Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir

I shook my head bitterly.

‘Well, at least there’s an end to their dirty little plot. At least we’ll be spared another pogrom, for a while anyway.’

Heydrich looked uncomfortable now. Nebe got up and looked out of the library window.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ I yelled, ‘you don’t mean to say that it’s going to go ahead?’ Heydrich winced visibly. ‘Look, we all know that the Jews had nothing to do with the murders.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said brightly, ‘that’s certain. And they won’t be blamed, you have my word on it. I can assure you that -’

‘Tell him,’ said Nebe. ‘He deserves to know.’

Heydrich thought for a moment, and then stood up. He pulled a book from off the shelf and examined it negligently.

‘Yes, you’re right, Nebe. I believe he probably does.’

‘Tell me what?’

‘We received a telex before the Court convened this morning,’ said Heydrich. ‘By sheer coincidence, a young Jewish fanatic has made an attempt on the life of a German diplomat in Paris. Apparently he wished to protest against the treatment of Polish Jews in Germany. The Führer has sent his own personal physician to France, but it is not expected that our man will live.

‘As a result, Goebbels is already lobbying the Führer that if this diplomat should die then certain spontaneous expressions of German public outrage be permitted against Jews throughout the Reich.’

‘And you’ll all look the other way, is that it?’

‘I don’t approve of lawlessness,’ said Heydrich.

‘Weisthor gets his pogrom after all. You bastards.’

‘Not a pogrom,’ Heydrich insisted. ‘Looting will not be permitted. Jewish property will merely be destroyed. The police will ensure that there is no plunder. And nothing will be permitted which in any way endangers the security of German life or property.’

‘How can you control a mob?’

‘Directives will be issued. Offenders will be apprehended and dealt with.’

‘Directives?’ I flung my cigarettes against the bookcase. ‘For a mob? That’s a good one.’

‘Every police chief in Germany will receive a telex with guidelines.’

Suddenly I felt very tired. I wanted to go home, to be taken away from all of this. Just talking about such a thing made me feel dirty and dishonest. I had failed. But what was infinitely worse, it didn’t seem as if I’d ever been meant to succeed.

A coincidence, Heydrich had called it. But a meaningful coincidence, according to Jung’s idea? No. It couldn’t be. There was no meaning in anything, anymore.

Thursday, 10 November

‘Spontaneous expressions of the German people’s anger’: that was how the radio put it.

I was angry all right, but there was nothing spontaneous about it. I’d had all night to get worked up. A night in which I’d heard windows breaking, and obscene shouts echoing up the street, and smelt the smoke of burning buildings. Shame kept me indoors. But in the morning which came bright and sunny through my curtains I felt I had to go out and take a look for myself.

I don’t suppose I shall ever forget it.

Ever since 1933, a broken window had been something of an occupational hazard for any Jewish business, as synonymous with Nazism as a jackboot, or a swastika. This time, however, it was something altogether different, something much more systematic than the occasional vandalism of a few drunken SA thugs. On this occasion there had occurred a veritable Walpurgisnacht of destruction.

Glass lay everywhere, like the pieces of a huge, icy jigsaw cast down to the earth in a fit of pique by some ill-tempered prince of crystal.

Only a few metres from the front door to my building were a couple of dress shops where I saw a snail’s long, silvery trail rising high above a tailor’s dummy, while a giant spider’s web threatened to envelope another in razor-sharp gossamer.

Further on, at the corner of Kurfürstendamm, I came across an enormous mirror that lay in a hundred pieces, presenting shattered images of myself that ground and cracked underfoot as I picked my way along the street.

For those like Weisthor and Rahn, who believed in some symbolic connection between crystal and some ancient Germanic Christ from which it derived its name, this sight must have seemed exciting enough. But for a glazier it must have looked like a licence to print money, and there were lots of people out sightseeing who said as much.

At the northern end of Fasanenstrasse the synagogue close to the S-Bahn railway was still smouldering, a gutted, blackened ruin of charred beams and burned-out walls. I’m no clairvoyant but I can say that every honest man who saw it was thinking the same thing I was. How many more buildings would end up the same way before Hitler was finished with us?

There were storm-troopers – a couple of truck-loads of them in the next street – and they were testing some more window-panes with their boots. Cautiously deciding to go another way, I was just about to turn back when I heard a voice I half-recognized.

‘Get out of here, you Jewish bastards,’ the young man yelled.

It was Bruno Stahlecker’s fourteen-year-old son Heinrich, dressed up in the uniform of the motorized Hitler Youth. I caught sight of him just as he hurled a large stone through another shop window. He laughed delightedly at his own handiwork and said: ‘Fucking Jews.’ Looking around for the approval of his young comrades he saw me instead.

As I walked over to him I thought of all the things I would have said to him if I had been his father, but when I was close to him, I smiled. I felt more like giving him a good jaw-whistler with the back of my hand.

‘Hallo, Heinrich.’

His fine blue eyes looked at me with sullen suspicion.

‘I suppose you think you can tell me off,’ he said, ‘just because you were a friend of my father’s.’

‘Me? I don’t give a shit what you do.’

‘Oh? So what do you want?’

I shrugged and offered him a cigarette. He took one and I lit us both. Then I threw him the box of matches. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘you might need these tonight. Maybe you could try the Jewish Hospital.’

‘See? You are going to give me a lecture.’

‘On the contrary. I came to tell you that I found the men who murdered your father.’

‘You did?’ Some of Heinrich’s friends who were now busy looting the clothes shop yelled to him to come and help. ‘I won’t be long,’ he called back to them. Then he said to me: ‘Where are they? The men who killed my father.’

‘One of them is dead. I shot him myself.’

‘Good. Good.’

‘I don’t know what is going to happen to the other two. That all depends, really.’

‘On what?’

‘On the S S. Whether they decide to court-martial them or not.’ I watched his handsome young face crease with puzzlement. ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you? Yes, these men, the ones who murdered your father in such a cowardly fashion, they were all S S officers. You see, they had to kill him because he would probably have tried to stop them breaking the law. They were evil men, you see, Heinrich, and your father always did his best to put away evil men. He was a damned good policeman.’ I waved my hand at all the broken windows. ‘I wonder what he would have thought of all this?’

Heinrich hesitated, a lump rising in his throat as he considered the implications of what I had told him.

‘It-wasn’t – it wasn’t the Jews who killed him then?’

“The Jews? Good gracious no.‘ I laughed. ’Where on earth did you get such an idea? It was never the Jews. I shouldn’t believe everything you read in Der Stürmer , you know.‘

It was with a considerable want of alacrity that Heinrich returned to his friends when he and I had finished speaking. I smiled grimly at this sight, reflecting that propaganda works both ways.