The One from the Other

TWENTY

The ox-blood in my veins left me feeling like it was my twenty-first birthday. It was plain to see why they’d given the stuff to Luftwaffe pilots. With enough of that whiz-juice in your blood you wouldn’t have thought twice about landing a Messerschmitt on the roof of the Reichstag. I felt better than I looked, of course. And I knew I wasn’t nearly as vigorous as the dope told me I was. I walked like someone learning to walk again. My legs and hands felt as if I had borrowed them from one of Geppetto’s rejected puppets. With my pale face, dirty ill-fitting black overalls, sweaty hair, and unaccountably heavy shoes, I told myself I lacked only a bolt through my neck to make the final casting in a Frankenstein movie. It was worse when I spoke. My voice made the monster sound like Marlene Dietrich.

I walked as far as the elevator and then sat in a wheelchair. The hospital was full of visitors and no one paid me or Stuber any attention, least of all the doctors and nurses who commonly took advantage of visiting time to have a break or catch up with some paperwork. All of them were overworked and underpaid.

Stuber wheeled me quickly to his Volkswagen taxi. I got into the passenger seat and, conserving my energy, let him close the door. He ran around the front, jumped inside, and was already revving the garden-mower engine before I had told him where we were going. He lit two cigarettes, fed one between my lips, let out the clutch, and then drove quickly onto the Maximilianstrasse roundabout, from where we could have gone in any direction. “So where to?” he asked, holding the steering wheel hard to the left so that we kept on going round and round.

“Across the bridge,” I said. “West along Maximilianstrasse and then down Hildegard Strasse, onto Hochbruchen.”

“Just tell me where we’re going,” he growled. “I’m a taxi driver, remember? That little license you see there from the Municipal Transport Office means I know this city like I know your wife’s pussy.”

My ox-blood let that one go. Besides, I preferred him like this. An apology or embarrassment might have slowed him down. Speed and efficiency were what was required, before the whizz-juice and my malice gave out. “The Holy Ghost Church, on Tal,” I said.

“A church?” he exclaimed. “What do you want to go to a church for?” He thought about that for a moment as we raced across the bridge. “Or are you having second thoughts about this? Is that it? Because if you are, then Saint Anna’s is nearer.”

“So much for your knowledge of gynecology,” I said. “Saint Anna’s is still closed.” As we came through the Forum, I caught sight of the street corner where the comrades had given me an early taste of the blackjack before bundling me into their car. “And I’m not having second thoughts. Besides, didn’t you tell me I wasn’t to get gabby? What do you care what I want in a church? It’s none of your business. You don’t want to know. That’s what you said.”

He shrugged. “I just thought you was having second thoughts about this. That’s all.”

“When I have second thoughts, you’ll be the first to know,” I said. “Now, where’s the rattle?”

“Down there.” He nodded at my feet. There was a leather tool bag on the floor. I was so ragged up I hadn’t noticed it. “In the bag. There are some spanners and screwdrivers in there to give it some respectable company. Just in case anyone gets nosy.”

I leaned slowly forward and lifted the bag into my lap. On the side of the bag was the city coat of arms and “Post Office Motorbus Services, Luisenstrasse.”

“It belonged to a bus mechanic, I figure,” he said. “Someone left it in the cab.”

“Since when did bus mechanics start taking export taxis?” I asked.

“Since they started screwing American nurses,” he said. “She was a real peach, too. I’m not surprised he forgot his tools. They couldn’t keep their faces off each other.” He shook his head. “I was watching them in the rearview mirror. It was like her tongue was looking for her door key inside his flap.”

“You paint a very romantic picture,” I said and opened the bag. Among all the tools was a U.S. government-issue Colt automatic. A nice pre-Great War .45. The sound suppressor attached to the muzzle was homemade but most of them were. And the Colt was the ideal gun for a silencer. The only trouble was its length. Wearing the pipe the whole thing was almost eighteen inches long. It was as well Stuber had thought to supply a tool bag. A rig like that might sound quiet but to look at was about as inconspicuous in your hand as Excalibur.

“That gun is as cold as Christmas,” he said. “I got it off a shit-skin sergeant who does guard duty at the American Officers’ Club in the Art House. He swears on his black momma’s life that the gun and the pipe were last used by a U.S. Army Ranger to assassinate an SS general.”

“So it’s a lucky gun, then,” I said.

Stuber gave me a sideways look. “You’re a strange one, Gunther,” he said.

“I doubt it.”

We drove down Hochbruchen in sight of the Hofbrauhaus, which, unusually for that time of day, was doing brisk business. A man wearing lederhosen staggered drunkenly along the pavement and narrowly avoided colliding with a pretzel cart. The smell of beer was in the air—more so than seemed normal, even for Munich. A posse of American soldiers ambled along Brauhstrasse with a proprietorial swagger, turning the air blue with their sweet Virginia tobacco. They looked too large for their uniforms, and their boozy laughter echoed down the street like small-arms fire. One of them started to dance a buck-and-wing as, somewhere, a brass band began to play “The Old Comrades March.” The tune seemed appropriate for what I had in mind. “What’s all the fuss about?” I growled.

“It’s the first day of Oktoberfest,” said Stuber. “Lots of Amis wanting taxis and here I am driving you around.”

“You’ve been paid very handsomely for the privilege.”

“I’m not complaining,” he said. “It just sounded that way. Me using the wrong tense to tell you what I was thinking. The present progressive, I think.”

“When I want you to tell me what you’re thinking, sonny, I’ll twist your ear. Future conditional.” We reached the church. “Turn left toward Viktualienmarkt and pull up at the side door. Then you can help me get out of this walnut shell. I feel like a pea in a street game of three-card monte.”

“That’s the sucker move you’re describing, Gunther,” he said. “Where I get the pea out and nobody notices me doing it.”

“Shut up and get the door, beetle jockey.”

Stuber stopped the car, jumped out, ran around the front, and threw open the door. It exhausted me just watching him.

“Thanks.”

I sniffed the air like a hungry dog. Down on the market square they were roasting almonds and warming pretzels. Another brass band was launching into “The Clarinet Polka.” If I’d had one leg I couldn’t have felt less like dancing a polka. Listening to it made me want to sit down and take a breather. Over at the festival meadow on Theresienwiese, the revels would be in full swing. Big-breasted girls in dirndls would be demonstrating the Charles Atlas course by lifting four beer steins in each hand. Brewers would be parading with their usual mix of bombast and vulgarity. Small children would be eating their way through gingerbread hearts. Fat stomachs would be filling up with beer as people tried to forget all about the war and others tried, sentimentally, to remember it.

I remembered the war only too well. That was why I was here. Mostly, I remembered that awful summer of 1941. I remembered Operation Barbarossa, when three million German soldiers, myself included, and more than three thousand tanks had crossed into the Soviet Union. I remembered with an all-too-painful clarity the city of Minsk. I remembered Lutsk. I remembered everything that had happened there. Despite all my best efforts, it seemed I wasn’t ever likely to forget it.

The speed of the advance took everyone by surprise—ourselves as much as the Popovs. That’s what we called the Ivans in those days. On June 21, 1941, we had grouped on the Soviet border, full of trepidation for what was to follow. Five days later we had traveled an astonishing two hundred miles and were in Minsk. Bombarded by a massive artillery barrage and hammered by the Luftwaffe, the Red Army had taken a severe mauling and many of us thought the war was more or less over at that point. But the Reds fought on where others—the French, for example—would certainly have surrendered. Their tenacity was at least in part because NKVD security detachments had checked a wholesale panic with the threat of summary executions. Doubtless the Reds knew that this was no idle threat, for they were certainly aware of the fate that had befallen thousands of Ukrainian and Polish political prisoners in Minsk, Lvov, Zolochiv, Rivne, Dubno, and Lutsk. So swift had been the progress of the Wehrmacht in the Ukraine that the retreating Soviets had no time to evacuate the prisoners held in the NKVD jails. And they hardly wanted to let them fall into our hands, where they could become SS auxiliaries, or German partisans. So before abandoning these cities to their fate, the NKVD set the prisons on fire—with all the prisoners still locked up inside. No, that’s not true. They took the Germans with them. I suppose they intended to swap them for Reds later on. But it didn’t turn out that way. We found them later, in a clover field on the road to Smolensk. They’d been stripped and machine-gunned to death.

I was with a reserve police battalion attached to the 49th Army. It was our job to find NKVD murder squads and put an end to their activities. We had intelligence that a death squad from Lvov and Dubno had gone north to Lutsk and, in our light panzer wagons and Puma armored cars, we tried to get there ahead of them. Lutsk was a small town on the Styr River with a population of seventeen thousand. It was the seat of a Roman Catholic bishop, which was hardly likely to endear it to the communists. When we arrived there we found almost the entire population gathered around the NKVD prison and in great distress about the fate of relatives incarcerated there. One wing of the prison was well ablaze, but using our armored cars we managed to break down a wall and save the lives of more than a thousand men and women. But we were too late for almost three thousand others. Many had been shot in the back of the head. Others had been killed by grenades tossed in the windows of cells. But most had just been burned to death. I will never forget the smell of burnt human flesh as long as I live.

The local townspeople told us which way the death squad had gone and so we gave chase, which was easy enough in the panzer wagons. The dirt roads were hard as concrete. We caught up with them only a few miles north in a place called Goloby. A firefight ensued. Thanks to the cannon mounted on our car, we won it easily. Thirty of them were captured. They hadn’t even had time to throw away their distinctive red identification documents, which, inconveniently for them, contained photographs. One of them even had the keys to Lutsk Prison still in his pocket as well as numerous files relating to some of the murdered prisoners. There were twenty-eight men and two women. None of them was older than twenty-five or -six. The youngest, a woman, was nineteen and good-looking in that high-cheekboned, Slavic way. It was hard to connect her with the murders of so many people. One of the prisoners spoke German and I asked him why they had murdered so many of their own people. He told me the order had come straight from Stalin and that their party commissars would have had them shot if they had failed to carry out his order. Several of my men were for taking them with us so they could be hanged in Minsk. But I did not care for this extra baggage. And so we shot them all, in four groups of seven, and headed north again, toward Minsk.

I had joined the 316th Battalion straight from Berlin, at a place called Zamosc, in Poland. Prior to this, the 316th and the 322nd, with whom we operated, had been in Kraków. At that time, so far as I was aware, no mass murders had been carried out by either of these two police battalions. I knew that many of my colleagues were anti-Semitic, but just as many were not, and I didn’t see any of this as a problem until we got to Minsk, where I made my report. I also handed over the two dozen sets of identification papers we had confiscated before executing their murderous bearers. It was July 7.

My superior, an SS colonel called Mundt, congratulated me on our successful action while at the same time issuing a reprimand for not bringing back the two women so they could be hanged. It seemed Berlin had issued a new order: all NKVD women and female partisans were to be hanged, in public, as an example to the population of Minsk.

Mundt spoke better Russian than I did at the time, and he could also read the language. Prior to his attachment to Special Action Group B in Minsk he had been with the Jewish Office of the RSHA. And it was he who noticed something about the NKVD prisoners we had executed. But even when he read aloud their names I still didn’t understand.

“Kagan,” he had said. “Geller, Zalmonowitz, Polonski. Don’t you get it, Obersturmführer Gunther? They’re all Jews. That was a Jewish NKVD death squad you executed. It just goes to show you, doesn’t it? That the Führer is right about Bolshevism and Judaism being one and the same poison.”

Even then it didn’t seem to matter that much. Even then I told myself that I hadn’t known they were all Jews when we shot them. I told myself that it probably wouldn’t have made any difference—they had murdered thousands of people in cold blood and they deserved to die. But that was on the morning of July 7. By the afternoon I had started to look upon the police action I’d led somewhat differently. By the afternoon I had heard about the “registration,” as a result of which two thousand Jews had been identified and shot. Then, the following day, I had happened upon an SS firing squad, commanded by a young police officer I had known back in Berlin. Six men and women were shot and their bodies fell into a mass grave in which perhaps a hundred bodies already lay. That was the moment when I realized the real purpose of the police battalions. That was the moment when my life changed, forever.

It was fortunate for me that the general commanding Special Action Group B, Arthur Nebe, was an old friend of mine. Before the war he had been the chief of Berlin’s criminal police, a career detective like myself. So I went to him and asked for a transfer to the Wehrmacht for front-line duties. He asked me my reason. I told him that if I stayed it would only be a matter of time before I was shot for disobeying an order. I told him that it was one thing to shoot a man because he had been a member of an NKVD death squad, but that it was quite another to shoot him just because he was a Jew. Nebe had thought that was funny.

“But Obersturmbannführer Mundt tells me the people you shot were Jews,” he said.

“Yes, but that’s not why I shot them, sir,” I said.

“The NKVD is full of Jews,” he said. “You know that, don’t you? Chances are you catch some more of these death squads, they’ll be Jews. What then?”

I stayed silent. I didn’t know what then. “All I know is that I’m not going to spend this war murdering people.”

“War is war,” he said, impatiently. “And frankly, we may have bitten off rather more than we can chew in Russia. We have to win in this theater as quickly as possible if we’re to secure ourselves for the winter. That means there’s no room for sentiment. Frankly, we’ll have a job looking after our own army let alone Red Army prisoners and the local population. It’s difficult work we have ahead of us, make no mistake. Not everyone is suited to it. I don’t particularly care for it myself, Bernie. Do I make myself clear?”

“Clear enough,” I said. “But I’d rather shoot at people who were shooting back. I’m peculiar like that.”

“You’re too old for front-line duty,” he said. “You won’t last five minutes.”

“I’ll take my chances, sir.”

He looked at me for a moment longer and then stroked his long, crafty nose. His was a cop’s face. Shrewd, tough, good-humored. Until then I hadn’t really thought of him as a Nazi at all. I knew for a fact that only three years before he had been part of an army plot to depose Hitler as soon as the British declared war on Germany following the annexation of the Sudetenland. Of course, the British never declared war. Not in 1938. As for Nebe, he was a survivor. And anyway, in 1940, after Hitler defeated the French in just six weeks, a lot of his opponents in the army had changed their opinion of him. That victory had seemed like a kind of miracle to many Germans, even those who disliked Hitler and all that he stood for. I supposed Nebe was one of these.

He could have had me shot, although I never heard of anyone who was shot for disobeying the so-called Commissar Order, which became little more than a license to murder Russian civilians. He could have had me sent to a punishment battalion. Those did exist. Instead, Nebe sent me to join Gehlen’s Foreign Armies East Intelligence Section, where I spent several weeks organizing captured NKVD records. And subsequently I was transferred back to Berlin, to the War Crimes Bureau of the German High Command. I figured that was Arthur Nebe’s idea of a joke. He always did have a strange sense of humor.

I thought of all the excuses for what had happened in Lutsk. That I wasn’t to know they were Jews. That they were murderers. That they had killed nearly three thousand people—probably more. That they certainly would have killed many more political prisoners if we hadn’t shot them.

But it always came up the same way.

I had executed thirty Jews. That they had killed all those prisoners simply to stop them from collaborating with the Nazi invaders—as almost certainly they would have. That Stalin had recruited large numbers of Jews to the NKVD because he knew they had more to fight for. That I had played a part in the greatest crime in recorded history.

I hated myself for that. But I hated the SS more. I hated the way I had become complicit in their genocide. No one knew better than me what had been done in the name of Germany. And that was the real reason I was walking into that church with murder on my mind. It wasn’t just about a severe beating and the loss of my little finger. It was about something far more important. If anything, the beating had brought me to my senses about who these people were and what they had done, not just to millions of Jews, but to millions of Germans like me. To me. That was something worth killing for.