A Man Without Breath (19 page)

‘You know, that’s quite an audacious idea.’

‘And we should try to make sure that anyone from the government or the National Socialist Party, but especially the SS and the SD, has as little to do with the investigation as possible.’

‘This is interesting. How do you mean?’

‘We could put the whole investigation under the control of the International Red Cross. Better still, under the control of the Polish Red Cross, if they’ll wear it. We could even arrange for a few journalists to accompany the commission to Smolensk. From the neutral countries – Sweden and Switzerland. And perhaps some senior Allied prisoners of war – a few British and American generals, if we have any. To use as witnesses. We could put them under parole and let them have free access to the site.’ I shrugged. ‘When I was a cop handling a murder inquiry, you had to let the press in on things. When you didn’t they’d think you were trying to hide something. And that’s especially true here.’

Goebbels was nodding. ‘I like this idea,’ he said. ‘I like it very much. We can take pictures and shoot newsreel like it’s a proper news story. And we could also let the neutral country journalists go where they want, speak to whoever they want. Everything in the open. Yes, that’s excellent.’

‘The Gestapo will hate that, of course. But that’s good, too. The press and the experts will see it and draw their own conclusions: that there are no secrets in Smolensk. At least there are no German secrets.’

‘You leave the Gestapo to me,’ said Goebbels. ‘I can handle those bastards.’

‘There is one argument against it, however,’ I said. ‘And it’s a pretty damned important one.’

‘And what is that?’

‘I should think that anyone in Germany who is related to one of our men taken prisoner at Stalingrad would find it profoundly worrying to be reminded of what the Reds are capable of. I mean there’s no telling that our boys haven’t met or will meet the same fate as those Polish officers.’

‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘And it’s a terrible thought. But if they’re dead, they’re dead, and there’s nothing we can do about that. On the other hand, if they’re still alive I tend to think that shining a light on this particular crime might actually help to keep them that way. After all, the Russians are certain to deny responsibility for these poor Poles, and it would hardly support their argument if they were unable to show the world that their German POWs are alive.’

I nodded. Joey could be pretty persuasive. But he hadn’t finished with me yet. In fact, he’d hardly even started.

‘You know, it’s right what you said – about lawyers. I’ve never liked them very much. Most people think I’m a lawyer myself, because of my Ph.D. But my doctoral thesis at Heidelberg University was about a romantic playwright called Wilhelm von Schütz. He was the first to translate Casanova’s memoirs into German.’

For a moment I wondered if this might be why Joey was such a womanizer.

‘I even wrote a novel, you know. I was a very open, Renaissance sort of fellow. After that, I was a journalist and I gained a real respect for policemen.’

I let that one go. During the Weimar Republic, my old boss at Kripo, Bernhard Weiss, had been a frequent target of the Nazi newspapers because he was a Jew, and at one time Weiss had even sued Goebbels for libel and won. But when the Nazis took power, Weiss had been obliged to flee for his life to Czechoslovakia, and then England.

‘And of course two of my favourite movies are about the Berlin police:
M
and
The Testament of Doctor Mabuse
. Subversive and hardly conducive to the public good, but really quite brilliant, too.’

I had the vague memory that the Nazis had banned
Mabuse
,
but I couldn’t remember for sure. When the minister of propaganda is interested in your opinion it tends to affect your concentration.

‘So, I agree with you one hundred per cent,’ he said. ‘A policeman is what this investigation needs most. Someone who’s in charge but not obviously in charge, if you know what I mean. It could even be someone authorized by this ministry to do everything, from securing the area – after all, there might be some Russian saboteurs down there who’d like to conceal the truth from the world – to ensuring the full cooperation of those damned flamingos at Army Group Centre. They won’t like this any more than the Gestapo. Von Kluge and Von Tresckow. Believe me, I’ve had to put up with that kind of snobbery all my life.’

This sounded worryingly like my own opinion.

Goebbels took out a cigarette case and quickly lit a cigarette, warming to his own train of thought. I had a horrible feeling that he was measuring me up for the job he was starting to describe.

‘And of course it will have to be someone who can make sure that there is no wasted time. Perhaps you’re right about that, too. About Stalin’s maths. And think about it, Captain Gunther. Think about the sheer diplomatic and logistical nightmare of making sure that all those foreigners and journalists are allowed to do their jobs without interference. Think about the overwhelming need for there to be one man behind the scenes, making sure that everything runs smoothly. Yes, I do ask you to think about that, please. You’ve been there. You know what’s what. In short, what this investigation needs is a man to manage the site and the situation. Yes, it’s obvious to me that his investigation needs
you
, Captain Gunther.’

I started to disagree, but Goebbels was already waving away my objections with the back of his hand.

‘Yes, yes, I know you said you didn’t want to return to Smolensk, and I can’t blame you for that. Frankly, I can’t think of anything worse than being away from Berlin. Especially when it’s a dump like Smolensk. But I’m appealing to you, captain. Your country needs you. Germany is asking you to help clear her name of this bestial deed. If like me you want the truth about this awful crime to be laid at the door of the Bolshevik barbarians who carried it out, then you’ll accept this task.’

‘I don’t know what to say, sir. I mean it’s flattering, of course. But I’m not at all diplomatic.’

‘Yes, I’d noticed that already.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘If you do this service for me you will not find me ungrateful. You’ll soon find that I’m a good person to have on your side, captain. And I’ve a long memory, as you already know.’ He started to wag his finger at me in the same way I’d seen him do on the newsreels. ‘Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but I never forget my friends.’

There was of course an opposite side to this coin, though Goebbels was too clever to draw it to my attention right away, not while he was still trying to seduce me. On the whole I prefer to do the seducing myself, but it was increasingly clear to me that there wasn’t going to be room for me to refuse a man who only had to pick up the telephone again and instead of ordering coffee instruct one of his lackeys to have the Gestapo turn up at the door on Wilhelmplatz to give me a lift to Prinz Albrechtstrasse. So I listened, and after a while I started to nod my compliance, and when he asked me straight out, yes or no, if I would take the job, I said I would.

He smiled and nodded his appreciation. ‘Good, good. I
appreciate it. Look, I’ve not made that journey myself but I know it’s a brutal one, so I’ll have my own plane fly you down there. Shall we say tomorrow? You can have whatever you need.’

‘Yes, Herr Reich minister.’

‘I’ll speak to Von Kluge himself and make sure you have his full cooperation as well as the best accommodation that’s available. And of course I’ll draw up some letters patent explaining your powers as my plenipotentiary.’

I didn’t much like the idea of representing Goebbels in Smolensk. It was one thing taking charge of the Katyn Wood investigation and an international commission; but I hardly wanted soldiers looking at me and seeing the cut-out of a man with a club foot and a sharp line in suits and phrase-making.

‘These things have a habit of not remaining secret for very long,’ I said, carefully. ‘Especially in the field. For form’s sake it would be best if the powers granted to me in your letter made it quite clear that I am acting as a member of the War Crimes Bureau and not the ministry of propaganda. It wouldn’t look good if one of those journalists or perhaps someone from the International Red Cross gained the impression that we were trying to stage-manage the situation. That would discredit everything.’

‘Yes, yes, you’re right, of course. For the same reason you had better go down there wearing a different uniform. An army uniform, perhaps. It’s best we keep the SS and the SD as far away from the scene as possible.’

‘That most of all, sir.’

He stood up and ushered me to the door of his office.

‘While you’re down there I shall expect regular reports on the teletype. And don’t worry about Judge Goldsche, I shall
telephone him immediately and explain the situation. I shall simply say that all of this was my idea, not yours. Which of course he’ll believe.’ He grinned. ‘I flatter myself that I can be very persuasive.’

He opened the door and walked me down the magnificent staircase so quickly I hardly noticed the limp, which was, I suppose, the general idea.

‘For a while after your time in Kripo you were a private detective, weren’t you?’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘When you get back we’ll talk again. About another service you might be able to do for me this summer. And which you’ll certainly find is considerably to your advantage.’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’

The sun was shining, and as I walked out of the ministry onto Wilhelmplatz it seemed to me that my own shadow had more substance and character than I did, as if the body occluding the light behind it had been cursed into spineless insignificance by some evil troll, and for no good reason I stopped and spat onto the black contour as if I had been spitting onto my own body. It didn’t make me feel any better. In lieu of bending my own ear with accusations of cowardice and craven cooperation with a man and a government I loathed, it was nothing more – or less – than an expression of the dislike I now felt for my own person. Sure, I told myself, I had said yes to Goebbels because I wanted to do something to help restore Germany’s reputation abroad, but I knew this was only partly true. Mostly I agreed with the diabolic doctor because I was afraid of him. Fear. It’s a problem I often have with the Nazis. It’s a problem every German has with the Nazis. At least those Germans who are still alive.

Friday, March 26th 1943

The spring thaw in Smolensk still looked to be a long way off. A fresh layer of snow covered the broken cobbles and twisted tramlines of Gefängnisstrasse, a fairly typical-looking street in the south of the city – typical only by the standards of the Spanish Peninsular War that is: in Smolensk there were times when I found myself looking around for Goya and his sketchbook. In the turret of a burnt-out tank on the corner of Friedhofstrasse was the blackened corpse of a dead Ivan made more macabre by the sign in German he was holding in a skeletal hand directing traffic north, to Commandant’s Square. A horse was dragging a sled laden with an impossible quantity of logs while its one-armed owner, swaddled in quilted rags and with a length of string for a belt, walked slowly alongside smoking a pungent pipe. A babushka wearing several headscarves had set up a stall by the prison door and was selling kittens and puppies, but not as pets; on her feet were waterproof shoes made from old car tyres. Beside her, a bearded man was carrying a yoke with a pail of milk on each end and holding a tin mug in his hand; I bought a mugful and drank the best milk I’d tasted in a long time
– cold and delicious. The man himself looked just like Tolstoy – even the dogs in Smolensk looked like Tolstoy.

‘Jews are your eternal enemies!’ proclaimed the poster on the noticeboard by the front door of the prison. ‘Stalin and Jews belong to the same gang of criminals’.

As if to make sure you understood the message there was a large drawing of a Jew’s head against the background of a star of David. The Jew was winking in a sly, dishonest way and, as if to remind everyone that this race was not to be trusted, the poster listed the names of thirty or forty Jews who had been convicted of various offences. Their fates were not mentioned, but you didn’t need to be Hanussen the clairvoyant to divine what this would have been: in Smolensk there was only one punishment for anything if you were a Russian.

The prison was an assemblage of five ancient buildings from the time of the Tsars, all grouped around a central courtyard, although two were little better than ruins. The high brick wall of the courtyard had a large shell-hole in it that had been covered with a screen of barbed wire and the whole area was observed by a guard in a watchtower with a machine gun and a searchlight. As I crossed the courtyard and headed into the main prison building, I heard the sound of a woman weeping. And if all of that wasn’t depressing enough, there was the simple window-frame gallows they were erecting in the prison yard. It wasn’t tall enough to guarantee the mercy of a broken neck, and whoever the gallows was meant for faced death by strangulation, which is about as depressing as it gets.

In spite of the hole in the prison-yard wall, security was tight: once you were through the hellish main door there was a floor-to-ceiling turnstile to negotiate and then a couple
of steel doors that, when they closed behind you, made you think you were Doctor Faustus. I shivered a little just to be in the place, especially when a tall, skinny guard walked me down a circular flight of iron stairs into the depths of the prison and along a beige-tiled corridor that smelt strongly of misery, which, as anyone will tell you, is a subtle mixture of hope, despair, rancid cooking fat and men’s piss.

I was visiting the local prison to take the witness statements of two German NCOs accused of rape and murder. They were both from a division of panzer grenadiers: the Third. I met the two NCOs one after the other in a cage with a table and two chairs and a bare light bulb. The floor was covered in a grit or sand that cracked under my shoes like spilled sugar.