Field Gray

5

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.”

“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.