Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb

But it was one of those RSHA murderers who brought me in from the cold. An Austrian, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, was rumored to be the next chief of the Reich Main Office for Security — the RSHA — but the same rumor said that his appointment could not be approved by Hitler until the man had finished drying out at a sanatorium in Chur, Switzerland. This left Kripo in the forensically capable if thoroughly murderous hands of General Arthur Nebe, who, until the previous November, had commanded SS Operation Group B in Byelorussia. Group B was now commanded by someone else, but if what was bruited about the Alex was correct — and I had good reason to think it probably was — Nebe’s men had killed more than forty-five thousand people before he finally earned his ticket back to Berlin.

Forty-five thousand. A number like that was hard to comprehend in the context of murder. Berlin’s Sportpalast, where the Nazis held some of their rallies, had a capacity of fourteen thousand. Three whole Sportpalasts full of people who were there to cheer a speech by Goebbels. That’s what forty-five thousand looked like. Except none of those murdered had cheered, of course.

I wondered what Nebe told his wife, Elise, and his daughter, Gisela, about what he’d been doing out in Ivan’s swamps. Gisela was a beautiful young woman of sixteen now, and I knew Arthur doted on her. She was intelligent, too. Did she ever ask him about his work in the SS? Or did she see something elusive in her father’s fox-like eyes and then just talk about something else, the way people used to do when the subject of the Great War had come up in conversation. I never knew anyone who was comfortable talking about that, certainly not me. If you hadn’t been in the trenches there was no point in expecting anyone even to imagine what it was like. Not that Arthur Nebe had anything to feel ashamed about back then; as a young lieutenant in his pioneer battalion with the 17th Army (1st West Prussian) Corps on the Eastern Front, he’d been gassed twice and won a first-class Iron Cross. Nebe was none too fond of the Russians as a result but it was unthinkable that he would ever have told his family that he’d spent the summer of 1941 murdering forty-five thousand Jews. But Nebe knew that I knew and somehow he could still look me in the eye; and while we didn’t talk about it, what was surprising to me more than him was the fact that I could tolerate his company, just about. I figured that if I could work for Heydrich, I could work for anyone. I wouldn’t say we were ever friends, Nebe and me. We got along all right, although I never understood how someone who had plotted against Hitler as early as 1938 could have become a mass murderer with such apparent equanimity. Nebe had tried to explain this, when we were in Minsk. He’d told me that he needed to keep his remarkable nose clean long enough for him and his friends to get another opportunity to kill Hitler; I just didn’t see how that justified the murders of forty-five thousand Jews. I didn’t understand it then and I don’t understand it now.

At Nebe’s suggestion we met for Sunday lunch in a private room at Wirtshaus Moorlake, a little southwest of Pfaueninsel, on the Wannsee. With an attractive beer garden and an orchestra, it looked more Bavarian than Prussian and was very popular with Berliners in the summer. This summer was no exception. It was a beautiful day and neither of us was wearing a uniform. Nebe was dressed in a three-piece, belt-back Knickerbocker suit made of light gray houndstooth tweed, with button pockets and peak lapels. With his light gray stockings and polished brown brogues, he looked like he was planning to shoot something with feathers, which would certainly have made a welcome change. I was wearing my summer suit, which was the same three-piece, pin-striped navy suit I wore in winter except that I had neglected to wear the vest as a concession to the warmer weather; I looked as sharp as a seagull’s feather and I didn’t care who knew it.

We ate lake trout with potatoes and strawberries with cream, and enjoyed two bottles of good Mosel. After lunch we took a longish sort of boat or shell on the water. Because of my extensive naval experience Nebe let me row, of course, although it might have had as much to do with me being a captain and him a general; and while I applied myself to the oars he smoked a large Havana cigar and stared up at an unblemished Prussian blue sky as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Perhaps he didn’t. Conscience was a luxury that few officers in the SS and SD could afford. The Wannsee looked like an impressionist painting of some idyllic scene on the River Seine at the turn of the century, the kind that looks like the picture is suffering from a severe case of spots. There were canoes and outrigged shells, sailing boats, and sloops, but no boats that required petrol: petrol was even harder to get than pills and booze. There were plenty of young women around, too — which was one of the reasons Nebe liked it there — but no young men; they were all in uniform and probably fighting for their lives in some Russian shell hole. The women in the long narrow shells wore white singlets and the briefest of shorts, which were an improvement on corsets and French bustles because they showed off their breasts and behinds to anyone like me who was interested in that kind of thing; they were tanned and vigorous and sometimes flirtatious, too; they were only human, after all, and craved male attention almost as much as I craved the chance to give it to them. Some of them rowed alongside us for a while and made conversation until they realized just how old we were; I was in my forties and I think Nebe must have been almost fifty. But there was one girl who took my eye. I recognized her as someone who lived not so far away from me. I knew her name was Kirsten and she was a schoolteacher at the Fichte Gymnasium on Emser Strasse. Seeing her row, I resolved to see a little more of Emser Strasse and perhaps, by some happy accident, her. After she and her lithe companions pushed off I kept an eye on their boat, just in case; you never know when a beautiful girl is going to fall in the water and need rescuing.

Another reason Nebe liked it on the Wannsee was because you could be absolutely sure that no one was eavesdropping on your conversation. Ever since September ’38 and the failed Oster coup, of which he’d been an important part, Nebe had suspected that he was suspected, of something; but he always spoke very freely with me, if only because he knew I was held in even greater suspicion than he was. I was the best kind of friend anyone like Nebe could ever have had; the kind of friend you could and would give up to the Gestapo without a second’s thought if it meant saving your own skin.

“Thanks for lunch,” I said. “It’s been a while since I bent the elbow for something as decent as that Mosel.”

“What’s the point in being head of Kripo if you can’t get an extra supply of food and drink coupons?” he said.

Coupons were needed for Germany’s rationing system, which seemed increasingly draconian, especially if you were a Jew.

“Mind you, what we ate, it was all local stuff,” he said. “Lake trout, potatoes, strawberries. If you can’t get that in Berlin during the summer then we might as well surrender now. Life wouldn’t be worth living.” He sighed and puffed a cloud of cigar smoke into the sky above his silver-gray head. “You know, sometimes I come here and take a boat out on my own, slip the mooring and then just drift across the lake without a thought to where I’m going.”

“There is nowhere to go. Not on this lake.”

“You make it sound like there’s something wrong with that, Bernie. But this is the nature of lakes. They’re for looking at and enjoying, not for anything as practical as what you imply.”