Field Gray (5 page)

GERMANY, 1954

I
’d been in Landsberg before, but only as a visitor. Before the war, lots of people visited Landsberg Prison to see cell number seven, where Adolf Hitler was imprisoned in 1923 following the failed Beer Hall Putsch, and where he had written
Mein Kampf
; but I certainly wasn’t one of those. I never liked biographies very much. My own previous visit had occurred in 1949 when, as a private detective working for a client in Munich, I’d gone there to interview an SS officer and convicted war criminal by the name of Fritz Gebauer.

The Americans ran the prison and there were more convicted Nazi war criminals locked up there than anywhere else in Europe. Two or three hundred had been executed on the prison gallows between 1946 and 1951, and since then, a great many more had been released, but the place still housed some of the biggest mass murderers in history. Of these, I was well acquainted with several, although I avoided most of them during the times when we prisoners were allowed freely to associate. There were even a few Japanese prisoners from the Shanghai war crimes trial, but we had little or no contact with them.

The castle was from 1910 and, unlike the rest of the historic old town, was west of the River Lech: Four white brick-built blocks were arranged in a cross shape at the center of which was a tower from which location our steel-helmeted iron-faced guards could swing their white batons like Fred Astaire and watch us.

I remembered once receiving a postcard of Hitler’s cell and I had the impression that my own was not dissimilar: There was a narrow iron bedstead with a small nightstand, a bedside light, a table, and a chair; and there was a big double window with more bars on the outside than on a lion tamer’s cage. I had a cell facing southwest, and that meant I had the sun in my cell during the afternoon and evening and a pleasant view of Spöttingen Cemetery, where several of the men hanged at WCPN1—which was what the Americans called it—were now interred. This made a nice change from my view of New York Bay and Lower Manhattan. The dead make quieter neighbors than waste-cargo barges.

The food was good, although not recognizably German. And I didn’t much like the clothes we were obliged to wear. Gray and purple stripes never suited me very well; and the little white hat lacked the all-important wide snap brim I’d always preferred and made me look like an organ-grinder’s monkey.

Soon after my arrival I had a visit from the Roman Catholic chaplain, Father Morgenweis: Herr Dr. Glawik, who was a lawyer appointed by the Bavarian Ministry of Justice; and a man from the Association for the Welfare of German Prisoners whose name I don’t recall. Most Bavarians, and quite a few Germans, too, regarded all of the inmates at WCPN1 as political prisoners. The U.S. Army saw things differently, of course, and it wasn’t very long before I was also visited by two American lawyers from Nuremberg. With their strongly accented German and their bullshit bonhomie, these two were patient and very, very persistent; and it was only a relief in part that they seemed hardly interested in the two Vienna murders—which had nothing to do with me—and not at all interested in the killings of two Israeli assassins at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, of which I was undeniably guilty, albeit in self-defense. What they
were
interested in was my wartime service with the RSHA—which was the security office created by the mergers of the SD (the security service of the SS), the Gestapo, and Kripo in 1939.

Several times a week we would meet in an interview room on the ground floor near the main entrance of the castle. They always brought me coffee and cigarettes, a little chocolate, and sometimes a Munich newspaper. Neither man was older than forty, and the younger of the two was the senior officer. His name was Jerry Silverman, and before coming to Germany he’d been a New York lawyer. He was hugely tall and wore a green gabardine military jacket with pink khaki trousers; there were several ribbons on his breast, but instead of the metal bars most American officers wore on their shoulders to indicate their rank, Silverman and his sergeant had a cloth patch sewn on their sleeves that identified them both as members of the OCCWC—the Office of the Chief Counsel for War Crimes. The fact was, they were wearing uniforms but they didn’t belong to the U.S. military; they were Pentagon bureaucrats, prosecutors from the American Department of Defense. Only in America could they have given lawyers a uniform.

The other, older man was Sergeant Jonathan Earp. He was a head shorter than Captain Silverman and had—he told me, in an idle moment when I asked him—graduated from Harvard Law School prior to his joining the OCCWC.

Both men had one or two German parents, which was why they spoke the language so fluently, although Earp was the more fluent of the two; but Silverman was cleverer.

They came armed with several briefcases that were full of files, but they hardly ever referred to these; each man seemed to carry a whole filing cabinet in his head. They did, however, take copious notes: Silverman had small, very neat, distinguished handwriting that looked as though it might have been written by Völundr, the ruler of the elves.

At first I assumed they were interested in the workings of the RSHA and my knowledge of Department VI, which was the office of Foreign Intelligence; but it seemed they knew almost as much about that as I did. Perhaps more. And only gradually did it become clear that they suspected me of something far more serious than a couple of local murders.

“You see,” explained Silverman, “there are some aspects of your story that just don’t add up.”

“I get a lot of that,” I said.

“You say you were a Kommissar in Kripo until—?”

“Until Kripo became part of the RSHA in September 1939.”

“But you say you were never a party member.”

I shook my head.

“Wasn’t that unusual?”

“Not at all. Ernst Gennat was the deputy chief of Kripo in Berlin until August 1939, and he was to my certain knowledge never a Nazi Party member.”

“What happened to him?”

“He died. Of natural causes. There were others, too. Heinrich Muller, the Gestapo chief. He never joined the party either.”

“Then again,” said Silverman, “maybe he didn’t need to. He was, as you say, head of the Gestapo.”

“There are others I could mention, but you have to remember that the Nazis were hypocrites. Sometimes it suited them to be able to use people who were outside the party system.”

“So you admit you allowed yourself to be used,” said Earp.

“I’m alive, aren’t I?” I shrugged. “I guess that speaks for itself.”

“The question is how much you allowed yourself to be used,” said Silverman.

“It’s been bothering me, too,” I said.

He was clever, but he couldn’t ever have played poker; his face was much too expressive. When he thought I was lying, his mouth hung open and he shifted his lower jaw around like a cow chewing tobacco; and when he was satisfied with an answer, he looked away or made a sad sound like he was disappointed.

“Maybe you’d like to get something off your chest,” said Earp.

“Seriously,” I said. “You don’t want me.”

“That’s for us to decide, Herr Gunther.”

“Maybe you could beat it out of me, like your friends in the Navy and the FBI.”

“It seems like everyone wants to hit you,” said Earp.

“I’m just wondering when you two are going to figure that it’s your turn.”

“We’re not like that in the Chief Counsel’s Office.” Silverman sounded so smooth I almost believed him.

“Well, why didn’t you say so before? Now I feel completely reassured.”

“Most of the people in here have talked to us because they wanted to talk,” said Earp.

“And the rest?”

“Sometimes it’s hard to say nothing when all your friends have ratted on you,” said Silverman.

“That’s okay, then. I don’t have any friends. And very definitely none in this place. So anyone who rats on me is probably a bigger rat himself.”

Silverman stood up and took off his jacket. “Mind if I open a window?” he said.

The politeness was instinctive and he started to open it anyway. Not that I could ever have jumped out; the window was barred, just like the one in my cell. Silverman stood there looking out with his arms folded thoughtfully, and for a moment I remembered a newspaper photograph of Hitler, in a similar attitude, on a visit to Landsberg after he’d become Reich Chancellor. After a moment or two he said,

“Did you ever meet a man called Otto Ohlendorf? He was a Gruppenführer—a general—in the Reich Main Security Office.” Silverman came back to the table and sat down.

“Yes. I met him a couple of times. He was head of Department Three, I think. Domestic Intelligence.”

“And what was your impression of him?”

“Intense. A dedicated Nazi.”

“He was also head of an SS task group that operated in the southern Ukraine and the Crimea,” said Silverman. “That same task group murdered ninety thousand people before Ohlendorf returned to his desk in Berlin. As you say, he was a dedicated Nazi. But when the British captured him, in 1945, he sang like a canary. For them and for us. Actually, we couldn’t shut him up. No one could figure it. There was no duress, no deal, no offer of immunity. It seems he just wanted to talk about it. Maybe you should think about doing that. Get it off your chest, as he did. Ohlendorf sat in that very chair you’re sitting in now and talked his damn head off for forty-two days in succession. He was very matter-of-fact about it, too. You might even say normal. He didn’t cry or offer an apology, but I guess there must have been something in his soul that just bothered him.”

“Some of the guys here quite liked him,” said Earp. “Up until the moment when we hanged him.”

I shook my head. “With all due respect, you’re not selling this idea of unburdening myself very well if the only reward is the one in heaven. And I thought Americans were supposed to be good salesmen.”

“Ohlendorf was one of Heydrich’s protégés, too,” said Silverman.

“Meaning you think I was?”

“You said yourself it was Heydrich who brought you back to Kripo in 1938. I don’t know what else that makes you, Gunther.”

“He needed a proper homicide detective. Not some Nazi with an anti-Semitic ax to grind. When I came back to Kripo, I had the unusual idea that I might actually be able to stop someone from murdering young girls.”

“But afterward—”

“You mean after I solved the case?”

“—you continued working for Kripo. At General Heydrich’s request.”

“I really didn’t have much choice in the matter. Heydrich was a hard man to disappoint.”

“But what did he want from you?”

“Heydrich was a cold murdering bastard, but he was also a pragmatist. Sometimes he preferred honesty to unswerving loyalty. For one or two people such as myself, it wasn’t so important that they stick to the official party line as that they should do a good job. Especially if those people, like me, had no interest in climbing the SS ladder.”

“Oddly enough, that’s exactly how Otto Ohlendorf described his own relationship with Heydrich,” said Earp. “Jost, too. Heinz Jost? You remember him? He was the man Heydrich appointed to take over from your friend Walter Stahlecker in charge of Task Group A, when he was killed by Estonian partisans.”

“Walter Stahlecker wasn’t ever my friend. Whatever gave you that idea?”

“He was your business partner’s brother, wasn’t he? When you and he were running a private investigation business in Berlin in 1937.”

“Since when has one brother been responsible for another’s actions? Bruno Stahlecker couldn’t have been more different from his brother Walter. He wasn’t even a Nazi.”

“But you met Walter Stahlecker, surely.”

“He came to Bruno’s funeral. In 1938.”

“On any other occasions?”

“Probably. I don’t remember when, exactly.”

“Do you think it was before or after he organized the murder of two hundred and fifty thousand Jews?”

“Well, it wasn’t afterward. And by the way, he was Franz Stahlecker, never Walter. Bruno never called him Walter. But to come back to Heinz Jost for a moment. The man who took over Task Group A when Franz Stahlecker was killed. Would this be the same Heinz Jost who was sentenced to life imprisonment and then paroled from this place a couple of years ago? Is that the man to whom you’re referring?”

“We just prosecute them,” said Silverman. “It’s up to the U.S. high commissioner for Germany who’s released and when.”

“And then last month,” I said. “I hear it was Willy Siebert’s turn to walk out of here. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t he Otto Ohlendorf’s deputy? When those ninety thousand Jews got killed? Ninety thousand, and you people just let him walk out of here. It sounds to me that McCloy wants his head examined.”

“James Conant is high commissioner now,” said Earp.

“Either way, it beats me why you boys bother,” I said. “Less than ten years served for ninety thousand murders? It hardly seems worth it. My math isn’t great, but I think that works out to about a day of time served for every twenty-five murders. I killed some people during the war, it’s true. But by the tally handed down to the likes of Jost and Siebert and that other fellow—Erwin Schulz, in January—hell, I should have been paroled the same day I was arrested.”

“That gives us a number to aim at, anyway,” murmured Earp.

“To say nothing of the SS men who are still here,” I said, ignoring him. “You can’t seriously believe that I deserve to be in the same prison as the likes of Martin Sandberger and Walter Blume.”

“Let’s talk about that,” said Silverman. “Let’s talk about Walter Blume. Now, him you must know, because like you he was a policeman and worked for your old boss, Arthur Nebe, in Task Group B. Blume was in charge of a special unit, a Sonderkommando, under Nebe’s orders, before Nebe was relieved by Erich Naumann in November 1941.”

“I met him.”

“No doubt you and he have had a lot to reminisce about since you came here and were able to renew your acquaintance.”

“I’ve seen him, of course. Since I’ve been in here. But we haven’t spoken. Nor are we likely to.”