Philip Kerr - Field Grey

I drank the schnapps. What else was I going to do with it? People say all kinds of crazy things when they've had a drink – me included. They talk about God and the saints and hearing voices and seeing the Devil; they shout about killing Franzis and Tommies and they sing Christmas carols on a summer's day. Their wives don't understand them and their mothers never loved them. They'll say black is white, up is down and hot is cold. No one ever expects a drink to help you make sense. Arthur Nebe had taken several drinks but he wasn't drunk. Even so, what he said sounded crazier than any drunk I'd ever heard and ever hope to hear again.

I stayed at Lenin House for two or three weeks, sharing a seventh-floor billet with Waldemar Klingelhofer, who was an SS Obersturmbannfuhrer – a lieutenant colonel – in overall charge of the anti-partisan hunts in the Minsk area.

Minsk was one place where German propaganda did not exaggerate the strength of local partisans, who took advantage of the huge thick forests called pushcha that characterised the area. Most of these fighters were young Red Army soldiers but quite a few were Jews who'd fled from pogroms to the comparative safety of the forest. What did they have to lose? Not that the Jews were always welcomed with open arms: some of the Byelorussians were no less anti-Semitic than Germans, and more than half of these refugee Jews were murdered by the Popovs.

Klingelhofer spoke fluent Russian – he'd been born in Moscow – but he knew nothing about police work or hunting partisans. Real partisans. I gave him some advice on how to recruit some informers.

Not that my advice to Klingelhofer really mattered, because at the end of July Nebe ordered him to Smolensk to obtain furs for German Army winter clothing; and I was ordered to Baranowicze, about one hundred and fifty kilometres southwest of Minsk, to await transport back to Berlin.

Formerly a Polish city until the Soviets occupied it at the beginning of the war, Baranowicze was a small, prosperous town of about thirty thousand people, more than a third of them Jews. In its centre was a long, wide, suburban-looking tree-lined street with two-storey shops and houses that the occupying German Army had renamed Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse. There was an Orthodox cathedral recently built in the neoclassical style and a ghetto – six buildings on the outskirts of the city, where more than twelve thousand Jews were now confined; at least those Jews who had not escaped into the Pripet marshes. Two whole regiments of the SS Cavalry Brigade commanded by Sturmbannfuhrer Bruno Magill were searching the 38- thousand-acre marshland, killing every Jew they could find. This left the city quiet – so quiet that for a couple of days until a seat became available on a Ju 52 back to Tegel airfield in Berlin I was able to sleep in a proper bed in what formerly had been Girsh Bregman's Leather Goods and Shoe Store.

I tried not to consider the sudden fate that had overtaken Girsh Bregman and his family, whose framed photographs still stood on top of an upright Rheinberg Sohne in the little parlour behind the shop; but it was only too easy to think of them enduring the close privations of the ghetto or, perhaps, fleeing their persecutors, who included not just the SS but also the Polish police, former Polish Army soldiers, and even some local Ukrainian clergy who were keen to bless these 'pacifications'. Of course it was possible that the Bregmans were already pacified, which is to say, that they were dead. That's about as pacified as you could get in the summer of 1941. Most of all I just hoped they were alive. Only it was the kind of hope that looked like a canary in a mine full of gas. I wouldn't have minded a little gas myself. Just enough to sleep for about a hundred years and then wake up from the nightmare that was my life.

At least you did wake up,' said Silverman. 'Unlike six million others.'

'You're a funny guy. Are you always so quick with maths or is it just that one number you like?'

'I don't like anything about it, Gunther,' said Silverman.

'Neither do I. And please don't ever make the mistake of thinking I do.'

'It's not me that makes mistakes, Gunther. It's you.'

'You're right. I should have made sure I was born somewhere other than Germany in 1896. That way maybe I could have ended up on the winning side. Twice. How does it feel, boys? To sit in judgement on someone else's mistakes? Pretty good, I imagine. The way you two act anyone might think you Americans really do believe that you're better than anyone else.'

'Not everyone else,' snarled Earp. 'Just you and your Nazi pals.'

'You can keep telling yourself that, if you like. But we both know it's not true. Or is it that occupying the moral high ground is more than an aspiration for you Amis? Perhaps it's also a constitutional necessity. Only I suspect that underneath all that sanctimony you're just like us Germans. You really do believe that might is right.'

'At this moment,' said Silverman, 'all that really matters is what we believe about you.'

'He tells a good story.' Earl was speaking to Silverman. 'A regular Jakob Grimm, this guy. All it lacked was the "once upon a time" and the "happily ever after". We should get him some heated iron shoes and make him dance around the room in them like Snow White's stepmother until he's straight with us.'

'You're quite correct,' said Silverman. 'And you know, only a German could have thought of a punishment like that.'

'Didn't you say you had German parents?' I said. 'Just a mother you're sure about, I presume.'

'Neither of us feels very proud of our German background,' said Earp. 'Thanks to people like you.'

For a while the three of us were silent. Then Silverman said:

'There was a Gunther we heard about in that town you mentioned. Baranowicze. He was an SS Sturmbannfuhrer with one of the small killing units belonging to Arthur Nebe's Task Force B. A Sonderkommando. He organised one of the early gassings. Everyone in a mental hospital at Mogilev was killed. That wouldn't be you, would it?'

'No,' I said. But seeing that they were hardly likely to be satisfied with a straight denial I lifted my finger to indicate that I was trying to remember something. And then I did. 'I think there was an SS Sturmbannfuhrer called Gunther Rausch. Attached to Task Force B in the summer of 1941. It must be him you're thinking of. I never gassed anyone. Not even the fleas in my bed.'

'But it was you who suggested to Arthur Nebe the idea of mass killings using explosives, wasn't it? You admitted as much yourself.'

'That was a joke.'

'Not a very funny joke.'

'When it comes to blowing people up I don't think anyone has ever managed that more efficiently than America,' I said. 'How many did you blow up in Hiroshima? And Nagasaki? A couple of hundred thousand and still counting. That's what I've read. Germany may have started the process of mechanised mass killing but you Americans certainly perfected it.'

'Did you ever visit the Criminal Technology Institute in Berlin?'

'Yes,' I said. 'I often went there in the course of my duty as a detective. For forensic tests and results.'

'Did you ever meet a chemist called Albert Wildmann?'

'Yes. I met him. Many times.'

'And Hans Schmidt? Also from the same institute?'

'I think so. What are you driving at?'

'Isn't it the case that you returned from Minsk to Berlin at the behest of Arthur Nebe, not to join the German War Crimes Bureau as you told us, but to meet with Wildmann and Schmidt in pursuit of your explosives idea?'

I was shaking my head, but Silverman wasn't paying attention and I was gaining a new respect for him as an interrogator.

'And that having discussed the idea in detail, you yourself returned to Smolensk with Wildmann and Schmidt, in September 1941.'