Philip Kerr - Field Grey

Biberstein had a thoughtful-looking face with a broad forehead and a sceptical cast to his mouth. There was something of the serious clown about him – an authority figure and white-faced straight man whose sour, rising diphthongs and way of speaking at someone instead of to them reminded me that before joining the SS and the SD, Biberstein had been a Lutheran minister in some northern peasant town where they didn't seem to mind that their pastor was a long-standing Nazi Party member. Probably they hadn't minded either that he led a murder commando in Russia before being promoted and asked to take charge of the Gestapo in southern Poland. A lot of Lutherans had seen Hitler as Luther's true heir. Maybe he was. I didn't think I'd have liked Luther any more than I ever liked Hitler. Or Biberstein.

'I wouldn't like you to make the same mistake as Otto,' said Biberstein. 'So I'd like to give you some advice. If you can't remember something then really you should just say so. No matter how feeble that might seem or how culpable it might make you look. When you're in any doubt at all, remind the Amis that this all happened almost fifteen years ago and that you really can't remember.'

'Speaking for myself,' said Haensch, 'I have always maintained that any prisoner has the right to silence. This is a legal principle known and respected throughout the civilised world. And especially in the United States of America. I myself was a lawyer in Hirschfelde prior to joining the RSHA, and you can take it from me that there is no court in the Western world that can force a man to give evidence against himself.'

'They managed to convict you, didn't they?' I said.

'I was convicted in error,' insisted the bespectacled Haensch who had a lawyer's slimy face to match his lawyer's slimy manner and even slimier patter. 'Heydrich did not order me to Russia until March 1942, by which time Task Force C had more or less completed its work. Quite simply there were no Jews left to kill. However, all of this is beside the point. As Biberstein says, this happened almost fifteen years ago. And one cannot be asked to remember things that happened then.'

He took off his glasses, cleaned them and added, exasperatedly, 'Besides, it was war. We were fighting for our very survival as a race. Things happen in war that one regrets in peacetime. That's natural. But the Amis weren't exactly saints In wartime, themselves. Ask Peiper. Ask Dietrich. They'll tell you. It wasn't just the SS who shot prisoners, it was the Amis, as well. To say nothing of the systematic mistreatment of the Malmedy prisoners of war that has occurred in this and other prisons.'

Haensch twitched, nervously. His were the kind of chinless, weak features that gave war criminals and mass murderers a bad name. Not that the Amis looked on Haensch with any more disgust than anyone else. That particular distinction was reserved for Sepp Dietrich, Jochen Peiper and the perpetrators of the so-called Malmedy massacre.

'Just remember this,' said Biberstein. 'That we're not without friends on the outside. You certainly should not feel that you are alone. Doctor Rudolf Aschenauer has represented hundreds of old comrades, including Walter Funk, our former economics minister. He is a most ingenious attorney at law. As well as being a former party member he is also a devout Roman Catholic. I'm not sure what your religious affiliations are, Captain Gunther, but it cannot be denied that in this part of the country, the Catholics have the louder voice. The Catholic Bishop of Munich, Johannes Neuhausler, and the Cardinal of Cologne, Joseph Frings, are active lobbyists on our behalf. But so is the Evangelical Bishop of Bavaria, Hans Meiser. In other words, it might be in your interests to find your Christian faith again, since both churches support the Committee for Church Aid for Prisoners.'

'I myself have had the personal support of the Evangelical Bishop of Wurttemberg, Theo Wurm,' said Haensch. 'As has our comrade Martin Sandberger. And you needn't worry about paying for a defence. The committee will take care of all your legal team's expenses. The committee even has the backing of a few sympathetic US senators and congressmen.'

'Quite so,' said Biberstein. 'These are men who have been most vocal in their opposition to Jewish-inspired ideas of vengeance.' He turned for a moment and waved his hand dismissively at Landsberg's brick walls. 'Which is all this is, of course. Keeping us here, against all the rules of international law.'

'The important thing is that we all stick together,' said Haensch. 'The last thing we want now is any unnecessary speculation as to what some of us did or did not do. Do you see? That would only complicate matters.'

'In other words, it would be desirable, Captain Gunther, if your statements to the Amis concerned only yourself.'

'Now I get it,' I said, 'and here I was thinking it was really my welfare you were concerned about.'

'Oh, but it is,' said Haensch. 'My dear fellow, it is.'

'You've got a big pile of potatoes in the office of the Parole and Clemency Board,' I said, 'and you don't want anyone like me knocking it over.'

'Naturally we want to get out of here,' said Haensch. 'Some of us have families.'

'It's not just in our interest that we're released soon,' said Biberstein. 'It's in Germany's interest that we draw a line in front of what happened and then move on. Only then, when the last prisoner of war has been released from here and in Russia, can we Germans plan for the future.'

'Not just German interest,' added Haensch. 'It's in American and British interest, too, that good relations are fostered with a fully sovereign German government, so that the real ideological enemy can be effectively opposed.'

'Don't you think we've killed enough Russians?' I asked. 'Stalin's dead. The Korean War is over.'

'No one is talking about killing anyone,' insisted Biberstein. 'But we're still at war with the communists whether you like it or not. A cold war, it's true, but a war nonetheless. Look, I don't know what you did during the war and I don't want to know. None of us do. No one in here talks about anything that happened back then. The important thing is to remember that every man in this prison is agreed on one thing: that none of us is or was criminally responsible for his acts or those of his men because we were all of us following orders. Whatever our personal feelings or misgivings about the odious work we were tasked with, it was a Fuhrer order and it was impossible to disobey. As long as we all stick to that story it's certain we can all of us be out of this place before the decade is out.'

'And hopefully well before that,' added Haensch.

I nodded, which was misleading because it made me look as if I cared what happened to any of them. I nodded because I didn't want any trouble and just because they were convicts was no reason they couldn't give me any. The Amis wouldn't have minded that at all. Unlike the Parole and Clemency Board, most of the MPs in Landsberg were of the opinion that we all deserved to hang; and possibly they were right. But most of the reason I nodded was because I was tired of not being liked by anyone, including myself. That's okay when you can go and put that feeling under several millilitres of alcohol, but the bars in prison are never open, especially when you need a drink the way I needed one now. Life in most prisons would be improved by the ration of a daily tot of liquor, like in the British Royal Navy. That's not a penal theory with which Jeremy Bentham would have agreed, but you can take it to the bank.

Most of all I could have used a drink at night just before I went to bed. Perhaps it was having to talk about and relive the summer of 1941, but while I was in Landsberg, sleep provided little respite from the cares of the world. Often I would awake in the unfocused gloom of my cell and find myself soaked in sweat having dreamed an awful dream. And more often than not it was the same dream. Of earth shifting strangely beneath my feet, turned, not by any unseen animal, but by some darker, subterranean elemental force. And, as I watched closely, I saw the black ground as it shifted again and the blank-eyed head and spiderlike hands of some murdered Lazarus, self-raising from its own corpse gases, appeared on the mysterious surface. Thin and white like a clay pipe, the naked creature lifted its behind, its chest, and, last of all, its skull, moving backwards and unnaturally, the way a collapsed puppet might arrange its various limbs, until at last it appeared to be kneeling in front of a cloud of smoke which cleared suddenly as it was sucked into the muzzle of the pistol in my steady hand.