Philip Kerr - Berlin Noir

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An omnibus of novels
These three mysteries are exciting and insightful looks at life inside Nazi Germany – richer and more readable than most histories of the period. We first meet ex-policeman Bernie Gunther in 1936, in March Violets (a term of derision which original Nazis used to describe late converts.) The Olympic Games are about to start; some of Bernie's Jewish friends are beginning to realize that they should have left while they could; and Gunther himself has been hired to look into two murders that reach high into the Nazi Party. In The Pale Criminal, it's 1938, and Gunther has been blackmailed into rejoining the police by Heydrich himself. And in A German Requiem, the saddest and most disturbing of the three books, it's 1947 as Gunther stumbles across a nightmare landscape that conceals even more death than he imagines.

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‘I might be able to help. Like I say, I come here a lot.’

‘All right then.’ I took out my wallet and held up a five-dollar bill. ‘You ever hear of a man called Eddy Holl? He comes in here sometimes. He’s in the advertising and publicity business. A firm called Reklaue & Werbe Zentrale.’

Neumann swallowed and stared dismally at the bill. ‘No,’ he said reluctantly, ‘I don’t know him. But I could ask around. The barman’s a friend. He might – ’

‘I already tried him. Not the talkative type. But from what he did say, I don’t think he knew Holl.’

‘This advertising mob. What did you say they were called?’

‘Reklaue & Werbe Zentrale. They’re in Wilmersdorfer Strasse. I was there this afternoon. According to them Herr Eddy Holl is at the offices of their parent company in Pullach.’

‘Well, maybe he is. In Pullach.’

‘I’ve never even heard of it. I can’t imagine the headquarters of anything being in Pullach.’

‘Well, you’d be wrong.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m ready to be surprised.’

Neumann smiled and nodded at the five dollars I was slipping back into my wallet. ‘For five dollars I could tell you everything I know about it.’

‘No cold cabbage.’

He nodded and I tossed him the bill. ‘This had better be good.’

‘Pullach is a small suburb of Munich. It is also the headquarters of the Postal Censorship Authorities of the United States Army. The mail for all the GIs at Tegel has to go through there.’

‘Is that it?’

‘What do you want, the average rainfall?’

‘All right, I’m not sure what that tells me, but thanks anyway.’

‘Maybe I can keep my eyes open for this Eddy Holl.’

‘Why not? I’m off to Vienna tomorrow. When I get there I’ll telegraph you with the address where I’ll be staying in case you get something. Cash on delivery.’

‘Christ, I wish I was going. I love Vienna.’

‘You never struck me as the cosmopolitan type, Neumann.’

‘I don’t suppose you fancy delivering a few letters when you’re there, do you? I’ve got quite a few Austrians on my landing.’

‘What, play postman for Nazi war-criminals? No thanks.’ I finished my drink and looked at my watch. ‘You think she’s coming, this girl of yours?’ I stood up to leave.

‘What time is it?’ he said, frowning.

I showed him the face of the Rolex on my wrist. I had more or less decided not to sell it. Neumann winced as he saw the time.

‘I expect she got held up,’ I said.

He shook his head sadly. ‘She won’t come now. Women.’

I gave him a cigarette. ‘These days the only woman you can trust is another man’s wife.’

‘It’s a rotten world, Herr Gunther.’

‘Yeah, well, don’t tell anyone, will you.’

10

On the train to Vienna I met a man who talked about what we had done to the Jews.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘they can’t blame us for what happened. It was preordained. We were merely fulfilling their own Old Testament prophecy: the one about Joseph and his brothers. There you have Joseph, a repressive father’s youngest and most favoured son, and whom we can take to be symbolic of the whole Jewish race. And then you have all the other brothers, symbolic of gentiles everywhere, but let’s assume they are Germans who are quite naturally jealous of the little velvet boy. He’s better looking than they are. He has a coat of many colours. My God, no wonder they hate him. No wonder they sell him into slavery. But the important point to note is that what the brothers do is as much a reaction against a stern and authoritarian father – a fatherland if you like – as it is against an apparently over-privileged brother.’ The man shrugged and started to knead the lobe of one of his question-mark shaped ears thoughtfully. ‘Really, when you think about it, they ought to thank us.’

‘How do you work that out?’ I said, with considerable want of faith.

‘Had it not been for what Joseph’s brothers did, the children of Israel would never have been enslaved in Egypt, would never have been led to the Promised Land by Moses. Similarly, had it not been for what we Germans did, the Jews would never have gone back to Palestine. Why even now, they are on the verge of establishing a new state.’ The man’s little eyes narrowed as if he had been one of the few allowed a peek in God’s desk-diary. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, ‘it was a prophecy fulfilled, all right.’

‘I don’t know about any prophecy,’ I growled, and jerked my thumb at the scene skimming by the carriage window: an apparently endless Red Army troop convoy, moving south along the autobahn, parallel to the railway line, ‘but it certainly looks like we ended up in the Red Sea.’

It was well named, this infinite column of savage, omnivorous red ants, ravaging the land and gathering all that they could carry – more than their individual body weights – to take back to their semi-permanent, worker-run colonies. And like some Brazilian planter who had seen his coffee crop devastated by these social creatures, my hatred of the Russians was tempered by an equal measure of respect. For seven long years I had fought them, killed them, been imprisoned by them, learned their language and finally escaped from one of their labour camps. Seven thin ears of corn blasted with the east wind, devouring the seven good ears.

At the outbreak of the war I had been a Kriminalkommissar in Section 5 of the RSHA, the Reich Main Security Office, and automatically ranked as a full lieutenant in the SS. Apart from the oath of loyalty to Adolf Hitler, my being an SS-OberSturmFührer had not seemed much of a problem until June 1941, when Arthur Nebe, formerly the director of the Reichs Criminal Police, and newly promoted SS-GruppenFührer, was given command of an Action Group as part of the invasion of Russia.

I was just one of the various police personnel who were drafted to Nebe’s group, the aim of which, so I believed, was to follow the Wehrmacht into occupied White Russia and combat lawbreaking and terrorism of whatever description. My own duties at the Group’s Minsk headquarters had involved the seizure of the records of the Russian NKVD and the capture of an NKVD death-squad that had massacred hundreds of White Russian political prisoners to prevent them from being liberated by the German Army. But mass murder is endemic in any war of conquest, and it soon became apparent to me that my own side was also arbitrarily massacring Russian prisoners. Then came the discovery that the primary purpose of the Action Groups was not the elimination of terrorists but the systematic murder of Jewish civilians.

In all my four years’ service in the first, Great War, I never saw anything which had a more devastating effect on my spirit than what I witnessed in the summer of 1941. Although I was not personally charged with the task of commanding any of these mass-execution squads, I reasoned that it could only be a matter of time before I was so ordered, and, as an inevitable corollary, before I was shot for refusing to obey. So I requested an immediate transfer to the Wehrmacht and the front line.

As the commanding general of the Action Group, Nebe could have had me sent to a punishment battalion. He could even have ordered my execution. Instead he acceded to my request for a transfer, and after several more weeks in White Russia, during which time I assisted General Gehlen’s Foreign Armies East Intelligence Section with the organization of the captured NKVD records, I was transferred, not to the front line, but to the War Crimes Bureau of the Military High Command in Berlin. By that time Arthur Nebe had personally supervised the murders of over 30,000 men, women and children.

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