The Lady from Zagreb

Seven

The irony of being introduced to the audience at an international crime commission conference by a man who had not long finished murdering forty-five thousand people did not escape me, or indeed Nebe himself. Arthur Nebe, who was ex — political police, when such men had still existed, had never been much of a detective. He colored a little around the ears as he talked, a little, about the Murder Commission, almost as if he recognized that the commission of murder was something in which he was rather more expert. I don’t think there was anyone in that room who could have looked death in the face more often than Arthur Nebe. Not even Himmler and Kaltenbrunner. I still remembered something Nebe had told me back in Minsk, about experimenting with blowing people up in the search for a more efficient and “humane” method of mass killing. I wondered what some of the Swedes and Swiss in our audience would have said if they’d known anything of the crimes that were being committed by German police in Eastern Europe and Russia, even as we spoke. Would they have cared? Maybe not. You could never quite predict how people would react to the so-called Jewish question.

When he finished his introduction there was a ripple of polite applause and then it was my turn. The bare wooden floorboards creaked like an old leather coat as I walked on jelly legs to the lectern, although that might have been the sound of my nerves pulling at the muscles of my heart and lungs.

I’ve seen a few tough-looking crowds in my time but this was the toughest. At least five or six of them only had to raise a finger to have me face a firing squad before morning coffee was over. Galileo had an easier job with the Inquisition, trying to persuade them that the algebra in the Bible doesn’t add up to a month of Sundays. The audience at the Café Dalles on Neue Schönhauser Strasse used to throw chairs at the piano player when they were bored. And I once saw a tiger get a bit rough with a clown at the Busch Circus. Now, that was funny. But the faces I was looking at would have given Jack Dempsey pause for thought. Anita Berber was wont to piss on the customers when she decided that she didn’t like them, and much as I should like to have taken a leaf out of her book, I thought it best if I just read what was written on the pages I’d spread on the lectern in front of me, although a lot of what I said had been added onto my speech by Leo Gutterer and stuck in my throat like an S-hook from a burglar’s cigar box.

“Heil Hitler. Gentlemen, criminologists, distinguished foreign guests, colleagues, if the last ten years have proved anything at all it is that many of the frustrations the German police experienced under the Weimar Republic have diminished to the extent that they no longer exist. Street fights and the threat of communist insurrection that characterized the time before the election of a National Socialist government are a thing of the past. Police manpower has been increased, our equipment modernized, and, as a corollary, the institutions of state security are considerably more efficient.

“From a time when Germany, and Berlin in particular, was virtually run by criminal gangs and cursed by one ineffective government after another, a strong centralized, classless state now exists where factionalized politics ensured that only anarchy existed before. When the National Socialists came to power, one or two policemen such as myself remained mildly skeptical of the party and its intentions; but that was then. Things are very different now. A healthy respect for the law and its institutions are now the natural inheritance of every true German.”

As I spoke, Himmler — who moments earlier had removed his glasses to polish the lenses with a neatly folded handkerchief — smiled and put a mint in his mouth. He showed no signs of having remembered our first and only meeting, at Wewelsburg Castle, in November 1938, when he kicked me on the shin for being the bearer of some unwelcome news about one of his SS colleagues. Even wearing boots, it was not an experience I was keen to repeat. Meanwhile, Kaltenbrunner scowled and inspected his manicure; he had the look of a man who was already craving a drink. I put my head down, and pushed on.

“My name is Bernhard Gunther and I’ve been a Berlin policeman since 1920. For more than fifteen years I’ve been a member of Berlin’s Murder Commission, which as General Nebe has explained is a group of detectives assisted by experts such as a medical jurisprudent and a photographer. The cornerstone of the commission is the criminal commissars, several of whom are also German lawyers. Under each commissar is a staff of about eight men, who do all the work, of course. The commission is controlled by Commissioner Friedrich-Wilhelm Ludtke, whom many of you will know. Anyone who wishes to discover more about the Berlin police and in particular its famous Murder Commission, should perhaps read a book called Continental Crimes by Erich Liebermann von Sonnenberg — who was himself the director of Kripo until his death last year — and criminal director Otto Trettin. Writing about the stories that appear in this book, George Dilnot, the celebrated English crime reporter, said, ‘There is enough drama and excitement in these tales to satisfy the most voracious appetite.’”

(This was a lie, of course: the truth was that Dilnot hated the book, considering it clichéd and naïve. The book’s many failings were perhaps hardly surprising given that it had been subject to the censorship of the Ministry of Truth and Propaganda, and many of the more interesting cases the commission had investigated, including the Fritz Ulbrich case, were deemed to be too sensationalist for public consumption. But Dilnot, an Englishman, wasn’t exactly around to contradict me, or more accurately, Gutterer.)

“I’m afraid I can’t promise to provide much in the way of drama and excitement. The fact is that Liebermann von Sonnenberg or Otto Trettin would almost certainly do a better job of speaking to you, today; as would Commissioner Ludtke or Inspector Georg Heuser, who recently and cleverly apprehended Ogorzow, the S-Bahn murderer, here in Berlin. The fact is that, even by the blunt standards of this city, I’m a plain speaker. But I’ve always believed that a certain amount of straight talk comes with the job, so if you’ll forgive my lack of rhetorical flourish, I will do my best to describe one particular crime which, at the time I took over its investigation, had become a cold case and was generally symptomatic of the devastating lack of morale that affected the Berlin police under the previous government.

“Indeed, back in 1928, five years after the events I’m about to describe to you, the case was almost forgotten, and when it was assigned to me by the then Berlin police commissioner, Ernst Engelbrecht, at the Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz, it was with the expectation that I would come up empty-handed. In truth, this case had almost become a means of putting arrogant young detectives like me firmly in their place, as more experienced policemen are wont to do. And the fact that I eventually apprehended the perpetrator owes as much to my own good luck as to any forensic judgment on my part. Luck is not something that should ever be discounted in a criminal investigation. Most detectives rely on good luck a lot more than they would have you believe — including Engelbrecht, who was something of a hero and a mentor to me. Engelbrecht once told me that a good detective has to believe in luck; he said that it’s the only explanation why criminals ever get away with anything.”

(My speech neglected to mention that Ernst Engelbrecht had been obliged to leave the Berlin police force because of some things he’d said about the SA in his nonfiction book, In the Footsteps of Criminality, published in 1931.)

“Beyond a few bare facts that appeared in the newspapers at the time, the full details of this case have never been made known to the public. So soon after the sensational case of Fritz Haarmann, the Düsseldorf Vampire, it was held by the government of the day that the details of the Gormann case were much too unpleasant and salacious to lay before the general public, although some might legitimately say that these murders were the inevitable corollary of carelessly liberal policies pursued by a whole series of ineffectual Weimar governments.

“Fritz Gormann worked as a bank clerk agent for the Dresdner Bank on Behrenstrasse. He was a quiet, unassuming sort of man who lived with his wife of fifteen years and three children in Berlin West. Highly thought of by his employers, and well paid to boot, he appeared to be a respectable member of the community and was a regular worshipper at his local Lutheran church. He was never late for work, he didn’t drink alcohol, he didn’t even smoke. There are detectives I know — myself included — who could not have measured up to the apparently high moral standard of Fritz Gormann.

“Gormann’s uncle was an amateur cinematographer and when he died in 1920, he left his nephew his film studio and camera equipment in Lichterfelde. Gormann knew nothing at all about filmmaking but he was interested enough to take some night classes in the craft, and before very long he was making short, silent films. Having cut his teeth filming and editing harmless little movies, Gormann now turned his attention to his real interest, which was making erotic films. To this end, in 1921, Gormann placed an advertisement in the Berliner Morgenpost inviting aspiring models to tea at the Café Palmenhaus on Hardenbergstrasse.

“His first applicant was Amalie Ziethen, aged twenty-five, recently arrived in Berlin from Cottbus; she had a good job at Treu and Nuglisch’s perfume shop on Werderstrasse and was considered an excellent employee. But like a lot of young women of her age, she entertained ambitions of becoming a film actress. Gormann appeared to be benign, even avuncular, and explained that studios like UFA-Babelsberg were looking for girls all the time but because the competition was so intense, it was necessary that she arrange her own screen test. He explained that this same screen test should attempt to answer as many questions as possible, including what a girl looked like naked and when she was enjoying ecstasy. Cleverly, he added that this was why he always met girls at the café, instead of at the studio, so they would feel no pressure and had time to properly think things over. Amalie didn’t really need to think twice about what Gormann was proposing. She’d wanted to be in pictures all her life and had already done some nude modeling for a couple of magazines, including the cover of a naked culture magazine called Die Schönheit.

“She and Gormann left the café in Gormann’s car and drove to Lichterfelde, where, after appearing in Gormann’s pornographic film, she was strangled with a length of electrician’s wire. The body was subsequently dumped in the Grunewald Forest, not very far north from where we are now. If this was all that had happened to poor Fräulein Ziethen that would have been bad enough. It was only much later on, after we had finally arrested Gormann, that a viewing of his film collection revealed just what agonies Amalie and several other girls had endured before Gormann took their lives. Suffice it to say that he was a modern Torquemada.

“As is typical of the lust murderer, with each girl the script was horribly the same; Gormann would film her in the studio at Lichterfelde until she had gone as far as her own sense of modesty allowed, at which point he would drug her and then subject her to a pedal-operated sex machine which he had manufactured especially for him in Dresden. Then he would torture the girl for some hours, before finally having sex with her, and it was during the very act of intercourse that finally he strangled her with a ligature made of Kuhlo wire. He even devised an ingenious clockwork device to enable him to crank the camera and which allowed him to appear in front of the lens so that he could film himself in the very act of committing murder — a device which he later patented and sold to a German movie company.

“At least nine girls disappeared in this way between 1921 and 1923, and their strangled bodies were found dumped in sites as far afield as Treptow and Falkensee. The Murder Commission knew that all the dead girls shared one thing in common: they were all strangled with Kuhlo wire, which was why at the Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz, for a long time these murders were known as the Kuhlo killings.

“Several good detectives — Tegtmeyer, Ernst Gennat, Nasse, Trettin — all tried to solve the Kuhlo killings. Without putting too many details before the public, the Murder Commission sought to enlist the huge public interest there was in this case. On one celebrated occasion a couple of Berlin furniture shops — Gebruder-Bauer on Bellevuestrasse, and J. C. Pfaff on Kurfürstendamm — each donated a window where various exhibits from the murders could be displayed in the hope that a member of the public might recognize them: clothes, a length of curtain material one of the bodies had been wrapped in, the wire used to strangle the girls, and photographs of the places where the bodies had been found. But the displays caused huge crowds to collect in front of the windows and the police were obliged to intervene with the result that the shop owners requested that the articles be removed, as they were interfering with their businesses. Other appeals for information were no more successful. Detectives were even invited from Scotland Yard in England and from the Sûreté in Paris to help, all to no avail.

“Meanwhile the particular batch of wire used to strangle the girls was tracked down to UFA film studios, Babelsberg; this and the fact that two of the murdered girls had told friends they were going to meet a Rudolf Meinert for a casting session caused the Murder Commission to focus for a time on the film industry. In order to meet some of his victims, Gormann had used this name, knowing that there was a real Rudolf Meinert who was head of production at UFA. Meinert was in fact interviewed by detectives several times. As were other producers and directors at UFA film studios. After a while, anyone who had anything to do with German cinema was interviewed. Detectives even saw Gormann’s advertisement in the newspaper and spoke to him; but he seemed like no one’s idea of a suspect in a murder case. He was a church elder; a man who had won the Iron Cross and been wounded during the war; he even gave money to the Prussian Police Benevolent Fund.

“Gormann also showed detectives some of the movies he had made — innocuous casting films that were a million kilometers away from the kind of film he preferred to make; and he directed detectives to some of the girls he had filmed who testified to his kindness and generosity. Those girls he hadn’t strangled, that is. But what no one thought to check was Gormann’s relationship with the film studio; there was no relationship. As far as the studio was concerned, Gormann was just another supplicant in a long line of supplicants that were, more often than not, ignored.

“Then, in 1923, even as Gormann was being rejected as a suspect, the murders stopped completely. At least, those murders that bore Gormann’s trademarks. Any detective will tell you that the most terrible thing about investigating a series of lust murders is that the murderer stops killing before he is caught. It’s the most appalling feeling on earth to find yourself wishing another murder will be committed in the hope that it might yield up the one vital clue that will crack the case. It’s moral paradoxes like this that make the job so difficult sometimes and which cause homicide detectives many sleepless nights. In circumstances like these I’ve even known detectives to blame themselves for a victim’s death. As paradoxes go, to desire a death in the hope that you might save a life is about as acute a dilemma as you’ll find outside of wartime. It’s no good telling a cop how the philosopher Kant argues that to act in the morally right way people must act from duty. Or — again, according to Kant — that it is not the consequences of actions that make them right or wrong but the motives of the person who carries out the action. Most cops I’ve ever met couldn’t even spell ‘categorical imperative.’ And I know I myself fall short of his morally absolute standard every day I go to work.

“But back to Fritz Gormann. When the Kuhlo killings case came my way in 1928, I took the files home with me and spent several nights reading them through in their entirety. And then I read them again. You see, it’s almost invariably the case that when eventually you make an arrest, the evidence was staring you in the face all along; and with this in mind, sometimes the best thing you can do is to arrange a review of all the available evidence in the hope that you may see something that wasn’t seen the first time. You see, a cold case is nothing but all of the false and misleading evidence that, over a period of years, has come to be accepted as true. In other words, you start by patiently challenging almost everything you think you know; even the identity of the victims.

“You might reasonably think that it would be impossible to mistake the identity of a murdered girl. You would be wrong. It turned out that one of the nine murdered girls was someone else: the girl we thought she was had, after a year living in Hannover, turned up safe and well. Meanwhile I was struck by how much work had gone into the investigation and how many people the detectives in the Murder Commission had managed to interview. But by the time I finished I knew the case as well as any detective who’d been in on the case since the beginning.

“Now, before joining the Murder Commission I had been a sergeant working in Vice. Consequently many of my informants were to be found in some less than salubrious places, including a place called the Hundegustav Bar. Previously known as the Borsig Cellar, this was a real dive. At the Hundegustav they had some private rooms where they used to show what were called Minette movies — movies that explicitly featured naked girls on film. Not only were such pornographic films tolerated under the Weimar Republic, incredibly they were actively encouraged as a way of asserting the complete freedom that characterized a modern society — one that had left behind outmoded concepts like morals and accepted standards of behavior. This is one of the reasons why Germany demanded a Nazi revolution in the first place.

“Anyway, I was in there on police business — well, I would say that, wouldn’t I? — and I happened to see one of these films and something about the girl in the film struck me as familiar. I’d seen her before somewhere. But it was several days before I thought to check the Kuhlo case files, and when I did, it turned out that the girl in the film was none other than Amalie Ziethen, the very first girl that Gormann had strangled.

“I went back to the club with my commissar to interview a thief called Gustave the Dog, who owned the Hundegustav Bar. We checked the film and were astonished to find the girl’s name scratched on the film’s leader and also the actual date of her death. Gustave told us he’d paid cash for the film; the man who’d sold it to him hadn’t left a name, of course, but he described him well enough. A respectable man with a bow tie, stiff collar, a limp, perhaps an injured arm, a bowler hat, and an Iron Cross on his lapel. I had an artist friend draw a likeness of the man to Gustave’s exact instructions. Then I went around to some of the other clubs looking for a man like this who might have sold them a Minette movie. But I always drew a blank.

“Doubtless many of you are familiar with the phrase Media vita in morte sumus. I think all homicide detectives have this written on the inside of their hats. And you can hear that sentiment in a poem by the great German poet Rilke, of whom I am fond, which goes, ‘Death stands great before us, We all are his, Even our most carefree laughter to him belongs, and in the midst of the joy that life is, Mortal tears are most immortal songs.’”[1]

I glanced up as Heinrich “Gestapo” Müller took out a notebook and started to make notes with a silver pen. Was he — I wondered — a fan like me of Rilke? Or was there another, more sinister reason why he was making a note? Was he reminding himself to have some of his thugs come to my flat on Fasanenstrasse in the early hours and arrest me? That was the thing about Müller; as a policeman he was a real wire brush: it was hard to think of him having anything but sinister reasons for doing anything at all.

“Since detectives on the Murder Commission live with death as much as anyone, it’s perhaps natural that they should often believe that murderers stop only because they get caught or because they are dead. Nearly all of the detectives in the Murder Commission who were on the original investigation believed what they wanted to believe: that the killer had been stricken with remorse and committed suicide. But given the fact that the murderer might have been the man in the bowler hat who’d sold Gustave the Minette film, it was now equally possible that this earlier explanation as to why the killer had simply stopped after the last Kuhlo killing — that of Lieschen Ulbrich — was wrong. So I asked myself what other reason might have accounted for the strangler giving up an activity he seemed to very much enjoy? Had something else happened to the Kuhlo killer? Something that had made him stop killing? If he wasn’t dead, had he perhaps left Berlin? Returning to a lengthy list of witnesses who’d been interviewed, I started to investigate what dramatic life events had occurred to any of these men five years ago that might have put a stick in the spokes of a lust murderer’s career. And finally I came up with a list of possible suspects, at the head of which was the name of Fritz Gormann.

“Gormann had been awarded a second-class Iron Cross in 1917, having served as a train transport commander with a field artillery regiment. He had a limp, which was the result of an injury sustained in 1916. As I mentioned, Gormann had been a suspect until detectives rejected him on the grounds that the bank clerk — now a bank manager — was perceived to be much too mild-mannered ever to kill someone. This was nonsense as his military record clearly demonstrated that Gormann’s medal had been awarded for courage under fire.

“Further research revealed that on the day before his wife’s fortieth birthday in the summer of 1923, Fritz Gormann visited Braun’s jewelry shop at 74 Alte Jakobstrasse. The shop had been robbed twice before — in January 1912 and again in August 1919. Unknown to Gormann when he visited the shop to buy his wife a brooch, the shop was in the process of being robbed a third time. Gormann entered the store to find Herr Braun, the proprietor, lying dead on the floor and a man advancing upon him from a back room with a gun in his hand, demanding the cash that Gormann had brought with him to buy the brooch. Gormann refused and was shot, but not before he managed to hit the murderer with the lead-filled cosh that Braun had kept for self-defense. The robber was subsequently captured and executed while Gormann himself spent six months recovering from his wound in the Charité Hospital.

“But as a result of his wound he lost the use of his right arm, which, I’m sure you will all agree, is a considerable disadvantage for a strangler. And recognizing that his career as a lust murderer was now at an end, Gormann sold his studio in Lichterfelde and went back to being a respectable member of Berlin’s banking community. It seems incredible but it was as simple as that.

“Gormann’s picture as the hero of Alte Jakobstrasse had appeared in the newspapers at the time. And so I took this picture to the Hundegustav Bar, where Gustave himself confirmed that Gormann was indeed the man who had sold him the pornographic Minette film. But was he the killer? It’s one thing selling an erotic film that includes a real murder, but that doesn’t necessarily make the vendor a murderer.

“The next day I went to the Dresdner Bank at number 35 on the south side of Behren-Strasse and Friedrichstrasse to take a closer look at my suspect. I was still not entirely satisfied that we had our man, and this feeling was underlined when, after we arrested him, we searched his house and found — nothing. Not one can of film. Not one length of Kuhlo wire. Nor any curtain material that matched the piece we had. Nothing. And of course Gormann himself denied everything. Back at the Police Praesidium on Berlin’s Alexanderplatz I was beginning to feel like a bit of a fool. Actually it was worse than that. I felt low enough to think that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a detective, after all. I don’t mind telling you that I almost handed in my warrant disc right then and there.

“These are the dark moments that haunt every detective. The shadows of the shadows, as I sometimes think of them, when things can become easily mistaken for something else. When evil masquerades as good and lies appear to be the truth. But sometimes, after the shadows comes the light.

“Experience teaches patience. You learn to rely on routines. On habits. On trusting your own way perforce of doing several things at once. I often think that being a detective is a little like the traffic-control tower that stands in the center of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz: not only do its lights have to control traffic from five different directions, it also tells the time and, in bad weather, provides much needed shelter for a traffic policeman.

“In Gormann’s neighborhood of Schlachtensee, I spoke to one of his neighbors who told us that several years before, he’d seen Gormann burying something in his garden. Now, there’s nothing unusual about that in Schlachtensee, at least there isn’t when the man has two arms. But a one-armed man burying an object in his garden is perhaps more unusual, even in Berlin just ten years after a terrible war that maimed so many. In short it might reasonably be supposed that a one-armed man who buries an object in his garden might have something important to hide. So we got a court order, dug it up, and discovered a tarpaulin-covered box containing several dozen cans of film.

“Gormann still denied everything. At least he did until we discovered that in one of the later movies he actually appeared in several frames; and with this evidence we finally secured a full and detailed confession. He told us everything — every horrible fact. His modus operandi. Even his motive: he blamed a woman for encouraging him to volunteer for the army in 1914, which, he said, scarred him for life. And he’d sold the film to the Hundegustav Bar so that he could see one of his victims whenever he wished. The rest he had planned to destroy. Three months later Gormann was beheaded at Brandenburg Prison. I attended the execution myself, and I take no pleasure in mentioning that he did not die well. Incidentally, if you’re so inclined, you can see the death mask they made of his severed head in our police museum at Alexanderplatz.

“The exact number of Gormann’s victims cannot be easily calculated. He himself could not actually remember how many he’d killed. He had destroyed much of his film library after the studio was sold. Also the Weimar decade was a time when so-called lust murders were common, and it was a time when bizarre serial murders regularly occupied the front pages of German newspapers. These cases both engrossed and appalled the German public, and it was this collapse in the moral fiber of the country that led many to call for the restoration of law and order in the form of a National Socialist government. Murder of this kind is much less common today. Indeed, it can honestly be said that it seldom ever occurs; Paul Ogorzow, the S-Bahn murderer whose crimes horrified this city last year, wasn’t even a German, he was a Pole, from Masuren.”

There was a lot more about Paul Ogorzow’s racial inferiority as the reason for his criminality — a simplistically eugenic explanation provided by the state secretary of the kind to which I had no intention of lending my voice; besides, Masuren was part of East Prussia, and Ogorzow, who had grown up speaking German, was no more a Slav than I was. Instead I’d decided to end on a more personal, insightful note — something which, like a tree cake from the famous Café Buchwald, had layers of meaning that were not immediately obvious. I spoke off the cuff, of course, which would certainly have alarmed Gutterer; then again, no one, not even the state secretary of Propaganda, was about to interrupt me now in front of all our distinguished foreign guests.

“Gentlemen, as a detective I can’t claim to have learned very much in my twenty years of service. Frankly, the older I get, the less I seem to know and the more I’m aware of it.”

A little to my surprise, Himmler started to nod, although I knew for a fact that he wasn’t yet forty-two and he didn’t look like the type to admit his ignorance about anything. Nebe had told me that in Himmler’s briefcase there was always a copy of a Hindu verse scripture called the Bhagavad Gita. I don’t read much of that kind of thing myself and I didn’t know if I thought this made him a wise man; but I expect he thought so.

“But what I’m sure of is this: that it’s the ordinary people like Fritz Gormann who commit the most extraordinary crimes. It’s the ladies who play a Schubert impromptu on the piano who poison your tea, the devoted mothers who smother all of their children, the bank clerks and insurance salesmen who rape and strangle their customers, and the scoutmasters who butcher their whole families with an ax. Dockworkers, truck drivers, machine operators, waiters, pharmacists, teachers. Reliable men. Quiet types. Loving fathers and husbands. Pillars of the community. Respectable citizens. These are your modern murderers. If I had five marks for every killer who was a regular Fritz who wouldn’t harm a fly, then I’d be a rich man.

“Evil doesn’t come wearing evening dress and speaking with a foreign accent. It doesn’t have a scar on its face and a sinister smile. It rarely ever owns a castle with a laboratory in the attic, and it doesn’t have joined-up eyebrows and gap teeth. The fact is, it’s easy to recognize an evil man when you see him: he looks just like you or me. Killers are never monsters, seldom inhuman, and, in my own experience, nearly always commonplace, dull, boring, banal. It’s the human factor that’s important here. As Adolf Hitler has himself pointed out, we should recognize that Man is as cruel as Nature itself. And so perhaps it’s the Man next door who is the beast of whom we had better beware. For that reason it is perhaps also the Man next door who is best equipped to catch him. A very ordinary man like me. Thank you and Heil Hitler.”

The men seated in front of me started to clap; they were probably relieved that they could get out of that stifling, smoke-filled room and have a coffee on the terrace. Some of the other speakers who were yet to follow — Albert Widmann, Paul Werner, and Friedrich Panzinger — eyed me with a mixture of envy and contempt. The contempt I was used to, of course. As Nebe had reminded me, my own career was stalled, permanently; I was just air and a threat to no one; but they still had their own speaking ordeals ahead of them, and it wasn’t long before I learned that I’d managed to set the bar quite high. As I sat down, Nebe made some long-winded appreciative noises at the lectern and told everyone how I’d modestly neglected to mention the police decoration I’d received for apprehending Gormann and what an asset I was to everyone in Kripo at Werderscher Markt. This was news to me as I hadn’t ever been through the door of the smart, new police building on Werderscher Markt and, other than Nebe himself, knew hardly anyone who worked there. It sounded a lot like praise but he might as well have been giving Ebert’s eulogy on the steps of the Reichstag. Still, it was nice of him to bother; after all, there were some, like Panzinger and Widmann, who would happily have seen me on my way to Buchenwald concentration camp.