The Isis Covenant

VII

Geistjaeger 88? Jamie studied the sparse file on the computer in his Kensington High Street flat. According to Detective Danny Fisher, the two murdered families had one thing in common, apart from the similarity of their names. If you went back a couple of generations their genes converged with those of a Hamburg resident named Berndt Hartmann, and this Hartmann’s name had been linked to Geistjaeger 88. Most people thought Herman Göring was the Second World War’s greatest art thief, but he’d had a few rivals. Hans Frank for one, the gauleiter who had ruled over what had been called the General Government — the Nazis’ Polish slave state — and had pinched Raphael’s Portrait of a Young Man from under Göring’s nose. Frank, however, was just a bit player. Göring was a man who didn’t know the meaning of the word enough. When he stole, he stole on an industrial scale. In 1939 he had created an organization specifically to create the greatest art collection the world had ever seen. The man appointed to run it was an Austrian art historian called Kajetan Mülhmann, an SS officer and the Nazi Special Delegate for the Securing of Art in the Occupied Territories. Mülhmann and his staff travelled the length and breadth of the ever-expanding Third Reich plundering artworks belonging to Jews, ‘enemies of the state’ and the Roman Catholic Church, prudently siphoning off the occasional piece to go to Adolf Hitler’s planned Führermuseum in Linz. But what Göring and Hitler had, Heinrich Himmler must have too. Himmler loathed ‘der dicke’, as he called Göring. He also had his own, rather more specialized, reasons for hunting down artefacts and artworks. In 1942, he ordered the creation of a special SS unit specifically for that purpose. It had started off with a grandiose name to match the grandiose aspirations of its founder, but the men who served in it called themselves Ghosthunters and their unit became Ghosthunter 88; eight being the number that corresponded with the letter H in the alphabet, and not, as some historians had surmised, after the celebrated anti-aircraft, turned anti-tank gun of that calibre.

Geistjaeger 88 operated in total secrecy and under the direct orders of Himmler himself, his instructions passed on by his closest aide, SS Brigadeführer Walter Schellenberg. The file revealed that the only reason anyone knew of its existence was the testimony of a man called Bodo Ritter. Jamie checked the name on the internet and his lips pursed in disappointment. It was inconvenient, but in the unlikely event that he could discover anything of value for Detective Danny Fisher, that was where he’d find it.

After making the required phone call, he shrugged on his battered hiking jacket and took the short walk through the rain and down into the bowels of the local Tube station. While he waited for the next service to King’s Cross he stood with his back tight to the platform wall. Jamie Saintclair had already seen the underside of one Tube train and he didn’t intend to repeat the experience.

With Detective Sergeant Shreeves’ warnings still sharp in his mind, he took care to find a spot at the end of the carriage with a good view of his fellow passengers: the usual cosmopolitan London mix of ages and classes, colours and shades, submissiveness and potential threat. His eye was drawn to a pair of young Asian men talking quietly by the doorway. They were the right age, and they had the watchful, restless look of career criminals or undercover policemen. He waited for them to make their move, every sinew tensed for the battle for survival that must come in the tight-packed confines of the carriage, but they got off at the next stop. That left an Italian-looking gentleman wearing an overcoat just long enough to hide a sawn-off shotgun, who had also joined the train at Kensington. Christ, he couldn’t live like this, spending every waking hour expecting a bullet or a knife. Better not to see it coming at all. To test the theory he sat back on a seat and closed his eyes, only to find himself watching repeat showings of as many variations of his own death as his subconscious could come up with. Maybe Shreeves was right and he should spend the winter on Bondi Beach?

But he wasn’t going to Bondi Beach just yet. Instead, he bought a ticket for the 10.45 to Cambridge. It takes just under an hour to cover the fifty miles that separate London and the university city. As the suburbs gave way to intermittent flashes of open fields, he ran over what he had been able to discover of Standartenführer Bodo Ritter. The man had carved out a low-key career as an academic in the art department of an obscure south German university. And there he would almost certainly have stayed, but for the discontent with Germany’s economic ills that drew him to the increasingly popular National Socialist Workers’ Party and their charismatic leader, Adolf Hitler.

At some point in the early 1930s Bodo Ritter had been introduced to a charming Argentine-German called Richard Darré, a rising star in the Nazi party and the SS, and it was through Darré that he met Heinrich Himmler. One of Ritter’s main areas of research had been early Germanic folklore. In Himmler he had a ready audience for his theories, which, in turn, won him an invitation in 1935 to join the SS-Ahnenerbe, the organization’s Ancestral Heritage, Research and Teaching Society. Bodo’s later career would show him as a man with an eye for an opening, and he recognized his opportunity in Himmler’s fascination with the origins of the Germanic peoples. In a few years he had made himself indispensable and was appointed to the SD, the Reich security service; just another petty bureaucrat in Hitler’s industry of repression.

‘I hope you have a strong stomach.’ Chris, the young research assistant at the Imperial War Museum’s records facility at Duxford, placed a file on the wooden desk.

Jamie gave a grim nod as he studied the tattered beige oblong containing who only knew what horrors. It looked as if it hadn’t been opened for years, but that wasn’t surprising. These days not many people were interested in the international military tribunals that had tried the top Nazis for war crimes at Nuremberg. Everything that needed to be said had been said. All the arguments chewed over in the sixty odd years since. And Bodo Ritter was small fry compared to the men he followed into the dock.

‘You said you were mainly interested in Ritter’s career after nineteen forty-two?’

‘That’s right. But I’d also like to get a handle on the kind of men I’m dealing with.’

Chris leafed through the file. ‘Then I suggest we start here.’ He laid a sheaf of faded papers on the desk. ‘This is a copy of Ritter’s sworn statement to a civilian lawyer of the US Advocate General’s staff in nineteen forty-seven. You have to understand that in Nuremberg terms this was just a sideshow.’

Jamie nodded. ‘I know he was tried by an American military court and not with any of the big names.’

‘Good, so I don’t have to go into the background. As you can see, the first few paragraphs cover his life before the war, his university career and his subsequent enrollment in the SS. Then …’ He passed Jamie the documents.

A chill descended that seemed to eat into Jamie’s bones. It wasn’t the horrors — the deaths of fifteen thousand men, women and children and God knew how many more — but the dispassionate way Ritter described them. No regret, no guilt or sorrow, just a cold, hard recital of the facts.

And after the facts came the lists. Lvov, Domobril, Zhitomir, Mielnica, Novo Selista, Volhynia, Zloczow, Drohobycz, Kamenka and Stryj. Beside each Ukrainian town a careful accounting for Himmler’s number-hungry bureaucrats. Jews, Jewesses, Jewish children, communist, partisan; beginning in tens, then hundreds and eventually, at the Babi Yar ravine outside Kiev, tens of thousands.

And after the lists, the reality. Witness statements from soldiers who had seen the horrors at first hand, from men who had taken part, from survivors who had crawled naked and bloody from the death pits and, somehow, lived to tell the tale. Bodies heaped in layers, with the living made to lie upon the dead waiting to be killed in their turn. The desperate cries of the wounded. A small hand reaching out from a sandy grave in a silent plea to be finished off. Blood welling in fountains from the earth as the murderers attempted to disguise the enormity of their crime. Bodo Ritter’s war.

‘Christ.’ Jamie met the other man’s eyes across the table.

‘Yes, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. There were at least forty sonderkommando operating behind the front lines as the Germans advanced into Russia, from the Baltic coast to the Crimea. The Nazis were extremely proud of what they were doing and kept detailed records. Fortunately, some of them survived the war, which is why men like Ritter were brought to justice. Of course, the Wehrmacht and the SS and local militias often did their dirty work for them, so the figures you see in these papers are a minimum. It’s likely that between one and a half and two million men, women and children — and that doesn’t include Russian prisoners of war — were murdered over a two-year period.’

‘He makes it all sound so … reasonable.’ Jamie shook his head at the thought. ‘Just another day at the office.’

Chris nodded. ‘Men like Ritter didn’t think in terms of humanity. Only in numbers. The Einsatzgruppen commanders were lawyers and policemen, Nazi party functionaries. Ask them why they did it and they’d shrug their shoulders and tell you they were only doing their duty. Obeying orders.’

Jamie turned to a second, much shorter deposition made by the same man a few days after the first.

Ritter gave an account of his unit’s specific tasks and areas of operation and at the end was appended a list of personnel, almost all of whom were listed as dead or missing.

By the time he reached the final page of the file, a facsimile of Ritter’s death certificate following his hanging at Landsberg prison in 1950, Jamie felt exhausted, but he spent another hour making his own copy of the Ritter testimony before heading for home. As he left the gates of the Duxford complex, the young man he had been with a few moments earlier picked up the phone in his office.

‘You wanted to know if anyone took an interest in the Bodo Ritter file?’