Philip Kerr - Field Grey

'Nebe was two different men,' I said. 'Perhaps several more than just two. In 1933 Nebe believed that the Nazis were the only alternative to the communists and that they would bring order to Germany. By 1938, probably earlier, he'd realised his mistake and was plotting with others in the Wehrmacht and the police to overthrow Hitler. There's a propaganda ministry photograph of Nebe with Himmler, Heydrich and Muller that shows the four of them planning the investigation of a bomb attempt on Hitler's life. That was November 1939. And Nebe was part of that very same conspiracy. I know that because I was part of it, too. However, Nebe quickly changed his mind after the defeat of France and Britain in 1940. Lots of people changed their minds about Hitler after the miracle of France. Even I did, for a few months, anyway. We both changed our minds again when Hitler attacked Russia. Nobody thought that was a good idea. And yet Arthur did what he was told. He'd plot away and do what he was told even if that meant murdering Jews in Minsk and Smolensk. Doing what you were told was always the best kind of cover if you were simultaneously planning a coup d'etat against the Nazis. I think that's why he seems like such an ambiguous figure. I think that's why, as you said, he was falling down on the job as commander of Task

Force B. Because his heart was never in it. Above all, Nebe was a survivor.'

'Like you.'

'To some extent, yes, that's true. Thanks to him.'

'Tell us about that.'

'I already did.'

'Not in any great detail.'

'What do you want me to do? Draw you a picture?'

'Really, we want as many details as possible,' said Earl.

'When someone is lying,' said Silverman, 'it's nearly always the case that they start to contradict themselves in matters of detail. You should know that from being a policeman yourself. When they start to contradict themselves on the small things you can bet they're lying about the big things, too.'

I nodded.

'So,' he said, 'let's go back to Goloby, where you murdered the members of an NKVD squad.'

'The ones you claim had murdered all of the inmates at the NKVD prison in Lutsk,' said Earp. 'According to the Soviets, that was just German propaganda, put out to help persuade your own men that the summary execution of all Jews and Bolsheviks was justified.'

'You'll be telling me next that it was the German Army who murdered all those Poles in the Katyn Forest.'

'Maybe it was.'

'Not according to your own congressional investigation.'

'You're well informed.'

I shrugged. 'In Cuba, I got all the American newspapers. In an attempt to improve my English. 1952, wasn't it? The investigation. When the Maiden Committee recommended that the Soviets should answer a case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague? Look, it's a story I've been interested in for a long time. We both know the NKVD killed as many as we did. So why not admit it? The commies are the enemy now. Or is that just American propaganda?'

I fetched a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of my prison jacket and lit one slowly. I was tired of answering questions but I knew I was going to have to open the door of my mind's darkest cellar and wake up some very unpleasant memories. Even in a room with bars on the window, Operation Barbarossa felt like a very long way away. Outside it was a bright and sunny June day, and although it had been a very similarly warm June day when the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union, that wasn't the way I remembered it. When I recalled names like Goloby, Lutsk, Bialystok and Minsk I thought of infernal heat and the sights, sounds, and smells of a Hell on earth; but most of all I remembered a clean-shaven young man aged about twenty standing in a cobbled town square with a crowbar in his hand, his thick boots an inch deep in the blood of about thirty other men who lay dead or dying at his feet. I remembered the shocked laughter of some of the German soldiers who were watching this bestial display; I remembered the sound of an accordion playing a spirited tune as another, older man with a long beard walked silently, almost calmly toward the fellow with the crowbar and was immediately struck on the head like some ghastly Hindu sacrifice; I remembered the noise the old man made as he fell to the ground and the way his legs jerked stiffly like a puppet's until the crowbar hit him again.

I jerked my thumb at the window. 'All right,' I said. 'I'll tell you everything. But do you mind if I put my face in the sun for a moment? It helps to remind me that I'm still alive.'

'Unlike millions of others,' Earp said pointedly. 'Go ahead. We're in no hurry.'

I went to the window and looked out. By the main gate a small crowd of people had gathered to wait for someone. Either that or they were looking for the window of cell number seven, which seemed a little less likely.

'Is someone being released today?' I asked.

Silverman came over to the window. 'Yes,' he said. 'Erich Mielke.'

'Mielke?' I shook my head. 'You're mistaken. Mielke's not in here. He couldn't be.'

Even as I spoke a smaller door in the main gate opened and a short stocky grey-haired man of about sixty stepped out and was cheered by the waiting well-wishers.

'That's not Mielke,' I said.

'I think you mean Erhard Milch, sir,' Earp told Silverman. 'The Luftwaffe field marshal? It's him who's being released today.'

'So that's who it is,' I said. 'For a moment there I thought it was a real war criminal.'

'Milch is – was – a war criminal,' insisted Silverman. 'He was director of air armaments under Albert Speer.'

'And what was criminal about building planes?' I asked. 'You must have built quite a few planes yourself if the state of Berlin in 1945 was anything to go by.'

'We didn't use slave labour to do it,' said Silverman.

I watched as Erhard Milch accepted a bunch of flowers from a pretty girl, bowed politely to her, and was then driven off in a smart new Mercedes to begin the rest of his life.

'What was the sentence for that then?'

'Life imprisonment,' said Silverman.

'Life imprisonment, eh? Some people have all the luck.'

'Commuted to fifteen years.'

'There's something wrong with your High Commissioner's maths, I think,' I said. 'Who else is getting out of here?'

I took a puff on my tasteless cigarette, flicked the butt out of the window and watched it spiral to the ground trailing smoke like one of Milch's invincible Luftwaffe planes. 'You were going to tell us about Minsk,' said Silverman.

On the morning of 7 July 1941, I commanded a firing squad that executed thirty Russian POWs. At the time I didn't feel bad about this because they were all NKVD, and less than twelve hours before they themselves had murdered two or three thousand prisoners at the NKVD prison in Lutsk. They also murdered some German POWs who were with them, which was a miserable sight. I suppose you could say they had every right to do so given that we had invaded their country. You could also say that our executing them in retaliation had considerably less justification, and you'd probably be correct on both counts. Well, we did it, but not because of the so-called 'commissar order' or the 'Barbarossa decree', which were nothing more than a shooting licence from German field headquarters. We did it because we felt – I felt – they had it coming, and they would certainly have shot us in similar circumstances. So we shot them in groups of four. We didn't make them dig their own graves or anything like that. I didn't care for that sort of thing. It smacked of sadism. We shot them and left them where they fell. Later on, when I was a pleni in a Russian labour camp, I sometimes wished I'd shot many more than just thirty, but that's a different story.