures imposed! No measures imposed!’ Siering imitates him. ‘Everything has to be imposed on you lot, you have to shove your noses in the shit like a puppy so that you smell something.’
Kiepert swallows that one too and remains outwardly calm, even though a mild fury is rising up inside him. Son of a bitch, he curses inwardly, I could be your father.
Siering finishes his cigarette and immediately lights another from the glowing stub. ‘This Wiegand is a very dangerous fellow,’ he says in a slightly more subdued voice, ‘he’s been living in Berlin ever since his supposed flight, we’d just tracked him down, and then a fat fool of a sentry managed to lose his trail again.’
Kiepert nods. So he’s slipped through your fingers, he thinks. ‘I get it,’ he says, ‘and now you expect that …’
‘Yes, that he’s going to show up in these parts,’ Siering interrupts, ‘but that’s not the real reason why I’ve come here. We had in fact presumed that …’ He breaks off and turns towards the door.
An old man in a long, worn overcoat, high farming boots and a cylindrical black fur hat has come in and is standing in the doorway in a humble and expectant posture.
‘What’s all this?’ Siering roars at him. ‘Why didn’t you knock?’
You don’t need to, Kiepert thinks. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asks.
‘I did knock,’ the old man says in an unmistakeable East German accent and waves his hand apologetically. ‘I assume you gentlemen didn’t hear me.’
‘Get out!’ Siering shouts.
The old man stays awkwardly where he is. ‘I wanted to ask you …’, he begins uncertainly.
‘Get out!’ Siering shouts again. ‘Before I throw you out! Riff-raff,’ he says contemptuously to Kiepert when the door has closed again behind the old man.
Kiepert wants to put in a word for the old man, who arrived in the town a few days ago with a convoy of refugees, but chooses not to. How do individuals like this become so arrogant, he thinks? ‘You were about to tell me the purpose of your presence here,’ he says politely.
Siering lounges with his elbows on the desk. ‘What was I about to say when that old brute came in?’ he asks.
‘You were saying that you’d presumed that …’ Kiepert says, repeating Siering’s interrupted sentence.
‘Right,’ Siering says. ‘Yes, we presumed that Wiegand had run away to Russia, because there wasn’t a trace of him to be found, but now we know that the bastard was in Berlin all along, if not actually here in Eichwalde.’
‘I would rule out the latter,’ Kiepert objects, ‘he’s far too well known here to dare to appear in this neck of the woods, particularly since his neighbour …’
Siering waves a dismissive hand. ‘No matter, it was just a passing remark. What I want to say is this: from May 1941 Wiegand stayed in Berlin under a false name. Do you think it likely that his wife knew nothing about it?’
Kiepert shakes his head. ‘No,’ he has to admit.
‘But the old cow has always disputed that,’ Siering yells. ‘If she’s investigated, and at first that happened often, she never knew anything, she always played stupid, and our colleagues in the investigation service always believed the bitch.’