Philip Kerr - Field Grey

'Think of us like the Brothers Grimm,' said the Ami smoking the pipe. 'Gathering material for a story.'

'I try not to think of you at all if I can help it. But the Brothers Grimm works for me. I never liked their stuff very much. I especially hated the story about the village idiot with the pipe and the bow tie and his wicked Uncle Sam.'

'So, then. After Paris. You went home to Berlin.'

'Briefly. I organised Renata a job at the Adlon and lived to regret it. The poor kid was killed in the first big bombing raid on Berlin, in November 1943. Some help I was.'

'And Heydrich?'

'Oh he was killed earlier than 1943. Only he had it coming and on a silver salver. But that's another story.'

'Did he believe you? About not finding Mielke?'

'Maybe. Maybe not. You never knew with Heydrich. We talked it over in his office at the Prinz Albrechtstrasse. Next thing I knew I had orders to go to the Ukraine. I might have taken that personally if it wasn't that everyone had the same orders.' I shrugged. 'Well, I expect your friends Silverman and Earp told you all about that. Then I was in Berlin for a while before going to Prague. That was the summer of 1942. Let's see now. A year later I was in Smolensk, with the War Crimes Bureau. As an Oberleutnant. But after the battle of Kursk we were out of that whole theatre pretty quickly. The Red Army was in the driver's seat, you might say. I got a leave. I got married. To a schoolteacher. Then I was recruited into the

Abwehr – military intelligence – and promoted to captain again.'

'Why were you demoted?'

'Because of what happened in Prague. I stepped on someone's corns, I guess.' I shrugged. 'Anyway, February 1944 I joined General Schorner's Northern Army as an intelligence officer. I spoke a fair bit of Russian by then. And a bit of Polish, too. The work was mostly interpreting. At least it was until the fighting started. Then it was just fighting. Kill or be killed. Tell me something, did either of the Brothers Grimm see combat?'

'Nope,' said the man with the pipe. 'I was flying a desk for the whole of the war.'

'I was too young,' said the man with the bow tie.

'I didn't think so. You get to recognise that in a man's eye. It might interest you to know that by 1944 there was no such thing as "too young" for the German Army. There was no "too old" either. And no one was left flying a desk, as you put it, when they could fly a plane, or sit in a tank, or man an anti-aircraft battery. Boys of thirteen marched alongside men aged sixty-five and seventy. You see, it wasn't until the Red Army reached East Prussia that German civilians began to suffer in the way Russian civilians had suffered. This meant that there was more for us to fight for; and it was why men and boys of all ages were conscripted into the Army. Nothing and no one was to be spared, least of all ourselves. Total war was what Goebbels called it. And it means what it says, which was rare for him. Total means everything. All in, nothing left out.

'You Amis talk about this Cold War of yours with no understanding of what it means to fight a cold, pitiless war without mercy and against an enemy who never stops coming. Oh, believe me, I know. I was killing Ivans for fourteen months and I can tell you this – there's no end to them. As many as you can kill they keep on coming. So remember that, if the time ever comes when you have to do the same. Not that anyone believes you'll stop them. Why would you fight to save Europe, to save Germans? That's the only reason we fought. To stop the Ivans from slaughtering the population of East Prussia. You might say that this was what we had done to the Jews, and you'd be right. But there were no war crimes trials for Soviet officers, no Ivans here in Landsberg. You would have to see what happens to a crowd of civilians when a Russian tank drives straight through its middle, or watch a fighter strafe a line of civilian refugees, to know what I'm talking about. Sepp Dietrich and his men shot how many Americans at Malmedy? Ninety? Ninety. A war crime you call it. For the Russians, in East Prussia, ninety wasn't even an infraction, it was a misdemeanour. Except that it's hardly a misdemeanour when the general demeanour of your soldiery is one of barbarous cruelty.'

I was silent for a moment.

'Something wrong?'

'I never talked about this before,' I said. 'It's not easy. What does Goethe say? About sun and worlds I can tell you but little. All that I can see is the suffering of humanity. Still, it's right that you should hear it. The trouble with you Amis is that you think it was you who won the war, when everyone knows it was the Ivans. Without you and the British they'd have taken longer to beat us. But they'd have beaten us all the same. Stalin's maths, we used to call it. When there were just five of us left there would be twenty Russians. And that was how Stalin was going to win. You'd better remember that if the Ivans ever invade West Berlin.'

'Sure, sure. Let's talk about Konigsberg. You were taken prisoner at Konigsberg.'

'Don't rush me. I have to tell this in my own way. When something has been asleep for this long you don't just shake it by the shoulder and shout in its ear.' 'Take your time. You've got plenty.'

Konigsberg is, was, important to me. My mother was born in Konigsberg. When I was a child we used to go on holiday to a seaside town near there called Cranz. Best holiday we ever had. My first wife and I went there on our honeymoon, in 1919. It was the capital of East Prussia – a land of dark forests, crystal lakes, sand dunes, white skies, and Teutonic knights who built a fine old medieval city with a castle and a cathedral and seven good bridges across the River Pregel. There was even a university founded in 1544, where the city's most famous son, Immanuel Kant, would one day teach.

I arrived there in June 1944. As part of Army Group North. I was attached to the 132nd Infantry Division. My job was to gather intelligence on the advancing Red Army. What type of men? What condition? How well armed? Supply lines – all the usual stuff. And from the German civilians who fled their homes ahead of the Russian advance, the intelligence I had was of well-equipped, ill-disciplined, drunken Neanderthals who were bent on rape, murder and mutilation. Frankly, a lot of this seemed like hysterical nonsense. Indeed, there was a lot of Nazi propaganda to this effect that was designed to dissuade everyone from surrender. And so I resolved to discover the true situation for myself.

This was made more difficult when at the end of August the Royal Air Force bombed the city to rubble. And I do mean rubble. All of the bridges were destroyed. All of the public buildings lay in ruins. So it was a while before I was able to verify the reports of atrocities. And I was left in no doubt as to the truth of these when our troops retook the German village of Nemmersdorf, about a hundred kilometres east of Konigsberg.

I'd seen some terrible things in the Ukraine of course. And this was as bad as anything we'd done to them. Women raped and mutilated. Children clubbed to death. The whole village murdered. All seven hundred of them. You've got to see it to believe it, and now I believed it and I could have wished I didn't. I made my report. The next thing, the Ministry of Propaganda had it and were even broadcasting parts of it on the radio. Well, that was the last time they were honest about our situation. The only part of my report they didn't use was the conclusion: that we should evacuate the city by sea as soon as possible. We could have done it, too. But Hitler was against it. Our wonder weapons were going to turn the tide and win the war. We had nothing to worry about. Plenty of people believed that, too.

That was October 1944. But by January the following year it was painfully clear to everyone that there were no wonder weapons. At least none that could help us. The city was encircled, just like at Stalingrad. The only difference was that as well as fifty thousand German soldiers there were three hundred thousand civilians. We started to get people out. But in the process, thousands died. Nine thousand died in just fifty minutes when a Russian submarine sank the Wilhelm Gustoff outside the port of Gotenhafen. And we kept on fighting, not because we obeyed Hitler, but because for every day that we fought, a few more civilians managed to escape. Did I say that was the coldest winter in living memory? Well, that hardly helped the situation.