Field Gray (6 page)

“And why’s that?”

“I thought it was free association. Do I have to explain who I choose to speak to and who I don’t?”

“There’s nothing free in here,” said Earp. “Come on, Gunther. Do you think you’re better than Blume? Is that it?”

“You seem to know a lot of the answers already,” I said. “Why don’t you tell me?”

“I don’t understand,” said Earp. “Why would you speak to a man like Waldemar Klingelhöfer in here and not Blume? Klingelhöfer was also in Task Group B. One’s just as bad as the other, surely.”

“All in all,” said Silverman, “it must seem like old times for you, Gunther. Meeting all your old pals. Adolf Ott, Eugen Steimle, Blume, Klingelhöfer.”

“Come on,” insisted Earp. “Why speak to him and none of the others?”

“Is it because none of the other prisoners will speak to him because he betrayed a fellow SS officer?” asked Silverman. “Or because he appears to regret what he did as head of the Moscow killing commando?”

“Before taking charge of that commando,” said Earp, “your friend Klingelhöfer did what you claim to have done. He headed up an antipartisan hunt. In Minsk, wasn’t it? Where you were?”

“Was that just shooting Jews, the same as Klingelhöfer?”

“Maybe you’ll let me answer one of your questions at a time,” I said.

“There’s no rush,” said Silverman. “We’ve got plenty of time. Take it from the beginning, why don’t you? You say you were ordered to join a Reserve Police Battalion, number three one six, in the summer of 1941, as part of Operation Barbarossa.”

“That’s correct.”

“So how come you didn’t go to Pretzsch in the spring?” asked Earp. “To the police academy there for training and assignment. By all accounts, nearly everyone who was going to Russia was at Pretzsch. Gestapo, Kripo, Waffen-SS, SD, the whole RSHA.”

“Heydrich, Himmler, and several thousand officers,” said Silverman. “According to previous accounts we’ve heard, it was common knowledge after that what was going to happen when you all got to Russia. But you say you weren’t at Pretzsch, which is why the whole business of killing Jews was such an unpleasant surprise for you. So why weren’t you at Pretzsch?”

“What did you get? A sick note?”

“I was still in France,” I said. “On a special mission from Heydrich.”

“That was convenient, wasn’t it? So let me get this straight: When you joined Battalion Three One Six, on the Polish–Russian border in June 1941, it’s really your impression that your job would involve nothing more than hunting down partisans and NKVD, right?”

“Yes. But even before I got to Vilnius I’d begun to hear stories of local pogroms against the Jews because the Jews in the NKVD were busy murdering all of their prisoners instead of releasing them. It was all very confused. You’ve no idea how confused. Frankly, I didn’t believe these stories at first. There were plenty of stories like that in the Great War, and most of them turned out to be false.” I shrugged. “In this particular case, however, even the worst, most far-fetched stories were nearly all true.”

“Exactly what were your orders?”

“That our job was a security one. To keep order behind the lines of our advancing army.”

“And you did that how?” asked Silverman. “By murdering people?”

“You know, being a detective in the police battalion, I paid a lot of attention to my so-called comrades. And it turned out that a lot of these murdering bastards in the Task Groups were lawyers, too. Just like you guys. Blume, Sandberger, Ohlendorf, Schulz. I expect there were others, but I can’t remember their names. I used to wonder why it was that so many lawyers took part in these killings. What do you think?”

“We ask the questions, Gunther.”

“Spoken like a true lawyer, Mr. Earp. By the way, how come I don’t have one here? With all due respect, gentlemen, this interrogation is hardly consistent with the rules of German justice; or, I imagine, the rules of American justice, either. Doesn’t every American have a Fifth Amendment right not to be a witness against himself?”

“This interrogation is a necessary step in determining if you should be tried or released,” said Silverman.

“This is what we German cops used to call an Eskimo’s fishing trip,” I said. “You just drop a line through a hole in the ice and hope that you catch something.”

“In the absence of any clear evidence and documentation,” continued Silverman, “sometimes the only way to gain knowledge of a crime is by questioning a suspect such as yourself. That’s usually been our experience with war crimes cases.”

“Bullshit. We both know you’re sitting on a ton of documentation. What about all those papers you recovered from Gestapo headquarters that are now in the Berlin Document Center?”

“Actually, it’s two tons of documentation,” said Silverman. “Between eight and nine million documents, to be precise. And eight or nine represents our total staff at the OCC. With the Einsatzgruppen trial we got lucky: We found the actual reports that were written by the Task Group leaders. Twelve binders containing a gold mine of information. As a result, we didn’t even need a prosecution witness against them. All the same, it took us four months to put the case together. Four months. With you it might take longer. Do you really want to wait here for another four months while we work out if you have a case to answer?”

“So go and check those Task Group leader reports,” I said. “They’ll clear me for sure. Because I wasn’t one of them, I’ve told you. I got an exeat back to Berlin, courtesy of Arthur Nebe. Out of the task area. He’s bound to have mentioned it in his report.”

“That’s where your problem lies, Gunther,” explained Silverman. “With your old friend Arthur Nebe. You see, the reports for Task Groups A, C, and D were very detailed.”

“Otto Ohlendorf’s were a model of accuracy,” said Earp. “You might say he was a typical fucking lawyer in that respect.”

Silverman was shaking his head. “But there are no original reports written by Arthur Nebe from Task Group B. In fact, there are no reports from Task Group B until a new commander is appointed, in November 1941. We think that’s why Walter Blume took over from Nebe. Because Nebe was falling down on the job. For whatever reason, he wasn’t killing nearly as many Jews as the other three groups. Why was that, do you think?”

Arthur Nebe. It had been a while since I’d really thought about the man who’d saved my life and, perhaps, my soul, and whom I’d repaid so unkindly: Effectively, I’d murdered Nebe in Vienna during the winter of 1947–1948, when he’d been working for General Gehlen’s organization of old comrades, but I hardly wanted to tell the two Amis anything about that. Gehlen’s organization had been sponsored by the CIA, or whatever they called it back then, and possibly still was.

“Nebe was two different men,” I said. “Perhaps several more than just two. In 1933, Nebe believed that the Nazis were the only alternative to the communists and that they would bring order to Germany. By 1938, probably earlier, he’d realized his mistake and was plotting with others in the Wehrmacht and the police to overthrow Hitler. There’s a propaganda ministry photograph of Nebe with Himmler, Heydrich, and Muller that shows the four of them planning the investigation of a bomb attempt on Hitler’s life. That was November 1939. And Nebe was part of that very same conspiracy. I know that because I was part of it, too. However, Nebe quickly changed his mind after the defeat of France and Britain in 1940. Lots of people changed their minds about Hitler after the miracle of France. Even I changed my mind about him. For a few months, anyway. We both changed our minds again when Hitler attacked Russia. Nobody thought that was a good idea. And yet Arthur did what he was told. He’d plot away and do what he was told even if that meant murdering Jews in Minsk and Smolensk. Doing what you were told was always the best kind of cover if you were simultaneously planning a coup d’état against the Nazis. I think that’s why he seems like such an ambiguous figure. I think that’s why, as you said, he was falling down on the job as commander of Task Group B. Because his heart was never in it. Above all, Nebe was a survivor.”

“Like you.”

“To some extent, yes, that’s true. Thanks to him.”

“Tell us about that.”

“I already did.”

“Not in any great detail.”

“What do you want me to do? Draw you a picture?”

“Really, we want as many details as possible,” said Earl.

“When someone is lying,” said Silverman, “it’s nearly always the case that they start to contradict themselves in matters of detail. You should know that from being a policeman yourself. When they start to contradict themselves on the small things, you can bet they’re lying about the big things, too.”

I nodded.

“So,” he said. “Let’s go back to Goloby, where you murdered the members of an NKVD squad.”

“The ones you claim had murdered all of the inmates at the NKVD prison in Lutsk,” said Earp. “According to the Soviets, that was just German propaganda, put out to help persuade your own men that the summary execution of all Jews and Bolsheviks was justified.”

“You’ll be telling me next that it was the German army who murdered all those Poles in the Katyn Forest.”

“Maybe it was.”

“Not according to your own congressional investigation.”

“You’re well-informed.”

I shrugged. “In Cuba, I got all the American newspapers. In an attempt to improve my English. Nineteen fifty-two, wasn’t it? The investigation. When the Malden Committee recommended that the Soviets should answer a case at the International Court of Justice in the Hague? Look, it’s a story I’ve been interested in for a long time. We both know the NKVD killed as many as we did. So why not admit it? The commies are the enemy now. Or is that just American propaganda?”

I fetched a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of my prison jacket and lit one slowly. I was tired of answering questions, but I knew I was going to have to open the door of my mind’s darkest cellar and wake up some very unpleasant memories. Even in a room with bars on the window, Operation Barbarossa felt like a very long way away. Outside it was a bright and sunny June day, and although it had been a very similarly warm June day when the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union, that wasn’t the way I remembered it. When I recalled names like Goloby, Lutsk, Bialy-stock, and Minsk, I thought of infernal heat and the sights, sounds, and smells of a hell on earth; but most of all I remembered a clean-shaven young man aged about twenty standing in a cobbled town square with a crowbar in his hand, his thick boots an inch deep in the blood of about thirty other men who lay dead or dying at his feet. I remembered the shocked laughter of some of the German soldiers who were watching this bestial display; I remembered the sound of an accordion playing a spirited tune as another, older man with a long beard walked silently, almost calmly toward the fellow with the crowbar and was immediately struck on the head like some ghastly Hindu sacrifice; I remembered the noise the old man made as he fell to the ground and the way his legs jerked stiffly, like a puppet’s, until the crowbar hit him again.

I jerked my thumb at the window. “All right,” I said. “I’ll tell you everything. But do you mind if I put my face in the sun for a moment? It helps to remind me that I’m still alive.”

“Unlike millions of others,” Earp said pointedly. “Go ahead. We’re in no hurry.”

I went to the window and looked out. By the main gate a small crowd of people had gathered to wait for someone. Either that or they were looking for the window of cell number seven, which seemed a little less likely.

“Is someone being released today?” I asked.

Silverman came over to the window. “Yes,” he said. “Erich Mielke.”

“Mielke?” I shook my head. “You’re mistaken. Mielke’s not in here. He couldn’t be.”

Even as I spoke, a smaller door in the main gate opened and a short, stocky, gray-haired man of about sixty stepped out and was cheered by the waiting well-wishers.

“That’s not Mielke,” I said.

“I think you mean Erhard Milch, sir,” Earp told Silverman. “The Luftwaffe field marshal? It’s him who’s being released today.”

“So that’s who it is,” I said. “For a moment there I thought it was a real war criminal.”

“Milch is—was—a war criminal,” insisted Silverman. “He was director of air armaments under Albert Speer.”

“And what was criminal about building planes?” I asked. “You must have built quite a few planes yourself, if the state of Berlin in 1945 was anything to go by.”

“We didn’t use slave labor to do it,” said Silverman.

I watched as Erhard Milch accepted a bunch of flowers from a pretty girl, bowed politely to her, and was then driven off in a smart new Mercedes to begin the rest of his life.

“What was the sentence for that, then?”

“Life imprisonment,” said Silverman.

“Life imprisonment, eh? Some people have all the luck.”

“Commuted to fifteen years.”

“There’s something wrong with your high commissioner’s math, I think,” I said. “Who else is getting out of here?”

I took a puff on my tasteless cigarette, flicked the butt out of the window, and watched it spiral to the ground trailing smoke like one of Milch’s invincible Luftwaffe planes.

“You were going to tell us about Minsk,” said Silverman.

MINSK, 1941

O
n the morning of July 7, 1941, I commanded a firing squad that executed thirty Russian POWs. At the time, I didn’t feel bad about this because they were all NKVD and, less than twelve hours before, they themselves had murdered two or three thousand prisoners at the NKVD prison in Lutsk. They also murdered some German POWs who were with them, which was a miserable sight. I suppose you could say they had every right to do so, given that we had invaded their country. You could also say that our executing them in retaliation had considerably less justification, and you’d probably be correct on both counts. Well, we did it, but not because of the “commissar order” or the “Barbarossa decree,” which were nothing more than a shooting license from German field headquarters. We did it because we felt—I felt—they had it coming and they would certainly have shot us in similar circumstances. So we shot them in groups of four. We didn’t make them dig their own graves or anything like that. I didn’t care for that sort of thing. It smacked of sadism. So we shot them and left them where they fell. Later on, when I was a
pleni
in a Russian labor camp, I sometimes wished I’d shot many more than just thirty, but that’s a different story.

I didn’t feel bad about it until the next day when my men and I came across a former colleague from the Police Praesidium at the Alex, in Berlin. A fellow named Becker, who was in another police battalion. I found him shooting civilians in a village somewhere west of Minsk. There were about a hundred bodies in a ditch, and it seemed to me that Becker and his men had been drinking. Even then I didn’t get it. I kept on looking for explanations for what was essentially inexplicable and certainly inexcusable. And it was only when I realized that some of the people Becker and his men were about to shoot were old women that I said something.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I asked him.

“Obeying my orders,” he said.

“What? To kill old women?”

“They’re Jews,” he said, as if that was all the explanation that was needed. “I’ve been ordered to kill as many Jews as I can, and that’s what I’m doing.”

“Whose orders? Who’s your field commander and where is he?”

“Major Weis.” Becker pointed at a long wooden building behind a white picket fence about thirty yards down the road. “He’s in there. Having his lunch.”

I walked toward the building, and Becker called after me: “Don’t think I want to do this. But orders are orders, yes?”

As I reached the hut, I heard another volley of shots. One of the doors was open and an SS major was sitting on a chair with his tunic off. In one hand he held a half-eaten loaf of bread and in the other a bottle of wine and a cigarette. He heard me out with a look of weary amusement on his face.

“Look, none of this is my idea,” he said. “It’s a waste of time and ammunition, if you ask me. But I do what I’m told, right? That’s how an army works. A superior officer gives me an order and I obey. Chapter closed.” He pointed at a field telephone that was on the floor. “Take it up with headquarters if you like. They’ll just tell you what they told me. To get on with it.” He shook his head. “You’re not the only one who thinks this is madness, Captain.”

“You mean you’ve already asked for the orders to be confirmed?”

“Of course I have. Field HQ told me to take it up with Division HQ.”

“And what did they say?”

Major Weis shook his head. “Questioning an order with Division? Are you mad? I won’t stay a major for very long if I do that. They’ll have my pips and my balls, and not necessarily in that order.” He laughed. “But be my guest. Go on, call them. Just make sure you leave my name out of it.”

Outside there was another volley of shots. I picked up the field telephone and cranked the handle furiously. Thirty seconds later, I was arguing with someone at Division HQ. The major got up and put his ear to the other side of the telephone. When I started to swear, he grinned and walked away.

“You’ve upset them now,” he said.

I slammed the phone down and stood there trembling with anger.

“I’m to report to Division, in Minsk,” I said. “Immediately.”

“Told you.” He handed me his bottle, and I took a swig of what turned out to be not wine but vodka. “They’ll have your rank, for sure. I hope you think it was worth it. From what I hear, this”—he pointed at the door—“this is just the smoke at the end of the gun. Someone else is pulling the trigger. That’s what you have to hold on to, my friend. Try to remember what Goethe said. He said the greatest happiness for us Germans is to understand what we can understand and then, having done so, to do what we’re fucking told.”

I went outside and told the men I’d brought with me in a Panzer wagon and a Puma armored car that we were going into Minsk, to make a report on the morning’s antipartisan action. As we drove along I was in a melancholy frame of mind, but this was only partly to do the fate of a few hundred innocent Jews. Mostly I was concerned for the reputation of Germans and the Germany army. Where would this end? I asked myself. I certainly never conceived that thousands of Jews were already being slaughtered in a similar fashion.

Minsk was easy to find. All you had to do was drive down a long straight road—quite a good road, even by German standards—and follow the gray plume of smoke on the horizon. The Luftwaffe had bombed the city a few days before and destroyed most of the city center. Even so, all of the German vehicles moving along the road kept their distance from one another in case of a Russian air attack. Otherwise, the Red Army was gone and Wehrmacht intelligence indicated that the population of three hundred thousand would have left the city, too, but for the fact that our bombing of the road east out of Minsk—to Mogilev and Moscow—had forced as many as eighty thousand to turn back to the city, or at least what remained of it. Not that this looked like a particularly good idea either. Most of the wooden houses on the outskirts were still ablaze while, nearer the center, piles of rubble backed onto hollowed-out office and apartment buildings. I’d never seen a city so thoroughly destroyed as Minsk. This made it all the more surprising that the Uprava, the City Council, and Communist Party HQ had survived the bombing almost unscathed. The locals called it the Big House, which was something of an understatement: Nine or ten stories high and built of white concrete, the Uprava resembled a series of gigantic filing cabinets containing the details of every citizen in Minsk. In front of the building was an enormous bronze statue of Lenin, who viewed the large number of German cars and trucks with an understandable look of anxiety and concern, as well he might have done, given that the building was now the headquarters of Reichskommissariat Ostland—a German-created administrative area that stretched from the Byelorussian capital to the Baltic Sea.

Pushing a heavy wooden door that was so tall it might still have been growing in a forest, I entered a cheap, marble-clad hall that belonged in a Métro station and approached a locomotive-sized central desk where several German soldiers and SS were attempting to impose some kind of administrative order on the ant colony of dusty gray men who were pouring in and out of the place. Catching the eye of one SS officer behind the desk, I asked for the SS divisional commander’s office and was directed to the second floor and advised to take the stairs, as the elevator was not working.

At the top of the first flight of stairs was a bronze head of Stalin, and at the top of the second there was a bronze head of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Operation Barbarossa looked like it was going to be bad news for Russian sculptors, just like everyone else. The floor was covered with broken glass, and there was a line of bullet holes on the gray wall that led all the way along a wide corridor to a couple of open facing doors, through which more SS officers were passing to and fro in a haze of cigarette smoke. One of these was my unit’s commanding officer, SS-Standartenführer Mundt, who was one of those men who look like they came out of their mother’s womb wearing a uniform. Seeing me, he raised an eyebrow and then a hand as he casually acknowledged my salute.

“The murder squad,” he said. “Did you catch them?”

“Yes, Herr Oberst.”

“Good work. What did you do with them?”

“We shot them, sir.” I handed over a handful of Red identification documents I’d taken from the Russians before their executions.

Mundt started to look through the documents like an immigration officer searching for something suspicious. “Including the women?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pity. In future, all female partisans and NKVD are to be hanged in the town square, as an example to the others. Heydrich’s orders. Understand?”

“Yes, Herr Oberst.”

Mundt wasn’t much older than me. When the war broke out he’d been a police colonel with the Hamburg Schutzpolizei. He was clever, only his was the wrong kind of cleverness for Kripo: To be a decent detective you have to understand people, and to understand people you have to be one of them yourself. Mundt wasn’t like people. He wasn’t even a person. I supposed that was why he had a pet dachshund with him—so that it might make him seem a little more human. But I knew better. He was a cold, pompous bastard. Whenever he spoke he sounded like he thought he was reciting Rilke, and I wanted to yawn or laugh or kick his teeth in. Which is how it must have looked.

“You disagree, Hauptmann?”

“I don’t much care to hang women,” I said.

He looked down his fine nose and smiled. “Perhaps you’d prefer to do something else with them?”

“That must be someone else you’re thinking of, sir. What I mean is, I don’t much like waging war on women. I’m the conventional type. The Geneva Convention, in case you were wondering.”

Mundt pretended to look puzzled. “It’s a strange way of observing the Geneva Convention you have,” he said. “To shoot thirty prisoners.”

I glanced around the office, which was a good size for just one desk. It would have been a good size for a sawmill. In the corner of the room was a fitted cupboard with its own little sink, where another man was washing his half-naked torso. In the opposite corner was a safe. An SS sergeant was listening to it like it was a radio and trying, without success, to persuade the thing to open. On top of the desk was a trio of different-colored telephones that might have been left there by three wise men from the East; behind the desk was another SS officer in a chair; and behind the officer was a large wall map of Minsk. On the floor lay a Russian soldier, and if this had ever been his office it wasn’t anymore; the bullet hole behind his left ear and the blood on the linoleum seemed to indicate he would soon be relocated to a much smaller and more permanent earthly space.

“Besides, Captain Gunther,” added Mundt, “it may have escaped you but the Russians never signed the Geneva Convention.”

“Then I guess it’s fine to shoot them all, sir.”

The officer behind the desk stood up. “Did you say Captain Gunther?”

He was a Standartenführer, too, a colonel, the same as Mundt, which meant that as he came around the desk and placed himself in front of me I was obliged to come to attention again. He had been spawned in the same Aryan pond as Mundt and was no less arrogant.

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you the Captain Gunther who telephoned to question my orders to shoot those Jews on the road to Minsk this morning?”

“Yes, sir. That was me. You must be Colonel Blume.”

“What the devil do you mean by questioning an order?” he shouted. “You’re an SS officer, pledged to the Führer. That order was issued to ensure security in the rear for our combat forces. Those Jews set their houses on fire after having been ordered to make them available as billets for our troops. I can’t think of a better reason for a reprisal action than the burning of those houses.”

“I didn’t see any burning houses in that area, sir. And Sturmbannführer Weis was under the impression that those old women were being shot only because they were Jews.”

“And if they were? The Jews of Soviet Russia are the intellectual bearers of the Bolshevik ideology, which makes them our natural enemy. No matter how old they are. Killing Jews is an act of war. Even they seem to understand that, if you don’t. I repeat: Those orders must be carried out for the safety of all army areas. If every soldier only carried out an order after having considered the niceties of whether or not it agreed with his own conscience, then pretty soon there would be no discipline and no army. Are you mad? Are you a coward? Are you ill? Or perhaps you actually like the Jews?”

“I don’t care who or what they are,” I said. “I didn’t come to Russia to shoot old women.”

“Listen to yourself, Captain,” said Blume. “What kind of an officer are you? You’re supposed to set an example to your men. I’ve a good mind to take you to the ghetto just to see if this is some kind of an act—if you really are this squeamish about killing Jews.”

Mundt had started to laugh. “Blume,” he said.

“I can promise you this, Captain,” said Colonel Blume. “You won’t be a captain anymore if you can’t manage it. You’ll be the lowest private in the SS. Do you hear?”

“Blume,” said Mundt. “Look at these.” He handed Blume the papers of the NKVD I’d executed at Goloby. “Look.”

Blume glanced at the documents as Mundt opened them for him. Mundt said: “Sarra Kagan. Solomon Geller. Josef Zalmonowitz. Julius Polonski. These are all Jewish names. Vinokurova. Kieper.” He grinned some more, enjoying my growing discomfort. “I worked on the Jew desk in Hamburg, so I know something about these yid bastards. Joshua Pronicheva. Fanya Glekh. Aaron Levin. David Schepetovka. Saul Katz. Stefan Marx. Vladya Polichov. These are all yids he shot this morning. So much for your fucking scruples, Gunther. You picked a Jewish NKVD squad to execute. You just shot thirty kikes whether you like it or not.”

Blume opened another identification document at random. And then another. “Misha Blyatman. Hersh Gebelev. Moishe Ruditzer. Nahum Yoffe. Chaim Serebriansky. Zyama Rosenblatt.” He was laughing now, too. “You’re right. How do you like that? Israel Weinstein. Ivan Lifshitz. It sounds to me like you hit the jackpot, Gunther. So far you’ve managed to kill more Jews in this campaign than I have. Maybe I should recommend you for a decoration. Or at the very least a promotion.”